Lelani Vecina Gallery

Aldo Natoli, un comunista senza partito

the poster 11/10/2010 (but published for the first time in September 2003)

In 1987 we made a number of days in Rome Sung. I went with Nicole to talk Gallerano Aldo Natoli, and the presence of Nicola helped me overcome the subjection to the person that I consider my example and reference of moral and political style before. We talked about the popular Rome Natoli discovered after the war and who helped to seek a ransom. These stories were exciting because they were strict with his restraint that gives shape to feelings deeper and less easily.
"I am a metics in Rome, a Sicilian who have lived since my early youth qui,” spiegava, “ma non posso dire di essermi mai profondamente acclimatato con gli umori popolari. In fondo, io prima di diventare comunista ero un giovane intellettuale aristocratico. O per lo meno pretendevo di esserlo. Questo nocciolo è rimasto abbastanza dentro di me. Ma stavo molto bene con loro; e in questo forse vi era il ricordo del modo come io mi ero proletarizzato, in un certo senso, quando stavo in galera. Però dal punto di vista culturale in fondo io ho mantenuto sempre questa ristrettezza - stavo per dire autonomia, ma preferisco dire ristrettezza aristocratica.”
Su questa coscienza della diversità si fonda una passione senza populismo: “Nell’attività politica che ho svolto prima di essere arrestato, that is, between the end of '35 and the end del'39, I have never had contact with a worker. The party pointed out to us the requirement not to have contacts in working-class. This would lead to [also] the fact that the working-class Roman, left, communist in particular, had been partially destroyed by repression and infiltration, police. So I had never met a working-class peasant. My first acquaintance was in jail. It made it easier for me in the development of some types of myth in relation to the working class and peasants. That is, when I remember the relationships I had in prison, with workers and peasants, should resist the myth. Do you understand? "There are those who idolized the class in astratto, e poi si dice deluso; e chi costruisce proprio sulla conoscenza un “mito” che dura tutta la vita.
Riascoltando il nastro, mi accorgo che quello che avevo preso per un intercalare è la parola chiave: “capisci?” Non racconta avventure, non si intenerisce sul passato, ma ci aiuta a capire che cosa è Roma, che cosa siamo noi. I fornaciai di Valle Aurelia, le donne di Trastevere che andavano al Divino Amore ma erano furiose contro l’articolo 7, il Quarticciolo (“al Quarticciolo c'era il Gobbo, in quel tempo. Capisci? Quindi c'era un intreccio, fra le frange, la base del partito e non solo questa piccola delinquenza locale ma il clan del Gobbo. E il Gobbo per un certo periodo di tempo He claimed to be communist, there "), Borgata Gordiani, Tormarancia -" You know, we had towards the suburbs, the suburbs of the underclass, a position that had nothing to do with respectability. And in this magma proletarian, with a very high percentage of immigrants from the South - without jobs, people make do: it was not yet time for hustlers, this came later - the party had an enormous prestige. They saw the party as the instrument of redemption. "
It was not just going there, into the village, but to bring it back in Rome: "The fight against the Atlantic Pact: how we could make that fight in the center of Rome, if not there was the participation of the villages? Del'47 But in the end, the issues of unemployment, we made a general strike that lasted two days. With an action, organized, formidable - to work in the center and periphery. And even with Gappisti actions: for example in the sense of paralyzing the transport trade by destroying the tramway, or sowing the four-headed nails. But in some villages, organizing strikes back. For example, building roads. "
When goodbye says:" days ago, I stopped for a streetcar route (Natoli's love for Rome, the proletariat has always been fully repaid) and asked me, Natoli, what are you doing? And I : I am not a communist party. " It 'a painful thing for those who lived in the party. But from that day I was proud of it too.

Example Career Aspirations

Il Tea Party parla di noi

the poster 11/09/2010

start with the beginning of a sacred text of traditional liberal, democratic, anarchist, "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau: "With all my heart do the statement: 'The best government is the one that governs least, 'and I would like to see put into practice as quickly and systematically. " We have always read this as a poster utopia anti-authoritarian, anarchist, but another law tradition rather the proclamation of these words as an extreme liberalism and an anti-authoritarianism e antistatualismo individualista di destra.No0n a caso, “libertario” è una parola di sinistra in Italia e di destra negli Stati Uniti. Dopo tutto, il gesto rivoluzionario di Thoreau – il rifiuto di pagare le tasse – risuona precisamente con gli argomenti di tutte le destre degli ultimi quarant’anni, compresa la retorica antistatuale del Tea Party.
Lo slogan della rivoluzione americana, quello per cui i rivoluzionari di Boston buttarono a mare le casse di tè inglese piuttosto che pagarci l’imposta, era “No taxation without rapresentation”: no semplicemente “niente tasse”, ma niente tasse senza rappresentanza (pochi ricordano, fra laltro, che i coloni americani pagavano allora lower taxes for citizens of the motherland - but they were represented in parliament, and they do not). Now, among the degradation of politics and globalization, what is left in crisis is just the representation on which they held the very idea of \u200b\u200bdemocracy and the legitimacy of taxation. Hence the perception (fueled and sustained by the "left") that taxes are not paid to an institution that represents us to be used for the common good, but there are stolen to be wasted or used for purposes that do not know and do not control, that the money paid does not come back at all. Perhaps the answer to the leftist rhetoric of woodworm right should not be to compete on the same but plan to try to restore to citizens the feeling that the state we are not the "Politicians" as they call them in America, or "caste" as they call it here.
Add to this, too, that by Thatcher and Reagan on the idea that there is a "common good" does not enjoy great popularity. There is no society, there are individuals, "said Margaret Thatcher. And the revolutionary act of Thoreau is also this: the individual rebellion, which originated in the experience of the lonely cabin in the woods in which experiments can be socialized out of space in the city - ecological utopia for us, but the metaphor of the border if we look other eyes - of an individual who opposes their individual conscience to the law of a state where you do not recognize and do not like.
There is all the difference in the world, of course, between that Thoreau refused to pay taxes because they do not want to take up arms and a Tea Party refusing to pay because he was afraid that the weapons carried it off. But also at the heart of the revolt of the right is also the concern that this was alien claims to interfere with his conscience, with its moral and religious values. It 's a concern that does not belong only to the right. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement opposed to the segregation laws not only the political principles of equality among citizens ma soprattutto quelli morali della “beloved community”, una comunità retta dal valore religioso della carità e dell’amore. Uno slogan del movimento delle donne negli Stati Uniti è “fuori lo stato dalle mie mutande”: lo stato si ferma al confine della nostra coscienza e del nostro corpo – sia per noi, sia per una destra che si mobilità attorno a suoi principi di religione, famiglia, comunità, sessualità.
Persino l’apparentemente inspiegabile ostilità alla riforma sanitaria ha a che fare con questo. Per noi, che consideriamo la salute un diritto, significa pretendere che lo stato usi i nostri soldi per darci i mezzi per vivere sani, per prevenire e curare le sofferenze del corpo and psyche. But a tradition that limits the definition of the rights of the individual bones of formal rights, health care reform may be submitted as a claim of the state to get their hands on their bodies and their minds. We
the most ridiculous and extreme example: the legend fueled by Tea Party that health care reform provided for the establishment of "committees of death", which would decide in closed rooms secret government such as the elderly should live and which should be deleted ( about: the percentage of elderly voters jumped from 16% in 2008 to 23% in the midterm elections of 2010). There is no doubt that this is paranoia. But
. Saturday, November 6, in a television Rai 3, struggled in the technological possibility of diverting the course of hurricanes. At one point, tentatively, the conductor asked: Who decides where to send them? Massimo Cacciari, a philosopher and exponent of the modern left, he said: you can turn into a hurricane as it hits New Orleans and kill thousands of people but must be in a more sparsely populated area and kill ten only, but is something that is not may decide on a democratic or a dictator can do good and holy, or a committee of scientists and technicians .. Cacciari spoke so dejected and hypothetical - but clearly the act of imagining a future where we can such a decision authoritarian and / or bureaucratic restrictions on who can live and who can die perhaps does not belong to the same paradigm of the legend of "Boards of death"? And if I were one of ten peasants condemned to death?
Paranoia, of course - but Delmore Schwartz said that even paranoids have real enemies, and the idea that our life has a power that we do not control and do not know is not the monopoly of this right. A New Orleans after Katrina, a number of African Americans in the slums was (and remains) convinced that the levees were blown up in order to send the full in their districts and save New Orleans and rich tourist. It will be paranoia, but African Americans historically have had good reasons to think that the state does not belong and that would really be able to do something like this: in the flood of 1927, that in an infinite number of blues singing, maybe really happened, and after all, it was not sent just the blacks and Latins to be killed on the front line in Vietnam? Who decides who lives and who dies? and who decides who decides? If they did to blacks and Puerto Ricans, because they could not do the hillbilly peasants who voted for Paul Rand? Meanwhile, in this election, voters are African American and Hispanic decreased (13 to 10 and from 9 to 8 per cent) and increased rural ones.
Therefore, in its way, the Tea Party comes to us. In the best page of his book The Audacity of Hope. Barack Obama wrote that the reason why the U.S. Constitution has worked its origin in the form of negotiation, dialogue and compromise, but acknowledged that there are times when they express the meaning of things instead of the idealists and extremists, like the anti-slavery at the time of civil war. He added, in his unwavering faith bipartisan, that this also applies to extremists of the other party, so you have to be careful what you say, however, not to do it but just to read the signals.
If we try to read the signs of the new wave of right, we can not console with the finding that many of the more absurd candidates were not elected: the fears that have fueled this movement (along with a disproportionate amount of money) is shared by a much wider range of Republican voters (and others). And arise from the radicalization of questions we ask ourselves: what to do with representation, democracy, the relationship between citizen and state, between law and conscience, in the age of globalization? The responses of the American Republicans are retrograde, disturbing and counterproductive. But if we do not imagine different answers, if the left does not find its mission to become involved in decisions that affect us all, then we suffer a future in which the collapse and emptying of the representation and participation, the growing separation fra il potere e la maggioranza dell’umanità, si risponderà solo con la delega fideistica (al dittatore buono e santo o alla commissione di tecnici – Berlusconi e Bertolaso, o loro controfigure?) o con la rabbia paranoica, o con tutte e due le cose insieme.

Protect Front Door Sun

Via col vento: edili americani nella crisi

il manifesto 2.11.2010

Peachtree Street è la strada principale di Atlanta, Georgia. Ci ha abitato anche Rossella O’Hara; in Via col Vento la si intravede, in carrozza su una rustica via di rossa terra della Georgia. Oggi è un canyon di grattacieli di alberghi e uffici e non ci abita nessuno – metà della gente che vedi per strada porta le targhette col nome dei partecipanti ai vari congressi che popolano zona. Ogni tanto, incongruamente, passano carrozze a cavalli dalle forme fantasiose, e le famigliole che ci vedo sopra sono tutte di afroamericani, una specie di rivalsa dei discendenti di Mamie che tornano da turisti dove l’immaginazione nazionale li ricorda come schiavi e cocchieri. Peraltro, i cocchieri sono neri anche adesso.
Stamattina, 1 novembre, c’è animazione insolita all’angolo di Peachtree: una cinquantina di uomini e donne con giubbotti arancione e una selva da cartelli camminano in cerchio davanti a un grattacielo per uffici, come vuole la legge che impone ai picchetti di muoversi. Sono i membri della United Brotherhood of Carpenters, la “fratellanza” dei carpentieri edili (in edilizia vige l’arcaico sindacalismo di mestiere, per cui carpentieri, elettricisti, muratori, eccetera, sono tutti iscritti a sindacati separati e spesso in concorrenza fra loro. Dal 2002 la UBC non fa più parte delle confederazioni nazionali). Protestano contro la Ultra, un’azienda appaltatrice che come tante altre nella zona non applica le norme su salari, provvidenze e sicurezza. Gridano slogan antifonali da stadio, col nome del sindacato al posto della squadra. Un cartello invita gli automobilisti a suonare il clacson: “honk for workers’ rights”, suona per i diritti dei lavoratori. Tutti i camion e gli autobus rispondono, ma anche un paio di SUV.
Nel picchetto ruotano soprattutto neri e latini; i due sindacalisti che li affiancano. Gli chiedo di che it is summoned and the person responsible. To get me to talk directly with the workers do not think so. However, the manager - his name is Jimmy Gibbs - is very helpful.
"We have a dispute with the Ultra, a contractor here in the building. Does not meet any of the standard employment relations - wages, hours, benefits, training, security. Do you think the project you working on now is called 'Credibility' - ironic, no? In all these years we have seen eroding working conditions and we have talked with employers and the public entities, many do not even have heard others had the political will, so we decided to bring the dispute out to inform people. We did demonstrations, posters, banners, leaflets, across Atlanta. We saw every kind of retaliation and intimidation: Contractors threaten the workers do not get them to talk with us. The Ultra, then, use a labor broker, a subcontractor of the workforce: go get the workers in Mexico or Central America, they pay them in black, no payments, they charge to their security, accident prevention, so if you have an accident, and it happens often, they have no claim or state that there is hurt and found himself without a job, he did not even have paid the last paycheck because they were without a contract ... Unfortunately, our country is going through una transizione in cui i lavoratori immigrati sono sfruttati. Molti vengono qui senza conoscere le leggi, i minimi salariali, i diritti che gli spettano. E sono disposti a lavorare per meno: vengono da economie di povertà, e la paga è comunque più di quello che guadagnano a casa – anche se poi il costo della vita qui è più alto, un dollaro qui non va tanto lontano come in Messico. Noi non cerchiamo di reclutarli ma vogliamo che siano informati. Non crediamo a nessuna discriminazione. Se io vivessi in Messico o in America Centrale e avessi una famiglia da mantenere, farei come loro: se ci sono imprenditori qui negli Stati Uniti che offrono lavoro a condizioni sotto la norma di legge ma comunque migliori che in patria, vengo qui. Noi diciamo solo che anche per gli immigrati dovrebbero valere le stesse regole che valgono per tutti.”
Più che che ai diritti degli immigrati in quanto persone, comunque, il sindacato sembra pensare allo sfruttamento dell’immigrazione come a una distorsione del mercato. E’ una delle funzioni tradizionali del sindacato, fin dal New Deal di Roosevelt: garantire parità di condizioni per le aziende, la regolarità della concorrenza e del mercato, prima ancora che sopravvivenza per le persone. “Lo sfruttamento di questa gente crea una concorrenza sleale verso le aziende in regola. La vertenza è proprio su questo: bisogna che le condizioni siano uguali per tutti. Ci sono anche aziende che ci appoggiano, che dicono ai repubblicani e ai democratici: guardate, che questa situazione ci manda tutti al fallimento, perché quando andiamo a trattare gli appalti ci troviamo contro aziende che non pagano le tasse, i salari, la sicurezza, e noi non ce la facciamo a competere. I repubblicani dicono che sono contro l’immigrazione illegale ma non dicono niente contro gli imprenditori che ne approfittano per sfruttare gli immigrati. Non puoi essere contro l’immigrazione e poi permettere che gli immigrati siano sfruttati, perché è questo che li porta qui”: paradossalmente, proteggere i diritti degli immigrati diventa un modo per scoraggiare l’immigrazione. Ma non è un paradosso solo americano.
E’ la vigilia delle elezioni, non posso evitare di chiedergli che pensa. "Unfortunately, Georgia is a strongly Republican state, red state, and we operate in very difficult conditions, although Atlanta is more detailed and we have a lot of support. Of course here in the South, in Georgia, we all have our own way of seeing things. You know that the South, Georgia, has historically not very strong African Americans. With the first African-American president, racial tensions are clearly seen in the game. Everything goes back to the story here, unfortunately it will take at least another generation before that some of these wounds are healed. " As for the economy, "the stimulus is gone all the bankers, the richest one percent and almost anything is 'drained', as we used to say, up down, to those who really need it. We see people educated to a degree, with the doctors, who are unemployed, because things are going badly for everyone. And to stay out of work is suffering. "
A key point in Obama's platform was a commitment to enact the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to sign up and ask for the representation and the union contract without going through a referendum in which the company are subject to blackmail and pressure of each type (when talking about the lack of representativeness of trade unions in America, it should be noted that enrollment is difficult and often dangerous, and there are no national contracts: most of the work in the U.S. Work is what we would call black). But so far, Obama has not kept his promise.
'Well, when chambers of commerce are spending millions of dollars to block a thing ... it was stuck. What's wrong with giving workers the right to take the card if you like, without going through the whole rigmarole of them and not leave it to the company to decide its own future and those who represent them? Do not know anyone who wants to bankrupt the company where he works, but want the same seat at the bargaining table and negotiate a contract. If you open a bank account or get a loan, sign a contract and do not understand why workers should not have a piece of paper, a signed agreement, which guarantees the future. Some depict unions thugs, as the ruin of America, but we saw at Ford and Chrysler that the union is available to reason to make companies competitive. "
At this point, we cease to understand each other. I tell him that concessions to Chrysler are becoming a model that dismantles the rights and jobs at Fiat in Italy, but this kind of international solidarity is not part of the perception of many American trade unionists. Indeed, "See? The Republicans always say that the union is losing jobs, and here's an example of how to return thanks to the union places in America. " Skip to playing a truck lying on solidarity. "In a globalized society," said Gibbs, "the investment goes where labor costs less." It now costs less in the U.S. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why, not even articulated or understood, form, and misdirected anger of many Americans who see ancestral certainties vanish, they feel put their house on the same floor of the third world and forced to compete on the cheap. The slogan of the Tea Party is "Take Back America." But there that America is gone with the wind of the crisis and will never return.