Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

408 / ANARCHISM
maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development; we
want bread, freedom, love, and science for everybody.
And in order to achieve these all important ends, it is necessary in our opinion that
the means of production should be at the disposal of everybody and that no man, or
groups of men, should be in a position to oblige others to submit to their will or to exercise
their influence other than through the power of reason and by example.
Therefore: expropriation of landowners and capitalists for the benefit of all; and
abolition of government.
And while waiting for the day when this can be achieved: the propagation of our
ideas; unceasing struggle, violent or non-violent depending on the circumstances,
against government and against the boss class to conquer as much freedom and
well-being as we can for the benefit of everybody.
1 13. Luigi Fabbri: Fascism: The Preventive Counter-Revolution (1921)
The anarcflists and revolutionary syndicalists in /taly tried to spur the /talian workers on to
revolution, taking a leading role in the fa ctory occupations that spread across Italy in 1920,
which they hoped would mark the beginning of a general expropriation and the social revolution.
The more moderate socialist parties effected a compromise, and then Mussolini and the
Fascists began tlleir counter-revolution in earnest, with the support of the bourgeoisie and
the government. Malatesta, the anarcho-syndicalist, Amando Borghi (1882- 1 968), and many
otller anarchists were arrested in October 1920, within weeks of the ending of the fa ctory oc­
ClIpations. Luigi Fabbri (1877- 1935) was a friend of Malatesta, co-editor of Umanita Nova,
and a notable anarchist propagandist. He was one ofthefirst to provide an anarchist analysis
of fascism in his 1921 publication, Fascism: The Preventive Counter-Revolution (reprint:
Pistoia: Licinio Capelli, 1975). The fo llowing excerpts Iwve been translated by Paul Sharkey.
THE FASCIST PHENOMENON IS NOT peculiar to Italy. It has surfaced in even more serious
form in Spain and has raised its head in Germany, Hungary, the Americas and
elsewhere. Nor were persecution and unlawful reaction mounted by private citizens
unknown prior to the World War. In certain respects, they had precedents in the pogroms
in Russia and the lynchings in the United States. What is more, the United
States has always had a sort of private police in the service of the capitalists, acting in
cahoots with the official police, but independently of government, in troubled times
and during strikes ...
Fascism, guerrilla warfare between fascists and socialists-or, to be more accurate,
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat-is nothing but the natural unleashing
and material consequence of the class hostilities honed during the [first