Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta s Experiments with Revolution, 1889-1900

by Davide Turcato

Davide Turcato makes the relevance of history dynamically clear. Making Sense of Anarchism is simultaneously a critique of how history is typically written and a demonstration of how to do it right. Using Errico Malatesta's revolutionary exploits as a guide, Turcato provides an antidote to studies that equate anarchism with irrationality. He also produces a gripping survey of debates and political experiments as crucial to the twenty-first century as they were to the nineteenth. Davide Turcato is the editor of The Method of An Errico Malatesta Reader , and of Malatesta's complete works, a ten-volume project being released in English by AK Press.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 17, 2012

Reviews

[Micah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malatesta achieved the rare feat of demonstrating that one could hold to principles and ideals without becoming an insufferable prick who thinks they're too good for everyone else ("condemning the anarchist movement to sterility," as he puts it). He also understood that anarchists would necessarily be a minority (if most were anarchist we wouldn't have to struggle for anarchy) and had incredible tactical sense for maximizing anarchist action. Turcato sums his views up as "anarchist gradualism," a term Malatesta did use, although to mean that anarchism could be approached by a series of localized, armed insurrections (along with other tactics when armed struggle wasn't in the cards), and that it wouldn't come crashing down all over the planet in a single miraculous instant, as some seemed to believe. He also meant we shouldn't be too discouraged by setbacks. But he had an incredible sixth sense for what things (elections, for example) would never lead down the way of freedom and were thus not "sudden" or "gradual" at all, but completely misdirected.

All in all, it's amazing how little by or about Malatesta is available in English, and the history and analysis of Malatesta's views and actions here are very valuable.

[Edward Christie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part biography, part political treatise, part study of the act of history-telling, this is actually just really good. Also he goes on a prison escape, which is cool