Cooperative modulations: the antimafia movement and struggles over land and cooperativism in eight Sicilian municipalities

Abstract

Debate on the antimafia movement has placed the phenomenon mainly in the urban civil society tradition of new Italian social movements. While acknowledging the resonance of antimafia mobilization in this context, this article explores a different tradition, wherein struggles against the mafia in Sicily are analysed alongside, and in constant interconnection with, the development of the agrarian cooperative movement of the island. Focusing on the Alto Belice area of western Sicily, the article argues that antimafia politics evolved from an association with agricultural workers' cooperativism in an anti-middleman direction after the 1950s land reform. Moreover, it assesses ethnographically how this tradition has influenced actors in the contemporary, largely successful, movement of antimafia cooperatives that cultivate land confiscated from the mafia by the Italian state. It examines how these actors link to this genealogy, associating their contemporary activity, in largely imaginary ways, to this history of struggles, and claiming inheritance over it.

Keywords::

• Mafia
• antimafia
• cooperatives
• Sicily
• land reform
• legality.

Notes

¹ The village where my fieldwork was based is San Giovanni; research also involved participants from other Alto Belice villages, such as Corleone.

² In Sicily, a bracciante is a person who works as a field hand, making a living through daily wage labour in an agrarian context. Historically, braccianti refers to landless peasants.

³Decreti Gullo, notably Decree Number 279, 19 October 1944 (‘concessions of uncultivated land to farmers’).

⁴ In the Coalition, the conservative Christian Democracy (DC) party was in the majority but the PCI also participated. The Coalition collapsed due to Cold War tensions when the Communists were thrown out of government in ‘the May 1947 crisis’ –partly induced by the dramatic events of Portella (Ginsborg 2003: 111–113).

⁵ ‘The cooperative is the cell of the future socialist organization’, noted Gullo (in Rossi-Doria 1983, 106).

⁶ The scheme I suggest is not all-encompassing, and allows for differentiated routes to development of collective action – as well as for its disintegration. For instance, the collapse of the regional association of Left cooperatives (USCA) was due to corrupt practices internal to USCA rather than the outcome of mafia activity (Sabetti 2002, xi).