First published in 1963 with the financial help of a generous sympathiser, the book La Sotta Rossa (The Red Sect) by Individualist anarchist Enzo Martucci has been reprinted several times in response to many requests.
It's raw materials are a continuous propaganda of Individualist anarchism since the age of 16, first-hand accounts and close studies of communist and anarchist leaders, imprisonment, hypocrisy, betrayal, poverty.
It's keystone is Martucci's repudiation of communism and authority. Reading this one soon becomes aware of Martucci as a fighter of long standing, not only against bourgeois society, but also against the communist so-called alternative . Martucci explains that:
There are two types of anti-communism - the bourgeois and the anarchist. The first is narrow-minded, stupid and reactionary. The second is diverse, expressing a strongly individualist sentiment which rebels against the chains and hypocrisies of this world but at the same time opposes the advent of a future even worse in it's rigid fitting of men into barracks and bureaucratic-industrial-Stalinist society.
In the chapter called "What is Marxism?" Martucci deals with historical materialism. He demonstrates that egoism is the motive force in humans and that it does not depend on the satisfaction of economic needs alone. There is also the spiritual, which is quite often independent of the stomach:
Reality is the reverse of what Marx wrote. Man certainly has economic needs, but he also has sentimental, idealistic and passionate needs, and just as the first acts on the second, so this in turn acts on the first.
To Martucci the Communist objective is antithetical to anarchy and he spells out the difference quite eloquently in the following passage:
Between us there exists a reciprocol and violent antipathy. The issue is not only determined by diversity of ideas, but also by the irreducible opposition of temperaments. I have a tormented and restless soul - romantic and dyionsyiac in temperament. My excessive sensibilities, my ardent passions, my breath for a new life of boundless freedom, make me a brother of those poets and vagabonds of the nineteenth century who sought beyond the stable order of things for the most mad intoxications. With Nietzsche I could set sail dreaming of a hot, tropical south, or a Greece arrayed in incorruptible indigo; with Stirner I could direct my self towards a chaotic future involving a free and easy anarchy, licentious as a Bacchante; bare-chested and erect with hair blowing in the wind; with Baudelaire I could inhale the poisonous fragrance of the flowers of evil, or madden with desire for a beauty that descends from heaven to hell, making the universe less foul and time less weary. But with Gramsci or Togliatti? I would have to take the People's train to Moscow! No!
Later he writes:
I am a disciple of Nietzsche and Stirner, a convinced amoralist and a believer with LaRochefoucald that evil aswell as good has it's heroes. I can understand Alexander the Great who conquered the Orient and died of debauchery in Babylon; Nero who, to satisfy an artistic fantasy, set fire to Rome; Napoleon who stained Europe with blood while dreaming of world domination; Bonnot the bank robber who alone against 500 police fell heroically at Choisy le Noir.
I understand the tyrant aswell as the rebel: the ego that affirms itself in freedom. But I despise the slave and the spy: the ego that humiliates itself and crawls. I admire the evil that makes the great - even when unfortunate - the evil that produces the promethean attempt, the strenuous struggle against the world. But I detest the object which reduces men to vermin and uneasily explains away his acceptance of an existence in which he is exploited on all sides in order to survive. Barabbas does not nauseate me, but Judas does. And for me this is a question of sentiment, not of morality.
For Martucci, humans are not of one piece - logical and utilitarian; they are not cubes or theorems, not mathematical formulations, but problematic and mysterious beings who continually reveal themselves in new ways, abandoning themselves to diverse and opposing passions that burst forth from an obscure depth. Communism, or so-called "scientific socialism" seeks to reduce all humans to a phantom equality, to kill the anthropoid in order to bring forth from it's skeleton a robot over which shines, like far-off bloodshot suns, the hateful faces of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. But reason will never succeed in disciplining the passions, nor will utopian engineering (whether communist or anarchist) succeed for very long in subduing life to it's orders.