Friedrich Engels

From Italy

Vorwärts.  
No. 32, March 16, 1877

From Italy.

At last the socialist movement in Italy has been placed on firm ground and promises a rapid and victorious development. But in order that readers may completely understand the transformation that has taken place, we must go back to the origins of Italian socialism.

The beginnings of the movement in Italy derive from Bakuninist influences. While a passionate but extremely confused class hatred of their exploiters prevailed among the working masses, a crowd of young lawyers, doctors, littérateurs, clerks, etc., under Bakunin’s personal command, seized the leadership in every place where a revolutionary working-class element emerged. They were all members in various degrees of initiation of the secret Bakuninist “Alliance”, whose purpose was to subject the entire European workers’ movement to its leadership and thereby swindle its way to power in the coming social revolution for the Bakuninist sect. Further details on this are set out at length in the pamphlet: *A Plot against the International* (Brunswick, published by Bracke).

As long as the movement among the workers themselves was still in its infancy, this went splendidly. The wild Bakuninist revolutionary phrases everywhere aroused the desired applause; even the elements deriving from earlier political-revolutionary movements were swept along by the current, and alongside Spain, Italy became, in Bakunin’s own expression, “the most revolutionary country in Europe”. Revolutionary in the sense of much cry and little wool. By contrast with the essentially political struggle through which the English, then the French, and finally the German workers’ movement had grown great and powerful, all political activity was here condemned, because it involved the recognition of the “state”, and “the state” was the epitome of all evil. Hence: prohibition of forming a workers’ party; prohibition of fighting for any protective measures against exploitation, e.g., a normal working day, the restriction of women’s and children’s labour; prohibition, above all, of participation in any elections. Instead, the command was to agitate, organise, and conspire for the future revolution, which would then, as soon as it came down from heaven, be carried out without any provisional government, by the complete destruction of all state institutions and anything reminiscent of the state, through the mere initiative of the working masses (secretly directed by the Alliance) — “only don’t ask me how!”

As we said, as long as the movement was in its infancy, all this drew splendidly. The great majority of Italian towns still lie fairly outside world trade, which they know only in the form of the tourist traffic. These towns supply the surrounding peasants with handicraft products and handle the sale of agricultural produce over wider areas; besides which, the landed nobility lives in them and consumes its rents there; finally, the many tourists bring their money there. In these towns the proletarian elements are few in number and still less developed; moreover, they are heavily interspersed with people without regular or steady employment, such as the tourist traffic and the mild climate encourage. Here the hyper-revolutionary phrase, which secretly also whispered of dagger and poison, found a fertile soil at first. But Italy also has industrial towns, especially in the north, and once the movement had taken root among the genuine proletarian masses of these towns, such vaporous fare could no longer suffice, and these workers could not, in the long run, be kept in tutelage by those failed young bourgeois who had thrown themselves upon socialism because, in Bakunin’s words, they found themselves in a “career without an outlet”.

And this is what happened. The dissatisfaction of the Upper Italian workers with the prohibition of all political, i.e., all real activity that went beyond empty chatter and conspiracy swindle, grew from day to day. The German electoral victories of 1874 and their after-effect, which brought about the unification of the German socialists, did not remain unknown in Italy either. The elements that had emerged from the old republican movement, and had submitted only reluctantly to the “anarchist” clamour, found more and more opportunity to emphasise the necessity of the political struggle, and gave expression to the awakening opposition in the journal *La Plebe*. This weekly, republican in the first years of its existence, had soon joined the socialist movement and had kept itself as far removed as possible from all “anarchist” sectarianism. When, at last in Upper Italy, the working masses outgrew their importunate leaders and put a real movement in place of a fantastic one, they found in *La Plebe* a willing organ, which from time to time allowed heretical hints about the necessity of the political struggle to be heard.

Had Bakunin remained alive, he would have combated this heresy in his accustomed manner. He would have accused the people of the *Plebe* of “authoritarianism”, lust for power, ambition, etc., raised all sorts of petty personal complaints against them, and had this repeated again and again by all the organs of the “Alliance” in Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Only in the second place would he then have demonstrated that all these crimes were nothing but inevitable consequences of that original sin, the heresy of recognising political action; for political action was recognition of the state, and the state was the embodiment of authoritarianism, of domination, and consequently anyone who wanted political action for the working class must consistently want political domination for himself, and was therefore an enemy of the working class—stone him! In this method, borrowed from the late Maximilien Robespierre, Bakunin possessed great skill, only that he employed it all too regularly and all too monotonously. And yet this method was still the only one that promised at least momentary success.

But Bakunin had died, and with him the secret world government passed into the hands of Mr. James Guillaume of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. The cosmopolitan who had been through many waters was replaced by a narrow-minded pedant, who applied the fanaticism of the Swiss Calvinist to the doctrine of anarchy. The true faith was to be enforced at any price, and the narrow-minded schoolmaster of Neuchâtel was to be unconditionally recognised as the pope of this true faith. The *Bulletin of the Jura Federation* — which admittedly numbers barely 200 members as against the 5,000 of the Swiss Workers’ Federation — was appointed the official gazette of the sect and began simply to “rebuke” those who wavered in the faith. But the Lombard workers, who had constituted themselves as the “Upper Italian Federation”, were no longer willing to put up with these admonitions. And when last autumn the *Jura Bulletin* even presumed to order *La Plebe* to dismiss a Paris correspondent who was not to Mr. Guillaume’s liking, friendship was at an end. The *Bulletin* continued its denunciations of *La Plebe* and the Upper Italians. But the latter now knew where they stood; they knew that behind the preaching of anarchy and self-rule lay the claim of a few intriguers to command the entire workers’ movement dictatorially. “Four small, very calm lines of comment have put the *Jura Bulletin’s* nose out of joint, and it acts as if we were furious with it, whereas it has merely edified us. Truly, one would have to be very childish to bite at the bait of people who, sick with envy, knock on all doors to beg, by means of slander, a little bit of malice against us and ours. — The hand that has been going around for a long time, sowing weeds and strife, is well enough known for its Jesuitical (Loyolan) machinations still to deceive anyone.” (*La Plebe*, January 21, 1877.) And in the issue of February 26 these same people are described as “a few narrow-minded anarchist and — monstrous contradiction — simultaneously dictatorial minds”; the best proof that these gentlemen in Milan are perfectly seen through and will cause no further mischief there.

The German elections of January 10 and the attendant transformation in the Belgian movement — the abolition of the previous policy of political abstention and its replacement by agitation for universal suffrage and a factory law — did the rest. On February 17 and 18 the Upper Italian Federation held its congress in Milan. The resolutions refrain from any unnecessary and misplaced hostility towards the Bakuninist groups of the Italian International. They also declare their readiness to send delegates to the congress convened in Brussels that is to attempt a unification of the various fractions of the European workers’ movement. But at the same time they state with the greatest decisiveness three points that are of the most decisive importance for the Italian movement:

1. that all means presenting themselves must be employed to further the movement — hence also political means;

2. that the socialist workers must constitute themselves as a socialist party, independent of any other political or religious party; and

3. that the Upper Italian Federation, while preserving its own autonomy and on the basis of the original statutes of the International, regards itself as a member of this great association, independently of all other Italian federations, to which it will nevertheless, as hitherto, continue to give proofs of its solidarity.

Thus: political struggle, organisation as a political party, and separation from the anarchists. With these resolutions the Upper Italian Federation has finally broken away from the Bakuninist sect and placed itself on the common ground of the great European workers’ movement. And as it embraces the most industrial part of Italy — Lombardy, Piedmont, Venetia — success cannot fail to follow. Confronted with the use of the same rational means of agitation that have been tested by the experience of all other countries, the quackery of the Bakuninist miracle doctors will soon enough reveal its impotence, and the Italian proletariat, even in the south of the country, will soon shake off the yoke of people who derive their vocation to lead the working-class movement from their position as degenerate bourgeois.