Structured and
organized revolution

Try telling a feeling of exclusion and otherness radical than the order of things you want "natural", but doing it from a specific social context and situated through because the contradictions and powerlessness. This is the meaning of the novel by Piero Pieri Les nouveaux Anarchist. Intolerable acts of desperation in Bologna (Transeuropa editions, pp.158, € 13.50).
Pieri tells, ironically, the story of a group of people, students, university precarious, anarchists and police, and through them their own worlds, social and psychological. Corrosive, for example, the views on the university education profession (sociological question: why is it full of professors who have done 68 but not of professors who have done 77?), its corrupt ways of selection, the barons - things that Pieri knows from the inside, teaching Contemporary Italian Literature at DAMS in Bologna (hence the conclusion: "Universities should not be reformed, should not be rebuilt from scratch, not even revolutionized. Universities should be made to explode"). The life of a research fellow who works tiredly on the Pascoli's young child's and a "poor artist" is undermined by the police raid, which considers them insurrectionary anarchist, imprisone them, torture them. Brutality that will lead to a radical, as Rita - the true anarcho-insurrectionist - will avenge the wrongs inflicted on the two former lovers.
It is an hyperbolic turning point, in terms of narrative, and from that point on, the novel you read is even more as a metaphor and reflection. Up to criticize the violent method of Fai - Informal Anarchist Federation: "What the fuck informal means? You are like an Armani casual jacket? [...] It's never been theorized horizontal chaos ... just doing in bed the horizontal chaos ... true, Rita? ". So much so that Rita is between space leaks in our common mystical and millenarian hopes that fail to materialize if not in letter bombs sent via mail.
Final response of the narrative, then, is not the abstract and impotent revolt of insurgents, but a revolution structured and organized, starting from the nodes and the real contradictions of society: in this case, the experience of an ordinary frustrated and beaten fellow.

Marco Rovelli

From the belly of the
school-company

The author (Dario Molino, The Buddha, the girl, the professor, Besa Publisher, Nardo (Le) 2009, pp. 149, € 15.00) continues his investigation on "the new advances from within his world of work and daily life in general. As he had done in the previous novel (Itala scola. The crimes of a school company, Zero for Conduct, 2004), uses the techniques of narrative to represent a new social and cultural form that is above it, difficult to decipher, for its established canons of interpretation in a time that is gone now. Although this book has cut a yellow science fiction, but unlike the first, all set in the "company-school", to highlight the reduction of knowledge to a commodity, the idiocy of the educational bureaucracy, in this case, the school offers a pretext for the narrative, which then spread out of the educational institution. This is a bright trace in the initial contextualization of the novel. Electronic registers, input and output pass for students and teachers.
Super technocratic and progressive Executives, increase in the number of pupils per class, which led to constant revisions, upward, the parameters of ASL to make it compatible with the new requirements. Unprecedented problems of spatial organization in the classroom. Then the following outstanding and futuristic description of janitors and cleaners, with plates applied under the arms, back and chest to measure perspiration and through a complex system of calculation, define their labor-intensive in order to determine who Awards will be productivity, economic incentives.
This is the background, say the place where there are two of the protagonists of the story, a professor and student, but everything that takes place outside of that environment and with the addition of a Buddhist monk. Starting from a usual school trip to Paris, the story builds and builds extensively in the typical places of everyday Turin, streets and squares, streets and courses, bars, taverns, apartments in the historic center. Until the monumental cemetery in Turin where the story ends, between shots, rituals, tombs and arms depots. Is revealed as the existence of an organization with branches in Italy and France by attacks to strike the enemies of the faith, including the Tibetans, trying to attribute it to other religious groups, to provoke a conflict, unrecognizable, compared to those that characterized the social life of the then boosted an industrial city. This is a conflict of cultures, differences of religion. A fight that has implications for "murder", because someone leaves the skin, the student hero is mysteriously given up for dead, only to be resurrected and weaving, along with his professor., the plot of the entire narrative.
It is the professor who, perhaps for its formation and its history, has more than the others, the application for the sense of what is happening. And the answer is disarming, but representative of the times that he is living. It is bitter and solitary reflections. We spend our lives, he says to himself, projecting into the future, looking for something eternal love, sex, money, social position, political career, a different world, the sunset the American empire, the victory of the Holy Faith, the 'Levi's latest model, an increasingly modern air conditioner, and in this fight with their neighbors, there are renal colic, we do a temporary work for 550 € a month, our wife goes away with another.
This fragile and light this will become our past, he concludes, therefore, our memory, our place in history will be nothing more than a memory of quarrels, ephemeral desires, vacuous, and personal failures. The uncertainty of this, his existential weakness creeps to the point in bringing professor, during times of depression, to acknowledge his suffering due to a life lived in the systematic doubt: sometimes I can not even decide whether to sit or stand up, it's hard to imagine that we can do without doubt just about everything.

Diego Giachetti

Anarchist Chronicles:
Umanità Nova in the history of del ’900

The book recently published by Zero in Conduct, anarchic Chronicles (1), is a collection of contributions of several authors on the history of the anarchist magazine "Umanità Nova" (UN), founded in 1920 as a newspaper directed by Errico Malatesta and published today in the form of weekly. Particularly interesting is the possibility to access the original numbers of the newspaper collected in two DVDs with this book.
As we explained in the book by Gigi Di Lembo, the process of gestation of an anarchist newspaper began in 1909 with "La Protesta Umana" by Ettore Molinari and Nella Giacomelli, to be published daily for about a month. The idea, however, continues to ferment until the birth of the Italian Anarchist Communist Union (UCAI) in 1919, then Italian Anarchist Union (UAI) in the 1920 (2), could realize the efforts by collecting sufficient funds to ensure the release of the newspaper Umanità Nova directed by Errico Malatesta on February 26, 1920.
It is important to note that even this ambitious project to build an anarchist newspaper "open to all tendencies" was initially characterized by a strong domestic opposition in the movement and consequent lengthy discussions on the advisability of such a mammoth effort for a movement that, even then, was largely minority and with limited means. It should however be noted that, thanks to the unity efforts aimed by Malatesta, the newspaper was an element gradually unifying the efforts of (almost) all anarchists and made possible a broadening libertarian base among the working masses who greeted enthusiastically the output of a deployed daily on open positions and consistently revolutionary. It was an outlet seemed revolutionary, in fact, at hand and the Socialists (with its own newspaper, L'Avanti) could no longer represent the workers' desire for radical change.
The book describes well the parable of the newspaper that, despite supporting it with an editorial staff is limited to a handful of companions in an anarchist context in Milan and certainly not exciting in terms of militants (3), after a few months after the first number is considered dangerous by the Socialists of anarchy contagion in action: the Kuliscioff writes, in fact, to Turati that "now L'Avanti is almost boycotted and the workers do not read that Umanità Nova, they tell me it now exceeds 100,000 copies" (4). The occupation of the factories in September 1920 probably marks the peak of the newspaper. UN clearly supports the most advanced positions of the proletariat is, however, betrayed by the Socialists and the General Confederation of Labour (CGL), accepting the compromise with employers, bringing the total defeat of the movement and paving the way for the repression that primarily affect the anarchists Including the editorial staff of Umanità Nova (5).
The prolonged and unjustified detention pending trial of Malatesta, Borghi and Quaglino, guilty only of having publicly supported their political positions through the newspaper, and the subsequent hunger strike by prisoners, and proclaimed that he risked the lives of the seventy years old Malatesta, generate fibrillation in the anarchists base exacerbated by the abandonment of the anarchist to their fate by the Socialists and the CGL.
It is in this context of severe stress that some anarchist sympathizers, individualists, in March 1921 promote the bombing of the commissioner Gasti at Teatro Diana in Milan that will result in twenty-one dead and more than one hundred fifty wounded (6). The aim of the bomb will escape the attack and even there is a real suspicion that there have been false police information to direct the attack. The immediate effect is still detrimental to the whole movement: the destruction of the editorial and printing facilities of UN by the fascists, anarchists wherever hunted and the substantial disappearance of popular sympathy hitherto demonstrated for the anarchists and their daily. And fascism will gain popular sympathy hitherto non-existent and since then has essentially free hand to "normalize" the situation. "Since then, the fascists understood that the bombs and terrorism could be an excellent tool to achieve their goals and the subsequent Italian history test no doubt that even tried to use this tool. But even the anarchists learned the lesson and, since then, kept away from temptations dynamite." (7)
The book then proceeds to trace the noble path of resistance that the comrades in Italy and abroad tried to impose on a political situation now drastically inhospitable for Italian-language anarchist paper. Umanità Nova will survive, however, moved to Rome from May 1921 until July 1922 in the form daily and then weekly from August 1922 to 1922 (8) in December. But the story of UN banished from fascism in Italy can now rampant rise in the long exile of twenty years in New York (9), Buenos Aires (10) and Paris (11) and then in the resistance in several italian cities (12). This is also part of the relatively unknown story which the Anarchist chronicles finally throws full light. The last article of Martina Guerrini analyzes a number of articles published on the Florentine issue of Umanità Nova dedicated to the female universe, therefore, you gain the visibility it deserves in the history of the anarchist magazine.
To conclude the pleasure of sharing reading this wonderful book I remember that, as has been rightly said in an earlier emmerre review of the book (13), "our" Umanità Nova is revived after the war in the form of weekly and is still alive and active since unlike many other historic titles of political movements, even if it is not receiving any public assistance. I therefore welcome the opportunity to greet and thank her friends and companions over the years have committed themselves voluntarily and freely in the editorial staff (which frequently changes its components) and keeps alive the voices of Italian anarchists. And I suggest to all readers of "A" to subscribe also to Umanità Nova because in Italy we need free newspapers that do not represent the usual power groups and are also independent from the state contribution and Umanità Nova is perhaps the only occasion (14).

Marco Gastoni

Notes

1. CRONACHE ANARCHICHE. IL GIORNALE "UMANITA' NOVA" NELL'ITALIA DEL NOVECENTO (1920-1945), by F. Schirone, Ed. Zero in Condotta, 2010 with 2 dvd, € 28. Scritti di De Agostini, Di Lembo, D'Errico, Galzerano, Guerrini, Ortalli, Pagliaro, M.Rossi, Sacchetti, Scaliati e Schirone. The two Annexes DVD contain the complete collection, digitized, of the anarchist newspaper "Umanità Nova" (1920-1922), edition of Milan and Rome. There are the issues of exile: USA (1924-1925), Argentina (two unique numbers, 1930 and 1932) and France (1932-1933). The work ends with the collection of "Umanità Nova" published in Italy in the period of Resistance: Florence (1943-1945), Genoa (single number during the uprising against Nazi fascism, April 22, 1945) and Rome (1944-May 1945).
2. The main feature dell'UCAI was its tendency to be an organization founded on the principles of anarchist communism. The organization that took over after its dissolution, the Italian Anarchist Union, was formed under pressure instead of Malatesta as an organization of synthesis, that is open to anarchists, communists, individualists, trade unionists, anti-war, insurrection, etc. ". by Anarchopedia (http://ita.anarchopedia.org/Unione_Comunista_Anarchica_Italiana). On the UAI experience, see M. Antonioli, T. Antonelli and others, the Italian Anarchist Union. Among European revolution and fascist reaction (1919-1926), Zero in Condotta, Milan, 2006, pp. 312.
3. See the analysis of Mauro De Agostini (Anarchist Chronicles, p.43-44) on Dante's Pagliai in March 1921.
4. Two of the most influential people in the socialist era. The passage of the letter of August 1920 is taken from Anarchist Chronicles p.29. The Kuliscioff overestimate the spread of UN (100,000) Franco Schirone more conservatively puts at 60,000 in 1920 but remember that L'Avanti in the same period pulls 70,000 (Anarchist Chronicles, pag.227)
5. The complete editorial staff of Umanità Nova is in fact arrested and only the head editor Gigi Damiani escapes to surprisingly ensure that the appearance of the newspaper in those conditions on the run thanks to the efforts of many comrades.
6. See the essay by Joseph Galzerano in the book: see also Vincenzo Mantovani, "Anarchici alla sbarra-La strage del Diana tra primo dopoguerra e fascismo" Il Saggiatore / Net, Milan, new edition 2007
7. Mark Gaston "Anarchists in the dock," Umanità Nova, No. 29, 2010
8. See the contributions of Giuseppe Scaliati and Giorgio Sacchetti in the book that well describe this period.
9. 18 numbers between 1924 to 1925: see the interesting contribution by Giulio D'Errico in the book.
10. 2 unique numbers in 1930 and 1932: see Angelo Pagliaro in the book.
11. 10 numbers between 1932 and 1933 under different titles in order to escape persecution by the French authorities, see Franco Schirone in the book.
12. 16 numbers between 1943 and 1945 in Florence, 22 issues between 1944 and 1945 in Rome and a unique number of the April 25, 1945 in Genoa, see Marco Rossi in the book.
13. emmerre "Anarchist Chronicles" Umanità Nova, n.41, 2010 (http://www.umanitanova.org/n-41-anno-90/cronache-anarchiche).
14. Subscribe to UN! To request a free sample copy: email: unamministrazione@virgilio.it mail: Federico Denitto PO Box 812 34132 Trieste centro. Annual subscription € 55, € 35 half-year, € 65 abb. + gadget, 80 € foreign or supporter. Payments on ccp No 89947345 made out to Federico Denitto PO Box 812 34132 Trieste centro. For bank transfers: IBAN: IT88Q0760102200000089947345 BIC / SWIFT: BPPIITRRXXX always made out to Federico Denitto. This year, those who subscribe to € 65 can choose between various gadgets (http://www.umanitanova.org/abbonamento).