Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (72 page)

For their part in the strike, Malatesta, Armando Borghi (Secretary of the syndicalist union), and eighty other anarchists were arrested in October and held in prison awaiting trial until the following July when they were freed by a jury. Malatesta then directed all his energy towards uniting the libertarian forces against fascism through a ‘Workers’ Alliance’.

He recognized the working-class movement as at that time the most powerful force for social transformation. While co-operatives and trade-unions in capitalist society tend to be reformist because they serve sectional interests and develop an
esprit de corps
, they can be valuable in a revolutionary situation. In Malatesta’s view, the syndicalists were mistaken however in seeing the workers’ organizations as the only framework for future society. The general strike which they advocated could be a powerful weapon in raising their consciousness but too much faith in it could do harm to the revolutionary cause. In a revolution, it would be best for the workers’ organizations to disappear and be absorbed in new popular groupings. Malatesta therefore recommended anarchists to work as anarchists within the unions, advocating and practising as far as possible direct action, decentralization and individual initiative.

This did not mean abandoning anarchist organization which must allow for complete autonomy and independence to individuals who co-operate for common aims. The decisions of congresses moreover should not be binding but simply suggestions based on free agreement. Having accepted a programme however, Malatesta considered it the moral duty of an anarchist to fulfil his or her pledges. At the same time, a libertarian organization should only hold together as long as it maintains a ‘spiritual affinity’ amongst its members and adapts its constitution to continually changing circumstances.
²⁶

After the collapse of the factory occupations and the general strike, things went from bad to worse. In 1921, some anarchists undertook a series of bombings in Milan which not only alienated many workers but provided the Fascists with an excuse to use counter-violence against the Left. The
paralysed Socialist Party split into three different factions. Mussolini’s ‘march’ on Rome in 1922 heralded the defeat of the working-class movement in Italy. Nevertheless, despite constant police harassment and government censorship, Malatesta managed with great difficulty from 1924 to 1926 to bring out
Pensiero e Volontà
which contained some of his most thoughtful and penetrating articles.

After a lifetime of study and agitation, he concluded that anarchism is not linked to any philosophical system and is born of a ‘moral revolt against social injustice’. The common factor amongst anarchists divided into different schools is the ‘searching for a more secure guarantee of freedom’. It was Malatesta’s view that freely accepted communism is the best guarantee for individual freedom, for only in association can human beings overcome the ‘hostile forces of Nature’.

Whereas he had earlier argued like Bakunin that there is a natural law of solidarity which predominates in nature as in society, he came to stress that in nature brute force alone rules and that all human life is ‘a struggle against outside nature, every step forward is adaptation, is the overcoming of a natural law’.
²⁷
Far from being based on natural harmony, anarchy is ‘a human aspiration, which is not founded on any real or imagined natural necessity, but which can be achieved through the exercise of the human will. It takes advantage of the means that science offers to Man in his struggle against nature and between contrasting wills.’
²⁸
Malatesta is the first major anarchist thinker to reject the notion of a prior natural order, a notion which had formed the bedrock of previous anarchist philosophy, and which had been habitually counterpoised to the artificial disorder of government. It marks a major shift in anarchist thought and adapts the creed to a metaphysical belief in chaos.

Malatesta was as insistent as ever about the need for a social revolution preceded by an insurrection to overthrow the government. He believed that only violent revolution could solve the social question and that it was an act of will and not the inevitable outcome of economic and political forces. Revolution for Malatesta was not merely speeded up social change; it was a fundamental transformation of society:

At the same time, he stressed that anarchist revolution should not destroy all institutions but only those based on authority such as the army, police,
judiciary and prison. Other existing institutions should be taken over and used by the people to manage their own affairs. The first task on the morrow of the revolution is therefore to destroy all political power and for the workers and peasants to take over the factories and land and work them in common. The landowners, the industrialists and the financiers must be expropriated, the banks abolished, tide deeds destroyed, and the people armed. Intellectuals and members of the bourgeoisie would have to work like everybody else if they wanted to enjoy the same benefits. Those workers and peasants who do not want to join in the collectives would be given tools to provide for themselves. Anarchists, Malatesta adds, ought to be tolerant of all social concepts as long as they do not threaten the equal freedom of others.

As realistic as ever, he recognizes that anarchists would probably play a minority role in any foreseeable revolution so it would be their special mission to be ‘vigilant custodians of freedom’.
³⁰
If any group tried to reconstitute the State they should rebel against its demands and refuse to support it in any shape or form. Malatesta had come to believe that in the long run, the complete triumph of anarchy would come gradually by evolution rather than by violent revolution once the initial period of insurrection was over.

An anarchist attempt on Mussolini’s life in 1926 was used as an excuse to ban not only the libertarian but the whole of the independent press. All opposition was silenced. Malatesta spent the remaining five years of his life with his companion and daughter under house arrest, guarded night and day by Mussolini’s police. Whoever went to see him was arrested and questioned.

It did not prevent him from writing articles, including his recollections and criticisms of his ‘old friend’ Kropotkin whom he believed erred in his theory of scientific determinism and in his excessive optimism. He was a ‘victim of mechanistic fatalism’ who underestimated the importance of the will in human affairs. By believing communist-anarchism would triumph inevitably as if by a law of nature, he had failed to see the difficulties ahead:

At the end of his life, anarchy for Malatesta was not so much a form of natural order as a human creation. The idea of natural harmony, he now felt in his old age, is an invention of human laziness.

Malatesta had long espoused anarchism not because it is a scientific truth and a natural law but because it corresponded ‘better than any other way of social life, to my desire for the good of all, to my aspiration towards a society which reconciles the liberty of everyone with co-operation and love among men’. It was enough for him that it did not contradict any known law of nature. Indeed, he argued that ‘Science stops where inevitability ends and freedom begins … it is in this ability to exercise will-power that one must seek for the sources of morality and the rules of behaviour.’
³²
Science leads to fatalism, the denial of free will and of freedom, and a mechanical and deterministic interpretation of phenomena (like Kropotkin’s) leaves no room for moral responsibility. Anarchy on the other hand is a human aspiration achieved through the exercise of the human will which can achieve new effects. It would be misleading however to suggest that Malatesta was an extreme voluntarist opposed to science. He was flattered to be alleged to possess a ‘scientific mind’ and criticized Kropotkin precisely because he felt he was a ‘poet of science’ who was ‘too passionate to be an accurate observer’.
³³

Malatesta’s view that it is necessary to struggle
against
nature in order to achieve abundance reflects the prevailing nineteenth-century notions about economic scarcity. He agreed with Marx’s view that overproduction is inherent in capitalism, arguing that it places obstacles in the way of producing useful commodities. Since the
raison d’ětre
of capitalism is profit there needs to be an artificial scarcity of goods. But he was convinced that modern technology made abundance a real possibility. Unfortunately, his emphasis on struggle against nature in order to achieve well-being for all is too harsh. As modern social ecologists have pointed out, it is necessary to co-operate with and not conquer the forces of nature.

Malatesta was right however to insist that anarchism is not linked to any particular philosophical system. In his case, he took a consistently sceptical and anti-metaphysical stance, but it did not turn him into a mechanical atheist. Not only did he oppose his own doctrine of the creative power of the will to Kropotkin’s deterministic and mechanistic system, but more tellingly he assumed that people
can
do what they
will.
Although he called for war on religions, he constantly emphasized the importance of moral and spiritual values: the moral basis of anarchism is love for all
humanity. However dark the prison he found himself in, Malatesta never lost sight of his own shining ideal of freedom and love.

Although Malatesta reluctantly accepted the need for revolutionary violence, he insisted that the end does not justify the means. Indeed, ‘every end needs its means’; since morality must be sought in the aims, the means is determined.
³⁴
It follows that while the capitalist who appropriates the labour of others is a thief, if an anarchist steals the property of another, he is no less a thief. Unlike Reclus, Malatesta was no apologist for ‘
la reprise individuelle’
, the individual ‘rip-off’.

Malatesta also argued that one must not and cannot defend the revolution with means which contradict the ends. He was totally opposed to revolutionary terror; ‘if in order to win it [the revolution] it were necessary to erect the gallows in the public square’, he wrote, ‘then I would prefer to lose.’
³⁵
The great advocate of insurrection and revolution, pointed to the horror of indiscriminate violence the day before he died. He wrote in his notebook: ‘He who throws a bomb and kills a pedestrian, declares that as a victim of society he has rebelled against society. But could not the poor victim object: “Am I society?”’
³⁶
Only the kind of violence which was not motivated by hatred and which aimed at the liberation of all was justifiable in Malatesta’s eyes. He did not want to impose anarchy by force in order to defend its gains against violent opponents.

Malatesta sounds more authoritarian when he argued that the task of the anarchist propagandist is to ‘push’ the people to seize all the freedom they can and to ‘push’ the revolution as far as it will go.
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Yet he made clear that such ‘pushing’ is a question of ‘education for freedom’ in which people are stimulated to think and act for themselves. Finally, Malatesta still felt as late as 1920 that it was necessary for groups and parties who are ‘joined by free agreement, under oath of secrecy’ to provide a network of speedy communications to inform each other of all incidents likely to provoke a widespread popular movement. Such oaths and secrecy, which hark back to Bakunin’s conspiracies, would appear an unreasonable restriction on the free exercise of individual judgement. In general, however, Malatesta insisted that anarchists should work in the open as much as possible in ‘the full light of day’.
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What shines through all of Malatesta’s writings is his openness, his sincerity, and his honesty.

Malatesta died in 1932, aged seventy-nine, still faithful to his vision of a society ‘without bosses and without
gendarmes’.
³⁹
The indomitable international revolutionary, renowned for his warmth, humanity, and unflagging optimism, remained a symbol of the fragmented Italian anarchist movement which was forced into exile and only regrouped after the Second World War. He was not only one of the great anarchist thinkers, but a key link in the movement from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
Uniting his theory and action with rare consistency, he combined idealism with common sense, philosophical rigour with practical experience. Rejecting the role of prophet or leader, he stands as an outstanding example of the modest, independent individual which the anarchist movement has so often produced.