The Complete Works of Malatesta Vol V (Paperback)

The original Anarchy in the U.K.

This volume focuses on the crucial years in Errico Malatesta’s life when he was exiled in London. Responding to what he saw as the unrealistic insurrectionism and isolation into which anarchism had fallen, Malatesta advocated “a long and patient work to prepare and organize the people,” through which anarchism would operate in broad daylight to entrench itself in the workers’ movement.

Among the concerns Malatesta addresses in this volume are the assassinations of King Humbert of Italy and President McKinley in the US. The emerging radical labor movement that was taking off in England, France, and Spain at the time, and his own imprisonment in England. 

Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) is a principal figure of Italian and international anarchism. His sixty-year militancy, much of it spent in exile or in prison, spanned the foundation of the anarchist movement in 1872 to the eve of the Spanish Revolution. He has written “bestsellers” of anarchist literature, such as Between Peasants, Anarchy, and At the Café. However, his evolving anarchism—pragmatic, theoretically coherent, and as relevant today as it was a century ago—is best illustrated by the myriad of articles scattered in the anarchist press and collected for the first time in these Complete Works.

Davide Turcato is a historian of Italian anarchism and the author of Making Sense of Anarchism.

Andrea Asali is a writer and translator. Her first book is I Belong Only to Myself: The Life and Writings of Leda Rafanelli. 

Carl Levy taught and researched at the Open University, University of Kent at Canterbury, Queen Mary, University of London, and for many years at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Professor of Politics. His works include eleven edited or single-authored books and eighty journal articles and edited chapters. Among his works on anarchism are Gramsci and the Anarchists, Carl Levy and Matthew Adams (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, and Carl Levy and Saul Newman (eds), The Anarchist Imagination: Anarchism Encounters the Humanities and the Social Sciences. He has written many articles and book chapters about Errico Malatesta and is writing a biography, entitled Errico Malatesta: The Rooted Cosmopolitan.