The mafia - it ain't what it used to be.
In his book Excellent Cadavers Alexander Stille charts the rise of the Corleonesi family to the top of the brutal world of Sicily's Cosa Nostra. In the first half of the twentieth century, he writes, the mafia was governed by strict internal rules that helped ensure its successful reproduction ("by definition", a leading Palermo expert on the mafia reports, the survival of criminal organizations "depends on a code of conduct which is particularly severe"). It was forbidden for 'men of honour' to lie to each other about mafia business; kidnappings and other high profile crimes were frowned upon and the killing of women and children was prohibited, to prevent the state feeling obliged to intervene; occasional jail time was considered an occupational hazard, required for the state to be able to show that it was doing something about organized crime; contact between low level members of different families was minimised; and so on. These principles were deeply internalised and made the Cosa Nostra a cohesive, stable system that was extremely difficult for law enforcement to penetrate (until Tomasso Buscetta's testimony leading up to the Maxi Trial of mafiosi in the 1980s Italian police hadn't even figured out the Sicilian mafia's real name!). It was this "traditional" institutional and cultural structure that provided the basis for 'omertà' – the code of silence subscribed to by mafiosi and the members of the communities in which they operated. Omertà, the principled refusal to cooperate with the authorities even if one has been the victim of a crime, was a crucial factor in the mafia's resilience.
The traditional mafia
The "traditional" mafia can be seen as analogous in some respects to post-war capitalism, aware that its own stability required making concessions to the public and refraining from the most overtly destructive types of behaviour. But in the 1970s, all that began to change, as both the "moderate" mafia and post-war Keynesianism were overtaken by a leaner, more ruthless competitor.
The Corleonesi achieved dominance within the Cosa Nostra by flagrantly violating its institutional norms (while nonetheless justifying its actions in terms of them). In particular it a) kept the identity of soldiers secret and b) violated the obligation not to lie about mafia business to other 'men of honour', and as a result managed to play other families off against each other in a mafia 'war' that weakened everyone except itself. Whereas "traditional" mafia leaders lived in society and hence had to conform at least partially to public values and opinion, the leaders of the Corleonesi were mostly fugitives from the law. This paradoxically gave them greater freedom to act ruthlessly, engaging in kidnappings and bombings of high profile public figures like the president of the Christian Democrat Party in Palermo (possible analogy to the increasing cross-border mobility of capital here?).
This new mafia was leaner, more mobile and more ruthless, which enabled it to rapidly gain dominance over the Commission and displace the "traditional" mafia families, which had underestimated it and ended up being picked off one by one.
But in the process the cultural and institutional basis that had held the Sicilian mafia together for 120 years was eroded. High profile assassinations caused public outrage, not only against the mafia but at the political system that enabled it. The state felt increasingly obliged to take meaningful action against organized crime. Eventually even the sacred principle of omertà was undermined. This is when Buscetta started to talk and the whole structure began to unravel. When the mafia assassinated Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two highest profile anti-mafia investigators in Italy, mafiosi took this as a sign not of strength but of desperation, and the trickle of defectors became a flood. As one pentito (defector) explained, the two murders "convinced me that Cosa Nostra has undertaken an irreversible strategy of death".
Similarly neoliberalism was able to displace 'traditional' post-war capitalism in the 1980s by being more ruthless. It decimated the bargaining power of the labour, pushed for deregulation, suppressed wages, and concentrated investment increasingly in hypermobile financial capital that contributed little to society but was very effective in generating short-term profits and marginalising the influence of public opinion over state policy. But just as the Corleonesi undermined the foundations of the mafia system even as they gained control over it, so neoliberalism grew fat by consuming the basis of its own success. The distribution of easy credit could only patch up the contradictions in the system for so long, and the massive externalities building up in the financial system made a systemic crisis inevitable.
The Corleonesi's 'financial crisis' was the Maxi Trial of hundreds of Mafiosi, the product of a reinvigorated public and hence state opposition to organized crime and its attendant political corruption. The family responded with a campaign of 'pax mafiosi' under new leadership – murders of state officials were halted, restored a common aid fund for imprisoned mafiosi and ended the policy of murdering informants and their families. This policy had some success in reducing the wave of defectors, but it wasn't enough – the Cosa Nostra is now "a shadow of its former self" having been overtaken by rival organisations.
It's interesting that the Coalition government in Britain hasn't adopted the Corleonesi response to the crisis. There has been no pax capitalismo. This might correspond to the Corleonesi's initial response to the Maxi Trial, which was to dramatically escalate the violence and the terror. The result of the first Maxi Trial, which convicted hundreds of mafiosi, represented a crushing defeat for the Corleonesi. Its strategy of direct military confrontation with the state had failed to secure favourable verdicts, and had deeply alienated the public. But in the face of growing internal divisions the Corleonesi leadership felt it had to go for broke and "step up the violence severalfold", risking "all-out war with the state" in the process. The new motto: "[ora] ci rempemu i corna a tutti [now we are going to break all their heads]".
It was only when that strategy failed that they turned in a serious way to pax mafiosi – too late, as it turned out. If the Coalition is still in the 'breaking heads' phase, then we can perhaps expect a partial or total return to "traditional" capitalism if and when austerity fails to resolve the crisis. If not, the government's militancy may reflect the fact that whereas the alternative to the mafia – no mafia – was fairly straightforward and had broad popular appeal, the public in Britain has yet to mobilise sufficiently in favour of an alternative political and economic program.
First published at New Left Project