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    Anarchy
    Anarchy
    Anarchy
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    Anarchy

    By Errico Malatesta

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1974
    Author

    Errico Malatesta

    Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was an Italian anarchist. He spent much of his life exiled from Italy and more than ten years in prison. Malatesta wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was an enormously popular public speaker in his time, regularly speaking to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands.

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    Reviews for Anarchy

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    • 4/5
      Anarchy is a slim book, just 54 pages altogether, of which the first 15 are the translator’s introduction. Malatesta’s style, though, is dense - arguments come thick and fast, but with extreme clarity. Of course, in such a short book, not everything can be examined in great depth. But as a brief, clear introduction to anarchist thought, this is hard to beat. It’s a hard book to summarise, because it’s already a very concise summary of a whole body of thought. Still, here’s a distillation of Malatesta’s already distilled argument:Anarchy literally means “without government”. It has taken on the common secondary meaning of “disorder and confusion” only because people have been conditioned to believe that the abolition of government is impossible. In the days when people believed that the abolition of monarchy was impossible, the word “republic” carried a similar meaning to “anarchy” today. The purpose of Malatesta’s book is to show that anarchy is desirable, and that life without government would be a state not of chaos but of solidarity.He begins by reminding us that government does not physically exist - it is merely a “metaphysical tendency”. We speak of the government doing this or that, but the government has no life of its own - it is a collection of individuals who have power over other individuals.So why do we give up our personal liberty and initiative to a few individuals? There are many theories of government, but all are fundamentally based on the idea that “men have conflicting interests, and that an external, higher authority is needed to oblige one section of the people to respect the interests of the other.” This is what Malatesta rejects, going back to the origin of human beings to show how, ill-equipped physically to survive against larger carnivorous animals, people banded together and survived through mutual aid. Alone, we died; together, we survived and prospered. Cooperation, not competition, is what makes us human.However, there’s a problem: “Man discovered that he could … achieve the advantages of cooperation by subjecting other men to his will instead of joining with them; and … obliged the weakest to work for him, preferring dominion to association.”So we end up with the paradox that the basic human attribute of cooperation, instead of being used for the benefit of all, is harnessed by a privileged few to work for their benefit alone. Government exists to support this unequal state of affairs. The solution, Malatesta believes, is to abolish private property and inequality, and therefore the need for government. This would lead to a return to the sharing and cooperation on which human progress was initially built.Malatesta never denies the individualist instinct, but he describes it as a “relic of our ancestors” which has “not only proved useless in ensuring individual wellbeing, but also is harmful to everybody, victors and vanquished alike.” We may still regress to individualist struggle sometimes, but it takes us backwards. Long-term, human progress lies in the higher principle of solidarity, “the coming together of individuals for the wellbeing of all, and of all for the wellbeing of each.” Individual freedom is actually enhanced, not limited, by the freedom of others.img_0010_1534_edited-1In the latter part of the book, Malatesta deals with the question of whether, after the abolition of private property, there could be a “good” government, one which enhanced individual freedom and protected the gains made. His answer is an emphatic “no”, effectively a rebuke to his socialist rivals of the day, but also a pretty prescient description of the flaws of State socialism as practised later in the 20th century. His description of government becoming its own privileged class, acting in the name of the people but inevitably oppressing them, is pretty much what happened in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.The problem is that a lot of questions remain unanswered. To some extent, this is the nature of the work - it’s a deliberately short, concise book, and doesn’t seek to answer everything. But part of it is also due to Malatesta’s thought process - he says that he can’t predict the future, and doesn’t have all the answers. The point of anarchism is for all the people to decide, not just one. Here he is, for example, discussing education: “How will children be educated? We don’t know. So what will happen? Parents, pedagogues and all who are concerned with the future of the young generation will come together, will discuss, will agree or divide according to the views they hold, and will put into practice the methods which they think are the best. And with practice that method which in fact is the best, will in the end be adopted. And similarly with all problems which present themselves.”This is an admirable approach when it comes to details, but the trouble is that there are some pretty big questions that do need to be answered. How will private property be abolished? Who will do it? What kind of system will replace it? How will the rights of those who disagree with the new system be guaranteed? What’s to stop the person with the most guns from setting himself up as the new authority? I’m sure you can think of plenty more valid questions, and none of them are really answered in this book. Malatesta simply says that a revolution will take place, private property will be abolished and the social wealth will be placed in the hands of the people, who will somehow forget the antagonisms they have learnt and revert to the “natural” human principle of solidarity. I’m sorry, but this is not convincing to me.This, I find, is often the problem with radical social theories. The end result may be desirable, but how to get from A to B? If current society is so irredeemably broken, then how do you change it without riding roughshod over the rights of people to disagree with you? People are, after all, shaped to a great degree by the society they live in, a problem Malatesta recognises: “How will these men, brought up in a society based on class and individual conflict, ever be able to change themselves suddenly and become capable of living in a society in which everyone will do as he wishes and must do, and without outside coercion and through the force of his own will, seek the welfare of others?”It’s a question he doesn’t answer convincingly enough for me. The old A to B problem again. Still, I loved reading about B, a place in which “my freedom is the freedom of all, since I am not truly free in thought and in fact, except when my freedom and my rights are confirmed and approved in the freedom and rights of all men who are my equals” (Bakunin). B sounds like a place I could be happy. Perhaps, somehow, we’ll get there in the end.

    Book preview

    Anarchy - Errico Malatesta

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Anarchy, by Errico Malatesta

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

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    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Anarchy

    Author: Errico Malatesta

    Release Date: July 28, 2012 [EBook #40365]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANARCHY ***

    Produced by Vineshen Pillay - vineshen.pillay@gmail.com

    ANARCHY

    BY

    Errico Malatesta

    Published by the Free Society Library in 1900

    ANARCHY.

    ANARCHY is a word which comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, without government: the state of a people without any constituted authority, that is, without government.

    Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a party (which party has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word Anarchy was taken universally in the sense of disorder and confusion; and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.

    We shall not enter into philological discussions; for the question is not philological but historical. The common meaning of the word does not misconceive its true etymological signification, but is derived from this meaning, owing to the prejudice that government must be a necessity of the organization of social life; and that consequently a society without government must be given up to disorder, and oscillate between the unbridled dominion of some and the blind vengeance of others.

    The existence of this prejudice, and its influence on the meaning which the public has given the word, is easily explained.

    Man, like all living beings, adapts and habituates himself to the conditions in which he lives, and transmits by inheritance his acquired habits. Thus being born and having lived in bondage, being the descendant of a long line of slaves, man, when he began to think, believed that slavery was an essential condition of life; and liberty seemed to him an impossible thing. In like manner, the workman, forced for centuries, and thus habituated, to depend upon the good will of his employer for work, that is, for bread, and accustomed to see his own life at the disposal of those who possess the land and the capital, has ended in believing that it is his master who gives him to eat, and demands ingenuously how it would be possible to live, if there were no master over him?

    In the same way, a man who had had his limbs bound from his birth, but had nevertheless found out how to hobble about, might attribute to the very hands that bound him his ability to move, while, on the contrary, they would be diminishing and paralyzing the muscular energy of his limbs.

    If, then, we add to the natural effect of habit the education given him by his masters, the parson, teacher, etc., who are all interested in teaching that the employer and the government are necessary; if also we add the judge and the bailiff to force those who think differently--and might try to propagate their opinions --to keep silence, we shall understand how the prejudice as to the utility and necessity of masters and governments has become established. Suppose a doctor brings forward a complete theory, with a thousand ably invented illustrations, to persuade that man with the bound limb whom we were describing, that, if his limb were freed, he could not walk, could not even live. The man would defend his bands furiously, and consider any one his enemy who tried to tear them off.

    Thus, since it is believed that government is necessary, and that without government there must be disorder and confusion, it is natural and logical to suppose that Anarchy, which signifies without government, must also mean absence of order.

    Nor is this fact without parallel in the history of words. In those epochs and countries where people have considered government by one man (monarchy) necessary, the word republic (that is, the government of many) has been used precisely like Anarchy, to imply disorder and confusion. Traces of this signification of the word are still to be found in the popular language of almost all countries.

    When this opinion is changed, and the public convinced that government is not necessary, but extremely harmful, the word Anarchy, precisely because it signifies without government, will become equal to saying natural order, harmony of the needs and interests of all, complete liberty with complete solidarity.

    Therefore, those are wrong who say that Anarchists have chosen their name badly, because it is erroneously understood by the masses and leads to a false interpretation. The error does not come from the word, but from the thing. The difficulty which Anarchists meet with in spreading their views does not depend upon the name they have given themselves, but upon the fact that their conceptions strike at all the inveterate prejudices that people have about the function of government, or the State, as it is called.

    Before proceeding further, it will be well to explain this last word (the State) which, in our opinion, is the real cause of much misunderstanding.

    Anarchists, and we among them, have made use, and still generally make use of the word State, meaning thereby that collection of institutions, political, legislative, judicial, military, financial, etc., by means of which the management of their own affairs, the guidance of their personal conduct and the care of ensuring their own safety are taken from the

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