FROM ITALY”!

The socialist movement in Italy too has at last been placed on a
firm foundation and shows every sign of developing rapidly and
successfully. But to enable the reader to fully grasp the turnabout
that has taken place, we have to retrace the history of how Italian
socialism emerged.

The beginnings of the movement in Italy can be traced back to
Bakuninist influences. While a passionate but extremely muddled
class hatred against their exploiters was dominant among the
working masses, an army of young lawyers, doctors, writers, clerks,
etc., under Bakunin’s personal command, seized the leadership in
every place where the revolutionary proletarian element appeared.
All of them, albeit with varying degrees of initiation, were
members of the secret Bakuninist “Alliance” whose aim was to
impose its leadership on the entire European workers’ movement,
and thus enable the Bakuninist sect surreptitiously to gain
dominance in the coming social revolution. A detailed account of
this can be found in the pamphlet Ein Complot gegen die
Internationale (published by Bracke in Brunswick).’

This worked splendidly as long as the workers’ movement itself
was still in the process of formation. The extravagant Bakuninist
revolutionary phrases aroused the desired applause everywhere;
even the elements which stemmed from earlier political revolutionary movements were swept along in the current, and alongside
Spain, Italy became, in Bakunin’s own words, “the most revolutionary country in Europe”.”” Revolutionary in the sense of there

2 See K. Marx and F. Engels, The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the
International Working Men’s Association (present edition, Vol. 23).— Ed.

From Italy 175

being much ado about nothing. In contrast to the essentially
political struggle by which the English workers’ movement,
followed by the French and finally the German movement, had
become big and powerful, here all political activity was rejected
since it implied recognition of “the State’’, and “the State” was the
epitome of all evil. Hence, the ban on the formation of a workers’
party; the ban on the fight for safeguards against exploitation, e.g.,
a standard working day, limitation of female and child labour; and
above all a ban on participation in any elections. On the other
hand, we have the command to agitate, organise and conspire for
the coming revolution, which, when it drops from the skies, should
be carried through without any provisional government and with the
total destruction of all state and state-like institutions, solely by the
initiative (secretly directed by the Alliance) of the working masses.
“But do not ask me how!’’?

As we have already said, as long as the movement was in its
infancy this all went splendidly. The vast majority of Italian towns
are still largely isolated from world traffic, which they know only
in the shape of tourist traffic. These towns supply the local
peasants with handicraft products and facilitate the sale of
agricultural produce over a larger area; moreover, the landowning
nobility live in these towns and spend their revenue there; and,
finally, a multitude of foreigners bring their money there. The
proletarian elements in these towns are not very numerous, still
less advanced, and moreover include a strong admixture of people
who have no regular or steady jobs, as is favoured by tourism and
the mild climate. Ultra-revolutionary phrases, which tacitly implied
dagger and poison, fell upon fertile soil here to begin with. But
there are also industrial towns in Italy, especially in the north, and
as soon as the movement gained a foothold among the truly
proletarian masses of these towns such a hazy diet could no longer
suffice, nor could these workers allow those failed young
bourgeois—who had thrown themselves into socialism because, to
use Bakunin’s words, their “career had reached a deadlock” —to
patronise them in the long run.

And so it happened. The dissatisfaction of the North Italian
workers at the ban on all political action, i.e., on all real action
which went further than idle talk and conspiratorial humbug,
grew with every passing day. The German electoral victories of
1874°% and the unification of the German socialists achieved in
their wake did not go unnoticed in Italy either. The elements

aH. Heine, Buch der Lieder. Junge Leiden, Lieder VIII.— Ed.

which stemmed from the old republican movement and had only
reluctantly submitted to the “anarchistic’” clamour increasingly
began to find the opportunity to stress the necessity of political
struggle and to voice the rising opposition in the newspaper La
Plebe. This weekly, republican during the first years of its
existence, had soon joined the socialist movement and kept aloof
as long as possible from all “anarchical’ sectarianism. When,
finally, the working masses in Northern Italy outgrew their
obtrusive leaders and created a real movement in place of the
fantastic one, they found in the Plebe a willing organ prepared
from time to time to publish heretical hints about the necessity of
political struggie.

Had Bakunin been alive, he would have fought this heresy in
his usual manner. He would have imputed “authoritarianism”, a
craving for domination, ambition and so on to the people
connected with the Plebe; he would have made all manner of petty
personal criticisms against them and would have had this repeated
time and again in all organs of the Alliance in Switzerland, Italy
and Spain. Only as a secondary thought would he have
demonstrated that all these crimes were simply the inevitable
consequences of that original deadly sin—the heresy of recognising political action; for political action implied recognition of the
State, and since the State was the embodiment of authoritarianism,
of domination, it followed that everybody who stood for workingclass political action must logically stand for political domination
for himself, and hence be an enemy of the working class—stone
him! Bakunin used this method, which he borrowed from the late
Maximilien Robespierre, with great skill, but applied it far too
often and far too uniformly. This was nevertheless the only
method which promised at least momentary success.

But Bakunin had died* and the secret world government had
passed into the hands of Mr. James Guillaume of Neuchatel in
Switzerland. The cunning man of the world was superseded by a
strait-laced pedant who applied the fanaticism of the Swiss
Calvinists to the anarchist doctrine. The true faith had to be
asserted at all costs and the narrow-minded schoolmaster of
Neuchatel had in any case to be recognised as the Pope of this
true faith. The Bulletin of the Jura Federation*—a Federation with
an avowedly hardly 200 members as against the 5,000 of the Swiss
Workers’ Association *”—was designated as the official gazette of

2 On July 1, 1876.— Ed
b Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne de l’Association internationale des travailleurs.— Ed.

From Italy 177

the sect and began bluntly to “rebuke” those who were vacillating
in their faith. But the workers of Lombardy who had formed the
North Italian Federation were no longer willing to tolerate these
rebukes. And when last autumn the Jurassic bulletin even
presumed to order the Plebe to get rid of a Paris correspondent
who had incurred Mr. Guillaume’s displeasure,* the friendship
came to an end. The bulletin continued to accuse the Plebe and
the North Italians of heresy, but the latter now knew what was
what; they knew that the preaching of anarchy and autonomy
served to conceal the claim of a few plotters to dictate their orders
to the whole workers’ movement.

“Four short and very calm lines in the note have greatly irritated the Jura
bulletin, and it tries to make out that we were enraged by it, whereas we were
merely amused. Indeed, one would have to be very childish to swallow the bait of
people who, ill with envy, knock at all doors and by means of vilification seek to
solicit a bit of malice against us and our friends. The hand which has long been
going around, sowing the seeds of discord and strife, is too well known for anyone to
be still deceived by its Jesuit (Loyolite) machinations” (La Plebe, January 21, 1877).>

And in the issue of February 26° these same people are called
“a few narrow-minded anarchistic and—what a monstrous contradiction!—at the same time dictatorial minds’; this is the best
proof that these gentlemen have been seen for what they are in
Milan and that they can cause no more mischief there.

The finishing touches were made by the German elections of
January 10 and by the concomitant turnabout in the Belgian
movement—the abandonment of the previous policy of political
abstention and its replacement by agitation for universal suffrage
and factory legislation. The North Italian Federation held a
congress in Milan on February 17 and 18.‘ In its resolutions the
congress refrains from all unnecessary and misplaced hostility
towards the Bakuninist groups of the Italian members of the
International. They even expressed willingness to send delegates to
the congress called for in Brussels which will attempt to unite the
various components of the European workers’ movement. But at
the same time they express three points with the utmost firmness
.which are of decisive importance for the Italian movement,
namely:

a “Nouvelles de l’extérieur. Italie”, Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne de
l’Association internationale des travailleurs, No. 51, December 17, 1876.— Ed.

b “Quattro piccole righe...”, La Plebe, No. 3, January 21, 1877.— Ed.

¢ “Abbiamo ricevuto...”, La Plebe, No. 7, February 26, 1877.— Ed.

4d “Congresso Socialista di Milano”, ibid.— Ed.

1. that all available means—hence also political means—must
be used to promote the movement;

2. that the socialist workers must set up a socialist party, which is
to be independent of any other political or religious party;

3. that the North Italian Federation, without prejudice to its
own autonomy, and on the basis of the original Rules of the
International,* considers itself a member of this great association
and moreover independent of all other Italian associations which,
however, will as before continue to receive proof of its solidarity.”

And so— political struggle, organisation of a political party and
separation from the anarchists. By adopting these resolutions, the
North Italian Federation has definitively broken with the Bakuninist sect and taken its stand on the common ground of the great
European workers’ movement. And since it embraces the industrially advanced regions of Italy—-Lombardy, Piedmont and Venetia—it is bound to be successful. Against the rational means of
agitation which experience has shown to be effective in all other
countries, the cliquishness of the Bakuninist quacks will quickly
reveal its impotence, and in the South of the country too the
Italian proletariat will throw off the yoke imposed by people who
derive their mission to lead the workers’ movement from their
position as down-and-out bourgeois.