Purple Movement
Discussion
Emanuele Toscano on the internet-organized movement against Berlusconi in Italy:
"The “purples” are the expression of this sense that it is the right of individuals, even if not sanctioned by the Constitution, to resist the State, not to subvert the established order, but to protect it, and to protect democracy.
A movement such as this, expressing a wide dissatisfaction that spreads across the country from south to north, cannot be described as representing an “antipolitical” sentiment (an accusation often visited on it by shallow critics, including those politicians who have found themselves its target). The purple movement, just like any free form of aggregation and expression – gathers together the excellence and virtuosity of individual intelligences, just as Pierre Levy emphasises, but it can also attract the lower forms of fanaticism. Up till now, the “purple” movement has succeeded in keeping its different souls together, as a unique, pooled energy - not just one of many political subjects in a crowded arena – forging individual and collective experiences in the common battle in defence of the Constitution, for free expression and information and for individual citizenship rights.
This emerging of the purple movement definitely confirms and highlights the crisis of representation that’s been hitting political parties and trade unions over the last decades. These public entities look, by contrast, completely unable to respond to the challenges caused by the complex political, social and cultural changes brought about by the third millennium. The crisis of representation manifests itself in the way this movement was born: through the Internet. The net is – with all the limitations connected to this definition – an open, fluid, space, where the rules are self-determined by the community willing to represent itself (i.e. the global community feeding Wikipedia, the free and opened encyclopedia). The net is a natural incubator of dissent, connected to the scarcity of trust in the political class which is, with just a few exceptions, more and more distant from its electorate - a political class which is disconnected from civil society and perceived as administering rules and norms that it doesn’t itself respect.
This latent mistrust, often translated into opened hostility, is protected by the movement from the risk of being instrumentalized by traditional political forces, which in the past did contaminate them. It has challenged them to criticize their own actions, denouncing their inadequacy.
Instead, the purple movement has been working on the creation of a common front, fuelled by opposition to the “Berlusconian” cultural model and the aim to stop the authoritarian trend practised by the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; an opposition that could be the starting point for fundamental renewal of a country that has been weakened by the economic crisis, brutalized by the dominant TV culture and mortified by reactionary legislation.
The strength of the purple movement lies in its capacity to use the web as a tool to both spread information and as a source of socialized forms of communication. These forms of communication allow people to express individual dissent through what Manuel Castells calls “mass-self communication”: a type of communication that is both autonomous and interconnected in its production of content, in its way of spreading and receiving communication, inside a “many to many” frame.
This allows an expression of dissent and opposition to dominion that can be autonomous from that of constraining collectivities – political parties, trade unions, associations – once the only protagonists of political, social and individual dissent. This kind of action in which the social actors lost their individual drive in the collective goal has now been replaced by one where the construction of dissent derives first and foremost from an individual drive and its need to express itself. This individual drive is connected to hundreds of thousands of people through the web.
Certainly, the purple movement is an experiment in the delicate phase of its development; and indeed these new forms of expression are already suffering to a degree from what we might call a 'strained horizontality', which prevents the emergence of leadership and a construction of consent as responsive as it can be on the web." (http://www.opendemocracy.net/emanuele-toscano/i%25E2%2580%2599m-my-personal-revolution-purple-movement-in-italy)