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The mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860-1960; a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs, by Anton Blok

Watts, Michael J.

The Journal of peasant studies, 2016-01, Vol.43 (1), p.67-91 [Periódico revisado por pares]

London: Routledge

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  • Título:
    The mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860-1960; a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs, by Anton Blok
  • Autor: Watts, Michael J.
  • Assuntos: Entrepreneurs ; Entrepreneurship ; Organized crime ; Peasantry ; Peasants ; Sicily ; Violence
  • É parte de: The Journal of peasant studies, 2016-01, Vol.43 (1), p.67-91
  • Notas: ObjectType-Article-1
    SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
    ObjectType-Feature-2
    content type line 23
  • Descrição: On the evening of 8 November 1926, Antonio Gramsci was arrested at his lodgings in Rome. Among the papers he left behind, gathered by his comrade in the Italian Communist Party Camilla Ravera, was an unfinished manuscript entitled Alcuni temi della questione meridionale (Some aspects of the southern question). As a Sardinian he was deeply interested in the long-running and contentious debate in the wake of the turbulent 1860s and the Garribaldian revolution, over the politics and political economy of the exploited southern periphery of Italy, the Mezzogiorno. Gramsci's essay addressed a number of questions he had raised previously on the relations between peasants and workers, most especially in ‘Workers and peasants’ (1919) and especially the ‘Lyons theses’ (1926) penned in the wake of the April 1920 strike and insurrection. The subsequent offensive against industrial workers led by capital and the social democrats threw into bright relief the incontestable fact that the southern peasantry made up a significant proportion of the military forces which put down the revolutionary workers' revolt in the north. The southern question was shaped by Gramsci's understanding of the peculiarities of Italian economic, political and cultural development: it encompassed the Vatican's role as a cosmopolitan mini-state, the spatiality of the Risorgimento and the class character of an Italian unification process dominated by the Piedmontese state, the continuing but uneven and dependent development associated with the North's internal colonization of the South, and not least in political terms the Communist Party's need to break the pact between northern capital and the southern agricultural landowning class; in short, to construct an alliance between the northern workers and southern peasants out of the Italian realities of a nation and a people having no coincident history (Gramsci 1971, 44–122; see also Jessop 2005). The southern question provides the historical canvas on which Anton Blok's foundational book The mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860–1960: a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs must be situated – published, it should be noted, in 1974 at the outset of the peasant studies boom and what one might call ‘the return to the agrarian question’ in the social sciences. It is curious, for a scholar of such singular breadth and intellectual capaciousness, that Blok does not refer directly to Gramsci,3 but he makes it crystal clear in the preface that mafia – its genesis and its temporal rhythms of growth, decline and resurgence – can only be grasped by locating western Sicily on the larger canvas of ‘larger complex societies’, which means for Blok seeing violent entrepreneurs as mediators between town and country, state and countryside, in relation to ‘the distinct stage of development reached by Italian society’ (1974, xxvi, xxvii). Holding in abeyance for a moment the implicit teleology in Blok's language of historical stages, the central point is that mafia and state-formation (and what, drawing on Norbert Elias, he refers to as the civilizing process) are organically connected. At the heart of his project of ‘making mafia intelligible’ is a complex Venn diagram of interconnections among commercialization, demographic growth, proletarianization, patterns of mobility and processes of state formation, all situated with respect to the politics of the ‘degree of stable central control over the means of physical force in the southern periphery’ (Blok 1974, xxx, xxvii).
  • Editor: London: Routledge
  • Idioma: Inglês
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