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Title: Dear Comrades at *Ilota* Author: Enrico Malatesta Date: 1 April 1883 Language: en Topics: anarcho-communism, communism, anarchy, letter, revolution, reform Source: The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, edited by Davide Turcato, translated by Paul Sharkey.
Editor’s Note: Translated from “Cari Compagni dell’Ilota,” Ilota
(Pistoia) 1, no. 9 (1 April 1883). The background to this letter was the
defection from anarchism of Andrea Costa, one of the chief members of
the Italian Federation, who in 1879 had started advocating the extension
of socialist tactics to parliamentary ones. Costa had a significant
following, especially in the Romagna region, and in November 1882 he had
been elected to parliament. His tactics had sparked heated debates in
part of the socialist press, and Ilota was one of the periodicals that
considered those tactics legitimate. In a recent series of articles, the
Ilota had thus called for the union and joint organization of all
socialist forces, despite the tactical differences.
---
I have watched the efforts you have been making to step up the socialist
party’s organizing and I congratulate you upon them.9 Organization
represents the very life and strength of a party and without it we would
not even be able to effectively spread our program, let alone try to
implement it.
But it strikes me that in offering a broad outline of the sort of
organization we want, you have made a serious mistake that might
generate either failure today or the certainty of our breaking up in the
future.
Out of an excessive love of unity and concord, you would like to see us
organized regardless of differences of opinion regarding aims and means,
the only bond between us being the shared aspiration for some vague,
indeterminate socialism.
If a party—especially a party of action—is to thrive, it needs to be
aware of the goal it intends to reach and especially the means by which
it intends to reach it. Otherwise, it is inescapably doomed to remain
powerless and to peter out amidst internal differences.
I am certainly not referring to those secondary differences of opinion
that are not indicative of definitive parting of the ways. For instance,
there is the view that oral propaganda may be more effective than the
printed word, or that the pamphlet is preferable to the newspaper, urban
insurrection over armed bands, attacks upon property over attacks upon
the person, the Irishman’s dagger over the Russian’s mine, or vice
versa, without there being anything to inhibit membership of the same
organization. These are matters to be resolved in different ways
depending on circumstances and means that are not mutually exclusive and
upon which, in the worst scenario, a revolutionary can defer to majority
opinion for the sake of the need for agreement.
But when it comes to programs that are, or are believed to be,
incompatible, how can you ever amalgamate them and bring together folk
who from the word ”go” must bicker and fight with one another?
How, for instance, do you propose to organize me alongside a
legalitarian, when I believe that driving the people towards the ballot
box and getting them to hope that parliament can bring us reforms likely
to make our task easier, already means betraying the cause of socialism?
A legalitarian, at best, looks upon universal suffrage as a gain that
can be a great boost to the socialist party; whereas I believe it is the
best means the bourgeoisie has for oppressing and blithely exploiting
the people. He sees universal suffrage as a first step in the direction
of emancipation; I see it as the secret to getting the slave to fasten
his own chains and a guarantee against revolt, getting the slave to
believe he is the master.
So how would you see us united? While he will be campaigning to secure
such voting rights and, when he gets them, to persuade the people to
exercise them, I will be striving to prevent voting rights being granted
or, if they are, to ensure that the ballot-boxes are empty and held in
contempt.
I do not wish to dwell upon the reasons of either side here. No matter
which of us is right, it makes no difference to the fact that, until
such time as one side wins the other over, we cannot seriously hope to
see them being useful members of the same organization. This is not the
first time I have advanced this notion.
When the volte-face, which is now known by the slick euphemism “Costa’s
evolution,” came about, Costa did all he could to hide the changes he
was making to our shared program and strove to preserve the party’s
unity—despite the shattered unity around the program—by insisting that
we were all basically in agreement. We alerted people to the danger,
underlined the differences, and tried to save the revolutionary party,
even at the price of seeing its ranks thinned.
We were overruled, and instead of there being, as there should be, two
co-existing parties that would spur each other on, what we had instead
was, primarily, disorganization, impotence, personality clashes,
coolness, and a muddling of things and ideas. And wherever the party
remained more or less united, as it did in Romagna, it was because of
bamboozlement and deceptions and a change that was designed to arrive at
an extreme lullaby socialism, and was swallowed by our comrades at an
undetectable snail’s pace, without their even being conscious of where
they were being led. Luckily, we’ve seen signs that make us hopeful
that, soon, the stalwart socialists of Romagna, who are and have always
been revolutionaries, will come to their senses, see where they have
been tricked, and feel all of the outrage and wonder that they would
have felt years ago, had they been told then that “you are to have a
representative who will sit in His Majesty’s parliament on behalf of the
Romagna democratic coalition, a colleague and friend to the
bourgeoisie’s representatives.”
Now that enlightenment has finally arrived, do we want to travel once
again the very trail that did the Italian socialist party so much
damage, and call for a sinking of the deep-seated differences between us
and build a unity founded upon a deceitful outward agreement?
That might suit someone eager for a seat in the benches of
Montecitorio,[1] who therefore needs to do his best to muster a large
body of voters, but it will not suit us who are out to make the
revolution.
Without letting ourselves be deceived by beloved traditions ruined
beyond recovery by treachery, in practice today there is less real
difference between us and the action-oriented republicans—with whom we
can travel at least the first stage along the road (namely, armed
insurrection against the monarchy)—than there is between us and those
who lull the socialists and harness socialism into serving the interests
of whichever faction of the bourgeoisie finds it expedient to dress
itself in red.
And Costa showed that he was perfectly well aware of the situation when
he was shunned by the socialists in Naples and sought a recommendation
from Bovio, happily sitting at a republican banquet alongside the
Honourable Mr. Aporti.[2]
Let Costa do what he will: we shall not lift a finger to slow his
political downfall since we regard him as doomed to sink to the bottom
of the slippery slope.
But let us organize ourselves.
Yes, let us marshal all of our party’s resources, but let us remember
that, as far as we revolutionaries, we insurrectionists are concerned,
those who uphold parliamentarianism are not welcome in our party.
It will, assuredly, be painful parting company with old comrades. It
will affect me as much as anyone else, since among my adversaries there
are dear friends who were, for a long time, my companions in prison, in
exile, in poverty, and who will, I hope, be my companions on the
barricades and share in our victory.
But whenever the talk turns to the interests of the revolution, all
considerations of personality must be silenced. We reach out a hand to
all who believe, in good faith, that they serve the revolution’s
interests and we cling to the hope that we may see them follow their
hearts. But our party should be our party and our organization should be
our organization. And that organization should be the International
Working Men’s Association, whose program, hatched over a long time,
rings out today as COMMUNISM, ANARCHY and REVOLUTION.
So, comrades, let us close the ranks of that association, which its
deserters, having tried in vain to kill it off, are busy proclaiming
dead, because the association’s existence is a standing rebuke to their
behavior, and because the remorse of abandoning it may be pricking their
conscience.
Yours, Enrico Malatesta[3]
[1] Montecitorio is the seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies.
[2] Giovanni Bovio was a philosopher and republican politician, and
Pirro Aporti was a senator of the extreme left.
[3] Though Malatesta’s first name was Errico, many called him Enrico.
Accordingly, articles and published letters often contained the latter
spelling in his signature.