Moving Ground: Shifting Conditions for Struggle in an Alpine Quarry

The proposed paper will use data gathered during the initial phase of an anthropological fieldwork research in a mining area affected by economic collapse and deindustrialization. The locality lies in the middle of the mountains visible from where the present conference is being held. The paper will reflect on differentiated politicized forms of nostalgia (both in Herzfeld’s sense and not) and the structural conditions for the emergence of specific arrangements of contentious relationships between capital and labour. Italian Alps have notoriously been interested by crippling depopulation patterns during the 20th century. The province of Trento has shown a partly contrasting tendency to this general logic. A centuries-old focus on the administration of a territory centred around mountains compelled institutions to the creation and protection of industries through policies that developed since the 1950s. This induced attraction of capital and creation of heavy infrastructures even in the furthest valleys most prone to isolation and emigration. These, in turn, required workers, creating the possibility for the inhabitants of these valleys to offset the emigration outflows already underway. One of the larger and longer-lasting industries of the region developed in the mining of porphyry stone It grew from commons with community-based rights of use to a hierarchy of enterprises that exported half of the extracted material in global markets, managing to provide up to 20% of global porphyry stone production. Various industrial periods have been characterized by different modes of workforce inclusion processes. Natives, internal migrants from southern Italy and more recent international ones experienced what Glick Schiller and Çaglar call differently structured ways of emplacement. Differentiated structures of opportunities in which those pathways of inclusion have been rendered possible, also meant different modalities of conflict in the relationship between capital and labour. Workforce externalization and entrepreneurialization began in the 1980s. Subsequent financialization of profits and the buying of mines in the World South by local mining companies engendered a form of delocalization that permitted a gradual disengagement from the area. The aftermath of the Great Recession opened a period of industrial collapse, paralleled with a profound degrading of working conditions for the new wave of residual labour recruitment, now mostly of transnational migrants. The dissolution of the possibility to access means of subsistence adequate to the reproduction of pre-existing social conditions caused a silent expulsion of workers from the sector and the province. The migration option reopened, especially for those who lacked access to alternative wages, family plots of land or social ties exploitable for dampening the shock. Anthropologist Gavin Smith suggested that social production of place under capitalism is the outcome of corporatist ways of organizing and controlling labour and its mobility. He looked at how these forms of corporatism developed in Spain, but also more generally in States that followed the Bretton Woods Agreement. Those States sought to establish corporatist alliances between capital and labour to muffle their frictions by way of a structured distribution of goods to the population. When the arrangement has no longer been able to manage this redistribution without losing too much ground to labour it has been scrapped for a new class block, in Gramscian terms, connected with various strands of the neoliberal ideology. Thanks to Stefano Gallo’s work on the history of Italian internal migrations, we can see similar patterns in Italy. He showed the long-lasting corporatist control of moving labour in liberal and then fascist Italy and the relations between fears for local employment on one side and the use of external labour by capital on the other. He showed that opposition and xenophobia towards internal migrants exploited by the Italian bourgeoisie often characterized natives’ popular opinions. Organized labour tried and increasingly succeeded in reframing the problem, uniting both native and migrant workers and taking them out of the bourgeoisie’s control. That is, until the violent fascist backlash. Different contexts for production and reproduction of capital favour the emergence of different conditions for contestation and co-option of labouring people. A wave of unionized southern Italian immigrant labourers in the porphyry industry succeeded in radicalizing and mobilizing workers in a period of rising wage and welfare conditions during the 70s. A new generation of individualized workers renewed the workforce in the late 80s accompanied by gradual degradation of wages and work rhythms. A new round of contestations that again united locals and migrants (this time mostly of international origins) run through the 90s, but gains remained limited and from a defensive position, lost by the collapse of the Great Recession. In a valley characterized by a declining timber cutting industry on the opposite end of the same mountain range of my area of research, Jaro Stacul described the ways local people’s extremely individualized work ethic helped the adoption of a specific instantiation of Herzfeld’s structural nostalgia Forza Italia and Lega Nord’s populist anti-politics became widespread in the locality of his research. In contrast to timber, the porphyry area’s rich resource catalysed a much greater capital accumulation, and thus class divisions. Stone quarries’ entrepreneurs actively promoted populist co-option during the 90s through the same insistence on a supposedly ancestral entrepreneurial work ethic with a similar mobilization of nativist and exclusionary narratives during both the increase in incoming international workers and the generalized push towards neoliberal restructuring. For many workers in the sector another kind of nostalgia also emerged during the years. A degraded quality of the working conditions and prospects than that of the boom years parallels with that of the very stone material extracted out of the mountains. Talks of the desertification of the natural environment around stone quarries and the degrading of both the lived environment and the depletion of stone reserves are not new. Since at least the mid-80s, the future seemed to appear increasingly bleak in reflections of workers. They were not wrong.