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Title: Anarchist Propaganda Author: Errico Malatesta Language: en Topics: practice Source: Retrieved on March 3rd from http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/unk/xx/propaganda.htm Notes: Collection of writings of various dates from Verne Richards (ed.), Malatesta: Life and Ideas, Freedom Press 1966.
It must be admitted that we anarchists, in outlining what we would like
the future society to be a society without bosses and without gendarmes
have, in general, made everything look a bit too easy.
While on the one hand we reproach our adversaries for being unable to
think beyond present conditions and of finding communism and anarchy
unattainable, because they imagine that man must remain as he is today,
with all his meanness, his vices and his fears, even when their causes
have been eliminated, on the other hand we skate over the difficulties
and the doubts, assuming that the morally positive effects which will
result from the abolition of economic privilege and the triumph of
liberty have already been achieved.
So, when we are told that some people won’t want to work, we immediately
have a string of excellent reasons to show that work, that is the
exercise of our faculties and the pleasure to produce, is at the root of
man’s well-being, and that it is therefore ridiculous to think that
healthy people would wish to withdraw from the need to produce for the
community when work would not be oppressive, exploited and despised, as
it is today.
And if they bring up the inclinations to, or the anti-social, criminal
ways of, a section, however small, of the population, we reply that,
except in rare and questionable cases of congenital sickness which it is
the task of alienists to deal with, crimes are of social origin and
would change with a change of institutions.
Perhaps this exaggerated optimism, this simplification of the problems
had its raison d’etre when anarchism was a beautiful dream, a hurried
anticipation, and what was needed was to push forward to the highest
ideal and inspire enthusiasm by stressing the contrast between the
present hell and the desired paradise of tomorrow.
But times have changed. Statal and capitalist society is in a state of
crisis, of dissolution or reconstruction depending on whether
revolutionaries are able, and know how, to influence with their concepts
and their strength, and perhaps we are on the eve of the first attempts
at realization.
It is necessary therefore to leave a little on one side the idyllic
descriptions and visions of future and distant perfection and face
things as they are today and as they will be in what one can assume to
be the foreseeable future. When anarchist ideas were a novelty which
amazed and shocked, and it was only possible to make propaganda for a
distant future (and even the attempts at insurrection, and the
prosecutions we freely invited and accepted, only served the purpose of
drawing the public’s attention to our propaganda), it could be enough to
criticize existing society and present an exposition of the ideal to
which we aspire. Even the questions of tactics were, in fact, simply
questions of deciding which were the best ways of propagating one’s
ideas and preparing individuals and masses for the desired social
transformation.
But today the situation is more mature, circumstances have changed ...
and we must be able to show not only that we have more reason on our
side than have the parties because of the nobility of our ideal of
freedom, but also that our ideas and methods are the most practical for
the achievement of the greatest measure of freedom and well-being that
is possible in the present state of our civilization. Our task is that
of “pushing” the people to demand and to seize all the freedom they can
and to make themselves responsible for providing their own needs without
waiting for orders from any kind of authority. Our task is that of
demonstrating the uselessness and harmfulness of government, provoking
and encouraging by propaganda and action, all kinds of individual and
collective initiatives.
It is in fact a question of education for freedom, of making people who
are accustomed to obedience and passivity consciously aware of their
real power and capabilities. One must encourage people to do things for
themselves, or to think they are doing so by their own initiative and
inspiration even when in fact their actions have been suggested by
others, just as the good school teacher when he sets a problem his pupil
cannot solve immediately, helps him in such a way that the pupil
imagines that he has found the solution unaided, thus acquiring courage
and confidence in his own abilities.
This is what we should do in our propaganda. If our critic has ever made
propaganda among those who we, with too much disdain, call politically
“unconscious,” it will have occurred to him to find himself making an
effort not to appear to be expounding and forcing on them a well-known
and universally accepted truth; he will have tried to stimulate their
thought and get them to arrive with their own reason at conclusions
which he could have served up ready-made, much more easily so far as he
was concerned, but with less profit for the “beginner” in politics. And
if he ever found himself in a position of having to act as leader or
teacher in some action or in propaganda, when the others were passive he
would have tried to avoid making the situation obvious so as to
stimulate them to think, to take the initiative and gain confidence in
themselves.
The daily paper UmanitĂ Nova is but one of our means of action. If
instead of awakening new forces, and encouraging more ambitions and
enthusiastic activity, it were to absorb all our forces and stifle all
other initiatives, it would be a misfortune rather than an affirmation
of vigor, and witness to our strength, vitality and boldness.
Furthermore there are activities which cannot by definition, by carried
out by the paper or by the press. Since the paper has to address itself
to the public it must of necessity speak in the presence of the enemy,
and there are situations in which the enemy must not be informed. The
comrades must make other arrangements for these situations ...
elsewhere!
In general terms the answer is obviously that one must carry out in
public what it is convenient that everybody should know and in secret
what it is agreed should be withheld from the public at large.
It is obvious that for us who carry on our propaganda to raise the moral
level of the masses and induce them to win their emancipation by their
own efforts and who have no personal or sectarian ambitions to dominate,
it is an advantage where possible to give our activities a maximum of
publicity to thereby reach and influence with our propaganda as many
people as we can.
But this does not depend only on our wishes; it is clear that if, for
example, a government were to prohibit us from speaking, publishing, or
meeting and we had not the strength openly defy the ban, we should seek
to do all these things clandestinely.
One must, however, always aim to act in the full light of day, and
struggle to win our freedoms, bearing in mind that the best way to
obtain a freedom is that of taking it, facing necessary risks; whereas
very often a freedom is lost, through one’s own fault, either through
not exercising it or using it timidly, giving the impression that one
has not the right to be doing what one is doing.
Therefore, as a general rule we prefer always to act publicly ... also
because the revolutionaries of today have qualities, some good and
others bad, which reduce their conspiratorial capacities in which the
revolutionaries of fifty or a hundred years ago excelled. But certainly
there can be circumstances and actions which demand secrecy, and in
which case one must act accordingly.
In any case, let us be wary of those “secret” affairs which everybody
knows about, and first among them, the police.
Isolated, sporadic propaganda which is often a way of easing a troubled
conscience or is simply an outlet for someone who has a passion for
argument, serves little or no purpose. In the conditions of unawareness
and misery in which the masses live, and with so many forces against us,
such propaganda is forgotten and lost before its effect can grow and
bear fruit. The soil is too ungrateful for seeds sown haphazardly to
germinate and make roots.
What is needed is continuity of effort, patience, coordination and
adaptability to different surroundings and circumstances.
Each one of us must be able to count on the cooperation of everybody
else; and that wherever a seed is sown it will not lack the loving care
of the cultivator, who tends it and protects it until it has become a
plant capable of looking after itself, and in its turn, of sowing new,
fruitful, seeds.