Stefano d’Errico’s book (over 500 pages) is a continuation of his long-standing political reflection on Camillo Berneri, which includes Anarchismo e politica nel problemismo e nella critica all’anarchismo del ventesimo secolo, il “programma minimo” dei libertari del Terzo Millennio. Rilettura antologica e biografica di Camillo Berneri (2007; of which there are Portuguese and Spanish translations, published in 2009 and 2012 respectively, under a shorter title), and Il socialismo libertario ed umanista oggi fra politica ed antipolitica. Attualità della revisione berneriana del pensiero anarchico (2011).
Berneri (1897–1937) was an Italian anarchist intellectual, born in Lodi, who began his political activism in Reggio Emilia among the socialists. He later graduated under Gaetano Salvemini, frequently taking part in his cultural initiatives organized in Florence in the early 1920s. In this way, Berneri came into contact with intellectuals such as Ernesto Rossi and the brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli. Furthermore, Berneri wrote for important journals of the time, such as Critica politica, a supporter of the federalist model, Piero Gobetti’s Rivoluzione liberale, and Giuseppe Gangale’s Conscientia, an anti-fascist Protestant publication. Berneri devoted great attention to the Giustizia e Libertà movement, founded by the Rosselli brothers, forging relationships with many of its activists, including Aldo Garosci, Silvio Trentin, and Franco Venturi. Within anarchist circles, Berneri was regarded as brilliant and eclectic, yet at the same time “unorthodox” and even somewhat controversial. His intense journalistic activity was driven by a commitment to finding solutions to lift anarchism out of the crisis that characterized it in the 1920s and 1930s, preserving its political and philosophical heritage, and keeping it alive as a political option. For this reason, his opinions caused controversy, at times very bitter, within the anarchist movement. Among the first to travel to Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, from October 1936 until his death he edited the weekly Guerra di classe, published in Barcelona. Berneri was killed on 5 May 1937, possibly by Stalinist assassins, while clashes raged in the Catalan city, pitting government troops and social-communist militants against the anarchists and supporters of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM).
Berneri has been studied by a number of historians in recent years, who have been fascinated by his “unorthodox” views within the anarchist movement on electoral abstention, or by his support for the CNT in the government during the Spanish Civil War. Among them, d’Errico appears to share many points of the interpretation proposed by Giampietro Berti, who regards Berneri as one of those who, in the 1920s and 1930s, faced “the problem of rethinking anarchism” and sought to correct the anarchists’ attitude towards the political sphere.Footnote 1
All these topics are discussed in A 3.0 by d’Errico, who tries to bring Berneri’s ideas as close as possible to the present day. One of the moments in the book where this effort to translate Berneri’s thought into the present day emerges most clearly is in the chapter dedicated to ecology, which moves from Élisée Reclus through Berneri to Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan (pp. 161–165). Rather than a historical study of Berneri, this book is therefore a political analysis inspired by Berneri’s thought. In fact, A 3.0 lacks consideration of the historiographical debate regarding this important Italian anarchist. According to the author, Berneri is the key to rethinking politics within a serious perspective of social emancipation. The personal controversy concerning Antonio Senta (among other things author of a good biography of Luigi Galleani, published in English by AK Press in 2019 and in Spanish by Editorial Eleuterio in 2021) over a 2012 review with which the author did not agree (pp. 133–137) could have been treated in a more balanced manner. The same is true of the critical references to Alternativa libertaria (an Italian organization ideologically linked to Pëtr Aršinov’s Platform, pp. 82–84), caused by differences in trade union strategies, and to the Milan publishing house Elèuthera (p. 145). In this way, the author’s polemical spirit tends to overshadow critical reflection. Similarly, in A 3.0, the impact of counterculture on post-1968 social movements is characterized as the “reproduction, in a defensive form, of the nineteenth-century alterity of early socialism, mimicked through folklore” (p. 95). On the following page, the landscape of Italian centri sociali is reduced to a singular, marginal entity (p. 96). Such trenchant judgements risk obscuring the nuances of complex social phenomena.
The second part of the book is a denunciation of the progressive dismantling of the Italian state school system – a subject about which d’Errico is well informed, given that he is secretary of the Unicobas Scuola trade union. D’Errico has previously devoted two other books to the impact of neo-liberalism on education: La scuola distrutta (2019) and La scuola rapita (2021). In this section, the author analyses the transformations that have taken place in the school system in recent years, highlighting “the total lack of attention paid to education” (p. 313) by much of the Italian political establishment and society. The third and final part is a critical reflection on Italy over the last thirty years. Within it, d’Errico highlights, among other things, the persistence of the legacy of fascism, which, he claims, is responsible for the civil and cultural backwardness that characterizes Italy (pp. 327–332).
D’Errico’s political considerations and his historical analysis of Berneri’s political thought, as presented in A 3.0, constitute two levels that often overlap and tend to blur into each other. For this reason, the opinion expressed by Claudio Venza (a specialist in the history of Spanish anarchism and professor at the University of Trieste, who sadly passed away in 2022) regarding a previous book by the author seems well-founded. In a review published in Il Mestiere di Storico, the journal of the association bringing together contemporary historians in Italy (Sissco), Venza noted, in fact, “a certain instrumentalization” of Berneri’s thought in d’Errico’s analysis.Footnote 2
A 3.0 concludes with an extensive appendix that opens with a biography of Berneri (pp. 407–420). This is followed by a text that discusses in depth the position taken by Berneri during the Spanish Civil War, regarding the inclusion in the government of ministers nominated by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (pp. 421–441). The volume closes with a reprint of the Costituzione della Federazione Italiana Comuni Socialisti (FICS) [Constitution of the Italian Federation of Socialist Municipalities], written by Berneri for the Conference of Italian anarchists in exile in France, held in Paris in 1935, and accompanied by a text by d’Errico (pp. 443–472), a useful list of Berneri’s texts quoted in the volume, and a list of references.
