Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

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Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby FourthBase » Sun Mar 03, 2013 5:30 pm

In lieu of a proper OP, I present this link to the RI search results:

search.php?keywords=beppe+grillo

[crickets]


The man is a hero. A role model. And, he's hilarious. An antidote to deep, immobilizing pessimism. We should maybe take more time to notice people like that, and a little less time existentially moping about how all hope is lost and all efforts futile.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -euro.html

Italy plunged deeper into political chaos this weekend after Beppe Grillo, the quixotic former comedian who holds the balance of power in parliament, suggested that the country may have to abandon the euro and return to the lire.


Pardon me if this is crude, but: If I had a vagina, that bolded part would make it wet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beppe_Grillo

viewtopic.php?p=129564#p129564
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Mar 03, 2013 5:47 pm

.

Grillo! Paisano!

Here's a clip with English subtitles..

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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Mar 04, 2013 12:33 am

A demagogue, but in the absence of a real left, better he holds the balance of power between the banker-owned fake progressives and the Berlusconi brutes.
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby FourthBase » Mon Mar 04, 2013 1:01 am

JackRiddler wrote:A demagogue, but in the absence of a real left, better he holds the balance of power between the banker-owned fake progressives and the Berlusconi brutes.


I'm intrigued. Why is he a demagogue* and not a hero? Or, can one be both?

*The etymology of demagogue seems positive or neutral enough: People-leader. This is bad?
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Mar 04, 2013 10:26 am

FourthBase wrote:
JackRiddler wrote:A demagogue, but in the absence of a real left, better he holds the balance of power between the banker-owned fake progressives and the Berlusconi brutes.


I'm intrigued. Why is he a demagogue* and not a hero? Or, can one be both?

*The etymology of demagogue seems positive or neutral enough: People-leader. This is bad?


One can be both, and I suppose Grillo qualifies. As Mr. Never Trusts the Corporate Media, I actually fell for an NY Times line that he's anti-immigrant, though the real position seems to be more in the Obama-style mainstream of "if they work, they're good."

He's certainly got a mind for publicity, starting with a well-written English-language blog.

His blog post on immigration:


http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/2007/11/r ... ation.html

I have interviewed Rula Jebreal on the topic of immigration. Her analysis is simple and it’s common sense. In Italy the parties always put forward their interests and some even put their ideologies in first place. Then come the citizens. If there’s a problem, let them sort it out. If the situation gets out of hand, they do a decree that leaves things as they were. This political class has run its course. Let’s hope it goes away soon, before Italy disintegrates.

”The problem of immigration in Italy falls on society in terms of the impact and the issues. From the point of view of politics, it is ignored or purposely not spoken about or tackled only when there are episodes of crime.

Then the approach is like fan-clubs. Those who talk about zero-tolerance don’t explain what that means in legal terms. When I have asked politicians this, they replied, for example, that all graffiti on the walls has to be eliminated as soon as it appears… .I had thought I would get a fuller response.

On the other hand, there are the others who talk about full solidarity, an approach that is for one thing offensive and humiliating for immigrants who are not considered as human beings, men and women with rights and duties.

The issue blows up always at the moment of the episodes. There’s not a complete European approach that sees immigration not just as part of the problem but also as part of the solution.

In France, Sarkozy is taking big steps forward by putting immigrants into his government like Rachida Dati, Minister of Justice. He is the man who created the Islamic conference to understand how to engage in dialogue and tackle the issue of radical Islamism in the community.

The issue of the Roma people is very obvious and could have been predicted: it was clear that by including certain countries in the European Community, inhabitants would arrive in vast numbers, even for the different life prospects.

What’s missing here is a complete political project and an objective: many people arrive without job prospects so the only possibility is for them to turn to petty crime. The political response is absent for now, and the whole burden falls on society whose response is obviously one of refusal and of shock.

There’s no one who is softening the impact, even by controlling the flow of migrants. The French proposal to the European Community is to regulate the flow even of Community members. There are discussions in the European Commission, there will also be discussions in the Italian Parliament with the usual ideological approach. A solution will be found. I hope it won’t be too late. Today society responds even violently: there are those who attack the camps of the nomads, those who burn them.

There are then those who think it’s possible to welcome everyone. There’s no planning as is done in other countries.

Unfortunately, for the umpteenth time, the politicians are silent and go on busying themselves with other things. There’s a serious risk: that the situation explodes and that what happened in France with the burning down of a hotel whose guests were immigrants could happen here. It’s true that in Italy there’s less racism than in other European countries but there’s a lot less integration. It’s a fact that is shocking. There’s a lot less integration.

It’s no good working round the issue that is very clear: we need to regulate the flow, to give rights but also duties. We need to start to think like Great Britain that welcomes people but gives clear rules, where anyone who commits crime leaves the country and never returns. It’s a valid system that for now has worked very well.” Rula Jebreal

Posted by Beppe Grillo at 10:15 AM


Clearly one of the forerunners is in the pirate parties of Germany and Sweden. They're putting together their program by Internet referendum, it seems.

Here's an interesting interview -- apparently his first since 1993 -- with some old-time Internet religion, and a naive view of Obama that isn't really about Obama at all but perhaps a forgivably misconceived comedian's model of Obama from someone who hopes to mimic said model.

Last night I was interviewed live on air by the SkyTG24 news service. This is something that hasn’t happened to me in the past fifteen years! Here is an extract of the video text.

Journalist: “So, as we promised, I would like to welcome Beppe Grillo who is joining us live on air on Nightline SkyTg24. Good evening Beppe, thank you for joining us”.

Beppe: “Thank you, Thank you indeed. Finally, after fifteen years, here I am live on the television. You are only the second the second lot of people filming me live, after the Police’s General Investigation and Special Operations Unit, that is. So everything is okay. On top of it all, your TV channel is absolutely extraordinary, you almost feel like family. ‘Gino, have you seen this? Hi Cinzia! How are you? Are you there? Say hi to Davide …’ I don’t know why it is, but I don’t know what to say. There are billions of things that I would like to talk about. I have not given a live interview on television since 1993. But I want to be brief because we are busy putting together something that has been five years in the making and that will maybe come to fruition in Florence on Sunday.

We have spoken about the Civic Lists. Has anyone perhaps heard about the Civic Lists, the Meetups, the Blog… It is something that began five years ago. I was working as a comedian at the time and then I learned about Meetups and Blogs in the United States. I proceeded to set up a blog and, thanks to the participation of thousands of people, of informed citizens, we became the seventh biggest Blog in the world of one billion users worldwide, that is according to Forbes.

The Web is busy changing the world as we know it, with the social networks, with Facebook, with MySpace and with the Blogs. The Internet is changing people’s lives. ”

Journalist: “Because of your attitude regarding the Internet and technology, certain people have labelled you as the Italian Obama. This is certainly not because of your skin colour.”


(dumbfuck cracker couldn't leave that out)

Beppe: “Obama is copying me. He is copying all of us. I’m not joking. Obama has risen to stardom thanks to the Web. He posts potential new laws on the Web and allows ten days for people to discuss these laws before signing them. He is a man of the people and he is financed by the people. His very first speech was posted on Youtube and his support base is the people. It is a down-up, or upside down democracy. Here in Italy we have a total impasse and we are in the middle of a crisis that will provide a severe beating to these psychodwarfs, dancers, gnomes, elves and friends of friends. We are raving mad. There is a general economic and political madness all around us. The parties have disappeared. When I said that the parties were busy dying, they accused me of practicing anti-politics. Do you remember? Yet now they have all disappeared. They disappeared because they never really existed in the first place. There was no real left wing, there was no real right wing and there was no real opposition. All that there was, was a general taking the piss out of millions of citizens. Elections were held without the voters being able to choose their preferred candidate. We are sitting with 18 sentenced criminals still in our Parliament. The outlaws are making the laws. We have about one hundred more that are already found guilty and awaiting appeals, awaiting trial, statute barred offenders and plea-bargainers. You name them and we have them. Our Parliament has become little more than a rubbish dump.

Journalist: “You have clearly jumped in with both feet and immediately started talking about important political issues.”

Beppe: “No, this is not politics. I’m talking about toxic and hazardous waste. This is not politics. Politics involves overturning the status quo. It means sending the parties home. Informed citizens, with helmets. Informed citizens that draft civic lists. Civic lists, getting into City Hall. That is where the quality of life of the citizens is decided. In the various Municipalities.”

Journalist: “Okay. Let’s start here then. On Sunday, in Florence, you will be presenting you “Civic Lists for a New Renaissance” as you have called them. Many young candidates and, above all, people with certain very precise characteristics required in order to become a part of this project.”

Beppe: “Yes, that is the idea behind these Civic Lists. They grew partly out of the Meetups, which are groups of people that work with me and share my vision, in fact our vision. These are real 5-Star Civic Lists. We are discussing the real issues, real politics. We talk about the recycling of refuse, we talk about door-to-door differentiated refuse collection rather than about incinerators, we talk about WiFi and about free, unlimited connectivity. We talk about. That is the madness of these people, who are spending millions that they don’t have in the first place, on infrastructure that is totally absurd and they will never be built. Because mobility has nothing to with getting some trucks across bridges, corridor five or linking Turkey with the Ukraine. They are going insane. The mobility of the future is all about moving as little as possible. All about circulating ideas. The Internet is mobility. […] There is a 27-year old from Treviso that has developed a huge following thanks to two ideas. He currently earns 250 Euro per month and he lives in the district of Treviso, a pretty large municipality. This young man has done two things: firstly he organised differentiated refuse collection at 90 schools, at no cost to either the municipality or to the schools themselves. Secondly, he devised an open source software programme. Via Skype and with only one call, any resident of Treviso can now make contact with the person that can solve his/her problem, without having to climb in the car and drive anywhere, thus increasing the traffic jams. Via Skype, only one chat on Skype. At no cost to the municipality. We have forty-thousand such ideas. Free access to the Internet …”

Journalist: “Why is it so difficult to get these ideas off the ground when these ideas could be coming from small local councils?”

Beppe: “We start from the other end. We start from the communities. We have launched a “breathe down their necks” campaign. Currently it is like a resident who goes to his own home, where he finds his employees holding a meeting to discuss his life and gamble with his property and his quality of life, yet they don’t even allow him in to the meeting. The residents would like to attend these meetings, film the proceedings and post them on the Web. When these people are filmed and exposed on the information highway that is the Web, then everyone will know what games they have been playing, and that is precisely why they don’t want to be filmed. The answer is simple. Let’s get rid of these seventy year old geriatrics. Away with them. Bring in some new blood. Residents that can start in the town councils and then move from there on to the regional councils and perhaps eventually from there into Parliament. We talk about public water. I would like to know what the right wingers and left wingers think about privatising water and allowing it to be owned by some or other “Pty Ltd”. I want to know what they think about WiFi. Our current law is absolutely unbelievable. One you will only find here in Italy, in Burma and in China. The infamous Pisanu Law. I personally watched that half-pint, Pisanu, go on television and make believe that is a democrat. As a matter of fact, with his anti-terrorism law, he succeeded in blocking free WiFi. Go to Paris or to London and you will find people working on their computers in the libraries and in the parks, like in many other cities around the world. We, instead have some very serious shortcomings […]

To summarise what I have said then, there are a number of young people that have been addressing these issues, namely water, incinerators, energy, WiFi, mobility and transportation, in other words the real issues, for the past five years. We have discussed these ideas, debated these ideas with Nobel Prize winners, because that is what they are being called on the Web and, well, these young people will appear on the civic lists. They are nobodies, they are only youngsters. They don’t have a cent, none of us have any money, we are not being financed by anybody and we receive no subsidies. The media is obviously against us. This is my very first television interview. That is why I am so happy and why I’m trying to be brief so that I can explain what has been happening in my life for the past five years. […] I repeat. There will be civic lists. I believe in them because I have put my life and my profession into them. I have put everything on the line for this project. Just as thousands of youngsters and young adults have done, simply because they want to know that they have some good prospects for the future. The civic list are only the first step and it won’t stop there. The process has been slow because we are having to fight against the media, especially the newspapers. But we are like a virus that attacks from below and they will never get rid of us. You can try, but you won’t get rid of us, ever. Thank you for the interview.[…]

Journalist: “Let me add just one final postscript. The time and place of the appointment in Florence?”

Beppe: “The appointment is at the Saschall Theatre in Florence. I will be there from 10 in the morning until late night and there will also be a number of other people making speeches. There will even be some big names. Riccardo Petrella will be talking about water being a public asset, because he is the world’s greatest philosopher on the topic of water. He is a marvellous person and a professor. There will be a number of professors, doctors and journalists talking on the day. Travaglio will be there, as will a number of economists. There will be a number of fantastic people there, the same ones that attended the Vday event, names that you have not even mentioned. We will be leaving the city with the “Florence Bill” in hand, the famous Florence Bill. I have great faith in this city. The Florence Bill will reflect the twelve things that we want to achieve in all our towns, with every civic list under our control. The names on the list must be youngsters with no criminal record and must not have held public office for longer than one term, must be residents of the town that they will be representing politically.”

Journalist: “We will be reporting back on the event, as proven by this, your first interview since 1993. Thank you Beppe Grillo.”

Beppe: “I thank you. Many thanks to you and, as always, to the General Investigation and Special Operations Unit!”


It's hard not to love this, so let's repeat!

Here in Italy we have a total impasse and we are in the middle of a crisis that will provide a severe beating to these psychodwarfs, dancers, gnomes, elves and friends of friends. We are raving mad. There is a general economic and political madness all around us. The parties have disappeared. When I said that the parties were busy dying, they accused me of practicing anti-politics. Do you remember? Yet now they have all disappeared. They disappeared because they never really existed in the first place. There was no real left wing, there was no real right wing and there was no real opposition. All that there was, was a general taking the piss out of millions of citizens. Elections were held without the voters being able to choose their preferred candidate. We are sitting with 18 sentenced criminals still in our Parliament. The outlaws are making the laws. We have about one hundred more that are already found guilty and awaiting appeals, awaiting trial, statute barred offenders and plea-bargainers. You name them and we have them. Our Parliament has become little more than a rubbish dump.


"A severe beating to these psychodwarfs, dancers, gnomes, elves and friends of friends. We are raving mad."
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby crikkett » Mon Mar 04, 2013 11:24 am

FourthBase wrote:If I had a vagina...


Well I did add him to the Hot Dissidents list in the Lounge sometime in the last couple of weeks.

(His name means "cricket" in English)
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby FourthBase » Mon Mar 04, 2013 6:57 pm

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/world ... ement.html

With a background in accounting, he has also taken on scandal-ridden businesses that have cost shareholders and taxpayers spectacular amounts through mismanagement, including the Parmalat dairy empire, Telecom Italia and the bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena.


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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Dec 04, 2016 1:41 am

.


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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Dec 04, 2016 1:27 pm

Grillo can't be all that bad. He's professing a circular economy, which is a sustainable economy. I applaud the man.
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby American Dream » Sun Dec 04, 2016 9:02 pm

Wu Ming’s interview “Beppe Grillo lives on the ruins of the movements"

Image

This is an interview by Roberto Ciccarelli, whom we thank, and it appears in today’s (Friday’s) issue of “Il Manifesto”. We couldn’t be more clear and straightforward than this. It synthesises what we think about the Movimento 5 Stelle (henceforth M5S) and about its relation to the crisis/absence of social movements.

This interview by Roberto Ciccarelli appeared on Il manifesto and on Wu Ming Foundation’s blog, Giap.

Beppe Grillo’s strategy is a diversionary one. It pushes the “indignation”, so praised during the Spanish acampadas or American Occupy movements, away from Italian piazzas. The more vicious the crisis becomes, the more the outbursts of resentment are brought together in one convenient format: the blog of the 5-Stelle Leader, which spurs on Jacobin justicialism against the so-called caste and its different masks.

According to Wu Ming (the five-writer collective and authors of Q – as Luther Blisset – 54 and Altai), M5S has confined the potential energies of an uprising against austerity to a discursive cage which makes a parody of political conflict, leaving its administration to a “sectarian business organisation” (Casaleggio&Associati) and to the symbolic guidance of Beppe Grillo. According to them, the five-star radicalism “administers the absence of radical movements in Italy”. This thesis, strongly outlined in an article published on Internazionale’s website, was subsequently expanded on “Giap”, Wu Ming’s influential blog. It interrupts the Italian movements’ stunned silence over the last decade, from Genoa’s G8 to the campaigns for common goods.


RC: So, what is Grillo’s version of the story?

WM: There is an “Honest People” (assumed to be undivided from within, no classes, no opposing interests) and there is a “Corrupt Caste”, described as external to the “People”. In order to solve Italy’s problems, it is necessary to elect “honest people”, who won’t make “right-wing decisions” or “left-wing decisions”, but “fair” decisions. Here, Grillo’s rhetoric is similar to that of the much-despised Monti government: issues are technical, not political. This is a simplistic and comforting framework, which removes contradictions, doesn’t deal with the causes of the crisis and which offers easy-to-recognise enemies.

RC: But why is M5S gathering an enormous consensus at present, even among left-wingers and activists of previous movements?

WM: If Grillo and Casaleggio have succeeded in doing this, it’s because the movements were unable to find a way out of the crisis that hit them ten years or so ago. There hasn’t been any reorganisation, and the cycle of struggles that followed haven’t been able to take root in common sense. Grillo embodies the failure of the movements, and we must deal with this primarily. The fact that so many left-wing and radical people (amongst them activists in the previous cycle of struggles) chose Grillo “because there is no alternative” is understandable: we don’t have it in for them. But we are sure that M5S is a false solution, and the “there’s-nothing-else” refrain is a consequence of the “capturing” we were talking about. If Grillo’s face is superimposed on every movement, it is inevitable that people will have the impression that he is the only one taking action. The spell must be broken, and, at the same time, the heavy work of reconstruction must be carried out.

RC: Could you give an example of a “fundamental knotty problem” that they don’t want to face?

WM: The “citizens’ income”: they constantly mention it, and this was certainly a bad habit in the “antagonist” movement, most of all in a certain post-workerism that was a little bit, let’s say, “flower power”. But what does one mean by “citizens’ income”? The problem can be further divided in two: what does one mean by “income”? Is it an unemployment subsidy? Is it the minimum wage? Is it one thousand euros per person? And then, do we get it by taxing the rich or by abolishing the pension funds and cutting all public salaries? Certainly the ultra-liberalist Casaleggio is pushing for the latter, but do they all agree? Furthermore, what is understood by “citizenship”? Is it the universalistic principle born of the French Revolution or is it the right-wing nationalistic variety? Is it ‘ius soli’ or ‘ius sanguinis’? Is my black neighbour, whose children go to school with mine, included or not? Judging from certain racist statements coming from exponents of M5S and from Grillo himself, we would say that he is not included, and that the “citizens’ income” would be distributed according to chauvinistic criteria.

RC: You “cheer” for the rebellion of the movement’s base against the top of M5S and the base. But which base are we talking about, given that in M5S there is not only the precarious worker and the poorly-paid worker who is obliged to be self-employed but also the small businessman hit by the crisis and the pensioner?

WM: There’s been a misunderstanding about this point. By “cheering for a rebellion within M5S” we mean the hope that the contradictions will intensify and explode. This shouldn’t be confused with a narrow argument about the “base” that “is good”: at the base there are many fascists and people that until yesterday were carried away by Bossi or Berlusconi. There’s even that guy from the Pontedera M5S who broadcast a terrifying racist statement, there’s that Sardinian member who compared gay marriage to sex with animals… The “base” isn’t “good”, this would also be part of a right-wing framework, an attempt to covertly bring back the idea of the “People” versus the “Caste”, when in this case Grillo and Casaleggio are the caste. No, we hope for vertical and horizontal breaks, and on concrete issues. It will be specific battles that bring “left-wing” M5S members face-to-face with choices that now can no longer be put off.


Excerpted from: https://libcom.org/blog/wu-ming’s-interview-“beppe-grillo-lives-ruins-movements-03032013
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 06, 2016 9:14 am

Democracy Against Neoliberalism

Matteo Renzi’s constitutional reform was politically illegitimate in method and antidemocratic in content. We should celebrate its rejection.

by Cinzia Arruzza

Image
Matteo Renzi in 2015.

In order to explain the outcome of this referendum, which saw a massive turnout of 67 percent and No winning with almost 60 percent of the votes, one has to look at the convergence of multiple factors. Forces across the political spectrum opposed the reform for different reasons. On the Left, the measure was challenged by the CGIL, the country’s biggest union; by the left of the Democratic Party, including its former secretary; by the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI); by the whole radical left, including left unions, social coalitions, students’ organizations, and the various networks of occupied spaces; and by a number of prominent left-leaning constitutional law experts such as Gustavo Zagrebelsky. The arguments ranged from the defense of democratic representation and popular sovereignty against the principle of governability to the opposition to Renzi’s aggressively neoliberal political project, of which the constitutional reform is only a portion.

On the Right, the reform was opportunistically opposed by the xenophobic Northern League, by the right-wing nationalist party Fratelli d’Italia, by neo-fascist forces such as Casa Pound and Forza Nuova, and — reluctantly — by Berlusconi. The reason for the mainstream right’s opposition is rather clear: as Renzi highly personalized the vote on the constitutional reform and linked the destiny of his government to the outcome of the referendum, the currently disorganized and fragmented right saw it as an opportunity to get rid of the government and start a process that may allow them to regroup and be competitive again.

Finally, the Five Star Movement, a catch-all populist movement with highly contradictory positions, resisted the constitutional reform all the way through the parliamentary debate, protesting at every turn against the violation of the most basic parliamentary rules by the government. The reasons for their position combined both a defense of parliamentary democracy’s rules and the ambition to overtake the PD as Italy’s principal party.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/ital ... party-m5s/
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:32 am

The Experiment

AN INTERVIEW WITH
JACOPO IACOBONI

Italy’s Five Star Movement offers a hollow promise of democracy.

Image
Five Star Movement leader Beppe Grillo speaks in 2011.

In the run-up to Sunday’s Italian election, the Five Star Movement is the country’s largest single party. While the coalition arithmetic looks likely to block its path to government, since 2007 the M5S has seized a central role in Italian politics. It today holds the Rome mayoralty and stands close to 30 percent support.

Despite its opposition to “the caste” — an establishment ranging from politicians to journalists and European institutions — the M5S is difficult to define politically. If its galvanizing idea is its online direct democracy, standing in apparent contrast to Italy’s sclerotic institutions, it has not clearly assumed a collective identity.

Media often compares M5S to more clearly defined forces, such as Spain’s left-populist Podemos, or else emphasizes its connection to far-right and Eurosceptic forces. In reality, the M5S’s peculiarity lies in its bid to avoid such definition, thus remaining “intact” as a force defined against politics itself.

In his recent book The Experiment, La Stampa journalist Jacopo Iacoboni detailed the curious roots and often bizarre practices of the M5S, with technocratic pseudoscience and conspiracy theories underlying its apparently more optimistic vision of a purer, unmediated democracy. In this interview with Jacobin’s David Broder, Iacoboni explains the strange coalition of forces which have created this movement.

In your book The Experiment you describe the career of Roberto Casaleggio, who was the guru of the M5S until his death in 2016. Who was he, and what was his political inspiration?

Roberto Casaleggio was an IT manager who became the head of a British-Italian joint venture in the mid-1990s. This Webegg project emerged from Finsiel, linked to the Olivetti group, and the British company Logica. He was a man gifted with real intelligence and a measure of intuition.

Most important was that he understood the possibility of using networks to form, spread, and manipulate consent. He first of all did this within the workings of the joint venture itself, experimenting in its intranet forum. Then came the arrival of social networks (Meetup, an early 2000s social network which provided a platform for the M5S, and then Facebook). This allowed Casaleggio to extend this experiment in social engineering to Italy as a whole.

His original political inspiration was closer to the Right than the Left. He used to say that he was one of the few people to attend the first meetings staged by the Lega Nord, under its early leader Umberto Bossi. That is not to say that the M5S is right wing. Rather, it is a tool, an instrument that resulted from his experiment. What matters is not its (un-ideological) content, but its form. It is a skeleton to which any content can be attached.

You describe how already in the 1990s Casaleggio took a keen interest in “neurolinguistic programming” and manipulating consent. What role did the technologies drawn from this domain play in informing the “direct democracy” of the M5S, and its practical functioning?

Neurolinguistic programming is not a technology but a pseudoscience that emerged in the United States, in the books by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Within the Webegg venture I mentioned above, Casaleggio organized periodic retreats — even in monasteries — which were always accompanied by a psychologist, who was himself an expert in neurolinguistic programming.

Many years later, upon Roberto Casaleggio’s instruction, neurolinguistic programming was also introduced among the members of the M5S parliamentary group. This was the work of Silvia Virgulti, a rather interesting figure who was long also the girlfriend of current M5S prime ministerial candidate Luigi di Maio.

Another very interesting practice within the M5S parliamentary group is the use of hypnosis.


Continues: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/five ... gio-grillo
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby American Dream » Tue Mar 06, 2018 8:06 am

In Italy Election, Anti-E.U. Views Pay Off for Far Right and Populists

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Matteo Salvini, center, leader of the far-right League party, after voting in Milan on Sunday.


The new Italian political landscape does not mean that the anti-establishment forces will get the chance to govern together, or that they even want to. But their strength at the polls was a strong indicator of voter anger after a prolonged period of economic stagnation and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants from Africa and elsewhere.

For years, migrants who survived the perilous crossing of the sea arrived on Italy’s southern coasts. The country’s center-left government sought to strike a balance between a humane response and enforcement of its borders.

Italy pleaded with other countries in Europe to help share the burden, both by patrolling the waters and accepting a portion of the migrants sheltered in reception centers. But its neighbors, including France, locked their doors and the migrants, many of whom felt stuck in Italy, became an open political nerve.

The center-left government eventually reduced the arrivals through deals in Libya and further south. But by then the damage was done, and Europe, which is deeply wary of the Five Star Movement and the League, may now be about to pay the consequences.

“We are surely in front of an extraordinary result,” Alfonso Bonafede, a member of Parliament from the Five Star party said soon after the first exit polls at a conference room in a Rome hotel. “We can say historic even. The Five Star Movement will be the pillar of the next legislature.”

Mr. Berlusconi, Mr. Salvini and Ms. Meloni ran together with the idea of governing together. With their failure to reach the 40 percent threshold to claim power, it was not clear what would happen.

Supporters of Mr. Berlusconi argued after midnight on Monday on television that his coalition had essentially won the election. But Mr. Berlusconi himself did not appear to be the winner, even within his coalition.

That Mr. Salvini appeared to win more support than Mr. Berlusconi, a media mogul with three television channels and decades in government and business, was stunning.

Not long ago, Mr. Salvini was insulting southern Italians, saying they smelled bad. But he shed his party’s northern roots and drew on the frustration over illegal immigration to appeal to those he once mocked. His campaign was rife with anti-migrant and anti-Muslim language.

That’s what voters seemed to like.

Giulia De Virgilio and her husband, Vico Vicenzi, both 72-year-old lawyers, walked out of a polling station in Rome’s historic center on Sunday and said they had cast their votes for Mr. Salvini, despite usually voting for the left.

Their comments suggested that Mr. Salvini’s efforts to transform his party from a northern secessionist movement into a force appealing to Italians everywhere had paid off. He convinced the couple that illegal migrants posed an existential threat, especially after a young woman was killed and dismembered in a central Italian town in January. The police arrested Nigerian immigrants in the killing.

“They cut out her heart, her guts — they are cannibals,” said Ms. De Virgilio. She said, “Nigerians are drug dealers.”

That anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as a strong dose of euroskepticism, swept Italy this election season.

The Five Star Movement appealed to voters on both the left and the right, especially in the country’s poorer southern regions. Young voters flocked to their throw-out-the-bums message.

Five Star’s ability to elide hard positions on controversial issues such as immigration and leaving the eurozone, as well as its support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, made it a difficult target for its political enemies.


https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/w ... ebook.com/
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 09, 2018 10:01 am

Opportunist Populism: On Italy's Five Star Movement

David Broder offers background on Italy's populist Five Star Movement.

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Beppe Grillo address a Five Star Movement rally in Piazza Maggiore, Bologna. May 7, 2011.


When we talk about these alternative solutions, is the reason that the alternative solution in Italy is different from those in Spain and Greece is that in Italy there is a prioritization of fighting against establishment corruption? Is establishment corruption what drives Italy’s alternatives more to the right than what we’re seeing in Greece and Spain?

I definitely think so. In a sense, although the corruption of the Italian political class is very much a reality, there is something more conservative in the very idea of anti-corruption. There is a certain tendency to have a vision of returning to some mythical past when things worked properly. A slogan often in the mouths of Five Star movement activists is the idea of Italy being a “normal” country. This tends to lead to a certain antipathy towards things like public services that don’t really work. In Greece and Spain, there’s a much stronger element of having a positive political alternative, like the idea of a more generous social democracy, whereas the Five Star movement doesn’t really have any positive program at all. It is very heterogeneous coalition.

For example, in the run-off vote for the Rome mayoral election, which the Five Star movement will almost certainly win, I have lots of comrades who are communists who are planning to vote for the Five Star movement because they hate the establishment party, the Democrats, which is prime minister Renzi’s party. Meanwhile almost all the far right is also lining up behind the Five Star movement. The previous mayor, Gianni Alemanno, who is a lifelong fascist and still on the far right, is saying he’s going to vote for [Virginia] Raggi of the Five Star movement, because she stands against the political class who don’t care about ordinary people.

But the discourse of the Five Star movement lacks any defining positive element of its own. It’s more governed by hostility towards elites. And as it happens, the elites we have, at least at the moment, are liberals. That often gives the the focus of Five Star’s campaigns and slogans a quite rightwing direction.

Essentially M5S sees antifascism as just one more part of the liberal establishment’s effort to silence ordinary people. The success of the party does tend to introduce pro-fascist and anti-immigrant themes into a general political debate, which is something that the left needs to avoid.

Do the people of Italy, then, create their own Five Star movement in their mind the same way so many people here in the US who voted for Barack Obama imprinted their own feelings upon him, things that weren’t necessarily the case? Is there the same kind of imprinting of people’s values on the Five Star movement? Does the Five Star movement mean different things to different people?

Absolutely. The idea of being against entrenched elites, or against corruption, or for honesty in politics is a very broad idea. In last year’s Mafia Capitale scandal, all of the establishment parties, together with far right terrorists, politicians of left and right — all of them — were caught together in the same corruption, stealing more than a billion euros in city funds. To stand against that is an easy position to take.

But the Five Star movement is organized on a local basis as well, so its groups in different cities tend to have quite different positions from each other, depending on who the party of the local government is. So you can project onto it whatever you want. The movement very rarely takes strong positions on issues. For example, the Democratic Renzi government has introduced all sorts of gay rights legislation. Italy had never had any specific gay rights legislation before, and the government wanted to bring in gay civil partnerships and also give gay couples the right to adopt, with the so-called “kangaroo clause” (surrogate mothers for gay couples). Similarly, Renzi recently made it so children of migrants born on Italian soil would have automatic Italian citizenship. On these kinds of divisive social issues, the Five Star movement just doesn’t take positions, and almost all of its MPs and senators abstain, because of course if they took a firm position either way, it would undermine its ability to be a catch-all party or a cipher for people to project onto it whatever they want.

It’s even cleverer than that, because for example with the gay rights measures, the Five Star movement MPs who abstained used opposite arguments for their reasons to abstain. Some said it doesn’t go far enough (the government isn’t serious about introducing gay marriage and equal rights for gay people and so on), whereas others were opposed to it entirely from a Catholic reactionary family values point of view. So the movement succeeds in sending out completely opposite messages to different constituencies of voters so it can please everyone all of the time.

Of course, the fact that it hasn’t actually been in government (except for some local mayors) means it’s easier for it to maintain this nebulous position and refuse to take firm positions of its own.


More at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3673-o ... r-movement
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Re: Beppe Grillo and the Five Star Movement

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 29, 2018 7:27 am

The Italian Malaise

The recent election signaled a decisive shift in Italian politics, marking the collapse of the parties that have ruled Italy for the past 25 years. In this interview, conducted by Lewis Bassett, David Broder surveys the state of Italian politics in the four weeks since the election, and asks where next for Italian politics.

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We had the election in Italy four weeks ago. The build-up was a morbid affair with an 81 year old Berlusconi attempting another comeback while the left appeared lacklustre and divided. The result was a hung parliament. Can you tell me what your thoughts have been on the result and what coalition you see emerging?

The election saw the collapse of the parties that have ruled Italy for the last quarter-century. The Democrats, who led the previous government, fell to just 18%, while the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), at 32%, was the biggest single party. M5S had already scored well in 2013, but the more striking development was the radicalisation of the right, through the electoral pact which combined the hard-right Lega, Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and smaller allies. The Lega has in recent years become a national rather than only Northern-based party and embraced a harsh anti-immigrant platform. In leaping to 17% it for the first time outcompeted Forza Italia (14%), which had in various guises been the main centre-right party since 1994.

The Lega and M5S increased their vote but no party or coalition won an overall majority. Now we can expect a realignment in which these rising forces seek to replace the centrist parties as the new normal. Lega and M5S both pose as ‘outsiders’ and together hold a majority of seats, but there are definite obstacles to them now forming a coalition with each other. The Lega’s Matteo Salvini wants to cement his party’s leadership of the whole right, consuming Forza Italia, and so can hardly agree to play second fiddle to M5S leader Luigi di Maio. For its part, M5S is a strongly Southern-backed movement with strong support among the unemployed and the youth, but also claims to transcend left and right. It remains politically amorphous and to clearly align with such a coherent hard-right force as the Lega could destabilise it.

The first votes in parliament last weekend highlighted some of these dynamics. The M5S made a deal with the right-wing parties to elect its own Roberto Fico as president of the lower chamber and Forza Italia’s Elisabetta Alberti Castellati as president of the Senate, but this was only after the Lega had pushed aside Berlusconi’s favoured candidate. Weakened by the Lega’s advance, Berlusconi has said that the right-wing alliance is ‘over’ and is also deeply hostile to M5S. In policy terms the Lega (which wants to slash tax to a 15% flat rate) and M5S (which wants to roll out an unemployment benefit they exaggeratedly call a ‘citizens’ income’) seem incompatible, but they could make a short-term deal so that they can change the electoral law and hold new elections in which they could capitalise on Forza Italia and the Democrats’ current weakness. Even since the 4 March election the Lega has gained six percent in the polls.

In government since 2013, the Democrats cannot remain in office even in a grand coalition but could conceivably grant external support to an M5S administration. After years of decrying ‘irresponsible populism’, most of its leaders and base remain hostile to this, despite the appeals made by some of the left both within and outside the party keen to block the Lega. President Sergio Mattarella shall in the next few days ask either Luigi di Maio or Matteo Salvini to start trying to form a government. I would expect this to be a protracted process in which the M5S will be concerned to maintain the ‘optics’ of equidistance from the other parties. This will more likely produce some kind of temporary fix rather than the formation of a coalition able to last for five years.

Tell me about the Five Star movement. For many it’s not clear what their politics are exactly and at a glance their support for direct democracy and their anti-establishment rhetoric can appear attractive to some leftists in the UK.

Five Star well-reflects the current ills of Italian society. Its support feeds on a popular distrust in Italian institutions, which has proceeded unbroken since the collapse of the so-called ‘First Republic’ in the corruption scandals of the early 1990s, and the quarter-century of economic malaise, aggravated since the 2008 financial crisis. Italy is one of just four Eurozone countries yet to recover to pre-crisis GDP levels, has close to 35% youth unemployment, and a crippling public debt which membership of the Eurozone prevents its governments from even beginning to tackle. Created in 2009 after the Vaffanculo (Fuck You!) protests organised by comedian Beppe Grillo, M5S reflects the atomisation and social despair that results from this long-term malaise, including a distrust in the kind of state-led projects that might improve living standards.

M5S’s very strong support among the unemployed (at over 50% of the vote), in the South, and among younger layers (over 40% among all under-45s) reflects its attraction to those excluded from the employment market, as well as small business owners and employees who are in work but in danger of losing what they have. It claims to be politically transversal and to cross class divides, but in this it actually represents a very specific phenomenon: the disaggregation and social pulverisation of the social categories which the labour movement and political left used to unite under the banner of either ‘the working class and its allies’ or ‘the people’. M5S does not speak in the name of a class or even ‘the people’, but ‘citizens’; it promises not progress, but a vague notion of turning the tables on arrogant elites. The M5S’s policy proposals are far less ambitious than its fierce rhetoric against the ruling ‘caste’ might suggest. ‘Cleaning up politics’ is both the instrument and end goal of change, and its economic programme is slight.

Liberal press often tie it to the far right, and Luigi di Maio has indeed harshened its rhetoric on immigration, even speaking of a target of ‘zero boats’ disembarking in Italy. This election followed the refugee crisis but also the collapse of a late 2017 move to grant citizenship to the children of migrants born in Italy. A country with so little regard even for its ‘indigenous’ children is also shutting the door to new Italians, and M5S simply goes along with this, if not embracing the extremist policies of the Lega or Berlusconi. Ultimately, M5S’s concern is to maintain a ‘catch-all’ identity, and this forces its MPs to abstain on divisive issues like gay rights or migration. Its online Rousseau platform, the hub of its ‘direct democracy’, stands above an atomised and passive membership, who never meet or take important decisions, and vote in very low numbers. The assumptions behind the movement, such as they exist, are in fact curiously technocratic and neoliberal, postulating a rational administration of the state denuded of politics or what they call ‘ideology’.

M5S has nonetheless cornered the market. In railing against failed parties and institutions it expresses the anger of the atomised individuals faced with the effects of the crisis. Without doubt, its ability to monopolise an ‘anti-establishment’ feeling, railing against ‘the parties’ and the ‘caste’, particularly owes to the hollowing out of the Left. In this it benefited from the collapse of Rifondazione Comunista, which in the early 2000s secured around three million votes, but ultimately allied with neoliberal centrists in government. Unable to create a new anti-systemic force, in 2008 it lost its remaining parliamentary representation. But not only the radical Left’s strategic choices, but the material disaggregation of its social base, helped create a climate in which anomie and distrust rather than solidarity comes most naturally. If large swathes of older ex-Communist voters and the subaltern categories today vote M5S, this is also because they are less bound by class feeling or political identity.

Five Star backed away from an anti-EU position while parties of the left, including Potere al Popolo, didn’t appear to want to discuss it despite evidence that young voters in particular are hostile toward the EU. Questioning Italy’s membership of the EU was the dog that did not bark in this election – why is that?

The key issue is the Eurozone, although this is often described as a matter of European belonging. Older voters are more strongly bound by the European idea, because of the cross-party support for this over recent decades, the belief that ‘Europe’ is an outside guarantee able to save Italy from its ills, and the fact that elderly Italians are, on average, less hard-hit by the crisis than the younger Italians unable to make their way in the current context. Given this divide in what was once a solidly pro-European country, we see that over-45s favour staying in the Eurozone by about three-to-one, while a slight majority of younger Italians would prefer to break away.

The Lega and M5S have in recent years called for a referendum, but in the immediate pre-election period abandoned this. Doubtless neither wanted to be saddled with actually leading Italy out of the euro, a difficult task given its generally febrile politics, and parts of the Lega’s Northern middle-class base are particularly reluctant to make such a leap. For Matteo Salvini’s party, it made sense to shift the anti-EU focus to more consensual questions of immigration and race, while also complaining about the budget limits imposed by the Eurozone.

The Democrats stand as defenders of the budgetary ‘responsibility’ and austerity demanded by ordoliberalism and treat criticism of the Eurozone as driven by racism and stupidity or indeed a transgression of ‘anti-fascism’. The centre-Left Free and Equal list have something of the same cultural baggage, but perhaps more surprising is the radical Left’s unwillingness to confront this question head-on. Potere al Popolo’s rather vague call for a ‘break with the EU treaties’ was designed to hold together a variety of positions among its component parts, notably elements of Rifondazione Comunista who remain wedded to the analysis already tested to destruction by Syriza in Greece.

While the Lega has dropped calls for Euro exit the hard right continues to be seen as owning this territory. An alternative model comes from France, where Jean-Luc Mélenchon has attached the fight for a refoundation of Europe to the possibility of breaking away if this change proves impossible. This is designed to show that the Eurozone cannot indeed be reformed, and beyond unlikely and limited proposals like relaxing budget limits or facilitating some sort of transfer union this does seem the case. Italian manufacturing capacity has fallen by around a quarter since the crisis and Eurozone membership has, if not caused this, at least impeded a government response. Clearly this question is not going to go away and demands a decisive response.


More at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3714-t ... an-malaise
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