There is a lot of European money circulating these days and in the
universities some old historians, eager for missed recognition and young
daring researchers in search of visibility, are launching themselves
into ambitious projects (long-term history, comparativist,
transnational) as well as ambiguous (between methodological innovation,
academic approval and compatibility), just to grab some crumbs. So, on
the occasion of the 130th anniversary of the state of siege that put an
end to the Fasci dei Lavoratori experiment, professors and students from
various universities in the South, and beyond, met last 14 and 15 May,
between Palermo and Corleone , to talk about a topic that all of them,
with a few rare exceptions, had never previously dealt with, in a
conference with the pompous title, The Sicilian Fasci. Movement,
institutions, memory.
Now, one can be a caryatid of the social history of the past (Carmine
Pinto, Salvatore Lupo, Santi Fedele, Giovanna Tosatti) or a shining
promise of the historiography of the future (like Vittorio Coco, Alessia
Facinoroso, Gabriele Montalbano, Alessandro Bonvini and Carlo Verri) but
in a few months of poorly digested studies one cannot improvise as a
specialist in a subject which in Sicily has had historians and scholars
of the first magnitude who also approached it with respect, prudence and
humility, after years if not decades of studies and archival research.
And in fact very little was said about the workers' Fasci as such at the
new Palermo-Corleone conference: instead, there was rant about Napoleone
Colajanni, whose influence on the Fasci was notoriously minimal and
contested - certainly not that of the "great inspirer" mentioned from
Wolf -; the topic of the Corleone mafia's relationship with Bernardino
Verro was touched upon, as if it were new, as if hundreds of pages and
ferocious controversies had not already been spent on it and, in
general, on the mafia/Fasci relationship; Facinoroso dealt with the
Fasci of women workers with unparalleled expertise without, however,
managing, once again, to reconstruct their specificity; Coco has
redesigned the biography of Lorenzo Panepinto, much more active in Santo
Stefano Quisquina in the period following the local Fascio; in two cases
the specific skills of the two speakers prevailed - fortunately -:
Montalbano, when he spoke about the Italian community in Tunisia which,
in its anarchist component, showed particular solidarity with the Fasci
of Sicily; and Alessandro Bonvini when he reported on the commitment
made by Nicola Barbato in favor of the independence of Cuba. For the
rest: relations between the Fasci and the Italian socialist party and
Crispi's repression, hackneyed and hackneyed arguments, fried and
refried, we did not go to the beyond what the school books report.
The history of the Workers' Fasci has always been a sensitive matter for
its political and cultural implications, where utopia, emancipation,
social revolution, collectivism, communism were not empty words but full
of meaning, and that experience of 130 years ago - our Paris Commune! -
still today resonates with Sicilians for reasons of revenge and social
redemption. Seeing it addressed lightly, even with disdain, in an
asphyxiated environment like the university one constitutes in itself -
beyond the value of individual scholars - a profound note of blame.
Perhaps it would have been enough to refer to the books of Romano, Ganci
and Renda, to the Agrigento conference of 1975 and to the centenary
conference, held in Piana degli Albanesi in 1994 (to which should be
added those of Carrara of the same year and of Palermo of 1995, which
did not produce documents). In these conferences we really talked about
the constitution, organisation, development, political ideals and
operational methods of the Fasci. On this documentary basis, the
Agrigento conference posed three fundamental questions: 1. whether the
delay in the political and socio-economic development of Sicily had been
caused by the defeat of the Fasci; 2. whether or not the Fasci conformed
to the socialist organizations of the continent; 3. if so, to what
extent they propagated socialism. The conference in Piana degli Albanesi
and the subsequent one in Palermo, in specifying the national and
European dimension of the movement of the Fasci of workers (who were not
only Sicilian) and reiterating the revolutionary perspective inherent in
their action, overturned the questions posed in Agrigento: 1 . it was
the defeat of the Fasci that retarded the development of the entire
nation; 2. to paraphrase Giuseppe Carlo Marino, the Fasci movement was a
"system of synergies representing an enormous range of forces" that
could not be classified in a classist sense: the socialist party was not
able to perceive its horizontality, "the fruit of a culture that it had
had deep roots in Sicily"; 3. Finally, it is not important to know
whether the Fasci were truly socialist: what is important is being able
to perceive the autonomous values that the movement managed to express.
Let us measure the sidereal distance between the problems raised then
and the historiographical indications dictated in tandem in the
introduction to the Palermo-Corleone conference by the two renowned
historians, Carmine Pinto in Salerno and Salvatore Lupo in Palermo.
Suffice it to say of Pinto that, under the specter of political violence
(he has embroidered on it, since 2017, a nice money-making project), he
even goes so far as to compare the workers' Fasci movement with
post-unification brigandage, of which he claims to be a specialist.
Equating criminals and social revolutionaries - as in fact he does and
as the Italian judiciary did at the time of the First International and
is still fashionable today - can have no other purpose than to
criminalize and devalue the political ideas of the latter. His is a
clear attempt, in line with official historiography, to "exorcise the
danger of a revolution, or in any case the desire for a radical change,
even a bloody one, in society" (these are Nico Berti's words).
Lupo is no exception. After 30 years of embarrassed silence he takes up
the theses that another exponent of the Catania "modernizing" school,
Giuseppe Barone, formulated in 1994 in Caltavuturo, commemorating the
fallen of that Fascio. Theses were contested then, in Caltavuturo
itself, and ridiculed in Piana degli Albanesi, in which he redefined and
transformed the Fasci movement into a reformist movement, aimed at
"modernizing" the Sicilian institutions, in close alliance with the
various factions of the local bourgeoisie.
More explicitly, Lupo dates back the season of popular blocs by a decade
- on which he trained as a historian - inaugurating a new methodological
trend, the so-called "prawn step": investigating the past starting from
the future, first from then, following go back to the biographies of two
(only two, however) of the main leaders of the Fasci, Garibaldi Bosco
and De Felice Giuffrida, who in the twentieth century joined the
moderate, inter-class, allianceist, pro-Giolittian bloc of the popular
parties, and the social-reformist party. Ergo, the workers' Fasci were
the prediction, the anticipation, the first outline.
Poor Manacorda must be turning in his grave.
Natale Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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
universities some old historians, eager for missed recognition and young
daring researchers in search of visibility, are launching themselves
into ambitious projects (long-term history, comparativist,
transnational) as well as ambiguous (between methodological innovation,
academic approval and compatibility), just to grab some crumbs. So, on
the occasion of the 130th anniversary of the state of siege that put an
end to the Fasci dei Lavoratori experiment, professors and students from
various universities in the South, and beyond, met last 14 and 15 May,
between Palermo and Corleone , to talk about a topic that all of them,
with a few rare exceptions, had never previously dealt with, in a
conference with the pompous title, The Sicilian Fasci. Movement,
institutions, memory.
Now, one can be a caryatid of the social history of the past (Carmine
Pinto, Salvatore Lupo, Santi Fedele, Giovanna Tosatti) or a shining
promise of the historiography of the future (like Vittorio Coco, Alessia
Facinoroso, Gabriele Montalbano, Alessandro Bonvini and Carlo Verri) but
in a few months of poorly digested studies one cannot improvise as a
specialist in a subject which in Sicily has had historians and scholars
of the first magnitude who also approached it with respect, prudence and
humility, after years if not decades of studies and archival research.
And in fact very little was said about the workers' Fasci as such at the
new Palermo-Corleone conference: instead, there was rant about Napoleone
Colajanni, whose influence on the Fasci was notoriously minimal and
contested - certainly not that of the "great inspirer" mentioned from
Wolf -; the topic of the Corleone mafia's relationship with Bernardino
Verro was touched upon, as if it were new, as if hundreds of pages and
ferocious controversies had not already been spent on it and, in
general, on the mafia/Fasci relationship; Facinoroso dealt with the
Fasci of women workers with unparalleled expertise without, however,
managing, once again, to reconstruct their specificity; Coco has
redesigned the biography of Lorenzo Panepinto, much more active in Santo
Stefano Quisquina in the period following the local Fascio; in two cases
the specific skills of the two speakers prevailed - fortunately -:
Montalbano, when he spoke about the Italian community in Tunisia which,
in its anarchist component, showed particular solidarity with the Fasci
of Sicily; and Alessandro Bonvini when he reported on the commitment
made by Nicola Barbato in favor of the independence of Cuba. For the
rest: relations between the Fasci and the Italian socialist party and
Crispi's repression, hackneyed and hackneyed arguments, fried and
refried, we did not go to the beyond what the school books report.
The history of the Workers' Fasci has always been a sensitive matter for
its political and cultural implications, where utopia, emancipation,
social revolution, collectivism, communism were not empty words but full
of meaning, and that experience of 130 years ago - our Paris Commune! -
still today resonates with Sicilians for reasons of revenge and social
redemption. Seeing it addressed lightly, even with disdain, in an
asphyxiated environment like the university one constitutes in itself -
beyond the value of individual scholars - a profound note of blame.
Perhaps it would have been enough to refer to the books of Romano, Ganci
and Renda, to the Agrigento conference of 1975 and to the centenary
conference, held in Piana degli Albanesi in 1994 (to which should be
added those of Carrara of the same year and of Palermo of 1995, which
did not produce documents). In these conferences we really talked about
the constitution, organisation, development, political ideals and
operational methods of the Fasci. On this documentary basis, the
Agrigento conference posed three fundamental questions: 1. whether the
delay in the political and socio-economic development of Sicily had been
caused by the defeat of the Fasci; 2. whether or not the Fasci conformed
to the socialist organizations of the continent; 3. if so, to what
extent they propagated socialism. The conference in Piana degli Albanesi
and the subsequent one in Palermo, in specifying the national and
European dimension of the movement of the Fasci of workers (who were not
only Sicilian) and reiterating the revolutionary perspective inherent in
their action, overturned the questions posed in Agrigento: 1 . it was
the defeat of the Fasci that retarded the development of the entire
nation; 2. to paraphrase Giuseppe Carlo Marino, the Fasci movement was a
"system of synergies representing an enormous range of forces" that
could not be classified in a classist sense: the socialist party was not
able to perceive its horizontality, "the fruit of a culture that it had
had deep roots in Sicily"; 3. Finally, it is not important to know
whether the Fasci were truly socialist: what is important is being able
to perceive the autonomous values that the movement managed to express.
Let us measure the sidereal distance between the problems raised then
and the historiographical indications dictated in tandem in the
introduction to the Palermo-Corleone conference by the two renowned
historians, Carmine Pinto in Salerno and Salvatore Lupo in Palermo.
Suffice it to say of Pinto that, under the specter of political violence
(he has embroidered on it, since 2017, a nice money-making project), he
even goes so far as to compare the workers' Fasci movement with
post-unification brigandage, of which he claims to be a specialist.
Equating criminals and social revolutionaries - as in fact he does and
as the Italian judiciary did at the time of the First International and
is still fashionable today - can have no other purpose than to
criminalize and devalue the political ideas of the latter. His is a
clear attempt, in line with official historiography, to "exorcise the
danger of a revolution, or in any case the desire for a radical change,
even a bloody one, in society" (these are Nico Berti's words).
Lupo is no exception. After 30 years of embarrassed silence he takes up
the theses that another exponent of the Catania "modernizing" school,
Giuseppe Barone, formulated in 1994 in Caltavuturo, commemorating the
fallen of that Fascio. Theses were contested then, in Caltavuturo
itself, and ridiculed in Piana degli Albanesi, in which he redefined and
transformed the Fasci movement into a reformist movement, aimed at
"modernizing" the Sicilian institutions, in close alliance with the
various factions of the local bourgeoisie.
More explicitly, Lupo dates back the season of popular blocs by a decade
- on which he trained as a historian - inaugurating a new methodological
trend, the so-called "prawn step": investigating the past starting from
the future, first from then, following go back to the biographies of two
(only two, however) of the main leaders of the Fasci, Garibaldi Bosco
and De Felice Giuffrida, who in the twentieth century joined the
moderate, inter-class, allianceist, pro-Giolittian bloc of the popular
parties, and the social-reformist party. Ergo, the workers' Fasci were
the prediction, the anticipation, the first outline.
Poor Manacorda must be turning in his grave.
Natale Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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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