Chapter 1

For the war, meanwhile, no.

No war, wherever or however it’s lit.

Yesterday’s aversion — in which everyone, at least on this side of the barricade, was communicated, and in which irreducible, do not persist, today that the anarchists emerged slowly, painfully, from half a century of disenchantment that of mockery, of hunger, of chains repay the sacrifice of the harrowing generation from which the unity, the independence of the homeland had been built; hardened to the criticism that from disillusionment erupted unripe and inexorable to search for the desolating causes, has become more tenacious, unshakable today than to wars, to all wars, however disguised, lacks the ideal content than to assertors, confessors, to the heralds and soldiers of the idea and the national cause gave the generous nostalgia of the Holocaust, the tenacity that did not abdicate before the executioner, betrayal, misfortune and in Mantua, Brescia, Novara, Aspromonte, Montana found in the misfortune reason for the unanimous solidarity consensus and renewed victorious courage.

The war is no more today than a stock exchange operation, a business, on whose cloudy windings the faces of civilization, the labors of progress, the national pride are overturned to hide the inconfessable and shameless fraud, to reap the sack, for the size, for the fortune of the great thieves the necessary tribute of energy and blood that the proletariat alone can give and, though docile, though late, would not otherwise give with ardor, self-sacrifice, the blind impetus that is an essential condition for success.

* * *

Civil longings, intolerance of foreign tyrannies, tremors of national resurrection the wars that have been bloodying the old and new world for twenty years? China’s war against Japan in 1895; the war of the2 United States against Spain in 1898[2]; England’s war against the Boers in 1899; coalition Europe

against the Chinese Empire in 1900; Japan’s war against Russia in 1904; Italy’s war against Turkey in 1911; the Balkan States last year; now, the one that burns in the old continent? I When are the organizers of the paradoxical carnage themselves conceding — and it is, moreover, also to the less shrewd ones confirmed by the immediate experience — that the monopoly of the commercial financial industrial markets of Korea, Manchuria, China, Cuba, the Transvaal, or the hoarding of the Sirti to the rapt speculations of the Banco di Roma, will now come out of the competitions? When does the presumption of England, France, Belgium, Germany, Germany, America to bring beyond their borders other civilizations than extortion, exploitation, corruption, drowns in the Concentration Camps of the Transvaal as in the Congo, in the Republican horrors of Tonkino or Madagascar as in the Puritan Inquisition of the Philippines, and takes on the sense of an atrocious impudent irony towards autocratic Russia and pellagrosa and illiterate Italy?

Pirates, jackals, usurped purse-snatchers, shopkeepers, priests, suppliers, gamblers, and gamblers, who are panting, dividing the tenth of the profits they have earned, the wars of today and tomorrow, the wars of every nation and every race, every land and every continent.

Dividends, usuries, tithes are cut only on Job’s back, whether he is black or white or yellow, whether he was born under the cross, the crescent moon, the tricolor, whether he is held to the laxity by his master by Cecco Beppe or Guglielmine, Gennariello, Wilson or Poincaré.

And to put to Job the alternative of being for or against war would seem idle without the sophistry that descends from the most diverse parchments and tribunes, maramal or naive, to swindle its good faith, to shake its inertia made up of distrust much more than sloth, to upset its simple souls and sincere judgments.

So much sophistry! How many, to excuse the frail deeds, to hide the brazen defections!

* * *

Let us leave as a gang the scoundrels who change their conscience according to who change their master, and faith, ideals and enthusiasm draw on the crib and measure them against the blame. Insurrectionists, anti-patriots, anti-racists to the point of resigning oneself to the legendary German stick in the brains of the foreign invasion, yesterday — when they filled the bowl of daily slop, licked the ass of their “comrades” — are nationalists, patriots, warmongering today that the nationalism of the homeland has hired them to shoot guns of the gang, prepare the litter to their vanity, and compensates of the loaf of bread the treads that in the midst of us has harvested their equivocal and mercantile revolving. Lansquenets of those who pay them, they barter their bread with conscious lies and with professional victuals, too foreign to any shudder of feeling so that their loudly blunders, their inverted somersaults, their shameless faces can move more than with compassion or disgust, so that their mercenary chameleonism, their desperate intellectual and moral latitude, even if they pose as philosophers and censors, can have weight in a sincere debate.

People pass by and nostril-tighten us, too.

If only there was dissension, no one would have noticed!

* * *

But the war was before and before everything the sudden and definitive liquidation of militant socialism. The great industrialists of Westphalia, Saxony, Silesia in the deadly war on industry1i in Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester — who in the fierce competition of the two antagonistic industries and the fundamental reason for the bitter European conflict — certainly did not dream of having allies in the deadly war between the parliamentary representatives of the German proletariat, in William of Hohenzollern to have Narrow at his side, more trustworthy and more devoted than his Hussars of the Guard, the century of socialist deputies to the Reichstag.

Not even a shadow of a contrast, not even the slightest attempt at opposition: Deutschland über alles! The great German homeland above all; while on the other side of the border, the extreme socialist who still dared to oppose the Chamber on 7 July to the approval of the four hundred thousand francs balanced for Poincaré’s visit to Petersburg, no longer finds a man to remember socialist internationalism, to remember, in the imminence of war, the shameful speeches and heretical agendas acclaimed at the meeting of the Secretariat of the International Socialist Party in Brussels the week before.

Not one, not even Hervè.

The man who had abandoned their lords’ homeland on the dunghill, crying out under the serenity of the goodness that the French proletariat would respond with insurrection to the declaration of war, inscribed among his social duties, at the first flash of the hurricane, that of reassuring the government “that there would not be a general strike against the threatened war, that there would not be a general insurrectional strike once war was declared.

That the socialists, the trade unionists, the libertarians would march like one man to the frontier giving the nationalists the example of courage and discipline, trusting in the Republic’s concern for women and children”.[3]

A shrewd ministerial reshuffle has defeated any distant threat of opposition. On August 26, Viviani recomposed his ministry by calling the representatives of the different gradations of radical and unified socialism: Jules Guesde, Marcel Sembat, Bienvenu Martin, Gaston Thompson, Alexandre Millerand, Aristide Briand, Victor Augagneur, etc. On the one hand, the opposition was silenced by taking the less docile leaders hostage to the government, and on the other hand, the Socialist Party was held responsible for the war and its fate, to which the destinies, the fortunes of the Bank of France, Creuzot, Chatillon Commentry, Credit Lyonnais, great finance and great French industry are so closely linked.

If the bourgeoisie has never been so ruffled, the socialist opposition could not have been more oblique nor more stupid.

In England socialism was in the ranks, dispersed and Sana the only dissenting voice, that of Keir Hardie, as in France, vox clamantis in the desert, soon suffocated by the insane cry of the crowds: in Berlin! In Berlin, the lone voice of protest from some anarchist newspaper didn’t vibrate.

In Belgium socialism was at the border, for the homeland, in arms and luggage.

In Italy Machiavelleggia.

The minor part which, on the road to Damascus, has been repeating for years, at every crisis, its homages to the dominant class in its most august symbol, and for the war, for the conquest of Trento and Trieste, for the annexation of Albania, for the claim of Tunis, Malta, Corsica, Nice, the four fifths of Europe; the major part and for the war as well. It is not those who do not see that the neutrality imposed on the government is only a shrewd alibi. The dynastic treaties have linked the political fates of the Italian people to those of the central governments, against tradition, against history, against the living protests of an anguished recent historical past, against the implicit renunciation of the integration of national unity; and the socialist policy and against Austria against Germany, rebelling against the commitments” made by the government with the triple alliance. But it is clear that it would be with the government for the war against Austria, for the Italian redemption of Istria and Trentino; not against the war in s6 and for itself, not against the war that, by reconfirming the irreconcilable interests of capitalism and the proletariat in the name of the homeland or the lineage, oblitera denies and perverts all the criticism, the soul, the action, the very reason for being, the socialist aspiration and the proletarian emancipation.

***

We are not dealing here with the usual case of aberration or individual corruption: we are dealing with the failure of a method.

Socialism has its reason for being in the economic fact of the irreducibility of the antagonism between proletarian and bourgeois interests; and movement of struggle and class redemption, and if this redemption is subordinated to the destruction of the economic monopoly and the political privilege of the bourgeoisie, it is not necessary to spend a word to show that the socialist movement will be a revolutionary movement not only because its remote aspiration is revolutionary, but because it is revolutionary of all the daily irreconcilabilities it must necessarily be at its work every hour of every day.

A socialism which, in the remote expectation of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, intends to make ends meet as little as possible, and establishes, on the basis of assiduous compromises in the Municipality, in the Province, in the Parliament, in the most difficult labor markets, any kind of cooperation in view of the conservation of the liberty hitherto conquered, and social order, albeit provisional, in which the gradual intellectual and moral elevation of the proletariat matures, and socialist movement that reabsorbs itself without thinking it, without realizing it, without wanting to, in the old democracy against which it had risen, protest and reaction. It is the socialist movement that, after the flashing and persecuted period of the origins, and came, crosses the cooperation reconciling with the capital, crosses the parliament reconciling with the state, crosses the mental reserves reconciling with the church, disarming the suspicions of all the institutions of order and enabling, crosses the renunciation, to take in the government of public affairs the political succession that the old parties threaten to compromise and subvert with their absurd and obstinate immobility.

Excite, exasperate this action with the flattery of a convenient participation in the government business, with the bait of the major influences connected to it, and the involution will be precipitated by the concern of tomorrow’s responsibilities.

How can we wonder if, having reached the threshold of power, these people, who for thirty years have spent their intelligence, study, speech, and tenacity to persuade us that our interests were not the interests of our masters; that they were other, different, opposing, irreconcilable, taking the interests of our masters; that they could not take advantage of each other, triumph, except over the defeat of the ruling class, because there is no margin, neutral earthly ones on which to form an alliance, to come to a compromise; and inspired us the suspicion, grafted on to distrust, imposed divorce from every political party to which the class had to oppose the identity of economic interests, surrounded by a solidarity, a force that no force could resist — then came from tumble to tumble to tell us that in the name of lineage or civilization or homeland those interests could be, had to be reconciled and confused: that in the name of the nation or of civilization or of the fatherland, the masters, the exploiters, those who live by our sweat and hail on our servitude, could also, if they were born here from the Soča or from the Brenner Pass, be our brothers; and that the wretched, even the wretched of our own misery, of our own abjection, could be our enemies in spite of the identity of destiny and the solidarity of interests, if they were born, if they were camped beyond Kvarner, because beyond that, though they are as painful as we are, the progeny of servants have another flag, another king. And it is the Austria of Franz Joseph of Hapsburg, while we, we are the Italy of Vittorio Emanuele of Savoy. And that it is sad, and miserable, but we must, we vilified, we exploited, we ragamuffins who have never seen each other, who have felt like brothers even ignoring each other, venturing on each other, cutting our throats without mercy or mercy if a contrast flashes between Gennariello and Cecco Beppe, If between the masters beyond, who for the builders of their fortune never had nothing but contempt, jail, tread in the belly, and those on this side, who in our skin have cut off omnipotence and blasphemy, the stupidest complaint of junkmen is lit.

The proletariat, who took on the Eucharist of the International for an hour, a citizen for an hour of the universal homeland, rejoined among the narrow confines of the people, reconciles with its millenarian torturer, dresses his livery, belts his arms and insignia, defeats him by singing his enemies, happy to give his life, the bread of his triumph for the people, the homeland, civilization, without even remembering that of his three stepmothers and the bastard three times disowned.

He has accustomed us to the Elysée and the Quirinal, socialism well thought out; we have seen the desolate whispering of the miserable at the funerals of Umberto di Savoia and Cardinal Bonomelli; he has cleverly led us to Chalons and Draveil in the socialist massacres of the breadless[4]; We can well see him taken on with Millerand to the supreme magistracy of war, yearning with Bissolati, with Turati, with Ferri, with the various snotty Corridoni — reconciled in the great name of the country — in Trento in Trieste, to the organized extermination of the wretched on both sides of the border.

In the name of the Fatherland and civilization...