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title = "How do we get away with (from) it? - Popular Illegalisms in a Neoliberal World"
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**By Valeria Graziano**


# Call It What You Will

The exhortation “Snađi se, druže!”—”Figure it out, comrade!”—originated purportedly during WWII when partisans had to come up with solutions under harsh conditions. When tasked with a seemingly impossible mission, they would often ask, “But how do I do that?”; and the answer was often, “You figure it out, comrade.” Later, during the socialist period, the phrase described everyday workarounds for bureaucratic or material constraints, like smuggling western clothes (in slang: “šana”) and petty theft. Today, it endures as a cultural symbol of hacking systems for personal advantage.

Many more cultures have terms for such forms of popular illegalisms. Expressions like “by hook or by crook” (UK), “βρίσκω την άκρη” (Greece), “pomoću štapa i kanapa” (Serbia), “buscarse la vida” (Spain), “l’arte di arrangiarsi” and “aumm’ aumm’” (Italy), and “jeitinho” and “malandragem” (Brazil), *viveza criolla* (South American Spanish speaking countries), “megoldani okosba” (Hungary), “kombinować” (Poland), all reflect these widespread practices.

Despite the rapid spread of digital tools in the last decades, systemic demands on individuals to comply with cumbersome, invasive reporting and verification procedures have multiplied. This phenomenon is especially visible in the U.S., prompting commentators to explore “bureaucratic harm.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes it as “organized abandonment,” echoed by Elizabeth Povinelli’s “economies of abandonment,” and Dan Spade’s “administrative violence”, perpetrated by welfare institutions lacking resources to serve the public good.[^1] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney discuss “enforced negligence” by public-interest institutions, like universities, that weaponize professionalization as a process for privatizing the social individual’s capacity to care.[^2]

Sociologist Loïc Wacquant poignant analysis of neoliberal bureaucracy, in the article “Crafting the Neoliberal State,”[^3] highlights how the punitive containment of the impoverished and the marginalized is founded on two pillars: on the one hand, the transformation of welfare provisions into workfare, a paradigm in which assistance—whether it be in the form of unemployment subsidies, social housing, food stamps or other similar provisions—is increasingly deployed as a mean to scrutinizing and moralizing behaviors and enforce psycho-social coercions skewed towards the introjection of the values of subordination embedded in the work schemes, mandatory training and compulsory medical treatments[^4]. On the other hand, the expansion of policing, penal and carceral systems, and of the corollary prison industries (including those managing facilities specifically targeting migrant populations). According to Loïc Wacquant, this revamping of the capacities of public authorities is “not the spawn of some broad societal trend—whether it be the ascent of ’biopower’ or the advent of ’late modernity’—but, at bottom, an exercise in state crafting.” That is, it is a deliberate political project of advanced capitalism, a paradigm that, while originating in North America, is “in progress—or in question—in all advanced societies submitted to the relentless pressure to conform to the U.S. pattern.”[^5] 

Contemporary accounts of institutional tinkering emerge across disciplines. Édouard Glissant’s seminal work provides a key concept of “the right to opacity.”[^6] Glissant’s notion of opacity challenges the idea that clarity and transparency are universally positive. He argues they have been routinely utilized in colonialism to reduce the texture of diverse realities. Stemming from the resistance of enslaved people to being measured and controlled by their masters, the right to opacity is for Glissant the foundational theoretical concept for a philosophy of difference and for practicing hospitality toward the Other without reducing them to what is known or understood. 

Recently, the concept of opacity has been re-activated as a political accomplishment relevant to ongoing decolonial work in institutions.[^7] Echoing Glissant, Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has been excavating the practice of *taqiyya*, a term belonging to Shia Islamic jurisprudence that connotes a legal dispensation for those who must dissimulate their faith when at risk of persecution. For Hamdan, *taqiyya* is “an admission that free speech is not about speaking freely, but reclaiming control over the very conditions under which one is being heard.”[^8]

In *Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India*, Amit Rai accounts for practices of *jugaad*—finding DIY solutions to problems—as subaltern responses to poverty and discrimination diffused across the Indian subcontinent, but also problematically celebrated in management literature.[^9] Beyond survival, it functions as creative engagement with material and technological constraints of daily life, challenging mainstream innovation discourses that glorify it as frugal innovation, omitting its import as a critique of capitalist production.

In *Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies*, sociologist Veronica Gago builds on the “baroque” concept to critically examine how neoliberalism is experienced, negotiated, and resisted at the Latin American grassroots level, focusing on Buenos Aires’ largest illegal open-air market, La Salada.[^10] Published in 2017, the book challenges the narrative that neoliberalism is solely imposed as a top-down matrix, portraying instead as a complex process actively shaped by the practices and strategies of those it seeks to govern.

Her description builds on Aihwa Ong’s definition of contemporary spatiality as “baroque ecology” and Álvaro García Linera work on “baroque modernity”,[^11] but also, albeit without direct reference, on Bolívar Echeverría’s *La Modernidad de lo Barroco* to describe a distinctive Latin American way of experiencing and contesting coloniality and capitalism,[^12] characterized by “motley zones” of “temporal folding,”[^13] a “hodgepodge" mix of adaptation, resistance, and innovation,[^14] a “simultaneous coexistence of modes” that challenges at the same time the “romantic totalities” of modernity and the competitive rationality of neoliberalism.

Back in Europe, the 1990s monetary integration was accompanied by intense political debates. The acronym PIGS was introduced by *The Wall Street Journal* in 1996, to refer to four southern European nations (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain), marked the resurfacing of old discriminatory stereotypes, a disdain from the part of the global financial elites towards “Mediterranean indolence, to living beyond one’s means, to corruption, to the lack of rules, to the absence of that ethics of rigor and business, of moderation and work that Max Weber already posed as a sine qua non condition of capitalism.”[^15] Such prejudices echo those identified by Edward Said in his seminal study of *Orientalism,* where “the incorrigibility of Orientals...proves that they are not to be trusted.”[^16] It’s an old game: painting the South and East as fundamentally corrupt, somehow intrinsically flawed, to bolster the West’s sense of its own moral and economic superiority.

In Italy, one of the PIGS countries, the Southern lifestyle has long been politically contentious, notably through Antonio Gramsci’s *The Southern Question*, where he discussed the economic and social divide between Italy’s industrial North and agrarian South, attributing the South’s criminality to the administrative neglect and economic extractivism (to put it in more contemporary terms) by the State.[^17]

In the 1920s, the philosopher Benedetto Croce brought to public attention a 1600s treaty titled “On Honest Dissimulation” by the Neapolitan writer Torquato Accetto. Published in 1641, the text considers ethical behavior in politics and life, contributing to a broader debate within the Academy of the Idle, a literary institution focused on the “art of free time.” Accetto sees dissimulation—hiding the truth without lying—as a veritable Renaissance art, requiring moral discipline, a strategy for dealing with harsh realities while maintaining virtue. In 1925, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis coined the term “porosity” to address Naples’ unique qualities, contrasting it to German rationality.[^18] While Berlin reminded him of military barracks, they saw Naples as a place where no form – social or architectural – should be taken as permanent, where everything is in a constant state of transformation and re-adaptation. Also Alfred Sohn-Rethel, in his *The Ideal of the Broken Down* reflected on the ways in which, in the Neapolitan poverty-stricken everyday, the technical objects of modernity get their proper social use only once they are broken and then reused with “tinkering proficiency,” thus become des-alienated from the realm of capitalist commodities.[^19]

Franco Cassano and Franco Piperno’s works, *Il Pensiero Meridiano* and *Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale*, explore political uses of the southern way of life.[^20] Cassano depicts the South as an “imaginative periphery," stating, “[g]enerally, in the North’s imagination, the South exists only as a tourist paradise or a Mafious hell.”[^21] He presents a “Meridian style,” inspired by Camus and Pasolini, valuing freedom and skepticism toward institutionalized emancipation. Piperno, a founder of *Potere Operaio*, critiques the modern state’s legitimacy crisis, advocating southern Italian “municipalities” as self-regulating entities, where local genius and urban political life thrive, contrasting state sovereignty with embodied sociability.


# Where I’m Coming From

For my own research trajectory and the conception of the bonfires, the Italian cultural landscape of politicized plebeian illegalisms that influenced me growing up was a foundational element.

My political sensibilities were formed amidst the echoes of Italian autonomist *operaismo*, a leftist movement that emerged from the struggles of the working class but was uniquely attuned to the agency and primacy of the lumpenproletariat. Unlike more traditional leftist circles, autonomist *operaismo* acknowledged that resistance did not solely emanate from the factory floor but also from those who lived on the margins of society—people who defied both economic norms and state control. Two books, in particular, deeply informed this perspective.

Danilo Montaldi’s *Autobiografie della leggera*, published in 1961, documents the marginalized lives of vagabonds, pickpockets, and smugglers in the Po River valley, who skulked around the edges of postwar Italy’s economic boom.[^22] The word *leggera* itself carries layers of meaning, not merely referring to plebeian criminality but suggesting a kind of lightness—a nimbleness of spirit—that captures these figures’ improvisational tactics. In Milanese slang, *leggera* can denote the deftness of a pickpocket’s hand or the quiet step of a thief at night, yet it also alludes to the relative “lightness” of poor people’s pockets, a metonymy for their constant material lack. For Montaldi, these individuals embodied a cultural milieu of evasion and survival that characterized those excluded from the state’s industrial ambitions, creating a counter-society where being *leggera* meant thriving in the cracks of the system.

Similarly, in *Andare ai resti*, Emilio Quadrelli delves into the transformation of neighborhood gangs into *batterie*—a uniquely Italian configuration of youthful, tightly-knit criminal camaraderie.[^23] By the 1970s, these *batterie* had become fixtures of Italy’s urban landscape, embodying what Quadrelli calls “a continuation of defiance under different forms.” These groups weren’t chasing conventional power or profit; rather, as Quadrelli writes, “to make a mockery of power was the true prize, the smirk on the faces of these young rebels a greater treasure than any material spoils.” Women, too, carved out spaces within this world, moving beyond the limits imposed by both conservative and radical circles. This ethos, driven not by greed but by an irreverent thrill, was central to their way of life. It was about flipping the script on authority, about taking joy in the cracks of the system, and in deriding the so-called guardians of order.

Both Montaldi and Quadrelli relied heavily on the voices and stories of the protagonists, wrestling with the complexities of their own mediation. They aimed not to romanticize the material, but they understood that these self-narrations were not merely accounts of reality—they were acts of self-authorship, ways to construct a political identity and assert a stance. Both authors thus allowed their subjects to speak to the contradictions of their lives, illustrating how their illegal acts were not just transgressions, but expressions of agency against the encroachments of capital and state authority.


# Striking while it’s hot

Illegalisms—those everyday acts of maneuvering around bureaucracy and market forces—are vital to today’s far-right appeal. Thus, engaging with illegalism from a leftist angle can tackle three urgent problems. First, it reveals how far-right leaders use law-breaking to build their power: figures like Trump and Berlusconi have built iconic personas by openly flouting the law, presenting themselves as anti-systemic figures, while leftist movements often find themselves cornered into defending legality, despite knowing the system’s flaws. Second, it critiques the fetish of transparency in technocratic bureaucracy, where automation pretends to create fairness but instead strips away human agency in co-determining contextual decisions. And finally, the study of popular illegalism can help dislodge the moralizing horizon of hard work as a path to a successful life as presented in the hustle-and-grind cultures. The figure of the virtuoso,[^24] the self-made entrepreneur, etc. stand to receive the delinquent as their hidden doppelganger. Ingenuity is, in this sense, the big absent from the values celebrated in modern capitalist societies. Ingenuity is to class struggle what creativity is to arts and innovation is to technologies. 

# Notes

[^1]: Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "![Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning.](bib:686abf24-fb41-45c4-b807-657658d15cd6)" In *Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship*, edited by Charles R. Hale, 31–61. University of California Press, 2008; Povinelli, Elizabeth A. *![Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism](bib:19e18b84-d9e9-4b66-acef-e4e85c9a8a19)*. Duke University Press, 2011; Spade, Dean. *![Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law](bib:30ff8341-2ea2-4b75-89ce-9ef0ae1b9b73)*. Duke University Press, 2015..

[^2]: Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. “![The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.](bib:084ca105-9e9b-46ea-875f-d655ad1aeb1f)" *Social Text* 22, no. 2 (2004): 101–15.

[^3]: Wacquant, Loïc. "![Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare and Prisonfare in the Bureaucratic Field.](bib:953035fe-d457-432d-bc66-7490c84bbc52)" In *Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Fields*, 238–56. Routledge, 2014..

[^4]: Friedli, Lynne, and Robert Stearn. "![Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes.](bib:f5934bd0-ced6-4cc6-8e91-7f3573ff6e71)" *Medical humanities* 41.1 (2015): 40-47.

[^5]: Wacquant. “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare and Prisonfare in the Bureaucratic Field.”: 248.

[^6]: Glissant, Édouard. “For Opacity.” In *![Poetics of Relation](bib:df385b94-1150-4e51-b1b6-eece496f12cd).* University of Michigan Press, 1997: 189-194.

[^7]: Davis, Benjamin P. "![The Politics of Édouard Glissant’s Right to Opacity.](bib:a6a02549-81ee-4908-8ab2-306d18b8520e)" *The CLR James Journal* 25, no. 1/2 (2019): 59–70.

[^8]: See Lawrence Abu Hamdan's solo exhibition “تقيه (Taqiyya) –The Right to Duplicity”, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, 11 July–13 September 2015.

[^9]: Rai, Amit S. *![Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India](bib:bc8189db-527f-42ae-910d-80840abdbf5c)*. Duke University Press, 2019.
     
[^10]: Gago, Verónica. *![Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies](bib:e0ac5fb7-adb5-4fd7-aa32-7efd032250f7)*. Duke University Press, 2017.

[^11]: Ong, Aihwa. *![Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty](bib:9cd89ddd-b8aa-4ccb-bdd2-3bfec0e8ffb0)*. Duke University Press, 2006; García Linera, Álvaro. “![Sindicato, multitud y comunidad. Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia](bib:88d8c5bf-196d-42a5-baa8-d727d4a670c6).” In *Tiempos de rebelión*, by Álvaro García Linera, Felipe Quispe, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, and Luis Tapia. La Paz: Comuna and Muela del Diablo, 2001.

[^12]: Echeverría, Bolívar. *![La modernidad de lo barroco.](bib:389f071b-7438-4fe4-91a8-4875d8d9481e)* Ediciones Era, 2000.

[^13]: Gago. *Neoliberalism from Below*, 21.

[^14]: Ibid, 69.

[^15]: Curcio, Anna. “!['Un paradiso abitato da diavoli' … o da porci. Appunti su razzializzazione e lotte nel Mezzogiorno d'Italia](bib:07f9b498-d200-456b-ac7b-aadf7613ba73)”, *UniNomade*, 5th September 2012. https://uninomade.org/un-paradiso-abitato-da-diavoli-o-da-porci/ (accessed October 2024). 

[^16]: Said, Edward W. *![Orientalism](bib:97428a0e-069e-47e3-bb86-a5f0ca0263ea)*. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014, 321.

[^17]: Gramsci, Antonio. “![Some Aspects of the Southern Question](bib:4c78d76b-b829-4ff8-afeb-7d81d1ad73ff).” *Selections from Political Writings (1921–1926)*, 1978, 441–62, originally written in 1926.

[^18]: Benjamin, Walter and Asja Lacis, “Neapel” (1925). In Walter Benjamin, *Gesammelte Schriften*, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhauser, 7 vols, Suhrkamp, 1972.

[^19]: Sohn-Rethel, Alfred “Das Ideal des Kaputten. Über neapolitanische Technik” (1926). In *Das Ideal des Kaputten*. ça ira-Verlag, 2018, 41–48; the English translation by John Garvey is available at: https://hardcrackers.com/ideal-broken-neapolitan-approach-things-technical/ (accessed September 2024).

[^20]: Cassano, Franco. *![Il pensiero meridiano](bib:0b9ed633-e341-48b0-a673-0b3bc740a496).* Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, 2015; Piperno, Franco. *Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale: genius loci e individuo sociale*. Vol. 11. Manifestolibri, 1997.

[^21]: Cassano, Francesco, and Claudio Fogu. "![Il pensiero meridiano oggi: Intervista e dialoghi con Franco Cassano](bib:5b3537d0-e804-4ced-b2db-6c84f316062b)." California Italian Studies 1.1 (2010).

[^22]: Montaldi, Danilo. *![Autobiografie della leggera](bib:ba64ac2a-ae09-4e31-a1b2-724b88828b99)*. Einaudi, 1961.

[^23]: Quadrelli, Emilio. *![Andare ai resti. Banditi, rapinatori, guerriglieri nell'Italia degli anni Settanta](bib:b11959fd-2514-47a0-852f-21f803d07f05)*. DeriveApprodi, 2024.

[^24]: Virno, Paolo. *![A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life](bib:14790edc-bc4b-4c16-abd2-6ffc34ccaf79)*. MIT Press, 2004.


