Interesting meeting last
Interesting meeting last night in the middle of nowhere at which some interesting facts emerged.1. That Malatesta was never actually a member of the Socialist League but merely knew some of the anarchist members of the League and attended some of its meetings. He did meet Morris at that time (1889-90) but they would have had to have spoken to each other in French since Malatesta didn’t speak English then.2. That Malatesta actually shared some of Morris’s criticism of the anarchists who drove him out of the League, eg their talk of “absolute freedom” and advocacy of “individual appropriation” as also their belief that all that was required was to destroy capitalism (by bombs or “the new chemistry” as it was known in the anarchist movement) and an anarchist society would spontaneously arise on its ruins.3. On Morris’s death in 1896 Malatesta wrote what was described as a “rather bitter” obituary in which he criticised the fact that in his will Morris, like a good bourgeois, left all his money (some £1.5 million) to his family and not a penny to the workers’ movement or to workers. Morris, said Malatesta, was a socialist in literature but a bourgeois in life (and, it’s true, Morris did not abandon his bourgeois lifestyle, though over the years he did give considerable sums of money to the socialist movement). Malatesta, suggested the speaker, was criticising Morris for not doing what he had done. Malatesta (who was born in 1853) himself came from a bourgeois background (though not as privileged as Morris’s) and gave up his medical studies to learn a trade (in the event, as an electrician, then the cutting edge technology). Incidentally, £1.5 million would be worth at least 100 times that amount today, so Morris was definitely one of the 1%.4. Peter the Painter and those involved in the Sidney Street siege a hundred years ago were not anarchists (as in the popular imagination and as anarchists sometimes claim). They were in fact Latvian members of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic party. Malatesta was only incidentally involved in this since they had borrowed an acetylene torch from his electrician’s business without him knowing what for. It was in fact to use in their raid on the jewelry shop.