CLASS WAR, REACTION & THE ITALIAN ANARCHISTS
by Adriana Dadà
Introduction
At the start of the twentieth century, the Italian anarchist movement was rediscovering its ability to appear as an organized presence thanks in part to its work among the masses and the organic links which many militants had established since the 1890s with the new workers' and peasants' organizations (1). In the 1880s, as a result of the move to the tactic of "propaganda by the deed" by the international anarchist movement in reply to government repression, the path had been cleared for a tendency which was far from the established Bakuninist line. This was the anti-organizationalist tendency, which brought to an extreme the concept of the autonomy of the group and of the individual, with the result that any remaining organizational structures were destroyed.
This revision (which took place at the same time as the social-democratic revisionism within the Marxist camp) was greatly influenced in many ways by an extremist reading of the revolutionary optimism and scientific determinism of Kropotkin who, in turn, had been profoundly influenced by positivism. While this revision did not reject Bakuninist ideas, it did in effect stop them from being put into practice by denying the importance of organization as an indispensable element of revolutionary action and the building of a future society. The anarchist communist project was replaced by a harmonistic vision of society. This vision relied on a hypothetical casual, fatalistic coincidence of common interests in order for there to arise the possibility of a collective agreement on the need for revolution and the running of the post-revolutionary society which would follow it. The rejection of any form of organization, brought to an extreme by those who fell under the influence of Kropotkin, had as its result the exaltation of individual action, the most exasperated spontaneism and the use of terrorism and led to isolation from the masses, something which was enormously deleterious. On a theoretical level, it led to a split between the pro-organizational anarchist communist tendency and the various other harmonistic and deterministic tendencies, the anti-organizationalists or individualists.
Just as the bombs of the 1880s and '90s had been the desperate reaction to the frustration produced by the bloody crushing of the Commune and the repression of the First International, anarcho-syndicalism became the response to the blind alley into which anarchism had been forced by terrorist action (which "propaganda by the deed" had degenerated into). In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the workers' movement was developing in leaps and bounds both in Europe and in the United States, moving from mutualism to resistance. Given the "degeneration" of the anarchist party, a large number of its members (above all the more obscure ones and particularly those who were workers, or close to them) favoured this path. By doing so, they were in effect maintaining an ideological and strategic continuity that was characteristic of this tendency (also at an international level) at the start of the new century. Nonetheless, in the 1890s, alongside this rebirth in favour of organization which was to manifest itself in every country after the Capolago congress (1891), there were now various other tendencies: insurrectionalists, anti-organizationalists and individualists. At the start of the twentieth century in Italy, the modest presence of the anti-organizationalists and the weak "individualist provocation" current were unable to stop the anarchist communists (active for the most part in the class organizations) from pushing ahead with their process of organization with the founding in 1907 of the Italian Anarchist Party. This experience, though filled with difficulty, succeeded in establishing structures at local and regional level which were to get stronger and stronger during the struggles of the crisis years of the Giolitti system.
Notes:
1. On the anarchist movement between the end of the nineteenth century and the First World War, see: M. ANTONIOLI, Introduzione a Dibattito sul sindacalismo. Atti del Congresso internazionale anarchico di Amsterdam (1907), Florence 1978; M. ANTONIOLI, Introduzione a L. Fabbri, L'organizzazione operaia e l'anarchia, Florence 1975; M. ANTONIOLI, Il movimento anarchico italiano nel 1914, in "Storia e Politica", 2, 1973, pp. 235-254; G. CERRITO, Il movimento anarchico dalle sue origine al 1914. Problemi e orientamenti storiografici, in "Rassegna Storica Toscana", 1, 1969, pp. 109-138; G. CERRITO, Dall'insurrezionalismo alla Settimana Rossa, Florence 1976; G. CERRITO, L'antimilitarismo anarchico in Italia nel primo ventennio del secolo, Pistoia 1968; P.C. MASINI, Storia degli anarchici italiani. Da Bakunin a Malatesta, Milan 1969; P.C. MASINI, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell'epoca degli attentati, Milan 1981; E. SANTARELLI, Il socialismo anarchico in Italia, Milan 1973; S. TARIZZO, L'anarchia. Storia dei movimenti libertari nel mondo, Milan 1976; G. WOODCOCK, L'anarchia. Storia delle idee e dei movimenti libertari, Milan 1966.