People :
Author : Carl Levy
Text :
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 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 organizations 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 socialization 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 Labor Party, trade unionists both moderate and syndicalist, Radical Liberals and less radical liberals of the broadsheet press, and even his neighborhood 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) postwar 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 postwar 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 adaptation 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 criticized 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 militarized 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 Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, first published in 1953.[25] Before his death Emidio had helped Berneri’s various plots against Fascist and Royal luminaries. Vero/Vernon was deported from France in 1935 but not before a joint collaboration with Camillo Berneri and Marie-Louise Berneri on the anti-Fascist, newspaper, Free Italy/Italia Libera. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, he collaborated with veterans of Freedom, which had ceased effective publication in 1932, with the new fortnightly, Spain and the World, which then became Revolt!, before becoming the rather popular War Commentary during the Second World War: in 1945 the title reverted to Freedom.
In 1945 Vernon, Marie-Louise, Philip Sansom, and John Hewetson were charged with trying to disaffect members of the armed forces and were defended by a campaign which included George Orwell, Michael Tippett, T.S. Eliot, and Benjamin Britten. Vernon, Samson, and Hewetson were convicted and served nine months in jail, whereas Marie was acquitted on a technicality. After serving his sentence, instead of pursuing a career as a civil engineer, he ran the family business, which was sold in the 1950s. He then worked as a freelance photographer, which included a series of famous early photographs of Orwell in his Islington flat.[26] Later he became an organic gardener and a travel courier. For the last thirty years of his life he lived in a smallholding in Suffolk. In the late 1940s the small but dynamic Freedom group included the likes of Colin Ward, George Woodcock, and Alex Comfort. At the height of his fame, one the founders of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the guide to the great British and American public on Surrealism, Cubism, and all things modern in art, Herbert Read, was a major contributor to Freedom’s publication house, which over the decades published a formidable array of books and pamphlets.[27] Marie-Louise died of a viral infection in 1949 shortly after losing a child at birth,[28] but she left behind a literary legacy, most notably a fine study of utopias, which is still a wonderful read.[29]
From 1951 Vernon edited Freedom as a weekly but quit as editor in 1964 only to resume the editorship sporadically for many years to come. He stopped writing for the newspaper in the 1990s. He was a difficult person to work with: most of his closest colleagues such as Sansom, Hewetson, and Woodcock were not on speaking terms at their deaths, and his famous longstanding quarrel with the former contributor to Freedom, Albert Meltzer, was legendary. Although endorsed by Freedom, Colin Ward’s 1960s Anarchy tried to make anarchism and its method relevant to the newer generation of the welfare/warfare state, engaging with social scientists, architects, and designers and opening up to university students who would be involved in the social and radical currents of 1968’s New Left.[30]
Although one might assume that Emidio was the key influence in Vero’s politics, it was in fact Malatesta who was the central figure in his political life. Vero knew him personally and told me that as a tiny child he sat on Malatesta’s shoulders watching the “zepps” (the German zeppelins) bombing London.[31] Malatesta never wrote a book or memoir. His written work consisted of journalism and important pamphlets. Richards translated several of the pamphlets and most importantly two collections of his newspaper articles.[32] The second collection focused on his writings from 1924 to 1931.[33] The collection here is compiled not in a chronological sense but under twenty-seven topics derived from translated sections of articles taken from throughout his life such as “Anarchism and Anarchy,” “Ends and Means,” “The Anarchist Revolution,” “Anarchists and the Working Class Movements,” “Workers and Intellectuals,” “Anarchism and Science,” etc. This is followed by notes on a biography and Malatesta’s relevance for anarchists today. Now surely much of the introductory and concluding material is rather old hat, with an annoying sectarian point-settling air to proceedings, including a rather uncharitable dig at my teacher James Joll,[34] and a rather curious, dated museum-piece polemic with George Woodcock over whether or not anarchism was dead as he had announced in the first edition of his history of anarchism of 1962. Woodcock’s timing was poor: small-‘a’ anarchism informed much of the early participatory democratic Anglo-American New Left and Civil Rights movements, and nearly destroyed the Gallic Gaullist State in a few heady weeks in May 1968, something Woodcock admitted in later editions of his popular history.[35]
The value of this collection is the pithy overview of Malatesta’s thought and also the appendices, which reproduce among other things, Malatesta’s longish essay of assessment and memories of Kropotkin written a year just before the death of the Italian anarchist. In this collection, one gets an excellent feel for the nonsectarian, open-ended, and thoughtful consistency of Malatesta’s anarchism. But this volume can be supplemented with the volume of Malatesta’s writing edited by Davide Turcato, The Method of Freedom (2014), which reproduces a selection of articles in a chronological fashion within the various phases of his political militancy. Richards’s edition gives the reader a sense of Malatesta’s political ideas, whereas Turcato’s volume is an English overview of his major project to reproduce all his writing, interviews, and correspondence in ten volumes, of which three have been published in Italian.[36] With Richards’s pioneering efforts and with Turcato’s overview of his ongoing massive, definitive, scholarly, and historically contextual project, the English reader will now appreciate the Malatestan “method of freedom” in all its clarity and good sense.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
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