Of Roberto Pecchioli

Source: Heretically
I met the Fifth Estate. It happened this morning, soon, in my neighborhood. In less than half an hour and within a radius of a few tens of metres, I verified the existence of the Fifth Estate. It's here, I met him and even touched him. We know the ancient division of society into three orders, dating back to the Middle Ages. The first order, or State, it was made up of the clergy; the second by the nobles. The third, theoretically, from everyone else. His representation, in the French States General, was entrusted to members of the nascent bourgeoisie, who made the Revolution and buried the past forever. His vate was Abbot Sieyès, author of a very successful pamphlet that set France on fire at the beginning of the fateful period 1789. With the lexicon of Gyorgy Lukàcs, we could say that it was the ecclesiastic of Fréjus who gave the Third Estate class consciousness, starting from the famous phrase "what is the Third Estate? All. What has happened so far in the political system? Nothing. What do you want?? Becoming something". The bourgeoisie cut off the King's head and inaugurated modernity.
During the nineteenth century, the socialist controversy began to talk about the Fourth Estate, that is, of the peasant and worker proletariat whose ranks swelled in the shadow of the industrial revolution, of forced urbanization, of the birth of large factories. Its artistic representation is the great painting of 1901 by the Piedmontese Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo: a compact and orderly crowd moving towards the future, confident in history, led by a young mother with her little son around her neck and two men, the most combative peasants. There is in this framework of large dimensions and gigantic ambitions, the sense of a composed dignity, a sober elegance despite the common simplicity of the clothes and attitudes, an irrevocable advance, inevitable of men and women who feel like communities on the march determined to change their condition all together.
Overwhelmed by postmodernity that has become supermodernity, the Fourth Estate dissolved at the end of the 20th century which it had inaugurated and then crossed with so much hope. He moves forward in his place, or rather, the human mush that we feel like calling the Fifth Estate recedes into a new feudalism. Surmodernity is the key word to explain the Fifth Estate. The expression coined by Marc Augé outlines the excesses suffered by a humanity immersed in a triple acceleration: excess of time, for the struggle to make sense of reality in the overabundance of events and information; excess of space due to the speed of movement in an increasingly smaller world. In the end, excess ego, the individual who considers himself a world unto himself to the detriment of the community dimension. In the wasteland, spoiled by supermodernity, a rhizomatic humanity boils over, the Fifth Estate. I met her a few steps from home, any morning, because for once I noticed it. A young African male stands next to the opening supermarket, disembarked from some boat and brought here by the Navy. Not at all undernourished, That's good, smiling, hosted at our expense to do nothing, to be nothing, it appears to me like a living and unaware gadget of contemporaneity. He has a smartphone with headphones, a rock band t-shirt, the hooded jacket and imitation sports shoes from the big brands that produce in Asia. It wants its own small place in the great circus of the global market, no longer seeks or expects a “normal” existence.
Beyond almsgiving, Help the ladies with the shopping cart, every now and then he lends a hand in cleaning some private gardens. When the businesses are closed he hangs out with others like him – they seem to have been made with a cookie-cutter – and then gets on the bus, where obviously he doesn't get a ticket and isn't fined, he couldn't pay anyway. This morning a boy with tribal tattoos and a nose piercing passed by him, branded backpack on the shoulders, the same smartphone, the same headphones, photocopy clothing and gait, the difference is that the designer labels on the clothes and shoes are authentic. He goes to school “signed”, he's a little late but he doesn't hurry, the teachers will be used to it. From the movements and the sound muffled by the headphones, he is listening to rap, probably Young Signorino (Mmm, but how good / this sweet drug bu, this / Mmm, but what a goodie, this) or Sfera Ebbasta, born Gionata Boschetti, King of Trap, whose hugely popular Tran Tran is about someone who doesn't give a damn about anything, while elsewhere he celebrates his girlfriend who is only interested in money and drugs. Just enough time to get me back, and the fifth estate, if you prefer the Desiring Multitude of Negri and Hardt, Hegel's old plebs, he reappears in the guise of a breathless young man, malvestito, maybe Italian, perhaps South American, That, off a moped to be scrapped with a large bag over his shoulder, you inquire about an address. Mail delivery: if your condition is similar to that of the over thirty-year-old son of acquaintances, has a VAT number (an entrepreneur!), works at least nine hours a day in traffic- the risks are all his, he is self-employed, perhaps it is part of the start-up statistics- scraping together as much as possible between the 700 they 800 euros per month. He eats street food from a dirty bag, rubbish delivered by a poor man like him, another from the Fifth Estate.
My destination is the shop of a large telephone operator who has just "eaten" a few tens of euros for services and applications that I did not ask for, but only carelessly typed in the belief that it would reject them (a very common trick, it seems) I get in line, but the Fifth Estate is lurking. He has the physiognomy of a corpulent young man in his thirties accompanied by his wife - more likely his partner - with a baby around his neck. He's wearing a scruffy, never-ironed shirt, with short denim pants so low-waisted that they show large portions of an embarrassing B-side, legs and arms reveal multicolored tattoos. His language is almost incomprehensible, grunts a few Anglo dialect words interspersed with the inevitable "fuck", he evidently understands little of what the clerk tells him, and turns for help to the girl who shakes her head, showing with a certain pride two cherries tattooed behind one ear. The Caliban of the Fifth Estate knows perfectly all the tariff plans of the telephone operators and has a Netflix subscription.
Resigned to the new that advances, I leave the temple of mobile phones and "all inclusive" rates to come across another, insidious exponent of the Fifth Estate. It has the civilized appearance of a young gentleman in a jacket, tie and briefcase 24 ore. Son of the family, he explains that he is a partner in a real estate agency, search for empty apartments to sell or rent, he addresses everyone on first terms and makes it clear that he will pay something for every positive report received; in the meantime he tries to sell contracts for electricity wholesalers. A lacquered fraudster ready to take on the role of order clerk of globalization. In half an hour I saw and touched a universe that was unimaginable twenty years ago. A new imposing social class is advancing at the pace of the shrimp, completely unaware of its existence. It has no collective consciousness, nor does she seem interested in commitment: politico, social, civil, ethical. He lives and that's enough. E’, in a thousand different forms, the Desiring Global Precarious. The new class of oblivious dominated losers: the Fifth Estate.
Of the five characters observed on the spring morning, the least negative is the African. Chosen by the family to go in search of fortune probably because he was stronger and more robust than his brothers, it is the unconscious instrument of rampant globalism. Symbol, in spite of himself, of the wonders of the multi-ethnic society that he ignores and cares nothing about, performs a series of tasks assigned by Power. First of all, it lowers social protections and the wages of others. Whatever job or chore is offered to him, the pay is lower than anyone else's. He has no other interest than to do what is asked of him as best he can and collect the little money agreed upon. Indifferent to everything that is different from his uprooted horizon, he is the precarious worker par excellence of society, stigmatized on the one hand, unaware positive symbol for others. It hasn't, nor can he have, no interest in collective struggles, to understand and integrate into the unknown world into which they threw him. When he does something, is less than a number, an intermittent worker like the traffic light at night. Lower wages, it burns social guarantees exactly as it unknowingly degrades the civil fabric and the surrounding aesthetic panorama. He has no specific faults. We must fight against desired and fueled mass immigration, hate exploiters in suits, tie and company car, their slave-thirsty globalization, their pompous liberalism, their false, very false open society, the subjectivism and narrow selfishness of which they are advocates, you can't blame the Fifth Immigrant Estate, last link in a criminal chain.
Difficult to get angry even with the signed student, perpetually connected, maybe a bit of a bully. He is not responsible if this is the world, he looks, imitates e, like the others, he wants his share. May Day will have seen the concert organized by the unions. There, between tired buzzwords of which he knows nothing, for him only annoying interruptions in the music, the heads of antiquated organizations called CGIL, CISL, UIL tries every year to save their soul, or certify one's existence in life, paying real and presumed artists who pretend to contest the society of the spectacle and the market. This year's own goal is sensational. They invited the aforementioned Sfera Ebbasta, who showed up on stage with two Rolexes, symbols of the most revolting "class" consumerism (social) and shouted that he doesn't give a damn, naturally after having cashed the check signed Camusso. Sincere, the cunning Sphere, in line with market dictates, symbol of disengagement, of individual regression, as well as responsible pro quota for the degradation of not only musical tastes of millions of nerds of the Fifth Estate.
He is the singer of the Uber generation. Better to travel for little money, who cares if the poor guy transporting us is an illegal immigrant who maybe sleeps in the car or a family man fresh from dismissal due to relocation. What matters is that everything seems to cost little, like rooms rented through Airbnb, low-cost travel. street food, music downloaded on Spotify. Their day is marked by continuous posts on Facebook, the photos on Instagram waiting for the judgment of others in the form of "likes" or suffering from the insults and derision of keyboard companions. Performance anxiety and collective judgement, like aspiring television singers and chefs: for me it's no, says the Judge, supermodern substitute for the plebs of the Roman amphitheatres with the power of life and death, thumb up or down. Today the thumb has become one of the most used emojis, the pictograms that replace words in mass aphasic messaging. WhatsApp is not by chance owned by Mark Zuckerberg. Unrelated to any in-depth analysis, great user of Bignami in the form of apps and Wikipedia that take away the effort of learning and remembering, the Fifth Estate is convinced that happiness is continuous travel- generally without understanding anything about the places where he is and the people he meets - if he is very young, free himself from parental guardianship, except the role of paying officers which he willingly continues to accept, live any experience, buy or at least consume new goods and new services. A liquid Fifth State, which just raise the temperature slightly for it to become gaseous and fall downwards instead of rising upwards as in nature.
Became an adult, is poised to become the Global Jerk, determined to have his say on everything over the air, insulting, offending, becoming enthusiastic or hating at other-directed command. The greater his ignorance will be, its claim to express is greater, with a few sentences and many blunders, a definitive opinion that no one will be able to undermine. He doesn't know, but it is a product of scale, one among many. In his own way, it succeeded perfectly. They wanted it that way: compulsive consumer, mobile, unfaithful to everything, devoid of deep-rooted principles, "he changes his accent and thoughts" every day. Dream of New York City, he lives in a bubble of shopping mall cosmopolitanism without elevating himself from the local suburbs. He has a diploma in his pocket, not infrequently a degree, but he knows very little about everything. Outside the instrumental specialization in which he was educated, it is a blank slate filled only by commercial messages and the music imposed by the entertainment system. He doesn't even suspect that he is a pawn in a very big game and in any case he isn't upset by it, as long as he can consume, give vent to instincts.
The Third Estate absorbed the first two, he made himself the new Prince and organized a perfect system to continue to dominate, exploit, earn. It colonized the imagination, understanding that the first ideas to be erased were dignity, awareness, ethics. All worthless principles because they cannot be calculated in money. It destroyed popular and bourgeois culture, every “high” concept discredited, mocked any spiritual conception, vertical, aristocrat of life, until he built his favorite creature, the plebeian multitude prisoner of Desire. Diego Fusaro, young philosopher from Turin, he dedicated his latest book to the figure of the Precario, convinced of identifying its revolutionary potential. We are not convinced. The author of Minima Mercatalia certainly has the best intentions, his voice remains one of the most important in the asphyxiated "against" panorama, but we think that the neo-Marxist error consists in imagining a humanity that revolts against its masters solely in the name of economic reason. He doesn't go all the way in denouncing evil.
Nevertheless, one of his images struck us. It is that of the painting by Pellizza da Volpedo compared with a creation by Massimo Bartolini, dal titolo My fourthhomage, visible in the same Milanese museum that houses Il Quarto Stato, of which it intends to be a tribute and post-modern counterpoint. Bartolini's photography presents today's losers caught still, with your feet sunk into the earth, devoid of movement, without an order, each dressed and posed differently, with blank, directionless stares. One hundred years later, he victory of liberal capitalism over the other great ideological narratives of the twentieth century, such is the mass condition. No hope, no future to look forward to, no common path. It is an image as powerful as it is alienating, proof of an epochal defeat. But the route of one materialism towards another remains, more skilled, shrewd, corrivo, capable of narcotizing precisely because it is unable to elicit consensus. His strength becomes non-dissent, resignation, sleep, the animal reflex, pavloviano, of those who desire and are wrapped in the coils of ever new needs and desires.
Two radical American thinkers, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams recently wrote a sort of manifesto for the Fifth Estate: Demand full automation; demand universal income; demand the future. A text that we believe is very welcome to the hyperclass of the powerful masters of everything. The morality of the slave who is content to consume with other people's money is theorized, devaluing work and personal commitment, moving every struggle from the terrain of dignity to that of the demand for consumption. It will be accepted, theme name. If these are the opponents, the system can sleep peacefully, the Fifth Estate will not cause any worries. The difficulty, indeed the tragedy we are experiencing is that of generations so intensively uneducated as to want, desire, demand exactly what is convenient for those in power. There is no intellectual class of reference to point the way. She disappeared, to put it in the words of Hegel accepted by Marx, the "unhappy conscience" of those who realize the evil in progress and take alternative paths. What escapes the enemies of liberal capitalism of Marxist ancestry is the close relationship between their ideal universe and the enemy one.
They fought with all their strength to destroy popular culture and that of the upper classes. Deconstruct, deconstruct, dismiss. They succeeded perfectly, unwittingly carrying out the work of liberals, whose horizon is to go beyond every limit. Natural morality discredited, mocks the family, killed his father, every form of spirituality thrown into inconsistency, bomb the pillboxes of religions and morality, the strongest wins, inevitably, he is the one who knows how to lie best to the people. The communist lie has proven to be less durable than the liberal-capitalist one. All that remains is to weave a different canvas, in which man returns to recover all his dimensions. There is the Dionysian festival and the Apollonian order, matter but also spirit, the gaze turned upwards, rights as well as duties, consumption together with the joy of frugality and community life.
They have built a third-rate humanity, broken down, centerless, dedicated to instinct, regressive. They eliminated natural and social rights, making believe that the desire, the whim, instinct raised to the norm are sacred individual rights. They created a dehumanized Fifth Estate, regrettable, without embankments, billions of atoms thrown at random into a world from which they have taken away every question of meaning. If it ever happens, ee will emerge only through forms of restoration of conscience. Can anyone imagine the meaning of honor, dignity, decorum, spirit, morale, family, identity, lotta, collective effort, for the post-humanity of the Fifth Estate?
The Third Estate of 1789 he won by transforming himself like a Zelig, nationalist in the 19th century, permissive anti-bourgeois after 1968, neo-feudal-globalist following the fall of twentieth-century communism. The multitude, with all due respect to Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, he lost because he made the disvalues ​​of the Other his own. Serve without conscience and without livery, in the end they only claim a slice of the pie. The Fourth Estate, at least, self-aware, he wanted to change and menu, do not win a place at the Lord's table.