Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (70 page)

In order to rival the feats of the followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini, the Italian anarchists organized strikes and demonstrations, but also resorted to the well-tried tactic of the Italian revolutionary tradition — the insurrection. In 1874, Malatesta, Andrea Costa, and members of a group within the International, who called themselves the Italian Committee for the Social Revolution, planned an uprising in Bologna in order to trigger off similar actions and eventually the ‘social liquidation’ throughout Italy. Bakunin was waiting to join them, but the
carabinieri
had been informed and foiled the insurgents as they were marching on Bologna.

The message of direct action was not lost on the international anarchist movement. At the Berne Conference of the International in 1876, Malatesta explained the background to the Bologna uprising and argued: ‘the revolution consists more in deeds than words … each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts … it is the duty of every revolutionary socialist to declare his solidarity with the movement in the making.’ The movement should seek to destroy existing institutions by force; a ‘river of blood separated them from the future’.
²
Three months later Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero gave a clearer definition of their strategy in the
Bulletin of the Jura Federation
: ‘The Italian federation believes that the insurrectional fact, destined to affirm socialist principles by deeds, is the most efficacious means of propaganda.’
³
The view of the Italians came to dominate European anarchist activities during the 1880s, especially in France and Spain.

Despite the persecution of the authorities a national congress was held in a wood outside Florence in 1876, where Malatesta and Cafiero persuaded the delegates to move from a form of Bakuninite collectivism to communism. Those present accepted the proposition: ‘Each must do for society all that his abilities will allow him to do, and he has the right to demand from society the satisfaction of all his needs, in the measure conceded by the state of production and social capacities.’
⁴
The congress also confirmed the insurrectional position of the Italian anarchist movement.

Malatesta, Cafiero and Costa lost no time in putting their preaching into practice. In the following year, they entered two villages near Benevento in Campania with an armed band, burning the tax registers and declaring the end of the reign of King Victor Emmanuel. The peasants, including their priests, welcomed them at first but feared to join them; as a result, Italian troops soon arrived and captured the insurgents.

This second abortive rising provoked another round of persecution. The Italian sections of the outlawed International called for a general insurrection on a national scale but when it failed to materialize individuals turned to their own acts of terror. In 1878, the new King Umberto was stabbed by a republican cook from Naples and on the following day a bomb was thrown in a monarchist parade. Even greater repression followed. The International was broken up and Malatesta went into exile.

Whilst staying with members of the Jurassian Federation of the International in Switzerland, Malatesta became friends with Elisée Reclus and Kropotkin, the leading anarchist communists of the day. He still continued to travel afar. In 1879 he went to Rumania. He attended the congress of the International in London in 1881 and in the following year went to Egypt hoping to foment rebellion in the days of Arabi Pasha.

He returned to Italy in 1883 where he tried to help reorganize the Italian sections and edited the journal
La Questione Sociale.

It was at this time that he wrote his most widely read pamphlet
Era contadini
(Between Peasants; 1884), an exposition of anarchist communist ideas for those who had little knowledge of social questions. Malatesta defined anarchy as ‘without government… the government only serves to defend the bourgeois, and when it is a question of our interests, the best is to manage them ourselves’. On the grounds of human solidarity, he advocated a form of communism which involved the common ownership of property and the socialization of production. It was therefore necessary ‘to establish a perfect solidarity between men of the entire world’ based on the principle of ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. After the revolution, he recommended that society be divided into communes in which different trades will form associations. Only anarchist communism could liberate humanity and bring about ‘the destruction of
political power, that is to say of the government, and the conquest of the soil and of all existing riches’.
⁵

Soon after writing this pamphlet Malatesta was arrested and sentenced in 1884 to three years’ imprisonment. After helping out in a cholera epidemic in Naples, he jumped bail and sailed to Buenos Aires in 1885. He spent the next four years in Argentina, leaving an indelible anarchist stamp on the labour movement there. When he returned to Europe, he visited France, England, Switzerland and Spain before settling again in Italy in 1897.

During his second stay in London in 1889, he began what was to become a lifelong friendship with his biographer Max Nertlau. He also met William Morris at the Socialist League, and got to know Joseph Lane and Frank Kitz well. He was deeply impressed by the London Dock Strike of 1889–90, although he did not think it would lead to a general insurrection. At the 1890 Conference of the Socialist League, he advocated the seizure of property in general; in its journal
The Commonweal
on 6 August 1890, he is quoted as saying ‘Let us urge the people to seize the property and go and dwell in the mansions of the rich; do not let us paralyse our efforts by discussion as to the future.’ As for those workers who were calling for a general strike in England, he urged: ‘The General Strike would be good if we were ready to make use of it at once by immediate military action whether by barricades or otherwise.’ These oft-quoted sentiments were however out of keeping with Malatesta’s condemnation of terrorism and his call for a new syndicalism in the following decade.

In 1891 Malatesta issued one of his most influential pamphlets
Anarchy
, reprinted in English by Freedom Press in 1892. Malatesta considered it the best pamphlet he ever wrote, and it certainly expressed his ideas in a lively and polemical style.

The influence of Bakunin is immediately clear in the pamphlet; Malatesta quotes him on ‘the natural and social law of human solidarity’ and the need to recognize that ‘My freedom is the freedom of all.’
⁶
But the impact of Malatesta’s old schoolfriend F. S. Merlino, a lawyer and social historian, is also apparent. They both came to criticize the economic determinism of Marx, arguing that the revolution is not inevitable and that the State can have an influence on the economic structure of society.

Malatesta’s starting-point in the pamphlet is that there is a fundamental law of solidarity which ensures that the development of human well-being is achieved through mutual aid or co-operation. But the resulting harmony of interests is very different from Kropotkin’s vision, for Malatesta describes mutual aid as
‘association for the struggle
against all natural factors antagonistic to the existence, the development and well-being of the associates’. The view that human progress is achieved in a struggle
against
nature leads
Malatesta to trace man’s preference for domination to the ‘fierce and antisocial instincts inherited from his animal ancestry’.
⁷
According to Malatesta, man is instinctively driven to defend his individual existence as well as his offspring. We therefore need society to redirect our natural desires, our ‘animal’ desires, into co-operative behaviour since co-operation is the only means towards progress and security. It is a view similar to Bakunin’s but which also finds echoes in Kropotkin.

For Malatesta anarchy means a society without government. While recognizing the various meanings given to the word ‘State’, he prefers in his drive to destroy all political authority to collate the State and government and to call simply for the abolition of government. Government, however much it provides public services, is by its very nature plundering and oppressive. Since it is also ‘the property owners’
gendarme’
, its abolition would also involve the abolition of private property. It is essential to convince people that government is both harmful and useless and that with anarchy (in the sense of the absence of government) will come ‘natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity’.
⁸
By stressing solidarity and the equality of conditions, Malatesta defines an anarchism closer to socialism than liberalism.

In place of government, he calls for the spontaneous groupings of individuals united by sympathies and interests in voluntary associations. Life would be managed on the basis of free initiative, free compact and voluntary co-operation. The real being, Malatesta insists, is the individual, and society or the collectivity is only made up of individuals. He sees little likelihood of conflict in a free and equal society as long as personal freedom is based on voluntary solidarity and an awareness of the community of interests. He proclaims the maxim ‘DO AS YOU WISH’ since ‘in a harmonious society, in a society without government and property, each one will WANT WHAT HE MUST DO.’
⁹
It would appear that at this stage in his life Malatesta therefore held the optimistic view that in an anarchist society there would be no clash between desire and duty. As for the means to realize such a society, the only way is ‘to crush those who own social wealth by revolutionary action’.
¹⁰

In the early 1890s, Malatesta travelled widely in Europe. He was in Spain in 1891 at the time of the Jerez uprising and tried to ease the conflict between collectivists and communists by calling for an ‘anarchism without adjectives’. With Charles Malato in Belgium, he witnessed in 1892–3 the general strike for universal suffrage and recognized its limitations. In the mean time, he found himself in Italy intermittently, maintaining his contacts and advocating a new unionism. Then in 1896, Malatesta helped organize the London Congress of the Second International where the anarchists were finally expelled from the international socialist movement.

His thoughts turned once again to Italy. With bad harvests and rising prices triggering off many peasant revolts, the country seemed ripe for revolution. In 1897 Malatesta therefore returned secretly to the port of Ancona and started editing
L’Agitazione
from a room; in it he called for the formation of a broad front of anarchists, syndicalists and socialists. It was probably the most important of the many publications edited by him, and his articles in it show signs of a maturing intellect informed by experience.

He reiterates that anarchy is a
‘society organised without authority
, meaning by authority the power to
impose
one’s own will’.
¹¹
Such a society would not be disorganized or chaotic as the apologists of government maintain. Where Engels had argued that organization is impossible without authority, Malatesta maintains that organization, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it. Alone one is powerless; it is ‘by co-operation with his fellows that man finds the means to express his activity and his power of initiative’. He also countered Engels’ argument that once classes disappear the State as such has no
raison d’ětre
and transforms itself from a government over men into an administration of things: ‘Whoever has power over things has power over men; who governs production also governs the producers; who determines consumption is the master of the consumer.’
¹²
The crucial question is for things to be administered on the basis of free agreement among the interested parties, not according to laws made by administrators. To achieve this end, he proposed the formation of an anarchist ‘party’ working outside parliament. Its task would be not to emancipate the people, but to help the people to emancipate themselves.

Malatesta’s activities were soon curtailed for he was arrested again early in 1898 during a public demonstration in Ancona and was charged with ‘criminal association’. Anarchists in the past had denied the charge on the grounds that they were opposed to organization, but Malatesta and his comrades declared that they were organized and demanded the right to organize a ‘party’ in the sense of an association with a common purpose. Although Malatesta and his comrades managed to turn the trial into a campaign for civil liberties, he was still sent to the penal island of Lampedusa for five years. In a daring escapade, he managed to flee to the United States. He stayed in New Jersey, where he was shot in the leg during an overheated discussion at a meeting of anarchists.
¹³
After visiting Cuba, where he was allowed to stay for ten days and address several meetings as long as he did not use the word ‘anarchy’, he returned to London in 1900.

Whilst living in London for the next thirteen years, Malatesta wrote articles and pamphlets mainly for the Italian anarchist press and did not involve himself directly with the British anarchist movement centred on Kropotkin and
Freedom.
This was partly because he felt that English comrades should write for an English paper, but also because he did not want
to engage in public polemic with Kropotkin and undermine his prestige. Although he quietly went about earning his living as a mechanic and electrician, the police tried to implicate him in the Sidney Street affair in 1910 (as an electrician, he had supplied a bottle of gas to one of the gang) but without success. In 1909 he was imprisoned, with Rudolf Rocker, for three months on a charge of criminal libel brought by his fellow Italian Belleli, who had been called an Italian police spy. Malatesta was also recommended for deportation, but the threat was lifted after a vigorous campaign by workers’ organizations and by the radical press which led to a mass demonstration in Trafalgar Square, organized by Guy Aldred and attended by several MPs. The
Daily Herald
, in particular, took up the cause, publishing one letter which referred to Malatesta as an ‘international Tom Mann’. The growing influence of the movement at this time led the alarmed
Daily Telegraph
to report on 12 March 1912: