Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy

ABSTRACT

This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democratic assembly; of being and having laboured together as a social body in all of its corporeal materiality and resistant subjectivity. Having made democracy their own through years of assembly and collective law-making that sought to imagine a world outside of the ‘Republic of Property’, the Italians I met reminisced not only about water but also about this practical process as a kind of inalienable commonwealth. Today, they face the state’s refusal to recognize their claims to democracy and its willingness to overrun popular will, even as their democratic process has left its traces.

KEYWORDS:

• Water
• democracy
• neo-liberalism
• law

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In this paper, I use commons (bene comune) and commonwealth (comune) interchangeably, even though there is an Italian politics to the use of one over the other. I cannot deal with the intricacies of this here since it is not relevant to the argument.

2 For a scholarly treatment of the same topic, see also Roberts (2008).

3 I thank Ugo Mattei for this formulation and clarification, made in a conversation that took place February 2017 in Turin, Italy.

4 Indeed, as Carrezzo and Fantini argue, ‘the key role of municipalities in the area of local public services may be considered a structural feature of the Italian economy of the twentieth century’. By the beginning of the last century, so-called Italian ‘municipalism’ was consolidated in legislation, and political parties across the political spectrum all held that private enterprises were to be excluded from the provisioning of essential services. The authors note that ‘the opposition of the local authorities to implement European regulation promoted in the early 1990s can, in the Italian case, be explained by the rooted consideration of water management as a constitutive component of local governance and identity’ and by the ‘intimate connection between water and local government’ (2016, 109).

5 This citation is taken from a conversation that took place with Ugo Mattei in Turin, February 2017.

6 This phrase was used in a talk by Marco Bersani at a conference (Agorà dell’acqua e dei beni comuni) in Rome in November 2015.

7 This conversation took place in the offices of Toscana’s Regional Council in Florence, February 2017.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article funded by Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research [9066].