All or None: Cooperation and Sustainability in Italy's Red Belt

By Alison Sánchez Hall

At once a social history and anthropological study of the world’s oldest voluntary collective farms, All or None is a story of how landless laborers joined together in Ravenna, Italy to acquire land, sometimes by occupying private land in what they called a “strike in reverse,” and how they developed sophisticated land use plans, based not only on the goal of profit, but on the human value of providing work where none was available. It addresses the question of the viability of cooperative enterprise as a potential solution for displaced workers, and as a more humane alternative to capitalist agribusiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Aug 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785339813

Alison Sánchez Hall

Alison Sánchez Hall attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, receiving her Ph.D. in 1977. After a career as a museum anthropologist and university lecturer, she retired from the University of Central Arkansas in 2014, but is still engaged in her lifelong pursuit as a political and community activist.

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ALL OR NONE

ANTHROPOLOGY OF EUROPE

General Editors:

Monica Heintz, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

Patrick Heady, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Europe, a region characterized by its diversity and speed of change, is the latest area to attract current anthropological research and scholarship that challenges the prevailing views of classical anthropology. Situated at the frontier of the social sciences and humanities, the anthropology of Europe is born out of traditional ethnology, anthropology, folklore, and cultural studies, but engages in innovative interdisciplinary approaches. Anthropology of Europe publishes fieldwork monographs by young and established scholars, as well as edited volumes on particular regions or aspects of European society. The series pays special attention to studies with a strong comparative component, addressing theoretical questions of interest to both anthropologists and other scholars working in related fields.

Volume 1

The France of the Little-Middles:

A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

Marie Cartier, Isabelle Coutant, Olivier Masclet, and Yasmine Siblot

Volume 2

European Anthropologies

Edited by Andrés Barrera-González, Monica Heintz, and Anna Horolets

Volume 3

All or None:

Cooperation and Sustainability in Italy’s Red Belt

Alison Sánchez Hall

ALL OR NONE

Cooperation and Sustainability in Italy’s Red Belt

Alison Sánchez Hall

First published in 2018 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2018 Alison Sánchez Hall

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-980-6 hardback

ISBN 978-1-78533-981-3 ebook

To the memory of my father, Robert Odell Bland (1920–1994), who was ahead of his time and moved back to the land to Arkansas from California in the 1970s in search of water and sustainability.

"‘All or none’ was not just a saying. It was put into practice, and it is absolutely necessary to realize this in order to understand the utopia of Ravenna."

—Pietro Albonetti

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Maps and Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Alice Nel Paese Delle Meraviglie (Alice [the Anthropologist] in Wonderland)

Chapter 2. Ravenna—Then and Now

Chapter 3. The Red Belt

Chapter 4. Underneath All, the Land

Chapter 5. Land to Those Who Work Her

Chapter 6. Top Down or Bottom Up?

Chapter 7. Making Work

Chapter 8. Working Together

Conclusion

Glossary

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1. Alice the Anthropologist, 1980

Figure 1.2. Strike in reverse, 1972

Figure 2.1. The Lombardinis with new house attached to old one still used for cooking, 1972

Figure 2.2. Valentina Ballardini and the anthropologist’s daughter Juliana, 1980

Figure 2.3. Former tenant farm home (Massari Braccianti Cooperative), 2010

Figure 2.4. Tampieri-Patuelli restored tenant farm home, 2012

Figure 2.5. Giuliana Ballardini buying bread at multigenerational family-owned bakery, 2012

Figure 2.6. Ernesto and Adriana Ballardini shelling peas, 2012

Figure 2.7. Giordano Ballardini with granddaughter Cristina, 2012

Figure 2.8. Dania, Giordana, Andrea (the Tomato King), and Barbara Bersani, 2010

Figure 2.9. Family-owned dairy, 2010

Figure 2.10. Ballardinis’ great-great-granddaughter Emma in giant tomato harvester, 2010

Figure 2.11. Alice the Anthropologist with three generations of Bersani women, 2010

Figure 3.1. Mario Tampieri at a former fascist landowner’s palazzo (palace) in Mezzano, 2010

Figure 3.2. Rice weeders (mondine), circa 1950

Figure 3.3. Giordene Ranieri Bartoletti’s mother, 1972

Figure 4.1. Wheelbarrowers at work, circa 1900

Figure 5.1. The anarchist Andrea Costa in 1880 (1851–1910)

Figure 5.2. Nullo Baldini and daughter, 1930

Figure 5.3. The wheelbarrowers, circa 1900

Figure 7.1. Women returning from strike, 1956

Figure 7.2. Effect of introduction of new sugar beet seed on employment in 1972

Figure 7.3. Relationship between mechanization expense and increase in labor hours on collective farms in the larga in 1972

MAPS AND TABLES

Map 0.1. Italy with location of the Red Belt province of Ravenna, the Po Delta, and the Region of Emilia Romagna

Map 0.2. The province of Ravenna with rivers, topography and agricultural zones, towns, and locations of collective farms in 1972

Map 0.3. Post–World War II land tenure with large capitalist, small private, and tenant farm zones and 2012 Northern League right-wing strongholds in the Red Belt

Table 2.1. Mergers and Current Holdings and Membership in Ravenna Braccianti Cooperatives

Table 2.2. Members of Cooperatives in the Province of Ravenna

Table 2.3. Italian Cooperative Movement, 2006

Table 2.4. Collective Farms in the Large-Farm Larga Zone, Province of Ravenna, 1972

Table 2.5. Collective Farms in the Small-Farm Appoderata Zone, Province of Ravenna, 1972

Table 2.6. Collective Farms in the Hilly Collina Zone, Province of Ravenna, 1972

Table 2.7. Farm Sizes in Italy, 2016

Table 2.8. Distribution of Annual Employment of Braccianti in the Province of Ravenna, 1972

Table 5.1. Workers’ and Mutual Aid Societies in Romagna to 1870

Table 5.2. Growth of Red Braccianti Collectives, 1913–2015

Table 7.1. Membership in Agricultural Unions in the Province of Ravenna, 1947

Table 7.2. Number of Farms in the Province of Ravenna, 2010

Table 7.3. Gross Agricultural Sales and Land Use in the Province of Ravenna, 1961–2014

PREFACE

Because this book is about Italy, we begin in Vatican City with Pope Francis, who has over the last four years been supporting and guiding a global association of ‘excluded workers’ like garbage pickers and migrant laborers, acting as their visible leader. He envisions the idea of a ‘social economy’ that invests in people and opens access to ownership and opportunity by spreading work. In addressing these groups, Francis tells them that the future of humanity is in great measure in your own hands, through your ability to organize and carry out creative alternatives, through your daily efforts to ensure the three L’s (labor, lodging, land) (Ivereigh 2017).

The pope is serious about the way neoliberal globalism weakens local ties and benefits educated elites at the expense of the common man, but he is not pessimistic about the future. His lack of pessimism in the face of a worldwide concentration of wealth and power so pernicious that it even influences what people think they know, what they believe, and whom they elect is reminiscent of James Baldwin’s words about race relations in the United States. Those words are even more relevant today:

I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. (Peck 2017)

This book is not about politics or faith. It is about how academic anthropology might provide more than a narrowly dispassionate empirical analysis of humanity’s decline. Introductory texts promote anthropology as a mirror for man (Kluckhohn 1949), and as a field whose purpose is to make us aware of ourselves and our society and thus transform our self-awareness into knowledge and security (Bohannan 1963: 14). The theme of the 2017 American Anthropological Association’s annual meetings is Anthropology Matters. If there ever was a time when all knowledge should be focused on solving human problems, it is now. Even Forbes business magazine tells us that Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity by 2050 (Hansen 2016).

My central thesis is this: the pope is right about the future of humanity being in our own hands. Furthermore, I would add, if people work together, economics does not have to be such a dismal science. As scholars who specialize in studying the brief history of Homo sapiens on this planet, anthropologists know we should not point to human nature, as with original sin, to excuse bad, or even primarily self-interested, behavior (Binford 1972). We often write in the first person because we are influenced by different perspectives and seek answers to different questions. Some, for example, might want to know how forty thousand Pueblo Indians lived in what is now the southwestern United States without an authority backed by force, and would notice harmonious values and individual personalities that are gentle, nonaggressive, cooperative, and modest. Others, whose questions involve the effects of a cooperative society on the individual, would instead notice the way children seem coerced into suppressing their individualism in ways that cause them to become neurotic adults filled with covert hostility (Stocking 1989: 250). Neither interpretation is clearly right or wrong.

My questions here concern cooperation and sustainability: Is there a cooperative side of our human nature that is inhibited by our culture? Or, is human nature to blame for preventing Homo sapiens (thinking or wise man) from developing cooperative and sustainable ways of coexisting on this planet? And will things, as Erik Reece believes, only get worse if we don’t engage in some serious utopian thinking (cited in Kapur 2016)?

John Bodley has spent his career researching and writing about global Victims of Progress (1982). His new book The Small Nation Solution (2013) tells us that the problems facing humanity are not with capitalism per se. Bodley’s anthropologically based scale and power theory challenges the delusion that perpetual economic growth within an elite-driven model of globalization is the solution to all our problems. He sees unlimited growth as a problem not a solution (Bodley 2013: 36). Bodley is not the only anthropologist who has observed how the small pre-literate groups we have traditionally studied operate with limited exploitation of the environment and each other. Despite the material wealth in modern large-scale societies run by governments elected democratically, the average person does not feel as free, or as secure in access to resources, as our tribal ancestors did for most of human history, during which time our human nature was evolving.

Out of 150,000 years of human history, it was only 7,000 years ago that humans began to deal with an unending pursuit of growth. This is when aggrandizing individuals . . . in times of crisis . . . convinced their followers to accept them as rulers, rather than as leaders, and to pay them tribute (ibid.: 7). Judging from current events, the severe inequality that has been increasing in our modern era is wreaking havoc. It seems reasonable to conclude that this defies human nature and is not sustainable. Ants are innately good totalitarian subjects; humans are not.

Bodley provides many examples of the successes of smaller-scale democratic societies with less inequality as measured by the Gini index (ibid.: 48–49). His small-nation models of sustainable systems have values that are capitalist (some of his best tribal friends are capitalists), communalist, or ecological. His point is simply that for democratic processes to function effectively, decision making power over wealth needs to be widely distributed, not concentrated in a few hands (ibid.: 195).

One of Bodley’s models for a future transformation of the global system that would prioritize social and ecological sustainability over further concentration of wealth is the Mondragón network of cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. Although located in a large nation-state, the Basque region is one of nineteen largely decentralized regions established by Spain’s 1978 constitution.

Although such decentralization may be a necessary cause of improved democratic decision-making, it is unfortunately not a sufficient cause. Italy’s 1948 constitution, which specifically states that Italy is a nation founded on work and that cooperatives of all kinds were to be encouraged, and which even limited the rights of private property, also delegated substantial power to its twenty decentralized regions. But one region in the north has more cooperatives and less inequality than all the others, while entrenched poverty and a strong presence of the Mafia characterize many areas in the south.

In the United States, decentralization leads to mixed results. On the one hand, individual cities and states have acted independently to provide healthcare, increase minimum wages, and address climate change. On the other, powerful groups backed by billionaires, with unlimited funds to spend on propaganda, are essentially taking over state legislatures to pass favorable laws and have designs on rewriting the U.S. Constitution (Hartmann 2017).

Bodley’s basic premise is that the biggest problems that are happening in the world are caused by misguided growth directed by fallible human decision makers (2013: 36). Throughout human history, unintended consequences of intentional actions have led to resource depletion, wars, and the seemingly inevitable incorporation of smaller societies into larger ones and into worldwide systems that operate as if humans did not exist (Harris 1989a: 495, 501).

Anthropological studies of culture change typically focus on changes in cultures as systems and not on deliberate intent by members of a society (Wallace 1956: 267). An exception is religious revitalization movements where culture change can come about when people under stress unite to create a more satisfying culture, a process that is so common that few men have lived who have not been involved (ibid.). Due to the spread of new communication systems, modern revitalization movements do not have to be religious. Neither are they necessarily based on charismatic leadership or monitored by professional revolutionaries or intellectuals (Khosrokhavar 2012: 150–51). Even though intentional attempts to change culture rarely achieve desired results, intentional actions of individuals, organizations, and movements can and do shape decision-making and culture change. They can end wars, expand civil rights, protect constitutional principles, and reduce inequality (as in cooperatives or employee-owned businesses). And if individuals and groups, working together on local and state levels, do not unite to stop them, groups such as the Mafia in Italy and billionaires in the United States can and will intentionally become so powerful that they can take over governments and rule the world.

This book is about the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy where landless laborers joined together in unions, cooperatives, and political parties to intentionally shape a more humane agriculture and adjust with minimum disruption to the technological changes that ultimately caused their class to disappear. Italy’s Red Belt is a region where decentralization actually works, where the left came to power and didn’t make a mess (Fitch 1996), and where, despite many changes associated with globalization and even the rise of right-wing populism, primarily in other parts of the country (Passarelli and Tuorto 2014: 66), there is still less inequality here than anywhere else in Italy (Ciccarelli 2016).

Like bumblebees that aerodynamically should not be able to fly, collective experiments are often thought to be impossibly utopian, going against immutable laws of human nature, and sealing their fate by either disregarding the world as it is (Jennings 2016: 384) or having too much commercial dependence with the outside world (Erasmus 1984: 166). But in the province of Ravenna, a unique cooperative spirit grew out of deprivation and misery. It led to strikes, occupation of land, a tradition of tenacious nonviolence, and mutual dependence. Placards placed in neglected fields declared "Questo Terreno e Mal Coltivato, or This Land Is Poorly Cultivated (and thus should belong to the workers), and La Terra a Chi La Lavora (The Land to Those Who Work Her). The slogan Tutti o Nessuno (All or None") sent a message to landowners that they would not have any workers to work their land unless they used it to provide not only capitalist profit but also jobs and well-being for everyone.

This Italian project provided a rare opportunity to add to the literature on cooperatives a positive example of how a voluntary socialist endeavor survived in Ravenna, Italy, for over 130 years by finding its niche within the hostile world surrounding it. The research design for my 1972 study included an investigation of ethnohistorical and cultural-ecological causes for the success of the world’s oldest voluntary nongovernmental agricultural production cooperatives (also known as collective farms, which in Ravenna are called farmworker agricultural cooperatives or farmworker cooperatives for short). The 2010–14 study focuses on the persistence of the cooperative spirit, the economic effect of the collectives on two generations of member families and their communities, and efforts throughout Italy to expand the worker collectives to address unemployment.

There is no comprehensive case study in English on the Ravenna collectives and their practical value to cooperative, intentional social change experiments elsewhere, despite their theoretical significance to the humanities and social sciences. If collective farms in Ravenna were able to survive and successfully compete for over a hundred years, the idea that attempts to provision the collective good will inevitably fail has to be reassessed. How and why they have changed to meet new challenges of globalization over the last forty-five years is another important question. In the United States, the Ravenna experience is relevant to everyone whose livelihoods, human rights, and civil rights are threatened, as well as to the increasing number of American consumers searching for alternatives to our dominant food system through participation in farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture programs.

For these reasons, I made several trips to Italy from 2010 to 2014 to revisit the Ravenna collectives for the first time in forty years. It was an unusual anthropological opportunity for me to successfully locate and interview the same families and their descendants, investigate the variables that were originally concluded to explain success, and compare development processes historically and cross-culturally. What follows is the story of how a group of people, working together, intentionally created a collective movement that arguably led to a more sustainable agro-ecological, as opposed to agri-business, model of agricultural development. While the study is necessarily descriptive and ethnohistorical, it explores the relevance of the experience of this small group of Homo sapiens along Italy’s northeastern Adriatic coast to anthropological theory and to the outside world. Unless otherwise noted, all Italian-English translations and paraphrases are mine.

Chapter 1 is an overview of the Ravenna collectives and theoretical issues of cooperation and intentional social change. Chapter 2 introduces readers to the province of Ravenna, the role of cooperatives in the economy and society, their socioeconomic benefits to communities, and the changes that have occurred since the 1970s. Chapter 3 focuses on the ethos of cooperation in the Red Belt of the Emilia-Romagna region. To explain the origin and persistence of that unique regional ethos, chapters 4 and 5 trace the ethnohistorical relationships between land tenure, people, and power, and the sociopolitical development of the collectives from mutual aid societies to large landowning modern farms. Chapter 6 compares the results of authoritarian state edicts and market-based capitalist reforms with grassroots cooperation to show why the latter has had such success in Ravenna. Chapter 7 compares collectives with private forms of agriculture to show the comparative advantages of cooperation of all kinds in Ravenna, and chapter 8 describes how worker-managed collective organizations in Ravenna operated to provide employment and insure fair remuneration to members. The final chapter concludes the study by exploring the reasons for the strengths and shortcomings of these collectives, their relevance to anthropological theory, and implications for intentional attempts to change the end of history in Southern Italy and elsewhere. This book is my personal interpretation of the contemporary viability of cooperative enterprise and my way of thanking those cooperators from Ravenna by telling their story to the English-

speaking world.

—Alison Sánchez Hall

Little Rock, Arkansas, 2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Most of the credit for this book has to go to the cooperators from Ravenna, Italy, who taught me alternatives to our current way of life. From the small town of Longastrino, Ernesto Ballardini was a deserter from Mussolini’s army. His wife Adriana did not recognize him when he arrived at their door after walking home from Russia. He supported his family by fishing in the swamps at night and hiding from the Germans and fascists during the day. Although the fascists took away everything they had, they rebuilt their lives after the war through the development of a strong collective farm, agricultural labor union, and political movement. I learned from the Ballardinis that fulfillment in life comes not only from having family and work but also from associating with others for the common good. This is the type of social capital (described by Robert Putnam) that Alexis de Tocqueville thought was the key to making American democracy work.

Special recognition must go to the family of my dear friend, the late Lisetta Rivalta Arevalos from Ravenna, who made sure I could occasionally take a long hot bath during my 1972–74 anthropological participant observation fieldwork. Her sons Dan, Matteo, and Jimmy and their friend Gerardo Langone maintained the close connection between our families for over forty years. The enthusiasm for cooperation of those who worked in the management of the League of Cooperatives in Ravenna—the late Mario Tampieri and Guido Brighi, Pietro Pasini, Giovanni Errani, and others—left an indelible impression. Paola Patuelli, daughter of World War II partisans, helped me understand the importance to the cooperative movement of the political, economic, and cultural vacuum that followed the defeat of fascism. Luciano Lucci, whose love of his native Alfonsine is reflected in his website, provided an invaluable source of current local politics. Rosa, Gino, Carmen, Massimo, and their friend Paolo were wonderful hosts at the Tra le Braccia de Morfeo Bed and Breakfast in Ravenna.

I am grateful to historian Pietro Albonetti, who not only translated the crucial study by Friedrich Vöchting from German to Italian but also was the only Italian to read and comment on my English manuscript. I have not forgotten Sergio Nardi or the staff at the Oriani Library in Ravenna where I spent many long days struggling to read Italian sources. I also thank Marcella Montanari for her research assistance while I was relearning Italian after a forty-year hiatus, the volunteers at the Ravenna Cooperators’ Circle (Circolo Cooperatori Ravennate) archives, the staff at Longo publishers, Andrea Baravelli of the University of Ferrara, and University of Bologna faculty Tito Menzani, Roberto Fanfani, and Pier Giorgio Massaretti. I was also very fortunate (and pleasantly surprised) to find many essential Italian sources in the British and New York Public Libraries.

With the support of my family and my women friends, Claudia Goldstein, Katherine West, Dr. Patricia mPata McGraw, Nancy Radloff, and Marie Horchler, I finally found the determination to make this book a reality. The volunteers I worked with over many years in nonprofit organizations, especially Katy Elliott who founded the Arkansas Sustainability Network and Jean Gordon of Arkansas Women’s Action for New Directions, convinced me of the power of intentional social change. My students, including Jillian Browder, and my colleague Brian Campbell, who epitomizes the dedication and energy of the new generation of anthropologists, inspired me. I am grateful to Dean Maurice Lee and Associate Dean Peter Mehl of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Arkansas, and to my colleagues in the Sociology Department, including Gordon Shepherd, who believed in me, and S. Lynne Rich, who thought enough of the project to go with me to Italy. Anthropologists John Bodley and Michael Blim, and historian David W. Ellwood (who didn’t know me but answered my emails anyway), deserve my respect and gratitude. I am immensely grateful for the encouragement and expertise provided by the publisher, editors, and staff at Berghahn Books. Last, but not least, I would like to acknowledge the late Professor Charles J. Erasmus, my mentor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Whether or not people can successfully cooperate for the collective good in complex societies is a question that followed him his entire professional career. He passed it on to me, where it has been ever since. Finally, funding for different phases of the study came from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Central Arkansas.

ABBREVIATIONS

CAB: Braccianti Agricultural Cooperative (collective farm)

CGIL: Red Labor Union

CISL: White (Catholic) Labor Union

CLN: Committee for National Liberation post–World War II

CMC: Red Construction Cooperative

COOP Italia: A national Red Consumer Cooperative

COR: Ravenna Vegetable and Fruit Consortium

Federbraccianti: National labor union for agricultural workers associated with C.G.I.L.

Federcoop: Federation of Cooperatives

INEA: Italian National Institute of Agricultural Economics

Istat: Italian National Institute for Statistics

Legacoop: National and Regional Leagues of the Red Cooperatives

PCI: Italian Communist Party

UIL: Green (Republican) Labor Union

MAP 0.1. Italy with location of the Red Belt province of Ravenna, the Po River Delta, and the region of Emilia Romagna (redrawn by Nancy Radloff)

MAP 0.2. The province of Ravenna with rivers, topography and agricultural zones, towns, and locations of collective farms in 1972 (redrawn by Nancy Radloff)

MAP 0.3. Post–World War II land tenure with large capitalist, small private, and tenant farm zones and 2012 Northern League right-wing strongholds in the Red Belt

Sources: Medici and Orlando 1952: 166; Barbieri (based on data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Regions of Tuscany and the Marches) 2012: 283; background topographic map © User: Deusdemona / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0. Data overlay by the author and Marie Horchler.

CHAPTER

1

ALICE NEL PAESE DELLE MERAVIGLIE (ALICE [THE ANTHROPOLOGIST] IN WONDERLAND)

Alice laughed. There’s no use trying, she said: "one can’t believe impossible things."

I daresay you haven’t had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. (Carroll 1871)

Conditioned by conventional negativity about the usual failures of utopian experiments, I went to Italy in 1972 to study the world’s oldest nongovernmental voluntary agricultural production cooperatives. I was prepared to chalk up another statistic in the chronicle of collective failures: perhaps another good explanation about why they failed.

Instead, I encountered the anomaly of Socialist- and Communist-led agricultural collective farms (then nearly one hundred years old) in a Western capitalist country. Located in the province of Ravenna in Italy’s Red Belt region of Emilia-Romagna (map 0.1), these unique worker-managed organizations secured control of 20–25 percent of the rich and valuable land at the mouth of the Po River. They weathered the storms of poverty, violent oppression, disease, economic pressure, mismanagement, depression, war, and fascism. And they did more than simply survive: they built, held onto, and expanded a land base that became a legacy to future generations. I expected to find failure, but instead I found that they provided a substantial measure of economic benefits for the members and their families, and only required for admission to membership (which was up to 75 percent women in some areas) that one not be a fascist, that one be a farm worker (or owner of insufficient land) of good moral standing (no criminal record and not an alcoholic), and that one pay approximately the equivalent of one US dollar to join.

Over the years since 1974, I often wondered how the collective farms had changed. As the United States and world economies headed for collapse in 2008, I recalled my futile attempts to explain to the rural Italians why I had come to study them. Because my name Alison wasn’t translatable (and, in retrospect, because they knew had so much to teach me about cooperation), they kept introducing me as Alice Nel Paese Delle Meraviglie, which means Alice in Wonderland (figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1. Alice the Anthropologist, 1980

Photo by the author

Everyone there had seen the movie The Grapes of Wrath (Ford 1940), about my native California, and would then add to their introduction that I had come to learn how to cooperate in order to show Americans how it is done. I came to feel like the first anthropologist in the history of the discipline whose informants thought she came from a backward culture to study their more advanced ways. In 2010, in the light of all the changes that were occurring in my own country, with consumers questioning the logic or even sanity of corporate agriculture, I resolved to go back to Italy to see what had happened. This time, I would take the advice of my informants more seriously and begin to explore the ways in which the Italian experience might be exportable to the United States.

My intent in publishing this study is to introduce the English-speaking world to the agricultural production cooperatives in the province of Ravenna along the Adriatic coast in the Italian Po River Valley. Geographically, it is like a miniature version of the Lower Mississippi Delta, which, after California, became my second home. In Ravenna, the relationship between efforts to provide for the collective good and the development of a sustainable agricultural system go hand in hand, and Americans might be surprised to learn that it is a place where small private firms and cooperatives are the economically competitive basis of a participatory democracy.

Although the London Times’ business correspondent John Earle was the first to publish (in 1986) a nationwide historical survey, The Italian Cooperative Movement,’ it was Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy) who introduced the Emilian Model to the United States in 1994. A 1996 Nation magazine article by Robert Fitch described the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna as having a well-managed and uniquely Italian entrepreneurial brand of municipal socialism. He reported that its communities, according to Italian polls, were the best places to live and that the region boasted the lowest unemployment rate in Italy and the tenth highest GDP of all 122 regions in Europe (1996).

Canadians John Restakis and Bob Williams cofounded the Summer Program for Cooperative Studies in Bologna. A 2003 article by Bob Williams described the partnership in Emilia-Romagna between the regional government, university and nonprofit research institutes, and associations of enterprises. He noted that the region had approximately one enterprise for every twelve residents (2003). In 2006, John Logue, professor of political science at Kent State, proposed importing the Emilian model to Ohio. His Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State was inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s idea that democracy would succeed in the United States because of the widespread ownership of productive assets, the economic independence of citizens, and the absence of a history of feudalism (Logue and Yates 2001: 9). To Logue, workers’ cooperatives are a realistic modern equivalent to small owner-operated farms and shops (2006).

Published in 2010, after ten years of summers in Italy and mentoring by the English-speaking Italian economists Stefano and Vera Zamagni, John Restakis’s Humanizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital includes two chapters on the region’s industrial manufacturing cooperatives (knitwear, clothes, ceramic tiles, motorcycles, shoes, equipment), networks of cooperatives and small firms, value-added cooperative enterprises (including agricultural processing, consumer and marketing cooperatives), and a construction labor cooperative with large global contracts. Restakis explains how the strong cooperative movement in Emilia-Romagna was a lifeboat in tough economic times and how clusters of small private firms and cooperatives made it possible for both to survive and prosper, even within the global economy (2010: 86).

Most recently, American filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin released WEconomics: Italy in 2016. It is a short documentary film on the cooperative economy of Emilia-Romagna featuring an interview with Vera Zamagni. The film describes Northern Italy’s answer to corporate rapacity and state indifference (Durrenberger 2016) and beautifully captures the power of cooperatives in a world in desperate need of hope (Lappé 2016).

RAVENNA’S AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION WORKERS’ COOPERATIVES

Less easily understandable from the American point of view, and as yet unknown to the English-speaking world, is the story of the success of the initial collective farms that grew out of earlier Republican and Catholic mutual-aid societies. These are the foundation for the cooperative spirit upon which the Emilian Model is based. Historically developed and linked to anarchist ideology and to strong labor unions associated with Italian Socialist and Communist political organizations, the Ravenna collectives are unique in that they still own or lease 12,407 hectares (30,658 acres) of some of the richest and most valuable agricultural land in Europe. The history of the acquisition and use of that land, passed on from generation to generation without being owned by private individuals or the state, provides an enviable example of a more humane economy and society in stark contrast to what developed in my home states of California and Arkansas.

The Ravenna collectives are a rare surviving example of collectivization that came about as a spontaneous, voluntary action of agricultural workers who rose to meet the challenge of reclaiming a vast swamp for agricultural use. As we shall see, the Romagnol braccianti, literally the day laborers from Emilia-Romagna who work with their arms, were no mere victims or bystanders of history. When pushed off the land that had nurtured their ancestors, they developed unique defense mechanisms to cope with forces within their culture that they saw as negative: the technological displacement of labor by machines, the lack of any kind of humanistic control over the use of technology in agriculture, and the private appropriation and use of the land for the controlling elite economic class.

Clinging doggedly to the Romagnol lands and contriving all manner of schemes to squeeze the maximum amount of labor, rigorously shared by all, out of a skimpy economy, the Ravenna collectives developed a flexible system of security and made work for the individual members. When forced by urgent economic necessity, they resorted to the strike in reverse, moving their machines onto unused, privately owned land, eventually forcing it to be sold to the collectives (figure 1.2).

These worker-managed enterprises, where productivity depended upon the conscience of the worker-owners, were exceptionally well adapted to an economy characterized by chronic and widespread partial unemployment. They developed sophisticated planting and production plans, based not only on the simple goals of yield and profit in cash but