Youth & Work

The periphery is a multitude of solitudes. You see her walking alone, most of the time accompanied by the dog and you no longer understand if it is the animal that takes the person out, only to breathe a bit of nanopowders and put her lungs back in balance with the rest of the city. . A mass that does not meet, at most is in a compassionate row. The collective movement of circles, debates, parties, trade unions, "fiduciaries of scale" and courtyards, has increasingly fragmented to become a single unit: a monasticism not chosen, but made up of distance rather than research.

Men and women who were part of a stream that moved along a single track: house-factory, factory-house. Consisting of repeated movements, which over time had become instinctive and yet this being side by side for hours, years, in the same workplace, in the same neighborhood, in the same problems had led to collective responses to collective problems: it was politics that at times discovered itself as a community: a backward, ignorant, naively confident, but not indifferent mass. Each story was an unpublished novel of characters in search of an author. Now the periphery is a whole that does not constitute a unity: a sui generis concept.

The problems were followed by rigorously individual solutions because each problem is perceived only as one's own: it is yours alone (even if it is the same as a thousand others). Here Margaret Thatcher's prophecy "Society does not exist. There are only individuals." A retreat on oneself that has become regression, a search for surrogates that could compensate for lost relationships and dreams. Then came the aging, the empty courtyards, the Covid that like a perfect storm have weakened even those faint flashes, transforming loneliness into poverty, as Maurizio Maggiani writes "the poor are those who do not know how to give themselves a destiny".

Also when I walk the streets of Mirafiori I am full of "money", the air is clean, I have jobs to distribute, people get information in the newspapers and I am an active part of a vital chain that shakes hands that they work and, working, they transform the periphery into vital circularity. They are not dreams, but a political program.

NP Febbraio 2020

Fabrizio Floris