The Utopian

By Nadia Urbinati.

(Translated by Yascha Mounk)

Race riots, Italian style. Why recent confrontations between immigrant workers and mafia clans might strengthen Italian democracy.

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Just off the coast of Calabria in Southern Italy, Rosarno was home to hundreds of African migrant workers, many of them illegal immigrants. Working the local fields, they labored in appalling conditions for very low wages. In January 2010, long-standing tensions between locals and migrant workers — incited by organized crime groups — exploded into violence.

For Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorra, the African immigrants of Rosarno were “more courageous than us Italians” in their fight against mafia clans. Saviano is right. These immigrants really do have to be courageous: they’ve got nothing to lose except the few cents they somehow cobble together to survive or send back home. They have to be courageous, because they are used to being constantly at risk. They have to be courageous because they cannot hope for any protection — neither from the governments of the countries they fled (governments that often persecute them), nor from the law of the country where they now work. But it is not only Italian law that is hostile to them: all too often, they also face hostility from its inhabitants, who see African immigrants as half-man, half-beast.

These immigrants are “clandestine” in the eyes of Italian culture and society, as well in the eyes of the law. Clandestine in a total sense. For the law, they are non-existent. Their legal invisibility, in turn, gives Italians leave to exploit them with impunity, to insult them, and to maltreat them. Outside the norm, they are at everybody’s mercy: living a “bare life,” as Giorgio Agamben might say.

Irrespective of the immigrants’ intentions, the fact that they are clandestine puts them eyeball to eyeball with their native Italian equivalents: the ‘Ndrangheta, the Mafia, and the Camorra, who prosper, in part, because they make use of the formal and civil clandestineness of immigrants. Clandestine force plays off against clandestine force. As we have seen in Rosarno, the clandestine immigrants, not our own outlaws, ultimately pay the price of defeat. When they use force — and, given that the law gives them neither voice nor visibility, they have no other means at their disposal — the weakest and the most exposed, those towards whom the law is indifferent, lose.

But when these immigrants insist that they be paid their promised pittance, they — ignorant of the ‘Ndrangheta’s Code of Honor, and freer than the Calabrians — do so with their heads raised high. This is why their violence — though unjustified in a civil society — is an accusation against Italy’s democracy. The fact that they are radically and totally exploited makes them the natural enemies of those who use them to boost the profits of their illicit business interests, of those who are themselves enemies of the law and of civil society. These immigrants should be seen as friends of democracy, if only because they show with tremendous clarity how grave the problem of organized crime in Italy really is.

The events of Rosarno call to mind the struggle of Giuseppe Di Vittorio. Di Vittorio, the founder of the post-war trade union movement, CGIL, fought against the great Southern landowners to improve the treatment of women and children in the rural Tavoliere area of Apulia. His choice, too, was between legality and illegality. At the age of seven and a half, Di Vittorio was already a day laborer. At the age of twelve, at a protest of day laborers demanding a salary — as opposed to the meager daily wages still given to immigrants today — he was involved in a shoot-out with the police, during which Ambrogio, a boy his age, was killed. Di Vittorio was not fighting to eliminate his adversaries, and he was opposed to violence. He was fighting to change rules and social relations. His adversaries were the wheeler — dealers of the underworld, and didn’t think twice about using violence to prevent day laborers forming unions, or to stop the transformation of the conflict from a violent rebellion — which justified repression — into a form of civic contestation. Then, as now, working within the law would have rendered public what has to remain invisible if organized crime is to make a profit.

The day laborers mobilized by Di Vittorio lived in dirty rat holes. They went on strike for an extra ladleful of watery soup with which to wet their dry bread. They were the natural ancestors of today’s clandestine immigrants.

There is, however, one difference which renders today’s emergency more serious and worrying. Back then, those who shot at the day laborers were professional policemen. Today, the citizens themselves have taken over this task, manipulated as they are by a propagandistic wave which is itself inspired by the rhetoric of the parties that govern Italy. Like a pestilent wind, this kind of propaganda is capable of instigating terrible things, all the more so in those parts of the country over which the law has only a feeble hold.

Di Vittorio was right. A system that makes illegal day labor possible knows no compromise. It fosters a system of illicit money—grabbing that knows no regional boundaries, and it is the total enemy of government by law. The fight against the system of day labor and illegality has to be won, not just for the sake of the poor immigrants and peasants of the South, but also for the sake of Italian democracy.

Nadia Urbinati, Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University, is a prominent critic of the Berlusconi government and a regular commentator on Italian politics for La Repubblica.