Errico Malatesta | |
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 Malatesta, 1891 | |
| Born | (1853-12-04)4 December 1853 |
| Died | 22 July 1932(1932-07-22) (aged 78) |
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| Philosophical work | |
| School | Anarcho-communism |
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Errico Malatesta (4 December 1853 – 22 July 1932) was an Italiananarchist propagandist, theorist andrevolutionary socialist. He edited several radical newspapers and spent much of his life exiled and imprisoned, having been jailed and expelled from Italy, Britain, France, and Switzerland. Originally a supporter of insurrectionarypropaganda by deed, Malatesta later advocated forsyndicalism. His exiles included five years in Europe and 12 years in Argentina. Malatesta participated in actions including an 1895 Spanish revolt and a Belgian general strike. He toured the United States, giving lectures and founding the influential anarchist journalLa Questione Sociale. AfterWorld War I, he returned to Italy where hisUmanità Nova had some popularity before its closure under the rise ofMussolini.
Errico Malatesta was born on 4 December 1853[1][2] to a family of middle-class landowners in Santa Maria Maggiore, at the time part of the city ofCapua (currently an autonomous municipality renamedSanta Maria Capua Vetere, in the province of Caserta), at the time part of theKingdom of the Two Sicilies. More distantly, his ancestors ruledRimini as theHouse of Malatesta. The first of a long series of arrests came at age fourteen, when he was apprehended for writing an "insolent and threatening" letter to KingVictor Emmanuel II.[3][4]
In April 1877, Malatesta,Carlo Cafiero,Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky and about thirty others started aninsurrection in the province of Benevento, taking the villages ofLetino andGallo without a struggle. The revolutionaries burnt tax registers and declared the end of the King's reign and were met with enthusiasm. After leaving Gallo, however, they were arrested by government troops and held for sixteen months before being acquitted. AfterGiovanni Passannante's murder attempt on the kingUmberto I, the radicals were kept under constant surveillance by the police. Even though the anarchists claimed to have no connection to Passannante, Malatesta, being an advocate of social revolution, was included in this surveillance. After returning toNaples, he was forced to leave Italy altogether in the fall of 1878 because of the intense surveillance, beginning his life in exile.[5]
He went to Egypt briefly, visiting some Italian friends but was soon expelled by the Italian Consul.[5] After working his passage on a French ship and being refused entry to Syria, Turkey and Italy, he landed in Marseille where he made his way toGeneva,Switzerland – then something of an anarchist centre.[5] It was there that he befriendedÉlisée Reclus andPeter Kropotkin, helping the latter to produceLa Révolte. The Swiss respite was brief, however, and after a few months he was expelled from Switzerland, travelling first toRomania before reaching Paris, where he worked briefly as a mechanic.[6]
In 1881, he set out for a new home in London. He would come and go from that city for the next 40 years.[6] There, Malatesta worked as a mechanic.[7] Emilia Tronzio, Malatesta's mistress in the 1870s, was the step-sister of the internationalistTito Zanardelli.[8]With Malatesta's consent and support she marriedGiovanni Defendi, who came to stay with Malatesta in London in 1881 after being released from jail.[9]
Malatesta attendedthe July 1881 Anarchist Congress in London. Other delegates includedPeter Kropotkin,Francesco Saverio Merlino,Marie Le Compte,Louise Michel andÉmile Gautier. While respecting "complete autonomy of local groups" the congress defined propaganda actions that all could follow and agreed that "propaganda by the deed" was the path to social revolution.[10]
With the outbreak of theAnglo-Egyptian War in 1882, Malatesta organised a small group to help fight against the British. In August, he and three other men departed for Egypt. They landed inAbu Qir, then travelled towards Ramleh,Alexandria. After a difficult crossing ofLake Mariout, they were surrounded and detained by British forces, without having undertaken any fighting. He secretly returned to Italy the following year.[11]
InFlorence he founded the weekly anarchist paperLa Questione Sociale (The Social Question) in which his most popularpamphlet,Fra contadini (Among Farmers), first appeared. Malatesta went back to Naples in 1884—while waiting to serve a three-year prison term—to nurse the victims of acholera epidemic. Once again, he fled Italy to escape imprisonment, this time heading forSouth America. He lived inBuenos Aires from 1885 until 1889, resuming publication ofLa Questione Sociale and spreading anarchist ideas among the Italian émigré community there.[6] He was involved in the founding of the first militant workers' union in Argentina and left an anarchist impression in the workers' movements there for years to come.[6]
Returning to Europe in 1889, Malatesta first published a newspaper calledL'Associazione inNice, remaining there until he was once again forced to flee to London.
The late 1890s were a time of social turmoil in Italy, marked by bad harvests, rising prices, andpeasant revolts.[6]Strikes of workers were met by demands for repression and for a time it seemed as though government authority was hanging by a thread.[6] Malatesta found the situation irresistible and early in 1898 he returned to the port city ofAncona to take part in the blossoming anarchist movement among the dockworkers there.[6] Malatesta was soon identified as a leader during street fighting with police and arrested; he was therefore unable to participate further in the dramatic industrial and political actions of 1898 and 1899.[6]
From jail, Malatesta took a hard line against participation in elections on behalf of liberal andsocialist politicians, contradictingSaverio Merlino and other anarchist leaders who argued in favor of electoral participation as an emergency measure during times of social turmoil.[6] Malatesta was convicted of "seditious association" and sentenced to a term of imprisonment on the island ofLampedusa.[12]
He was able to escape from prison in May 1899 and he made his way home to London viaMalta andGibraltar.[13] His escape occurred with the help of comrades around the world, including anarchists inPaterson, New Jersey, London and Tunis, who helped arrange for him to leave the island on a ship of Greek sponge fishermen, who took him toSousse.[14]
In subsequent years, Malatesta visited the United States, speaking there to anarchists in the Italian and Spanish immigrant communities.[13] Home again in London, he was closely watched by the police, who increasingly regarded anarchists as a threat following the July 1900 assassination ofUmberto I by an Italian anarchist who had been living in Paterson, New Jersey.[13]
In 1902, the founding congress of theUnión Obrera Democrática Filipina - first national trade union federation in the Philippines - adopted Malatesta's bookBetween Peasants as being part of the political foundation of the movement.[15]
By 1910, he had opened an electrical workshop in London at 15 Duncan Terrace Islington and allowed the jewel thief George Gardenstein to use his premises. On 15 January 1910, he sold oxyacetylene cutting equipment for £5 (£500 at 2013 monetary values) to George Gardenstein so that he could break into the safe at H. S. Harris jewellers Houndsditch. Gardenstein led the gang that mounted the abortive Houndsditch robbery that is the precursor to theSiege of Sidney Street. Malatesta's cutting gear is on permanent display at the City of London Police museum atWood Street police station.[16]
While based in London, Malatesta made clandestine trips to France, Switzerland and Italy and went on a lecture tour of Spain withFernando Tarrida del Mármol. During this time, he wrote several important pamphlets, includingL'Anarchia.[17] Malatesta then took part in theInternational Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam (1907), where he debated in particular withPierre Monatte on the relation between anarchism andsyndicalism ortrade unionism. The latter thought that syndicalism was revolutionary and would create the conditions of a social revolution, while Malatesta considered that syndicalism by itself was not sufficient.[18]
After theFirst World War, Malatesta eventually returned to Italy for the final time. Two years after his return, in 1921, the Italian government imprisoned him again, although he was released two months before the fascists came to power. From 1924 until 1926, whenBenito Mussolini silenced all independent press, Malatesta published the journalPensiero e Volontà, although he was harassed and the journal suffered from government censorship. He was to spend his remaining years leading a relatively quiet life, earning a living as an electrician. After years of suffering from a weak respiratory system and regularbronchial attacks, he developed bronchialpneumonia from which he died after a few weeks, despite being given 1,500 litres of oxygen in his last five hours. He died on Friday 22 July 1932. He was an atheist.[19]
David Goodway writes that Malatesta held a "Mazzini-like role" and was "the leader of theItalian anarchist movement during its most important years. While other leaders of theInternational changed their opinions or abandoned politics, Malatesta remained firm in his original convictions for a half-century". In this sense, only Malatesta "remained devoted toanarchism by the end of the 1870s". Goodway argues that Malatesta was able to do so "by modifying his optimistic approach, substituting one of the more sophisticated versions of anarchism". Goodway writes that Malatesta developed "a two-pronged strategy" by the 1880s and early 1900s. Malatesta sought on one hand "to unify the anarchist and anti-parliamentary socialists into a new anarchist socialist party" as "anarchism was a minority movement within the Italian left", hence "Malatesta and his followers hoped to galvanize the elements of regional socialist group (theFasci Siciliani, theRevolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna, and thePartito Operaio) into a new anti-parliamentary socialist party". On the other hand, Malatesta was "one of the first anarchists to stress asyndicalist strategy" and anarchists "had to prod the socialists into insurrections and remain a revolutionary conscience afterwards during socialist reconstruction". Goodway further writes that "Malatesta defined this type ofanarchist communism as 'anarchism without adjectives'", described by Goodway as "a concept which he had developed with a group of Spanish anarchist intellectuals in the process mediating between mutually hostilecollectivists and communists". In stressing "tolerance within thelibertarian movement", Malatesta hoped that "Marxist socialists would permit the anarchists liberty for their own movement in post-revolutionary society".[20]
According to Davide Turcato, the label "anarchist socialism" came to characterize Malatesta's brand of anarchism as he "proclaimed the socialist character of anarchism and urged anarchists to regain contact with the working masses, especially through involvement in the labor movement". For Malatesta, "demanding the anarchists' admission to thecongress meant reassertingsocialism andlabor movement as central to anarchism; conversely, the Marxists' effort to exclude anarchists aimed at denying that they had a place among socialist and workers". According to Turcato, "Malatesta's struggle for admission to the congress was a statement of his new tactics". Turcato writes how "Malatesta recalled in theLabour Leader that in the old International both Marxists andBakuninists wished to make their program triumph. In the struggle betweencentralism andfederalism,class struggle and economicsolidarity got neglected, and the International perished in the process. In contrast, anarchists were not presently demanding anyone to renounce their program. They only asked for divisions to be left out of the economic struggle, where they had no reason to exists ('Should')". In other words, "the issue was no longer hegemony, but the contrast between an exclusive view of socialism, for which one political idea was to be hegemonic, and an inclusive one, for which multiple political views were to coexist, united in the economic struggle. [...] The matter of the question had changed: the controversy was no longer with the anarchists, but about the anarchists".[21]
Anarchists who influenced Malatesta's political beliefs includedPierre-Joseph Proudhon,Mikhail Bakunin,Carlo Cafiero,[22]Peter Kropotkin andÉlisée Reclus. In turn, Malatesta's works influenced Marxist philosopherAntonio Gramsci andanarcha-feminist activistVirginia Bolten,[23] as well as theArgentine Regional Workers' Federation[24] and widerArgentine anarchist movement.[25]
Malatesta argued withPierre Monatte at theAmsterdam Conference of 1907 against puresyndicalism. Malatesta thought thattrade unions werereformist and could even be at times conservative. Along withChristiaan Cornelissen, he cited as examplelabor unions in the United States, where trade unions composed of skilled qualified workers sometimes opposed themselves to un-skilled workers in order to defend their relatively privileged position.[18] Malatesta warned that the syndicalists aims were in perpetuating syndicalism itself whereas anarchists must always have overthrowing capitalism and the state, the anarchist ideal of communist society as their end and consequently refrain from committing to any particular method of achieving it.[26]
Malatesta's arguments against the doctrine of revolutionary unions known asanarcho-syndicalism were later developed in a series of articles, where he wrote that "I am against syndicalism, both as a doctrine and a practice, because it strikes me as a hybrid creature."[27] Despite their drawbacks, he advocated activity in the trade unions, both because they were necessary for the organization and self-defense of workers under a capitalist state regime, and as a way of reaching broader masses. Anarchists should have discussion groups in unions, as in factories, barracks and schools, but "anarchists should not want the unions to be anarchist."[28]
Malatesta thought that "[s]yndicalism ... is by nature reformist" like all unions.[29] While anarchists should be active in the rank and file, he said "any anarchist who has agreed to become a permanent and salaried official of a trade union is lost to anarchism."[30] While some anarchists wanted to split from conservative unions to form revolutionary syndicalist unions, Malatesta predicted they would either remain an "affinity group" with no influence, or go through the same process of bureaucratization as the unions they left.[31]
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