(en) anarkismo.net: In search of early Italy's "lost"
Bakuninist organisations by Michael Schmidt
A review of Nunzio Pernicone's Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892 (AK Press, USA, 2009) I'm a
historian of the global anarchist movement (Black Flame - 2009; Cartography of
Revolutionary Anarchism - 2013), but during what I term the First Wave (1868-1894), the
Italian anarchist movement was always a bit vague to me. The reason was that most
historians make a point of stressing that the Italians made their mark not in Italy, but
as travelling militants, especially in Egypt, Tunisia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and the
United States. But the conundrum was: if Italian anarchists were so influential in the
revolutionary labour movement abroad, how was it possible that they had little traction
where they came from? ---- Now Pernicone as helped explain why: Firstly, the dominance in
Italy from the time of the Italian Federation of the IWMA of a form of self-described
anarcho-collectivism (later anarcho-communism) that was insurrectionist and
anti-syndicalist in the manner of Hatta Shuzo and the "pure" anarchists of Japan (they
initially supported mass formations, but were just not very keen on unions), and later due
to repression became staunchly anti-organisationist / anti-mass too. Not a smooth
trajectory, bearing in mind that the likes of the young insurrectionist Luigi Galleani
also cut his teeth on worker organising. Secondly, the new Italian state was dominated by
two political factions: the “Historic Right” consisting of conservatives and monarchists,
while the “Historic Left” consisted of nationalists and republicans – but this “Left” was
compromised by its post-unification support for the monarchy; as a result, until the
1890s, government swung between two anti-socialist poles, which saw the emergent anarchist
movement and the socialists more broadly, suffer continual cycles of repression. This
repression was meted out by two processes that were not submitted to the courts where they
could have been challenged: “admonishment” under which militants were put under
restrictive surveillance; and domicilio coatto, which involved forced internal exile on
islands off the coast such as Lampedusa.
And yet, despite this climate, organisational efforts were perennial. The first
International Revolutionary Brotherhood organisation in Italy, the Society of Legionnaires
of the Italian Social Revolution (SLRSI), was founded by Bakunin in 1866, being reformed
the next year as the Liberty & Justice (LeG) group, which lead directly to the foundation
of the Italian Federation (FI) of the IWMA in 1869 that adhered to Bakunin’s line against
Marx. Although initially based in Naples and its docks and the island of Sicily with more
than 3,500 members by 1870, and swelling to an early peak of 32,450 members by 1874,
primarily in north-central Italy, the FI was heavily repressed by the state in the late
1870s, while its insurrectionist (which later developed into an anti-organisationist) bias
meant it would have to wait decades to achieve its own trade union central. But one of the
key innovations of the FI was its emphasis on the equality of women: driven by women
leaders such as Luisa “Gigia” Minguzzi of the FI’s Tuscan Federation and Vincenza
Matteuzzi of the FI’s Marchian-Umbrian Federation, by 1876, the FI had organised women’s
sections and groups in the cities and towns of Florence, Aquila, Imola, Perrugia, Carrara
and Prato.
By 1880, the FI was essentially dead in the water – although well into the decade in
northern Italy, groups in various cities remained loyal to the internationalist line and
still considered themselves part of the FI, now aligned to the Black International.
Although repression had a generally negative impact on the Italian anarchist movement,
with the majority adhering to a self-defeating self-described “anarcho-communist” line
that talked insurrection but adopted anti-organisationism, so did little but produce
incendiary newspapers and eschewed worker’s struggles, there were some positive
organisational developments among the constructive minority. For example, in 1885,
Ambrogio Galli’s Anarchist Communist Group (GCA) of Milan founded the Upper Italian
Federation (FAI) with the purpose of reviving the movement, particularly among the
workerists of the Italan Workers’ Party (POI) founded three years earlier with a programme
that excluded from membership any who were not working class; initially the two camps had
much in common, but the hostility of most anarchists to what they saw as the reformism of
trade unions lead to a parting of their ways. There was better progress in 1885 when the
Forlì Congress brought together 11 northern cities, scores of anarchist groups and
federations from almost every region, resulting in the formation in August of the regional
Anarchist Socialist Federation of Pesaro-Urbino (FASPU) and by 1887, a Forlì International
Federation (FIF) was founded with 300 members; meanwhile although in 1876, a tiny and
ephemeral Florentine Anarchist Federation (FAF) had been founded, adhering to Malatesta’s
pro-organisational line, significant advances were made by Minguzzi among women workers at
one of the two cigarette factories in Florence. However, these initiatives remained
overwhelmingly regional and were unable to achieve national federation.
One of Bakunin’s main Italian disciples and in many ways his successor, Errico Malatesta
(1853-1932) who turned his back on his middle class origins to become an inveterate
militant, insurgent, organiser and polemicist, moved from an “anarcho-communist”
insurrectionist position that he had held in the 1870s to a mass anarchist position by
1889 when he wrote his Programme, published in his newspaper L’Associazione, in Nice,
France, as a call to arms against the deleterious effects of the anti-organisationist,
terrorist and individualist deviations which had driven the Italian anarchist movement
into isolation from the working class. Impressed by the strike-wave then surging across
Europe, especially the struggle of the London dockworkers, Malatesta wrote in another
article in the newspaper that “The masses arrive at great vindications by means of small
protests and small revolts. Let us join them and spur them forward... Indeed every strike
has its revolutionary characteristic; every strike finds energetic men [sic.] to punish
the bosses and, above all, to attack property and to show the strikers that it is easier
to take than to ask.”
In his neo-Bakuninist Programme, Malatesta stated that “a great revolution is approaching,
perhaps it is imminent,” and so the anarchist movement was faced with a “great mission”
for which it needed to construct an international revolutionary anarchist-socialist party
(later described by Malatesta as “the totality of all who embrace the programme, who
advocate its triumph and who consider themselves bound not to do anything opposed to it”).
As Pernicone paraphrases it, “Malatesta believed that although only the masses could make
the revolution, they needed the guidance of a vanguard anarchist party. For only the
anarchists, who harboured no secret desire for power, could arouse the masses to full
consciousness of their might and spur them to destroy the state and every other obstacle
blocking emancipation. And only the anarchists could be relied upon to resist the
formation of new governments that would impose their will upon the masses, arrest and
divert the course of the revolution, and prevent the evolution of a libertarian society.”
Malatesta’s Programme finally bore fruit in 1891 at the Capolago Congress in Switzerland,
to which more than 200 associations (two thirds of them anarchist and one third socialist
and workerist) affiliated, representing more than 50 Italian cities and towns, plus exile
groups from Switzerland, France, Britain, Egypt, the United States, Argentina and Brazil,
at which it was overwhelmingly decided to found a Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party
(PSAR), which soon established regional federations across Italy; repressed by the state,
the PSAR’s regional federations were revived in 1897, though by then, Malatesta had moved
away from the party’s original syncretism towards endorsing a far more ideologically
coherent programme; within fifteen years, the Italian pro-organisational anarchists
controlled their own 80,000-strong anarcho-syndicalist labour centre, the Italian
Syndicalist Union (USI).
In sum, Pernicone has: corrected a longstanding Marxist occlusion regarding the Italian
revolutionary left between the Risorgimento (state unification) of 1861 and the eventual
establishment of a Marxist party in 1892, a bias that reflects the initial dominance of
the Bakuninists; restored the pro-organisational history of the Italian movement - which
was especially defined by its dispute with the anti-organisationists, a battle that it
eventually won, in time to be on the barricades during the anti-colonial Red Week in 1914,
not to mention the revolutionary Red Years of 1919-1920, with the USI peaking at 800,000
members, backed by a political organisation - in echo of Bakunin's dual-organisational
strategy, the 20,000-strong Italian Anarchist Union (UAI); and lastly, Pernicone has
offered tantalysing glimpses of the establishment of Women's Sections which were to prove
so influential as the vanguards of anarcho-syndicalism where it dominated the labour
movement in most of Latin America until the 1930s. I hope he'll see fit to research and
write a companion volume on the Italian movement from 1892, through the Fascist era, until
the present.
http://www.anarkismo.net/article/28200
