Several years ago in France, in a period of full economic prosperity, the social workers declared, "We are workers like any other because we repair the socio-productive apparatus." After '68, they were less sanguine: "The social workers feel very strongly the ambiguity of the notion of social work and are sensitive to the misunderstandings it can generate." In fact, in the new economy of survival, it is no longer a matter of participating in a society of (more or less futile) abundance. Mr. Berlinguer said it in January 1 977: " ™' are the ones who want austerity, in order to change the system and construct a new model of development." And s'trai:gely enough, he immediately refers to the transportation system, "to the revision of the myth of the personal automobile with the reorganization of cities. The solution to the transportation problem should lead to a radical transformation of State mechanisms through a modification of the nature of business." Thus, everywhere, the mobile mass's vehicular power is repressed and reduced; from limits on speed or fuel to the pure and simple suppression of the personal auto, the myth of the car is condemned to disappear along with the myth of the worker, the central historical agent of the logistical State.
The austerity preached by Enrico Berlinguer, as we know, had disastrous repercussions even within the Italian Communist Party, and many comparisons were made to the Spartan regime. But doubtless it would have been more correct to speak only of the end of the Lycurgean system, of the decomposition into anomie of a "society" whose members had been trained for centuries only to launch an attack, and who no longer knew what to do with their existence when this occupation was suddenly denied them. If you take away the Westerner's car or motorcycle, what will be left for him to do?-if not completely fulfill the prophecy of M.l.S. Bloch, who, in 1 897, announced: "War having become a kind of stalemate in which neither side can gam the upper hand, the armies will remain face to face, constantly threatening each other but unable to strike the deciding blow. This is the future: no combat, only famine; no killing, only the bankruptcy of nations and the collapse of any social system."
The Consumption of Security
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