WORLD WORLDWIDE (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria 2023 The missed ransom. Journey through the issues of the south and Sicily ----The proletarian defeat and fascism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In the years 1919-20 a vast peasant front pursued the objective of taking

possession of the land with hundreds of occupations. The working world is also
connected to it, from the railway workers to the sulphate workers to the workers
in the shipyards and in the manufacturing sector. The movement of the railway
workers (very strong and directed towards Palermo, Caltanissetta or the ferry
boats of Messina by anarchist militants), is already well established by strikes
which lead to the conquest of better working conditions, under the slogan: "The
railway to the railwaymen". Between Caltanissetta and Canicattì the anarchist
railway worker Raffaele Frugis also organizes the revolutionary syndicalist Labor
Chambers and dozens of miners' leagues. (1) In the mines there is a clash with
the owners, some of whom are also large landowners as well as leading figures in
the mafia, such as Calogero Vizzini. The FIOM is the engine of the other workers'
struggles in the Palermo area, starting with the shipyards. He fights the wage
cages that impose lower wages for southern and Sicilian workers racistically
considered less productive than northerners; the director of Cantieri Lojacono
defends this colonial exploitation by brazenly declaring that equalizing wages
would have discouraged industries from investing in the South by eliminating the
competitive element given by lower wages (2). On the basis of the occupations of
the lands (and in close contact with the peasant leagues) and the occupations of
the factories in the North, the FIOM led by Giovanni Orcel on 4 September,
following the layoffs and the lockout operated by the management, starts the
occupation and the self-management. The enthusiasm of the workers drags the other
factories in the capital. The demands are often purely economic, but the movement
is vast, tenacious, and the climate between the city, the countryside and the
mines in the autumn of 1920 is pre-revolutionary.

The employers and institutional front does not stand by and watch. The offensive
starts from the countryside, where the landowners in cahoots with mafia and
war-hardy go straight to the fight. In some centers such as Corleone,
Boccadifalco, Collesano, Scillato, Isnello, Santa Ninfa, Salemi the armed
peasants defend the occupations from what Nicola Alongi, in the columns of "La
Rassegna Socialista" defines "the mafia bourgeoisie who believed, wretched, that
it was enough kill a peasant who knows how to say a few more words to kill the
socialist movement in that country". It is a game of massacre and intimidation
with the elimination of the most prominent socialist leaders and peasants, as
already in Prizzi with Giuseppe Rumore on 22 September 1919 and Nicolò Alongi on
29 February 1920. The front fell apart, but in no in a few cases the peasants
organize themselves into armed squads to avenge the killed people's leaders, as
in the area of San Giuseppe Jato and Prizzi. 1920 ends with the movement of
occupations forced on the defensive and 1921 opens with the agrarians in a
counterattack, now using the mafia of gabellotti and campieri, now the violence
of fascist squads: five months in which the workers' and peasants' movement the
whole island will be inflicted deep wounds that will make it retreat from the
great strides achieved.

In the workers' camp the employers' counter-offensive is no less, but here it is
the CGdL that collapses, which on 19 September reaches a compromise with the
industrialists at a national level; however much Orcel and his closest
collaborators try to delay the effects, they will eventually be forced to give
way, letting the reformists regain control of the Chamber of Labour. The
agreement has all the weight of a defeat: the workers also lose the hours worked
under occupation, the movement disintegrates and retreats and the occupation at
the Naval Shipyard ceases definitively on 29 September causing Orcel's isolation
and his assassination on October 14th at the hands of the mafia. "It was the
beginning of a long dying phase. The Palermitan workers, "without a boss,
betrayed by their own workmates, held up by the bourgeois press to hatred and
public contempt, tormented by hunger", attacked by fascist hooliganism, suffered
heavily from the effects of the economic crisis which induced employers work to
hasty decisions to abandon productive activities" (3).

The socialist movement, fragmented into two competing parties (with the much
stronger reformist one in Sicily), wastes a lot of energy on costly electoral
campaigns in which it prevails in numerous localities, nevertheless instilling in
its base a legalistic spirit and trust in institutions, extinguishing their
revolutionary consciousness and provoking their political and practical disarmament.

Many historians have given great prominence to the takeover of the town halls by
the socialist parties, and much less to the weakening of the social power of
demand which had formed around the dream of a redemption that went well beyond
the management of a town hall, which the owners and fascists to unleash the most
violent and widespread campaign of violence, assaults, assaults on offices and
political assassinations ever seen. Eastern and south-eastern Sicily during the
first half of 1921 was the hottest theater (4), in spite of the central-western
part, where the employers and the bourgeoisie acted strong in the armed mafia arm.

To exacerbate the crisis of the P.S.I. it is also the split in Livorno on 21
January 1921 with the birth of the Communist Party of Italy, which in any case
will have little following in Sicily.

On these aspects the polemics of the anarchists (largely neglected by some
historiography) are very harsh. From their newspapers they openly accuse the
socialists: "out of a hundred socialist foremen ninety-nine always end up in one
way or another with betrayal" writes Paolo Schicchi in L'Etna on 5 March 1921.
The impotence and socialist yielding in the face of the mounting reaction are a
fact indisputable history. The end of the Labor Alliance promoted by the
Sindacato Ferrovieri, the General Confederation of Labor and the Italian Union of
Trade Unions, and the failure of the "legalitarian strike" of August, sealed by
the peace treaty between the PSI and the PNF of 3 August 1921, can be traced back
to them. , which literally disarms the proletariat and hands it over to the
bosses and fascism.

Errico Malatesta describes the situation in Pensiero e Volonta of 1 October 1926
as follows:

"When the factories were occupied, I did nothing but preach the need to broaden
the movement and ran from factory to factory to incite resistance. 'If you - I
said to the workers - leave the factories that you now own as owners, you will
return later as slaves, like frustrated dogs, and you will fall back into that
state of misery and abjection which you had managed to overcome'. The keynote of
all my speeches was always this: 'Act now, or the bourgeoisie will make you pay
in tears of blood for the fear you have given them'. And right up to the last
rally that it was possible to hold in Rome, when fascism was already about to
triumph, before a crowd of 50,000 people, against Enrico Ferri who spoke for the
socialists and, in the name of the 'fatal revolution', of the historical laws'
etc., he recommended to be calm, to have faith, to wait for the times to be ripe,
I said: Act, resist, oppose violence to violence, or tomorrow it will be too
late". (5)

With the end of the "united proletarian front" the opposition to fascism is
unable to put up a resistance that could become a counterattack and regain lost
positions. Many cases of armed defense are therefore destined to remain isolated;
the same experience of the Arditi del Popolo (on which you can read the special
page edited by Natale Musarra on the Arditi of Catania on page 7 of this issue),
will be marred by socialist opportunism and communist hesitations, dictated by
their aversion to any movement born outside their control and their political
strategies (6). The grassroots "united proletarian front" on which the Sicilian
anarchists wanted to focus fails to take off due to their geographical
disintegration and an increasingly compromised situation, with the proletarian
organizations pushed back in all their recent conquests.

Yet another lost opportunity for redemption of the oppressed classes; it will
take a long time for another one to recur.

Pippo Gurrieri

11 - continue

Natale Musarra, Biographies of Sicilian anarchists. Raffaele Frugis (1883-1927),
railwayman and agitator. Libertarian Sicily n.303, January 2011.

Giuseppe Carlo Marino, Parties and class struggle in Sicily from Orlando to
Mussolini, De Donato, Bari 1976, p.182-3.

Marino, cit., p. 199. The inverted comma is taken from "The Proletarian
Dictatorship!", Palermo, 21 November 1920.

for a reconstruction of the period see Giuseppe Miccichè, Dopoguerra e fascismo
in Sicilia, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1976.

The intervention can be found in: Errico Malatesta, Complete Works, edited by
Davide Turcato, vol. 8, Anarchism realizable and realizable (1924-1932), Zero in
Condotta-La Fiaccola, Milan-Ragusa, 2023, p.220-24. On the period, see also vol.
7, United Proletarian Front, The two-year red period, Umanità Nova and fascism, 2022.

on the Arditi del Popolo see, among others: Andrea Staid, Gli Arditi del popolo -
The first armed struggle against fascism, 1921-1922, La Fiaccola, Ragusa, 2007
and Marco Rossi, Arditi e non gendarmi, BFS, Pisa 1997 .

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