💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › errico-malatesta-the-revolutionary-haste.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:44:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Revolutionary “Haste” Author: Errico Malatesta Date: September 6, 1921 Language: en Topics: practice, social revolution Source: Retrieved on March 4th, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/malatesta/haste.html Notes: From Umanità Nova, n. 125, September 6, 1921
Let us deal again with G. Valenti’s article republished by the Reggio
Emilia newspaper Giustizia.
Valenti dwells on enumerating all the masses that are indifferent or
hostile to subversive propaganda. Writing about the United States, he
claims that there are 60 (?) million Catholics organized in religious
associations who go to church and pray God, and he invites the
anarchists to go and make propaganda among those 60 millions, if they
want to speed up the revolution. He claims that only 4 and a half
million producers out of 40 million are organized in organizations, the
majority of which, as a matter of fact, are still opposed to socialism;
he also invites trade unionists to start working at organizing workers
in unions, if they really want to speed up the revolution. He claims
that only one million voters out of twenty-five million voted for Debs
in the last polls, he recalls that in the South socialist speakers get
beaten and driven out of towns by mobs intoxicated with patriotism;
finally, he invites communists to go and propagandize their 21 points in
the South, instead of “bugging socialists into accepting them”.
This is all too true and right, if it means that we have to make
propaganda and do our best to win over as many individuals, as many
masses as possible to the ideas of emancipation.
On the other hand, the argument is completely wrong if it means that the
demolition of capitalism has to wait until those 60 million Catholics
become free thinkers, all workers (or their majority) are organized for
class struggle, and Debs gets out of prison thanks to the majority of
voters.
Let us not misunderstand. It is an axiomatic, self-evident truth that a
revolution can only be made when there is enough strength to make it.
However, it is an historical truth that the forces determining evolution
and social revolutions cannot be reckoned with census papers.
Catholics in the United States and elsewhere will remain as numerous as
they are, or even grow, as long as there is a class, holding the power
of wealth and science, interested in keeping the masses in their
intellectual slavery, in order to dominate them more easily. Workers
will never be fully organized, and their organizations will always be
subject to breaking down or degenerating, as long as poverty,
unemployment, fear of losing one’s job, desire to improve one’s
conditions feed the antagonism among workers, and give the masters the
opportunity to profit from any circumstances and any crises to make the
workers compete against each other. And voters will always be sheep by
definition, even if sometimes they happen to kick back.
Given certain economic conditions and a certain social environment, it
is proven that the intellectual and moral conditions of the masses stay
basically the same. Until an external, ideally or materially violent
event comes and changes that environment, propaganda, education and
instruction remain helpless; they only act upon those individuals who
can overcome the environment in which they are forced to live, in virtue
of natural or social privileges. However, that small number, that
self-conscious and rebellious minority born by every social order in
consequence of those injustices to which the masses are subject, acts
like a historical ferment, which suffices, as it always did, to make the
world progress.
Every new idea and institution, all progress and every revolution have
always been the work of minorities. It is our aspiration and our aim
that everyone should become socially conscious and effective; but to
achieve this end, it is necessary to provide all with the means of life
and for development, and it is therefore necessary to destroy with
violence, since one cannot do otherwise, the violence which denies these
means to the workers.
Naturally, the “small numbers”, the minority, must be sufficient, and
those who imagine that we want to have an insurrection a day without
taking into account the forces opposing us, or whether circumstances are
in our favour or against us, misjudge us. In the, now remote, past, we
were able, and did, carry out a number of minute insurrectionary acts
which had no probability of success. But in those days we were indeed
only a handful, and wanted the public to talk about us, and our attempts
were simply means of propaganda.
Now it is no longer a question of uprising to make propaganda; now we
can win, and so we want to win, and only take such action when we think
we can win. Of course we can be mistaken, and on the grounds of
temperament may be led into believing that the fruit is ripe when it is
still green; but we must confess our preference for those who err on the
side of haste as opposed to those who always play a waiting game and let
the best opportunities slip through their fingers for they, through fear
of picking a green fruit then let the whole crop go rotten!
In conclusion, we completely agree with La Giustizia when it emphasizes
the necessity of making a lot of propaganda and of developing
proletarian struggle organizations as much as possible; but we
definitely depart from it when it maintains that we should not take
action until we have drawn the majority of that inert mass, which will
only be converted by the events and will only accept the revolution
after the revolution has begun.