By GIOVANNI ALVES*
In the final phase of his life and work, Pasolini assumes the posture of a “corsair”, a literary pirate who relentlessly attacks the institutions, culture and values of an Italy undergoing profound transformation.
On November 2, 1975, one of the greatest Italian writers and filmmakers of the XNUMXth century passed away: Pier Paolo Pasolini. He was murdered in Ostia, near Rome, in circumstances that remain controversial and not fully understood. Pasolini was a multifaceted figure, known as a poet, filmmaker, writer and public intellectual in Italy. His premature death represented a great loss for culture and art. In this article, we will reflect on the last phase of the Italian writer and filmmaker.
Pier Paolo Pasolini's “corsair phase” refers to the final period of his life and work, especially in the 1970s, during which he became an even more forceful and controversial critic of Italian society, capitalism, consumerism and contemporary politics. The term “corsair” is inspired by the texts he published in the newspaper “Corriere della Sera“, which were later collected in the book Corsair Writings (Script Corsari.
In this phase, Pasolini assumes the role of a “corsair”, a literary pirate who relentlessly attacks the institutions, culture and values of an Italy undergoing profound transformation. There are film antecedents of this phase – Theorem e Pigsty, for example, can compose with came out, what we can call the Trilogy of Death (in contrast to the Trilogy of Life).
During the “corsair phase,” Pasolini intensified his critique of consumerism and the consumer society that, in his view, was destroying Italy’s cultural and human authenticity. He saw consumerism as a form of “soft fascism,” more insidious and dangerous than historical fascism because it did not use brute force to impose itself, but rather seduction, media manipulation, and the commodification of all aspects of life. Pasolini believed that consumerism turned people into mere consumers, alienated and conformist, incapable of resisting a system that shaped their desires and identities. He argued that the new mass culture was uniformizing Italian society, erasing the regional, popular, and class differences that, for him, were sources of authenticity and cultural richness.
The “corsair phase” was also marked by the denunciation of the growing presence of neo-fascism in Italian society, which he saw as a symptom of the crisis of capitalism. For Pasolini, contemporary neo-fascism was not just an expression of far-right political movements, but a manifestation of a system of power that expressed itself through the media, advertising and consumerism. He saw the transformation of Italian society as a form of “homologation”, where all aspects of life were subjected to the logic of the market and the imposition of bourgeois and consumerist values.
From this perspective, Pasolini argued that the true violence of modern fascism was not in the explicit manifestations of power or repression, but in the way in which mass culture and consumerism colonized people's consciousness, leading them to passively accept a system that alienated them and transformed them into objects of consumption.
Pasolini’s “corsair” stance is also characterized by his boldness and willingness to confront taboos, hypocrisies and controversial issues. He attacked both the right and the left, criticizing the Italian Communist Party (PCI) for giving in to conformity and bourgeoisification, and accusing intellectuals and politicians of failing to perceive or confront the true nature of modern fascism.
His controversial stance was also expressed in his criticism of the liberalization of customs and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which he saw as an extension of the logic of consumption. For Pasolini, sexual liberation did not represent true freedom, but rather a way of transforming the body and sexuality into commodities, reinforcing the alienation and dehumanization that he so criticized.
The articles that make up the corsair writings[I] are clear examples of this phase. In them, Pasolini addresses issues such as the destruction of popular traditions, cultural homogenization, state repression, political corruption, and the hypocrisy of Italian society. He wrote in a direct, blunt, and often provocative manner, challenging the reader to face the uncomfortable truths he exposed about contemporary society. This stance led Pasolini to be seen as a controversial and often marginalized figure, but also as one of the most lucid and visionary critics of his time.
His analysis of the relationship between consumerism, mass culture, and neofascism anticipated many of the issues that would become central in the following decades, especially the increasing commodification of everyday life and the insidious influence of media and advertising in shaping individual consciousness and desires.
The “corsair phase” is, in many ways, Pasolini’s last act of resistance against a system that he saw as irreversibly corrupt and dehumanizing. His refusal to submit to conformity and his willingness to attack consumerism, neo-fascism, and the hypocrisy of Italian society made him a “corsair”—an intellectual who, like a pirate, attacks the ships of established power and challenges the certainties and illusions that sustain the status quo. His tragic and violent death in 1975, in circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery, gave his writings and films of this phase an even more prophetic and desperate dimension, confirming his role as one of the most relentless and visionary critics of contemporary society.
Pasolini’s “corsair phase” is therefore the period in which he became one of the fiercest critics of consumer society, neo-fascism and cultural alienation. His provocative, controversial and often solitary stance made him an indispensable voice for understanding the transformations of capitalism, politics and culture in Italy and the world. It is a time when Pasolini abandons any hope of reconciliation with society and assumes his position as a “corsair”, a radical critic willing to fight to the end against the forces that he saw as destroying humanity and authenticity.
The last phase of Pasolini's filmography is represented by his final film, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which marks a drastic change in tone and content. This film is a free adaptation of the work of the Marquis de Sade, set in the Republic of Salò during the Second World War, and offers a violent and hopeless critique of consumer society, fascism and the corruption of power. Compared to Beggar, Salò represents the final stage of Pasolini's pessimism towards capitalist society. While Beggar still had a dimension of humanity and a search for authenticity, Salò portrays a world in which brutality, domination and dehumanization are taken to the extreme, without any possibility of redemption.
Salò – Pasolini critical of the sociometabolism of barbarism
Salò ou The 120 Days of Sodom is a loose adaptation of the novel by the Marquis de Sade, set in the Republic of Salò, the last fascist stronghold in Italy during the Second World War.[ii]. The plot follows four powerful figures – a Duke, a Bishop, a Magistrate and a President – who kidnap 18 young people (nine girls and nine boys) and take them to an isolated mansion. There, they subject the young people to a regime of physical, psychological and sexual torture that unfolds in three “circles”: the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit and the Circle of Blood.
Over the course of 120 days, the young people are brutalized and treated as objects for the sadistic pleasure of the fascists, who reduce them to mere “commodities.” The film culminates in a series of tortures and executions, explicitly portraying the horror, dehumanization and absolute exercise of power under the influence of capital.
The Duke (Paolo Bonacelli) is one of the figures of power, symbolizing the fascist nobility and the corruption of the ruling class. The President (Umberto Paolo Quintavalle) represents political power, exercising his authority in a tyrannical and sadistic manner. The Magistrate (Aldo Valletti) is a figure of the judiciary, who actively participates in the tortures and demonstrates the connivance of justice with the oppressive power. The Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi) represents the Church and religious hypocrisy, collaborating with the horrors committed in the mansion. The Ladies (Caterina Boratto, Hélène Surgère and Elsa De Giorgi) are the older women who narrate erotic stories to stimulate the fascists, revealing how the narrative of oppression and pleasure are intrinsically linked.
The aesthetic of Salò is deliberately cold, clinical and detached. Pasolini avoids any attempt at romanticization or embellishment, filming the scenes of torture and violence in a direct and almost documentary-like manner. The colors are neutral, and the camera maintains an impersonal distance, reinforcing the sense of estrangement and dehumanization. The use of Ennio Morricone's music creates an ironic contrast with the brutality of the scenes, intensifying the impact of the narrative.
Salò is a fierce critique of absolute power – the power of capital in its phase of global expansion – and the way it corrupts and dehumanizes. The four fascist masters exercise their unlimited power over the young, transforming them into objects for their satisfaction and revealing the destructive and sadistic essence of domination. It is not about mere absolute Power, the almost metaphysical force of Evil. We cannot forget the historical nature of fascism. Fascism was the bourgeoisie’s response to the class struggle and the rise of Bolshevism in the historical conditions of social crises and the decline of liberal capitalism immediately after the First World War.
Fascism arises when the ruling classes fear the proletarian revolution, using it as a means of repressing social movements and maintaining control. Fascism – according to Leon Trotsky – was not just an ideology, but a form of government that feeds on the dissatisfaction of the petty bourgeoisie and the people with liberal democracy.[iii]
Pasolini adds a new perception of fascism: fascism is the means of manipulating subjectivity – body and mind – in its biopolitical form or form of governmentality that expands with neocapitalism, the highest phase of total capitalism, manipulative capitalism.[iv] and – at the same time – the initial historical phase of the structural crisis of capital[v] . Neoliberalism would exacerbate the tendencies set at the dawn of neocapitalism, with manipulation being deepened by the new informational technological base. Thus, the neofascism denounced by Pasolini would become the new social metabolism: the sociometabolism of barbarism.
The film came out explores how the human body under capital is reduced to an object of consumption, a commodity to be used, abused and discarded. This commodification is a metaphor for late capitalism and neo-capitalism, which Pasolini saw as a system that transformed people into objects of consumption. Salò denounces the link between neo-fascism and modern consumerism. came out It is not a historical film – although it uses historical references to the fascist Republic of Saló.
Pasolini saw consumerism – the ideology of rising neo-capitalism – as a new, more subtle and insidious form of fascism that imposed its logic of domination through pleasure and desire rather than physical coercion. The film presents a world in which all morality and values have been destroyed, reflecting Pasolini’s vision of the cultural and ethical disintegration of neo-capitalist society. The fascist overlords’ total lack of empathy and compassion is a representation of the extreme alienation and loss of humanity that Pasolini saw in neo-capitalism.
came out It was produced at an early stage of the structural crisis of capital that manifested itself in the crisis of the capitalist economy of the early 1970s and its political repercussions in Italy and the Western world in general. The 1970s were marked by recession, unemployment, inflation and the 1973 oil crisis, which shook capitalist economies.
In Italy, this period became known as the “Years of Lead” (Years of Lead), due to increasing political violence, with conflicts between far-left and far-right groups, terrorist attacks and state repression. Neo-fascism was on the rise, with far-right groups promoting political attacks and assassinations, while the Italian state responded with repressive measures that undermined civil liberties. Pasolini saw this context as a manifestation of the crisis of late capitalism and the moral collapse of the consumer society.
He perceived the convergence between consumerism, alienation and fascist violence, and Salò became his final manifesto against what he saw as the total decadence of the civilization of capital in its phase of structural crisis. Its release, just a few months before Pasolini's assassination, only reinforces the prophetic and desperate character of his final message about the human condition and the horrors of domination and consumption under manipulative capitalism.
Pasolini and neocapitalism
In newspaper articles from the 1970s – mainly in the period 1973-1975 – Pasolini expressed the true horror of neo-capitalism. On the eve of his death when he was assassinated by the fascists, Pasolini reached the peak of his criticism of the Italian bourgeois order. For him, neo-capitalism destroyed one of the greatest powers in Italian society: the Catholic Church. In other words, the new power of capital did what not even Mussolini's fascism could do: empty the religious spirit.
In the newspaper Run from the Sera On May 17, 1973, Pasolini made a blunt – and visionary – statement: “Fascism, as a regressive moment of capitalism, was objectively less diabolical […] than the democratic regime”[vi] . Pasolini is addressing the fact that the Church, according to him, “[had] made a pact with the devil, that is, with the bourgeois State.” He says: “Fascism was a blasphemy, but it did not undermine the Church from within, because it was a false new ideology […] if fascism did not even scratch the Church, neocapitalism is destroying it today. The acceptance of fascism was an atrocious episode: the acceptance of bourgeois capitalist civilization is a definitive fact, whose cynicism is not just one more stain among many in the history of the Church, but a historical error for which the Church will probably pay with its decadence.” [vii].
Therefore, for Pasolini, the acceptance of capitalist bourgeois civilization or the democratic regime was worse than fascism, because it did what not even fascism could do: empty the spirit of religion – and in the case of the Church: “The bourgeoisie – he says – represented a new spirit that is certainly not the fascist spirit: a new spirit, which at first would compete with the religious spirit (excepting only clericalism) and then would end up taking its place to provide men with a total and unique vision of life (without needing clericalism as an instrument of power)”.[viii]
And he emphasized: “The future does not belong to the old cardinals, nor to the old politicians, nor to the old magistrates, nor to the old policemen. The future belongs to the young bourgeoisie, which no longer needs the classical instruments to hold power; which no longer knows what to do with a Church already exhausted by the fact of belonging to that humanist world of the past, which constitutes an obstacle to the new industrial revolution. The new bourgeois power, in fact, requires from consumers a totally pragmatic and hedonistic spirit: only in a technical and purely earthly universe can the cycle of production and consumption take place according to its own nature. For religion, and above all for the Church, there is no longer room.”[ix]
In March 1974, in another article published in the magazine Drama, entitled “The Intellectuals in 68: Manichaeism and Orthodoxy of the “Revolution of the Day After”, Pasolini highlighted the emergence of “a new form of civilization and a long future of “development” programmed by Capital”. For him, neocapitalism “carried out its own internal revolution, the revolution of Applied Science” – that is, Pasolini unconsciously referred to what Marx called “big industry” characterized by the dominance of relative surplus value and the real subsumption of labor to capital.
Karl Marx considered large-scale industry to be the “complete revolution (which is constantly deepening and renewing itself) in the capitalist mode of production itself, in the productivity of labor and in the relationship between capitalist and worker.”[X] This “Applied Science Revolution”[xi] for Pasolini it was equal in importance to the “First Sowing, on which the millennial peasant civilization was founded”[xii]. Capital thus founded a new form of civilization that, for it, was losing “any hope of a workers’ revolution”.
He says: “That is why the word Revolution was shouted so much. Even more so, because it was already clear not only the impossibility of a dialectic, but even the impossibility of defining the commensurability between technological capitalism and humanist Marxism.”[xiii] Pasolini was truly pessimistic about the new historical course of capitalism and its “development” – that is, consumerism, well-being and the hedonistic ideology of power.
In the June 10, 1974 article in Run from the Sera, entitled “Study on the Anthropological Revolution in Italy”, Pasolini dealt with the strong theme of his corsair writings: the anthropological mutation provoked by neo-capitalism in Italy. He observed that (i) “the 'middle classes' have changed radically, I would even say anthropologically: their positive values are no longer reactionary and clerical values, but rather the values (not 'named' and still lived only existentially) of the hedonistic ideology of consumption and the consequent modernist tolerance of the American type. It was Power itself – through the 'development' of the production of superfluous goods, the imposition of frenetic consumption, fashion, information (and above all, in an imposing manner, television) that created such values, cynically discarding traditional values and the Church itself, which was the symbol of these values”[xiv] .
Later, Pasolini observed (ii) “that peasant and paleo-industrial Italy has collapsed, disintegrated, no longer exists, and that in its place there has been a void that probably awaits to be filled by a complete bourgeoisification of the type mentioned above (modernizing, falsely tolerant, Americanizing, etc.)”[xv] .
The Italian filmmaker reflected on the political scenario in Italy in which fascism (or the right) in view of Italy's own history is a crude, ridiculous, and ferocious right, while “parliamentary neo-fascism is the faithful continuation of traditional fascism.” But Pasolini recognizes that there is something worse happening in Italy. He says: “All forms of historical continuity have been broken. The ‘development’, pragmatically desired by Power, has historically been instituted in a kind of epoché[xvi] which radically 'transformed', in just a few years, the Italian world”.[xvii]
This “qualitative” leap concerns both fascists and anti-fascists: it is in fact the transition from a culture made up of illiteracy (the people) and tattered humanism (the middle classes) of an archaic cultural organization to the modern organization of “mass culture.” For Pasolini, “the thing, in reality, is enormous.” [xviii]. He insists that the phenomenon of anthropological “mutation” has occurred. Pasolini – almost like a Gramsci of “Americanism and Fordism” – emphasized that capital has modified the necessary characteristics of Power, giving rise to a new bourgeois man – the neo-fascist man. He says: “The “mass culture”, for example, cannot be an ecclesiastical, moralistic and patriotic culture: in fact, it is directly linked to consumption, which has its internal laws and ideological self-sufficiency capable of automatically creating a Power that no longer knows what to do with the Church, the Fatherland, the Family and other similar beliefs.”
Pasolini will characterize the new epoch of the Italian world – the era of total bourgeoisification – which is characterized by the “cultural standardization” that concerns everyone: people and bourgeoisie, workers and sub-proletarians. Pasolini clarifies what he understands as the “cultural standardization” that characterizes the Italian anthropological mutation: “The social context has changed, in the sense that it has become extremely unified. The matrix that generates all Italians has become the same. There is therefore no longer any considerable difference beyond the political option, a dead scheme to be filled by empty gestures between any Italian fascist citizen and any Italian anti-fascist citizen. They are culturally, psychologically and, what is most striking, physically interchangeable. In everyday behavior, mimicry, somatic, there is nothing that distinguishes a fascist from an anti-fascist except, I repeat, a rally or a political action (middle-aged or young, the old can be differentiated in this sense), this with regard to average fascists and anti-fascists. As far as extremists are concerned, standardization is even more radical.”[xx]
Pasolini comes to the conclusion that “fascism, therefore, is no longer traditional fascism.” And he clarifies: “The young people of the fascist groups, the young people of the SAM[xx], the young people who kidnapped people and planted bombs on trains call themselves and are called fascists; but this is a purely nominalistic definition. In reality, they are in every way identical to the vast majority of young people their age. Culturally, psychologically, somatically, I repeat, there is nothing that distinguishes them. What distinguishes them is only an abstract and a priori 'decision' that, in order to be known, must be said. It is possible to talk casually for hours with a young fascist extremist without realizing that he is a fascist. Whereas ten years ago it was enough, I don't even say a word anymore, just a look to distinguish and recognize him.”[xxx]
Neofascism and the new power
For Pasolini, neofascism is therefore “a nominal fascism, without its own ideology (emptied by the real quality of life lived by these fascists) and, furthermore, artificial”.[xxiii] This situation is desired by Power itself, which, after having liquidated – in a pragmatic manner, as always – traditional fascism and the Church (clerical fascism, which was effectively an Italian cultural reality), decided to keep alive certain forces that could oppose – according to a mafia and police strategy – the communist eversion. Behind the neo-fascist “young monsters” – these young people and their nominal and artificial fascism – who planted the bombs, we have, in fact, the bourgeois power, truly “its sinister masterminds and financiers” responsible for the “intolerable conditions of conformity and neurosis, and therefore of extremism.”
Therefore, we are not living in a truly democratic regime, but in a fascist regime – “a fascism even worse than the traditional one, but it would no longer be exactly fascism. It would be something that we are already living in reality and that the fascists live in an exasperated and monstrous way, but not without reason”.[xxiii]
In a June 24, 1974 article for the Run from the Sera In his book “True Fascism and, therefore, True Antifascism,” Pasolini noted that for many centuries in Italy, the culture of the ruling class and the culture of the dominated class—the popular culture of workers and peasants—remained distinguishable, even though they were historically unified in the culture of the nation. He noted: “Today—almost suddenly, in a sort of Advent—historical distinction and unification have been replaced by a standardization that almost miraculously realizes the interclass dream of the old Power. To what can we owe this standardization? Evidently, to a new Power.”[xxv]
Pasolini writes this “Power” with a capital letter only because – he says – “I honestly don’t know what this new Power consists of or who represents it. I simply know that it exists. I no longer recognize it in the Vatican, nor in the powerful Christian Democrats, nor in the Armed Forces. I no longer recognize it even in large-scale industry, because it is no longer formed by a certain limited number of large industrialists: to me, at least, it appears as a whole (total industrialization) and, what’s more, as a whole that is not Italian (transnational). I also know, because I see and live them, some characteristics of this new, still faceless Power: for example, its rejection of the old reactionism and the old clericalism, its decision to abandon the Church, its determination (crowned with success) to transform peasants and sub-proletarians into petty bourgeoisie, and above all its desire, so to speak cosmic, to go to the bottom of “Development”: to produce and consume.”[xxiv]
Pasolini tries to describe the features of the new Power that emerges with the neo-capitalism that was consolidated in the 1960s in Italy. He says that it has certain “modern” features due to tolerance and the “perfectly self-sufficient” hedonist ideology, but he perceives, on the other hand, “certain ferocious, essentially repressive features”. But Pasolini reveals the falseness of the new bourgeois Power: “tolerance is in fact false, because in reality no man has ever been forced to be as normal and conformist as the consumer; and as for hedonism, it evidently covers up a decision to pre-order everything with a cruelty unprecedented in history.”[xxv].
This new Power, he says – “not yet represented by anyone and resulting from a ‘mutation’ of the ruling class, is in reality, if we wish to preserve the old terminology – a “total” form of fascism”. For Pasolini, fascism is Power that imposes itself on others in a repressive way. As in came out, young people are forced to serve the personalities of Power who command the scene of terror. For Pasolini, tolerance is repressive because it imposes cultural “standardization”. This Power – he says – has culturally “standardized” Italy: it is, therefore, a repressive “standardization”, even if obtained through the imposition of hedonism and joy of living. The strategy of tension is an indication, even if essentially anachronistic, of all this.”[xxviii].
How did Pasolini discover the new power of neo-fascism that was imposing itself on neo-capitalist Italy? What was Pasolini’s method? He knew semiology – Pasolini observed people and their behavior. He knew that culture produces certain codes, that codes produce certain behavior, that behavior is a language and that at a historical moment in which verbal language is entirely conventional and sterilized (he says, technocratized), the language of behavior assumes decisive importance.
Therefore, he considered that there were good reasons to maintain that the culture of a nation (Italy, in this case) was expressed (in 1974) above all through the language of behavior, or physical language. He says: “[…] a certain amount – completely conventionalized and extremely poor – of verbal language”. In other words, the expression is through the language of behavior in view of the emptying of the level of linguistic communication. This is how Pasolini perceives the anthropological mutation of the Italians, that is, their complete identification with a “single model”:
Therefore, deciding to let your hair grow to your shoulders or cut your hair and grow a mustache (in the 1900s style); deciding to tie a headband around your forehead or pull a cap over your eyes; deciding between dreaming about a Ferrari or a Porsche; following television programs closely; knowing the titles of some best-sellers; wearing arrogantly fashionable pants and shirts; having obsessive relationships with girls treated as mere ornaments, but, at the same time, supposedly “free”, etc. etc. etc.: all of these are cultural acts.
Today, all young Italians perform these same identical acts, have the same physical language, are interchangeable: something as old as the world, if it were limited to a single social class, to a single category; but the fact is that these cultural acts and this somatic language are interclass. In a square full of young people, no one can distinguish, by physical appearance, a worker from a student, a fascist from an anti-fascist, something that was still possible in 1968.”[xxviii]
Pasolini feels powerless in the face of the new Power. He can do nothing. Fighting Development, the myth of neo-capitalism, would mean provoking a recession. However, one can try to correct this Development – this is what the Italian Communist Party is trying to do – Pasolini moves from pessimism to political realism: “If the Left Parties did not support the current Power, Italy would simply collapse; if, on the contrary, Development continued at the pace at which it began, the so-called “historical compromise” would undoubtedly be realistic, because it would be the only way to try to correct this Development, in the sense indicated by Berlinguer in his report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (cf. Unit of 4/6/1974).[xxix]
However, whether he was a pessimist or a realist, this did not prevent him from making a self-criticism: “we did nothing to prevent the fascists from existing”. Pasolini criticizes the way the left treated the young fascists, behaving like them, that is, being racist, fetishizing them as representations of evil: “We limited ourselves to condemning them, gratifying our conscience with our indignation, and the stronger and more petulant the indignation, the calmer our conscience became. In reality, we behaved towards the fascists (I am referring mainly to the young people) in a racist way: that is, we hastily and mercilessly wanted to believe that they were predestined by their race to be fascists, and in the face of this decision of their destiny there was nothing to be done. And let us not dissimulate about this: we all knew, in our right minds, that it was by pure chance that one of those young people decided to be a fascist, that it was a mere unmotivated and irrational gesture; perhaps a single word would have been enough to prevent this from happening. But none of us ever spoke to them, or even spoke to them. We quickly accepted them as inevitable representatives of evil. And perhaps they were eighteen-year-old boys and girls, who knew nothing about anything, and who plunged headlong into this horrible adventure out of sheer desperation.”[xxx]
This is how Pasolini identifies neofascism, as distinct from the old fascism: the new fascism is something quite different – it is not “humanistically rhetorical, it is Americanly pragmatic. Its purpose is the brutally totalitarian reorganization and standardization of the world.” But the scathing criticism is to consider young fascists as “fatal and predestined representatives of Evil.” Pasolini exclaims: “[they] were not born to be fascists. When they became adolescents and capable of choosing, for who knows what reasons and needs, no one, in a racist way, imprinted the fascist mark on them. It is an atrocious form of despair and neurosis that drives a young person to make such a choice; and perhaps just a small different experience in their life, just a simple encounter, would have been enough for their destiny to be different.”[xxxii]
The disappearance of the peasant world
In an article dated July 8, 1974, published in Evening country and entitled “Exiguity of history and immensity of the peasant world”, Pasolini says that the monstrosity of neo-capitalism means – on the other hand – the disappearance of the peasant world and consequently of the sub-proletarian world and the working-class world. All have succumbed to the bourgeoisification of the world. He takes the opportunity to speak of his ideal of the peasant universe (to which belong the urban sub-proletarian cultures and, until a few years ago, those of the working-class minorities who were – says Pasolini – “pure and true minorities, as in Russia in 1917”).
For him, the peasant universe is a transnational universe that simply does not recognize nations. He says: “It is the residue of a previous civilization (or a sum of previous civilizations, all very similar to each other), and the ruling (nationalist) class shaped this residue according to its own interests and political objectives. It is this unlimited pre-national and pre-industrial peasant world, which survived until a few years ago, that I miss (it is no wonder that I spend as much time as possible in Third World countries, where it still survives, although the Third World is also entering the orbit of so-called “Development”).”[xxxi]
The men of the peasant world did not live in a golden age of abundance and consumerism, but rather in the age of bread. That is to say, says Pasolini, “they were consumers of extremely necessary goods. And it was this, perhaps, that made their poor and precarious life extremely necessary. While it is clear that superfluous goods make life superfluous (to be very elementary and conclude with this argument).”
Pasolini is critical of Western modernization promoted by the acculturation of the “consumerist Center” that has destroyed several Third World cultures. He says that the cultural model offered to Italians (and to all men on the globe) is unique. Pasolini, therefore, is critical of Americanism and the unique model of American way of life that they imposed on the world: “Conformity to this model is presented first and foremost in the lived experience, in the existential and, consequently, in the body and in behavior. This is where the values, not yet expressed, of the new culture of consumer civilization are lived, that is, of the new and most repressive totalitarianism ever seen.”
Pasolini criticizes – once again – the cultural standardization, the behavioral and linguistic reduction promoted by the new Power. This is what he denounces as being the impoverishment of expressiveness as dialects and regional cultural diversity disappear (Pasolini's penultimate film – The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights (1974) – is a true ode to the human diversity that the new Power of capital destroys). If Pasolini were alive today, he would probably be a defender of the multipolar world against the hegemonic unipolarity of the expanded West – or the consumerist Center: “From the point of view of verbal language, the entire language has been reduced to a communicative language, with an enormous impoverishment of expressiveness. Dialects (mother tongues!) have become distant in time and space: young people are forced to stop using them because they live in Turin, Milan or Germany. Where they are still spoken, they have completely lost their inventive potential. No young man from the Roman outskirts would be able to understand the jargon of my novels from ten or fifteen years ago; and irony of fate! – he would be forced to consult the enclosed glossary like any good bourgeois from the North!”[xxxii]
The theme of cultural standardization is strong in Pasolini. He laments the standardization of all young people, due to which one can no longer distinguish oneself by one's body, by one's behavior and by one's unconscious and real ideology (consumer hedonism) – one cannot distinguish a young fascist from all other young people. In fact, all these unhappy young people have only one unconscious and real ideology: consumer hedonism. He distinguishes today's conformism from the conformism of the past: in the past, men were conformists and as much as possible equal according to their social class.
And, within this class distinction, according to their particular and concrete (regional) cultural conditions, Today, he says (in 1974) – “on the contrary (and here comes the “anthropological mutation”), men are conformists and all equal to each other according to an interclass code (student equal to worker, worker from the north equal to worker from the south) at least potentially, in the anxious desire to become uniform”.[xxxv]
In an interview given to Guido Vergani on July 11, 1974 entitled “Expansion of the 'outline' on the anthropological revolution in Italy” and published in The world, Pasolini discusses the question of moral choices – to be a Marxist or to be a fascist. Discussing moral choices and culture is a political discussion – according to, for example, Antonio Gramsci.
As a communist, Pasolini wants to understand the political choices of Italians. He has never ceased to be a militant for the culture of the subaltern. Pasolini observes that such choices, as always happens, are grafted onto a culture like the culture of the Italians which, he says, has changed completely in the meantime. He says: “Italian culture has changed in its experience, in its existential aspects, in its concrete aspects. The change consists in the fact that the old class culture (with its clear divisions: the culture of the dominated or popular class; the culture of the dominant or bourgeois class, the culture of the elites) has been replaced by a new interclass culture: one that expresses itself through the way of being of the Italians, through their new quality of life. The political choices, grafted onto the old humus cultural, were one thing; grafted onto this new humus cultural, are another. The Marxist worker or peasant of the forties or fifties, in the hypothesis of a revolutionary victory, would have changed the world in one way; today, in the same hypothesis, he would change it in another.”[xxxiv].
Pasolini does not hide the fact that he is “desperately pessimistic” about a new power that – he says – “has manipulated and radically changed (anthropologically) the great masses of Italian peasants and workers”. He has difficulty defining the new power. He knows that it exists and that it is “the most violent and totalitarian that has ever existed: it changes people’s nature, it reaches the deepest consciousness”.
He is able to discern the means of neo-capitalist totalitarianism: television advertising, “perfectly pragmatic”, as he says, represents the indifferentist moment of the new hedonist ideology of consumption: and is therefore enormously effective. It is not at the service of Christian Democracy or the Vatican, “at an involuntary and unconscious level it has been at the service of the new power, which no longer coincides ideologically with Christian Democracy and no longer knows what to do with the Vatican”. Pasolini realizes that television advertising contributes to the uniformity of the masses – he emphasizes: “[…] one does not perceive any substantial difference between passers-by (especially young people) in the way they dress, in the way they walk, in the way they are serious, in the way they smile, in the way they gesture, in short, in the way they behave. And one can therefore say […] that the system of signs of physical-mimetic language no longer has any variations, that it is perfectly identical in everyone”.
And he concludes: “Power has decided that we are all equal”[xxxiv] Pasolini identifies the root of cultural uniformity in the fetishism of commodities, that is, in the desire to consume – “a desire to obey an unspoken order. Each person […] feels the degrading desire to be equal to others in consuming, in being happy, in being free: because this is the order that he has unconsciously received, and which he “must” obey, under penalty of feeling different. Never has difference been such a dreadful crime as in this period of tolerance: Equality has not in fact been conquered, but it is a “false” equality received as a gift.”[xxxviii]
After exposing – more clearly – the roots of the anthropological revolution in Italy, Pasolini goes on to describe its vital manifestations, such as, for example, the “fossilization of verbal language” – he says, “students speak like printed books, young people from the town have lost the ability to invent slang”; joy is always exaggerated, ostentatious, aggressive, offensive. Physical sadness is profoundly neurotic because it results from social frustration. In short, young people are unhappy.
He says: “Isn’t it happiness that counts? Isn’t it through happiness that the revolution is made? The peasant or sub-proletarian condition knew how to express, in the people who lived it, a certain “real” happiness. Today, this happiness with Development has been lost. This means that Development is not at all revolutionary, not even when it is reformist. It only provokes anguish. […] the young men of the people are sad because they have become aware of their own social inferiority, since their values and cultural models have been destroyed.”
The ideology of neofascism according to Pasolini
Pasolini saw consumerism not simply as a lifestyle or an economic trend, but as a totalizing system of social control, capable of shaping subjectivities and transforming individuals into objects. For him, modern consumerism was not just a set of practices of buying and selling goods, but an ideology that permeated all spheres of life, eliminating the autonomy of the individual and reducing him to an alienated being, guided by desires induced and manipulated by the market.
Em Salò, this logic is represented in an extreme and literal way. The four fascists who govern the Republic of Salò subject their victims to a series of rituals of consumption of the human body, where sadistic pleasure and total domination replace any form of authentic human relationship. Young people are stripped of their dignity and treated as mere objects of consumption, manipulated and destroyed at the will of the powerful. This dynamic of consumption of the body and life is a direct metaphor for the way in which late capitalism treats individuals, reducing them to commodities and instruments of profit.
Pasolini believed that consumerism had become a more effective and insidious form of fascism than historical fascism itself, because it operated invisibly, penetrating people’s minds and hearts without the need for physical coercion. Whereas classical fascism used brute force to impose its will, consumerist neofascism seduces and persuades, causing individuals to willingly accept and even celebrate their own submission and alienation.
Pasolini was aware that capitalism had evolved to a stage where alienation and dehumanization had become an integral part of everyday life, even in liberal democracies. The film portrays a dystopian future, but one that was already taking shape at the time, in which consumption, hedonism and violence are inseparable, and where the difference between freedom and oppression becomes indistinguishable. Pasolini's radical pessimism allowed us to perceive the truth of Saló's exaggeration: the world of social barbarity.
The 1970s projected us into the new temporality of global capital. Salò proves prophetic in anticipating trends that are now evident. The rise of neofascist movements in several countries, often fueled by discontent with neoliberalism and globalization, demonstrates how neofascism can camouflage itself within democratic and economic systems that promote unbridled consumerism. The use of propaganda, marketing, and media manipulation by these movements reflects exactly what Pasolini saw as the new face of fascism: a power that does not need dictatorships to impose itself, but that infiltrates people's culture and desires, exploiting their insecurities and fears.
Furthermore, mass culture and the society of the spectacle, which transform everything into a commodity – including bodies, identities and even politics itself – reflect Pasolini’s vision of a world where consumption becomes the dominant form of control and oppression. The cult of instant pleasure, personal satisfaction and the commodification of all human relationships that we see today on social media, reality TV and in the digital economy itself is the concretization of what Pasolini suggested in “Salò”: the total transformation of the individual into an object of consumption.[xxxviii]
*Giovanni Alves He is a retired professor of sociology at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Author, among other books, of Work and value: the new (and precarious) world of work in the 21st century (Praxis editorial project). [https://amzn.to/3RxyWJh]
Notes
[I] PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. Corsair Writings. Editora 34: São Paulo, 2020. In Brazil, a first anthology of corsair essays organized by Michel Lahud was published in 1990 entitled “Os jovens felicidadees” (Editora brasiliense, 1990). The first edition of Escritos Corsários (Script Corsari), by Pier Paolo Pasolini, was published in 1975, shortly after his death. This book brings together articles and critical essays in which Pasolini addresses topics such as politics, mass culture and the effects of economic development in Italy.
[ii] The Republic of Salò, officially known as the Italian Social Republic, was a Nazi puppet state created in 1943 after the fall of Mussolini's fascist regime. Based in Salò on Lake Garda, the government was established under strong German influence and sought to maintain control over northern Italy until the surrender of German troops in 1945. Although it proclaimed sovereignty, it was largely dependent on Germany and lacked international recognition, except by a few Axis allies. The regime faced significant resistance and culminated in Mussolini's execution in 1945.
[iii] MANDEL, Ernest (1974). Introduction: The Theory of Fascism According to Leo Trotsky. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/portugues/mandel/1974/mes/fascismo.htm. Accessed on 01/11/2024.
[iv] ALVES, Giovanni. The Triumph of Manipulation: Lukács and the 2022st Century. Praxis Publishing Project: Marília, XNUMX.
[v] ALVES, Giovanni. The concept of structural crisis of capital. Praxis editorial project: Marília, 2025 (in press).
[vi] PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “Linguistic analysis of a slogan”. Corsair writings. Publisher 34: São Paulo, 2020, p. 44.
[vii] Ibid., P. 44
[viii] Ibid., P. 45
[ix] Ibid., P. 45
[X] MARX, Karl. Chapter VI (unpublished). Boitempo editorial: São Paulo, 2022, p.104.
[xi] PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “A study on the anthropological revolution in Italy”. Corsair writings. Publisher 34: São Paulo, 2020, p. 58.
[xii] Op.cit, PASOLINI, p. 58
[xiii] Ibid., p.58
[xiv] PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “Study on the Anthropological Revolution in Italy”. Corsair Writings. Publisher 34: São Paulo, 2020, p. 73.
[xv] op.cit., PASOLINI, p. 73
[xvi] Greek term from skeptical philosophy translatable as “radical suspension of judgment.”
[xvii] Ibid., p.74
[xviii] op.cit. p.76.
[xx], p. 81 Ibid., p.75
[xx] Italian equivalent of the Nazi SS, which began to act as a parallel police force in the Republic of Salò from 1943 during fascism. (T.N.)
[xxx] Ibid., p.76
[xxiii] Ibid., p.77
[xxiii] Ibid., p.77
[xxv] PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “True fascism and therefore true antifascism”. Corsair writings. Editora 34: São Paulo, 2020, p. 78.
[xxiv] Ibid., p.79
[xxv] Ibid, p.79-80
[xxviii] Ibid, p.80
[xxviii] Ibid., p.81
[xxix] Ibid., p.82
[xxx] Ibid. p.83
[xxxii] PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “The exiguity of history and the immensity of the peasant world”. Corsair writings. Editora 34: São Paulo, 2020, p. 89
[xxxi] Ibid., P. 86
[xxxii] Ibid., p.87
[xxxv] Ibid., p. 91-92
[xxxiv] PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “Expansion of the ‘outline’ on the anthropological revolution in Italy”. Corsair writings. Editora 34: São Paulo, 2020, p. 92.
[xxxiv] Ibid. p.93-94
[xxxviii] Ibid., p.95
[xxxviii] Excerpt from the chapter entitled “Accattone and Saló: The Alpha and Omega of Pasolini”, by Giovanni Alves published in the book Pasolini's prisms, organized by Giovanni Alves and Ana Celeste Casulo (Praxis Publishing Project, 2024).
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