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Title: A Bit Of Theory Author: Errico Malatesta Date: 1892 Language: en Topics: love, revolution Source: *The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader*, ed. Davide Turcato, Paul Sharkey. This translation is from Freedom (London) 37, no. 411 (October 1923), translated by F.A.B. The text was originally published as “Un peu de théorie,” L’En Dehors (Paris), August 1892.
Rebellion is rumbling on all sides. Here, it is the expression of an
idea; there, the result of need; more often it is the consequence of a
network of needs and ideas which reciprocally give rise to and
re-enforce one another. It devotes its attention to the causes of social
ills or it follows a side issue, it is conscious or instinctive, it is
humane or brutal, generous or narrow and selfish, but it is steadily
growing and spreading.
This is history in the making, and it is useless to waste one’s time
complaining of the course it takes, because this course has been laid
out by all the evolution that went before.
But history is made by men, and since we do not wish to be mere passive
and indifferent spectators of the historic tragedy, since we wish to
co-operate with all our strength in bringing about the circumstances
which seem to us the most favourable to our cause, we must have some
standard to guide us in judging the events that occur, and especially in
choosing the position that we will occupy in the struggle.
The end justifies the means. This maxim has been greatly slandered. As a
matter of fact, it is the universal guide to conduct.
One might better express it thus: each end carries with it its own
means. The morality or immorality lies in the end sought; there is no
option as to the means.
Once one has decided upon the end in view, whether by choice or by
necessity, the great problem of life is to find the means which,
according to the circumstances, will lead most surely and economically
to the desired end. The way in which this problem is solved determines,
as far as human will can determine, whether a man or a party reaches the
goal or not, is useful to the cause or—without meaning to—serves the
opposite side. To have found the right means is the whole secret of the
great men and great parties that have left their mark in history.
The object of the Jesuits is, for the mystics, the glory of God, and for
the others the power of the Company of Jesus. They must, therefore,
endeavour to degrade the masses, terrorise them, and keep them in
submission. The object of the Jacobins and all authoritarian parties,
who believe themselves to be in possession of absolute truth, is to
force their ideas upon the common herd and to bind humanity upon the
Procrustean bed of their beliefs.
With us it is otherwise; entirely different is our goal and very
different, therefore, must be our means.
We are not fighting to put ourselves in the place of the exploiters and
oppressors of to-day, nor are we fighting for the triumph of an abstract
idea. We are not like that Italian patriot who said, “What matters it if
all the Italians die of hunger, provided Italy be great and glorious.”
Neither do we resemble that comrade who admitted that he would not care
if three-fourths of the human beings were massacred, provided Humanity
was free and happy.
We wish men to be happy—all men, without exception. We wish every human
being to be free to develop and live as happily as possible. And we
believe that this freedom, this happiness, cannot be given to men by any
man or any party; but that all men must, by their own efforts, discover
the conditions of happiness and win them. We believe that only the most
thorough application of the principle of solidarity can put an end to
struggle, oppression, and exploitation; and that solidarity can come
only as a result of a voluntary agreement, an intentional and
spontaneous harmonizing of interests.
For us, therefore, everything that aims to destroy economic or political
oppression, everything that helps to raise the moral and intellectual
level of humanity, to make men conscious of their rights and their power
and to get them to look after their interests themselves, everything
that arouses hatred of oppression and promotes human brotherhood, brings
us nearer to our goal and, therefore, is desirable—subject only to a
quantitative calculation as to how to secure, with the resources
available, the maximum useful result.
And, per contra, anything is undesirable, because opposed to our aim,
which seeks to preserve the present state of things, or to sacrifice a
man, against his will, to the triumph of a principle.
What we desire is the triumph of love and freedom. But does that mean
that we refrain from using violent means? Not at all. The means we
employ are those that circumstances make possible or necessary. It is
true that we would prefer not to hurt a hair of anybody’s head; we would
like to wipe away all tears and not to cause any to be shed. But the
fact is that we have to make our fight in the world as it is, or else be
condemned to be nothing but fruitless dreamers.
The day will come, we firmly believe, when it will be possible to work
for men’s happiness without doing any harm either to oneself or to
others. To-day this is not possible. Even the purest and gentlest of
martyrs, one who, for the triumph of the right, would let himself be
dragged to the scaffold without resistance, blessing his persecutors
like the Christ of the legend, even such a one would still be doing much
harm. Apart from the harm that he would be doing to himself—which, after
all, counts for something—he would cause all those who love him to shed
bitter tears.
The main problem always, therefore, in all the acts of our life, is to
choose the lesser evil, to try to accomplish the largest possible total
of good with the least possible harm.
Humanity drags painfully along under the weight of political and
economic oppression. It is stupefied, degraded, killed—and not always
slowly—by poverty, slavery, ignorance, and their consequences. For the
maintenance of this state of things there exist powerful military and
police oganisations which meet any serious attempt at a change with
prison, hanging, and massacre. There is no peaceful, legal way of
getting out of this situation—and that is perfectly natural because the
laws are made by the privileged class in order to protect their
privileges. Against the physical force that blocks our way there is no
appeal except to psysical force—there can be no revolution except a
violent one.
There is no doubt that the revolution will cause much misfortune, much
suffering. But it might cause a hundred times more and it would still be
a blessing compared to what we endure to-day.
It is a well-known fact that in a single battle more people are killed
than in the bloodiest of revolutions. It is a well-known fact that
millions of children of tender age die every year for lack of care, that
millions of workers die prematurely of the disease of poverty, that the
immense majority of people lead stunted, joyless, and hopeless lives,
that even the richest and most powerful are much less happy than they
might be in a society of equals, and that this state of things has
lasted from time immemorial. Without a revolution it would last
indefinitely, whereas one single revolution which went right to the
causes of the evil could put humanity for all time on the road to
happiness.
So let the revolution come! Every day that it delays means an enormous
mass of suffering inflicted on mankind. Let us work so that it shall
come quickly and shall be the kind of revolution we must have in order
to put an end to all oppression and exploitation.
It is through love of mankind that we are revolutionists; it is not our
fault if history drives us to this painful necessity.
Therefore, for us and for all those who look at things as we do, each
piece of propaganda or of direct action, whether by word or deed,
whether done by a group or by an individual, is good when it helps to
bring the revolution nearer and make it easier, when it helps to gain
for the revolution the conscious co-operation of the masses and to give
it that character of universal liberation without which we might,
indeed, have a revolution, but not the revolution that we desire. And it
is specially in connection with a revolution that we must keep in mind
the principle of using the most economical means, because here the cost
is figured up in human lives.
We know too well the terrible material and moral conditions in which the
working class lives not to be able to understand the acts of hatred,
vengeance, and even ferocity which may occur. We understand how there
can be some of the oppressed who, having always been treated by the
bourgeoisie with the most shameful cruelty, having always seen that
anything is permitted to those who have the power, may say to themselves
some fine day when they have the power, “Now we will do what the
bourgeois used to do.” We understand how it can happen in the fever of
battle that some people, naturally kind-hearted but not prepared by long
moral training—very difficult under present conditions—may lose sight of
the goal to be reached and may regard violence as an end in itself and
let themselves be swept along to savage excesses.[1]
But it is one thing to understand and excuse, and another thing to
recommend. Those are not the kind of deeds that we can accept,
encourage, and imitate. We must, indeed, be resolute and energetic, but
we must try never to go beyond what is absolutely necessary. We must be
like the surgeon, who cuts when he must but avoids causing needless
suffering. In a word, we should be guided by love for mankind, for all
mankind.
We consider this love for mankind as the moral basis, the very seed of
our social programme; we believe that only by conceiving of the
revolution as the great human jubilee, as the liberation and
fraternizing of all men, to whatever class or party they may have
belonged—only in this way can our ideal be made real.
Brutal revolt will undoubtedly occur, and it may, indeed, help to give
the last great blow which shall overthrow the present system; but if it
is not steadied by revolutionists acting for an ideal, it will devour
itself.
Hate does not create love: with hatred one cannot rebuild the world. And
a revolution inspired by hate either would fail completely or else would
lead to fresh oppression, which might, indeed, be called “anarchist,” as
the present Governments are called “liberal,” but which would none the
less be oppression and would not fail to bring about all the conditions
that oppression inevitably produces.
[1] These words clearly refer to the deeds of François Koenigstein,
known as Ravachol, a French anarchist who had carried out a series of
dynamite attacks in the preceding months, as a result of which he was
guillotined on 11 July 1892. Malatesta’s article provoked a response in
the same periodical from Émile Henry, who argued that nobody had the
right to judge the deeds of a fellow anarchist. Henry himself died under
the guillotine two years later, after throwing a bomb at the Café
Terminus in Paris. (D. Turcato)