The Utopian Realism of Errico Malatesta

If realism is the idea that political philosophy should orient itself towards really existing
politics1, then radical realism is, in my view, the idea that the best kind of realism is one
which aims for and works to bring about fundamental social change, such as abolishing
capitalism, prisons, or white supremacy. Radical realism therefore seeks to instantiate
Raymond Geusss view that political philosophy has to be both fully realistic and fully
utopian.2 The idea being that we should accept the existence of the grim reality which
surrounds us and not be subject to wishful thinking, while also aspiring for and trying to
achieve a radically different world from the one we find ourselves in. Radical realists are
therefore utopians in the sense of advocating social arrangements which are impossible to
implement under existing conditions and so can only actually be realised if existing
conditions are transformed.

What is of course not immediately clear is what utopian realist political theory would actually
look like and so how realism and utopianism would be combined in practice. When
utopianism is discussed in the contemporary literature the focus is generally on whether or
not one can be a utopian and a realist at the same time, as opposed to actual attempts at
utopian realist theory.3 Thankfully, the radical realists of today are not the first people to
attempt to combine utopianism with realism. Utopian realism has in fact been a core
component of one of the largest and most influential mass movements in human history,
anarchism. Anarchism is a kind of anti-state socialism which first emerged in late 19th
century Europe and sought to abolish capitalism and the state, alongside other forms of
hierarchy such as sexism and racism, in favour of a stateless classless society organised
through networks of directly democratic workplace and community assemblies.4 One of the
main theorists of anarchism was an Italian called Errico Malatesta and it is his ideas which
concern me today.

To understand Malatestas approach to political theory we must first understand what

1
Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat, Realism in Normative Political Theory, Philosophy Compass 9, no. 10 (2014), 2.
2
Quoted in Prinz, Janosch. Raymond Geuss Radicalization of Realism in Political Theory. Philosophy &
Social Criticism 42, no. 8 (2015), 785-6.
3
Rossi, Being Realistic and Demanding the Impossible, Work in Progress Paper Presented at What Is
Realism? Conference National University of Singapore 2015.
4
Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland,
CA: AK Press, 2009), 71.
politics, which I term, conformism and idealism. A conformist is someone who rejects the
idea that things can or should change in any substantial fashion and at best seeks minor
alterations to existing structures. While Malatesta accepts that we are besieged and buffeted
on every side by hostile realities he thinks that [t]he whole of human progress has been
made up of battling against natural facts and social facts. As a result, we have to combat
these realities, rather than accept everything, and defer to everything because this is the
situation in which history placed us. 5 Malatesta therefore, like Geuss, recognizes the fact
that political action is characterised by its ability to not conform to existing rules and instead
violate them, ignore them, or change what the rules are.6

In contrast to a conformist, an idealist is someone who loses sight of reality and instead
focuses on abstract ideals which are disconnected from the real world.7 For example,
according to Malatesta, anarchists who focus on describing in detail what an anarchist utopia
would look like or imagining how an ideal revolution would occur are so caught up in their
ideas that they ignore the real political situation on the ground and the need to develop theory
which guides action in the present.8 In a similar fashion, anarchists who reject all forms of
violence due to abstract moral principles are ignoring a crucial fact of reality: the ruling
classes have and will continue to use violence to crush dissent and perpetuate the capitalist
social order. Under such conditions one must use violence in self-defence in order to achieve
anarchist goals. To not do so is to condemn popular movements to defeat at the hands of the
police and army.9 As Malatesta writes, we are forced to struggle in the world as we found it,
on pains of remaining sterile dreamers, who leave untouched all the existing evils, and do
good to no one, for fear of doing wrong to anyone.10

Malatestas critiques of conformism and idealism come together in his remark that,

the problem facing us anarchists, who regard anarchy not so much as a beautiful
dream to be chased by the light of the moon, but as an individual and social way of
life to be brought about for the greatest good of all is to so conduct our activities as

5
Errico Malatesta, The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA:
AK Press, 2014), 450.
6
Raymond Geuss, Politics and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 41.
7
Malatesta, A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of LAgitazione 1897-1898 (Oakland CA: AK
Press, 2016), 13.
8
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 420, 425, 451.
9
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 188-9.
10
Quoted in Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatestas Experiments with Revolution
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2012) 22.
 to achieve the greatest useful effect in the various circumstances in which history
places us. One must not ignore reality, but if reality is noxious, one must fight it,
resorting to every means made available to us by reality itself.11

In other words, if we aspire to a fundamentally different world then we must engage in real
political practice which tries to bring about a different world. If this real political practice is
to be effective it must be guided by strategy and ways of organising which are both
appropriate to the situation in which we are acting and capable of actually bringing about an
anarchist society. As Malatesta writes, to be able to act, to be able to contribute to the
realization of ones cherished ideas, one has to choose ones own path. In parties, as more
generally in life, the questions of method are predominant. If the idea is the beacon, the
method is the helm. It is for this reason that we are anarchists in our goal but we are
anarchist in our method too.12 Malatesta thus conceives of anarchism as both an ideal
society and as a method of political action.

For Malatesta we should not conceive of the goal as a set of detailed blueprints about how
exactly an anarchist society would work.13 After all we are not able to in the name of
Anarchy, prescribe for the coming man what time he should go to bed, or on what days he
should cut his nails!14 Such specific practical questions are for the people in the future
society to answer themselves. Instead we can do no more than indicate a method through
which people can act and determine the nature of society.15 By this Malatesta means that we
should think of an anarchist society as one which successfully instantiates certain states of
affairs, such as people having a say in decisions which affect them, people not being
oppressed, or social relations being infused with a sense of solidarity. These states of affairs
will be actualised through general anarchist methods of organisation and association, such as
each person in a group having a vote, smaller groups federating together to form larger
groups, or organisations electing instantly recallable mandated delegates to perform
administrative tasks. These anarchist methods of organisation and association provide the
parameters in which an open ended project of experimentation can occur whereby people
develop and refine ways of being which achieve the states of affairs that characterise an ideal

11
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 449-50.
12
Quoted in Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism, 55.
13
This is similar to Marxs opposition to so called utopian socialism because of its incredibly detailed models
of what a future society would look like.
14
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 140.
15
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 141.
anarchist society. As Malatesta writes, Anarchist ideals. . . are the experimental system
brought from the field of research to that of social realization.16 On such a view the point is
not that we are one hundred percent successful at instantiating the states of affairs which
characterise an ideal anarchist society but that we are constantly engaging in action which
attempts to do so and thereby brings reality closer to our ideals. In Malatestas words,
Anarchy cannot come but little by little slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and
extension. Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or
within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always.17

This march towards Anarchy must begin in the present with anarchist movements prefiguring
the future anarchist society and therefore attempting, as far as it is possible, to construct the
world as they wish it was during their struggle against the world as it is. To prefigure an
anarchist society is to build the kinds of non-hierarchical and democratic social relations and
practices that would exist in such a society. In so doing anarchists are developing through
experimentation in the present the real methods of organisation and association that people in
the future will use to achieve the states of affairs that characterise an ideal anarchist society.
Anarchists organisations generally do this in two ways. First, by embodying the kinds of
organisational structure and methods of deliberation and decision-making that a future
society is to contain. For example, making decisions through direct democracy or creating
affinity groups which are formed for specific purposes and dissolve when they are no longer
needed. Second, by performing the kinds of functions that organisations in a future society
will do, such as a community assembly enabling locals to run their own affairs, or an
anarchist school providing free education to children, or a co-op managing a workplace
democratically.

Malatesta provides two main reasons why anarchists must prefigure the future anarchist
society. The first reason is that means and ends are not separate from one another. The means
you use to pursue a goal determine where you actually end up and so where you want to go
imposes limits on how you can get there. Malatesta writes,

it is not enough to desire something; if one really wants it adequate means must be
used to secure it. And these means are not arbitrary, but instead cannot but be
conditioned by the ends we aspire to and by the circumstances in which the struggle

16
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 302.
17
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 300.
 takes place, for if we ignore the choice of means we would achieve other ends,
possibly diametrically opposed to those we aspire to, and this would be the obvious
and inevitable consequence of our choice of means. Whoever sets out on the highroad
and takes a wrong turning does not go where he intends to go but where the road leads
him.18

Therefore, if we want to achieve an anarchist society, which is a free stateless and non-
hierarchical society that is organised through federated democratic assemblies, then the
anarchist movement that builds such a society must itself be organised through these same
methods of anarchist action. Were the anarchist movement to fail to embody its principles
and, for example, be organised in an authoritarian top down manner then its revolution would
not produce an anarchist society. Instead it would produce an authoritarian society in which
the authoritarianism of the movement would come to characterise society as a whole, such as
the former leadership of the movement becoming the new ruling class. For Malatesta, while a
revolution marks a dramatic shift in social life there is no such dramatic shift in anarchist
methods of organisation and association. The methods remain the same. What changes is the
context and the conditions under which these methods are applied and so the extent to which
they can be fully put into practice.19

The second reason is that it is only through experience within prefigurative spaces that people
can develop into the kinds of people capable of both overthrowing capitalism and the state
and building a functioning anarchist society. When a worker is active within a militant union,
for example, they develop a sense of fellowship that binds him to his comrades, learn to
cooperate with others in the defence of shared interests, battle against the bosses and the
boss-supporting government, and come to understand that bosses and governments are
useless parasites and that the workers could run the apparatus of society on their own. While
during and after a revolution workers must take control of the economy and produce to
satisfy peoples needs. In order to do this effectively workers must already be able to
collectively self-manage their lives and so must have developed this skill prior to the
revolution. As Malatesta writes, how could workers be expected to provide for pressing
needs unless they were already used to coming together to deal jointly with their common
interests. In the case of food production, for example, a revolution will need bread and

18
Malatesta, The Method of Freedom, 281-2.
19
Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism, 64.
[w]ho is going to see to that, if the baker workers are not already associated and ready to
manage without bosses.20

Despite the fact that Malatesta produced political theory for 19th and early 20th century
radicals, his ideas remain highly relevant in the modern world. The prefigurative politics
which he advocated is in fact central to the practices of a large number of contemporary
social movements. The famous Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, for example, was
primarily organised by people who either self-identified as anarchists or listed anarchism as
an influence on their thinking.21As a result, Occupy made decisions through general
assemblies and consensus decision making, which is a kind of direct democracy. This was
done in order to prefigure the non-hierarchical and democratic society the organisers aimed to
create. For participants of Occupy one of the key reasons behind engaging in prefigurative
politics was, like Malatesta had argued in 1897, its transformative effect on participants. To
quote the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber,

We all knew it was practically impossible to convince the average American that a
truly democratic society was possible through rhetoric. But it was possible to show
them. The experience of a thousand, or two thousand, people making collective
decisions without a leadership structure, motivated only by principle and solidarity,
can change ones most fundamental assumptions about what politics, or for that
matter, human life, could actually be like.22

Prefigurative politics has also been incredibly important to the actions of progressive forces
within the Syrian Civil War. Since 2012 the Kurdish PKK, PYD and YPG have, whilst also
fighting ISIS, established a system of democratic self-management known as Democratic
Confederalism within Rojava, northern Syria. It is composed of democratic councils which
begin at the level of face to face democracy in local communes and federates upwards
through delegation to form co-ordinating councils at the level of the neighbourhood, the
district and West Kurdistan as a whole.23 Parallel to this, revolutionaries in the rest of Syria
have created 800 democratic councils after the Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz proposed this
strategy in his article The Formation of Local Councils, which was first published in 2011

20
Malatesta, Method of Freedom, 243-4.
21
Mark Bray, Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013).
22
David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crises, A Movement (London: Allen Press, 2013), 89.
23
Michael Knapp, Anja Flach and Ercan Ayboga, Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Womens
Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 87-91.
and later expanded in 2012.24 Aziz justifies the creation of local councils in part because they
ensure the revolution remains genuinely revolutionary. He writes,

the more self-organizing grows in power, the more able these deep social bonds will
be to defend themselves and others against . . . moral slippage, and against the risk
that the use of arms will slowly make the revolution and society as a whole hostages
of the gun. Blending life and revolution is the necessary condition for the revolution
to continue until the regime is destroyed.25

From these examples it is clear not only that Malatestas ideas are relevant to the modern
world, but also that utopian realism does not exist only in the writings of great theorists.
Utopian realism is a really existing political force within the political practices of ordinary
people transforming their lives and the world around them through their own direct action. If
realism is to successfully orient itself towards the real world then it must study these radical
social movements and, in my view, follow Malatestas lead by offering theoretical assistance
in realistically building utopia.

24
Agns Favier, Local Governance Dynamics in Opposition Controlled Areas in Syria. Accessed 13/06/17:
https://isqatannizam.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/local-governance-dynamics-in-opposition-controlled-areas-in-
syria/
25
Omar Aziz, The Formation of Local Councils. Accessed 13/06/17:
https://borderedbysilence.noblogs.org/the-formation-of-local-councils-by-omar-aziz/
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