Britain, AFED Organise! #81 -anarchism - Review Carlo Tresca: portrait of a rebel.,Nunzio Pernicone 387 pages. AK Press. ?14.00

?I declare that bourgeois society must be changed by attacking the pillars that support 
it. A revolution is needed to change it, not a fascist revolution that is regressive and 
reactionary, but a proletarian revolution, one of slaves against slavers, of civilisation 
against obscurantism. I declare that I feel my spirit and strength reinvigorated every 
time the interests of reaction attack me with their persecution. I affirm my libertarian 
faith?. ---- - Speech by Tresca in 1925 ---- Nunzio Pernicone, the author of this book 
died of cancer on May 30th 2013. He was a colleague of the late Paul Avrich, and like 
Avrich contributed much to historical research of anarchism. His other major work, Italian 
Anarchism, 1864-1892 appeared in 1993. This particular volume is an expanded and corrected 
version of the first 2003 edition. It involved many years of research tracing obscure old 
Italian immigrant anarchist militants in the United States.

In some ways this book is a tribute to
Pernicone?s father, a great admirer of
Tresca. Salvatore Pernicone imparted
anarchist ideas to his son, and was an
actor and director in various amateur
theatre groups that put on plays as
benefits for Italian-American radical
papers that included Tresca?s Il Mar-
tello. Indeed some of the plays that
were performed in the 1920s and
1930s were written by Carlo Tresca
himself.

Carlo Tresca was born in Sulmona
in the Abruzzo region of Italy. He
was the sixth of eight children unto
a well-off family which owned land
and a carting business and stationery
shop. However an economic slump
in the 1890s effected the fortunes of
the family. His older brother Ettore
became a doctor and joined the
Italian Socialist Party (PSI) after
witnessing the appalling health and
living conditons of many workers
and peasants. Carlo himself had by
the age of fifteen developed an in-
tense hatred of the Catholic Church
and began to engage in anti-clerical
activity. He then began attending PSI
meetings where he met many rail
workers, Sulmona having developed
into a major rail centre in the Abruz-
zo in this period. By 1902 Tresca was
propagandising for the PSI among
the artisans of Sulmona. He followed
this up with organising drives among
the peasants in the surrounding area.
He capped his reputation by giving
the final speech on the May Day rally
that year. His talents as organiser
and orator were being honed by his
activity, and soon he received a sen-
tence of thirty days for his socialist
activity. He aggravated the situation
by calling the carabinieri captain
who had arrested him a drunk, who
had arrested him to please the city?s
?cancerous criminal clique?, ending
up serving seventy days.

He now applied his skills to radical
journalism, working on a local social-
ist paper and finally being brought
up on a charge of insulting the army.
He had now attracted the enmity
of a local baron, who sued him for
libel. Tresca had few illusions that
he would be convicted for this, and
in Italy at the time this meant five
years in prison and a heavy fine. He
decided to emigrate to the USA.

He arrived in New York in August
1904. Here he involved himself with
the immigrant Italian socialist move-
ment. He stood on its revolutionary
wing. Very soon he became editor of
its paper, Il Proletario. He perfected
the agitational literary skills he had
developed in Italy, attacking the
Catholic Church and the consular
representatives of the Italian state,
accusing them of parasitism and cor-
ruption.

Tresca?s exposure to the Sulmona rail
workers had developed a taste for
direct action among Italian workers.
He involved himself in a hat makers
strike, delivering fiery speeches on
the picket line. By now, he was fol-
lowing the development of revolu-
tionary syndicalism in Italy, which
spread its ideas to the Italian Ameri-
can community. He agreed with the
statement that ?five minutes of direct
action were worth as many years of
parliamentary chatter?. Another de-
velopment was the emergence of the
industrial unionist Industrial Work-
ers of the World (IWW). Tresca wel-
comed its development and became
a very visible supporter, although
curiously he never actually joined
it. He did publicly declare himself a
revolutionary syndicalist.

By now, the reformists among the
Socialists were tiring of his revolu-
tionary ideas. He had tried to es-
tablish an alliance with the Italian
American anarchists but as the result
of an incident between the two cur-
rents, Tresca was meant to attack the
anarchists in the pages of Il Prole-
tario. He declined to do so and was
forced to resign in 1906. He resigned
from the Italian socialist section itself
after the vicious attacks on him by
the reformist leadership. He now
launched an independent paper La
Plebe.

In this period he suffered a first at-
tempt on his life when a small-time
Mafiosi tried to slit his throat, most
likely under contract from an owner
of a conservative Italian newspaper.

Tresca went on to taking a leading
role in the Lawrence textile strike
of 1912, organised by the IWW. He
went on to take part in further strikes
throughout the USA, including two
textile workers strikes, a hotel work-
ers strike, and a miners? strike. He
was always fearless and was arrested
several times. He carried on anti-mil-
itarist agitation through a new paper
L?Avvenire (The future) and was
fiercely opposed to the First World
War. The authorities closed down the
paper when the U.S. entered the war
in 1917. A massive repression began
against members of the IWW and
against anarchists.Tresca was arrested
along with the IWW leadership,
even though he now felt lukewarm
about the IWW because of ?centralis-
ing tendencies? initiated by Big Bill
Haywood. In the end the charges
were dismissed, but Tresca narrowly
avoided imprisonment and/or de-
portation. Whilst by now Tresca had
increasingly anarchist convictions,
he did not profess them openly and
underlined the point that his new
paper, Il Martello (The Hammer),
was an independent voice. This won
him no friends around the anarchist
current organised around Luigi Gal-
leani. Whilst professing anarchist-
communism, they were strongly
opposed to effective organisation,
sneered at involvement in workplace
agitation which they dismissed as
reformist, and adopted the use of
armed force, engaging in bombings
and bank robberies. They felt that
Tresca should have openly expressed
his anarchism and to prove it should
have risked deportation. Tresca tried
at first to get along with this current,
but faced growing denunciations
from them.

In 1923 he printed an ad for a birth
control pamphlet in his new paper
Il Martello. For this he received a
prison sentence of a year and a day!

He became a driving force in stop-
ping the growth of fascism amongst
the Italian immigrant population. He
actually forged an alliance with some
of the Galleanists , and between
1923 and 1924 anarchists were in
the forefront of anti-Fascist activity,
along with old allies from the IWW.
Tresca also became involved in
the defence of the Galleanist anar-
chists Sacco and Vanzetti, who were
eventually murdered by the State on
flimsy charges. There though, Tresca
faced Galleanist suspicion (although
Vanzetti himself sent him a letter of
thanks for his defence work).

In 1926 Tresca narrowly avoided
death at a rally as the result of a
bomb, which prematurely exploded
and killed all three of the fascist
bombers. The anti-fascist agitation
eventually led to the dissolving of the
Mussolini-sponsored Fascist League
in 1929.

He was now gaining other enemies.
He had at first welcomed the Rus-
sian Revolution, however it soon
became apparent that the Soviet
Union was nowhere near the ideals
of socialism and anarchism, and he
became a staunch opponent of the
Communist Party. They turned on
him and launched vicious attacks in
their newspapers. He served on the
Dewey Commission which exoner-
ated Trotsky of all charges from the
Moscow show trials. He accused the
Soviet secret police of the disappear-
ance of Juliet Poyntz, who had been
involved in the Soviet underground
apparatus in the USA, and disgusted
by the situation in Russia, was now
preparing to issue a denunciation
and publish a book on her experi-
ences in both the US and Russia. In-
dications are that she was murdered
by NKVD agents and buried in the
woods near New York.

Tresca had to face the combined
attacks of both Communists and
Galleanists. When Armando Borghi,
one of the chief proponents of the
organisational anarchist communism
of Errico Malatesta and who had
been a leading light in the Italian syn-
dicalist union USI, came to the USA,
he foolishly took the side of the Gal-
leanists. From house arrest in Italy
Malatesta pleaded for these vicious
polemics against Tresca to cease.

By now, other enemies of Tresca
were becoming more concerned
about his activities. He had been
opposed to the Mafia from soon after
his arrival in America. Now he began
a public campaign against them in
Il Martello. On January 11th 1943
Tresca was shot dead by an unknown
gunman as he was crossing Fifth
Avenue.

Was it the NKVD who had ordered
his death? Was it the work of Mus-
solini?s secret police? Pernicone and
others believe that it was in fact a hit
ordered by a Mafia notable, Frank
Garafolo. Undoubtedly Tresca?s
fearlessness resulted in his death,
whoever was responsible.

Pernicone paints a warts and all por-
trait of Tresca, examining his colour-
ful love life, and his sometimes dubi-
ous use of funds. He broke a tenet of
anarchism that one should never pro-
vide information to the government
when he testified to the Criminal
Division of the U.S. Attorney about
Poyntz. Many U.S. anarchists, not
just the Galleanists, were shocked
by this act, and many old friends
and comrades broke off relations
with him after this. Equally Tresca?s
anti-Fascism in the end led him to
support for the Allies in the Second
World War, though he qualified this
with the hope that a social revolution
would break out at the end of the
war. As Pernicone asks: ?Did Tresca
not see the contradiction between
these two objectives? Did he serious-
ly believe in the possibility of a social
revolution emerging from the war, or
was he merely engaging in formulaic
anarchist rhetoric??

This book describes a fascinating
and larger than life individual, in the
process shedding light on the state of
the Italian-American anarchist move-
ment, a movement crippled by vi-
cious personal polemics and rivalries,
and by a failure to go beyond either
anti-organisational Galleanist insur-
rectionism on one hand and ad hoc
labour organising on the other.