Errico Malatesta Archive
Written: 1922
Source: Published online by LibCom.org
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
AMBROGIO: So tonight you will talk to us about the means by which you propose to attain your ideals... to create anarchism.
I can already imagine. There will be bombs, massacres, summary executions; and then plunder, arson and similar niceties.
GIORGIO: You, my dear, sir, have simply come to the wrong person - you must have thought you were talking to some official or other who commands European soldiers, when they go to civilize Africa or Asia, or when they civilize each other back home.
That's not my style, please believe me.
CESARE: I think, my dear sir, that our friend, who has at last shown that he is a reasonable young man although too much of a dreamer, awaits the triumph of ideas through the natural evolution of society, the spread of education, the progress of science, the development of production.
And after all there is nothing wrong with that. If anarchism has to come, it will come, and it is useless to rack our brains to avoid the inevitable.
But then... it is so far away! Let's live in peace.
GIORGIO: Indeed, would that not be a good reason for you to indulge yourself!
But no, Signor Cesare, I don't rely on evolution, on science and the rest. One would have to wait too long! And, what is worse, one would wait in vain!
Human evolution moves in the direction in which it is driven by the will of humanity, and there is no natural law that says evolution must inevitably give priority to liberty rather than the permanent division of society into two castes, I could almost say into two races, that of the dominators and that of the dominated.
Every state of society, because it has found sufficient reasons to exist, can also persist indefinitely, so long as the dominators don't meet a conscious, active, aggressive opposition from the dominated. The factors of disintegration and spontaneous death which exist in every regime, even when there are compensatory factors of reconstruction and vitality to act as antidotes, can always be neutralized by the skill of whoever disposes of the force of society and directs it as they wish.
I could demonstrate to you, if I wasn't afraid of taking too much time, how the bourgeoisie are protecting themselves from those natural tendencies, from which certain socialists were expecting their imminent death.
Science is a potent weapon that can be used equally for good or for evil. And since in the current conditions of inequality, it is more accessible to the privileged than the oppressed, it is more useful to the former than the latter.
Education, at least that which goes beyond a superficial smattering, is almost useless, and is inaccessible to the underprivileged masses - and even then it can be directed in a way chosen by the educators, or rather by those who pay and choose the educators.
AMBROGIO: But, then all that is left is violence!
GIORGIO: Namely, the revolution.
AMBROGIO: Violent revolution? Armed revolution?
GIORGIO: Precisely.
AMBROGIO: Therefore, bombs…
GIORGIO: Nevermind all that, Signor Ambrogio. You are a magistrate, but I don't like having to repeat that this is not a tribunal, and, for the moment at least, I am not a defendant, from whose mouth it would be in your interest to draw some imprudent remark.
The revolution will be violent because you, the dominant class, maintain yourselves with violence and don't show any inclination to give up peacefully. So there will be gunfire, bombs, radio waves that will explode your deposits of explosives and the cartridges in the cartridge-boxes of your soldiers from a distance... all this may happen. These are technical questions that, if you like, we'll leave to the technicians.
What I can assure you of is that, as far as it depends on us, the violence, which has been imposed on us by your violence, will not go beyond the narrow limits indicated by the necessity of the struggle, that is to say that it will above all be determined by the resistance you offer. If the worst should happen, it will be due to your obstinacy and the bloodthirsty education that, by your example, you are providing to the public.
CESARE: But how will you make this revolution, if there are so few of you?
GIORGIO: It is possible that there is only a limited number of us. It suits you to hope so, and I don't want to take this sweet illusion from you. It means that we will be forced to double and then redouble our numbers…
Certainly our task, when there are no opportunities to do more, is to use propaganda to gather a minority of conscious individuals who will know what they have to do and are committed to doing it. Our task is that of preparing the masses, or as much of the masses as possible, to act in the right direction when the occasion arises. And by the right direction we mean: expropriate the current holders of social wealth, throw down the authorities, prevent the formation of new privileges and new forms of government and reorganize directly, through the activity of the workers, production, distribution and the whole of social life.
CESARE: And if the occasion doesn't arise?
GIORGIO: Well, we'll look for ways to make it happen.
PROSPERO: How many illusions you have, my boy!!!
You think that we are still in the time of stone-age weapons.
With modern arms and tactics you would be massacred before you could move.
GIORGIO: Not necessarily. To new arms and tactics it is possible to oppose appropriate responses.
And then again, these arms are actually in the hands of the sons of the people, and you, by forcing everyone to undertake military service, are teaching everybody how to handle them.
Oh! You cannot imagine how really helpless you'll be on the day a sufficient number rebel.
It is we, the proletariat, the oppressed class, who are the electricians and gas-fitters, we who drive the locomotives, it is we who make the explosives and shape the mines, it is we who drive automobiles and airplanes, it is we who are the soldiers... it is we, unfortunately, that defend you against ourselves. You only survive because of the unwitting agreement of your victims. Be careful of awakening their consciousness…
And then you know, among anarchists everybody governs their own actions, and your police force is used to looking everywhere, except where the real danger is.
But I do not intend to give you a course in insurrectional technique. This is a matter that… does not concern you.
Good evening.