IMBRIGLIAMENTO E FUGA NELL’ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA. Il lavoro agricolo dipendente nel Tavoliere e nella Piana di Gioia Tauro in prospettiva genealogica/Harnessing and escape in contemporary Italy: Dependent farm labour in Tavoliere and the Plain of Gioia Tauro in genealogical perspective

Abstract

The essay begins by analysing the forms of harnessing, on the one hand, and of flight, on the other, that characterize migrant farm-labour in contemporary Italy. Starting from field research in the agro-industrial enclaves of Tavoliere and of the Plain of Gioia Tauro, harnessing and flight are examined by articulating direct experience to statistical data and secondary sources. Yet, this dynamic cannot be taken simply as a recent development. Against a tendency to ignore or trivialise the historical depth underlying contemporary agribusiness’ labour organisation, I undertake a genealogy of agro-capitalism in the two paradigmatic cases of Tavoliere and the Plain of Gioia Tauro. Since the transition from a feudal to a capitalist, and then industrial, system, starting from the last decades of the 18th century, farmers, politicians and planners always relied on attempts to harness a recalcitrant labour force. Through a critical reading of archival and historical sources, projects of land reclamation and settler colonization emerge as experiments in harnessing – through, for example, recourse to forced, carceral, war-prisoner, heavily controlled settler-colonial labour, compounded with other forms of restriction and mobility regulation that characterized capitalist agriculture into the post-war period.

Keywords: 

Mobility Harnessing; Genealogy; Capitalist Farming; Migrant Farm-Labour; Flight.