In the alternative school for bright, Turin (www.scuolaperalternativa.it), Paul Ginsborg presented February 18, this book Revelli, questioning along with the audience the author.
Today it seems lost the distinction between these two positions, describing the main policy in the modern world, since 1789: equality or hierarchy, autonomy and heteronomy, rationality or irrationality, horizontal or vertical. Today the so-called radical left does not see more of these alternatives, and the institutional left does not seem to want to seize them. You lose the traditional categories of left space and time.
space of Parliament, winning the nineteenth century, it is emptied: Paolo Cacciari calls "humiliating" his recent parliamentary experience, a pre-established mechanism where the individual has only to press the button to vote. The space of the parties has become perverse: they withdraw from society, and that withdraws from the parties. Even the four secretaries in the Rainbow Left alone decide the nominations.
The linear time and progressive in the design of the Left is in full compliance at the time acceleratissimo, compressed, and filled thus become unavailable for the policy: no time! Thus, lack of political actors and solutions. In the Introduction to the book, Revelli indicates some "meta-values" of the political or constitutional principles, to reconstruct the left, and indeed the same policy that has been lacking.
But, on the left - Ginsborg concludes - is a serious problem behaviors: personal quarrels, and ambitions of individualism, narcissism galore, there is no culture of unity. Many attempts fail because of these evils. Gandhi has much to teach to the left. The churches should do more on this moral level.
Revelli avverte che il suo libro è impegnativo: è un compendio di 25 anni di lavoro, in buona parte entro il seminario “Etica e politica” che Bobbio guidava nel Centro Gobetti. Registra un fallimento, lo smarrimento dell’identità di sinistra. Questa polarità destra-sinistra dà ordine alla politica, come il denaro, strumento di scambio, lo dà all’economia. Siamo caduti in un contesto non più politico. Quelle due identità sono relative, spaziali, non sostantive: dipende da chi si colloca a destra o a sinistra dell’altro.
Il libretto di Bobbio, Destra e sinistra (più edizioni dal 1994, 300.000 copie, tradotto in 19 lingue), contro la delegittimazione di questa distinzione, poneva come criterio il principio di uguaglianza: chi sottolinea ciò che accomuna è di sinistra, chi evidenzia ciò che differenzia è di destra. Dopo la metà degli anni ’90 cambia il dibattito: anche da sinistra si nega quella distinzione.
Soprattutto cade in dubbio il tempo direzionale, che era costitutivo della sinistra, cioè la storia come movimento. Alla fine del 900 il tempo ritorna ciclico, ripetitivo.
Anche la crisi dello spazio liquefa la differenza destra-sinistra. Lo spazio di questa differenza era lo stato-nazione, nei suoi confini territoriali sure, it was public space, produced by public transport, where public authorities overrule the powers private space where all points are under the same law. This space was "represented" in the parliamentary area, which is precisely defined left and right, stability and movement.
The new space of globalization is produced by private means, which are mass media, transmission flows (finance, drugs, information, goods, ...). This space has no boundaries, everything in it overlaps; communications at the speed of light bring to every point in space the different sources of power.
This is the crisis of politics, not only of left-right distinction. It was the left, in the French Revolution, which created the political space: the first was all right, hierarchy. Today the left mimics this right, the most of the project, the scenery more than the content. It's the end of the policy, falls the modern idea of \u200b\u200bpolitics.
Revelli, however, indicates four meta-values \u200b\u200bto reconstruct the left and the political
1) the choice between violence and nonviolence; establish the taboo of violence, which today means the end of humanity;
2) the principle of inclusion against exclusion principle (Carl Scmitt that underlying the policy in the category of friend-enemy), that the reciprocity , the point of view (the Man Planetarium Ernesto Balducci);
3) the principle of prudence, or liability (Hans Jonas, "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on earth "), against the principle of immediate effectiveness, decisions, productivity
4) the sense of limit against the desire for power.
These values \u200b\u200bare left, but should be shared, in order to counteract the political differences, no overall impairment.
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The two speakers then responded to various interventions.
Ginsborg - What is left of personal behavior in the important and difficult terrain. The left door is self-defeating when partisan interests, if not cheap. Stuart Mill asked the Citizens: humility, skepticism, imagination. It should, yes, generosity, but it is not only moral issue: we need a theory of political behavior on the left.
left in violence was not only conflict between fair and unfair means the end, but also free and plentiful, and justified, in the old Left: think of the forced collectivization of the land, the Stalinist purges. This was the old Left in 900.
Revelli - In response to an intervention, citing Bobbio (note 1), suggests a difference between right and left not only on the position in the political area, but anthropological, says: I think so, the distinction is deep in the history of our species in terms of symbolic value and we have different instinctive reactions to the scandal of inequality in the face, in front of the Shipwrecks of immigrants in the Strait of Otranto, but the problem is not this, is whether those who suffer the scandal comes together to change things, if you do a political entity or not.
Today the problem is not that a majority of the left piece fits in with the right, but is left empty, the lack of players left in the world.
Who proposes the addition of other alternatives (competition-cooperation; speed-slow) to those meta-values, Revelli responds slowly bringing back the sense of limits and prudence, reciprocity and cooperation. The art of politics is the coexistence of the different, is not putting together similar and dissimilar out, so the nation-state must give way to Man Planetarium.
to my observation that violence is contrary to the left, when it pursues good ends with unfair means, and to the right consistency, when kept inequalities (structural violence) through violent means, Revelli says that violence unfortunately left was heard and theorized as a factor of change, acceleration of time, is rationality as a feature of the left, which should lead to overcome violence.
Faced with the current crisis of political resistance Revelli proposes a cultural reason together, in public places, cultivate the 'sweet passions "more interest.
Peyretti Henry, February 19, 2008
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Note 1 - "The difference [between left and right] is among those who experience a sense of suffering to tackle inequalities and those who do not view the evidence and, essentially, on the contrary, they produce well-being and therefore should be supported. In this contrast, see the core of what is left and what is right " (Norberto Bobbio, in N. Bobbio, G. Bosetti, G. Vattimo, The Left in the era of karaoke, I Reset books, Donzelli, 1994, p. 51). In the same book, p. 47, Bobbio concludes his speech thus: "I'm tempted to say that the distinction goes beyond mere politics, is an almost anthropological."
Mexico City, San Francisco, Naples, Beirut, Calais: The five stages of the new edition of denied rights, the social film festival for the second consecutive year arrives in Sao Paulo to promote a culture of differences . 
