Populism and the useless.
I see around that there is a press that wants to celebrate the funeral of populism, and it does so using completely disconnected events, forgetting some fundamental things.
If we talk about a single party, I know the Humanist Party, the causes of its foundation are practically random: a charismatic leader, a sect that becomes a party, and many others.
But when we talk about a movement that appears, at the same time, all over the world, then it is necessary to understand that the perspective is the historical one.
If the movement is global, the birth of a new social class always corresponds to the creation of a historicized movement in national parties.
Just as the birth of the working class, or of the proletariat, created a labor movement on a world scale (then declined in various sauces depending on the country), the creation of populist movements must also correspond to the creation of a new social class.
I have already written about which social class it is: they are the useless ones.
Now many people will begin to say that if this was true in the case of the M5S, and perhaps also of the Meloni party, the League also contains "entrepreneurs", who therefore cannot be classified as "useless".
But this is a fatal mistake. I can give an example:
Now, it will be very clear to you that this will produce a new social class of useless, because you want to see as unemployed all those whose job was to do nails.
But you have forgotten that they work in a kind of shop. When you go around the streets (I think it also happens in Italy) you see these shops (usually franchises) where women come in and get French nails.
Now, this makes you understand one thing: the automation I posted above won't just make those who work in the shop useless. It will make the entire store useless, therefore also an entrepreneur.
There are therefore entrepreneurs who are already in the middle of the path of uselessness. After all, what will someone do who has wasted 50K € to open a franchise, and after two years he finds himself with the shop closed? Will you invest another 50K € in some other franchise? What is your expertise?
Therefore, the point is that the fact of representing "entrepreneurs" does not in itself exclude that even the Lega is a party of the social class of the useless. After all, when the textile industry was born, not only the worker who worked on manual looms lost his job. Even those who made manual looms lost their jobs, and also the small entrepreneur who had a shed with about thirty manual looms.
The birth of populist parties on a global scale corresponds to the birth of a new social class of useless, caused by the advancing automation.
Now, before giving up populism for dead, the question we must ask ourselves is: has the birth of this social class been interrupted? What answers have they given to this social class?
Grillo had somehow sensed this when he proposed the citizenship income: he knew well that this alone would have intercepted the need for this new social class.
But the problem is that citizenship income is, and remains, a MINIMUM income. It means that we are taking this social class and marginalizing it.
Do you seriously think this is a valid answer?
But we need to take a step back and understand: what does automation do? What does IT do?
The answer is: they are efficient. What kind of efficiency? Normally, economic efficiency.
And what is the situation towards an economy that becomes efficient? The good Pareto described it (although not proven):
- 20% of the population is useful and is paid with 80% of the wealth.
- 80% is useless and must be satisfied with the remaining 20% of wealth.
Although it has been shown (Arrow, San and others) that no economy can really reach a Pareto equilibrium, the fact of tensing means that we are close: even if we arrived at a situation of 25/75%, we would have a 75% of voters who are part of the new social class.
The newspapers have to come to terms with this: to tend, the populist parties can attract 70% of the votes.
The fact that so far the sum of pupulist grades in Italy is around 35% only means that:
- the populist political class CANNOT express candidates capable of attracting all populists.
- the digitization / automation process in Italy is quite embryonic.
Now, as regards the second point, it is a temporary situation. If the EU really begins to drop the lira to digitize, digitization will come. It may take longer, but it will come.
As for the populist political classes, I am not so sure that they are stable.
Let's not forget the fact that the Lega is the oldest party on the political scene, and that Meloni has been in politics for at least three decades.
The current populist leaders (Meloni and Salvini) are by no means revolutionaries: they are conservative, if anything, aiming to maintain and consolidate an ancient policy .
M5S remains, which by homologating has lost its revolutionary charge and is dying.
The problem is that NONE of these parties have a recipe to offer to the useless. The useless will send them to power, to discover that their personal situation does not change. Then they will look for more.
Definitely:
- populism has not stopped and will start to grow again, especially after COVID added a boost to digitization.
- the current populist parties have not been able to give birth to a dreamy leader who leads the masses towards a utopia.
Because this is the point: at the beginning of the M5S, Grillo and Casaleggio had made us dream of a utopian world in which "the network" would produce all the answers that the new social class was waiting for.
They were "dreamers", even if delusional (but after all Marx was not outdone, eh), and they seemed to have answers like "direct electronic democracy", "citizenship income", "zip war airganon", and other things .
Salvini and Meloni have no utopia to offer, if not the past: they both reply that they will bring Italy back to the end of the 1980s, but if you want to know how many chances they have of succeeding, you have nothing to do but return again. 'young people of 20 years. Can you do it? No. Is it possible? No. Too bad.
International populism needs what the new social class of the useless is asking: a dreamer leader, who talks to them calling them by name, a leader capable of designing a utopia located in the future.
I know the Communists are getting excited by this point, but I want to point out a few things to them:
- "Workers" and "useless" do not coincide. The worker was useful, and could blackmail the employer with the strike. The useless no.
- Marx's utopia is not in the future. You can find it in Chernobyl under a steel diving suit. It is dead, buried and radioactive. Nothing to do with the future.
Populism is not dead. It is smoldering under the ashes of old leaders who are using populism to keep themselves in power, like Salvini and Meloni.
This is why they are unable to intercept all populists: dead and buried ideas such as fascism and sovereignty do not paint utopias located in the future.
But the underlying social class is not decreasing in number, and will not resign itself to the statistics that are about to throw up a huge recovery on the country: on the contrary, when they see all the newspapers talking about recovery without their existence changing one iota , they will become even more frustrated and accuse the elites of stealing their recovery funds.
Conclusion?
As soon as a dreamy leader appears on the Italian political scene, capable of imagining a future utopia that answers the questions of the new social class, he could have up to 70% of the votes available.
You should think about it before you sing victory. Trump is finished, his america is not.
And Trump had never outlined a future utopia. Maybe Zuckerberg would succeed, what do I know? I don't know, but IT storytelling is certainly fascinating.
In any case, beware of those who sing victory. You haven't stopped populisms with Draghi. You stopped them with COVID subsidies and refreshments.
But now they ask you for their utopia.
Do you have one?