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Alfredo M. Bonanno Quotes

1937–2023

Alfredo Maria Bonanno (4 March 1937 – 6 December 2023) was a theorist of contemporary insurrectionary anarchism.

Also known as: Alfredo Bonanno, Alfredo Maria Bonanno

Random Alfredo M. Bonanno quote

25 quotes

By abolishing the ethic of production you enter revolutionary reality directly.

Armed Joy (1977)

Physical death, so much a preoccupation in the death world, is less mortifying than what is peddled as life.

Armed Joy (1977)

The rebellion of the exploited is never terrorism.

Of the Terrorism of Some Idiots and Other Matters (1979)

If production is at the root of capitalist exploitation, to change the mode of production would merely change the mode of exploitation.

Armed Joy (1977)

A transitory acceptance of the guillotine leads to its institutionalisation.

Armed Joy (1977)

Remunerated joy, weekends off or annual holidays paid by the boss is like paying to make love. It seems the same but there is something lacking.

Armed Joy (1977)

Courts and sentences are always part of the spectacle of capital, even when it is revolutionaries who act them out.

Armed Joy (1977)

Capital accepts the clash in the quantitative field, because that is where it knows all the answers.

Armed Joy (1977)

Anyone who decides to organise my life for me can never be my comrade.

Armed Joy (1977)

In order to break out of the magic circle of the theatricals of commodities we must refuse all roles, including that of the ‘professional’ revolutionary.

Armed Joy (1977)

We aren’t afraid, just stupidly full of prefabricated ideas we cannot break free from.

Armed Joy (1977)

No real joy can reach us from the rational mechanism of capitalist exploitation. Joy does not have fixed rules to catalogue it.

Armed Joy (1977)

What madness the love of work is!
With great scenic skill capital has succeeded in making the exploited love exploitation, the hanged man the rope and the slave his chains.

Armed Joy (1977)

The way capital is physically organised at the present time makes it vulnerable to any revolutionary structure capable of deciding its own timing and means of attack.

Armed Joy (1977)

Liberation is seen as setting right a balance that has been upset by the wickedness of capitalism, not as the coming of a world of play to take the place of the world of work.

Armed Joy (1977)

When the whole of reality is spectacular, to refuse the spectacle means to be outside reality. Anyone who refuses the code of commodities is mad. Refusal to bow down before the commodity god will result in one’s being committed to a mental asylum.

Armed Joy (1977)

In the illusory world of commodities, play is also an illusion. We imagine we are playing, while all we are really doing is monotonously repeating the roles assigned to us by capital.

Armed Joy (1977)

Only joy will be uncontrollable. A force unknown to the civilised larvae that populate our era. A force that will multiply the creative impulse of the revolution a thousandfold.

Armed Joy (1977)

Many things can be done ‘playfully’ yet most of the things we do, we do very ‘seriously’ wearing the death mask we have borrowed from capital.

Armed Joy (1977)

We insistently reaffirm that the use of organized violence against exploiters, even if it takes the form of minoritarian and limited action, is an indispensable instrument in the anarchist struggle against exploitation.

And We Will Still Be Ready to Storm the Heavens Another Time (1984)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Alfredo M. Bonanno (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.