The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol. III. Errico MalatestaЧитать онлайн книгу.
even the near-impossibility, of being able to operate in Greece in conformity with our ideas, we think it would be better to expend our energies in Italy.
But that does not mean that we have no interest in the issues being thrashed out in the East, or that we believe that they fall outside the social question, whose resolution we study and struggle for.
On the contrary, we are keen to explain ourselves on this score: our party is currently at the birthing stage and must commit all of its energies to the activity of internal formation, but a day will come, and soon we hope, when it will be able to make its message heard and its action felt in every single manifestation of the immense, multi-faceted human struggle. And we would do well to prepare it for that.
There are indeed comrades who say: over there the fight is not for anarchy and for socialism; over there no social revolution is under way, so the affair is no concern of ours. In a dispute between Greeks and Turks, between Christians and Muslims, we have no part to play, these comrades argue: our place is wherever the fight aims at the complete abolition of government and capitalism, and not elsewhere. But, in our view, these comrades are wrong.
Our program, anarchist socialism, sets out the end for which we must strive to set the revolution’s course. But how that revolution will start and what course it will take are matters too far beyond a party’s forces to depend on us.
If, prior to taking part in a revolution, we will wait until it has espoused the program and taken the shape we like, we will risk to wait for long! It is for us to imbue it with our program, and in order to do that, we have to be in the thick of it.
Wherever a people rouses itself, wherever a people rises up against an injustice, against bullying, we should be there—not in order to fight passively like dilettante barricade-fighters, after the fashion of the rest and for whatever the rest want, but in order to bring to them not just our brawn but also the succor of our ideas; we should be there to prevent the people, if we can, from letting themselves be led by the nose and falling into fresh servitude, or, if we cannot manage that, to alert the people to their having set off down the wrong road and to see to it that the ensuing disappointments confirm the truth of our program and act as an incentive to following it.
In short, we need to grapple with men as they are, events as they emerge and reap maximum possible advantage for the success of our ideas.
We socialists are well used to seeing history as something a lot simpler than it actually is; often we mistake our logical constructs for real life.
The struggle between the propertied and the proletarians, between the rulers and the ruled, is the only good and necessary struggle, because these alone are irreconcilable conflicts that cannot be resolved except through the abolition of classes. Every other conflict—of nationality, race, or religion—has no real reason to serve as a cause of struggle, since complete freedom for individuals and groups offers a solution to them all. And the purpose of socialist propaganda is precisely to eliminate pointless hatreds and conflicts that damage the solution to the social problem, and to unite all the oppressed, all the exploited, regardless of nationality or religion, in the fight against oppression and exploitation.
But in the meantime, such pointless, damaging conflicts do exist and need to be taken into account. They are complicated in a thousand ways by the fundamental conflicts spawned by property and by government. In one place the oppressor is a foreigner, in another the property-owner is of a different religion than the proletarian; and the fight against the property-owner and the oppressor is complicated, muddied and overlooked in the eruption of racial antagonisms and religious hatreds. Often, indeed, the natural enemies, property-owner and proletarian, people and government, fraternize and fight together in the name of fatherland or faith.
Besides, in certain peoples, the prejudice that the predominance of people from a different race or religion is the source of all their woes is so deeply rooted that there is no imminent hope of seeing the social question posed on its proper terrain unless the national question has first been resolved.
The East is the classical territory for these phenomena.
What should our action or practical program be, if we could play an active and effective part in the events now going on in Candia and in the Balkan Peninsula?
We should be the soldiers and apostles of freedom—of freedom for all. We should conduct ourselves in such a way as to make it understood that, for us, the enemy is not the Turkish proletarian, but the Turkish government and pasha; and that the enemy is also the Greek or the Armenian or the Bulgarian, if he is the exploiter of other men’s labors. And if we could fight bravely, then the prestige that the brave always enjoy in the eyes of warring populations and in times of war would be a great boost to us in this task.
We should stand with the Greeks, as long as they are the oppressed who fight for freedom; with the Turks, when the Greeks, having gained the upper hand, seek to become butchers and oppressors in turn.
We should fight alongside the Greeks when they fight for the right of unfettered self-determination. We should hold aloof and loudly denounce the shame and harm that will come of it once the Greeks acclaim King George and willingly place themselves under a new yoke.
Our comrades on the Greek border need no suggestions from us. Besides, given how remote we are from them, such suggestions can only be general and abstract. The efforts of Cipriani and his comrades to cling to as independent a stance as possible, show us that they understand their mission and that they are there to unfurl the glorious banner of international socialism.
Rather less hopeful, we admire their heroic panache and wish them success—for their own sake and for the sake of the cause.
156 This issue of L’Agitazione was published in two editions, on April 11 and 12 respectively. The first was unabridged, and the second came after the censor’s intervention. This article appears only in the first edition, having then been impounded. The other articles transcribed here appeared in both editions, but we have indicated them as dating from the second edition because that was the one from which we have translated them.
The 1st of May
Translated from “Il 1.o Maggio,” L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1,
no. 5 (April 12, 1897).
Six or seven years ago, the approach of this date used to arouse great hopes and great fears. The bourgeois quaked, the police made ready for a crackdown, the revolutionaries stood in readiness for the struggle, and huge masses of proletarians looked forward eagerly to that date like some mystical day fated to signal the end of their suffering.
Since then, the movement has, little by little, been dwindling in importance until it has been forgotten by some, and looked upon by others as one more innocuous anniversary on the calendar of the revolutionary merry-makers.
What should have been the tangible sign of the solidarity pact between the oppressed of every country, what should have been a review of the proletarian forces, what should have helped prepare the people for today’s great revolutionary means—the general strike—has turned into the feast of labor—and a feast day little observed!
Why such a stark and swift decline?
Who is to blame?
Pretty much everybody. The democratic socialists who, in Europe anyway, had come up with the idea and taken the initiative with the movement, were almost scared by the enthusiasm it inspired and by the revolutionary tenor it went assuming in a few months in all countries, and they immediately strove to play down its significance and drain it of the pugnaciousness it has acquired. In the bigger towns, where their party could marshal impressive numbers, they turned the First of May strike into a feast held on the first Sunday of the month, thereby sapping it of its character and raison d’être; or they sought to whittle down the demonstration to a procession of delegates walking to parliament to hand in a petition, thereby creating the belief, congruent with their tactics, that everything could be obtained through the law and that there was no point in street agitation.
The anarchists were divided,