Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective

Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism

Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey, David J Featherstone, Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey, David J Featherstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138352186
• eBook ISBN: 9780429603211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book initiates a critical discussion on the varieties of global anti-fascism and explores the cultural, political and practical articulations of anti-fascism around the world.

This volume brings together a group of leading scholars on the history of anti-fascism to provide a comprehensive analysis of anti-fascism from a transnational and global perspective and to reveal the abundance and complexity of anti-fascist ideas, movements and practices. Through a number of interlinked case studies, they examine how different forms of global anti-fascisms were embedded in various national and local contexts during the interwar period and investigate the interrelations between local articulations and the global movement. Contributions also explore the actions and impact of African, Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern anti-fascist voices that have often been ignored or rendered peripheral in international histories of anti-fascism.

Aimed at a postgraduate student audience, this book will be useful for modules on the extreme right, political history, political thought, political ideologies, political parties, social movements, political regimes, global politics, world history and sociology.

Chapters 5 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Globalising anti-fascist geographies

1

Radical diasporic anti-fascism in the 1920s

Italian anarchists in the English-speaking world

Nigel Copsey

Introduction

On 11 January 2018, at midday, a small group of people gathered on the corner of New York’s Fifth Avenue and Fifteenth Street.¹ Passers-by were no doubt oblivious as to why this group was gathered there. Those who stopped to hear the group’s speakers, and handed flyers, could learn that they were commemorating the colourful life of a fearless advocate of radical anti-fascism. At this very spot, some seventy five years earlier, Italian emigrant Carlo Tresca had been gunned down. Once described by Mussolini’s political police as the ‘deus ex machina of anti-Fascism’ in the United States, Carlo Tresca is now all but forgotten in his country of adoption. ‘One of the greatest anti-Fascists and a man with a sole purpose, which was to rid the world of Fascism’, Luigi Antonini eulogised at Tresca’s funeral.² A tribute that suggests that Tresca deserves a place in the pantheon of Mussolini’s enemies, alongside the likes of Giacomo Matteotti and Carlo Roselli, even if, in Tresca’s case, he was seemingly slain by a city gangster rather than by a fascist.³

In the transnational vanguard of the very earliest opposition to fascism, the anarchist Carlo Tresca is emblematic of those among Italian diasporic communities who expressed their anti-fascism as radical sovversivi (subversives). Their anti-fascism, manifesting a decade or so before Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, should not pass without recognition. Yet historians of anti-fascism retain their blind spots when it comes to the 1920s. Christopher Vials’s study of the anti-fascist tradition in the US starts after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933;⁴ Michael Seidman’s Transatlantic Antifascisms, which claims to be the first comprehensive study of anti-fascisms in Spain, France, the United States and Britain, does not begin its account until as late as 1936.⁵ And yet if we venture back to the early 1920s we find the United States as ‘the first sanctuary of anti-fascism’.⁶

‘He carried on a one-man war against Fascism long before the rest of the United States joined him’, the New York Times opined when reporting on Tresca’s murder.⁷ Such was Tresca’s anti-fascist prescience that freelance writer, Dorothy Gallagher, would dub Tresca ‘the most premature of “premature” anti-Fascists’.⁸ Yet his anti-fascist struggle was neither remarkably premature nor solitary. Tresca’s struggle, in truth, formed part of a much wider effort spanning several continents. As João Fábio Bertonha has previously pointed out:

The Italian communities scattered around the globe experienced a unique situation in the period between the wars. On the one hand, they were the target of extreme propaganda from the fascist regime, which tried to reinforce ties between Italy and its emigrants. This effort, in turn, provoked reaction and militancy from anti-fascist groups, which struggled for years to keep Italians outside of Italy immune to Mussolini’s propaganda.⁹

Over the period 1876–1915 no fewer than 14 million Italians left their country of birth, followed by a further 4.5 million in the period 1916 to 1945. Not only did Italians settle in large numbers in Europe but also in both North and South Americas. Some ventured further still. According to the 1921 census there were 8,135 Italians in Australia.¹⁰ Bertonha submits that ‘All of the countries to which Italians immigrated – Brazil, Canada, France, the United States, and so on – experienced this conflict between fascism and anti-fascism.’¹¹ While this was not strictly true, it remains true enough that wherever Italian communities were established abroad, they became subject to the competing claims of fascists and anti-fascists. This struggle, as we shall see, could sometimes turn violent, and in some cases lethal. Between 1921 and 1932, according to figures cited by Luca de Capraiis, 45 fascists abroad were killed and 283 wounded.¹² In one of the most publicised incidents, in 1924 a young anarchist, Enrico Bonomini, shot dead a ‘Fascist of the first hour’, Nicola Bonservizi in a Parisian restaurant.¹³

Within Italian emigrant neighbourhoods, the stage for anti-fascist opposition was often set by the arrival of black-shirted fascists. Organised into sections of the Partito Nazionale Fascista abroad, emigrant devotees of Mussolini were quick to form local branches of so-called fasci all’estero (Abroad League).¹⁴ It has been suggested that a London fascio was the very first (founded in June 1921),¹⁵ but a New York fascio had already been established a month or so earlier. In the United States alone, by early 1923, 85 fascio branches had been formed.¹⁶ By June 1924 it was reported that there were close to 300 fasci all’estero in existence outside Italy, with branches ‘in nearly every corner of the world’.¹⁷

Needless to say, for Italian left-wing radicals, the polarising prism through which this ‘world-wide expansion’ of fascism was understood was the fascist repression being meted out on comrades in Italy. According to one study, during the first six months of 1921 black-shirted squads ransacked 141 Communist and Socialist party branches in Italy. Over 70 Socialists were killed.¹⁸ Giacomo Matteotti, in his The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, chronicled fascist violence in Italy, ranging from murder and severe physical assault to attacks on property. There were hundreds of such incidents during May and November 1923, two typical months.¹⁹ Against this backdrop, that some compatriots wanted to don black-shirts on foreign soil was, unsurprisingly, sufficient stimulus for diasporic anti-fascist opposition to emerge.

Although this anti-fascism, as Bertonha makes clear, was truly global in reach, my chapter limits its scope to the response of the radical Italian diaspora in the English-speaking world: primarily to the US, but also to Canada, Britain and Australia. Here, as a result of the emotional traction that the figure of Mussolini held for diasporic expressions of ‘defensive nationalism’, that is to say, ethnic consciousness, pride and self-respect, anti-fascists of every hue were in the minority. Not surprisingly, when confronted with (white) nativist discrimination, most migrant Italians responded positively to the perceived ‘glories’ of Fascist Italy. In the US, for example, anti-fascists ‘numbered not more than 10 percent of the Italian American population, if that’.²⁰ This would present anti-fascists, particularly those left-wing radicals who favoured world-wide proletarian revolution with a dilemma: either express anti-fascism in strict ideological terms of international class solidarity and opposition to capital, or accommodate diasporic nationalism. There were other choices to be made too. What of the nature of their militant opposition: were fascists ‘to be treated as they treated anti-fascists in Italy’?²¹ Of the four examples discussed in this chapter, which responses were the most violent, and why?

As we shall see, each one of my examples taken from the English-speaking world had its fulcrum (a particular figure who played a central or essential role). In the US, it was Carlo Tresca; in Canada, Attilio Bortolotti; in Britain, Emidio Recchioni; and in Australia, Francesco Carmagnola. That all four were of anarchist/anarcho-syndicalist persuasion further problematises (revisionist) conflations of inter-war anti-fascism with Stalinism.²² It might be difficult to resist, but for sure, as Enzo Traverso put it in 2004, ‘Anti-fascism cannot be reduced to a simple variation of Soviet Communism.’²³

Before I begin to consider my four cases, some conceptual clarification is needed. The subject of ‘diaspora’ (from Greek, diaspeirein ‘disperse’) is typically approached through three core features: the first is dispersal in space (dispersal from the ethno-national ‘homeland’); the second is an orientation to this real or ‘imagined’ homeland; the third is a shared ethno-national cultural identity that cuts across the boundaries of the host society or societies.²⁴ Within Italian diasporic communities, we can further differentiate a specific sub-type: groups of Italian leftists who formed a radical diaspora. This diaspora shared the secondary characteristic of a radical political culture inherited from Italy and recreated within the host society. As in the case of the United States, as Marcella Bencivenni has revealed, this culture covered a wide spectrum of ideologies: communism, anarchism, syndicalism and socialism. Since this culture traversed ideological ground, it might make more sense to speak of a family of radicals, or an expatriate milieu of radicals. The family of sovversivi, for all their ideological differences, shared an insurgent desire to overthrow capitalism, free the workers, and thereby effect equality and social justice.²⁵

Resisting the ‘Black Death’: Italian-American anti-fascism in the 1920s

The final goal of the [North American Anti-Fascist] Alliance is to overthrow fascism in Italy so that the whole world will go immune from the fascist virus.

(Manifesto of the North American Anti-Fascist Alliance, 26 August 1926)

According to Pellegrino Nazzaro, the Manifesto of the North American Anti-Fascist Alliance (Alleanza Anti-Fascista di Nord America – AFANA) gave expression to the ‘first anti-fascist campaign in the western world’.²⁶ Yet within the field of anti-fascist studies few historians have ever reflected upon it, no doubt the result of the wider American left demonstrating more concern with the rise of Hitler than the rise of Mussolini who, according to one historian of anti-fascism, the American left ‘barely noticed’.²⁷

If no doubt correct in this broader sense, within the particular milieu of Italian–American radicalism Mussolini’s rise had very obvious repercussions. For Italian–American radicalism now ‘redirected much of its energy toward the anti-Fascist struggle, continually challenging, and in some case instances successfully contesting, the Fascist hegemony within the community’.²⁸ At the forefront of this struggle was Carlo Tresca who, following a brief sojourn in Lausanne, Switzerland, emigrated to the US in 1904. In Switzerland he had met a young socialist firebrand – Benito Mussolini no less. When Tresca boarded his train to Le Havre, his point of departure for New York, it was comrade Mussolini who bade him farewell.²⁹

Tresca was just one of the millions of Italians who migrated to the United States between 1880 and 1920. Most of these migrants (more than three million by 1918) originated from rural southern Italy (approximately 80 per cent); they were also disproportionately male (at a ratio of 190 males to 100 females in 1910). As copious numbers settled in North America, so Italian communities – ‘Little Italies’ – were established across numerous metropolitan areas. New York City was home to the largest concentrations. By 1930 the Italian-American population in the New York metropolitan area numbered over one million.³⁰ Largely unskilled workers, not only were Italian migrants the most proletarianised of all European migrants in the US, they were also largely ignored by a Democratic Party machine dominated by Irish Americans. Italian neighbourhoods could therefore encourage radi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Towards a global history of anti-fascism
• Part I Globalising anti-fascist geographies
• PART II Transnational lives, radical internationalism
• Index