In the pale, sad twilight hour, pregnant with comic and tragic events, while all ridiculous pettiness achieves manifestation and crime is erected as a life system, as an athletic gymnastic drill, while the blood of revolutionary and non-revolutionary citizens bathes the beautiful lands of Italy, anarchist individualism — unique and radiant living and historical reality — blazes majestically and gloriously beyond so much civil and social putridity toward joy, toward liberty, toward the sun.
The latest squall that raged suddenly in the cities and villages, has swept away people and things.
It was predictable and fatal.
The theory of love and meekness, propagated by all the Parties and all the proletarian organizations, absolutely could not resist the overwhelming flood.
The party chiefs, instead of educating the working class in rebellion and freedom, kept it always prone and enslaved. They only had their sights on the number of followers, membership cards, votes, discipline, etc, with the sole aim of forming a herd that was willing to let them milk and sheer it.
With a system of social political education of this sort, everyone knows what happened. The majority of proletarian who joined subversive parties and organizations willy-nilly, have gone over — bit by bit — to the enemy. What, pray tell, was the value of all the effusive praise that sages lavished on the proletariat — that poor wind-filled puppet — that some believed to be called by history to become the dictators of the world?
Now the proletariat has gone over to fascism, because fascists command, if tomorrow the black priest were to command, it would be willing to worship them, as it worshiped the red priests yesterday.
All the members of congregations have come out of the terrible storm badly, or rather extremely badly. Once again — and it won’t be the last time — the fraudulent bankruptcy of working class organizations has been declared. They have solemnly shown that they were not at all revolutionary or subversive, but reformist, state, church and shopkeeper organizations.
The failure of the organizational method, in the struggles for the conquest of well-being and freedom, is precisely and absolutely evident. Despite this, revolutionaries — many libertarian communists included — still insist — bellowing like cows about the necessity and importance of organization, don’t notice that their method has inexorably, irremediably swept them away and thrown them into the abyss.
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Individualists have laughed at all the compromises, all the renunciations, all the foul marketing, and still they laugh their irreverent, sacrilegious, cursed laughter.
We always laugh at each and all, at those who manufacture revolvers, rifles, bayonets, machine guns, cannons, ammunition, chains, shackles, various instruments of torture for the workers, at those who build prisons and raise gallows for “their” brothers, at those who organize themselves, or rather link themselves, into leagues and unions, paying membership fees and fattening the swine, as they give up their human dignity by electing masters and shepherds.
We laugh at those who shouts, “long live this and long live that,” at those who go to demonstrations ready to pay up and leave their bellies empty, at those who wait for the orders from the central committee of their party before they’ll rise up, at those who listen to leaders who exhort them to cowardice when they rise up, at those who wait for the sun of the future with arms crossed and stomachs empty, as if it could rise by itself from one minute to the next.
And those subversives who, in the name of liberty, want to overthrow the current government so that they can replace it with a new tyranny, how they make us laugh!
All symbols and all rites still provoke laughter in us. The religious procession is replaced with the march, the sermon with the rally in the same tone, the canopy with the banner. Portraits of rulers take the place of portraits of saints and madonnas, and the new christians, instead of singing sacred hymns, sing patriotic or subversive hymns. Nothing has changed, either in its form or its substance from twenty centuries ago to today.
But we aren’t tired of our laughing.
Our satanic laugher starts to boom like thunder and sends out flashes of lightning when we find ourselves before the worshipers of monstrous divine and human phantoms, which they call God, Religion, State, Fatherland, Humanity, Morality, Right, Duty, Custom, Altruism, Socialism, Communism, etc.
These baleful phantoms, created from the ignorance, fear and cruelty of human beings, still today make the stupid demand that the free and strong individual sacrifice himself to them, but he, who loves boundless liberty and the noonday sun, shoots his scorching and poisonous arrows against all the cursed and infamous idols and, striking them, laughs and is happy.
We laugh at all those who transform themselves into apostles of humanity and practice the craft of the preacher, promising earthly paradise and universal abundance; at those who want to give a single form to human society that numbers around two billion individuals each and every one different from the other; at those who, not able to live freely, pose as world redeemers, speaking of the rosy future while forgetting the black, cruel reality of the present. Finally, we laugh at all the poor in spirit who believe and hope in a radiant tomorrow, and faithfully and patiently await the reign of Saint Humanity.
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Beyond the organizationalist, prophetic, christianizing, monomaniacal anarchism of those who, like the young monk of Assisi, preach the theory of love and meekness, according to which our I “must gain by losing and rise by submitting,” there is the Anarchism of the free, virgin and rebellious instinct of refractories, nihilists, innovators, iconoclasts, amoralists, aristocrats, individualist, to whose proud, invincible and immortal breed I belong.