Speech by Maurizio Coppola, member of the national coordination of Potere al Popolo in the panel «Between people’s power and liberal democracy – Traps and necessities in the struggle for liberation»
This presentation aims to be a contribution to the strategic debate on “what is to be done?” in the specific context we entered in Europe in general and in Italy specifically since the Third Great Depression (1) (financial crisis 2008 and European debt crisis starting 2010/2011). This crisis has provoked an ultra-conservative reorganization of politics and society in our region. Conservative and neo-fascist forces have recovered institutional and social power through the electoral advancement of the ultra-right and the emerging hegemony of conservative values such as individualism and xenophobia. Moreover, social policies increasingly aim to guarantee the shrinking profitability of capital to the detriment of social welfare and the democratic rights of working people (seen in pension reforms, the raising of the retirement age, and the widespread working precarity and disproportionate unemployment of the youth and women). Once again, wars have become the “continuation of policy with other means”(2), as demonstrated by the economic incentives for the war in Ukraine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (3). But these are not simply isolated political and economic “events”; they are all inter-dependent pieces which form an entire picture of today’s global capitalism.
It is in this global context that we need to build our structured and organized actions towards radical alternatives. The strategic question of how to build the transition from what the Kurdish movement defines as “capitalist modernity” to socialism must get back to our political agenda, above all because of both the deep structural crisis the global system is producing and the (many) defeats and the (few) successes the socialist movement has experienced in the last decades. From a revolutionary perspective, this question of the transition to a radical alternative can only be answered based on a “concrete analysis of the concrete situation”, that should lead to the culmination of a genuine synthesis of theory and practice (4).
For answering the leading questions the workshop is asking, we need to theoretically and historically frame two main points: First, national states may well be weakened in the context of globalization and sovereignty transfer (in our case, above all to the European Union), but we are convinced that nations, national governments and institutions continue to maintain a great part of national sovereignty. They also shape the ideological, cultural, political, and economic structure of class relations and link territories to the state. The national state remains the strategic space in which our class and our actions are organized. Second, history advances in cycles, through the alternate stages of revolution, counter-revolution and newer revolutions. In the last fifteen years, European social movements have been thrown into a defensive position, and a counter-revolutionary period began that is still ongoing. In order to “not continue as usual” (and fail) or to surrender to the counter-revolution, we need to adapt and re-orient our strategies and tactics to this specific context. Today, no one would claim that revolution (in the classic and strict sense of the term) is topical in the immediate sense. We are much more in a phase in which we need to prepare the conditions out of which a revolutionary situation can be borne (5).
The face of the crisis in Italy
As an electoral option, Potere al Popolo was officially born in November 2017 (6), but the political process resulting in the launching of the new political organization can be dated to 2014/2015 and was located in the city of Naples, in the Southern part of the country. There are two important milestones of this process: first, the publication, in 2014, of “Dove sono i nostri. Lavoro, classi e movimenti nell’Italia della crisi” [Where are we? Labour, classes and movements in Italy in crisis] by the political collective Clash City Workers (7). It’s a book about the class composition of contemporary Italy, the forms of representation and struggle the class is adopting, and the perspectives of a radical change in the country. Second, the occupation of a former psychiatric prison abandoned by the public institutions in the middle of the city of Naples and its transformation into a place of sociality, organization and struggle (8).
But before entering the details of this organizational process, it is necessary to step back and look at the contemporary economic, social and political conditions of Italy in which this process was born and developed. Italy is characterized by a large social and economic division between a well industrialized North and un underdeveloped South. The North’s economic primacy is defined by small and medium supplier companies producing for the industries of the core European countries of the continent, a higher integration of the young and female labour force into the regular economy, and higher wages and better developed social welfare structures. On the contrary, Italy’s South is characterized by a higher unemployment rate that reaches peaks of around 45% for people under 25 years old in the main urban centres (Napoli and Palermo, for example), lesser integration of women in the regular labour market, higher labour precarity due to irregular work and lower wages, deindustrialization and an orientation of the economy to tourism and services, and the state’s presence primarily as a force of repression rather than a provider of social welfare benefits. In the past decade (2010-2020), this socio-economic situation led to a negative net migration rate of 600.000.
Politically, the last fifteen to twenty years also represented an important change in the Italian landscape. First: In the general elections of 2008, radical left parties lost their seats in the national parliament, and there have been no more socialist or communist deputies represented in it since. Second, starting from 2009, the Italian version of the “populist turn” got a clearer face with the irruption of the Five-Star-Movement in the electoral game. Its populism was strongly characterized by conservative and even reactionary positions such as “post-ideological ideology” or “neither right nor left-wing” on the one hand, and by progressive positions like “the people against the corrupted political elite” and support for a basic social benefit for poor families and workers on the other. This led to its gains in the general elections in 2013 (25% of the vote) and 2018 (over 32%), with its key electoral bases concentrated in the poorer and deindustrialized regions of the South. Third, we have seen the strengthening of the current governing right-wing party Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) which passed from less than 2% in 2013 and 4.4% in 2018 to 26% of the votes in 2022.
This party has its historical roots in the culture of fascism and neo-fascism and keeps ultra-conservative positions that are embodied in the slogan “god, homeland and family”. In its economic, social and foreign policies, the party represents the continuation of neoliberal and atlantistic (pro EU and pro NATO) positions. We also need to add that the reinforcement of the Brothers of Italy does not constitute per se a “fascistization” of Italy’s vote since in absolute terms, the center-right coalition has remained stable for years now. What has changed is the distribution among the coalition partners, with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia losing support. Fourth, the electoral participation has fallen drastically in the last years. In the general elections of 2006, 84% of the people with the right to vote went to the polls, whereas by 2022 this rate had diminished to 64%. In the regional elections of 2023 in the two main regions of Italy, only 37% (Lazio) and 41% (Lombardia) of those eligible participated. Even if elections remain a central moment of politicization for society at large, abstentionism is a reality we must face today.
With this mutation of the political landscape came a mutation of social conflict in Italy. Confederal trade unions accelerated their integration into the bourgeois institutions and, by consequence, lost their capacity to successfully organise labour actions or nationally coordinated political mobilizations. On the other side, new forms of union organizations – the so called grassroot unions – have grown in precarious sectors such as logistics and agriculture where labour conditions are characterized by high exploitation, low wages and irregular and undocumented work. The historically strong communist and autonomous social movements (those with a radical and Marxist ideology but organized outside of the traditional left-wing parties) have lost their position as a point of reference for larger social groups (above all students) and hence their ability to mobilise social and political power. The classical “division of political labour” between strong labour and youth movements outside of the institutions and radical political representatives defending their demands inside the institutions broke away in the years 2008-2012.
Recomposing the working class and a culture of struggle
This changing context forced political and social organizations to re-orient their political practices. In Naples, the student collective CAU (Collettivo Autorganizzato Universitario) and the aforementioned Clash City Workers decided to occupy the abandoned former psychiatric prison in March 2015 in order to restructure the social and political work they carried on in the city. In the Ex Opg Je so’ pazzo a mode of making politics was developed that tried to overcome the difficulties faced in the last decades and to make a step forward politically and organizationally (9). For this, we need to understand the three main practices. First, the Ex Opg Je so’ pazzo was immediately conceptualized as a Peoples’ House, meaning a physical place where the working class of a specific territory can meet, organise, and develop mutual aid activities in order to respond to their specific social needs.
The idea of People’s Houses is historically linked to the post-World War II tradition of the Communist Party of Italy. “A party cell for every bell tower” (Pietro Secchia) was the slogan for the idea that the Communist party needed to be a counter-hegemonic power against the dominant project of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party not only politically and institutionally, but also culturally and socially. The People’s Houses have exactly this objective, being a project of counter-hegemony by approaching human life in its totality, and not only as a political subject. While the occupation of the Ex Opg Je so’ pazzo in Napoli served as an example for other territories in the country, occupations should not be fetishised. If spaces are difficult to occupy and maintain, efforts should be done to rent a physical space in which a People’s House can be opened. Because it’s not the matter of occupying, but of having a space where inclusive social relations can be developed as an alternative to capitalist modernity. In this sense, People’s Houses are to be considered as “islands of socialism”.
Secondly, if the People’s Houses are the skeleton, mutualism and mutual aid practices are the living flesh of the organization’s body. It is the tool that links the militancy of the organization to the working and popular classes in the specific territory, reflects the social needs of the people and responds to them, and acts as a key tool of political organization. Thus, mutual aid practices serve as a tool of social inquiry and help us find the answers to the following questions: what are the material conditions of the working people? What are their immediate social needs? What are their political perspectives? At the same time, mutual aid practices are a response to the social fragmentation of today’s working class. Such practices recompose and unite the people socially divided in work and everyday life. Mutual aid intervenes in the fields which the social welfare state has abandoned in the process of neoliberal restructuration by following the principles of gratuitousness, self-organization and reciprocity. Typical fields of intervention are legal support for precarious workers and migrants, medical support, but also cultural and recreative activities such as theatre, sports, and dance. The main objectives are to respond to the social needs of the people, and to prove that even in the given conditions it is possible to develop new social relations through responding to these needs. For that, mutualism is not simply charity, but serves as one of the main political instruments in the class struggle of our times.
In order to politicize mutualism and build people’s power we must step from the individual to the collective level and develop our social and political struggles around this. For example, it means that if the legal support for precarious workers is repeatedly being provided to irregular workers, a political campaign against irregular work must be developed. Such a campaign could pressure the labour inspectorate into denouncing the irregularity, intervening against the employers who hire without contracts, or mobilizing undocumented migrants against the political institutions which keep them exploitable around the demand of papers for all (10). This approach considers the institutions of the liberal state neither as simply the prolonged and exclusively repressive arm of the bourgeoisie, nor as a neutral field in which lobbying is enough to change the course of things. The state institutions are much more a social and political battlefield through which we can gain material improvements for the popular classes, organize people’s power from and of the people and show that we can win with a message of hope.
In summary, our analysis of People’s Houses, mutualism, and people’s power forms the basis of our understanding of socialism. We see our task as a political and social process that does not postpone the achievement of socialism to a time yet to be determined, but practices building it here and now . Organizing relief in order to assure a life in dignity, recomposing the working class, rescuing the collective life, making solidarity practical and rebuilding the culture of struggle are fundamental elements in today’s socialist practice.
The field of representation: a field to invest in?
In the triennium 2015-2017 the Ex Opg Je so’ pazzo from Naples was a model for the opening of many other People’s Houses in Rome, Florence, Turin, Padova and other cities around the country. The intensification of mutual aid activities produced an activation of younger generations with no ideological political education, since it was the social practice itself which served as a tool of political aggregation. This wave of mutualism corresponded to a renewal of the historical experiences of “social centres” from the 1990s but did not automatically overcome the difficulties inherent in them. Indeed, mutualism demands effort, time, and energy in militant social activities, meaning there is a risk of reproducing mistakes without any (auto-)critical reflection, since habits can become a “second nature” and form a movement of “things” which we do not control anymore and which, on the contrary, controls us. Additionally, the concentration on the social level of intervention has meant, for many Italian social movements, abandoning the field of politics in favour of what could be called a “social illusion”. In this perspective, the world can be changed without taking political and state power or by settling only for counter-power (11). Thus, the field of political representation and elections is considered to be either insignificant or to be a machine that co-opts individual leaders of the social movements into state institutions.
When Potere al Popolo entered the electoral field at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, the new political movement had to confront itself with this entire picture. On the institutional level, we faced an apparently paradoxical situation: the lack of left-wing parties in the parliament able to integrate working class demands into the state institutions, the affirmation of a “populist moment” represented by the electoral growth of the Five-Star-Movement and, at the same time, a growing demobilization of younger generations in the electoral process (abstentionism). A similar paradox situation persists also on the social level: a weakening of strong conflictual social and union mobilizations on precise political topics since 2008-2010, a fragmentation of social movement organizations and the consequent concentration of their activities on the local, and at the same the rising of new forms of social activation through mutualism.
Entering the field of representation aims to respond to the double challenges produced by these two tendencies: building the self-representation of the movements and social organizations developed around mutualism in the absence of a genuine institutional left and, at the same time, also using elections to politicise a younger generation looking for a political alternative (despite a growing abstentionism, elections remain a “political moment”, even if turned negatively; during the general elections of 2018 and 2022, Potere al Popolo was able to mobilize and organize permanently a lot of young people in the territories where it works). This perspective is based on the conviction that elections represent a “political space” which is neither homogeneous, nor “empty” and simply waiting to be occupied by an alternative. It is an eminently unstable field of forces. This instability stems from the fact that social mobilizations suffer more defeats than victories and from the fact that the link with the transformation of the landscape of political representation remains very tenuous and fragile.
“Fight against the impossible and win”
What conclusions can be drawn from six years’ worth of experiences of the above-mentioned strategy? The “electoral turn” of Potere al Popolo was not a top-down manoeuvre exclusively based on a charismatic leader and a modernized communication. In the three months of preparation for the electoral campaign of Potere al Popolo in 2017 and 2018, several territorial assemblies were built all over Italy, assemblies which transcend the time of elections and which still constitute the core nucleus of the organization today (with around 60 all over the country). Unlike other electoral alliances, Potere al Popolo was born during elections, but not exclusively for the elections. Electoral moments serve as catalysts of political activation, but only a strong process of construction allows movements to grow after the elections. This construction contains territorial rooting through People’s Houses, mutualism, political education, and political campaigns.
If we look at the electoral results of the general elections, Potere al Popolo collected over 370,000 votes in 2018 (corresponding to 1.1%) and over 400,000 votes in 2022 (1.4% in the coalition Unione Popolare). What do this numbers tell us? First of all, today, the electoral space for a radical left corresponds to around 400,000 voters. In 2018, we probably overestimated the potential of breaking into the electoral space and going beyond the barrage of 3% by underestimating the consensus the Five-Star-Movement was able to collect in the given context. The elections in 2022 confirmed that without any deeper rooting in the territories and the popular classes and without the revival of a general mass movement, the electoral space to occupy for Potere al Popolo will remain limited. Does it mean that it is not worth running for elections? From our experiences, elections are a political moment in which people politicize; thus, it’s not about a yes-or-no question, but about the way of using these electoral moments by creating consensus around a political program in order to strengthen the process of organization of the popular classes.
Today, we are convinced that it is impossible to imagine a revolutionary process as anything other than a transfer of legitimacy giving precedence to “socialism from below” through interference with representative forms of politics. It is a long process during which we can not ignore any field of conflict (territories, workplace, social sectors, state institutions etc.). It is only by facing what seems impossible that we can build the conditions for a radical alternative.
References
(1) See Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World in Economic Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, notebook n° 4, published on October 10, 2023.
(2) See E. Brancaccio, La guerra capitalista. Competizione, centralizzazione, nuovo conflitto imperialista, 2022.
(3) See F. Schettino, Le caratteristiche economiche della questione palestinese, 2023.
(4) See G. Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought, 1924.
(5) E.M.S. Namboodiripad, P. Govinda Pillai, Gramsci’s Thought, 2021.
(6) Potere al Popolo Interview Je Pazzo
(7) For a resumé and a critical discussion, see M. Coppola, Dove sono i nostri?, 2014.
(8) Revolutionary social centre in an occupied prison – Ex OPG in Naples.
(9) See the publication Manuale del mutualismo published by Ex Opg Je so’ pazzo in 2019:
(10) For a deeper analysis of the social and political struggle with and for migrants, see M. Coppola, Tackling the Rightward Shift with Solidarity. In Naples, activists are turning to mutualism and new class politics, in Solidarity cities in Europe, 2019
(11) D. Bensaïd, On the return of the politico-strategic question, 2006.
