Luigi Fabbri

“ His living personality is what has vanished, and however eloquent the testimony of his writings or the cold account of his accomplishments, these will only be an incomplete reflection of what we saw—we who lived a bit of his life and warmed ourselves by the passionate fires of his heart. The true Errico Malatesta continues alive and whole in our spirits and memories—but won’t this impression he made and the influence he held upon us eventually be dissolved by the corrosive efforts of time? ”

“ The announcement of Malatesta's death deeply moved the world of revolutionary workers and filled the anarchists of all countries with sorrow. Even his adversaries were inclined to respect before the noble figure of the great Italian revolutionary who had ceased to live. Only fascism wanted to distinguish itself, beyond its borders, intending to throw a pile of mud on his tomb when it had barely closed. ”

“ However, Malatesta was always the same. If there was a man in Italy, who after fifty years of constant fighting, could repeat the poet Giuseppe Giusti’s boast: “I have not flexed or hesitated,” it was him. His words in the meetings of 1920 were the same as all his past propaganda since 1872. That “petit-bourgeois” had for half a century combated the bourgeoisie, small and large, and for all of his life had earned his way as a laborer by the sweat of his brow. That “old counter-revolutionary” hadn’t done anything since he was a boy but propagate and prepare the revolution. ”

“ They weren’t exempt from ugliness and baseness either, of course, and were still certainly too few, but already enough to do honor to humanity and to inspire belief in the brightest of hopes for our future. Kindness, not weakness or blindness, is the best raw material for all constructive rebellions against tyrants and social miseries. Malatesta’s kindness was united with an inflexible and resolved character, which didn’t trail off in useless words, but which was felt in each one of its spoken or written manifestations as one feels the heat of the sun. ”

“ In Bologna in 1920, I saw him playing with my children and full of passion, with the same spirit as in Ancona thirty years earlier when he wanted to fool around and run in the streets, or when he would encourage me to make some noise to scandalize the older comrades. He lived a perennial youth, and his ever-young spirit tamed his physical nature. They say that age and death are nothing but prejudices, and the deep psychological (even physiological) truth in this paradox can be seen in the story of his long life. ”

“ According to him, to be an anarchist it isn’t enough to believe with logic and theory that capitalist and statist organization is unjust and harmful to humanity; it isn’t enough to simply display the conviction that a dispersed organization without exploitation and without governments is possible and would be beneficent to all people. These alone wouldn’t add up, according to Malatesta, to being a good anarchist, if the anarchist didn’t feel above all else the pain that social ills cause others more intensely than the pain they cause oneself. ”

“ A bit later he saw himself encircled by an infinite sea of poor children from the neighborhood, among whom news of the pastry vendor’s generosity had spread in an instant, and he distributed so freely that in the end all of the merchandise had been devoured. Naturally it was the beginning and end of that type of business... Some days later Kropotkin, who knew nothing of this undoing, asked Malatesta how his new commerce was going. “I’m not lacking customers,” he responded, smiling, “but I can’t afford to buy any merchandise.” To be kind was what anarchy meant for him. ”

“ In action, Malatesta didn’t know divisions of tendencies. And if he much loved the comrades who understood his thought in its best expression, he no less strongly loved those who had the same passion of revolt, even when they were divided from him by some dissent about theory or strategy. He didn’t hesitate sometimes, to rudely show his disapproval of some his closest friends, when they appeared for a moment to subordinate the duty of solidarity with the rebels to considerations of uncertain opportunity and cold doctrinarianism. ”

“ Only that feeling of pain at the suffering of others, the human solidarity that rouses and the necessity that provokes the remedy, are able to push a man to action, to make a conscious rebel of a man, to form the complete anarchist who wants to emancipate not only himself from misery and oppression, but all the disinherited and oppressed of the world. ”

“ When they met in 1872, Bakunin didn’t believe Malatesta would last another six months, and his doctors agreed; it's fair to say that he defeated sickness for sixty years with his will to live. He never surrounded himself with doctors and nurses in agonizing fear of death, but instead held himself as if he didn't believe in death, believing in his own energies and always skeptical of the medical arts. ”

“ He didn’t view the division of labor on syndical terrain favorably, but understood the unavoidable relationships that derived from the past, and realized the uncertain usefulness of the Syndical Union, as such it was, for the cause of revolution, considered imminent. He therefore accepted, without discussing it too much, the state of affairs, and stayed together with the labor organization that most approximated anarchism, and only opined that it become a responsibility for anarchists to be organized, and to be better in one organization than in another. ”

“ Malatesta’s thought and actions cannot be fully understood without knowing what goodness was present in the propagandist and the militant. Despite the theoretical and practical quarrels that could at times separate him from others, he was truly the soul-brother of those who could be called — as Pietro Gori called them — the “heroes of goodness”: Elise Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Louise Michel, and others less known, including the entirely ignored majority of humankind, sometimes uneducated and almost illiterate, as were many we had known in the revolutionary world. ”

“ But those who knew Malatesta’s intimate feelings and the complex of his ideas knew that the meaning behind his words was in no way Tolstoyan, but perfectly coherent with his revolutionary sentiment and anarchist thought, in which it is not humanity that should serve a principle established before the fact, but principles which should serve the salvation of humanity. ”

“ But in such delicate and dangerous cases he always knew how to stay balanced, and to keep the necessary distances, and it was important to him that he act on his own responsibility without compromising others, avoiding any possible underhanded, hidden motives of those who approached him, constantly remaining the most self-consistent anarchist who never lost sight for even a minute of the revolution’s purpose: freedom. ”

“ Far from me is any intention of wanting to present Malatesta in these pages as a perfect man without any defects! He certainly had defects, though the pain of his departure and the great affection for him don’t allow me to see them now, or would make me forget them. The same fact that he has been so universally loved is a proof that his humanity participated in the common weaknesses, but more those that grow close to the hearts of the people than those which distance. ”

“ Later I will try to explain Malatesta’s ideas, including those on violence, in a more organized way. Here I will limit myself to the heart of his thoughts on the matter: the idea that nobody has the right to use to violence or the threat of violence to impose their own ideas, their way of living and organizing themselves, their systems, laws, or anything else upon others, under any pretext (even that of doing them well) . The logical conclusion is the right of individuals and peoples to rebel against governments and masters. ”

“ In a short discussion we had by letter,3 he wrote about justice and anarchy: “The anarchist program, founded in solidarity and love, goes beyond justice per se... love gives all that it can, and wants to give more each time... To do to others what you would want them to do (in other words, to do the maximum good) is what Christians call charity and we call solidarity; in sum, it is love.” All of his comrades know especially well how he felt about this ideal of love, since Malatesta’s affection for them was immense: a true tenderness, as the most loving family couldn’t have given. ”

“ In vain, the anarchists (and Malatesta in the most energetic way) opposed themselves to and fought here and there to galvanize the movement, particularly where by their numbers, or with the daily Umanità Nova, or through the Italian Syndical Union, they had major influence. In all of Italy the proletariat beat a retreat, and began to lose heart, the uncertainty and disillusion began among the masses. ”

“ So since then, Malatesta could live – together with his companion Elena Melli, with who 200
he had been together with since 1921, and with her daughter Gemma who he adored like his own daughter – only with the help of the comrades who were most nearly like friends and others who, though distant, took interest in him. This help never failed him, until the end, the modest bread that he needed; though it couldn’t be anything more than the help of poor people to a poor man. ”

“ La Questione Sociale under the editorship of Malatesta was like a continuation of L’Agitazione. As was inevitable, in several issues it sustained an animated debate against L’Aurora, and the divergence of ideas assumed a personal character for a moment, due to the special temperament of Ciancabilla and maybe that of Malatesta. It was during this debate, and as an unintended consequence of it, that during a conference, in the heat of discussion, Malatesta was shot with a revolver and lightly wounded in the leg. But Malatesta energetically refused to give importance and continuity [?] ”

“ Fascism planted itself as master, with the most ferocious violence, in Marcas and Milan as well. The camp of intervention directed by Malatesta was restricted bit by bit, and was increasingly limited to Rome and its surroundings, where the labor resistance on one hand, and on the other the hypocritical and opportunist politics of the government, dictated in the capital for diplomatic convenience, to save face, still impeded the open penetration of fascism. ”

“ However, an English editor made him the most favorable offer for a work of this type while he was in London, and in his last years an Italian editor did the same. But he was also repelled by asking the means to live through purely intellectual occupations that would have distracted him from the movement. He always saw the repose of old age as far ahead of him. “One is old only when he wants to be,” he said, “and old age is an infirmity of the spirit,” and laughingly advanced until the paradox arrived that “death is a prejudice.” ”

“ His active life as an anarchist was a monolith of humanity: unity of thought and action, balance between feelings and reason; coherence between preaching and practice; adherence of the inflexibly fighting energy to the man’s goodness ”

“ Malatesta had renounced the tranquility of pure intellectual work since the age of eighteen, when he began to neglect his studies and eventually abandoned them altogether to dedicate himself completely to propaganda, revolutionary agitation and to the fight, never turning back until his death. ”

“ Malatesta was opposed to any form of coercive violence, and the needed revolutionary violence was no exception — to the contrary of how all the Jacobin, Bolshevik, and in general authoritarian revolutionaries think. He didn’t believe it was useful, considering it the worst evil, to violate another’s liberty to bend that person to oneself, 47
to one’s own methods, to one’s own particular beliefs. The revolution should free the people from all of the impositions of their governments and masters, not create new impositions. ”

“ These have the great merit of making one read him with appetite, even when they treat the less actual and impassioned questions, because Malatesta took from them the most human aspects which relate best to general interests, and at the same time relate to the specific interests of those in his audience, touching the most intimate strings of the soul and simultaneously conquering their minds with an coherently reasoned logic. ”

“ In London, naturally, he took up work as a mechanic (he was an electrician as well now) in his little workshop in Islington, close to his apartment. As I have already had the occasion to say, work absorbed the majority of his time and above all exhausted him, in a way that left little to dedicate to his constant and continual intellectual work. He would also devote his nights to giving lessons in Italian, French, and general culture to any student that fell on him, to supplement the miserable earnings of his manual labor. ”