#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #SICILIA #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy, #Sicilia Libertaria: The missed ransom. Journey through the Southern and Sicilian issues 6 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 THE BUNDLES OF WORKERS ARE BORN ---- We have seen how during the 80s of the 19th

century peasant and worker aggregations developed in Sicily in continuity with
the previous organizational experiences, but endowed with a new spirit, in which
the trade union type coupled with a socialist perspective, thanks to the presence
of personalities from the socialist and anarchist world with a strong link with
the proletariat and in connection with the workers' formations of the North.
However, not all professional societies had this political connotation, and in
many there was confusion or syncretism between monarchist, Catholic and socialist
positions; however, their strong development among different categories of
workers in large urban centers and among day labourers, poor peasants,
sharecroppers and tenant farmers, subjugated by the weight of large estates and
land ownership in the hands of gabellotti and rich landowners, assumed particular
importance. rural areas.

In this sphere the anarchist experimentalist ideas of Giovanni Rossi had already
made their way, which had particularly convinced some leaders such as De Felice
Giuffrida in Catania and Pétrina in Messina, Arcuri, Garibaldi Bosco and Gulì in
Palermo, and pushed the workers' and peasant societies to develop the cooperative
and mutualistic idea and in some cases to prefigure the future society with the
activation of schools, medical clinics, cooperative warehouses, resistance funds
and theater companies, as well as supporting the experimental colony of Rossi in
Brazil. (1)

This work, together with the stimuli of the national workers' congress in Palermo
in May 1992, will lead to the development of the workers' bundles; process
accelerated by the crisis in the agricultural and mining sector, and by the
disastrous customs policy of the government aimed at protecting the industry of
northern Italy to the detriment of the south and the islands. The first bundle to
be formed will be that of Catania on 1 May 1891, strongly desired by the
anarchists Gulì, De Felice and Cipriani, while that of Palermo will be founded on
29 June 1892, under the pressure of Garibaldi Bosco and Emmanuele Gulì, linked to
the revolutionary anarchist socialist. But in Messina in 1888 Nicola Pètrina had
already founded one, which, after his arrest had been kept alive by the young
anarchists of the "Cipriani" Circle ..

In the congress of 14 and 15 August in Genoa, the Socialist Party of Italian
Workers was born, which will give a strong boost to socialist activism on the
island. However, the meeting found itself facing two obstacles that were
difficult to overcome: the question of the expulsion of the anarchists and the
peasant question. While the second, on which pure Marxists turned up their noses,
was postponed to the Reggio Emilia congress of the following year, the first was
implemented in no uncertain terms, but with many difficulties. The
representatives of the Sicilian fascism present, Pètrina for Messina and
Garibaldi Bosco for Palermo, were in disagreement on the question of the
anarchists: the first being against the expulsion and the second, transiting on
legalistic socialist positions, in favour. Three anarchists from Palermo, who
represented 10 of the 24 sections of the city, Gulì, Genoa and Zappulla, instead
took part in the congress of the expelled, in via Sivori.

The Fasci of Messina, Catania and Palermo served as centers of diffusion of the
movement, for the respective provinces and areas of influence, often supplying or
preparing the cadres of the 231 municipal Fasci constituted (and 31 in formation)
as of December 1893, for a total of 382,000 members: 1/8 of the 3,325,203
inhabitants of the island (according to the 1891 census), 1/4 compared to the
active population alone of 1,537,880 units. (2)

About half of the associations had joined the Socialist Party, the others either
diverged from the party, due to anarchist or republican influence, or were
characterized by heterogeneity and exclusively demanding conformation.

The fact is that, contrary to what was being said about the peasants' inability
to give life to class organizational processes, in the Sicilian countryside there
was a real protagonism of the rural masses as a whole. Di Rosa writes: "The Fasci
were not only a trade union and political organization but a school and
instruments of civil, moral and political formation, which had produced more
incisive and superior pedagogical effects in the conscience of the adherents and
of Sicilian peasant society produced by the 1877 school reform of the Depretis
Government".  The fasci movement found itself at the center of a vast movement of
protest during the first months of 1893, which it fueled but from which it was
also fueled. The protests of all categories of work, spontaneous or organized,
were aimed at demanding better living and working conditions: labourers,
peasants, reapers, the unemployed, sulphate miners, workers, fringes of the
population crushed by taxes; with them the socialists, the anarchists, the most
radical and sensitive political world. The year had opened with the Caltavuturo
massacre: on 20 January the troops had shot at the peasants who had occupied the
lands, causing 13 deaths and dozens of injuries. The outrage had prompted
widespread protests. On 7 May at S. Giuseppe Jato and S. Cipirello, during the
laborers' strike, Nicolò Barbato, president of the Piana dei Greci bundle, was
arrested together with other peasants; on May 12, again in S. Giuseppe Jato,
Bernardino Verro, president of the Corleone bundle with other strikers, was
arrested. But the movement was not intimidated. In the month of August, protests
against exorbitant municipal taxes exploded: on the 6th, one person died in
Alcamo; in Belmonte Mezzagno arrested 8 peasants and 4 women. The protests mixed
with those that exploded throughout Italy over the events in Aigues Mortes, the
town in southern France where, on 16 and 17 August, the population had attacked
the Italian community in an act of xenophobia, killing several workers (the
number is uncertain: between 10 and 17). Between 8 and 11 September in Piana dei
Greci the Town Hall was devastated, while in Acquaviva Platani was arrested. On
the 16th in S. Biagio Platani a popular protest against taxes led to the invasion
of the town hall.

Since 21 August the peasant world had been fighting for the modification of the
settlement agreements according to the decisions of the Corleone congress which
demanded an increase in the wages of the labourers, the abolition of terraggio, a
contract all against the peasants, the introduction of sharecropping contract,
the reduction of municipal taxes, the improvement of the living conditions of the
workers and the people. A strong and widespread mobilization that induced some
landowners (such as in Prizzi and Palazzo Adriano) to agree with the fasci.

On the occasion of the regional socialist and fasci congress of 21 and 22 May
1993, the leaders closest to the PSLI (in particular Garibaldi Bosco) tried to
implement the expulsion of the anarchists, according to the resolutions of the
Genoa congress; the influence of the latter, however, remained solid in numerous
localities (not only Catania and Messina, with De Felice and Noé) but in Palermo,
in the Trapani and Girgentano areas, where the influence of Friscia was strong,
and elsewhere, for example wherever the railway worker Emanuele Gulì was
transferred as a punishment. For De Felice, the Fasci should not have been
vassals of the PSLI. A situation of substantial coexistence will remain, albeit a
harbinger of clashes, not appreciated by the national socialist leadership, while
another tailspin of the clash will take place in the socialist congress in Zurich
on 6-12 August. (3) Even the anarchists will find themselves divided on the
tactics to follow, between supporters and opponents of the fascis, given the
numerous contradictions that manifest themselves, especially those on the
participation in the municipal elections, only to find a common strategy on an
insurrectionary project which he was preparing, with a discreet adhesion in the
whole movement, for the very first months of '94.

Pippo Gurrieri

6 - continue

Note

1 - Natale Musarra, Giovanni Rossi and socialism in Catania, Libertarian Sicily
n.168, Ragusa, September 1998. Of the same: The Sicilian revolutionary currents
and the Fasci of the workers, unpublished manuscript.

2 - Musarra, The currents..., cit.

3 - Giovanni Di Rosa, Damnatio Memoriae. The "good life" of the peasants,
1860-1970, Armando Siciliano, Messina, 2019, p.97. Musarra, The currents..., cit.

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