La responsabilità e la solidarietà nella lotta operaia: rapporto letto alla "Freedom Discussion Group" il 5 dicembre 1899 [Responsibility and Solidarity in the Workers' Struggle: report read at the "Freedom Discussion Group," December 5, 1899]. Barre: Casa ed. L'Azione, 1913.

La responsabilità e la solidarietà nella lotta operaia: rapporto letto alla "Freedom Discussion Group" il 5 dicembre 1899 [Responsibility and Solidarity in the Workers' Struggle: report read at the "Freedom Discussion Group," December 5, 1899]. Barre: Casa ed. L'Azione, 1913.

This short (21 pp.) report was written by German anarchist Max Nettlau and published by the book arm of L’Azione, a critical weekly of revolutionary propaganda based in Barre, VT, where anarchist Luigi Galleani had settled after postal authorities made it too "hot" for him to remain in Newark or East Boston. This work was issued as part of L'Azione's Biblioteca di Propaganda Rivoluzionaria, not to be confused with the similarly titled Biblioteca Rivoluzionaria series published by a very different group also part of the Left, namely, the Federazione Socialista Italiana del Nord America in New York in the same period of time, the second decade of the 20th century.

The verso of the title page indicates that the printer (stampatore) was C.A. Bottinelli of Barre, Vermont; that the printer was in the same city as the publisher was almost surely by design to avoid some of the issues that Galleani had had with postal authorities, at least in the delivery of copies of the printed work by the printer to the publisher for distribution.

Max Heinrich Hermann Reinhardt Nettlau (b. 1865 – d. 1944) was a German anarchist and historian. Raised in Vienna, he lived there until the anschluss to Nazi Germany in 1938. Nettlau retained his Prussian (later German) nationality throughout his life. A student of the Welsh language, he spent time in London where he joined the Socialist League and met William Morris, and anarchists such as Errico Malatesta and Peter Kropotkin, with whom he remained in contact for the rest of his life. 

In the 1890s, realizing that a generation of socialist and anarchist militants from the mid-19th century was passing away and their archives of writings and correspondence being destroyed, he concentrated his efforts and a recent modest inheritance from his father on acquiring and rescuing such collections from destruction. (Much of that collection made its way in the 1930s to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which still maintains a fine library of radical material, including many works in this Collection.) He also interviewed many veteran militants for posterity.

Nettlau wrote biographies of many famous anarchists, including Mikhail Bakunin and Élisée Reclus, as well as one of Errico Malatesta, q.v., published by Il Martello in New York in 1922. He also wrote a seven-volume history of anarchism.

Max Nettlau

Casa ed. L'Azione

1913

20 x 11.5cm; 21 p.

Italian