and conflicts that damage the solution to the social problem, and to unite all the oppressed, all the exploited, regardless of nationality or religion, in the fight against oppression and exploitation.
But in the meantime, such pointless, damaging conflicts do exist and need to be taken into account. They are complicated in a thousand ways by the fundamental conflicts spawned by property and by government. In one place the oppressor is a foreigner, in another the property-owner is of a different religion than the proletarian; and the fight against the property-owner and the oppressor is complicated, muddied and overlooked in the eruption of racial antagonisms and religious hatreds. Often, indeed, the natural enemies, property-owner and proletarian, people and government, fraternize and fight together in the name of fatherland or faith.
Besides, in certain peoples, the prejudice that the predominance of people from a different race or religion is the source of all their woes is so deeply rooted that there is no imminent hope of seeing the social question posed on its proper terrain unless the national question has first been resolved.
The East is the classical territory for these phenomena.
What should our action or practical program be, if we could play an active and effective part in the events now going on in Candia and in the Balkan Peninsula?
We should be the soldiers and apostles of freedom—of freedom for all. We should conduct ourselves in such a way as to make it understood that, for us, the enemy is not the Turkish proletarian, but the Turkish government and pasha; and that the enemy is also the Greek or the Armenian or the Bulgarian, if he is the exploiter of other men’s labors. And if we could fight bravely, then the prestige that the brave always enjoy in the eyes of warring populations and in times of war would be a great boost to us in this task.
We should stand with the Greeks, as long as they are the oppressed who fight for freedom; with the Turks, when the Greeks, having gained the upper hand, seek to become butchers and oppressors in turn.
We should fight alongside the Greeks when they fight for the right of unfettered self-determination. We should hold aloof and loudly denounce the shame and harm that will come of it once the Greeks acclaim King George and willingly place themselves under a new yoke.
Our comrades on the Greek border need no suggestions from us. Besides, given how remote we are from them, such suggestions can only be general and abstract. The efforts of Cipriani and his comrades to cling to as independent a stance as possible, show us that they understand their mission and that they are there to unfurl the glorious banner of international socialism.
Rather less hopeful, we admire their heroic panache and wish them success—for their own sake and for the sake of the cause.
156 This issue of L’Agitazione was published in two editions, on April 11 and 12 respectively. The first was unabridged, and the second came after the censor’s intervention. This article appears only in the first edition, having then been impounded. The other articles transcribed here appeared in both editions, but we have indicated them as dating from the second edition because that was the one from which we have translated them.
The 1st of May
Translated from “Il 1.o Maggio,” L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1,
no. 5 (April 12, 1897).
Six or seven years ago, the approach of this date used to arouse great hopes and great fears. The bourgeois quaked, the police made ready for a crackdown, the revolutionaries stood in readiness for the struggle, and huge masses of proletarians looked forward eagerly to that date like some mystical day fated to signal the end of their suffering.
Since then, the movement has, little by little, been dwindling in importance until it has been forgotten by some, and looked upon by others as one more innocuous anniversary on the calendar of the revolutionary merry-makers.
What should have been the tangible sign of the solidarity pact between the oppressed of every country, what should have been a review of the proletarian forces, what should have helped prepare the people for today’s great revolutionary means—the general strike—has turned into the feast of labor—and a feast day little observed!
Why such a stark and swift decline?
Who is to blame?
Pretty much everybody. The democratic socialists who, in Europe anyway, had come up with the idea and taken the initiative with the movement, were almost scared by the enthusiasm it inspired and by the revolutionary tenor it went assuming in a few months in all countries, and they immediately strove to play down its significance and drain it of the pugnaciousness it has acquired. In the bigger towns, where their party could marshal impressive numbers, they turned the First of May strike into a feast held on the first Sunday of the month, thereby sapping it of its character and raison d’être; or they sought to whittle down the demonstration to a procession of delegates walking to parliament to hand in a petition, thereby creating the belief, congruent with their tactics, that everything could be obtained through the law and that there was no point in street agitation.
The anarchists were divided, prey as they were of those germs of dissolution that, after dissipating so many energies, eventually led to a sharp separation and to the present new direction. One faction remained indifferent, or opposed the movement either because it was hostile to any movement of the organized masses or because this one did not have the outward appearance of an anarchist movement. The other faction enthusiastically embraced the idea, tried to imbue it with a pronounced revolutionary character, but having no broad base within the workers’ movement, could only produce unavailing efforts attested by personal sacrifices of varying gravity.
Only in Spain, precisely because there they were the soul of the workers’ movement, were anarchists able to set off and sustain really noteworthy agitation that first year. But then in Spain too the movement faded and perished: partly because there too the germs of disintegration afflicting anarchist bodies in other countries were making headway, and partly because of another factor that was everywhere the primary reason for the decline of the 1st of May.
And that factor was immoderate, untimely enthusiasm. The notion had taken root in the people that the revolution would take place on the First of May in a year or two. One year went by and then the next and another and still no revolution came. Disillusionment set in and the subject of the First of May was dropped.
The movement is in need of an overhaul: overhauling it with serious intent, without unwarranted short-term expectations, but with the firm intention of never halting again.
We are not going to make the revolution in 20 days: the police need not panic. We shall abstain from working, try to get as many people as possible to abstain too, and seize the opportunity to carry out as much propaganda as possible.
This is all our forces allow us to do now. We shall think about the rest in due time.
How to Get… What You Want
Translated from “Come si conquista… quel che si vuole,” parts 1 and 2, L’Agitazione (Ancona) 1, no. 5 (April 12, 1897); L’Agitatore Socialista Anarchico (April 25, 1897), single issue, replacement for no. 7 of L’Agitazione.
The history of the struggles that won the present type of suffrage in Belgium is interesting and very instructive. It shows how, through vigor and constancy associated with caution, a popular party managed, in the space of a few years, to bring a selfish, arrogant class to surrender, even though that class was determined to resist every concession
