Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur

When Silvio Berlusconi won the elections in 1994, the international press unleashed an avalanche of not particularly well-meaning commentary, while the left and the democrats expressed their own quite understandable indignation. But all this chatter threatened only to titillate the new forms of power, even in the best of cases. The truth that then had to be asserted and now has to be repeated, beyond the various electoral results, is that a critique of Berlusconi’s politics is impossible without a critique of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. More generally, a critique of “communication” (of which many continue to speak, àpropos of Berlusconi) is impossible without going against the grain of all the theories that, in the 1980s, were constructed precisely on the more or less explicit presupposition of the overcoming of capitalism and its laws by the various paradigms of communication.