The success of Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW in Germany should lead to a more in-depth and less cursory reflection on a political phenomenon that represents the real novelty of this year in Europe.
Dismissed as yet another expression of rising populism (populism, a catch-all word that allows you to define a phenomenon without knowing it), which is not even worth talking about (see the almost absolute silence of the mainstream newspapers, which are happy to define it as a "red-brown party"), the BSW has had the merit of bringing back to the forefront almost forgotten issues and themes.
Among these, the centrality of Gemeinsinn, ("community spirit") and Zusammenhalt ("cohesion") in defining a long-term political strategy, both of which can be linked to the concept of Gemeinschaft ("community").
In 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies published a book that was destined to have a great echo.
Tönnies says:
“The theory of society [Gesellschaft] concerns an artificial construction, an aggregate of human beings that only superficially resembles the community [Gemeinschaft], insofar as in it too individuals live peacefully alongside one another. However, while in the community human beings remain essentially united despite the factors that separate them, in society they remain essentially separated despite the factors that unite them.”
Exactly forty years later, in 1927, Hugo von Hofmannsthal uses the oxymoron “Konservative Revolution” for the first time. Born in Germany between the first and second half of the Great World War (1918 – 1939), it is characterized by the heterogeneity of thought of its exponents, but also by the common rejection of a linear conception of time – and therefore of the idea of progress – for the centrality of the concept of “Nation”, for the primacy attributed to art and the creations of the spirit and for the search for a “third way” between liberal capitalism and communism.
To provide the framework for this current of thought, despite its thousand streams, are essentially:
- The confusion generated by the end of a world, the Eurocentric one of the great Anglo-French colonial empires, in favor of a nascent “Anti-World”, so defined in the circle of Stefan George with reference to the United States of America, “which is imposing itself with the contamination of urban progress”.
- The disappointment for the disastrous results of the war in Germany (hyperinflation, French occupation of the Ruhr) and in Italy (the “mutilated Victory”).
- The triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Tsarist Russia and the outbreak of violent upheavals among the working masses of industrialized Western Europe (worker revolts).
These “emergencies” offered fertile ground for the birth and development of a varied but substantially homogeneous thought in showing itself hostile to the new order, marked by a merely materialistic and a-spiritual vision.
The concept of Gemeinschaft is therefore the one that “right-wing” thinkers (although not only them) end up converging, many of whom combine it using a racial prejudice.
Much more in keeping with the victorious liberal-democratic, as well as socialist, “progressive” thought was the conception of society understood as Gesellschaft, in the Tönnian sense, in which individuals “remain essentially separate despite the factors that unite them.”
In this sense, we should also understand the Verfassungspatriotismus (“constitutional patriotism”) of Jürgen Habermas who, in the aftermath of 1945, attempted to give a non-nationalist, non-racial answer, but one based on democracy, pluralism, and freedom of opinion to the same question: what is a society of men?
Starting from Margaret Thatcher's famous hyper-liberal denial of the Gesellschaft society ("there is no such thing as society. There are individuals, men and women, and families"), the current inadequacy of Verfassungspatriotismus to keep the Gesellschaften societies cohesive is clear. Proof of this is, among many others, the marked disaffection to vote throughout Europe, especially among the new generations. With the disappearance of the USSR and its satellites, the bipolar world, which lasted just over forty years (1945 – 1989), has melted away; there has been talk of the “end of History”, of the definitive victory of liberal democracy, of a perspective of “linear” progress, according to the neo-Enlightenment mainstream, which preaches absolute values (freedom, goodness, progress), which has defeated the Evil Empire, in Reagan’s definition of the Soviet Union and which exports democracy as if it were a commodity, without taking history and context into account, strong in the belief that it is still pursuing “the magnificent and progressive destinies” of Humanity.
A generation later, this perspective is starting to show obvious cracks:
- The monopolarity of the “Anti-World”, in which the EU is an atonal and voiceless satellite, must increasingly confront an evident loss of cultural and political hegemony, while still counting on an indisputable military hegemony;
- The public opinions of the Western world, increasingly old and disillusioned (see the already mentioned very low percentages of participation in elections, the cornerstone of liberal democracies), are dangerously atomized and transformed into "consumer communities", ready to suddenly move on the political chessboard (as witnessed by recent experiences in France, Germany and Italy, with the rise of the so-called "populist movements").
- The former "Third World" is almost entirely anti-Western, with elites often corrupt and no longer able to stem phenomena of religious and nationalistic fundamentalism (see for example the map with the countries that have joined the sanctions against Russia
In the face of this complex and dangerous picture, reflection "on the left" is proving to be a truly poor thing.
Let us limit ourselves to Italy. ISTAT certifies that the number of poor people from 2005 to 2021 has gone from 1.9 to 5.6 million people); we are also the only European country to have seen the real value of salaries decrease compared to 1990 (see instead the extreme case of Ireland, a tax haven on European soil, whose income has more than tripled in the same period). Inequalities have widened enormously and more than 20% of people are at risk of absolute poverty, where the total income of the wealthiest families is 5.3 times that of the poorest families and 1% of the population holds 13.6% of total wealth.
Shouldn't this be the ground on which to measure the political development capabilities of a left that wants to call itself such?
And instead. Confined on one side in the enclosure of woke thought, a sort of modern gnosis in which the individual repudiates community ties in the name of an anodyne universalism, of political correctness, substantially reduced to the defense of "abstract" individual rights, on the other in that of neoliberal policies disguised as progressivism (English New Labour, Schröder's version of the SPD), it has lost contact with the masses, now globalized, who are appearing on the threshold of power in ever greater numbers and ever more "demanding".
The re-emergence, in Sahra Wagenknecht's reflection, of the concept of Gemeinschaft should provide fruitful ideas for a political action that is tied to the traditions of the European left.
Here we could find the vision of a new social block, composed of the working classes, the most economically disadvantaged sectors of society, national capitalism, small and medium-sized businesses, often family-run, put at risk by a globalization without a government.
Gemeinschaft and not just Gesellschaft. A community that remains such, "despite the factors that separate the human beings that compose it".
However, the community requires a territory with precise borders and social, emotional, cultural ties between its members, so it is necessary to counteract any disintegrating thrust of the community fabric, in the absence of which there can be no authentic democracy (see the disaffection from politics).
The social identity founded on a territorial basis (the unbridgeable distance between the BSW and the AfD is measured precisely here: the Gemeinschaft is not defined on the basis of "race", religion, wealth or the concept of Blut und Boden but on a territorial basis: those who live permanently within the borders of the nation are part of the national community) has constituted the premise for the birth of modern democracy since the time of Cleisthenes' Athens at the end of the 6th century BC, who carried out a real revolution, "mixing" the Athenian population as Aristotle says and anchoring the tribes, first defined by blood, to the territory, to then arrive at the French Revolution and the modern democracies of the Welfare State.
Of course, the danger of a return to a world of small Homelands is evident, of the abandonment of an internationalist vision (“proletarians of the world unite!”), but if in politics it is necessary to reach a compromise, it is good that this is achieved on the ground of safeguarding the community fabric, without which democracy is a pure “paper game”, a fig leaf placed on unspeakable interests of "happy fews".
[1] [2] Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Leipzig, 1887. Interessante notare il sottotitolo, Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen, (“Considerazioni sul comunismo e il socialismo come forme empiriche di cultura”), poi sostituito nelle successive edizioni con il più neutro Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie, (“Concetti base di sociologia pura”). In esso il comunismo viene inteso come una forma culturale di “comunità”, mentre il socialismo come una forma culturale di “società”.
[2] [3] Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation, (“La scrittura come spazio spirituale della Nazione”), conferenza tenuta a Monaco il 10 gennaio.
[3] [4] Die Welt von Gestern nel titolo di una celebre opera di Stefan Zweig.
[4] [5] Cit. in Ernst NOLDE, La rivoluzione conservatrice, a cura di Luigi IANNONE, Soveria Mannelli 2009, p. VIII.
[5] [6] Il che ha poi provocato una sorta di rigetto del termine stesso, identificato tout-court come la culla teorica del nazionalsocialismo hitleriano.
[6] [7] „Der einzige Patriotismus, der uns dem Westen nicht entfremdet, ist ein Verfassungspatriotismus.“ Jürgen HABERMAS [8], Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Die apologetischen Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung, „Die Zeit [9]”, 29, 11. 07 1986, p. 40. [L’unico patriottismo che non ci estranea dall’Occidente è un patriottismo costituzionale”]
[7] [10] Francesco BORGONOVO, Un mondo malvagio da rifare. Dietro l’ideologia woke l’eterno ritorno della Gnosi, in “La Verità”, 23.09.24