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Title: Marie Louise Berneri Author: Phillip Sansom Date: June, 1977 Language: en Topics: Marie Louise Berneri, tribute, World War II, Zero Magazine Source: Zero Number 1, June, 1977, page 9 Notes: Scanned from original.
Note: Zero (Anarchist/Anarca-feminist Newsmagazine) was published in
London in the late 1970s.
“We cannot build until the working class gets rid of its illusions, its
acceptance of bosses and faith in leaders. Our policy consists in
educating it, in stimulating its class instinct and teaching methods of
struggle...It is a hard and long task, but...our way of refusing to
attempt the futile task of patching up a rotten world, but of striving
to build a new one, is not only constructive but is also the only way
out.”
-- Marie Louise Berneri, December, 1940
[]Marie Louise Berneri was the first anarchist I ever met. The first
convinced, dedicated, working-for-the-movement anarchist, I mean.
For she it was who opened the door when I rang the bell of the Freedom
Press office one day in 1943, when I set out to discover what anarchism
was and who the anarchists were.
The anarchist movement turned out to be the place for me, but by no
stretch of the imagination could I ever pretend that all anarchists were
like Marie Louise Berneri. She was quite exceptional — as a friend, as a
comrade, as a militant revolutionary and as a thinker.
When I first met her she was 25, and had already been affected by
revolutionary activity for about 20 of those years. Her father was
Camillo Berneri, a brilliant anarchist writer and a leading theoretician
of the Italian anarchist movement. He was also an activist, and so
subject to continual attacks by Mussolini’s fascists that eventually he,
his wife Giovanna and two daughters Marie Louise and Giliane, went into
exile in France.
That was 1926, and Marie Louise was learning the facts of life for a
revolutionary. Ten years later Camillo Berneri left for Spain, first to
fight on the Aragon front and then to edit the paper Guerra di Classe in
Barcelona. During this time Marie Louise made several “journeys of
confidence” to Barcelona, on behalf of the comrades in Paris, and was
able to see at first hand the achievements of the anarchist Spanish
workers, an inspiration which was to stay with her forever, even after
the brutal murder of her father by Communists during the May days of
1937.
Towards the end of 1937 she came to London to live with her friend Vero
Richards, himself the son of an Italian anarchist long exiled in London.
In 1936, when the Spanish Revolution began, no anarchist paper was
appearing regularly in Britain until Vero Richards began Spain and the
World--probably the most influential anarchist paper ever to appear
here. Marie Louise was heavily involved in working for the paper,
rapidly learning English to add to her native Italian and acquired
French and Spanish.
Franco’s military victory in 1939 brought some special problems--not
least the sudden appearance in London of some 160 Spanish refugees who
had managed to escape at the last moment, in need of food, clothing,
accommodation and support in every way. Marie Louise threw herself into
this very special task of drumming up help for these weary and
dispirited comrades, one of whom, Manuel Solgado, was to write later:
“We were morally and physically destroyed. Within a few days a comrade
came to take us to the Freedom Press premises, and it was there I first
saw Marie Louise, who received us with unbounded happiness. From the
very beginning she was at our disposal and moved heaven and earth so
that those of us still at the Salvation Army hostel could leave that
place. All her interest was centred on our explaining in detail the ins
and outs of our struggle. There was one episode about which she asked no
questions and about which all of us, without previous arrangement among
ourselves, kept silent. I refer to the incidents in May 1937, which were
provoked by the Communists and during which the lackeys of Moscow
assassinated her father, the dear comrade Camillo Berneri. We knew how
painful it would be for her to speak of this period and we always
avoided it, and she appreciated our silence.”
The end of the Spanish War brought an end to Spain and the World, but
that same year the Germans invaded Poland and World War II began. In
November 1939 War Commentary was launched, and once again Marie Louise
and Vero Richards were at the centre of publishing an anarchist paper.
The clarity and force of the anarchist position against the war quickly
brought support from many anti-war individuals who recognised that there
was no point In opposing the economic system which engendered
it--capitalism--and the Institution which organised It--the state. In
1940 Marie Louise organised a series of lecture-discussions on Spain
which strengthened this trend by emphasising the constructive aspects of
anarchism as demonstrated by the Spanish collectives and the
anarcho-syndicalist alternatives to trades unions.
In 1944 I was invited to join the Anarchist Federation, which at that
time was a closed shop for obvious reasons. But once In things moved
very fast, and within a year Marie Louise, Vero Richards, John Hewetson
and myself found ourselves in the Dock at the Old Bailey on charges of
conspiring to disaffect the Forces--offences which carried penalties of
up to 14 years gaol.
That trial is another story, too long to elaborate here. Suffice to say
that Marie Louise; much to her disgust, was released on the second day
on a purely technical point. For the anarchist movement this was of
great importance, for she was able, with co-editor George Woodcock and
other comrades, to continue publishing War Commentary, which did not
miss an issue while we were in prison (we were lucky to get light
sentences of 9 months). The war was over and we came out to find
comrades working hard to build a movement in the changed circumstances
of “peace” time. The paper changed its name to Freedom, and expanded to
a newspaper sized fortnightly. From 1946, a series of Freedom was
produced which was, in the opinion of many anarchists, of a higher
standard than ever before or since. It lasted three years. On 13 April
1949, Marie Louise Berneri died suddenly of pneumonia. She was 31. Shock
ran around the anarchist world. Hundreds of letters poured in from
stunned comrades everywhere, and dozens of notices appeared in anarchist
and socialist journals. She had corresponded in four languages with
journals, organisations or individuals with equal concern and
encouragement. She would answer simple questions with as much feeling as
she would enter into an involved polemic.
For all her brilliance in every way I never heard her put anybody down
or make them feel small. She was a true egalitarian, a true anarchist.
Personality cults are an anathema to anarchism. Nevertheless it’s not
difficult to see that it’s the presence or absence of personalities
which makes the difference as to whether or not we have a dynamic group,
an effective paper, or a growing movement: Marie Louise’s personality
was the inspiration of the wartime generation of anarchists in Britain.
Marie Louise realised as a propagandist that to get ideas across you
have to make them relevant to those you are addressing. As we shall see,
she could speak with the authority of an intellectual, but what at all
times illuminated her approach was an identification with those she was
either addressing or speaking about, and when she was deeply moved to
anger or compassion she could write with great fire.
Her own and her family’s history gave her good cause to hate the Fascist
regime in Italy, but she got no satisfaction out of the fearful bombing
of Italian towns by the R.A.F. and the U.S. Air forces during 1943.
“Hamburg, Milan, Genoa, Turin are covered in ruins, their streets heaped
with bodies and flowing with blood... The Press boasts of the RAF’s
power to carry such destruction to all the cities of Germany and Central
Europe. It screamed with indignation when the Germans bombed churches
and hospitals, but when the smell of carnage goes up from beautiful and
populated towns they find words of rejoicing. When the water mains were
hit in Milan and the centre of the city flooded, they find it a subject
for a joke. ‘Lake Milan’ the clever journalist calls it. What does it
matter to him if ‘the water is flowing between the ruins and the debris
of bombed buildings, and people living in the district were forced to
remain in the wreckage of their homes for four days until the water
subsided and they could get out...‘Lake Milan’ is indeed a splendid
joke. But while the journalists chuckle in the Fleet Street pubs, the
hospitals and rescue squads are working day and night to try and
palliate some of the pain and disfigurement, the hunger and exposure of
the victims.”
Similarly she had every reason to hate the Communists who had killed her
father and sabotaged the social revolution in Spain no less than in
Russia itself, but her contempt for the rulers of the Kremlin never let
her forget that their first victims were the Russian people themselves.
In 1944 she produced Workers in Stalin’s Russia, a well researched and
damning account of the appalling conditions under which the vast
majority of workers in Stalin’s empire toiled, suffered and died. This
was written ten years before Khrushchev was to denounce him. However,
while Khrushchev complained about Stalin’s treatment of his fellow
Bolsheviks, she exposed the true nature of the inequality between, say,
the Red Army officer class and the private soldiers, the official black
market, the party control of the unions, the hated Stakhanovite and
forced labour systems, and the much-vaunted equality between men and
women: “The Russian woman has been liberated to a great extent from the
slavery of the family only to become the slave of her work. Before the
revolution, she was imprisoned in her family life, submitted to the
wishes of her father or husband; and now she has lost these masters only
to acquire a more ruthless one, the State. The State has declared her to
be the equal of men but that formula is a cynical joke when the means of
achieving that equality are denied her. It is not by sweating down the
mines; while young men spend their time in offices that women can
achieve equality with men.”
Marie Louise described the lot of the working class Russian women as
being: “...submitted to a double inequality. She is not the equal of her
male fellow worker because, working as many hours and as hard as he
does, she earns less; nor is she the equal of the women and men
belonging to the privileged class. She slaves in the factories and mines
so that a whole population of bureaucrats can afford to live in
idleness. She has to become a servant to rich families in order to avoid
starvation. She is badly dressed and poorly fed, so that wives of
technicians, officers, GPU officials, can enjoy themselves and dress
smartly.”
There has been a steady stream of anarchist women challenging
established moralities and sexual relationships from Mary Wollstonecraft
and Emma Goldman through to the present day. Inheriting this body of
thought, Marie Louise was able to study and examine the whole concept of
women’s sexuality. At that time women’s liberation had yet to be seen as
a separate struggle.
Her reading of psychology at the Sorbonne added to her revolutionary
insight, and enabled her immediately to see the significance of the work
of Wilhelm Reich, when the first edition of The Function of the Orgasm
became available just after the war.
It was Marie Louise who first introduced Reich’s Ideas to the anarchist
movement--if not Britain itself--in an article titled “Sexuality and
Freedom” in the magazine Now, published by George Woodcock. She opened
with a quote from Reich: “The problem of sexuality permeates by Its very
nature every field of scientific investigation.” She went on: “To reduce
these problems to a question of family allowances, maternity benefits or
old age pensions Is ridiculous; to resolve it in terms of insurrection,
of overthrow of the ruling class and the power of the State is not
enough. Human nature is a whole. The worker Is not merely the producer
in the factory or the field; he is also the lover, the father. The
problems which he faces in his home are no less important than those at
his place of work. By trying to separate biological and psychological
problems from the sociological ones, we not only mutilate our theories,
but are bound to reach false conclusions.”
Showing up the bourgeois cowardice of psychoanalysts like Freud and
Jung, who backed away from the implications of sexuality in the face of
shocked reaction, she discussed the social and revolutionary importance
of Reich’s work and his conclusion: “Sexual repression is an essential
instrument in the production of economic slavery. Thus sexual repression
in the infant and the adolescent is not, as psychoanalysis--in agreement
with traditional and erroneous concepts of education--contends, the
prerequisite of cultural development, sociality, diligence and
cleanliness; it is the exact opposite.”
And she finishes in her own words with: “The importance of Dr. Reich’s
theories is enormous. To those who do not seek intellectual exercise,
but means of saving mankind from the destruction it seems to be
approaching, this book will be an individual source of help and
encouragement. To anarchists the fundamental belief in human nature, in
complete freedom from the authority of the family, the Church and the
State will be familiar, but the scientific arguments put forward to back
this belief will form an indispensible addition to their theoretical
knowledge.”
Space restricts detailed mention of all those who, as she would have
been the first to admit, Influenced her development.
After her father, first among these was of course Vero Richards who she
lived with for 12 years. Only his enormous resilience and courage
enabled him to carry on and finish some of the work she had left undone,
for just before her death she had completed her major work, Journey
through Utopia, a comprehensive scholarly and libertarian consideration
of hundreds of writings on utopia down the ages, from Plato’s Republic
to the American hobo’s Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Vero Richards later gathered together over 50 editorials she wrote for
War Commentary and Freedom between 1939 and 1948. Words of wisdom in a
mad world, a model of anarchist journalism, illuminated by courage and
compassion and summing up in one of her own titles the anarchist
attitude to all the post-war power struggles: Neither East nor West!
Manuel Solgado wrote of her death: “It only remains for me to ask the
comrades who shared with her those days of struggle...to follow her
example.”
Workers in Stalin’s Russia. M.L. Berneri. Freedom Press, 1944.
“Sexuality and Freedom.” M.L. Berneri. Now no. 5. Published by George
Woodcock.
Journey Through Utopia. M.L. Berneri. Routledge Kegan Paul. 1950.
Marie Louise Berneri, A tribute, Freedom Press 1949.
Neither East nor West, Selected Writings of Marie Louise Berneri. Edited
by Vernon Richards. Freedom Press, 1952