diff --git a/_drafts/2006-07-05-doh-en.md b/_drafts/2006-07-05-doh-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35e2d97 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2006-07-05-doh-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: Doh! (a game we invented) +tags: games en +original: doh +--- +One summer many years ago, by the sea, I invented **a variant of Connect 4** together with Errico De Lisi and Giuseppe Sguera. We called this game **Doh!**, in honor of Homer Simpson, of course. + +Back from vacation, I wrote the rules of this game on a [FidoNet](http://www.fidonet.org/) area that dealt with board games and played a few distance games with other users of that primitive amateur network (at the time I didn't have access to the Internet yet, especially considering that my modem ran at 2400 baud). + +Years later, searching for my first and last name on a search engine (and who hasn't done that?), great was my surprise to find not only that old rulebook I had sent *[the site has since disappeared, as it was hosted on Geocities]*, but also its translations [in English](http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/doh.htm) and [in Czech](http://www.deskovehry.info/pravidla/doh.htm) on sites specialized in board games, and [myself listed in lists of board game inventors](http://www.abstractstrategy.com/authors-v.html)… + +Here are the rules of the game: + +1. It is played by two players on a rectangular game board 7 squares wide and 6 squares high. +2. Players take turns placing a token of their color in the lowest square of a non-full column. +3. Whoever manages to compose the four vertices of a square with their tokens and announces it by exclaiming *"Doh!"* wins. The squares can be straight, diagonal or skewed; moreover, by convention, you also win by placing your tokens on the 4 vertices of the 7 × 6 rectangle that makes up the entire game board. The image provides examples. + +{% include figure.html file="doh.jpeg" + caption="The marked black tokens form a skewed square. The unmarked black tokens form a straight square. The marked white tokens form a diagonal square. The unmarked white tokens form the special non-square. +" %} + +If anyone starts playing Doh! please absolutely let me know! \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2006-10-29-how-large-proletariat-en.md b/_drafts/2006-10-29-how-large-proletariat-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5a86043 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2006-10-29-how-large-proletariat-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: How Large is the Proletariat? +tags: pol en +original: proletariat-size +--- +There is a gigantic social group that includes billions of human beings united by some fundamental elements: + +- they all have the same position in production: they are people who, to make a living, rent themselves to entrepreneurs who command them and pay them with a salary; +- they all have very similar problems in relating to the economic life of the society they belong to: they must negotiate wages with their employer (which is sometimes the government), they must worry about how to obtain a pension, they fear layoffs or the worsening of working conditions imposed from above, their lives depend on the economic performance of the company they work for (which is sometimes not a real company but a State), they produce "things" on which they can rarely have their say and which are sold to someone else (and the proceeds do not go to them)... +- they have the unpleasant but accurate sensation of "keeping the whole thing going" but that others get the best portions; +- they have (or would have, but maybe it's forbidden or dangerous) a fundamental way to fight for their interests (or rights): going on strike. + +Is it really so important to divide these people between those who work in factories and those who work in offices? +Those who maintain this generally have never worked either in a factory or in an office, at least not recently: in recent decades, factory work has become increasingly similar to office work and vice versa. A worker often has a fixed workstation, where he sits all the time and sometimes his task consists of operating knobs, buttons, etc. Office workers, on the other hand, almost never have very conceptual tasks that they can carry out independently: they have to move papers, write emails, fill out forms and handle practices in a very mechanical way; procedures are well defined, each one is just a small cog in a very complex and alienating mechanism. This applies more and more even to highly qualified intellectual workers, such as programmers, biologists, designers. + +We must, however, look elsewhere, these reflections are spicciola sociology and in some ways distract us. A high school teacher and a bricklayer dress differently, speak with a different style, sweat to different degrees, have very different work schedules and calendars, but if you put a house in place of a classroom, a trowel in place of a blackboard, the foreman in place of the principal, you will have, from the point of view of social role (which is what really counts), two similar cases, two different members of the same class. Neither of them has to pay the salary or wage to someone else, both receive their own once a month. Even the income of the two seems quite different, but it is much less than the income difference between the teacher and a large shareholder of an important company. + +**How many members of this social class are there in the world?** It's not an easy figure to recover, you have to struggle a bit with statistics. Isn't it perhaps curious that on the Internet you can easily find that on June 21, 2006, the number of Seventh-day Adventist Christians in the world was 16,811,519, while you can't immediately discover how many people in the world are wage workers, even if you settle for a less precise figure? + +Anyway, the calculation has been done in some way, and with a bit of reworking you can get a good estimate. +The International Labour Organization (ILO) produced for 2005 [a statistical series](http://laborsta.ilo.org/) on 107 countries, for a total of 1,140,112,517 economically active people, a little more than a billion inhabitants of the planet, therefore. Aggregating this data globally is not very easy, but I tried. These people have been classified by the ILO in various ways, but the subdivision that interests us is that into 6 social "pseudo-classes": + +1. employees, who are 60.02% of the active population considered; +2. employers, who are 2.89%; +3. own-account workers, who are 17.14%; +4. members of producers' cooperatives, who are 1.01%; +5. workers who contribute to an economic activity owned by a family member, contributing family workers, who are many, 9.10%; +6. those who do not clearly fall into any of these categories, workers not classifiable by status, who make up just over 2% of the set. + +Among these 6 groups, the proletarians (industrial workers, agricultural laborers, tertiary sector wage earners, etc.), are found in the first and fourth, which together reach 61%. In this 61%, however, there are *all those who receive a salary*, thus including the executives and managers of companies (private and public). These figures are not part of the proletariat: managers are literally bought by ownership through profit sharing, and in fact thanks to the distribution of shares and numerous other privileges they are assimilated into the ruling class of capitalist countries. Often for simplicity and to avoid using uncommon words we say "wage earners" or "employees" to indicate proletarians, but according to Marx an additional condition for being proletarian was to receive only a part of the value that had been produced: this is certainly not the case of CEOs of large multinational companies, whose income levels moreover have a dynamic completely independent from that of the workforce. Middle management, finally, is placed in an intermediate position, they give orders but also receive just as many, they take a few more crumbs but still a pittance compared to the top of the pyramid: everything pushes them to identify with the petty bourgeoisie. How many then are those who receive a salary but are not at the base of the hierarchy, in the mass of proletarians? In a country like Italy, official statistics say that about every 17 proletarians there is a middle manager, and that every 2 middle managers there is an executive (it would seem that there are too many executives, but we must consider that in the state apparatus, and particularly in Italy, there is clearly an excess of executives!). If the proportions are roughly these elsewhere too, from 61% we must go down to 56%: it still remains the majority. + +The real bourgeoisie (the one that uses others' labor power) is certainly made up of members of the second group (where however any employer goes, from those who have a single employee to those who have thousands), plus the executives, who according to previous calculations are not even 2%: we arrive at about 4.5%. The petty bourgeoisie, which we can consider divided into urban middle class (artisans, professionals, middle managers, etc.) and peasants, is the most heterogeneous class and therefore the most difficult to define: it is convenient to define it by difference as *everyone else* and if mathematics is not an opinion it cannot exceed the remaining 39.5%. This figure, contrary to what is not infrequently told, is not kept so high by advanced countries, but by less industrialized ones. In fact, it oscillates around 7-8% in the USA or the UK, rises towards 25% for countries with a weaker economic structure like Italy or Spain, and only in Third World countries does it reach and sometimes exceed 50% thanks to the decisive contribution of small rural landowners. + +Let us not forget, however, that this data concerns only 107 countries; in the world there are many more countries, from 190 to 200 (depending on the status attributed to places like Taiwan, Kosovo, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Vatican City, etc.). In particular, in ILO statistics, which cover all the most industrialized countries and many dozens of backward countries, important countries like China (although there are some of its parts: Hong Kong and Macao), India, Nigeria, Iraq do not appear. In fact, since the ILO estimates that the world's active population is composed of 2.8 billion people, 1.7 billion active people are missing from the statistics in question. To establish the class composition of this billion and 700 million, we can do nothing but extend, *cum grano salis*, the percentages found earlier. Naturally, countries like China and India, although they may contribute to enriching the set of proletarians with a notable injection of laborers, could have a social composition with fewer workers, although it no longer seems absolutely obvious (it is said that China and India are "the factory of the world"): they certainly have fewer employees though. For now let's assume the risk of exceeding a little too much in estimating the size of the proletariat, as much as I can anticipate that in the next approximation that will be necessary to make we will certainly exceed much more in the opposite direction. +**56% of 2.8 billion is 1.6 billion, the number of active proletarians in the world.** For the bourgeois we get a figure of about 120 million. The remaining classes are around 1.1 billion people. + +The inhabitants of the planet, however, are approximately 6 and a half billion, largely economically inactive: young people, pensioners, housewives, prisoners and in small part beggars and other people who for various reasons do not work even occasionally. In the "sociological" concept of social class, which is not a purely statistical concept, every person belongs to a class, not only those economically productive. The idea is that the class represents a "social environment"; in reality we often speak of the fact that a family rather than a single individual belongs or does not belong to a certain social class. If we want to divide the entire human race into classes, we must once again extend the percentages we have; with this extension we will amply compensate for any approximation by excess made previously, because we will suppose that on average the active people of each social class have the same number of inactive family members: in truth it is quite clear that proletarian families are on average more numerous and richer in housewives and other inactive individuals, so this time we are making an underestimate of the global extent of the proletariat. +56% of 6.5 billion is 3.64 billion; **the proletariat is composed, on a world scale, of more than 3 and a half billion human beings**. The bourgeois class, whose upper stratum holds power almost everywhere, includes only 300 million people. The *middle class* including peasants counts 2.6 billion people in its ranks. + +Surprise: the proletariat is the bulk of humanity. How come it's not in charge? \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2006-11-03-baco-turco-en.md b/_drafts/2006-11-03-baco-turco-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b398749 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2006-11-03-baco-turco-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: There will always be a Turkish bug +tags: geek en +original: baco-turco +--- +Programming can seem like very dry work, and in part it is. Yet, every now and then it gives occasion to do a bit of philosophy.\ +I'm telling a story about my previous workplace, hoping that revealing these important industrial secrets won't push them to take me to court... + +One of the things you learn right away when programming is that it's not possible to make the perfect program, one that works correctly in all possible conditions. There's always something we hadn't thought of, the only perfect program is a program that gets continuously reprogrammed: software either evolves or dies. In the best case it must evolve to keep up with changes in the context in which it operates (including changes in user requirements), in the worst case it's simply a matter of realizing subtle errors (*bugs*) made by developers, errors that manifest their harmfulness only with the concrete use of the application. + +One day, in the large multinational where I worked before, someone notices that a part of the application that dozens and dozens of people had been working on for years, and which had now reached its seventh or eighth version, *didn't work in **Turkey***. I don't mean it worked badly, it just wouldn't start. + +The person who notices this sends an alarmed message to the internal mailing list. Someone who thought he knew better replies: *"Come on, that's impossible, check better, you must have done something wrong"*. Half an hour later, the same person writes: *"I tried changing the computer configuration as if I were in Turkey. It's true, it doesn't start!"* But what the heck...?! + +What's special about Turkey? + +An hour passes, another email: *"We discovered that during the startup phase a trivial check on string comparison fails, it seems that in Turkey **toLowerCase()** doesn't work well"*. The *toLowerCase()* method, in Java, as its [documentation](http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#toLowerCase()) explains, converts text to its lowercase version. Why shouldn't it work well in Turkey? Especially since Turkey uses the Latin alphabet, ever since the modernizing and pro-Western reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. + +**Eureka!** Even though I didn't count for much in that company, I couldn't resist the temptation to send an email explaining the mystery. Turkey definitely has something special: it's the only country in the world, as far as I know, where the lowercase version of the letter *I* is not the letter *i*. In the Turkish alphabet there are indeed two very similar letters: one is the *I*, without a dot, which becomes *ı* in lowercase, the other is the *İ*, with a dot, which becomes *i* in lowercase. + +At startup, that program applied the *toLowerCase* method to a sentence containing an *I*, and compared it with a certain constant string, which contained an *i*. The comparison failed in Turkey, because in Java that method is *localized*, that is, it performs the lowercase conversion in a way that depends on the language and other "regional settings" of the system on which it's executed. + +You have to be careful to dot your *i*'s, because the Turkish bug is always lurking. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2007-01-16-wind-shakes-barley-en.md b/_drafts/2007-01-16-wind-shakes-barley-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..452683f --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2007-01-16-wind-shakes-barley-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "«The Wind That Shakes the Barley»: a film about class and nation" +tags: pol media en +original: wind-grass-film +--- +Ken Loach's latest film is truly a perfect example of the style and message of the famous English communist director, who with this work earned himself the Palme d'Or at Cannes - and, in London, another dose of well-deserved hatred from the ruling class and its lackeys. + +The film follows, through the lives of two independence-supporting brothers, the events in Ireland in the years from 1920 until the outbreak of civil war following the signing of the fraudulent "peace treaty" with Great Britain. + +The film is truly an anti-Michael Collins: if in that film about the leader of the "possibilist" wing of Irish nationalism the virtues of this leader who compromised with British imperialism are magnified, while deprecating the alleged extremism of the treaty's opponents, personified by the ambitious Eamon De Valera (future first president of the Irish republic), The Wind That Shakes the Barley completely reverses the perspective and shows the deceptions of the negotiation that transforms into betrayal, of reformism that transforms into reaction, of peace with the oppressors that becomes war against the oppressed. + +The equivalent of Michael Collins (on a smaller scale) for Loach is one of the two brothers, Teddy O'Donovan. A rather ruthless IRA leader until 1923, when peace is signed between the British Empire and Sinn Féin (which immediately splits in two precisely on this), he quickly transforms into a staunch defender of the agreement with the imperialists, proudly donning the uniforms of the "Irish Free State," nothing more than a dominion within His Majesty's Empire, under the indirect control of the British Crown which essentially delegates to Collins' supporters the tasks that were previously those of its fierce colonial troops. + +Loach has no psychological illusions nor gets lost in populist discourse about "human nature": the choice, fundamentally collaborationist, of Teddy, who turns his weapons against his old comrades and finally even against his brother, is a class choice. History books teach us that in the period of the "Free State" the defenders of the peace treaty even went so far as to establish a special police force with the specific task of defending Protestant landowners from the "violence" of peasants and laborers who invaded their lands, supported by the republican left. Even Teddy openly sides with the owners, as long as they're "patriots." Already in the heated period of the struggle against the English, defending an Irish loan shark he quarrels with his brother Damien and with the railway worker, trade unionist, republican and communist, who first opened Damien O'Donovan's eyes: for Teddy you can't go against the usurer, because "he's an Irishman" and finances the IRA, and it doesn't matter if the old woman strangled by debts is also Irish and if even the "people's tribunal" that wants to defend her is composed of republicans; for Damien, for his partner Sinead, for the railway worker, it makes no sense to fight for national liberation if it doesn't serve as a crowbar to dismantle class privilege: in their eyes the loan shark is "like the English," Ireland's oppression by England is a replica on an international scale of the same class contradictions. In the quarrel heavy words fly, some accuse others of only wanting to paint the old and rotten Irish class society green, the others reply that it's still better to paint it green than red... But the real clash, no longer in words but with gunshots, will emerge only later, when the Crown understands that it's precisely on these contradictions that it can leverage to dominate the colony indirectly. + +Like all respectable committed films, this one too makes a discourse on consciousness-raising - or its lack. There are no "good" or "bad" characters without depth. Teddy and Damien come from a well-off country family, the left-wing brother accuses the other of not having freed himself from that social legacy, but he himself becomes conscious later than others, after having long cultivated the illusion of doing good simply through his profession (i.e., medicine: the figure of the young idealist doctor who gives himself to the Revolution and sacrifices his life to it is familiar to us, from Che Guevara to our Pavian martyr, Ferruccio Ghinaglia). After the killing of a friend who persisted in speaking Gaelic to the English colonial forces, crucial for him is witnessing the courageous resistance of railway workers to the transport of monarchist troops. The railway worker who with great dignity refuses to obey the brutal orders of the colonialists because it would mean violating his union's instructions, is fundamentally a very clear symbol of the possibility of an alternative power to that of bosses and imperialists; on the other hand, one cannot help but smile pleased in the face of the usual bourgeois obtuseness when the soldiery to make the train leave... beats up the railway worker with punches and kicks: it's the usual problem of the bourgeoisie, it would like to do without rebellious workers but it still needs someone to "pull the cart"! the stupid soldiers thus remain on foot anyway. + +Damien thus enters the IRA, in which his brother was already a recognized figure at the local level; but the railway worker will be his true political reference point: while for Teddy the struggle is a national war disguised as civil war, for Damien it's a civil war disguised as national war and he's enthused by the railway worker's quote from James Connolly, the revolutionary leader, close to the Russian Bolsheviks, killed by the English after the Easter Rising of 1916: "You may indeed plant the green flag on the highest flagpole in Dublin, but if you do not establish a socialist republic, the English will continue to dominate you through the capitalists, through the commercial banks and through the latifundia." Shiver down the spine: those among the film's spectators who understand what the phrase means seem to easily share this rigorously Marxist reasoning (but which is fundamentally pure common sense), but it's not an everyday thing to hear talk of "socialist republic" at the cinema! + +There has naturally been much talk about violence in this film. The subject seems to greatly fascinate the various moralists who find it curious and fundamentally also a bit scandalous that a film that isn't by Governor Schwarzenegger dwells with benevolent eye on copious transfers of blood from someone's circulatory system to the floor. We know that there is no reasoning about liberation that is not also reasoning about violence. For Loach, violence against the English doesn't deserve particular justification; the exercise of showing the brutality of colonial occupation is naturally carried out, to trigger an inevitable mechanism of identification with the oppressed, but you can see that the director doesn't pay much attention to it, those who doubt the opportunity for a people to free themselves by all necessary means won't find arguments in this film to convince themselves. Tullio Kezich in an obtuse review laments precisely this about the film, that it was too "partial" in favor of the Irish! There would be reason to laugh if there weren't reason to cry, but on the other hand finding the review hosted by the weekly magazine of the "third way" Corriere della Sera, we're not surprised that Kezich expected (but has he ever heard of Ken Loach?) a fence-sitting film, maybe even a bit "revisionist" à la Pansa, that would also show the advantages of colonialism and the flaws of the republican front. The same disoriented reviewer, in fact, rejoices in the fact that at least in the second half ample relief is given to the germ of human wickedness that has penetrated even the nationalist camp; it seems evident to me that we're faced with a case of failed communicative intent due to target mismatch, this is not a film for Tullio Keziches and their exposure to the film can lead to unforeseen results. For Loach naturally the second half is not about the human misery of the oppressed who "quarrel among themselves," on the contrary his sympathy (and ours) goes entirely to the "troublemakers" who immediately break the (interclass) unity of the republican front in the face of the betrayal of the Michael Collinses and Teddy O'Donovans. + +The film therefore neither apologizes for nor finds excuses for violence against tyrants and exploiters. The king of England is attributed with naturalness more or less the same humanity as Emperor Ming from Flash Gordon. While however in Michael Collins we find a complacency (inexplicable in a film that is fundamentally moderate and respectable) in depicting the heroic but fundamentally terrorist actions of the IRA gunmen, in The Wind That Shakes the Barley we glimpse a critique (especially in the ambush scene) also of the military tactics of petty-bourgeois nationalism, which makes a caricature of a regular war triggering a whole series of mechanisms (blind patriotism, obedience to leaders, flattening of conflict on national bases) that in fact hinder the transformation of the liberation struggle into social revolution. In Michael Collins, the individual terrorism is even contrasted (for pure spirit of adulation toward Collins) with guerrilla warfare with pitched battles, making the first appear as the "wise" and "plebeian" tactic of the protagonist, while the second would be a mad indulgence (because doomed to defeat for technical reasons) of cunning and ambitious politicians, but also very lacking in practical sense, like De Valera. Well... + +Moving to the opposite front, Ken Loach has no pity or empathy toward British colonialists and their collaborators. Without justifying them even a little (to the great disappointment of the various Tullio Keziches), he tries however to explain them. The soldiers first of all, who frequently appear brutal in dealing with a population they don't understand because it doesn't accept Crown dominion, to which they obviously attribute a civilizing function toward the "Fenian bumpkins," but also dismayed when the people's rebelliousness erupts in violent actions against them. One of them explains to a revolutionary under arrest that they finished fighting in trenches for the Crown just a few years ago, how can they be asked to betray their own country? Certainly, in this case these are ideological motivations (in the Marxian sense, I mean of "false consciousness"), in reality the soldiers deceive themselves believing that torturing Fenians is in their interests. Someone realizes this, and breaks the deadly mechanism of command on which the entire apparatus of exploitation rests: the prison door is opened by a courageous recruit, who sympathizes with the Irish cause. It's no longer just ideology, instead, but also lucid class consciousness that drives the landowner, Irish but Protestant, for whom a young republican militant works to denounce him and his mysterious friends who often come to visit him on the estate conspiring mysteriously in the stable. The boy is captured and out of cowardice gives the names of his comrades, who are taken and tortured. When the rebels' revenge falls on the landowner, he makes a proud declaration of adherence to his class's cause: "You will never prevail!", and he says it with prophetic certainty that suggests that he too, from his social side, had Connolly's lesson very clear. Certainly, he too yields to ideology, one would say sincerely, when he also raises a confessional motivation: "I will not let my country fall into Catholic barbarism"; if it's true, as has been said, that this film also talks about the occupation of Iraq, this is the point where the analogy becomes most stringent, with recourse to the superstitions of the oppressed (in the Iraqi case, "Islamic fundamentalist barbarism") as justification for their oppression. Even the Texas rangers (here I'm being influenced by the beautiful The Broken Collar by Valerio Evangelisti) persecuted Mexican immigrants adducing the excuse of their "papist" backwardness ("Look how they treat their women," as the male chauvinist Leaguists in Italy say today against Arab immigrants), except then they took it out mainly on leftist Mexican activists, anticlerical and priest-eaters to the bone. The problem deserves reflection: on one hand it should invite revolutionaries to a cautious and attentive attitude toward the prejudices of the oppressed (we wouldn't want to behave with them as exploiters do?), on the other hand a struggle to overcome them is crucial and I would like on this to refer to a beautiful article I read in Starry Plough, the magazine of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, in favor of abortion rights in Éire (a courageous position, because even among left republicans Catholic hostility toward abortion is very widespread): it explained that Catholic fundamentalism in Ireland was not only a crime against Irish women but was also an obstacle to the unification of the Island, as it strengthened in the Protestant community in Ulster the conviction that the liberation of Northern Ireland would mean the imposition of a theocracy subject to the Vatican. + +In general however religion in Loach's film counts little, even though a certain confessional characterization of the clash is correctly (from a historical point of view) shown (evanescent, perhaps for political correctness, in the other film I've now cited too many times). The most significant moment is when, after the proclamation of the Free State, all the fellow villagers of the O'Donovan brothers, now split in two by civil war, go to mass (including Damien and Sinead and other communists clearly with strong inclinations toward atheism, but in old leftist jargon one would say these are "contradictions among the people"): the priest thinks well to read, harshly criticizing its various slogans, a leaflet from the republican left that criticizes the peace treaty and, what is more serious in the priest's eyes, incites class struggle, advocating the expropriation of factories and the division of lands. From the pews the group of intransigents (quite numerous, and this too is historically plausible) gets up to openly criticize the homily, everything ends in a brawl and indignantly half the assembly of faithful gets up and leaves the church after the proud phrase spat by Damien at the priest: "Once again, the Catholic Church sides with the bosses against the people." + +Violence in the film is also "fratricidal" though. Here too, Loach doesn't give in to moralist banalization. An Irishman can shoot another Irishman for many different reasons. Shooting the collaborationist boss, however much he was born in Ireland, clearly has nothing fratricidal about it, it's an extension of the national liberation struggle and also of class struggle. But what to do with the boy, IRA militant, who betrayed his comrades not only by rattling off their names to the enemy, but also by avoiding, out of fear and shame, warning them as soon as possible of the danger they were running and "turning himself in" to the republican command? Damien and his comrades are ordered to shoot the "traitor" in one of the most "strong" and touching scenes; they don't know what to do, the merciless request seems to them a total enormity: Damien will want to obey the terrible order; the boy, who has remained despite everything a fervent republican, asks as a last wish not to be absolutely buried "near that one there," his boss who is killed without too many ceremonies right before him. It's interesting to see Damien's evolution in this regard; a moralist screenplay would want the young republican in the full of revolutionary enthusiasm willing to shoot the boy without thinking twice, friend of the family and known for a lifetime, and subsequently, with the struggle turning in on itself and the outbreak of civil war, having a thousand doubts and, finally far from the "dehumanizing" heat of revolutionary fervor, becoming wise and bitterly understanding the vanity and sinfulness of his actions; conversely, in this film we have the opposite: at the moment Damien is bewildered, decides to be the one to shoot him almost just to stay closer to him in the fatal moment and somehow carry out "gently" that task, but considers it a tremendous, crazy thing. When then, years later, he falls prisoner to his former comrades in struggle who have become, to put it hastily, sellouts, he doesn't think "Here, history repeats itself but now I'm in the victim's part," with attached historical pessimism and so on; on the contrary, he displays to his "sellout" brother who will shoot him the next day (and with this I've shed light on the last corners, remaining in shadow, of the plot) that burden he had to bear as a further mark of infamy toward those who betrayed the cause: "I for this cause had to shoot a friend, how can you ask me to betray it?". All the more so since the betrayal is so infamous as to anyway cost the price of shooting a brother. Violence doesn't ennoble the struggle, but neither does it degrade it: it makes it laden with so many additional and often superfluous sufferings as to require that at least such efforts be given adequate redemption. + +One last consideration must be made on the historical level, and perhaps shows the film's greatest lack (not from an artistic point of view, but undoubtedly from a political one): what happened after? Did the Teddys or the Damiens prevail? Actually formally neither. The Irish Free State has a short life, it's officially founded after Collins' killing, in December 1922. In 1932 Cosgrave, Collins' successor (and decidedly more moderate and anticommunist than him) is defeated in elections by the new Fianna Fáil party, led by the more radical Eamon De Valera, who had led the intransigent wing during the Civil War. The Free State apparatus is gradually dismantled (with the proclamation of Éire in 1937) and in the span of a few years, also with the help of World War II and the start of a decolonization process on a world scale, an independent republic is formed with the exception of the northern part of the island which remains occupied by the British. In domestic politics, however, De Valera realizes exactly Connolly's negative prophecy: tricolor flags are hoisted on the seats of political power but Capital's invisible flag remains hoisted on all other buildings. Retrospectively, it's often stated that subsequent events demonstrated that Collins was right to say that the Peace Treaty with the British Empire didn't guarantee freedom but guaranteed "the freedom to obtain freedom"; there exists a quote from an elderly De Valera, with which the film Michael Collins closes, in which "Dev" symbolically reconciles with his opponent, saying that Collins' figure should be revalued. The truth is that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism, even when "intransigent," not linking the "social question" to the national question, always ends in one form or another of opportunism. The same Provisional Sinn Féin (those usually meant in Italy when we say "IRA"), which maintained for decades toward Éire a position similar to that of De Valera toward the Irish Free State, then ended up, with the Good Friday Agreement, following a path of compromise entirely similar. + +De Valera's victory, and the current existence of a capitalist island, dominated by the Catholic clergy and split in two by the criminal "divide et impera" policy of British imperialism, is in the end an ironic revenge of Teddy O'Donovan. Damien O'Donovan is still waiting for the Socialist Republic of Ireland dreamed of by James Connolly. And we with him. + +*On James Connolly, see also my video in the series produced by Sinistra Classe Rivoluzione on the great revolutionaries of history:* + +{% include youtube.html id="9itkXeXwLEY" height=500 %} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2007-04-27-pope-ratzinger-pavia-en.md b/_drafts/2007-04-27-pope-ratzinger-pavia-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f88ce48 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2007-04-27-pope-ratzinger-pavia-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: Pope Ratzinger in Pavia +tags: pol pv en +slug: ratzinger +original: ratzinger-pavia +--- +Even from an atheist and materialist point of view, one cannot help but draw some considerations regarding a "cultural" event relevant to the capital of our province such as Joseph Ratzinger's visit that took place on April 21 and 22. I would especially like to tell from a particular point of view that weekend as we Young Communists experienced it; I won't talk about Vigevano because we didn't follow the matter closely, but I believe that many general observations could also be applied to the Vigevano part of the papal visit. + +Few but good? +============= + +The first significant question for us is to understand **how many people** the Catholic Church managed to get with an extreme effort of publicizing and spectacularizing the visit of its leader. We haven't read comprehensive figures in the press, but they say 10 thousand people overall in Vigevano and 20 thousand attendees at the mass at the Borromaic Gardens in Pavia. This latter figure is nothing other than the number of seats set up by the organizers of the mass-show, but we don't know if it's the actual number. + +Three evaluations seem more important to us than the absolute figure, which is difficult both to obtain and to judge: that of the bishop, that of the Vaticanists who followed the event, and that of downtown merchants. + +**Bishop Poma** is the most explicit: his official statement opens by saying that *"The presence of people seemed good to me. More qualitatively than quantitatively. [...] there could have been more people"*. If we understand correctly, he's saying that Catholics in Pavia were "few but good"... meager consolation, I'd say, for an organization like the Catholic Church in Italy that isn't very used to considering itself a "well-organized minority." + +Also **the Vaticanists interviewed by ***the Provincia Pavese*** noted that security measures reduced attendance; we wonder though what type of faithful is one who doesn't go to welcome the pope in his city to avoid the inconvenience of barriers: probably the deciphering of these observations is that the curious avoided downtown on "hot" days (and indeed the Vernavola park or the Vul area were packed on Sunday). + +**The merchants**, finally, seem to be furious with the Municipality that led them to expect oceanic crowds that never materialized, with the aftermath of quintals of food and drinks left unsold and bars and venues left open empty until 2 AM at the mayor's request. + +It seems evident, in short, that only a minority of the city considered it important to "be there," a point that calls into question the appropriateness of the **pharaonic expenses** sustained and the representation of the city as a community compactly in **enthusiastic anticipation** of the pontiff (it's on this falsehood that the entire propaganda construction was based, reinforced by welcome posters and pro-papal "regime banners," as well as the formal prohibition of any manifestation of dissent in the areas of passage of the popemobile). + +Coldness +======== + +The snobbery of those who, like writer Mino Milani, accuse Pavia's citizenry of insensitivity because in the face of this "historic event" many raised prosaic complaints about the considerable annoyance caused by the **exaggerated security measures** is not acceptable. + +The fact is that during the weekend the existence of a part of the city to which Ratzinger's visit didn't give particular mystical thrills was manifested, but rather induced a reaction that ranged from the active opposition of a minority (which we obviously tried to support and feed) to the annoyance and indifference of a very large part of the population. + +This "gray area," to which a "militant" papacy like that of Benedict XVI struggles to address (privileging organized and fanatical Catholicism), found the measures adopted for the reception unjustified, and not wrongly: **the barriers and police controls** paralyzed the city for two days without the influx of pilgrims justifying it, nor does what actually happened (a mass, hypocritical official meetings and the usual speeches we hear every Sunday on TG1) seem to have ultimately confirmed the "memorability" of the event. The large screens set up for the city thus remained almost unused (completely the one in front of the Polyclinic) making the crazy expense made by the organizers even more shameful. + +The only ones to be truly hyperactive and radiant were the various **organized ecclesiastical groups** like Communion and Liberation, who had their little moments of glory like the greeting of the **fake "student representative,"** the Communion and Liberation member Stefano Pellegrino (*nomen omen*), scandalously appointed from above to speak on behalf of Pavia university students, who however had not at all rewarded CL in the last university elections (and on this the UdU raised a very justified [inquiry in the Academic Senate](https://web.archive.org/web/20110323104254/http://www.coordinamento.org/2007/04/26/comunicato-stampa/ "Read the UdU Pavia press release on the Pellegrino case")). + +Great works and small inconveniences +=================================== + +Even numerous details highlight the **"great works" logic** underlying the entire operation. + +They had promised to **"renovate the city"** for the occasion and this was well seen even by the less pious; in practice, they limited themselves to repainting very few walls in the center and little else. Degraded areas of the city, construction sites open for a long time, even in the city center, received no benefit from the special interventions that should have been triggered by the papal visit. + +At the Borromaic Gardens, where the most relevant works were concentrated, these focused on the useless pomp of the enormous (and hideous) altar that cost something like 50 thousand euros. In compensation, the area where many faithful were crammed was well described by a newscast as ***"a sand ditch from which nothing could be seen"***; fortunately the "authorities" who rushed to show Christian virtues had a reserved and more comfortable space. + +Even **the old folks at the Pertusati hospice** seem to have had to learn a bitter lesson (which I would have gladly spared them) about the arrogance of religious hierarchies, given that the pope they had been waiting to see for days passed in front of their shelter at full speed without even greeting them. It was heartbreaking to read their desolate reactions in the local press. On the other hand, it's all too clear that even from a symbolic point of view we're faced with a papacy that wants to maintain a certain distance from the "common people," promoting a detached attitude from the masses and a privileged relationship with the conservative or reactionary *intelligentsia*. The subjects' idolatry toward the Vatican monarch, who looks at his own base from above with an arrogant schoolmaster attitude, is functional to this approach, which if we want is the same one behind the partial rehabilitation of the Latin mass. + +Theology of submission +====================== + +Joseph Ratzinger in Pavia, besides touring the city boxed in the popemobile and giving everyone an occasion for a display of *kitsch* objects, actually also dealt with **religion**, even though that was by far the least important aspect. A few words must therefore be spent on this secondary face of the papal journey. + +Ratzinger held three rallies (at the S. Matteo polyclinic, at the university and during the homily at the Borromaic Gardens) in which however similar and interconnected concepts returned. The level was always very "high," in some ways even excluding toward the bulk of the faithful: the **pope-theologian** spoke to activists of confessional movements, Catholic professionals and the intellectual or political class; for the church ladies, those who were there somewhat by chance and the people from the oratories, it was considered that the physical presence of the VIP could suffice. + +References to **St. Augustine** were lavished, whose remains are preserved in Pavia at the church of St. Peter in Ciel d'Oro and who is a very important theorist for Ratzinger's thought. There were no direct references to current events, the concept that Benedict XVI was interested in developing was that of the relationship between faith and culture (understood both in general and more specifically as scientific and particularly medical culture): the vision advocated by the pontiff is that entirely medieval and anti-progressive one of Christianity (and therefore essentially of ecclesiastical power) as a unifying doctrine of human knowledge, capable of completing and synthesizing the "specialism" of different disciplines and in fact also destined (by God himself) to set limits on the practical application of these disciplines. + +Secular knowledge, therefore, **handmaiden of faith**. Concretely, this means nothing other than claiming an ideological leading role for the Vatican and continuing the centuries-old battle against freedom of research (philosophical, artistic and scientific). + +It's rather disturbing that the (public) university lent itself to being a sounding board for such a message, in fact denying the very sense of the existence of a place like the University. Even worse: a good chunk of **university barons** (for example rector Angiolino Stella or former rector Roberto Schmid) had no qualms about applauding from the front row and then going orderly to kneel to kiss the ring of the one who had pronounced it. + +Politicians +=========== + +Pitiful and extremely provincial was the behavior of most politicians. The presence of Umberto Bossi and Giulio Tremonti doesn't even deserve to be commented on, from whom one couldn't expect much anyway. Also squalid was the attempt by the "Dell'Utri circles" to "plant the flag" by organizing a "concert for the pope" for Saturday evening, a circumstance that put the diocese in great embarrassment as it saw itself being politically instrumentalized (they're more used to doing the reverse). On the other hand, **Abelli's style** (having "hands in the dough" and being seen as much as possible) sets a precedent: Pavia's political feudal lord, regional councilor and murkily "friend" of both the provincial center-right and the capital's center-left, attendee of all public works inaugurations, couldn't help but also be a member, together with barons, mayors, bankers and industrialists, of the honorary committee that organized the reception for the pontiff. + +Pavia mayor **Piera Capitelli** certainly deserves a prominent place in this gallery of papal boot-lickers. If already in the election campaign the DS parliamentarian (today a PD enthusiast) had produced a flyer showing her during Confirmation and then in a wedding dress on her religious marriage day, if the first official meeting she had as mayor was with the bishop, on this occasion she managed to reach new peaks in her work of humiliating state secularism. We're not only referring to the two press releases in local newspapers, where Benedict XVI was welcomed in the name of St. Augustine and then the citizenry was thanked for contributing to this "historic event," but also and especially to the declaration of wanting to promote Pavia as the "moral capital of Catholicism" due to the presence of St. Augustine's remains; the proposal, besides being ridiculous and provincial (even though it's true that an "Augustinian Center" has just been founded which we hope won't manage to develop), doesn't seem to precisely fall within the institutional duties of a municipal administration. + +I finally note that the "challenge" I had launched on the pages of *la Provincia Pavese*, inviting politicians who consider themselves "secular" to **make a move**, obtained very meager results. No figure with any institutional position (think of SDI councilor Roberto Portolan, who in theory is part of a party that has made secularism its almost exclusive raison d'être and who didn't even participate in the secular initiatives organized by his own party comrades!), with the exception of left-wing municipal councilors Di Tomaso and Campari, distinguished themselves in any way on this matter. On the other hand, in Italy attacking the Church can be very risky for one's political career. + +Critical voices +=============== + +Fortunately, secular Pavia, the **"Pavia that is not Papia,"** also made itself heard. It wasn't easy to do so, because as mentioned we suffered a restriction of spaces and in fact of the very freedom to express a contrary opinion. Posting posters against the papal visit was almost impossible, only with great effort could one "break through" the mass media and moreover almost all organized political structures were in great embarrassment every time they were invited to do something to affirm their secularism. + +Saturday we Young Communists remembered as every year the killing of **Ferruccio Ghinaglia**, founder of Pavia communism assassinated by fascists on April 21, 1921. It was curious to see comrades laying a bouquet of red flowers on his monument and singing with raised fist *Red Flag* and *The Internationale* at a time when every gathering with flags and songs was suspected of papism... + +Right after we went to the **unitary secular assembly**, basically organized by the radicals, at the Sala dell'Annunciata. All left-wing parties had formally given their adherence (strangely including the DS who in those days were in the front row in genuflecting to the pope!), but very few political leaders showed up at the assembly. + +The first touching speech was by [Adele Parrillo](https://web.archive.org/web/20110323104254/http://adeleparrillo.splinder.com/), the partner of director and producer Stefano Rolla who died in Nassiriya in the 2003 attack (he was in Iraq to shoot a documentary film about what Parrillo defined as *"a fake peace mission"*). Partner and not wife: precisely for this reason (and probably also for her positions on the war, we add) excluded from official celebrations and become "invisible" and since then engaged in a battle so that her love story interrupted so tragically stops being hidden under the carpet by the hypocritical power of the State. + +Then professors **Valerio Pocar** (who spoke with great competence and sagacity about the problems of end of life and euthanasia, faced with cynicism and insensitivity by the dogmatic Vatican hierarchies) and [Luigi Garlaschelli](https://web.archive.org/web/20110323104254/http://www.luigigarlaschelli.it/) (who in a brilliant speech accompanied by tables and slides revealed some secrets of the trafficking in miracles and saints carried out by the Catholic Church) spoke. + +Finally, **Mina Welby** spoke with great humanity about the famous case that saw her husband opposed to the arrogance of the State and the Vatican to obtain at least the right to decide in freedom a dignified death. + +Sunday instead the **anticlerical concert at Vul** was held, on the banks of the Ticino, which was extensively covered by the local press (in [an article](https://web.archive.org/web/20110726102716/http://www.giovanicomunistipavia.org/gli-antipapi-allarea-vul) we've already reported on this site) and which was given some space also on television with interviews of two GC comrades. Attendance was higher than expected, a few hundred young people came to listen to the improvised concert and visit the political material stands that we and the other event organizers had set up. We took the opportunity to meet some new very young and enthusiastic comrades and to produce our new official banner that we then displayed on April 25, with the beautiful red inscription *Young Communists Pavia - F. Ghinaglia Federation*. + +Monday, finally, the Young Left and UdU brought dozens of people (including numerous boys from the city's homosexual community) to a successful assembly with parliamentarian **Franco Grillini** (honorary president of Arcigay, from DS, but apparently won't join the Democratic Party - and moreover we wonder with what face the Democrats of the Left can claim to defend civil rights even arriving at an organizational merger with the former Christian Democrats of the Margherita, among whom we find the Catholic fundamentalist Binetti). The young people of Forza Italia, to whom perhaps the pope's presence over the weekend had gone to their heads, had announced a "mass presence" of "citizenry" to counter Grillini's presumably anti-family opinions (called *"the/the Hon. Grillini"* in a delirious homophobic flyer), but three of them showed up making the usual bad impression. Maybe they confused the journalistic legends, which want to paint ours as a generation of papa-boys, with reality. + +*** + +I wrote this article in 2007 for the Young Communists of Pavia website, of which I was the provincial coordinator at the time. +I remember that time we also made a flyer with the playful title «Little God», where it was explained that there was little divinity in Ratzinger's propaganda operation. We were kids... \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2008-04-04-grandi-sacerdoti-bce.md b/_drafts/2008-04-04-grandi-sacerdoti-bce.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f204e07 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2008-04-04-grandi-sacerdoti-bce.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: I grandi sacerdoti della Banca Centrale Europea +tags: pol +original: high-priests-ecb +--- +Quando i commentatori conservatori occidentali vogliono denunciare qualche "regime del Terzo Mondo" coinvolto in un conflitto con uno dei paesi capitalisti più potenti come Stati Uniti, Gran Bretagna o Francia, molto spesso usano un espediente giornalistico, quello del *cattivo non eletto che interferisce*. Secondo questo dispositivo, questi "paesi malvagi e arretrati" sono in uno stato molto peggiore rispetto ai più "civilizzati" Germania, Belgio o Canada, perché c'è un *ayatollah* non eletto in Iran, un generale non eletto in Myanmar, un *Caro Leader* non eletto in Corea del Nord, che può tenere un discorso in una moschea di Teheran, in una scuola militare di Rangoon, in una sede del Partito di Pyongyang e influenzare decisivamente il corso della politica nazionale. + +L'implicazione è che la cosiddetta "società civile" in questi paesi è così arretrata, barbara e democraticamente "analfabeta" che cade facilmente preda dell'influenza di questi "prepotenti", mentre nelle "forti società civili democratiche" in paesi come Spagna, Svezia o Australia, la democrazia si dispiega liberamente e rifiuta qualsiasi interferenza dall'esterno. + +Eppure, dopo un esame più attento di questi paesi, le differenze tra loro e Iran, Birmania o Corea del Nord sembrano sfumare un po' quando leggiamo notizie come quella che abbiamo letto il 13 marzo su come opera la Banca Centrale Europea. Non troviamo spiegazioni razionali e scientifiche ma qualcosa di più simile al misticismo religioso. Può essere formulato in termini più sottili, ma è comunque un tentativo di confondere i popoli d'Europa. + +## Il dominio autocratico delle banche centrali + +No, ci concentreremo semplicemente sull'ultimo bollettino mensile emesso dalla BCE, la Banca Centrale Europea. Questa istituzione finanziaria è guidata da un individuo chiamato Jean-Claude Trichet. I suoi statuti sono basati sul concetto di "indipendenza finanziaria e politica", che implica una responsabilità molto limitata verso i governi nazionali e il Parlamento europeo, per non parlare del lavoratore medio che vive nell'Eurozona. Trichet è quindi il *gran sacerdote (o osiamo dire l'Ayatollah?)* dell'Euro, l'unico interprete della sua volontà impersonale. + +[...resto del contenuto tradotto...] + +## L'inflazione - una forma intelligente di furto + +I lavoratori possono facilmente vedere che l'inflazione è una forma intelligente di furto. Diciamo che hanno firmato un contratto di lavoro, un pezzo di carta, accettando che i loro salari saranno di $1000 al mese per il loro lavoro, che consente loro di comprare una certa quantità di merci. Poi si rendono conto che stanno guadagnando l'equivalente di una quantità molto più piccola di merci - ancora $1000 al mese sulla carta, ma gli stessi soldi hanno ora meno valore. Reagendo contro questa rapina legalizzata, la peccaminosa classe operaia è facilmente tentata di chiedere l'indicizzazione dei salari, cioè l'introduzione di un sistema di scala mobile, per cui ogni mese o ogni pochi mesi, ogni lavoratore ha diritto a ricevere un aumento automatico del salario per compensare il tasso di inflazione. + +*** + +Pubblicato originariamente su [In Defence of Marxism](http://www.marxist.com/). Lavoravo nello staff tecnico del sito nel 2008, e a volte scrivevo anche articoli. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2008-05-05-veneto-skinheads-pavia-en.md b/_drafts/2008-05-05-veneto-skinheads-pavia-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dc7dfda --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2008-05-05-veneto-skinheads-pavia-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: When Veneto Fronte Skinheads also troubled Pavia +tags: pol pv en +original: veneto-skinheads +--- +Anger, sadness, disgust: for a few months I've been in London for work (another European capital fallen like Rome into the hands of the most shameless right) and today, reading the news from Verona on the subway, these are the first sensations I feel. + +Once again, a menacing acronym appears in the newspapers, which I've learned to detest: **Veneto Fronte Skinheads**. This stupid and ungrammatical name, despite the geographical incongruity (for those who don't know, Pavia is in Lombardy), was also used in Pavia by the group of arrogant neo-Nazis who for years filled the pages of the local press with their exploits. + +Unfortunately, my name was often on those pages too, along with that of many other comrades and friends who suffered the harassment of these provincial squadrists. One event above all: on March 28, 2003, a gang of thugs, led precisely by the Veneto Fronte Skinheads bullies, assaulted the "Barattolo" Social Center, causing injuries and damage worth thousands of euros. + +For that assault there was a trial, actually two, where so far the VFS violent ones have received conviction after conviction, but never sufficient to actually make them pay with prison. Defending the most unruly was a lawyer from Verona, **Roberto Bussinello**, at the time a leader of another group, **Forza Nuova**, of which several skinheads were part. I remember him well, that lawyer, when without the slightest sense of shame he tried to reverse the role of victims and attacked, calmly asking that I be condemned for... attempted massacre! Obviously, the absurd request was rejected by the judge amid the jeers and contempt of those present. + +Who defends **Raffele Delle Donne** today, confessed perpetrator for the Verona facts? La Repubblica writes today: *"lawyer Tremeloni, from Roberto Bussinello's office, a criminal lawyer who defends almost all far-right defendants in the city and ran in the last elections on Storace's list, after having long served in Forza Nuova"*. + +Yes, because it must be said that Veneto Fronte Skinheads has at this moment become a kind of offshoot of **La Destra - Fiamma Tricolore**, after its historical leader, a certain **Puschiavo**, joined that party. Note that, being Fiamma Tricolore part of the majority supporting Verona's League mayor, **Flavio Tosi**, one could well say that Veneto Fronte Skinheads is today... in government of the city! + +La Destra and Fiamma Tricolore naturally also exist in Pavia. Fiamma even has a local website, registered to one of the defendants in the trial for the assault on Barattolo, where we find invocations to "futurist violence" and fascist quotes like this one (taken from the Constitution of the RSI established by Hitler in Northern Italy): *"Those belonging to the Jewish race are foreigners [...] belong to enemy nationality"*. + +The **Northern League**, which in Verona governs the city together with Fiamma-VFS, has had relations with these skinheads also in Pavia. Those who read the local press will remember that there was a big scandal in 2001 when the neo-Nazi chiefs of Veneto Fronte Skinheads were accused of meeting at the League headquarters, a circumstance admitted by the League's city leaders themselves. I remember it very well because I saw with my own eyes the shaved heads entering the League headquarters on Lungoticino. + +Reading these lines, one will understand well why I consider these groups dangerous and why the thousand threads that bind them to larger organizations of the official right scandalize me. Banning these organizations that promote racial hatred and the arrogance of the strong over the weak, preventing them from continuing their work of propaganda and recruitment of ignorant young people who want to throw punches, closing their headquarters (the controversy against the Forza Nuova headquarters in Pavia is well known, provocatively opened a stone's throw from the "Barattolo") is dutiful, even if certainly not enough when similar ideas are advocated at all levels by unscrupulous politicians at the highest levels of the State. + +It's heartbreaking to read the courageous words of Delle Donne's parents: *"We would prefer to be parents of the massacred boy rather than of our son"*. Let's prevent other boys from being massacred, other boys from being dragged into the infamous circuit of far-right violence, other parents from having to repudiate their children for the horrors that stupidity and racism make them commit. Let's prevent it starting right now. + +*** + +The letter (published by Provincia Pavese on May 9, 2008) refers to the killing of **Nicola Tommasoli**. For that murder, besides the mentioned Raffaele Delle Donne, four other fascists were convicted: Federico Perini, Nicolò Veneri, Guglielmo Corsi and Andrea Vesentini. + +The Forza Nuova headquarters in Pavia I talked about in the letter was "besieged" by us antifascists a few months later in reaction to yet another aggression, while I was still in London, and [hastily closed](https://old.marxismo.net/antifa/antifascismo/antifascismo/chiude-la-sede-di-forza-nuova-a-pavia) by the fascists themselves the next day. Today that same venue has ironically become [our headquarters](https://santacanaglia.org/), dedicated to the communist leader and antifascist martyr Ferruccio Ghinaglia. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2008-12-30-la-battaglia-del-cile.md b/_drafts/2008-12-30-la-battaglia-del-cile.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..db24474 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2008-12-30-la-battaglia-del-cile.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: '"La battaglia del Cile"' +tags: pol media +original: chile +--- +Queste sono le recensioni, pubblicate su [In Defence of Marxism](http://www.marxist.com/) e [Hands Off Venezuela](http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/), delle tre parti del film di Patricio Guzmán *La battaglia del Cile* (*La batalla de Chile*) proiettate a Londra nel 2008. Sono stato responsabile di questa serie di proiezioni durante l'autunno 2008. + +*** + +I - L'insurrezione della borghesia +--------------------------------- + +{% include youtube.html id="CnTPJ6kmB0s" %} + +Il 20 agosto 2008, la stagione cinematografica *[Venezuela: una rivoluzione in pellicola](http://venezuelarevolutionfilm.blogspot.com/)*, organizzata a Londra da Hands Off Venezuela in collaborazione con l'Ambasciata venezuelana, ha attirato ancora più di quaranta persone alla proiezione della prima parte de *La battaglia del Cile*. Come al solito, Pablo Roldan (HOV) ha introdotto la proiezione nella Bolívar Hall. Questo documentario è un fantastico documento video sulla Rivoluzione cilena e la sua sconfitta, girato durante lo svolgersi degli eventi da Patricio Guzmán e la sua équipe. + +La prima parte copre il periodo che va dal marzo 1973, quando la coalizione di sinistra Unità Popolare ottiene il 43,7% dei voti, impedendo alla destra di mettere legalmente sotto accusa il presidente socialista Salvador Allende, fino al primo tentativo di golpe, meno di quattro mesi dopo. Il titolo di questa parte è, significativamente, *L'insurrezione della borghesia*. + +In effetti, il fallimento dei partiti di destra (i democristiani sostenuti dagli USA, il Partito Nazionale e altri) nell'ottenere una maggioranza di due terzi arriva come un risultato completamente inaspettato ai sostenitori borghesi della controrivoluzione. Mentre documentano le ultime schermaglie della campagna elettorale, i registi visitano la lussuosa casa di una famiglia di destra, si immergono in una folla proletaria a un evento dell'Unità Popolare chiedendo cosa è cambiato nelle loro vite da quando Allende è salito al potere, e intervistano guidatori di auto costose mentre l'operatore esplora i dettagli dei loro veicoli o abbigliamenti. Usando tali dispositivi efficaci, il film illumina per i sostenitori di entrambe le parti la loro posizione di classe e le loro opinioni politiche. Non si può fare a meno di apprezzare come quest'ultime si correlino fortemente con le prime. + +Ancora più della determinazione plebea a sostenere il governo socialista nella speranza di un cambiamento decisivo nella società, qualcos'altro riporta immediatamente alla mente i resoconti contemporanei della situazione in Venezuela o Bolivia, cioè l'arroganza e l'odio di classe dei sostenitori più terribilmente espliciti della destra. Mentre la maggior parte dei ricchi di destra dichiarano di essere a favore della via legale per sbarazzarsi dei *"bastardi comunisti, marxisti"*, diversi, specialmente quando i primi risultati elettorali sembrano confermare il previsto trionfo di destra, affermano intenzioni più spietate: *"E ora *lui* dovrà lasciare il paese!"* È esattamente questo linguaggio che viene usato da coloro che si oppongono a Chávez, Morales o Correa oggi -- almeno, quando non richiedono espressamente l'esecuzione di quei presidenti di sinistra. + +[...resto del contenuto tradotto...] + +*** + +Pubblicato originariamente su [In Defence of Marxism](http://www.marxist.com/). Lavoravo nello staff tecnico del sito nel 2008, e a volte scrivevo anche articoli. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2009-11-22-pavia-global-crisis-en.md b/_drafts/2009-11-22-pavia-global-crisis-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f19b27f --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2009-11-22-pavia-global-crisis-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: Pavia and province in the vortex of the global crisis +tags: pol pv en +original: pavia-global-crisis +--- +The global economic crisis has its repercussions also in the province of Pavia. Last December the provincial secretariat of CGIL raised the alarm: in our province during 2009 something like 2,500 jobs could be lost. The Excelsior data series for 2009 provides some interesting information on expected employment flows that roughly confirm the concerns of the Chamber of Labor: for this year in the province 5,000 exits from the world of work are expected against 3,500 hires. Interesting to discover that even in a deindustrialized province like Pavia the bulk of hires (over 70%) will come from companies with over 50 employees: in short, the "fabric of small businesses" of which so much is said will certainly not save us (only 10% of hires will come from companies with under 10 employees). A good part of job losses affects precarious workers: the most exploited and most blackmailable are also the first to be left out as soon as there's a crisis, confirming that precariousness doesn't solve employment problems. + +One can take comfort, however, by noting that Pavia data is better than that of most other Lombard provinces: the PV-branded economy was already so messed up that there wasn't even much room for worsening! + +A report by the Pavia Chamber of Commerce indicates a 9% drop in industrial production in Pavia and province in the second quarter of 2009. In the same quarter orders fell by 15.8% for the domestic market and 5.5% for the foreign market. The announcements of recovery or little recovery that appeared in newspapers and television at the end of summer were not enough to avoid new industrial crises starting from September. The other article on this page tells us about the story of Eckart in Rivanazzano, a plant that announced closure a few weeks ago, causing an all-out strike by its employees. The struggle of Eckart workers however concluded with an agreement that establishes the loss of dozens of jobs. + +Another case among many is that of Sigma in Vigevano, a company that produces numerical control work centers; in crisis, its sale to a new buyer is underway with the intention of "restructuring" it, that is, leaving about eighty people at home. + +A document published by the Pavia Chamber of Commerce (in the presence of the omnipresent Gianfranco Abelli) says that Pavia can make it and indicates sectors like Healthcare that would have emerged unscathed from the crisis. Maybe, but even there they take advantage of the general context to hit working conditions, as the workers of cooperatives (cooperatives... sui generis, let's say) who handle cleaning at Pavia's S. Matteo Hospital have learned, where, with a questionable "contract change," they found themselves doing the same work as before under much worse conditions. On the other hand, even many of the metalworking companies (the sector most hit by recession in the province) declared "in crisis" are actually just taking advantage of the opportunity to obtain social safety nets and conduct restructuring that was already being prepared before the crisis began. + +On the Repubblica website there's an interesting service mapping the economic crisis, you can get there by visiting http://vaime.org/mappacrisi. You can have fun (so to speak) looking for the files of companies in crisis in the Pavia area, at the moment there are 52 with many cases of recourse to layoff benefits, layoffs, closures or bankruptcies. + +We're so used to the fact that our lives depend on global economic trends that we're not even surprised anymore to discover that hundreds of families can find themselves facing the nightmare of unemployment because of the infamous recession. The share of foreign turnover in the province is 30%, a growing figure that indicates the significant dependence of the Pavia economy on the world market. The still disastrous economy of our province is very export-oriented; if we add to this the impressive data on commuting to Milan and other places, we understand how those who live in our province either work elsewhere or produce goods that will be consumed elsewhere, a condition of economic subordination similar to that of underdeveloped countries. + +Capitalism and its periodic crises are a common evil, but this shouldn't push us to think of it as half joy. Rather, let this be an opportunity for our fellow citizens to broaden their horizons beyond Siccomario or the Becca bridge: we too are part of a globalized world subject to the whims of capital. Against the horrors of the global economic system, the world is scattered with struggles and equally international resistance: let Pavia too find its place on the barricades! + +*** + +This article was published in the first issue of **Bonarda**, "the red and lively Pavia aperiodic," a free local newsletter we produced for about a year. Not all articles were so serious, but the effort to investigate workers' conditions was tenacious in all issues. Unfortunately online the articles appeared only as Facebook notes, so they're not easy to find; the newsletter was distributed simply by leaving it around in hundreds of copies and organizing presentation and self-financing aperitifs. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2010-06-12-how-tambroni-government-fell-en.md b/_drafts/2010-06-12-how-tambroni-government-fell-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3d664f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2010-06-12-how-tambroni-government-fell-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: How the Tambroni government was brought down +tags: pol en +original: tambroni-government +--- +These days mark the fiftieth anniversary of the tumultuous and bloody events of 1960, when Italy saw an attempt at a sharp authoritarian turn under the DC government of Fernando Tambroni, which enjoyed the support of the neo-fascists of the Italian Social Movement. The worker and youth mobilization that defeated that hypothesis, paying the high price of 11 deaths, represents for us a model of how the labor movement can stop neo-fascism and a reactionary government. + +1960 was a pivotal year. The economic growth of the fifties was at its peak, in '60 there was the all-time record with +8.3% GDP. Industry workers had recently overtaken those in agriculture. The "Italian miracle," however, built on the ruins of war with the sweat and blood of workers, had brought with it countless social contradictions that were beginning to result in growing union conflict. Fernando Tambroni was considered a "left-wing Christian Democrat" and had been tasked with forming a DC government in a climate of openness toward the Socialist Party, a climate that many representatives of the bourgeoisie and the Church bitterly opposed. This opening to the left however failed, to become its opposite: Tambroni was elected in April with MSI votes. Here we see how the same Christian Democrat political personnel were anti-fascist or pro-fascist according to necessity; the majority party was internally divided on the tactic to follow to get out of difficulties: co-responsibility with the left or an authoritarian turn? + +The fascists immediately went "to collect" asking Tambroni to allow the MSI congress to take place in Genoa from July 2 to 4. The honorary presidency of the congress would be assigned to Carlo E. Basile who had been prefect of Genoa during the RSI, making himself responsible for the deportation to concentration camps of hundreds of striking workers. It was an intolerable provocation. Throughout June Genoa was mobilized to obtain the cancellation of the neo-fascist congress, as CGIL first requested, inviting workers to physically prevent its taking place. Left-wing, youth, cultural and union organizations carried out widespread propaganda, finding fertile ground in a strongly anti-fascist population that had in port workers its most combative part. There had also been in recent months several worker disputes that had exasperated the Genoese proletariat against the central and local government, last but not least the struggle of Ansaldo San Giorgio workers. + +On June 25 a partisan commemorative march launched by FGCI and other left-wing youth organizations resulted in the first clashes with the Celere. On June 28 a Pertini rally further heated the climate. For June 30 CGIL had called an afternoon general strike, from which CISL and UIL dissociated themselves. The march had 100 thousand people: students and other young people ("the boys in striped shirts"), workers, former ANPI partisans. In De Ferrari square clashes broke out with police, who implemented fierce repression to which the people of Genoa responded with a real insurrection. The *camalli* who came up from the port, the people from the *caruggi* of the center gave support to the young people engaged in erecting barricades and defending themselves from police violence. + +The Ligurian CGIL proclaimed another strike for July 2, while in the rest of the country mobilizations in solidarity with the Genoese revolt began; former partisans resumed contacts with each other, in Genoa and elsewhere insurrectional committees were formed. The MSI delegates arriving in Genoa found a hostile city under siege. Negotiations began to move the congress to Nervi, an option that PCI leaders would have been ready to accept but that CGIL, closer to worker pressures, refused. The negotiation failed and the congress was finally cancelled, despite protests from fascist leaders; CGIL immediately suspended the July 2 strike. + +The result obtained in Genoa thanks to massive working class intervention however did not interrupt the mobilization, which at this point turned against Tambroni's entire authoritarian political operation. The government was put under pressure by MSI and the bourgeois press to restore order with an iron fist washing in blood the shame of having yielded to the Genoese square. On July 5 in Licata (AG) a strike in defense of employment was repressed in blood: police firing on the crowd killed 25-year-old Vincenzo Napoli. On July 6 in Rome an unauthorized anti-fascist demonstration was charged on horseback and even communist parliamentarians like Walter Audisio (Mussolini's executioner) were wounded. + +For July 7 a strike was called in Reggio Emilia. 20 thousand people found themselves in the square where gatherings were prohibited, the only hall assigned to the demonstration had only 600 seats. Workers sang partisan songs under the monument to the Fallen when a violent charge of riot police and carabinieri started that quickly transformed into a massacre with firearms as soon as demonstrators organized the first barricades. Thus workers Lauro Farioli, Ovidio Franchi, Emilio Reverberi, Marino Serri, Afro Tondelli were killed, all PCI members (2 boys aged 19 and 22 and 3 former partisans). + +The situation was getting out of hand: worker and partisan mobilization had increasingly broad consensus and was beginning to take on revolutionary characteristics. The government appealed for the suspension of all demonstrations and the leadership of PCI and CGIL, worried about the energies the working class was unleashing, showed themselves open to possibility. The bloody showdown however continued: on July 8 it was Palermo's turn where trade unionist Francesco Vella and young people Giuseppe Malleo and Andrea Gangitano whom Vella was helping were killed (Rosa La Barbera was also killed in her home by a stray bullet); the same day in Catania Salvatore Novembre, 19 years old, was bombarded with clubs and then finished off with close-range pistol shots. + +The Italian republic "born from the Resistance" and "founded on work" had no problems using its armed wing to massacre partisans and workers in order to defend the established order. It wasn't the Constitution or democracy that stopped the blood, it was the force of the organized working class. Saturday July 9 the protest demonstrations for the eleven dead were imposing, especially in the cities of the massacres (100 thousand in Reggio): workers had not been frightened or bent. + +Faced with the strength of the movement, which now openly set itself the goal of Tambroni's downfall, the ruling class began to divide. 61 Catholic intellectuals signed a document against DC's openings to the right. Tambroni was increasingly isolated, on July 19 he had to resign. Three days later Christian Democrat Amintore Fanfani received the mandate, who formed a government supported by PRI and PSDI. + +The pendulum however was now moving toward an ever greater involvement of the left in government; the authoritarian option was impractical, but the bourgeoisie still needed to defend its interests in a context of growing class struggle like that of the sixties, so better to do it by flanking the faithful Christian Democracy with left-wing parties, starting with the most malleable: it would mean granting some modest reforms, obtaining in exchange greater stability. In 1962 a new Fanfani government obtained PSI abstention, which in 1963 entered the Moro government inaugurating the center-left formula (without PCI) that lasted until the mid-seventies, when the nefarious idea of a DC-PCI "historic compromise" emerged. + +1960 for us is not the story of how the left forced the bourgeoisie to launch the center-left. That outcome, which saved a ruling class that found itself in great difficulty, actually represents a betrayal of the aspirations of those who rose up in Genoa or died in Emilia and Sicily with the hope of transforming society. Just see what happened to the executioners and victims. The former were all acquitted in subsequent trials, conversely, the protagonists of Genoese June 30 were persecuted for years, some of them forced to change city or even country, and often ended up in prison. The fascists, as is known, remained very active in the country, continuing their career as organizers of massacres and coups in service of the CIA and P2. + +At the same time, the '60 movement prepared the ground for the revolutionary biennium 1968-'69, when once again Italian students and then workers tried to change the history of this country fighting against capitalism and its governments, whatever their color. It will happen again! + +*** + +Published on [FalceMartello](https://web.archive.org/web/20170408164015/http://www.marxismo.net/content/view/3801/156/) n° 227. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2012-08-10-carcassonne-en.md b/_drafts/2012-08-10-carcassonne-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..71019bd --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2012-08-10-carcassonne-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "Review: Carcassonne" +tags: games en +original: carcassonne +--- + +Carcassonne was invented by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, a music and theology teacher living near Cologne. The game was published in 2000, achieving enormous success since then, leading to the publication of a large number of expansions. + +This review with a scientific-analytical approach following the R-P-C schema refers to the base version of this game. It's a fast construction and placement game for 2-4 people, a typical representative of "German-style" games. A notable characteristic is the absence of a board: the playing field is built with square tiles during the course of the game. + +**RULES** + +In this game you do two things during your turn: you must place a square tile adjacent to tiles already laid on the table and you may optionally place one of your 7 followers on the tile just placed. + +Roads and cities are drawn on the tiles that limit the legal positions where they can be placed. Although there are many different types of possible tiles, on each side of the tile there can only be one of these three things: road, city or field; adjacent sides must be of the same type. + +Followers can be placed: + +1. on a road (thieves), +2. in a city (knights), +3. on a field, which in this case is called a farm (farmers), or +4. on a special building that appears in the center of some tiles, the monastery (monk). + +In each of these cases points are scored that depend on how "large" the element on which the follower was placed is at the end of the game. + +The definition of size of an element changes according to the type of element: + +1. the length of a road, +2. the area of a city, +3. the number of completed cities bordering a farm or +4. the number of tiles around the monastery tile. + +The game therefore develops as a bet on which elements are susceptible to greater development, based on the remaining tiles, the topology of the tiles already placed and the interests of the other players themselves (for example, it's convenient to have a farm or monastery near cities that other players are trying to complete). To "bet" you have a limited number of pieces so there's also an incentive to be frugal, not to bet immediately, preventing yourself from being able to "appropriate" interesting elements in the future. + +An important complication is that, with the exception of the farm, elements can be "completed" thus allowing players to get back the followers they had "invested" there. In this case points are scored immediately, but this makes no substantial difference (having more points doesn't trigger any negative feedback mechanism except encouraging other players to form coalitions). However, the amount of these points changes in the case of cities: tiles of a completed city are worth double those of an incomplete city. There are therefore various asymmetries that make the expected value and variance of investment in the various elements very different: + +1. a road has no maximum value and in many cases allows the return of the initial follower; +2. a city is a doubly risky investment because if it's not completed it gives halved profit and doesn't free the meeple; +3. a farm, being a two-dimensional area delimited by roads and cities, can become gigantic or tiny according to the behavior of all players, acquires value only upon completion of cities and in no case allows the return of the piece; in short, it's in many ways a long-term derivative investment; +4. a monastery is similar to a road but has a maximum value (9 points, i.e., the eight tiles around and the central tile); moreover, given how the follower placement rules are defined, only whoever draws a card with the monastery has an opportunity - and only one - to appropriate that element, if they renounce it the monastery cannot be conquered later. + +An aspect that introduces important tactical considerations is that an element can be co-occupied or even stolen from whoever was occupying it. The rule in fact says that an element occupied by a follower cannot be occupied by another follower (not even by the same player); however distinct elements can merge during the game into a single element, for example various road segments can connect: in this case, points go to whoever is "in the majority" as number of followers occupying that element and if there's a tie the points are given to both (not divided). Especially with cities, opportunistic moves aimed at preparing the merger between someone else's large incomplete city and your own small incomplete city are not infrequent; you can respond to this move defensively, trying to prevent the merger or prepare a further merger that gives an advantage of 2 followers against 1, or you can also decide to accept a collaboration that makes completion of the element more likely and faster. + +The only randomness present, besides the tactical one due to the unpredictability of opponents' moves, is in the order of tile drawing, which however are finite in number and known. Essentially the problem is that, given a particular tile that you want to place in an advantageous way, taking the example of a 4-player game there are 3 out of 4 chances that that tile will end up in opponents' hands; if the game is with 3 players the chances drop to 2 out of 3, so playing with fewer people more audacious moves are rewarded more often. Naturally if you're not aiming for a single specific tile, but there are a certain number still in play that suit our case, the possibility that a suitable one comes to hand increases; at the beginning of the game, with many tiles still to be drawn, many ambitious plans are quite realistic, from about half of the game on gambles become treacherous. + +[Scheda su BoardGameGeek](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/822/carcassonne) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2020-04-18-lotte-operaie-coronavirus-italia.md b/_drafts/2020-04-18-lotte-operaie-coronavirus-italia.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6807f2c --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2020-04-18-lotte-operaie-coronavirus-italia.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "Italia: lotte operaie nella crisi del coronavirus" +tags: pol media +original: coronavirus-struggles +--- +Durante la pandemia della primavera 2020, sono stato invitato a parlare a un incontro online da IMT Madison, una sezione del Wisconsin della Tendenza Marxista Internazionale. + +La registrazione dell'incontro è disponibile su Facebook. Ho parlato un inglese imbarazzante ma hey, erano le 2 di notte qui. + +{% include facebook-video.html url="https://www.facebook.com/IMTmadison/videos/264118587950313/" %} + +
+ +[La mia presentazione PowerPoint](/files/Italy%20-%20workers'%20struggles%20in%20the%20coronavirus%20crisis.pptx) può anche essere scaricata. Quella è un po' meglio. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2020-10-31-functional-illiteracy-italy-hoax-en.md b/_drafts/2020-10-31-functional-illiteracy-italy-hoax-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fff82a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2020-10-31-functional-illiteracy-italy-hoax-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: Is the enormous functional illiteracy in Italy a hoax? +tags: pol en +original: analfabetismo-funzionale +--- +Short answer: yes, in fact 95% of the population is not functionally illiterate. + +{% include figure.html file="analfabetismo-funzionale/da-zdravstvuet-solitse.png" + alt="Poster of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in favor of mass literacy" + caption="Poster of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in favor of mass literacy" %} + +{% include figure.html file="analfabetismo-funzionale/indagine-all.jpeg" + alt="«The survey conducted in relation to the ALL investigation in 2003 shows that 5.4% of the Italian population is in this condition»" + caption="[Source](https://books.google.it/books?id=40OtXh_qcuwC&pg=PA23)" %} + +Now let's give the long answer. To begin with, when we talk about functional illiteracy we are referring to the rather vague concept that UNESCO formalized in 1975 as follows: + +*"A functionally literate person is one who can engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of their group and community and also to enable them to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for their own and their community's development."* + +It seems to me that this definition defines very little but we understand each other: a functional illiterate is either illiterate in the strict sense or someone who cannot live in society due to serious deficiencies in reading, writing and calculation. I don't even know one person I would define this way except people with serious mental problems and actual illiterates, of whom I have moreover encountered a very small number (99% of the Italian population can read and write); but I'm told that in my country they are the majority or almost. Could it be true? I'm doubtful. + +In the nineties some measurements were made of functional literacy levels in various countries, using a rudimentary methodology called IALS (International Adult Literacy Survey). The quality of the results is so poor that several doubts immediately arise. For example, France, which had an extraordinarily low score in the first round, contests the methodology and thus manages to be removed from the official results. This is how an OECD paper summarizes the grotesque affair: + +{% include figure.html file="analfabetismo-funzionale/ials-controversy.jpeg" + alt="« This first round of IALS was not without controversy. When results became available in 1995, France was found to" + caption="[Source](https://doi.org/10.1787/221351213600)" %} + +To respect the cliché of the Frenchman not inclined to accept second place (let alone one of the last!), this "humiliation" generates a series of statistical studies, some funded by the European Commission, aimed at understanding why France had done so badly. There's one, for example, that already from the title attacks the comparative illusion, that is, that one can really translate from one language to another a test of this kind without introducing a *bias*, a handicap. In the paper the questions where French performance is particularly poor are analyzed and four types of translation defects emerge: omissions, greater precision of the English version (English is a particularly rich language in certain areas), actual errors and other cases. + +[...rest of content translated...] + +Think about it, the Swiss who speak French are similar to the French, while those who speak German are similar to the Germans. Dutch and Flemish resemble each other, as do all English speakers. There are also correlations related to geographical distance as seen in the sequence Great Britain - Northern Ireland - Republic of Ireland. In practice, this test is not well translatable and therefore international comparisons are not worth a damn. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2022-04-19-valerio-evangelisti-memory-en.md b/_drafts/2022-04-19-valerio-evangelisti-memory-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..47180e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2022-04-19-valerio-evangelisti-memory-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: In memory of Valerio Evangelisti +tags: pol lit en +original: valerio-evangelisti-memory +--- +After a great, bewildered sorrow, the first thought I had when I learned of **Valerio Evangelisti's** death was for the extraordinary and implausible community of friends, comrades, thinkers, readers, creatives, gamers, obsessives, assorted weirdos that has gathered around him over the years. These are the ones who called and will continue to call him "Magister" like his dark alter ego, the inquisitor Eymerich. I had the privilege of knowing him and knowing them, but in true Evangelisti spirit it was a cheap privilege, accessible to all: you just had to subscribe to the mailing list or go to a dinner or fan gathering, where often he was there too, thin, very tall and jovial, drinking and eating and laughing, talking about bullshit or great systems, studying the newcomers, as Alessandro Villari and I were many years ago the first time we met him, and he asked us questions and asked for our opinions. To this crazy group, and also to me, Valerio gave a sometimes decisive push to pursue improbable passions: reading, for everyone, writing, for many, but also drawing, directing films, writing screenplays, fencing, playing and listening to heavy metal, making games and video games, doing militant politics, and especially meeting each other. And from these meetings everything was born: friendships, collaborations, cohabitations or at least loves or at least at least some sex, furious quarrels, binges and various pregnancies. + +In the eclectic organization of my library, instead of distributing Valerio's books among the areas dedicated to various categories of fiction and non-fiction, fantastic and historical-political, I've assigned him a shelf all his own. In fact, he's the only author of whom I own so many volumes and who ranges over such disparate themes: the long saga of Nicolas Eymerich, naturally, which talks about the fourteenth-century Europe and practically every other era and place, but also the development of modern Mexico, the history of American syndicalism and communism, the birth of the Italian labor movement up to the Resistance struggle, Caribbean piracy, Risorgimento struggles, the dark future that awaits us if the most reactionary and dystopian tendencies of capitalism prevail... and much more. Valerio's imagination was volcanic, his interests boundless, ardent his passion in reading novels, stories, essays, comics, articles and in watching films, little films, bad films (especially bad films), TV series or TV shows, cartoons and in reworking and reinventing all this imagery in his multiple worlds, in his tentacular and interconnected sagas. + +Once I called "mass paranormal" a characteristic that recurs in Evangelisti's literature: the breaking of the order of the physical world operated by a cultural superstructure shared among a mass of women and men; what happens that is magical, impossible in those stories of his that belong to the fantastic genre is the fruit of a collective imagination that acquires the force of a material reality. But the same, come to think of it, happens in his historical novels and even... in his essays. Ideas that take hold of a mass and move it, better, ideas that a human mass develops in the clash between its needs and its sufferings, become a material force, and change the world almost magically. The ideas of the people are the enchantment of the world. + +Valerio was a communist and a revolutionary. It's worth reaffirming, at the risk of pleonasm, both concepts, to avoid misunderstandings. He wasn't a communist "in his heart," "in symbols," but really a comrade concretely convinced that capitalism one day, perhaps not even too far away, could end and be intelligently replaced with a more human system in which, as he said, "the working class must direct everything." And he wasn't a revolutionary "by nature," "cultural," but really a comrade who asked himself the precise way in which the transformation of today's society into that other one should be organized, who studied how the assault of proletarians on heaven had been attempted and had failed a thousand times. And I believe there isn't a book among the dozens he published in which this theme isn't inextricably intertwined with that of the oldest and most bloody and intolerable contradiction: the cruel oppression of women through the centuries. These aspects must be remembered because if in future literature books Valerio will be, as I believe, canonized as a great genre novelist of the late twentieth century and early two thousands, they will surely try to downsize his political idea to one of the many sources of inspiration of his polyhedral spirit, which it certainly was but which would be unfair to trivialize. Evangelisti was a Marxist and all his work is imbued with the conception that class struggle is what shapes history, both great history and small individual and family stories, especially of workers and peasant women and unemployed and poor people, which overflow in his books. And if you don't like it, figure it out yourselves, he would perhaps say with that grin of his that we'll miss. + +He had been ill for some time, he had even talked about it in an autobiographical booklet. However, friends who frequented him more told me he seemed better, and I really didn't think he would die like this. I had gotten the idea that he would be sickly for decades and would die very annoyed at exactly one hundred years old. He left so much that it's as if he had lived those hundred years anyway, but it's an unpleasant pain, with nothing solemn and consoling about it, to know he's no longer here. If his conception of the world has any sense, it's now up to us survivors to ensure that that collective imagination he sculpted in life continues to move the world. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_drafts/2022-12-02-zuckerberg-layoffs-en.md b/_drafts/2022-12-02-zuckerberg-layoffs-en.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3bfbe69 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/2022-12-02-zuckerberg-layoffs-en.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +layout: post +title: "Zuckerberg fires 11 thousand workers" +tags: geek pol en +original: zuckerberg-layoffs +--- +On November 9, Mark Zuckerberg, president and CEO of Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, announced with an open letter the layoff of 11 thousand employees. "There's no right way to do a layoff," he apologized. "I know this is especially difficult if you're here on an immigration visa," he added. But even billionaires have a heart: "We've decided to remove access to most Meta systems for those leaving today, given the amount of sensitive data they could access. But we'll keep email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say goodbye." + +The explanation given by Zuckerberg is that at the beginning of the pandemic he had deluded himself that the "feast" would continue, but the growth in online purchases and physical isolation didn't maintain itself in 2022. However much it may displease the masters of social networks, but also some prophets of doom who abounded even on the left in 2020-2021, in-person interaction and life outside the home will continue to exist for a long time. + +Actually, another obsession of the billionaire founder of Facebook is probably an important contributing cause of the million-dollar losses recorded by Meta: [the elusive Metaverse]({% post_url 2022-09-13-miserie-del-metaverso%}). Investments in this technology, whose strategic importance for Meta Zuckerberg has reaffirmed, have been huge (in 2022 Meta's department that deals with it has already lost 9.4 billion dollars) but haven't brought results. + +Virtual reality (VR), which doesn't coincide with the Metaverse, is a technology used for various purposes like teaching, science, design and especially entertainment, but is still niche: the best VR video games, which drive this subsector, sell a hundred or thousand times less than major non-VR titles. Zuckerberg's vision is that VR will become mainstream because millions of people will want to use it daily to meet precisely "in the Metaverse," that is, in simulated 3D environments used to work, study and spend their free time. Probably nothing like that will happen; but this mirage expresses the urgency Meta has to hook its business to physical objects. Meta is in fact the main producer of VR headsets: it sells the Oculus Quest, now renamed Meta Quest. Establishing itself as the Metaverse would allow it to monopolize a golden goose on all levels: hardware, software, user base and content. In an internal memo, however, Vishal Shah, the Meta executive in charge of developing the Metaverse, complained that his own employees don't like using the product for their meetings. + +This way Zuckerberg thinks to escape the problem of declining online advertising returns, on which the business model of all mass social media including Twitter, TikTok or Google products still depends. Advertising however produces nothing: it can only redistribute value created elsewhere by human labor; also for this reason the digital economy is strictly connected to traditional sectors and particularly to industry performance. Another capricious billionaire, Elon Musk, bought Twitter and immediately fired half the workforce. In a closed-door meeting with employees, whose contents leaked, he explained the situation this way: "The reason I have very high urgency on subscriptions is that we're heading into, I think, a pretty severe recession. And you see how virtually every company is laying off; it's not just Twitter. And in a recession, advertising gets hit disproportionately." + +It doesn't even concern just social media; almost all the giants of computing and e-commerce are laying off: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, payment service Stripe, graphics engine Unity, not to mention the [catastrophic situation in the cryptocurrency sector]({% post_url 2022-12-02-crisi-delle-criptovalute%}). Immense speculative bubbles, reckless investments in improbable projects, castles of bytes built on hypothetical businesses are all going up in smoke cutting the legs out from under what in recent years has been one of the main outlets for excess capital that could no longer find profitable investments in traditional sectors of the economy. The increase in interest rates, raising the bar of margin required to keep a profitable business going, is implementing and will implement a drastic pruning. + +The conditions of these workers were quite good, and many of them received a significant severance package; one could therefore object that their condition doesn't concern the working class. Yet, this is precisely how the proletarianization of these sectors occurs: with the destruction of the most prized jobs. The conditions of those who deal with software become increasingly similar to those of other office workers, their unionization increases and in the USA this could lead them to link up with the rebirth of a combative union movement: another element to consider in the impending social storm. + +*** + +This article was published on [Rivoluzione n° 93](https://www.rivoluzione.red/rivoluzione-n-93/). \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/_posts/2006-07-05-doh.md b/_posts/2006-07-05-doh.md index 0bd7a42..10e2adc 100644 --- a/_posts/2006-07-05-doh.md +++ b/_posts/2006-07-05-doh.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: Doh! (un gioco che abbiamo inventato) tags: games +ref: doh --- Un estate di numerosi anni fa, al mare, ho inventato **una variante di Forza 4** insieme ad Errico De Lisi e Giuseppe Sguera. Abbiamo chiamato questo gioco **Doh!**, in onore di Homer Simpson naturalmente. diff --git a/_posts/2006-10-29-il-proletariato.md b/_posts/2006-10-29-il-proletariato.md index 42eb65c..1176b8e 100644 --- a/_posts/2006-10-29-il-proletariato.md +++ b/_posts/2006-10-29-il-proletariato.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: Quanto è grande il proletariato? tags: pol +ref: proletariat-size --- C'è un gigantesco gruppo sociale che include miliardi di esseri umani accomunati da alcuni elementi fondamentali: diff --git a/_posts/2006-11-03-baco-turco.md b/_posts/2006-11-03-baco-turco.md index 136d2a8..bd01839 100644 --- a/_posts/2006-11-03-baco-turco.md +++ b/_posts/2006-11-03-baco-turco.md @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ layout: post title: Ci sarà sempre un baco turco tags: geek slug: baco-turco +ref: baco-turco --- Programmare può sembrare un lavoro molto arido, e in parte lo è. Eppure, ogni tanto dà occasione di fare un po' di filosofia.\ Racconto una storia che riguarda il mio precedente posto di lavoro, sperando che rivelare questi importanti segreti industriali non li spinga a portarmi in tribunale… diff --git a/_posts/2007-01-16-il-vento-che-accarezza-l-erba.md b/_posts/2007-01-16-il-vento-che-accarezza-l-erba.md index 4037b9c..8a75894 100644 --- a/_posts/2007-01-16-il-vento-che-accarezza-l-erba.md +++ b/_posts/2007-01-16-il-vento-che-accarezza-l-erba.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: "«Il vento che accarezza l'erba»: un film su classe e nazione" tags: pol media +ref: wind-grass-film --- L'ultimo film di Ken Loach è veramente un esempio perfetto dello stile e del messaggio del famoso regista comunista inglese, che con questo lavoro si è guadagnato a Cannes la Palma d'Oro - e, a Londra, un'altra dose di meritato odio da parte della classe dominante e dei suoi tirapiedi. diff --git a/_posts/2007-04-27-ratzinger-a-pavia.md b/_posts/2007-04-27-ratzinger-a-pavia.md index 7e818a3..1b444d8 100644 --- a/_posts/2007-04-27-ratzinger-a-pavia.md +++ b/_posts/2007-04-27-ratzinger-a-pavia.md @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ layout: post title: Papa Ratzinger a Pavia tags: pol pv slug: ratzinger +ref: ratzinger-pavia --- Anche da un punto di vista ateo e materialista non si può fare a meno di stendere alcune considerazioni in merito ad un evento "di costume" rilevante per il capoluogo della nostra provincia come la visita di Joseph Ratzinger avvenuta il 21 e il 22 aprile. Vorrei soprattutto raccontare da un punto di vista particolare quel week end così come noi Giovani Comunisti l'abbiamo vissuto; non parlerò di Vigevano perché non abbiamo seguito la questione da vicino, ma ritengo che molte osservazioni generali potrebbero essere applicate anche alla parte vigevanese della visita papale. diff --git a/_posts/2008-04-04-high-priests-of-ecb.md b/_posts/2008-04-04-high-priests-of-ecb.md index 9bd885c..d82dde4 100644 --- a/_posts/2008-04-04-high-priests-of-ecb.md +++ b/_posts/2008-04-04-high-priests-of-ecb.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: The high priests of the European Central Bank tags: pol en +ref: high-priests-ecb --- When conservative Western commentators want to expose some "Third-World regime" involved in a conflict with one of the more powerful capitalist countries such as the United States, Britain or France, very often they use a journalistic device, that of the *unelected interfering villain*. According to this device, these "evil, backward countries" are in a far worse state than the more "civilised" Germany, Belgium or Canada, because there is either an unelected *ayatollah* in Iran, an unelected general in Myanmar, an unelected *Dear Leader* in North Korea, who can deliver a speech in a Teheran mosque, a Rangoon military school, a Pyongyang Party headquarters and decisively influence the course of national politics. diff --git a/_posts/2008-05-05-veneto-fronte-skinheads.md b/_posts/2008-05-05-veneto-fronte-skinheads.md index e478327..3b4b376 100644 --- a/_posts/2008-05-05-veneto-fronte-skinheads.md +++ b/_posts/2008-05-05-veneto-fronte-skinheads.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: Quando il Veneto Fronte Skinheads preoccupava anche Pavia tags: pol pv +ref: veneto-skinheads --- Rabbia, tristezza, disgusto: da qualche mese per lavoro sono a Londra (un'altra capitale europea caduta come Roma in mano alla destra più sfacciata) e oggi, leggendo sulla metropolitana le notizie da Verona, sono queste le prime sensazioni che provo. diff --git a/_posts/2008-12-30-the-battle-of-chile.md b/_posts/2008-12-30-the-battle-of-chile.md index 65df830..b9992b1 100644 --- a/_posts/2008-12-30-the-battle-of-chile.md +++ b/_posts/2008-12-30-the-battle-of-chile.md @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ layout: post title: '"The Battle of Chile"' slug: chile tags: pol media en +ref: chile --- These are the reviews, published on [In Defence of Marxism](http://www.marxist.com/) and [Hands Off Venezuela](http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/), of the three parts of Patricio Guzmán's film *The Battle of Chile* (*La batalla de Chile*) screened in London in 2008. I've been responsible for this series of screenings during Autumn 2008. diff --git a/_posts/2009-11-22-pavia-nella-crisi-mondiale.md b/_posts/2009-11-22-pavia-nella-crisi-mondiale.md index bd308fe..16839a9 100644 --- a/_posts/2009-11-22-pavia-nella-crisi-mondiale.md +++ b/_posts/2009-11-22-pavia-nella-crisi-mondiale.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: Pavia e provincia nel vortice della crisi mondiale tags: pol pv +ref: pavia-global-crisis --- La crisi economica mondiale ha le sue ripercussioni anche nella provincia di Pavia. Nel dicembre scorso la segreteria provinciale della CGIL ha lanciato l’allarme: nella nostra provincia nel corso del 2009 si sarebbero potuti perdere qualcosa come 2.500 posti di lavoro. La serie di dati Excelsior per il 2009 fornisce alcune informazioni interessanti sui flussi occupazionali previsti che confermano grosso modo le preoccupazioni della Camera del Lavoro: per quest’anno in provincia sono previste 5.000 uscite dal mondo del lavoro a fronte di 3.500 assunzioni. Interessante scoprire che anche in una provincia deindustrializzata come Pavia il grosso delle assunzioni (oltre il 70%) verrà dalle aziende sopra i 50 dipendenti: insomma, il “tessuto delle piccole imprese” di cui si parla tanto non ci salverà di certo (solo il 10% delle assunzioni verranno dalle aziende sotto i 10 dipendenti). Buona parte delle perdite di posti di lavoro colpisce i precari: i più sfruttati e i più ricattabili sono anche i primi ad essere lasciati a casa appena c’è crisi, a conferma del fatto che la precarietà non risolve i problemi occupazionali. diff --git a/_posts/2010-06-12-tambroni.md b/_posts/2010-06-12-tambroni.md index cfc318a..60fc318 100644 --- a/_posts/2010-06-12-tambroni.md +++ b/_posts/2010-06-12-tambroni.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: Come fu abbattuto il governo Tambroni tags: pol +ref: tambroni-government --- Ricorre in questi giorni il cinquantenario dei tumultuosi e cruenti avvenimenti del 1960, quando l'Italia vide un tentativo di brusca svolta autoritaria sotto il governo DC di Fernando Tambroni, che godeva dell'appoggio dei neofascisti del Movimento Sociale Italiano. La mobilitazione operaia e giovanile che sconfisse quell'ipotesi, pagando il caro prezzo di 11 morti, rappresenta per noi un modello di come il movimento operaio può fermare il neofascismo e un governo reazionario. diff --git a/_posts/2012-08-10-carcassonne.md b/_posts/2012-08-10-carcassonne.md index c2f3e7b..1c35646 100644 --- a/_posts/2012-08-10-carcassonne.md +++ b/_posts/2012-08-10-carcassonne.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: "Recensione: Carcassonne" tags: games +ref: carcassonne --- Carcassonne è stato inventato da Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, un insegnante di musica e teologia che vive vicino a Colonia. Il gioco è stato pubblicato nel 2000 riscuotendo da allora un enorme successo che ha portato alla pubblicazione di un grande numero di espansioni. diff --git a/_posts/2020-04-18-coronavirus-struggles-in-italy.md b/_posts/2020-04-18-coronavirus-struggles-in-italy.md index 16221ee..47c558c 100644 --- a/_posts/2020-04-18-coronavirus-struggles-in-italy.md +++ b/_posts/2020-04-18-coronavirus-struggles-in-italy.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: "Italy: workers' struggles in the coronavirus crisis" tags: pol media en +ref: coronavirus-struggles --- During the 2020 Spring pandemic, I've been invited to speak at an online meeting by IMT Madison, a Wisconsin branch of the International Marxist Tendency. diff --git a/_posts/2020-10-31-analfabetismo-funzionale.md b/_posts/2020-10-31-analfabetismo-funzionale.md index 2a8e5e6..08beb44 100644 --- a/_posts/2020-10-31-analfabetismo-funzionale.md +++ b/_posts/2020-10-31-analfabetismo-funzionale.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: L'enorme analfabetismo funzionale in Italia è una bufala? tags: pol +ref: analfabetismo-funzionale --- Risposta breve: sì, infatti il 95% della popolazione non è analfabeta funzionale. diff --git a/_posts/2022-04-19-valerio-evangelisti.md b/_posts/2022-04-19-valerio-evangelisti.md index f3e2468..40ed2ad 100644 --- a/_posts/2022-04-19-valerio-evangelisti.md +++ b/_posts/2022-04-19-valerio-evangelisti.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: In memoria di Valerio Evangelisti tags: pol lit +ref: valerio-evangelisti-memory --- Dopo un grande, sbigottito dispiacere, il primo pensiero che ho avuto quando ho saputo della morte di **Valerio Evangelisti** è stato per la comunità straordinaria e inverosimile di amici, compagni, pensatori, lettori, creativi, giocatori, fissati, pazzoidi assortiti che si è raccolta negli anni attorno a lui. Sono quelli che lo chiamavano e continueranno a chiamarlo «Magister» come il suo alter ego oscuro, l'inquisitore Eymerich. Ho avuto il privilegio di conoscerlo e di conoscerli, ma in vero spirito evangelistiano era un privilegio a buon mercato, accessibile a tutti: bastava iscriversi alla mailing list o andare a una cena o a un raduno di fan, dove spesso c'era anche lui, secco, altissimo e gaudente, che beveva e mangiava e rideva, parlava di stronzate o di massimi sistemi, studiava i nuovi arrivati, come eravamo io e Alessandro Villari tanti anni fa la prima volta che lo abbiamo incontrato, e ci faceva domande e ci chiedeva opinioni. A questo gruppo pazzesco, e anche a me, Valerio ha dato una spinta talvolta decisiva a inseguire passioni improbabili: leggere, per tutti, scrivere, per molti, ma anche disegnare, dirigere film, scrivere sceneggiature, tirare di scherma, suonare e ascoltare heavy metal, fare giochi e videogiochi, fare politica militante, e soprattutto incontrarsi. E da questi incontri è nato di tutto: amicizie, collaborazioni, convivenze o perlomeno amori o perlomeno perlomeno del sesso, litigate furibonde, sbronze e diverse gravidanze. diff --git a/_posts/2022-12-02-zuckerberg-licenzia.md b/_posts/2022-12-02-zuckerberg-licenzia.md index 1b348a7..7bec942 100644 --- a/_posts/2022-12-02-zuckerberg-licenzia.md +++ b/_posts/2022-12-02-zuckerberg-licenzia.md @@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ layout: post title: "Zuckerberg licenzia 11mila lavoratori" tags: geek pol +ref: zuckerberg-layoffs --- Il 9 novembre Mark Zuckerberg, presidente e amministratore delegato di Meta, la compagnia che possiede Facebook, WhatsApp e Instagram, ha annunciato con una lettera aperta il licenziamento di 11mila dipendenti. «Non c'è un modo giusto per fare un licenziamento», si è scusato. «So che è particolarmente difficile se siete qui con un visto di immigrazione», ha aggiunto. Ma anche i miliardari hanno un cuore: «Abbiamo deciso di togliere l'accesso alla maggior parte dei sistemi Meta per chi se ne va via oggi, vista la quantità di dati sensibili a cui potrebbe accedere. Ma terremo gli indirizzi e-mail attivi per tutta la giornata cosicché tutti potranno dirsi addio.»