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Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library
March 2001 ~ No. 26

PROLETARIAN DAYS – HIPPOLYTE HAVEL

March, the red month, is with us again.

The month of rebellion, the awakener of the down-trodden, the harbinger of hope.

The days of past grand deeds are here, their memory rousing the proletariat to a clear consciousness of their world-liberating mission, strengthening them with the fires of noblest aspirations.

And joyfully, hopefully the workers of today honor the memory of the heroes of the past, and prepare to emulate their example.

After the soldiers of liberty of 1848 had suffered defeat, the international bourgeoisie celebrated its orgies in the fond hope that the spirit of rebellion had forever been buried.

Yet but a brief space intervened between 1848 and 1871. During that time the supposedly dead Socialism circled the world, and thousands of hearts beat in joyful tumult as the Commune was proclaimed at Paris.

But once more the reaction triumphed. After a heroic struggle the proletariat was defeated. Again was heard the cry, the Revolution is dead, dead and buried forever! But who call doubt that the rebels have since grown a hundredfold? The Titanic struggle of Russia is giving the lie to bourgeois assertions.

In vain we seek the names of those heroes who – on that memorable March 18, 1871 – by their self-sacrifice ensured the triumph of the proletariat. Obscure were they; nameless men, women, and children of the streets: inspired by the solemn moment, they ushered in the revolutionary tide. It overflowed Paris, arousing an enthusiasm felt far beyond the confines of France. It still lives and bursts into flames whenever the cry is heard, Vive la Commune!

The obscure, the nameless! They are the true heroes of history. We know no books they have written. Not authors, nor orators they. Yet how lifelike they tower before our mental eye in all the glory of their self-sacrifice, their noble passion and immortality. We see them, these brave unknown, in the thick of combat, their eyes aflame, their fists clenched. We hear their songs of battle, witness their inspiring devotion. We behold them dying, serenely joyous, the devoted martyrs of a noble cause.

Countless times duped, deprived of the fruits of their triumph, again we see them enter the arena. Restlessly they storm forward, ever forward!

An unbroken thread of red runs through proletarian history, from the ancient slave revolts and peasant wars of feudal days, to the uprisings of the proletariat in 1792, 1830, 1848, 1871, down to the heroic struggle of the Russian people of our own time.

It is an uninterrupted warfare; and we of this generation shall continue the fight till the victory of the downtrodden is complete.

The men and women of fame are the meteors momentarily lighting up the horizon. then fading away into the night of the past. But the nameless do not vanish. They are like the phoenix, eternally resurrected in the ashes of his fiery death. We know that we do not hope in vain when we rest in them our faith for the future.

***

We live in pregnant days. Dark clouds are gather-ing; all signs portend the coming struggle.

Our bourgeoisie has grown to look upon the work-ingman as its mere slave, incapable of independent thought or action. How horrified they feel when the masses evidence by demonstrations that they have awakened to self-assertion and refuse to starve.

A labor demonstration serves to remind the rulers of the misery suffered by the disinterested. It clarifies their vision to threatening danger; it points to the terrible chasm yawning before them.

That they may not be continually reminded of their crimes against the proletariat, the exploiters have exiled them into obscure alleys and barrack tenements. There poverty lives apart. It is not suffered to obtrude its misery upon the rich, to the possible detriment of their digestion. There it does not exist for the bourgeois. It is to him a strange land.

But a demonstration brings the proletariat to the palaces. The rulers and exploiters are overcome by fear and horror. They see, like Belshazzar of old, the handwriting on the wall.

History repeats itself. These are our March days.

From Mother Earth, March 1908

The Cook that Broke the Spell: Giovanni Passanante Speaks for Rebellion against the Savoy Dynasty

When King Umberto I came to Naples on 17 November 1878, on his first visit since becoming king of Ita

ly, it never occurred to anyone that he would become a target for an assassin, although an anonymous letter had reached police headquarters several days before saying that the king’s life was to be attempted.

Although 17 November was something of a grey day, Naples, setting aside the heated arguments in the city council regarding the debt that would be entailed by the expenditure on its reception, hastened to offer the most splendid of welcomes to Umberto and his queen, Margherita. At the station the royals would step on to a carpet painted by Morelli, Michetti and Vietri and the queen feigned embarrassment as if fearing to walk upon it, but they calmed her fears. Also at the station and for the queen’s benefit there was a mass of flowers in a bronze vase, paid for from a subscription raised in the poorer districts at the rate of a penny a head. For even the poor were eager to give thanks to the man who kept them poor and idle. The king was accompanied by minister Benedetto Cairoli who sat in the wrong seat beside the king. At 2.25 pm., the cannon of Sant’Elmo gave the signal and the royal procession set off under a hail of flowers. All of a sudden, on the Carriera Grande a young man leapt on to the carriage: in one hand, wrapped in a red rag on which was written "Long live the Universal Republic! Long live the Orsinis!" he was wielding a knife 40 centimetres long which he had sold his own jacket in Medina to a second-hand clothes dealer for 3.40 lire to purchase. This young would-be assassin was a surprise to everybody, a party-pooper in that his action left it plain to see that, as far as he was concerned, there was another Italy, one that did not believe in handshakes or smiles, an Italy of toil and suffering.

His attempt failed, but – as the queen, no less, was to confess – the spell of the House of Savoy was broken. The attempt was a signal, a protest by a citizen of the ‘new Italy’, sensible and expressive of the objections and curses emanating from the harassed southern populace in whose eyes the liberators from the north had shown themselves to be worse oppressors than the Bourbons. The knife barely scratched the king’s arm; the king leapt to his feet, clouting the attacker on the head with the scabbard of his sabre whilst Margherita tossed the bouquet of flowers into his face and screamed "Cairoli, save the king!" Cairoli promptly intervened and seized the attacker by the hair and was stabbed in the leg for his pains. The assailant was handed over to the captain of the cuirassiers and received the first of several beatings. The whole thing had happened so quickly that when the procession carried on with its slow progress very few people knew that anything had happened. But when monarchist Naples learned of the incident that evening, it raced to the king’s side to cry: "Sire, the assassin is not from Naples!" The demonstrations carried on for eight more days until the royals left Naples and at the station the king assisted the limping Cairoli on to the train. Even though the assassination bid had been the individual action of one man acting alone, the country was in uproar and throughout Italy there were demonstrations against the monarchy and everywhere there sprouted up clubs called after the young republican trooper Barsanti, who had been killed at the age of 21 for mutiny in barracks. Bombs went off in Florence and Pisa and in Pesaro rifles were looted from a barracks. The government fell on 11 December. In the Chamber of Deputies, representative Toscano placed the assassination bid in the broader Italian social and economic context, exacerbated by the incompetence of her governments and the wrong-headed remedy in the shape of the tax upon flour, the imposition of which had triggered riots and led to 258 dead, 1099 injured and 3788 arrests. "Thrust thus into despair, what did you expect the proletariat to do? Only two courses were left to it: a life of crime and banditry, or emigration … Gentlemen, it is high time that we blushed to the very roots of our hair over this state of affairs!" warned Toscano to no avail.

The young would-be assassin was just 29 years old. His name was Giovanni Passanante, a native of Salvia in the province of Potenza, and he was a cook. He had rejected the usual fate reserved for southerners, to become either bandits or emigrants, and had instead become a political agitator and his intention in Naples that day had been to have done with poverty and hunger by lashing out at the king, the man responsible for all the nonsensical decrees blighting Italy and the lives of Italians.

He knew how to read and write, although many were to mock his ungrammatical writings (but then even Garibaldi’s memoirs include mistakes) in which he dreamed of a better society that might be achieved by means of the Universal Republic. And it had even occurred to him that under that Republic there would be pensions for all. He had picked up his ideas from the early socialists and from the republicans and spent his spare time immersed in reading, a dangerous and suspicious pastime in a largely illiterate society. In Potenza, the boss of the inn where he had worked had sacked him after stumbling upon him reading once. In his pockets – one biographer tells us – there was always some republican or socialist newspaper and he never missed a chance to explain the new ideals to other people. Reported to the authorities, he had been secretly kept under surveillance and on the night of 16 May 1870 had been caught red-handed by the police while surreptitiously sticking up subversive manifestoes on the walls in Salerno, where he had moved. He was arrested and convicted. In Salerno, he opened an inn and let people eat there even if they had no money to pay and went bankrupt. After which he travelled around looking for work, ready, like any good southerner, to turn his hand to anything.

He had happened to arrive in Naples in search of work. On the walls he read the posters eulogising the coming of the king and looked in vain for a contrary message, whereupon he had determined to strike and sold his jacket to that end. At his trial he was to make it plain that, had he had accomplices, he would have had more money too and might have armed himself with a revolver, instead of the pathetic knife that cost him 40 centesimi (it cost 18 pence and he had had to beg the seller for a discount). After he was arrested he tossed 12 pence into the street, having no further use for it.

Subjected to unspeakable tortures to get him to reveal the conspiracy, he reiterated that he had acted alone, that he knew nobody and the inmates in the San Francesco prison could hear his screams. The police and judicial investigation took a full four months trying to extract a confession from him by any means necessary and Inspector Di Donato uttered words that the would-be regicide never had, such as "I despise the internationalists and communists as traitors." Experts who examined Passanante ruled out insanity, but their findings are startling and defy explanation. They made a case for Passanante, whom they described as a sensitive man, sympathetic to the point where "his answers are indicative of an extraordinary delicacy and strength of mind (…) His explanations of his thinking is normal and rapid (…) Investigation of his previous life has not discovered any act of dishonesty." In addition, in his speech he was "forthright and resolute" and his physiognomy was "soft, even given to smiling" and he placed great store by "keeping faith with friends and principles. One has to know how to keep a secret and how to sacrifice one’s life for a principle." This would come out during the trial when the president of the court asked him if he was acquainted with Salerno internationalist Matteo Mario Melillo, a journalist arrested as an accomplice. Passanante was to deny this and said that that was for Melillo to say and not him.

The trial was held on 6 and 7 March 1879. It was a judicial sham and even the most elementary procedures were trampled underfoot with brazen cynicism and the president, Ferri, refused to draw lots for the jury but hand-picked them one by one so as to ensure that their findings would not reveal the feelings of the citizenry who, whilst deploring the violence of Passanante’s action, by no means sympathised with Umberto I and the all-conquering dynasty. Leopoldo Tarantini, appointed to defend the accused, travelled to Rome before accepting the task, to kneel before the king and apologise for the task that he would, as a professional duty, have to perform. The public in the courtroom knew that the court was riding roughshod over the most elementary guarantees and frequently mumbled about it, whereupon the president threatened that he would be forced "in the event of repetition of displays of sympathy with the accused" to order the courtroom cleared. There was no applause for the king, but plenty of displays of sympathy for Passanante who conducted himself with subtle, tongue-in-cheek irony, making a mockery of the proceedings. He explained his action: "Rather than an attempt upon the life of the king, against whom I have nothing personal, it was meant as a deathblow against the monarchy, a protest and a chastisement to the starvelings acclaiming him because it brought home to them the slavery of their bellies, their poverty and their hunger." At this, the president pointed out that life had changed, and Passanante returned: "The former government stood for the three G’s ‘galas, grist and gallows’, which these days have been replaced by the 3 C’s: ‘chatter, crying and coughing up’." His defence counsel, whilst confining himself to asking for the court’s clemency, had touched the hearts of the jury and the president called a 45 minute recess to forestall the danger of any extenuating arguments’ being taken on board. The prosecution was asking for the death penalty. In under 15 minutes the court had made its decision, but four jury members – as Francesco Saverio Merlino was to reveal a year later in a book published in France – voted to acquit him and five voted to acknowledge extenuating arguments. It took the president only five minutes to sentence "Giovanni Passanante to the death penalty, to be carried out in accordance with the law, to loss of rights under Article 3 and to pay the costs of this trial". "Oh, and as to the costs" – the condemned man grinned and said with a slight wave of the hand – "the costs will be borne by you!"

His defence counsel had failed to explain that Passanante had said that his intention had not been to kill the king; he had offered no extenuating arguments and only after the death sentence had been pronounced did he table an appeal, but Passanante refused to sign up to it and asked to be judged by the Chamber of Deputies. The sentence was therefore amended to life imprisonment, and what imprisonment! Passanante was to survive for 32 years of unbelievable suffering. In Portoferraio prison he was committed to a dark cell below sea level and hampered by irons weighing 18 kilos. Every night seamen from Elba could hear Passanante’s screams of pain as he was savagely beaten by Umberto I’s gaolers. The prison governor, Simon, was to brag to Amilcare Cipriani: "I broke Passanante and I’ll break you too!" In 1899, a parliamentarian, Bertani, denounced the mistreatment of the regicide. This caused a scandal and experts found the convict reduced to little more than a jelly and he was moved to the criminal asylum in Montelupo Fiorentino where physical and mental recovery were impossible. Thanks to his being made of sterner southern stuff, he hung on until his death at the age of 61 on 14 February 1914.

Umberto I, however, could not cheat his fate and on 29 July 1900 he was shot dead by Gaetano Bresci who had travelled back from America for the purpose. Meanwhile, when [Passanante’s native town of] Salvia got the news of the attempt on the king’s life, the town council met in extraordinary session to deplore the action of their townsman which had brought shame upon them (as they put it) but had also entered them in annals of the other Italy. It was decided that the mayor, Giovanni Parrella, should be sent to Naples to offer their apologies to the king. But there was a problem: even the mayor was on his uppers and did not possess a suitable outfit for a meeting with the king.. so the council (undoubtedly exceeding its authority) authorised him to draw the requisite sum from the town funds to hire a suit and cover his travelling expenses to Naples. In the presence of the king, the mayor could scarcely mumble. "Majesty … I represent … Salvia… the disgraced…" and could get no further. The king encouraged him by shaking his hand (after all, he had emerged unscathed) and told him: "Killers have no homeland." But, even so, the entire area was held "culpable" and therefore could not make up for having allowed to live, 29 years earlier, the child that later dared the impossible and the king’s courtiers came up with the suggestion appropriate to such an unspeakable act of civic shame. The town’s name had to be changed and Salvia eradicated (it was so called because of all the salvia that grew in the area) and replaced by a more suitable name, one that sounded sweeter by way of testimony to its attachment to the monarchy and its esteem for the ruling family. That name, they told the fawning Parrella, would be Savoia di Lucania. In short, they resorted to an act of conquest, to an unprecedented act of might and majesty, the way that the Romans used to rename their conquered territories. The mayor returned to Salvia somewhat scared. On 21 November, after only three days, the town council was summoned to an emergency sitting to consider the renaming of the town. That renaming was sealed by royal decree on 3 July 1879 and "at the request of faithful subjects" the area has since been known as Savoia di Lucania. And even though the king was driven out of Italy in 1946, over 100 years later the former Salvia, in testimony to a sealed and intolerable slavishness, is still known to this day as Savoia di Lucania.

Prior to the trial [according to a note from police headquarters in Naples to the Prefecture of Salerno], Errico Malatesta "writing from Geneva to a friend of his emphasised the appropriateness of doing something to mark the holding of the Passanante trial, say, a strike that might embarrass the political authorities." When internationalists protesting at the severe sentence passed on Passanante were arrested in Bologna, Giovanni Pascoli, one demonstrator, shouted: "If these are evil-doers, then long life to evil-doers!" He was to be arrested on those grounds alone and served quite some time in jail. The Italian government managed to get the anarchist newspaper Avantgarde (of which Paul Brousse was the editor) shut down in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, simply because it had put the case for Passanante’s attempt on the king.

Giovanni Galzerano Umanità Nova, 27 November 1988

Interview with Giuseppe Galzerano – What’s all this about a Bourbon plot?

Giuseppe Galzerano is working on the second edition of his [Italian language] book Gaetano Bresci: The Life, Attentat, Trial, Sentencing and Death of the Anarchist Regicide. We looked him up at home in Casalvelino Scalo. He is putting the finishing touches to his new edition and shuttles between his computer and old books, newspapers, photocopies, notes and other documentation. His 1975 publishers put out books about emigration and antifascism and Giuseppe Galzerano is the author of texts about Carlo Pisacane, the assassination attempt by Giovanni Passanante, the anarchist Vincenzo Perrone from Salerno who died fighting for freedom in Spain and Antonio Galotti who fought in the Cilento revolt in 1828.

How far back does your interest in Bresci go?

It started in 1970 when I was 17. I read Arrigo Petacco’s book on Bresci, an essay by Armando Meoni in a magazine from Prato and a French comrade wrote me to say that she was in touch with Bresci’s daughters in America, but at the time it never even occurred to me to press her for the addresses. In 1988 I published my book which met with reasonable critical and public success. For the centenary I thought about bringing out a second edition, but then I embarked on some fresh research and a tour through the archives and that added to the book considerably. It now stands at 700 pages … At the Milan Archives I looked at the trial records, records that vanished and have only recently become accessible again: 6 hefty volumes, a total of nearly 10,000 pages. As I was combing through them it occurred to me that I was having more luck than the lawyer Francesco Saverio Merlino who was appointed to defend the regicide just two days before the trial, sought a postponement and was turned down and had very little time to go through the trial papers. I carried out research at the archives in Rome and Naples and have come up with a lot of unpublished material. I found ‘fragments’ by Bresci here and there: some of his letters at the Criminological Museum in Rome, some photographs taken of Bresci in the National Carabinieri Museum. I have had priceless help from the Berneri-Chessa Archive in Reggio Emilia, from the CIRA in Lausanne, from the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam and lots of other comrades, male and female who – at my suggestion – successfully tracked down newspapers and pamphlets from the time.

And what of the Italian-American anarchist press?

Yes, I have looked at L’Aurora, La Questione Sociale and Cronaca Sovversiva, titles hard to get hold of here in Italy. I have touched upon the debate on the regicide, the substance of the anarchist movement in America during the 19th century, evidence as to the work of émigré comrades and reports of infiltrators, whose activity I document. I reprint almost verbatim the interrogations of the Italian-American anarchists from Paterson, the city that the press described as ‘anarchy’s capital’ and where there was indeed a massive anarchist presence, when you think that La Questione Sociale was a massive weekly with a print run of 15,000 copies!

But why a second edition?

Above all because it was out of print and orders were still pouring in for it. Then, to place on record the sacrifice and selflessness of Bresci. And also because Bresci is surrounded by masses of speculation and disinformation.

Any new historical findings from this new research?

Above all it confirms that Bresci acted alone and that there was no plot, no anarchist plot and no Bourbon plot to execute the king of Italy.

But in his book Arrigo Petacco…

I am none too happy about Petacco’s reviving the conspiracy story. A thesis that, for all their good intentions and mischief-making intent, even the detectives could not get to stick at the time! Petacco makes a number of mistakes: starting with Bresci’s birth date and his contention that Bresci returned to Italy under an assumed name. There is no truth in this: I have seen the list of the 67 passengers who left New York on board Le Gascogne on 17 May 1900 and landed in Le Havre and Bresci is listed, name and surname, as No 36. Then he talks about a certain Granotti who was supposedly to have opened fire if Bresci had missed. This too was a police invention and poor Granotti returned to America and avoided capture. He was tried in his absence, on the basis of accusations extorted under torture from a cousin of his from Biella, who promptly recanted the whole thing and fled to Argentina. Furthermore, the Italian consulates in America offered a $100 reward for anyone who could supply information about Luigi Granotti and he was spotted simultaneously in Shanghai, New York, Buenos Aires and London and so on. Some people even made a profession out of it: changing names occasionally they used to call to the consulates, give their information and cash in. Granotti was never caught as Luigi Galleani had predicted in a splendid article in 1902. I have discovered that he died in the United States in 1949 – where he had been living under an assumed name, unmolested by the police and unrecorded by the register of his home district. Unintentionally I turned into something of a ‘history detective’. I was able to consult his file and lots of other files of people who were implicated and managed to reconstruct a number of intriguing human and political stories.

And what of poor Bresci’s death?

That was a state suicide, in Santo Stefano penitentiary. That was quickly understood at the time and is still the case today. Bresci was Italy’s most closely watched prisoner and in those circumstances there was no way for him to attempt, let alone contemplate suicide. The earliest reports were contradictory and there was mention of a scarf (a likely story!), a hand-towel and a sheet. But then the papers, who carried the ministry’s version of things, leaked a morsel of truth: the corpse stank. Meaning that he had been strangled some days before the official date of death. Not only that, but I also query the date of death, because, according to one witness I have come across it happened even earlier. Then, thanks to further evidence, I give the name of the convict who actually carried out the killing of Bresci and who rewarded with a royal pardon, whilst the prison governor’s career took off and his salary was raised from 4,500 to 9,500 lire – more than doubling.

And what of the Bourbon plot that Petacco talks about?

Even that is nothing new. Benedetto Croce referred to it back in 1926 when he wrote that in 1904 a pro-Bourbon journalist had come to Italy – at the instigation of Maria Sofia – to secure Bresci’s release. Note that date: can one release a prisoner who was killed three years earlier? And then again, why a journalist and not, say, a general or some expert? A journalist writes but getting someone out of jail also involves fighting. Some mix-up, surely. That story does not stand up. At the time Errico Malatesta who was also called into question by the Communist press responded with a piece in Il Risveglio in Geneva, giving Croce a right drubbing. Then there’s the story of the queen’s having set up the assassination. Well, that sort of yarn means that one knows nothing about the anarchists, their extraordinary independence and utter refusal to obey and deep-seated aversion to the institution of the monarchy. Moreover, the former queen of Naples could not have had any dynastic interest at stake as she had no offspring and her husband had died in 1894. So it strikes me as self-evident that an anarchist would not have had any interest in backing one dynasty over another, or whether the throne was occupied by one house or another, since he is opposed to monarchy itself. 29 July 2000 marked the first centenary of the killing of the king by Bresci. What was the significance of that deed in our country’s history? Above all it brought a far-reaching political and social about-turn. True, the death of one Pope leads to the election of a successor and in fact Umberto’s son suc- ceeded to the throne but the fact that he was picking up a crown stained with his father’s blood was a great lesson to him. He abandoned his father’s repressive and reactionary policies and Italy became a slightly – if I may be so bold – more democratic country thanks to those three revolver shots from Bresci. Not only that but this violent assault upon the institution on monarchy helped – as Passanante and others also did – to bring about the republic in 1946. A republic that forgot about its predecessors who had given their very lives to bring it about.

Bresci’s tyrannicide is associated with the anarchists. However…

However, tyrannicide was not introduced to the social struggle by anarchists. In the history of humankind and of man’s struggle for freedom, it goes back to the days of ancient Greece and such brave men have always been heroes in the culture of their times. Even the Church preached and justified killing a king! Not travelling too far back in time, when Garibaldi arrived in Naples in 1860, one of his first moves was a decree awarding a 30 ducat per month pension to the mother of Agesilao Milano and a gift of 2,000 ducats to his sisters. Agesilao Milano was a Calabrian soldier of Albanian extraction who had attempted the life of the king of Naples in 1856 and who had been feted by the Piedmontese monarchists. Italy really is a schizophrenic country: how come one king-killer is ‘good’ and another ‘evil’? There is no sense to such distinctions. Bresci stated plainly that he wished only to strike at the king, identifying the king as the embodiment of responsibility for poverty, hunger, emigration and the cannon-fire of Bava Beccaris.

And what is your next project?

More ‘assassinations’: I’m returning to an old project on the anarchist attempts on Mussolini’s life and I’ll be starting with the one in Bologna, credited to Anteo Zamboni, the 15-year old cravenly lynched by the blackshirts and whose parents were sentenced to 30 year terms of imprisonment. Then I’ll look into Angelo Sbardelotto’s attempt. Already I have collected a lot of evidence and it’s merely a matter of sitting down to write. I hope it may be ready for publication next year.

Interview conducted by FP in A Rivista Anarchica No 266, October 2000

Giuseppe Galzerano’s book is Gaetano Bresci. La vita, l’attentato, il processo, la condanna e la morte del regicida anarchico. Obtainable from Galzerano at 84040 Casalvelino Scalo, SA. Italy

Request for help:
Australian anarchist history - Dundonald

Dundonald, a Scottish engineering worker, first met Nechaev and Bakunin in Geneva in 1869. He was so impressed with their ideas that he translated The Catechism of a Revolutionist into English in 1870. When he returned to Scotland he devoted himself to organising syndicalist groups and became involved in actions to sabotage the spread of industrialisation in Scotland.

He was forced to flee Scotland because of his activities and eventually turned up in Australia. He reversed his name to Donald Duncan but continued to be involved in workplace activity. His best known works are "The Great Fire of Melbourne" published in 1898 and his analysis of the Sunshine Railway accident at Sunshine Harvesters, one of Australia’s expanding new industrial complexes at the edge of Melbourne. He published this work in 1908. Although growing old and concerned about being sent back to Scotland to face charges, he gave moral support to the emerging Industrial Workers of The World.

I'm keen to learn more about Dundonald’s life in Melbourne. I understand his descendants still live in Melbourne. If anybody has any access to information about this man and his life, or if anybody has seen or has a copy of ‘The Great Fire of Melbourne’ published in 1898, can they Email me at anarchistage@yahoo.com, write to me at PO Box 20, Parkville 3052, Melbourne, Australia or contact me via The Anarchist Age Institute (03) 9828 2856. Joseph Toscano.

PS. I understand his grandson spent some time in Pentridge prison in Melbourne in the late 1960’s / early 1970’s and may have had some contact with the anarchist movement in Melbourne during this period. Source of article - Melbourne Anarchist Archives Vol. 1 1966-1973

Book review

The struggle against the state and other essays by Nestor Makhno, edited by Alexandre Skirda, AK Press 1996, ISBN 1-873176-78-3

"Organisational responsibility and discipline should not be controversial: the are the travelling companions of the practice of social anarchism" Nestor Makhno.

The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays was published after eighteen years of meticulous research. Alexandre Skirda, the editor of this invaluable 120 page book has laid the proverbial golden egg with this publication. Most of the book is made up of articles written by Nestor Makhno between 1925-1928 for the anarchist magazine ‘Dyelo Truda’.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book, the ABC of the Revolutionary Anarchist was published in the anarchist magazine ‘Probuzdenige’ in 1932.

Alexandre Skirda’s 12 page Bibliographical Afterword could only have been written by someone who is familiar with his subject. Although a necessary addition to the book, the points and counter points made, tend to dull the reader’s critical facilities and act as an effective sleeping potion.

Nestor Makhno’s writings are invaluable, not because he expands the anarchist dream or encourages people to take up revolutionary activity but because they provide an insight into one of the few 20th century anarchists who was able to put anarchist theories into practice. If the Makhnovists had won in the Ukraine the course of 20th century history may have been different.

From Anarchist Age Weekly Review (Melbourne)

See page 7 for Struggle against the state and other titles we distribute.

Correction:

"Fight for Africa, which you deserve" The Industrial Workers of Africa in South Africa, 1917-1921. Lucien van der Walt (KSL Bulletin #24)

The seventh paragraph reads: "By 1913, there are nearly 40,000 white workers, and around 200,000 African workers on the Witwatersrand." This should read "By 1913, there are nearly 40,000 white workers, and around 240,000 African workers, on the Witwatersrand."

Credits

This issue of KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library brought to you by the KSL collective in March 2001.

Website: http://flag.blackened.net/ksl/Sharpley.htm

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Bash the Fash - the readers respond

excellent reading! Soja, Poland

This pamphlet is definitely welcomed as I’d been thinking that there wasn’t really anything around in cheap pamphlet form which promotes and explains the recent history of militant anti-fascism. This one does the trick anyway so nice one. - T., Plain Wordz distribution

Very funny - S., Yorkshire

The pamphlet has arrived and is indeed quite interesting. I must confess that I was till now rather sceptical about street encounters, but from that experience I'll have to think it over! - Ronald Creaghe, France. Moderator, Research on anarchism email list.

Tells it like it is - M., Yorkshire

Making History?

Anti-capitalist events are being planned in London for May 1st . Already the police & press are complaining.

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KSL Publications & Distribution

KSL Bulletin
Subscription rates for one year (4 issues) are:

Individuals Insitutions: UK £3 £5
Overseas: £6 £10

The Kate Sharpley Library relies on financial and material donations: have you made one recently?

 

Octavio Alberola, Alvaro Millán & Juan Zambrana Revolutionary activism: The Spanish Resistance in context 17p, 1-873605-77-3 £1.50

K. Bullstreet Bash the Fash (1) Anti-fascist recollections 1984-1993 36p, ill, 1-873605-87-0£1.50

Stuart Christie We, the anarchists! A study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927-1937 136p, 1-901172-06-6 £7.95

Flavio Costantini Art of Anarchy 49p, 0-948703-00-8 £3

George Cores Personal Recollections of the Anarchist Past 18p, 1-873605-05-6 £1

Sam Dolgoff Fragments: a Memoir 200p, 0-946222-04-5 £3

Andrea Ferrari & Aldo Aguzzi Pages from Italian Anarchist History 20p, 1-873605-22-6 £1

Luigi Galleani The End of Anarchism? 83p, 0-904564-55-2 £3

Juan Garcia Oliver Wrong Steps: Errors in the Spanish Revolution 30p, 1-873605-72-2 £1.50

Miguel Garcia Miguel Garcia’s story 72p, 0-904564-54-5 £2

Victor Garcia Three Japanese Anarchists: Kotoku, Osugi and Yamaga 30p, 1-873605-62-5 £1.50

Sylvain Garel Louis Lecoin: An Anarchist Life 34p, 1-873605-52-8 £1.50

Daniel Guérin No Gods No Masters (Vol. 1 & 2) 294p; 276p, 1-873176-64-3 (Vol. 1) 1-873176-69-4 (Vol. 2) £11.95 each

Agustin Guillamon The Friends Of Durruti Group: 1937-1939 114p, 1-873176-54-6 £7.95

Rhona M. Hodgart Ethel MacDonald: Glasgow woman anarchist. 23p, 21cm. £1

Justice for Mark Barnsley Beaten up - Fitted up - Locked up! Mark Barnsley and The Pomona Incident - a miscarriage of justice. 44p, £2

Ignacio de Llorens The CNT and the Russian Revolution 16p, 1-873605-37-4 £1

Wilf McCartney Dare to be a Daniel 26p, 0-908437-17-X £1

Nestor Makhno The Struggle Against The State And Other Essays 114p, 1-873176-78-3 £7.95

Umberto Marzocchi Remembering Spain: Italian Anarchist Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. 28p, 1-873605-42-0 £1.50

G. P. Maximoff The Guillotine at Work 337p, 0-904564-22-3 £5

Albert Meltzer Anarchism: Arguments for and against 96p, 1-873176-57-0 £3.95

~ I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels: Sixty Years of commonplace Life and Anarchist Agitation 386p, 1-873176-93-7 £12.95

~ First Flight: Origins of the Anarcho-syndicalist movement in Britain 25p, 1-873605-10-2 £1

Max Nettlau A Contribution to an Anarchist Bibliography of Latin America 33p, 1-873605-02-1 £4

Des Patchrider The Couriers are Revolting: The Despatch Industry Workers Union 1989-92 26p, 1-873605-67-6 £1.50

John Patten Ned Kelly’s Ghost: The Tottenham IWW and the Tottenham Tragedy 23p, 1-873605-32-3 £1

~ Yiddish Anarchist Bibliography 32p, 1-873605-27-7 £7.50

Odon Por The Italian glassblowers takeover of 1910: Syndicalism in action 16p, 1-873605-05-6 £1

Graham Purchase Anarchism & Ecology: the Historical Relationship 30p, £1

Elisee Reclus The Evolution of Cities 22p, 0-908437-04-8 £1

~ Man and Nature 34p, 0-908437-03-X £1

Antonio Tellez The Anarchist Resistance to Franco 50p, 1-873605-65-X £2

~ Sabate: Guerilla Extraordinary 208p, 1902593103 £5.95

Various authors Prisoners and Partisans: Italian Anarchists in the struggle against Fascism 37p, 1-873605-47-1 £1.50

Efim Yartchuk Kronstadt in the Russian Revolution 36p, 1-873605-07-2 £3

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Kate Sharpley Library, BM Hurricane, London WC1 N 3XX England

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