A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #42 - For a history of the Libertarian Communist Movement in Italy by A.G. (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Capital is a historically highly dynamic process, which has always 
placed change at the basis of its survival and evolution, bringing with 
it enormous contradictions. Production has progressively 
internationalized, merging the manual and intellectual productive 
capacities of over 3.5 billion wage earners, who produce social wealth 
that, rather than being redistributed equitably to address the most 
serious imbalances, is concentrated in a handful of private hands. It is 
from this unresolvable historical contradiction that "all the evil in 
the world" originated and continues to replicate itself. This awareness, 
verified during the class conflict, has also constituted the cornerstone 
of every subsequent development and achievement attributable to 
anarchist communism in Italy and thus characterizes the phase we are 
analyzing, which began in the late 1960s with the rebirth of the 
anarchist communist and libertarian communist groups (hereinafter GCL), 
with libertarian communism being understood in this specific phase as 
synonymous with anarchist communism.

The post-war period saw an anarchist movement reconstituted after the 
twenty-year fascist period, but deeply tested by the defeats it suffered 
that had exacerbated its limitations and delays: the alternating events 
of the Russian Revolution up to the consolidation of Stalinism in the 
communist parties affiliated with the Third International; the defeats 
of revolutionary attempts in the post-war period; the rise of fascism 
and Nazism in Europe, together with the defeat suffered in the war and 
revolution in Spain, sharpened the crisis that unleashed the divergences 
that had developed in terms of political and organizational responses.

The new energies, especially youthful and class-based, emerging from the 
resistance to fascism, in which anarchists participated significantly, 
are unable to reverse the crisis of perspective that is making political 
and social action confusing and uncertain.

But the heirs of what was once a prestigious revolutionary movement had 
no intention of stopping, even though the internal divergences that 
arose, and the social and class conflict that began to manifest itself 
in the late 1960s, found the Italian anarchist movement in a state of 
unresolved crisis in theory, strategy, tactics, and organizational 
practice. Reactions to this state of affairs were manifold, including 
that attributable to the GCLs, both outside and within the Italian 
Anarchist Federation (FAI), founded in September 1945. While it is true 
that from the late 1960s, the GCLs began to move decisively toward the 
ambitious goal of building an anarchist communist political organization 
(OP) in Italy, it is also true that these same groups were unable to 
critically engage with the political and organizational experiences most 
closely related to them.

The experience of the Gruppi Anarchici d'Azione Proletaria (GAAP, 
1949-57), which was similar in time and had also attracted some of the 
same influences within the FAI, is not contextualized and subjected to 
the necessary critique, but rather schematically reiterated in its 
relevant content. In this regard, it is worth remembering that the 
dispersal of militant sources and resources and the epilogue of the GAAP 
affair, which flowed into Leninism, social democracy, and dispersal, 
certainly would not have helped. This ended up constituting a cumbersome 
legacy, difficult to reintroduce, especially given the controversies it 
sparked within the Italian anarchist movement. Moreover, the dispersion 
mainly concerned political development, which was largely consciously 
removed: an omission that did not allow the GCLs to rework, valorize, 
and critically re-propose those distinctive "fixed points" that, in 
theory, strategy, and in matters of political organization, had 
particularly characterized the GAAP experience.

The GCL also identified the organizational discontinuity that 
characterized anarchism throughout its history as one of the causes of 
its crisis: they rediscovered and reintroduced a materialist and 
communist Bakunin, Carlo Cafiero, and Pietro Gori, who moved in the same 
direction as Luigi Fabbri and Errico Malatesta, to name just a few 
theorists-all reconsidered in a classist sense in the qualifying sense 
of the term-to relaunch, in theory and, above all, in social reality, 
the process of building the Political Organization of anarchist 
communists. This considerable effort saw the publication of numerous 
handouts on the history of the workers' movement and anarchism, as well 
as elaborate studies on the characteristics of the current economic and 
political phase, on trade union intervention, in mass movements, in the 
community, on issues such as healthcare and the role of schools. These 
were prerequisites for organized action in social reality, which also 
reflected concrete attempts at coordination at the national level.

But, despite this effort, the GCL began its political and organizational 
journey from an experience inevitably limited by the young age of its 
militant members, who-lacking historical memory-would have struggled 
greatly to recover and critically embrace previous experiences and 
developments, to acquire and transform them into a truly viable organic 
political proposal.

The lack of historical memory due to the dispersion and omission of the 
materialist and communist presuppositions of anarchism, combined with 
the aforementioned organizational discontinuity that has characterized 
anarchism itself since the First International, also negatively 
influenced the acceptance of the contents of another historical 
reference point, so to speak: the Arshinov Platform (named after its 
probable material author, the Russian Petr Arshinov, 1887-1937?), due to 
how it was born (1926), how it developed and, above all, due to its 
decidedly classist orientation and the political and organizational 
contents that distinguished it. The Arshinov Platform is one of the most 
forgotten and least studied parentheses in the history of the anarchist 
movement, and this not only because of its small quantitative size but, 
above all, because of the bitter debate that followed and which saw the 
major exponents of the international anarchist movement of the time 
enter into the fray in the raging polemics. The attempt undertaken by 
the Russian and Ukrainian anarchists exiled in Paris (including Arshinov 
himself, Nestor Makhno, Ida Mett and others) which in 1926 had given 
rise to the Platform , together with that undertaken by the GAAP in 
Italy a quarter of a century later, did not propose a repetitive and 
nostalgic return to the dictates of the First International, but 
constituted a real process of revision of the doctrine, in the awareness 
of the serious crisis of anarchism, for its renewed affirmation in the 
social reality in unprecedented phases of capitalist development.

This is not the place to delve into historical reconstructions of the 
Platform , but it is important to note that in Italy the GCLs drew from 
it some of the political and organizational concepts that would become 
distinctive, such as the organization's unity in theory and strategy, 
tactical homogeneity, and collective responsibility. However, they 
re-proposed them in a decontextualized manner, similar to that 
undertaken in adopting the political and organizational concepts of the 
more recent GAAP experience. Thus, even in the case of the Platform , 
there was a lack of critical assessment of an experience that tore the 
international anarchist movement apart: along with the Platform 's 
constructive suggestions, the GCLs failed to grasp its weak points, 
limiting themselves to re-proposing organizational statements that 
inevitably ended up assuming efficiency-oriented and self-referential 
roles. This was a limit clearly identified by the GAAP who instead tried 
to "resolve" it with an appropriate and documented elaboration (among 
other elaborations we recall: Resistenzialismo piano di ritardo; Piccola 
enciclopedia Anarchica; the Readings of Bakunin and Malatesta; the 
numerous articles published in «Umanità Nova», «Volontà», «L'Impulso», 
«Il Libertario»), to reposition their political and organizational 
proposal in the historical phase in which they found themselves intervening.

These insights and considerations, albeit with some exceptions, did not 
constitute a shared and collective reference for the GCLs, remaining at 
the core of the individual groups' patrimony and therefore marginalized 
from the overall political development. They resulted in a simplistic 
assumption of the most functional and immediately adaptable aspects to 
the organizational path they intended to undertake. The National 
Conference of Anarchist Workers (CNLA), held in August 1973 in Bologna, 
carefully prepared by several groups within and outside the FAI 
(primarily the Ligurian groups of the OAL), marked the high point of the 
GCLs' qualitative and quantitative presence, measurable in terms of 
political development. The conference will see the advance participation 
of fifty-six groups, approximately twenty of which are members of the 
FAI (although the final document was subsequently signed by thirty 
groups due to various absences from the conference or disagreements over 
its contents), and an estimated attendance of around two hundred, 
largely young workers, who will define the relationship to be maintained 
with the Mass Organization (OdM), meaning the union in its broadest 
sense. The CNLA member groups will bring the conference's 
recommendations to their various local contexts: recognition of the 
relationship between the PO and the OdM, a relationship that, with some 
lexical artifice, is defined as "dialectical," leads to the indication 
of their presence in the union's grassroots bodies and is assumed and 
pursued with substantial uniformity. This practice undoubtedly 
represents progress compared to that pursued in other areas of the 
anarchist movement, where decisions made at congresses, or in any case 
collectively, are not binding: the CNLA's recommendations are instead 
developed collectively and adopted as the strategy and tactics of union 
intervention, despite some divergences limited, however, to only a few 
groups.

The clash with the FAI was inevitable, and the subsequent 11th Congress 
of the Federation, held in Carrara in December 1973, marked the 
definitive break with the path undertaken by the CNLA's member groups. 
In its aftermath, the CNLA would never match the quantitative and 
qualitative results achieved in Bologna, taking on the form of what it 
truly was: a coordination of anarchist communist and libertarian 
communist groups among which some disagreements were beginning to 
develop over the methods and timing of the OP's construction. From the 
very beginning, it would characterize itself not so much as the embryo 
of the OdM, as some of its internal members believed, albeit 
approximate, but as the forum in which the strategy and tactics of union 
and community intervention were defined, thus qualifying as a 
specifically political forum.

The achievement of a certain unified goal, however, fails to address 
another emerging limitation, already highlighted and increasingly 
complicated: the groups in question originate as more or less deeply 
rooted, extensive, and homogeneous territorial aggregations, which, 
however, do not transcend, at least at their peak, the regional (groups 
from Puglia, Marche, Tuscany, Emilia, Liguria) or local (Milan, Rome, 
Naples, Perugia, etc.) dimension. Thus, the ensuing confrontation 
between these organized entities begins, develops, and endures as a 
confrontation between pre-established realities.

The GCLs, therefore, do not conceive of themselves as a process of 
growth of a militant group aiming to become essentially homogeneous in 
theory, strategy, tactics, and organizational practice, but rather as a 
coordination of organized groups that arose in heterogeneous 
environments and, as such, face objective challenges. This is another 
difference from the orientations of the Platform , which positioned 
itself as a militant entity whose organic coordination would constitute 
a PO, with the groups as the territorial articulation and not, 
conversely, the premise for the organizational aggregation process. The 
GCLs, instead, tend to achieve theoretical, strategic, and 
organizational homogeneity just like single, already organized entities: 
it follows that the confrontation established is between groups; that 
the unitary processes they intend to pursue characterize the groups; 
that in these processes, the driving force is inevitably the most 
representative groups, with all the inherent rigidities and in a local 
context that has never truly been overcome.

Furthermore, and this is a not irrelevant detail, the overall experience 
of the GCL presents itself as an alternative to the FAI, responding to 
its ostracism with a logic of opposition similar to the entire 
experience of the Platform , when a profound and not merely formal 
dialogue was necessary precisely in consideration of the efforts made by 
the FAI itself on an organizational level in the event that, in 1965, 
had led to the "Associative Pact" and the split with the 
anti-organizational tendencies represented by the Anarchist Initiative 
Groups (GIA): the phase had changed and the Italian and international 
anarchist movement had changed since the times of the Platform , 
assuming, for the sake of argument, that the logic of opposition was, in 
that case too, appropriate.

All these events, however, were insufficiently evaluated by the GCL, 
further demonstrating that the lack of historical memory discourages 
critical evaluation and leads to the schematic replication of behaviors 
borrowed from previous reference experiences, which, decontextualized, 
lead to error. Thus, a retreat begins to occur with respect to both the 
GAAP and the Platform , when the latter experiences sought to recover, 
restore, and re-propose the Bakuninian concept of the "active minority" 
and "organizational dualism," in a dual dimension in the relationship 
between Mass Organization and Political Organization, expressed in an 
organizational and militant practice. The path undertaken will therefore 
prove to be overall fragile, both due to the difficulties of the phase 
and the lack of rooting in social reality, and because the GCLs are 
unable to fully homogenize, overcoming the limited coordination between 
groups, characterized by traits of self-referentiality and sectarianism. 
Objectively, the problem was identifying which territorial entity should 
manage the unification processes, without making any progress beyond the 
limit of affinity groups, where the strongest and most active organized 
entity ends up exerting a conditioning effect on all the others.

The result was an unbalanced process, incapable of developing 
appropriate management of resources (intellectual, militant, material, 
economic, etc.) which, being limited, would not allow for their 
investment according to the priorities dictated by the current phase of 
a process of collective growth. This growth would remain the property 
not of a militant network but of individual groups, some of which would 
eventually disperse. Despite all these limitations, the GCL nevertheless 
carried out a fruitful and highly timely revival of communist and 
class-based anarchism, resuming social intervention, especially in the 
trade union, student, and local areas. They engaged in historical and 
political development, resulting in interesting processes of qualitative 
and quantitative growth, albeit limited to certain geographical areas. 
In those years, the GCL rediscovered and re-proposed the organizational 
issue, also stimulating debate within and outside the FAI. They 
demonstrate that a communist anarchism, firmly rooted in the class 
struggle and grasped in its transformations within the context of 
ongoing imperialist dynamics, is truly viable and feasible. They 
identify the need for organized political intervention in social 
reality, one that positions anarchism as an active and visible entity, 
characterized by an autonomous political development capable of being 
applied at a mass level, fostering the process of building the OP. 
Despite countless contradictions, the GCL nevertheless evolves toward an 
anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, internationalist anarchism, open to 
clear processes of updating, thus facilitating a critical recovery of 
the most significant historical experiences of the proletarian and 
anarchist movement. They attempt to counter discontinuity and 
organizational decline with the revival of Bakunin's concept of an 
active minority and organizational dualism, which will characterize the 
subsequent paths of anarchist and libertarian communism in Italy.

The late 1970s saw the maturation of the defeat of the entire social and 
class opposition: imperialist competition increased and capital 
reorganized itself on a global scale in a process that would later go 
down in history as neoliberal globalization, thus linking to current 
scenarios. The crisis that would overtake the entire extra-parliamentary 
left, within the context of the movement's retreat in 1977-a 
foreshadowing the great capitalist restructuring of the subsequent 1980s 
with the defeat of the trade union movement at the gates of FIAT (1980) 
and the social and political disintegration that followed-would 
inevitably also involve the GCL, whose numbers would decline 
considerably, although, after various vicissitudes, they managed to 
organize themselves at the national level in 1985, into the Federation 
of Anarchist Communists.

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