A-Infos (en) Italy, FAS Sicilia Libertaria: LEADERSHIP AND ANARCHY - Natale Musarra (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Since I do not intend to get dragged into personal and potentially 
harmful controversies, I will not respond directly to Davide Turcato on 
the issue of "leaderism and anarchy", which he raised in the last issue 
of the newspaper, but to those who think they can use it to generate 
confusion in our ranks. ---- It should be clarified first of all that 
the article from which the criticism, benevolent of course, which 
provoked the current discussion is taken, was not intended to review 
Turcato's book or those of Nico which I equally cited Berti and Antonio 
Senta - I rarely deal with sales - but only to point out some 
historiographical points which in my opinion deserve attention and 
further investigation.

Leaderism, by Turcato's own admission (I wouldn't have insisted), seems 
to be among these. First of all, let's clear the field of possible 
misunderstandings: leaderism is a power option, the leader of a party or 
a movement is the head of that party or that movement: it is not a moral 
authority (like that of the Pope) and it is not , generically 
understood, an "authoritative" person or with more or less high rates of 
personal ancestry - and descent; has little or nothing to do with the 
number of publications published, with the influence they have exercised 
on this or that militant, with empathy and the like, with oratory 
ability and other skills, including scientific or philosophical ones 
(although, in the long run , this can lead to heavy discrimination).

The leader is a guide, delegated or self-delegated, instituted or 
instituting, representing or on behalf of social and/or political groups 
(even willing over time to transform him into a symbol and celebrate the 
cult of personality). It is usually the condition of those in those 
groups who enjoy or tend to enjoy, in the absence of corrective and/or 
anti-authoritarian alternatives, "greater visibility, prestige and 
influence" than others, that is, a position of power, pre-eminence, 
authority recognized even if sometimes in an "informal and spontaneous" way.

  At the basis of leaderism is the mirror phenomenon, and for 
anarchists even more unacceptable, of gregariousness. In fact, by 
definition, by principle and by definition, anarchists do not have 
leaders and followers. While in the Mazzini, republican, socialist and 
communist groups (with which from time to time we would like to lump 
them together), the existence of bosses and bosses, hierarchies and 
discipline, is recognized and sought - to prefigure the organization of 
future statist and authoritarian -, in anarchist groups, since the time 
of Bakunin (every now and then we should re-read the "classics" of 
anarchism where the topic is widely dissected and explored in depth), it 
has been rejected and fought. And if elements of sociability, linked to 
the material and immaterial culture of a territory, remain common among 
the various groups of the left, they however do not correspond to 
behaviors, aspirations, utopian visions, choices of struggle and life, 
which are instead different from each other if not even opposites.

It is probable that some anarchists have not always been coherent and 
have made attempts or outlines of leaderism - the authoritarian 
mentality introjected since birth conspires in this sense -, but this 
constitutes a critical point to be addressed, also from the ideological 
point of view and of the possible remedies, not to be generalized. 
Posing the question as a fact common to the entire anarchist movement - 
a historiographical objectivization - and not as a possible and 
personalized element of ideological "tension", and doing so by typifying 
some figures such as that of Malatesta, constitutes a blunder or a 
historiographical hoax.

However, many historians who delight in anarchism use indifferently, 
especially towards Malatesta, the epithet "leader of the anarchists" 
(without specifying which anarchists, since anarchism was the organizer, 
of which the Malatesta one is a part, for many years and perhaps still 
professed by a minority of anarchists) or "party leader". The party to 
which they refer is the one founded in Capolago in 1891 and proposed 
cyclically in the following years, in a structured form or through 
intimate and informal networks. Not all these historians have the 
scruple to use less "annoying" terminology or to use it through a third 
party, usually from the police.

Anyone who describes Malatesta as a leader (even when he does not use 
this word), therefore formulating a judgment that conflicts with his 
quality as an anarchist, should at least attempt to explain or resolve 
the contradiction. Personally, I do not believe that Malatesta gave 
direction to the anarchist movement, that he "planned" its activities 
through his dense network of contacts and the "reality of an opaque 
organization" (even for the militants themselves). I think he is rather 
a participant in a plural movement, where we influence and condition 
each other, almost never in a single direction. As Luciano Canfora has 
recently shown well in The Scholars of Marx, reviewing and rethinking 
one's ideas, based on one's own experience, the solicitations of others 
and the political opportunities of the moment, is a much more frequent 
eventuality than is imagined among same theorists of authoritarian 
communism. Detecting "ruptures", as Canfora does (a rarity in the 
Italian panorama, a fixed canon in the French historiography of social 
movements), is much more fertile and significant from a historical point 
of view than entrenching oneself behind a continuity of thought which in 
anarchist thinkers appears much more problematic.

The parvenus of contemporary local historiography think that it is 
possible to describe a fact, an environment, a historical character 
without at the same time interpreting them and consequently expressing 
value judgments on them. They do not consider that any data, even the 
most neutral and insignificant one, such as the transcription of a 
letter or a document, is in reality strongly influenced by the choices, 
method and sympathies of the researcher. The rhetoric of value-free 
historical description makes us lose sight, as much of liberal and 
Anglo-Saxon historiography would like, of the sometimes abysmal 
differences of ideas between movements, parties, political groups, 
individuals, attempting to recompose them through common sociability, 
recurring emotions, a common destiny and an identical feeling, cemented 
by persecution, emigration and exile. Such a homogenizing approach 
unfortunately distances us from critical and dispassionate reflection, 
or from the questioning of central issues for our movement, as they 
pertain to the means/end relationship and the very meaning of its 
ideological distinction.

Therefore, that Malatesta or whoever else among the anarchists is a 
leader or head of a party, seems to me today to be a further stereotype, 
closely related to those which make anarchists into people who are 
inevitably confused, incongruent, adventurist, inconsistent with 
themselves, since the authority and the drive to command and servitude 
would be ineradicable from human nature. Stereotypes that are all the 
more harmful as they deny anarchism its main characteristic as a 
movement for liberation from the mental, physical and psychological 
constraints that precipitate human societies towards authoritarianism, 
dictatorship and indiscriminate violence.

A banishment then to stereotypes, but also to the stereotypical readings 
to which certain historiography has accustomed us, such as that, to 
which Malatesta's criticism is often compared and to which I will 
return, of an exclusively positivist, determinist and naive "communist" 
Kropotkin.

Christmas Musarra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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