Practicing the hegemony of non-hegemony: the pluriversal politics of the Neapolitan commons movement

ABSTRACT

The concept of pluriversal politics, which encompasses the vast array of alternatives to ecologically destructive and colonial capitalism, is crucial for envisioning emancipatory futures. However, the diversity of the initiatives composing the pluriverse poses obstacles to the unity necessary to dismantle interconnected systems of oppression, thus creating an intrinsic dilemma between diversity and unity. This paper explores the navigation of this challenge within emancipatory and pluriversal projects, drawing on material from ethnographic research on the Neapolitan Commons movement. The case study illuminates how social movement actors achieve simultaneous unity and diversity through the grassroots-developed concept of ‘hegemony of non-hegemony.’ In the Neapolitan context, this framework allows diversity to thrive while maintaining essential unity, crucial for confronting economic and political powers. The findings underscore how grassroots, autonomous, and pluriversal degrowth practices can challenge capitalist growth dynamics through unity in diversity, hence suggesting the unnecessary nature of state-led, top-down, or uniformizing approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Hegemony
• pluriverse
• social movements
• commoning
• Naples
• depatriarchalization

Acknowledgements

We are deeply indebted to the collective intelligence of the Neapolitan Commons movement, whose permanent research was a founding inspiration of this paper. We also thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. All errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Global tapestry of alternatives’ is also the name of a global network of movements and initiatives inscribed in pluriversal politics: https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/

2 A concept denoting a new form of capitalism that is characterized by the increasing importance of knowledge and information in the production of wealth.

3 Conelli explains how the Italian south has been shaped by colonial discourses despite not being subject to colonization.

4 An archive of the relevant legal acts is: https://commonsnapoli.org/archivio/documenti-giuridici/. See also Capone (2022).

5 In this case, ‘Non-mixed’ refers to the exclusion of cisgender men. Generally speaking, non mixed groups aim to gather together (only) people experiencing the same axis of oppression to allow their autonomous empowerment and self-organisation.

6 ‘Feministisation of politics’ entails the idea of making politics more feminist, i.e. antidiscriminatory in an intersectional way, but also more horizontal, caring, attentive to different languages, etc. ‘Depatriarchalization of politics’ is the expression which adopted – especially in the Italian context – to make the same concept gender-neutral, as no gender can be per se associated to being more feminist than others; rather, what is important is the adherence to anti-patriarchal values. See: https://municipalisteurope.org/feministisation-of-politics/post/fop-self-assessment-a-guide-to-start-a-feministisation-process-in-your-organisation/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorenzo Velotti

Lorenzo Velotti is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and a member of the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) and of Research and Degrowth International (R&Di). During his PhD, he held a visiting position at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Lorenzo's research interests lie at the intersection of the sociology and the anthropology of social movements, as well as political ecology. For his PhD research, Lorenzo conducts engaged ethnography on the politics of care within urban commons’ movements in Naples and Barcelona.

Riccardo Buonanno

Riccardo Buonanno is a political theorist from Naples (Southern Italy) and a member of the l'Asilo community of commoners situated in the historical centre of his hometown. He is currently developing his PhD project, funded by FCT, at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (Portugal). His research concerns commons through the lens of Political Ecology, Critical Political Theory, and Political Philosophy. He sees commoning as a process of daily political and artistic creation, questioning the persistence of human dominion over Being and beings. His focus is on the governance of commons as a technique of collective imagination, designing the unexpected and indeterminacy.

Maria Francesca De Tullio

Maria Francesca De Tullio is a postdoc researcher in Constitutional Law (Federico II University of Naples). She also worked at the University of Antwerp, on the project Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities (www.spacesandcities.com), and fulfilled a research residency at Université Paris 2. She authored a book on Substantial Equality and New Dimensions of Political Participation and one on Rights, Budget Constraints, and Economic Recovery between Mirage and Reality. Other main areas of research are counter-terrorism and states of emergency, competition law on the Internet, and the collective dimension of privacy in the age of big data. Finally, she is active in co-research processes with Italian and European commons movements, and in their negotiations with administrations.