This is the introduction to the collection The State – Or Revolution: Selected Works of Camillo Berneri. Camillo Berneri was a noted Italian anarchist active during and after the First World War. He was assassinated by the Stalinists in Barcelona during the May Days of 1937.

Introduction: Petrograd 1917 to Barcelona 1937

I considered Berneri the most brilliant mind since Malatesta, among the most courageous, and of extraordinary ability to work with large groups. It was he who organised the Italian anti-Fascist [militia] column. It was he who managed the supply of food, clothing and arms. It was Berneri who fought with them at every front and raised their spirit when he saw sign of discouragement and pessimism. In other words Camillo Berneri was one of the finest [types] of comrades I have ever come across in the anarchist movement […] Bravely he wrote in his paper pointing out that the Revolution was sailing between two dangerous cliffs – Burgos and Moscow. How very prophetic his words were the dreadful days of Barcelona proved.

– Emma Goldman[1]

Camillo Berneri was one of the leading lights of the Italian anarchist movement for nearly a quarter of a century before Stalinists murdered him during the May Days in Barcelona in 1937. Yet, like so many non-English language anarchists, awareness of his writings is not widespread in the English-speaking movement, limited to a few important essays (primarily Peter Kropotkin: His Federalist Ideas) and a few articles translated in the late 1970s.[2] This collection of essays and articles addresses this gap, presenting to this and future generations of anarchists a libertarian thinker whose brilliance was universally recognised at the time of his murder.

Berneri was born in Lodi on the 20 May 1897 in Lombardy, northern Italy. His father, Stefano Berneri, was a former Garibaldian Redshirt turned municipal civil servant and his mother, Adalgisa Fochi (1865-1957), was a socialist, writer and primary school-teacher (his maternal grandfather was the Italian Republican Carbonari secret society and a follower of Giuseppe Mazzini). Malnutrition brought him near death when only a few months old and his family moved often across Italy because of work and in 1904 while in Palermo, Sicily, he came down with typhus and the following year saw him fall ill with enteritis in Varallo Sesia.

Berneri became active in politics when the family settled in Reggio Emilia and, in 1912, Berneri became a member of the local Socialist Youth Federation, eventually joining its Central Committee and working on its national organ, L’Avanguardia. However, this affiliation did not last for he came into conflict with the Socialist Party during the First World War following the repression of demonstration in Reggio Emilia against a rally organised by Cesare Battisti, a pro-intervention ex-socialist, which saw two young workers killed. The Party’s official position on the war was an ambiguous “neither support nor sabotage” but Berneri was absolutely against the conflict and left the Party. He then befriended Torquato Gobbi (1888-1963), then a young anarchist bookbinder, who helped him became an anarchist in 1915. The resolute anti-war and internationalist position of the libertarian movement undoubtedly helped this progression.[3]

Berneri met and fell in love with anarchist primary school teacher Giovanna Caleffi (1897-1962) in 1916, marring the following year. The same year saw him conscripted into the army and so he missed the birth of their first daughter, Marie Louise Berneri (1918-1949) in March 1918. He was sent to the Academy of Modena, an officer cadet school, where he was caught with anarchist and anti-militarist propaganda and expelled. This did not stop him being sent to the front in November 1917, where, in March 1918, he was wounded and hospitalised. After being released from the army, the family moved from Arezzo to Florence, where their second daughter, Giliana Berneri (1919-1998), was born. Both daughters became active anarchists.

From Soviets to Stalin

With the end of the war, the near-revolution of the Red Years (Biennio Rosso) began inspired, in part, by the Russian Revolution of 1917 but also by radicalisation at home caused by the war and its social and economic consequences.[4] The various organisations of the left increased in size and membership – including the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) and anarchist groups. Berneri had undoubtedly picked an exciting time to be an anarchist.

The Russian Revolution was welcomed by libertarians across the globe. They saw it as a striking confirmation of anarchist ideas on direct action, expropriation and working-class organisations smashing the existing State. With its workers councils (soviets), factory committees and peasant communes, the Russia had strikingly confirmed Kropotkin’s summation of the anarchist vision of revolution:

Developed in the course of history to establish and maintain the monopoly of land ownership in favour of one class – which, for that reason, became the ruling class par excellence – what means can the State provide to abolish this monopoly that the working class could not find in its own strength and groups? Then perfected during the course of the nineteenth century to ensure the monopoly of industrial property, trade, and banking to new enriched classes, to which the State was supplying “arms” cheaply by stripping the land from the village communes and crushing the cultivators by tax – what advantages could the State provide for abolishing these same privileges? Could its governmental machine, developed for the creation and upholding of these privileges, now be used to abolish them? Would not the new function require new organs? And these new organs would they not have to be created by the workers themselves, in their unions, their federations, completely outside the State?[5]

In 1919, Berneri was involved in the general strike of 20-21 July called in solidarity with the Russian Revolution and participated in the creation of the Italian Anarchist Union (UAI). The same year saw him graduate from the University of Florence where he became a professor of philosophy. Continuing his revolutionary activities as the Red Years reached their climax with the September Occupation of the Factories, he became friends with leading anarchists Errico Malatesta and Luigi Fabbri as well as contributing extensively to the anarchist press, including the UAI’s daily newspaper Umanita Nova edited by Malatesta. Yet the libertarians, while influential, remained a minority and could not win enough of the working masses away from the Marxists whose party and union bureaucracies managed to retain control over the movement. They also rejected libertarian calls for a United Front during the revolution situation, so allowing the opportunity to be lost.

Concrete and accurate information from Russia was limited and often drowned out by misinformation by the bourgeois press. All socialists, whether Marxist or libertarian, viewed the new regime with sympathy and supported it against attacks upon it. Yet, as more information became available both on Bolshevik practice and ideology, the initial euphemism started to wane. While continuing to support the revolution, they started to recognise that the Bolshevik regime was destroying it, building not socialism but a State-capitalist party dictatorship. Berneri’s writings followed this evolution but his perspective (as shown in his article “Regarding our critiques of Bolshevism”) was to be as fair as possible, seeking to understand what had went wrong and refusing to view alternatives through rose-tinted glasses (like believing the peasantry were inherent communist). Like other anarchists, he saw that the “new”, so-called workers’, State had swiftly produced an old enemy, the bureaucracy.

Anarchists in Russia saw this development first-hand. Emma Goldman, most famously, recounted her experiences in 1920 of the “cumbersome Bolshevik machine and general inefficiency” as well as “how paralysing was the effect of the bureaucratic red tape which delayed and often frustrated the most earnest and energetic efforts [. . .] Materials were very scarce and it was most difficult to procure them owing to the unbelievably centralised Bolshevik methods. Thus to get a pound of nails one had to file applications in about ten or fifteen bureaus; to secure some bed linen or ordinary dishes one wasted days.” The “newly fledged officialdom was as hard to cope with as the old bureaucracy” while the “bureaucratic officials seemed to take particular delight in countermanding each other’s orders.” In short, “the new Communist bureaucracy and inefficiency, and the hopelessness of the whole situation [. . .] was a crushing indictment against the Bolsheviki, their theories and methods.”[6]

Yet these accounts only became known once the likes of Goldman and her comrade Alexander Berkman had managed to leave Russia. Before that, as Berneri’s articles show, anarchists had two main sources to evaluate the new regime. First, the reports from Russia by individual anarchists visiting or delegates sent by libertarian organisations to see the Revolution in practice. Second, by the words of the leading Bolsheviks themselves. The latter is important for while Lenin’s early writings (such as The State and Revolution) had received a warm welcome in libertarian circles (and, indeed, had converted a few anarchists and syndicalists to the Marxism they had previously rejected), the turn to advocating party dictatorship, opposing workers’ control and so on, made anarchists re-evaluate their position (some, like Malatesta, were always hesitant about thinking Marxists had changed their spots).

This twofold development showed that validity of anarchist theory for libertarians had long argued that “State socialism” was, to use Bakunin’s words, the “most vile and most dreadful lie that” has “been begotten – formal democracy and red bureaucracy?”[7] The Russian anarchist had prophetically argued against Marx that “the organisation and the rule of the new society by socialist savants” would be “the worst of all despotic governments! [. . .]  The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class. And finally, when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class and then falls – or, if you will, rises – to the position of a machine. [. . .] There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”[8] The Bolshevik regime swiftly confirmed these warnings.

As well as drawing upon Bakunin, Berneri also utilised Kropotkin’s critique of the Paris Commune to inform his critique of State socialism. Thus, for example, in his well-known articles “The Paris Commune” and “Revolutionary Government” Kropotkin indicated how the Paris communal council became isolated from the masses and swamped by red-tape, so hindering the revolution and preparing its defeat (whether from external forces or within by new rulers). Interestingly, this analysis has been confirmed (albeit unknowingly) by a Leninist who admits – in passing, and without awareness of its implications nor drawing any of the very obvious conclusions it implies – that the council of the Paris Commune was “overwhelmed” by suggestions from other bodies, the “sheer volume” of which “created difficulties”, that it “found it hard to cope with the stream of people who crammed into the offices” while reports, letters and motions “piled up” at the Town Hall and in the offices of the secretariat and were not discussed.[9]

If these bureaucratic problems developed within a single city (for reasons Berneri explains well in his article “State and Bureaucracy”) what would happen if the same principles were applied to a whole nation? The Soviet regime under Lenin and Trotsky gave a striking confirmation of this analysis as, for anarchists, it showed that Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s warning were right – these problems afflicted Bolshevik Russia to an even greater degree as the new rulers had to consider and solve the issues affecting millions and millions. That the numbers and powers of the bureaucracy likewise increased should come as no surprise to anyone not a believer in the Bolshevik Myth. This is reflected in Berneri’s famous analysis of Kropotkin’s federalism (translated in the 1940s as the pamphlet Peter Kropotkin: His Federalist Ideas), a sympathetic account in which Berneri repeats Kropotkin’s arguments. Thus his analysis in “State and Bureaucracy” echoes Kropotkin’s critique of the Paris Commune as well as the article “The Commune” (1880) which sketches the libertarian federalist alternative to the State.[10]

The impact of the Russian Revolution was felt in Italy as elsewhere across the world, both positively in encouraging working class hopes and revolts and negatively, in bringing Russian influence into the labour movement. Groups across the world sought to ape the Bolsheviks, echoing uncritically the policies of the Bolsheviks.[11] Berneri would experience the latter both in Italy and, later, in Spain.

Exile, Workers and Work

With the isolation and so defeat of the Occupation of the Factories by the Socialist Party and Trade Union leadership, the Italian bourgeoisie turned to Mussolini’s fascists as a means of securing their position. As historian Tobias Abse points out, “the rise of fascism in Italy cannot be detached from the events of the biennio rosso, the two red years of 1919 and 1920, that preceded it. Fascism was a preventive counter-revolution […] launched as a result of the failed revolution.”[12]

While anarchists whole-heartedly supported the Arditi del Popolo, a workers’ militia formed to fight the Blackshirt squads, and urged (again) a United Front, the Italian Marxists (whether Social-Democratic or Communist) remained as sectarian as before. Rather than unite against fascist attacks, the Socialist Party signed a “Pact of Pacification” with the Fascists (which the latter ignored) while the Communist Party was little better, banning its members from taking part in the Arditi del Popolo as it was not a party-controlled body.

Meanwhile, the fascist squads attacked and destroyed anarchist and Marxist meeting places, social centres, radical presses and Camera del Lavoro. However, even in the dark days of fascist terror, the anarchists resisted the forces of totalitarianism and “[i]t is no coincidence that the strongest working-class resistance to Fascism was in […] towns or cities in which there was quite a strong anarchist, syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist tradition”. Mussolini’s rise was not irresistible, as shown by “the total humiliation of thousands of Italo Balbo’s squadristi by a couple of hundred Arditi del Popolo backed by the inhabitants of the working class districts” in the anarchist stronghold of Parma in August 1922. However, “it was the withdrawal of support by the Socialist and Communist parties at the national level that crippled” the Arditi and, along with it, resistance to fascism.[13]

Like others on the left, Berneri and his family suffered fascist persecution and they had to leave Florence to Umbria where he taught in a teacher-training school. He crossed the French border illegally in April 1926 when he refused to swear allegiance to the regime which all teachers had to swear, so losing his post (he had also been physically attacked twice).[14] He arrived in Nice the following month and his family, including his mother, joined him soon after.

The family set up home in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a suburb of Paris, living a precarious existence. Due to fascist repression, Paris had a substantial community of Italian political exiles and the Italian authorities kept a close eye on these political dissidents. Berneri continued his political activities, including contributing to the libertarian press and anti-fascist activities. In this, Berneri was hardly unique. Indeed, Italian anarchists resisted fascism as it spread to immigrant communities across the world while the native boss and political classes cozied up to Mussolini’s regime and its local, wealthy, Italian supporters, impressed by how it had crushed “the Reds” and unions. In America, for example, veteran anarcho-syndicalism Carlo Tresca played a leading role in America throughout the 1920s and 1930s fighting fascism.[15]

Towards the end of 1927, Berneri joined the Union of Italian Journalists created the same year and which brought together many of the more famous anti-fascist exiles. However, journalism and work at the French National Library was not sufficient to support him and his family, so Berneri combined them with work on construction sites as a bricklayer. Economically in a precarious situation, Berneri also experienced political insecurity as an Italian political refugee in a country whose State is keen to curry favour with Mussolini’s regime. This meant that until 1935 he had only temporary French residence permits and so lived under the constant threat of deportation for political activities which where, in principle, prohibited.

While writing on a host of subjects, including fascism, he had no wish to leave his opposition to Mussolini at wielding the pen. His various activities saw him identified as an activist of note and in December 1928 he was expelled from France. Arriving in Brussels, he could not secure a residency permit and left for Geneva. Returning to France clandestinely in June 1929, he is eventually betrayed by a “comrade” who had been introduced to him, and vouched for, by an anti-fascist Catholic but who turned out to be a spy for the Italian security service who entrapped him in a plot to assassinate a fascist Minister in Belgium. Arrested in Brussels on 20 December 1929, Berneri was sentenced to five months imprisonment after a trial in February the following year. When released, he was deported to the Netherlands from where the Dutch police immediately returned him to Belgium. After short periods in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, Berneri eventually found himself back in France and obtained safe-conduct to appear before a Parisian court. Unable to stand trial on the planned date, in August he was put on a train for Berlin where he would enjoy the hospitality of the German anarchist Augustin Souchy.

When Berneri finally returned to France, he was tried a second time for the Brussels events and sentenced to a year and two months, being amnestied on 14 July 1931 but avoided being expelled from the country because he had already been declared an undesirable in the surrounding countries. Returning to Paris, he continued writing and working in a variety of jobs to support his family. While Camillo led the life of a fugitive in a succession of European countries, Giovanna did what she could to obtain a French residence permit for her husband, using her network of contacts and invoking the services of a Brussels lawyer called Paul De Bock. While all this was going on it fell to Giovanna to bring up and support the children. In 1933, with the help of French anarchist Louis Lecoin (1888-1971), she opened a small grocery shop to survive).

Berneri continued to write in the difficult circumstances he and his family – like so many Italian anti-fascist refugees – found themselves. When the newspaper of the USI, Guerra di Classe, was relaunched in September 1930, Berneri sent it a letter of encouragement which was published by the newspaper under the title “The Hour of Anarcho-Syndicalism”. Then, until its disappearance in 1933, he submitted regular articles on a range of issues (including trade unionism, state communism, fascism, etc.) as well as a first version of one of his best essays, “Worker Worship”. While considered as an intellectual, when in exile Berneri had to make a living as a manual worker (as he mentions in that article). Like Malatesta who learned a trade to make a living, but unlike Kropotkin whose living was made by writing scientific articles, books and so on for non-anarchist journals and publishers, Berneri had direct experience of “the proletariat” and saw that – as Bakunin, for one, had argued and as should be expected – that power corrupts both who wield it and those subject to it. As such, he was critical of those anarchists who uncritically appealed to the constructive power of “the masses” to solve all the problems a revolution was likely to throw up.

Yet Berneri’s comments on “worker-worship” did not mean rejecting the working masses as the agent of social revolution. Far from it as only those subject to oppression and exploitation have an interest in ending them. Nor did it mean rejecting anarcho-syndicalism as a strategy to achieve anarchy (likewise, Emma Goldman’s recognition of the important role of minorities in social change did not stop her advocating syndicalism[16]). While not blind to the problems and challenges of syndicalism as well as the weaknesses of the USI’s activity before the rise of Fascism, he was well aware of its importance in achieving social change and the benefits it accrued to the anarchist movement in terms of both widening its influence and ensuring it looks outwards rather than at internal ideological trivialities. Anarchist activism within the labour movement played a key role in developing the kind of realistic anarchism Berneri was seeking.[17]

Another important text penned during this time was on the issue of work and how to transform it (“Attractive Work”). This issue had been discussed by socialist thinkers from Charles Fourier onwards, with Kropotkin recognising its importance for achieving libertarian communism (as discussed, for example, in “Agreeable Work” in The Conquest of Bread). Berneri’s comments on this issue recall those by Kropotkin as well as by Emma Goldman:

Every year the cost of production in human life is growing larger (50,000 killed, 100,000 wounded in America last year); the returns to the masses, who help to create wealth, are ever getting smaller. Yet America continues to be blind to the inevitable bankruptcy of our business of production. Nor is this the only crime of the latter. Still more fatal is the crime of turning the producer into a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labour, but of the power of free initiative, of originality, and the interest in, or desire for, the things he is making.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only grey and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence, — too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect personality as “one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger.” A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work.[18]

Berneri’s essay does not dispute the appeal or desirability of the transformation of work such introductory texts advocate. Rather, he seeks to understand what this would mean in practice so that libertarians are aware of potential issues and difficulties. His discussion is wide-ranging and recognises that transforming work is not only vitally important but also something which will take time, just as transforming the industrial and social legacies the revolution has inherited but which have been shaped by social inequalities and the needs of capital. He reminds us that increases in output may be the result of a worsening of the condition of the worker. This means that a rise in quality (such as increases in goods) can easily go with a drop in qualitative experiences, so even if the former is equally distributed its cost can be a dehumanisation of work which makes the worker less free and less fulfilled during work and so less happy. Increased consumption need not make up for increased intensity of work and increased boredom during a longer working day. Work not only shapes materials, it also shapes those who do it and workers’ control of production is just the necessary first step in a longer process of transforming the productive process, something – as the Soviet Union showed – can only be undertaken if the workers themselves manage their own workplaces as anarchists have always recognised.

Between Madrid and Burgos… and Moscow

Berneri finally received a residence permit in 1935 but with the defeat of the fascist coup across two-thirds of the country in July 1936, like thousands of other anti-fascists and libertarians he immediately left for Spain. The struggle in Spain was not just a Civil War for the workers and peasants also took the opportunity of seizing land and workplaces, organising militias to liberate those areas under Franco and transforming society along anarchist lines as anarchism and syndicalism had been the main influences in the labour movement since the times of the First International in the 1860s.[19]

Unsurprisingly, the CNT, an anarcho-syndicalist union, and the FAI, an anarchist federation, took the lead in both fighting the fascist uprising and the subsequent revolution. George Orwell arrived in December 1936 and gives a vivid account of revolutionary Barcelona:

The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. […] It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; […] Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos días’ […] and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere […] Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. […] Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.[20]

Berneri threw himself wholeheartedly into the conflict. He helped form a militia column of Italian volunteers and joined the Spanish anarchists of the Ascaso column on the Aragon Front. There he took part in the battle of Monte Pelado (28 August 1936) and Huesca (3 September 1936). However, due to problems with his hearing and vision, he was sent from the front back to Barcelona where he became the editor and contributor to Guerra di Classe, relaunched as a weekly paper, as well as speaking on the CNT-FAI radio.[21]

Berneri used these platforms to warn of the mistakes being made by the leadership of the CNT-FAI, arguing that the revolution and the civil war were intertwined.[22] The war could only be won on social, not military grounds. Only an anti-capitalist struggle could counter fascism effectively and that the counter-revolutionary forces were not solely on Franco’s side but included those who opposed the social revolution in Republican Spain at worse head were the Stalinists. He also produced a series of articles critiquing the Marxism which had produced the Stalinism undermining the war and revolution.

He saw the necessity of all those parties and groups in favour of some kind of social revolution working together, indeed his last published article (“Us and the POUM”) defended the dissident Leninists of the POUM against Stalinist attacks. He recognised it (like other anarchists in Spain, whom he quotes) as an anti-fascist and revolutionary grouping even if “not all [its] programme […] coincides with our current demands and with our aspirations”. Anyone who slandered the POUM and called for its suppression, most obviously the Stalinists, was “a saboteur of the anti-fascist struggle who must not be tolerated.”[23] The important criteria was that the POUM saw the need to go beyond defending a bourgeois republic in the struggle against fascism, that to defeat fascism the system which spawned it had to be destroyed and only the mass support produced by a transformation in the living conditions and freedoms of the working people could ensure both. The POUM recognised that war and the revolution were inseparable and were allies even if its views on the nature of that revolution differed.[24]

Berneri’s analysis of developments found support with American Trotskyists:

Berneri, spiritual leader of Italian anarchism since the death of Malatesta, leader of the Ancona revolt of 1914, escaped from Mussolini’s clutches, had fought the reformists (including the CNT leaders) in his influential organ, Guerra di Classe. He had described the Stalinist policy in four words: “It smells of Noske”. In ringing words he had defied Moscow: “Crushed between the Prussians and Versailles, the Commune of Paris initiated a fire that lit up the world. Let the General Godeds of Moscow remember this.” He had declared to the masses of the CNT: “The dilemma ‘war or revolution’ has no longer any meaning. The only dilemma is: either victory over Franco, thanks to the revolutionary war, or defeat.” How terribly true had been his identification of Noske and the Stalinists! As Noske, the Social Democrat, had Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht kidnapped and murdered, so the Stalinist-democrats had assassinated Camillo Berneri.[25]

Yet while Morrow quotes and accepts the analysis of Berneri (and praises the likes of Durruti), he also attacks “anarchism” which he equates to the leadership of the CNT and FAI rather than the rank-and-file who were creating and fighting for the revolution he was celebrating. This cognitive dissonance helps explains the many inaccuracies he inflicts on his readers, inaccuracies which have become embedded into most Marxist accounts of Spanish Anarchism.[26] Needless to say, Morrow makes no comment on Berneri’s devastating critiques of Bolshevism published in Guerra di Classe.

Berneri’s eloquent polemics did not go unnoticed by the Stalinists and when the May Days erupted in Barcelona, they took the opportunity to silence him once and for all. German anarchist Augustin Souchy later recounted the events leading to his murder:

When the hostilities started, Berneri was in his rooms with his friend, [Francesco] Barbieri, also a well known anarchist. With them were the wife of Barbieri and Tosca Pantini, widow of an Italian militiaman killed on the Aragon front. The Italians’ house was surrounded by Catalan city guards and members of the PSUC wearing red armbands with their party insignia on them. On the morning of Tuesday May 4^th, the Catalan and Communist guards came to the house and told the Italian anarchists to be careful because there was a lot of shooting in the neighbourhood. There was another visit in the afternoon for the purpose of registering the house and confiscating the arms which belonged to Italian militiamen on leave in Barcelona. The next day, Wednesday May 5^th, at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, Berneri and Barbieri were taken away by 12 guards, six of them from the city police, the others were members of the PSUC as evidenced by their red armbands. The leader of the group, showing his badge with the number 1109, asked for their names. Two of the group remained in the house to carry out a further search. Berneri had been working on a book about Mussolini’s policy in the Mediterranean, with special reference to the Balearic Islands. It was a book against Italian fascism.

Barbieri’s wife wanted to go with the two comrades when they were taken away, but they refused to allow her.

Both men were shot during the following night, by machine gun fire, as revealed by the autopsy. It was cold blooded murder, since both men were unarmed. The murder was committed near the Palace of the Generality. Soon after the bodies of the two anarchists were delivered to the mortuary of the Hospital Clinico. The lists show that the Red Cross had found both bodies near the Generality.

The evidence is irrefutable. Berneri and Barbieri were shot because they were anarchists by police and members of the PSUC, i.e. faithful Moscow Communists. Barbieri’s companion declared “Barbieri asked why they who were anarchists and therefore anti-fascists, were being ill treated. And the leader of the group answered: ‘It’s because you are anarchists that you are counter-revolutionaries.’”[27]

What the fascists could not achieve, the Stalinists managed. While not the only assassinated anarchist during the May Days, Berneri was the most famous.[28]

Berneri was buried on 11 May 1937. The authorities, abetted by the CNT higher committees calls for calm, had banned funeral processions in case they inflamed passions. In defiance of this ban, the bodies of the Italian anarchists Camillo Berneri, Francesco Barbieri, Adriano Ferrari, Lorenzo De Peretti and Marco Pietro were escorted from the Clinical Hospital by a procession of several thousand comrades and friends, walking behind the black flag of a German anarcho-syndicalist group. Giovanna attended her husband’s funeral with Marie Louise and was latter the driving force of the C. Berneri Committee in Paris which published a collection of his writings under the title Camillo Berneri: Pensieri e Battaglie[29] with a preface by Emma Goldman, the first of many such collections published.

The May Days marked the turning point Berneri had warned of: the decisive defeat of the revolution. Soon the Stalinists turned on the revolutionaries, suppressing the POUM while arresting anarchists and other revolutionaries. The militias were fully militarised, the Republic State was reformed and its authority imposed, peasant collectives attacked and destroyed, the worker collectives placed under governmental control – all in the name of winning the war against Franco but which, as Berner predicted, resulted in the defeat of the Republic.

Conclusions

While his life was tragically cut-short, Berneri did live through and analyse some of the most significant events of the twentieth century – the Russian Revolution, the Italian Red Years, the rise of fascism and the Spanish Revolution. He cast a realistic eye over anarchism and its assumptions, questioned orthodoxies and took nothing for granted. Invoking principles or handy assumptions to avoid critical thinking or difficult situations saw him respond by noting that these were hardly convincing. As one contemporary Italian anarchist later recounted:

Camillo Berneri was a born revolutionary who matched a practicality seeking to make optimum use of the movement’s strengths and intelligence with the patience of a teacher drawing friendship and agreement from those all about him, and with the delicate sensibilities of a consistent, fair-minded anarchist of deep convictions; a rock of granite unscathed by the passage of muddy waters.

For us, Berneri was anarchism incarnate. We could see in him the poetry of a Pietro Gori, the intransigence of a Luigi Galleani, the perspicacity and action of an Errico Malatesta. This philosopher was an anthology of forty years of militant anarchism and he offered it all the Spanish revolution with such simplicity and clear-sightedness that everyone, anarchists and non-anarchists alike, could not but be dumbfounded. He was the safe guide and ever blooming flowers of our activities on the front and in the rear alike. He would be a priceless mentor to us today. We do not mourn for ourselves but for his untimely demise.[30]

This collection is only a selection of his writings. If it encourages more translations of Berneri’s work, that would be something. Yet Berneri himself would have been the first to say that this is not an end in itself, that this collection – like any future translations – exists only to help libertarians today in our struggles to increase liberty and equality, to struggle successfully against exploitation and oppression, and build the forces that can that create libertarian communism. Anarchists today will benefit from reading Berneri’s informed and realistic analysis and this is the greatest praise any thinker can receive.

End Notes

[1] Emma Goldman, Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press 2006), 295.

[2] The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review Number 4, 1978. Sadly, its notice that “Cienfuegos Press will be publishing Class War in Spain: Camillo Berneri which will contain a biography of Berneri and a full collection of his writings” did not come to fruition.

[3] The Italian Socialist Party was one of the few sections of the Second International which did not side with its ruling class during the First World War. In contrast, the vast majority of the anarchist movement, both in Italy and Internationally, opposed the war and stayed true to their internationalist and class struggle principles. Sadly, a few leading anarchists – most notably Peter Kropotkin – urged supporting the Allies. Malatesta took the lead in refuting Kropotkin’s arguments.

[4] One of the best short accounts of this period is “Italy After 1918”, War Commentary: For Anarchism, (September 1943) by Berneri’s eldest daughter, Marie-Louise Berneri (reprinted in Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 80 [Summer 2020]). Also see Iain McKay, section A.5.5 of An Anarchist FAQ (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press: 2008) volume 1 and “Fighting Fascism: Lessons from Italy”, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 71-72 (Fall 2017).

[5] Modern Science and Anarchy, 164; this originally appeared in “L’Anarchie VII: La conception anarchiste yelle qu’elle se dessine aujourd’hui,” Les Temps Nouveaux, 8 April 1911.

[6] Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (London: Active Distribution, 2017), 61, 62, 66, 67, 107.

[7] Michael Bakunin, “Letter of 19 July 1866”, Correspondance de Mikhail Bakounine, lettres à Herzen et à Ogareff (1860-1874) (Paris: Perrin et Co., 1896), 219.

[8] Michael Bakunin, “The International and Karl Marx”, Bakunin on Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 295, 318, 319.

[9] Donny Gluckstein, The Paris Commune: A Revolutionary Democracy (London: Bookmarks, 2006), 47-8, 51.

[10] All three of these articles – “The Paris Commune”, “Revolutionary Government” and “The Commune” — were later included in Kropotkin’s first anarchist book, Words of a Rebel (1885)

[11] With the rise of Stalin, the negative impact steadily increased. While Trotsky’s post-hoc explanations of Stalinism arising from the bureaucracy fail both to understand the role Bolshevik ideology and action played in this process and to acknowledge that, as Berneri noted, anarchists had long predicted this outcome. The conflict between Stalinists and Trotskyists was somewhat meaningless as both favoured party dictatorship, although ironically the former denied it existed and the latter attacked them for undermining. As Trotskyists sought to return to the Bolshevik policies which helped spawn the bureaucracy in the first place, their success in the faction fights of the 1920s in the Russian political machine would not have changed the class relations within Russian society, but simply who the bureaucrat was.

[12] Tobias Abse, “The Rise of Fascism in an Industrial City”, Rethinking Italian Fascism: capitalism, populism and culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), David Forgacs (ed.), 54.

[13] Abse, 56, 74.

[14] See Red Years Black Years: Anarchist Resistance to Fascism in Italy (London: ASP, 1989) for more details of fascist violence (including murder) against libertarians in Italy.

[15] Nunzio Pernicone, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2010) and Dorothy Gallagher, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988)

[16] See Goldman’s “Minorities versus Majorities” and “Syndicalism: The Modern Menace to Capitalism” in the collection Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (New York: Humanity Books, 1998),

[17] A few words are needed about the Italian syndicalism as Berneri refers to its specific characteristics at times. Unlike other syndicalist movements, the Italian movement initially developed within the Italian Socialist Party and so many leading pre-War Italian syndicalists considered themselves Marxists. As one historian notes, “[i]n Italy, the syndicalist doctrine was more clearly the product of a group of intellectuals, operating within the Socialist party and seeking an alternative to reformism.” These “explicitly denounced anarchism” and “insisted on a variety of Marxist orthodoxy.” They “genuinely desired – and tried – to work within the Marxist tradition”. (David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979], 66, 72, 57, 79) Anarchist influence only became predominant when the minority of pro-interventionist Syndicalists (mostly Marxists, it must be stressed) were expelled in 1914 and anarchist Armando Borghi (1882-1968) was elected the General Secretary of the USI. It was amongst this group of pro-war intellectuals that fascism draw some of its adherents while the USI itself was crushed by fascism along with the rest of the left.

[18] “Anarchism: What it Really Stands for”, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (New York: Humanity Books, 1998), 67-8.

[19] Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (Edinburgh/San Francisco: AK Press, 1998).

[20] George Orwell, “Homage to Catalonia”, Orwell in Spain [London: Penguin Books, 2001], 32-3.

[21] Anarchist volunteers from other countries often spoke on the CNT-FAI radio to inform listeners in other countries of developments in the conflict and call for support and aid. For example, Scottish anarchist Ethel MacDonald likewise gave radio speeches in English, see Chris Dolan’s An Anarchist’s Story: the life of Ethel MacDonald (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009)

[22] For a latter anarchist analysis of the failings of the CNT-FAI along the lines Berneri arguing in these articles, see Vernon Richards’ excellent Lessons of the Spanish Revolution: 1936–1939 (Oakland: PM Press, 2019), which Richards dedicated to the memory of Camillo and Marie Louise Berneri.

[23] “Noi e il POUM”, L’Adunata dei Refrattari (1 May 1937)

[24] Regardless of Stalinist claims then (and Trotskyist claims later), the POUM was not Trotskyist as Trotsky himself constantly bemoaned. They were anti-Stalinist Leninists but, while respecting Trotsky, rejected key aspects of his ideology (such as refusing to subscribe to the dictatorship of the proletariat being that of the party). The representatives of the Fourth International in Spain were the tiny group called The Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain which, while the CNT, FAI and POUM grew in significantly in members during the Civil War, remained constant at around 20 members (although, by the end of the war, the number of Trotskyist groups had increased 100% as it had split in two).

[25] Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), 157.

[26] “Trotskyist Lies on Anarchism”, Black Flag 211 (1996).

[27] Augustin Souchy, “The Tragic Week in May”, The May Days: Barcelona 1937 (London: Freedom Press, 1987), Vernon Richards (ed.), 41-2. As well as Souchy’s eye-witness account of the May Days, Orwell recounts his experiences during it, as well as the Stalinist lies about it, in Homage to Catalonia.

[28] Orwell recounts meeting a Italian militiaman in Barcelona, someone who “was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the GPU. (“Looking Back on the Spanish War”, Orwell in Spain, 360).

[29] Camillo Berneri, Pensieri e Battaglie (Paris: Comitato Camillo Berneri, 1938).

[30] Umberto Marzocchi, Remembering Spain: Italian anarchist volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2005), 9.