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Author : Carl Levy
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Since the end of World War II the number of major works on anarchism and anarchists published in English is impressive. I will not attempt to list them all, but we have George Woodcock’s biographies of Godwin, Proudhon and Kropotkin and Richard Drinnon’s biography of Emma Goldman; then there is Maximoff’s huge volume of Bakunin’s selected writings, Eltzbacher’s Anarchism, Stirner’s Ego and His Own and Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (edited), and Irving Horowitz’s 600-page anthology on and by The Anarchists; and finally there are the histories: G.D.H. Cole’s second volume in his “History of Socialist Thought,” which deals with Marxism and Anarchism (1850–1890), Woodcock’s Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, and James Joll’s The Anarchists. To this list one must add the literature on the Spanish Civil War, at least that part of it which recognizes the anarchist contribution to the struggle, and at the top of this list I would put Burnett Bolloten’s Grand Camouflage, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Brenan’s Spanish Labyrinth (the latter two being postwar reprints). One has only to look up at one’s bookshelves to realize that I should have mentioned Herbert Read’s Anarchy and Order, Marie-Louise Berneri’s Journey through Utopia, Rudolf Rocker’s London Years, etc., etc.!
And the longer the list becomes the greater is my surprise that no one should have long ago thought that Errico Malatesta deserved a place in that distinguished company, for he is acclaimed by the historians I have mentioned as one of the “giants” in the giant-studded 19th century revolutionary movement. The fact that he is seen by the historians more as a revolutionary agitator than as a thinker, explains in part their superficial treatment of his role in what they call the “historic anarchist movement.” Then there is the question of language. It is noteworthy that English social historians are not linguists, and Italian is not an international language (and neither are Italians good linguists) and so, in spite of the fact that the Italian anarchist movement has produced probably more valuable and thought-provoking writers than any other movement, their names, let alone their ideas, are virtually unknown outside their country (the exception being the Spanish speaking movement).
However, the principal disadvantage with which Malatesta has had to “contend” is that he did not conform to the pattern set by 19th century revolutionary thinkers and revolutionary leaders which would have ensured him his place among the historians’ “great men.” He was, first of all, too good a revolutionary, to even think of keeping a diary; and he was too active to be allowed to live the kind of settled life that would have allowed him carefully to file away his correspondence for posterity and the convenience of historians. Furthermore, though he was in his 79th year when he died he had never found the time (nor, I suspect, felt the inclination) to write his memoirs, which his closest friends, as well as publishers with an eye on a best seller, had, for their different reasons, been urging him to do for many years. And last, but not least, he earned his living as a skilled worker and not as a writer. If it is thought that I exaggerate the disadvantages, I would refer the reader to Cole’s valuable History (Vol. II), to the “Principal Characters” a list of more than 60 names with which he prefaced his text, and invite him to apply the various “tests” I have suggested.
Now let me enumerate some of the reasons why I think it high time not only that historians should accord to Malatesta his proper place in the movement (obviously I cannot oblige them to agree with me, but I hope the publication of this volume of his writings will now make it virtually impossible for them to ignore him as a thinker) but more important, that anarchists in the English speaking world should have something more than a pamphlet by which to study his ideas.
For nearly sixty years Malatesta was active in the anarchist movement as an agitator and as a propagandist. He was, as a glance through the files of the anarchist press will show, one of the movement’s most respected members as well as remaining to the end one of its most controversial. He was active in many parts of the world, as well as the editor of a number of Italian anarchist journals including the daily Umanità Nova (1920–22). Half his life was spent in exile and the respect he was accorded by governments is surely evidenced by the fact that he spent more than ten years in prison, mainly awaiting trial. Juries, by contrast, showed a different respect, in almost always acquitting him, recognizing that the only galantuomo, that the only honest man, was the one facing them in the prisoners’ cage!
I have, in this volume, purposely soft-pedaled the man in order to emphasize his ideas, because everybody recognizes Malatesta as the man of action but few realize how valuable, and original, and realistic were his ideas. Yet if there is merit in his ideas, the principal source is his experience in the day-to-day struggle and his identification with the working people as one of them. In my opinion Bakunin and Kropotkin, in spite of their prison experiences, remained aristocrats to the end. What George Woodcock refers to as Kropotkin’s “weakness for oversimplification in almost all the issues he discussed” are the attributes not of the saint but of the aristocrat. And indeed even he suggests that one should not “be content with the impression of Kropotkin as a saint. Obstinacy and intolerance had their place in his character….”
Malatesta had no illusions about the “historic role of the masses” because he shared and understood their lives and reactions. But because he also understood how their oppressors “reasoned,” and how the “in-betweeners” preached what they were too privileged, socially and materially, to practice, he expected more from the organized workers, but nevertheless he directed his propaganda to all men of good-will.
This volume is divided into three parts. The first consists of selections from his writings, the second, Notes for a Biography of Malatesta, and the third part is an attempt to make an assessment of Malatesta’s ideas and tactics in the light of present-day experience.
It is obvious that even the most scrupulous editor cannot avoid reflecting his own preferences in making a selection. But I have done my best to limit this intrusion by attempting to present a “complete” picture of Malatesta’s most important ideas and arguments, rather than selecting a limited number of articles from his extensive Writings. And I arrived at the 27 sections in which the ideas have been grouped by the simple process of reading his articles and classifying the subject matter within each article under as many headings as seemed appropriate. The next stage was to condense the material within each classification and then to reduce the number of headings, either by combining some, or by deciding that the material in others was not sufficient or especially interesting to justify inclusion. The picture that emerged was one of Anarchist Ends and Means, and I therefore grouped the sections accordingly, and ending with the complete text of the Anarchist Program which Malatesta drafted and which was accepted by the Italian anarchist Congress in Bologna in 1920, for it seems to me to synthesize Malatesta’s ideas and his commonsense approach to anarchist tactics.
If Malatesta has been badly served by the English speaking movement, quite apart from the historians, the same cannot be said of the Italian movement. After his death all his writings from 1919 to 1932 were collected and published in three volumes (totaling more than 1,000 pages). And after the War two large volumes compiled by the late Cesare Zaccaria and Giovanna Berneri appeared in Naples, containing as well as much of the material that appeared in the first three, many of Malatesta’s articles from the Volontà (1913–14) period as well as from l’Agitazione (1897). I have been able to supplement these with a file of Volontà, as well as with odd copies of Bertoni’s Risveglio (Geneva) and Fabbri’s Studi Sociali (Montevideo) and the magazine Volontà (Naples) in which a number of the earlier articles were reprinted. So though conscious of not having read all Malatesta’s writings, I have read enough to feel sure that I have not missed some major aspect of his thought.
Some readers may think that in presenting extracts rather than selections one is presenting Malatesta out of context as well as doing him an injustice as a writer. The latter point seems to me to be a valid one, for in spite of being a reluctant writer, the lucidity of the language and the construction of his articles make them worth reading as literature, and as a propagandist and polemicist he was a master of his craft. Perhaps one of these days it will be possible to make good this “injustice.”
As to the extracts being out of their context and needing copious footnotes giving the background in which the articles from which they have been taken, were written, I have resisted doing this partly because this volume would have then appeared to be a work for scholars instead of the undisguised anarchist propaganda it aims at being, but also because it seems to me that the reader himself or herself can easily put these extracts in their context by a quick glance at the foot of the page. For apart from his writings after 1924, one can say that whenever Malatesta took up his pen it was either because the situation was ripe for revolutionary action, or that he saw possibilities, for effective anarchist propaganda. The critics will reply that the fact that Malatesta’s writings referred to particular historical situations means the arguments cannot be relevant to, or that they have no bearing on, economic conditions or the political situation today. I take the opposite point of view because I find the ideas of the practical anarchists of the past more stimulating, as well as being able to relate much of what they say to the present, than their starry-eyed contemporaries whose ideal futures had no practical basis even in the present from which they were launched.
Much more than the political background, what should commend Malatesta to our consideration today is his way of thinking. Irving Horowitz in the long Introduction to his above mentioned anthology, seems to have discovered the place Malatesta’s ideas should rightly occupy, apparently on the strength of his pamphlet Anarchy, when he describes him as “the great Italian anarchist who bridges 19th- and 20th-century European thought as few of his peers did.” To determinism Malatesta opposed free will; to “scientism” he opposed the scientific approach. I feel that Malatesta, who when he was over 70 declared that: “to be told that I have a scientific mind does not displease me at all; I would be glad to deserve the term; for the scientific mind is one which seeks the truth by using positive, rational and experimental methods …” would have been happy to read the remarks with which Dr. Alex Comfort, in 1948, prefaced a long extract from an article he wrote in 1884 on the subject of “Love”: “Malatesta, though not a social psychologist, gives a statement of the anarchist case [on marriage] which is possibly more balanced than any since Godwin”; or that a political scientist in an article on “Anarchism and Trade Unionism” written in 1957, considers that not only were Malatesta’s writings on the subject “a useful starting point” but that he should also conclude that his “main contentions still hold good.”
Malatesta was a propagandist not a professional writer. Enzo Santarelli, the Italian Marxist historian contemptuously refers (1959) to the limitations of Malatesta as a thinker and writes him off as a revolutionary agitator, but in the process Malatesta emerges as the central character and thinker in Santarelli’s 300-page volume. What a glorious “failure”!
Part Two of this volume: “Notes for a Biography” is even more modest than its title could imply. It reflects in the main the questions I asked myself about Malatesta’s life in the course of reading him and the extravaganzas by the historians. Again most of the answers were to be found in the biographies and the articles published by his friends. Acknowledgment is made in the Source Notes, but I would like to mention specially three invaluable biographers and interpreters, Luigi Fabbri, Max Nettlau, and Armando Borghi (the latter still with us, and the octogenarian editor of the Italian anarchist weekly, Umanità Nova) who have done all the hard work. I have only selected, and if I have not retailed the human anecdotes and have presented Malatesta’s Life in some twenty-odd unconnected bits, it is that while I think Malatesta’s life illumines his ideas, the neglect he has suffered as a man of ideas in the English speaking world is, in part, due to the emphasis laid on his political notoriety by the historians and some of the anarchists. It seemed to me that what was required was to seek to debunk the popular “image” of the man and his background, as well as to situate him in the political picture of his time.
The Notes are followed by the Appendices. The first two in reply to Kropotkin’s first world war attitude (which were written specially for Freedom and are, with the letter to that journal and Malatesta’s account of the “Red Week” in Ancona the only texts by Malatesta which have not been translated from the Italian original for this volume) have been included in this part for convenience since they are referred to in the Notes. The article on Kropotkin, as well as being an important document for anarchists also belongs to this part of the book.
Part Three, the last forty pages, is not what I had hoped to write, which was an Assessment of Malatesta’s ideas in terms of present-day realities. What I have produced is a rambling piece which ideally I would have wished to hold back to expand and clarify. I have not done so for a number of reasons.
Firstly because it does try to relate Malatesta’s ideas to the problems of today; secondly because it deals with his ideas on the General Strike as a revolutionary tactic and in the process gives me, thirdly, the opportunity to question the thoroughness with which we anarchists study the efficacy of the tactical weapons we advocate in our propaganda. And lastly, I have included this piece aware as I am of its structural defects, because if this volume meets with the success I want it to have, it will be reflected in growing activity in the groups, a more efficient use of their energies, more coordination between groups nationally (as distinct from the organizational mania). For, even more than in the 19th century (when the anarchist movement was truly Internationalist) to survive and develop we must explore how to coordinate all our activities internationally, not by the show of internationalism—Congresses and telegrams soon evaporate—but by actions which prove our resolve beyond any shadow of doubt. Part Three, then, is not directed to the “outsiders” who may chance on this volume, but to all revolutionists, and in particular to anarchist comrades and friends wherever they may be.
It is not a criticism of the “Idea,” about which the historians write their learned tomes, but an attempt to get those of us who think anarchism a wonderful way of life and also want to do something to try and change things, to take stock and seek to make the best use of our resources. The necessary decisions and action must stem from us. And Malatesta, I am convinced, is the most realistic of guides.
London, February 1965
V.R.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
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January 28, 2021 : Editor’s Introduction to the First Edition -- Added.
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