Preliminary Programme

This paper will give a tour d'horizon from the origins of Fascism and its encounters with anarchism to the demise of the regime and the settling of accounts between former 'sovversivi' in the Spanish Civil War and the Resistance. Although few anarchists joined Mussolini in his war interventionism or in the formation of the 'fascism of the first hour', they were a strategic group who catalyzed Mussloni's desertion of the socialist movement. This force field of shared interests in Sorel, Stirner, Futurism and insurrectionalism, was evident when Mussolini was a putative left-wing socialist before 1914. From the war to the Biennio Rosso (1919-1920), shifting alliances with certain social interventionists and Fiumian legionaries kept lines of communication open between the evolving populist right and the unorthodox libertarian left. However, the battlelines became clearer once fascism became a mass agrarian movement in the spring of 1921. From then on, the disillusioned 'social' right and the anarchists posed a threat to Fascism as movement and then as Regime.
Meanwhile Fabbri, Malatesta and Bernieri wrote some of the earliest and most perceptive dissections of the regime in the 1920s and the 1930s.
These discussions will make up the second half of this paper. (Show less)

Locals and cosmopolitans in the German anarcho-syndicalist movement
The German syndicalists developed from a small radical group to a mass organisation of 150,000 members in the revolutionary phase between 1918 and 1923. Thereafter, the anarcho-syndicalists stabilised as the „Freien Arbeiter – Union Deutschlands (AS)“ [FAUD (S)] on a relatively high level of 25,000 members. In this paper I want to demonstrate the influence of the FAUD on a local level between 1918 and 1933. In particular I will focus on the few hundred individuals who David Montgomery referred to as a ‘militant minority.’ These men and women forged their co-workers into a self-confident class.
Drawing on Robert Merton, I refer to the men and the few women who held the power locally and who were rooted in the working class as the locals of German anarcho-syndicalism. The existence of these locals can be proven for all places where the FAUD existed for a while. They were of crucial importance for the cohesion of the organisation. The cosmopolitans of the German and anarcho-syndicalism were more interested in national and international dealings. They comprised only a few individuals such as Rudolf Rocker and August Souchy who were responsible for the strong international leanings of German speaking in anarcho-syndicalism.
In my paper I will analyse three levels of German anarcho-syndicalism: the meaning, the conflicts, and the co-operation between the locals and the cosmopolitan elite of German and anarcho-syndicalism. (Show less)

Questions of anarchist theory and tactics are often presented as “squaring‐the‐circle” problems, where the practicable options are precluded by anarchist principles and the allowable ones are impossible: so it is for the dilemmas between reform and revolution, coercion and persuasion, organization and spontaneity. The question of collective action is no exception. Action by anarchist minorities seems inherently elitist and ultimately authoritarian, while action by anarchist masses is hopelessly unlikely. For insight on this question, as on others, it may be useful to turn to the common sense of Errico Malatesta. In his theory and practice the apparently irreconcilable horns of the dilemma become complementary halves of a coherent, dynamic view of social change.
Malatesta’s starting point was the acknowledgment of the problem that revolutionaries “elites” faced: conscious minorities could not substitute for the masses if a revolution was to be truly emancipatory, at the same time that the action of the masses could not be forthcoming at the will of the conscious minorities. Such recognition led Malatesta to positing a clear distinction between anarchist and workers’ organizations and to setting a double task for anarchists. As an autonomous conscious minority—one among many competing forces in society—they were to organize amongst themselves and fully advocate their ideas. As a segment of the masses they were to be as flexible as possible in order to steer collective action in an emancipatory direction. However, they could exert influence among the working masses only by “going to the people.”
Malatesta coupled voluntarism with realism: “one must aim at what one wants, doing whatever one can.” Anarchists knew what they wanted. What could be done depended on the masses. Anarchists did not intend to impose their programme to still unconvinced masses, but equally they could not and did not want to wait for the masses to become fully anarchist before making a revolution. On the one hand, social crises were bound to happen long before anarchists could become majoritarian. On the other hand, only a limited number of people could be converted in a given environment. Revolutionary consciousness could not be the prerogative of large masses under the existing material constraints of exploitation and oppression. Revolutions themselves, by removing the barriers to social progress, created new opportunities for raising the moral level of the masses. Anarchy could only be realized to the extent that such moral readiness was widespread among the population.
In sum, Malatesta, combined flexibility, pragmatism, and a disenchanted outlook on the masses with theoretical integrity. Anarchist gradualism was his ultimate response to the conundrum that anarchist “elites” faced. The uplifting of popular consciousness and the increase of freedom, equality and wellbeing fed each other in a dynamic, iterative, and open‐ended process. (Show less)