WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere n. 17 - Camillo Berneri. Our tasks and his legacy - Pier Carlo Masini (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 On May 5, 1937 in Barcelona, our comrade Camillo Berneri was assassinated by

Stalinism. His killing is part of the counter-revolutionary repressive wave
implemented by the republican government of Negrín, controlled by the Spanish
Communist Party and through this by the Soviet Union, dominated by the new
bourgeoisie of the Stalinist apparatus. Persecuted by fascism and forced into
exile, Berneri opposed with his ability as a political leader and a man of
culture the totalitarianisms that marred the last century and of these he was a
conscious victim, until he fell in the revolutionary war alongside the Spanish
proletariat. Militant and theoretician of revolutionary anarchism, he was an
implacable critic of the doctrinairism and sectarianism that afflicted our
movement, advocating a concrete political anarchism, firmly implanted in the
working class and capable of promoting alliances with the other forces of the
workers' movement and the anti-totalitarian left .
He was neither a republican nor a socialist, although his first education derived
from these political schools, nor even less a liberal, as a part of
historiography, even of a libertarian matrix, likes to portray him today.
Instead, he was a staunch supporter of organized anarchism, who conceded nothing
during his existence to bourgeois ideologies nor did he ever give any discount to
the political forces they represented, starting with Rosselli's liberal
socialists, with whom he also undertook an in-depth and sincere confrontation and
a military alliance in the Spanish War. His work of revision and updating of the
ideological heritage of anarchism could not find a complete arrangement due to
the hardships that the life of a militant imposed on him and due to his untimely
death at only forty years of age.

With his lucid analysis, with his ability to highlight the limits of the
anarchist movement, Berneri shows us the need for a continuous work of
restoration of our theory and constant renewal of strategic elaboration, in order
to raise our capacity of intervention in the class movement and in social
conflict. With his open and dialectical approach and with his political and moral
rigor he still pushes us to study and organize ourselves to be up to the tasks
before us.
We remember him on the eighty-sixth anniversary of his death with a writing that
Pier Carlo Masini - founder, manager and theorist of the Anarchist Groups of
Proletarian Action - dedicated to his work and to his memory, in which the
coherence of his thought and his political action.

CAMILLO BERNERI, NEW TASKS OF THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT
Berneri is an uncomfortable writer. So uncomfortable that at every step in his
writings one encounters ruthless points of self-criticism.
«I am convinced, he wrote after the war, that the anarchist movement is still in
such a state of political infantilism and moral confusion that it is necessary to
intensify propaganda to regenerate the environment with young and new elements»
(Free Agreement 1-15 August 1922 ).
And to this work of surgeon, chastiser and reformer of programs and customs he
dedicated himself with the same missionary passion

who in those years engaged Gramsci in the communist party, Rosselli in the
socialist movement, Gobetti in the liberal currents.
Precisely in Gobetti's newspaper he, responding to Umberto Morra, defends the
anarchist movement from arbitrary interpretations, precisely on the basis of a
clear differentiation of anarchism from its inorganic individualist appendages:
«Around the organized anarchist movement there is a vast halo of various
elements, anarchists of an amorphous anarchism ranging from ravacholism to
Stirnerian and Nietzschean rehashings. But, historically, the anarchist movement
must be considered in relation to organized forces which present a continuity of
thought and action. And this movement is only the extreme wing of socialism» (The
Liberal Revolution of February 19, 1924).
Against individualism, against amorphism, against disorganizing and
anti-socialist tendencies, Berneri's critique is pointed with particular vigor.
He sees the danger of an upper hand within the movement of these negative
tendencies, favored by a misunderstood tolerance.
«If I take issue with individualism, he wrote to Luigi Fabbri in July 1930, it is
because, if the individualist current has little numerical importance, it has
managed to influence almost the entire movement. Almost all anarchists, in my
eyes, are individualists, optimists and doctrinaires...».

Connected to this critique is the denunciation of the dangers implicit in the
dispersion of anarchism among many
sporadic "attitudes" which represent as many evasions from the central problems
of the revolutionary struggle: from neo-Malthusianism, which he criticized with
particular harshness, to pacifism, validly attacked in some controversial notes.
"The times require our cultural mobilization. There is the Bolshevik myth to gut.
There is the capitalist system in a state of bankruptcy to be anatomized. There
are the problems of the revolution to discuss. There are social-democratic
misunderstandings to be blown away. And many other battles of ideas to fight. In
France the revolution is far away and certain amateurisms are explained. But
where there is a world to tear down and a world to rebuild, as it is in Spain,
any specialization (education, hygienist, liberal amourist) is grotesque».
Berneri warned the enormous responsibility that in our times hangs over the
anarchist movement, as a guide of the revolutionary proletariat. And every
carelessness, every waste of energy, every irresponsibility, every
undisillusioned illusion, every indulgence towards individual defects or
collective deficiencies, every crowd-loving optimism appeared to him as attacks
on the movement and its future.
At the same time, Berneri's concern is to attract the discussion of his comrades
on the concrete issues of society in general and of Italian society in
particular, to activate a discussion on these concrete issues in the movement. In
this sense we can speak of a "problemism" of Berneri, perhaps borrowed from
Salvemini, of whom he had been a disciple and collaborator in the Unit.
Anyone who scrolls through Berner's bibliography, the hundreds of articles
scattered across dozens of periodicals, will encounter a multifaceted ingenuity,
the critic, the storyteller, the polemicist, the historian, the specialist in
pedagogical matters, the lover of scientific research. But above all he will find
a keen interest in the concrete problems of Italian society, from emigration to
housing, from professional culture to school organization, from home working to
eight hours, from the relationship between the city and the countryside to social
legislation. Also in the aforementioned letter to Fabbri he writes:
«My dream is to provoke the examination of a large series of problems, then, by
collecting the critical observations, the additions, the solutions, etc. of those
who will deal with them, arrive at a program for 1932 or 1933, to be presented as
the program of a group of anarchists, who let the others live in peace but who
want to march their own way...».[...]
Camillo Berneri was the only leading militant, the only revolutionary leader, in
an intellectual and political sense, who in Italy freed from fascism could set
our movement on the road to rebirth, transform it from a caravan into an
organisation, from a family into a party , from wishful thinking into certainty,
the only one capable of promoting it as an active force in the Italian revolution.
For this reason those who feared like smoke in their eyes this rebirth, who
feared this rebirth as the ignominious end of their lies, killed him in a rambla
in Barcelona on May 5, 1937.

Pier Carlo Masini, preface to Camillo Berneri, New tasks of the anarchist
movement, L'Impulso, Livorno, 1955.

http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/blog/2023/05/03/il-cantiere-di-febbraio-2023-2/
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