Articoli di riviste sul tema "Anarchism – Italy"

AbstractThis paper discusses Pietro Gori’s charismatic leadership of the Italian anarchist movement at the turn of the nineteenth century and, in particular, the characteristics of his political communication. After a discussion of the literature on the topic, the first section examines Gramsci’s derogatory observations on the characteristics and success of the communicative style adopted by anarchist activists such as Gori. The second investigates the political project underpinning the kind of “organized anarchism” that Gori championed together with Malatesta. The third section unveils Gori’s communication strategy when promoting this project through those platforms considered by Gramsci as being primary schools of political alphabetization in liberal Italy: trials, funerals, commemorations, and celebrations. Particular attention is devoted to the trials, which effectively demonstrated Gori’s modern political skills. The analysis of Gori’s performance at the trials demonstrates Gramsci’s mistake in identifying Gori simply as one of the champions of political sentimentalism.

Since its crisis-marked beginnings, punk’s relationship with anarchism could be described as ‘complicated’. In spite of the wide use of the word and the circled ‘A’ symbol, not every artist considered anarchy in its political meaning of radical egalitarianism and libertarian socialism. This article explores the ‘impulse of anarchy’ in punk, as considered by Edoardo Sanguineti, as a more-than-political aesthetic phenomenon present in all avant-garde poetry (and arts in general) in modern history, consciously or not, whose ultimate goal is to change life and modify the world. Through this perspective, the article presents a comparative analysis of three expressions of crisis by three different punk groups from three different European countries, in three different languages: ‘Možgani na asfaltu’ (‘Brains on the Asphalt’) in Slovene by Berlinski zid from (then) Yugoslavia, ‘Lasciateci sentire ora’ (‘Let Us Hear Now’) in Italian by Franti from Italy and ‘Crisis’ in English by Poison Girls from the United Kingdom. The article will thus try to contribute to the understanding of anarchist and anarchic influences in coping with crisis under international capitalism and bourgeois hegemony.

SummaryThis article examines the role of charismatic leadership in the Italian anarchist and socialist movements in the period up to the biennio rosso. It focuses on the activities of Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) in 1920 after his return from exile in London. Italian anarchism may have relied upon the informal prestige of leaders such as Malatesta to keep the sinews of its organizations together, however even if Malatesta drew enormous crowds on his return, his oratory was far less demagogic than his maximalist socialist competitors. Malatesta's charisma was a product of the supercharged atmosphere of 1920 and his reputation as the ‘socialist Garibaldi’ or the ‘Lenin of Italy’. In fact his Socratic approach, demonstrated in his written and spoken interventions, was rather closer to the educationalism of Mazzini.

The Italian Risorgimento left behind a series of figures and personalities that have become part of the mythopoiesis of a modern nation. An important role was played by the figure of Carlo Pisacane, who on many occasions was stripped of his philosophical-political stance to make way for the figure of the Risorgimento martyr or romantic passionate. We want here to follow in the footsteps of those who have paid particular attention to Pisacane’s political, philosophical and social thought, describing him as a precursor of socialism, anarchism and the idea of a republican Italy united in an assembly of communes. The purpose of this paper is to offer reflections on the problem of education in Pisacane, a subject that very few historians and biographers of Pisacane have addressed and that he himself treated only in passing, but to which he gave an important place in his work. Although he was not an educator or pedagogue, Pisacane attempted to sketch a model of national education because he felt it necessary to complete his description of the social order that would emerge from the new social pact and to emphasize the importance that would be given to education and the pedagogical function in the future organization of the masses.

R. G. Davis directed the first commercial productions of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Won't Pay We Won't Pay!, both in Canada and the USA. In the context of the original close relevance of the plays to the political situation in Italy, he looks at how in the USA especially their force has been diluted if not extinguished by the imperative to conform to the inherent anti-communsm of American culture. R. G.Davis founded and directed the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, and the Epic West Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre at Berkeley in 1975. Later he returned to academia to study science and ecology, and visited Cuba to examine the culture of organic farming. He has contributed previously to New Theatre Quarterly and its predecessor, specifically on Fo in two articles for the original Theatre Quarterly: ‘Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo’, in TQ 8 (1986), and ‘Dario Fo Off-Broadway: the Making of Left Culture under Adverse Conditions’, in TQ 40 (1981).

In the late nineteenth century, prompted by uneven industrial development, the predominantly agrarian regions of Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Istria were slowly undergoing processes of urbanization and economic transformation. As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, these regions were subject to dynamic migrations of the labor force from several regions and neighboring countries. Industrialization was the crucial impetus behind the formation of the first working-class organizations and syndicates, but their development, their socio-political goals, and the strategies they employed were heavily influenced by socialist theoreticians and agitators from Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and Italy. This ideologically heterogeneous labor movement depended on cross-border cooperation with different individuals and collectives, ranging from Hungarian Marxists and Austrian social democrats to Italian anarchists. Even though unions and subversive pamphlets were illegal and closely monitored, migratory activists continued to agitate and collaborate with local workers through various underground channels. This paper will analyze various ideological inputs of migratory workers within the area that is now present-day Croatia during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. It will also examine the perception of their presence and activism articulated by political authorities and mainstream newspapers. Due to a lack of similar research, emphasis will be placed, to some extent, on anarchist activities in this area.

Seven Italian volunteers decided on 29 July 1914 to join the Serbian army responding to a proclamation issued by the son of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Ricciotti. They were Republicans and Anarchists, and saw their engagement as the advance party of Italian volunteers that would eventually force Italy to join the ranks of the Entente in order to accomplish the last phase of the Italian Risorgimento by liberating Trento and Venezia Giulia with the city of Trieste. Five of them were killed on the Drina river, while the remaining two returned soon afterwards to Italy. Nevertheless, their memory was honoured as the first Italian participants in the Great War and as the tangible proof of the Italian engagement in favour of Serbia, and later Yugoslavia.

In 2019, during the centenary of De Carlo’s birth, Massimo Cacciari spoke about immaterial architecture as a possible new frontier of architectural research of our time. During the Cold War, new networks were created in Italy, beyond national borders, based on international dialogues and artistic collaborations. After the analysis of some phenomena that characterized the Cold War and the creative processes of architectural production in the twentieth century, this research describes some projects and writings of Giancarlo De Carlo and Vittoriano Viganò. The contribution outlines the influence of Cold War policies on the works of these Masters under the banner of two slogans: “Anarchist Architecture” and “Interrupted Sign”. According to these aspects, it is possible to emphasize the presence of a root of architectural design that tends to the formal disintegration of architecture.

Abstract Among the great variety of fiscal institutions, a current tendency, probably favored by the globalization process, is that to increase the power of minor levels of government. This tendency was particularly emphasized in Europe in consequence of the transfer of powers from national governments to the European Union.A typical case of this decentralization process is that of Italy, a country that since its origin, in 1861, was based on the Napoleonic administrative centralization. In 2001, however, a constitutional reform decided that «The Republic is constituted by municipalities, provinces, metropolitan cities, regions and the State” (art. 114).Since that time, Italian regions, and more than 8000 local governments, started acting almost independently from the central government (from which they continued, however, to draw a great part of their financial resources).This situation appears to be proper of a kind of ‘anarchic polycentrism’ rather than fiscal federalism, with a lot of contradictions between decisions taken by the central government and those of the subcentral and local powers.This paper focuses on the bureaucratic and political shortcomings of the devolution of powers in a centralized and unitary state.

The author is an annual contract professor at the University of Venice - Ca' Foscari, Treviso campus, Italy, with a course on Political and Economic Geography. Previously he had annual contracts at the Institute of Human Geography, State University of Milan with courses on Geopolitical Dynamics and Analyzing Methods. He is corresponding member of the IGU World Political Map Commission. He is a member of the editorial board of the international reviews Geography Research Forum, Geopolitics, and The Arab World Geographer. His academic interests include current geopolitical dynamics, international relations, borders and nation-state issues, ethnonationalisms, political and economic dynamics in Eastern Asia (particularly China and Japan), the geopolitical legacy of Elisée Reclus, Piotr Kropotkin and anarchic thought. Recent publications are: Cina e Giappone. Due modelli per il futuro dell' Asia (Turin, UTET Libreria, 2000); "La geografia politica," in M. Casari, G. Corna Pellegrini and F. Eva, Elementi di geografia economica e politica (Rome, Carocci, 2003). Personal Webpage: http://www.fabrizio-eva.info

As diplomats across the world gathered in Paris in spring 1919 to discuss the peace process, observers asked “Whither India?” Critics wondered how the British government could enact emergency laws such as the Rowlatt Acts at the same time as it introduced the Government of India Act of 1919, which was intended to expand Indian involvement in governing the British dominions on the Indian subcontinent. Because Britain presented itself as a liberal form of empire on the international stage, its willingness to suspend rule of law over its subjects appeared contradictory. India's support of the Allied powers allowed Indian moderates to represent India in Paris; during the war, Indian subjects had contributed over one million soldiers and suffered influenza, plague, and famine. The possibility of a new relationship between those governing and those being governed led many Indians to demand an adherence to the rule of law, a guarantee of civil liberties, and the foundations of a government that was for and by the Indian people. In a time of revolution in Russia, and assassinations by anarchists in Italy and France, it seemed foolhardy to repress radicals by censoring the press, preventing the right of individuals to assemble, or detaining suspects before they had committed any crimes. Lala Lajpat Rai, an Indian political activist who had been part of the progressive wing of the Indian National Congress, wrote from the United States, “India is a part of the world and revolution is in the air all the world over. The effort to kill it by repression and suppression is futile, unwise, and stupid.”

Abstract: This article investigates the action of anarchists to the revolutionary situations that emerged in Europe from the October Revolution in Russia until 1923, and their reaction to the failure of anarchist revolutionary practice. It focuses on Russia, Spain and Italy to show the similarities and differences in the anarchist critique of the failure of anarchists to guide the social unrest into a successful revolutionary outcome. Rather than simply looking at the role of their opponents this critique centers on aspects of anarchist praxis and tactics which some anarchists argued needed to be revised in light of experience. Key words: Anarchism, Russian Revolution, anarcosyndicalism, Triennio Bolchevique, Bienno Rosso

Anarchism is an ideology that has shown a remarkable talent for survival; it has been with us for some 200 years, since its ideas were first propounded by William Godwin at the end of the 18th century. The principal focal points of anarchism in modem history were in Italy, where an anarchist movement first appeared, led by Bakunin, and in Spain and France, where, from the 1880s to the 1930s, it amassed many adherents. In North and South America, it gained a strong foothold in the United States and Argentina, and more limited support in Brazil, Uruguay, Cuba and Mexico.

Cooperation plays an important role in the contemporary economic dynamics, experiencing an unstable balance between the mutualistic principle and the search for efficiency. The essay historically analyzes the origins of the cooperative movement in Italy in its relations, still little explored, with anarchist thought. In doing so he highlights, through the study of the case of the general association of laborers of Ravenna, the fact that what drives the workers who decide to start work and consumer cooperatives is the need to improve their deplorable living conditions and also to give substance, however partially, to the utopia of a society finally freed from exploitation and hierarchy.

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) is one of famed Italian play-wright Dario Fo, written as a response the neo-fascist tension that reached a boiling point in during the ‘Hot Autumn.’ A period of immense turmoil in late 20th -cemtury Italy. The play draws from the conventions of the Brechtian form and commedia dell’arte, aptly transforming them into mechanisms that can help both the play and spectators subvert the high cultures of Gramscian cultural hegemony, absorbed into ADA’s comic microcosm. This essay explores how political and theatrical realms are immortalised and then pit against each other through the course of the play, with the character of the Maniac acting as a rhetorical device acting as the connection between the two. In essence, this paper believes that Style is considered over substance in many of the styles of theatre Accidental Death operates within; the stylistic elements that quantitatively constitute the Brechtian form, commedia dell’arte, and farce allow them to subvert the ‘high cultures’ that are held culpable in Gramscian cultural hegemony, all of which ADA absorbs into its comic microcosm. This leads to a sustained paradox between the political and theatrical dimensions of the play, where the theatrical lends credence to the political though the use of fictional formal elements.

An exercise of anachronism, the article reads Kiarostami’s movies through the lenses of De Chirico’s painting. The exercise is not common in historical disciplines, like art and cinema history. Relations of influence never contradict the “temporal arrow”. Semiotics disregards this temporal frame, and compares texts by situating them in a common network of signifying relations. Semiotics can compare two or more artistic texts whatsoever, but does not encourage an anarchist point of view. Only texts that share similar structures can be fruitfully compared. De Chirico was not only the foremost metaphysical painter but also an important theoretician of metaphysical art. In a text on “art and madness”, he points out that the mad man is like the man who has lost his memory. However, the kind of memory De Chirico has in mind is not the long-term memory of psychologists, but a kind of “semiotic memory”, where interpretative habits are deposited. If this memory is lost, signs cannot be connected to other signs in a customary way, but become the origin of a new perception of reality. That is, according to De Chirico, what happens both in madness and in metaphysical art, where usual spaces and common objects turn into ground for marvel and terror, but also for sweetness and comfort. Metaphysical art, then, does not aim at finding a supernatural reality beyond that of everyday life, but, on the contrary, seeks to finds in everyday life a secret dimension, wherein things reveal themselves as different from how they appear. De Chirico’s reflection on metaphysical aesthetics was a consequence of his experiments with visual language and artistic forms. He had realized that painters could use some architectural forms, like those of arcades, harbors, train stations, etc. in order to frame space in a way that might elicit a metaphysical perception of reality. More generally, two formal features characterize most of De Chirico’s paintings executed in Florence/Paris (1910-1915) and Ferrara (1915-1918): a strong “geometrization” of space and a multiplication of contradictory framings. On the one hand, geometrization simplifies the structure of space and confers an a-temporal outlook to reality; on the other hand, the multiplication of contradictory framings visually translates the enigmatic character of metaphysics. Nothing, or almost nothing, justifies a comparison between De Chirico and Kiarostami from a historical point of view. The latter never mentions the former in his commentaries on his own films; nor spectators, either in Iran or in Italy, think about Italian metaphysical art when they watch Kiarostami’s movies. Moreover, it is undeniable that many characteristics of Kiarostami’s filmic discourse are closely related to a culturally specific background: the (visual) culture of contemporary Iran. Nevertheless, it is evident that Kiarostami’s cinema shares many of the aesthetical principles and creative processes of Italian metaphysical art. First of all, as it turns out from the analysis of most Kiarostami’s movies, an effort to present spectators with a geometrical, simplified, and essential space characterizes the plastic level of his filmic discourse. It is an essential space where relations between elements of narration are visually schematized. Second, Kiarostami too is almost obsessed with the superposition of multiple, often contradictory framings over this geometric space. That allows Kiarostami’s filmic discourse to transform it into a symbolic device, able to signify and communicate complex relations between deep, cosmic, and metaphysical values (mainly life and death). As de Chirico points out in some of his theoretical writings, his aesthetics also relies on the creation of uncanny configurations of objects, where strange and de-familiarizing relations subvert and replace customary ties between subjects and objects, and especially among objects themselves. The same aesthetic principle is at work in most Kiarostami’s movies, where objects are central not only in the development of narrative plots but also as symbolic devices that allow deep values to be expressed at a figurative level. Many differences separate De Chirico and Kiarostami: the historical époques in which they live(d), the socio-cultural contexts in which they work(ed), and the media that they adopt(ed). Yet, a strong similarity can be perceived in certain aspects of their visual languages. There are at least two ways to account for this similarity: on the one hand, the philological one, which nevertheless seems to be doomed not to succeed for the two artists do not share the same historical landscape. The second, more promising way is the one suggested by Lotman’s cultural semiotics: maybe similarities between De Chirico’s and Kiarostami’s visual languages are due to the fact that the Italian and the Iranian semiosphere share some general features in the way in which they shape the articulation and manifestation of meaning through visual texts. A tentative hypothesis explaining such similarity could be formulated as follows: a strong influence of the poetic discourse on the creation of meaning characterizes both semiospheres, a discourse where the syntactic relations of prose are less predominant than the emphasis on the symbolic value of empty space and isolated objects.