Neoliberalism as a state-centric class project: The Italian case

Abstract

This essay sheds light on the neoliberal aspects of the Italian political-economic system exemplified in the relationship between capital, state and media. The main argument is that the specific marriage between neoliberalism and neocorporatism that characterizes Italy reveals a distinctive characteristic of neoliberalism: a class project relying heavily on the state. As Polanyi has suggested through the concept of ‘embeddedness’, capitalism has consistently developed through the double movement of preaching the independence of the free market from the state and requiring the state's protectionist interventions. After describing this state-centric framework to interpret neoliberalism, in the second part of the paper, I consider the political-economic history of Italy's recent decades, paying particular attention to the media system. I will examine the ‘communicative performance’ of neoliberalism in Berlusconi's discourses and concrete political decisions taken in the name of neoliberalism. The articulated relationship between media and politics reveals the continuous attempts by the advocates of neoliberalism to seize the state, not to reduce its intervention but in fact to manipulate the market.

Notes

1. One of the biggest issues that has affected the Italian state since its formation in 1861 has always been the gap between the industrialized North and the poorly developed agricultural economic regime of the South. The difference has been not only economic but cultural and social.

2. The Cassa del Mezzogiorno (Cazmez) was originally instituted in 1950s by the De Gasperi government as a programme to fill the distance between North and South. Carey and Carey (1955) described it then as a good effort similar to the New Deal in the United States.

3. Gandini (2009) directed a documentary showing how 30 years of commercial TV has profoundly impacted the Italian culture, passing from a castigated and repressed culture, dominated by the Catholic Church and the austerity of the Communist Party, to a televisual culture in which prime time consistently displays a parade of semi-naked women.