It was the Italian Federation of the International Workingmen's
Association that publicly clarified, for the first time, the strategy of
propaganda by deed. After the conclusion of the Bern congress, a piece
by Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero appeared in the Bulletin of the
Jura Federation, where it is stated that the Italian Federation
considered the insurrectional act, intended to affirm socialist
principles through action, the most effective means of propaganda and
the only one that, without deceiving and corrupting the masses, could
penetrate the deepest social strata and attract the living forces of
humanity into the struggle supported by the International.
The International that met in Bern from 26 to 29 October 1876 was
profoundly different from that of the Saint-Imier Congress (1872) and
that of the Geneva Congress (1873). The anti-authoritarian tendencies,
held together only by their common opposition to the centralizing aims
of Marx and Engels, were divided by profound contradictions on both the
theoretical and strategic levels. We find an echo of these
contradictions in the memoirs of James Guillaume, then a representative
of the Jura Federation, and of Errico Malatesta, who still in 1926
expressed himself in this way regarding the debate in the socialist
movement: "the socialist sentiment caused the rejection of Proudhonism
which, especially for the Proudhonists after the death of Proudhon
(January 1865), had become an anodyne system of mutual exchange" and
further down "this revolutionary collectivist idea was alone before the
workers of many countries where the few Proudhonians, Blanquists and
Marxists, Fourierists and others counted for very little". In 1876 it
was possible to verify that these debates had caused an accentuation of
centrifugal forces, so that within the Anti-Authoritarian International
of the non-Marxist socialist tendencies, in practice only the anarchist
one remained.
The Italian Federation represented the most intransigent tendency of the
International and its delegates made the Bern Congress a public platform
to expose the principles shared by the same organization; among the
other topics discussed, Errico Malatesta, in relation to the
organization of the International Workingmen's Association and the
tactics of the labor movement, reports the strict orthodoxy of the
Italian Federation, which refused to limit membership of the
International to workers only. "The objective of the social revolution",
he declared, "is not only the emancipation of the working class, but the
emancipation of all humanity; and the International, which is the army
of the revolution, must gather under its banner all revolutionaries,
without distinction of class". Malatesta also, defining British-style
trade unionism as a "reactionary institution", rejects the idea that it
could achieve positive results in Italy: "the economic conditions of
Italy and the temperament of Italian workers are opposed to it".
In 1877 the anarchist movement was more than ever engaged in propaganda
by deed through guerrilla warfare, with strategies already articulated
and practiced by a long series of revolutionaries during the
Risorgimento. Both the teachings of Mikhail Bakunin and the indigenous
revolutionary tradition converged to guide the choices of the
International, even if its immediate inspiration was undoubtedly
Pisacane's Political Testament.
The decision to undertake a new armed insurrection had been taken by a
small circle of militants; the anarchists were aware that a few dozen
poorly equipped insurgents would not have been able to prevail against
infantry and cavalry regiments armed with modern weapons. Their campaign
was aimed at provoking the revolution, carrying out an act of propaganda.
The strategy was for the band to roam the countryside as long as
possible, preaching class warfare, inciting social brigandage, occupying
small towns and leaving them after having carried out some revolutionary
act, to head towards that area where our presence would be most useful.
This action will go down in history as the Banda del Matese.
The Banda del Matese did not provoke a peasant revolt. However, by
capturing national attention for several weeks, it attracted
considerable curiosity towards the International and its socialist
program. Over the next year and a half, moreover, the Italian Federation
acquired many new members. Although this expansion cannot be attributed
with certainty to the propaganda value of the insurrection, the exploits
of the Banda del Matese - contrary to what is thought - did not diminish
the attractiveness of anarchist socialism for Italian workers, and
undoubtedly strengthened it in the eyes of some. And for the anarchists
themselves, with the exception of a few dissidents like Costa,
insurrectionism would remain the cornerstone of their revolutionary
strategy despite its apparent failure.
The Italian anarchists' continued commitment to insurrectionism may seem
ill-advised in retrospect, but it was nevertheless consistent with
Bakuninist teachings. Beyond that, there was the example of the
Mazzinians who had preceded them, who had persevered in the face of
repeated defeat and martyrdom. As heirs to this heroic revolutionary
tradition, the anarchists would not abandon insurrectionism after only
two defeats. Moreover, their determination to persist was further
strengthened by the belief that the mission had failed because of
practical problems, due primarily to the need to begin action
prematurely. But perhaps nothing confirmed the anarchists' faith in
insurrectionism more than the Italian government's reaction. If the
authorities believed it impossible that anarchists could spark a peasant
revolt in southern Italy, why would they deploy twelve thousand men
across the Matese? Surely this small army was intended to intimidate -
or if necessary repress - the local peasants, rather than to hunt down
twenty-six anarchists.
Later, of course, even the most ardent anarchist insurrectionists
realized that their faith in the revolutionary and libertarian instincts
of the masses was misplaced. However, ultimately, the failure of
insurrectionary tactics cannot diminish the incredible audacity and
spirit exhibited by the Banda del Matese.
The numerical and organizational growth of the Italian Federation
through the first half of 1878-which occurred in an atmosphere of
increasing persecution-disproves the commonly held view that the
insurrectionary failures of 1874 and 1877 had completely discredited
anarchism and helped reduce the International to little more than "a
small sect of conspirators, persecuted by the police," as Marxist
historian Gustavo Malacorda put it. Although membership may have fallen
from 1874, the trend points to organizational expansion, not
contraction. Only government repression would overwhelm the movement in
the months that followed. Insurrectionary tactics may have been
discredited in the eyes of legalistic bourgeois intellectuals, but
workers and artisans continued to dream of a revolutionary solution to
the social question. Anarchism, despite its shortcomings and travails,
was still the dominant school of Italian socialism in the summer of 1878.
Historians of Italian socialism have viewed the insurrectionary drive as
a symptom of the movement's decline, but on the contrary it was
supported by the growth and reorganization of the Italian Federation.
Most of them, moreover, assume a priori that the Italian International
was doomed to failure because its guiding principles and tactics were
anarchist rather than Marxist. Among Marxist historians in particular,
the shortcomings and failures of the Italian International have been
emphasized almost to the exclusion of any consideration of its
achievements, as if a positive assessment of everything the anarchists
did constituted an ideological betrayal. This approach is unfair and
mistaken.
The anarchist movement perhaps placed too much emphasis on immediate
direct action, a strategy doomed to failure, given the realities of the
1870s. This attitude can be understood if one thinks of the popular
discontent and the unrest that had shaken the young kingdom of Italy in
the first decades after unification: the southern countryside was shaken
by the clash between landless peasants and landowners over the lands and
civic uses usurped by the latter, a problem that had dragged on without
a solution from the Bourbon regime to the Savoy regime. In reality,
contrary to the hopes of the anarchists and Bakunin, the unrest in the
countryside was subsiding, and it was necessary to wait twenty years for
a new general unrest, that of the Sicilian Fasci of 1893-94, this time
however led by social democrats and concentrated above all in Sicily
alone. It is also worth remembering that the Italian Federation had been
formed thanks to the disillusionment created by the indifference of the
extreme parties, and in particular of the Mazzinians, towards the
uprisings of 1868-69, aggravated by the critical attitude towards the
Paris Commune. In a certain way, anarchism presented itself as the
continuator of the Risorgimento movements, broadening its objectives to
include the improvement of the conditions of the masses through the
abolition of private property. It is at this crossroads that Mikhail
Bakunin's teaching fits in, with the rejection of electoral tactics and
the trust in the revolutionary capabilities of the people. At the same
time, the anarchist movement ignored the potential of revolutionary
syndicalism, although even in this case there were objective factors
that - in their eyes - compromised the feasibility of this alternative,
in particular the profound weakness of the workers' movement.
The fact remains that, regardless of its numerous failures and
inadequacies, the anarchist movement made a significant contribution to
the future of socialism and the Italian workers' movement, and it did so
in incredibly adverse circumstances, establishing the principles that
would characterize anarchism in the decades to come: the coherence
between means and ends and the emancipation of the exploited classes as
an autonomous movement of the same. These are the same principles that
have informed propaganda by deed since its appearance.
Some historians have argued that the International-despite its
decentralized structure, its officially powerless secretariat, and its
antipolitical philosophy-was the first Italian socialist party, perhaps
the first political party of any kind, because it possessed more modern
characteristics than the contemporary Democratic-Republican and
Liberal-Conservative groups and organizations. As a party, the
International spread anarchist socialism throughout the peninsula,
acquiring, at its peak, a predominantly working-class membership,
perhaps between twenty-five and thirty thousand, and a much larger
auxiliary following of sympathizers. Although not a mass party in the
typical twentieth-century conception, the International was sufficiently
imposing in membership, numerical strength, and influence to convince
the Italian government to destroy it.
Given the anarchists' emphasis on political action against the state
rather than economic action against capitalism, their anti-classist
approach to revolutionary organization, and their antagonism to
conventional trade unionism, the International was less successful as a
trade union organization than as a party. Nonetheless, the International
was the first federation of workers' organizations in Italy to embrace
the concept of proletarian emancipation through revolutionary struggle
and the first to attempt to organize workers to increase their
effectiveness in strikes against employers. As such, the International
was the legitimate ancestor of the League of the Sons of Labor, the
economic arm of the Italian Workers' Party founded in 1882, and of the
General Confederation of Labor founded in 1906. The International's
experience in Italy forged links between socialism and the labor
movement that have remained intact to the present day.
Tiziano Antonelli
https://umanitanova.org/da-berna-al-matese-difetti-e-pregi-della-propaganda-col-fatto/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Association that publicly clarified, for the first time, the strategy of
propaganda by deed. After the conclusion of the Bern congress, a piece
by Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero appeared in the Bulletin of the
Jura Federation, where it is stated that the Italian Federation
considered the insurrectional act, intended to affirm socialist
principles through action, the most effective means of propaganda and
the only one that, without deceiving and corrupting the masses, could
penetrate the deepest social strata and attract the living forces of
humanity into the struggle supported by the International.
The International that met in Bern from 26 to 29 October 1876 was
profoundly different from that of the Saint-Imier Congress (1872) and
that of the Geneva Congress (1873). The anti-authoritarian tendencies,
held together only by their common opposition to the centralizing aims
of Marx and Engels, were divided by profound contradictions on both the
theoretical and strategic levels. We find an echo of these
contradictions in the memoirs of James Guillaume, then a representative
of the Jura Federation, and of Errico Malatesta, who still in 1926
expressed himself in this way regarding the debate in the socialist
movement: "the socialist sentiment caused the rejection of Proudhonism
which, especially for the Proudhonists after the death of Proudhon
(January 1865), had become an anodyne system of mutual exchange" and
further down "this revolutionary collectivist idea was alone before the
workers of many countries where the few Proudhonians, Blanquists and
Marxists, Fourierists and others counted for very little". In 1876 it
was possible to verify that these debates had caused an accentuation of
centrifugal forces, so that within the Anti-Authoritarian International
of the non-Marxist socialist tendencies, in practice only the anarchist
one remained.
The Italian Federation represented the most intransigent tendency of the
International and its delegates made the Bern Congress a public platform
to expose the principles shared by the same organization; among the
other topics discussed, Errico Malatesta, in relation to the
organization of the International Workingmen's Association and the
tactics of the labor movement, reports the strict orthodoxy of the
Italian Federation, which refused to limit membership of the
International to workers only. "The objective of the social revolution",
he declared, "is not only the emancipation of the working class, but the
emancipation of all humanity; and the International, which is the army
of the revolution, must gather under its banner all revolutionaries,
without distinction of class". Malatesta also, defining British-style
trade unionism as a "reactionary institution", rejects the idea that it
could achieve positive results in Italy: "the economic conditions of
Italy and the temperament of Italian workers are opposed to it".
In 1877 the anarchist movement was more than ever engaged in propaganda
by deed through guerrilla warfare, with strategies already articulated
and practiced by a long series of revolutionaries during the
Risorgimento. Both the teachings of Mikhail Bakunin and the indigenous
revolutionary tradition converged to guide the choices of the
International, even if its immediate inspiration was undoubtedly
Pisacane's Political Testament.
The decision to undertake a new armed insurrection had been taken by a
small circle of militants; the anarchists were aware that a few dozen
poorly equipped insurgents would not have been able to prevail against
infantry and cavalry regiments armed with modern weapons. Their campaign
was aimed at provoking the revolution, carrying out an act of propaganda.
The strategy was for the band to roam the countryside as long as
possible, preaching class warfare, inciting social brigandage, occupying
small towns and leaving them after having carried out some revolutionary
act, to head towards that area where our presence would be most useful.
This action will go down in history as the Banda del Matese.
The Banda del Matese did not provoke a peasant revolt. However, by
capturing national attention for several weeks, it attracted
considerable curiosity towards the International and its socialist
program. Over the next year and a half, moreover, the Italian Federation
acquired many new members. Although this expansion cannot be attributed
with certainty to the propaganda value of the insurrection, the exploits
of the Banda del Matese - contrary to what is thought - did not diminish
the attractiveness of anarchist socialism for Italian workers, and
undoubtedly strengthened it in the eyes of some. And for the anarchists
themselves, with the exception of a few dissidents like Costa,
insurrectionism would remain the cornerstone of their revolutionary
strategy despite its apparent failure.
The Italian anarchists' continued commitment to insurrectionism may seem
ill-advised in retrospect, but it was nevertheless consistent with
Bakuninist teachings. Beyond that, there was the example of the
Mazzinians who had preceded them, who had persevered in the face of
repeated defeat and martyrdom. As heirs to this heroic revolutionary
tradition, the anarchists would not abandon insurrectionism after only
two defeats. Moreover, their determination to persist was further
strengthened by the belief that the mission had failed because of
practical problems, due primarily to the need to begin action
prematurely. But perhaps nothing confirmed the anarchists' faith in
insurrectionism more than the Italian government's reaction. If the
authorities believed it impossible that anarchists could spark a peasant
revolt in southern Italy, why would they deploy twelve thousand men
across the Matese? Surely this small army was intended to intimidate -
or if necessary repress - the local peasants, rather than to hunt down
twenty-six anarchists.
Later, of course, even the most ardent anarchist insurrectionists
realized that their faith in the revolutionary and libertarian instincts
of the masses was misplaced. However, ultimately, the failure of
insurrectionary tactics cannot diminish the incredible audacity and
spirit exhibited by the Banda del Matese.
The numerical and organizational growth of the Italian Federation
through the first half of 1878-which occurred in an atmosphere of
increasing persecution-disproves the commonly held view that the
insurrectionary failures of 1874 and 1877 had completely discredited
anarchism and helped reduce the International to little more than "a
small sect of conspirators, persecuted by the police," as Marxist
historian Gustavo Malacorda put it. Although membership may have fallen
from 1874, the trend points to organizational expansion, not
contraction. Only government repression would overwhelm the movement in
the months that followed. Insurrectionary tactics may have been
discredited in the eyes of legalistic bourgeois intellectuals, but
workers and artisans continued to dream of a revolutionary solution to
the social question. Anarchism, despite its shortcomings and travails,
was still the dominant school of Italian socialism in the summer of 1878.
Historians of Italian socialism have viewed the insurrectionary drive as
a symptom of the movement's decline, but on the contrary it was
supported by the growth and reorganization of the Italian Federation.
Most of them, moreover, assume a priori that the Italian International
was doomed to failure because its guiding principles and tactics were
anarchist rather than Marxist. Among Marxist historians in particular,
the shortcomings and failures of the Italian International have been
emphasized almost to the exclusion of any consideration of its
achievements, as if a positive assessment of everything the anarchists
did constituted an ideological betrayal. This approach is unfair and
mistaken.
The anarchist movement perhaps placed too much emphasis on immediate
direct action, a strategy doomed to failure, given the realities of the
1870s. This attitude can be understood if one thinks of the popular
discontent and the unrest that had shaken the young kingdom of Italy in
the first decades after unification: the southern countryside was shaken
by the clash between landless peasants and landowners over the lands and
civic uses usurped by the latter, a problem that had dragged on without
a solution from the Bourbon regime to the Savoy regime. In reality,
contrary to the hopes of the anarchists and Bakunin, the unrest in the
countryside was subsiding, and it was necessary to wait twenty years for
a new general unrest, that of the Sicilian Fasci of 1893-94, this time
however led by social democrats and concentrated above all in Sicily
alone. It is also worth remembering that the Italian Federation had been
formed thanks to the disillusionment created by the indifference of the
extreme parties, and in particular of the Mazzinians, towards the
uprisings of 1868-69, aggravated by the critical attitude towards the
Paris Commune. In a certain way, anarchism presented itself as the
continuator of the Risorgimento movements, broadening its objectives to
include the improvement of the conditions of the masses through the
abolition of private property. It is at this crossroads that Mikhail
Bakunin's teaching fits in, with the rejection of electoral tactics and
the trust in the revolutionary capabilities of the people. At the same
time, the anarchist movement ignored the potential of revolutionary
syndicalism, although even in this case there were objective factors
that - in their eyes - compromised the feasibility of this alternative,
in particular the profound weakness of the workers' movement.
The fact remains that, regardless of its numerous failures and
inadequacies, the anarchist movement made a significant contribution to
the future of socialism and the Italian workers' movement, and it did so
in incredibly adverse circumstances, establishing the principles that
would characterize anarchism in the decades to come: the coherence
between means and ends and the emancipation of the exploited classes as
an autonomous movement of the same. These are the same principles that
have informed propaganda by deed since its appearance.
Some historians have argued that the International-despite its
decentralized structure, its officially powerless secretariat, and its
antipolitical philosophy-was the first Italian socialist party, perhaps
the first political party of any kind, because it possessed more modern
characteristics than the contemporary Democratic-Republican and
Liberal-Conservative groups and organizations. As a party, the
International spread anarchist socialism throughout the peninsula,
acquiring, at its peak, a predominantly working-class membership,
perhaps between twenty-five and thirty thousand, and a much larger
auxiliary following of sympathizers. Although not a mass party in the
typical twentieth-century conception, the International was sufficiently
imposing in membership, numerical strength, and influence to convince
the Italian government to destroy it.
Given the anarchists' emphasis on political action against the state
rather than economic action against capitalism, their anti-classist
approach to revolutionary organization, and their antagonism to
conventional trade unionism, the International was less successful as a
trade union organization than as a party. Nonetheless, the International
was the first federation of workers' organizations in Italy to embrace
the concept of proletarian emancipation through revolutionary struggle
and the first to attempt to organize workers to increase their
effectiveness in strikes against employers. As such, the International
was the legitimate ancestor of the League of the Sons of Labor, the
economic arm of the Italian Workers' Party founded in 1882, and of the
General Confederation of Labor founded in 1906. The International's
experience in Italy forged links between socialism and the labor
movement that have remained intact to the present day.
Tiziano Antonelli
https://umanitanova.org/da-berna-al-matese-difetti-e-pregi-della-propaganda-col-fatto/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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