Recognizing that few of our English-language readers will make their way through a densely written book in Italian, Insurgent Notes is nonetheless publishing this brief announcement of our comrade Raffaele Sciortino’s book on the past decade and on the worldwide rise of neo-populisms.
We hope that some of our multilingual readers here and above all in Europe will take notice.
Raffaele Sciortino, I dieci anni che sconvolsero il mondo. Crisi globale a geopolitica dei neopopulismi. Asterios Editions, Trieste, 2019. (Ten Years That Shook the World: Global Crisis and the Geopolitics of Neo-Populisms.)
The book, recently published in Italy by a researcher and militant, takes up the phenomenon of the “neo-populisms” emerging in the west within the complex framework of capitalist crisis, looking beyond the reductionist counter-position of their critics and apologists.
The author looks at the neo-populisms historically, through the complex dialectic between “1968” and the assembly plants of globalization. He focuses on the non-contingent transformation of the class struggle of the classical workers’ movement in the twentieth century into the contemporary movements of fully dispossessed hyper-proletarians in relation to a social reproduction completely dominated by the mechanisms of fictitious capital.
If the forms of neo-populist mobilization, however spurious and ambivalent, do not, for now, go beyond demands for “citizenship” and/or sovereignty, always at the risk of nationalism, they nonetheless present nodes and questions which are inescapable for anyone involved in the struggle for a human community freed from the realm of profit.