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Malatesta, Anarchist Socialism, L’Agitazione, and the Bread Riots

by Roberto Giulianelli3

      1. The background

Errico Malatesta returned to Italy in March 1897. His exile, begun right after the “Banda del Matese” trial, coincided with the scattering of the First International, in whose name a number of groups and newspapers would carry on operating for many years to come.4 After an initial period in the Middle East, Malatesta travelled around Europe, coming into contact with Russian, French, Swiss, Belgian, and English revolutionaries. In July 1881, along with Francesco Saverio Merlino,5 he represented Italy at the London Congress, where the strategy of anarchism was thrashed out: the insurrectional option was given priority and anarchism was portrayed as the only genuinely revolutionary movement. From then until the end of the century, anarchism favored individual­istic terrorism as a privileged weapon in its political struggle.6

After his participation in Arabi Pasha’s anti-European insurrection in Egypt, and his arrest by the British authorities, Malatesta returned clandestinely to Florence in 1883 with the intention of obstructing Andrea Costa’s parliamentarist turn. He spent several months in jail, charged with armed conspiracy against the State, and on his release published the weekly La Questione Sociale,7 the pamphlet Program and Organization of the International Workingmen’s Association, and Between Peasants, unquestionably his best known publication.8 Then, dodging a three-year jail term, he left Italy once again, bound this time for Argentina where he would spend the next five years.

By 1889 he was back in Europe, launching the newspaper L’Associazione in Nice, and from its columns he expressed an unprecedented detachment from “propaganda by deed.” Though partly justifying attacks by anarchists by their being driven to it by a profoundly iniquitous ­socio-economic system,9 Malatesta proposed that a libertarianism finding expression in terrorist attacks should be replaced by an organized movement committed to pursuing individual freedom and social justice by means of activity that should never to be at odds with its goals. In order to give substance to this plan, from the summer of 1890 onwards and in close partnership with Merlino, he mooted a national anarchist congress to be held the following year in the Swiss town of Capolago.

At that meeting in January 1891, discussion of a movement that would be organized along federal lines carried the day. The nascent Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party was assigned the tasks of working towards a popular insurrection through its propaganda and of being part of it once it erupted. No concessions were made to Costa’s option, a rupture that would be sealed a year later at the Genoa congress. The emerging anarchist party would never submit to the verdict of the ballot-box, just as libertarians would never be counted among the active or passive electorate. Besides, Malatesta had already rejected the voting option in a letter addressed to Andrea Costa on May 16, 1890.10

The Capolago congress drew an attendance of Italian libertarians that was not merely substantial but also diverse, as witness the presence there of Luigi Galleani, one of the chief exponents of the anti-organizationist current.11 However, the congress proved rather ineffectual when it came to pragmatically defining the project put forward by Malatesta and Merlino. The Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party had in fact set itself a universal goal (the social revolution), which was therefore neither bounded by nor applicable to any specific geographical territory. The very ambition of launching a body not territorially bounded ended any realistic chance of the party’s surviving and growing.12 Failure to agree on high profile issues, such as the stance to be adopted vis à vis socialists and republicans, highlights a further shortcoming of a congress whose outcome would soon be shown to be inconsistent.13

The testing ground for the ideas that emerged from Capolago was the gathering on the first of May 1891. At the time, May 1st had a twofold nature: to the reformist socialists it was merely a workers’ holiday, and to the revolutionaries it was a general strike and therefore a subversive opportunity. Anarchists, obviously, tended to embrace the latter interpretation, yet the ineffectuality of the unrest in Paris the previous year had confirmed for Malatesta that the libertarian movement could only capitalize upon that opportunity by organizing.14 In 1891 Italian anarchism had formally become a party and the streets of May 1st looked like the proper arena for the social revolution.15

In the weeks following the Capolago congress a few anarchist exponents had busied themselves, especially in the center and south of the country, making preparations for an insurrection. Indeed, in many places, that 1st of May witnessed particularly combative rallies, followed by clashes with the police. The bloodiest incident took place in the Italian capital. Shattered by the crisis triggered by the “construction boom” of the 1880s, Rome was suffering an economic and social situation, the seriousness of which could be gauged by the large number of unemployed.16 Amilcare Cipriani’s plea for caution to the crowds that had gathered in the Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme went unheeded. The demonstrators soon clashed with the police, who repeatedly rode across the square, making their way through the crowd with sabres.17

The insurrection eventually failed, in Rome as elsewhere in the peninsula; and Malatesta’s clandestine tour of Italy that same spring was no more successful. Malatesta visited Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, and Lombardy in a vain effort to pick up the threads of the nascent anarchist party. Upon his arrival in Lugano, on the return leg, he was arrested by the Swiss authorities. By September, he was back in London.18

May 1, 1891 actually exposed the shortcomings of the experiment started in the 1880s. Much of the Italian anarchist movement had rejected the organizationist turn and even those who were in favor of it had ultimately demonstrated that they were incapable of following through. Between 1892 and 1894, the proliferation of newspapers of an individualist bent as well as isolated groups who prided themselves on their marginalization, shows that a sectarianism that was only partly justified by the police crackdown was still one of the chief identifying features of the anarchist movement.19 The efforts made by Malatesta and Merlino to provoke a repudiation of the platform ratified in London ten years earlier had been useless. But then again, the sacrifice being asked for was not small: for the “active minority”—which had felt, since 1881, that it had been invested with the mission of promoting revolution through individual violence and avenging the endless injustices in the world—it amounted to no longer standing in for a working class that was considered still too immature to take full responsibility for its own emancipation. While Europe and the United States registered a proliferation in attacks attributable to “propaganda by deed,”20 most of the Italian libertarian movement had chosen to reject Malatesta’s approach, adding more fuel to the anarchist–bomber equation that was to tarnish anarchism in the public imagination long after the end of its most frenzied dynamite-throwing days.

With Sicilian Fasci and the riots in Lunigiana, Malatesta suffered an even greater disappointment than the one in 1891. Here too, the plan was to transform incidental agitations, though ones with widespread partici­pation, into social revolution. Given that both Malatesta and Merlino were outside Italy, it fell to Pietro Gori21 to conduct most of the propaganda effort in the field by holding talks in a range of cities.22 Towards the end of 1893, convinced that the great day was finally at hand, Malatesta decided to return, taking up quarters in central Italy. Merlino would do the same in the South, while Charles Malato volunteered to be the northern vertex of an imaginary triangle within which the insurrection was to erupt. The plan, of which the Italian authorities immediately got wind, fell through. Nevertheless, in the first days of 1894, Malatesta reached Ancona, one of the cities that had hosted Gori’s talks a few months earlier.23 There he published the one-off Il Commercio24 (the curious title being an attempt to evade police attention), but above all he wrote an article—“Let Us Go to the People”—into which, in the wake of the aborted attempt at insurrection, he had poured his disappointment at yet another missed opportunity.

In “Let Us Go to the People”—published by the Ancona-based paper L’Art. 24825 on February 4, 1894, by which time Malatesta had probably already left Italy—one can find an echo of some of the criticisms that the socialists had been levelling at Italian anarchism since the 1870s, starting with its lack of organizational preparedness and the absence of solid ties to society. The relentless predisposition to

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