Amador Fernández-​Savater: What is the con­text in which the Italian elec­tions have taken place?

Bifo: The polit­ical dis­in­teg­ra­tion of Europe. Europe was born as a pro­ject of peace and social solid­ar­ity, tak­ing up the leg­acy of the social­ist and inter­na­tion­al­ist cul­ture that opposed fas­cism. In the 90s, fin­ance capital’s major centres of power decided to des­troy the European model and the sign­ing of the Maastricht Treaty unleashed the neo-​liberal assault. In the last three years, the anti-​Europe of the ECB and Deutsche Bank seized the oppor­tun­ity of the 2008 fin­an­cial crisis in the US to trans­form the cul­tural diversity of the European con­tin­ent (its Prot­est­ant cul­ture, gothic and com­munit­arian, its Cath­olic cul­ture, baroque and indi­vidu­al­ist, its spir­itu­al­ist and icon­o­clastic ortho­doxy) into a factor of polit­ical dis­in­teg­ra­tion of the European Union; and above all in order to make labour res­ist­ance bow com­pletely before cap­it­al­ist glob­al­isa­tion. The drastic cut­ting of wages, the elim­in­a­tion of the 8 hour limit to a work­ing day, labour pre­car­ity among young people, the post­pone­ment of retire­ment for older people and the privat­isa­tion of ser­vices. The European pop­u­la­tion has to pay the debt accu­mu­lated by the fin­an­cial sys­tem because debt func­tions as a gun poin­ted at the backs of workers.

Bifo: Beppe Grillo’s move­ment is the nov­elty in these elec­tions. It has picked up votes mainly from the left move­ments, but it has also gathered votes on the right. Beppe Grillo has said repeatedly that his move­ment would steal votes from the right and it has achieved this. I do not believe the 5 Star Move­ment will be able to gov­ern Italy, that is not the point. The import­ant and pos­it­ive func­tion that the Move­ment can have is to make the coun­try ungov­ern­able for the anti-​European party of Draghi-​Merkel-​Monti. The Italian elect­or­ate has said: we will not pay the debt. Default. Europe’s fin­an­cial gov­ern­ab­il­ity has ended, even if Ber­lusconi and Ber­sani reach an agree­ment in order to sur­vive and keep impov­er­ish­ing the coun­try by trans­fer­ring resources and wealth to the fin­an­cial sys­tem. That agree­ment has no future, it will not last. But it is then that the worst can begin.

AFS: What do you have in mind?

Bifo: The fin­an­cial class will try to strangle Italy as it has done with Greece. The polit­ical crisis will be tur­bu­lent and viol­ent. The res­ult may be fright­en­ing. The mafia and fas­cism have shown they con­trol 35% of the Italian elect­or­ate and the left no longer exists. The idea of the North’s seces­sion will re-​appear even with the Lega Nord’s collapse.

AFS: Do you see an alternative?

Bifo: Yes, a pro­cess of lib­er­at­ing Europe from the viol­ence of fin­ance cap­ital could also begin – the recon­struc­tion of Europe on a social basis. Out­side the polit­ical schemas of the 20th cen­tury, there could arise every­where an uncon­ven­tional move­ment for organ­ised default and pro­duct­ive autonomy. An occu­pa­tion move­ment could trans­form uni­ver­sit­ies into sites of prac­tical research for find­ing post-​capitalist solu­tions. The factor­ies, which fin­ance cap­ital wants to des­troy, could be occu­pied and self-​managed, as was done in Argen­tina after 2001. The squares could be occu­pied so that they became sites of per­man­ent debate.

AFS: This move­ment of soci­ety that you pro­pose, would it have any programme?

Bifo: The pro­gramme was set forth by Beppe Grillo, a pro­gramme which, des­pite what the pro­fes­sional liars of La Repub­blica say, is very reasonable:

A cit­izen wage.
Reduc­tion of the work­ing week to 30 hours.
The resti­tu­tion to schools of the 8 bil­lion dol­lars that the Ber­lusconi gov­ern­ment stole from the edu­ca­tion system.
Good work­ing con­di­tions for all pre­cari­ous work­ers in edu­ca­tion, health and transport.
Nation­al­isa­tion of banks that have favoured spec­u­la­tion at the cost of the community.
Imme­di­ate abol­i­tion of the fiscal pact

Grillo’s party has pre­ven­ted the gov­ern­ment of fin­an­cial dic­tat­or­ship. Now it is the turn for the move­ment of soci­ety. Will soci­ety have the neces­sary energy and intel­li­gence to self-​manage social life with a move­ment of gen­er­al­ised occu­pa­tion? If we don’t have that energy, we deserve the dis­aster that will come.

One might think that a crisis brought on by rapacious, unregulated capitalism would have changed a few minds about the fundamental nature of the global economy.
One would be wrong. True, there is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today, particularly as a crisis brought on by the system's worst excesses continues to ravage the global economy. If anything, we are witnessing an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: Books, newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound, telling us of companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are bailed out by taxpayer money, and sweatshops where children work overtime.

Yet no matter how grievous the abuse or how indicative of a larger, more systemic failure, there's a limit to how far these critiques go. The goal is invariably to democratize capitalism in the name of fighting excesses and to extend democratic control of the economy through the pressure of more media scrutiny, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, and honest police investigations. What is never questioned is the bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street and the World Social Forum dare not touch.

It's no wonder, then, that the optimistic leftist expectations that the ongoing crisis would be a sobering moment -- the awakening from a dream -- turned out to be dangerously shortsighted. The year 2011 was indeed one of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around the world. A year later, every day brings new proof of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening actually was. The enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious fundamentalism; Occupy is losing momentum to such an extent that the police cleansing of New York's Zuccotti Park even seemed like a blessing in disguise. It's the same story around the world: Nepal's Maoists seem outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela's "Bolivarian" experiment is regressing further and further into caudillo-run populism; and even the most hopeful sign, Greece's anti-austerity movement, has lost energy after the electoral defeat of the leftist Syriza party.

It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism, more wars, more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out of their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their lives, the first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which leads to a return to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the ruling ideology are not put into doubt. They are even more violently asserted.

Could we in fact be seeing the conditions for the further radicalization of capitalism? German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once told me that, if there is a person alive to whom they will build monuments 100 years from now, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who did more than anyone else to promote and implement the marriage of capitalism and authoritarianism -- an arrangement he euphemistically referred to as "Asian values." The virus of this authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe, nowhere more so than China.

Faced with today's explosion of capitalism in China, analysts often ask when political democracy as the "natural" political accompaniment of capitalism will enforce itself. But what if the promised democratization never arrives? What if China's authoritarian capitalism is not a stop on the road to further democratization, but the end state toward which the rest of the world is headed?

Leon Trotsky once characterized tsarist Russia as "the vicious combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock market," but the description applies even better to today's China. In the Chinese iteration, the combination may prove to be a more stable one than the democratic capitalist model we have come to see as natural.

The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, but democracy -- not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism.

(Reuters) - Bulgarian nationalist party Attack is gaining support among voters with pledges to nationalize companies and raise wages while blaming foreigners for unsatisfying living standards, its leader told Reuters on Tuesday.

Attack party leader Volen Siderov blamed the "colonial" West for low wages and high prices in Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2007 and has committed to budget restrictions and a currency peg in an effort to swap its lev for the single European currency used by 17 other EU member nations.

"I want to underline the negative role of the West, which through all these years of colonizing was actually pushing things in that direction - low incomes, cheap labor because foreigners benefit from it," Siderov said in an interview.

Attack's growing popularity, now about 5 percent, is raising questions over the political future of the poorest EU member ahead of a May 12 election where grudging support for Bulgaria's main parties looks likely to end in a hung parliament.

Public anger at consumer prices charged by energy monopolies led to widespread protests last month over Bulgaria's low standard of living and forced the resignation of the center-right cabinet headed by Boiko Borisov.

"Protesters said: 'Let's get Bulgaria back, let's get our property back' and this is our slogan I have here on my badge," said the 57-year-old Siderov, whose party also has an anti-Roma and anti-Turkish agenda.

In a powerful demonstration of public despair over Bulgarian living standards which stand at less than half the EU average, a 59-year-old man set himself on fire in protest on Monday in the western town of Bobovdol. He was the fifth man to set himself on fire and remains in critical condition.

Several scholars consider the Attack party ultranationalist,[4][5][6] and designate its leader Volen Siderov an ultranationalist too.[5][7] The organization's orientation and rhetoric is described as racist, especially antisemitic and anti-Roma as well as xenophobic.

Oh Jeezus, populist chameleons:

source: bloggers4ukip.org.uk not hotlinking those cnuts.