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Another Kind of Politics

Donald Trump has said goodbye as befits his fame, with a tragic riotous revelry. A crowd with improbable disguises took its cue from the fake news on the Internet fomented by the presidency, assaulted the Capitol and wandered around its rooms and corridors with the aim of intimidating representatives and senators. All of this, however, taking selfies: a moment of fame on Facebook or YouTube and a trophy to show off back home in deepest America, while carousing in the local pub. His successor Joe Biden will seek a rebalance in a bipartisan collaboration, but he cannot escape from the dominant trait now characterising the political show. The swearing-in ceremony was the enthronement of a republican king, according to the rites of Hollywoodian show business: pop singers, actors, directors, and rock stars, and the new reigning couple hand in hand as they admired the fireworks in the night.

Meanwhile, on the other shore of the Atlantic, a similar depressing show is going on the air with the Italian crisis, which has combined the old canons of parliamentary cretinism with the new grammar of the TV screen or the Internet, with talk show hosts mesmerised by the number of turncoats and new unknown champions of shifting alliances who have become TV celebrities.

A question, then: but is this politics? Is it really necessary to wander amid the mounting hysteria of the social media, the storytelling about political leaders as if they were the characters in a TV serial, and parliamentary-chamber cretinism followed in slow motion by the journalistic circus? There is another politics to choose which is not their papier-mâché scenario: with feet firmly planted in class reality, with its gaze fixed on the world and the international facts that count. Whoever wants to understand and fight must choose communist politics.

Another Kind of Politics. (2021, February). Internationalism, 12.

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