The 1860S and 1870S: Marxism Rejected, and the Humus of Marxism

chapter 1 The 1860s and 1870s: Marxism Rejected, and the Humus of Marxism

1 The Democratic Antithesis

‘Over more than a century the term “worker” has become an element of all cultural discourse, whether explicitly or implicitly, as a denomination of a social or professional condition’.1 These words appeared in an early 1960s text by Italo Calvino, in one of those discourses of which he was the unsurpassed master, constructed in a careful and calibrated balance between the specifically literary and social theory. Getting to grips with the question of the centrality of the term ‘worker’, Calvino underlined the genesis of a profound phenomenon of very great significance: ‘the worker has entered into history of ideas as the personification of the antithesis’.2 The cultures of Marxism have been essential in determining the immanently universalistic value through which the term ‘worker’ has expressed both the subjectivity and objectivity of an historical process concluding in the horizon of total liberation, negating what currently exists. These cultures have given theoretical explanations of the worker’s antithetical nature, within a genesis that was largely common to the formation of both the ‘worker’ and these cultures: an antithesis that a symbiotic construction of theory and historical objectivity almost seemed to have made apparent. Workers and the cultures of Marxism represented the antithesis in a dialec- tical process that saw the negation long maturing within the thesis; within the given reality. This would, then, arrive at a separation in which it was still pos- sible to see elements that would be recomposed in the perspective of a far-off but hoped-for synthesis. Over the course of a long-term process, ‘democracy’ and ‘democrats’ were now the thesis, now the antithesis, now the synthesis. Moreover ‘the forms of a prior stage always emerge among the ideas of a more recent one … and the vital kernel of an era, a nebulous mass in expansion, is channelled into forms that are the historical precipitate of rather older eras’.3

1 See Calvino 1980, pp. 100, 101. 2 Ibid. 3 R. Musil, ‘Geist und Erfahrung’, Der Neue Merkur, March 1921.

If Marx and Engels first appeared in Italy in the guise of authoritative expo- nents of European democracy, we can explain this not only in terms of chrono- logical coincidence – with the great democratic uprisings of the late 1840s – but also with regard to a dimension of European democracy that was both extremely widespread and radical. There is an obvious – even if problematic – continuity tying the Marx and Engels presented as ‘German democrats’ in 1847 as they commemorated the anniversary of the 1830 Polish revolution4 to the Marx who referred to ‘democratic principles’ in his famous 1848 letter to L’Alba, and the positions of Tucci and Cafiero at the November 1871 Rome Congress of the Società Operaie, when they sought to demonstrate that Mazzini’s position stood in contradiction to ‘being democratic’ and the International itself.5 This is a web whose threads make visible both the developments of a line of thinking and the milieus that served as the mediation for its development. In the 1860s and immediately after the Paris Commune, essential elements of what would later become ‘Marxism’ were being spread by the democratic press across Italy. From 1864 onward there was an early and widespread divulgation of both the Inaugural Address and the Provisional Rules of the International Working- men’s Association. In July 1865 the first full translation (notwithstanding a few small omissions) of these two documents appeared in Genoa’s Il Dovere.6 The Rules had already appeared alone in the February 1865 issue of Milan’s L’Unità Italiana. Previous to the Il Dovere translation there had only been three English editions and two German ones. Yet by the end of the decade there were a total of five Italian editions of the Provisional Rules, six of the General Rules agreed at the Geneva Congress, one complete edition of The Inaugural Address, and two of its concluding section; and moreover, in 1871 the General Rules would be published a further fourteen times. However, not until the historian Ettore Ciccotti’s new translation published by Mongini in 1901 would the Inaugural Address again be published in Italy. The circle of newspapers involved in producing these editions was relatively broad: as well as the ones that we have already mentioned, they included Lib- ertà e Lavoro and Il Popolo d’Italia in Naples; Il Gazzettino Rosa in Milan; Il Proletario Italiano in Turin; L’Eguaglianza in Girgenti; Il Romagnolo in Ravenna; La Favilla in Mantua; and La Plebe in Lodi. This latter would then distribute the General Rules separately from its normal run, selling them at 10 centes-

4 See La Rivista di Firenze, 24 December 1847. 5 See Del Bo (ed.) 1964, pp. 81–8. 6 See Hunecke 1971.