Chapter Attraente, piacevole e senza pena: la concezione del lavoro in Camillo Berneri

Abstract

Within the international anarchist movement, the figure of Berneri presents several elements of originality. His anti-dogmatism and his critique of 19th-century positivist epistemology, with its totalising macro-categories, are translated into Berneri's theoretical battle for the affirmation of the individual and his subjective dimension in History. In his historical reconstruction, work loses its connotation as a biblical 'punishment', becoming a vehicle for the affirmation of personality. In the context of Berneri's revisionism, therefore, free and self-determined labour is the translation onto the plane of social organisation of this anti-determinist tension through which the Italian anarchist attempted to reconcile a probabilistic epistemology with a political praxis open to the most radical experimentalism.