Bratach Dubh

Anarchists have tended to shy away from the problem of the national liberation struggle or rejected it entirely because of their internationalist principles. If internationalism is not to be merely meaningless rhetoric, it must imply solidarity between the proletariat of different countries or nations. This is a concrete term. When there is a revolution, it will be as it has been in the past, in a precise geographical area. How much it remains there will be directly linked to the extent of that internationalism, both in terms of solidarity and of the spreading of the revolution itself.

The years covered by this pamphlet mark an important period for the whole of the movement against capital. It was at this time that the antagonist movement in Italy finally shed all its taboos concerning destruction, violence and the use of arms against the class enemy.

Haven’t you ever, just once, felt like turning up late for work or felt like slipping away from work early? In that case, you have realised that time spent working is time doubly lost because it is time doubly wasted...

The numerous editions and translations of this pamphlet by Errico Malatesta all over the world have already demonstrated that its importance and relevance have been recognized universally.

Now that the tragic history of fascism has run the full course of its formal development, culminating in the modern democratic State, Rühle’s article becomes more readily comprehensible to us. It was written at the end of the thirties and dedicated to the contemporaneous struggle against both bolshevism and fascism. The real dominion of present day capitalism shows the authoritarian designs that have provided the platform for contemporary fascism (camouflaged by democracy), and those of contemporary bolshevism (camouflaged by the dictatorship of the proletariat) to be quite similar.

The growing contrast between the real workers’ movement and their ‘official’ spokesmen (parties of the left, trades unions, etc.) is a direct consequence of the latter’s failure to fulfil their professed task of freeing the workers from exploitation. Each day that passes demonstrates to whoever wants to see it that these organs have no intention of challenging the basic structure of capitalism, and are now making quite unashamed appeals to the workers to make sacrifices, accept unemployment, wage cuts, increased prices and so on, in order to save the economy for their employers.