This new book by Giacomo Becattini (The awareness of places. The territory as a choral subject. Donzelli editore, 2015, pp. 322)
he is distinguished by the richness and relevance of the problems he brings to the fore. In the background, neo-liberalism which should have been buried for some time (Keynes published The End of Laissez-faire in 1926) and instead is now re-proposed on "ideological aftermath of the past" offering "an embalmed corpse for public worship". The book is a catalog of reflections largely resulting from the dialogue with Alberto Magnaghi.
What is territory? Becattini exemplifies with the post-war boom. Many apparently anodyne places were "springs charged over the centuries". They would have changed the face of the country only if the conditions for their "liberation" had been created. This happened with the liberalization of trade after which Prato, Biella, Carpigiani and many other local strains were able to transform "the water of their artisan know-how and their local cultures ... into the wine of exports and the joie de vivre of social groups even of modest extraction”. For Becattini the territory is that of Cattaneo, a reality built by man. In his vision, the entire system of equilibrium prices between supply and demand must not only achieve the minimum cost of production of each commodity, but also the best territorial and professional allocation of each human productive agent; focus therefore on well-being and not on profit. The optimum optimorum would be given by numerous aggregations of subjects (local communities) specialized in many made in. Each would excel in the production of a typical group of goods and the resulting technical and cultural climate. The natural thrust is towards this ideal world where each localized group of producers, to protect its own reputation (the supreme good in the chivalrous code advocated for industry by the English economist Alfred Marshall) must produce something that is the most suitable for a specific purpose, socially recognized. Each community of producers stakes its reputation which is therefore its true social capital. It is therefore driven to continuous innovations to maintain or expand the surplus deriving from the difference between the revenues from the sale to other places of the good in which it specializes and the domestic consumption of that good. In this system, each person, self-interpreting their abilities and preferences, moves by migrating in search of the place, physical and social, where they believe they have the greatest chances of living better (joie de vivre); thus we pass from the theory of the value of commodities to the theory of human happiness. But there are obstacles in the real world constituted by the accumulation of wealth and the consequent powers of production and decision-making concentrated in a few hands: it is up to politics to eliminate them.
Italy is the ideal field in which the forces identified by Becattini can be released. But we need an industrial policy that values the territories and sectors in which we are naturally and historically strong; “a development that exploits both our dexterity and our imagination”, where the advantages of the district form and of Made in Italy are magically coupled with those of our tourism.
Are we on the right track today? In my opinion, the answer is a resounding no. For general reasons and for local reasons. The former come from the great crisis of which we are still prisoners; Giacomo traces it back to the wider crisis of capitalism. Once the competition with socialism ended, finance was allowed to invade all fields. By now we are concerned only with the profit that can be obtained from each transaction, ignoring that the competitive force, productivity, does not derive from the mere spatial proximity of companies in the same sector (cluster), but from the formation of a special productive environment, an industrial atmosphere, which has its roots in the local manufacturing community. Every place, as it has been shaped by mother nature and its history, has its own degree of productive chorus which depends primarily on the homogeneity and cultural congruence of the people who make it up. The morality of the institutions (this is the local aspect) is fundamental and without it the trust that represents the glue of local society vanishes.
The financialisation of capital jeopardizes everything precisely because it puts the profit of a few before the collective well-being by transforming the companies themselves into goods; manages to do so by virtue of the large concentrations that are always being built (think of the monstrous merger hypothesized between the London and German stock exchanges). There is still a tendency towards gigantism, in industry and in banks, despite the harsh lessons of the past. Becattini recalls the words that Enrico Cuccia wanted to sculpt in the report on the 1978 financial statements of Mediobanca, clearly indicating the preferability to big business of "more modest but healthier companies" which would have led to "less political interference, licit and illicit, in the economic life of the country". This is where you can start again. Becattini's beautiful book takes us by the hand towards a new planning for the revitalization of district areas: the joie de vivre against profit.
