The insurrectionary idea, a legacy of the Risorgimento uprisings that
the Paris uprising of 1871 had revived, remained prevalent in Italiananarchism from its earliest beginnings in Sicily and the First
International until the 1920s, when it underwent a substantial rethink
following the Bolsheviks' defeat in the Russian Revolution. Behind it
was the widespread belief that every insurrectionary movement, every
popular revolution, would create its own forms of self-government. Even
today, some consider the emergence of soviets in Russia in 1917 and
councils in Spartacist Germany to confirm this assumption. However, upon
closer inspection, they appear instead to be reworkings and adaptations
of previous organizational forms (from the peasant MIRs to the sections
of revolutionary France to the strike committees of revolutionary
syndicalism) that preceded and partially directed the insurrection
before being absorbed and disintegrated by the central power.
How can society be anarchically rebuilt in the aftermath of the
revolution? Contrary to popular belief, this question was posed from the
very beginning by a large minority of anarchists convinced that the
mystique of self-sufficient insurrection would lead to failure. Social
reconstruction programs based on free municipalities (Saverio Friscia)
or "free production societies" (Antonino Riggio), confederated among
themselves, were widely accepted in Sicilian socialist circles, for
example, in the aftermath of the Paris Commune: both options did not
simply indicate a "future humanity" but envisaged a series of
experiments to be implemented even before the insurrectional event. More
or less similar developments occurred in the rest of Italy: "A Socialist
Commune" by Pisan anarchist Giovanni Rossi, founder of the Cecilia
colony, dates back to 1878.
The leaflet we reproduce here is from February 28 of that same year,
printed clandestinely by Luigi Alvino (1847-1889), a prominent, now
largely unknown, exponent of Neapolitan anarchism. He was a tragic
figure because, like the much more famous Fanelli, Cafiero, and Covelli,
he ended his days in the Nocera Inferiore mental asylum (see the
biographical sketch compiled by Giuseppe Aragno for the DBAI). At that
time, a year after the Matese uprisings and a month after the death of
Victor Emmanuel II, Alvino was busy organizing a vast conspiracy network
for a new insurrection that was to break out in Sicily, spread
throughout much of the South, and even reach Sardinia. The leaflet was
intended to serve as a program.
By exposing the collective organization of post-revolutionary society,
however, he incurred, according to the Naples police commissioner, a
"serious disagreement" with Emilio Covelli, the standard-bearer of the
most intransigent insurrectionism, and a cooling of relations with
Malatesta and Ceccarelli, with whom he also cohabited in Naples (Police
Commissioner to the Prefect of Naples, report of March 8, 1878, in AS
Napoli, Prefettura Gabinetto, b. 418 f. 16.10 "Manifesti = Giornali").
Workers,
For centuries we have been consumed by poverty; for centuries the land,
the factories, and the thousand industries fertilized by our sweat have
not been sufficient to satisfy our most immediate needs. The greater
part of the products serves to feed the idleness of those who have
constituted themselves owners of those goods to which we all have an
equal right.
Are we perhaps destined to live only to work?
Why do they, who produce nothing, consume everything?
Driven by such abjection, we repeatedly stained the barricades with our
blood; but unfortunately, we never succeeded in asserting our rights;
for the political reasoning of the bourgeoisie immediately seized the
banner and took advantage of our martyrs, leaving us, ignorant and
deluded, only one freedom: to die of hunger.
And yet these defeats have finally given us a full awareness of our true
needs, of our strengths, and, above all, of the hostile arts to be
avoided. It was the defect of that awareness that from the monstrous
ruins of '89 the past arose, reinstating, under other names and forms,
the privileges of the minority-of pleasure-seekers.
Do we want to fall into the same error today? Do we, driven by poverty,
want to take up arms, without a program, without a concept of the new
possible social organization?
Workers,
The impending revolution is to solve the economic problem; and precisely
for this reason it is social. But it is a historical necessity that
revolutions have an immediate end in which they materialize: this end is
collectivism, which expresses itself in anarchy. The following
collective organization summarizes the various moments of its initial
establishment.
Considering:
that all men are equal before the laws of nature.
that all have an equal right to enjoy the means society provides to
fully develop their physical and moral faculties.
that liberty, without this absolute economic equality and individual
independence, is ironic.
that all past forms of social constitution, that is, governments, are
violations of the laws of nature, in that they only tend to protect and
maintain social inequalities.
that the republic is a government like any other, and certainly the
worst, since it conceals the sordid interests of the bourgeoisie within
the coils of legality.
that work is a social necessity; when shared among all individuals
without exception, it not only makes itself less burdensome, but ensures
their greatest well-being within that of the community.
It is proclaimed:
The absolute equality of all members of the human family: no longer rich
and poor, masters and servants, guardians and wards, etc., etc., but one
single and free association in which work is the natural law for all.
Thus, the human tendency toward the spontaneous harmony of opposites
will be free to develop: Anarchy.
Laws, decrees, offices, authority, government-in a word, all existing
social institutions, manifestly in violation of the laws of nature, are
abolished.
Land, tools of labor, housing, transportation, or any other social
capital is declared the collective property of society as a whole.
Communes will have the collective management of the social capital
existing within their own jurisdiction.
Tools of labor will be operated collectively; workers in the land,
factories, workshops, industries, arts, and crafts existing in each
municipality will form individual associations with their own rules.
These associations will provide for the greater development of
production and establish the value of labor bonuses through periodic
meetings or conferences.
Likewise, members of each municipality will meet in meetings or
assemblies and will provide for the well-being of the community, the
drawing of lots for housing, etc.
In each municipality there will be an Exchange Bank that will keep track
of the deposits of each factory or workshop, will exchange the bonds for
the products in demand, will establish exchange relationships between
the various factories, workers' associations, and raw materials
warehouses, will direct the surplus product to where it is most needed,
etc., etc.
The associations will deposit the products of their industry at the
Exchange Bank.
Hospitals, health services, children's education, the post office,
telegraphs, railways, Exchange Banks, theaters, etc., etc. will be
declared public services, whose employees will be paid with public bonds.
Every individual, wherever he may be, has the right to be immediately
admitted to work in the workers' association of his choice.
The infirm, those unable to work due to old age or physical
disabilities, and newborns up to the age of 18 have the right to have
their needs met free of charge and, for this purpose, will receive
public exchange vouchers from the public health or education service.
Once the causes of wrongdoing cease, crimes will naturally cease. In
each municipality, the people will also be able to elect arbitrators to
administer justice or carry out special duties, but these will always be
revocable, and decisions made may be appealed to the people.
The union of a woman and a man is consecrated only by the free will of
both. Newborns will live with their mother until at least the age of 7,
but the entire collective being will watch over them, providing the
means for their support from birth until the age of 18.
At the age of 16, each person chooses a profession and at 18 provides
for their existence with it.
Those who do not work must, of course, starve. - Long live the Social
Revolution.
Despite their "summary" nature, the solutions proposed by Alvino appear
largely original. Only when he speaks of "work vouchers" and the
"exchange bank" does one think of James Guillaume's booklet, "Idées sur
l'organisation sociale," published in Switzerland in August 1876, which
makes exchange vouchers and the exchange bank the cornerstones of
society's future economic organization. But while Guillaume envisioned,
once the shortage of products had ended, a subsequent transition from
"exchange" to "distribution" according to need (what Kropotkin would
later call "picking from the heap")-that is, from collectivism to
communism-Luigi Alvino, from Naples, the very center of anarchist
communism, insisted instead on exchange based on the work performed-that
is, on collectivism-another thing that must not have particularly
pleased the good Covelli.
Natale Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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