Carlo Cafiero was born in Barletta on 1 September 1846. His life would take him far from the Apulian city: into the circles of the International, alongside Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Engels and Errico Malatesta, into the struggles of the workers’ movement and eventually into the insurrectionary experience of the Matese Band. Yet the relationship between Carlo Cafiero and Barletta cannot be reduced simply to the fact that he was born there.
Material and political traces of his history remain in the city. His birthplace, the memorial plaque prepared before the rise of Fascism but unveiled only in 1946, the bust later restored, initiatives promoted by local libertarian groups and even debates over street names all reveal the difficult relationship between Barletta and one of its citizens best known in the history of the international anarchist movement.
There is also a less visible memory, made up of documents, newspapers, photographs and political initiatives. Part of this history has been reconstructed over the years in the pages of Magozine through research carried out in libertarian archives and through the activities of collectives in which we took part.
Bringing these traces together today makes it possible not only to reconstruct Carlo Cafiero’s place in the memory of Barletta, but also to return to his ideas: anarchist communism, internationalism, economic equality and criticism of the concentration of wealth.
Carlo Cafiero: From Barletta to the International Anarchist Movement
Cafiero was born into a wealthy family in Barletta, and his education could have led him towards a very different life from the one he eventually chose. After completing his studies, he gradually distanced himself from his social background and came into contact with the socialist movement and the International Workingmen’s Association.
His path is particularly interesting precisely because of this break. Cafiero did not belong to the social classes whose emancipation he would later support. Instead, he came from a privileged economic background, which he progressively renounced as he embraced the revolutionary cause.
His initial relationship with Friedrich Engels and the Marxist milieu was later replaced by a growing closeness to Bakunin and the Italian anarchist movement. Cafiero thus became one of the leading figures of a generation of internationalists who sought to transform socialism from a theoretical doctrine into a revolutionary movement.
But it would be a mistake to remember him exclusively as a man of action. Cafiero was also an important popularizer of socialist economic ideas and the author of one of the earliest summaries of Karl Marx’s Capital, written to make complex economic concepts understandable to the workers for whom those analyses were primarily intended.
His later libertarian thinking emerges particularly clearly in Carlo Cafiero: Anarchy and Communism, where we explored the relationship between individual freedom, economic equality and common ownership.
Cafiero, Malatesta and Propaganda of the Deed
One of the best-known episodes in Cafiero’s life is connected with the Matese Band, the insurrection organized in 1877 together with, among others, Errico Malatesta.
The idea was not to wait for the conditions for revolution to mature spontaneously. Revolutionary action was supposed to demonstrate concretely to local populations that rebellion against the existing order was possible.
During the insurrection, the internationalists occupied several towns in the Matese area, destroyed tax registers and property records and proclaimed the social revolution. The experience was short-lived, and the insurgents were arrested.
The episode is also important for understanding the debate surrounding so-called propaganda of the deed, a concept that over time has often been reduced to the idea of individual acts of violence, but which originally had a broader meaning. We reconstructed its history and contradictions in Propaganda of the Deed: Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero.
The failure of the insurrection did not prevent the experience from leaving a deep mark on the history of Italian anarchism. Malatesta himself would later reflect on the limitations of insurrections built on the belief that revolutionary example alone could spontaneously provoke a popular uprising.
Carlo Cafiero and Barletta: A Difficult Memory
The international dimension of Cafiero’s life contrasts with the relatively discreet presence of his memory in the city where he was born.
Yet Barletta preserves a particularly interesting testimony to the history of Italian anarchism: the memorial plaque dedicated to Carlo Cafiero on his birthplace.
Research carried out together with Rosanna Rizzi, with the collaboration of the “Armando Borghi” Libertarian Library in Castel Bolognese, allowed us to reconstruct a history that spans Fascism and the postwar period. The plaque had already been prepared in 1922, but remained in storage for years and could only be installed in 1946.
Carlo Cafiero’s Memorial Plaque and the Anarchists of 1946
The centenary of Cafiero’s birth provided the opportunity to bring his memory publicly back into the city.
On 11 September 1946, the memorial plaque was unveiled at his birthplace. Later research made it possible to recover photographs, documents and even accounts of the money collected by anarchist groups and individuals to create it. Armando Borghi, one of the most important figures of twentieth-century Italian anarchism, also took part in the commemoration.
It is a small piece of local history that nevertheless reveals something much larger: the reconstruction of the anarchist movement after twenty years of Fascist dictatorship and the determination to recover a political memory that the regime had attempted to erase.
We told the story of this research and published some of the recovered documents in our article on the history of Carlo Cafiero’s memorial plaque in Barletta.
The Restoration of Carlo Cafiero’s Bust
That memory found a second life many decades later.
In 2017, the commemorative bust on Cafiero’s birthplace was restored through a self-financed initiative, without economic or institutional sponsors. The aim was not simply to clean and restore a monument, but to bring Cafiero back into the city’s cultural debate.
The project culminated in the public presentation of the restored bust and a series of initiatives dedicated to his life and ideas, documented in the announcement Rediscovering Cafiero – Public Presentation of Carlo Cafiero’s Restored Bust.
The plaque and the bust therefore tell the story of two very different moments, 1946 and 2017, united by the same question: how can we prevent Cafiero’s memory from becoming simply a name from the past?
A Street in Barletta Named After Carlo Cafiero?
The question of memory inevitably enters public space as well.
Street names are not neutral: they create a geography of memory through which a city decides which people and events should be passed on to future generations.
This is also the origin of the debate over Cafiero’s place in Barletta’s street names and the proposal to replace a name associated with Italian military and monarchical history with that of the anarchist born in the city.
The issue was discussed in the article Via Cialdini: Carlo Cafiero in Barletta’s Street Names.
Beyond the specific proposal, an interesting question remains: why should a city commemorate generals, monarchs and representatives of political power through its streets far more often than those who challenged that power?
Rediscovering Cafiero therefore also means asking whom we choose to remember in public space, and why.
Cafiero in the Anarchist Memory of Barletta and Apulia
Cafiero’s memory has not remained confined to monuments.
Over the years, various libertarian groups have tried to bring his ideas back into the streets through commemorations, meetings and public initiatives. In some cases, Cafiero’s memory became intertwined with that of other Apulian figures of the International.
One example is Carlo Cafiero and Emilio Covelli Remembered on May Day in Barletta and Trani, a testimony to an anarchist memory that also helps reconstruct the important role played by Apulia in the birth and spread of the Italian internationalist movement.
Other initiatives have continued over the years to bring Cafiero back into public space. In 2022, for example, on the 176th anniversary of Carlo Cafiero’s birth, the Terra Bruciata Collective organized a public meeting in Barletta dedicated to his life and ideas.
These documents belong to different periods and organizations and do not constitute a complete history of the city’s anarchist movement. Taken together, however, they reveal the persistence of a political memory that periodically returns to question the city.
Carlo Cafiero and Internationalism
One of the most contemporary aspects of Cafiero’s thought is probably his radical internationalism.
In the society imagined by Cafiero, access to common wealth could not depend on national belonging. In the example of a resident of Beijing contained in Anarchy and Communism, a person arriving from the other side of the world should enjoy the same rights as those already living in a particular community.
It is a simple but powerful image because it overturns the idea that being born within a particular border should grant someone greater rights over the resources found within it.
This reflection was taken up again in 2017 in the Letter to Carlo Cafiero on His 171st Birthday, a text written by the Rivoltiamo la Terra Libertarian Collective in the context of controversies and racist incidents affecting Barletta at the time.
That text remains here as a document of that historical moment. But the question raised by Cafiero goes far beyond the circumstances in which it was revived: can an internationalism exist that recognizes universal rights regardless of where a person was born?
It is a question that takes on an even broader meaning in a world organized through states, military alliances and opposing geopolitical blocs. Recovering libertarian internationalism therefore means imagining direct relationships between peoples, communities, workers and movements rather than simply choosing which power or bloc should receive our hopes.
From Cafiero’s Thought to the Cafiero Project
Rediscovering an anarchist thinker should not mean turning his writings into sacred texts.
Ideas acquire meaning when they are compared with new historical conditions, modified and, when necessary, surpassed.
It was from this need that, many years later, the Cafiero Project emerged. This was not a theory developed by Carlo Cafiero, but a contemporary proposal that I chose to dedicate to him and that attempted to translate certain libertarian principles into economic practices applicable to present-day society.
The idea was to build economic networks among self-employed workers, cooperatives, small businesses, local producers and collective organizations, supported by exchange tools and systems capable of encouraging activities more strongly oriented toward self-management and the redistribution of wealth.
The project contained limitations and solutions tied to the period in which it was developed, but it raised a question that I still consider fundamental: can libertarian transformation begin by building different economic relationships even before society as a whole is transformed?
The full proposal is preserved in the article The Cafiero Project in the Integral Revolution.
It is therefore not a useful text for explaining what Cafiero himself thought in the nineteenth century. Rather, it is an example of what it can mean to start from a political tradition and try to create something new.
Why Rediscover Carlo Cafiero Today?
There is a risk in recovering anarchist memory: revolutionary men and women can be turned into harmless historical figures precisely through their celebration.
A plaque, a bust or the anniversary of his birth can remind us that Carlo Cafiero existed. But simply remembering a man born in Barletta in 1846 would mean little if the questions that shaped his life were no longer capable of challenging us.
Who should control the wealth produced by a society?
What relationship should exist between individual freedom and economic equality? How can work be organized without creating a permanent division between those who own and those who work? How can autonomous communities cooperate without building new centers of power? And what meaning can internationalism have in a world once again marked by confrontation between rival blocs?
We do not necessarily have to find in Cafiero the answers to the problems of the twenty-first century. It would be paradoxical to expect a nineteenth-century revolutionary to provide a program for dealing with digital capitalism, the climate crisis, automation, financial concentration and new forms of supranational power.
We can, however, recover the method: not treating the existing economic and social organization as the only one possible.
This is also why the question of what has become of anarchy cannot be answered simply by looking at its history. In our article on what it means to be an anarchist and how anarchism can be brought into the present, we tried to shift attention precisely from preserving anarchist identity toward building self-management, mutualism, federalism and grassroots organization.
Perhaps this is the most interesting way to remember Carlo Cafiero in Barletta: not simply to ask which monument, plaque or street should bear his name, but to continue asking in the present the questions to which he devoted his life.
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