The Long Project of Control

Although most of the people would have forgot that during the time of lackening of the social struggles, the whole apparatus of legislative, judicial and police tools, created from the second half of the 70’ untill the first half of the 80’, to put an end, to a whole decade of mass movements criminalizing them as a whole, has remained completely efficient and ready to use. The parenthesis of “tangentopoli” whit its load of resentment, had also feeded the dangerous illusion that the judicial tool could substitute the political struggles and the social conflicts by attacking the system of power and its network of complicity.

The fasti of Berlusconi of the second Republic, however the endemic conflict between political power and gowned power, have shown the opposite, untill insure themselves the condescence, when not the support of the left, around the so called politics of safety with its corollary of restrictions of rights and of democratic guaranties. The flattening of the social conflictuality on the problem of public order is a frequent temptation and very often “bipartisan”. The new culture of emergency, followed to the 11st September, has rapidly translated in raised powers of policy, oppressive practises and discriminations, most of all against migrants but not only, restablishing that ominous theorem of the “ dangerous places” that says that specific environments would function as incubator for militants of terror and would benefit in its whole the condition of “special surveilled”. Under this climate the union of the antineoliberist movements as a kind of fifth column accomplice not only of the popular resistances met by the imperial politic in the world but also of terrorism, the step is short. Most of the magistrature may help with diligence to this plot of inner and outer war. The many inquiries against migrant citizens accused to be contiguous with terrorism are an example and its groundlessness and its grotesque aspects have been with efficacy denounced also by the Republic. But if on one side the inquiries contrite themselves to deport with force discriminated subjects as moslem migrants, in a scenery like that of the fundamentalist extremism and of its terrorist groups of which in reality are not part at all, on the other side we follow a diametrically opposite proceeding: that of extrapolating the individuals and their actions from the context in which these actions have been consumed. Can we extrapolate the reaction of the demonstrators from the context of urban guerrilla imposed by the police forces in Genova? The occupation of the houses from the mad attack that the conditions of income and of life of citizens are suffering? The streets block or the wild strikes, from the closing of the factory or from contracts and rights thrown away? The revolt of Scanzano Ionico from the mad and authoritarian management of the territory? This extrapolation constitutes the “Juridical way” that substitutes itself to a political answer and to a social mediation that no one wants to face anymore. The “illegal” behaviour of the individuals is separated from its reasons and from the tissue of contradictions that generate it and it is measured in the end with the articles of the criminal code and most of the time with an unprejudiced interpretation. The function of the magistrature is this. And for this reason it is used to substitute and close the political discourse with the aggravating circustamce of a climate of emergency guaranteed by the majority of the political forces. The message is clear: “no negotiation!” The same “juridical path” taken against Berlusconi, even if groundless, has the paradoxal effect to separate him and his particular interests from the antidemocratic and ultraliberist politics carried on by his government with, as a result, to make these legitimate and available to be taken by his political candidates of the centre left, even in different ways. The juridical interpretation of the facts of Berlusconi will end like this acquitting most of his political choices ( especially all those not strictly interlaced with the “conflict of interests”). But in the meantime, the trust and even more the space, granted to the police action and to the magistrature will exert completely its function to inhibit the social conflictuality and confine movements in a merely witness role, relied on good heart of the political representations. The right at the government has shown enough not to be afraid of the judge by two different standards in the matter of justice (iron hand with all the excluded groups and the social movements, velvet glove with the strong powers) leaving to the left (the institutional left) the questionable coherence of the use of justice. Which damages has this caused in the recent history of our country on the field of individual and collective freedoms should not be so easily forgotten, as well as the fact that social justice and justice are two different things and sometimes cause friction agaist one another.