Risk and passion

Observing the electoral campaign of Italian cities, the gaps surrounding the candidates (a few and selected people) show in a plastic way the difference with the crowds of past years. One wonders what is the place of politics and, conversely, of the economy in society. The crowds are there, but they are no longer in the presence of politics because it seems that voters perceive that the decision-making processes that affect their lives take place elsewhere. In Mirafiori, for example, party candidates in public meetings faced a few dozen people, but they would have been hundreds or thousands if there had been an entrepreneur willing to offer jobs.

It is the effect of the separation of the economy from society, a fracture that over the years has led not only the economy and finance to live on its own "light", but to incorporate society itself: shaping its ideals, language , he finished. In fact, the supreme ends of man - wrote Polanyi - are economic well-being and growth, not peace and freedom.
"A market-oriented society, like ours, must find it difficult to correctly assess where the importance of the economic sphere ends.
Indeed, as soon as man's daily activities are organized through markets of various types, based on the motive of profit, determined by competitive attitudes and governed by a scale of utilitarian values, society becomes an organism that is, in all respects essential, subjected to earning purposes. Having thus absolutized the motive of economic gain in practice, man loses the ability to go back to relativizing it mentally.
His imagination is constrained by constraints that limit its capacity ».

If we analyze the economy from a historical perspective, we note that it is not the only expression of shared values. Otherwise there is the risk of replacing belief with credit, secular religion with belief in bank accounts, happiness with technological development. Capitalism won, but for centuries the economy was inserted within social logics and values ​​(it was embedded), therefore, a political action capable of passion and risk is all the more necessary: ​​"life, Polanyi observed, requires faith and confidence; history is struggle and defeat, victory and redemption ».
Because those on the outskirts cannot always lose, not always, not forever.

Fabrizio Floris
NP November 2021