In a 1983 article for Volontà that we share below, Amedeo Bertolo endeavoured to critically diagnose the anarchist movement of his time in a remarkably direct and lucid manner; a diagnoses which we may help us to see through our own times.
In a second essay from 1979 (below), written during Italy’s “years of lead“, Bertolo finds no “cure” for the fragilities of anarchism in violent direct action aimed at people – individuals or groups – and justified as targeting the class enemy.
For those unfamiliar with Amedeo Bertolo, we close with selections from an interview he gave to Mimmo Pucciarelli and published in L’anarchisme en personnes (Atelier de Création Libertaire, 2006).
With this post, we reopen our collection of essays by Amedeo Bertolo and return to our series grouped under the title, “writers of May 68”, which we began in 2018 and in which we have included Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Eduardo Colombo and Amedeo Bertolo. The reference to “May 68” is a political metaphor in this instance, for aside from Semprun, the other three writers were in their respective countries of origin at the time (Amorós was in spain, Bertolo in italy, and Colombo in argentina), but all four writers would be profoundly marked by the events of May and would endeavour to rethink anarchism in the wake of those events.
Three of the essays that we have shared in English translation were passed onto us by others. They are: “Authority, Power and Domination”, “Fanatics of Freedom”, “Democracy and Beyond”. We have made changes to the translations only when we believed it was necessary
Our modest effort is dedicated to the memory of Amedeo.
Let’s leave the pessimism for better times
Amedeo Bertolo, Volontà, nº 3, 1983
These are lean times for anarchists, if it were not for the satisfaction of saying that it’s a “widespread illness …” or that “we told you so …”. For example, we can scarcely console ourselves by thinking of the extreme crisis of the extreme left that rightly or wrongly a large number of anarchists lived with, after 68, in a love-hate relationship and, either way, in a market competition for revolution; no more than by thinking about the failure of the armed struggle Leninists, the most extreme of the extremists, whether in their most openly militarist version (the Red Brigades’ model), with the morbid attraction of a cocktail of hallucinatory theory and of efficacious spectacular actions, or in the more sophisticated version, but no less hallucinatory, of remote-controlled diffuse violence.
It is with satisfaction that we note the disappearance of this movement of super-revolutionaries that was Autonomia Operaia and to see its pontiff [Tony Negri] in Montecitorio declare on television: “It’s not that my comrades and I oppose in principle participation in parliament…” (in fact, they have always been favourable “to opening and using spaces of freedom in the heart of institutions”), as they have also been “The only forces capable of stopping terrorism”…
In these times of low tides, it is better for our already very low morale to not let the least occasion pass by without rejoicing, as for example, with the unusually high level of abstentions in the legislative elections of last June [1982].
…[Amedeo Bertolo analyses the results of the vote from which he concludes that the level of abstention was not due to a refusal by young people to participate]… that young people did not seem to express, in abstaining, their indifference to politics. It’s not surprising, as it must be difficult for them to renounce the excitement of the “first secular communion”, the first ritual gesture of political society, without taking into account their modest interest in being nonconformists. Political indifference can express itself logically as much by voting as not voting. If voluntary abstention such as the ballot form rendered null and void implies a desire to refuse, however minimally, a negative but active attitude in response to the electoral ritual, by contrast, the accomplishment of the “democratic obligation” implying here as much emotion or intellectual reflection as in the tearing up of a bus ticket, is an act realised in indifference. It is the same for the refusal of “conjugal obligation” that can be attributed to an aversion to sex or to the desire for more satisfactory sexual relations, and not to an indifferent frigidity.
Indeed, the “newly indifferent” express themselves by a conformist vote, while, probably, a non-negligible part of young people’s abstention manifests not indifference but a refusal, as well as for the majority of those who “newly abstain”. Even remaining prudent, if one cannot attribute an anarchist value to the million of voices who did not vote, one may consider that they offer a psychological disposition favourable to libertarian discourse. This is not an “I don’t care”, but a “fuck off”, which is quite different. In the absence of an alternative theory, the “fuck off” can easily become anew an “I don’t care”.
[…]
Upon my return to Italy at the end of June, after a six month absence, I found the tribe in very bad health. Not that it was doing any better six months earlier, but I had hoped, with little reason, that after having touched bottom in the crisis, that the convalescence had begun. It was an absurd hope that my scepticism belied, but despite everything, I hoped, as when one wakes up from a sleep hoping to have found the solution to the problem that had bothered one the previous night. But there was none of that. On the contrary, the tribe’s situation had gotten worse.
By tribe, I mean the anarchist movement, or more precisely, those anarchists who recognise themselves as militants as I understand the term, in a sort of ideal community; a community with indefinite borders, perhaps indefinable, yet a community perceived as such by those who found it, a cultural community, almost ethnic, making of the movement something other than a political party. For some, there is something more to it, for others a great deal more or it is something completely different.
Upon my return, despite the crisis, the tribe was a little animated thanks to Bettino Craxi and his call for early elections. Fortunately, in Italy, elections are called almost every year (next year, there will be, I believe, regional elections, then municipal and European elections…). As a consequence, this electoral ritual allows us also frequently and without difficulty to repeat our ritual of abstention, while guaranteeing for us a month or two of tracts, posters, public speaking, etc. As a bonus, with a bit of luck, we will be able to celebrate, as happened this time, a small increase in the levels of abstention; to enjoy the Christian Democratic Party being slapped, the disillusionment with the Socialist Party and
a slight but significant erosion of support for the Communists… Then, either way, there are the holidays or the vacations and “in September or October, we will see” (the syndrome of: “tomorrow, it’s another day”). But do understand my irony! I too participated with a certain pleasure in this ritual of abstention and, better yet, I found a definitive and radical solution for the matter by burning my electoral identity card; I drank a toast to the additional 3 percent of non-voters, etc. And I also tried to push away, for later, the problem of the tribe’s crisis…
[…]
The anarchist movement is in crisis, a serious qualitative and quantitative crisis. Our press continues to lose readers, the books barely sell, groups unravel, contacts weaken and become purely formal or individual. Our meeting halls (those we still have not closed down) are almost always empty of people, as of ideas. Public activity (and the internal debate) have reached their lowest levels. Comrades, melting away like snow in the sun are ever more numerous, alleging a hundred different pretexts (but these sudden defections cannot fail to have a common element). Creativity, imagination, the desire to make real, to achieve, the spirit of initiative; these are almost all but a memory.
Already, for a few years now, the house was shaky. The first cracks in the flooring could be heard, a bit of plaster would fall from the walls, but it still seemed solid to us, having survived the tide of new reformism, as well as the return “to private life” or the catastrophic choice of armed struggle. But then the first fissures appeared. And now, everything is falling to pieces and the building threatens to collapse. Some move out, calmly, others do so with a sense of guilt. One left saying that they were going out for cigarettes, never to return, another panicked, jumped from the window, hurting themselves and waking away limping, turning for a last regretful glance at the house where they had lived for so many years. For those who remain, they vainly shore up the structures that threaten to collapse. They look at each other exhausted, without any confidence in the future and a little suspicious (who will be the next one to start maligning now? Who will pretend to be working, while they move in fact ever closer to the door?). Someone suggests finding refuge in the basement, which has resisted other collapses; but there is little room and some are claustrophobic.
If things continue in this way, we will find ourselves with the simulacrum of a movement, as in the 1950s and 60s, or even worse. At least, at that time, there were stubborn and tenacious old anarchists who held firm and a handful of adamant and impassioned young anarchists to assure the future. Today, the few “neither young, nor old” that falter or the hesitant “youngsters” can neither guarantee nor promise as much.
I said what I wanted to say. It’s perhaps awkward, a little simplistic or too literary, but I said it. Now, I want to share with you the fundamental reason why I hesitated to write all of this. I was afraid to aggravate the situation, to multiply the effects of the crisis by giving it a voice, of unleashing panic (“but please, it’s not the plague, it’s just a little flu!”). Today, I am (almost) convinced of the opposite; therefore, let’s move forward and without pity (the compassionate doctor, etc.). The crisis of the anarchist movement in Italy is the crisis of anarchism (but what happened in France 10 years ago and what is happening in Spain today?). It is not a circumstantial crisis (or worse, not only circumstantial), but structural. It is a historical crisis. If anything, what were circumstantial were the moments of 1945 and 1968. The general tendency, during the “good days”, and dramatically visible today in its descending curve, is that of a historical crisis.
(Apocalyptic; shudders amidst the public in the room). Is it the end of anarchism? Perhaps it is not of anarchism (ah, sighs of relief), but of a certain historically determined anarchism; yes, probably.
The time is for optimism; let’s leave the pessimism for better times. It’s very witty, no? I read this about a month ago on a Swiss anarchist poster and I found it not only funny, but also extraordinarily fitting to become our watchword, our motto, for the near future; mine, at least.
If for twenty years I employed the pessimism, or worse, the scepticism of a part of my person (let’s say, of reason) to balance the excessive optimism of another part (let’s say, the heart), it is time to invert the roles. Seeing that with the situation that we know, emotion tends to pessimism (my, our, morale is at zero), it is necessary to re-establish the equilibrium by pushing reason towards optimism.
Lucidity, now, should not restrain, but rather sustain debate. How is this possible in an objectively disastrous framework such as that which I have just portrayed? Why an optimism of reason when, according to me, the crisis of the anarchist movement is a structural crisis, a historical crisis? This is not a Panglossian optimism of the kind, “everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”. It is instead an optimism that, in a more useful manner, binds not only the real in the strict sense, but also the possible (we have so often spoken, two years ago, of the utopian function and we have never denied a utopian function to reason). This is an optimism that while not lying about the crisis, on the contrary, analyzes it to the point of self-mutilation if necessary and beyond, and opens, in anticipation of and by constructing, positive potentialities. I believe these potentialities to be enormous (see how my reason, obedient, begins to carry out its optimistic function). To overcome this crisis, anarchism must transform itself profoundly. It may then not only stem the crisis, but also endow itself with a vitality equal or superior to its golden age.
In fact, if one wants to see things as they are, it is more a crisis of activism than of anarchism. If many desert activism, few desert anarchism (and with those who don’t desert but still feel ill at ease, it is activism that they doubt, and not anarchism). It is a little like (a horrible but effective analogy) thousands of priests scrapping their vestments because they can no longer tolerate the contingencies of their vocation and/or because they no longer believe in the function of the Church, while remaining Christians. Of course, the anarchism of the “ex” is a repressed and melancholy anarchism, but, avowed or not, the conviction remains, for most, that anarchism as a philosophy of humankind and of society is a very beautiful thing. What has begun to fail and what is increasingly absent is confidence in the sense of activism, above all in its way of “doing politics” and in the possibility of our beautiful revolution.
The validity of anarchism as a philosophy of humankind and of society is not the pathetic nostalgia of an “ex” or the forced faith of a militant. I am objectively convinced that anarchy has, in itself, an inexhaustible force, a richness and freshness which ideological revivals (neo-Marxists, neoliberals, …) only make evident. I want to claim as proof the bold use of libertarian cosmetics in the new, varied ideological make-up. The counter-culture of the 1960s, the feminism of the 70s, the pacifism of the 80s, the new ecological sensitivity and also folkloric, social-musical phenomena (punk) have had and still continue to have many elements pulled from anarchism; even though many comrades think that they could and can substitute them for the anarchist movement. If this is not a passing phenomenon of cultural scavenging, that means that anarchism is a healthy and invigorating food. If 68 provoked a revival of anarchism throughout the world, it is because it was also (not entirely, but not a little) a cultural revolt with libertarian colour. However, channelled into sterile theoretical forms and practices, this revival was of short duration (not so short, thankfully) and, in Europe at least, it manifested itself as a circumstantial phenomenon. The practices proposed could not but be sterile for they proposed anew an obsolete anarchism.
What anarchism then? That which was formed as a felicitous juxtaposition – but historically contingent – of a philosophy of freedom, equality and of an “objectively” revolutionary social context or that which, from this juxtaposition, developed as a libertarian variant of revolutionary socialism? The general crisis of anarcho-syndicalism in the 1920s and 30s however had already signalled the crisis of this latter anarchism, the context of which having changed substantially since then. If one could still delude oneself, up to the fall of fascism, by attributing the cause of the decline of anarchism to repression, the ephemeral revival of the post-war period could have quickly clarified things.
In the 1970s, we did no better than to propose again, by caricaturising it, this obsolete model of anarchism and a semblance of political actions that, given the context, could only repeat, in tracts, newspapers and demonstrations, more or less sophisticated variations on “Long live anarchy” and “The only solution is the revolution”. The consequence could not have been different! There was ennui and frustration; sooner or later, obviously, there would be a crisis.
This crisis, though, however serious it is, can be beneficial. It is perhaps finally the occasion to see more clearly, without illusions (it is not difficult), but also without anguish (it is more difficult); a chance that obliges us, to survive, to thoroughly rethink anarchism, while responding quickly to the sentiment of defeat and powerlessness that insidiously spreads. For years, I concerned myself with anti-repressive campaigns; now, it seems to me much more important to launch an anti-depressive campaign.
The thread of my thoughts is still entangled and will be so for some time yet. But I believe that I have found the thread’s end so as to begin to disentangle it. The anarchism of the 1800s, that has survived until the present with some modest revisions, no longer works and this for at least half a century. It continues to survive, of course, but with periodic crises and an inexorable downward tendency. It transmits to us a mixture of very old (above all, strategic, but not only) and very contemporary elements – excuse the emphasis – that are universally valid and therefore still relevant; so relevant they are pinched by the Right and Left, in little morsels that can be neutralised. It is furthermore an impoverished anarchism in its manifestations, so much so that it can only express itself (or almost) in the form of a political anarchism without however, and this is paradoxical, being able to provide political perspectives to put into practice here and now. Between an improbable proletarian revolution and slippery democratic paths, there would seem to be only space for words, not for action. The impasse is inevitable.
To get beyond this impasse, a different anarchism has to be invented in which the “hard core” of the old anarchism (but what is this exactly? Let us seriously think and discuss this), because, without this hard core, there is no anarchism, neither old nor new. Let this core be enveloped by a pulp of flexible thoughts and actions; adaptable, experimental, debatable, absolutely non-dogmatic. Let an anarchism be invented that is changing and multiform, in which the activist and the poet can recognise themselves; that carries within it struggle, but also life; that reflects everything in individual and collective behaviour which moves in a libertarian direction and which is reflected also in behaviour … Let this be seen as an anarchism that profoundly transforms the social imaginary and that denies domination in all its forms, in all cultural “places”, where it has infiltrated itself for millennia, from sexual relationships to political institutions, from language to technology, from the economy to the family, from the emotions to rationality. This anarchism would not know crises. It would straddle them; the crisis of regeneration of those who are thirty or forty years old, disappointed by politics and ill at ease in society; the crisis of identity of the very young, 10% of which, according to a poll carried out two months ago, do not recognise themselves in any political structure and who believe that society must be radically transformed; the crisis of powerlessness of angry workers, of unhappy housekeepers, of desperate youth, of the non-integrated, of the disintegrated, of the unemployed; the crisis of ennui with … whoever wishes, can add to the list.
An anarchism as a great cultural transformation; it is obvious that a change on this scale can only take place in the long term and begin from this moment on in the forms and with the rhythms that today’s reality and our desire renders possible, without waiting for the revolution (but without necessarily renouncing it) and without despairing should it not appear probable, neither for tomorrow, nor for the day after tomorrow.
The revolution must no longer be neither a myth nor an alibi. The great transformation must not begin now; in fact, it already began more than a century ago, for even if the old anarchism ended up in a dead end (more by our own fault than that of our “fathers” and surely not because of our “grand-fathers”, for whom it was a perfectly adapted instrument), it nevertheless had all of the elements necessary for the great transformation and it is certain that more than one cultural change of a libertarian hue in the last century was directly due to these elements. And extraordinary men and women produced the old anarchism! A few among us had the chance to personally know some of this “great vintage” that in part disappeared or is disappearing now. It is thanks to this direct knowledge that anarchism was passed onto us not only “in the head”, but “in the heart”, and above all, to a degree, we inherited the idea of the polyhedral wealth of anarchism. And it is also in thinking of them that I launch this message of optimism. We have at our disposition a fantastic gold seam. Let us stop digging in the same direction and let us not despair in believing the seam exhausted! Let us look in other directions.
Émile Henry and the sense of measure
Amedeo Bertolo, A Rivista anarchia, nº 72, February – March 1979
We always believed that Émile Henry and his bombing of the Café Terminus [Paris, Gare Saint-Lazare, 12/02/1894], along with the bombing of the Diana Theatre [Milan, 23/03/1921] and other such episodes, were a part of the least exemplary past of anarchism; that it was, if not “a skeleton in the closet”, at least the kind of anarchism that can be explained (or perhaps only exorcised) by a particular social-economic-political context, etc. We always believed that the anarchist movement, learning from its past, had acquired a balanced idea of the possible use of violence as a means of struggle, that “anarchist terrorism”, as much as because it is contrary to our necessary coherence between means and ends, as because it has demonstrated itself to be disastrously counter-productive, was considered a “dead weight” and that only the crudest, deceiving professionals of historiography, of publishing and of the press would fail to shake off that bogey.
We were mistaken. In the pages of the last number of the magazine “Anarchismo”, in a critical review of [Jack London’s] The Minions of Midas, Alfredo Maria Bonanno tells us not only that Émile Henry’s bombing was a qualitative (positive) leap in the use of revolutionary violence, because it marked the passage from a discriminating attack/assassination (against precise individuals of power and privilege) to an attack/assassination of a bunch of “class enemies”, but that even today, a gesture like Henry’s would indicate an analogous “qualitative leap” and would make a “theoretical contribution to the movement”!
We tried to laugh – with difficulty, as with mediocre black humour – but, even though we tried to not take too seriously what we read, we also felt our hair stand on end.
We tried to laugh because we knew the author and his insatiable need to exhibit himself with ever more impressive bluster, pour épater le bourgeois [“to shock the bourgeois”; originally in French], or more likely, because it is difficult in these times to shock the bourgeois with the omnipresence of hackneyed verbal truculence, pour épater l’anarchiste [“to shock the anarchist”; originally in French]. It has been years, in fact, that Alfredo Maria has applied himself to flagellating the anarchist movement become soft and bourgeois (excluding himself) with the modesty of a procurator, the grace of a brawler and the naivety of an advertiser.
In this way, again, we also managed to “digest”, in the same number of the magazine, the article on Proudhon, where he invites us to shoot certain people in the head. It is not the first time that he makes these kinds of invitations. He gained a certain success of notoriety with his “shoot, boy, shoot” (in other words, “let’s arm ourselves and, you, go for it”), seasoned with joyous images such as that of a brain spurting out of a skull. On another note, it seems to have to do with semantics more than anything else: one says today, “I’m going to kill you, knock your head off, blow your brains out” with the same ease that one says “at the limit”, “shit” and “that is”. Of course, it must be tiring to have to always surpass oneself in verbal virulence to continue to “cause a scandal”. Recourse must be had to difficult rhetorical exercises, as with certain recycling of images from the end of the 18th century, already begun with the “false Sartre”[1], another discrete publishing success (it is the time of revivals): for example, the images of fat bourgeoisie (who in the present context have become socialist intellectuals) who wipe the blood of proletarians from their mouths and pick out from their teeth half-chewed bits of workers’ flesh. But up to this point, we are still perhaps precisely in the domain of bad rhetoric, not so much in terms of taste, but in terms of the far too visible disproportion between the reality and the language.
Until now then we had not found sufficient motivation to write, to demand polemically for example if the “Apocalyptic one” considers that Malatesta was soft when he argued with Costa and Merlino, instead than putting a bullet in their head, or to ask him according to what logic a reformist appears to him worthy of this treatment but not a Stalinist, such as those for example from whom he publishes so generously an abundance of documents and communiqués.
Is the line of demarcation between comrades the use of “revolutionary” violence? Is it only the use of bombs and the P38 [Walther P38 pistol] (true or on paper)? Are then even the “revolutionary” fascists of the NAP [Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari/Armed Revolutionary Nuclei] comrades?
Until now, I had not found sufficient motivation to respond to the “provocation”. In fact, I had none, because the taste for polemic is absolutely foreign to my character. The fact is that after twenty years of presence in the movement, I begin to be fed up with polemics which often reveal themselves to be – almost always – occasions for the internal gratification of an aggressiveness that one does not manage to express outwardly, just as the ulcer is the stomach’s self-destruction, the body that attacks itself, the reflex of an individual, anxious impotency. A discussion, a debate, even animated by a few bellicose points (as the Greek etymology of the word “polemic” reminds us), can certainly be constructive, or at least clarifying. But activist experience has taught me that when the discord between positions is great and extends itself beyond the object of a specific question, and even more when in the interlocutor there is an obvious pleasure and self-satisfaction in clashing, then there is a strong probability that the polemic loses the substantial characteristics of the discussion and becomes a game of verbal massacre. It is then better not to choose the path of direct polemic, the tit for tat, but the path of indirect confrontation, both between what one says and does, as between what other individual or collective elements of anarchism do or say.
And yet, I decided to write, running the risk of overvaluing the negative importance of a certain prose, thereby echoing in the [magazine] “A” the hallucinatory absurdities published in another magazine. The fact is that the criticism in question, in my view, goes beyond the limits of the usual extreme terribleness of this magazine, of the verbal violence with which one tries to give life to a surrogate of insurrection on paper, of having this diffuse violence which is in reality an activist practice, an armed version of the illusory “tomorrow, the revolution”, pass for a social practice – just like the Resolution of the Strategic Direction of the self-proclaimed hard core of the Combatant Communist Party/Red Brigades. Concerning the qualities and flaws of this form of struggle, about which we are far from expressing an indiscriminate, negative judgement, the discussion is wide open. It is our view however that this discussion should be led with more equilibrium and moral rigour, from the moment when history should have taught us how delicate and how difficult it is to predict the relationship between the use of violent means and the revolutionary and libertarian growth of consciousness; how difficult it is to maintain the coherence, ethically, as well as, tactically and strategically, between means and ends. But to the extent that someone dreams of “the development of confrontation to unimaginable levels” (to be read in a crescendo with a falsseto voice, and perhaps even with an artistically cunning, dialectal inflection, of false proletariat), this can simply be read as an excess of “optimism”, as some among us exaggerate “pessimism”.
However, when someone theorises firing at the crowd, one exceeds, I believe, the tolerable limit of made to measure rhetorical artifice for an improbable catastrophism, to then fall into the irresponsibility of an emotional excitation and self-excitation that are a matter for psychoanalysis more than they are a concern for political analysis.
For the moment, in this critique, a limit is still placed on indiscriminate violence: it is directed at the “bourgeoisie”. But what is the bourgeoisie today? If the fault of the person one kills is not individual but “objective”, a matter of “class”, how is it to be established where this “bourgeoisie” begins and where it ends? There, where, as in the structures of late Italian capitalism, power is diffuse, diluted in a continuous gradation, as are privilege and parasitism diffused, diluted, mixed; there, where the state is interiorised, where the “heart of the state” is also in the exploited, because there no longer exists an impermeable, proletarian culture opposed to the state; what is this bourgeoisie that one must strike out at? It is true that at a level of sociological abstraction, it is still possible to identify – as we ourselves have done – a dominant class (a capitalist and technical-bureaucratic hybrid) which occupies the summit of the social pyramid. It is however one thing to identify the limits of classes at an analytic level, and another to identify them with an operational goal.
In this situation, it is terribly easy to give to the “bourgeoisie” an ideological and psychological definition that dilates itself at will. And then, for what reason would one stop here in the terrorist escalation, and could one not continue and declare that other “qualitative leaps” are possible? For example, one can defend (one can do almost anything with words) that to assassinate housewives or workers means: 1) to strike at “objectively” guilty individuals (housewives vote Christian Democrat and follow the advice of priests and Gustavo Selva, while the workers “make” the state with the PC [Communist Party] and the labour unions …), 2) to compel the ignorant exploited to wake up from the sleep of television and consumption, to put them before the disguised, objective brutality of the system, 3) and I could go on and they get better. And with these motivations, can one deny the validity of striking at the odious middle class?
Let us stop here, for our intention is not so much – for the reasons already stated – to discuss and therefore to argue point by point, to refute and to document, but to testify to our indignation and out concern. Let us make one last consideration. We have the feeling of going back ten years in time, in 1968, when an enraged band shouted in the streets, “bomb-blood-anarchy”, and a few exalted and irresponsible loudmouths with a nihilistic humour debated the more or less significant utility of placing bombs in banks – the temples of capital – and in shopping centres – the temples of consumption.
Then the massacre of Piazza Fontana occurred, perpetrated by the fascists and the secret services – less loud – and attributed to anarchists. We would not like to find ourselves, for another five years, having to employ all of the energies of the movement in explaining that we are again the victims of a “provocation”. And here the photograph irresistibly comes to mind of Alfredo Maria Bonanno (published a few years ago in a pamphlet put out by “La Fiaccola”) holding a meeting from the height of a stage on which can be read in large letters: “It is the fascists who place bombs”.
Worse still: given that in the heart of the anarchist movement is also reflected the despair/the disintegration of the extreme left (effect of the great deception of revolutionary expectations, in the short term), which substitutes for the vital creativity of its most felicitous expressions a deadly destructiveness – self-destructiveness (homicide-suicide), given that beyond the salon theorists of “proletarian violence”, there also exist protagonists of flesh and blood, of nerves stretched by existential anxiety, marginalisation and rebellion against a situation that seems to be indefinitely “blocked”, we would not want someone to interpret literally the ravings of striking out and of putting, let us say it, a bomb in a bar in the Piazza del Duomo, in Milan, or – why not? – on the Via Etnea in Catania.
It would not be sufficient then to cast off the terrible moral responsibility, to write something similar to what he wrote on the occasion of the assassination of the commissariat of Milan, which is the most recent approximation to an attack that simply aims at striking out (but not so much “striking out” after all and more involuntarily). Therefore, while condemning the action, we would defend the person of the author against the comfortable and far too easy calumnies of the leftist matrix. Not like the “Apocalyptic one”, as he appears on pages 429-431 of his published and unpublished writings, collected in a precious anthology, La dimensione anarchica [The Anarchic Dimension]. A sign of the tumultuous change of the times: these anthologies, in the era of deplorable, bourgeois modesty, were published posthumously, not with the diligence of the author …
[1] This is in reference to a canard published by Anarchismo editions in 1978, falsely attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre and entitled “My Political Testament”, being in fact a text by Joseph Déjacque. [See: Alfredo M. Bonanno, Il falso e l’osceno, Edizione anarchismo, 2007.] The objective of this operation was a) to measure the degree of confusion and idiocy that existed within supposed leftwing culture; b) to verify the reaction times and control of cultural structures; c) to furnish an instrument, the false as an instrument of struggle, thereby providing an indication that could be subsequently developed in a very different way and with different objectives. [T.N.: This footnote is, in part, a translation of a footnote to the same article, as published in the collection, Émile Henry: Polemiques, debats, discussions, Éditions anarchronique, 2018.]
A.B. Because of certain readings, some reflections, questions, I felt very close to what appeared to me to be anarchism. My first anarchist readings were a matter of chance. Umanità Nova[2] was posted in a display window near my house. I think that it was Pinelli[3] who would place it there as he was the only anarchist who lived in that neighbourhood. It was a display window used by anarchists, as once political parties had done in the past. I would pass by it and I found the newspaper a little strange, but also amusing.
M.P. Why strange?
A.B. Don’t you think that when a non-anarchist comes across anarchism, that they consider it strange? Let us say outside of the norm. I remember that I found the anti-clerical texts amusing. But I also found their excessive rhetoric a little extravagant. This was how I judged the newspaper at the time… maybe even today, but for other reasons. [Smiles] After, everyday, on returning from the Berchet Secondary School, I would pass by a newspaper kiosk, not from the Piazza Duomo. The person who ran the kiosk was an anarchist. When I began to ask him for the anarchist newspapers that he displayed, he would also pass onto me other publications. […] The word anarchist meant nothing to me, but, as I was intellectually curious, I became interested and I searched in the municipal library for what they had about anarchists. The first two books that I read were not even very favourable to the anarchists. They left me somewhat perplexed, as they spoke above all of bombs, of blood. … I thought that anarchists were a little strange. Meanwhile, fortunately, I started to read the magazine Volontà, published then by Giovanna Berneri[4], a magazine which maintained a decent cultural level. […] I found in Volontà ideas that were very close to what I thought. It was Augusta Farvo, who had the kiosk on the Piazza Duomo, who would give me the magazine. Augusta sold the anarchist press of the time: Il libertario, Umanità Nova, L’Adunata dei Refrattari and Volontà. This old lady was a picturesque character, with an interesting anarchist past. […] I saw her one last time at the funeral of Valpreda[5], but she was already suffering from dementia. She must have been almost ninety years old; however she was suffering from an advanced state of Alzheimer’s. She died in 2004.
[…]
M.P. When was the first time you went to an anarchist meeting?
A.B. It was in 1960. At that time, the anarchists would meet at the headquarters of the Republican Party, on Sunday mornings. My first impression was very positive. I found the gathering to be very lively, everyone spoke, they expressed their opinions, there seemed to me to be no hierarchy and I was left with the impression of a great freedom and equality. And those present were working class and of differing ages, from 50 to 70 years of age. There were some thirty people at that meeting. I believe that it was a meeting of the Milan Libertarian Group, but it was an open meeting. When I arrived, no one asked me who I was. I sat in the back of the room and I attended the meeting. I was enthusiastic about what appeared to me to be a very collective participation. Except me, there was no other young person present…
M.P. And no one asked you anything?
No, no one asked me anything at this first meeting. But at the second and third, I met two people who were younger than the others, Eliane Vincileoni and Giovanni Corradini, who invited me to a gathering at their house. I went and thus began my militant activity. It was the beginning of 1961 and I founded the Gruppo Giovanile Libertario with some mates from secondary school, in collaboration with Eliane and Giovanni. […] They were around thirty five years old and they were the ones who suggested the two themes around which to act and reflect, themes that would accompany my anarchist militancy for many years: solidarity with libertarian Spain and an analysis of class based on three categories: one dominant, the other dominated and another ascending to power, the “new bosses”, which we called techno-bureaucracy. This analysis allowed us to work according to a dynamic class framework, true for periods of transition such as the one we are familiar with today. […] Libertarian Spain was a passion, not only because of the libertarian history of the country, but also because of the hope, I am wont to say almost conviction, of what the Spain of 1936 represented. This interest accompanied me like a “fixed idea” until the middle of the 1970s, until one year after Franco’s death, and it led me to constantly act, through various forms of propaganda and solidarity, with the libertarian movement of that country. […]
Through the intermediary of Eliane, we came into contact with anarchist youth in Paris, with French and French-Spanish youth, the later sons of Spanish refugees. Before the summer of 1962, I organised a fund raiser in my old secondary school for the purchase of a mimeograph machine for the anarchists inside Spain. Then, I got into contact with elements of the organisation Defensa Interior,[6] in particular with Alberola.[7] It was then that, with Luigi Gerli, one of the comrades of the libertarian group who studied philosophy, we assumed the commitment to go to Spain, in a clandestine mission, to take in FIJL pamphlets and new communication codes.
M.P. Why did they for chose two Italians for this task?
A.B. I think that they needed “labourers”. On our side, we really wanted to do it and it was us who proposed to help them. Obviously, non-Spaniards had an advantage in these kinds of missions; young tourists were theoretically less suspect than young Spaniards.
M.P. Can you tell me the story of this “clandestine trip”?
A.B. I set off alone on a motorcycle and Luigi Gerli went with someone called De Tassis, who called himself a revolutionary communist. We didn’t start out together: Gerli and De Tassis, then me. I took the mimeograph machine camouflaged in a painter’s case, with tubes of paint and the outlines of a painting, as a disguise. It was a sketch done by my brother who painted better than I did. At the time, he was sixteen, but he was also already an anarchist. I went through Toulouse, where I met Alberola who gave me all of the information necessary for the mission. Upon arriving in Spain, I went to Barcelona, where I met a group of young people from the city, and then I went to Madrid, where I met Gerli who was wrapping up his part of the endeavour. […] After Madrid, I went on to Cadiz, Almeria and Alicante, where I had three contacts to whom I gave the new codes and the FIJL pamphlets, which I would copy manually with the mimeograph machine at night, in my room, for two or three hours. On returning to Barcelona, I met the comrades again, left them with the mimeograph machine and set out on the return journey. The mission took a few weeks between July and August. I did not have a lot of money, so that I slept in student hostels, in horrible hotels or in the tent. Once, on the beach, between Almeria and Alicante, I had just fallen asleep in my sleeping bag when two Guardia Civil on patrol, who had seen the light of the motorcycle, woke me up. My disguise as an artist-tourist worked to perfection and they didn’t even search me. Fortunately, as I had a package of pamphlets with me… That night, I was a little afraid, though not much; I was more “unconscious” of the risks. The strength of the Ideia… [laughter]
In the middle of September, we learned that three Barcelona comrades had been arrested because of two or three bombings of the Falange and Opus Dei headquarters. A few days later, the news arrived that one of them had been condemned to death and the other two to thirty years in prison by the military tribunal. We then decided to do something to impede this assassination. […] We decided to kidnap the Spanish consul in Milan with the aim of calling attention to this case in public opinion, in particular to the death penalty of one of the three Spanish comrades. I don’t remember how we arrived at this decision. […] In this project, the four members of the group were involved,[8] along with De Tassis and three left socialists from Verona, with whom we had contact. We brought them into the coup not only because we were few, but also because we needed someone who knew how to drive. […] On the 27th of September of 1962, we arrived at the Spanish consulate with a car rented in Verona. We had thought of entering the consulate, and doing whatever was necessary to kidnap the consul. But, when we arrived, the consulate was already closed because we had been delayed by some five or ten minutes. We were amateurs… but luck comes to the aid of amateurs, as we opted for another plan. We then went to the house of the vice-consul, a man named Isu Elias. When we arrived at the Via Vincenzo Monti, where he lived, we decided that it wasn’t a good idea to kidnap him there, because right in front was a carabinieri [Italian national military police] barracks.
We tugged on our imaginations and came up with a new plan. I telephoned the vice-consul, pretending to be the secretary of the assistant to the mayor of Milan and I invited him for lunch on the next day, telling him that I would arrive with a chauffeur to take him to the restaurant. The next day, I confirmed the meeting, telephoning the consulate. The chauffeur was one of the students from Verona, the only one with a driver’s permit, and he was disguised as a motorist with a cap that I had purchased the night before. The car had only been rented for only a few days, as we didn’t have a lot of money at our disposal. In front of the consulate, Aimone placed himself as lookout at the street corner, De Tassis went up to fetch the vice-consul, the driver, Alberto Tomiolo, got out of the car to open the door for him, De Tassis sat in the front seat next to the driver and Pedron and I sat on either side of the vice-consul, with a revolver in hand. We only had a single revolver from the time of the Resistance…
We went to a chalet in a small village near the Swiss border, where we held our hostage for three days. We claimed the action in the name of the International Federation of Libertarian Youth, identifying the motive and demanding the commutation of the death penalty and the prison sentences of the Spanish comrades. In the meantime, we contacted other Spanish comrades, notably Alberola, to give over the vice-consul to them, with the aim of taking him to Geneva and giving him over to an organisation of the United Nations. [..] In sum, the media extensively covered the kidnapping. Things became more complicated with Tomiolo’s fears, who contacted a lawyer friend of his, who advised him to contact journalists from the Stasera, a para-communist daily newspaper from Milan and to try to free the vice-consul, at his own initiative. In the meantime, public opinion and political parties began to move, above the communist youth organisations, which organised demonstrations. Cardinal Montini himself, the future Pope, decided to ask for clemency from the very Catholic Franco. Thanks to this mobilisation, the death penalty was commuted to thirty years in prison and the other two prison sentences were reduced. Our action had a positive outcome for our Spanish comrades and the judicial process had repercussions in the spread of ideas and in the solidarity with libertarian Spain. […]
M.P. Were you surprised by May 68?
A.B. We were stupefied and enthusiastic to see the anarchist flag waving with dignity in the streets as a fundamental part of the revolt. We tried to join the student movement, but with some ideological hesitation, especially at the beginning. We published a beautiful document: “A statement of the Gioventù Libertaria anarchists to the students considered anarchists by the bourgeois press”, in which we said: “Make an effort and you will become anarchists if you leave behind your petty-bourgeois ideas, if you accept the abolition of the separation of manual and intellectual labour and, accordingly, the privilege of the diploma, of post-secondary education, etc.” [laughter]
Then, we organised conferences on May 68 with slides and we began to see people arrive, young people, very young… We began to grow and organise ever more activities: conferences, debates, posters, pamphlets, demonstrations under our flags. […] In France, the movement ended before the arrival of the summer of 1968, while in Italy, it continued through to the whole of 1969. […] The activity was intense. Every Saturday and Sunday, we were at the Círculo Ponte della Ghisolfa, writing pamphlets, making posters. We introduced serigraphy in our activities. […]
M.P. Then the time of the bombs arrived…
A.B. It began in April of 1969, when in Milan the Anarchist Black Cross was organised. […] While we were preparing the first bulletin, fascist bombs exploded which were attributed to the anarchists. When the bomb attacks began, we denounced the provocation. The first bomb attack was on the 25th of April. Some comrades were arrested. […] Then there were the attacks on the trains in August and other smaller incidents in Palermo and Legnano, with an A circled, but for which fascists were arrested. It was obvious that something was being prepared. We engaged in a frenetic counter-information campaign to try to explain what was happening. Reading the first bulletins of the Black Cross, one can see that we already predicted the continuation, even without exactly guessing what the future would bring. We knew that, sooner or later, there would be deaths and that the responsibility would be attributed to anarchists. In fact, there were many deaths and many comrades were accused […]
On the 12th of December, when the bombs exploded in December in Milan, very many Milan anarchists were immediately arrested, including Pinelli. I wasn’t immediately arrested […]
The rest of the story is well known. On the night of the 15th to the 16th of December, Pinelli is thrown from the fourth floor of the commissariat of police, during a police interrogation, following an illegal incarceration. […] After this event, our principal activity was to get counter-information out, denouncing Pinelli’s assassination and affirming the innocence of Valpreda.
[…]
M.P. Did the magazine Interrogations opened new paths for contemporary anarchism?
A.B. For anarchism, I don’t know, for us, it did. […] Through the magazine, we initiated long lasting relations with a part of the community of international libertarian intellectuals who collaborated with it. They were almost all of them in contact with Louis Mercier-Vega,[9] who was an exceptional figure, in terms of intellectual lucidity and passion for anarchism. We took upon ourselves to organise an international colloquium every two years. […] These colloquia had an enormous success. Some five hundred people participated in the first colloquia, with more than ten, twenty, thirty speakers, with different political allegiances, as there were few anarchist intellectuals who could contribute. But this was also because we liked to interact with non-anarchist intellectuals who had interesting ideas for anarchists. […] Generally, we organised these colloquia in Venice because of the logistic advantages of the location. The largest gathering organised by the Centro Studi libertari was in 1984 and it attracted thousands of people to the city.
M.P. In the 1970s, was there an evolution in the anarchist movement, in its ideas?
A.B. Yes, there was, but not all of it was positive. There was a certain mimicry, whether of far-left positions, the extra-parliamentary left, or of traditional anarchist positions, here and there with some touches of armed struggle, which I consider deplorable. The anarchist “people” little by little decreased. It reached its height, numerically speaking, in the mid-1970s. As to its quality, the movement aged, which sometimes suggests a positive maturation, but which can also mean that the best left and only the worse remained. There was a little bit of all of this.
M.P. We are at the end of the 1970s, that is, twenty years after your initiation in the anarchist movement. During this period, many things happened: the creation of magazines, the opening of new spaces, the organisation of numerous cultural activities. Did all of this contribute to the renewal of anarchism?
A.B. Yes, but not sufficiently, in my opinion. But maybe it was impossible to do more. I don’t know. In the beginning, I thought so, however, in fact, I was sought some intellectual exigency in certain areas, themes, which traditional anarchism never explained in a convincing way to me; for example, the analysis of class. In the colloquium dedicated to the “new bosses”, a new discourse on class was produced. The Marxist discourse on class never convinced me, so that we made an effort, successful or not, to clarify things. Self-management, utopia, were other themes that I wanted to clarify, beyond what the traditional anarchist literature gave me. The effort was made, the results didn’t seem to me to be overly brilliant, but only time will tell… On the other hand, due to this work, we were able to spark some intellectual interest, to establish a dialectical relation even with non-anarchists, more or less libertarian. I don’t know if anything remains of all that. […]
M.P. Why create the Centro Studi in 1976?
A.B. On the one hand, we did so to promote original libertarian research. On the other hand, it was to preserve the memory of anarchism in an archival centre. […]
M.P. And why create the publisher Elèuthera in 1986?
A.B. Because, on the one hand, it seemed to us that a “strictly” anarchist publisher such as Antistato was at the end of its possibilities, even if there had already been an opening with the collection, “Segno libertario”. On the other hand, after a certain success in the first half of the 1970s, towards the end of the decade, sales began to decline and distribution problems began to worsen. Beyond this, we thought it would be interesting to develop what we had initiated with the collection “Segno libertario”, giving priority to a new publisher that was more artisanal than it was militant.
[…]
M.P. What reactions were there, among anarchists, to the change in the publisher’s name, from Antistato to Elèuthera, and in the themes of the the books?
A.B. As in other cases, we have to first understand what we mean by “anarchists”. Active militants represent maybe a thousand people. But there are also thousands of people who consider themselves more or less anarchists and who, in their own way, are active, but who do not recognise themselves in the structures of the movement, in the groups, in the places, etc. Let us say that with Elèuthera, we reached these “non-organised anarchists”; non-organised, not in their lives, but in the sense that they do not frequent anarchist spaces, they don’t go to demonstrations. […] We think we reached the libertarian fringe and that this is potentially vital for the renewal of the “anarchist movida”, not to say for anarchism tout court. […] It is impossible to define this fringe. It is like the old alcohol metaphor. There are numerous alcoholic drinks, the alcohol of which is obtained by fermentation or by different concentrations. Pure alcohol is undrinkable, but it is essential to make an alcoholic drink. Let us say that pure alcohol is anarchy, but it is produced, for it to be consumable, according to the times and places of its production and according to the raw material used. In this alcohol metaphor, the word “libertarian” could represent “cider”, that is, an alcoholic drink with a low level of alcohol! I don’t want to disparage this drink, which I appreciate, and I also don’t want to say that those who belong to this fringe are not sufficiently anarchists. A drink with little alcohol can be quite good. The metaphor however doesn’t push us towards abstinence. […]
Anarchy can and should be thought of in the same way as we think about the quantity of alcohol that we should have in our drinks… In the end, classical anarchism was more libertarian than anarchist. For example, Bakunin’s action and those of the First International were not anarchy: they were examples of libertarian practice with a partial anarchist content. Anarcho-syndicalism was and is still a libertarian action and thought. […] I believe it was the feeling, or the certainty, that traditional anarchist practice was in no way satisfactory, that it offered no results, that it was something that would lead us to an ultra-minority anarchist ghetto, that led me to address myself to the world of “libertarians”. […]
M.P. According to you, who were the original libertarian thinkers who manifested themselves over these last years?
A.B. Colin Ward[10]… He inspired us a great deal, even though his thought did not bring anything significantly new to anarchism. Then there is Castoriadis, who made very important contributions to libertarian thought, with his theory of the social imaginary and with the idea of self-creation of society and of man, even though he never defined himself as a libertarian. […] Ward is interested in a revolutionary project in which the libertarian forces emerge from the present and in a non-resolvable dialectic between authority and freedom. Ward belongs to the period after the Second World War. His thought and his work are situated in an objectively non-revolutionary reality, in a reality where revolution is not thinkable. It is for this reason that he thought in terms of the executibility of anarchy, taking as an example what appears, more or less spontaneously, in society, and interpreting it in an anarchist fashion. We can add to this list Lourau[11] and Eduardo Colombo[12], and probably others…
[…]
M.P. Is anarchy perhaps a means and not an end?
A.B. It is neither a means, for an end… it is rather a method. Anarchy can be understood as an instituting principle of a non-hierarchical society, in the same that the State is an instituting principle of a modern, hierarchical society. But I prefer to see it as an ethical dimension of values, as a constellation of values that can be synthesised with the terms freedom, equality, solidarity, diversity. Therefore, it is an anarchy that is not a model of society, or rather, a utopian model, abstract and not very interesting, but which can be useful, as the perfect circle can be. It is however more useful to see anarchy as a constellation of values that should influence our daily individual and collective, personal and social, action.
I do not see any opposition or incompatibility between a social anarchism and anarchism as a life style, as some practice it. I believe they are quite compatible. Anyone of us can be carried towards the one or the other, but a little of one is necessary in the other and vice versa, otherwise the necessary coherence of the anarchist method is not possible. Without claiming a perfect coherence between values and their concrete incarnation, one must tend toward the most libertarian attitude possible, the most egalitarian attitude, the attitude of the greatest solidarity, according to differing situations, the capacities and possibilities of individuals, in the times and places where we live. […]
As I look back on my forty years as an anarchist, I think that I always applied the formula created by Mercier-Vega, a formula that holds as much for my past, as for the future: without illusions and without regrets!
[…]
M.P. To conclude this interview, can you tell me of your plans for the coming years?
A.B. I don’t know. I navigate by sight. I don’t have long term projects, only short term, like the work I do for Elèuthera and the Centro Studi Libertari.
[1] Excerpts from an interview with Amedeo Bertolo (A.B) by Mimmo Pucciarelli (M.P.) and published in Laurent Patry and Mimmo Pucciarelli, L’anarchisme en personnes, Atelier de Création Libertaire, 2006, pp. 149-221.
[2] The newspaper Umanità Nova was originally founded by Errico Malatesta in 1920. Shut down by the Italian fascist regime in 1922, it would reappear in 1945 and it is currently the weekly newspaper of the Federazione anarchica italiana.
[3] Giuseppe Pinelli was born in Milan, on the 21st of October, 1928. He was defenestrated on the night of the 15th to the 16th of December in 1969, from the fourth floor of the Milan police headquarters, where he was being held and interrogated as a result of a series of bombings in Milan and Rome on the 12th of December of the same year. One of the bombs exploded in the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, located in the Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing 17 people and injuring 88. Given its gravity, the event would have significant political importance, being part of the “strategy of tension” developed by the extreme-right, which sought a hardening of the state’s repressive politics, as a response to student protests and workers militancy in the factories. Pinelli would be arrested and die in police custody in this context, with anarchists accusing the sadly notorious police commissioner Luigi Calabresi (himself assassinated a few years later) of direct responsibility for his death. This episode was the inspiration for Dario Fo’s theatrical play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970).
[4] Italy, 05/05/1897-14/03/1962. Born Giovanna Caleffi, she was Camillo Berneri’s partner, until the latter’s assassination in 1937, in Spain, at the hands of the communists.
[5] Pietro Valpreda: Milan, 22/06/1933-06/07/2002. Despite being innocent, he was imprisoned between 1969 and 1972 for the bombings in Piazza Fontana (see footnote 3).
[6]Defensa Interior was a clandestine organisation that had as its objective to struggle against the Franco regime from inside Spain. Founded in September of 1961, at the congress of the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) in exile, in Limoges, it was then ratified by the two other organisations: the Movimiento Libertario Español-FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) and the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias –FIJL. The Defensa Interior was never welcomed by the bureaucrats of the CNT and the FAI, with the result that it would be formally dissolved at the congress of the CNT in exile, in Montpellier (1965). The FIJL did not accept this decision, having continued with clandestine activities.
[7] Octavio Alberola: Minorca, 1928. Alberola was an Anarcho-syndicalist militant, who was very active in the struggle against Franco. [TN]
[8] Aimone Fornaciari, Amadeo Bertolo, Gianfranco Pedron and Luigi Gerli. [TN]
[9] This was one of the pseudonyms of Charles Cortvrint. He was born in 06/05/1914 in Brussels and he committed suicide in 20/11/1977 in Collioures, France. Among his many engagements, he participated in the Spanish revolution of 1936 joining the International Group of the Durruti Column. He collaborated extensively with the anarchist press, founded various magazines, as well as being a writer. He is without a doubt one of the most remarkable individuals of the anarchist movement after WWII.
[10] London 14/08/1924-Ipswich 11/02/2010. Ward was an anarchist militant, architect, urban-planner, and writer. [TN]
[11] René Lourau: France, 1933-2000. Lourau was a sociologist and a disciple of Henri Lefebvre. [TN]
[12] Argentina, 01/09/1929-Paris, 13/03/2018. Colombo was an anarchist militant, a doctor, psychoanalyst and writer. He was one of the most important figures of contemporary anarchism.
For more on Amedeo Bertolo, see the Kate Sharply Library (here) and the Centro studi libertari – Archivio G. Penelli (here).
Amedeo Bertolo: An apology for anarchism
In a 1983 article for Volontà that we share below, Amedeo Bertolo endeavoured to critically diagnose the anarchist movement of his time in a remarkably direct and lucid manner; a diagnoses which we may help us to see through our own times.
In a second essay from 1979 (below), written during Italy’s “years of lead“, Bertolo finds no “cure” for the fragilities of anarchism in violent direct action aimed at people – individuals or groups – and justified as targeting the class enemy.
For those unfamiliar with Amedeo Bertolo, we close with selections from an interview he gave to Mimmo Pucciarelli and published in L’anarchisme en personnes (Atelier de Création Libertaire, 2006).
With this post, we reopen our collection of essays by Amedeo Bertolo and return to our series grouped under the title, “writers of May 68”, which we began in 2018 and in which we have included Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Eduardo Colombo and Amedeo Bertolo. The reference to “May 68” is a political metaphor in this instance, for aside from Semprun, the other three writers were in their respective countries of origin at the time (Amorós was in spain, Bertolo in italy, and Colombo in argentina), but all four writers would be profoundly marked by the events of May and would endeavour to rethink anarchism in the wake of those events.
We have already published six essays by Bertolo: A life in anarchy, Authority, power and domination, Democracy and beyond, Fanatics of freedom, The subversive weed, The Utopian function in the anarchist imaginary.
Three of the essays that we have shared in English translation were passed onto us by others. They are: “Authority, Power and Domination”, “Fanatics of Freedom”, “Democracy and Beyond”. We have made changes to the translations only when we believed it was necessary
Our modest effort is dedicated to the memory of Amedeo.
Let’s leave the pessimism for better times
Amedeo Bertolo, Volontà, nº 3, 1983
These are lean times for anarchists, if it were not for the satisfaction of saying that it’s a “widespread illness …” or that “we told you so …”. For example, we can scarcely console ourselves by thinking of the extreme crisis of the extreme left that rightly or wrongly a large number of anarchists lived with, after 68, in a love-hate relationship and, either way, in a market competition for revolution; no more than by thinking about the failure of the armed struggle Leninists, the most extreme of the extremists, whether in their most openly militarist version (the Red Brigades’ model), with the morbid attraction of a cocktail of hallucinatory theory and of efficacious spectacular actions, or in the more sophisticated version, but no less hallucinatory, of remote-controlled diffuse violence.
It is with satisfaction that we note the disappearance of this movement of super-revolutionaries that was Autonomia Operaia and to see its pontiff [Tony Negri] in Montecitorio declare on television: “It’s not that my comrades and I oppose in principle participation in parliament…” (in fact, they have always been favourable “to opening and using spaces of freedom in the heart of institutions”), as they have also been “The only forces capable of stopping terrorism”…
In these times of low tides, it is better for our already very low morale to not let the least occasion pass by without rejoicing, as for example, with the unusually high level of abstentions in the legislative elections of last June [1982].
…[Amedeo Bertolo analyses the results of the vote from which he concludes that the level of abstention was not due to a refusal by young people to participate]… that young people did not seem to express, in abstaining, their indifference to politics. It’s not surprising, as it must be difficult for them to renounce the excitement of the “first secular communion”, the first ritual gesture of political society, without taking into account their modest interest in being nonconformists. Political indifference can express itself logically as much by voting as not voting. If voluntary abstention such as the ballot form rendered null and void implies a desire to refuse, however minimally, a negative but active attitude in response to the electoral ritual, by contrast, the accomplishment of the “democratic obligation” implying here as much emotion or intellectual reflection as in the tearing up of a bus ticket, is an act realised in indifference. It is the same for the refusal of “conjugal obligation” that can be attributed to an aversion to sex or to the desire for more satisfactory sexual relations, and not to an indifferent frigidity.
Indeed, the “newly indifferent” express themselves by a conformist vote, while, probably, a non-negligible part of young people’s abstention manifests not indifference but a refusal, as well as for the majority of those who “newly abstain”. Even remaining prudent, if one cannot attribute an anarchist value to the million of voices who did not vote, one may consider that they offer a psychological disposition favourable to libertarian discourse. This is not an “I don’t care”, but a “fuck off”, which is quite different. In the absence of an alternative theory, the “fuck off” can easily become anew an “I don’t care”.
[…]
Upon my return to Italy at the end of June, after a six month absence, I found the tribe in very bad health. Not that it was doing any better six months earlier, but I had hoped, with little reason, that after having touched bottom in the crisis, that the convalescence had begun. It was an absurd hope that my scepticism belied, but despite everything, I hoped, as when one wakes up from a sleep hoping to have found the solution to the problem that had bothered one the previous night. But there was none of that. On the contrary, the tribe’s situation had gotten worse.
By tribe, I mean the anarchist movement, or more precisely, those anarchists who recognise themselves as militants as I understand the term, in a sort of ideal community; a community with indefinite borders, perhaps indefinable, yet a community perceived as such by those who found it, a cultural community, almost ethnic, making of the movement something other than a political party. For some, there is something more to it, for others a great deal more or it is something completely different.
Upon my return, despite the crisis, the tribe was a little animated thanks to Bettino Craxi and his call for early elections. Fortunately, in Italy, elections are called almost every year (next year, there will be, I believe, regional elections, then municipal and European elections…). As a consequence, this electoral ritual allows us also frequently and without difficulty to repeat our ritual of abstention, while guaranteeing for us a month or two of tracts, posters, public speaking, etc. As a bonus, with a bit of luck, we will be able to celebrate, as happened this time, a small increase in the levels of abstention; to enjoy the Christian Democratic Party being slapped, the disillusionment with the Socialist Party and
a slight but significant erosion of support for the Communists… Then, either way, there are the holidays or the vacations and “in September or October, we will see” (the syndrome of: “tomorrow, it’s another day”). But do understand my irony! I too participated with a certain pleasure in this ritual of abstention and, better yet, I found a definitive and radical solution for the matter by burning my electoral identity card; I drank a toast to the additional 3 percent of non-voters, etc. And I also tried to push away, for later, the problem of the tribe’s crisis…
[…]
The anarchist movement is in crisis, a serious qualitative and quantitative crisis. Our press continues to lose readers, the books barely sell, groups unravel, contacts weaken and become purely formal or individual. Our meeting halls (those we still have not closed down) are almost always empty of people, as of ideas. Public activity (and the internal debate) have reached their lowest levels. Comrades, melting away like snow in the sun are ever more numerous, alleging a hundred different pretexts (but these sudden defections cannot fail to have a common element). Creativity, imagination, the desire to make real, to achieve, the spirit of initiative; these are almost all but a memory.
Already, for a few years now, the house was shaky. The first cracks in the flooring could be heard, a bit of plaster would fall from the walls, but it still seemed solid to us, having survived the tide of new reformism, as well as the return “to private life” or the catastrophic choice of armed struggle. But then the first fissures appeared. And now, everything is falling to pieces and the building threatens to collapse. Some move out, calmly, others do so with a sense of guilt. One left saying that they were going out for cigarettes, never to return, another panicked, jumped from the window, hurting themselves and waking away limping, turning for a last regretful glance at the house where they had lived for so many years. For those who remain, they vainly shore up the structures that threaten to collapse. They look at each other exhausted, without any confidence in the future and a little suspicious (who will be the next one to start maligning now? Who will pretend to be working, while they move in fact ever closer to the door?). Someone suggests finding refuge in the basement, which has resisted other collapses; but there is little room and some are claustrophobic.
If things continue in this way, we will find ourselves with the simulacrum of a movement, as in the 1950s and 60s, or even worse. At least, at that time, there were stubborn and tenacious old anarchists who held firm and a handful of adamant and impassioned young anarchists to assure the future. Today, the few “neither young, nor old” that falter or the hesitant “youngsters” can neither guarantee nor promise as much.
I said what I wanted to say. It’s perhaps awkward, a little simplistic or too literary, but I said it. Now, I want to share with you the fundamental reason why I hesitated to write all of this. I was afraid to aggravate the situation, to multiply the effects of the crisis by giving it a voice, of unleashing panic (“but please, it’s not the plague, it’s just a little flu!”). Today, I am (almost) convinced of the opposite; therefore, let’s move forward and without pity (the compassionate doctor, etc.). The crisis of the anarchist movement in Italy is the crisis of anarchism (but what happened in France 10 years ago and what is happening in Spain today?). It is not a circumstantial crisis (or worse, not only circumstantial), but structural. It is a historical crisis. If anything, what were circumstantial were the moments of 1945 and 1968. The general tendency, during the “good days”, and dramatically visible today in its descending curve, is that of a historical crisis.
(Apocalyptic; shudders amidst the public in the room). Is it the end of anarchism? Perhaps it is not of anarchism (ah, sighs of relief), but of a certain historically determined anarchism; yes, probably.
The time is for optimism; let’s leave the pessimism for better times. It’s very witty, no? I read this about a month ago on a Swiss anarchist poster and I found it not only funny, but also extraordinarily fitting to become our watchword, our motto, for the near future; mine, at least.
If for twenty years I employed the pessimism, or worse, the scepticism of a part of my person (let’s say, of reason) to balance the excessive optimism of another part (let’s say, the heart), it is time to invert the roles. Seeing that with the situation that we know, emotion tends to pessimism (my, our, morale is at zero), it is necessary to re-establish the equilibrium by pushing reason towards optimism.
Lucidity, now, should not restrain, but rather sustain debate. How is this possible in an objectively disastrous framework such as that which I have just portrayed? Why an optimism of reason when, according to me, the crisis of the anarchist movement is a structural crisis, a historical crisis? This is not a Panglossian optimism of the kind, “everything is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”. It is instead an optimism that, in a more useful manner, binds not only the real in the strict sense, but also the possible (we have so often spoken, two years ago, of the utopian function and we have never denied a utopian function to reason). This is an optimism that while not lying about the crisis, on the contrary, analyzes it to the point of self-mutilation if necessary and beyond, and opens, in anticipation of and by constructing, positive potentialities. I believe these potentialities to be enormous (see how my reason, obedient, begins to carry out its optimistic function). To overcome this crisis, anarchism must transform itself profoundly. It may then not only stem the crisis, but also endow itself with a vitality equal or superior to its golden age.
In fact, if one wants to see things as they are, it is more a crisis of activism than of anarchism. If many desert activism, few desert anarchism (and with those who don’t desert but still feel ill at ease, it is activism that they doubt, and not anarchism). It is a little like (a horrible but effective analogy) thousands of priests scrapping their vestments because they can no longer tolerate the contingencies of their vocation and/or because they no longer believe in the function of the Church, while remaining Christians. Of course, the anarchism of the “ex” is a repressed and melancholy anarchism, but, avowed or not, the conviction remains, for most, that anarchism as a philosophy of humankind and of society is a very beautiful thing. What has begun to fail and what is increasingly absent is confidence in the sense of activism, above all in its way of “doing politics” and in the possibility of our beautiful revolution.
The validity of anarchism as a philosophy of humankind and of society is not the pathetic nostalgia of an “ex” or the forced faith of a militant. I am objectively convinced that anarchy has, in itself, an inexhaustible force, a richness and freshness which ideological revivals (neo-Marxists, neoliberals, …) only make evident. I want to claim as proof the bold use of libertarian cosmetics in the new, varied ideological make-up. The counter-culture of the 1960s, the feminism of the 70s, the pacifism of the 80s, the new ecological sensitivity and also folkloric, social-musical phenomena (punk) have had and still continue to have many elements pulled from anarchism; even though many comrades think that they could and can substitute them for the anarchist movement. If this is not a passing phenomenon of cultural scavenging, that means that anarchism is a healthy and invigorating food. If 68 provoked a revival of anarchism throughout the world, it is because it was also (not entirely, but not a little) a cultural revolt with libertarian colour. However, channelled into sterile theoretical forms and practices, this revival was of short duration (not so short, thankfully) and, in Europe at least, it manifested itself as a circumstantial phenomenon. The practices proposed could not but be sterile for they proposed anew an obsolete anarchism.
What anarchism then? That which was formed as a felicitous juxtaposition – but historically contingent – of a philosophy of freedom, equality and of an “objectively” revolutionary social context or that which, from this juxtaposition, developed as a libertarian variant of revolutionary socialism? The general crisis of anarcho-syndicalism in the 1920s and 30s however had already signalled the crisis of this latter anarchism, the context of which having changed substantially since then. If one could still delude oneself, up to the fall of fascism, by attributing the cause of the decline of anarchism to repression, the ephemeral revival of the post-war period could have quickly clarified things.
In the 1970s, we did no better than to propose again, by caricaturising it, this obsolete model of anarchism and a semblance of political actions that, given the context, could only repeat, in tracts, newspapers and demonstrations, more or less sophisticated variations on “Long live anarchy” and “The only solution is the revolution”. The consequence could not have been different! There was ennui and frustration; sooner or later, obviously, there would be a crisis.
This crisis, though, however serious it is, can be beneficial. It is perhaps finally the occasion to see more clearly, without illusions (it is not difficult), but also without anguish (it is more difficult); a chance that obliges us, to survive, to thoroughly rethink anarchism, while responding quickly to the sentiment of defeat and powerlessness that insidiously spreads. For years, I concerned myself with anti-repressive campaigns; now, it seems to me much more important to launch an anti-depressive campaign.
The thread of my thoughts is still entangled and will be so for some time yet. But I believe that I have found the thread’s end so as to begin to disentangle it. The anarchism of the 1800s, that has survived until the present with some modest revisions, no longer works and this for at least half a century. It continues to survive, of course, but with periodic crises and an inexorable downward tendency. It transmits to us a mixture of very old (above all, strategic, but not only) and very contemporary elements – excuse the emphasis – that are universally valid and therefore still relevant; so relevant they are pinched by the Right and Left, in little morsels that can be neutralised. It is furthermore an impoverished anarchism in its manifestations, so much so that it can only express itself (or almost) in the form of a political anarchism without however, and this is paradoxical, being able to provide political perspectives to put into practice here and now. Between an improbable proletarian revolution and slippery democratic paths, there would seem to be only space for words, not for action. The impasse is inevitable.
To get beyond this impasse, a different anarchism has to be invented in which the “hard core” of the old anarchism (but what is this exactly? Let us seriously think and discuss this), because, without this hard core, there is no anarchism, neither old nor new. Let this core be enveloped by a pulp of flexible thoughts and actions; adaptable, experimental, debatable, absolutely non-dogmatic. Let an anarchism be invented that is changing and multiform, in which the activist and the poet can recognise themselves; that carries within it struggle, but also life; that reflects everything in individual and collective behaviour which moves in a libertarian direction and which is reflected also in behaviour … Let this be seen as an anarchism that profoundly transforms the social imaginary and that denies domination in all its forms, in all cultural “places”, where it has infiltrated itself for millennia, from sexual relationships to political institutions, from language to technology, from the economy to the family, from the emotions to rationality. This anarchism would not know crises. It would straddle them; the crisis of regeneration of those who are thirty or forty years old, disappointed by politics and ill at ease in society; the crisis of identity of the very young, 10% of which, according to a poll carried out two months ago, do not recognise themselves in any political structure and who believe that society must be radically transformed; the crisis of powerlessness of angry workers, of unhappy housekeepers, of desperate youth, of the non-integrated, of the disintegrated, of the unemployed; the crisis of ennui with … whoever wishes, can add to the list.
An anarchism as a great cultural transformation; it is obvious that a change on this scale can only take place in the long term and begin from this moment on in the forms and with the rhythms that today’s reality and our desire renders possible, without waiting for the revolution (but without necessarily renouncing it) and without despairing should it not appear probable, neither for tomorrow, nor for the day after tomorrow.
The revolution must no longer be neither a myth nor an alibi. The great transformation must not begin now; in fact, it already began more than a century ago, for even if the old anarchism ended up in a dead end (more by our own fault than that of our “fathers” and surely not because of our “grand-fathers”, for whom it was a perfectly adapted instrument), it nevertheless had all of the elements necessary for the great transformation and it is certain that more than one cultural change of a libertarian hue in the last century was directly due to these elements. And extraordinary men and women produced the old anarchism! A few among us had the chance to personally know some of this “great vintage” that in part disappeared or is disappearing now. It is thanks to this direct knowledge that anarchism was passed onto us not only “in the head”, but “in the heart”, and above all, to a degree, we inherited the idea of the polyhedral wealth of anarchism. And it is also in thinking of them that I launch this message of optimism. We have at our disposition a fantastic gold seam. Let us stop digging in the same direction and let us not despair in believing the seam exhausted! Let us look in other directions.
Émile Henry and the sense of measure
Amedeo Bertolo, A Rivista anarchia, nº 72, February – March 1979
We always believed that Émile Henry and his bombing of the Café Terminus [Paris, Gare Saint-Lazare, 12/02/1894], along with the bombing of the Diana Theatre [Milan, 23/03/1921] and other such episodes, were a part of the least exemplary past of anarchism; that it was, if not “a skeleton in the closet”, at least the kind of anarchism that can be explained (or perhaps only exorcised) by a particular social-economic-political context, etc. We always believed that the anarchist movement, learning from its past, had acquired a balanced idea of the possible use of violence as a means of struggle, that “anarchist terrorism”, as much as because it is contrary to our necessary coherence between means and ends, as because it has demonstrated itself to be disastrously counter-productive, was considered a “dead weight” and that only the crudest, deceiving professionals of historiography, of publishing and of the press would fail to shake off that bogey.
We were mistaken. In the pages of the last number of the magazine “Anarchismo”, in a critical review of [Jack London’s] The Minions of Midas, Alfredo Maria Bonanno tells us not only that Émile Henry’s bombing was a qualitative (positive) leap in the use of revolutionary violence, because it marked the passage from a discriminating attack/assassination (against precise individuals of power and privilege) to an attack/assassination of a bunch of “class enemies”, but that even today, a gesture like Henry’s would indicate an analogous “qualitative leap” and would make a “theoretical contribution to the movement”!
We tried to laugh – with difficulty, as with mediocre black humour – but, even though we tried to not take too seriously what we read, we also felt our hair stand on end.
We tried to laugh because we knew the author and his insatiable need to exhibit himself with ever more impressive bluster, pour épater le bourgeois [“to shock the bourgeois”; originally in French], or more likely, because it is difficult in these times to shock the bourgeois with the omnipresence of hackneyed verbal truculence, pour épater l’anarchiste [“to shock the anarchist”; originally in French]. It has been years, in fact, that Alfredo Maria has applied himself to flagellating the anarchist movement become soft and bourgeois (excluding himself) with the modesty of a procurator, the grace of a brawler and the naivety of an advertiser.
In this way, again, we also managed to “digest”, in the same number of the magazine, the article on Proudhon, where he invites us to shoot certain people in the head. It is not the first time that he makes these kinds of invitations. He gained a certain success of notoriety with his “shoot, boy, shoot” (in other words, “let’s arm ourselves and, you, go for it”), seasoned with joyous images such as that of a brain spurting out of a skull. On another note, it seems to have to do with semantics more than anything else: one says today, “I’m going to kill you, knock your head off, blow your brains out” with the same ease that one says “at the limit”, “shit” and “that is”. Of course, it must be tiring to have to always surpass oneself in verbal virulence to continue to “cause a scandal”. Recourse must be had to difficult rhetorical exercises, as with certain recycling of images from the end of the 18th century, already begun with the “false Sartre”[1], another discrete publishing success (it is the time of revivals): for example, the images of fat bourgeoisie (who in the present context have become socialist intellectuals) who wipe the blood of proletarians from their mouths and pick out from their teeth half-chewed bits of workers’ flesh. But up to this point, we are still perhaps precisely in the domain of bad rhetoric, not so much in terms of taste, but in terms of the far too visible disproportion between the reality and the language.
Until now then we had not found sufficient motivation to write, to demand polemically for example if the “Apocalyptic one” considers that Malatesta was soft when he argued with Costa and Merlino, instead than putting a bullet in their head, or to ask him according to what logic a reformist appears to him worthy of this treatment but not a Stalinist, such as those for example from whom he publishes so generously an abundance of documents and communiqués.
Is the line of demarcation between comrades the use of “revolutionary” violence? Is it only the use of bombs and the P38 [Walther P38 pistol] (true or on paper)? Are then even the “revolutionary” fascists of the NAP [Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari/Armed Revolutionary Nuclei] comrades?
Until now, I had not found sufficient motivation to respond to the “provocation”. In fact, I had none, because the taste for polemic is absolutely foreign to my character. The fact is that after twenty years of presence in the movement, I begin to be fed up with polemics which often reveal themselves to be – almost always – occasions for the internal gratification of an aggressiveness that one does not manage to express outwardly, just as the ulcer is the stomach’s self-destruction, the body that attacks itself, the reflex of an individual, anxious impotency. A discussion, a debate, even animated by a few bellicose points (as the Greek etymology of the word “polemic” reminds us), can certainly be constructive, or at least clarifying. But activist experience has taught me that when the discord between positions is great and extends itself beyond the object of a specific question, and even more when in the interlocutor there is an obvious pleasure and self-satisfaction in clashing, then there is a strong probability that the polemic loses the substantial characteristics of the discussion and becomes a game of verbal massacre. It is then better not to choose the path of direct polemic, the tit for tat, but the path of indirect confrontation, both between what one says and does, as between what other individual or collective elements of anarchism do or say.
And yet, I decided to write, running the risk of overvaluing the negative importance of a certain prose, thereby echoing in the [magazine] “A” the hallucinatory absurdities published in another magazine. The fact is that the criticism in question, in my view, goes beyond the limits of the usual extreme terribleness of this magazine, of the verbal violence with which one tries to give life to a surrogate of insurrection on paper, of having this diffuse violence which is in reality an activist practice, an armed version of the illusory “tomorrow, the revolution”, pass for a social practice – just like the Resolution of the Strategic Direction of the self-proclaimed hard core of the Combatant Communist Party/Red Brigades. Concerning the qualities and flaws of this form of struggle, about which we are far from expressing an indiscriminate, negative judgement, the discussion is wide open. It is our view however that this discussion should be led with more equilibrium and moral rigour, from the moment when history should have taught us how delicate and how difficult it is to predict the relationship between the use of violent means and the revolutionary and libertarian growth of consciousness; how difficult it is to maintain the coherence, ethically, as well as, tactically and strategically, between means and ends. But to the extent that someone dreams of “the development of confrontation to unimaginable levels” (to be read in a crescendo with a falsseto voice, and perhaps even with an artistically cunning, dialectal inflection, of false proletariat), this can simply be read as an excess of “optimism”, as some among us exaggerate “pessimism”.
However, when someone theorises firing at the crowd, one exceeds, I believe, the tolerable limit of made to measure rhetorical artifice for an improbable catastrophism, to then fall into the irresponsibility of an emotional excitation and self-excitation that are a matter for psychoanalysis more than they are a concern for political analysis.
For the moment, in this critique, a limit is still placed on indiscriminate violence: it is directed at the “bourgeoisie”. But what is the bourgeoisie today? If the fault of the person one kills is not individual but “objective”, a matter of “class”, how is it to be established where this “bourgeoisie” begins and where it ends? There, where, as in the structures of late Italian capitalism, power is diffuse, diluted in a continuous gradation, as are privilege and parasitism diffused, diluted, mixed; there, where the state is interiorised, where the “heart of the state” is also in the exploited, because there no longer exists an impermeable, proletarian culture opposed to the state; what is this bourgeoisie that one must strike out at? It is true that at a level of sociological abstraction, it is still possible to identify – as we ourselves have done – a dominant class (a capitalist and technical-bureaucratic hybrid) which occupies the summit of the social pyramid. It is however one thing to identify the limits of classes at an analytic level, and another to identify them with an operational goal.
In this situation, it is terribly easy to give to the “bourgeoisie” an ideological and psychological definition that dilates itself at will. And then, for what reason would one stop here in the terrorist escalation, and could one not continue and declare that other “qualitative leaps” are possible? For example, one can defend (one can do almost anything with words) that to assassinate housewives or workers means: 1) to strike at “objectively” guilty individuals (housewives vote Christian Democrat and follow the advice of priests and Gustavo Selva, while the workers “make” the state with the PC [Communist Party] and the labour unions …), 2) to compel the ignorant exploited to wake up from the sleep of television and consumption, to put them before the disguised, objective brutality of the system, 3) and I could go on and they get better. And with these motivations, can one deny the validity of striking at the odious middle class?
Let us stop here, for our intention is not so much – for the reasons already stated – to discuss and therefore to argue point by point, to refute and to document, but to testify to our indignation and out concern. Let us make one last consideration. We have the feeling of going back ten years in time, in 1968, when an enraged band shouted in the streets, “bomb-blood-anarchy”, and a few exalted and irresponsible loudmouths with a nihilistic humour debated the more or less significant utility of placing bombs in banks – the temples of capital – and in shopping centres – the temples of consumption.
Then the massacre of Piazza Fontana occurred, perpetrated by the fascists and the secret services – less loud – and attributed to anarchists. We would not like to find ourselves, for another five years, having to employ all of the energies of the movement in explaining that we are again the victims of a “provocation”. And here the photograph irresistibly comes to mind of Alfredo Maria Bonanno (published a few years ago in a pamphlet put out by “La Fiaccola”) holding a meeting from the height of a stage on which can be read in large letters: “It is the fascists who place bombs”.
Worse still: given that in the heart of the anarchist movement is also reflected the despair/the disintegration of the extreme left (effect of the great deception of revolutionary expectations, in the short term), which substitutes for the vital creativity of its most felicitous expressions a deadly destructiveness – self-destructiveness (homicide-suicide), given that beyond the salon theorists of “proletarian violence”, there also exist protagonists of flesh and blood, of nerves stretched by existential anxiety, marginalisation and rebellion against a situation that seems to be indefinitely “blocked”, we would not want someone to interpret literally the ravings of striking out and of putting, let us say it, a bomb in a bar in the Piazza del Duomo, in Milan, or – why not? – on the Via Etnea in Catania.
It would not be sufficient then to cast off the terrible moral responsibility, to write something similar to what he wrote on the occasion of the assassination of the commissariat of Milan, which is the most recent approximation to an attack that simply aims at striking out (but not so much “striking out” after all and more involuntarily). Therefore, while condemning the action, we would defend the person of the author against the comfortable and far too easy calumnies of the leftist matrix. Not like the “Apocalyptic one”, as he appears on pages 429-431 of his published and unpublished writings, collected in a precious anthology, La dimensione anarchica [The Anarchic Dimension]. A sign of the tumultuous change of the times: these anthologies, in the era of deplorable, bourgeois modesty, were published posthumously, not with the diligence of the author …
[1] This is in reference to a canard published by Anarchismo editions in 1978, falsely attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre and entitled “My Political Testament”, being in fact a text by Joseph Déjacque. [See: Alfredo M. Bonanno, Il falso e l’osceno, Edizione anarchismo, 2007.] The objective of this operation was a) to measure the degree of confusion and idiocy that existed within supposed leftwing culture; b) to verify the reaction times and control of cultural structures; c) to furnish an instrument, the false as an instrument of struggle, thereby providing an indication that could be subsequently developed in a very different way and with different objectives. [T.N.: This footnote is, in part, a translation of a footnote to the same article, as published in the collection, Émile Henry: Polemiques, debats, discussions, Éditions anarchronique, 2018.]
Amedeo Bertolo: The Eulogy of Cider[1]
[…]
M.P. How did you come to anarchism?
A.B. Because of certain readings, some reflections, questions, I felt very close to what appeared to me to be anarchism. My first anarchist readings were a matter of chance. Umanità Nova[2] was posted in a display window near my house. I think that it was Pinelli[3] who would place it there as he was the only anarchist who lived in that neighbourhood. It was a display window used by anarchists, as once political parties had done in the past. I would pass by it and I found the newspaper a little strange, but also amusing.
M.P. Why strange?
A.B. Don’t you think that when a non-anarchist comes across anarchism, that they consider it strange? Let us say outside of the norm. I remember that I found the anti-clerical texts amusing. But I also found their excessive rhetoric a little extravagant. This was how I judged the newspaper at the time… maybe even today, but for other reasons. [Smiles] After, everyday, on returning from the Berchet Secondary School, I would pass by a newspaper kiosk, not from the Piazza Duomo. The person who ran the kiosk was an anarchist. When I began to ask him for the anarchist newspapers that he displayed, he would also pass onto me other publications. […] The word anarchist meant nothing to me, but, as I was intellectually curious, I became interested and I searched in the municipal library for what they had about anarchists. The first two books that I read were not even very favourable to the anarchists. They left me somewhat perplexed, as they spoke above all of bombs, of blood. … I thought that anarchists were a little strange. Meanwhile, fortunately, I started to read the magazine Volontà, published then by Giovanna Berneri[4], a magazine which maintained a decent cultural level. […] I found in Volontà ideas that were very close to what I thought. It was Augusta Farvo, who had the kiosk on the Piazza Duomo, who would give me the magazine. Augusta sold the anarchist press of the time: Il libertario, Umanità Nova, L’Adunata dei Refrattari and Volontà. This old lady was a picturesque character, with an interesting anarchist past. […] I saw her one last time at the funeral of Valpreda[5], but she was already suffering from dementia. She must have been almost ninety years old; however she was suffering from an advanced state of Alzheimer’s. She died in 2004.
[…]
M.P. When was the first time you went to an anarchist meeting?
A.B. It was in 1960. At that time, the anarchists would meet at the headquarters of the Republican Party, on Sunday mornings. My first impression was very positive. I found the gathering to be very lively, everyone spoke, they expressed their opinions, there seemed to me to be no hierarchy and I was left with the impression of a great freedom and equality. And those present were working class and of differing ages, from 50 to 70 years of age. There were some thirty people at that meeting. I believe that it was a meeting of the Milan Libertarian Group, but it was an open meeting. When I arrived, no one asked me who I was. I sat in the back of the room and I attended the meeting. I was enthusiastic about what appeared to me to be a very collective participation. Except me, there was no other young person present…
M.P. And no one asked you anything?
No, no one asked me anything at this first meeting. But at the second and third, I met two people who were younger than the others, Eliane Vincileoni and Giovanni Corradini, who invited me to a gathering at their house. I went and thus began my militant activity. It was the beginning of 1961 and I founded the Gruppo Giovanile Libertario with some mates from secondary school, in collaboration with Eliane and Giovanni. […] They were around thirty five years old and they were the ones who suggested the two themes around which to act and reflect, themes that would accompany my anarchist militancy for many years: solidarity with libertarian Spain and an analysis of class based on three categories: one dominant, the other dominated and another ascending to power, the “new bosses”, which we called techno-bureaucracy. This analysis allowed us to work according to a dynamic class framework, true for periods of transition such as the one we are familiar with today. […] Libertarian Spain was a passion, not only because of the libertarian history of the country, but also because of the hope, I am wont to say almost conviction, of what the Spain of 1936 represented. This interest accompanied me like a “fixed idea” until the middle of the 1970s, until one year after Franco’s death, and it led me to constantly act, through various forms of propaganda and solidarity, with the libertarian movement of that country. […]
Through the intermediary of Eliane, we came into contact with anarchist youth in Paris, with French and French-Spanish youth, the later sons of Spanish refugees. Before the summer of 1962, I organised a fund raiser in my old secondary school for the purchase of a mimeograph machine for the anarchists inside Spain. Then, I got into contact with elements of the organisation Defensa Interior,[6] in particular with Alberola.[7] It was then that, with Luigi Gerli, one of the comrades of the libertarian group who studied philosophy, we assumed the commitment to go to Spain, in a clandestine mission, to take in FIJL pamphlets and new communication codes.
M.P. Why did they for chose two Italians for this task?
A.B. I think that they needed “labourers”. On our side, we really wanted to do it and it was us who proposed to help them. Obviously, non-Spaniards had an advantage in these kinds of missions; young tourists were theoretically less suspect than young Spaniards.
M.P. Can you tell me the story of this “clandestine trip”?
A.B. I set off alone on a motorcycle and Luigi Gerli went with someone called De Tassis, who called himself a revolutionary communist. We didn’t start out together: Gerli and De Tassis, then me. I took the mimeograph machine camouflaged in a painter’s case, with tubes of paint and the outlines of a painting, as a disguise. It was a sketch done by my brother who painted better than I did. At the time, he was sixteen, but he was also already an anarchist. I went through Toulouse, where I met Alberola who gave me all of the information necessary for the mission. Upon arriving in Spain, I went to Barcelona, where I met a group of young people from the city, and then I went to Madrid, where I met Gerli who was wrapping up his part of the endeavour. […] After Madrid, I went on to Cadiz, Almeria and Alicante, where I had three contacts to whom I gave the new codes and the FIJL pamphlets, which I would copy manually with the mimeograph machine at night, in my room, for two or three hours. On returning to Barcelona, I met the comrades again, left them with the mimeograph machine and set out on the return journey. The mission took a few weeks between July and August. I did not have a lot of money, so that I slept in student hostels, in horrible hotels or in the tent. Once, on the beach, between Almeria and Alicante, I had just fallen asleep in my sleeping bag when two Guardia Civil on patrol, who had seen the light of the motorcycle, woke me up. My disguise as an artist-tourist worked to perfection and they didn’t even search me. Fortunately, as I had a package of pamphlets with me… That night, I was a little afraid, though not much; I was more “unconscious” of the risks. The strength of the Ideia… [laughter]
In the middle of September, we learned that three Barcelona comrades had been arrested because of two or three bombings of the Falange and Opus Dei headquarters. A few days later, the news arrived that one of them had been condemned to death and the other two to thirty years in prison by the military tribunal. We then decided to do something to impede this assassination. […] We decided to kidnap the Spanish consul in Milan with the aim of calling attention to this case in public opinion, in particular to the death penalty of one of the three Spanish comrades. I don’t remember how we arrived at this decision. […] In this project, the four members of the group were involved,[8] along with De Tassis and three left socialists from Verona, with whom we had contact. We brought them into the coup not only because we were few, but also because we needed someone who knew how to drive. […] On the 27th of September of 1962, we arrived at the Spanish consulate with a car rented in Verona. We had thought of entering the consulate, and doing whatever was necessary to kidnap the consul. But, when we arrived, the consulate was already closed because we had been delayed by some five or ten minutes. We were amateurs… but luck comes to the aid of amateurs, as we opted for another plan. We then went to the house of the vice-consul, a man named Isu Elias. When we arrived at the Via Vincenzo Monti, where he lived, we decided that it wasn’t a good idea to kidnap him there, because right in front was a carabinieri [Italian national military police] barracks.
We tugged on our imaginations and came up with a new plan. I telephoned the vice-consul, pretending to be the secretary of the assistant to the mayor of Milan and I invited him for lunch on the next day, telling him that I would arrive with a chauffeur to take him to the restaurant. The next day, I confirmed the meeting, telephoning the consulate. The chauffeur was one of the students from Verona, the only one with a driver’s permit, and he was disguised as a motorist with a cap that I had purchased the night before. The car had only been rented for only a few days, as we didn’t have a lot of money at our disposal. In front of the consulate, Aimone placed himself as lookout at the street corner, De Tassis went up to fetch the vice-consul, the driver, Alberto Tomiolo, got out of the car to open the door for him, De Tassis sat in the front seat next to the driver and Pedron and I sat on either side of the vice-consul, with a revolver in hand. We only had a single revolver from the time of the Resistance…
We went to a chalet in a small village near the Swiss border, where we held our hostage for three days. We claimed the action in the name of the International Federation of Libertarian Youth, identifying the motive and demanding the commutation of the death penalty and the prison sentences of the Spanish comrades. In the meantime, we contacted other Spanish comrades, notably Alberola, to give over the vice-consul to them, with the aim of taking him to Geneva and giving him over to an organisation of the United Nations. [..] In sum, the media extensively covered the kidnapping. Things became more complicated with Tomiolo’s fears, who contacted a lawyer friend of his, who advised him to contact journalists from the Stasera, a para-communist daily newspaper from Milan and to try to free the vice-consul, at his own initiative. In the meantime, public opinion and political parties began to move, above the communist youth organisations, which organised demonstrations. Cardinal Montini himself, the future Pope, decided to ask for clemency from the very Catholic Franco. Thanks to this mobilisation, the death penalty was commuted to thirty years in prison and the other two prison sentences were reduced. Our action had a positive outcome for our Spanish comrades and the judicial process had repercussions in the spread of ideas and in the solidarity with libertarian Spain. […]
M.P. Were you surprised by May 68?
A.B. We were stupefied and enthusiastic to see the anarchist flag waving with dignity in the streets as a fundamental part of the revolt. We tried to join the student movement, but with some ideological hesitation, especially at the beginning. We published a beautiful document: “A statement of the Gioventù Libertaria anarchists to the students considered anarchists by the bourgeois press”, in which we said: “Make an effort and you will become anarchists if you leave behind your petty-bourgeois ideas, if you accept the abolition of the separation of manual and intellectual labour and, accordingly, the privilege of the diploma, of post-secondary education, etc.” [laughter]
Then, we organised conferences on May 68 with slides and we began to see people arrive, young people, very young… We began to grow and organise ever more activities: conferences, debates, posters, pamphlets, demonstrations under our flags. […] In France, the movement ended before the arrival of the summer of 1968, while in Italy, it continued through to the whole of 1969. […] The activity was intense. Every Saturday and Sunday, we were at the Círculo Ponte della Ghisolfa, writing pamphlets, making posters. We introduced serigraphy in our activities. […]
M.P. Then the time of the bombs arrived…
A.B. It began in April of 1969, when in Milan the Anarchist Black Cross was organised. […] While we were preparing the first bulletin, fascist bombs exploded which were attributed to the anarchists. When the bomb attacks began, we denounced the provocation. The first bomb attack was on the 25th of April. Some comrades were arrested. […] Then there were the attacks on the trains in August and other smaller incidents in Palermo and Legnano, with an A circled, but for which fascists were arrested. It was obvious that something was being prepared. We engaged in a frenetic counter-information campaign to try to explain what was happening. Reading the first bulletins of the Black Cross, one can see that we already predicted the continuation, even without exactly guessing what the future would bring. We knew that, sooner or later, there would be deaths and that the responsibility would be attributed to anarchists. In fact, there were many deaths and many comrades were accused […]
On the 12th of December, when the bombs exploded in December in Milan, very many Milan anarchists were immediately arrested, including Pinelli. I wasn’t immediately arrested […]
The rest of the story is well known. On the night of the 15th to the 16th of December, Pinelli is thrown from the fourth floor of the commissariat of police, during a police interrogation, following an illegal incarceration. […] After this event, our principal activity was to get counter-information out, denouncing Pinelli’s assassination and affirming the innocence of Valpreda.
[…]
M.P. Did the magazine Interrogations opened new paths for contemporary anarchism?
A.B. For anarchism, I don’t know, for us, it did. […] Through the magazine, we initiated long lasting relations with a part of the community of international libertarian intellectuals who collaborated with it. They were almost all of them in contact with Louis Mercier-Vega,[9] who was an exceptional figure, in terms of intellectual lucidity and passion for anarchism. We took upon ourselves to organise an international colloquium every two years. […] These colloquia had an enormous success. Some five hundred people participated in the first colloquia, with more than ten, twenty, thirty speakers, with different political allegiances, as there were few anarchist intellectuals who could contribute. But this was also because we liked to interact with non-anarchist intellectuals who had interesting ideas for anarchists. […] Generally, we organised these colloquia in Venice because of the logistic advantages of the location. The largest gathering organised by the Centro Studi libertari was in 1984 and it attracted thousands of people to the city.
M.P. In the 1970s, was there an evolution in the anarchist movement, in its ideas?
A.B. Yes, there was, but not all of it was positive. There was a certain mimicry, whether of far-left positions, the extra-parliamentary left, or of traditional anarchist positions, here and there with some touches of armed struggle, which I consider deplorable. The anarchist “people” little by little decreased. It reached its height, numerically speaking, in the mid-1970s. As to its quality, the movement aged, which sometimes suggests a positive maturation, but which can also mean that the best left and only the worse remained. There was a little bit of all of this.
M.P. We are at the end of the 1970s, that is, twenty years after your initiation in the anarchist movement. During this period, many things happened: the creation of magazines, the opening of new spaces, the organisation of numerous cultural activities. Did all of this contribute to the renewal of anarchism?
A.B. Yes, but not sufficiently, in my opinion. But maybe it was impossible to do more. I don’t know. In the beginning, I thought so, however, in fact, I was sought some intellectual exigency in certain areas, themes, which traditional anarchism never explained in a convincing way to me; for example, the analysis of class. In the colloquium dedicated to the “new bosses”, a new discourse on class was produced. The Marxist discourse on class never convinced me, so that we made an effort, successful or not, to clarify things. Self-management, utopia, were other themes that I wanted to clarify, beyond what the traditional anarchist literature gave me. The effort was made, the results didn’t seem to me to be overly brilliant, but only time will tell… On the other hand, due to this work, we were able to spark some intellectual interest, to establish a dialectical relation even with non-anarchists, more or less libertarian. I don’t know if anything remains of all that. […]
M.P. Why create the Centro Studi in 1976?
A.B. On the one hand, we did so to promote original libertarian research. On the other hand, it was to preserve the memory of anarchism in an archival centre. […]
M.P. And why create the publisher Elèuthera in 1986?
A.B. Because, on the one hand, it seemed to us that a “strictly” anarchist publisher such as Antistato was at the end of its possibilities, even if there had already been an opening with the collection, “Segno libertario”. On the other hand, after a certain success in the first half of the 1970s, towards the end of the decade, sales began to decline and distribution problems began to worsen. Beyond this, we thought it would be interesting to develop what we had initiated with the collection “Segno libertario”, giving priority to a new publisher that was more artisanal than it was militant.
[…]
M.P. What reactions were there, among anarchists, to the change in the publisher’s name, from Antistato to Elèuthera, and in the themes of the the books?
A.B. As in other cases, we have to first understand what we mean by “anarchists”. Active militants represent maybe a thousand people. But there are also thousands of people who consider themselves more or less anarchists and who, in their own way, are active, but who do not recognise themselves in the structures of the movement, in the groups, in the places, etc. Let us say that with Elèuthera, we reached these “non-organised anarchists”; non-organised, not in their lives, but in the sense that they do not frequent anarchist spaces, they don’t go to demonstrations. […] We think we reached the libertarian fringe and that this is potentially vital for the renewal of the “anarchist movida”, not to say for anarchism tout court. […] It is impossible to define this fringe. It is like the old alcohol metaphor. There are numerous alcoholic drinks, the alcohol of which is obtained by fermentation or by different concentrations. Pure alcohol is undrinkable, but it is essential to make an alcoholic drink. Let us say that pure alcohol is anarchy, but it is produced, for it to be consumable, according to the times and places of its production and according to the raw material used. In this alcohol metaphor, the word “libertarian” could represent “cider”, that is, an alcoholic drink with a low level of alcohol! I don’t want to disparage this drink, which I appreciate, and I also don’t want to say that those who belong to this fringe are not sufficiently anarchists. A drink with little alcohol can be quite good. The metaphor however doesn’t push us towards abstinence. […]
Anarchy can and should be thought of in the same way as we think about the quantity of alcohol that we should have in our drinks… In the end, classical anarchism was more libertarian than anarchist. For example, Bakunin’s action and those of the First International were not anarchy: they were examples of libertarian practice with a partial anarchist content. Anarcho-syndicalism was and is still a libertarian action and thought. […] I believe it was the feeling, or the certainty, that traditional anarchist practice was in no way satisfactory, that it offered no results, that it was something that would lead us to an ultra-minority anarchist ghetto, that led me to address myself to the world of “libertarians”. […]
M.P. According to you, who were the original libertarian thinkers who manifested themselves over these last years?
A.B. Colin Ward[10]… He inspired us a great deal, even though his thought did not bring anything significantly new to anarchism. Then there is Castoriadis, who made very important contributions to libertarian thought, with his theory of the social imaginary and with the idea of self-creation of society and of man, even though he never defined himself as a libertarian. […] Ward is interested in a revolutionary project in which the libertarian forces emerge from the present and in a non-resolvable dialectic between authority and freedom. Ward belongs to the period after the Second World War. His thought and his work are situated in an objectively non-revolutionary reality, in a reality where revolution is not thinkable. It is for this reason that he thought in terms of the executibility of anarchy, taking as an example what appears, more or less spontaneously, in society, and interpreting it in an anarchist fashion. We can add to this list Lourau[11] and Eduardo Colombo[12], and probably others…
[…]
M.P. Is anarchy perhaps a means and not an end?
A.B. It is neither a means, for an end… it is rather a method. Anarchy can be understood as an instituting principle of a non-hierarchical society, in the same that the State is an instituting principle of a modern, hierarchical society. But I prefer to see it as an ethical dimension of values, as a constellation of values that can be synthesised with the terms freedom, equality, solidarity, diversity. Therefore, it is an anarchy that is not a model of society, or rather, a utopian model, abstract and not very interesting, but which can be useful, as the perfect circle can be. It is however more useful to see anarchy as a constellation of values that should influence our daily individual and collective, personal and social, action.
I do not see any opposition or incompatibility between a social anarchism and anarchism as a life style, as some practice it. I believe they are quite compatible. Anyone of us can be carried towards the one or the other, but a little of one is necessary in the other and vice versa, otherwise the necessary coherence of the anarchist method is not possible. Without claiming a perfect coherence between values and their concrete incarnation, one must tend toward the most libertarian attitude possible, the most egalitarian attitude, the attitude of the greatest solidarity, according to differing situations, the capacities and possibilities of individuals, in the times and places where we live. […]
As I look back on my forty years as an anarchist, I think that I always applied the formula created by Mercier-Vega, a formula that holds as much for my past, as for the future: without illusions and without regrets!
[…]
M.P. To conclude this interview, can you tell me of your plans for the coming years?
A.B. I don’t know. I navigate by sight. I don’t have long term projects, only short term, like the work I do for Elèuthera and the Centro Studi Libertari.
[1] Excerpts from an interview with Amedeo Bertolo (A.B) by Mimmo Pucciarelli (M.P.) and published in Laurent Patry and Mimmo Pucciarelli, L’anarchisme en personnes, Atelier de Création Libertaire, 2006, pp. 149-221.
[2] The newspaper Umanità Nova was originally founded by Errico Malatesta in 1920. Shut down by the Italian fascist regime in 1922, it would reappear in 1945 and it is currently the weekly newspaper of the Federazione anarchica italiana.
[3] Giuseppe Pinelli was born in Milan, on the 21st of October, 1928. He was defenestrated on the night of the 15th to the 16th of December in 1969, from the fourth floor of the Milan police headquarters, where he was being held and interrogated as a result of a series of bombings in Milan and Rome on the 12th of December of the same year. One of the bombs exploded in the headquarters of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, located in the Piazza Fontana, Milan, killing 17 people and injuring 88. Given its gravity, the event would have significant political importance, being part of the “strategy of tension” developed by the extreme-right, which sought a hardening of the state’s repressive politics, as a response to student protests and workers militancy in the factories. Pinelli would be arrested and die in police custody in this context, with anarchists accusing the sadly notorious police commissioner Luigi Calabresi (himself assassinated a few years later) of direct responsibility for his death. This episode was the inspiration for Dario Fo’s theatrical play, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970).
[4] Italy, 05/05/1897-14/03/1962. Born Giovanna Caleffi, she was Camillo Berneri’s partner, until the latter’s assassination in 1937, in Spain, at the hands of the communists.
[5] Pietro Valpreda: Milan, 22/06/1933-06/07/2002. Despite being innocent, he was imprisoned between 1969 and 1972 for the bombings in Piazza Fontana (see footnote 3).
[6] Defensa Interior was a clandestine organisation that had as its objective to struggle against the Franco regime from inside Spain. Founded in September of 1961, at the congress of the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) in exile, in Limoges, it was then ratified by the two other organisations: the Movimiento Libertario Español-FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) and the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias –FIJL. The Defensa Interior was never welcomed by the bureaucrats of the CNT and the FAI, with the result that it would be formally dissolved at the congress of the CNT in exile, in Montpellier (1965). The FIJL did not accept this decision, having continued with clandestine activities.
[7] Octavio Alberola: Minorca, 1928. Alberola was an Anarcho-syndicalist militant, who was very active in the struggle against Franco. [TN]
[8] Aimone Fornaciari, Amadeo Bertolo, Gianfranco Pedron and Luigi Gerli. [TN]
[9] This was one of the pseudonyms of Charles Cortvrint. He was born in 06/05/1914 in Brussels and he committed suicide in 20/11/1977 in Collioures, France. Among his many engagements, he participated in the Spanish revolution of 1936 joining the International Group of the Durruti Column. He collaborated extensively with the anarchist press, founded various magazines, as well as being a writer. He is without a doubt one of the most remarkable individuals of the anarchist movement after WWII.
[10] London 14/08/1924-Ipswich 11/02/2010. Ward was an anarchist militant, architect, urban-planner, and writer. [TN]
[11] René Lourau: France, 1933-2000. Lourau was a sociologist and a disciple of Henri Lefebvre. [TN]
[12] Argentina, 01/09/1929-Paris, 13/03/2018. Colombo was an anarchist militant, a doctor, psychoanalyst and writer. He was one of the most important figures of contemporary anarchism.
For more on Amedeo Bertolo, see the Kate Sharply Library (here) and the Centro studi libertari – Archivio G. Penelli (here).
Anthologies of Bertolo’s work have been published in Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.