Five Star Movement

= The "five stars" are a reference to five key issues: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, connectivity, and environmentalism.

URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement

This party also advocates participatory democracy, direct democracy, E-democracy, free access to the Internet, the principles of "zero-cost politics", nonviolence and degrowth.

Characteristics

From the Wikipedia:

"In the Five Star Movement converge themes derived from ecological and anti-particracy promoting the direct participation of citizens in the management of public affairs through forms of digital democracy. The Movement wants to be a "democratic encounter outside of party and associative ties and without the mediation of directive or representational organisms, recognising to all users of the Internet the role of government and direction that is normally attributed to a few".[72] From the economic point of view, embraces the theories of degrowth supporting the creation of "green jobs" and the rejection of polluting and expensive "great works", including incinerators, aiming to an overall better quality of life and greater social justice.[73] The Five Star Movement proposes the adoption of large-scale energy projects, elimination of waste, sustainable mobility, protection of territory from overbuilding, teleworking.

Politics returned to citizens as a "temporary service"

The movement bases his principle on the direct democracy like an evolution of representative democracy. The idea is that citizens will not delegate anymore their power to parties, considered old and corrupted intermediates between the State and themselves, that serve the interests of lobby groups and financial powers. They will success only if creating a collective intelligence and the Net will make it possible.

The Five Star Movement, in order to go in this direction, choose the Italian and European parliamentary candidates through online voting of Beppe Grillo Blog's registered members. Through an application called "Operating System" reachable on the web,[77] the registered users of M5S discuss, approve or reject legislative proposals (submitted then in the Parliament by M5S group). For example, the M5S electoral law was shaped through a series of online voting,[78] like the name of the M5S candidate President of Republic.[79] The choice to support the abolition of a law against immigrants was taken online by members of the M5S even if the final decision was against the opinion of Grillo and Casaleggio.

One of the most important rules of M5S is that politics is a temporary service: no one who has already been elected for more than two times at any level (local or national) can be a candidate again and has to come back to his original job.

Auto reduction of salary and rejection of public electoral refund

Another feature of the movement is the so-called "zero-cost politics",[16] according to which politics must not become a way to make money and career. For this reason, the movement was founded in the symbolic date of 4 October, the day of St. Francis.

Belonging to the Movement requires the autoreduction of salaries of the citizens elected: in some regions such as Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna and Sicily[84] the elect allocate part of the salary for purposes relating to the 'political activity of the group (exposed cover, legal fees, appeals to the Administrative Court and the Council of State, etc.)

Likewise the movement intends to reject campaign contributions, Grillo described the reasons for this choice 27 March 2010. In the regional elections in Sicily in 2012, as well as rejecting more than "1 Million Euro in electoral reimbursements", the sicilian MoVement has also decided to allocate the money saved by the reduction of the salaries of their elected in a fund for micro-credit to help small and medium enterprises, from Grillo always been considered the "backbone of Italy".

In the general elections of 2013 the Five Star Movement claims to have rejected over €42 million of public electoral refund[86] (instead of all the other parties), supporting its expenses for the campaign with crowdfunding through the blog. The remaining unspent of the collection, approximately €400,000, was donated to the earthquake victims of Mirandola, for the construction of a gym school.[89] However, many critics have reported that the party did not have the right to have refunds at all, because of lacking of a democratic statute required by law.

In this context, the principle of zero-cost politics is formalized also with the political initiative of the so-called "Restitution Day" by parliamentarians belonging to the Movement: the first time about €1.5 million of their wages returned and paid into the Amortization Fund of Italian Public Debt,[95] and then €2.5 million returned every 5 month to a fund for micro-credit, set up on purpose at the Ministry of Treasury, in order to help small and medium enterprises, following the M5S Sicilian experience a year earlier.

"Clean lists"

elimination of multi-tasks and compliance mandates

Among the greater political battles of M5S is the ethical commitment, internally consistent since[98] to a greater simplicity and transparency as possible to counter the use to hold two or more positions[99][100][101] which show the intricate conflicts of interest between any organization, subsequently strengthened by public register[102] to avoid centralizations such as nepotistic and clientelistic. In order to be Five Star Movement candidates, citizens must be without any criminal records (for this reason it requires "clean lists").

Civil rights

The leader of the movement, Grillo, on 15 July 2012, claims to be approving of same sex marriage.[107] The declaration of Grillo was inspired by the discussion of the National Assembly on the subject.[108] In offering his support to gay marriage, Grillo broke a silence on the subject, which some might denote opposition, clarifying the full support of the movement to recognize such marriages." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement)

Discussion

The Movement legitimizes capitalism

CortoCircuito:

"The Five Star Movement is undoubtedly one of the novelties in the Italian election campaign. Born in 2009 under the wing of the comedian Giuseppe Grillo and the web marketing expert Gianroberto Casaleggio, founder of the company Casaleggio Associati, this new organization made up of local networks connected via the web (and beyond), has been transformed in a short time, by organizing itself. This happened thanks to four preliminary steps: the creation of Grillo’s blog (2005); the development of MeetUps, local groups of activists (2005/2008); the initiatives carried out in different years around the peninsula, on issues such as environment, energy, technology, mobility, development; and the candidacy to regional and local elections, with the recent decision to reach the Parliament. The cleverness of Grillo, or rather, of Casaleggio Associati, lies in identifying some particular trends of this Italy in crisis, in order to get into the political scene: the void left by the disappearance of “mass parties” (the case of PCI / PD is anomalous, as they still exist but scaled down); the growing uneasiness due to the social inequality increased with the crisis; a large number of committees and groups working locally on issues of potential social conflict, even if fragmented; the lack of a new and organized political reference and, finally, the intolerance of the so-called Italian “middle class”: service industry workers, small entrepreneurs, freelancers, students betrayed by the cynicism of the labor market, retirees.

Grillo’s movement stands as the only one able of reactivating people, or rather the “citizens”, through the capillary and immediate information of everything that happens and its viral, well-studied campaigns, with simple messages like “abolition of the caste” or “public water”, mobilized for a “direct democracy”, without mediation. If the idea of reactivating enthusiasm and protagonism is a good intention, the problem comes with a closer look at the contradictions of 5 Star Movement, starting with their megaphone. In fact, the role of personalities like Grillo leads, intentionally or not, to direct the attention towards projects of compatibility within the system, which is presented as reformable, and everything is traced back to one big problem: that of development and compatible consumption, the same at the basis of many committees of the United Nations, generically called “decrease”. Not to mention the schizophrenia in terms of economy: they criticize the GDP and its growth, but they speak of “monetary sovereignty” and of restarting the economy, as if the growth did not depend on profits, labor exploitation and interests of bankers and industrialists. Moreover, it should be emphasized how, both the comedian / political leader and the 5 star movement, claim a strong state presence in the economy, an issue that clashes with the real protagonism of those who are now invited to take action to change the status quo. This is precisely because the formula used, “the state is us”, does not embody a critical view of society compared to the division into classes (more nuanced than in the past, but certainly present in the tangibility of daily social dramas), and to the historical role of the state as guarantor of the status quo, as well as political economy and its laws (above all, the pursuit of profit). Talking about the corrupt political class is not enough, since this means not wanting to make it clear that the state has a key role to maintain order. The minimal rights acquired after the war, for example, came after years of struggle, then, and only then, followed by an adaptation of the laws. This is because the law takes note of the force of the thrusts of society, otherwise it is used politically against society itself, as happened in the past and as it does today in times of crisis and disintegration, with the recent antisocial measures by European governments.

Another apparently controversial issue is that the 5 Star Movement appears as a “movement of ideas and not of ideologies, because left and right are concepts of the past”. Even here we are dealing with a mystification of reality: it is true that “right” and “left” does not mean anything in itself. However, at least one of these ideologies has been lasted, a strong, deep-rooted and apparently intangible one: that of the “free market” (of goods and bodies), of “development” (of what is not needed), and of “growth” (of exploitation); in short, of capitalism as the best possible social relationship. Who does not realize it is dazzled by it, and we understand why, even in the face of evidence, he is led to legitimate the present state of things, in the hope of reforming a system that is harmful to the root. However, in every epoch the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class." (http://www.inventati.org/cortocircuito/2014/05/29/grillo-and-the-five-star-movement-nothing-is-created-nothing-is-lost/)