Abstract

The paper analyses personal experiences of activists and sympathizers of CasaPound movement, aiming to understand the meaning of their individual action as well as their cultural, political and social orientations. CasaPound is a cultural and political movement, clearly inspired by fascism, born in 2003 and spread in Italy during the last eight years. CasaPound aims to pursue an alternative to nowadays globalization process and to the market and consummation logics, to affirm an ethic of popular sovereignty and citizenship rights. At the same time, CasaPound aims to build an open space of resistance, elaboration and collective action where individual actors can express their own commitment and their own personal subjectivity. In particular, the aim of the research is to understand the limits linked to the process of affirmation of subjectivity for the people engaged in the CasaPound movement. Subjectivity has been interpreted not just as an element characterized by presence or absence, but more like a tension, more or less constant, of transformation of a lived situation in a free action, with the aim of understanding how this tension is lived by the actor. The research results presented show that personal affirmation is a fundamental aspect in the activism of CasaPound members as well as a driver for their strong engagement in the movement. At the same time, this subjective affirmation is strictly related to the development and strengthening of their community. Consequentially, any personal project is inevitably linked to the common project of the movement, which all members must endorse. In this way, private life and life within the movement tend to merge in one «living space» Informal collective activities - concerts, conviviality in pubs, sport activities - are not just considered as a form of amusement, but they become an experience in socialization and aggregation and political action at both individual and collective levels. The research has been conducted by combining several methodologies (participant observation, interviews, focus groups) alternately during the different fieldwork stages.