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Title: Kropotkin and Malatesta
Author: Gaston Leval
Date: n.d.
Language: en
Topics: Pëtr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, science, scientific method
Notes: Translated from the French by the uploader. From Les Cahiers de Contre-courant (Paris: Sofrim, n.d.); scan of French original here: https://archive.org/details/GastonLeval-KropotkineEtMalatesta

Gaston Leval

Kropotkin and Malatesta

Counter-current recently reproduced an article in which Malatesta

attacked Kropotkin's intellectual ouevre. This article wasn't the only

one on the same subject published by the same author. I have read others

which, in their time, had exercised in South America (where I then was)

a real but passing influence in certain anarchist-communist milieux. I

was myself, at first brush, impressed by his apparent logic, and at the

death of Malatesta I affirmed in the Buenos Aires journal Nervio that

the Malatestan principle was superior to that of Kropotkin.

But, as an autodidact in constant training, always searching, always

studying, and taking up Kropotkin as well as Malatesta, it was not long

before I convinced myself that the position of the latter led to an

impasse, to a kind of medieval scholasticism in which study would be

banned, and in which the dialectics of the most skillful literati would

outweigh a thorough knowledge of the facts. That is, in rebuffing

science we in reality rebuff all systematic and serious study of the

different problems that occupy us—because such is what science is— and

we condemn anarchist thought to be nothing more than prattle, more or

less skilled, more or less eloquent, but without consistency and without

the possibility of having a real scope in the social thought of the

present and the future. That, in practical terms, was leading us to

nothingness. Only the vain, in this century in which coordinated studies

provide and continue to provide so many relevant factors which limit our

pretensions to know everything and to wish to decide everything, can be

satisfied with it.

Malatesta's critiques were formulated after the death of Kropotkin,

which is and has been deeply regrettable. Taken on the whole, I daresay

that only a few valid points stand. This is not apparent for those who

have not read sufficiently either the attacker, or his target.

Malatesta is off-base when he presents Kropotkin as a simple "poet of

science." It would first be necessary to know in what way he is

qualified to say so. For all his keen intelligence does not change the

fact that he was never anything but a student who frequented

revolutionary circles more than the university, and that subsequently

nothing in all of his writings permits us to attribute him a sufficient

erudition to judge Kropotkin this way.

Kropotkin was, at 30 years of age, named the president of the Russian

Geographical Society, for the brilliant discoveries he had made

concerning the general orography of Asia. He was, replacing Huxley, the

great continuator of Darwin, and a collaborator-editor of the British

Encyclopedia. His value as a naturalist was apparent in books such as

Mutual Aid, where for the first time he presented a whole social

philosophy founded on the solidarity within animal species and in the

prehistory and history of humanity. Elisée Reclus got Kropotkin to

collaborate in the editing of the Universal Geography, on what concerned

Russia and Asia. Whoever has read Fields, Factories, and Workshops has

seen his vast knowledge in material economy, a knowledge which, along

with that of the history of civilization, bursts from the page in the

first chapters of The Conquest of Bread, which we find in the powerful

pamphlet The State, Its Historic Role, and in Modern Science and

Anarchy. Ethics shows an immense erudition, and even this or that

chapter in Words of a Rebel prove a knowledge which exceeded that of an

amateur. If, at the moment of Kropotkin's imprisonment in France, men

such as Herbert Spencer signed the petition in protest on behalf of the

English scientific world, this was not only because he was a political

criminal.

A "poet of science" he may have been, but he was much more than this.

There have been greater men of science, but Kropotkin was one of them.

And we can regret not having had many others of the same caliber—the one

I cannot forget being Elisée Reclus.

Thus launched, Malatesta made some fundamental reproaches of Kropotkin.

First, that of having based anarchy on science alone, and on nothing but

science. For this he reproduced many times a phrase pulled from Modern

Science and Anarchy. This sentence, thus: "Anarchy is a conception of

the universe, based on a mechanical interpretation of phenomena, which

embraces all of nature, including the life of societies." What does that

have to do with anarchy? asked Malatesta, several times. Whether or not

the universe is or is not explicable according to the latest discoveries

of physics does not at all preclude that the oppression and exploitation

of man by man are an injustice, and that we must fight them.

In this, he was right, and this first reaction is so obvious that he has

all of his readers with him. But his first fault was to present this

sentence, extracted from a paragraph which appeared in a chapter of a

book which contains many others, as the only base which Kropotkin gave

to anarchy.

I am obliged to say that in proceeding this way Malatesta absolutely

deforms Kropotkin's thought. Anyone who reads Modern Science and Anarchy

will see, on page 46 of the French edition, that the reproduced sentence

belongs to the chapter entitled "The Place of Anarchy in Modern

Science". There Kropotkin responds to the question: "What place does

anarchy occupy in the great intellectual movement of the nineteenth

century?" Situating himself on this ground where philosophy cannot

ignore new discoveries, he explains that science, that is to say the

knowledge acquired on the nature and constitution of matter, the

mechanism of the universe and the evolution of living forms and social

organisms, constitutes a whole which gives a sure basis to materialist

philosophy; that this materialist philosophy, by eliminating the

authoritarian conception that supposes a God as creator and director of

the world, allows the development of a philosophy where progress is the

work of a perfectly natural evolution, without the interposition of an

exterior source or intelligence. That consequently natural laws—or

rather natural "facts"—are essentially non-authoritarian, and that this

vast synthesis of the world permits the elaboration of a new social

philosophy. Thus, says Kropotkin, the place of anarchy is "ahead of the

intellectual movement of the nineteenth century."

That this exceeds the intellectual preoccupations of Malatesta is his

own affair. Bakunin, before Kropotkin, had elaborated a similar

philosophy. For him, socialism was the direct and logical consequence of

the materialist conception of the universe. But we well know that he had

other reasons to fight. Kropotkin also had his own. Reading him is

enough to know this.

Because, as Malatesta seems to ignore, from the first chapter of Modern

Science and Anarchy, everyone can read: "Like socialism in general, and

like every other social movement, anarchy is born among the people, and

it will only maintain its vitality and its creative force as long as it

remains popular." On page 3 he insists at length on this claim. Then he

shows the popular elements fighting against oppression, creating customs

such as judicial norms, but preceded most often by "more or less

isolated individuals who rebelled."

"All reformers, politicians, religious leaders, economists," he writes,

"belonged to the first category. And, among them, one always finds

individuals who, without waiting for all of their fellow citizens, or

even for a minority of them, to be imbued with the same intentions, rose

up against oppression—whether in more or less numerous groups, or all

alone, as individuals if they were not followed. We encounter these

revolutionaries in all epochs of history."

The basis of anarchy is therefore not limited to the latest discoveries

of physics, and it's a complete distortion of Kropotkin's thought to say

so.

It's another unfounded reproach of Malatesta's that depicts Kropotkin as

advocating the submission of man to universal determinism, in the sacred

name of science. If some "scientists" have written similar things,

Kropotkin is not responsible, anymore than Malatesta is responsible that

in the name of his "voluntarism" some individuals chuck bombs to

demonstrate their revolutionary will [volonté - trans.]. Kropotkin—and

here again Bakunin who had preceded him, with an unsurpassable depth—was

too intelligent not to know that the human will, however determined it

may be, is also, on its own scale, a factor on the cosmic and above all

planetary determinism, and never, in any writing, did he recommend the

submission of man to physical laws, or laws of biology. The citations I

have given are sufficient proof.

We can prove it again by reading all of Kropotkin's books. Whether it be

in The Great French Revolution, in his Memoirs [of a Revolutionist], in

Words of a Rebel, in Modern Science and Anarchy, in various pamphlets,

for instance "Anarchist Morality," in which he exhorts the youth to

struggle for justice, in the name of fullness of life; in the pamphlet

"To The Young," etc., Kropotkin always considered the factor of human

will (which is the principle Malatestan discovery) as one of the

necessary elements of history. To take one aspect of his thought—which

in every way exceeds philosophic mediocrity—and making it all of his

thought, is not a fair treatment, and not ethically defensible.

I am familiar with nearly everthing which has been published of

Malatesta's writings, in Italian and in Spanish, and I am familiar with

Kropotkin, as with other theorists of anarchism. I can say that as

concerns science, Malatesta is the only one who took this negative and

contemptuous view of science. It's a position which coincides with the

dangerous antiscientific reaction of a certain spiritualist philosophy

of which Benedetto Croce is the most notable theorist in Italy. That we

would react against the excesses of the materialist conceptions of the

nineteenth century, which ignore too much, in the slow discovery of

truth, of that which psychology and the study of the physical world

would reveal to us, is good and necessary. That we would repudiate

science itself: no. That is why, in certain anarchist milieux where we

study, the influence exercised by Malatesta and his voluntarist

philosophy—it is already nonsense to oppose the will to science—has been

ephemeral. This is why, in occupying myself with with economy,

sociology, and the reorganization of society (other than in the

imagination), not contenting myself with the discursive method to

understand the origin of the state and the evolution of human societies,

I have taken an entirely different path than that given by Malatesta.

Not having been born infused with science, nor with a genius sufficient

in itself, I modestly believed I had to study.

In my intellectual formation, it is the method recommended by Kropotkin

which has proved for me to be the most useful. But, let us repeat it,

was this method solely Kropotkinian? Not at all. All the

non-individualist anarchist social thinkers: Proudhon, Bakounine, Elisée

Reclus, Ricardo Mella, Pietro Gori, Anselmo Lorenzo, Jean Grave, Tarrida

del Marmol, etc., have seen in science, that is, it must be repeated

again, in knowledge as broad, serious and profound as possible, one of

the bases or one of the weapons of anarchism. In this sense, Malatesta

is the only one of his opinion, and in attacking Kropotkin, he attacks

all the others.

He has the right to take the position that pleases him, but if I already

responded to his anti-Kropotkin articles, if I answer them tirelessly,

it is because they demolish, for those who are not warned, Kropotkin as

a sociologist and as a thinker. Reading this articles, we might believe

that it is useless to read Kropotkin, and useless to study. Sociology

becomes the domain of those who know how to rattle off an article

according to their momentary inspiration, and to defend (because they

have an excellent literary don, in Malatesta) the most contradictory

things under an apparent logic of reasoning. It is a dialectical

question, a question of dialectical games.

This happens frequently with Malatesta. I had, around 1934, with his

disciple Luigi Fabbri, who then published Studi Sociali in Montevideo, a

correspondence in which this comrade and friend wrote me that it would

be necessary to pass through authoritarian stages before the triumph of

our ideas in a revolution. I responded to him that he had the duty to

write what he thought, and proposed to him a debate in his journal in

which I collaborated. He accepted. Fabbri defended ideas which were

those of Malatesta, as he emphasized in his letter. They seemed to me so

different from what I knew of the latter that I began to read

methodically the articles, pamphlets, and collections of articles of

Malatesta and I noticed that he advocated the same issues, always with

the same dialectical ease, the same gift of reasoning which in turn

makes the uninformed reader accept the most contradictory theses. With

the same convincing logic he declared that if anarchists did not know

how to orient the revolution by putting themselves at its head, it would

be the authoritiarians who would do it, "and then, goodbye to anarchy!";

or that the anarchists being a minority, could not think of making an

anarchist revolution without exercising a dictatorship, which would be

the negation of anarchy; or that, as we could not cope with all the

tasks that a revolution would impose, we should be content with other

parties taking charge of them (and we still wonder what would happen to

anarchy); then, and this was his last position, that in a revolution we

had to limit ourselves to "free experimentalism." In what did that

consist? To demand from the Bolshevik Communists, arms in hand if

necessary, our right to practice our ideas, to experiment them freely in

the anarchist islands formed in the midst of the dictatorial revolution.

The slightest logic, and historical experience, proved to us that this

would never be possible. It was enough to remember what had happened in

Russia. Even if they did not resort to violent dissolution and massacre

against us, as Trotsky had done in Russia, it would be enough to deprive

us of raw materials to stifle such attempts dangerous for the

dictatorship. Malatesta did not seem to perceive this. And all these

contradictory dispositions were defended almost simultaneously. It was

the same with other problems of decisive importance, such as that of

unions before a revolution. Six months apart, Malatesta advocated their

disappearance because, being born out of the struggle against

capitalism, they would have no reason to exist after capitalism, or else

the activity of anarchists in the unions, the use of which he advocated

as the basis of the new society. Also, contradictions as to the most

recommendable economic legal principle. Malatesta defended anarchist

communism quite well, and also certain formes of collectivism. And when

Fabbri wrote a book on the thought of his master-- which thought had, in

part, paralyzed his own—he could only conclude that in economy,

Malatesta wanted "freedom."

The absence of method, of coordinated thought has caused a brilliant

intelligence, a sharp mind to be somehow wasted for lack of coherence,

of continuity, of will in intellectual effort.

Moreover, Malatesta, more briefly, impugned Bakunin, reproaching him, as

if this had been the essential and the only aspect of the thought of

this formidable man as a thinker and organizer, of having defied nature.

It is truly disconcerting.

Of course, one finds some errors in Kropotkin's writings. I have already

formulated my reservations on various points. Malatesta was right when

he wrote—though others have said it as well—that Kropotkin elaborated

certain ideas, then strove to justify them through science. But does

this go against the use of science in sociology, of the scientific

method, applied according to the aptitudes and the culture of each, of

the systematic and serious study, coordinated, controlled and

recontrolled which, even if it does not claim to be scientific, is so

without knowing it? Not at all. When Kropotkin sees only mutual aid

associations in the corporations of the Middle Ages, he can be

criticized for not having sufficiently emphasized the struggles and

inter-corporative inequalities and the formation of a bourgeoisie of

masters against the companions who were to compose the proletariat. When

he opposes the customary rights to the state, we can respond that if it

is the case that human societies have been known, in certain periods, to

live on the basis of these rights, that customs have been often worse

than the law, and that all things considered, the latter is still

preferable. When he attributes to the masses a too-spontaneous creative

gift, we can respond that is wrong to do so because he also recommends

what the Kropotkinist "mass" has not wanted to see, the responsible and

relentless activity of revolutionary minorities, and that of the

anarchist minority for the present and the immediate future.

We can still make other reproaches, justified and founded otherwise than

those of Malatesta. But I ask if, in the elaboration of all sciences, in

the research and discovery of all the great truths which involve

prolonged studies, has it not always been so? Must science be abandoned

if it has made more than one mistake? To demolish everything because

contradictions are revealed in the successive contributions of

researchers? And to fall back on an empiricism dominated by ignorance or

irresponsibility?

Whatever may be the errors for which we may reproach Kropotkin, at the

very least the method he recommended offers, as is proper with all

scientific method, the possibility of correction, rectification, and

successive complement. Those who apply it will have a much greater

chance to find the truth than those who will write a bit haphazardly, as

has Malatesta. A social movement, a social philosophy, a current of

thought cannot work usefully, according to the goals they pursue, unless

they act in an organic way, in a continuity of coherent efforts where

the critical spirit, which oversees all research, is a guide for a

better construction.

Malatesta has not been an example of this, and he himself, the

anti-Kropotkinian, was Kropotkinian in the best of his pamphlets, the

small masterpiece, "Anarchy." The theses he developed there are borrowed

from Mutual Aid, which I name again, because this book, with all we

learn therein, poses the foundation of a biological and social

philosophy, theoretical and practical, of immense scope. If we are

capable of developing the fundamental theses and intrinsic

possibilities, even as we prune what may appear to us to be

questionable, our ideas will exert an enormous positive influence on the

future of humanity. They will not exert any with the "thought," or the

Malatestan method of thought-absent-method, in spite of the sometimes

interesting insights which one finds there.