Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy

Italian Studies, 2018

Serviço Social & Sociedade

This article, the result of a Postdoctoral research, sought to understand the interconnections between Welfare and Italian Social Service and analyze the impacts of its crisis and the advance of neoliberalism in social policies, based on the study of the M'Imprendo Project. He identified that there is a culture of rights and citizenship in Italy, heritage of Welfare, and that such impacts threaten the training/practice of the social worker who has an influence of Sociology and Social Sciences in the academic sphere.

The author claims that neoliberal discourse plays -hide and seek‖ with the state, which appears at the same time absent and present, negated and necessitated. In order to test its limits, the paper historicizes such discourse by engaging with the Italian case. More specifically, this study examines the most representative figure of Italian neoliberalism, former Prime Minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, and his ambiguous relationship with the state. Drawing on Marx and Gramsci's conceptualization of the state, the paper sheds light on the Italian context as well as the more general characteristics of the neoliberal state.

2014

The impact of neo-liberal globalisation on the nation-state has been extensively studied in terms of politico-economic restructuring and forms of governmentality and securitisation. While the former speaks of a process of de-nationalisation, the latter brings about a re-nationalisation process. In both cases, though, the focus has only been on one component of the nation-state, i.e. the state. The nation has either been treated as a given backdrop or merely ignored. This articles aims to bring the nation back as a way to better contextualise practices of socio-spatial exclusion associated with one particular aspect of neoliberal globalisation, namely international migration. By analysing parliamentary debates in Italy between 1986 and 2014, the article explores the intersections between neoliberalism and cultural essentialism as they conflate in what I call the 'neoliberal culturalist nation'. This construct permits to identify the role that a national culturalist imaginary plays in prompting and justifying governmental practices of securitization, which in turn are implicated in the production of vulnerable and expendable labour force. Moreover, it reveals how a neoliberal workfarist and individualised logic is functional to the 'normalisation' of the foreign immigrant and the reproduction of the national titular group. My argument is that a national culturalist imaginary exists in a mutually reinforcing relation with, rather than in opposition to neoliberalism. Far from keeping nation and state as ontologically distinct or theorising their decoupling, the article points instead to a renewed spatial isomorphism between nation and state which comes indeed to epitomise the very process of current re-nationalisation.

Fascism, 2013

The present works sets up to analyze the relationship between radical right activism and the unfolding of the financial crisis in Europe, investigating the extent to which the current economic circumstances have influenced right-wing movements’ political supply and repertoires of action. Using the case study of the Italian neo-fascist group CasaPound, and based on a mix of historiography and ethnographic methods, the present work systematically analyzes the ways in which the group tackles the economic crisis. We find that the crisis offers a whole new set of opportunities for the radical right to reconnect with its fascist legacy, and to develop and innovate crisis-related policy proposals and practices. The crisis shapes the groups’ self-understanding and its practices of identity building, both in terms of collective rediscovery of the fascist regime’s legislation, and in terms of promotion of the fascist model as a ‘third way’ alternative to market capitalism. Even more important...

2016

The paper explores the changes in public action that have occurred over the last twenty years in the city of Rome, focusing on two case studies which represent an example of policy restructuring and depict the new role attributed to private initiative and investments, to the detriment of public roles and public property. The paper debates the interpretive utility of the concept of neoliberalization for understanding these processes of change. The first case study regards the privatization of a public utility in charge with providing water and energy; the second one focuses on the valorization of a public real-estate property. Both cases highlight processes of marketization and commodification, depicting a neoliberal mode of public action, widely regarded as the obvious response to the inefficiencies of more traditional administrative action. The theoretical con-ceptualization of neoliberalization allows one to approach these changes as part of a more organized and coherent framework...

2010

Abstract: The paper traces back the path that has transformed the Italian Communist Party from its original revolutionary stance into a democratic government party, leading to a radical change in its original political outlook. Its recent dissolution into a new political entity, a great deal antithetic to its original ideological roots, has completed the process. The changing nature of the party was reflected in the very different roles performed in the political and economic life of post-war Italy.

2016

Aim of this work is trying to show, from a mainly theoretical standpoint but with constant references to Italian concrete cases, how neoliberalism, even though usually described as a State withdrawal from many issues left to individuals' freedom, would actually represent an increase in forms of State intervention and control. The paper aims to analyze what forms this control may take, starting from current economic crisis, finding they are attributable to two scenarios: an explicit centralizing form, analyzed through the analytical tools of " state of exception " literature (Schmitt, Agamben); an implicit technical form, studied referring to the literature on " government through numbers " (Porter, Power, Miller, Es-peland, Desrosier). The paper also tries to show, once again through concrete examples, and by comparison with Polanyi's analysis of resistance to '900 classical liberalism, how behind the two neoliberal power there would be the same strength to impose to consciences, and most of all what would be the consequences of this for the possibility for social movements to try to deconstruct neoliberalism's discourse, and to challenge it by collective action.

American Anthropologist, 2010

ABSTRACT In Italy, the term precarizzazione (precarious-ization) refers to the process of implementing neoliberal policies to transition toward a semipermanent and privatized labor regime but also to the normalization of psychic uncertainty and hypervigilance of worker-citizens. In this article, I examine “precarious workers” and a psychological harassment called “mobbing,” specifically, and suggest that these practices of labor exclusion of a transitional work regime produce emergent subjectivities through an analytics of anticipation. I illustrate the social, political, and psychic effects of imagining neoliberalism, as Italians do in this context, not as complete but, rather, as a metadiscursive object of emotionally charged apprehension and anticipation.