Part 3
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Part Three
No, I would not like to return to the old times … simply to follow the same road and find ourselves back to where we are now. To want to, one should also be able to take with one the results of fifty years activity and all the experience acquired in that time. And in that case it would be the “good old days.”
—From Malatesta’s preface to Nettlau’s Bakunin e l’Internazionale in Italia dal 1864 al 1872 (1928)
We do not boast that we possess absolute truth; on the contrary, we believe that social truth is not a fixed quantity, good for all times, universally applicable or determinable in advance…. Our solutions always leave the door open to different and, one hopes, better solutions.
—Umanità Nova, 1921
Malatesta’s Relevance For Anarchists Today: An Assessment
I
Malatesta’s critical essay of recollections of Kropotkin was one of the last things he wrote, and that was thirty-four years ago; and some of his writings selected for this volume go back to the ’90s. There have been tremendous social upheavals and economic developments in these thirty years which Malatesta, were he writing these concluding lines for me, would be the first to recognize and take into account in formulating anarchist tactics in the ’60s of the twentieth century. But we should be wary of confusing technological and scientific discoveries and advancement with political progress and social awareness. Obviously in the past thirty years in the fields of technology and science mankind has made strides which only fifty years ago might have been considered impossible. On the other hand the growth of radical political thought and awareness during the latter half of the 19th century is a phenomenon not experienced since. Indeed the characteristic of our age is that though we have developed the new sciences to the point where we know more about ourselves, about our motivations, our behavior patterns, our unconscious thoughts; where we know more about the workings of the ruling groups; and of the economic and financial system; where as a result of mass communications secret diplomacy and political scandals, cannot remain uncovered, as easily as in the past, revolutionary avant-garde movements are at their lowest ebb, and Western Man seems unable to project, let alone realize a way of life that combines the full satisfaction of material needs with individual fulfillment and happiness.
It is significant that in the affluent nations of the world, where at last the material conditions for the realization of socialism have been achieved, there is no longer a socialist movement worthy of the name. And that in the hungry half of the world the movements of “liberation” are nationalistic and intensely hierarchical and political, and rarely influenced by radical revolutionary ideas of social and economic justice.
The temptation is to conclude that the age of classical revolution is passed. As one sociologist put it
Modern revolutionary theory was conceived at an early stage of Capitalism, in a world of scarcity and ruthless exploitation, when one could think only of a life and death struggle between rich and poor in which the poor had nothing to lose but his chains. Since then a situation has developed in advanced industrialist countries where there are too many people who could lose only by revolution. They would therefore prefer to see a peaceful transformation toward a more enlightened social organization.[302]
It is undoubtedly true that the power structure at the top has undergone very considerable change in the past thirty years, and that a growing proportion of the population, by reason of its economic and/or social status, now has a stake in capitalist society and will resist any attempt at radical change. But because the revolutionary theory, as quoted by Mannheim, has been shown to be fallacious anyway, (the poor being more concerned with their next meal than with their chains, are thus prepared to follow any demagogue who promises them a square meal every day in return for their political servitude) and revolutionary movements, at all times, a small section of the community, the chances of a revolutionary upheaval in this respect have not been made all that much more difficult by the “managerial revolution” on the other side.
To assume that these elements in themselves represent a formidable physical obstacle, which daily grows larger, is to ignore the lessons of Algeria and Kenya for instance and to exaggerate white militancy in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. In the former, the withdrawal of the military might of the respective Metropolitan powers revealed the bankruptcy of the militant boasting of the “colons.” We have yet to see how militant they will be in S. Rhodesia and South Africa if and when they are resisted by armed Africans, and not by moral arguments and the Luthuli tactics of nonviolence, which it could be argued, have been shown to be inadequate in dealing with these two situations of injustice.
Mannheim, in his observations on dictatorship, points out that “given modern social techniques, a minority will never hand over power to an unarmed majority.” He follows this eminently Malatestian and anarchist remark with “Revolution against any totalitarian power, once entrenched, is nearly hopeless. No established totalitarian regime, whatever its political creed, can be broken from within; it takes an external war to unseat it.” From which, in his opinion, “it follows that the utopian hopes of the Communists that their dictatorship would gradually fade away are even more visionary than many of their other over-optimistic expectations.”
While agreeing with Mannheim that the “withering away” of the State theory of the Marxists is “visionary,” assuming that it was ever expressed by them in good faith, one cannot allow Mannheim’s equally utopian faith in the positive role of “external war to unseat” totalitarian power to pass unchallenged. His simplifications hardly stand up to examination. The last war (1) unseated the Hitler and Mussolini gangs (2) aided Franco’s regime—at a time when according to Mannheim’s arguments it could have destroyed it (3) consolidated the power of the Stalin regime in Russia (4) and as a result of its possession of the Atomic Bomb and the financial advantages resulting from its late entry in the War, the United States emerged as the dominating world Power, politically and economically.
Thus if it can be shown that “external war” has unseated dictatorship it has also consolidated others, as well as creating new ones in the process! So that on balance, considering the price mankind pays in death and destruction, any advantages that can be enjoyed by the survivors are not political but if anything economic ones. The characteristic of modern war is the technological progress that it stimulates and subsidizes at all costs.
Most of us welcome the labor-saving gadgets that are now within the reach of our purses, but without considering the terrible price at which this technological breakthrough has been bought nor the price our children and future generations will have to pay to liquidate our debt of folly. Some of us do, and that minority in the affluent society is the guarantee that human values will survive in an environment of milk and gadgets just as they emerged in one of abject poverty lorded over by an aristocracy of undisguised wealth and privilege.
Malatesta’s analysis of Capitalism is still valid; mass production needs, and even creates, mass markets. Yet the raison d’être of capitalist economics is still profits, and therefore the “artificial scarcity of goods” which Malatesta referred to in the 1920s as “a characteristic” of that system, still obtains, and in that case it is reasonable to suppose that the “affluence” we enjoy in the West is not the result of a change of heart among capitalists, but the chance effect of a cause serving at the same time other interests.
Have the capitalists then, in serving their interests at the same time silenced popular opposition by dangling the carrot of full employment and “affluence” in front of the working people? They haven’t, and not only are they unable to guarantee full employment (assuming that they considered it to be good business) but neither can they control their employes’ demands, for as Malatesta pointed out, the more successful they are in pressing their demands the more will they demand.
In other words, general prosperity, which also means more education as well as more material things, does not result in a passive or contented acceptance of a class structure and a privileged society. Just as the intentions of mass communications (apart from being profitable business) which are to condition the mass-reading public, also produce the opposite effect on large numbers of people, so prosperity (more education) produces growing feelings of resentment among wage earners at having to be ordered about by another, simply because he disposes of the means of production. There is a growing cynicism about the alleged superior qualities of those who control our political life, as well as less acceptance than in the past of the ostentatious ways of life of the wealthy parasites in our midst. State funerals for politicians are obvious attempts to rehabilitate the former, and football pools, with the occasional huge prize winnings, an open sesame to the millionaires’ club for the man in the street. But the dilemma of capitalism cannot be solved by these obvious tricks, whatever they may do in the short term to distract attention from the major issues.
Even assuming that the problems of world hunger and poverty can and will be satisfactorily solved in the next twenty years, and I make the assumption only in order to argue for the validity of anarchy in a world in which the basic material needs of life have been satisfied, the fact is, if the capitalist, or state-socialist, systems succeed in solving the problems of production and distribution in a way that ensures the basic necessities to maintain health for every individual in the world, they will still not have touched the problem of Authority.
Having filled the empty bellies they are, willy-nilly feeding minds, until then exclusively obsessed by food, with ideas, with ambitions, dreams, power, love. Thus having solved the problem of hunger the ruling elite would surround itself with doting followers, but also in a short time have to contend with the pressures from those hungry for the fruits of power as well as from those simply desirous of running their own lives without being bossed around from above.
Malatesta, speaking for the latter, did not make the mistake of confusing them with those he described as “strong, intelligent, passionate individuals, with strong material or intellectual needs, who finding themselves by chance, among the oppressed, seek, at all costs to emancipate themselves, and do not resent becoming oppressors…. “They are rebels but not anarchists,” he concluded, because they had both the feelings and mentality of “unsuccessful bourgeois” and when they do succeed they not only become bourgeois “in fact” but are “not the least unpleasant among them.” The anarchist movement has to this day been unable to protect itself from the Colin Wilsons and other “rebels” of this world who were never anarchists. Since we cannot prevent anyone from calling himself by whatever name he likes, all we can do, declared Malatesta, is to “try to prevent any confusion, or at least seek to reduce it to a minimum,” even if there may be circumstances in which we “find them alongside us.” This, it seems to me is a positive reaction; the alternatives lead to sectarianism, isolation, and in anarchist terms, to an extreme form of individualism.
Malatesta also avoided the mistake, not uncommon in anarchist movements, of seeking to counteract the ill-effects, or the failure, of one extreme by opting for another. The answer to the excesses of “propaganda by the deed” was not Tolstoyan “passive anarchy” any more than organization with party discipline was the answer to uncoordinated actions, or faith in the inevitability of anarchy. Similarly the failure of insurrectionary attempts in the early days of the movement led to the excessive faith, of some, in the powers of the “general strike,” while others concerned by the insufficient influence exerted by anarchists in the workers’ organizations and revolutionary parties, either sought to contract out of society (by starting isolated communities) or became so involved in Trades Union and party activities, that many ended up by being their spokesmen.
In steering a middle course, Malatesta was undoubtedly guided by a long experience and observation of the fate of these extreme attitudes and groupings, no less than by his clear image of the role of anarchists in the social struggle. Far from this middle course implying compromise and reformism, Malatesta sought to ensure that the anarchist movement should always retain its fundamental characteristics but without thereby being condemned to sterility and the role of passive observers of the world political scene.
Apart from the early years, when he too was carried away by the bakuninist ideas of successful local insurrections setting the world on fire, Malatesta was only too aware of the improbability of achieving the anarchist revolution in a foreseeable future, and one can therefore understand why he should have steered clear of both kinds of anarchist extremists: those who were convinced of the impossibility of ever achieving anarchism (such as the individualists) no less than those who thought it could be ushered in overnight by toppling a few heads of State, by a successful General Strike, or by a mass syndicalist organization.
For these reasons he avoided dogmatic postures and refused to win applause by oratorical flourishes. He could not, for instance, conceive of a world or even a community in which absolute freedom reigned. “Mutual Aid” is not “a Law of Nature”—“natural Man is in a state of continuous conflict with his fellows….” He was an anarchist because it corresponded “better than any other way of social life” to the kind of life he wished to live, which for him included, “the good of all” a consideration, in Malatesta’s case, free from sentimental or oratorical overtones in view of his realistic appraisal of human problems.
In 1920 when he was editor of the anarchist daily, Umanità Nova and inciting, as well as, hoping for far-reaching popular action, he was never tempted to write-down or simplify the problems of social revolution: “The needs, tastes, aspirations, and interests of mankind”—he wrote—“are neither similar nor naturally harmonious; often they are diametrically opposed and antagonistic. On the other hand, the life of each individual is so conditioned by the life of others that it would be impossible, even assuming it were convenient to do so, to isolate oneself, and live one’s own life. Social solidarity is a fact from which no one can escape.”
Having presented what is, in his opinion a realistic picture of the human situation Malatesta suggests that
[Social Solidarity] can be freely and consciously accepted and in consequence benefit all concerned, or it can be accepted willy-nilly, consciously or otherwise, in which case it manifests itself by the subjection of one to another, by the exploitation of some by others.
Organization is surely one of the basic manifestations of human solidarity and one is not surprised to find Malatesta in 1897 defining anarchy as “society organized without authority”. To say, as Joll condescendingly does, that he “had always accepted some degree of organization,” in order to conclude that in the polemic between Malatesta and the then anarcho-syndicalist, Monatte, it was the latter “who was right,” is to distort the questions at issue between the two militants at the Amsterdam Congress of 1907. Indeed Malatesta went so far as to point out in that same piece of 1897 that
were we to believe that organization was not possible without authority we would be authoritarians because we would still prefer authority, which fetters and impoverishes life, to disorganization which makes life impossible (my italics)
and everything he wrote subsequently emphasized the need for, without making a cult out of, organization. Organization is “a necessary aspect of social life” from which nobody can escape
and even the most extreme anti-organizers not only are subject to the general organization of the society they live in, but in the voluntary actions in their lives, and in their rebellion against organization, they unite among themselves, they share out their tasks, they organize with whom they are in agreement, and use the means that society puts at their disposal.
As to organization of the anarchist movement, not only did he consider it “useful and necessary.” In his view activity in isolation, when possibilities existed to coordinate, or join it, with the activities of a strong group condemned one to impotence, and to wasting one’s efforts in small ineffectual action.
Here again, Malatesta’s approach was anything but dogmatic. For his experience on the daily anarchist paper made him question, in retrospect, the wisdom (and I assume this to mean the effectiveness, from the point of view of propaganda) of seeking to reconcile all the anarchist currents of thought in one paper, in a period of political ferment such as Italy was passing through in the immediate postwar years. If one juxtaposes these with the following observations
Isolated, sporadic propaganda … serves little or no purpose. In the conditions of awareness and misery in which the masses live, and with so many forces against us, such propaganda is forgotten and lost before its efforts can grow and bear fruit. The soil is too ungrateful for seeds sown haphazardly to germinate and make roots
one is probably justified in concluding that Malatesta felt that when propaganda was at a low ebb it was time for anarchists of all shades to sink their tactical differences, and seek to combine in propagating the ideas, the ends, they held in common, but that when the movement was strong, and the political environment promising from a revolutionary point of view, they should unite where possible but not hesitate to have their respective organs of expression.
A critical study of the international anarchist press—not just simply a bibliography—would not only be revealing, but important in an attempt to further anarchist ideas. In the past fifty years the whole economics of printing and publishing have radically changed—and unfavorably from the point of view of the minority press. Equally the voice of mass communications has centupled in that time, and relatively therefore the difficulties of getting a hearing for anarchist ideas ever greater. Yet throughout the world the anarchist groups and movements each go on struggling to produce their papers and their journals without any attempt at coordinating their efforts or even establishing the most elementary kind of information service which would help to provide factual background material on political and other events of topical interest, while leaving each journal free to contribute its own interpretation.
Far from suggesting that the anarchist press should be centralized (such an attempt was made in Spain by the CNT-FAI Committees in 1938 with disastrous consequences). I am suggesting that internationally its resources could be used more effectively if they were coordinated. I am also suggesting that such coordination would not only improve the topical content of the various journals, but would also result in the discussion of anarchist ideas and tactics by anarchists internationally. In Malatesta’s time there was a ferment of ideas singularly lacking today in the anarchist movement.
Do we really know all the answers? Have we restated anarchism in current terms with all the wealth of sociological research at our disposal? Have we reexamined anarchist tactics in the light of the momentous events technological and political that have taken place in the past thirty years? Have we understood the developments in the capitalist system, and in government in these postwar years and have we made an analysis of their significance in anarchist terms? I think not, and I say this as an assiduous reader of anarchist literature of all kinds in four languages, as well as in all humility, in view of my close association with the publishing activities of Freedom Press over many years.
In the course of compiling this volume I have been made only too aware of the inadequacies of anarchist propaganda in dealing with the means which we believe will lead a universally authoritarian society in, at least, a libertarian direction. And as I was pointing out earlier our choice of panaceas is determined by circumstances, with the tendency to veer from one extreme to another. My political education included, for instance, unquestioning “faith” in the efficacy of the “General Strike” as the answer to every anarchist’s prayer, and in the course of the years, like many of my comrades, I have called on the “general strike” to put things right, just as socialists have appealed to “revolutionary government” to solve all the problems stemming from “bad” governments!
It was only because I intended to include in the Selections a section on the “general strike” that I discovered that Malatesta had written very little on the subject and that when he did it was generally to warn against placing too high hopes in the general strike as a weapon of social change. This led me to reread some of the literature on the subject including Berkman’s valuable ABC of Anarchism (recently reissued by Freedom Press) I append the results of my own somewhat cursory reading, more as an illustration of the extremism (one way or the other) of anarchist positions and the unquestioning acceptance of our panaceas, than as confirmation of Malatesta’s thesis or his way of summing up the problems, and of evaluating which, in the circumstances are the best tactics, though I feel that we have something to learn in these directions too.
II
In the early ’20s Malatesta was writing of the general strike that it was a powerful weapon of struggle in the hands of the workers and “is, or could be, a way and the occasion to determine a radical social revolution.” The situation was analogous to that in Spain fourteen years later, a weak government unable to impose its authority; the workers on the verge of revolution; the Right using the socialist renegade Mussolini to reestablish the rule of “Law and Order.” The obvious and vital difference was that whereas in Spain the revolutionary elements captured the imagination of the reformists and indifferents, and swept them forward, in Italy the dead hand of the socialist politicians and Trade Union leaders killed the revolutionary potentialities of the situation. Obviously in such a situation the General Strike as Malatesta put it, “if understood and used differently from the way the old advocates of this weapon used it” could have been a “really effective means for social transformation.” Nevertheless in general terms he asked himself whether “the idea of the general strike has not done more harm than good to the revolutionary cause.”
It was some years earlier, at the Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907, that Malatesta expressed his reasons which were that: Firstly, many syndicalists were advocating the general strike as a substitute for the insurrection, and secondly that they overlooked the limitations of the general strike as a weapon in the struggle against the capitalist regime.
Without having any illusions about their past achievements, Malatesta saw that at least steady progress had been made in the right direction by the insurrectionary socialist movement, before it was halted by the emergence of Marxism, “with its dogmas and fatalism” and “unfortunately, with its scientific pretenses (we were in a period of full, scientifist euphoria), Marxism gave false hopes and also attracted or diverted most of the anarchists.” They began by saying that “the revolution comes but is not made” that socialism would “inevitably come about” in the order of things, and that the political factor (which Malatesta points out is “after all simply violence in the service of economic interests”) is of no importance because the economic question determines every aspect of social life. “And so insurrectionary preparation was neglected and practically abandoned. Far from despising the political struggle, the anti-insurrectional Marxists later decided that politics was the principal and almost the only means to bring about the triumph of socialism that is, once they saw the possibility of entering Parliament and of giving to the political struggle the restricted meaning of electoral struggle, and with this means they sought to extinguish in the masses all enthusiasm for insurrectional action.”
It was in this atmosphere, writes Malatesta, that the idea of the general strike was launched, and “welcomed enthusiastically by those who had no faith in parliamentary action, and saw in it a new and promising road leading to popular action.” The trouble was however, that most of them viewed the general strike “not as a means of drawing the masses towards insurrection, that is, of the violent destruction of the political power, and to the seizure of the land, the means of production and of all social wealth, but as a substitute for the insurrection, a way of ‘starving the bourgeoisie’ and obliging it to capitulate without a blow being struck.” Far from starving the bourgeoisie, “we should starve ourselves first,” was his cryptic comment.
That Malatesta was not exaggerating when he referred to the General Strike as a panacea and as a substitute for the insurrection is to be found in a whole number of pamphlets published at the time. In this country, for instance, the anarchist press issued Arnold Roller’s well-known essay on “The Social General Strike” (Freedom Press, London, 1912) in which one reads that, “The heroic times of the battle on the barricades have gone by.” The “winding lanes” in which a barricade could easily be erected and defended have been replaced in large cities by “broad long streets, in which the columns of an army can easily operate and take the barricades,” and even the paving stones have been replaced by wooden blocks and asphalt “and such material is not fit for building barricades.” Therefore, Roller concludes “it would be foolish for the people to begin a revolution, relying upon such insufficient means of defense.” An excellent argument against barricades in Bond Street but not necessarily against insurrection!
Roller also deals with the problem of feeding the population during a general strike:
As soon as the bakers and butchers quit working, the General Strike will be felt much more intensely, and it will be probably the first time that the ruling classes will understand and feel what it means to be hungry…. The proletarians can stop production, but they cannot stop consumption. In this way they would during the transition do the same thing as the ruling classes have done uninterruptedly for thousands of years—that is, “consume without producing.” This action of the ruling classes the working class calls “exploitation”; and if the proletarians do it, the possessing classes call it “plundering,” and Socialists call it “expropriation.”
In 1907 Malatesta was telling his fellow delegates in Amsterdam: “Some of the enthusiasts of the general strike go so far as to admit that the General Strike involves expropriation. But then the soldiers come. Are we to let ourselves be shot down? Of course not. We should stand up to them, and that would mean Revolution. So why not say Revolution at once, instead of General Strike?
This was not simply a question of words for in Malatesta’s view it went deeper than that:
The advocates of the General Strike make people think they can do things without fighting, and thus actually spoil the revolutionary spirit of the people. It was propaganda of this kind that brought about such illogical positions as that taken up by the strikers recently at Barcelona, where they did fight the soldiers, but at the same time treated with the State. This was because they were under the delusion that it was only an economic question.
Again the idea expressed by such writers as Roller that “when the bakers and butchers quit working” the ruling classes will “probably for the first time understand what it means to be hungry” is not only doubtful, but even if it were true, the fact is that they would be no more worse off than the rest of the population and that short of everybody starving to death something must give, and it is inevitable that it will be the workers, for they and not the employers are the producers of the necessities of life. Malatesta argued thus because he was far from convinced that under capitalism there was ever over-production or that the granaries and the warehouses were stuffed with surplus food. Unlike Roller who believed that
the crisis of over-production is the best guarantee for the success of the Social General Strike, because the products on hand permit the satisfaction of all needs before the complete reorganization; namely, by a general “Help yourself” on the part of the workers.
Malatesta always pointed out that the characteristic of capitalism is under-rather than over-production (see Section 12 “Production & Distribution”) and that it was a mistake to believe that the stocks of food and essential goods in the large cities was sufficient to feed the people for more than a few days. When pressed by Malatesta to investigate the true position, Kropotkin who, in all his writings on the subject, had been a partizan of the prize au tas (taking from the storehouses) view, discovered that if the imports of food into England were stopped for four weeks everybody in the country would die of starvation; and that in spite of all the warehouses in London, the capital city was never provisioned for much more than three days. Is the situation much different today in London and in all the large cities of the world?
Malatesta offered the Congress of 1907 what he called “a more or less novel conception” of the General Strike: namely “that in dealing with this question we must begin by considering the necessity of food.” And in which case
A peasant strike, for instance, appeared to him as the greatest absurdity. Their only tactics were immediate expropriation, and wherever we find them setting to work on those lines it is our business to go and help them against the soldiers. And then he had read somewhere that we ought to go and smash the railway bridges! He wondered whether the advocates of such foolishness ever realized that corn has to come the same way the cannons come. To adopt the policy of neither cannons nor corn is to make all revolutionists the enemies of the people. We must face the cannons if we want the corn.
“We must face the cannons if we want the corn” symbolizes the commonsense which informed all Malatesta’s, counsels and his own actions in the long years of his political maturity. It is his approach which even in this new scientific age in which we live, should commend itself to us today. It is not only about “cannons and corn” that his arguments have that ring of realism. I suggest that throughout the Selections this approach is applied to every major problem. For sixty years Malatesta was an anarchist because it “would correspond better than any other way of social life, to my desire for the good of all, to my aspirations towards a society which reconciles the liberty of everyone with cooperation and love among men, and not because anarchism is a scientific truth and a natural law.” And for most of those sixty years without ever abandoning these feelings his feet remained firmly planted on the ground. Insurrection, General strikes, Revolution, Anarchy—yes, but the ever-recurring warning in all his theoretical and agitational writings is that the community has to go on eating every day whatever the political upheavals.
He may well have been stating the obvious but so long as it is overlooked it needs to be repeated again and again.
Monatte’s taunt, after hearing Malatesta’s view at the 1907 Congress was
In listening tonight to Malatesta bitterly criticizing the new revolutionary concepts, I felt that I was listening to the arguments of a distant past. To these new concepts, the brutal reality of which frightens him, Malatesta has simply offered the old Blanquist ideas which fondly imagined that it was possible to reinvigorate the world by means of a triumphant armed insurrection.
Furthermore, the revolutionary syndicalists present tonight, have been reproached for having deliberately sacrificed anarchism and the revolution to syndicalism and the general strike. Well, I wish to declare, that our anarchism is as good as yours and we have no more intention than you have de mettre noter drapeau dans noter poche (of hiding our true colors). As everybody here, anarchy is our final object. But because times have changed, we have also modified our concept of the movement and of the revolution. The latter cannot be achieved in the meld of 1848. As to syndicalism, if in some countries in practice it has given rise to some errors and deviations, the experience is there which will prevent us from repeating them. If instead of criticizing from above the past, present or even future shortcomings of syndicalism, anarchists were to become more closely involved in its activity, the hidden dangers that might be contained in syndicalism would once for all be exorcized!
Monatte exaggerated the differences between syndicalists and anarchists because he did not or for tactical reasons was not willing to take into account the opening sentences in Malatesta’s exposé which made it quite clear that he would only deal with those aspects of his ideas in which “he was in disagreement with earlier speakers and in particular with Monatte” for to do otherwise would simply mean burdening delegates with the kind of repetitions which are permissible at meetings when one is addressing a hostile or indifferent audience. But here—he went on to add—“we are among comrades and none of you hearing me criticize what can be criticized in syndicalism will surely be tempted to take me for an enemy of workers’ organization and action; anyone who does obviously doesn’t know me very well!”
Without wishing to be unkind to Monatte, who remained devoted to the cause of revolutionary syndicalism to the end of a long life, but in the interests of truth, it must be mentioned that whereas Monatte succumbed to the temptations of the Bolshevik Revolution a few years later (though he soon left them), Malatesta not only exposed the dangers from the beginning but received the announcement of Lenin’s death with what was, for the revolutionary Left, no less than for some anarchists, the shocking remark “Lenin is dead. Long Live the Revolution!”
I have only apparently diverged from the subject of the pros and cons of the General Strike as a revolutionary weapon, because it seems to me that from the foregoing one can the better judge whether Malatesta’s criticisms were the “arguments of the distant past” or those of a man who refused to be deflected from the realities of the present and, in the circumstances, of the foreseeable future.
It is interesting to note that French syndicalists, such as Pierre Besnard, in the ’30s were defining the general strike as “la grève generale insurrectionelle et expropriatrice.”[303] The general strike he explained as “a specifically syndicalist weapon” which can deal “in a decisive manner with all revolutionary situations whatever the initial factors of the movements set in motion. It is directly opposed to insurrection, the only weapon of the political parties.” And he adds that it is
by far more complete than [insurrection]. In fact whereas the latter only makes it possible to take power, the general strike not only provides the possibility of destroying that power, of getting rid of those who enjoy it, of preventing any party from capturing it, it deprives capitalism and the State of all means of defense, while at the same time abolishing individual property, replacing it by collective property.
In a word, the general strike has a power of immediate transformation, and this power is exercised for the sole benefit of the proletariat, to whom the possession of the apparatus of production and exchange offers the means of radically transforming the social order.
The expropriatory general strike, with violence which the proletariat will invariably be obliged to use, will be, moreover, clearly insurrectional.
Its effect will be felt at the same time politically and economically, whereas insurrection permits a party to act only in the political field.
Surely Malatesta would be justified in rising from his grave in anger and demanding that we call a spade a spade! And he would need do no more than point to the fact that the syndicalists were now embellishing the term “general strike” with “insurrectionelle et expropriatrice” and that Besnard, syndicalist, in his interesting “program” shares the same preoccupations as Malatesta, anarchist, when he writes
Let us, now, examine what are the characteristics of the general strike. I have said that it signified in the first place and above all, the cessation of production, and work, under capitalism.
This means that workers, then the peasants, must simultaneously stop work. Does this mean they must quit their place of work and abandon the means of production to the bosses? No. Unlike what happens during a strike, workers will have to at the same time stop work, occupy the place of production, get rid of the boss, expropriate him, and get ready to get production moving again, but in the interests of the revolution.
The cessation of work and production will mark the end of a regime, the expropriation of the possessors of the means of production and exchange and at the same time the overthrow of State power.
“On the duration of this stoppage will depend the future of the revolutionary movement,” writes Besnard. Malatesta in 1907 seeing clearly this danger declared that “rather than calling on workers to stop working we must get them to work on their own account. Failing which the general strike will become a general famine even if we had been able from the outset to seize all the goods stored in the warehouses.” And again in 1920 we find him advocating the taking-over of factories as the answer to general strikes of protest (see Section 18).
To this day for syndicalists and many anarchists the general strike remains the battle cry, the short cut to the free society “if only the workers would make up their minds.” As far as I know no objective study on the subject of the general strike has been made by anarchists or syndicalists since Malatesta expressed his doubts at the Anarchist Congress in 1907 and again in 1920. It is significant that the major work on the subject should be by an American professor, Wilfrid Crook, and is packed with valuable material though marred by the author’s obsession with the Communist bogey.[304] A work which is more objective and valuable, though it only deals briefly with the problem, is Lady Chorley’s Armies and the Art of Revolution,[305] a war-time publication which was presumably justified by the publishers as a work of “national interest” in so far as it would assist those engaged in “political warfare” in dealing with revolutionary situations among the defeated nations. Be that as it may, Lady Chorley has done the kind of research anarchists should have long ago engaged in. Her conclusions are of considerable interest and bear out the arguments advanced by Malatesta from his own experience. The author is “summing up”
the rather heterogeneous evidence [of the preceding pages and trying] to arrive at some conclusions as to the value of the general strike as a revolutionary weapon. In particular, an attempt must be made to answer the question whether a general strike can in any circumstances provide conditions which will indirectly weaken the fighting power of the forces of the status quo government, so that an insurrection may succeed even against their opposition.
It seems clear that the general strike has certain inherent weaknesses that cannot be overcome. Its object is to hold a government to ransom by the dislocation of all economic life. If the middle classes are against the strike, this dislocation cannot be completely effected since they are competent to run skeleton necessary services. When the dislocation is complete, after a few days the strains put upon the strike organization will probably be beyond its resources on a vast and probably quite impossible scale. Moreover, the structure of modern community life cannot survive such a dislocation for more than a few days. And if the whole structure crumbles, the resulting chaos will be a crushing liability rather than an asset. History shows that successful revolutions have invariably taken off from a springboard of properly organized community life. Whether, the community life is organized in the interests of this or that class is of no moment. The point is that it is organized. It is a fallacy to suppose that revolutions are ever the offspring of chaos and foul night. Relative economic chaos may ensue for a time after a successful revolution. This may be inevitable. But no leader can afford to make the production of general chaos an instrument of revolutionary policy. During a revolution, the more smoothly the machinery runs for the neutral population, the better….
A general strike, then, must succeed in its objective within the first few days. If this does not happen, it will probably collapse under the weight of the dislocation it has itself brought about before that dislocation actually brings down the whole social structure. There is a third alternative: that it should transform itself into armed revolt. Granted the opposition of the armed forces of the government, such a revolt can only be successful if the conditions created by the strike prevent the troops from exerting their full strength…. Taking it by and large, the general strike is not a good revolutionary weapon. Its main revolutionary value is as an expression of working-class solidarity. It can sometimes be used to create artificially a revolutionary situation, but unless such a situation can be used as the taking-off point for an already planned insurrection, whose chances have been calculated, it is a useless expenditure of enormous energy. As an actual instrument of policy it is more wasteful of energy than a straight insurrection, and its failure is more likely to set back a working-class movement than the failure of an insurrection.
The passages I have italicized in Lady Chorley’s conclusions seem to me to be the particularly relevant ones in a piece full of important observations for anarchists and syndicalists, and not least for those who see in the general strike the weapon par excellence of the nonviolent revolution.
The point surely is that where the general strike is neither purely economic or political but revolutionary in its objectives, its purpose being to replace government and all the institutions of State by other forms of social and political organization, it is in effect the insurrection as visualized by Malatesta, and the only difference between his approach and that of any other, what I would call, practical anarchists, such as Alexander Berkman is one of emphasis, but it is crucial to the whole future development of anarchist thinking and propaganda no less than in its possibilities of developing as a movement of radical change. On the subject of “Organization of labor for the Social Revolution” Berkman writes in the ABC of Anarchism
We know that revolution begins with street disturbances, and outbreaks; it is the initial phase which involves force and violence…. This phase of the revolution is of short duration. It is usually followed by the more conscious, yet still spontaneous, destruction of the citadels of authority, the visible symbols of organized violence and brutality; jails, police stations and other government buildings are attacked, the prisoners liberated, legal documents destroyed…. But this stage passes quickly; the people’s ire is soon spent. Simultaneously the revolution begins its constructive work.
But then to his imaginary interlocutor who asks whether he really thinks the reconstruction will start so soon, he rightly replies that “it must begin immediately” (the people must eat today and tomorrow warned Malatesta; and this is what the revolutionary workers in Barcelona in 1936 realized when within 48 hours of crushing the military rebellion—and without government authority they reestablished the essential services needed by the community).
But when Berkman’s questioner asks “Are you not too hopeful” he replies: “No, I don’t think so. I am convinced that the social revolution will not ‘just happen.’ It will have to be prepared, organized. Yes, indeed, organized—just as a strike is organized. In truth it will be a strike, the strike of the united workers of an entire country—a general strike.”
And he then goes on to argue that it is obvious unarmed masses and their barricades couldn’t in these days of “armored tanks, poison gas, and military planes” withstand “high power artillery and bombs thrown upon them from flying machines.” The whole proposition is “ridiculous” and it is therefore “time to have done with this obsolete idea of revolution”
The strength of labor is not in the field of battle. It is in the shop, in the mine and factory. There lies its power that no army in the world can defeat, no human agency conquer.
In other words the social revolution can take place only by means of the General Strike. The General Strike, rightly understood and thoroughly carried out, is the social revolution.
It is most important that we realize that the General Strike is the only possibility of social revolution. In the past the General Strike has been propagated in various countries without sufficient emphasis that its real meaning is revolution, that it is the only practical way to it. It is time for us to learn this, and when we do so the social revolution will cease to be a vague, unknown quantity. It will become an actuality, a definite method and aim, a program whose first steps is the taking over of the instruments by organized labor.
Berkman’s imaginary interlocutor expresses himself satisfied—but about another topic: “that the social revolution means construction rather than destruction”! But in all frankness, Berkman’s argument just does not hold water as it stands. “You can shoot people to death but you can’t shoot them to work” he declares. But, equally can it be said that without shooting them to death you can starve them back to work.
It is when Berkman implies that a revolutionary social strike will prevent any intervention by the armed forces that he seems to join company with the syndicalists, the “nonviolent” anarchists, and others whom Malatesta roundly criticized, save that Berkman does recognize there must be a “clash” between Authority and the revolutionary workers, which “involves force and violence” but which “will be of short duration.” What is this but Malatesta’s insurrectionary period? And why assume that the forces opposed to the struggle will not be the full force of the State’s armed power?
It seems to me that for those anarchists or revolutionary socialists who cannot honestly see how violence can be avoided in any decisive confrontation between the forces of the under-privileged and those of the State which, after all, they are openly declaring daily, exist to protect privilege by violence (even law can only be enforced by the use or threat of force), it is bad propaganda in the long term to seek to suggest that the struggle to overthrow authoritarian rule as the first step in building a libertarian society will not involve violence, or a series of violent encounters with the entrenched forces of the status quo. Not only does one disillusion those who were led to believe that the revolution would all be plain sailing, but one appears as utopians to those practical people whose logic and commonsense are insulted by such “simplicist” arguments.
Arnold Roller in 1912 was not to know that in 1936 the people of Barcelona would defeat a carefully laid plan by the military to seize the city in less than 24 hours, and in spite of the fact that the new part of Barcelona where they met their defeat consisted of wide and straight avenues and “not winding lanes”! Or that in 1944 the Danes would ignore the problems of wood blocks and asphalt and instead “turned over trolley cars for barricades” (see Crook p.302), any more than Berkman was to know in 1929 that the Algerian resistance could successfully wage its war of independence against the cream of French military might—500,000 strong, armed with the latest weapons of horror, both military and psychological, from flame throwers, helicopters, the latest in automatic weapons and heavy armored transport and offensive weapons, and the ruthless “paras” as well as a militant million white “colons” who certainly did not give up their privileged status without a fight, to torture, refined and crude, terrorism, bombings of civilian populations, starvation … in a word, the French pulled every dirty trick from the militarist-imperialist bag to no avail. Ben Bella in the end was received in the Elysée as spokesmen for the Algerian people, just as in 1936 the anarchists in Catalonia were received in the Generalitat as “masters” of the city, and of the province.
It is surely significant that Malatesta who equally was not to know about these, and other, events that could be enumerated, puts forward arguments which are confirmed—not refuted—by the experience of the past thirty years. What, it seems to me, makes his approach so worthy of serious consideration as contemporary is that it was not only patently honest but was also illumined by an imagination which was political as well as human. Can one, by the same token, concede that he was probably right when he declared that the simplification of the revolutionary problems only served to “spoil the revolutionary spirit of the people”?
III
I have only touched on the subject of the General Strike. Professor Crook’s angled work on the subject has probably uncovered all the sources available. What we need is an anarchist eye and imagination to interpret the 400 pages of text and probe the 70 invaluable pages of source notes, and in due course supply us with the findings!
But even a cursory glance at the general strike as a weapon of social revolution leads us to the question of “violence” and “nonviolence” one of the three tactical issues over which anarchists have wasted more hours and reams of paper arguing at cross purposes. It will come as something of a shock to some anarchists reading Malatesta to learn that “nonviolent revolutionary direct action” was in fact “rediscovered” not discovered by the “Committee of 100” in its meteoric, short-lived, but historically and socially, significant existence. When he referred to “passive anarchy” as “an error the opposite of the one which the terrorists make” he was writing in 1896. Thus it can be said that the Tolstoyan-Gandhist and Bakuninist-Malatestian trends have co-existed in the anarchist movement these past 70 years, and therefore, to present the former as a new departure in anarchist tactics—as anarchism’s New Look—is as unconvincing as it is historically false!
If the barricades in Barcelona led to Franco and his vaunted “25 años de paz” (“25 years of peace”—or should it be “repression,” or “apathy”?) what did Gandhism lead to in India, and where has it got the blacks in South Africa? Again, to say as the Tolstoyans do, that even assuming the barricades and insurrection had a chance of succeeding in the distant past, the power of the State backed by formidable armed forces, and the entrenched power of industrialists and financiers, today has relegated such tactics to the history books, is an argument which must be examined and appraised in the light of all the evidence from Spain, Cuba, Algeria, Egypt, and Black Africa.
But to say all this without recognizing that these same “problems” equally militate against “nonviolent” tactics, clearly indicates that for some nonviolence is accepted as an article of faith. It probably explains the sterility of the discussions in the columns of Freedom in recent years. What I propose to do now is not to reopen the discussion, but simply to point out that Malatesta and those of a like mind have never suggested that the anarchist society could be brought about through violence.
What they do say is that the possibility of radical change in society depends on first destroying the entrenched power of the ruling, the privileged, minority or class in present society, seeing that all the evidence on which we can draw indicates that no ruling class abdicates its power except when opposed by a superior force, and anarchists are not alone in drawing such conclusions. But as Malatesta points out again and again, what emerges from such upheavals is not necessarily anarchy but “the resultant” of all the active forces in society. So far as the role of anarchists in such situations is concerned, they must beware of trying, or hoping, to impose anarchy by force, just as they must be prepared to defend their right to live as anarchists, with force if necessary, it being clearly understood however that in living their way of life they do not interfere with the equal freedom of others to live theirs.
Malatesta therefore remained to the end of his life a believer in the need for violent, insurrectionary, action, not for the romantic and sentimental reasons attributed to him by popular historians, but because it was the only way out of the “vicious circle” which he so succinctly defines in these terms:
Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society men must be changed, and to transform men society must be changed.
Propaganda by the spoken and written word is not the answer. By propaganda we must encourage as many people as possible to make demands on the bosses and State by direct action; this in turn will, open the way to further penetration by anarchist propaganda among larger sections of the community and so on. Malatesta sought to create on the one hand an ever-growing mass-movement of political and social awareness as well as militancy which on the other hand would weaken the power as well as the raison d’être of the State, a situation which ideally would culminate in a violent “confrontation” provoked by the State in a last desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable.
In reality of course, the “confrontation” generally takes place at a much earlier stage, that is when government still feels confident of having the necessary forces to intimidate and curb those of the people who dare to challenge its authority. Russia in 1917, Spain 1936, Italy 1920 were the culminating chapters in long histories of struggle, of challenge and repression, highlights of revolutionary “breakthroughs” followed by “biennia negros,” military dictatorships, and the suppression of “elementary rights.” That neither in Russia, Italy, or Spain did these struggles lead to anything resembling the libertarian society—indeed they in fact ended in the victory of dictatorships—must obviously make us question the means.
If we dismiss these “failures,” as the propagandists of “nonviolence” invariably do, with the slogan that “violence begets violence” we shall learn nothing. The very fact that they are proposing to combat the violence of the State and of the privileged class, with nonviolence, which they offer as a viable tactic, would indicate that they are not convinced that violence “begets violence.” And indeed one has only to look around one to see that State violence more often than not “begets” obedience and servility, as well as bottled-up feelings of revenge which in times of upheaval often manifest themselves in horrible, anti-social acts of violence. And it is these explosions by the politically unconscious victims of the authoritarian society, and not the positive, generous practical actions of the conscious revolutionaries at such moments of history, which are seized upon by reactionary newspapermen in the heat of the struggle and perpetuated by equally reactionary, and cloistered and unimaginative historians.
Malatesta sought to base anarchist tactics on historic realities without nevertheless assuming that the pattern that emerged should or must perforce be slavishly followed. If history teaches us nothing else it is surely that we should seek to avoid repeating the mistakes of our predecessors. Thus there are certain well trodden political paths which from an anarchist point of view invariably lead to disaster. But if anarchists are to count in those social struggles which, albeit, are not anarchist, they must offer practical solutions as well as valuable criticism. It should be emphasized that our practical solutions may well be unattainable in the circumstances and yet still be practical.
Anarchists, as Malatesta was always pointing out, cannot stand on the sidelines waiting for a sign that might indicate society was ripe for anarchy. For, if they do, they will wait forever; in fact they would do better to give up because they would be left behind by events. The anarchist revolution is the culmination of a series of forward and alternating steps by man and his environment, and for them to lead eventually to anarchist ends, demands the participation of anarchists at every stage, as anarchists.
So long as the life of society is regulated by a privileged minority asserting and protecting itself with the complex machinery of Law and violence, and thus creating a class with a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo, every serious challenge to its authority be it violent or nonviolent will be met with the full force of the Law and legalized violence, the only language with which a privileged minority can address itself to the arguments and pressures of a majority without privileges, in any society. I do not propose to develop the insurrectionary argument here; it has already been clearly put by Malatesta. All I would add is that subsequent events have confirmed his arguments as well as his warnings. From the anarchist point of view obviously the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39 is the most significant social upheaval in our time. Though the anarchists have not yet subjected these events to the exhaustive analysis they deserve, the broad outline contained in the literature available could so easily be used to illustrate these pages of Malatesta’s writings, just as his writings, because they foresaw the very problems that faced the anarchists and other revolutionaries in the Spanish struggle, could have served them as a tactical manual, the acceptance and application of which would have in all probability pushed the revolutionary possibilities to their fullest limits resulting either in the complete defeat of Franco’s coup d’état in the first weeks of the struggle or in his military victory in the first six months, but without the possibility of lording over the country.
In other words, if the anarchists and syndicalist “leaders” after their spectacular victories of the first days of the military uprising had sought to exploit their richly deserved prestige in the eyes of the workers by directing all their energies and propaganda to the workers, inciting them to enlarge and consolidate the revolutionary gains of the 19th July, rather than seeking to use that prestige to cement a unity at top level with the other organizations and parties (which is what they did with scant success) they would have liberated all the latent and potential revolutionary forces in the country and beyond their frontiers. This may have ended in defeat within a few weeks. But it would have been defeat when the revolutionary feelings and expectations were still high—and therefore when it was possible to continue the struggle by other means. Whereas, in prolonging the struggle by sacrificing the revolution to the war of fronts, not only did the politicians, with the support of the revolutionary organizations, ensure military defeat, but also ensured that a people subjected for more than two years to great material privations as well as growing political dissensions between the parties and workers’ organizations, when it did finally concede victory to Franco and his backers, was exhausted, decimated, disillusioned, bitter, and helpless. The great exodus of half a million Spaniards, who preferred exile or French concentration camps, to Spain under Franco, was no guarantee of continuity in the struggle, for they, no less than those left behind, and who escaped the repression were also exhausted, disillusioned, and … divided. Franco’s proclaimed “25 years of peace” obviously does not accurately describe his years of repressive and corrupt rule. But neither would “25 years of resistance” accurately describe the opposition to his regime. And I say all this not in a critical vein (for if we must be critical, it is of my generation which supported the Spanish people’s great struggle only with fine words and medical aid) but in seeking to provoke a dispassionate evaluation of anarchist tactics and principles in the light of anarchist experience in that life-and-death struggle. Spain was not only the military training ground for Hitler’s troops and the testing ground for his weapons of destruction, it was also a political crucible for all the parties and movements of the Left. They all failed, not just the anarchists and the revolutionary syndicalists of the CNT, but the Socialists, the Communists, the Catalan Separatists no less than the Basque Nationalists, (and I assume that just as by anarchists I mean all shades from extreme individualists to “reluctant” Ministers, so the reader also takes socialists and communists to include all the shades and factions from Right to Left: from POUM to PSUC)!
We know that fighting a war of fronts resulted in military defeat; we know that the entry of anarchists and the two workers’ organizations (UGTCNT) into the government neither safeguarded their particular interests nor helped the armed struggle against Franco; we know that conscription did not produce military victories any more than did Russian military aid. The question Spanish anarchists have not to this day sought to answer is: from the anarchist point of view was the defeat in Spain a defeat of anarchist theory and tactics as distinct from the failure of anarchists to seek to apply their theory and tactics? And from what I have previously said, by “defeat” I am not referring to Franco’s military victory but to the defeat of the Revolution with which a section of the Spanish people opposed, and in two thirds of Spain defeated, the military uprising in July 1936. Anarchist tactics might well have led to defeat: this has already been admitted. What we must ask ourselves is whether the alternative course, of playing the government game, produced beneficial results, irrespective of military defeat. The point I am trying to make is that there are “successful” failures; that is, where the seeds of positive future struggles have been sown. This was not only the basis of Malatesta’s teachings, but also the conclusions reached by Lady Chorley:
The object of an insurrection is to affect a seizure of power; and this has been shown in the opening chapter that straight insurrections have never been won and probably never can be won against the full strength of a professional army. But insurrections have frequently broken out spontaneously in conditions where any chance of permanent success was impossible and even occasionally have been launched deliberately in the accepted knowledge that they could achieve no positive and direct success. Regarding revolutionary strategy by and large it does not necessarily follow that such insurrections are always unjustifiable. Indirectly, they can sometimes alter the whole political situation so deeply that from a revolutionary standpoint they may be a valuable factor in long-term strategy, even though foredoomed to military failure.
And it is interesting that among the historic examples she quotes to support her conclusions is that of the Asturian Rising in 1934, which was followed by the “biennio negro” (the two black years).
The Asturian Rising was a desperate protest against the failure of the 1931 Revolution to hold its gains and effect any deep alteration in the social system of Spain…. In the Asturias where the UGT was supreme, the working class rose in a revolt as determined and heroic as any in all European working class history. They held out for a fortnight, and were finally subdued by Moorish troops, foreign legionaries, and air bombing. The liquidation of the revolt was particularly cruel—some 30,000 prisoners were kept in jail for eighteen months apart from bloodier and more spectacular acts of vengeance…. The working classes now had a tradition and a heroic myth. Asturias combined for them “the pride of an army in its previous feats of military glory and the pride of a Church in its religious martyrs.” It was a welding iron to fuze the differences of the Left parties into a common aim…. It is not, therefore going too far to say that a direct result of the splendid failure in Asturias was the triumph of the Left in the elections of February 1963, the decisive turning point in the path of the revolution.[306]
For 25 years anarchists the world over have been commemorating the Spanish Revolution. If reading Malatesta convinces us that it is time we started studying the valuable lessons it can teach us, I am convinced that we would learn to waste less of our time and our other slender material resources in sloganizing and gesturing; I think some of us would drop out; and I am also convinced that those who do not believe in the Kropotkinian theory of inevitability or in some kind of social spontaneous combustion, will welcome with relief the Malatestian cold-douche of commonsense, pragmatic anarchism, and far from being pessimistic as a result, we too may also discover the argument that for sixty years “captured” such an intelligence who was also, by common consent, the most active and realistic of all anarchists!
IV
The writers of all the recently published histories of anarchism are unanimous in declaring that the anarchist movement is dead. All that remains is the idea and a few anarchists dotted about the globe. Their conclusions may well be right; what I question are the arguments which lead them to their conclusion, for I find myself wondering whether the Movement they are talking about is the one I have in mind. For as I see it, it is a movement of continuous renewal rather than “an historically determined movement” as the Marxist historian Santarelli views it, and as I suspect Woodcock and Joll also do.
Not only do the historians consider that the anarchist “movement” in the 1880s was numerically stronger than it has even been since, but that it was more active, and as a movement with a popular basis, had greater opportunities of achieving its aims. Furthermore that governmental power and the means of repression were weak by contrast with what they were soon to become. To sustain such a thesis one should also be prepared to accommodate such notable exceptions as the revival of anarchist fortunes in Italy in 1913–14 and in 1919–22, as well as of anarchism as a growing influence in Spanish politics at various periods in the present century, culminating in the revolutionary events of 1936. One has also to bear in mind that the 20th is a century of revolutionary upheavals, whether we approve of them or not, by comparison to which those of the 19th century are almost small fry!
I criticize the modern historians of anarchism because it seems to me that they have either started work with an idée fixe and selected their facts to prove their thesis, or have started with no preconceived ideas but neither with any burning desire to get to the root of the anarchist dilemma, if such it is. They have instead contented themselves with rehashing the considerable material already available on the 19th century revolutionary movements, and seem to have fallen into the trap of assuming that writers and diarists and assiduous correspondents are necessarily the most active revolutionaries and “trend-setters.” And because, as I have pointed out in the introduction to this volume, Malatesta was a reluctant writer, and too good a revolutionary and conspirator to keep a diary or file away his letters for posterity, our historians have not even bothered to read what he did write and have as a result failed to realize that not only was he a “dedicated” revolutionary but also a thinker whose ideas were forged in the social struggle and had nothing in common with the rhetorical, the “millenarian,” predictions of a world of love and plenty which most of his 19th century contemporaries indulged in. Far from Malatesta being Kropotkin’s “collaborator and most famous disciple” as one writer[307]—who declares that he has been “interested in the international anarchist movement since the turn of the century”—recently put it, it is abundantly clear that the personal esteem each had for the other never bridged the fundamental tactical differences which divided them for most of their lives. The fact is that both men went their own ways, neither seeking to join issue with the other (until Kropotkin declared his support for the Allies in the 1914–18 war, and Malatesta publicly disassociated himself from his friend’s attitude).
From the point of view of the development of the anarchist movement the Marx-Bakunin struggle could be seen to be less significant than the Kropotkin-Malatesta confrontation that-might-have-been—and from this distance in time, not to have provoked it, seems to this writer to have been a serious tactical mistake on Malatesta’s part.
Both men were undoubtedly the major “trend-setters” in the anarchist movements that saw the light in the 20th century. Woodcock succinctly summed up their different approaches in his Biography of Kropotkin[308] when he wrote:
That this quality [Kropotkin’s constitutional optimism], with its tendency to expect rapid and painless solutions to vast problems, amounted at times to a fault, was evident not only to hostile critics, but also to some who shared his fundamental ideals, for even his old friend and comrade, Malatesta, the most realistic of all anarchists, said after his death that he had leaned too much towards excessive optimism and theoretical fatalism (p.439)
and again in a footnote he points out that even though the two men were “close personal friends up to the time of the break over the first world war,
they did not always agree on tactics or general ideas. Malatesta was a practical revolutionist, with a tendency towards conspiratorial action. The most realist of the great anarchists, he did not always share Kropotkin’s optimism and while he accepted anarchist communism, regarded it in the light of a hypothesis to be revised and reconsidered according to changing circumstances (p.382)
I have italicized Woodcock’s two references to Malatesta in order to underline my surprise that in his History, published ten years after the Biography, Malatesta becomes the “knight errant in search of revolutionary adventure” and the subject for the usual anecdotes, but has no place in the first half of his history dealing with the Idea, in which he devotes 30 pages to Godwin, 12 to Stirner, and 39 to Proudhon. That these writers are full of thought-provoking ideas no one who has bothered (or tried) to read them will deny. But what have they, except for Proudhon, to do with the second part of his History—“The Movement”?
Until recent years the names, let alone the writings, of Godwin and Stirner were unknown in the anarchist movement. As Woodcock points out of Godwin’s “Political Justice,” in spite of the succès d’estime it enjoyed at the time of publication in 1793, a century was to elapse before it was reprinted. And Godwin himself “died in obscurity. His ideas were familiar only to a restricted group of people with literary interests, and his social writings became the gospel of no political group,” and he adds “The general neglect of Godwin has persisted. Never, in the nineteenth century, was he among the revered political writers.”
Malatesta was for more than fifty years both at the center of the ferment of ideas, and for most of that time an active militant in various countries. He did not enjoy the same kind of reverent esteem accorded to Kropotkin in the anarchist movement if for no other reason that his writings for the most part published in journals of which he was editor, and which were agitational papers existing to take advantage of a particular political situation (e.g., l’Agitazione, Volontà, Umanità Nova—I can only think of Pensiero e Volontà published after Mussolini’s victory, as the exception to this rule) and one of Malatesta’s roles in such papers was to seek to create a coordinated movement out of all the anarchist goodwill dispersed and unorganized. As a result he found himself frequently engaged in polemics generally with the extremist elements, between the out and out individualists on the one hand and those who in their concern to do something would almost veer to authoritarianism. As a result Malatesta was always a controversial figure, and not without his detractors within the anarchist circles as well as, of course, in the Left wing authoritarian parties. And one can imagine that he felt that he would do his cause more harm than good by challenging the Kropotkinian “optimism and theoretical fatalism.” That it was in his opinion a stumbling block to the full development of the anarchist movement as a revolutionary and political force, emerges only too clearly from his recollections on Kropotkin, which was the last article he wrote, only a year before his death. I cannot understand how an historian of Woodcock’s experience and knowledge of the anarchist trends could deliberately disregard this document of fundamental importance to an objective understanding of why the anarchist movement has failed.
I too, think the anarchist movement has failed but not because, to quote Woodcock’s conclusions, “in almost a century of effort it has not even approached the fulfillment of its great aim to destroy the state and build Jerusalem in its ruins”—few anarchists would share the view that this has been the aim of the anarchist movement as such—but because most anarchists have seemed unable or have been unwilling, to distinguish between their problems as conscious individuals and the problems of society as a whole. And because they generally manage to find solutions to their basic material needs which permit them to live full lives they assume that what they have done others can also do, and either they conclude that propaganda is unnecessary, in which case they spend the rest of their lives living out their one-man-revolutions; or if they feel an urge to communicate their “discoveries” to their fellow-men tend to express and project their personal experience and solutions as applicable and possible for the community at large. Such propaganda can be shown to have produced valuable results in helping other individuals “discover” a new way of life for themselves, and even make them, in turn, into propagandists. In theory such propaganda will snowball, and in a short time an important minority of the population will be anarchists. In practice the results from such propaganda have been limited because its impact is personal and not social.
By way of illustration I recall the case of a Glasgow factory worker during the last world war who became an anarchist and developed into a brilliant public speaker. At a certain stage he realized that the factory was no place for him, and set out in a caravan to live the free life, earning a living making clothes pegs. He had applied theory to practice, was the conclusion drawn by his anarchist comrades. He has not been heard of since in the anarchist movement—which means nearly twenty years silence. Those who say that he—assuming he is still making and selling clothes pegs from his horse-drawn caravan—is still the best anarchist among us, are right in one sense: he has obviously reduced his personal material needs to a minimum and this he can acquire by making pegs and is left with a great deal of leisure to enjoy life. They are also wrong, because they overlook the equally important fact that our clothes-peg-anarchist depends on other people wanting his pegs and growing the food he and his horse need; and, most important, that very few other people have chosen to share his way of life. For if everybody decided to take to the road and earn a living making pegs, all of us, horses and anarchists would all die of hunger; and the monument to their naiveté—mountains of unwanted clothes pegs!
Woodcock makes a valid point when he writes that while it is true that anarchists are, in theory, revolutionaries
in practice however, organized anarchism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was really a movement of rebellion rather than a movement of revolution. It was a protest, a dedicated resistance to the worldwide trend since the middle of the eighteenth century toward political and economic centralization.
But one cannot share his conclusions that anarchism is a lost—albeit good—cause but that “once lost they are never won again” and that the “heritage that anarchism has left to the modern world” is
in the incitement to return to a moral and natural view of society which we find in the writings of Godwin and Tolstoy, of Proudhon and Kropotkin, and in the stimulation such writers give to that very taste for free choice and free judgment which modern society has so insidiously induced the majority of men to barter for material goods and the illusion of security. The great anarchists call on us to stand on our own moral feet like a generation of princes, to become aware of justice as an inner fire and to learn that the still, small voices of our own hearts speak more truly than the choruses of propaganda that daily assault our outer ears.
For if anarchism is a lost cause then there can be no anarchist “heritage” unless one is satisfied to say that anarchists are an élite, the “princes” in a world of slaves.
Woodcock also fails to see that for a large number of anarchists “the historic anarchist movement” has no meaning. Few people come to accept an idea simply by reading an “authority.” Somewhere Malatesta writes that it is action that sets people thinking—and while this is certainly true in his case for he only discovered the existence of the International and Bakunin after he had become an active Mazzinian in his early student days—and while he was not dogmatic on this and would recognize that for some, thought precedes, action, I think it is generally true that people formulate even vague social ideas as a result of their direct experience or observation of the world around them. Writers can help to clarify or develop these vague ideas, if they succeed in relating their writings to realities.
It is in this respect that Malatesta was one of the ablest and most honest of anarchist propagandists, and because the basic problems, which set in motion the vague ideas I refer to, have not in fact changed all that much in the past fifty years there is still a great deal that Malatesta can teach us, not as a prophet, but as somebody who belongs to our time and who worked and lived among the people, and always aware that he would be the last to suggest that anarchists today should blindly accept his ideas, or adopt his “anarchist program” piecemeal or seek to relive his life as an agitator.
Malatesta has much to teach us, bearing in mind the present situation in the anarchist movements of the world, in his approach to anarchism, both as an idea and a way of life, and in his political sense and realism. To ignore these lessons is to condemn the anarchist movement to the political graveyard, mourned by the few dedicated custodians of the “Idea,” and to periodic disinterment by historians in search of a subject.
V.R.
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