say that there is quite a lot to the doctrines of authoritar- headlong towards a despotic dictatorship, and ANARCHIST ian Communists, but what is most strikingly absent is or ANTI-STATIST COMMUNISM with its libertarian vision of nothing other than communism. revolution. Let it be clearly understood that in no way do we dis- If one has to talk about contradiction in terms, it must pute the right of authoritarian Communists to adopt what- be not between the term communism and the term anar- Anarchism ever title they see fit, whatever they like, and adopt a chism, which are so compatible that the one is not possi- name that was our exclusive property for almost half a ble in the absence of the other, but rather between century and that we have no intention of giving up. It communism and State. Where there is a State or govern- would be ridiculous to contest this right. But whenever ment, no communism is possible. At least, it is so difficult the neo-Communists come to discuss anarchism and hold to reconcile them, and so demanding of the sacrifice of and discussions with anarchists, there is a moral obligation on all human freedom and dignity, that one can surmise that them not to pretend they know nothing of the past, and it is impossible when today the spirit of revolt, autonomy they have the basic duty not to appropriate that name to and initiative is so widespread among the masses, hun- such a degree as to monopolise it, to such a degree that gering not only for bread, but also for freedom. an incompatibility is created between the term ‘commu- Communism nism’ and the term ‘anarchism’ that is artificial and false. Whenever they do these things they reveal themselves to be devoid of all sense of political honesty. Everyone knows how our ideal, expressed in the word Luigi Fabbri anarchism, taken in a programmatic sense of a socialism A Short Biography organised in a libertarian way, has always been known as anarchist communism. Almost all anarchist literature has, Although very little is known of Luigi Fabbri outside of since the end of the First International, belonged to the Italian anarchist circles, he was one of the leading the- communist school of socialism. Up until the outbreak of orists and propagandists among the second wave of Ital- the Russian Revolution in 1917 the two chief schools into ian anarchist-communists (which included Luigi Galleani, which socialism was divided were, on the one hand, le- Camillo Berneri and Pietro Gori, amongst others), active galistic, statist collectivism, and, on the other, anarchist, from the late 1890s through the duration of his life. He revolutionary communism. What number of polemics, be- co-edited the influential Italian anarchist journal ‘Il Pen- tween 1880 and 1918, have we not engaged in with the siero’, and wrote regularly for other publications such as Marxian socialists, today’s neo-Communists, in support of ‘Lotta Umana’ and the daily ‘Umanita Nova’. the communist ideal as against their German-barrack- In 1926, he managed to escape the “preventive room collectivism! counter-revolution” of Italian fascism, seeking refuge in And so, their ideal view of the reorganisation to come France, Belgium, and finally, after being expelled several has remained the same, and its authoritarian overtones times, in Uruguay where he eventually died in 1935. have even become more pronounced. The only difference between the collectivism that we criticized in the past and From: http://nefac.net/node/93 the dictatorial Communism of today is a tactical one and a slight theoretical difference, and not the question of the immediate goal to be reached. True, this links up with the Local Contact: State Communism of the pre-1880 German socialists - the Volkstaat, or ‘people’s State’ - against which Bakunin di- rected such vitriolic criticism; and likewise the govern- ment socialism of Louis Blanc, so brilliantly demolished by Proudhon. But the connection with the revolutionary statist approach is only on the secondary level of politics, and not on the level of its particular economic viewpoint - that is, the organisation of production and the distribu- tion of the products - of which Marx and Blanc had a rather broader, more general view than their latest heirs. In contrast, the dichotomy is not between anarchism and a more or less “scientific” communism, but rather be- More copies can be downloaded from: Luigi Fabbri tween AUTHORITARIAN or STATE COMMUNISM, rushing www.zabalaza.net here is a bad habit that we must react against. It tion of society from the economic point of view, did not labour by the members of human society, without any of is the habit that authoritarian Communists have talk about communism, but rather about collectivism, and them being able to appropriate social capital to them- Thad for some time now, that of setting commu- in effect, styled themselves COLLECTIVISTS. selves for their exclusive advantage to the exclusion or nism against anarchism, as if the two notions were nec- That was the position up to 1918; that is to say until the detriment of others. It is an ideal of the economic reor- essarily contradictory; the habit of using these two words Russian Bolsheviks, to set themselves apart from the pa- ganisation of society, common to a number of schools of COMMUNISM and ANARCHISM as if they were mutually in- triotic or reformist social democrats, made up their minds socialism (anarchism included); and the Marxists were by compatible and had opposite meanings. to change their name, resurrecting that of “Communist”, no means the first to formulate the idea. In Italy, where for something over forty years these which fitted the historical tradition of Marx and Engels’ fa- Marx and Engels did write the programme for the Ger- words have been used together to form a single term in mous Manifesto of 1847, and which up to 1880 was em- man Communist Party in 1847, it is true, setting out its which one word complements the other, to form the most ployed by German socialists in a purely authoritarian, theoretical and tactical guidelines; but the German Com- accurate description of the anarchist programme, this ef- social democratic sense. Little by little, nearly all the so- munist Party already existed before that. They drew their fort to disregard such an important historical tradition cialists owing allegiance to Moscow’s Third International notion of communism from others and were by no means and, what is more, turn the meanings of the words upside have ended up styling themselves COMMUNISTS, disre- its creators. down, is absurd and can only serve to create confusion in garding the perversion of the word’s meaning, the differ- In the superb hothouse of ideas, the First International, the realm of ideas and endless misunderstandings in the ent usage of the word over the span of forty years in the concept of communism was increasingly clarified; and realm of propaganda. popular and proletarian parlance, and the changes in the it took on its special importance in confrontation with col- There is no harm in recalling that it was, oddly enough, stances of the parties after 1880 - thereby creating a real lectivism, which around 1880 was, by common agree- at a congress of the Italian Sections of the first workers’ anachronism. ment, incorporated into the political and social vocabulary International (IWMA), meeting clandestinely near Florence But that’s the authoritarian Communists and not us; of anarchists and socialists alike. From that time forward, in 1876, that, on a motion put forward by Errico Malatesta, there would not even have been any need for us to de- the word communism has always taken to mean a system it was affirmed that communism was the economic bate the matter had they taken the bother, when they for the production and distribution of wealth in a socialist arrangement that could best make a society without gov- changed what they called themselves, to set out clearly society, the practical guidelines for which were set down ernment a possibility; and that anarchism (that is, the ab- what change in ideas was reflected in this change in in the formula: FROM EACH ACCORDING TO ABILITY, TO sence of all government), being the free and voluntary name. Sure, the socialists-now-become-Communists EACH ACCORDING TO NEED (in contrast to the collectivist organisation of social relationships, was the best way to have modified their platform as compared with the one formula of “to each the fruits of their labour” or even “to implement communism. One is effectively the guarantee laid down for Italy at the Genoa Congress of the Workers’ each according to their work”). The communism of anar- for the other and vice versa. Hence the concrete formu- Party in 1892. But the change in programme revolves chists, built on the political terrain of the negation of the lation of ANARCHIST COMMUNISM as an ideal, and as a wholly and exclusively about methods of struggle (es- State, was and is understood to have this meaning, to sig- movement of struggle. pousal of violence, dismissal of parliamentarianism, dic- nify precisely a practical system of socialist living after We have indicated elsewhere [see Fabbri’s Dictatorship tatorship instead of democracy, and so on); and it does the revolution, in keeping with both the derivation of the and Revolution] how in 1877 the Arbeiter Zeitung of not refer to the ideal of social reconstruction, the only word and the historical tradition. Berne published the statutes of a ‘German-speaking An- thing to which the terms communism and collectivism can In contrast, what the neo-Communists understand by archist Communist Party’; and how in 1880 the Congress refer.