<nettime> the ground zero of the spaghetti left

["Alex Foti" <alex.foti@gmail.com>]

hey guys and girls,

as you know, a tsunami has brought berlusconi III back to power and
wiped out the left from parliament. it's a first since 1946. and rome
risks ending up with a neofascist mayor, if the left doesn't mobilize
at the ballot next week. Wannabe-Obama Veltroni has been cut down to
size with pretty much the same score Prodi had got in 006. The
founding of the new party has assisted the euthanasia of the red and
green left, and radically simplified the hithero byzantine
parliamentary landscape: a right party and its ally, a center(left?)
party and its ally, and a minor clerical party is all it's left. The
xenophobic, authoritarian, populist northern league is the big winner.
Bar them, Mr B can dispose of spaghettiland as he pleases. It's all
too depressing to contemplate, but hopefully we'll survive the night
and fight back.

The apocalypse of the Italian institutional left (rifondazione, greens
+ one minor commie party) has been largely self-inflicted. Their awful
performance in government, where they did not manage to push for any
of the three things the movement had voted them in power -- shutdown
of detention centers and repeal of antiimmigrant legislation, erasure
of precarity laws and welfare spending for the precarious,
legalization of thc criminalized by berlusconi and fini -- caused many
to abstain or vote for fringe parties. Thee hastily built cartel
Sinistra Arcobaleno looked like an amateurish attempt at the top to
salvage discredited leaderships past their date. Still the 4%
threshold in the lower chamber could have been met if they hadn't
chosen the vain bertinotti as their presidential candidate (he's
history now). When in Bologna the antiabortion rightwing tv host
ferrara was welcomed by egg- and veggie-throwing, the red pensioner
solidarized with the enemy of women and the left, making sure another
constituency, that of the blooming italian neofeminist movement, would
not vote for the rainbow left.

The movement of northeastern centri sociali and the no military base
vicenza movement did not enter the rainbow, not even those with green
party cards, advising to vote for either progressive candidates (like
the no-us-base mayoral candidate for vicenza, where the movement list
scored in the double digits, as well as thrice more than the rainbow)
or to abstain. And the only candidate already elected in the first
round for the rainbow in rome city elections is a member of action,
the movement that has squatted dozens of houses for evicted families.
Amid ruins and havoc, these are among the signs that it's the
political caste of communists and greens that failed miserably and was
defeated, rather than a direct defeat for the offspring of the
movement. Nevertheless there can be no illusions: the butchers of
genoa are back in power.

What now? Nobody really knows, but the rainbow cartel is shelved, as
professional reds and greens go back to their earlier homes for
internecine bloodletting or to veltrusconi's pd. For the rest of us
who believe in the political rather than in politics, it's time to
come up with something new, now that the legacy of spaghetti communism
is dead for every practical purpose. Who are we? That's the question
to start from. We have named the enemy, now it's time to name the good
guys and the bad girls and what they can really do to change the
world, one italy at a time.

tabula rasa,

lx


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