You will always be alive with us through our action and our lives. “ACTION REPLACES TEARS”
Alfredo Maria Bonanno, born in 1937 in Catania, Sicily, is one of the most prolific contemporary anarchists, responsible for Anarchismo editions and other publishing ventures. In 1977 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his book La Gioia Armata (Armed Joy). This book had been published at a historical moment when the Italian revolutionary movement was openly going on the offensive, while similar conditions existed in other European countries (Germany, Spain, England, Greece, Chile and more) and the question of violence was on the daily agenda. His contribution lies in a celebration of the pervasive class violence that liberates and satisfies the individual, but at the same time he sounds the alarm about the emergence of the armed party, which reduces the class conflict to a militaristic dimension, imposing the mediation of a small minority of armed men on the complexity of tens of thousands of people struggling by all means against the current reorganization of Capital, which at that moment seemed weak.
In the spirit of the book, all authentic liberating and destructive action comes from a logic of satisfaction in the struggle, not a self-sacrificing duty in accordance with the dictates of a micro-bureaucracy. The Italian Supreme Court ordered the destruction of the copies of the book that were in circulation, and sent a circular to public libraries to dispose of any copies they might have had.
Several librarians objected to this Nazi-inspired tactic. Its circulation was generally banned, and copies were confiscated from the homes of anarchist militants in the context of police raids on houses.
Shortly afterwards, the author was accused of being an “instigator” of the Azione Rivoluzionaria, an armed organisation of 1976-79, which operated on the basis of “affinity groups” throughout central Italy, mainly against newspapers and party offices, and similar “manipulative mechanisms of consensus-building”. In 1979 the organisation was practically dismantled with the arrest of 86 people and the arrest of Salvatore Cinieri and Gianfranco Faina. The first went on to die in prison in a scuffle with criminal inmates when he defended a prisoner suspected of submitting an escape plan, while the second was released to die of lung cancer after being diagnosed with a tumour while in custody.
With the retreat of the movement, the author’s interest turned to the critique of traditional trade union and organisational structures, as well as to the new metropolitan uprisings that have been re-emerging in the West steadily since the 1980s, without the guidance of any party, without open demands, etc.
The rapid changes in social and economic conditions as capitalism pivoted to its post-industrial phase, were not greeted by Alfredo Bonanno and his comrades as any cause whatsoever for alarm, retreat or disillusion. The fixed armed and political structures and the proletariat they wanted to command have all but disappeared; common language and culture between those excluded and those included within the technological administration of society have been irreversibly eroded; rebellion which no longer expresses itself intelligibly in class consciousness or the leveraging of better conditions becomes synonymous with ‘irrational violence’. But in publications which Alfredo Bonanno contributed to in this period like ProvocAzione and Canenero, there is the persistently audacious question: whether these developments, which devastated the revolutionary movements in Europe, might really contain more than a little ‘good news’ for those who really desire anarchy and subversion?
This ‘good news’ is to be found in the preponderance of attack: the social war which – with greater or lesser intensity – has survived the collapse of political ‘lightning conductors’. The subversive crackle of sabotage, mini-riots, daily refusal and individual expropriation. These form, not a historical force, and even less some kind of ‘party of disorder’ but are instead merely tiny self-organised rebellions which serve to widen and concretise the distance between power and its enemies, undermining what has become the core objective of contemporary production: consensus and social peace.
The plan of power, with many different variations, is by necessity today to take the ‘sting’ out of exclusion by the flattening of life, tracking and managing unpredictability out of existence. Without language, the power of thought, the means to interpret reality, what is lost is the possibility to distinguish things. So even if I am barred in an absolute way from the ‘goods’ and ‘freedoms’ of this society I might not see or feel this distance for what it is – something sharp and violent – but as something indefinable, debilitating and perhaps a source of desperate longing for an illusion which will ‘humanise’ the distance (racism, nationalism, etc).
Without words to describe ‘revolution’, ‘class-enemies’, ‘solidarity’ which in the past had a common social foundation and meaning even to the exploiters they were hurled at, the morass of empty symbols and images which has replaced all this hyper-produces either frantic participation in the topics and fads of the moment or, for those really excluded, a perspective which consists mainly of rotting away in the shadows.
The refusals and attacks which respond to this condition have almost been dispossessed of the ability to speak at all and so clearly cannot make up a coherent revolutionary alliance. But because the human creature’s imagination, passion, intelligence and pride hasn’t been totally annihilated yet, it carries on trying to express itself even when all the avenues for doing so have been blocked.
The attack can make and flesh out this distance, making it clearer, sharper, perceivable. Distance between the existent order and the pent up energy of those pushed up against it with no way out is, today, exclusively evidenced and compounded by refusal and attack (all else, all participation, political speech, engagement, having been emptied of content, are accordingly part of the process of dispossession). What destructive reactions create, therefore, are more or less irresolvable tensions in the distance between this world and its undesirables who through a fusion of necessity and will, refuse its invitation to expire without a fuss.
This, Alfredo Bonanno cautions us, is ultimately the new ‘class’ terrain in which anarchists must struggle within (if indeed they still want to struggle at all): a bustling, unweildly jungle of capacities, perceptions, dreams, wills and desires which have made an enemy of power, or else have just been expelled from its process, and so have nowhere to go but towards the destruction of the existent. Anarchists are not outside of this looking in. We are also there, somewhere in the explosive mixture, if for no other reason than that our idea has no place whatsoever in this world of mercantile barter, precarious adjustment and chattering opinion.
So the question Alfredo Bonanno rolls up into bottles and casts into the sea, to float stationary in the doldrums or be tossed into the storms of the 21st century is the following: what methods and what perspectives can anarchists avail themselves with to pull down hard on these tensions, including our own, which are being opened up by attack, to the point that they snap?
What is impossible is the quantitive, strategic cohesion of the mass armed-and-political structures of yesterday, but it is not just organising under those auspices, or allying with the corpses of those entities which is to be completely rejected. It is an entire way of perceiving, their entire conception of force which is based on number, defensive organisation, management of the present, all kinds of delegation, political realism, guerilla militancy – in a word – in the banalising mythology of the rapport de force.
These concepts and perspectives must be replaced by those of a vital game of subversion without intermediaries, a game played between those whose individual struggle out of the domestication of the present is the only reliable guidance in what to look for and how to look for it. This game is played out far from spotlights, spectacle and all their grandiose illusions which have tragically polluted the insurgent dreams of the past, but perhaps, for all that, it is a game far closer to insurrectional possibility.
Alfredo Bonanno and his comrades put forward a kind of flying machine with two wings designed to both fan, and soar on, these new winds of subversion.
The first ‘wing’ is small diffuse actions ‘pulverised throughout the territory’. This is conceived as a new direction for the anarchist movement – away, generally, from attraction to hostile symbols and towards the sometimes-undefended periphery where the great flows of data, energy and commodities hold together the rancid social relations in post-industrial society.
The second ‘wing’ is sometimes referred to as ‘intermediary struggle’, meaning a struggle against a project of power with a precise destructive conclusion – having recourse therefore, to the cultivation and coordination of self-managed groups of attack from amongst all those who are affected by the object of the struggle (something qualitatively different from anarchist comrades developing their projectuality with the entire social field to play with).
Ultimately both orientations have practically bled into and fed one another, especially in the anti-nuclear struggles in Italy in the ’80s (against the pylons and other tendrils that supplied nuclear plans and other elements of technological restructuring – and, for two years, an application of the ‘intermediary’ method against the cruise-missile base in Comiso). There, both these wings stimulated a deliberate, self-conscious and (also thanks especially to Alfredo Bonanno) well-documented flight.
Both methodologies, in different ways, are in a perspective of generalisation, of social contagion according to the logics and timetables of affinity between individuals and self-organised groups. Both are tools fashioned specifically to be of use to comrades concerned with precipitating, augmenting, intensifying insurrectional openings in the present.
Some of Alfredo Bonanno’s best-known works, which are available in English thanks to Jean Weir’s translation work, include The Anarchist Tension, Anarchism and the National Liberation Struggle, A Critique of Syndicalist Methods, For An Anti-authoritarian Insurrectionalist International (the latter a rather out-of-print pamphlet in Greek, published by Εκδόσεις Επαναστατική Αυτοοργάνωση), Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy, Palestine Mon Amour, Locked Up, From Riot to Insurrection, texts on Hegel, Stirner, trade unionism and workers’ autonomy, etc.
His well-known long-standing activity also made him a target of repressive institutions. On February 2, 1989, in the context of a Digos operation (roughly equivalent to the Greek cops EKAM), after a robbery of a prominent jewellery shop, with raids on squats and anarchist houses, he was arrested together with Giuseppe Stasi and the two were sentenced to 68 and 54 months in prison, respectively. Again on the night of June 19, 1997, in a “sweep” operation by the Italian security services against anarchist squats and hundreds of houses throughout the country, following the bombing of the Palazzo Marino in Milan, Bonanno was arrested along with hundreds of other anarchists.
On February 2, 2003, he would also be sentenced to 6 years in prison and a 2,000 euro fine for armed robbery, in the context of the “Marini Trial”, in which anarchist militants were convicted on the basis of the Italian Marini theorem, according to which all anarchists in the country (squats, solidarity groups for prisoners, immigrants, etc.) are members of an “armed organisation with the aim of overthrowing the democratic constitution”. For this organisation, they even invented a (hitherto non-existent and ridiculous) name: ORAI – “Revolutionary Anarchist Insurrectionalist Organisation”. Bonanno’s reputation as a “theoretician” and convict author gave him the position of “ideological leader” of this non-existent organisation, according to the accusations. In the appeal
court, his sentence was reduced to 3.5 years.
In October 2009, Alfredo Bonanno was arrested near Trikala, after the arrest of anarchist Christos Stratigopoulos following an armed bank robbery. Christos Stratigopoulos also maintains anarchist publications (Sisyphos, Revolutionary Self-Organization), and had invited Alfredo Bonanno to Greece for a series of speeches on the occasion of his book “Domination and rebellion in post-industrial society” published by the “Eleftherian Institute of Social Studies of Ioannina”, which was run by Stratigopoulos, who, since his arrest, took full responsibility for the bank robbery, stating that he had resorted to this action for personal livelihood reasons, for the repayment of onerous bank loans. Christos Stratigopoulos had been arrested in 1994 with the anarchists Antonio Budini, Jean Weir, Carlo Tesseri, and Vaggelio Giuggia near Rovereto, Northern Italy, for robbing the local Agricultural Bank, and had been sentenced to prison sentences under the Marini theorem, in which a young girl was used to “identify” the four comrades. In the next phase of the theorem he “investigated” a photograph of Alfredo Bonanno (twenty years ago) in a sketch by the authorities, at the top of a pyramid with lines linking him to the arrested and other fighters. A repetition of such methods was evident in Greece, with the reports that would “leak” every few days about the possible participation of Alfredo Bonanno in another robbery in Argostoli, as part of a climate of physical extermination of “grandfather” Alfredo, who despite his 73 years and his poor health, did not abandon his “weapons”.
We consider it legitimate to use some of these weapons in the battle that is raging in Greece today, as Capital restructures itself, attempting an unprecedented devaluation of labour and reduction of living conditions, in a climate of national consensus among its ideological, trade union and political agents, thus exposing them to crisis.
We would be remiss if we did not mention that it was while in the cells of Greek democracy after his arrest near Trikala city , that Alfredo Bonanno, wrote in a calm ferocity the many pages that would become the book “L’ospite inatteso“, (“The Unexpected Guest”). It was here that he revealed in intense, piercing stanzas his recollections of combat decades prior in the land known as Palestine. A struggle against torturers, massacres administered by grey men with a clockwork routine.
The abyss of authority can abnegate responsibility and opens the way to butchers of the moral and material dimensions of the human, but perhaps only for so long. The necessity of cutting the executioners route through the infamous impunity of authority is a concept which runs right through the heart of Alfredo Bonanno’s more haunting contributions to the struggle for living freedom against this world of death.
Having said all this and the undeniable gaps they leave, there is also absolutely no doubt that Comrade Alfredo Bonanno left a part of his revolutionary heart in Greece and it is also no coincidence that his last wish, after his death, was to leave the ashes of his body in the sea of the Ionian Sea, of his Sicilian birthplace, Catania.
Anarchists comrades and anarchist project Act for freedom now!