From Italy (1877)

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In late February 1877 Engels received several January and February issues of La Plebe sent by Enrico Bignami from Italy. In a letter to Marx of March 6 he wrote about his intention to prepare this material for the Vorwärts, central organ of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (see present edition, Vol. 45). Engels realised his plan in this article.

It was published in English for the first time in the collection: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcko-Syndicalism, International Publishers, New York, 1972.

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 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 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 Neuchâtel 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 Neuchâtel 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 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:

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 Veneria—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.