Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro

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Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro


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      1  1 Other exemplars would include ‘machine politics’ (e.g., Merton 1949; Scott 1969), ‘kinship politics’ (e.g., Hammel 2005), ‘clan politics’ (e.g., Collins 2004; Schatz 2004; Ceccarelli 2007), ‘patronal politics’ (e.g., Hale 2015), ‘warlord politics’ (e.g., Reno 1998) or even ‘chimpanzee politics’ (e.g., de Waal 2007 [1982]).

      Throughout the history of the human race no land and no people have suffered so terribly from slavery, from foreign conquests and oppressions, and none have struggled so irrepressibly for emancipation as Sicily and the Sicilians. Almost from the time when Polyphemus promenaded around Etna, or when Ceres taught the Siculi the culture of grain, to our day, Sicily has been the theater of uninterrupted invasions and wars, and of unflinching resistance. The Sicilians are a mixture of almost all southern and northern races; first, of the aboriginal Sicanians, with Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and slaves from all regions under heaven, imported into the island by traffic or war; and then of Arabs, Normans, and Italians. The Sicilians, in all these transformations and modifications, have battled, and still battle, for their freedom.

      Marx 1860

      That mafiosi also perform some politically relevant functions – e.g., they provide votes to politicians – is well known, but this book goes well beyond this simple and well-documented fact. It argues that the mafia is inherently a political institution, which may perform a number of different functions (as political parties do, for instance), but is especially well suited to performing political ones because the nature of social relationships in mafia life is eminently political.

      To be sure, the mafia may be even more than politics: as this book maintains from the start, what we call ‘mafia’ is really a total social fact (as Marcel Mauss would say) wherein politics, economics, religion, sexuality, morality and many other social things converge and coexist. The book acknowledges this complexity but chooses to analytically emphasize the political side of this totality because of its centrality to the whole architecture. Politics is the pillar of that ‘total social fact’ called mafia. Seen from the vantage point of politics, it is argued, the mafia may be better captured in its genesis, its inner working mechanisms and its reproductive/expansive power.

      Of course, how we conceive of ‘politics’ is essential to consider. If we narrowly define politics as the sphere of the (liberal, constitutional, maybe also democratic) state, the mafia falls out of this realm, by definition. It can thus be easily relegated to other – presumably less noble and less legitimate – institutional fields, such as economics, business and, obviously, crime. But if we adopt a wider and more historically sound concept of politics, and accept that there have been, and still are, various ways of organizing political life, including ways that have been and still are framed as ‘crime’ by the (liberal, constitutional, maybe also democratic) state, then a whole research field opens itself up to our investigations. That is the move made by this book, which could also be read as a book on politics and the ways of conceiving it in contemporary sociological terms.

      Put in other terms: I suggest that what we call ‘mafia’ could be conceived of as a sort of popular or folk politics that has gained some degree of local and even translocal hegemony by innovatively drawing on cultural models which are firmly opposed to bourgeois ones – ranging from aristocratic to subaltern modes of cultural expression. ‘Mafia’ is what may happen to ‘hidden transcripts’, James C. Scott’s (1990) famous formula for capturing subaltern infrapolitics,3 when their bearers become locally dominant while refusing to culturally transform into a fully-fledged dominant class imbued with bourgeois, middle-class values, i.e. the values at the core of the contemporary global social world. The warrior ethos of the old aristocratic classes (in Sicily, the baronial culture; in Japan, the samurai ethos) is the cultural horizon of mafiosi – not the spirit of capitalism, not a bourgeois civic culture (see Elias 1982 [1969]; on the samurai ethos, see Ikegami 1997; on the Sicilian baroni, see Pontieri 1943; Marino 1964). Instead of challenging the old hierarchies and eventually creating new ones – which is the aim of ‘progressive’ subaltern groups, according to modernist and socialist visions of politics – mafiosi have worked, and still work, hard in order to ‘achieve a superior rank while making no objection to the persistence of a hierarchical order’ (Gould 2003, 164). Out of utopia, and in purely analytical terms, there is no special reason to prefer the first (‘progressive’) option to the second (call it ‘conservative’). This analytical distinction is a crucial point for understanding the mafia in sociological terms – a distinction this book maintains in order to develop a non-normative, non-statist, and alternative understanding of the mafia as a global form.

      Mafia may be an enterprise, but it is far from patently obvious that it is an economic enterprise. It is one thing to say that mafiosi ‘produce and promote’ something like protection, but it is quite another to say that they also sell what they produce and promote. Production is such a general category of social life that anything humans do can be subsumed under this rubric: from culture to deviance to space. Promotion is a communicative


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