Pier Paolo Pasolini

In politics too, or better, in the social debate, Pasolini was able to create scandal and debate with some assertions that were as much unheard as, at the same time, true: during the disorders of 1969, when the autonomist university students were acting in a guerrilla-like fashion against the police in the streets of Rome, all the leftist forces declared their complete support for the students, and described the disorders as a civil fight of proletarians against the system. Pasolini, instead, alone among the communists, declared that he was with the police; or, more precisely, with the policemen, considering them true proletarians who were sent to fight against boys of their same age for a poor salary and reasons which they could not understand, because they had not had the fortune of being able to study. This ironic statement, however, didn't stop him from contributing to the autonomist Lotta continua movement.

Pasolini was also an ardent critic of consumismo, i.e. consumerism, which he felt had rapidly destroyed Italian society in the late 1960s/early 1970s, particularly the class of the subproletariat, to which he felt both sexually and artistically drawn. Pasolini observed that the kind of purity which he perceived in the members of that class (as portrayed e.g. in Acccattone) was rapidly vanishing, the animalistic joie de vivre of the boys being rapidly replaced with more bourgeois ambitions such as a house and a family. The coprophagia scenes in Salò were described by him as being a comment on the processed food industry.

Not only economical globalization but also the cultural domination of the North of Italy (around Milan) over other regions, especially the South, primarily through the power of TV, angered him. He opposed the gradual disappearance of Italian dialects by writing some of his poetry in Friulian, the dialect of the region where he spent his childhood.