Gnocchi Viani, “Fra due litiganti” (see note 17).
131 The correspondence from London as carried in Lotta di Classe on February 13–14, 1897, reports that the meeting, in which Malatesta took part, was held on 7 February.
Protest Candidates
Translated from “Le candidature di protesta,”
L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 1 (March 14, 1897).
Our comrades in Rome are nominating our friend Luigi Galleani, who is in forced residence, as candidate, and it seems that other protest candidates have been nominated elsewhere.132
It is hard and painful for us to be open and blunt about our opinion. When men whom we respect and like, who have done much and will do much more still for our cause, are in prison or in forced residence and a way of getting them out is presented, how does one go about saying, no matter how distasteful the means, No, let them stay inside!
Nevertheless we shall steel ourselves and make no bones about our thinking. If others find us too uncompromising, let them forgive us on the basis that we too have done our time in prison and in forced residence, we are always at risk of going back again, and we can be strict with others because we know that we would be equally strict with ourselves. As to our candidate friends, they will certainly forgive us for they will be cognizant of our motives: indeed, some of them we know to completely agree with us on this matter.
Protest candidacy, especially when one can be sure that the person elected will not be going on to play the deputy at any price, is not ipso facto at odds with our principles, much less our tactics: but it is nonetheless leaving the door open to equivocation and compromise. It is the first step on a slippery slope where it is hard to keep one’s footing.
If one wants to vote for a protest candidate, one needs to be a voter; meaning that one needs to register and whoever does not register is neglectful in not preparing the means to achieve his ends. One more step, one small step and we too, aping the socialists, will be saying: You cannot be a good anarchist if you don’t register as a voter.
And once registered and with no protest candidate handy, there is a strong temptation to go ahead and vote all the same… as a favor to a friend or to strike a blow against an adversary. We are all human and it takes so little to pop a ballot into a ballot box. Experience teaches.
Then there is the matter of the performance of the person elected. Have you heard Merlino? He has already put his finger on the flaw in the reasoning, and says to us: Once you have yanked Galleani out of forced residence by making him a deputy, is he supposed to stand down so he can be sent straight back into forced residence and provide you with the entertainment of rescuing him again?
We are sure that Galleani, were he to be elected, would not head for Montecitorio or would drop in for just a moment in order to spit his contempt into the face of the deputies, but, even so, this time Merlino has it right. Then again, would they all be made of the same stuff as Galleani?
Protest candidacies have given us back a number of comrades and we heartily rejoice at that, but we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that they have done our party a very great wrong.
Putting Cipriani up as a candidate, for instance, succeeded in freeing him; but in order to do so it smuggled parliamentarism into the Romagna and shattered the anarchist unity in that region.133
Not that we intend any slur upon the Rome comrades. On the contrary: we understand and appreciate their unselfish motives. We just deplore the fact that our party is in such a sorry state that it cannot do anything better on behalf of our prisoners than have recourse to the lame, dangerous stratagem of protest candidacy.
Let us strive, let us propagate, let us organize and then we will be able to elicit much more telling and much more effective displays of public opinion in support of our people than elections.
132 The nomination of protest candidates was a tactic to rescue victims of legal injustices from jail or forced residence. Individuals elected to parliament were shielded from prosecution by the system of parliamentary immunity. Luigi Galleani, a prominent figure of Italian anarchism, had been in forced residence on the island of Pantelleria since November 1896, after serving a three-year prison term, passed on him at a trial in Genoa in 1894, in which thirty-five anarchists faced criminal conspiracy charges.
133 Amilcare Cipriani, initially a Garibaldian and later a protagonist of the Paris Commune, enjoyed enormous popularity. In 1882, Cipriani was sentenced by an Ancona court to twenty-one years for a murder committed fifteen years earlier in Egypt. This unleashed an impressive campaign for his release. In 1886, he was elected as a protest candidate, only for his election to be overturned. As a result of popular pressure, his freedom was restored by an act of clemency in 1888. Romagna was the region where Andrea Costa, the foremost Italian internationalist who started advocating electoral tactics in 1879, was eventually elected to parliament in 1882. Thus, in the early 1880s, the campaign for Cipriani’s protest candidacy intersected with the harsh controversy about Costa’s legalitarian turn.
The Italian Socialist Party’s
Election Manifesto
Translated from “Il manifesto elettorale del Partito socialista italiano,” L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 2 (March 21, 1897).
The “Italian Socialist Party,” called by others the “Milan Party,” has issued its summons to the “battle of the ballot boxes.”134
It states that it is taking to the field “to defend popular freedoms, to demand respect for the law (sic), to win the most pressing forms of justice that are the pledge and condition of its ideal’s advent”; that that ideal is “unlikely to be achieved through muddled riots by a populace starved and brutalized by a life of slavery”; and that consequently “even as it calls for organization and the conquest of public powers by the proletariat, it offers, in its minimum program, a series of graduated reforms designed primarily to improve its living conditions.”
And it demands: a withdrawal from Africa and cut in military spending; statutory freedoms; universal suffrage, tax reform, and a range of social legislation.
Which is fine.
But we wonder why they do not describe themselves simply as republicans, or, indeed, as His Majesty’s opposition?
Maybe it is because of that theoretical claim that collective property is the natural and necessary outcome of modern economic trends? Well then, so long as it is a matter of faraway theories and desires, any good property-owner and any police officer could claim to be socialists readily enough. Just as long as they are left to suit themselves.
Or maybe it has to do with that conquest of public powers on the part of the proletariat? But that is nothing more than so-called “popular sovereignty.” And who is not in favor of the “sovereign people” these days? The point is that the real sovereigns are the ones who stand on the people’s backs.
All the reforms that, according to these socialists, the voters must demand through the ballot box, also figure in more or less radical bourgeois programs, and have already been implemented in several countries, without making any difference in terms of weakening capitalism or bettering the people’s conditions.
Is it worth
