Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (89 page)

After the experience of the German occupation and the resistance, anarchism in France had something of a revival in the fifties and early sixties around magazines like
Le Libertaire
of the Anarchist Federation and the new
Noir et Rouge.
Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel (the latter a French Nazi during the occupation) produced an incomplete
Histoire de l’anarchie
in 1949 and Jean Maitron brought out his
Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France
in 1951. The libertarian atmosphere affected Albert Camus who associated with French and Spanish anarchists and syndicalists, and studied anarchist history and philosophy. Although he was critical of Stirner and Bakunin in his
L’Homme révolté
(1951), he was even more critical of authoritarian communism. The work shows that he was moving towards a form of anarcho-syndicalism.

It was in the sixties that libertarian ideas really began to take hold on a new generation. Inspired by Dada and Surrealism, a small band of artists and intellectuals founded the Internationale Situationniste in 1957 which soon rediscovered anarchist history and developed a libertarian critique of consumer society and culture. In 1964 a French group, Jeunesse Libertaire, gave new impetus to Proudhon’s slogan ‘Anarchy is Order’ by creating the circled A, a symbol which quickly proliferated throughout the world. Daniel Guérin, a former Marxist, developed a libertarian form of socialism and called in 1965 for
L’Anarchisme: de la doctrine à l’action.
Three years later the greatest outburst of libertarian energy since the Second World War occurred in the student rebellion of May 1968. During the general strike which followed, de Gaulle’s regime tottered but did not fall. While the students lost the revolution, they won the argument, and authoritarian socialists and communists in France have been on the retreat ever since. A revived syndicalist organization — the Confédération Nationale du Travail — has since made headway, especially in south-west France and in the Paris region.

Amongst intellectuals, Michel Foucault developed a highly imaginative, and equally contentious, critique of power, while Cornelius Castoriadis as Paul Cardan posed the choice of libertarian
Socialisme ou Barbarie
as we reach the crossroads in the labyrinth of contemporary society and culture. French post-modernist thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard have made a major contribution to renewing anarchist theory. In the new century, French anarchists have been at the forefront of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements.

I
N
ITALY
THE
EARLY
anarchists emerged from the republican and nationalist movement led by Mazzini and Garibaldi. The methods of the clandestine
Carbonari
with their loose organization and acts of insurrection left a mark on the developing anarchist strategy. The ideas of Proudhon were also nudging republican thought in a federal direction long before the arrival of Bakunin in 1864. But while he is often seen as the first inspiration of the Italian anarchist movement, he was with other Russian revolutionaries more of a catalyst than an originator.
¹

Carlo Pisacane, the Duke of San Giovanni, was a transitional figure between the old nationalists and the anarchist movement, acting as chief of staff in Mazzini’s army and spreading Proudhon’s and Fourier’s ideas. He called for the creation of an independent nation through the social revolution. The only just and secure form of government, he asserted, was ‘the anarchy of Proudhon’, but he went beyond Proudhon by arguing that industrial factories should become c1ollective property and the land be collectivized in communes. Above all, Pisacane was one of the earliest advocates of
propaganda dei fatti
(propaganda by the deed):

There were several old comrades of Pisacane amongst the Brotherhood founded by Bakunin in Florence in 1864 as well as in his International Brotherhood set up later in Naples. It was in Florence that Bakunin abandoned his Panslavism, so it could be argued that the birth of anarchism in Italy coincided with the birth of the international anarchist movement.
³
Amongst the members of the Italian section of the International Brotherhood were Giuseppe Fanelli, a deputy at the Italian parliament, who went on a pioneering mission to Spain to spread the anarchist gospel, and Carlo Gambuzzi, who became for a long time one of the principal leaders of the Italian anarchist movement.

In 1869 the branches of Bakunin’s Brotherhood were dissolved in
Italy and the they became sections of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). It was from this time that the Italian anarchist movement really began to grow. When Bakunin replied to Mazzini’s twin-pronged attack — on the Paris Commune for its atheism and on the International for denying genuine nationalism — the International in Italy went from strength to strength.
⁴
Disenchanted Mazzinian republicans and Garibaldian volunteers radicalized by the Paris Commune recruited some thirty thousand members to the International, mainly from central Italy and Naples. But it was not yet a workers’ organization. It had been introduced by the bourgeoisie, and by 1872 its militants were still mainly young people from affluent families.
⁵

Early in the 1870s a new group of militants emerged, led by young Carlo Cafiero, Errico Malatesta and Andrea Costa. Cafiero was a product of the Apulian nobility who had given up his family fortune and his career as a diplomat. As a member of the International Marx had hoped to use him to convert Italy and Spain to Marxism; he wrote a compendium of
Capital
and met Marx in 1871 in London. In the event, he was converted by Bakunin and Malatesta to the anarchist cause. Malatesta was the son of a liberally minded small-scale landowner, and was raised in the province of Caserta. He too cast in his lot, when a medical student, with the people. Andrea Costa came from Romagnole petty bourgeois stock, and studied law at Bologna University. All three young men were convinced positivists. Inspired by the sociology of Comte and Spencer, they saw society as a living organism whose natural growth was hindered by the institutions of private property and the State.

In order to rival the feats of the followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini, the anarchists organized strikes and demonstrations, but also resorted to the well-tried tactic of the Italian revolutionary tradition — the insurrection. In the 1860s there had been civil war in the south and the Italian State was particularly weak. It was therefore not unreasonable to hope that an uprising could spark off a general insurrection which would bring down the tottering State. In 1874, Andrea Costa, Malatesta, and members of a group within the International who called themselves the Italian Committee for the Social Revolution planned an uprising in Bologna in order to trigger off similar actions in other towns and cities throughout Italy. Bakunin was waiting to join them, but the
carabinieri
had been informed and foiled the insurgents as they were marching on Bologna.

The Italian message of direct action was not lost on the international anarchist movement. At the Berne Conference of the IWMA in 1876, Malatesta explained the background to the Bologna uprising and argued that ‘the revolution consists more in deeds than words … each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts … it is the duty of every
revolutionary socialist to declare his solidarity with the movement in the making.’
⁶

Three months later Cafiero and Malatesta gave a clear definition of propaganda by the deed in the
Bulletin of the Jura Federation
: ‘The Italian federation believes that the insurrectional fact, destined to affirm socialist principles by deeds, is the most efficacious means of propaganda.’
⁷
The view of the Italians came to dominate European anarchist activities during the 1880s, especially in France and Spain.

Despite the persecution of the authorities a national congress was held in a wood outside Florence in 1876, where Cafiero and Malatesta persuaded the delegates to move from a form of Bakuninite collectivism to communism. Those present accepted the proposition:

The congress also confirmed the insurrectional position of the Italian anarchist movement.

Malatesta, Cafiero and Costa lost no time in putting their preaching into practice. In the following year, they entered two villages near Benevento in Campania with an armed band, burning the tax registers and declaring the end of the reign of King Victor Emmanuel. The peasants, including their priests, welcomed them at first but feared joining them; as a result, Italian troops soon arrived and captured the insurgents.

This second abortive rising provoked another round of persecution. The Italian sections of the outlawed International called for a general insurrection on a national scale but when it failed to materialize individuals turned to their own acts of terror. In 1878, the new King Umberto was stabbed and on the following day a bomb was thrown in a monarchist parade. Even greater repression followed. The International was broken up and Cafiero and Malatesta went into exile.

Costa soon turned his back on insurrectionary anarchism. He considered that ‘insurrectionism, if practised, leads to nothing if not the triumph of reaction and, if not practised, it leads to the disesteem of him who preaches it and it remains merely verbal’.
⁹
He became a deputy, and played an important part in forming the Italian Socialist Party. Like Paul Brousse, whom he met in the spring of 1880, he developed a form of communalism with the tactic of formulating minimum and maximum programmes for local socialist parties. While collectivism was the means, he still saw anarchy as the end. Cafiero on the other hand suddenly went over to the parliamentary
socialists; he eventually became insane, obsessed by the idea that he was enjoying more than his fair share of the sun.

The defection of Costa and Cafiero reflected a general shift to social democracy in the Italian labour movement. It was not long before anarchism in Italy became the preserve of constantly changing, largely autonomous groups in the small towns. Towards the end of the century, individual Italians were responsible for some of the most notorious assassinations, killing the French President Sadi Carnot in 1894, the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas in 1897, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, and finally King Umberto after two attempts in 1900.

Some anarchists during this period went abroad to realize their ideals in utopian communities, such as the Cecilia Colony in Brazil which lasted four years in the early 1890s. In the twentieth century, many Italians emigrated and continued to propagate anarchist ideas, especially in Latin America and North America.

The most prominent anarchist thinker to emerge in Italy was undoubtedly Errico Malatesta who remained active in the international anarchist movement for nearly sixty years and the principal figure in the Italian anarchist movement during its most important years. In the late 1880s and early 1890s he tried to form a new nationalist anarchist ‘party’ but it failed to get off the ground. Nevertheless, his tolerant ‘anarchism without adjectives’ was widely influential.

Malatesta worked closely at this time with F. S. Merlino, a lawyer who showed in his studies of the Italian State that bureaucracy and State institutions can exert their influence on the economic base of society. Although Merlino went on to become a socialist, he helped lay the foundations of Italian syndicalism and weaned Malatesta off his early Marxian taste for economic determinism. Other anarchist intellectuals who collaborated with Malatesta at this time included Pietro Gori, a lawyer who composed some of the most popular inspirational songs of the era, and Luigi Fabbri, who popularized anarchist ideas about education, birth control, and militarism.

National congresses of the anarchist movement were held in 1891, 1907 and 1915 but there was no continuous national organization. Anarchists in the 1890s remained a minority group in the labour movement, seeing their role as being to foster revolutionary consciousness and to prod socialists to insurrection. They worked in their local Chambers of Labour (
camere de lavoro
), which remained largely autonomous. As a result, while anarchism remained weaker as a movement than socialism from the turn of the century to the First World War, its values, symbols and language dominated Italian working-class popular culture.
¹⁰
Localism, anti-Statism,
operaismo
(workerism), and anti-clerical and anti-militarist sentiments prevailed.