Political militants of the Red Biennium between Piedmont and Lombardy.
Marxist Perspective Library, March 2024. Pages 564. ---- "Of the largemass of recordings preserved in the Bermani Archive in Orta San Giulio,
it seemed to Marcello Ingrao and me that it might be of some interest to
select the narratives of the communist, socialist, anarchist, republican
and squadristi militants of the 1920s, which I had recorded in the 1960s
and which are transcribed here as reported in speech".
Cesare Bermani collected these testimonies, as has been the practice for
many decades, recording them from the witnesses' own voice, without
intermediaries and without filters, with his tape recorder. Gianni
Bosio, with whom Bermani collaborated on Edizioni Avanti!, writes in the
Praise of the Magnetophone "[...]that it would become the point of
reference for a group of non-academic researchers, whose fundamental
points seem to me to be summarized as follows: The recorder is an
instrument of many and different comparisons, a pledge of new
possibilities even within the traditional cultural disciplines" and
thanks to the use of the tape recorder Bermani has collected thousands
of hours of recordings "The tape recorder documents the constant
presence of the oppositional culture which it comes not only from the
objective historical presence of the popular classes and the working
class, but also from the forms of awareness[...]the tape recorder gives
back to the culture entrusted to the means of communication the
instrument to emerge[...]it gives back to the culture of the oppressed
classes the possibility of preserve the ways of one's own awareness,
that is, one's own culture[...]as far as I am concerned, everything I
have written about contemporary history has largely taken into account
the broadening that oral narratives bring to history".
And it is precisely from these recordings that Bermani and Ingrao have
built this book, starting from a preface of this last Red Biennium, the
roots and strength of a perception, in which the author traces the
events that characterized the Red Biennium in Italy, its scope, the
events of the militants "This experience and this achievement, precisely
because they reached these historical heights and political depths,
would have imposed a particularly painful price in the ebb phases of the
struggles, in the ferocious counter-offensives of a multifaceted
international reaction[...]The story and the memories of those militants
are also a precious testimony to this." "There are thirty-one
testimonies, some are transcribed as they were recorded, the informant
spoke in dialect, his language, because in dialect a concept or idea is
better expressed; the transcription in the "official language" is also
reported. Each interview is preceded by a biobibliographic sheet of the
militants.
As Bermani writes, "From these portraits and stories, it seems to me
that a lively picture emerges above all about the Red Biennium and the
subsequent affirmation of fascism and I believe there may be some use in
reproposing them, if only to measure the sidereal distance between
politics and the militants of the time and politics and militants
contemporary to us, that is, over a hundred years later". A not useless
revisitation, I believe, also for the reflections on the debacle
suffered by the Italian left from the end of the seventies onwards". If
the dawn of a new society free from the domination of capital and class
division did not arise, it was only glimpsed, that dawn represented an
aspiration that led the popular masses to new experiments and
formulations, a starting point of a path of formation of a collective
political identity, because as one of the interviewees said "We count
for one, after us there will be others".
Carlo Ottone
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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