International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 114

International Journal on Criminology
society by offering an opening for collaboration. This can vary in its extent. The
collaboration may be very slight, involving simple co-existence on the part of non-
Mafiosi who consider that they have to “get along” with the Mafia, especially as
it is deemed to have quietened down by abandoning the visible use of force. The
intense form of collaboration is when non-Mafiosi businessmen choose—after
making a rapid and short-term calculation of whether it is advantageous—to enter
into a relationship involving active cooperation with the Mafia so as to benefit from
the ensuing advantages like access to markets, suppliers, credits, and so on. The
decrease in recourse to violence is, therefore, accompanied by the growth of a grey
area which blurs the boundaries between the legal, the illegal and the criminal. If it
has proved possible for this opening for collaboration to be extended and broadened
out, including to citizens who are assumed to be above suspicion, it is essentially
because the use of violence has largely given way to a new weapon of power, which
is artificial scarcity.
The Everyday Nature of Mafia Power. The Weapon of Artificial Scarcity
Scarcity is a fundamental element in current economic analysis: scarcity of
resources, or factors of production, but also the financial scarcity of budget constraint
weighs upon economic agents and limits their choices. 3 However, in the literature of
economics, this scarcity is exogenous and natural.
The Mafia superimposes an artificial scarcity upon this de facto scarcity,
that is to say a socially constructed scarcity which can be used to oppress people
in a selective and discriminatory fashion. By using artificial scarcity, the Mafia can
achieve the same results as through violence, which is mainly to direct and limit
the behavior of non-Mafiosi, without having to suffer the disadvantages of this—
these disadvantages being understood in terms of identification and repression and/or
denunciation. Using artificial scarcity is probably also less costly to implement than
using conspicuous violence on a large scale. Furthermore, it is less easy to identify
and therefore to denounce as a criminal act. Therefore, artificial scarcity enables the
Mafia to condition the local economy and society in a systematic but almost invisible
way, thus consolidating its hold over a given territory without the threat being easily
discernible. The exercise of Mafia power then departs from the purely military sphere
characterized by the use of violence and the questioning of the monopoly of violence
by the State, to enter the economic sphere: its aim here is to entrench its power, a
power which is all the more worrying in that it becomes largely uncontested while at
the same time pervading the everyday life of the area under its control.
3
The standard point of reference on the subject is L. Robbins’s definition according to which the
economy is “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce
means which have alternative uses.” Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of
Economic Science (London: MacMillan, 1932), 15.
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