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Title: Neither Prison, No Policemen Author: Enzo Martucci Language: en Topics: egoism, Egoist anarchism, prison abolition, Errico Malatesta, Freedom Source: https://fireonthehorizon.noblogs.org/post/2016/07/28/neither-prison-no-policemen/
The libertarian communist of today conceives the Anarchy as a democratic
a-statal regime, based on the municipality in which the majority will
decide the general rule of conduct⌠The theorists of libertarian
socialism, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rèclus, Malatesta were instead more
tolerant. They thought that in the future municipality, the economical
system to follow, the ethical and moral rules to respect, the collective
decisions to take will not be imposed by the majority, but they must be
voluntary accepted by the totality of the associated. They believed in
the agreement of all, in an idyllic life, but they admitted also a
dissident minority to whom the majority will recognize the right to try
their experiences. Only if the minority will attempt with violence the
interests of the majority, this last one will be obliged, with force, to
subdue it.
âMartucci will not acceptâ wrote Malatesta in 1922, polemizing in
UmanitĂ Nuova, âthat, for regard to the sacred rights of the individual,
weâd have to set free, to do harm, a wild killer or a rapist of
children. We instead consider him a sick person and we will close him
into a hospital where we will heal him.â I think that as for nature, the
individual can do everything if he has the force, so the others, that
feel themselves injured by his action, they can defend themselves in
every way. The defence is also natural and a group can expel the one who
harms the comrades, can send him to another place or kill him if the
damage has been too heavy.
But he must not be deprived of freedom, closing him in a
prison-hospital, he has not to be healed if he doesnât want to be. The
presumption to attend, to heal, to put the right way up, is extremely
hateful because it forces the individual to cease to be what he is and
what he wants to remain to be, to become what he is not and he does not
want to be.
Take a type such as the sadist Clara of Mirabeau; tell her she has to
cure herself to destroy her perverse and abnormal tendencies, that are
dangerous for her and for the other people. Clara will answer you she
does not want to heal, she wants to remain as she is, challenging every
danger, because the fulfillment of her erotic desires, excited by the
smell of the blood and the shows of cruelty, it gives her so deep
pleasure, so strong emotion, she could not prove any more if she
transformed herself into a normal woman and she was forced to satisfy
with the usual and insipid luxury. Tell her she is a monster, she would
be horrified, and she will answer you: âThe monsters⌠The monsters! For
first there are no monsters! What you call monsters are higher forms, or
simply out of you conception. Are Gods not monsters? Is the genius man
not a monster ? As the tiger, the spider, as all the individuals that
live above all the social lies, in the shining and divine immorality of
things. But also me, then, Iâm a monster!â
A famous killer who killed women not to rob them, but to violate them,
to obtain the concordance of his spasm of pleasure with the spasm of
death of the other, he confessed: âIn those moments I seem to be God and
to create the world.â If you had offered him the remedy to make him
normal, he would refuse it, perceiving that in normality he could not
find a so intense sensation as the one he felt in that abnormality.
Therefore wanting to cure these individuals, wanting to heal them
against their will, would be like to exact from a tuberculous to abstain
himself from the smoke and the alcohol to prolong his life. âBut I donât
care if I die beforeâ, will answer the ill man âbut I want to satisfy
myself now as I want. It will be better to live only a year more and not
ten year suffering and renouncing to everything.â
Do you want to force, to be saved the ones who want to be lost? But they
will not be the owner of their lives. They could not dispose as they
like of it, and they perceive as a bad thing the benefit you would do to
them. If the Clara of Mirabeau or the characters of Sade try to torture
you, shoot on them. But leave them in peace and abandon the idea to
induce them to the repentance, in the name of God and of morality, or to
cure and heal them, for the glory of science and of the humanity.
And, besides, is it true that all that commit a crime are foolish, sick
worthy of the mental hospital or of the shower?
If the answer is directed to Lombrosoâs science, it will answer
positively. It will define the crime as an atavistic return. If its
directed to Ferriâs science it says that the crime is a product of the
anthropological factor combined with the social one. If youâll ask
Nourdau, he will say that also the genius is degenerated. This science
is dogmatic and a unilateral move towards easy generalizations, extends
the results of the observations on the facts, experimented and
understood, to facts not experimented, not understood, and it will find
an absolute truth, a pretentious knowledge, but fictive, that reduce to
an non-existent unity the plurality of reality, and it assures that
every one that is different from this typology is a pathological subject
appointed for the hospital.
But such kind of science has nothing in common with the other relative
science, modest, in a continuous doing, always doubting of its
achievements and always reexamining them, destroying the certainties and
going on a new street.
âThere are two parts in the scienceâ wrote Berth âone is formal,
abstract, systematic, dogmatic, a sort of metaphysical cosmology very
far from the reality, but it wants this different and complex. Real in
the unity of its abstract and simple formulas; It is the science with a
big S, the science who claims to deny religion, opposing solution to
solution, and giving to the world and its origins a rational
explanation. And there are different sciences, concrete, having everyone
its own method, right to their own particular object, Sciences holding
the real from the nearest and are no more that reasoned technical. Here
the pretense unity of the science is brokenâ.
The socialist, communist, the builder of future cities, not being able
to accept the truth, unique and universal, reveled by the religion they
denied, receive from the Science, unitary and dogmatic, the other truth,
unique and universal, outside of which canât exist individual welfare,
neither social order. They feel the need to have their foot on the solid
ground of the absolute certainty, and for this reason Malatesta collects
all the scientific response on the origin of criminality. But it is not
true that only people that have markedly abnormal tendencies, that are
mad or ill, make crimes. The experiences show also perfectly healthy and
normal men commit crimes and not only for economical reasons or for
causes determined by ignorance or prejudice.
A young man, good, simple, sincere, that I knew in prison, he was there
because he was serving a life sentence, having poisoned his wife to live
with his lover. An accountant was with me in confinement on Tremitiâs
Island, he was a man more normal, common, ordinary never known.
To the confinement he was sent by fascist police because he had hosted a
fiery communist brother. But the accountant seems to be the
personification of the pacific and calculator wisdom of the middle
class. Also nearly he did not go to prison because he corrupted babies
and made acts of lust on them. Money, with which he bought the silence
of an angry mother, saved him on that occasion. But he confessed he
always made the satyr when he was free, in Milano.
A friend of mine, died many years ago, was a generous, loyal, noble
young man, with an exquisite sensibility and an upper cleverness. He was
a refined poet, he fell in love with a woman that in the end left him.
Meeting her one day, in his soul upset by anger and jealousy it
manifested imperious, blind, instinctive, the need to put fire to the
baby she had in her arms. âI feltâ he told me âI had to kill the baby to
make the mother suffer all that she had made me suffer. I contained
myself with superhuman effort of will. But a moment more and I would
have shotâ.
All men can commit crimes, because in the soul of everyone are gathered
the more different instincts and the more opposite tendencies. In me are
mostly developed the generous one, in you the perverse one; but in
special circumstance, under the stimulus of powerful material,
sentimental or intellectual interests, I can kill a man and you can save
another.
So what does the Malatesta society say? Does it consider me a fool only
because I do my will and my reason did not have the force to hold the
instinctual act? But not always will and reason are able to stop the
instincts! Sometimes they can, sometime they donât. And then, in certain
cases, also if I can stop myself, I donât do it because I think is good
for to follow the spontaneity that led me to the criminal action. To
kill, for example, who offended and damaged me. So am I a fool because I
think in my way and not like the others that condemn the revenge?
But Malatestaâs society wants the mad at every cost, and closes me in
the prison-hospital that is worse than the bourgeois prison. In fact, in
prison I stay for a determinate period, the time of punishment. The law
based on classical school considers me responsible for my action, and
after punishing me with a punishment proportionate to the caused damage,
lets me free and it doesnât care about what I will do. Instead the law
founded on the positive school judges me irresponsible, ill and it
establishes I will remain in the hospital till I will be sane. That is
for indeterminate time, till the day the doctor will decide to let me
go. So Iâll become surely mad, having frozen showers, straitjacket and
other benevolent healing treatments.
The repression of the crime through the internment of criminals in the
mental hospital, would ask also the constitution of a police to raid the
dangerous sick people. But in this way will rebirth the authoritarian
mechanism- juridical- police and there would not be freedom. In the
Anarchy could not exist prisons disguised as hospitals, neither
policemen masked as nurses. The Individual will provide to his defense
by his own, or in association with others, but not delegating this task
to specialists that should become masters of all.
The natural spontaneity, no more oppressed by the compression of the
laws, morals, education, will not conduct us to the impossible paradise
of love brotherhood, but it will not even produce a resurgence of
murders and violence.
If, instead, to keep the order and annihilate criminals, weâll create a
new repressive and preventive system, weâll fatally come back to the
society we destroyed. That is the society of the governors and of the
governed.