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Title: Anarchism in Italy Author: Vittorio Sergi Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Italy, history Source: Sergi, Vittorio. “Anarchism, Italy.” In The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, edited by Immanuel Ness, 129–133. Vol. 1. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Anarchism in Italy has its origins in the second half of the nineteenth
century in the context of the political radicalism of intellectuals and
popular leaders who struggled for national liberation and a republican
government, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) and Carlo Pisacane
(1818–1857). From 1864 on, the influence of Mikhail Bakunin was decisive
in the creation of a radical and autonomous political doctrine. Together
with initial industrialization in the urban centers of the center and
north of the country, there was an important growth in workers’
associations (societĂ operaie), often organized by profession, in which
anarchism found supporters. In the south of the country, the majority of
workers were landless peasants who, led by an enlightened elite, had
engaged in several failed insurrections. This activity was soon
channeled into continuous guerilla actions often mixing brigandage with
social protest. In 1869, under the influence of Bakunin, Carlo Gambuzzi
and Stefano Caporosso founded the first anarchist journal, Eguaglianza
(Equality), in Naples, edited by Michelangelo Statuti. The first Italian
anarchist organizations, such as the Federazione Operaia Napoletana
(1874), emerged in the south. There, Bakunin found important supporters
and natural leaders such as Carlo Cafiero (1846–1892) and Errico
Malatesta (1853–1932). When anarchist tendencies spread to the north,
from Rome to the eastern region of Marche and Romagna, Tuscany, and the
industrial centers of Milan, Turin, and Genoa, they gained supporters
among the working class, artisans, and the urban underclasses. Italian
anarchist organizations and groups were part of the First International
Workingmen’s Association, and at the first meeting of the Italian
section of the International, held in Rimini from August 4 to 6, 1872,
Cafiero and Andrea Costa (1851–1910) supported the anarchist position
against the Marxist currents that would soon drive the anarchists out of
the International.
From 1870 to 1880, Italian anarchism defined itself as autonomous from
socialism and republicanism, and with the leadership of Costa and
Malatesta, tried to find a common organization as a revolutionary party.
Anarchists supported and participated in several popular revolts until
their important insurrectionary plans were frustrated by the police: in
August 1874 near Bologna and Castel del Monte in the southeast, and in
1877 in the northwest of Campania in the Matese region, where after
several guerilla actions the rebels were defeated. The crisis of a
common organizing project and harsh repression by the state provoked by
individualist terrorist practices escalated across Europe, as acts of
“propaganda by the deed” were often performed by the hands of Italian
anarchists. In 1887, the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo (1871–97)
killed the prime minister of Spain, Antonio Canovas; in 1894, Sante
Caserio (1873–94) stabbed French president Sadi Carnot to death; and in
1898, Luigi Luccheni (1873–1910) stabbed and killed Princess Elisabeth
of Austria. Malatesta criticized this individualist tendency and
promoted instead participation in popular organizations and trade
unions. An anarchist-led, nationwide protest for “food and work” started
in Ancona in January 1898, ending with barricades and bloody military
repression in Milan in May. The repression was also enforced by an
international anti-anarchist conference of European police forces in
Rome from November 24 to December 21 of that year. In this context,
Gaetano Bresci (1869–1901), an Italian immigrant to the United States,
shot and killed King Umberto I in Monza on July 29, 1900 as a revenge
for the victims of the military repression of 1898.
At the turn of the century, Costa broke with Malatesta and joined the
Italian Socialist Party together with a section of the trade union
movement that chose the liberal democratic political terrain opened up
by the introduction of universal suffrage. Anarchism in this period was
characterized by intense activity among workers, leading to the
formation in 1912 of the Italian Syndicalist Union (Unione Sindacale
Italiana, USI) as a branch of the International Workingmen’s Association
(Associazione Internazionale dei Lavoratori, AIT/IWA). Meanwhile,
anarchists participated in the General Chamber of Labor (Camera Generale
del Lavoro, CGDL), today the Italian General Confederation of Labor
(Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, CGIL), with the aim of
gaining positions within the working-class organizations. Beginning in
1912, protests against Italy’s colonial war in Libya led to nationwide
strikes and to generalized standoffs, with a revival of individualist
attacks against military personnel and politicians.
In 1914, conditions of low wages and high prices were exacerbated by
heavy police repression. A political meeting attended by Malatesta in
the city of Ancona was attacked by the police, and the ensuing protests
culminated in riots which soon spread to the major urban centers of the
country, as well as to regions where anarchists had strong bases, such
as Romagna and Marche. Riots, strikes, and acts of sabotage broke out
all over Italy, often led by anarchists. The majority of republican,
socialist, and anarchist leaders chose not to push the popular unrest
into a general insurrection, and the state regained control through
another round of repression that sent many anarchists to jail and
Malatesta into exile. In the same year, anarchist newspapers and
activists led a campaign against the possible participation of Italy in
the war. When Italy attacked Austria and Germany in 1915, many
anarchists chose to respond by acts of individual and collective
desertion and sabotage. After the war, in 1919, the Union of Italian
Communist Anarchists (Unione Comunista Anarchica Italiana, UCAI) was
founded in Florence. One year later it approved Malatesta’s “Anarchist
Program” (Malatesta & Richards 1993: 182–98) and became the Italian
Anarchist Union (Unione Anarchica Italiana, UAI), publishing its own
newspaper, UmanitĂ Nova (New Humanity).
When, in 1920, there was another nationwide protest following on from a
revolt of military conscripts in Ancona that had popular support,
anarchists such as Pietro Ferrero (1892–1922) and Maurizio Gorino joined
the radical socialists and the collective of Antonio Gramsci’s Ordine
Nuovo (New Order) in promoting the occupation of factories and the
takeover of the production of essential goods and services. The movement
was strong, especially in the main industrial districts of Turin and
Milan. This revolutionary movement was defeated in 1921 by the rising
violent reaction emerging from the newborn fascist organization. In
response, many anarchists joined the Arditi del Popolo, a paramilitary
organization formed by ex-soldiers and political militants that
practiced armed struggle against fascists until 1924.
From the second half of the nineteenth century through the 1920s,
Italians had migrated to the Americas by the millions. The Italian
anarchist presence in the United States, Argentina, and Brazil was
significant enough to sponsor newspapers and initiatives, as well as to
provide economic support to prisoners and organizations, all of which
had a strong impact in Italy itself. Two of the most important Italian
anarchist newspapers were founded in New York: Il Martello (The Hammer)
in 1918 by Carlo Tresca, which was an organ of revolutionary
syndicalism, and L’Adunata dei Refrattari (The Call of the Refractory
Ones), an organ of the anti-organizational and individualist tendency
founded in 1922 by Armando Borghi. In Buenos Aires, Italian anarchism
had a strong influence within the labor movement and gained a reputation
for its violent and open resistance to repression, notably with the
group around Severino di Giovanni (1901–31). La Battaglia (Battle) and
Guerra Sociale (Social War), among many other journals, were edited in
Brazil. Giovanni Rossi founded the experimental colony of CecĂlia in the
province of Paranà (1890–4), and one of his associates, Gigi (Luigi)
Damiani, became an important union leader during the strikes of 1917–19
in SĂŁo Paulo. In addition, individual anarchists, including such
luminaries as Malatesta, Galleani, and Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935), also
made journeys around the Mediterranean, establishing small groups,
educational projects, and publications in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon,
Tunisia, and Turkey (Khuri-Makdisi 2003; Gorman 2005).
The rise of the fascist regime in Italy in 1926 forced many anarchists
into exile or underground. Various anarchist groups went to Spain to
participate in the anti-fascist resistance there on the side of the
anarchosyndicalist ConfederaciĂłn Nacional del Trabajo-FederaciĂłn
Anarquista Ibérica (CNT-FAI), most notably in the enlistment of
anarchists from the UAI with the republican organization Giustizia e
LibertĂ (Justice and Liberty), part of the Italian Ascaso Column led by
the anarchist Camillo Berneri (1897–1937), later assassinated by
Stalinist agents.
After years of underground activity, exile, and detention, witnessing
the crisis of the fascist regime, anarchists confined in the island of
Ventotene held a clandestine congress in 1942 in which they planned for
the fall of fascism and a new revolutionary project. In 1943, the
Federation of Italian Anarchist Communists (Federazione dei Comunisti
Anarchici Italiani, FCAI) was founded. Anarchists often fought in the
popular armed resistance with the republican partisan groups of
Giustizia e LibertĂ , the communist Garibaldi brigades, or autonomous
anarchist fighting groups such as the Michele Schirru battalion in
Tuscany, or the Malatesta and Bruzzi battalions in Milan and Genoa. On
September 19, 1945, the Italian Anarchist Federation (Federazione
Anarchica Italiana, FAI) was founded in Carrara in an attempt to rebuild
anarchist unity. The directive committee of the federation refused to
support the National Liberation Committee (Comitato di Liberazione
Nazionale, CLN), which would be instrumental in the constitution of the
new republic. This position, together with the strong hegemony of the
Italian Communist Party, closed spaces for the anarchist initiative and
its presence among the working class.
In the 1950s, anarchism entered a deep crisis. At the beginning of the
1960s, the formal unity of FAI began to splinter into the three main
organizations and tendencies that have continued to the present time.
One breakaway group, claiming the heritage of the “anarchist party”
projected by Malatesta, gave birth to the Federation of Anarchist
Communists (Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici, FDCA). Local autonomous
groups belonging to the anti-organizational and individualist tendency
left the FAI in 1965 and founded the Anarchist Initiative Groups (Gruppi
di Iniziativa Anarchica, GIA), and then in 1967 the Federated Anarchist
Groups (Gruppi Anarchici Federati, GAF), which became the Italian
section of the Anarchist Black Cross (an international prisoner-support
organization) and the hegemonic group in the country.
During the movements of 1967–79, anarchists were often attacked and used
by the security forces for provocation and infiltration, as part of a
“strategy of tension” aimed at arousing public hysteria toward the
Italian left (Censor 1975/1997; Sanguinetti 1979/1982). Nevertheless,
many anarchists participated actively in local organizations and
collectives, and several were imprisoned or killed, such as Giuseppe
Pinelli, killed in police custody in 1969 in Milan (the subject of Dario
Fo’s famous play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist), or Franco
Serantini, killed by the police in Pisa in 1973. When armed struggle was
on the rise, anarchists Gianfranco Faina and Salvatore Cinieri formed
their own armed initiative with the small affinity group-based
organization Azione Rivoluzionaria (1976–80). In the 1980s, a part of
the movement took on board the discourses and practices of radical
ecology, experimented with the creation of autonomous local communities,
or practiced individual forms of expropriation.
The 1990s were characterized by a strong repressive turn against
anarchists that followed the hegemony of the insurrectionary and
anti-organizational tendency. On November 16, 1995, the police launched
a major operation involving hundreds of activists. Alfredo Maria Bonanno
(b. 1937) and 53 others were accused by the public prosecutor Antonio
Marini of many offenses, including forming a terrorist organization.
Many were convicted, but their tendency was not defeated and it
experienced a strong revival with the start of the anti-globalization
movement. In 1998, due to several acts of sabotage against the
high-speed train (TAV) project in Piemonte, a number of anarchists were
arrested, two of whom, Edoardo Massari and Maria Soledad Rosa, committed
suicide in custody. While the FAI and USI maintained a national
presence, they did not play a major role in the anti-globalization
movement, and by the end of the 1990s neither had a strong influence
among the youth who organized mostly in informal groups and Centri
Sociali (volunteer-run community spaces, often in squatted premises).
Anarchists participated actively in the protests against the G8 meeting
in Genoa in 2001 as the so-called “black bloc.” From 1999 to the
present, various collectives have joined their anti-organizational and
individualist strategies and started campaigns of armed propaganda with
sabotage, explosive attacks, and arson. Since 2003, ten acronyms have
claimed to be part of an Informal Anarchist Federation (Federazione
Anarchica Informale, also sharing the acronym FAI) and have claimed
responsibility for more than 30 low-intensity bombings aimed at European
Commission president Romano Prodi, military and police stations,
detention centers, and tribunals. Responsibility for several other acts
of sabotage against productive infrastructure was not directly claimed.
It has been suggested that this group may be provocateurs, the initials
FAI chosen for their similarity to those of the Federazione Anarchica
Italiana.
Anarchists are today present nationwide and are involved in all the
principal social and political conflicts, with more than 60 active
spaces and an articulated presence on the Internet and in the militant
press. Centri Sociali, libraries, and USI union sections are divided
into the two main historical tendencies: unions and federated
associations maintain open, public activity, while the
anti-organizational and individualist tendency refuses any kind of
formalization, stressing the importance of direct action and underground
organizing.
SEE ALSO: Anarchism, Argentina ; Anarchism, Spain ; Anarchism in the
United States to 1945 ; Anarchosyndicalism ; Autonomism ; Bakunin,
Mikhail Alexandrovich (1814–1876) ; Fanelli, Giuseppe (1826–1877) ;
Fascism, Protest and Revolution ; G8 Protests, Genoa, 2001 ; Galleani,
Luigi (1861–1931) ; Gori, Pietro (1865–1911) ; Gramsci, Antonio
(1891–1937) ; Infoshops ; Internationals ; Italian Labor Movement ;
Italy, Centri Sociali ; Italy, from the Anti-Fascist Resistance to the
New Left (1945–1960) ; Italy, from the New Left to the Great Repression
(1962–1981) ; Malatesta, Errico (1853–1932) ; Pisacane, Carlo
(1818–1857)
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