Permanent Seminar
Department of Anthropology, UB
Taught by Giacomo Loperfido, member of the GER, with a debate led by Susana Narotzky, director of the group, the Permanent Seminar of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Barcelona will be held next Wednesday, April 9, 2025.
Admission is free; we look forward to seeing you at 12:30 p.m. in the Anthropology Laboratory.
Lands of the Left. Rentier Capital, State Financialization, and the Dis-Integration of Class Identities
Giacomo Loperfido, PACT, Tübingen Universität – GER, Universitat de Barcelona
Loperfido’s research focusses on the socially situated dynamics by which political constituencies are produced, as well as on the transformations that are altering these dynamics. The basic argument is that collective cultures of activism — once bred within the Left, and traditionally rooted in industrial labour and shopfloor solidarity—have been affected, on the one hand, by a “conservative revolution” of the Left itself, while, on the other, both the Left and its past cultures of mobilization have been transformed, destabilized, and fragmented by deindustrialization, financialization, and the rise of precarious labour. Pitting against each other ethnographic evidence from 1) the old Tenants’ Union of Sesto San Giovanni (still working under a – fading – class-struggle frame), and 2) the work and action of a 5 Star Movement’s (5SM) Regional Councillor, the essay shows how populism operates through what the author calls a personalization of political relations. Through ethnography of these two political formations, both active in Sesto San Giovanni and Milan in the sphere of social suffering produced by the housing market, the essay illuminates how “populism” cuts across the horizontal ties of solidarity once produced by collective politics, in order to constitute its own electoral basis of support.
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