Errico Malatesta

Malatesta’s political formation began in the radical upheavals of post-unification Italy. Born at Santa Maria Capua Vetere in 1853, he encountered republican and socialist ideas as a young man and joined the International Workingmen’s Association, where he came under the influence of Mikhail Bakunin and revolutionary collectivism.¹ He abandoned faith in parliamentary reform and became an advocate of social revolution led by workers and peasants. His activism brought repeated arrests, exile, and surveillance. He lived and organized in Switzerland, France, Britain, Argentina, and elsewhere, using exile to build international connections rather than treating it as political withdrawal.

Malatesta returned repeatedly to Italy, including during periods of intense unrest, and remained a prominent public voice until the Fascist regime placed him under surveillance and later house arrest. He died in Rome in 1932.²

Malatesta argued that anarchism meant social freedom achieved through the abolition of both the state and capitalist domination. He favored an anarchist communist society in which production and distribution would be organized cooperatively, while rejecting the idea that a revolutionary minority could permanently govern on behalf of the majority.³ For him, liberty was not merely the absence of legal restraint: it required material conditions that allowed people to participate equally in collective decisions.

His distinctive contribution was a pragmatic theory of revolutionary organization. Malatesta defended unions, local associations, and coordinated anarchist groups as necessary instruments, even though he opposed hierarchical parties. He also distinguished mass insurrection from individual terrorism, arguing that isolated attacks could provoke repression, alienate working people, and substitute dramatic gestures for durable social action. His approach combined revolutionary aims with tactical flexibility and a strong ethical concern for means as well as ends.

Malatesta made journalism and political education central to anarchist practice. He wrote for and helped establish numerous newspapers and journals, including Umanità Nova, founded in Milan in 1920 during the Biennio Rosso, the period of strikes and factory occupations that followed the First World War.¹ His short works were designed for broad circulation rather than academic audiences. Anarchy presents a concise account of anarchist aims, while Between Peasants explains revolutionary socialism through a dialogue between rural characters; At the Café uses conversational exchanges to address objections about authority, violence, and social coordination.

He participated in international congresses and maintained correspondence across linguistic and national boundaries. His activism was not confined to Italy: his years in Argentina helped strengthen anarchist networks among immigrant workers, while London became an important base for publishing and contact with European militants.²

Malatesta’s lesser-known importance lies in the tension he preserved between revolutionary principle and practical judgment. He did not treat anarchism as a blueprint that could be imposed immediately; instead, he described revolution as a contested process in which institutions would be transformed through popular initiative. He also resisted rigid economic formulas, allowing that future communities might use different arrangements according to local conditions and collective choice.³

Although often grouped with insurrectionary anarchists, Malatesta criticized conspiratorial politics and warned against confusing courage with effectiveness. His debates with Peter Kropotkin and other anarchists reflected disagreements over war, revolutionary strategy, and the organization of the movement. Under Fascism, censorship and confinement limited his public activity, but his earlier writings continued to circulate internationally in translation. Later anarchist organizers drew on his insistence that freedom required both opposition to coercive institutions and disciplined cooperation among ordinary people.⁴

Anarchist communism

A socialist tradition seeking a stateless society based on common ownership, voluntary association, and distribution according to collectively determined needs.

Biennio Rosso

The “two red years” of 1919–1920 in Italy, marked by strikes, worker agitation, and factory occupations.

Individual terrorism

Political violence carried out by isolated individuals or small groups rather than by a mass movement; Malatesta criticized it as strategically damaging.

Umanità Nova

An Italian-language anarchist newspaper founded by Malatesta in Milan in 1920.