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A Theoretical Revolutionary

2022; Michigan State University; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/jstudradi.16.1.0081

1930-1197

Francesco Landolfi,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

The historical interest by the British historian Eric J. Hobsbawm about social deviance can certainly be explained from his life experience that later led him to develop the so-called “sociological” trilogy of deviance (Primitive Rebels, Bandits, Revolutionaries) between 1959 and 1972.1 As a Jew and Communist Party of Great Britain activist from his teens in the Europe of totalitarianism and World War II, Hobsbawm was always aware that he was a character belonging to a minority, rather than the English Anglican and monarchist majority.2 His fascination with unconventionality at its most extreme degree, the revolution, is reflected in his diaries, which show us the autobiographical profile of the eighteen-year-old Hobsbawm: “Eric John Ernest Hobsbaum, a tall, angular, gangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of eighteen and half. . . . He wants to be a revolutionary but, so far, shows no talent for organization. . . . He hasn't got the faith that will move the necessary mountains, only hope.”3Hobsbawm's “theoretical will” to change the world emerges through an innovative vision of history observed from the “bottom” of the underclass, with reference to the transitional periods relating to riots, uprisings, or civil wars. Hobsbawm began to develop the historical-Marxist idea that a society's value systems are modified according to the needs of the masses and therefore they take on a key role in the course of human events. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, the Communist Party Historians Group (to which Hobsbawm belonged) had the merit of considering, for the first time, the history of crime as a branch of social history, namely of conceiving “a new form of social history that aimed to write ‘history from below’”4 according to a Marxist view. So it was that Hobsbawm decided to take part of the so-called “Popular Frontism,”5 in which the analysis of historical times is seen from a “bottom-up” perspective. Hobsbawm developed the conviction that in the long term, economic and social changes weren't due to the will of political or religious authorities, but to the will of the working class that sometimes rises against them, thus promoting epochal reform processes.6 After about half a century, his work Uncommon People confirmed his Marxist historical methodologies, where in the preface he dedicated the book to those who “would leave no significant trace on the macro-historical narrative” and, despite that, had been “‘as big as you and I’”7 (quoting the writer Joseph Mitchell): “My point is rather that, collectively, if not as individuals, such men and women are major historical actors.”8Therefore, this connects with the importance about the “bottom-up” perspective, which was already introduced in the mid-nineteenth century with the publication of The Condition of the Working Class in England by Marx's friend Friedrich Engels in 1845.9 The development of this historiographic theory took shape during 1970s with the founding of the Warwick School. In this case, the concept of the transformation in modern history led Hobsbawm to consider revolutions as creative–destructive moments between past and present. It is no coincidence that the periodization of a “long” nineteenth century and a “short” twentieth century start with the outbreak of French and Russian revolutions, respectively.10 For this reason, this article aims to look at banditry's analogies and differences as proposed by Hobsbawm in order to emphasize three main degrees of criminal extremes: economic banditry, social banditry, and political banditry. The first one does not seek conflict with established authority, but tries to exploit it in its favor; the second accepts the legitimacy of central institutions but conflicts with local enforcement; the third and the last fights the institutional system in order to overturn it and follow its own vision of the “ideal government.”Beginning in the mid-1950s, Hobsbawm developed a deep interest in the study of the dangerous classes as soon as they became the main players in the conflict against institutional arrangements. Inspired by his Zeitgeist, between 1954 and 1955 Hobsbawm started to write about deviance by publishing articles on the Mafia and its financial power in United States, shortly after the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, led by Senator Estes Kefauver, highlighted the spectacular growth of the Cosa Nostra in the most important U.S. metropolis.11 In the same years this topic led him to travel in southern Italy, using research methodologies (e.g., the interview) and sources typical of sociological surveys.12 This journey led him to discover the character of social riots such as in the ethnic community from Piana degli Albanesi, its closeness with the Communist Party, and its steady will for independence against any kind of repressive institutional form (according to the stories of the communist deputy Michele Sala, Hobsbawm's guide in Sicily). That was confirmed by Hobsbawm in 1957 during a radio interview in Great Britain: “Piana has been red for generations. Rebelling is the local industry. When Garibaldi invaded Sicily in 1860 to raise the country against the Bourbons, the Pianesi were right there expecting him. They'd rebelled on their own and were sending messengers round to the other villages asking them to come out. When the Fascists fell, they declared themselves an independent republic for a while. It took a lot of talking before they agreed to come back into Italy.”13The travels made in Italy (as well as in Spain) in the 1950s and, at the same time, the attendance of places and characters close to the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (Manchester School, founded by the South African anthropologist Max Gluckman) in 1947, gave Hobsbawm the means to be able to write about history through a point of view until then underestimated.14Hobsbawm's is an historical revolution that would have been the turning point for innovative perspectives on historical sciences, such as social history, world history, and cultural history. It is no coincidence that his first essay (signed under the alias “Francis Newton”)15 deals with jazz as an alternative way to figure out modern culture and sensibility, even though at that time jazz was declining in the face of the “Swinging Sixties.”16 The study of jazz, intended as the first real popular music (and therefore revolutionary), becomes a peculiar observational tool for gaining knowledge about modern cultural history, which should not be underestimated nor ignored by the pure historical sciences.17The Hobsbawm's journey to Italy in the 1950s was not just caused by a personal interest in “millenarist” examples of social revolt, but also by the European historical background that firmly rooted in the international diplomatic context of Cold War. The death of Stalin in 1953, the Nikita Khrushchev “Secret Speech” before the Twentieth Communist Party of the Soviet Union Congress against Stalin's cult of personality, and the violent repression of the Hungarian uprising against the Red Army in 1956 were episodes that made Hobsbawm wonder about the validity of the communist ideology. That was also due to his dialogue with the main members of the Italian Communist Party, which in the 1950s was seen as the most important communist party in Western Europe.18Just as Hobsbawm's interest in current events conditioned him in his study of the Mafia, the same happened in 1959 concerning the Cuban Revolution by Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967). In this context, Hobsbawm, as a Marxist intellectual, wrote Primitive Rebels, his “first book as a historian,”19 which was conceived “to do historic justice to social struggles . . . that had been overlooked or even dismissed just because they tried to come to grips with the problems of the poor in a new capitalist society with historically obsolete or inadequate equipment.”20 The book's innovation was its modernity, because nobody had thought to include social bandits as “tragic, doomed heroes, but heroes none the less”21 into the historical overview until then, in order to restore them as important figures of political changes.22 Moreover, it is no coincidence that Bandits was written only ten years later, when mass global dissent manifested itself in the French protests of May 1968.However, 1968 was not a revolutionary year only for Western Europe, but even for the Soviet bloc and the global diplomatic situation. Indeed, back in January the Prague Spring undermined the communist support in Eastern Europe, so going over a condition of political imbalance that, in that area, wasn't more from the revolt in Hungary in 1956. Furthermore, again in January of that year, the Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese Army against the main towns in southern Vietnam showed Western public opinion (and the U.S. Army in particular) the vulnerability of an institutional system that seemed to be invincible until then.23As a war reporter, Hobsbawm entered the reality of his present and revised the news by linking it to past events through the means of the social history. Between 1959 and 1969 Hobsbawm kept writing articles on past and present riots and revolutionaries, which converged in Revolutionaries. After 1973 and the end of the so-called “Golden Age” (1945–73), Western Europe saw the widespread decline of representative democracies, which left space for new revolutionary realities (so often Marxist-Leninist or anarchist) violently trying to replace republican institutions, such as with the Red Brigades in Italy or the Rote Armee Fraktion in western Germany.24All of Hobsbawm's writings were affected by the news and the most critical years of the Cold War (the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, the escalation of the Arab–Israeli conflict) are useful for identifying revolutionary figures as morum correctores. If we follow Marx's social theory in which the means of production and relations (the base) modify the course of events and everything relating to politics, ethics, culture, religion, or law (the superstructure), we reach the conclusion that sometimes the dangerous classes of rebels can become an unconscious social accelerator of structural changes. As a Marxist economic historian, Hobsbawm's “admiration from embattled . . . losers”25 stems from his view of social protest as the driving force to make future realities by linking the world of economy with the underworld of the riot.26Although social deviance has always been a study prerogative for social sciences27 and, second, has been addressed by the French historian Fernand Braudel28 as a negative consequence of misery, the “sociological” trilogy of deviance by Hobsbawm was a work that inspired historiographical literature on the subject over the decades: from Africa to Central Europe, from China to Greece, from India to Mexico, from the Ottoman Empire to the United States.29 Banditry is endemic in these countries because it is directly connected to rough geographical conditions.30 Indeed, the development of banditry in Europe occurs in poorly accessible border areas, where the public authorities exercise a weak coercive power over the outlaws’ protective communities: in the mountain areas of Apennines, Pyrenees, and Balkans, over the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, or in the desert region of Andalusia.31Although Hobsbawm had the merit of inventing the historical figure of the “social bandit” as a protest leader, he mentioned a long series of banditry with different makings and purposes, forgetting that sometimes banditry may turn on the economic, political, and social evolution of the time. If it is true, for instance, that banditry occurs within civil societies “which lie between the evolutionary phase of tribal and kinship organization, and modern capitalist and industrial society,”32 it is also true that some banditry episodes occurred as early as the sixteenth century or in some already industrialized areas. Therefore, it's clear that the phenomenon of banditry in history inevitably carries the difficulty of being able to distinguish its endless variations. Although they could look similar in substance, they are actually very different in shape.33In Primitive Rebels neither the complex phenomenon of the Mafia nor the three revolutionary “millenarisms” of the David Lazzaretti sect in Tuscany, the anarchism in Andalusia, and the Fasci in Sicily may be considered pure expressions of social banditry, but rather as economic and political.34 Despite being an organized form of crime, economic banditry, unlike social and political, does not openly stand against local or central authorities, but marks the deal between the state and the people in order to set clear boundaries “on pain of lawlessness, murder and extortion.”35 Economic banditry such as the Mafia in Sicily often joins the Italian police in the prosecution of independent social bandits.36 In all its evolutionary phases (predatory, parasitic, and symbiotic),37 organized crime (intended as economic banditry) always maintained connections with political institutions as a reference point, whether or not they were supported by the so-called “City Mob.”38 The latter had no political vision and, if necessary, could be a tool in the hands of economic bandits in order to feed popular riots to their own advantage by undermining an enemy institution or promoting a new, previously corrupted, political reality.39 An example of such urban riots took place in Naples in 1860 during the shift from the House of Bourbon to the Savoy. Thanks to the mediation of the prefect of police, Liborio Romano, the city clashes between the mob exploited by the Camorra and what remained of King Francis II's Army were resolved by the inclusion of Camorra mobsters into the new enforcement of the National Guard and promising no criminal record in exchange for their loyalty to the King Victor Emmanuel II.40The “City Mob” support of the economic bandits enabled them to enter society and exploit its institutional weaknesses, sometimes replacing them.41 In times of political crisis, economic banditry takes advantage of the situation to expand its bribed connections with local authorities. An example of such an evolution took place in Italy during the so-called “Years of Lead” (1969–82) when the daily conflicts among law enforcement, the far-right, and far-left gave the Sicilian Mafia the opportunity to easily spread its business over Rome and northern Italy by instilling a Mafia mindset into local crime in order to turn them into real Mafia syndicates such as the Magliana gang in Rome or the Mala del Brenta in Veneto.42 All that, however, is partly in conflict with the statement that Hobsbawm made at the international conference Bande armate, banditi, banditismo held in Venice in 1985, in which social banditry (in a broad sense that includes also economic banditry) is basically an agrarian and rural phenomenon. That is, indeed, unambiguous when we talk about precapitalist societies prior to the rise of the first or even the second Industrial Revolution. This is because during twentieth century there are several examples of urban banditry that exist not in the rural context of the countryside, but in the degraded suburbs of cities.43Following Western urbanization's historical process, originating in the centralization of monarchical powers in the capitals of European kingdoms and then with the Industrial Revolution, expressions of social banditry evolved into the economic through their move from the countryside to the city. The deviance phenomenon of gangsterism or urban banditry, despite its rural roots, must be considered as the first entrepreneurial form of the Mafia. The transfer of financial power from rural realities to the metropolitan ones allowed social bandits to turn into businessmen, moving from a landowning to a capitalist economy and searching for “concreti e stabili agganci con le strutture burocratiche . . . in funzione dei diretti vantaggi che gliene possono derivare nell'esercizio delle proprie attività illecite”44 [real and steady connections with the local authorities . . . in accordance with the direct benefits they can get through their rackets]. This was the case, for instance, for the Sicilian Mafia, which was able to easily adapt itself in the “self-made man's” U.S. capitalist society45 by dealing with illicit businesses such as prostitution or extortion as well as owning legal businesses such as tobacco companies, meat markets, and shoeshines.46 The New York City gangsters Charlie “Lucky” Luciano (1897–1962) and Meyer Lansky (1902–1983) were the founders of the first real American organized crime organization, considered a “top-level get-together”47 corporation composed of a wide departmental structure and a large organization chart. The high availability of economic capital, a result of international alcohol and drug smuggling, and social capital inside the slums allowed modern economic bandits to evolve into crime entrepreneurs belonging to high society and the financial market, unlike their peasant ancestors, who made discretion and privacy a lifestyle.48 Although the Mafia took shape according to the kind of host institution, at the same time it preserved its rules and traditions, which remained largely unchanged over time. In the case of the New York City Camorra, in 1913 the journalist Amy A. Bernardy mentioned in an essay the Statuto of this organized crime, which was similar to the Spanish fraternity Garduna's regulations in the early sixteenth century.49 Finally, the Sardinian brigands could be considered as economic bandits. Despite having an ancient and “romantic” anti-feudal origin, similar to the nature of the social bandit, they switched to a gangster conspiracy to conduct kidnappings and were so named by the justice authorities as the “Anonima Sarda.” Unlike its traditional past, the Anonima Sarda's new way of crime was marked by its particular ruthlessness and brutality in making crimes, as well as the motives of crimes made only for profit and the choice of the victims in businessmen or celebrities instead of landowners.50The economic bandit, by having his survival as the final goal, is only interested in his own individual welfare, not in the common good, which is essential for the political bandit.51 Instead, unlike the economic bandit, the political bandit does not absolutely follow the rules of corrupt mediation between two powers, as happens for instance between the Mafia and the state; rather, he shows an extreme form of civil dissent, in which, however, the way of the martyr is even conceived in favor of a political ideology, almost sacred at times.Not having enough intellectual capacity to invent or share a political agenda, social bandits fit themselves between people and authority, sometimes carrying out brutally violent acts and rising to become public heroes, according to Hobsbawm's definition of “revolutionary traditionalists.”52 Thus, the Italian politician Francesco Saverio Nitti explained the centuries-old origin of brigandage in southern Italy as a reactionary but not revolutionary movement of peasants “perseguitati dalla così detta giustizia baronale”53 [haunted by the so-called baronial justice]. As far as the Apulian Gaetano Vardarelli (1780–1818) can help poor “spigolare” [gleaning] the wheat or “distribuire il sale gratis” [dealing salt for free] for the underclass between 1815 and 1818, he does not even try to establish a “società fondata sulla libertà e uguaglianza”54 [society founded on freedom and equality], simply because he has not got the material resources to change it.As mentioned above, in Primitive Rebels Hobsbawm includes heterogeneous deviance phenomena such as the Mafia and the three “millenarisms” within the only category of social banditry. However, Hobsbawm's awareness of the need to make a better declination of the shape of banditry took place in 1969 with the publication of Bandits, dedicated to three different kinds of social banditry: the “Noble Robber,” the “Avenger,” and the “Haiduk”55 as a patriot soldier.The “Noble Robber” embodies Robin Hood's legendary archetype, an outlaw that “rights wrongs” and a “bringer of justice” that never kills “but in self-defence or just revenge.”56 He stands out as the champion of the poor social substratum exploited by the abuses of local government, but not by the central authority of which the lawfulness is recognized.57 For instance, the Chinese Triad organized crime was based on this concept. According to legend, it was created by five rebel Buddhist monks, who decided to set up five secret societies or major lodges (Ch'ien Wu Fang) in order to fight the Imperial Army of Kangxi (1661–1722) and the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), by wishing, finally, for the restoration of previous Ming dynasty (1368–1644).58 The “Noble” bandit honors the value of loyalty even in respect to the opponents, being respectful of the enemy and by relying on his own code of honor. In this social banditry group, for instance, Hobsbawm includes people like William “Billy the Kid” H. Bonney (1859–1881), who always maintained his friendship with the Sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, Patrick “Pat” F. Garrett, until the latter killed him in an ambush.59A further discriminating factor that brings together all the stories of social bandits is the reason why, at some point in life, they decided to get away from civil society. This cause (always related to an injustice suffered) is similar for all the “Noble Robbers” stories explaining why they became outlaws, along with the reasons for their death or final arrest through betrayal by their “closest” friends.60 The Italian brigand Carmine “Crocco” Donatelli di Rionero (1830–1904), who fought against the occupying Savoy Army in Basilicata between 1860 and 1864,61 in the end was betrayed by his lieutenant, Giuseppe Caruso, who was promised an amnesty in exchange for his cooperation.62 The same can be said for the Apulian Angelo “Angiolillo” Duca (1734–1784), who became a criminal in order to “sfuggire all'ira di un barone, che volea vendicare un servo, cui Angelo in rissa avea ucciso un cavallo”63 [flee from a baron's wrath, who wanted to avenge a servant, to whom Angelo killed a horse during a brawl] and was finally betrayed by a friend of his, Ciccio Zuccarino.64 Further episodes of social banditry can be found in the life of the Mexican Francisco “Pancho” Villa (1878–1923), who (in his first bandit stage) went on the run only after wounding his sister's suitor in 189465; in the bandit Antonino “Testalonga” Di Blasi (1728–1766) from Caltanissetta, who became a fugitive the moment he was forced to kill a landowner's enforcer who had accidentally murdered his mother66; in Australia the bandit Edward “Ned” Kelly (1854–1880), who, as an Irish-Australian, considered the British Victoria Police Force and Bill Frost (an Englishman who got his sister pregnant without later marrying her) his mortal enemies.67In the most extreme cases, it may happen that some bandits are sanctified by their own community, so devoted in their idealization that they found a votive chapel for their memory still today attended by “who, in civil or religious iconography don't find anyone who looks like them, in whom to confide and in whose hands to put their lives.”68 This is the story of the Mexican bandit Jesús Juárez Mazo or Jesús Malverde, born in 1870 in Culiacán, State of Sinaloa. His life is basically a copy of those of the other social bandits, because it starts with the injustice of his parents’ death of hunger, then it continues with his conversion from honest carpenter and tailor to gold coins’ robber against the wealthy haciendas, by sharing his loot with poor people at night, until he was executed for treason in May 1909, just before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.69 However, what sets Malverde from the other criminal myths is his mystique that, after a century, shows no sign of diminishing. In particular, Malverde keeps being venerated by the Mexican drug traffickers as early as World War II, when Sinaloa became a strategic place for the manufacture of narcotics to be sent to the United States, which increased the average income of its inhabitants: Don't leave me, Malverdebecause we are almost thereBefore entering Sonorais the federal checkpointI have hidden in the truck30 kilos of crystalI have faith in your memoryand you have always protected meMy cargo arrivessafely in the United StatesThat's why you are Malverdemy favorite saint.70Tales about “gentlemen” bandits and their criminal activities do not do anything but increase their halo as immortal public enemies.71 According to oral sources, the kindness of stealing “from the rich (the banks) and give to the poor”72 by the U.S. bank robber John H. Dillinger (1903–1934) emphasized, by implication, his criminal actions in forward-looking anti-politics against the saver's exploitation by the banker, who embodied the root of all evil during the Great Depression. The same voices previously emerged to feed the mystique and kindness of Jesse James (1847–1882), who gave $500 to a widow who was forced to mortgage her farm to survive.73On this last figure, however, it is necessary to make a clarification. Although James served in the Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War and considered the Southern guerrilla William C. Quantrill (1837–1865) as his criminal “mentor,” it is rather hard to see him as a political bandit because we cannot tell whether he robbed for his own thoughts of fortune or continuing the Civil War through social destabilization in Kansas and Missouri.74 For this reason, it often happens that hybrid forms of banditry develop. From this point of view, it is hard to distinguish how far social or economic bandit goes politically. In some episodes of economic banditry between the 1950s and the 1970s, such as the Cavallero gang in Turin, the October 22 Group in Genoa, or the Spanish Francisco Sabatè y Llopart's (1913–1960) guerrilla group,75 the mode of bandit action blended in with the political ideology of their respective ringleaders.76 In this way, the bandits’ anarchist or Marxist-Leninist side could only be a ploy to justify their own struggle against the institutions, guilty of being born into poverty. The three founders of Cavallero gang, for instance, came from the Turin underclass and because they didn't want to work honestly, and found their work in bank robberies while keeping a slight political ideology.77Hobsbawm's second category of social bandit is the “Avenger,” a deviance figure that differs from the previous one in its brutality and fights against the local system without sharing benefits of its illegal business with the local community. In a way, the “Avenger” is a vengeful aspect of an expression of vigilante justice, which goes beyond the law and moral codes. Despite the fact that the “Avenger” keeps on distinguishing between the guilty and the innocent, he has no qualms about murdering those who sow unfairness in his own community by hurting even the innocent relatives of a wrongful man. In the case of the Brazilian cangaco Virgulino “Lampiao” Ferreira da Silva (1897–1938), as many as 1,000 killings, 500 cases of arson, and 200 rapes were attributed to his gang.78One of the most important differences between the social bandit and the political bandit is their purpose. It is therefore necessary to explain the difference between “riot” and “revolution.” In the first case, the social bandit is willing to rise against local authorities such as law enforcement under the orders of states’ governors without, however, wishing for a radical change in the institutional system in which he himself grow up. The political bandit, instead, decides to dedicate his life to revolution, namely for the rise of a new and best government culture through the total removal of the previous political hierarchy.The third category we find in Bandits is the “Haiduk” or patriot soldier: a leader such as the fifteenth-century Balkan Hajduc, highlighted by Hobsbawm or the nineteenth-century southern Italian brigand, who has a dual role of political destabilizer between authority and people or partisan against foreign invaders.79In this connection, the history of the social bandit Marco Sciarra (1550–1593) from Abruzzo is emblematic. Between 1588 and 1592 he sacked the land owned by the noblemen of the Papal states, even if he handed out “denaro e grano ai poveri”80 [money and wheat to the poor] and did not let his bandits rape women in order to retain the peasants’ favor. After Sciarra moved to the Republic of Venice and refused to move to Crete with his gang with auxiliary troops functions, he tried to flee to Naples but was killed in an ambush by a lieutenant of his who had been promised a pardon by the Pope Clement VIII.81 In the second half of sixteenth century the Republic of Venice would enlist common criminals to fight against the Ottomans,82 the Balkan Hajduci's gangs, which fought against the Ottoman Empire,83 had similar developments, according to Hobsbawm. Also, the voivode of Wallachia Vladislav III Tepes (better known as the Count Dracula) led a number of gangs engaged in the guerrilla war against his traitor officers.84 According to the chroniclers Laonikos Chalkokondyles and Michael Beheim, Vladislav created his own elite troop composed of “the worst sort of thugs” coming from “Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, or the land of the Tatars,”85 through which he ran a border land between the Muslim world and the Christendom. Moreover, his mysterious undead reputation strangely aligns him with another Balkan character, Arnod Paole, a Serbian haiduk who died in 1726 for fighting the Austrian invasion, of whom several myths and legends were born concerning the possibility that he was not really dead, but came back to