The ongoing debate in some sectors of the anarchist movement about the
possibility of "enhancing a constructive, positive and experimentaldimension" of anarchism, despite the current hierarchical social
organization, "putting into practice today, without waiting for major
changes, the forms of life that one would like to generalize in a future
free of exploitation and domination" (I quote from the first issue of
"Semi sotto la neve", February 2022), has an important but little-known
precedent in the attempts made in the 1930s to provide the anarchist
movement, which lacked one, with a program of immediate practical
achievements in the aftermath of a possible revolutionary movement.
Certain anarchist sectors, at an international level, mainly blamed this
lack for the failure of the revolutionary initiative in the first
post-war period and the organizational/realization gap that anarchism
paid for with respect to Bolshevism. A controversy ensued involving the
most well-known anarchist exponents of the time (Faure, Arshinov,
Voline, Nettlau, Cornelissen, Besnard, Leval, Lecoin, Rocker, Lazarte,
Peiró, Santillán ...)
The topic also interested the Italian anarchists who had taken refuge
abroad and, on the basis of the reflections of the last Malatesta and
the protests that they also aroused, made it the object of an intense
exchange of opinions and conceptual elaborations in newspapers and
pamphlets. The main participants were Berneri, Bertoni, Damiani, Fabbri,
Fedeli, Frigerio, Schiavina, Vella and Zavattero who ended up
intertwining several times the specific theme of "social reconstruction
in the aftermath of the revolution" with two other strands of Malatesta
and anarchist thought of the period: the so-called "revolutionary
gradualism" and the "practical and experimental character of anarchism".
Among the most interesting proposals was undoubtedly the "pre-anarchy"
of Randolfo Vella, supported both by the institution of the referendum,
which abolished the representative system at every level, and by the
so-called "competent Groups", that is, by "technical" management groups
"elected by the people and among the competent" for each branch of
production, supply and services. To this system, founded "on the widest
autonomies: individual autonomy, autonomy of the Municipality; and in
the metropolises: district autonomy; autonomy of the province, of the
region and of the nation", so that "each of them will be free to act
when its action falls only on itself, otherwise: either it can only act
in concert with the interested parties, or it will have to abstain from
any pernicious action"; the hypothesis of a "libertarian government",
formulated by Lolmo (Domenico Zavattero) and Pardaillan (Rocco Tavani),
was knowingly opposed, as a "simple administrative body necessary for
the functioning of the regular and orderly life of a people, for the
indispensable work of regulating production, transport, consumption". It
remained essential, however, that "the State disappear, and that it
never reforms itself".
In the middle of these two visions arose the equally heterodox one of
Camillo Berneri who, alongside the repudiation of any political
dictatorship, even anarchist, promoted "an integral Sovietism, in which
all the socialist currents of the people and all the representatives of
the avant-garde parties flow together, tempering and completing each
other", and from which a "minimum program", autonomist and federalist,
and even a "libertarian constituent" emerge. A different note, but one
that anticipated the future scenarios of the Spanish revolution, was
expressed by Carlo Frigerio in identifying "an effective basis for
future reorganization ... in the union nuclei, which, if they do not
have an anarchic character, are, if anything, already existing and more
suitable organisms - both for the elements that constitute them, both
for the technical solidarity that keeps them united, and finally for
their practical experience - to take over, in a first moment, the
economic management of society".
Very severe critics of these conceptions, in which they saw the danger
of authoritarian involutions, Gigi Damiani and Max Sartin (Raffaele
Schiavina) of the "Adunata dei Refrattari" of New York decided to
participate in the debate, distinguishing themselves from other
"anti-organizational" anarchists who, like Luigi Bertoni, believed that
any attempt to predict or substantiate the future was destined to fail.
Damiani argued that the "reconstructive" problem should be given a
solution "favorable to us or at least consistent with our aspirations"
while Max Sartin, in pointing out that "the main error of all social
revolutions of the past was to end up in authoritarian regimes", invited
anarchists, "anti-authoritarian by definition", to avoid "any
eventuality of a similar fate for tomorrow's revolution". Therefore,
"the anarchist method must be anti-authoritarian in all phases of the
revolutionary development ... in it there will therefore be no room for
transactions with authoritarian tendencies of any kind, nor for programs
of mass control, or of totalitarian realization or reconstruction;
programs that require violence and state organization for their
application and are typical of government parties".
This request was taken up by Luigi Fabbri, first by re-proposing the
Malatesta concept of "anarchic coexistence", according to which
post-revolutionary societies, necessarily not immediately and completely
anarchic, should be based "on the needs and wills, competing or
conflicting, of all their members who, by trying and retrying, find the
institutions that at a given moment are the best possible, and develop
and change them as circumstances and wills change"; but later distancing
himself from it because "a revolution with a libertarian direction
cannot give rise to a single system, but rather to various, varied and
variable systems, in peaceful federalist coordination of mutual
cooperation for the most common and general interests". And in his last
writing, Social Experimentalism, he advised his comrades to be "willing"
and "prepared", "even as a minority, to give the revolution a good
example of reconstructive work". He thus opened up to experiments that
would immediately prefigure the anarchist society of the future.
From this melting pot of positions emerged a common proposal, new but
ancient at the same time, given that it relaunched the insurrectional
action and rediscovered in the free Communes of the
first-internationalist tradition the intermediate element on which to
base the libertarian project in post-fascist Italy. At the "integrity"
conference between anarchists of various tendencies, held in
Sartrouville in October 1935, an initial agreement was reached through
the formation of an Anarchist Committee for Revolutionary Action, with
the aim of procuring the means and ensuring the preparation and
simultaneity of the insurrectional action; while the question of
alliances and projects for social reconstruction were postponed for
further study. With regard to the first, the hypothesis of an alliance
with the trade unionists, with "Giustizia e Libertà" and with a part of
the republicans, having an "absolutely provisional and limited
character", had its first application in the Spanish revolution. The
"reconstructive" proposal to "entrust to the initiative of freely
constituted groups all those functions that today are considered to be
the attributions of the State", to "achieve a plan to conquer the
municipalities, which represent the minimum expression of administrative
government and within the municipality to develop to the maximum the
concept of individual freedom, the pooling of all wealth and absolute
autonomy from the central government bodies", led instead to the
drafting of a dozen papers, still untraceable today, that P. Felcino
(Leonida Mastrodicasa), on behalf of the Committee that arose from the
Sartrouville conference, sent on 14 July 1936, for publication, to the
magazine "Studi Sociali" of Montevideo. Luce Fabbri's response, which
appeared 4 months later, was emblematic: "Since we are dealing with
insurrectional problems, I believe that the abstract elaboration of a
plan for struggle and reconstruction should be suspended for the moment,
in order to try to draw all the possible profit from the Spanish
experience, which, whatever its outcome, will give our reasoning a very
different basis".
It was precisely the Spanish revolution of 1936, in which the
"pan-unionist" model prevailed, that erased "almost with a stroke of the
sponge" (an expression used by Gianni Carrozza at the conference on
Camillo Berneri on 9 October 1977) a decade of elaborations and
innovative solutions implemented by the Italian anarchists who had fled.
Except for a few "emergences", between 1948 and 1949, by survivors of
that experience (Vella, Fedeli, Damiani), the debate on practical
anarchism was set aside and forgotten until, in August 1980, Aurelio
Chessa exhumed, publishing them, the proceedings of the Sartrouville
conference. But it's not as if it has made any giant steps since then ...
Natale Musarra
http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
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