The Campaigner

72
reproduction without however socially participating in The much-touted boom of the sixties, representing the
the actual, larger productive processes of social repro- last lap in U.S. imperialism's race for productive
duction; alienated thus from the whole, her real phy- investment, was predictably short-lived, as the 1963-64
siological reproductive capacity is seen as determined by recession made clear. For the working class, there was no
extra-human forces which have no profound coherence economic miracle. The standard of living remained
with those real "outside" processes actually determining miserably low. The binge of speculative building is most
the possibility for her to fulfill even this physiological eloquently depicted in Genoese and Neopolitan apartreproductive
function. Her view of the world is magical, ment houses which are wont from time to time to literally
ahistorical, impotent, fall down. Such edifices came nowhere near relieving the
It is no coincidence that the'nucleus of magical and pressures of homeless working class and lumpen layers,
religious beliefs should revolve around the central idea of whocontinue to smoulder in tuguri and barrache in the
fertility and conception, to then branch out into the bidonvilles outside every metropolis. The massive
areas of social (family) relations. In even present-day expansion of highways throughout the peninsula during
magical practice in southern Italy a plethora of beliefs the boom was accompanied by decaying, dwindling
exist to answer the metaphysical question "why?" con- public transportation.
cerning normal and abnormal physiological processes And yet, the postwar boom as a whole is conceived as
having to do with gestation and birth, the fruits of "hard work" deemed typical of the northern
The threat to the child already manifests itself during labor force (itself made up largely of southern immipregnancy
and the fate of the child is closely intertwined grants) as opposed to the proverbial laziness of the
with the condition and behavior of the mother during the unemployed southerners! Ironically, what prevents the
months before the child is born. For example, the mother individual from seeing the whole processes determining
must born with not burn coarsepear skin. wood The in mother fire must or remember her child will not be to his special misery is his own exasperated sense of identi-
fold her hands during church services or her child will fication with that particular brand of misery, -- that is,
choke on the umbilical cord during delivery:..if the chauvinism.
mother drinks out of the same vessel that is used to draw
Chauvinism
water from the well, she risks the danger of her Child
being born with an abnormally large mouth, etc.'etc.(18)
The individual's response to a life of material misery
The impotence inherent in such nonsense is the indicharacteristically
involves the static, mechanistic worldvidual's
inability to consider himself a continuing source view typified by the peasant who sees his wretchedness in
of self-developing capacities to change the condition of
terms of "the way things are" and resigns himself to a
his actual social existence. No concept of such self-devellife
of bestialized labor and social relations. The only
opment is possible in an area like the Mediterranean
solace offered the "idiocy of rural life" is the apparently
countries, and especially Italy, where there has been no consoling, but actually self-destructive illusion of
reflection of real development on the material conditions autonomy or self-sufficiency, a crude rationalization for
of life for centuries, the painful solitude of backwardness and isolation.
Regionalism, provincialism and nationalism are but
Capitalist Development of Italy the extension, in typically mechanistic, brick-building
Italy's industrial development has proceeded consis- fashion, of the peasant conception of self as a discrete
tently as a process of primitive accumulation against the fixed object in relation to the larger entities of town,
south. The nineteenth-century unifications precess left region or nation. In Italy such historically reinforced
the latifundist structure intact in the south, thus rationa- regional chauvinism exalts as virtues the particular
lizing national accumulation against the agricultural inhabitants of the same, in juxtaposition to all others;
sector as prerequisite to greater industrialization in the such is the case of the glorification of local dialects
north. In the fascist period the rape of the south conti- (whose continued widespread flourishing actually testinued
while vast strata of unemployed were channelled ties to backward educational systems and lack of
into the burgeoning state bureacracy (military, para- communications), or of, for example, Neopolitan
military, and other fascist organizations of all types). In cooking specialities like spaghetti (pasta being the only
the second postwar period, the U.S.-engineered recon- food Neopolitans can afford to eat).
struction of Italy respectfully preserved the traditionally This too is the rationalization mechanism underlying
backward southern sector and squeezed the peasant the mass of commonplaces characterizing individuals
population dry before shipping it off as immigrant labor, according to their place of birth: "The Milanese work
packing it into bloated bureacracies or feeding the hard," "Southerners are lazy," "The Genoese are
lumpen hustler-mafia population, stingy," etc. are all expressions of the chauvinist ideology