The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III. Errico MalatestaЧитать онлайн книгу.

      Editor’s Foreword

      Davide Turcato

      This volume collects Errico Malatesta’s writings from 1897 and 1898, and is part of Malatesta’s complete works, which encompass all his published and unpublished writings. The aim of this project is to document Malatesta’s thought as fully as possible.

      Besides the texts whose authorship can be attributed to Malatesta, we also included texts authored by other people, which report views as expressed by Malatesta. This distinction between his own writings and other people’s writings intersects with the previous distinction between published and unpublished writings, leading to a fourfold partition that may be of use in classifying the documents that have been included in the complete works:

      1. Own published writings: this is obviously the category comprising the vast majority of the texts. This group includes all articles, pamphlets, and other printed works by Malatesta.

      2. Own unpublished writings: besides any works meant for publication that may have been written but never completed or delivered, we can place in this category all of Malatesta’s correspondence, to which a specific volume of the complete works will be devoted.

      3. Other people’s published writings: included here are printed texts that, strictly speaking, are other people’s work, but which report almost directly Malatesta’s words—that is to say, interviews, speech reports, whenever they are sufficiently comprehensive and reliable, and transcripts of apologias in court. Included here as well are collective documents such as programs and manifestos, emanating from groups of which Malatesta was part.

      4. Other people’s unpublished writings: into this category can be placed documents from government sources, such as speech reports drafted by informants and police officials, interrogation transcripts, and other trial records.

This last category requires a brief explanation. Documents in this class must obviously be treated with great caution, suggested by broad considerations of reliability—which, incidentally, also apply to reports carried in the press hostile to anarchism. Above all, however, caution is required by documents attributable to Malatesta but produced while he was in custody. Even though an interrogation can be superficially equated with an interview, the state of captivity in which it takes places should keep one from unproblematically regarding it as a genuine expression of the speaker’s thought. Suffice it to mention the “opportunistic” outlook expressed by Malatesta himself, who, commenting upon a comrade’s decision to refuse release on probation, argued that it was naïve “to deny oneself the opportunity to do good for the sake of repudiating empty formalities which carry no moral authority the moment they are forced upon us by brutish violence.”1 Rather than include or exclude these type of documents en bloc, we have decided to assess them on a case by case basis, in the light of two criteria: their political or autobiographical interest; and their degree of reliability, based on a comparison with other Malatesta sources. On the basis of these criteria, for instance, we have included here the hitherto unpublished interrogations of Malatesta during the instruction phase of the April 1898 trial, as well as his speeches during the courtroom proceedings.

      With an author like Malatesta, one of the main problems an editor faces is represented by the attribution criteria. The seemingly obvious concept of “complete works,” as the set of works written in the author’s own hand, whilst valid in theory, is practically inapplicable in Malatesta’s case. The reason is that Malatesta’s writings are to be found mostly in periodicals edited by himself and are most often unsigned. The criterion of assembling only what can be demonstrably attributed to the author’s pen could be rigorously applied only at the cost of unacceptable exclusions that would defeat the very idea of “complete works”; or else, the pursuit of completeness would run the risk of turning into vaguely formulated and hardly generalizable ad hoc criteria applied on a case-by-case basis, which, in the final analysis, would be tantamount to an arbitrary and subjective selection. The dilemma has been tackled here by broadening the concept of authorship from the narrow meaning set out above to that of “intellectual responsibility”: when it could not be conclusively demonstrated either that a writing issued from Malatesta’s pen or that it did not, the writing was included if it could be shown that Malatesta made himself its “author” by taking on responsibility for it and openly acknowledging it as a faithful expressions of his thought. The concept of intellectual responsibility, though seemingly more vague, can actually translate into criteria that are more rigorous and explicit—and at the same time more practicable and less restrictive—than those set by the narrower concept of authorship. In other words, it is often easier to empirically ascertain a writing’s intellectual responsibility than its material authorship.

      The basic assumption informing the criterion of intellectual responsibility is simple and is set out by Malatesta himself in L’Agitazione. Commenting on an article that appeared in a review, he notes that, as it was signed by the editorial board, the article can be deemed as having come from the pen of the director, “or, at any rate, published under his responsibility.” One can legitimately presume that the same criterion applied to other people’s periodicals was all the more applied by Malatesta to his own. Similar to an article signed by an editorial board, it can be presumed, until proven otherwise, that an article published by Malatesta, unsigned and with no accompanying editorial note, in his own political newspapers, was by him, or had at least been read, reviewed, and approved by him,