Solidarity politics beyond social distancing: direct social action in Italy during the COVID-19 emergency

The COVID-19 pandemic and the “social distancing” measures created from the Spring of 2020 a series of social problems and needs: access to shops, supermarkets and pharmacies; childcare for working families; poverty and unemployment; psychological issues; domestic violence; difficulties in paying rent and bills, and so on. In addressing them, a significant role was played by grassroots solidarity initiatives that involved a wide set of actors, from established NGOs to radical political groups to ad-hoc networks of individual citizens. This paper aims to analyse these initiatives as direct social actions: actions that do not primarily focus upon claiming something or other from the state or other power holders, but that instead focus upon directly transforming some specific aspects of society by means of the very action itself. Thanks to participant observation and qualitative interviews, this paper aims to answer three questions. First, on the relationship between the emergency context and the materialisation of collective action, how widespread was the choice to adopt DSAs during the pandemic, and to what extent did it include also actors that had never engaged in such actions before? Second, what is the relationship between the involvement in DSAs in the context of the COVID-19 and politicisation processes, and to what extent were actors able to create a path towards other forms of action in the communities they engaged DSAs? Third, is there a path-dependency between processes put in place through the choice of direct social action in previous phases (i.e. the economic crisis and the long summer of migration) and those put in place in the COVID-19 pandemic? The paper aims to contribute to the literature on the changing nature of collective action, analysing its development in a context that is not usually considered favourable for activism.