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brokers, bankers, real estate promoters and developers, engineers,
consultants of all kinds, systems analysts, scientists, doctors, pub-
licists, publishers, editors, advertising execu tives, art directors,
moviemakers, entertainers, journalists, television producers and
directors, artists, writers, university professors16
belong to these elite groups. As they are extremely varied, these
groups are not characterized by a common political orientation;
neither can they be considered or defined as movements.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, by considering the Italian context, describes
how the process which brought these elites to power in today’s soci-
ety took place. In Italy, in the mid 1960s, a transformation
occurred which, in Pasolini’s opinion, was crucial and irreversible.
Principles and beliefs did not fundamentally change between the
pre-war period and the republican post-war period. In fact, after
the end of the Second World War Italy had simply shifted from a
fascist regime to a clerical-fascist regime, dominated by the Chris -
tian conservative party called Democrazia Cristiana. Most repre-
sentative seats of power had remained in the same hands, while the
main ethical and practical principles endorsed by the new State and
the new government were exactly the same as those sustained by
the fascist rhetoric: Church, motherland, family, savings, social
order, morality. But in the mid 1960s these rhetorical values sud-
denly did not matter anymore. Italy entered the industrial era and
the only real values became production and consumption. Goods
became the new idol and replaced political and clerical power.17
Pasolini’s analysis of the Italian context could be extended, mutatis
mutandis, to many Western societies after the Second World War.
But the crucial matter in this transformation, as pointed out by
Pasolini, is that the democratic process developed together with
hedonistic myths of production and consumerism.
This democratization process dates back to the early twentieth cen-
tury and is connected with the ideas of all the European and American
socialist parties. However, it is completely new when the industrial
establishment takes possession of it, starting from the mid 1960s.
INTELLECTUALS BETWEEN DISSOCIATION AND DISSENTING
258
16 Ibid, p. 34.
17 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari, pp. 128–131.
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