Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Unheard Prophet

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Unheard Prophet

Ilaria Bifarini

From:  https://ilariabifarini.com/pier-paolo-pasolini-un-profeta-inascoltato-2/

Among the themes of the A-levels, a passage by Pier Paolo Pasolini stands out—a controversial figure who remains poorly understood to this day, except in a superficial manner, according to a conformist reading. The eclectic and versatile intellectual and poet from Casarza was the first to publicly prophesy and denounce what would be the advent of neoliberalism, through the insidious and deceptive dictatorship of consumer society.

In the United States, mass consumerism had already established itself by the end of the First World War, to absorb the surplus production of the war industry. The defining feature of this model is the increasing expenditure on superfluous and unnecessary goods. The economic engine is mass production—standardised, mechanised, and aimed at the broad public—the masses, precisely, the same people employed in the production process. The worker, increasingly alienated through automation, plays the role of an active and conscious consumer in their leisure time, legitimising themselves as an individual and being willing to incur debt for it. The socio-cultural substrate of the United States provides fertile ground for the triumph of consumerist ideology.

Although with a few decades’ delay, Italy is also not immune to this pernicious phenomenon—based on inducing ever-new needs to sustain consumption of goods produced in a continuous cycle, without interruptions or deviations for saturation or satisfaction of material needs. The myth and idealisation of the American model have taken root from the post-war period in the collective imagination of the country.

However, a distinction must be made between what happens in Italy and elsewhere because, as Pasolini emphasises, while abroad—particularly in the United States—the socio-economic environment is fertile and natural for a new, rootless history, in Italy, consumerist faith takes on traits of violence. Like an “anthropological catastrophe,” it disrupts an ideological system rooted in cultural traditions and social participation, shifting towards a standardising, levelling model that imposes homogenisation, bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator.

The Bologna-born writer and director, who lived for many years in Rome and was closely connected with popular circles, with that world of the marginalised—depicted in his films and in the “Corsair Writings” (1975)—denounces this new, spreading ideology as true fascism, using the term to refer to the tyranny of power. Behind a false and superficial tolerance, it actually conceals a subtle and ruthless intolerance, a permissiveness granted from above and revocable at any moment by those in authority.

At a certain point, power needed a different kind of subordinate—one primarily a consumer. 

Without coups d’état or military dictatorships, an faceless Power is imposed, enforcing a cultural and anthropological uniformity of an interclassist nature, where any trace of class consciousness disappears. Through the hedonism of consumption and a false promise of well-being accessible to all, a cultural genocide and colonisation of souls take place in our country: the new model is fully internalised by the population, leading to an anthropological mutation. Unlike Mussolini’s fascism, which involved superficial and theatrical discipline, Pasolini believed that the society of mass consumption impacts young people not only in their behaviour but also in their thoughts, their imaginations, their deepest inner selves. “The poor and the powerless no longer aspire to more wealth and power but to be, in everything and everywhere, like the ruling class,” which has become culturally and socially the only class.

Pasolini’s late work, produced a few years before his death, is a lucid and heartfelt analysis—a warning call that went unheard and was underestimated by the intellectuals of the time, especially those on the Left, to whom the writer directed his message.

“I foresee a time when the new power will use your libertarian words to create a new conformism, a new Inquisition, and its clerics will be clerics of the Left.”

 

Foreseeing the future, driven by artistic sensitivity and a profound knowledge of popular culture, customs, and local traditions—quickly swept away by mass consumerism and its powerful media—Pasolini predicted the actual emergence of today’s neoliberalism. A wholly, as powerful as a religion, theory based on an economic matrix, with a seductive and glittering surface of consumerism, behind which lurks a repressive and totalitarian power without face.

Beyond the official narrative, the real motives behind his murder remain shrouded in mystery.