Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy

This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democratic assembly; of being and having laboured together as a social body in all of its corporeal materiality and resistant subjectivity. Having made democracy their own through years of assembly and collective law-making that sought to imagine a world outside of the 'Republic of Property', the Italians I met reminisced not only about water but also about this practical process as a kind of inalienable commonwealth. Today, they face the state's refusal to recognize their claims to democracy and its willingness to overrun popular will, even as their democratic process has left its traces.