A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: History. About Fasci dei Lavoratori and the 130th anniversary of the state of siege - A "SCARSULIDDU" CONFERENCE (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

There is a lot of European money circulating these days and in the 
universities some old historians, eager for missed recognition and young 
daring researchers in search of visibility, are launching themselves 
into ambitious projects (long-term history, comparativist, 
transnational) as well as ambiguous (between methodological innovation, 
academic approval and compatibility), just to grab some crumbs. So, on 
the occasion of the 130th anniversary of the state of siege that put an 
end to the Fasci dei Lavoratori experiment, professors and students from 
various universities in the South, and beyond, met last 14 and 15 May, 
between Palermo and Corleone , to talk about a topic that all of them, 
with a few rare exceptions, had never previously dealt with, in a 
conference with the pompous title, The Sicilian Fasci. Movement, 
institutions, memory.

  Now, one can be a caryatid of the social history of the past (Carmine 
Pinto, Salvatore Lupo, Santi Fedele, Giovanna Tosatti) or a shining 
promise of the historiography of the future (like Vittorio Coco, Alessia 
Facinoroso, Gabriele Montalbano, Alessandro Bonvini and Carlo Verri) but 
in a few months of poorly digested studies one cannot improvise as a 
specialist in a subject which in Sicily has had historians and scholars 
of the first magnitude who also approached it with respect, prudence and 
humility, after years if not decades of studies and archival research.

And in fact very little was said about the workers' Fasci as such at the 
new Palermo-Corleone conference: instead, there was rant about Napoleone 
Colajanni, whose influence on the Fasci was notoriously minimal and 
contested - certainly not that of the "great inspirer" mentioned from 
Wolf -; the topic of the Corleone mafia's relationship with Bernardino 
Verro was touched upon, as if it were new, as if hundreds of pages and 
ferocious controversies had not already been spent on it and, in 
general, on the mafia/Fasci relationship; Facinoroso dealt with the 
Fasci of women workers with unparalleled expertise without, however, 
managing, once again, to reconstruct their specificity; Coco has 
redesigned the biography of Lorenzo Panepinto, much more active in Santo 
Stefano Quisquina in the period following the local Fascio; in two cases 
the specific skills of the two speakers prevailed - fortunately -: 
Montalbano, when he spoke about the Italian community in Tunisia which, 
in its anarchist component, showed particular solidarity with the Fasci 
of Sicily; and Alessandro Bonvini when he reported on the commitment 
made by Nicola Barbato in favor of the independence of Cuba. For the 
rest: relations between the Fasci and the Italian socialist party and 
Crispi's repression, hackneyed and hackneyed arguments, fried and 
refried, we did not go to the beyond what the school books report.

The history of the Workers' Fasci has always been a sensitive matter for 
its political and cultural implications, where utopia, emancipation, 
social revolution, collectivism, communism were not empty words but full 
of meaning, and that experience of 130 years ago - our Paris Commune! - 
still today resonates with Sicilians for reasons of revenge and social 
redemption. Seeing it addressed lightly, even with disdain, in an 
asphyxiated environment like the university one constitutes in itself - 
beyond the value of individual scholars - a profound note of blame.

Perhaps it would have been enough to refer to the books of Romano, Ganci 
and Renda, to the Agrigento conference of 1975 and to the centenary 
conference, held in Piana degli Albanesi in 1994 (to which should be 
added those of Carrara of the same year and of Palermo of 1995, which 
did not produce documents). In these conferences we really talked about 
the constitution, organisation, development, political ideals and 
operational methods of the Fasci. On this documentary basis, the 
Agrigento conference posed three fundamental questions: 1. whether the 
delay in the political and socio-economic development of Sicily had been 
caused by the defeat of the Fasci; 2. whether or not the Fasci conformed 
to the socialist organizations of the continent; 3. if so, to what 
extent they propagated socialism. The conference in Piana degli Albanesi 
and the subsequent one in Palermo, in specifying the national and 
European dimension of the movement of the Fasci of workers (who were not 
only Sicilian) and reiterating the revolutionary perspective inherent in 
their action, overturned the questions posed in Agrigento: 1 . it was 
the defeat of the Fasci that retarded the development of the entire 
nation; 2. to paraphrase Giuseppe Carlo Marino, the Fasci movement was a 
"system of synergies representing an enormous range of forces" that 
could not be classified in a classist sense: the socialist party was not 
able to perceive its horizontality, "the fruit of a culture that it had 
had deep roots in Sicily"; 3. Finally, it is not important to know 
whether the Fasci were truly socialist: what is important is being able 
to perceive the autonomous values that the movement managed to express.

Let us measure the sidereal distance between the problems raised then 
and the historiographical indications dictated in tandem in the 
introduction to the Palermo-Corleone conference by the two renowned 
historians, Carmine Pinto in Salerno and Salvatore Lupo in Palermo.

Suffice it to say of Pinto that, under the specter of political violence 
(he has embroidered on it, since 2017, a nice money-making project), he 
even goes so far as to compare the workers' Fasci movement with 
post-unification brigandage, of which he claims to be a specialist. 
Equating criminals and social revolutionaries - as in fact he does and 
as the Italian judiciary did at the time of the First International and 
is still fashionable today - can have no other purpose than to 
criminalize and devalue the political ideas of the latter. His is a 
clear attempt, in line with official historiography, to "exorcise the 
danger of a revolution, or in any case the desire for a radical change, 
even a bloody one, in society" (these are Nico Berti's words).

Lupo is no exception. After 30 years of embarrassed silence he takes up 
the theses that another exponent of the Catania "modernizing" school, 
Giuseppe Barone, formulated in 1994 in Caltavuturo, commemorating the 
fallen of that Fascio. Theses were contested then, in Caltavuturo 
itself, and ridiculed in Piana degli Albanesi, in which he redefined and 
transformed the Fasci movement into a reformist movement, aimed at 
"modernizing" the Sicilian institutions, in close alliance with the 
various factions of the local bourgeoisie.

More explicitly, Lupo dates back the season of popular blocs by a decade 
- on which he trained as a historian - inaugurating a new methodological 
trend, the so-called "prawn step": investigating the past starting from 
the future, first from then, following go back to the biographies of two 
(only two, however) of the main leaders of the Fasci, Garibaldi Bosco 
and De Felice Giuffrida, who in the twentieth century joined the 
moderate, inter-class, allianceist, pro-Giolittian bloc of the popular 
parties, and the social-reformist party. Ergo, the workers' Fasci were 
the prediction, the anticipation, the first outline.

Poor Manacorda must be turning in his grave.

Natale Musarra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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