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.)

Notes for Bibliography
Part Two We follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of embodying a principle in a man. —Malatesta speaking at the Berne Congress of the International, 1876 Some of us, and Max Nettlau and Luigi Bertoni in particular, often suggested to Malatesta that he should write his Memoirs which would have been such a great contribution to contemporary history as well as to a better understanding of the events in which he was directly involved; and he would reply: “Yes, one day … but there is no hurry; I will think about it when there aren’t more important things to do, when I’m an old man.” But as he always found more important things to do, and never admitted to being old, he never wrote his Memoirs... (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.)

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.)

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.)

I 1. Anarchist Schools of Thought One can be an anarchist irrespective of the philosophic system one prefers. There are materialist-anarchists as there are others, like myself, who without prejudicing future developments of the human mind, prefer simply to declare their ignorance in these matters. Certainly it is difficult to understand how certain theories can be reconciled with the practical aspects of life. The mechanistic theory, no less than the theistic and pantheistic theories, would logically lead to indifference and inaction, to the supine acceptance of all that exists both in the moral and material fields. Fortunately philosophic concepts have little influence on conduct. And materialists and “mechanicists” in the teet... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)