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Paper short abstract

This paper surveys a migrant solidarity movement in Naples, tracing emergent forms of labour-based resistance that unsettle the Fordist figure of the citizen-worker. It invites rethinking social struggle beyond wage labour, through the strategies of informality and irregularity unfolding today.

Paper long abstract

In Naples, traditional labour mobilisation was hardly the answer to encroaching precarisation. The city’s semi-peripheral labour landscape has systematically been described by high rates of unemployment, sub-employment and informalisation; a symptom of the “Southern Question” that compounds socio-economic disparities between North and South Italy. Where labour unions found limited support, structural marginalisation has made Naples an important centre for social struggles spearheaded by the disempowered.

This paper surveys one such emergent organisation, a migrant-led social movement whose radicalizing linchpin foregrounds not citizenship, but labour. Taking after a socially embedded radical tradition, Movimento Migranti e Rifugiati Napoli (MMRN) strives to construct a mutual-aid platform that actively de-ethnicises migrant struggles. From this angle, a migrant is first and foremost a worker, (more or less) independently of ethnic origin and administrative status. By focusing on common experiences of labour exploitation and social discrimination, MMRN has built a movement that legally represents over 10,000 people in the Neapolitan hinterland and enjoys direct communication channels with local institutions, in an attempt to override (or at least limit) exclusionary national prerogatives. In tracing this renewed form of political organization and its inherent tensions, this paper points to the potential disentangling of the worker-citizen as the political subjectivity par excellence and, consequently, investigates the potential for solidarities beyond wage labour strictly defined.

In troubling times, the aim of the paper is to shed ethnographic light on a hopeful case that synthesizes a radical labour tradition with new possibilities for collective resistance, grounded in "digging where you stand".