Last saturday I spent 3 hours in a theatre, hypnotized by Marco Paolini. "Miserabili. Io e Margaret Thatcher", his last show, is an attempt to understand the roots of the modifications experienced by the Italian society during the last 20 years, with special regard to the northeastern part of Italy.
Paolini narrates these changes through two voices: Gelindo, born in the 30s, who testifies the transition from "a set of shovel-compatible corns" to "file-compatible ones", to symbolize the transformation of a rural society into an industrial one – and Nicola, born in the fifties, a contemporary of Paolini. He is the critical voice who describes the helplessness of a lower class worker, when confronted with the "new economy".
The show is principally an exhibition of the negative outcomes of this transformation: delocalization, recurrent credit crisis and – most of all – the Italian way to flexibility in the labour market, with a meaning closer to uncertainty than to opportunity.
I believe that an important part of this unease is due to the fact that, during a transition, it is difficult (if not impossible) to know what is beyond. I share the feeling (as exposed by Enzo Rullani on the First Draft blog) that one of the most important tasks that can be served by imagination is, in these years, to create a vision for what’s ahead of us.
But I also strongly disagree with Stefano Micelli’s opinion (on First Draft again) about the show, which poses a question and does not offer an easy answer. There is no way back from this transformation, and the discussion about thermodynamics and irreversible processes clearly states this.
The strong point of Paolini’s story is that the vision for "the rest
of us" cannot be to stay halfway between unacceptable (on EU standards)
working conditions and the elite of "innovation workers" (knowledge
workers are probably already out of fashion, it’s simply a matter of
which country is the one which is going to take the lead in that market).
Mr. Diesel’s ability to sell stories instead of trousers
(I’d say "before trousers") cannot set an example for everybody, and will do
anything to calm down the fear of uncertainty felt by hundreds of thousands of workers who feel their workplaces threatened by a competition that they, on strong moral ground, regard as unfair.
New ways to imagine the future will be no more than futile intellectual toys if they fail to be inclusive. If all we can tell to Nicolas and Gelindos are empty slogans (such as "China is an opportunity, not a threat" – N.B. this is not from the First Draft blog), then we are doing nothing to address their fears. Their only conceivable "way out of this" will be to look back – and boutades like Tremonti’s one
(proposing to introduce customs duties for products coming from the Far
East) will be the message which gets to
their ears. And hearts. More than presenting a logo in a fashionable cafeteria (I’m being radical, I know, but I needed to make my point clear).