Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885–1915

TLDR

Traditional analyses that focus on cyclical advances and retreats portray anarchism as powerless, spontaneous, and disorganized, a narrow national framework that fails to explain its sustained presence, especially during repression when Italian activity mirrored shifts across borders. The article aims to illustrate Italian anarchism’s transnational dimension by analyzing its presence in the United States and worldwide, with a focus on the anarchist press. The authors examine how transnationalism, through the mobility of militants, resources, and ideas, created opaqueness that supported insurrectionary tactics and is revealed by the press coverage. The study finds that transnational mobility fostered integration, continuity, and organization, and that insurrectionism, organizational opaqueness, and transnationalism together provide an alternative to the traditional advance‑.

Abstract

Analyses of anarchism emphasizing cyclical patterns of advances and retreats inadequately explain how anarchism sustained itself over time. They foster a picture of powerlessness before repression and cyclical reappearances as if by spontaneous germination, thus lending themselves to interpretations, such as Hobsbawm's millenarianism, that identify discontinuity, spontaneism, and lack of organization as features of anarchism, and ultimately supporting charges of ineffectiveness and irrationalism. A narrow framework of analysis of national scope is responsible for such explanatory inadequacy. This article illustrates the transnational dimension of Italian anarchism, by analysing its presence in the United States and worldwide, with special emphasis on the anarchist press. A transnational analysis reveals new forms of integration, continuity, and organization, based on the mobility of militants, resources, and ideas across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. In times of repression, seeming entrances and exits of anarchism on the Italian stage often corresponded to shifts of initiative across the Italian border. Transnationalism was a built-in characteristic that supported insurrectionary tactics by enhancing the opaqueness of their preparation. Together, insurrectionism, organizational opaqueness, and transnationalism help providing an alternative to the advance-and-retreat pattern of explanation.