teaches political theory at the University of Bologna (Department of Arts) and is adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of Western Sydney University. In the last decade his work has particularly centered on the relations between globalization, migration and political processes, on contemporary capitalism, as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is an active participant in the "post-workerist" debates and one of the founders of the website Euronomade. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019). He is currently coordinating the Horizon 2020 project PLUS (“Platforms, Labor, Urban Spaces”).
Mediterranea, a “non-governmental action” organized around a civilian monitoring and rescue ship in the central Mediterranean, is one of the most innovative initiatives deployed against the deaths of migrants at sea, in support of their freedom to move, and in defiance of the drastic policies deployed by the Italian government.
It was necessary to put in place a practice, capable of determining displacement and at least of alluding to an “offensive” move, beyond the necessarily defensive character of the resistance – why not buy a ship, put it at sea?
Last December Viewpoint hosted a roundtable discussion on Steve Wright’s seminal history of Italian workerism, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism.
Francesco Raparelli: An original “constellation” of capital is presented in Border as Method. The notion of the “multiplication of labor,” in particular, clearly grasps the “great transformation” in which we are immersed. Is a communist politics that takes seriously the irreducible multiplicity of exploitation that you describe so well still possible? Sandro Mezzadra: My work with Brett, Border as Method,… Read more →
Despite these ostensibly “progressive” victories, the region’s period of left-wing state dominance may have reached its limits, and in some cases, fallen into outright conservatism. Consequently, there’s a need for a re-activiation of political struggle at the grassroots level to overcome the inertia of the political cycle.
The State Stripped Bare It seems almost a paradox, or perhaps just an anachronism, to suggest that it is possible to describe the global situation from the vantage point of the state. Flows and scapes, transnational corporations, migratory movements, financialization, supply chains, the “unholy trinity” of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO – these are the actors, processes, and entities… Read more →
The mobility of labor was indeed part and parcel of the very “environment” within which workerism took shape in the early 1960s in Italy. Internal migration from the South of the country was challenging the political culture of the labor movement in the North, profoundly transforming the composition of the working class and at the same time reshaping the terms of the “Southern question.”
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