Malatesta: Life and Ideas

Notes
The most extensive biography of Malatesta is in Italian. See Giampietro Berti, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico italiano e internazionale 1872–1932 (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2003). See also Errico Malatesta, Autobiografia mai scritta. Ricordi (1853–1932), Piero Brunello and Pietro Di Paola, eds. (Santa Maria Capua Vetere: Edizioni Spartaco, 2003); and Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). On Malatesta in London, see Carl Levy, “Malatesta in Exile,” Annali della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi 15 : 245–70; Carl Levy, “Malatesta in London: The Era of Dynamite,” in A Century of Italian Emigration to Britain 1880–1980s, eds. Lucia Sponza and Arturo Tosi, special supplement of The Italianist 13 , 2... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 3
Part Three No, I would not like to return to the old times … simply to follow the same road and find ourselves back to where we are now. To want to, one should also be able to take with one the results of fifty years activity and all the experience acquired in that time. And in that case it would be the “good old days.” —From Malatesta’s preface to Nettlau’s Bakunin e l’Internazionale in Italia dal 1864 al 1872 We do not boast that we possess absolute truth; on the contrary, we believe that social truth is not a fixed quantity, good for all times, universally applicable or determinable in advance…. Our solutions always leave the door open to different and, one hopes, better solutions. —Umanità Nova, 1921 Malatesta’s Releva... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 : Appendix 4
Appendix IV Pietro Kropotkin—Ricordi E Critiche Di Un Vecchio Amico (Peter Kropotkin—Recollections and Criticisms of an Old Friend) by E. Malatesta (Studi Sociali, April 15, 1931) Peter Kropotkin is without doubt one of those who have contributed perhaps most—perhaps more even than Bakunin and Elisée Reclus—to the elaboration and propagation of anarchist ideas. And he has therefore well deserved the recognition and the admiration that all anarchists feel for him. But in homage to the truth and in the greater interest of the cause, one must recognize that his activity has not all been wholly beneficial. It was not his fault; on the contrary, it was the very eminence of his qualities which gave rise to the ills I am proposing to discuss. Naturally, Kropotkin being a mortal among mortals could not always avoid error and embrace the whole truth. One should ha... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 : Appendix 3
Appendix III Fact and Fiction on the Shooting Incident at a Meeting Addressed by Malatesta in West Hoboken in 1899 This minor incident in a very full life would have been put in its proper perspective but for the exaggerated importance attributed to it, as well as the falsification of the facts, by writers more concerned with satisfying their publishers’ interest and with entertaining the reading public, than with establishing the facts as well as getting them in their proper perspective. “Max Nomad”—described in the publisher’s blurb of the original American edition of his book Rebels and Renegades as “the pen-name of a political emigrant from prewar [1914–18] Europe who has been either a sympathetic observer of, or an active participant in the extreme left-wing revolutionary movements” in some European countries as well as in the United States since—devotes the fi... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2 : Appendix 2
Appendix II Pro-Government Anarchists by E. Malatesta (Freedom, April 1916) A manifesto has just appeared, signed by kropotkin, grave, Malato, and a dozen other old comrades, in which, echoing the supporters of the Entente Governments who are demanding a fight to a finish and the crushing of Germany, they take their stand against any idea of “premature peace.” The capitalist Press publishes, with natural satisfaction, extracts from the manifesto, and announces it as the work of “leaders of the International Anarchist Movement.” Anarchists, almost all of whom have remained faithful to their convictions, owe it to themselves to protest against this attempt to implicate Anarchism in the continuance of a ferocious slaughter that has never held promise of any benefit to the cause of Justice and Liberty, and which now shows itself to be absolutely barren and resultless... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

VI 26. Anarchist Propaganda It must be admitted that we anarchists, in outlining what we would like the future society to be—a society without bosses and without gendarmes—have, in general, made everything look a bit too easy. While on the one hand we reproach our adversaries for being unable to think beyond present conditions and of finding communism and anarchy unattainable, because they imagine that man must remain as he is today, with all his meanness, his vices and his fears, even when their causes have been eliminated, on the other hand we skate over the difficulties and the doubts, assuming that the morally positive effects which will result from the abolition of economic privilege and the triumph of liberty have already ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix 1
Appendix I Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles by E. Malatesta (Freedom, November 1914) At the risk of passing as a simpleton, I confess that I would never have believed it possible that Socialists—even Social Democrats—would applaud and voluntarily take part, either on the side of the Germans or on that of the Allies, in a war like the one that is at present devastating Europe. But what is there to say when the same is done by Anarchists—not numerous, it is true, but having among them comrades whom we love and respect most? It is said that the present situation shows the bankruptcy of “our formulas”—i.e., of our principles—and that it will be necessary to revise them. Generally speaking, eve... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Foreword by Carl Levy Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was born in Santa Maria Capua Vetere near to Naples. His family were middle-class tannery owners, and he was not, as the press would have it, a count who conspired with other aristocrats such as Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Malatesta lived between the era of the Paris Commune and Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. He knew Bakunin and Mussolini and was known and appreciated as a revolutionary (at least initially) by Vladimir Lenin. Although the young Malatesta was a key figure in the First International in Italy and elsewhere, his presence in Italy was mainly between 1885 and 1919, when his reappearances occurred during per... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

II 7. Ends and Means The end justifies the means. This saying has been much abused; yet it is in fact the universal guide to conduct. It would, however, be better to say: every end needs its means. Since morality must be sought in the aims, the means is determined. Once the goal one is aiming at has been established, consciously or through necessity, the big problem of life is to find the means which, in the circumstances, leads to that end most surely and economically. In the way this problem is solved will depend, so far as it can depend on human will, whether the individual (or party) reaches or fails to achieve his ends, whether he is useful to his cause or unwittingly serves that of the enemy. To have found the right means, herein lies... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Editor’s Introduction to the First Edition Since the end of World War II the number of major works on anarchism and anarchists published in English is impressive. I will not attempt to list them all, but we have George Woodcock’s biographies of Godwin, Proudhon and Kropotkin and Richard Drinnon’s biography of Emma Goldman; then there is Maximoff’s huge volume of Bakunin’s selected writings, Eltzbacher’s Anarchism, Stirner’s Ego and His Own and Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (edited), and Irving Horowitz’s 600-page anthology on and by The Anarchists; and finally there are the histories: G.D.H. Cole’s second volume in his “History of Socialist Thought,” which deal... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)