Carlo Cafiero

One of the most important early figures in Italian anarchism and a central figure in the development of anarchist communism. Born in 1846 into a wealthy landowning family in Barletta, in southern Italy, Cafiero initially appeared destined for a conventional upper-class career. He studied law at the University of Naples and briefly entered the diplomatic service. Yet he quickly became dissatisfied with the world of diplomacy and politics. His search for an alternative intellectual and moral life eventually brought him into revolutionary socialism and, ultimately, anarchism. His importance to anarchism lay not only in his political activism but also in his attempt to combine Marx's critique of capitalism with Bakunin's rejection of the state.

Cafiero's revolutionary development began in earnest after he moved through Florence and Paris and arrived in London in 1870. There he entered the circle of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and became deeply impressed by Marx's intellectual abilities. Marx and Engels subsequently sent him to Italy as an agent of the General Council. Cafiero went to Naples, where he encountered a society profoundly different from the industrial societies that Marx's theories primarily analyzed. He witnessed widespread poverty among peasants and workers and became convinced that Italy was experiencing conditions capable of producing revolutionary upheaval.

His experience in Naples also brought him into close contact with supporters of Mikhail Bakunin. Cafiero initially attempted to maintain unity between Marxists and Bakuninists within the International. He believed that the two revolutionary currents shared more fundamental principles than their leaders acknowledged. Engels, however, repeatedly urged him to oppose Bakunin and his followers. Cafiero resisted. His sympathy for Bakunin's ideas grew as he considered the particular conditions of southern Italy, where peasants rather than a large industrial proletariat constituted a major potential revolutionary force. He increasingly concluded that Bakunin's analysis was better suited to the social circumstances of Naples..

In 1872 Cafiero met Bakunin in Locarno, Switzerland. The encounter transformed his political outlook. Cafiero came to reject the idea of a revolutionary state, including a state supposedly controlled by workers. He now regarded authority itself as incompatible with genuine emancipation. His break with Marxism did not mean that he abandoned Marx's analysis of capitalism. Instead, Cafiero increasingly sought to unite Marx's economic critique with Bakunin's anti-authoritarian politics. This synthesis would become the foundation of his distinctive contribution to anarchist communism.

Cafiero played an important organisational role in the anarchist movement that emerged from the International. At the 1872 congress at Rimini, he served as president when Italian anarchists voted to break with the London-based General Council. Later that year, he served as co-president of the Saint-Imier congress, where an alternative international association was established. He also became one of the movement's principal financial supporters. Coming from considerable wealth, Cafiero devoted his fortune to the anarchist cause, helping finance delegates and revolutionary activity. He participated in efforts to organise uprisings in Italy, including the failed Bologna insurrection of 1874 and the Benevento uprising of 1877. The latter was intended to encourage a peasant revolution in southern Italy. Cafiero and his comrades entered the villages of Letino and Gallo, proclaimed freedom and socialism, and destroyed documents representing private property and state authority. The uprising ultimately collapsed, and Cafiero was imprisoned for sixteen months of pre-trial detention before ultimately being acquitted. These failures demonstrated the practical weaknesses of the anarchists' revolutionary strategy, but they did not destroy Cafiero's belief that capitalism and the state could not simply be reformed.

One of Cafiero's most significant intellectual contributions came from his continuing engagement with Marx. While imprisoned, he read Capital and became convinced of its importance. After his release, he produced a concise Italian-language summary, Il Capitale di Carlo Marx brevemente compendiato da Carlo Cafiero, published in 1879. The work introduced Italian readers to Marx's analysis of capitalism, including the labour theory of value, appropriation, division of labour, capital accumulation, alienation, and the exploitation of workers.

His importance to anarchism becomes clearest in his later attempt to synthesize Marxism and Anarchism. In his 1880 essay “Anarchy and Communism,” he argued that communism represented equality while anarchism supplied the necessary guarantee of liberty. Marx's economic analysis provided anarchism with a powerful explanation of capitalism, while anarchism prevented communism from becoming authoritarian, keenly rejecting Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat which he argued could develop into another mechanism of political and economic domination. Genuine emancipation required a stateless society.

For Cafiero, anarchist communism meant the abolition of both private property and political authority. Society would organise production and distribution around human needs rather than profit. He envisioned resources currently devoted to war, luxury, and capitalist accumulation being redirected toward education, medicine, pensions, and other social purposes. He also presented the family as a small-scale illustration of anarchist communism: individuals would contribute according to their abilities while their common needs were collectively met. Society itself could therefore become a larger human family founded on cooperation and equality.

Cafiero also became one of the strongest opponents of reformist socialism in Italy. He rejected the growing willingness of socialists such as Andrea Costa to participate in parliamentary politics and cooperate with existing political institutions. Cafiero argued that capitalism could not be transformed through minor reforms because the political institutions of the existing system ultimately protected its fundamental structure. In his view, socialism without revolutionary transformation risked becoming another form of accommodation with capitalism. His opposition to reformism helped define a distinct revolutionary current within Italian socialism. (Tho there was some back and forth throughout his life on this)

His essay “On Revolution,” published in 1881, developed these ideas further. Cafiero argued that revolution was not merely a distant historical possibility but an active process through which people could acquire revolutionary consciousness. He emphasised revolutionary action and the “propaganda of the deed,” believing that action could spread revolutionary ideas and teach people through experience.

Cafiero's final years were marked by severe mental and physical illness a result of years of political persecution, imprisonment, and exile. His health deteriorated during the early 1880s, and he eventually spent periods in psychiatric institutions. He died in Nocera Inferiore on July 17, 1892, at the age of forty-five.