Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta

321 Pages·2015·6.72 MB·English

by  Errico Malatesta

Life and Ideas
The Anarchist Writings of
Errico Malatesta
Edited by Vernon Richards
Foreword by Carl Levy
Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta
Edited and translated by Vernon Richards
ISBN: 978-1-62963-032-8
LCCN: 2014908067
© Vernon Richards
Foreword © Carl Levy
This edition copyright ©2015 PM Press
All Rights Reserved
PM Press
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ContEnts
Foreword by Carl Levy v
Editor’s Introduction to the First Edition 1
Editor’s Introduction to the third Edition (1984) 9
PART ONE
Introduction: Anarchy and Anarchism 13
I
1. Anarchist schools of thought 21
2. Anarchist—Communism 27
3. Anarchism and science 31
4. Anarchism and Freedom 39
5. Anarchism and Violence 45
6. Attentats 53
II
7. Ends and Means 59
8. Majorities and Minorities 63
9. Mutual Aid 65
10. Reformism 71
11. organisation 77
III
12. Production and Distribution 85
13. the Land 91
14. Money and Banks 95
15. Property 97
16. Crime and Punishment 101
IV
17. Anarchists and the Working Class Movements 107
18. the occupation of the Factories 125
19. Workers and Intellectuals 129
20. Anarchism, socialism, and Communism 135
21. Anarchists and the Limits of Political Co-Existence 141
V
22. the Anarchist Revolution 145
23. the Insurrection 155
24. Expropriation 159
25. Defence of the Revolution 163
VI
26. Anarchist Propaganda 169
27. An Anarchist Programme 173
PART TWO
notes for a Biography 191
Appendix I 227
Appendix II 233
Appendix III 237
Appendix IV 241
PART THREE
Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists today 255
notes 290
Index 295
F
oreword
by C l
arl evy
Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was born in Santa Maria Capua
Vetere near to Naples. His family were middle-class tannery owners,
and he was not, as the press would have it, a count who conspired with
other aristocrats such as Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Malatesta
lived between the era of the Paris Commune and Russian Revolution and
the establishment of the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. He knew
Bakunin and Mussolini and was known and appreciated as a revolutionary
(at least initially) by Vladimir Lenin. Although the young Malatesta was a key
figure in the First International in Italy and elsewhere, his presence in Italy
was mainly between 1885 and 1919, when his reappearances occurred during
periods of popular unrest: the 1893–94 Fasci Siciliani, the risings of 1897–98,
La Settimana Rossa (The Red Week) of 1914, and finally the Biennio Rosso
(Red Biennium) of 1919–20.1
For a large part of his adult life, Malatesta was an exile and spent nearly
thirty years in London, then the “capital” of the capitalist world.2 He is an
exemplar of the cosmopolitan nomadic radical who circulated through the
circuits of world imperialism, transporting an alternative modernity to that
of the Gatling gun, the Holy Bible, and the imperialist iron regime of the
mine, the plantation and the factory. Malatesta lived, organized, and fought
in Egypt, the Levant, the Balkans, Spain, Argentina, the United States, Cuba,
Switzerland, and France. The most exciting recent work on anarchism and
syndicalism before 1914 is now focused on the dissemination and reception
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Life and Ideas
of anarchist and syndicalist repertoires of action, thought, and culture in the
Global South as well as the tracing of transnational networks of libertarian
diasporas in port cities and elsewhere.3 Malatesta’s life is emblematic of this
process that allowed anarchists and syndicalist currents to have far greater
influence on the global Left than mere numbers would suggest. A sociology of
these networks reveals several generations of intellectuals like Carlo Cafiero,4
Francesco Saverio Merlino,5 and Luigi Fabbri,6 who were ideological comrades
and sounding boards for his ideas, and several generations of self-taught work-
ers and artisans from the anarchist seedbeds of Liguria, Tuscany, Umbria, the
Marches, and Rome who kept his presence alive in Italy even if he rarely set
foot in his native land.7 And one of these self-taught anarchists was Emidio
Recchioni, the father of Vernon Richards, the author and editor of this very
book.8 Malatesta never finished his medical degree at the University of Naples
and became an artisan: he trained as a gas-fitter and electrician, and between
his stints as an organizer and radical newspaper editor he always returned
to his trades, even in old age in Rome during the 1920s. Like the Russian
populists he sought to declass himself and go to the people, and he feared
and detested the development of a class of left-wing professional journalists,
orators, and politicians who fed off the social movements and betrayed their
principles.
Malatesta lived in a modern, globalized world of the steamship, the rail-
road, the telegraph, and dynamite.9 And although he fought a brave battle
against the anarchist terrorism and expropriation inspired by Ravachol and
Henry in the 1890s or in the new century of Parisian tragic bandits and Latvian
revolutionaries turned robbers consumed in the fires of the Siege of Sidney
Street, he never endorsed pacifism, wrote long articles against the followers
of Tolstoy, and remained a revolutionary inspired by, though critical of, the
followers of Mazzini during the Risorgimento. Like many Italian anarchists
of his generation, his political apprenticeship was forged in the disappointing
aftermath of the Italian struggle for unification and independence.10 Although
he renounced Mazzini and the Republicans when the old nationalist revo-
lutionary disavowed the Paris Commune for its atheism and promotion of
class war, Malatesta always retained deep ethical and voluntarist strains in his
thought and political action, maintained a fruitful dialogue with the Italian
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Republicans, and indeed formed an alliance through a mutual struggle against
the Savoy dynasty. Thus in 1914 this alliance of anarchists, anti-militarists,
syndicalists, republicans, and maverick socialists nearly brought the regime
to a crisis before the First World War rearranged the political field. But even
after the war, during the Biennio Rosso and the years leading to the creation
of Mussolini’s dictatorship (1922–26), Malatesta sought alliances with the
maverick left and the republicans to prevent or overthrow the growing power
of the new Fascist movement and its installation in power with the support
of the Savoyard king in Rome.11
Malatesta advocated the establishment of a national federation of an-
archist groupings—internationalists, anarchist socialists, and then plain
anarchists—in Italy from the 1870s to the 1920s, and for this he received
strong criticism and indeed abuse from the individualists, Stirnerites, and
the affinity group anarcho-communist anarchists associated with his old
comrade Luigi Galleani.12 But he was not an advocate of an anarchist revolu-
tion as such. The social revolution would be guided by small-‘a’ anarchist
methods but an anarchist party would not be the invisible pilot behind its
success. That is why he later looked back on the quarrels between Marxists
and Bakuninists in the First International and felt them both to be in the
wrong. He argued with Mahkno and the Platformists in the 1920s because
they seemed to be advocating an anarchist form of Leninism. The denouement
of the Bolshevik Revolution did not surprise him. Like Bakunin, he predicted
that a Marxist revolution would result in a dictatorship of a New Class of
ex-workers, intellectuals, and politicos. All social organisations might be prey
to an “iron law of oligarchy,” as German sociologist Robert Michels termed it.
Albeit, Malatesta took exception to the concept of “iron laws” in political and
social life; thus he objected to his fellow London exile Kropotkin’s marriage
of biological concepts of mutual aid with the open-ended business of human
politics. He fought all determinisms and indeed foreshadowed the critique of
many recent post-anarchists who have lambasted “classical anarchism” for its
determinism, essentialism, and Whiggish teleology. Nevertheless, Malatesta
argued that anarchist or syndicalist trade unions would be prey to the same
maladies as the moderate, socialist, or communist ones. The only remedy
was for anarchists to work in “ginger groups” in all trade unions and promote
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Life and Ideas
libertarian methods: rank and file control, circulation of leadership, and low
salaries for these temporary leaders.13
Trade unions were important for Malatesta. Although he never renounced
the role of insurrection in making the revolution, by the 1880s and 1890s, with
the massive London Dock Strike of 1889 in mind, he advocated a syndicalist
strategy to the first generation syndicalist French anarchist exiles in London
during the 1890s. When syndicalism grew worldwide in the early twentieth
century he pointed out the theoretical and practical weaknesses of its worker-
ism (the revolution was broader than that) and the fact that a peaceful general
strike would merely result in the starvation of the urban working classes and
the collapse of the strike if it wasn’t brought to a quicker termination by the
State’s armed forces and vigilante groups. When the factories of northern
Italy were occupied in September 1920, Malatesta suggested that the workers
recommence production and distribution links and not await events or negotia-
tions. The modern city had to be restarted by the revolutionaries on their own
initiative if the occupation was not to falter and lead to an inconsequential
negotiated settlement.14
But Malatesta did not ignore the countryside and, like Bakunin, saw the
tremendous revolutionary potential in the peasantry, and some of his most
widely read pamphlets were aimed at landless laborers and smallholders.
Unlike the Italian Socialists in 1919–20, he warned against the promotion of
the rapid socialisation of the land which drove the smallholders into the hands
of the Fascists. A class war between the landless laborers and the smallholders
was a war between the poor and the poorest and allowed Fascism to sweep
away the Red Zones around Bologna and Ferrara in the spring of 1921; start-
ing a rapid process to allow the former and largely discredited radical socialist
Benito Mussolini in 1919, ascend to prime minister by the autumn of 1922.15
Malatesta also argued that small-‘a’ anarchism was the only method by
which the reformists had won their dubious victories: the expansion of the
suffrage to the male British working class or the struggle for female suffrage
in early twentieth century Britain, which Malatesta witnessed and had known
many of the key personalities in the fight, had been won from the ruling classes
through direct action not peaceful petition and rallies, he argued, over and over
again. But he was not averse on occasion to forming alliances with moderate
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Foreword
socialists, anti-clericals, and even liberals if the State threatened the space of
civil society in which the anarchists could organize and make their case. Thus
he endorsed such broad alliances in Italy when civil liberties were threatened
during the 1890s,16 during the road to Fascism in the early 1920s, and under
the Fascist regime from his condition of near–house arrest in Rome from
1926 to his death in 1932. But Malatesta would under no conditions stand
as a protest electoral candidate as suggested by the former anarchist intel-
lectual and activist Saverio Merlino, who by the turn of the century endorsed
a maverick form of libertarian social democracy. Of course Malatesta was
not naive: he was no admirer of liberal politicians, such as Lloyd George,
whom he termed a hypocrite. He understood the realities of the republican
United States in the Gilded Age: industrial welfare, lynch law, nativism, and
the unbridled racist jingoism of the Spanish- American war were commented
on by Malatesta, who had spent 1900–1901 in the Italian anarchist colony
of Paterson, New Jersey, and in U.S. occupied Havana. He knew full well
that his near-deportation from London in 1912 was prevented by a united
front stretching from MPs such as Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie
in the British Labour Party, trade unionists both moderate and syndicalist,
Radical Liberals and less radical liberals of the broadsheet press, and even his
neighbourhood Islington’s “free-born Englishman” (sic) Fair-Trade Unionist
(Tory) newspaper. But a united front which involved a careful calibration of
direct action when the British government was threatened by industrial unrest,
the troubles in Ireland and the suffragettes as well as the pressure of radical
and liberal elite networks (indeed one might add “old boy’s networks”), which
worked to Malatesta’s advantage.17
The First World War brought a major split among the most famous
personages of international anarchism, especially a fierce debate against
Kropotkin, who not only endorsed the Entente and Allies but became a
bitter-ender and demanded a continuation of the war in 1916, even when
some senior British Tories were demanding a truce and a negotiated settle-
ment. Malatesta remained opposed to the war and witnessed how the war
reactivated the industrial radicalism of pre-war syndicalism in the factory
council movements and free soviets of Italy and the wider world.18 He felt
in 1917 that the expelled anti-parliamentary socialists and anarchists of the
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