(en) Anarkismo.net: Nameless in the crowd of nameless ones Some thoughts on "The Story of A Proletarian Life", by Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 1923 - by Kate Sharpley Library - KSL

(en) Anarkismo.net: ?Nameless in the crowd of nameless ones??
Some thoughts on "The Story of A Proletarian Life", by Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, 1923 - by Kate Sharpley Library - KSL

Some thoughts on Vanzetti's "Story of a Proletarian Life". Surely this work is one of the 
greatest working class autobiographies of all time? ---- I can?t remember when I first 
read ?The Story of A Proletarian Life.? I just know that one edition or another has been 
in and around my life for a long time. I read it most years, and usually I find myself 
reading it in a different way from the time before. Sometimes I read it as the voice of 
the immigrant experience and am moved by the image of Vanzetti, alone in the Battery, 
trying to make sense of where he was and realizing his essential loneliness and alienation 
from all that he saw around him. His portrayal of the exhausting search for work and the 
seeking out of fellow country people for help and support is both grim and poignant 
reading and one can understand how the acts of kindness he receives begin to drive and 
shape his philosophy of life.

His experience (and the experience of many others, I would guess) reflected the 
experiences of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman who, although rebels of a kind in their 
home country, were made anarchists by the conditions and situations they encountered after 
in America. In early twentieth century America, anarchism wasn?t necessarily a foreign 
import, even if the press did live in fear of being swamped by immigrant devils arriving 
with hidden anarchist newspapers and pamphlets written in alien and crude languages. In 
truth it was American capitalism, with its casual, everyday cruelties that helped turn 
some immigrants into anarchists, Vanzetti his comrades among them.

Other times I read the pamphlet in the way I think Vanzetti wanted us to read it?as the 
autobiography of a working class man?as a ?proletarian?. I think he was very clear as to 
what that actually meant by the word proletarian and it is important to him that we 
discover that clarity through our engagement with his writing. He wanted us to understand 
in concrete terms what it meant to be working class. In The Story of a Proletarian Life we 
read of the physical cruelties of his working life in Italy, a life that led to his 
contracting pleurisy; while his work experiences in America are no better. He endures 
hard, brutal labour in unbearable conditions that leave him exhausted and ill at the end 
of each working day. We need to be acutely aware when we read this section; the words on 
the page convey the smells, the aches, the exhaustion, and the mental misery that lie 
behind them and it would be inexcusable if we did not reflect on the life he is trying to 
describe. I sense he saw this as the most important section of his text and was trying to 
guide us into a foreign place; one few of us have any understanding of. Simply put, the 
experience he describes is the existence that constituted the living, everyday reality for 
many immigrant and poor working class communities torn between unskilled and skilled 
labour. It shaped who Vanzetti was and until we realize that I rather think we cannot even 
begin to understand him or the ideas that gestated from the economic and emotional 
situation he found himself in. Such a reading of his writing leaves us astonished as to 
how he and others could maintain their dignity and sense of self in the world they had to 
inhabit. The twenty four or so pages that detail his experience of both finding and 
enduring work can stand with the very best of working class autobiography. Concise, 
detailed, and passionate they still somehow ensure that we never lose sight of Vanzetti 
the human being amidst all the squalor and viciousness that made up his day-to-day 
existence, just as he never did. He was more than that. As he wrote ? I learned that 
class-consciousness was not a phrase invented by propagandists, but was a real, vital 
force, and that those who felt its significance were no longer beasts of burden, but were 
human beings.? (18)

What has always fascinated me, though, is the idea of Vanzetti as a self-educated man, as 
an autodidact, and what that meant with regard to his anarchism. Time and time again I go 
back to his chapter ?My Intellectual Life and Creed.? I know, I think, why this chapter 
fascinates me and, perhaps, other anarchists of my generation. When I was growing up I met 
many self-educated working class men and women. They were everywhere in the community I 
lived in. They had left school at 13 or so, often having shown some promise there, because 
economic necessity had driven them to work. This was especially so in the case of women 
like my mother, never without a book in her hand, who left school early to work in a 
factory wrapping boiled sweets. Their learning had never followed the accepted trajectory 
of a university or ?higher? education, that sense of order, shape and chronology that 
formed what we might call intellectual knowledge. Instead their intellectual life could be 
described as messy and contradictory, sometimes confrontational and often consisting of 
patterns that they had picked out for themselves from what they had read. Proscribed by 
what they could find in libraries, afford to buy, or could borrow from friends, they 
became autonomous learners in charge of their own education. They always recognized the 
?literary canon? and had, sometimes, a rather exaggerated respect for it. That said they 
brought their own frame of reference to the classics. I can remember sitting in a pub 
listening to two old miners tell me that Sir Walter Scott?s ?Ivanhoe? was a radical novel 
because they read it as an exercise in solidarity and anti-racism. Others felt the same 
about those awful novels of the English public school, (The Bounder of Greyfriars, that 
sort of thing) which they saw as friends together against the world, and authority in 
general, rather than the classist, racist novels that many critics felt they actually 
were. Sometimes these readers did meet in small groups to talk about what they were 
reading. Mostly though it was, I think, a rather solitary and lonely business. Some of 
these people were in the English anarchist movement when I joined all those years ago. 
Like many working class autodidacts they saw learning in unique and individual patterns 
that cut across all sorts of disciplines and genres, informing both how they saw 
anarchism, and their relationships with other anarchists not from their background.

It was like that for Vanzetti. He very carefully lists what he was reading after his 
arrival in America. There are the usual anarchist suspects as well as Marx, Darwin, and 
Spencer. I imagine him, in his room after, or before work, poring over Renan?s Life of 
Jesus a popular (and it has to be said, rather turgid) mainstay of late nineteenth and 
early twentieth century freethought, and re-affirming his antipathy to religious belief. 
We sense his coming to terms with history and discovering it?s cycles and movements from 
Greece and Rome onwards and his belief that only now was humanity leaving the prehistoric 
age -indeed ?human history has not yet begun?. Of course there was also ?literature??Hugo, 
Tolstoy, Zola, poetry and, above all, The Divine Comedy. One senses that the latter was as 
much an influence on him as any anarchist writing that came his way. All of it, all this 
reading shaped, cemented, and challenged his ideas. The words of these writers struck a 
chord, crystallized what he was already sensing and made him aware of the beauty that 
could be found in the way words related to each other. Literature provided a balm to the 
exhaustion of his everyday life and lit up the world around him with a hope that was 
tangible. Waiting for him was anarchism and a movement that celebrated worker?s culture 
and literacy, containing comrades who had a shared understanding of the dignity of life 
that he recognized and related to and helped him read, what he called, ?The Book of Life; 
that is the Book of Books! All the others merely teach how to read this one.? (29)

Through The Story of a Proletarian Life we can trace what contributed to Vanzetti?s 
embrace of the ?ideal?, the pursuit of which made his life worth living. Given his 
circumstances when he wrote this pamphlet it is understandable that he does not mention 
some matters, but we should remind ourselves of a few things about the anarchist world he 
moved in. His anarchist context, if you will. Vanzetti was a committed and passionate 
anarchist communist whose anarchism meant a permanent contestation. Influenced by the 
ideas of writers such as Luigi Galleani, Peter Kropotkin, and Max Stirner, and re-inforced 
by their affinity with each other, some of Vanzetti?s comrades, using any weapons they 
could, had been at war with the American government since the summer of 1914. Theirs (and 
his) was an anarchism that combined a fierce belief in the right of the individual to 
fight back and resist any ?invasion? of his or her freedom and individuality, combined 
with a practical recognition of mutual aid and support: from each according to their 
ability; to each according to their need. Their anarchism was atheistic, opposed to any 
form of conciliation with capitalism, all embracing, and passionate in a way that might 
make some of us uneasy. Galleani?s writings in the paper he edited, Cronaca Sovversiva, 
constantly celebrated individuals and groups who had carried out attacks on the rich and 
powerful. He lauded those men and women who had fought back by refusing to be acquiescent 
to the economic, physical and mental cruelty he defined as characteristic of both 
authoritarian and ? democratic? states. This paper was critical in developing Vanzetti?s 
appreciation of how anarchists should be; how they should carry themselves in a world that 
saw them as the enemy. That said, we do need to be careful though when we talk about 
influences and how they work. We can?t say a paper said that so they did this. That?s a 
convenience of approach that belongs in the archive and nowhere else. Processes of 
thinking went on, experiences in life were considered and a constant assessment of words 
was taking place, even if the words of anarchism resonated with them like only a few other 
words had ever resonated in their lives. A did not necessarily lead to B without often 
pulling in F, Q, and S. If anarchism was the end of their journey we need to know far more 
about their intellectual, economic, and emotional journeys before we make too many casual 
or sweeping statements about any comrades?s relationship with it, never mind the 
relationship between reading and action. We should also remember it wasn?t just Galleani 
doing the writing. In some cases it was working class and ?uneducated? writers striving to 
find the right words to describe the elation and possibilities that were inherent in the 
struggle for the attainment of anarchy. If anarchy was to be new and original and 
startlingly wonderful what words could they find to express these hopes, dreams, and 
potential possibilities? Inevitably they drew on their experiences with what we might call 
the literary canon and, as a result, their writings are often awkward, ungainly, 
hyperbolic and hauntingly beautiful, often all at the same time.

We also know that this anarchism offered an alternative cultural life that appealed to the 
self-educated militant. One in which they could play an integral part. Drama performances, 
picnics and musical concerts proliferated , all put on by the anarchists themselves and 
seen as integral to the pursuit of the ideal and the promotion of worker culture. Vanzetti 
and his comrades embraced all of this with a passion. Watching a play by Gori, listening 
to arias and folksongs , reading novels and poetry, talking and learning, all became part 
of the fabric of anarchism and, we might suggest , this anarchism became for Vanzetti, as 
much intuition and feeling as it was intellect.

We are entering awkward territory here. For so long we have seen Vanzetti as a victim, as 
the innocent man executed by the American state alongside his comrade, Nicola Sacco. He 
has been characterized as a simple working man with a devoted, if rather awkward belief 
system. This pamphlet shows us that those images will not do. He was a complex man, driven 
by a fierce morality. He reflected deeply on the world around him and was clearly aware of 
the power and possibility of language and its relationship to literature, ideas and 
action. His writing traces the journey that led him from Italy to the prison cell where he 
awaits execution, but it does much more. As well as describing to us just what proletarian 
could mean, it presents us with an anarchism that we cannot fully trace in anyone?s 
writings or in any newspaper. This is an anarchism that is equally based upon emotion and 
intuition as it is on any theoretical writing. It?s a fierce, uninhibited ideal, centred 
on the assertion of dignity in the face of appalling economic and emotional oppression. It 
maintained Vanzetti?s dignity in the face of the most disgusting living and working 
conditions that capitalist America threw at him. Knowing this we would do well to remember 
that the anarchist communism of the Galleanisti was aimed not just at the solid and 
hardworking man of Kropotkin?s ? Appeal to the Young? or Morris? ? New From Nowhere? but 
rather to the outsiders; those men and women at the very edge of capitalist life, living 
and working in a grim squalor we cannot imagine. Those people who were the very 
lumpenproletariat that Bakunin appealed to in some his writings.

Of course they are people that anarchism has very little contact with nowadays. It has 
little, regular relationship with the multitudes of desperate poor, and, in truth, the 
working class self-educated men and women who Vanzetti and his comrades were typical of 
are, for the most part, people of the past. Both of these realities mean we may have lost 
something very precious from our ranks?something that made anarchism richer and more 
complex. Anarchism, once, was able to re-enforce the dignity and self-perception of 
outsiders like Vanzetti and we should realize that any state that threatened that dignity 
had to bear the consequences. Vanzetti and others like him had not much else to lose 
except their own sense of worth. If they couldn?t choose their battles they would not run 
away from one. They would fight rather than surrender who they were or deny the hope that 
anarchism gave them.

So, after all those years I mull over the words of this man whose pamphlet has played no 
small part in my own life. If I became confused on some readings, uncertain or 
contradictory, I have never really worried. I feel pretty sure that he wouldn?t mind. Life 
for him was thinking, questioning, and always tangling one self up with words and 
meanings, never forgetting they are worthless without the emotions they stir in us. 
Ninety-one years on and Vanzetti still has much to offer me. I am thankful I have had the 
chance to read him and I am thankful to him for his words that have always encouraged me 
to think, question and act.

I am and will be until the last instant (unless I should discover that I am in error) an 
anarchist-communist, because I believe that communism is the most humane form of social 
contract, because I know that only in liberty can man rise, become noble, and complete.


From: imminent rebellion #13: http://www.rebelpress.org.nz/publications.

Related Link: http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/vhhp2j

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/27675