Giacomo D'Alisa

Rights of Resistance : The Garbage Struggles for Environmental Justice in Campania, Italy

Even when we manage to touch on the productive, ontological dimension of the problematic and the resistances that arise there, however, we will still not be in the position . . . to point to any already existing and concrete elaboration of a political alternative to Empire. And no such effective blueprint will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours. It will arise only in practices. At a certain point in his thinking Marx needed the Paris Commune in order to make the leap and conceive communism in concrete terms as an effective alternative to capitalist society. *Hardt and Negri, Empire, 206

Civil and Uncivil Actors for a Degrowth Society

Within the context of the ecological crisis and technocratic drift of western nations whose overarching goal is economic growth, a plea for degrowth is emerging. In this essay, the concept of degrowth is adopted as an interpretative frame to describe a variety of forms of grassroots activism, mainly across crisis-ridden Europe. Particular attention is devoted to the distinction between forms of alternative activism that respect conventional societal norms and forms of resistance that fundamentally reject some of the key tenets of contemporary market economies. These two forms of grassroots mobilization, whose actors we define, respectively, as ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’, constitute different (albeit perhaps complementary) imaginaries emerging out of the civil society arena, thus likely to lead to a profound reconsideration of authority (and legitimacy). The integration of both dimensions may contribute to the construction of a new degrowth society.

Voices, Clues, Numbers : Roaming Among Waste in Campania

A region in the Italian South, Campania comprises five provinces: Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, Salerno, and Naples, with a total population of almost 6 million people. This population, however, is...