Today is the birthday of Errico Malatesta, a tireless anarchist organizer and author active on four continents across six decades.
-
Today is the birthday of Errico Malatesta, a tireless anarchist organizer and author active on four continents across six decades. To observe the occasion, we invite you to read about how he and his comrades organized mutual aid to address the cholera epidemic of 1884.
https://crimethinc.com/cholera
Malatesta began his revolutionary career in Italy in the 1870s. Flirting with left nationalism as a teenager, he concluded that only anarchism offered real change, and joined the famously insurrectionist Italian section of the International.
Having seen how republican nationalism had only brought a new regime to power in Italy and reinforced existing social inequalities, he opposed statist models for social change in favor of grassroots labor organizing and militant resistance.
Despite a three-year prison sentence hanging over his head, Malatesta joined other revolutionary anarchists on a daring mission to Naples—the heart of the cholera epidemic—to treat those suffering from the disease, showing that grassroots mutual aid can address even the most serious crises.
Afterwards, he managed to escape Italy concealed in a box of sewing machines, survived an assassination attempt in New Jersey, and organized one clandestine newspaper and uprising after another.
He remains an example to us all.
-
G gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org shared this topic on
