#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Italy, #Sicilia Libertaria: The missed ransom (5) - From insurrectionalism to workerism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The raging cholera in Sicily under a state of siege and the defeat of the

attempted insurrection of September 1866, deliver us a prostrate population,
afflicted by mourning and misery. This does not prevent episodes of rebellion
from developing against the occupying troops and the ruling classes, accused of
having spread cholera on the island to subjugate the people. In Marineo, Adrano
and dozens of municipalities, landowners and soldiers are targeted, to the point
that the new Prefect of Palermo, Marquis Di Rudinì invites the mayors of the
province to enlist rural guards to collaborate with the police in restoring the
order. Mafia, military and allied institutions in an anti-proletarian function.
Cadorna accuses the Church of having instigated the revolt of the "Seven and a
half" in conjunction with the measures against the clergy which attempt to lead
to a sort of secularization of society, starting the plundering of numerous
ecclesiastical assets, which however, instead of favoring Municipalities and
peasants poor and landless, they will represent a tempting opportunity for
speculation and capital accumulation for rich landowners. Except for a few
exceptions, such as the localities of the squads that had fought with Garibaldi
and had fought in '66, in which the peasants asserted their reasons, what
Francesco Renda summarizes generally happens: "only 7 percent of the alienated
lands were assigned to small owners, part peasants and part artisans and small
shopkeepers. The remaining 93 percent was assigned 96,000 hectares to large
landowners and 75,000 hectares to medium landowners" (1). In reality, the goal of
the state is to confiscate resources from the sale of the Church's capital to
achieve a balanced budget, which in fact, despite the revenues being lower than
expected, is achieved. Resources extorted from the South and from Sicily, which
end up employed in the Northern regions.

20 years after unification, the North-South divide continues to widen; the island
ceased to be the granary of the Mediterranean in favor of an expanding intensive
agriculture, which together with the important sulfur industry, in the hands of
foreign companies, sharpened its role as a colony. The development of a discrete,
albeit insufficient, road and rail network, and of ports, remains anchored to the
extractive interest of Nordic and foreign capital. The island's economy is a
slave to non-development policies. Even the slow growth of the railway network or
the boom of the Florio naval industry do nothing but reproduce this mechanism
which contributes little or nothing to the improvement of the conditions of the
subaltern classes, who have no choice but to look in the coastal areas subject to
a more modern day, or in overseas emigration, a better life than that of the
fiefdom or the hell of the sulfur mines.

The framework of southern submission to the north is consolidating. Sereni writes
that in the period 1884-89 "Northern Italy, which possessed 56% of the national
wealth, paid only 47% of the state taxes, while the South and Sicily, which
possessed 27% of the country's wealth, they pay 32% of the taxes. But the
significance of these figures cannot be fully understood if one does not take
into account the fact that the average wealth per inhabitant was 2,411 lire in
the North, it fell to half (1,372 lire) in the South, where, moreover, the
individual average corresponded even less than in the North to a reality, given
that most of the wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small stratum of large
landowners" (2).

A climate of mass insubordination no longer corresponds to this dramatic social
situation. In the most radical political circles there is anguish, but it is
almost always detached from the problems of the oppressed. After all, the main
republican figures, shareholder or of the nascent socialism, belong to the
wealthy classes or the nobility, and even when they write or speak of social
changes and revolution, they fail to transfer these concepts to the subordinate
strata. They move within the Masonic lodges, trying to move them to radical
positions; often such lodges serve as republican or socialist chapters; men like
Giovanni Badia in Palermo, Antonino Riggio in Agrigento, Saverio Friscia in
Sciacca play an important role. Together with their inner circles they give life
to those groups which, in relation with Bakunin, present in Naples in 1865, will
contribute to the development of the International in Sicily, especially after
the end of the post-seven-and-a-half state of siege and the cholera crisis. But
the sections of the International live in ideological confusion due to an
immature political awareness and the still strong Mazzinian and Garibaldian
influences.  They must extricate themselves in a difficult work of political
clarification and at the same time take sides within the increasingly incurable
fracture in the International (founded in London on 28/9/1864) between the
Marxist component and the anti-authoritarian one led by Michele Bakunin. Thanks
to the role played by Friscia and the Sciacca section, Sicily sided with the
latter and with the Italian Federation established in Rimini in 1872, adhering to
the Bakuninist International which met in St. Imier in the summer of the same year.

However, this ordeal remains extraneous to the numerous worker and peasant
protests that take place in various Sicilian towns against the serious conditions
of the population and the unfair municipal and government taxes. The wealthy
classes are afraid of a possible repetition of insurrectionary events linked to
the development of the International which, especially after the Paris Commune of
March 1871, multiplies its membership. Here's how Gino Cerrito explains the
moment: "These adhesions, indeed, came more than anything else from that sense of
emptiness that had pervaded republican democracy after Unification, from an
instinctive repugnance towards social inequalities, from a sense of the human and
of justice, which transcended reality and projected itself into the dream of a
transformation of social organization, identifiable with a socialist society,
whose limits and characteristics were seen through a Garibaldian coloring" (3).

This reality was put to the test by the repression that hit the Sicilian sections
after the "anarchist uprisings" of 1874. In the island, the laws against the
mafia and marauding were used to hit anarchists and socialists. The International
remains shaken, especially in its strongest sections of Palermo and Trapani;
after the bitter disputes with Mazzini, he was in the throes of differences and
ruptures, above all for the work of Benoit Malon, the communard who, having taken
refuge in Palermo, tried to create a "third pole" between Marxists and
anarchists, inciting controversy. The sections live a fragile life, entangled in
division and ideological confusion; the slow end of an International was
approaching which still in 1877 tried to relaunch propaganda by deed, giving life
to the Matese uprisings, in order to involve the isolated and marginal rural
masses in the process of social revolution. For Cerrito: "The facts showed how
unfounded these hopes were. Since poverty, when there is no awareness of one's
right and an idea to guide action, does not cause revolutions, but at most
isolated revolts, easily tamed" (4).

The repression following the riots pushes many figures of the island's socialism
to take refuge in legalism and to place hope in the new government of the Left,
only to then change their mind in the light of the transformation that will
characterize the progressive government structure. However, as Natale Musarra
points out, also contradicting Cerrito, "In Sicily, the revolutionary mentality,
nourished by the memory of past people's revolutions, will remain alive and
powerful after the Unification; while the protagonism of the worker and peasant
will first be embodied again in the workerism of Palermo, which has little to
envy to that of Lombardy, to finally flow into the movement of the Fasci dei
Lavoratori". (5)

Pippo Gurrieri

Francesco Renda, "History of Sicily from 1860 to 1970", vol. 1, in Giuseppe Oddo,
"The mirage of the earth in post-Risorgimento Sicily - 1861-1894", Istituto
Gramsci Siciliano, Palermo 2013, page 153.

Emilio Sereni, "Capitalism in the countryside (1860-1900)", in Oddo, p. 224.

Gino Cerrito, "Radicalism and socialism in Sicily 1860-1882", reprint edited by
the Gaetano Salvemini Institute of Historical Studies of Messina, 2003, p. 176.

Cerrito, cit., p. 342.

Natale Musarra, "Saint-Imier and the International in Sicily", Libertarian Sicily
n. 429, September 2022

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