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Rating: The book and the video
This is a long monologue in which Roberto Saviano (b. 1979), writer and journalist, examines the Camorra phenomenon already highlighted in the book "Gomorra," from which a successful film by Garrone was derived.
Saviano investigates, narrates, and captivates with a personal style that mixes literary wisdom and theatricality. It reflects on endemic problems of our country without forgetting the power of words and art, the individual's ability, as a creator and demiurge, to change the world, provided one is willing to take responsibility for a journey of change and struggle that, in certain cases, can come at a very high cost.
Saviano is paying dearly for his journey. If everyone paid even a minimal percentage of the effort to say no to certain systems, perhaps the burden weighing down on him would avoid making him a new Sisyphus.
In defense of Roberto Saviano
by De Lorenzo
Roberto Saviano is undoubtedly one of the most important figures of the past decade and one of the most remarkable figures in Italian denunciation literature since Sciascia and, in certain aspects, Pasolini, to whose image I feel he is akin: capable of analysis, brave in denouncing the wrongs and problems of a part of Italy, original in writing style that sets him in a different dimension from that of even the greatest journalists who have dealt with the events of organized crime in Italy, such as Mauro de Mauro, Giuseppe Fava, Joe Marrazzo to name a few of the most famous. This is not the place, of course, to critically retrace Saviano's career, author of the renowned "Gomorra" ('06) which, published foresightfully by Mondadori, provided an unprecedented comprehensive view of the Camorra phenomenon in literature, surpassing the reductive and partial dimension of the phenomenon, which emerges in much Italian journalism that has intervened on the matter over various decades, born from an almost romantic idea of a Naples devastated by the criminal phenomenon and almost a victim, despite everything, of it.
The heart of the problem - and of the darkness, one might say - according to Saviano is in the superstructural nature of the Camorra phenomenon, understood as a phenomenon of criminal (or extralegal) economy that exploits, in an anti-competitive manner and through a true form of social dumping, the main production factors provided by Campania. Production factors that are given firstly by the territory, which after being the subject of the building sack well narrated by Rosi in "Hands Over the City" ('63) has become a place to funnel waste and toxic substances from across Europe at absolutely competitive prices compared to other lawful forms of disposal; and secondly from the workforce, made up of generations of women and youngsters who, lacking other placements and faced with unspeakable material and intellectual poverty, offer their work, for costs next to zero or almost, serving legitimate, quasi-legitimate, or decidedly illegitimate activities, reinvesting the proceeds from various criminal activities in the territory and beyond.
Saviano's vision, barring some digressions that enrich the anecdotal nature of his writings, is well summed up in the principles that, in his opinion, underpin that criminality, namely, in his own words, "business, business, business."
The success achieved by "Gomorra" has made Saviano a personality and has even brought him to the center of the political debate, where part of the left has even seen him as a possible leader in an anti-Berlusconi key, misconstruing his message and his values, which do not easily lend themselves to being politically categorized. In these terms, it is perhaps not wrong to observe how a left lacking credible compasses has exploited the Campanian writer, trying to belatedly jump on his bandwagon and exploiting for their own benefit the credit that Saviano has with a growing part of the electorate. It is no surprise that Saviano has always avoided direct involvements and exploitations and has never considered himself a man of just one political side, being too intelligent to not grasp the conceptual traps and logical contradictions that would hide behind his direct involvement with leftist politics.
Regardless of the fact that Saviano can publish in Italy thanks to the Mondadori-Einaudi group, namely a moderate publisher that is a child of the Lombardo-Piedmontese Enlightenment liberalism, with direct ascendance to Verri and Beccarla, rather than Giulio Einaudi, it is easy to observe how Saviano, even using a Marxist and economicist framework of interpreting reality, observes, on the normative plane and of what ought to be, how a change in consciences can occur only through the redemption of the individual as a responsible subject and the cult of legality, namely through values that are neither those of the left nor those of the most established southern regionalism, but necessarily belong to the moderate class, without political banners.
It is certainly not the southern regionalist left, governing many regions of the southern center and Campania itself over the last twenty years, singing the praises of the individual as such, being this thought more attentive to emphasizing a phantomatic vision of social living and society as the very end of the individual, and to preaching in the change of society and the so-called civil-collective consciousness the prerequisite for radical change of customs, even with respect to organized crime. It is quite clearly a prescription that might better suit the Siberian steppes than a south too astute and too harassed, over the course of history, by predatory forms of state to embrace, sincerely, any further form of statization of society, unsurprising that such prescriptions are preferred to the more flexible, charismatic, and yet efficient model of organized crime.
Proof of these assumptions is the fact that the left, governing these regions, has never managed to determine any cultural and anthropological change in the electorate, becoming solely (and perhaps knowingly) a distributor of prebends, subsidies, jobs, in addition to the submerged criminal economic system, but never in replacement of it. After all, a replacement of the illegal economy would only be possible through a legal and liberal economy, through forms of widespread entrepreneurship and competition, far from the very ideology of the left.
The left cannot certainly be a credible advocate for legality which has never constituted a core value for that political side, aimed at realizing revolutions by any means necessary, in opposition to legality itself as an expression of the parliamentarianism of the bourgeois state. If communism, or its derivatives, must be realized even "beyond" respect for the law, or at the cost of not respecting it as an obstacle to the advent of a new social order, it is not surprising how armed spontaneity, the Red Brigades, Lotta Continua, no global movements, and social centers have thrived on the left, progressively attracted toward an "ethical relativism" that renders, for example, many contemporary leftist youths accomplices of the same Camorra, as habitual consumers and dealers of forbidden substances imported to Italy through the same channels of organized crime, or opponents for the sake of opposition to law enforcement or any form of social control practiced, in the interest of the community and national security, by the State.
It seems feasible to demonstrate how a serious fight against the Camorra phenomenon and more generally against any form of crime cannot be practiced by the left, in support of Saviano himself, unless through a profound reconsideration of its values and its conception of State and Social Order, at the center of which the individual must be placed as a Single and as a Responsible Subject of every one of his choices, and all the tools must be prepared to sanction anyone who violates the Law as a guarantor of the Freedom of the Individual and as an attributive tool of certain responsibilities, in all parts of the country.
Simplifying for the Average User of Debaser, it is not credible to support Saviano without putting away symbols like the pro-Palestinian kefiah, joints and other synthetic drugs, iron bars, "dissentism" as a form of dissent for its own sake and mental diarrhea: essentially without putting away a vision of the State as an antagonist of hypothetical common values and an obstacle to a collective catharsis that belongs more to a parareligious dimension than to a rational and modern dimension. Only through this maturation journey will it be possible to be credible as real champions of a different and legal country, and only through a form of direct commitment to reform oneself as individuals - abandoning movimentalism and the intellectual laziness of those who are slaves to their own ideological prejudices and their own screens dictated by a misplaced conception of History - could the Left be credible in a fight against the Camorra, claiming with good reason the cultural groundwork of Saviano.
It is unfortunate that this debate, on the left, has not yet emerged, and it is no surprise that part of the left has recently started to question the importance of Saviano as a writer and as a symbol of a different and modern idea of Italy. Consider the case of some writers who have criticized the aura of heroism grown around Saviano, subtly accusing him of depicting himself and reality according to categories similar to those of the right; or esteemed musicians who have likewise observed how the work of the Neapolitan writer has highlighted the worst side of Campania. One should not dwell on this, as everyone's thesis must be respected and the free right to criticize anyone in democracy, including Saviano, should be recognized.
Rather, it is important to observe how an effective defense of Saviano himself has come from an author who more than anyone else has experienced on his skin the turmoil of the left, such as Adriano Sofri: transitioned from the movimentalism of the '70s to a more serene meditation on the limits of the left also in light of his experience in Craxism of the '80s. In "Repubblica" Sofri effectively criticizes Saviano's critics, observing how his isolation can gradually lead to his abandonment to fate, or to a death repeatedly threatened by Camorra leaders. Sofri effectively observes that the critics, with their action of isolation "would find themselves with a true hero on their hands - dead, because only dead heroes are true: the night before they are targets for the critical critics, like Giovanni Falcone [but also Commissioner Calabresi, Note by PDL] on a second-row seat at Maurizio Costanzo's show - nothing but a paper hero", consequently reprimanding this activity of criticism in the press [as they should have reprimanded him at the time of the Manifesto against Calabresi published in L'Espresso on June 13, 1971, Note by PDL].
Indeed, if the left were made of old Sofris and not young Sofris, things could be different for everyone, including Roberto Saviano.
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