Andrea Costa (politician)

Andrea Costa in the middle of his life, photograph around 1880

Andrea Costa (born November 30, 1851 in Imola ; died January 19, 1910 there ) was a socialist politician and publicist with an anarchist background in the Italian monarchy at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries .

In 1881 he founded one of the first socialist parties in Italy , the Partito Socialista Rivoluzionario Italiano (PSRI), for which he was elected as the first socialist member of the national parliament (Chamber of Deputies) in 1882 . The party merged in 1893 with the participation of Costa with the party of the Italian workers to form the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI).

Life

Costa studied literature in Bologna , but broke off his studies under the influence of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and turned to the dissemination of his theories. He supported Bakunin organization in the later first International designated the International Working Men's Association (IAA). In 1871 he founded the magazine Der Arbeiterverband , two years after the anarchist wing was excluded from the IAA in 1874, the newspaper Il Martello (translated: Der Hammer ). On charges of preparing a revolutionary plot, he was sentenced to two years in prison that same year. Then - in the same year that Bakunin died - Costa emigrated to Paris in 1876 . But also in France he was subjected to repression due to his anarchist work and was arrested several times. He returned to Italy in 1880 with his temporary partner, the Russian-born revolutionary feminist Anna Kuliscioff , whom he had met in exile in Switzerland. There, Costa turned more and more from Bakuninian theories and increasingly approached the social democratic- Marxist ideology. In Milan he first founded the International Journal for Socialism , and finally in 1881 the Avanti (not to be confused with the party organ of the Italian Socialist Party, Avanti, which was founded 15 years later ! ).

In 1882 Costa was elected to the Italian parliament as the first socialist member of parliament for the PSRI, the socialist-revolutionary party of Italy ( Partito Socialista Rivoluzionario Italiano ) , which he had co-founded the year before . In 1892 the various factions of the socialists united at a unification congress in Genoa under the umbrella of the Party of Italian Workers , which one year later - after the merger with the PSRI - was to be renamed Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). Andrea Costa is considered one of its founding fathers. He was a member of the Italian Parliament until his death in 1910.

Works

• Vita di Michele Bacunin . Soc. Azzoguide, Bologna 1877

literature

• Andrea Costa † . In: The True Jacob . No. 615 of February 15, 1910, p. 6530 digitized
• Nazario Galassi: Vita di Andrea Costa . Feltrinelli, Milan 1989, ISBN 88-07080-60-5 .
• Renato Zangheri: Andrea Costa . In: Maurizio Antonioli (ed.): Dizionario biografico degli anarchici italiani, vol. 1 . BFS, Pisa 2003, ISBN 88-86389-86-8 , pp. 453-459.

Web links

• Pictures of Andrea Costa on commons.wikimedia.org
• biographical article about Andrea Costa with picture on bim: Biblioteca comunale di Imola (Italian)
• Presentation of Andrea Costas on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death in 2010 - with various cross-references (Italian)