Carlo Tresca

Carlo Tresca

Carlo Tresca (born March 9, 1879 in Sulmona , Abruzzo , Italy , † January 11, 1943 in New York City , New York ) was an agitator of the labor movement. He was a member of the Italian Railway Workers' Federation and the author of the magazine Il Germe .

Tresca moved to the USA in 1904 to avoid imprisonment in Italy .

In Philadelphia he became the author of the magazine Il Proletario , the official newspaper of the Italian Socialist Federation (ISF) . Tresca's work turned the ISF into syndicalism . When he oriented himself more and more to anarchism , he gave up the activity for Il Proletario and brought out his own newspaper La Plebe . He later moved his newspaper to Pittsburgh , where he brought his revolutionary ideas to the Italian miners in western Pennsylvania .

Tresca joined in 1912 the union Industrial Workers of the World at (IWW) when he invited by the union in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts mobilized Italian working for a campaign to free two strike leaders.

After the successful strike in Lawrence he was active in various strikes in the USA, for example in 1912 in the textile workers' strike in Little Falls (New York), in 1913 in the hotel workers' strike in New York City and in the silk workers' strike in Paterson ( New Jersey ) and in 1916 during the miners' strike in Mesabi Range, Minnesota .

Tresca became one of the main characters in an attempt to stop Mussolini's efforts to win the Italian-Americans over to the support of the Italian fascists . He brought out an anti-fascist magazine ( Il Martello ) in which he portrayed Mussolini as a class enemy . The Italian fascists tried to kill Tresca in a bomb attack in 1926.

In the 1930s, Tresca became a declared opponent of Stalinism after Stalinists crushed the anarchist movements in Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War .

He supported the Bolsheviks , however , because he was of the opinion that a socialist state was preferable to a capitalist one, especially since he saw the communists as allies against the fascists.

Publicly accused Tresca 1938, the Soviet Union , Juliet Poyntz , having kidnapped to cover up their departure from the Communist Party.

Tresca was murdered. The murder was organized as a favor for Mussolini by Vito Genovese and carried out in New York on January 11, 1943.