Conference paper
The Crisis of Political Representation and New Modes of Participation
Gianni Statera
Abstract
The text is dealing with the problem of political representation and modes of participation in Italy towards the end of 1960’s and mid-1970’s.
The author’s hypothesis is that the movement of non-institutional participation from the autumn of 1969 functioned as a relative stabilizer of the Italian society, because it represented the channel of para-legal mobilization of considerable portions of lower social classes and those belonging to declassed bourgeois, while that movement never had any destructive terrorist manifestations. In that phase of the movement the principal role was taken by groups of the New Left. In the transitory period towards 1970’s sindicates, which had been transformed and partially debureaucratized, took over the role of channeling dissenting tendencies of the working class and wide marginal strata of the society.
During the crisis of 1973 and along with strengthening of leftist parties (the Communist Party of Italy), tendencies aiming at non-institutional participation started vanishing. Owing to its incapability of entering the government, what made it hold the image of the protector of order and legality, while it as simultaneously the representative of demands of participation from the bottom, the alternative of action for the CPI and the New Left was becoming more and more circumscribed, coupled with the parallel enlargement of the field of »armed parties« and various modes of terrorist violence. Marginal social groups started envisaging their position as the permanent state to which the only possible reaction could be »the ubiquity of violence«.
In his analysis the author pays particular attention to the »index of marginalization«, and the degree of »marginalization« is measured in relation to: (a) instability of the social role, (b) deficient or inappropriate internalization of cultural norms of the society or of subcultural norms of a class, stratum or social role, (c) the distance from the center of the society, i.e. from the central social roles and positions of hierarchical stability, (d) perturbations affecting social roles, or those which affected them, (e) consciousness of the non-existence of any institutional protection (syndicates) and impossibility of self-articulation by means of political party, »indicate, or formalized pressure group, (f) the awareness of partial or total irrelevance of the role, or even complete deprivation of any social role which is socially recognized, protected and channelized.
Based on those indicators, a description of the marginal strata within the social structure is given, and an analysis of the status of the youth, of the disintegration of the New Left, of terrorism and all-reaching guerrilla. In his conclusion the author Ss giving a hypothesis on a strategy »against social diversion« and he is favouring concretization of the idea of self-management in all the spheres of social praxis.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
156034
URI
Publication date:
31.12.1979.
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