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Title: In Defence of Malatesta
Author: Nick Heath
Date: Summer 2013
Language: en
Topics: Errico Malatesta, union organizing, Organise!
Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-09 from http://libcom.org/library/defence-malatesta
Notes: Published in Organise! #81.

Nick Heath

In Defence of Malatesta

“Let there be as much class struggle as one wishes, if by class struggle

one means the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters for the

abolition of exploitation. That struggle is a way of moral and material

elevation, and it is the main revolutionary force that can be relied

on.”

Malatesta

Recently there have been various references to the ideas of the Italian

anarchist Errico Malatesta either in books and pamphlets or in blogs.

For example the blog of Scott Nappalos has the following: ‘Anarchism and

the unions: a critique of Malatesta’s ahistorical perspective’.

I quote in length from the article:

“There are three main errors in Malatesta’s argument that will lead us

to different conclusions. Malatesta botches the role of history in

union’s structure, the function of struggle in transforming the

consciousness of its participants, and the variations in the forms of

workers organizations.

1. Ideology is less a product of will than of history.

In his reply to de Santillan, Malatesta claims he recognizes this point.

It may be that he did, but he fails to see the problem for his argument.

The basic idea is that unions can be revolutionary to the extent that

the class or sections of the class are revolutionary. This is a

historical matter. History and society develops unevenly, there will

always be sections of the working class moving into and away from

various revolutionary praxis embedded in their organizations. Likewise

the success and failure of these movements depend on their context, i.e.

The ruling class, the other workers organizations, the region’s position

in global capital, etc. When we move away from the abstract and timeless

perspective Malatesta uses, one leg of his argument crumbles (that it is

not possible to have mass unions that have revolutionary ideas and

practice).

2. Malatesta misses the role of struggle radicalizing workers

consciousness.

This makes growth without watering down principles possible, since

workers in participating can be radicalized (not saying it will, just

that it is possible, which destroys the fork in his argument). This is a

similar issue as above with Malatesta’s lack of understanding of

struggle across time. Workers’ ideas are not static, but rather shift in

a dynamic between the notions they have, their activity, and the ideas

they encounter. Throughout history workers have built libertarian

organizations not necessarily from anarchist agitation within movements

so much as being radicalized by the dynamics of struggle itself (though

of course there are other examples too). This means that it is also

possible for workers in libertarian unions to develop revolutionary

consciousness without being required to be anarchists before joining.

Since libertarian unions’ structure/principles are voluntarily built,

there is always a struggle around the orientation of the union. That

doesn’t mean however (as Malatesta argues) that unions by their nature

will cease being revolutionary when struggle progresses. Otherwise we

would not have seen libertarian institutions grow at all, they would

have turned reformist while growing and never had the chance to be

repressed. This isn’t negated by the fact that the CNT or whoever did in

fact turn towards reformist activities, since in fact that was true by

default. All revolutionary movements either produced reformism or were

destroyed. There are other factors that explain cooptation (and this was

not in fact Malatesta’s argument, he argues unions will become reformist

before reaching revolutionary conclusions).

It is also worth pointing out that alternative libertarian institutions

such as anarchosyndicalist unions, workers councils, militias, peasants’

councils, etc., formed perhaps the only significant anarchist movements.

Given this history, the burden of proof falls on those who claim

Malatesta’s strategy, which as of yet has no significant historical

precedent.

3. Not all unions were created equal.

Since Malatesta died before seeing the integration of unions into the

social partnership of the state and capital, it is not useful to view

Malatesta’s unions as identical to ours. For that reason, it is likewise

naïve to think that one can merely exist within organizations that are

setup for and schooled in repressing radical organizing and carry out

propaganda effectively. Over 80 years of communist infiltration into the

unions failed to produce any significant shifts in the unions nor

revolutionary movements. Again the burden of proof lies with anarchists

who think otherwise, and who have next to nothing to show for anarchist

attempts at such.

Malatesta’s arguments rely on the idea that all unions are the same,

some just want ideology. But in fact the structure, methods, and aims of

unions vary considerably. The fundamental division in our time is

between unions (or workers’ organizations) that seek to mediate between

capital and workers, and those that are spaces for autonomous organizing

that don’t exist beyond the activities of workers. The former is the

traditional American union, which exists mostly as a bureaucratic layer

of paid staff with specialized skills who negotiate a contract for the

workers. The contracts exchange workers control for largely economic

gains. Workers interact with the unions, and struggle for changes

through (and sometimes against it), but the union remains a third party

with separate interests of its own. The 20^(th) century is filled with

examples of the unions are highly efficient repressive organizations for

class cooption and collaboration.

We can likewise show our own fork. If you try to bore within the

existing repressive unions, either you do so autonomously (with workers’

own separate structures to organize with) or you don’t. If you work

within the union’s framework, you work on their terms and must fight

against their superior resources both economically and in alliance with

the boss and the state if you are successful. If you build a parallel

structure, then you are pursuing what Malatesta argued against, it is a

union of one form or another.”

Now in fact Malatesta believed the opposite of much of the above. In

fact it was he who provided an inspiration for many of the leading

lights of the foundation of the French syndicalist union the

Confederation General de Travail (CGT) and the parallel Bourses de

Travail (labour exchanges controlled by workers), like Emile Pouger and

Fernand Pelloutier.

Between 1885 and 1889 he was living in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Here

he took part in helping organise the bakers’ union which was founded by

Ettore Mattei and Francesso Momo. He drew up the charter and programme

of the union and supported its successful strikes. “His and Mattei’s

roles in the union were fundamental; they fought so that the union would

be an authentic society of resistance, an organization that moreover

could be labelled as “cosmopolitan”, instead of yet another mere

mutualist society” (The influence of Italian immigration on the

Argentine anarchist movement, Osvaldo Bayer).

In 1889 Malatesta moved to London and remained there, off and on, for

the next decade. Shortly after his arrival, the Great Dock strike broke

out. This ran from 14^(th) August to 16^(th) September. Like his fellow

anarchist Kropotkin, Malatesta was much impressed by the action of the

workers. As DiPaola notes, he had : “ close contact with anarchist,

labour and trade union militants. …Thanks to his deep knowledge of

British trade unionism he could examine both its positive and negative

aspects, particularly those arising from the danger of greater

bureaucracy in the labour movement. This contributed to the development

of his ideas about the organisation and political role of labour and

trade unions in Italy. He used the experience he achieved in Britain

when he published the newspaper L’Agitazione in Ancona in 1897, and

later when the Italian anarchists led the Unione Sindacale Italiana.”

In the paper he brought out in London L’Associazione, Malatesta began to

consider the implications of the great strike. Issue 1. contained an

article by him A Proposito di Uno Sciopero ( Regarding A Strike). He

noted that soon as the casual workers strike was called, all other

trades connected to loading and unloading of cargoes stopped work, some

of them purely in sympathy. Simultaneously other trades not connected to

the docks put forward their own demands and went out on strike,

amounting to a total number of 180,000 on strike. The gas workers

offered to come out on strike with the prospect of London “plunged into

darkness at night” and the homes of the bourgeois “exposed to great

danger”. He was deeply impressed by the self-discipline and “remarkable”

ability to get organised. Feeding a population of half a million,

managing donations and collections, organising meetings and

demonstrations, and keeping watch on the bosses’ attempts to employ

scabs, “All this was done marvellously and spontaneously, by the work of

volunteers”. Above all the workers’ collective action earned his

admiration. “Those workers were not lacking a broad and often

instinctive notion of their rights and social usefulness, nor did they

lack the combativeness required to make a revolution; a vague desire of

more radical measures arose in them…”

Turcato notes that: “ The positive implications of the Great Dock Strike

and the tactics of new unionism can hardly be over-estimated. He

(Malatesta) came to regard strikes as the most promising path to

revolution, in contrast to any other means that anarchists had practised

until then”. As Malatesta himself wrote in his article after considering

both movements originally initiated by the bourgeoisie and wars as

catalysts for social unrest, where reliance on them led to fatalism:

“Fortunately there are other ways by which a revolution can come, and it

seems to us that the most important among them are workers’ agitations

that manifest themselves in the form of strikes…The most fruitful lesson

of all was the huge dock labourer strike which recently occurred in

London”.

Malatesta further expanded these ideas in his paper, calling for the

intervention of anarchists in struggles for immediate economic gains..

Further, he stated that the Revolution was a longer process than

anarchists had believed. What was needed was a daily and long term

involvement in unions, cooperatives and educational societies.

For Malatesta economic struggle implied a political one. He used the

First of May mobilisations to illustrate a point. The most important

thing was for workers to collectively assert themselves, not the limited

reforms they demanded. Furthermore, it was a mistake to dismiss

agitation around the eight hour day, as Malatesta admitted a poor

reform, because struggle would produce class consciousness. Commenting

on the joint congress of the CGT and Bourses de Travail in Toulouse in

1897 he wrote: “The conscious part of the French proletariat, even when

they do not comprehend or accept our general principles, can devise the

way that must lead to the end of human exploitation”. Malatesta

repeatedly emphasised that these forms of struggle were means towards

social revolution. This flies in the face of the statement of Nappalos

that Malatesta misses the role of struggle radicalizing workers

consciousness, as even a cursory look at Malatesta’s ideas proves the

falsity of this statement. Further, we have to address the assertions

made in the Solidarity Federation booklet Fighting For Ourselves that:

“early anarchist-communists did not focus primarily on the labour

movement”. Apart from the fact that anarchist-communists of the period

also engaged, quite correctly, in agitation among what was then a

sizeable class, the peasantry, careful observation reveals this not to

be true. The booklet includes Malatesta among these early anarchist

communists. As we have seen, Malatesta was an early advocate of

involvement in the labour movement.

Turcato underlines this: “ Organization was a worker’s means to

gradually and collectively approach anarchism through class

consciousness”. He then quotes Malatesta “ To become an anarchist for

good, and not only nominally, he must start to feel the solidarity that

links him to his comrades; learn to cooperate with the others for the

defence of the common interests; and, struggling against the masters and

the government that supports the masters, understand that masters and

governments are useless parasites and that workers could manage by

themselves the social enterprise. When he has understood all this, he is

an anarchist, even if he does not carry the denomination”.Furthermore,

Emile Pouget, who was an architect of French syndicalism, travelled to

London and had meetings with Malatesta in 1893. The following year he

was again in London, living at the house of the Italian anarchist

Defendi family, where Malatesta also resided. Both of them contributed

to the British anarchist communist paper The Torch . The August 1894

issue had articles from them both, but significantly Malatesta’s was The

General Strike and The Revolution where he advocated the general strike

as a revolutionary weapon. It is apparent that Pouget had become

influenced by the Italian’s ideas on the subject. In 1895 he and Fernand

Pelloutier, described by Max Nettlau as an “intransigent anarchist

communist” went on an intense propaganda drive to introduce these new

syndicalist methods to French workers. Indeed Pelloutier in his 1899

Lettre Aux Anarchistes ( Letter To the Anarchists) praised Malatesta

“The words I am going to say have a perfect illustration in

propagandists like Malatesta, who knows how well to unite an indomitable

revolutionary passion with the methodical organisation of the

proletariat”.

It should be recognised that it was in this context that Malatesta, who,

as we have seen was instrumental in advancing the idea of the general

strike among anarchists, criticised it at the 1906 Amsterdam anarchist

congress. He stated that the general strike on its own could not

overthrow capitalism, but that what was needed was complementary

insurrectionary action to destroy the State. In fact he had emphasised

this in his first article on the subject back in 1889. He was aware that

some syndicalists were substituting the General Strike for generalised

revolutionary action and indeed this spurious notion reached its apogee

with the General Strike being seen as a non-violent alternative to the

failed uprisings during the German Revolution by the leadership of the

Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands , which included Rudolf Rocker.

On the subject of the unions which Nappalos addresses. Malatesta was

aware of the differences between different types of unions. In his

articles on the New Unionism of 1889 he heavily criticised the “old”

unions. When he attempted to introduce these new tactics in Italy, he

was accused by some anarchists of inglesismo (Englishism). He replied:

“Forget about inglesismo. If this term means anything at all, it means

economic resistance for its own sake, as it was practised by the ‘old’

trade unions, which-though they wanted to improve the workers’

conditions- accepted and respected the capitalist system and all

bourgeois institutions”.

Malatesta was an extraordinary pragmatic and flexible activist and

thinker, adapting to situations as they unfolded. Thus, after the

founding of the USI in 1912, Malatesta gave support saying that it

corresponded best to anarchist ideas and tactics. He did emphasise that

there were still many anarchists in the mainstream union central, the

General Confederation of Labour (CGL) and that what was needed was unity

of action between these comrades. The organisation created by Malatesta

and other organisational anarchists in 1920, the Unione Anarchica

Italiana (UAI) worked closely with the USI in the period of social

unrest that gave birth to the Italian factory council movement.

Malatesta did not have the hindsight that modern day anarchists may have

about the role of the unions, as Nappalos seems to think he should have,

but he was aware from the start of the general drift of trade unions

towards pure economism, reformism and bureaucratisation.

Finally, on the question of will versus history. In fact Malatesta was

highly critical of Kropotkin’s rigid determinism and his elevation of

anarchism as a science, influenced as he was by positivist ideas.

“Science, like any other system of ideas, must not be blindly accepted

as infallible; it is a study that only concerns itself with what is, and

not with what ought to be, that is, with the aspirations, desires and

wants of humanity. For Malatesta, anarchy is a product of the will, not

of necessity. And as such, science cannot embrace it, because science

“stops where inevitability ends and freedom begins” ( Julius Gavroche,

Autonomy No1). On the other hand he was equally critical of Bakunin’s

belief that the masses had a natural tendency towards anarchism. As he

wrote:

The great majority of anarchists, if I am not mistaken, hold the view

that human perfectibility and anarchy would not be achieved even in a

few thousand years, if first one did not create by the revolution, made

by a conscious minority, the necessary environment for freedom and well

being.

We do not want to “wait for the masses to become anarchist before making

the revolution,” the more so since we are convinced that they will never

become anarchist if the institutions which keep them enslaved are not

first violently destroyed. And since we need the support of the masses

to build up a force of sufficient strength and to achieve our specific

task of radical change of the social organism by the direct action of

the masses, we must get closer to them, accept them as they are, and

from within their ranks seek to “push” them forward as much as

possible.”

As Turcato remarks on the concepts of Malatesta as regards will and

material conditions: “To the extent that Malatesta committed revolution

and anarchy to conscious choices, he correspondingly refrained from

comforting analyses that committed social progress to allegedly

empirical trends, be they kropotkinian evolutionary laws or marxist

historical necessities.Malatesta held a realistic outlook on class

consciousness formation. He realised that propaganda had limited power

on masses constrained by harsh material conditions. At the same time, he

did not expect capitalist development to create the proletariat as a

revolutionary force, nor mere economic interests to unite the working

class into a compact army.”

We do not bow down to Malatesta as some sort of tin idol. He had his

faults, which should be recognised. But a false representation of his

ideas does no favours to those anarcho-syndicalists who wish to argue

against Malatesta’s ideas on specific anarchist political organisations

and syndicalism. In the next issue of Organise! we will take a more

in-depth look at Malatesta’s concepts of the relationship of conscious

anarchist groups to mass organisation

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