COMMUNISM AGAINST DEMOCRACY IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN ITALY

[GM111]

From the 2nd to the 7th September, 1867, the 2^nd Congress of the First International was held in Lausanne, where the great progress made by the Association was very evident. In Italy, too, the worker’s associations of Naples, Milan, Genoa, Bologna, and Bazzano had by now started corresponding with the General Council in London.

Almost simultaneously the League of Peace and Freedom held its congress in Geneva, on the 9^th September. This new association, composed of out and out bourgeois, set itself the task of abolishing the tensions and conflicts which had tormented 19^th century Europe. Even Mazzini refused to support such a hotchpotch of disparate and dubious ideologies.

While Bakunin would make use of this international tribune to promote his political, social and religious program, Dupont, on behalf of the International, would conclude his intervention with these words: “To establish perpetual peace it is necessary to destroy the laws that oppress labour, all privilege, and turn all citizens into one class of workers: in a word, the social revolution in all of its consequences must be accepted”.

By now it was no longer doubted that the constitutional Government could only ever carry out a reactionary role. But at the same time the complete impotence of the Mazzinian agitations had also been demonstrated, and the epoch of the Garibaldian expeditions was clearly over. The up and coming generation was quick to see that the revolution could only move forward by overcoming the old democratic ideologies.

[GM112]

1868 was a year of grinding poverty. On top of the economic crisis that had been besetting the country for over eight years, there was the war in 1866, and the policy of forced circulation (where banknotes had to be accepted as payment but were non-convertible). The cost of basic necessities shot up, and the workers’ wages, already kept at a very low level, were further reduced by the tax on movable wealth introduced in 1866.

Violent demonstrations spread throughout the country and workers and artisans expressed their discontent with demands for higher wages, with public rallies and, above all, by intensifying the resistance movement. And the strikes of 1868 in the great industrial cities would differ from the strikes of previous years in one key respect: they included different categories of workers.

Early in the year, as well as the tax on movable wealth, there began to be talk of an even worse tax which would weigh exclusively on the most impoverished classes: the “macinato” – the grist or flour tax. The parliamentary representatives of the bourgeois left staged their false opposition, with Crispi presenting himself as the great defender of the weak; the same Crispi who in the 1890s, after becoming head of government, would have no qualms about ruthlessly repressing the Sicilian Fasci.

From January 1^st onwards, protests and revolts against the “macinato” spread throughout the kingdom. In Emilia the revolts would take the form of a full-blooded insurrection, so serious that the government granted full military and civil powers, throughout central Italy, to General Raffaele Cadorna, the one man they believed could restore law and order; a man already feted for his bloody repression of the Palermo rebellion in 1866, which had earned him the nickname ‘the butcher’. In Italy as a whole the final death toll would be 257 dead, with 1,099 wounded and 3,788 arrested.

There could be no more favourable moment for him to launch his revolution that this, but instead Mazzini opposed the movement and even tried to put a stop to it. The leaders of the Republican Party, despite having had the power to totally transform this rebellion of peasants and workers, if only they had brandished the banner of the republic and social reforms, went instead to the aid of the bourgeois institutions.

The events in France in 1871 gave a sharp jolt to the Italian political scene. The abrupt collapse of Napoleon III’s empire and the subsequent insurrection of the Parisian proletariat roused the spirits and determined the stance of the political parties and the social classes. Political groups and committees stood shoulder to shoulder with the old Workers’ Societies, which were reinvigorated with a new influx of young people and which adopted a position firmly and decidedly on the side of the struggle of the Parisian proletariat.

Mazzini, by totally condemning the Paris Commune, would give clear evidence of his conservative and petty-bourgeois nature.

[GM113]

As far as the Italian State was concerned, it wished to strangle socialism at birth and prevent it from gaining a foot-hold in Italy. It identified the workers’ associations in Naples and Florence as the two main centres of its propagation and ordered their dissolution, since, it was said, they constituted a substantial threat to public order and a permanent offence to the laws and fundamental institutions of the nation.

But State repression would have the opposite effect to what was intended, helping to make the International more widely known than ever. From August 1871 onwards, not a day passed without another section forming.

Meanwhile Mazzini could see that the predominance he had gained in the workers’ societies between 1861 and 1864, after ousting its pro-government leadership, was slipping away. He convoked a new workers’ conference, in order to reorganise the above-mentioned societies under his leadership and exorcise the peril of the International by recommending that the congress should avoid being characterised politically as either republican or democratic, so it could form, together with the monarchists, a broad anti-internationalist front.

The speaker then dwelt on at some length on the International Conference held in London in 1871.

In the Italian peninsular there was evidently much enthusiasm for the International, but Engels was not slow to detect that the new sections were extremely weak: without programmatic clarity the Italian sections were bound to break with the General Council very soon. By November, the internationalists were already registering their unhappiness with the programme adopted at the London Conference. What most saddened Marx and Engels was that the conflicts didn’t generally manifest themselves as different points of view regarding the questions covered or the resolutions adopted by the General Council, but as personal interests, as the petty ambitions of rather dubious figures quite happy to move from one front to the other according to where they derived most personal advantage.

It was the perfect terrain for Bakunin’s ill-defined, and above all a-programmatic, theories of “libertarian” insurrectionalism to take root and spread. When on August 1^st 1872 the first Italian Internationalist Congress sat at Rimini, it declared that it was breaking with the General Council in London and that the Italian sections would not be attending the International’s next General Congress at The Hague in 1872.

The results of many years of work by the General Council seemed to have suddenly gone up in smoke.