# Essays — Character guide

> Key figures in Essays by Errico Malatesta.

- [Kropotkin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/kropotkin.md): 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. 
- [Michael Bakunin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/michael_bakunin.md): 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 
- [Anarchists](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/anarchists.md): 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 tact
- [the masters](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/the_masters.md): A generic referent for ruling class or capitalist oppressors, discussed as a social force.
- [Bolshevists](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/bolshevists.md): 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 w
- [Socialists](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/socialists.md): 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 Jacobins](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/the_jacobins.md): Historical French revolutionaries, invoked as a cautionary example of centralized power.
- [Robespierre](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/robespierre.md): A leader of the French Revolution, referenced as a symbol of revolutionary dictatorship.
- [Bonaparte](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/essays_se/characters/bonaparte.md): Napoleon Bonaparte, cited as an example of military dictatorship arising from revolution.

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