Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892


Book Description

Historians have frequently portrayed Italian anarchism as a marginal social movement that was doomed to succumb to its own ideological contradictions once Italian society modernized. Challenging such conventional interpretations, Nunzio Pernicone provides a sympathetic but critical treatment of Italian anarchism that traces the movement's rise, transformation, and decline from 1864 to 1892. Based on original archival research, his book depicts the anarchists as unique and fascinating revolutionaries who were an important component of the Italian socialist left throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Anarchism in Italy arose under the influence of the Russian revolutionary Bakunin, triumphed over Marxism as the dominant form of early Italian socialism, and supplanted Mazzinianism as Italy's revolutionary vanguard. After forming a national federation of the Anti-Authoritarian International in 1872, the Italian anarchists attempted several insurrections, but their organization was suppressed. By the 1880s the movement had become atomized, ideologically extreme, and increasingly isolated from the masses. Its foremost leader, Errico Malatesta, attempted repeatedly to revitalize the anarchists as a revolutionary force, but internal dissension and government repression stifled every resurgence and plunged the movement into decline. Even after their exclusion from the Italian Socialist Party in 1892, the anarchists remained an intermittently active and influential element on the Italian socialist left. As such, they continued to be feared and persecuted by every Italian government. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Assassins against the Old Order


Book Description

The image of the anarchist assassin haunted the corridors of power and the popular imagination in the late nineteenth century. Fear spawned a gross but persistent stereotype: a swarthy "Italian" armed with a bloody knife or revolver and bred to violence by a combination of radical politics, madness, innate criminality, and poor genes. That Italian anarchists targeted--and even killed--high-profile figures added to their exaggerated, demonic image. Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser M. Ottanelli dig into the transnational experiences and the historical, social, cultural, and political conditions behind the phenomenon of anarchist violence in Italy. Looking at political assassinations in the 1890s, they illuminate the public effort to equate anarchy's goals with violent overthrow. Throughout, Pernicone and Ottanelli combine a cutting-edge synthesis of the intellectual origins, milieu, and nature of Italian anarchist violence with vivid portraits of its major players and their still-misunderstood movement. A bold challenge to conventional thinking, Assassins against the Old Order demolishes a century of myths surrounding anarchist violence and its practitioners.




Italian Immigrant Radical Culture


Book Description

Maligned by modern media and often stereotyped, Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past. In Italian Immigrant Radical Culture, Marcella Bencivenni delves into the history of the sovversivi, a transnational generation of social rebels, and offers a fascinating portrait of their political struggle as well as their milieu, beliefs, and artistic creativity in the United States. As early as 1882, the sovversivi founded a socialist club in Brooklyn. Radical organizations then multiplied and spread across the country, from large urban cities to smaller industrial mining areas. By 1900, thirty official Italian sections of the Socialist Party along the East Coast and countless independent anarchist and revolutionary circles sprang up throughout the nation. Forming their own alternative press, institutions, and working class organizations, these groups created a vigorous movement and counterculture that constituted a significant part of the American Left until World War II. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture compellingly documents the wide spectrum of this oppositional culture and examines the many cultural and artistic forms it took, from newspapers to literature and poetry to theater and visual art. As the first cultural history of Italian American activism, it provides a richer understanding of the Italian immigrant experience while also deepening historical perceptions of radical politics and culture.




Carlo Tresca


Book Description

Arriving in America in 1904, Carlo Tresca began a nearly forty-year stretch as an active revolutionary. Nunzio Pernicone's definitive biography chronicles Tresca's larger-than-life personality, his revolutionary apprenticeship in Sulmona, Italy, and his subsequent career as fighter for liberty until his untimely death in 1943. The story of his life - as newspaper editor, labor agitator, anarchist, anti-communist, street fighter, and opponent of fascism - illuminates the lost world of Italian-American radicalism. Among friends and comrades Tresca counted revolutionary luminaries such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and countless sovversivi. From his work on behalf of the IWW, to his editorship of numerous papers, including Il Proletario and Il Martello, and his assassination on the streets of New York City, Tresca's passion left a permanent mark on the American map.




"Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth": The First International in a Global Perspective


Book Description

“Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth” provides a fresh account of the International Working Men’s Association. Founded in London in 1864, the First International gathered trade unions, associations, co-operatives, and individual workers across Europe and the Americas. The IWMA struggled for the emancipation of labour. It organised solidarity with strikers. It took sides in major events, such as the 1871 Paris Commune. It soon appeared as a threat to European powers, which vilified and prosecuted it. Although it split up in 1872, the IWMA played a ground-breaking part in the history of working-class internationalism. In our age of globalised capitalism, large labour migration, and rising nationalisms, much can be learnt from the history of the first international labour organisation. Contributors are: Fabrice Bensimon, Gregory Claeys, Michel Cordillot, Nicolas Delalande, Quentin Deluermoz, Marianne Enckell, Albert Garcia Balaña, Samuel Hayat, Jürgen Herres, François Jarrige, Mathieu Léonard, Carl Levy, Detlev Mares, Krzysztof Marchlewicz, Woodford McClellan, Jeanne Moisand, Iorwerth Prothero, Jean Puissant, Jürgen Schmidt, Antje Schrupp, Horacio Tarcus, Antony Taylor, Marc Vuilleumier.




The Conquest of Bread


Book Description

The Conquest of Bread is a political treatise written by the anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. Written after a split between anarchists and Marxists at the First International (a 19th-century association of left-wing radicals), The Conquest of Bread advocates a path to a communist society distinct from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, rooted in the principles of mutual aid and voluntary cooperation. Since its original publication in 1892, The Conquest of Bread has immensely influenced both anarchist theory and anarchist praxis. As one of the first comprehensive works of anarcho-communist theory published for wide distribution, it both popularized anarchism in general and encouraged a shift in anarchist thought from individualist anarchism to social anarchism. It was also an influential text among the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and the late anarchist theorist and anthropologist David Graeber cited the book as an inspiration for the Occupy movement of the early 2010s in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.




Anarchism


Book Description

"One of the ablest leaders and writers of the French New Left describes the two realms of "anarchism"--Its intellectual substance, and its actual practice through the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Italian Factory Councils, and finally its role in workers' self-management in modern Yugoslavia and Algeria. One sees in "anarchism" a close kinship to libertarianism of the right, with its horror of state bureaucracy and hostility toward bourgeois (liberal) democracy. Noam Chomsky, perhaps Guerin's American political counterpart, has written a concise and effective introduction which will add to the book's campus appeal. An important contemporary definition of New Left aims and their possible directions in the future." -- from back cover




Anarchism in Latin America


Book Description

The available material in English discussing Latin American anarchism tends to be fragmentary, country-specific, or focused on single individuals. This new translation of Ángel Cappelletti's wide-ranging, country-by-country historical overview of anarchism's social and political achievements in fourteen Latin American nations is the first book-length regional history ever published in English. With a foreword by the translator. Ángel J. Cappelletti (1927–1995) was an Argentinian philosopher who taught at Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela. He is the author of over forty works primarily investigating philosophy and anarchism. Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University.




Italian Immigrant Radical Culture


Book Description

Maligned by modern media and often stereotyped, Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past. In Italian Immigrant Radical Culture, Marcella Bencivenni delves into the history of the sovversivi, a transnational generation of social rebels, and offers a fascinating portrait of their political struggle as well as their milieu, beliefs, and artistic creativity in the United States. As early as 1882, the sovversivi founded a socialist club in Brooklyn. Radical organizations then multiplied and spread across the country, from large urban cities to smaller industrial mining areas. By 1900, thirty official Italian sections of the Socialist Party along the East Coast and countless independent anarchist and revolutionary circles sprang up throughout the nation. Forming their own alternative press, institutions, and working class organizations, these groups created a vigorous movement and counterculture that constituted a significant part of the American Left until World War II. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture compellingly documents the wide spectrum of this oppositional culture and examines the many cultural and artistic forms it took, from newspapers to literature and poetry to theater and visual art. As the first cultural history of Italian American activism, it provides a richer understanding of the Italian immigrant experience while also deepening historical perceptions of radical politics and culture. See the official website of the book at: http://www.marcellabencivenni.com




The Method of Freedom


Book Description

“Anarchy, in common with socialism, has as its basis, its point of departure, its essential environment, equality of conditions; its beacon is solidarity and freedom is its method.”—Errico Malatesta The most distinctive and universal anarchist principle is the principle of coherence between ends and means: human emancipation cannot be achieved by authoritarian means. However, the same principle could also be read in the opposite direction: our ends should not be disconnected from our action; our ideals should not be so lofty as to make no difference to what we do here and now. The anarchist whose deeds and words have best illustrated both sides of that principle—the “idealist” and the “pragmatist”—is Errico Malatesta. Never one to divorce thought from action, or retreat into dogmatism, his life and ideals remain an inspiration the world over. The Method of Freedom is the first collection to capture the full range of Malatesta’s thought over sixty years as an anarchist propagandist. The Method of Freedom collects Malatesta's most enduring long-form essays--including "Anarchy" and "Our Program"--together with previously untranslated articles from the numerous journals he edited over his long newspaper career. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the collected texts have been newly translated into English. Written in Malatesta's clear, accessible style, these essays are sure to excite a new generation of radicals.