Obsolete Capitalism: From the small bourgeoisie to the post-bourgeoisie. Autonomy of the post-bourgeoisie (Pt. X - The Birth of Digital Populism)

From the small bourgeoisie to the post-bourgeoisie. Autonomy of the post-bourgeoisie.

Is there a socio-political constant quality of the Italian populist and fascist ‘rank and file’ that runs throughout the twentieth-century and which is now looking adrift into the 21st? Antonio Gramsci believed that the matrix of Ur-Fascism as a mass movement was determined by the petty bourgeoisie’s desire of emancipation from both the ruling elite and the national and international establishment. According to his analysis, the socio-economic conditions which arose in the first two decades of the twentieth-century encouraged the Italian bourgeoisie - wearied by the post-World War I crisis - to want to be independent from the established and constitutional powers. The Gramscian analysis resonates, like a tuning fork, with other fragments proposed by other astute observers of the Italian customs from the past century. In an analysis of early Fascist Italian habits, in ‘Mario and the Magician’ Thomas Mann explicitly mentions a ‘middle-class bob’. During an ironic exchange from the short film La Ricotta, the director Pier Paolo Pasolini, indirectly answers the question of a journalist appearing on the stage, through the character of another director, played by Orson Welles:

‘What do you think of Italian society?’ ‘The most illiterate people, the most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe.’

In a crisp passage, Lapo Berti describes this trans-generational segment of Italian society, which was before stigmatized in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s movie as unfinished modernity:

The unachieved process of modernizing civilization has caused hostile reactions among the deepest layers of society, where people’s opinions are formed. This group seemed to reject modernity in all its forms, although they would naively get excited for its inventions. These people were inflamed by the fascist narrative; they embraced the deep cauldron of Demo-Christian reformism without being changed by it; then they returned to exalt the anomaly of Berlusconism, which, once and for all, revealed its populist and undemocratic nature. They represent today, as they did yesterday, a good half of the Italian people. When active, they influence the destiny of the country, then as now. (...)

Read more @ The Birth of Digital Populism/e.book