A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #41 - Hunger as a Political Fact: Poverty, Selective Welfare, and Self-Management Practices in Italy in 2026 - Totò Caggese (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In Italy, hunger is once again being discussed. Not as a metaphor, not 
as a useful image for ritual indignation, but as a widespread, daily, 
structural material condition. Millions of people experience various 
forms of food insecurity: impoverished diets, systematic sacrifices, 
dependence on external aid. Yet, in the dominant public discourse, 
hunger continues to be treated as an anomaly, a residue, an inevitable 
consequence of temporary crises.
The reality is different. Hunger is not a blip: it's a political fact.
A country that normalizes insecurity

In recent years, food insecurity has returned to the fore, affecting 
ever larger segments of the population.

It's not just a complete lack of food, but a progressive erosion of 
access to adequate, healthy, and socially acceptable food. One in ten 
people today cannot consistently afford a minimally balanced diet. It's 
not spectacular hunger, but silent, normalized, and invisible hunger.

The regional data reveals profound fractures. In Southern Italy, the 
incidence of food deprivation is more than double that in many areas of 
the North. Entire regions experience structural vulnerability, where job 
insecurity, unemployment, poor services, and rising living costs combine 
to produce material exclusion. But it would be a mistake to read this 
fracture as a simple historical delay: what is happening in the South 
anticipates dynamics that are gradually spreading elsewhere.

Hunger and poor work

One of the most relevant-and often overlooked-issues concerns the 
relationship between hunger and work. Food poverty doesn't just affect 
those formally excluded from the labor market. It increasingly affects 
those who work, but with insufficient wages, unstable contracts, and 
irregular schedules. Work no longer guarantees access to essential 
goods. This is the real divide.

Large families, single-parent households, people with low levels of 
education, young people, and precarious workers are increasingly exposed 
to food insecurity. Here, the rhetoric of individual responsibility 
reveals its full inconsistency: it's not about bad choices, but about a 
system that systematically produces incomes inadequate for life.

Conditional welfare and permanent assistance

Faced with this scenario, the institutional response has been 
predominantly defensive. Welfare has progressively changed its function: 
from a collective protection tool to a selective mechanism, based on 
increasingly stringent access criteria, controls, and conditionality. 
Food aid is thus fragmented into temporary measures, bonuses, parcels, 
and cards, without addressing the structural causes.

The spread of soup kitchens, food distributions, and emergency 
interventions isn't a sign of greater social justice, but rather a 
symptom of ongoing assistance. Need is managed, not eliminated. Hunger 
is addressed, not challenged.

In this context, food becomes a tool for social regulation: who can 
access aid, under what conditions, with what obligations. Rights become 
concessions. Dignity becomes compatibility.

Hunger and democracy

A society that tolerates such high levels of food insecurity is a 
politically fragile society. Hunger-even in its moderate forms-produces 
adaptation, silence, and the fear of losing what little remains. It 
reduces participation, fragments conflict, and makes any form of 
collective organization more difficult.

Hunger isn't just material deprivation. It limits the ability to choose, 
to speak out, to act politically.

Mutualism and self-management: practices of disruption

It is precisely in the spaces left empty by the state and the market 
that practices of mutualism and self-management continue to develop. 
Popular kitchens, self-managed solidarity stores, food recovery and 
sharing networks, purchasing and mutual support groups are not simply 
charitable responses. They are concrete attempts to remove need from the 
logic of selection and control.

In these experiences, food is neither a reward nor a disciplinary tool. 
There are no deserving or undeserving people. What exists is the mutual 
recognition of a common need and the choice to address it collectively. 
Mutualism does not eliminate hunger as such, but it reverses its 
political meaning: it demonstrates that scarcity is not natural and that 
grassroots organizing can produce more dignified responses than 
institutional ones.

This is why these practices are tolerated as long as they remain 
marginal and hindered as they grow. Because they challenge a fundamental 
principle of the current social order: that access to essential goods 
must be based on income, work performance, and market compatibility.

Beyond the management of poverty

Putting need back at the center means putting social conflict back at 
the center, even in its everyday and less visible forms. It means 
affirming that the right to food is not a concession to be demanded, but 
a practice to be built, against the logic of scarcity and guilt.

As long as millions of people are forced to choose what to 
sacrifice-food quality, health, social interaction-any talk of growth, 
stability, and individual responsibility will remain empty.

But as long as practices of mutualism and self-management exist, there 
will also be the concrete possibility of imagining and experimenting 
with another organization of material life, free from the blackmail of 
hunger.

https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
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