Anarchism in Italy
Italian anarchism as a movement began primarily from the influence of Mikhail Bakunin,[1] Giuseppe Fanelli, Carlo Cafiero, and Errico Malatesta.
When the Italian section of the International Workingman's Association was formed in 1869, new and more famous (or infamous) anarchists began appearing on the scene, notable individuals include Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta.
The federal congress at Florence has eloquently demonstrated the opinion of the Italian International on this point...It was also in Italy that early Anarchist attempts at revolution began.
Because of limited knowledge of the actual events taking place, many militants had utopian visions of the nature of the Commune, leading to popularity of Anarchist and other Socialist ideas.
[5] The radical republican Giuseppe Mazzini condemned the Commune because it represented everything he hated: class struggle, mass violence, atheism, and materialism.
In April 1877, Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, the Russian Stepniak and about 30 others started an insurrection in the province of Benevento, taking the villages of Letino and Gallo without a struggle.
The revolutionaries burned tax registers and declared the end of the King's reign, and were met with enthusiasm: even a local priest showed his support.
Unione Sindacale Italiana is an Italian trade union that was founded in 1912, after a group of workers, previously affiliated with the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGI), met in Modena and declared themselves linked to the legacy of the First International, and later joined the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers' Association (IWA; Associazione Internazionale dei Lavoratori in Italian or AIT – Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores in the common Spanish reference).
The most left-wing camere del lavoro adhered in rapid succession to the USI, and it engaged in all major political battles for labour rights – without ever adopting the militarist attitudes present with other trade unions.
Nonetheless, after the outbreak of World War I, USI was shaken by the dispute around the issue of Italy's intervention in the conflict on the Entente Powers' side.
The problem was made acute by the presence of eminent pro-intervention, national-syndicalist voices inside the body: Alceste De Ambris, Filippo Corridoni, and, initially, Giuseppe Di Vittorio.
[11] Pietro Bruzzi also collaborated with the Italian American individualist anarchist publication Eresia of New York City edited by Enrico Arrigoni.
It became a major opponent of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist regime, fighting street battles with the Blackshirts – culminating in the August 1922 riots of Parma, when the USI-AIT faced Italo Balbo and his Arditi.
[3] Inside the FAI a tendency grouped as Gruppi Anarchici d'Azione Proletaria (GAAP – Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action) led by Pier Carlo Masini was founded which "proposed a Libertarian Party with an anarchist theory and practice adapted to the new economic, political and social reality of post-war Italy, with an internationalist outlook and effective presence in the workplaces...
The GAAP allied themselves with a similar development within the French Anarchist movement, the Federation Communiste Libertaire, whose leading light was Georges Fontenis.
[17] In the early seventies, a platformist tendency emerged within the Italian Anarchist Federation which argued for more strategic coherence and social insertion in the workers' movement while rejecting the synthesist "Associative Pact" of Malatesta which the FAI adhered to.
Solidarity attacks against Italian diplomatic offices were made by anarchists in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.
