The Neapolitan way to the commons: poetics of irony and ‘creative use of the law’ in the case of L’Asilo

ABSTRACT

This article is the result of ethnographic research exploring the relationships between social movements for the commons and local institutions in Naples. Proposed as an effective counter-narrative that opposes the clientelistic and corrupt management of public resources, the approach introduced by the Neapolitan commons network has become a model on a national scale and beyond. My aim is to describe the social and cultural factors underlying commoning practices and policies for the commons in a context that expresses specific conceptions of the political. I will dwell, in particular, on the experience of L’Asilo, the first community of commons activists who obtained recognition from the local administration for the ‘civic use’ of a public building that they had occupied in the historic centre of Naples.

RIASSUNTO

Questo articolo è il frutto di una ricerca etnografica dedicata alle relazioni tra i movimenti sociali per i beni comuni e le istituzioni locali a Napoli. Nata in opposizione alle forme clientelari e corrotte di gestione dell’arte e della cultura, la rete dei beni comuni napoletani è divenuta un modello su scala nazionale e vanta connessioni con diversi movimenti europei. L’articolo si sofferma sui processi sociali e culturali che sottendono le pratiche di commoning e le politiche per i commons in un contesto che esprime specifiche concezioni del politico. Mi concentrerò, in particolare, sull’esperienza de L’Asilo, la prima comunità auto-gestita che ha ottenuto da un’amministrazione comunale l’ ‘uso civico’ di un edificio pubblico del centro storico che i suoi stessi attivisti avevano precedentemente occupato.

KEYWORDS:

• Commons
• clientelism
• irony
• law
• Naples
• social movements

PAROLE CHIAVE:

• Beni comuni
• clientelismo
• diritto
• ironia
• movimenti sociali
• Napoli

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the ERC project ‘Heteropolitics. Refiguring the Common and the Political’ has received funding from the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 724692). I am indebted to my fellow travellers: P.I. Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Aimilia Voulvouli, Manuela Zechner, George Dafermos, and Maria Deligiannidou; and to my Neapolitan friends. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their important comments.

Notes

1. As is well known, the academic discussion on the commons started with a provocative article by U.S. biologist Garrett Hardin (1968) and was developed mostly in the economic field by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom (cf. 1990).

2. Cf. https://www.che-fare.com/tamu-libreria-napoli/.

3. The DeMa local candidates list (from the first letters of the mayor’s surname) supported him in the 2011 and 2016 elections.

4. It is common knowledge that the 5-Star Movement has built its success around the populist construal of its political proposals (e.g. Biorcio and Sampugnaro 2019).

5. L. La Bruna, “Di Maio e il populista De Magistris” (la Repubblica, January 27, 2020). See also, e.g. C. Formenti, “De Magistris, il populista di sinistra tra luci e ombre” (MicroMega, November 28, 2017); O. Ragone, “De Magistris-De Luca, il duello dei populisti familisti” (la Repubblica, December 31, 2017).

6. Such institutional rhetoric concerns many of the Italian commoning experiences that surged forth in recent years.

7. As stated by De Angelis and Harvie (2014, 292), ‘there is a double impasse, for both capital and anti-capitalist social movements. Capital needs the commons in order to deal with the crisis. Social movements need to confront not only capital’s enclosures of commons, but also its attempts to co-opt commons’.

8. On 14 June 2007, the Italian Minister of Justice appointed a commission charged with writing a draft bill for the reform of the civil code rules on public goods (never modified since 1942). In 2008, the commission, chaired by Rodotà, submitted a highly innovative proposal to the Ministry.

9. The special issue “I beni comuni” of the journal Questione giustizia (2/2017) offers a valuable overview of this debate.

10. The Institute was founded in 1975 by a group of intellectuals linked to the figure of Benedetto Croce and close to historical and philosophical themes such as the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, the Italian Risorgimento and Italy’s Southern Question.

11. Other anthropologists have used E. Said’s concept of orientalism referring to the Italian context and to the hegemonic construction of southern Italy (i.e. Schneider 1998; Zinn 2001).

12. Naples has often been depicted as clientelist, corrupted, and at the mercy of ruling classes that maintain special relations with organized crime, i.e. Allum and Allum (2008).

13. This meeting, called ‘Commons and cities’, was held in Naples, at L’Asilo and in other commons spaces.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 724692).

Notes on contributors

Antonio Vesco

Dr Antonio Vesco is a researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, Italy. He holds a PhD in Anthropology (University of Siena) and in Political Science (University of Paris 1 Sorbonne), and has recently completed a three-year post-doctoral fellowship within the ERC project Heteropolitics. Refiguring the Common and the Political. His research interests focus on commons and institutions, party politics, political corruption, and the interconnections between Mafia clans and the state. On these topics he has published several papers in Italian and international journals, and the monograph Come pesci nell’acqua. Mafie, impresa e politica in Veneto (Rome 2018, with G. Belloni).