The Italian Southern question and Democratic Confederalism

Reader’s submission: A Reflection on the Southern Question and Democratic Confederalism.

It is not an exhaustive analysis, but a first step into developing a debate on the topic, and a revolutionary theory based on our history. For this reason, we invite our readers to send any answers, insights, further elaborations or critiques, which may be published on our website.

The southern question represents the largest single contradiction of the Italian nation-state. The roots of this contradiction lie in the statist practice and mentality, based on centralisation and the cancellation of differences, in the form of the Italian nation state, but also of power structures of Southern Italy.

The resolution of the Italian southern question necessitates its own specific political organization: every political solution dictated by the State has revealed itself to be fruitless and counterproductive, seeing as they have all been in substantial disagreement with our peoples’ most intimate aspirations. Even official Italian socialism has revealed itself to be rather corporativist and northern-oriented, aiming at the organisation of factory workers from the north, but being unable to offer an alternative to the capitalist system to Southern Italy, tied to rural life and based on the values of the land.

To find a solution to the southern question, it is necessary to understand the history of the South, particularly the history of its communal life, of the self-organisation of society, and to be conscious, at the same time, of the attacks it has endured.

Our shared history, despite the diversity of identities, peoples and historical periods, has seen several instances of widespread popular resistance to authority. In antiquity, during the so-called Samnite Wars and the Social War, first the Samnites and then the Italic peoples fought against Rome and its republic – initially for freedom and against colonisation, and later against assimilation. In the modern era, the struggle of those who were labelled ‘brigands’ – first against the French invasion and then against the Piedmontese one (a struggle whose political and social dimensions have never been fully and honestly examined, not even by the left in this country) – and the resistance to Nazi-Fascism, which in the South was both armed and ‘humanitarian’, has been largely overlooked by the official accounts of the partisan resistance.

In the context of our history, the resolution of the Southern Question is, for me, possible only through the creation of a series of conditions. Firstly, the elimination of the need for our people to migrate – a need that began with the war for Italian unification in 1860 and has never truly ceased. Secondly, the well-being and prosperity of society rather than the growing militarisation of the territories. And finally, full cultural awareness and the ability to live our lives in accordance with the ways and values that unite and distinguish us without being mocked, stigmatised, or repressed by a state authority that has made linguistic repression, the manipulation of our pre-unification history, and the suppression of expressions of popular folklore that are not immediately assimilable or marketable its hallmark.

The aim of a political organisation dedicated to resolving the Southern Question must be to put an end to the cultural genocide perpetrated by the Italian state since 1860.

In my view, all these conditions can be achieved within a 21st-century socialist framework.

The idea of democratic confederalism formulated by Comrade Abdullah Öcalan, who hails from the Middle East and is not Eurocentric, can provide us with the most useful ‘toolkit’ for political action in our South. The South is in some respects a ‘West that is still un-Westernised’, where capitalism and liberalism have been slow to take hold, thereby having less of an impact on the culture of communal unity, community-based and rich in values, which has the strength to oppose the hyper-individualistic way of life proposed by capitalist modernity. Just as elements of an oppressive feudal economy and mentality have survived to this day in Southern Italy, so too do those aspects of tradition that are emancipatory in character and oriented towards freedom. To this day, these emancipatory traditions strongly resist the attacks of capitalism.

Placing a cooperative economy, an ecological and feminist society (and thus a non-statist paradigm) at the centre of our political discourse may represent the charting of a course that is better suited to our specific historical and cultural reality. The political model of confederal self-government, cooperative work and the village (or neighbourhood) as the building block of society may be the key to breaking the deadlock in which the left has found itself in our regions. Upon these building blocks we may create a direct democracy capable of overcoming the serious crisis (the post-globalisation chaos) that is intensifying in the South, amidst depopulation, emigration and widespread crime.

Any organisation wishing to adopt this analysis should take on the following:

1) The cause of defending our languages and traditions.

The languages in which most southerners speak their first word should be a historic battle for this organisation. This would focus on the official recognition of Italy’s linguistic diversity and richness, and the teaching of these languages in schools, in line with the principle of unity in diversity and in contrast to the nation-state ideology of ‘one language, one flag, one people’.

2) The preservation of individual historical and social specificities.

An example of this is the city of Naples with its own literary, dramatic and musical traditions, which make it culturally vibrant and distinct.

3) The creation of a mass, popular movement, spanning both the city and the countryside, as well as inland mountainous areas which fosters harmony between humanity and nature through social change that overcomes the mindset that has allowed the devastation of our land in the name of immediate economic gain.

4) A campaign against recruitment, both into the ranks of the state armed forces (composed of almost 70 per cent southerners) and into those of the mafias, which by no means represent the ‘anti-state’ as erroneously propagated by the system, but rather the strange grafting of remnants of a hierarchical society onto the tree of the most rapacious form of capitalism.

5) To offer our fellow countrymen, our people, our young people, a new dream, a new model of a meaningful life to live, a new utopia to build and to fight for.

Setting aside the latest delusions of the northern bourgeoisie, brazenly dubbed ‘autonomy’, perhaps the final historic opportunity is now opening up for the revival of the southern struggle, and for the spread of the anti-system alternative to capitalism in the South. I would like to get on board this train.

Having acknowledged the historical merit of a host of individuals and cultural movements that have helped to restore lustre to and shed light on our past – the closer they came to the truth (and for this reason branded as revisionists and labelled ‘neo-Bourbons’) – it is our duty, as forces alternative to the system, not to squander this great potential for struggle, by leaving it in the hands of markedly reactionary movements such as monarchist nostalgics or crypto-fascists, who have everything to gain from the current climate of political uncertainty and distrust of the system.

For those who still advocate failed models of ‘real socialism’, based on statism and bureaucracy, I always have the utmost respect; they are part of our history. However, continuing to persist in these errors does nothing but hand the masses over to reactionary forces and chauvinistic nationalism.

Let us begin to rethink our utopia, free from all forms of dogmatism.