Luigi Galleani Archive
Written: 1914.
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
The writings of Luigi Galleani that are presented in this new edition, are all published, together with others from the period 1915–18, in the volume Una battaglia, published by “l’Adunata dei Refrattari” in 1947, and three of them (to be exact, those entitled respectively “Per la guerra, per la neutralità, o per, la pace?”) were previously collected in a pamphlet, printed by the comrades of “l’Adunata” in 1929, under the title “Against war, against peace, for social revolution” and “Against war, against peace, for revolution”). Now, many years later, both the pamphlet and the volume have become bibliographical rarities. Since not all the comrades feel the same pleasure in the sometimes fatiguing, often unsuccessful search for such rarities, and since a reasoned reprinting of Galleani’s writings has not yet taken place (and I am among those who regret it very much), and seemed useful, -at a time when the theme of war and peace is running on everyone’s lips again, to put back into circulation some of the articles that our comrade dedicated to the subject, at a time when the First World War was raging and the cemeteries and hospices were filled with the dead and invalids, but also with confusion and misunderstandings in the heads of many revolutionaries, including some of the most notorious anarchists of the time.
The writings that follow, instead, present us with a Galleani as always lucid, timely and punctual, not only in the hot analysis of the political, social and economic situation, but also in grasping the errors and disbandments of the socialist and libertarian camp at the very moment they appeared, as and masterfully exemplified by the arguments with which he responds to Kropotkin’s warlike declarations. This real and proper requisition against the “pragmatist” temptations of the revolutionary movement (which readers will find in the article, or rather, in the articles collected under the title “For
war, for neutrality, or for peace?”) is one of the most interesting parts still today to be proposed to the reflection of the comrades, and already too much has been written about the issue as a whole for me to return to it, if not to highlight a point that is particularly close to my heart.
Galleani himself, before examining and rebutting the warlike positions of Cipriani and Kropotkin, breaks a lance in favor of their good faith and feels compelled to justify his diversity of views (in other words, his consistency with the theory and practice of anarchism) with these words:
“Those are not worse than we are; we are not better, we are only farther away, in a less turbulent atmosphere; and from afar, the whole of the landscapes and phenomena is surprised in the broad outlines and essential relations without shadow and without deviation, while up the mind, up the soul, the wave that over there boils with all the passions! And it is clouded with every anxiety, dense with every disturbance, and with every aberration it is weak, weary, harmless, as if it were a pure cross between the two continents of all its bitterness, of all its ungrateful bitterness.
This type of reflection, in its general sense, could well be shared in many circumstances, but at this juncture, without wanting to seem presumptuous, I feel I must deny, and, better to say, correct the author himself, who, on this occasion, I think has allowed himself to be moved more than others by a feeling of modesty and a need for respect towards comrades who had given, in words and deeds, to the cause of the libertarian revolution, each one in half a century of commitment and reading.
The reason why Galleani, even if from far away America, among other things not yet directly involved in the conflict in the memo in which he wrote, is able to avoid and counteract the mistakes and skidding of Cipriani and Kropotkin, must be sought, in my opinion, precisely in a motivation of opposite character to the one he himself, ferociously put forward with too much generosity. He, in fact, was never the scholar and the theorist locked in his own intellectual universe, it was never the scientists of the revolution, who observed and weighed the evolution of the class clash in the aseptic, muffled and all summed up fictitious atmosphere of his own splendid isolation. Ferse for this reason never gave us (and probably today there will be no lack of those who are able to blame them) a prepackaged system of his own thought, but only hot written testimonies, in the contemporaneity of the action and directly aimed at influencing, modifying and directing this action in its unfolding. In my opinion, the richness and the ever-present validity of his thought lies precisely in the fact that it was never separated from his personal participation in the events he dealt with, from his uninterrupted militancy within the most conscious part of the revolutionary class, from his willingness to immerse body and soul in the crucible of the social conflict in progress, from his willingness to get his hands dirty in the struggle or, in other words, lies in his ability never to disjoin thought and action, theory and practice, but instead to make them interact continuously, as phases of a single, inseparable process.
On the other hand, Galleani wasn’t even the adventurer ready to throw himself in any melee, the idealist a bit shaggy and confused ready to ride any tiger to give vent to his need to fight against the enemy, without often having clear who this enemy was and therefore risking, sometimes, to end up working, without even realizing it, just to... the King of Prussia.
His ability to grasp immediately, almost instinctively, the exact terms of the ruthless confrontation between reaction and revolution, between the ruling class and the oppressed class, is rooted in the fact that he has grasped with great clarity the irreconcilable class split that runs throughout the history of social confrontation and in the extreme consistency with which he always adhered to this simple and yet inalienable principle of anarchism, without which one risks getting lost in the mists of humanism, resisting the flattery of the apparent “concreteness” of the various pragmatism and rejecting the prosopopoeia of the many revisions to which more or less illustrious intellectuals have sought. to submit the linearity of this class concept.
It is the same Galleani himself who, in another point of the above mentioned writing, affirms how, outside of this clarity and coherence, any deviation becomes not only possible, but also logical and inevitable: “On the ground of compromises and so: moved the point of departure the deviations go going to the antithesis without losing the relative logical appearance. When you exclude the homeland, you are forced to say class, to see nothing more than social revolution.”
I did not want to point out this problem, which is not at all marginal as some would have us believe) for the sole purpose of showing off dialectics: the fact is that the reflection I wanted to conduct on the Galleani fits in perfectly with the current situation of the anarchist and libertarian movement. In her bosom, in fact, there is certainly no lack, in our days, of those who love to make more or less wise judgments about what they see happening from afar, with all the cold disdainfulness of those who, presuming to have imprisoned in their intellectual alembic the essence of truth, can take the measures of the world far and wide, without ever having to risk to wear their new shoes in the mud of the streets; as well as those comrades who, assigned to action as an end in itself an untouchable primacy, are ready to jump on all the wagons of passage and to support in fact the most disparate theories (or perhaps those that gather at that time the most consensus) in order to demonstrate their undoubted animosity.
And the trouble wouldn’t even be that big, if we could limit ourselves to roughly drawing a line that divides the “good” comrades from the “wrong” ones: what is more dangerous, and that this kind of behavior exerts or has exerted its charm. on each one of us and that in these mistakes is easy for anyone to slip, maybe armed with the best intentions of this world.
And these two cases, apparently so different from each other, if not even opposed, are, on closer inspection, only two sides of the same coin; in one case and another it is simply a matter of exchanging one’s desires, or one’s theoretical lucubrations, for reality. There is only one cause, and therefore also the cause, the same one indicated to us by Galleani, paraphrasing which we could say: when you exclude the class, you are forced to no longer see the social revolution. It is in this way that the way is opened to reformism, swamped under the most original and extravagant appearances or, for converse, to the machiavellisms typical of every Jacobinism.
In order to remain inherent to the theme of this book, which is that of war and peace, and to try to draw from it the most useful indications for the needs of the struggles we are carrying on today, I would like to invite comrades to reflect on the way in which such deviations are expressed today within the so-called anti-war movement, which seems to have acquired new impetus and seems destined to make more and more proselytes.
Such a consideration could only cheer us up, at least on a superficial examination. On the contrary, I am afraid that we should be concerned about the development of so many (and so varied) peace movements. This concern arises as soon as we reflect on the title that so effectively sums up the content of Galleani’s writings: against war, yes, but also against peace, let us not forget that. And it becomes more tangible if we come to understand how the so-called peace is nothing more, in our day and age, than seventy or forty years ago, than the concrete and lasting form of the interim-imperialist armed conflict, so much so that one might well say, paraphrasing a famous motto: if you want war, prepare peace. I will try to be clearer, as far as I am concerned, not to bore the readers too much with this preface.
There is no movement, group, party, government or gang of social criminals that has not put the word peace on its flag. The Italian government speaks of peace in the very act of sending its tanks and selected combat corpses to Lebanon, as in the moment of transforming south-eastern Sicily into an American atomic arsenal; the Israeli government speaks of peace as it orders the massacre of hundreds of women, old men and children in Palestinian refugee camps; The plenipotentiaries of the United States and the Soviet Union are talking about peace, as they prepare to deal with the number of nuclear warheads that everyone is prepared to install around the world; millions of young people, workers, men and women who do not realize that they are already the slaughterhouse meat of the current war are also talking about peace, much more naively.
Our first task must be to expose this colossal hoax. Not only because, as Galleani writes “we have never known what peace is!”; but also and above all because, by force of compromises, by force of “concreteness” and “practical sense”, the ruling class has succeeded in making its endemic need for geographically limited wars give the name of peace. That peace for whose “preservation” (what nonsense!) the European and American pacifist movements are now taking to the field is nothing more than war on a small scale, war far from the front door, war that one can pretend to ignore, letting the false conscience do its work of numbing individuals.
Today, the pacifist movements carry on their shoulders the very serious responsibility of being the advanced tip of the line that is fighting for the preservation of the social situation as it is. By shaking the specter of nuclear war, power leverages the most atavistic sentiments of terror of individuals to make them forget that the risk of atomic conflict can only be eliminated by the destruction of power itself, by the overthrow of states and their criminal system of domination.
Whoever today keeps this truth, whatever the smokescreens with which he tries to cloud our brains, does nothing but work for the King of Prussia, does nothing more, realize or-or-no, than to contribute to the strengthening of that system of power that he has created and that increases the atomic arsenals.
The pages of Galleani collected in this volume remind us of something that we are all too often inclined to neglect, taken by quantitative cravings or blinded by the good will to do: for conscious revolutionaries there are no possible shortcuts or magic formulas to invent, the only way we can beat is that of the reality of the social clash in progress and the relationships of power that it determines, however unpopular or unprofitable this way may be.
Aggregating ourselves to carriages in which confusion is too often proportional to size, for the sole illusion of being so “among the masses” can only be counterproductive, alio the same way as all the supposedly “cunning” tactics with which, while we delude ourselves into opening up who knows what contradictions in the enemy camp, we do nothing but mystify the real terms of the clash, increasingly distancing its evolution in a revolutionary sense.
The only contradiction that we must put before the eyes of all, that we must work to deepen and make irremediable, in which we must act as propellers and detonators, and that which shows how the disappearance of war (and of that false peace which is nothing but the necessary continuation of it) is irreconcilable with the persistence of class domination and with all those structures and theories which, under any pretext, justify and perpetuate its existence. We must make it very clear that, paradoxical as it may seem, the best allies of warmongering states today are those who challenge them without putting their existence at stake, because in this way they endorse the mystification of a possible alternative within the existing state of affairs, misrepresenting the reality of the current clash. To propose again, under any semblance, the old fraud of the Popular Front, seeking tactical collusion with political and social forces! that we know are among the main enemies of any liberation process, would be today a suicide.
From a careful reading of the following pages, it will not be difficult for the comrades to draw precise indications about the role that the acting minorities are called to support in such as in other circumstances. What are the most suitable tools and ways to perform this role today, is not a question that can be dealt with here: it is up to the movement to know how to build the opportunities and means. So, to finish, I will limit myself to extrapolating a few lines from the writings presented here, arranging myself then, together with the other companions, to the task of giving a concrete answer to the question that concludes them: “Experience leaves the furrow, and in that furrow vigils the weed of inertia only because no one has sown any more seed; and despair and torment, anguish, resignation and sloth only because responsibilities evade, energies and forces are ignored, and ends are not glimpsed; but give responsibility a semblance, give awareness to strength, give it a light, give it a goal, and you will have made despair the audacity, resignation the heroism, sloth the revolt, deb vassal a sanctum, (....) of the Bastille a pile of ruins; and of the war the social revolution. Who’s gonna keep an eye on the cyclops?”
Forli, July 1983
LOMBARDI