Excerpt from Davide Turcato’s “Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900”
It’s somewhat difficult to choose an excerpt from Davide Turcato’s new book, because a) there’s so much goodness in it and b) Malatesta’s ideas evolve so much over time (always as a result of his “experimental” revolutionary method). But the following seems like a decent choice, for it’s relevance to questions many of us are trying to get our heads around today. Enjoy the taste. And, really, get the book: a few of us read it when it was still a $90 academic hard cover and it blew us away. We knew that we had to create an affordable paperback version for you guys!
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The indeterminacy of social action
The theoretical foundations of the insurrectionary tactics that underpinned Malatesta’s action of the early 1890s were illustrated in a series of articles that appeared in L’Associazione. In these articles Malatesta explained his positive outlook on uprisings. His outlook was based on theoretical notions, such as the indeterminacy of collective action and the precedence of deeds over ideas, that were already implicit in the tactics of propaganda by the deed that Italian anarchists began advocating in the mid-1870s. In L’Associazione Malatesta reiterated his belief in propaganda by the deed, at the same time that he thoroughly reviewed this concept, in the light of past experiences and changed conditions.
Malatesta articulated his appreciation of uprisings as steps on the path of revolution in the article ‘La sommossa non é rivoluzione’ (An uprising is not a revolution) of October 1889. This was Malatesta’s response to an article by the same title published in the Italian socialist revolutionary periodical La Rivendicazione, in which N. Sandri claimed that ‘every partial uprising is an aborted revolution’. Malatesta retorted that uprisings played an immense role in provoking and preparing revolutions. For Malatesta, ‘it is always deeds that provoke ideas, which in turn act upon deeds, and so on’. He pointed to the history of past revolutions, which were all preceded, provoked, and determined by numerous uprisings that prepared people’s minds to the struggle: ‘The great French revolution would not have occurred if the countryside—worked up by a thorough propaganda—had not started to burn castles and hang masters, and if the people of Paris in tumult had not committed the sublime folly of attacking the Bastille with pikes.’ The history of socialism itself provided further evidence with the Paris Commune, which arose from an uprising in Montmartre, and which in turn originated a splendid movement of ideas, and a whole period of feverish socialist activism. Revolutions had nowhere to start from than uprisings: ‘Certainly, while all uprisings make propaganda, only few have the good fortune to arrive at the right time to determine a revolution. Yet who can say what is the right time?’
The key concept outlined here by Malatesta is the indeterminacy of collective action. No one can fully foresee the outcome of one’s intentional social action, nor is the outcome of collective action necessarily what its participants had initially envisioned.
Similar ideas dotted Malatesta’s writings from 1889 on. Commenting upon the Rotterdam strike of September 1889 Malatesta had remarked that ‘history shows that revolutions start almost invariably with moderate demands, more in the form of protests against abuses than of revolts against the essence of institutions, and often with displays of respect and devotion to the authorities’ (‘Altro’).
In 1894 he expressed the same concept, with reference to the French Revolution and to the recent movement of the Sicilian Fasci: ‘Let us remember that the people of Paris started off by demanding bread to the king amidst applauses and tears of affection, yet—having received bullets instead of bread, as it was natural—after two years they beheaded him. And it was only yesterday that the Sicilian people were on the verge of making a revolution while cheering to the king and his whole family’ (‘Andiamo’).
Malatesta still reiterated the idea in writings of two decades later. In 1914 a strike of the railway workers in Italy was creating serious difficulties to the government. In the article ‘É possibile la rivoluzioné’ Malatesta started by claiming, ‘Naturally we do not know what could happen in the near future.’ He then emphasized how a minor issue over salaries had escalated into a serious crisis, and pictured a hypothetical scenario, which really looks like a disguised call for action: ‘If really—people wonder—the railway workers refused to work; if ill-intentioned people made even a limited service impossible, sabotaging the rolling stock and the railway tracks; if the most conscious part of the proletariat supported the movement with general strikes: what would the government do with its soldiers, even supposing that the latter failed to remember that they are forcefully enlisted proletarians, and that their fathers, brothers, and friends are among the strikers? How could the current order continue?’ Malatesta argued that revolution would impose itself as a necessity, for it alone could ensure the continuation of social life. ‘Perhaps this will not happen today. Still, why could not it happen tomorrow?’ After maintaining that nobody knows in advance when the times are really ripe and that the fateful hour could strike at any moment, Malatesta concluded: ‘Everybody keep ready for tomorrow . . . or for today.’ Only a few weeks later the insurrectional movement of the Red Week broke out, in which Malatesta had a leading role. It would be problematic to retrospectively determine whether Malatesta’s prediction should be read descriptively as that of a perceptive sociologist or prescriptively as that of an effective agitator.
Get the book here: http://www.akpress.org/making-sense-of-anarchism.html