Translator’s introduction
This letter, published in the Italian-language New York journal “Il Martello,” is Fabbri’s reaction to the project for an Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists. Fabbri was involved in the discussions on the setting up of an International Anarchist Communist Federation, as part of the “Pensiero e Volontà” Group together with Berneri and Fedeli. This article was published several months after the aborted attempt to set up the international, but it is not clear when the article was actually written.
General considerations
It was with a strong sense of goodwill that I read the project for an anarchist “Organizational Platform” ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
TO WILL ANARCHISM
Anarchism, thanks to the large number of its proponents who have used writing on every continent, has a library the importance of which can hardly be estimated.
Throughout their history, the anarchists, in addition to translating the emancipatory aspirations of individuals and peoples into a social alternative, were able to branch out in their activism, participating in a wide variety of social movements.
Thus, the reproduction of past texts would be a sufficient task for a collection. We will do this, but in the process, we will try to engage in the task of updating the anarchist analysis of a society the bases of which have been transformed. The exploitation and domination of man by man denounced in ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I. The bourgeois phraseology of “scientific” communism
A short while ago, through the publishing firm of the Communist Party of Italy, a little twelve-page pamphlet was issued by that “superlative theoretician” (as he was introduced to the public in the socialist and communist press) Nikolai Bukharin. It bore the pompous title Anarchy and Scientific Communism. Let us just have a look and see how much “science” there is in it.
Bukharin does not set out any true notion of anarchism, any of the points in the anarchist-communist program as they truthfully are; nor does he take the trouble to inform himself on anarchist thinking by drawing upon the primary sources of the anarchists’ histori... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Cries In The Wilderness: Alexander Berkman and Russian Prisoner Aid by Barry Pateman
“Not even a miserable piece of stone is dedicated to their memory for fear of rippling a placid
existence.” —Francesc Torres[235]
You can get tired of anniversaries. As you get older there are more and more of them, rolling towards you like a never ending freight train carrying commentary after commentary as the skeleton of each event is enthusiastically picked over to justify the positions and ideas that groups and individuals now hold. I am not interested in doing that for October 1917 (or for any other anniversary come to think of it). I rather think peoples lives and experiences are important in themselves ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Violent Literature and Anarchism
In order to avoid misunderstandings, we first need to clarify our terms. There is no theory of “violent anarchism.” Anarchism is a combination of social doctrines which have as a common basis the elimination of coercive, human-over-human authority; and the majority of its partisans repudiate all forms of violence and consider it legitimate only as a form of self-defense. But, as there is no precise line separating defense and offense, and as the concept of defense can be understood in very diverse ways, there appear from time to time violent acts, committed by anarchists as a form of individual rebellion, directed against the lives of heads of state and the representatives of the ruling cl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Introduction: How I met Errico Malatesta
The day I met Errico Malatesta is the most vivid memory of my distant youth.
It was in April, 1897. The conservative and bourgeois monarchy who sat in Savoy had suffocated the Italian people for nearly a year under a harsh storm of reactionary measures which prefigured fascism, pausing to appease them only once they threatened to disrupt the tranquil luxury of the ruling classes.
Francesco Crispi, the old Jacobin-become-Minister who hid behind the [banner of X] as he persecuted all new ideas, was forced to resign thanks to the tide of popular indignation at Italy’s defeat in Abyssinia. The imperial megalomania of the monarch Umberto I and his Minister was laid to rest, and ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, of the dictatorial direction of revolution, is made as deriving from Karl Marx.
That the concept of the proletarian dictatorship is the most suitable for the mentality formed with Marxism, that may be true; but that Marx actually conceived the revolution as guided and dominated by an absolute dictatorial power, this seems to us very doubtful. Karl Marx was an authoritarian socialist, not an anarchist one, and therefore he foresaw a governmental development of the revolution, in which the proletariat would become the ruling class and use political power to expropriate the bourgeoisie, intervening despotically in the right of property and in the bourgeois relations of production... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Introduction by Albert Meltzer
Nikolai Bukharin was regarded by many as Lenin’s favorite, in spite of his many differences with the leader of the Bolsheviks, the Benjamin of the Party which seized power in (or more precisely, after) the Russian Revolution. He was the youngest of the leadership, a merry extrovert among the more grim-faced professional revolutionaries, and above all, was popular with the Party both in Russia and abroad.
After Lenin’s death, Bukharin was considered the most likely successor to the leadership; indeed, looking round the assortment of Party hacks and armed scholars, there was no one else to recommend themselves who had the necessary background and the talents to conquer. As against the v... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Foreword
In spite of all the good intentions to the contrary which I brought to this essay, I have in fact failed, in examining the dark issue of fascism, to stand “above the fray.”
Many a time I have tried to suppress the pain and outrage that stirred my hand, but immediately thereafter wounded feelings surged back to offer me counsel in tune with a disturbed and aggravated state of mind. The fact is that I do not really stand above the fray. If only for personal reasons, as a matter of temperament and custom and, to a slight extent – confined to the climate in which I live – out of a professional obligation, I stand slightly apart from the active, militant movement, which is to say that my involvement... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
In the latest edition of Vie Ouvriere to have arrived from Paris, we find a long letter from a Russian comrade, Victor Serge, known in France — where he lived before 1915 — under the pseudonym of Kibaltchitch. He writes from Moscow about the Russian Revolution, living as he is in the middle of it all.
In truth, he has no news to deliver.
His letter is, more than anything else, a polemic against the newspaper Le Libertaire which he takes to task for keeping faith with our beliefs, according to which, if we may quote Bakunin’s phrase, the authoritarian communists’ notion that a revolution can be decreed and organized “either by a dictatorship or by a Constituent Assembly, is quite mistaken”. K... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
A book by Lenin was recently published by “Avanti!”, written after the revolution, which according to the title promised to be a treatise that would exhaust the question of relations between the revolution and the State. But, we confess to having experienced a strong disappointment.
Lenin's personality will be carved into history with characters of fire. Only these three years, since he and his party settled in power in a country of three hundred million inhabitants, would be enough to witness the powerful moral and material energy of this man who will one day appear among the most famous names in history.
But where it seems that his apologists have so far gone wrong in the exaltation of their master is when they p... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
