On August 12, 1861 was born in Vercelli (Piemont, Italy) the militant, thinker and anarcho-communist propagandist Luigi Galleani, known under various pseudonyms (Gigione, Antonio Valenza, Luigi Pimpino, etc.). Born into a middle-class family, his parents are Clemente Galleani, a primary school teacher, and Olimpia Bonino. As a young man he became interested in politics and in 1881 he enrolled in the Faculty of Law in Torí. In his early years he was a militant in republicanism and garibaldism, collaborating in the democratic newspaper L’Operaio of Vercelli.

In 1885, already anarchist and after abandoning his studies to devote himself to militancy, he founded in Vercelli the newspaper La Boje and collaborated in La Questione Sociale of Torí. After leaving with his family, he directed a workers’ league in Vercelli and organized a large number of conferences in various Piedmontese localities.

In 1886 he took an active part in the vaguístic movement of Torí d’aquell, which ended with a harsh police repression. Between 1887 and 1888 he was one of the animators of the full anarcho-socialist La Gazetta Operaiai of Torí and between 1888 and 1889 of La Nuova Gazetta Operaiai. He participated in the III Congress of the Partit Obrer Italià (POI) held in Pavia and collaborated in its organ of expression, Fascio Operaio. In September 1888, in Bologna, during the IV Congress of the POI, he unsuccessfully tried to get the revolutionary and abstentionist line adopted.

In 1889, a year of important workers’ agitation and wandering forces, he stood out as an activist and, sought by the authorities, he first went into exile in Switzerland, where he attended the University of Geneva, but he was expelled as an agitator after having organized in that city a tribute to the Haymarket martyrs. Afterwards he went to France, where, as a result of his activities, he was arrested and imprisoned, but he was released thanks to the intervention of the socialist Alexandre Millerand, requested by the libertarian revolutionary Amilcare Cipriani.

In October 1890 he returned to Switzerland and in December of that year he was arrested, along with other companions (Paul Bernard, Giuseppe H. Rovigo, etc.), for having distributed a trilingual anarchist manifesto. Released to the Italian authorities, he was able to benefit from an amnesty.

On January 6, 1891 he participated in the Capolago Congress (Ticino, Switzerland) where he defended Errico Malatesta’s thesis of creating an authentic anarchist organization that would embrace the entire Italian peninsula (Partit Socialista Anàrquic). In April 1891, at the International Conference for Workers’ Rights, held in Milan, he made a speech against the legalistic tendencies of the workers’ movement and presented a motion in favor of the organization of demonstrations for the First of May. In August 1892 he participated as a delegate in the Geneva Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). At the end of 1892 and the beginning of 1893 he was implicated in the trial for “association of fraudsters” in Genoa, along with 35 other anarchists, and in June he was sentenced to three years in prison.

He was imprisoned in Parma, and soon after he was confined to Pantelleria. There he met his future companion, Maria Ralló, with whom he would have two children. He also made friends with prominent anarchist and socialist militants (Nunzio Valenza, G. D’Ancona, G. Errera, Giovanni Gavilli, Galileo Palla, Emidio Recchioni, etc.). On November 2, 1899 he promoted the publication of the single issue of I Morti, published in Ancona by Alfredo Lazzari and which was an anti-parliamentary and anti-legalist answer to the proposal of a socialist deputy to present to the elections many imprisoned anarchist militants in order to obtain their freedom.

At the end of 1899, after reading this publication, a student, helped by his father, captain of a ship, facilitated the escape of Galleani and his company from Pantelleria and was able to reach Tunisia and then Malta, where, under the false identity of Antonio Valenza, he arrived in Egypt, first in Alexandria and then in Caire, where he made contact with the European libertarian movement. In 1900, after the attack of Gaetano Bresci against King Humbert I, he was arrested, but not extradited.

Then he left for London, where in October 1901 he embarked for the United States. On arrival he replaced, from October 26, 1901, Giuseppe Ciancabilla in the direction of the newspaper La Questione Sociale, which was published in Patterson (New York, USA), a city that had an important presence of Italian immigrant anarchists.

An outstanding lecturer and supporter of direct action and insurrection, in the United States he became one of the most intransigent opponents of the organizational tendency of the libertarian movement. In 1902 he went on a propaganda tour through Vermont and Connecticut. On June 18, 1902 he led the Patterson textile workers’ strike; a talented speaker, at a rally in Saals Park, in the Haledon neighborhood of Patterson, attended by 8,000 people, incited the vaguistas to demonstrate their demands and the provocation of a foreman turned the demonstration into a riot.

Martial law was decreed between June 20 and July 2 and the march was suppressed. Fired with a gunshot wound, he had to escape from detention by going to Mont-real (Quebec, Canada). He returned clandestinely to the United States the following year under the name of Luigi Pimpino and settled in Barre (Vermont), where on June 6, 1903 he began to publish the anarcho-communist Italian-language weekly Cronaca Sovversiva, which would be published until 1919. In 1906, with the advice of the chemist and explosives expert Ettore Molinari, he published the booklet La Salute è in voi!, which explained how to make a bomb, but he made a mistake in the transcription of the formula of the nitroglycerin that Molinari had given him and caused more than one explosion to militants who tried to make it; in 1908 he made the pertinent correction that was published in Cronaca Sovversiva.

At that time he maintained a hard controversy with the anarchist advocate and propagandist Francesco Saverio Merlino and with the socialist journalist Giacinto Menotti Serrati, editor of the newspaper Il Proletario of New York; the latter discovered his true identity to the North American authorities and was arrested and extradited to Paterson where he was tried in April 1907 and acquitted. In 1912 he moved to Lynn (Massachusetts) where he continued his propaganda work. During the Great War he criticized the interventionist anarchists and organized a large number of meetings against the war and against compulsory conscription.

In 1914 he published Faccia a facciao col nemico. Between 1914 and 1919 a wave of attacks carried out by Galleanists was unleashed in the USA (New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Washington, etc.) and the North American authorities decided to put an end to the instigator of the movement. After the suspension of Cronaca Sovversiva on July 18, 1918 -according to the Law of October 1917 that obliged all the newspapers in non-English language to carry the translation of the articles about the war-, the publication of some clandestine issues until March 1919 and the confrontations that started during the celebration of the First of May in New York, he was arrested and on June 26, 1919 he was extradited according to the “Anarchist Exclusion Act” and the “Sedition Act” of 1918, with other companions, to Italy, where he arrived in July in Gènova. Establishing in Torí, with Raffaele Schiavina (Max Sartin), who had also been expelled from the U.S.A., I reprised the edition of Cronaca Sovversiva, publishing 19 numbers between January 17 and October 2, 1920. Also in 1920 and in Torí, it published A Stormo, the manager of which was Pietro Rayneri, a newspaper of which 4,000 copies were published destined to the USA.

On October 28, 1922 he was sentenced by the Court of Torí to 14 months in prison for a press crime. On January 1924 he was released, but his health was damaged. Constantly watched by the feixist police, he did not have the strength to go to France as many of his companions did. In 1925 he published La fine dell’anarchismo? In November 1926, after Anteo Zamboni’s attack against Benito Mussolini, he was arrested and confined to Lipari for three years. During his confinement in this Tyrrhenian village he was again sentenced to nine months in prison for having insulted the Duce.

In February 1930 he was released and his companions Pasquale Binazzi and Zelmira Peroni took him to their residence in Caprigliola, where he was constantly watched by the fascist authorities. Luigi Galleani died of a heart attack on November 4, 1931 in Caprigliola (Tuscany, Italy). In November 1933, on the second anniversary of his death, the anarchist group “I Liberi” of New London (Connecticut, USA) published a single issue of Cronaca Sovversiva in his honor. In 1935 his work Aneliti e singulti was published posthumously.

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  • ButtBidet [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    Whatevs. I had some pretty hard lib positions on things well into my mid 30s.

    So what made you go left? Was it a book or documentary?

    • Red_Eclipse [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      1 year ago

      It was very incremental overtime starting from high school. American education puts you in conservatorism by default just from the backwards history textbook narrative (and being white and middle class and never having had food insecurity etc). Then we had this Contemporary Issues course where the teacher literally drew a line on the board with Liberal on the left and Conservative on the right (lol). I decided: I like the liberal one. That’s what I am!

      Starting in college I was seeing lots of political posts on social media like Tumblr that taught me about things like intersectionality and such. That and having taken courses like gender studies, and world history which was still quite lib but it was slightly better than my childhood which said “we are amazing and magically bring freedom to everybody.”

      Eventually I realized our entire economic system, capitalism, is the problem. Bernie Sanders got people talking about “socialism” so I was exposed to some of it. But here is where I got stalled for a while. Socdems and anarchists had good takes about why capitalism is bad but always warned against evil “authoritarian tankies”. I did not realize how programmed I was still, because even when I encountered one of these so called “tankies” it all just looked like propaganda to me. Citing Chinese media outlets etc, well of course they would lie, that’s all they do. But the BBC and AP say the opposite and we have freedom of press and it’s illegal for them to lie. So who is telling the truth? I was much less inclined to sink in these alternative takes about history and geopolitics, because of alt-right fake news that made me highly critical and suspicious of anything that wasn’t “official” and the “world” had a consensus on. It’s funny how the Nazi culture war stuff really distracted me…

      But ultimately I ended up in this spiral of despair where I was like “capitalism must be destroyed. But anarchist attempts are always instantly squashed and communism turns into evil dictatorships. But it must be destroyed. But alternatives don’t work. But it must be destroyed. But we can’t. But we have to. But we can’t. But we must. But we can’t. Must. Can’t. Must. Can’t.” This contradiction is what made me just say “fuck it, I’ll hear what they have to say” lurk on lemmy grad and I was pretty much instantly convinced. To sum it up,

      1. I ultimately still trusted institutions and “common sense” takes on history and the world. This needed to be destroyed first. Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People’s History of the United States got me started on this. You really have to get to a point where it’s like, wow, I have been lied to about literally everything ever.

      2. Deprogramming the red scare BS. even with #1 complete, it just leads you to radlib stuff like “okay everything is terrible but… China bad etc”. Reading all the debunking stuff helped. But I never would have given it the time of day without #1 being complete because I would have instantly dismissed it as state propaganda.

      3. Get rid of hangups about “authority”. Reading On Authority helped. Dictatorship of the proletariat sounds scary and sus to a liberal, it sounds like some kind of slippery slope. But we literally live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie right here, right now. If instead it was a dictatorship for people like us, it would be so much better. Authority and freedom is ultimately subjective. Freedom to do what? Do I really want rich people to have a say? Nope!

      Sorry it got so long, and there’s so much more, like how I didn’t even know what imperialism meant for a while. Maybe it will help others to get inside libs heads and convince them. Ultimately I was always a communist at heart - I always wanted equal rights and needs met for people. I just needed to find it. Maybe I’ll make this its own post later.