Greetings to the Socialists of Sicily

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Engels wrote this greeting at the request of F. Colnago, a prominent member of the Sicilian Socialist Party, expressed in a letter of September 18, 1894. Informing Engels that despite harsh repression the party would be reorganised and in early October 1894 resume publication of its journal Giustizia sociale, Colnago wrote: “Would you, our revered teacher, send us a word of encouragement and support; would you send the Sicilian Socialist Party a greeting which we shall publish in the first issue of our journal? Your testimony of solidarity will give us great strength in the face of the bourgeoisie.”

The Italian translation of Engels’ greeting was published, most probably due to censorship considerations, only on June 30, 1895 in the weekly newspaper La Riscossa, and in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 208, August 1, 1895 in the slightly abridged German translation from the Italian.

Greetings and a long life to your newspaper, organ of the Sicilian workers, good health to your party in its reorganisation! Nature has made Sicily an earthly paradise; this was a sufficient reason for human society, divided into opposing classes, to turn it into a hell.

Greco-Roman antiquity endowed Sicily with slavery in order to produce the great estates and the mines.

The middle ages replaced slavery with serfdom and the feudal order.

The modern age, although it claimed to have broken these chains, has merely changed their form. Not only has it retained these ancient forms of servitude; it has also added a new form of exploitation, the cruellest, the most merciless of all: capitalist exploitation.

The ancient Sicilian poets, Theocritus and Moschus, sang the idyllic life of their slave-shepherd contemporaries. These were, without doubt, poetic dreams. But is there a modern poet so bold as to sing the idyllic life of the “free” workers of present-day Sicily? Would not the peasants of this island be happy if they could work their fields even under the harsh conditions of Roman sharecropping? This is where the capitalist system has led us: free men pining for the slavery of the past!...

But let them take heart. The dawn of a new and better society sheds its light for the oppressed classes of all countries. And everywhere the oppressed are closing ranks; everywhere they understand one another across frontiers, across different languages: the army of the international proletariat is forming, and the new century which is about to begin will guide it to victory!...

(London)