Commons - Italy
Discussion
The post-2011 movement for the comments
DARIO GENTILI and ANDREA MURA:
"Although a central concept for many, the commons only began to be widely acknowledged as a fundamental social practice in Italy following the 2011 Italian water referendum, which signalled the successful effort of citizens to resist, together with a law privatising water services in Italy, a more generalised attempt to privatise public services with an economic value. An aggressive campaign of privatisation had begun years earlier, but the recent necessity for austerity cuts provided a further legitimising expedient in that direction.
Social practices based on the ‘commons’, however, are not simply the expression of a movement of resistance against the private exploitation of natural resources and public goods. What became immediately clear in Italy in fact, was that the defence of the commons meant at the same time the creation of a new kind of political and social bond. A political relationship beyond classes, beyond the traditional and formal idea of citizenship, beyond any identity logics of belonging.
This is not to say that those political movements that assume the claim of the ‘commons’ as their foundation do not begin their ‘action’ as a form of resistance and response to the private exploitation and depletion of public goods. The 2011 movement certainly emerged in that way. But in its defence of the ‘commons’, it quickly expanded its range of action so as to extend the idea of common goods (beni comuni) beyond the sphere of natural resources towards what has been called the ‘immaterial’ commons (health, education, culture, knowledge, etc.).
This included, naturally, those very cultural spaces in the cities (the occupation of Teatro Valle, the day after the water referendum, belongs to this category) that had been more and more targeted by privatisation campaigners. As acts of resistance and reaction, the practices of the ‘commons’ have an unlimited possibility of action in an unlimited capitalist market. As the problematic phrase ‘work as commons’ demonstrates, they can also affect the entire world of labour." (http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/dario-gentili-andrea-mura/austerity-of-commons-struggle-for-essential)