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The socialist movement
emerged
late in Italy
in
respect to the rest of Europe, because
until 1860
all
the attention was
catalysed to the problem of unification,
also because the Italian society was essentially rural. In 1864
Mazzini took part
in
the first Socialist
International Convention but in
effect his humanitarianism and his sense of brotherhood
between men was far from the concept of classes struggle of Marx
and Engels. In 1870 the anarchist
Bakunin
came in Italy. While Marx
and Engels were
convinced of the fact
that Italy and Spain were just
underdeveloped
countries of farmers that didn’t deserve too much trust, Bakunin was
interested
in
this
backwardness of Italy. He was sure that
farmers
were the “natural federalists”,
whose spontaneously
rebellious character was more important than the lack of discipline and
class-consciousness. In 1872 he gave life
to
the first Italian Socialist Convention in the city of Rimini, that
decided to break with Marx’s International Convention with the purpose to
found an autonomous International, organized
in a not too rigid
way. The
conflict between Marx and Bakunin was configuring such an opposition
between the northern
spirit,
rigidly
organized and the southern
spirit, creative and offhand,
careless of rules and discipline. In 1874 Bakunin declared that
the time
of the revolution
had come, encouraged by a succession of
expected strikes and manifestations
for the increasing price
of bread, connected to the economic crisis. The riots had to
explode
starting
from Romagna and then reach out.
Atually the arrests
started before the burst of the riots. This first flop prompted
the
young Andrea Costa, a follower
of
Bakunin, to adopt some kind of
more organized
struggle, founding the
Socialist Revolutionary Party of Romagna, and then in 1892 the
Italian Labour
Party that in 1893, in a convention in Reggio Emilia, set its plan,
founded on the classes struggle, opposition to the capital,
socialization
against
any
kind of collaboration with the bourgeois parties. The convention
ended with a
march of 10,000 farmers with the red flags in the
wind, very similar to a
procession. In the same year the party
included the word “Socialist” in its name. The
italian
socialist movement
was born, in a different perspective
with
respect to
the rest of Europe, with a strong
rural connotation, and continued
in
this way, overwhelmed at first
by the burst of the First World
War and then
by the contradictions of the
post-war, that could
see the
rise
of the fascist dictatorship. The PSI
(Italian Socialist Party)
had a fast
development: at the
beginning of the
century coul rely on
a
vast electoral
consensus in Northern and
Central Italy areas, on leagues and cooperatives,
up to become,
in 1902-04 a credible interlocutor of the liberal govern of
Giolitti. The
13th congress of the party
held
in Reggio Emilia in 1912
decided the expulsion of the right side of Bonomi and Bissolati
suggested by Benito Mussolini
(who
became the fascist dictator after a few years), causing a crisis of the
reformist group, accentuated in the early
postwar
period by the
harsh economic and social crisis. In 1921 a division gave life to
the
Italian
Communist Party
(PCI).
The
victory of the maximalists urged Turati to exit from the PSI.
By
Leonardo Manzari
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