The Anarchists and the Eastern Question – Errico Malatesta (1897)

Translated by Paul Sharkey from ‘Gli Anarchici e la Questione d’Oriente’, L’Agitazione, Ancona, April 11, 1897

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 is precisely to eliminate pointless hatreds 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.