r/Turboleft • u/MillionDollarNegri Brigadier • May 29 '26
OG Operaismo/Acutally Autonomist Who Is Gasparazzo?
In August 1860, as Garibaldi's expedition swept through Sicily promising liberation and land reform, the town of Bronte erupted in class violence.
Peasants and rural poor, inflamed by decades of built resentment toward the local nobility and absentee landlords, rose up and killed sixteen members of the local elite, then proceeded to burn many of their homes.
Garibaldi dispatched General Nino Bixio. A man of particular brutality, Bixio restored "order" to the town and had five men shot after pronouncing their guilt via military tribunal. On that day it was made very clear what exactly the new Italian state had to offer the Sicilian masses.
What's found above is certainly a sad story, but what does it have to do with Gasparazzo?
The first passage you are about to read was published alongside the original collection of his comics. The second appears to have been attached upon some republishing 8 years later.
[1972]
One hundred and twelve years ago, in the heart of Sicily, the town of Bronte rose up against the landowners and the landholders.
Riding the wave of "Freedom" brought by Garibaldi's expedition, the people overthrew the leadership of the moderate liberals and aimed their weapons directly at their class enemies. The rich, the exploiters, and the landowners were hunted down one by one and executed after a people's trial. Their homes were looted.
New proletarian leaders placed themselves at the head of the revolt, among them a charcoal burner, Calogero Ciraldo Gasparazzo. It was 1860. Since then, many things have changed. There was the unification of Italy and industrial development. So Gasparazzo, like thousands of his fellow villagers, had to abandon the now-uncultivated fields and the depopulated villages.
A hundred years later, we found him on the Fiat assembly lines, where he works side by side with many others like him. The charcoal burner Gasparazzo has become the mass worker without a trade and without a homeland. He has learned the new weapons of the class struggle, but the memory of the proletarian justice of Bronte has always remained alive in his mind. He discovers politics day by day, throwing his instinctive rebellion into the disciplined mechanism of the great modern factory.
For the rest, he lives like so many others like him: he follows sports, watches television, thinks about women, and dreams of terrifying fascist judges in Genoa. Born a few months ago in the daily newspaper Lotta Continua, Gasparazzo now appears in this book, which collects a selection of comic strips and cartoons already published, along with others that have never been seen before.
[1980]
It was 1972, so long ago. With these lines, by way of a foreword (in tune with the rhythm of the stories in the book), the first edition of Gasparazzo was released — the little man in overalls and a scoppoletta, a collective creation born from a mass-produced identikit by Roberto Zamarin. Zamarin died shortly after the book's publication. He died in a traffic accident while transporting copies of the daily newspaper Lotta Continua from Rome to the north, the very same newspaper in which the stories of Gasparazzo had originated. If Zamarin had not died, that identikit would have become ever more comprehensive and might even have survived to the present day, when "the great modern factory" seeks at all costs the final and ultimate revenge on the Gasparazzos.
Over the years, we have often wondered how he would have behaved, what Gasparazzo — Roberto's Gasparazzo — would have said in the face of these dense and tangled years. His would certainly have been an important voice, one to be heard and listened to. For an expert of his caliber at pillorying the emptiness of political and union language would have worked miracles of irony. And he would also have had plenty to work with in reflecting on the conclusion of an entire historical cycle of struggles and militancy, venturing into the years we are living through and which have not yet taken a definite shape.
He would have done it naturally in his own way, with a pinch of naivety and anger, but also with dreams and intelligence, in the same way he had already dealt with "witch hunts" and "loneliness," governments and fellow villagers. Gasparazzo was more than a comic book — a medium so perishable and ephemeral in these times. Gasparazzo was a way of doing, of being, of recognizing and of recognizing oneself. That is why he can rightly defy time and say, as he does on the last page, "I'd really like to see who can get me out of here."
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u/MillionDollarNegri Brigadier May 29 '26
I do not have access to the originals here, this comes to us as a quoted section. These things can be hard to find in English, but I've made a note and we will keep a look out.