Life and ideas : the anarchist writings of Errico Malatesta

286 Pages·2015·2.46 MB·English

by  Errico Malatesta

CONTENTS
Foreword by Carl Levy
Editor’s Introduction to the First Edition
Editor’s Introduction to the Third Edition (1984)
PART ONE
Introduction: Anarchy and Anarchism
I
1. Anarchist Schools of Thought
2. Anarchist—Communism
3. Anarchism and Science
4. Anarchism and Freedom
5. Anarchism and Violence
6. Attentats
II
7. Ends and Means
8. Majorities and Minorities
9. Mutual Aid
10. Reformism
11. Organisation
III
12. Production and Distribution
13. The Land
14. Money and Banks
15. Property
16. Crime and Punishment
IV
17. Anarchists and the Working Class Movements
18. The Occupation of the Factories
19. Workers and Intellectuals
20. Anarchism, Socialism, and Communism
21. Anarchists and the Limits of Political Co-Existence
V
22. The Anarchist Revolution
23. The Insurrection
24. Expropriation
25. Defence of the Revolution
VI
26. Anarchist Propaganda
27. An Anarchist Programme
PART TWO
Notes for a Biography
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Appendix IV
PART THREE
Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists Today
Notes
Index
F
OREWORD
by C L
ARL EVY
E
RRICO 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 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 workers 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 railroad,
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 revolutionary
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 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 anarchist
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 revolution 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 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 workerism
(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 negotiations. 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; starting 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 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 intellectual 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 settlement. 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 London congress of the
Second International in 1896,19 in which he fought on the anarchist side, had
been vindicated as wartime and (later) post-war socialist and industrial
radicalism seemed to be adopting or perhaps adapting pre-war anarchist and
syndicalist positions. But by the 1920s and the triumph of Fascism and
Bolshevism and the decline of anarchism in many of its former strongholds,
Malatesta returned to the basics and engaged in some of his most penetrating
journalism on themes of the essence of anarchism, anarchism and violence, and
the role of liberalism and spaces for anarchism in civil society. When classical
insurrectional anarchism faded after 1945, Malatesta’s legacy of an open-ended
and non-scientistic anarchism was adapted by “reformist” anarchists such as
Colin Ward.20 One of Ward’s closest comrades in the post-1945 British anarchist
movement was Vernon Richards.
Vero Benevento Constantino Recchioni was born in London in 1915 and
later anglicized his name to Vernon Richards.21 As previously mentioned,
Emidio Recchioni had been an active anarchist mainly in Ancona before his
arrival in London in 1899, which had been preceded by his imprisonment on the
penal island of Pantelleria where he made the acquaintance of Luigi Galleani, a
fellow prisoner. During the 1890s Emidio had been employed with the Italian
railroads, and this facilitated easy access to other comrades throughout the
anarchist seedbeds of central Italy. During the 1890s he may have been involved
in an attempt on the life of the authoritarian prime minister Francesco Crispi. In
London he quickly opened a noted Italian delicatessen, King Bomba, which
became a meeting place for two generations of anarchists and radicals, including
Malatesta’s inner circle when they visited London and the local Malatestan
anarchists, and later in the 1920s and 1930s Sylvia Pankhurst, whose partner,
Silvio Corio, was another Italian anarchist exile in London, and Emma Goldman
and George Orwell. The financial success of the shop allowed Recchioni to help
finance Malatesta’s major newspapers in Italy in 1913–15 (Volontà), 1919–22
(Umanità nova), 1924–26 (Pensiero e Volontà), and later funded several attempts
on Mussolini’s life.22 Under the pen-name “Nemo,” Recchioni was an avid
contributor to the Italian anarchist press and to Freedom, the newspaper founded
by Kropotkin in London in 1886. His contributions to the newspaper are still of
great interest, especially an article in 1915 in which he predicted a new form of
radicalism in a post-war Europe, rather close to the council communism and
militant factory shop stewards movements of the period 1917–20 before they
were undermined by the rise of Leninist communism and suppressed by the
restoration of the bourgeois order.23 He died in 1934, but his son Vero carried on
the family politics.
Vernon Richards received his education at Emmanuel school in Wandsworth
and then graduated in civil engineering from King’s College London in 1939. In
his youth he was an accomplished violinist but later let this lapse. In 1934 he
became active in the struggle against the Fascist regime of Mussolini and was
deported from France where he fell in love with the daughter of the anarchist
Camillo Berneri, Marie-Louise. Camillo Berneri was from the next generation of
Italian anarchists after Luigi Fabbri and helped modernize its scope with
important works on inter-war anti-Semitism, a critique of “worker-worship” and
the adaption of the concepts of mass society, psychoanalysis, and totalitarianism
for understanding the rise and strength of Fascism and Stalinism in the 1930s.
He was murdered in Spain during the May Days of 1937 in Barcelona, most
probably by Stalinist agents disguised as Spanish Republican Guards. Berneri had
criticised the policies of the CNT-FAI: the joining of the Popular Front
government, the lack of a guerrilla war, the sacrifice of the social revolution for a
militarised war effort and the lack of a campaign to undermine Morocco, the
original base of the Nationalists and the Army of Africa, by engaging in anti-
imperialist agitation in the Spanish-controlled portion of that country.24 These
critiques would reappear in one of Vernon Richards’s most cited works, The