JP

The movement in Naples has been through the same phases as the national movement, although it also has its own particular characteristics.

For instance, the unemployed make up a considerable force in the city, especially given the progressive deindustrialization from the 1970s onwards. Their movements have also displayed some original elements in terms of their forms of organization, which are without precedent in Italy. We can also say that the current situation in some senses seems to represent a break with the past.

The years following the police murder of Carlo Giuliani at the 2001 G8 summit protests were very difficult. Not so much because there was an absence of mass mobilizations, but because it was extremely difficult to make the more radical demands of the G8 mobilization accessible to “normal” people — the very people who were most affected by the neoliberal policies.

The repressive policies were very effective. In 2008 and in 2010 there were sizeable student mobilizations, and this movement gave birth to many of the organizations which are still active today, but the impact of these student mobilizations on wider society was still relatively marginal.

Today, as a result of the crisis and the worsening of living conditions in general — but also thanks to the city’s various social movements — it seems that some issues are gaining traction in Neapolitan society.

Many very important struggles are being fought out in Naples: the fight against the requalification of the area which used to house the steelworks in Bagnoli, for example, but also the struggles around the many housing occupations, the reappropriation of abandoned spaces, the fight against the privatization and mismanagement of the refuse system and its devastating environmental effects … we could give countless examples.

Sometimes these mobilizations dissipate once the objective has been reached, or in more unfortunate cases when they are defeated. In the last few years, however, it would seem that among everyone involved there is an increasing will to move these mobilizations onto a broader or more unified political platform.

For example, if a housing complex is occupied, the objective is not just to protect that single space, but rather to use this as a springboard from which to form a collective movement around local housing policy and access to social housing which has the aim of effecting legislative change. And the same applies to other struggles.

We would say that in Naples things are moving in this direction. Everything that we do here in the ex-OPG occupation is motivated by this same attitude, and it seems to us that this attitude is now widespread.

In general, the subjective forces that we seek to mobilize, and the people “the movement” in general seeks to address, themselves participate in struggles and very often act autonomously.

There have been many migrant-led struggles in Naples (for instance a few years ago there was a movement of logistics workers which was primarily led by migrants who had been hired illegally or who had contracts which were effectively false).

We would add, though, that for reasons relating to the city’s particular social and economic conditions, migrants have remained perhaps more marginalized in terms of being involved in the planning and leading of mobilizations than they are in other contexts, such as in central-north Italy.

Even school-age students seem to be much more willing to listen and participate, compared to some years ago. For some time now in Italy we have been facing a program of particularly damaging reforms, and the school reforms are one of the starkest examples of this. Now we are beginning to see the revolt.

But in order to maximize the potentials of these new political tendencies, to “stabilize” them, we need to be able to present concrete solutions. This is what we, as a political organization, are seeking to do.