#Marco D'Eramo

[howieabel]

"There’s no injustice more frightening – more definitive, more irredeemable – than inequality of life expectancy: a form of discrimination whereby years, sometimes decades, are stolen from the majority and given to a select few, based solely on their wealth and social class." - Marco D'Eramo

[collapsedsquid]

This helps to unravel at least some of the enigmas raised by the farmers’ protests of recent months. Instead of the classical alliance between workers and peasants proposed by Lenin, are we witnessing the formation of a new historic bloc? With tractors, combine harvesters and all the other machinery, the technological revolution wiped out the peasant masses Lenin was describing. Today’s peasants (at least those who have been protesting in Europe in recent months, and certainly not the labourers – often immigrants, even more often illegal ones – who work in their fields) are small landowners, similar to independent truck drivers, the small self-exploiting capitalists described by the Italian sociologist Sergio Bologna (one cannot help but remember the independent Chilean truck drivers who contributed so much to the fall of Salvador Allende). Along with nutritional sustenance, peasants provide global capitalism with ideological support. This abstract financial system needs to anchor itself deep in our psyches in order to effectively govern at the level of the nation-state. Capital’s political representatives do not need farmers’ votes, nor their economic output, as much as they need the ‘imagined community’ that is created around the potato, the grape or the white asparagus. A representative of Dutch farmers remarked in 2019, ‘If there will soon be no more farmers, don’t say “wir haben es nicht gewusst”’. That he was unafraid of ridicule in making a comparison with the Holocaust is an indication of how far symbolic investment in the figure of the farmer can go.

Yet more groping towards the question "Why do farmers have so much political power, when they have neither the votes nor the economic power of sectors governments worldwide are happy to piss on?"

[maturemenoftvandfilms]

Check out italian journalist Marco D'Eramo and tell me what you think. I think he's very cute.

He has a look that intrigues me. I'm not to say I'll do him, but I'm not going say I won't do him.

[mynameisgion]

This is the only objective piece read about 2022 war

[theculturedmarxist]

With the USSR, it was even easier to find a pretext for belligerence. Here was an empire of self-evident evil, and an atheist one at that. Its collapse created a gaping void for US grand strategists, who couldn’t help displaying a certain blasphemous nostalgia for their communist adversary. Just look at the names affixed to American military operations overseas. During the Cold War these were banal and arbitrary: the terrorist campaign against Castro’s Cuba was called Operation Mongoose; the mission to torture and assassinate members of the Vietcong was known as Program Phoenix; the bombardment of Cambodia, Operation Menu; Nickel Grass denoted the airborne delivery of arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War; Praying Mantis the attack on Iran in 1988. Yet the register changed after the fall of the Wall. The 1989 invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, marked a new grandiloquence. In 1991, as the USSR crumbled, the US embarked on mission Restore Hope in Somalia, while Haiti saw the pinnacle of this Orwellian newspeak with operation Uphold Democracy in 1994. There followed Joint Endeavour in Bosnia (1995), Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (2001), Iraqi Freedom (2003), and the classicizing Odyssey Dawn in Libya (2011).

If warfare in the communist era had a religious valence, in the post-communist world it became a question of morality – of humanity. We no longer speak of an Evil Empire but of ‘rogue states’. The enemy is to us what the criminal and gunslinger is to the sheriff. When we talk of ‘outlaw’ nations we embark, à la Carl Schmitt, on a ‘conceptual construction of penal-criminalistic nature proper to international law’: ‘the discriminatory concept of the enemy as a criminal and the attendant implication of justa causa run parallel to the intensification of the means of destruction and the disorientation of the theaters of war’.

Elsewhere, Schmitt notes that ‘to confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity’. As we edge, like sleepwalkers, closer to the abyss of nuclear war, one can’t help recalling the words of the Nazi jurist (who didn’t seem to realise he was also talking about his own regime): ‘weapons of absolute annihilation . . . require an absolute enemy, lest they should be absolutely inhuman’.

The contemporary period, then, is marked by a yearning for the Crusades. But in European public opinion one can sense a certain apathy, a lukewarm resignation if not thinly-veiled scepticism: the kind one feels when watching a film one’s seen too many times. The media still denounces Putin’s atrocities and makes obligatory comparisons with the Hitlers and Stalins of the past, yet it does so with the enthusiasm of a bored schoolchild, almost as if le coeur n’y était pas. How many times have we woken up to the news that our former allies have suddenly become reprobates and criminals? How can we forget that Saddam Hussein was furnished with chemical weapons to use against Iran before he was designated a war criminal himself? Or that Bashar al-Assad was deemed reliable enough to torture prisoners at the behest of the CIA before he became a so-called international pariah?

It also strains credulity that the US wants to see alleged war criminals tried in an international tribunal which it does not even recognise; that it supports Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime but refuses to tolerate Russia’s presence in Crimea and the Donbas; that it recognises the ethno-territorial grievances of Kosovar minorities in Serbia but not those of the Russophone minority in Ukraine, and so on. How can we take seriously the West’s invectives against authoritarian regimes, and calls to defend democracy, when our democratic leaders lay out the red carpet for a Saudi Prince who butchers critical journalists and an Egyptian General who executes political prisoners by the tens of thousands?

[ferrolano-blog]

La Europa profunda... la política agrícola rara vez mueve los corazones y las mentes. Pero las recientes protestas de los agricultores en Europa ofrecen lecciones fundamentales en la ciencia política contemporánea... Las protestas adquirieron un carácter antieuropeo, lo que resulta bastante sorprendente, pues los agricultores europeos son una clase protegida desde hace más de sesenta años, con un apoyo centralizado a los precios. Bruselas compraba los productos cuando su precio caía por debajo de un umbral... Con la ola neoliberal, las subvenciones se fragmentan en una jungla de medidas locales, una forma de clientelismo burocrático e informatizado... Puede sorprender que, entre las clases subalternas, el grupo social considerado más arcaico y tradicionalista sea el primero en desarrollar un carácter transnacional... Más sorprendente aún es que esta clase sea la única capaz de defender sus intereses con eficacia hoy en día... Los campesinos de hoy (al menos los que han estado protestando en Europa en los últimos meses, son pequeños terratenientes, similares a los camioneros independientes, los pequeños capitalistas autoexplotadores... restos del pasado, pero elementos indispensables de cohesión identitaria (Marco D'Eramo)

[climatepostsoviet]

Seemingly good intentions missing the point

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Can a frugal state be totalitarian? Or, in other words, is an anti-statist totalitarianism possible? These questions have been asked countless times during the era of triumphant neoliberalism: beginning in 1973 when Pinochet implemented the economic dictates of the Chicago School, passing through the various military regimes responsible for carpet privatizations (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, etc.), up to the discussions – no matter how wrongheaded – of the ‘sanitary dictatorship’ of neoliberal governance during the pandemic.

Totalitarianism requires a strong, ‘totalizing’ state, at least according to the doctrine promoted by Hayek in his 1944 Road to Serfdom, which in its redacted form, published by Reader’s Digest, sold one million copies. According to Hayek, a society sinks into totalitarianism as soon as the state begins to worry about the economic security of its citizens. The trajectory is irreversible; we start with social security and end up in concentration camps (or gulags). The omnipresence of the state is thus integral to ‘totalitarianism’ in the Arendtian sense.

A recent book, however, has planted in me a seed of doubt. Johann Chapoutot’s Libres d’obéir. Le management du nazisme à aujourd’hui (Free to Obey: Management, from Nazism to the Present Day [2020]), translated this year into Italian and German but, as is often the case, not English. Its central figure is Reinhart Höhn (1904-2000): a jurist, academic and SS general, sentenced to death for war crimes but subsequently pardoned. Höhn was part of a group of intellectuals that provided the theoretical framework not so much for Nazism itself as for the Gestapo, the SS and the occupation of almost all of Europe. His partners in this project included Werner Best (1903-89): a jurist too, but first and foremost a senior police officer in Hessen, then head of the political police, and finally plenipotentiary of occupied Denmark; Wilhelm Stuckart (1902-53), lawyer, jurisconsult to the Nazi party, member of the SS and formulator and compiler of the Nuremberg Race Laws; Franz Alfred Six (1909-75), a doctor of political science and member of the SS; Otto Ohlendorf (1907-51), an economic consultant and SS colonel who studied economics, held a doctorate in jurisprudence and commanded a unit responsible for around 90,000 deaths in Ukraine, before being sentenced to death at Nuremberg and hanged.

The presence of this educated élite at the head of one of the fiercest apparatuses of repression ever conceived, is a marked contrast with the hysterical image of SS officers in many American Second World War films: an image whose coarseness borders on the comical, and banishes the idea that a phenomenon like Nazism could ever repeat itself. We are typically reassured that such ghouls could never again implement such dangerous ideas. Not so in Chapoutot’s portrait. The author explains how these SS intellectuals were called upon to provide a conceptual framework capable of overcoming the enormous logistical difficulties by the conquest of practically the entire continent. 

In a 1941 text entitled Fundamental Problems for a German Administration of the Great Space, Werner Best wrote that ‘the rapid and powerful expansion of the territories on which the German people directly or indirectly exercise their sovereignty obliges us to review all concepts, principles and procedures through which this sovereignty has hitherto been thought and constructed.’ However much the territory under German dominion might increase, ‘the German people will never be able to afford doubling the number of public servants.’ More would have to be done with fewer personnel, not least because a large part of the male population was conscripted. The procedures of the state needed to be honed, made more flexible. In fact, Best had (unsuccessfully) proposed to Himmler that the public sector adopt a model of relativ lockeren Besetzung (‘relatively “loose” occupation’). The SS intellectuals thus became advocates of flexible management and streamlined protocols, at odds with the caricatured image of the Nazi dictatorship.  

Chapoutot charts the social trajectory of these characters following the defeat of Nazism. After his commuted twenty-year sentence, Franz Six became an advertising consultant for Porsche; Best worked as a consultant for the company Stinnes AG, then became an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German Federal Republic. The most interesting story was that of Reinhart Höhn, who, having escaped the death sentence and spent years practicing homeopathy under a pseudonym, went on to found the Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft (the Academy for Business Executives) at Bad Harzburg in Lower Saxony. By the time Höhn retired in 1972, around 200,000 German managers had passed through his institution; when he died, the number stood at 600,000. Professors at the school included other ex-SS officers, such as Six and Justus Beyer.

Bad Harzberg taught a style of management by target derived from Höhn’s reforms to the military chain of command. Under this system, the superior officer demands that his subordinates achieve their prescribed objectives, but leaves them free to decide exactly how, intervening only in exceptional cases (management by exception). Regrettably, Chapoutot does not investigate the relationship of the Bad Harzberg technique to the management styles now practiced in the United States. But his narrative shows how these hands-off methods were initially a product of German military expansion, which sought to reconcile a massive administrative operation with a reduced workforce.

The Nazi theorists were famously hostile to law and rights, viewed as creations of inferior Judaic and Latin cultures (Commandments of the Bible and Roman law codes respectively), and foreign to the proud German spirit which claims freedom from legal obligations. As such, they had a deep-rooted distrust of the state as a guarantor, responsible for the enforcement of law. The state was rather seen as a codified, ossified body which obstructs the flexibility and agility necessary for the expansion of Lebensraum. 

Nazis always talked of Reich (empire), never of Staat (state). Whereas Carl Schmitt saw states as bulwarks of political order, Best developed the idea of a Völkische Großraumordnung (popular order of the Great Space), in which the superior races would create zones of domination around themselves without fear of any normative restriction. Power was the only all-embracing source of political order. Aside from peoples (not, as per Schmitt, states), there existed no other normative points of reference that could be counterposed to the regime established by National Socialism.

For Höhn and his contemporaries, the state is unable to cope on its own when faced with the huge multiplication of tasks and responsibilities entailed by imperial expansion. It was precisely for this reason – to deal with re-armament, war preparations and the administrative challenges posed by the occupation of Europe – that para-state Nazi organizations began to surface, starting with the SS: a ‘private’ police force of 915,000 belonging to the party (even if Nazis always preferred to speak of a Bewegung – a movement – rather than a party). Likewise, Organisation Todt was born as a para-state company and ultimately employed 1.4 million foreign workers to meet civil and military engineering demands during the war. The state thus became one tool among many for achieving the Nazis’ domestic and overseas objectives.

Höhn believed that ‘legal theory has created an illusion, attributing to the state an “invisible personality”, transforming it in a perennial quest for sovereignty’, whereas in reality the state is nothing but an ‘“apparatus” at the service of power’, a tool which ‘the Nazi movement has captured, and to which it has ascribed other duties.’ In a chapter for the edited volume Grundfragen der Rechtsauffassung (Basic Questions for the Conception of Right), he elaborated on this argument: ‘The state is no longer the supreme political entity… It is rather an entity which limits itself to the execution of tasks assigned to it by the leadership (Führung), which operates in the service of the people. In this sense, the state is no more than a simple instrument . . . [to fulfill] the objectives it is assigned’.

It is this subordination of the state to externally-imposed targets and assignments that links Höhn’s theory to contemporary neoliberalism. Contrary to popular belief, neoliberals don’t seek to destroy the state; they know full well that without state there is no market. Rather, they want to invert the relationship of power between the market and the state. Not a market in the service of the state, but a state in the service of the market. Just as for Höhn the state is merely a mechanism equipped to achieve certain ends, so too for neoliberalism the state is a company that serves other companies – an entity that provides a service to be assessed in terms of the parameters of private enterprise (profitability, flexibility, best practices, benchmarking). None of this prevents a microscopic, pervasive control of citizenry, nor does it necessarily threaten the ability to stifle dissent. Just because war is outsourced to contractors (private mercenaries, that is to say) doesn’t mean it is less bloody, or lethal – or ‘total’.

The idea these Nazis passed down to us, then, is that of a heteronomous state, subordinated to external functions, designed to obey a logic which lies outside of it (and comes from a party or a company). This reverses the conventional wisdom. Totalitarianism doesn’t consist in enslavement by an omnipotent state; it rather wishes to impose a regime in which the state itself is enslaved as an instrument of an extrinsic omnipotence. A theory of management born to facilitate the advance of the Panzerdivisionen came to resemble the neoliberal project. We are thus able to resolve the Pinochet paradox, in which a brutal dictatorship violently imposes the free market. But if we were to think beyond 1973, it would be interesting to dwell for a moment on Paul Bremer’s 100 Orders, formulated in 2004 with the objective of instituting a neoliberal regime in Iraq, at the time occupied by the US Armed Forces. 

As Wendy Brown explains in Undoing the Demos (2015),

These mandated selling off several hundred state-run enterprises, permitting full ownership rights of Iraqi businesses by foreign firms and full repatriation of profits to foreign firms, opening Iraq’s banks to foreign ownership and control, and eliminating tariffs […] At the same time, the Bremer Orders restricted labor and throttled back public good and services. They outlawed strikes and eliminated the right to unionize in most sectors, mandated a regressive flat tax on income, lowered the corporate rate to a flat 15 percent, and eliminated taxes on profits repatriated to foreign-owned businesses.

- Marco D’Eramo, “Rule by Target,” New Left Review: Sidecar. October 15, 2021.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

[blogdeviajes]

El selfie del mundo I: turismo y destrucción creativa

¿Puede el turismo vaciar de sentido a una ciudad? Para Marco D'eramo el peligro del modelo Venecia acecha a muchas grandes ciudades.

En estos días estuve leyendo El Selfie del Mundo. Una investigación sobre la era del turismo, del periodista italiano Marco D’eramo. Hay varias ideas a lo largo del libro que dan para entradas independientes. Desde las referencias al viaje y el desastre causado por el coronavirus -lo dejo para la próxima entrada- al tema de cómo el turismo crea en los entornos urbanos las condiciones que llevan a…

[howieabel]

"The most important form of ‘social distance’ imposed by the pandemic was not spatial, not a matter of meters. It was the temporal distance between rich and poor, between those who could escape the worst effects of the virus and those whose lives were abbreviated by it. Modernity established a biopolitical chasm – a social distancing of death – that was widened and accentuated by the Covid-19 crisis." - Marco D'Eramo

[theculturedmarxist]

When riots erupted in France at the end of June, it took police just under a week to make more than 3,000 arrests. Clashes on the streets of Paris and Marseille evoked other recent confrontations with the forces of state repression: think of the 22,000 arrests made by the Iranian police last autumn, or the 10,000 detained in America during the summer of Black Lives Matter. What do these three uprisings, across three different continents, have in common? To start with, the age and social class of the protesters. Those arrested were almost entirely under 30, and a disproportionate share were NEETs (those not in education, employment or training). In France and the US, this was linked to their status as racialized minorities: 26% of the youth population in zones urbaines sensibles are NEET, compared to the national average of 13%, and African Americans comprise almost 14% of the general population but 20.5% of NEETs. In Iran, meanwhile, the decisive factor was age: young people have lived their entire lives under US sanctions. Recent figures show that around 77% of Iranians between the ages of 15 to 24 fall into this category – up from around 31% in 2020.

The second common factor is even more striking. In all three cases, protests broke out following a murder committed by police: George Floyd, an African American, was killed in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020; the 22-year old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in Tehran on 16 September 2022; and the 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, of Algerian descent, in Nanterre on 27 June. In the aftermath of these killings, the media spotlight was placed on the ‘vandals’, ‘thugs’, ‘hooligans’ and ‘criminals’ who took the streets, but rarely on law enforcement itself. In Iran, the identity of the policeman who caused Amini’s death of isn’t even known. In France, Éric Zemmour’s spokesperson launched an online fundraiser to support the cop who killed Nahel, which collected more than €1.6 million before it was taken down.

A third feature connects such protests and their repression to unrest in other countries: monotonous repetition. There is always the same recurring scene: smashed shop windows, burnt-out cars, some looted supermarkets, tear gas and the occasional bullet from the police. In the West, the same formula has been operative for decades: the police kill a young person from a marginalized community; the youth of this community rise up; they destroy a few things and clash with the police; they are arrested. The atmosphere reverts to a kind of precarious tranquillity, until the police decide to murder someone again. (Iran’s protests last year were the first major uprising against police violence in the country – a sign that even the land of the ayatollahs is easing its way into ‘Western modernity’.)

France has a long history of such incidents. To give just a few indicative examples: in 1990, a young paralysed man named Thomas Claudio is killed in the suburbs of Lyon by a police car; in 1991, a policeman shoots and kills the 18-year-old Djamel Chettouh in a banlieue of Paris; in 1992, again in Lyon, the gendarmerie shoot and kill the 18-year-old Mohamed Bahri for attempting to evade a traffic stop; the same year, in the same city, twenty-year-old Mourad Tchier is killed by a brigadier-commander of the gendarmerie; in Toulon in 1994, Faouzi Benraïs goes out to buy a hamburger and is killed by police; in 1995, Djamel Benakka is beaten to death by a policeman in the police station of Laval. Fast-forward: the riots of 2005 were a response to the death of two teenagers, Zyed Benna (17) and Bouna Traoré (15); those of 2007 sought redress for the death of two more, Moushin Sehhouli (15) and Laramy Samoura (16), whose motorcycle collided with a police car. The litany is unbearable: it would be sufficient to remember the death of Aboubacar Fofana (22) in 2018, killed by police in Nantes during an identity check. Note how strikingly Gallic the names of victims are: Aboubakar, Bouna, Djamel, Fauzi, Larami, Mahaed, Mourad, Moushin, Zyed . . .

The exact same dynamic can be found across the Atlantic. Miami, 1980: four white police officers are charged with beating to death a black motorcyclist, Arthur McDuffie, after he ran a red light. They are acquitted, precipitating a wave of tumult that rocks Liberty City, resulting in 18 deaths and over 300 injuries. Los Angeles, 1991: four white police officers beat up another black motorcyclist, Rodney King. The subsequent unrest causes at least 59 fatalities and over 2,300 injuries. Rioting spreads to Atlanta, Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose. Cincinnati, 2001: a white policeman kills a black man, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, and 70 people are injured in the ensuing protests. Ferguson, 2014: a white police officer kills Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man; riots, 61 arrested, 14 injured. Baltimore, 2015: a 25-year-old black man dies of various injuries incurred while he is detained in a police van; clashes leave 113 police officers injured; two people are shot, 485 arrested, and a curfew is imposed with the National Guard ultimately intervening. Charlotte, 2016: police shoot 43-year-old African-American Keith Lamont Scott; riots, curfew, deployment of the National Guard. A protester is killed during demonstrations, 26-year-old Justin Carr; 31 are injured. We eventually arrive at George Floyd; the scenario repeats itself.

British police have no reason to feel inferior to their transatlantic counterparts, nor their neighbours across the Channel. Here a few examples among many: Brixton, 1981: constant police brutality and harassment issues in protests and riots among the black community; 279 police and 45 civilians are injured (protestors avoid hospitals out of fear), 82 arrests, over 100 burnt vehicles, 150 damaged buildings, a third of which are set on fire. The upheaval spreads to Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds. Brixton, 1985: police search a suspect’s house and shoot his mother, Cherry Groce. A photojournalist is killed, 43 civilians and 10 police officers are injured, 55 cars are set on fire and a building is completely destroyed after three days of rioting (Cherry Groce survives her wounds but remains paralysed). Tottenham, 1985: a black woman, Cynthia Jarrett, dies of cardiac arrest during a house search carried out by police, and a policeman is killed by crowds in the resulting riots. Brixton, 1995: protests after a 26-year-old black man dies in custody; 22 arrests. Tottenham, 2011: police shoot and kill Mark Duggan; riots break out, extending to other areas of London and then to other cities. Over the next six days, five people are killed, 189 police officers are injured and 2,185 buildings are damaged. Beckton, 2017: a 25-year-old black Portuguese man, Edson Da Costa, dies of asphyxiation after being stopped by police. In subsequent protests in front of the police station, four are arrested and 14 police officers are injured.

I imagine this list was as exasperating to read as it was infuriating to write. At this point, police violence cannot be considered a bavure, as the French say, but a persistent and transnational feature of contemporary capitalism. (It brings to mind Bertold Brecht, who, faced with the reaction of the East German government to popular protest in 1953, asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler if the government dissolved the people and elected a new one?’) What’s astonishing is that after every one of these upheavals, thousands of pitiful urbanists, sociologists, ‘youthologists’, criminologists, healthcare professionals, charities and NGOs turn, in their contrition, to the profound social, cultural and behavioural causes of such ‘violence’, ‘excesses’, ‘outbursts’ and ‘vandalism’. The police, however, are not deemed worthy of the same attention. Police violence is often described but seldom scrutinized. Not even Foucault sharpened our understanding of it, focussing instead on specific sites where law enforcement is organized and institutionalised.

Policing has clearly evolved over the centuries: it has been subdivided into specialised corps (traffic, city, border, military and international police) and its tools have been refined (wire-tapping, tracking, electronic surveillance). But it has remained identical in both its opacity and its unreformability. The states mentioned above have never put meaningful police reform on the agenda. None of their governments has ever pushed for an alternative – for why would a regime want to tamper with its most effective disciplinary mechanism? Nor have upheavals, riots and agitations managed to bring about change. It would seem, conversely, that popular rage is a stabilising factor, a safety valve for the social pressure cooker. Ultimately, it solidifies the image that the powerful have of the populace. In Herodotus’s Histories, written in the 5th century BC, the Persian nobleman Megabyzus states:

There is nothing so void of understanding, nothing so full of wantonness, as the unwieldy rabble. It were folly not to be borne, for men, while seeking to escape the wantonness of a tyrant, to give themselves up to the wanton­ness of a rude unbridled mob. The tyrant, in all his doings, at least knows what he is about, but a mob is altogether devoid of knowledge; for how should there be any knowledge in a rabble, untaught, and with no natural sense of what is right and fit? It rushes wildly into state affairs with all the fury of a stream swollen in the winter, and confuses everything.

From the point of view of the regime, it may well be that riots are welcome, for they guarantee renormalisation, they permit social ‘bantustans’ to remain such, and they deflate discontents that could otherwise be perilous. Naturally, for them to perform this stabilizing function they must be subject to outward condemnation: vandalism should be denounced, violence should spark indignation, looting should cause disgust. Such reactions justify the ruthlessness of the repression, which becomes the only means to beat back the tide of barbarism. It is under these conditions that riots serve to ossify social hierarchy.

We cannot but recall the popular revolts that periodically shook the ancien régime and were regularly and mercilessly repressed: the Grande Jacquerie of 1358 (which gave rise to the common name for all subsequent peasant uprisings), the Tuchin Revolt in Languedoc (1363-84), the Ciompi Revolt in Florence (1378), the Wat Tyler’s Rebellion (1381), the Peasant’s War in Germany (1524-6), the Carnival in Romans (1580) and Masianello’s Revolt in Naples (1647). The historian Samuel Cohn has counted more than 200 of these instances in France, Flanders and Italy from 1245 to 1424. But it was the great historian Marc Bloch who noted how the feudal system needed these revolts to sustain itself:

A social system is not only characterised by its internal structure, but also by the reactions it provokes: a system founded on commandments can, in certain moments, imply reciprocal duties of aid carried out honestly, as it can also lead to brutal outbursts of hostility. To the eyes of the historian, who must merely note and explain the relationships between phenomena, the agrarian revolt appears as inseparable to the seigneurial regime as, for instance, the strike is to the great capitalist enterprise.

Bloch’s reflection leads us to the following question: if the jacquerie is inseparable from feudalism, and the strike from Fordist capitalism, then to what command system does the tumult of the NEETs correspond? There is only one answer: a system – neoliberalism – in which the plebe has been reconstituted. Who are these new plebians? They are the NEETs of the US high-rise projects and the neighbourhoods of south Tehran, the subproletarians of the zones sensibles. They are the class that many of today’s so-called ‘progressives’ disdain, fear, or at the best of times ignore.

[ferrolano-blog]

Sobre la inmigración... gobierne quien gobierne, siempre es el mercado laboral, a su vez determinado por la legislación pertinente, el ciclo económico y la situación geopolítica, el que determina las políticas migratorias... si los gobiernos "proteccionistas" quisieran realmente acabar con la inmigración irregular, se dedicarían a inspeccionar los lugares donde trabajan los inmigrantes sin papeles... Es en este contraste entre la inercia de los gobiernos con respecto al trabajo clandestino y la postura beligerante de los controles fronterizos donde la hipocresía de las políticas draconianas de inmigración aparece con mayor crudeza... "la inmigración beneficia principalmente a los ricos, no a los trabajadores", los más pobres de los cuales pueden salir perdiendo (un hecho que ayuda a explicar por qué los inmigrantes recientes se encuentran entre los grupos sociales más opuestos a la inmigración)... son precisamente los trabajadores menos cualificados los que más necesitan las economías avanzadas, para la agricultura, la construcción, la hostelería y el cuidado de ancianos y niños)... la inmigración divide internamente a las formaciones de derecha e izquierda ( Marco D'Eramo)

[pinseppe]

di Marco D'Eramo È una tragedia che fa ridere e insieme una farsa che fa piangere l’Italia quale emerge dal libro di Leonardo Bianchi, La gente. Viaggio nell’Italia del risentimento (minimum fax, Roma 2017, pp. 362, 18 €). Lo sguar