Economia criminale, riappropriazione delle terre e ‘altreconomia’ nel Mezzogiorno

Abstract

As well as representing a presidium of legality and contributing to re-inject in formal economy a huge mass of resources retrieved from shadow economy, the management for social purposes of properties confiscated to the mafia (a growing phenomenon in Southern Italy regions, and beyond) may represent a widespread territorial workshop for the bottom-up establishment of integrated ‘alter-economy’ supply chains, inspired by the social and cultural ethics of the fair trade. In perspective, these alternative chains could compete with capitalism for the control of significant market shares, by aiming at the contraction of just those pockets of diseconomy where criminal economy lurks and prospers. This latter, in fact, by the enormity of the sums conveyed, significantly affects the course of formal economy, eventually appearing not as a distortive drift of global capitalism, but rather as one of its logical outcomes.