Week 77

 

The Italian authorities had begun to pay attention to the phenomenon of transatlantic emigration during the 1870s – at the time, there was already an established tradition of commercial relations between the Italian ports, and especially Genoa with its shipping lines, and the region of the Rio de la Plata. So that the movement of men – some argued – was not to raise any alarm, being a natural consequence of the movement of goods.

As the number of emigrants begun to increase though, revealing a new form of “social migration”, so did the, often rather polemical, focus on the causes and consequences of migration phenomena. Far from devising effective remedies – whether possible at all – to a process that threatened to grow to such proportions as to leave a lasting social and political impact, many advocates for legal restrictions of the migratory fluxes begun to distinguish the “spontaneous” emigrants, from the “artificial” ones. That is, those who had left independently of any pressure, direct or indirect, or constriction, from those who had been compelled by the most different means, or encouraged to emigrate with false promises or threats.

Already in 1873 a circular letter sent to the prefects (January 18^th 1873) by Prime Minister Giovanni Lanza, explained:

During these recent times the despicable speculation of promoting, for the purpose of financial gain, the emigration of citizens […] towards South America has been spreading within the country; and for such purpose many agents travel across our provinces, especially those where the land workers are the poorest and most ignorant, exciting them into abandoning their place of birth, with the promise of making easy fortunes in the new world. Numerous families of land workers, persuaded in such a manner by deceitful promises, sell their things and even part of their clothing items in order to pay the travel's fare to speculators who then embark them more or less to the fashion of livestock and, when they don't abandon them in some port along the way, they deliver them to America […] where they fall prey of other speculators […] depriving them of their freedom and forcing them into miserable conditions. Such are usually the sad circumstances most of our emigrants find themselves in.

It's perhaps worth pointing out that Lanza's government – and the subsequent ones – did comparatively little to improve the living conditions of those “poorest and most ignorant” of the land workers, and often adopted measures to regulate the emigration phenomenon that one might regard as almost punitive, such as granting a passport only to those who could prove to have enough money for their return fare, or otherwise appeared able to make a living for themselves (with the result that those who couldn't were left with no recourse but to emigrate by illegal means, and therefore outside of any protection). It is therefore questionable whether such measures did anything to prevent the affirmation of the class of “emigration intermediaries”, who operated – in large part, allegedly, and according to contemporary publicists – taking advantage of their close relations with the navigation companies and explicating their action in between the groups of unorganized labor, and their potential employers across the ocean.

With the 1880s increasingly alarming details on the living conditions and economical exploitation of the Italian workers became commonplace – and especially so for those destined to South America. While a few observers could still point out the examples of those Italians who had made a fortune for themselves, portions of the liberal establishment took the emigration as symptom of the inadequacy of the government to take care of the Italian nation, while others focused on the almost “slave-like” conditions of the large masses of emigrants. A parallel which became easier to make when the Italian emigration to Brazil showed a suspect increase in coincidence with the eventual abolition of slavery in 1888, and certain commentators alleging forms of connivance between the “intermediaries” and the associations of the fazendeiros.

While the original data collected during the late XIX Century provide little more than a rough estimate, their presence is in itself evidence of the attention for the new phenomenon.

year	United States	Argentina	Brazil
1887	46,256	67,139	40,153
1888	47,856	75,029	104,353
1889	30,238	88,647	36,124
1890	62,969	39,122	19,675
1891	69,297	15,511	116,561 (183,738)^a
1892	61,434	27,850	55,049
1893	70,570	37,977	58,552
1894	39,829	36,699	34,872
1895	44,003	41,203	97,344
1896	-	75,204	96,324

a – The first estimate from the 1892 report of the Institute for Statistics appears to include only passengers landing in Rio de Janeiro. The second from the 1894 stats-book likely represents a correction accounting for other forms of immigration to Brazil and it is revised to 132,326 in the 1900 edition. The pattern between 1888 and 1895 is likely affected by different methods of data collection and accounting, but migratory patterns did have periodical spikes, for instance due to changes in immigration regulations, restrictions and travel fares.

 

When Alceste De Ambris made his way to Brazil – from Marseilles, like many others who didn't have a (valid) passport – it was 1898, and the number of unorganized Italian laborers in Brazil had reached substantial proportions. The young socialist (he was born in 1874 and had been involved with the socialist movement since the foundation of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892) was escaping from a sentence to one year of military jail, that he had been imposed for deserting early that year, when the Italian government had made recourse to the army to restore public order, and especially against the workers' and socialist organizations (1898 was the year of the Milan riots and of Bava-Beccaris' repression).

It was therefore in Brazil that De Ambris first made a name for himself, largely in the practical organization of the Italian land workers, and as editor of a periodical – also named Avanti!. It was his activity as a publicist, directly tied to his denunciation of the practices of the local land owners and work providers, which caused his new legal troubles: in April 1903, De Ambris escaped again from a jail sentence (four months and twenty days for defamation) by returning to Italy, where his pending sentence had been removed with the general amnesty passed by the new King.

His reputation immediately earned him a directive position in the new Camere del Lavoro - the first Italian trade unions, in the modern acception, which had begun forming during the 1890s – first in Savona, then in Livorno. And then the place of chief editor of the Gioventù Socialista, the Rome based official periodical of the socialist youth, which he held from 1905 to early 1907, favoring the participation of other syndicalists such as Michele Bianchi and Paolo Orano.

It was around this time that De Ambris (now listed by the public force as “socialist” and no longer as “anarchist”) found his collocation at the core of the rising revolutionary syndicalist movement, which had begun to establish itself among the organizations of the Northern region – largely influenced by the Milanese Avanguardia Socialista of A. Labriola and W. Mocchi – during the anti-reformer battles in the build up to the VIII National Congress of the Socialist Party (April 1904 in Bologna). While the congress had confirmed the predominance of the reformers within the general party structure, the syndicalist ideas had managed to expand their influence over certain “more advanced” groups of the socialist left and, especially, of organized labor (notably coming to control a few selected local organizations), as showcased by their substantial impact on the organization and ideological background of the general strike of September 1904, the first in Italian history.

On those grounds, and within the comparatively backwards social and industrial infrastructure, revolutionary syndicalism, far from a solid and systematic ideological formulation, became – to use A. Gramsci's words – the “instinctive expression […] of the workers' reaction”, the intransigent side, hostile to any sort of compromise, with the bourgeoisie, with the land owners, with the government. The second branch of the Italian revisionist movement – arguing for a necessary revision of the Marxist doctrine, but towards a direction completely alternative to that of Bernstein – born in Italy at the beginning of the XX Century and officially formed with the 1902 Congress of Imola, the revolutionary syndicalists posited both the refusal of a gradual process of reforms as a mean of advancement for the socialist movement as well as the prominence of the spontaneous economical organization (the trade union) over the mediated institutionalized form (the party). They affirmed in fact the primacy of “direct action” over the method of progressive reforms achieved through parliamentary “collaboration”, and found the most complete expression of this direct action in the organization of labor for the purpose of and towards the “general strike” – being influenced by the works of Geores Sorel, especially his 1898 “L'avenir socialiste des syndicats”, but retaining nonetheless various particular elements determined by the specific tenure of their local action. From Sorel and the French syndicalists, they also accepted the idea of a natural, organic or positive function of violence in creating the conditions for social renovation. As Arturo Labriola explained on Avanguardia Socialista (1903):

Any social formation is only able to reform itself to some extent; once crossed that point it consolidates, forcing men to blow it up with violent means.

I finally found some good data on the casualty breakdown for a typical U.S. infantry division during World War II separated by unit and type, in this case, the 80th Infantry Division. The first table come from a handwritten document compiled by 318th Infantry Regiment machine gunner Robert "Bob" Murrell sometime after the war. It can clearly be seen that assignment to the "tip of the spear" was very hazardous to one's health; infantry regiments incurred the vast majority of all losses, and it was basically a guarantee that assignment to a rifle company meant that one would become some type of casualty at least once.

Casualties of 80th Infantry Division, August 1944-May 1945, by Unit

Unit	KIA (OFF-EM)	DOW	DOI	SWA	SIA	LWA	LIA	CAP	MIA	OFF	EM
HQ, 80th Inf Div	1-0			2-0						3
317th Inf Regt	45-997	16-140	0-2	42-670	3-21	120-2,579	43-1,136	0-2	43-1,845	312	7,392
318th Inf Regt	42-1,067	6-115		60-1,273	3-61	91-2,089	8-580	0-15	28-873	238	6,073
319th Inf Regt	31-615	7-85		24-631	3-21	58-1,746	8-300		13-447	144	3,845
HQ, 80th Inf Div Arty	1-0				0-1	0-1				1	2
HQ Btry, 80th Inf Div Arty	0-1			0-1			0-1				3
313th FA Bn (105 mm)	4-18	1-5		5-33	0-2	10-36	1-8		3-2	24	107
314th FA Bn (105 mm)	6-10	0-3	0-1	5-17	0-2	6-21	2-10		0-1	22	74
315th FA Bn (155 mm)	0-5	1-0		3-1	0-1	3-13	2-7		0-2	10	37
905th FA Bn (105 mm)	2-4	0-4		2-13	0-1	2-23	0-7			6	60
305th Engr Cbt Bn	1-31	1-2		4-30		2-56	1-4		1-3	10	169
305th Med Bn	0-8			0-6	0-1	0-10	1-5		1-0	2	29
80th Cav Rcn Trp (Mecz)	0-9			0-2		0-13	1-5		0-2	2	55
HQ, Sp Trps, 80th Inf Div
Med Det, Sp Trps					0-1		0-1				2
HQ Co, 80th Inf Div						0-1					1
780th Ord LM Co
80th QM Co	1-2			0-1		0-3	0-1		0-1	1	8
80th Sig Co	1-1			0-2						1	3
MP Plat			0-1	0-1							2
Band
Total	135-2,766	32-354	0-5	147-2,681	9-112	292-6,591	67-2,065	0-17	88-3,176	776	17,862

Casualties of 80th Infantry Division, August 1944-May 1945, by Unit, Percent

Unit	Number	Percent
HQ, 80th Inf Div	3	0.01%
317th Inf Regt	7,704	41.33%
318th Inf Regt	6,311	33.86%
319th Inf Regt	3,989	21.40%
HQ, 80th Inf Div Arty	3	0.02%
HQ Btry, 80th Inf Div Arty	3	0.02%
313th FA Bn (105 mm)	131	0.70%
314th FA Bn (105 mm)	96	0.52%
315th FA Bn (155 mm)	47	0.25%
905th FA Bn (105 mm)	66	0.35%
305th Engr Cbt Bn	179	0.96%
305th Med Bn	31	0.17%
80th Cav Rcn Trp (Mecz)	57	0.31%
HQ, Sp Trps, 80th Inf Div	0	0.00%
Med Det, Sp Trps	2	0.01%
HQ Co, 80th Inf Div	1	0.0005%
780th Ord LM Co	0	0.00%
80th QM Co	9	0.05%
80th Sig Co	4	0.02%
MP Plat	2	0.01%
Band	0	0.00%
Total	18,638	100.00%

Casualties of 80th Infantry Division, August 1944-May 1945, by Branch of Major Unit, Percent

Branch	Number	Percent
Infantry	18,008	96.62%
Field Artillery	346	1.86%
Corps of Engineers	179	0.96%
Cavalry	57	0.31%
Medical Department	33	0.18%
Quartermaster Corps	9	0.05%
Signal Corps	4	0.02%
Corps of Military Police	2	0.01%
Total	18,638	100.00%

Unit	Number	Percent
Infantry regiments	18,004	96.60%
All other units	634	3.4%