Character guide

Kropotkin

major

Kropotkin stands behind Malatesta's central argument that solidarity, not competition, is the engine of human progress — the accumulated experience of generations teaching that union secures preservation and well-being. He is less a debater here than a foundation: the scientific conscience of the movement, cited to show that social instinct is not sentimentality but the essential element of man's moral nature. His presence gives the essays their evolutionary spine, grounding anarchist ethics in the long history of cooperation.

Michael Bakunin

supporting

Bakunin hovers over these essays as both ancestor and caution: the fiery nineteenth-century revolutionary whose spirit Malatesta honors while insisting on a harder, more humane calculus. Against the logic that would let all Italians starve for a glorious Italy, Malatesta affirms that every human being must be free to develop and live happily — and that this happiness cannot be handed down by any party. Bakunin's shadow sharpens the book's central tension: how to fight in the world as it is without becoming the thing you oppose.

Anarchists

major

Also known as the Anarchists

They are not avengers or dispensers of justice but would-be deliverers, arguing that land, tools, and accumulated wealth must become the common property of all mankind. Their quarrel with parliamentary Socialists is tactical and temperamental: they trust organized workers over government concessions, direct agreement over decrees from a central body, and fear that representation will breed a new class of professional politicians. Their insistence on taking part in the International Congress — and their refusal to be quietly excluded — frames the book's early argument about who owns the word socialism.

the masters

minor

A generic referent for ruling class or capitalist oppressors, discussed as a social force.

Bolshevists

supporting

Also known as the Bolshevists

Malatesta treats the Bolshevists with unusual care: he admires their energy, grants their sincerity, and refuses to echo reactionary calumnies against them. Yet he reads their method as a warning — a party dictatorship with decrees, penal laws, and armed force that defends the revolution today and will arrest it tomorrow. Lenin and Trotsky, he suspects, will not betray the revolution as they understand it, but they are preparing the governmental methods that will let others kill it. Their chapter is the book's sharpest meditation on means and ends.

Socialists

supporting

Also known as the Parliamentarian Socialists, the Socialists

They are the respectable face of the workers' movement: organized, electorally minded, willing to treat with masters and authorities, and increasingly absorbed in the interests of their own unions rather than the mass of the unemployed. Malatesta watches this drift with a mixture of frustration and clear-eyed analysis, noting how large funds breed caution and how success breeds conservatism. Their quarrel with the anarchists is not about the destination but the road — and the book's middle chapters turn on whether the workers' movement can be pushed past them.

the Jacobins

minor

Historical French revolutionaries, invoked as a cautionary example of centralized power.

Robespierre

minor

A leader of the French Revolution, referenced as a symbol of revolutionary dictatorship.

Bonaparte

minor

Napoleon Bonaparte, cited as an example of military dictatorship arising from revolution.