Capital is a historically highly dynamic process, which has always placed change at the basis of its survival and evolution, bringing with it enormous contradictions. Production has progressively internationalized, merging the manual and intellectual productive capacities of over 3.5 billion wage earners, who produce social wealth that, rather than being redistributed equitably to address the most serious imbalances, is concentrated in a handful of private hands. It is from this unresolvable historical contradiction that "all the evil in the world" originated and continues to replicate itself. This awareness, verified during the class conflict, has also constituted the cornerstone of every subsequent development and achievement attributable to anarchist communism in Italy and thus characterizes the phase we are analyzing, which began in the late 1960s with the rebirth of the anarchist communist and libertarian communist groups (hereinafter GCL), with libertarian communism being understood in this specific phase as synonymous with anarchist communism.
The post-war period saw an anarchist movement reconstituted after the twenty-year fascist period, but deeply tested by the defeats it suffered that had exacerbated its limitations and delays: the alternating events of the Russian Revolution up to the consolidation of Stalinism in the communist parties affiliated with the Third International; the defeats of revolutionary attempts in the post-war period; the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, together with the defeat suffered in the war and revolution in Spain, sharpened the crisis that unleashed the divergences that had developed in terms of political and organizational responses.
The new energies, especially youthful and class-based, emerging from the resistance to fascism, in which anarchists participated significantly, are unable to reverse the crisis of perspective that is making political and social action confusing and uncertain.
But the heirs of what was once a prestigious revolutionary movement had no intention of stopping, even though the internal divergences that arose, and the social and class conflict that began to manifest itself in the late 1960s, found the Italian anarchist movement in a state of unresolved crisis in theory, strategy, tactics, and organizational practice. Reactions to this state of affairs were manifold, including that attributable to the GCLs, both outside and within the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI), founded in September 1945. While it is true that from the late 1960s, the GCLs began to move decisively toward the ambitious goal of building an anarchist communist political organization (OP) in Italy, it is also true that these same groups were unable to critically engage with the political and organizational experiences most closely related to them.
The experience of the Gruppi Anarchici d'Azione Proletaria (GAAP, 1949-57), which was similar in time and had also attracted some of the same influences within the FAI, is not contextualized and subjected to the necessary critique, but rather schematically reiterated in its relevant content. In this regard, it is worth remembering that the dispersal of militant sources and resources and the epilogue of the GAAP affair, which flowed into Leninism, social democracy, and dispersal, certainly would not have helped. This ended up constituting a cumbersome legacy, difficult to reintroduce, especially given the controversies it sparked within the Italian anarchist movement. Moreover, the dispersion mainly concerned political development, which was largely consciously removed: an omission that did not allow the GCLs to rework, valorize, and critically re-propose those distinctive "fixed points" that, in theory, strategy, and in matters of political organization, had particularly characterized the GAAP experience.
The GCL also identified the organizational discontinuity that characterized anarchism throughout its history as one of the causes of its crisis: they rediscovered and reintroduced a materialist and communist Bakunin, Carlo Cafiero, and Pietro Gori, who moved in the same direction as Luigi Fabbri and Errico Malatesta, to name just a few theorists-all reconsidered in a classist sense in the qualifying sense of the term-to relaunch, in theory and, above all, in social reality, the process of building the Political Organization of anarchist communists. This considerable effort saw the publication of numerous handouts on the history of the workers' movement and anarchism, as well as elaborate studies on the characteristics of the current economic and political phase, on trade union intervention, in mass movements, in the community, on issues such as healthcare and the role of schools. These were prerequisites for organized action in social reality, which also reflected concrete attempts at coordination at the national level.
But, despite this effort, the GCL began its political and organizational journey from an experience inevitably limited by the young age of its militant members, who-lacking historical memory-would have struggled greatly to recover and critically embrace previous experiences and developments, to acquire and transform them into a truly viable organic political proposal.
The lack of historical memory due to the dispersion and omission of the materialist and communist presuppositions of anarchism, combined with the aforementioned organizational discontinuity that has characterized anarchism itself since the First International, also negatively influenced the acceptance of the contents of another historical reference point, so to speak: the Arshinov Platform (named after its probable material author, the Russian Petr Arshinov, 1887-1937?), due to how it was born (1926), how it developed and, above all, due to its decidedly classist orientation and the political and organizational contents that distinguished it. The Arshinov Platform is one of the most forgotten and least studied parentheses in the history of the anarchist movement, and this not only because of its small quantitative size but, above all, because of the bitter debate that followed and which saw the major exponents of the international anarchist movement of the time enter into the fray in the raging polemics. The attempt undertaken by the Russian and Ukrainian anarchists exiled in Paris (including Arshinov himself, Nestor Makhno, Ida Mett and others) which in 1926 had given rise to the Platform , together with that undertaken by the GAAP in Italy a quarter of a century later, did not propose a repetitive and nostalgic return to the dictates of the First International, but constituted a real process of revision of the doctrine, in the awareness of the serious crisis of anarchism, for its renewed affirmation in the social reality in unprecedented phases of capitalist development.
This is not the place to delve into historical reconstructions of the Platform , but it is important to note that in Italy the GCLs drew from it some of the political and organizational concepts that would become distinctive, such as the organization's unity in theory and strategy, tactical homogeneity, and collective responsibility. However, they re-proposed them in a decontextualized manner, similar to that undertaken in adopting the political and organizational concepts of the more recent GAAP experience. Thus, even in the case of the Platform , there was a lack of critical assessment of an experience that tore the international anarchist movement apart: along with the Platform 's constructive suggestions, the GCLs failed to grasp its weak points, limiting themselves to re-proposing organizational statements that inevitably ended up assuming efficiency-oriented and self-referential roles. This was a limit clearly identified by the GAAP who instead tried to "resolve" it with an appropriate and documented elaboration (among other elaborations we recall: Resistenzialismo piano di ritardo; Piccola enciclopedia Anarchica; the Readings of Bakunin and Malatesta; the numerous articles published in «Umanità Nova», «Volontà», «L'Impulso», «Il Libertario»), to reposition their political and organizational proposal in the historical phase in which they found themselves intervening.
These insights and considerations, albeit with some exceptions, did not constitute a shared and collective reference for the GCLs, remaining at the core of the individual groups' patrimony and therefore marginalized from the overall political development. They resulted in a simplistic assumption of the most functional and immediately adaptable aspects to the organizational path they intended to undertake. The National Conference of Anarchist Workers (CNLA), held in August 1973 in Bologna, carefully prepared by several groups within and outside the FAI (primarily the Ligurian groups of the OAL), marked the high point of the GCLs' qualitative and quantitative presence, measurable in terms of political development. The conference will see the advance participation of fifty-six groups, approximately twenty of which are members of the FAI (although the final document was subsequently signed by thirty groups due to various absences from the conference or disagreements over its contents), and an estimated attendance of around two hundred, largely young workers, who will define the relationship to be maintained with the Mass Organization (OdM), meaning the union in its broadest sense. The CNLA member groups will bring the conference's recommendations to their various local contexts: recognition of the relationship between the PO and the OdM, a relationship that, with some lexical artifice, is defined as "dialectical," leads to the indication of their presence in the union's grassroots bodies and is assumed and pursued with substantial uniformity. This practice undoubtedly represents progress compared to that pursued in other areas of the anarchist movement, where decisions made at congresses, or in any case collectively, are not binding: the CNLA's recommendations are instead developed collectively and adopted as the strategy and tactics of union intervention, despite some divergences limited, however, to only a few groups.
The clash with the FAI was inevitable, and the subsequent 11th Congress of the Federation, held in Carrara in December 1973, marked the definitive break with the path undertaken by the CNLA's member groups. In its aftermath, the CNLA would never match the quantitative and qualitative results achieved in Bologna, taking on the form of what it truly was: a coordination of anarchist communist and libertarian communist groups among which some disagreements were beginning to develop over the methods and timing of the OP's construction. From the very beginning, it would characterize itself not so much as the embryo of the OdM, as some of its internal members believed, albeit approximate, but as the forum in which the strategy and tactics of union and community intervention were defined, thus qualifying as a specifically political forum.
The achievement of a certain unified goal, however, fails to address another emerging limitation, already highlighted and increasingly complicated: the groups in question originate as more or less deeply rooted, extensive, and homogeneous territorial aggregations, which, however, do not transcend, at least at their peak, the regional (groups from Puglia, Marche, Tuscany, Emilia, Liguria) or local (Milan, Rome, Naples, Perugia, etc.) dimension. Thus, the ensuing confrontation between these organized entities begins, develops, and endures as a confrontation between pre-established realities.
The GCLs, therefore, do not conceive of themselves as a process of growth of a militant group aiming to become essentially homogeneous in theory, strategy, tactics, and organizational practice, but rather as a coordination of organized groups that arose in heterogeneous environments and, as such, face objective challenges. This is another difference from the orientations of the Platform , which positioned itself as a militant entity whose organic coordination would constitute a PO, with the groups as the territorial articulation and not, conversely, the premise for the organizational aggregation process. The GCLs, instead, tend to achieve theoretical, strategic, and organizational homogeneity just like single, already organized entities: it follows that the confrontation established is between groups; that the unitary processes they intend to pursue characterize the groups; that in these processes, the driving force is inevitably the most representative groups, with all the inherent rigidities and in a local context that has never truly been overcome.
Furthermore, and this is a not irrelevant detail, the overall experience of the GCL presents itself as an alternative to the FAI, responding to its ostracism with a logic of opposition similar to the entire experience of the Platform , when a profound and not merely formal dialogue was necessary precisely in consideration of the efforts made by the FAI itself on an organizational level in the event that, in 1965, had led to the "Associative Pact" and the split with the anti-organizational tendencies represented by the Anarchist Initiative Groups (GIA): the phase had changed and the Italian and international anarchist movement had changed since the times of the Platform , assuming, for the sake of argument, that the logic of opposition was, in that case too, appropriate.
All these events, however, were insufficiently evaluated by the GCL, further demonstrating that the lack of historical memory discourages critical evaluation and leads to the schematic replication of behaviors borrowed from previous reference experiences, which, decontextualized, lead to error. Thus, a retreat begins to occur with respect to both the GAAP and the Platform , when the latter experiences sought to recover, restore, and re-propose the Bakuninian concept of the "active minority" and "organizational dualism," in a dual dimension in the relationship between Mass Organization and Political Organization, expressed in an organizational and militant practice. The path undertaken will therefore prove to be overall fragile, both due to the difficulties of the phase and the lack of rooting in social reality, and because the GCLs are unable to fully homogenize, overcoming the limited coordination between groups, characterized by traits of self-referentiality and sectarianism. Objectively, the problem was identifying which territorial entity should manage the unification processes, without making any progress beyond the limit of affinity groups, where the strongest and most active organized entity ends up exerting a conditioning effect on all the others.
The result was an unbalanced process, incapable of developing appropriate management of resources (intellectual, militant, material, economic, etc.) which, being limited, would not allow for their investment according to the priorities dictated by the current phase of a process of collective growth. This growth would remain the property not of a militant network but of individual groups, some of which would eventually disperse. Despite all these limitations, the GCL nevertheless carried out a fruitful and highly timely revival of communist and class-based anarchism, resuming social intervention, especially in the trade union, student, and local areas. They engaged in historical and political development, resulting in interesting processes of qualitative and quantitative growth, albeit limited to certain geographical areas. In those years, the GCL rediscovered and re-proposed the organizational issue, also stimulating debate within and outside the FAI. They demonstrate that a communist anarchism, firmly rooted in the class struggle and grasped in its transformations within the context of ongoing imperialist dynamics, is truly viable and feasible. They identify the need for organized political intervention in social reality, one that positions anarchism as an active and visible entity, characterized by an autonomous political development capable of being applied at a mass level, fostering the process of building the OP. Despite countless contradictions, the GCL nevertheless evolves toward an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, internationalist anarchism, open to clear processes of updating, thus facilitating a critical recovery of the most significant historical experiences of the proletarian and anarchist movement. They attempt to counter discontinuity and organizational decline with the revival of Bakunin's concept of an active minority and organizational dualism, which will characterize the subsequent paths of anarchist and libertarian communism in Italy.
The late 1970s saw the maturation of the defeat of the entire social and class opposition: imperialist competition increased and capital reorganized itself on a global scale in a process that would later go down in history as neoliberal globalization, thus linking to current scenarios. The crisis that would overtake the entire extra-parliamentary left, within the context of the movement's retreat in 1977-a foreshadowing the great capitalist restructuring of the subsequent 1980s with the defeat of the trade union movement at the gates of FIAT (1980) and the social and political disintegration that followed-would inevitably also involve the GCL, whose numbers would decline considerably, although, after various vicissitudes, they managed to organize themselves at the national level in 1985, into the Federation of Anarchist Communists.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
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Link: (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #42 - For a history of the Libertarian Communist Movement in Italy by A.G. (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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