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It is not an episode of Un posto al sole. They are not the Cantieri Palladini. In short, it is not a fiction. It is a piece of Italian reality. It’s La Spezia: slave laborers employed to build luxury yachts paid four euros an hour, under the control of very violent “corporals”.
Workers in dangerous working conditions and, in the event of a positive virus, not even the possibility of health insurance. Once again the news confronts us with an unimaginable reality in a modern society: scenarios of an ançien régime, where the absolute wealth of the luxury consumer is combined with the absolute misery of the producer reduced to a “life of waste”. We can well say that on that quay on the border between Liguria and Versilia – our “golden coast” – the extreme poles of the social pyramid have almost come close to touching in a single point: in the object of desire, symbol of status for the some, a place of torment for others, revealing the background of injustice that underlies the social model that has emerged with the new century.
The chronicle tells us that the workers were mainly Bengalis (a symbol of a caste society that knows outcasts and knights). That the organization that managed them as low-value goods was broad and branched, endowed with substantial financial means (one million euros was seized), assisted by professionals and labor consultants capable of making everything seem perfect on paper, as in any system based on subcontracting. And it would seem like an anomaly in contemporary hypermodernity. Instead, it is, up to a point, an exemplary, if extreme, representation of her. The post-industrial model that has been consolidated in the world with financial, commercial and productive globalization is, by its nature and substance, inequality. Abysmally uneven. It lives on the conjugation of extremes. Disproportionate wealth such as those produced by this accumulation model can only be based on the expropriation of large sectors of the population and the reduction to a minimum, until the cancellation, of their rights.
If in the heart of the industrial twentieth century a manager like Vittorio Valletta received a salary 25 times higher than that of his own worker, today a CEO of a large transnational company earns a thousand, fifteen hundred times, even more with stock options. As if one of them were infected with the coronavirus, they will be assisted with the best life-saving medications in the Diamante department of San Raffaele while the Neapolitan pensioner is in the car, outside the Cardarelli emergency room, with the oxygen cylinder hanging from the window.
Here we measure in its entirety the falsehood of that theory called the trickle or the “trickle”, which has been the main argument of the neoliberal model when it continues to repeat, for years, that the concentration of wealth at the top continues to be positive because sooner or later it will “drain” downward, benefiting not only the “first” but also the “last.” In La Spezia it can be seen with the naked eye that that wealth remains dramatically at the top, coexisting with the worst deprivations at the bottom. I know very well that it will be objected that this is an extreme case, a unique event, so much so that it provoked the intervention of the law. And that the rest of the world is something else: the current social organization is so complex, labyrinthine, opaque – the circuits of production and distribution of wealth so dispersed in long and very long supply chains – that it allows us to continue a game of interpretations and rebuttals. But personally I am convinced that the rule is hidden in the exception. And that the luxury economy inevitably contains within itself the seeds of the society of misery.
