149 Between January 13 and 16, 1894, the Lunigiana region, an area in the north of Tuscany with a solid anarchist presence, witnessed insurrectional agitations in the wake of the crackdown on the Fasci movement in Sicily. Less than a month later, on February 12, Émile Henry tossed a bomb in the Terminus Café in Paris, injuring around twenty people, one of them fatally.
150 The one-off publication L’Anarchia was published in August 1896 by Malatesta and other anarchists living in London. In the piece “Errori e rimedi” (Errors and remedies), Malatesta argued with those who endorsed anarchist outrages that indiscriminately hurt innocent people.
151 Icilio Ugo Parrini was one of the main driving forces behind Italian anarchism in Egypt from the 1870s onwards and espoused a strongly anti-organizationist line. See also the collective letter from Alexandria carried in L’Agitazione, December 2, 1897, p. 393 of this volume.
152 On the night of August 30, 1706, during the siege of Turin by the French, the Piedmontese soldier Pietro Micca thwarted an enemy attempt to penetrate the city through a tunnel by setting fire to a mine, at the cost of his own life.
153 The reference is probably to Celso Ceretti who had been stabbed in 1889 in the wake of a harsh controversy between anarchists. Thus, it is likely that the reference omitted from Parrini’s letter was also to Ceretti. On Ceretti’s episode, see the article “For The Sake of the Truth,” p. 357 of this volume.
154 This entire article, including the letter from Parrini, was seized by the censor.
First Impoundment.
A Couple of Words to the Censors
Translated from “Primo sequestro. Due parole al fisco,”
L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 5 (April 12, 1897).
You impounded our last issue.155
Those who got the chance to read it will say whether or not there were grounds for that, and the jury will say, too—if you have the nerve and honesty to bring us before a popular jury.
This impoundment was wholly arbitrary, a really unlawful act.
We are not legalitarians, because… well, we shall not tell you the reason why lest it send you into a rage.
Even so, we have no intention of surrendering what few freedoms the people have won.
Too many freedoms have already been snatched from us because we’ve failed to exercise them and have allowed them to fall into disuse!
The law leaves us the right to make a newspaper and we avail of that right; and since we do so with the intention that it should be read rather than furnishing the police offices with waste paper, we strive to abide strictly within the limits of the law.
This has done us no good; you have impounded the abstract and theoretical expression of thought, to which the law takes no exception.
You have violated the law that you are called upon to uphold.
So be it. We have no effective means of requiring you to respect the law. We do have one consolation, though: you are making propaganda by deed against the law better than we ever could.
If in so doing you help educate the people in unlawfulness, you might even have our thanks for that. Will your masters be so thankful for it, though?
155 Besides the two articles cited already, two more articles and three reports were impounded.
The Anarchists and the
Eastern Question
Translated from “Gli Anarchici e la Questione d’Oriente,”
L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 5, 1st ed. (April 11, 1897).156
We have advised and still advise our friends against going to Greece because, given the current circumstances of the Italian anarchist movement and given the tremendous difficulties, even the near-impossibility, of being able to operate in Greece in conformity with our ideas, we think it would be better to expend our energies in Italy.
But that does not mean that we have no interest in the issues being thrashed out in the East, or that we believe that they fall outside the social question, whose resolution we study and struggle for.
On the contrary, we are keen to explain ourselves on this score: our party is currently at the birthing stage and must commit all of its energies to the activity of internal formation, but a day will come, and soon we hope, when it will be able to make its message heard and its action felt in every single manifestation of the immense, multi-faceted human struggle. And we would do well to prepare it for that.
There are indeed comrades who say: over there the fight is not for anarchy and for socialism; over there no social revolution is under way, so the affair is no concern of ours. In a dispute between Greeks and Turks, between Christians and Muslims, we have no part to play, these comrades argue: our place is wherever the fight aims at the complete abolition of government and capitalism, and not elsewhere. But, in our view, these comrades are wrong.
Our program, anarchist socialism, sets out the end for which we must strive to set the revolution’s course. But how that revolution will start and what course it will take are matters too far beyond a party’s forces to depend on us.
If, prior to taking part in a revolution, we will wait until it has espoused the program and taken the shape we like, we will risk to wait for long! It is for us to imbue it with our program, and in order to do that, we have to be in the thick of it.
Wherever a people rouses itself, wherever a people rises up against an injustice, against bullying, we should be there—not in order to fight passively like dilettante barricade-fighters, after the fashion of the rest and for whatever the rest want, but in order to bring to them not just our brawn but also the succor of our ideas; we should be there to prevent the people, if we can, from letting themselves be led by the nose and falling into fresh servitude, or, if we cannot manage that, to alert the people to their having set off down the wrong road and to see to it that the ensuing disappointments confirm the truth of our program and act as an incentive to following it.
In short, we need to grapple with men as they are, events as they emerge and reap maximum possible advantage for the success of our ideas.
We socialists are well used to seeing history as something a lot simpler than it actually is; often we mistake our logical constructs for real life.
The struggle between the propertied and the proletarians, between the rulers and the ruled, is the only good and necessary struggle, because these alone are irreconcilable conflicts that cannot be resolved except through the abolition of classes. Every other conflict—of nationality, race, or religion—has no real reason to serve as a cause of struggle, since complete freedom for individuals and groups offers a solution to them all. And the purpose of socialist propaganda
