socialist. He spent much of his life exiled from
. Malatesta wrote and edited a number of
. He befriended
, helping the latter to produce La Révolte. In April 1877, Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and about thirty others started an insurrection, taking 2 villages in the province of Benevento. The revolutionaries burned tax registers and declared the end of the King's reign and were met by enthusiasm. After leaving Gallo, however, they were arrested by
troops and held for sixteen months
Malatesta attended the Anarchist Congress of 1881 with other delegates including
Peter Kropotkin, Francesco Saverio Merlino, Marie Le Compte,
Louise Michel, and Émile Gautier. While respecting "complete
autonomy of local groups" the congress defined
propaganda actions that all could follow and agreed that "
propaganda by the deed" was the path to social
revolution. From jail, Malatesta also took a hard line against participation in
elections on behalf of liberal and socialist
politicians, contradicting Saverio Merlino and other anarchist leaders who argued in favor of
electoral participation as an emergency measure during times of social turmoil.
Malatesta was one of the first anarchists to stress a
syndicalist strategy and anarchists had to prod the socialists into insurrections and remain a
revolutionary conscience afterward during socialist reconstruction. Malatesta defined this type of anarchist
communism as "
anarchism without adjectives", described as a concept which he had developed with a group of Spanish anarchist intellectuals in the process of mediating between mutually hostile collectivists and
communists. In stressing tolerance within the libertarian movement, Malatesta hoped that Marxist socialists would permit the anarchists liberty for their own movement in post-
revolutionary society". The label "anarchist
socialism" came to characterize Malatesta's brand of
anarchism as he proclaimed the socialist character of
anarchism and urged anarchists to regain contact with the working masses, especially through involvement in the labor movement.