WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria, Nov. 23: SO MANY STORIES ABOUT ANARCHISTS (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Over the last twenty years, various publishing houses have discovered

that certain stories from the past attracted readers eager for strong
sensations, or simply eager for moments of escape, more than science
fiction stories that had partly become reality. The historical novel and
the closest thing to it, the "histoire-bataille", the buried
civilisations, the memoirs of nobles and rulers, the sweetened
biographies of saints and massacrers have thus achieved a certain
commercial success and cheered up the industries of cultural consumption
, leisure, tourism, and the bodies associated with them such as
universities.
The new historiographical literature satisfies the demand of a public
accustomed to the imperatives of the telematic society: speed,
convenience, superficiality and approximation. The new historians adapt
to it and, under the cover of popularisation, use it to accentuate those
characteristics that make academic historiography the favorite jester of
the dominant system: sectoralisation of knowledge, cultural
homologation, reduction, adaptation and compatibility of contents with
the "mainstream". " historiographical.

With certain exceptions, the new historiography has also touched
historians who are interested in anarchists. First of all, because there
are large numbers of those who attend the same universities that sponsor
it, who nourish the ambitions and share the mental views of career
historians; then because the majority of them have a vague and
fundamentally abstract idea of contemporary anarchism, they do not
participate or have not participated in the life of the movement and
would never, ever expose themselves to militate in it. And very few
actually contest the university system and indeed dispute its positions
of power, hierarchies, references/reverences and student subjection.

The reconstruction of the history of anarchists, of an often virtual
community, of a fluid and protean movement, of a composite and changing
thought over time, does not only constitute a challenge from a
methodological point of view but also an attempt to recompose much of
that identity that anarchists need to develop the guidelines of their
commitment, identify objectives and means to innovate, discard or
review. Writing about the history of anarchists is therefore an
eminently political act that cannot be delegated to anyone who is not an
anarchist or does not intend to be one.

Attention to the identity factor, which is nourished not only by history
but also by territorial roots (anarchisms also differ due to the
environmental, economic and cultural conditions in which they find
themselves operating) and by an alternative horizon of values compared
to the dominant, gives us a plural movement to which even the humblest
stonemason (this is the case of Spartera and the Mongelli brothers of
the Fascio dei Lavoratori of Catania) provides his own theoretical and
action contribution. Which contrasts radically with the return to the
hagiographies of the main exponents of Italian anarchism (Malatesta
above all), disguised as adventurous biographies and free as much as
possible from useless ideological trappings, according to the current
journalistic cliché.

   The apologies of the "leaders" of anarchism are considered as the
main limit of the anarchist historiography of the past, together with
the inability to address the substantial issues (formation, critical and
contextual position, internal and external ideological debate, evolution
of thought and political action) and immerse the movement in the flow of
great history. These limits curiously re-emerge today when we have new
and broader sources and more accurate studies.

Since his death, for example, Malatesta's writings have been printed and
reprinted but it has never been possible to produce a true critical
edition, which gives an account of the debate and the political-cultural
elaboration that took place around him, as well as him, without him, of
the dozens of comrades who intervened with often discordant positions,
more or less calibrated than his, of the controversies that were
triggered (and which are not limited to the now stale Malatesta-Merlin
dispute on communism where both do not a great figure), of the
relational context which includes, in addition to the companions of the
groups frequented, also the political and social communities in which he
had lived in Italy as well as the evanescent ones he passed through in
exile.

The original personalities who, like Malatesta, emerged from time to
time in the panorama of Italian anarchism almost always remained
anchored to the liquid, elusive, multiple, self-regenerating nature of
that movement, and evolved in a constant relationship with its internal
debate and with the specific political-social needs of the various
territories. Making those personalities, their political and human
vicissitudes, and their thoughts a timeless point of reference for the
entire anarchist movement, and even its north star, even going so far as
to methodologically replace their biography with the "type" of the
anarchist ideal of Weberian memory, leads to distorting historical
reality and denying the potential of a movement much broader, complex,
articulated and profound than each of its individual militants.

On the contrary, we should focus on a historiography that, abandoning
typicalizing generalizations, focuses more on individual contexts and
the peculiar cultures they host: in short, a historiography of "case by
case" but also "systemic" and relational, which is able to grasp and
report the differences and discontinuities, as well as the constants and
analogies, to a unitary framework. And that it brings about a recovery
of the collective debate and plural action which in Italy, since the
times of the First International, has always constituted the essence of
anarchist thought and practice.

It may be that this is also a way to finally free the history of
anarchists from the sectarianism and self-referentiality that continues
to prevail, despite all the imitations of the historiographical fashions
of the moment (transnationalism, emotional history, psycho-history,
women's history), allowing us to bring an anarchic look at the main
events in Italian and world history, from the Risorgimento to
colonialism, from imperialist wars to economic globalization.

Christmas Musarra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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