New institutions and the politics of the interstices. Experimenting with a face-to-face democracy in Naples

Abstract

This article analyses the politics of new municipalism in Naples in relation to the constellation of ‘new institutions’ that has arisen from this politics. These ‘new institutions’ are illustrative of a politics of the interstices as a distinctive trait of the convergence between city government and social movements in Naples, as the latter have opted for staying neither outside nor inside official institutions and the city government has adapted its conduct to this strategy. To illustrate this point, the article explores the emerging constellation of ‘new institutions’ in Naples, which is understood as an embryonic form of radical ‘face-to-face democracy’ (in Murray Bookchin’s terms) at the municipal level, that departs from mainstream conceptions of participatory democracy and commons-based democracy. Through this analysis, the article argues that the experience of new municipalism in Naples offers evidence of a kind of participatory urban democracy understood not in a procedural sense but in a genuinely political vein, where civic participation and political conflict productively coexist with institutional creativity.

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…But this is not the only polarisation that hinders its political potential. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, divisions and contradictions abound: between the public and the common (Bianchi, 2023; Russell et al, 2023); between direct and representative democracy (van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2023); between spontaneous grassroots organisation and institutionalised structures (Pinto et al, 2023); between innovating participatory processes within the green-left and building cross-class coalitions and counter-hegemonic visions (Béal et al, 2023); between green growth and degrowth (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023), between urban centrality and peripheral urbanisation (Toro and Orozco, 2023); between territory regulated as state space and territory conceived as non-state self-government (Arpini et al, 2023); between embodying the slow time of feminist prefigurative practices and mastering the fast time of masculinist grammars, turned against hostile forces (Sarnow and Tiedermann, 2023); between dealing with the path-dependencies of history, utopian and dystopian, and engaging in future-oriented movement-building (Milan, 2023); between overhauling the state machinery and leveraging local government to deliver policy programmes (Bua and Davies, 2023); between transforming the state form through rupture and prefiguring new state forms through interstitial experimentation and symbiotic hacking (Joubert, 2023; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023); between reconfiguring capitalist supply chains and developing autonomous counter-logistics (Minuchin and Maino, 2023); between care as an economic sector for productivity and care as an ethics for reimagining the city (Kussy et al, 2023). So it seems that just as municipalists work to prise open the cracks in capitalism, so too do fissures and fault lines appear in radical municipalist strategy itself – a hypothesis just as challenged by the intersectional contradictions of colonial capitalism and the patriarchal nation-state as it is poised to sublate them.…”

“…The citizen platforms created in 2014 in Spain were deeply impacted by the no nos representan discourse of the 15M (Roth et al, 2019). In Naples, Zagreb or Belgrade, an anti-establishment sentiment was key to the justification of bringing power back to people (Milan, 2023, Pinto et al, 2023). The form of the local assembly where citizens participate directly and not through representatives – strongly advocated by Bookchin (2015)– was on the table in the French local elections of 2020 (Béal et al, 2023, van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2023), but also more generally in the Fearless Cities network (Barcelona en Comú et al, 2019).…”

“…The case of Naples differs from Spain’s in that here social movements have opted for staying neither inside nor outside formal institutions. Pinto et al (2023) argue that radical municipalism stile napoletano is not based on a procedural view of participatory democracy, but on a more political, conflictual model. Despite the apparent benefits of spontaneity – adapting to the local culture and avoiding institutional sclerosis – the limitations of this approach are revealed as an incapacity to endure.…”

“…As municipalist praxis has proliferated, so too have descriptors and typologies, with multiple municipalist monikers springing up across this diverse field; prefixes range from ‘new’ (Roth, 2019a, 2019b; Russell, 2019) and ‘democratic’ (Shelley, 2022) to ‘autonomist’, ‘platform’ and ‘managed’ (Thompson, 2021b) to ‘pragmatic’ (Warner, 2023) and ‘entrepreneurial’ (Thompson et al, 2020) to ‘degrowth’ (Vansintjan, 2018) and ‘post-growth’ (Schmid, 2023). With the publication of this double special issue, we can add many more: care municipalism (Kussy et al, 2023), southern municipalism (Pinto et al, 2023), peripheral municipalism (Toro and Orozco, 2023), territorial municipalism (Arpini et al, 2023) and weak municipalism (Béal et al, 2023). All this typological creativity certainly suggests a vibrant, ‘pre-paradigmatic’ scholarly field of empirical enquiry trying to keep up with fast-moving, diversifying experimentation on the ground (on pre-paradigmatic fields, see Nicholls, 2010).…”

When Bookchin faces Bourdieu. French ‘weak’ municipalism, legitimation crisis and zombie political parties

“…As a consequence, we argue that French new municipalism is incomplete in its capacity to build a counter hegemonic project due to its ‘participationist ideology’ (Gerbaudo, 2019). Born out of the legitimation crisis (Fraser, 2015), citizen lists over-invested in participatory democracy, in a procedural sense but not in a ‘genuinely political vein’ (Pinto et al, 2023). They put strong emphasis on the search for innovative participatory tools, valuing decision-making methods that promote the so-called ‘collective intelligence’, welcoming the intensive use of digital technology and social media, but put less energy into building an ideological project of social justice.…”