Intro to Insurrectionary Anarchism : Catgirls Book Club

Here I’ve collected links to several texts by Sicilian anarchist Alfredo Maria Bonanno, originally translated into English from the Italian and published by his Scottish anarchist comrade Jean Weir as separate pamphlets or booklets, but now presented together in one convenient location.

These words aren’t presented chronologically according to when Bonanno wrote them, but logically, according to style and content, as a way to introduce the reader to the diversity and tenacity of the author’s thought. They consist of a mixture of speeches and written texts on various subjects, but still only represent part of Bonanno’s texts that so far have been translated into English, which themselves only represent a tiny part of what Bonanno has published in Italian.

Bonanno’s earliest books, The Necessary Destruction and Fundamentals of a Philosophical Theory of Indeterminacy, were published in 1968. Some of his even earlier essays were then collected in his 1974 book, The Anarchist Dimension. None of these books have yet been translated into English.

In 1969, Bonanno translated into Italian and wrote a preface to Pyotr Kropotkin’s book, Ethics, published by his friend Franco Leggio of La Fiaccola Editions. That same year, an edition of Errico Malatesta’s booklet, Anarchy, with an introduction by Bonanno was published, also by Leggio.

Many more books would follow, both of Bonanno’s own writing and of that of other anarchists and non-anarchists he has chosen to republish. Not to mention the multiple anarchist magazines he has edited and published over the decades.

But he is not only a writer and publisher. According to Bonanno himself, in 1969 he made a trip to Greece and took part in the armed struggle against the military dictatorship that had installed itself there two years prior. In 1972, again by his own admission, he gave up on the pharmaceutical company he’d been running.

Within a few years he would be sentenced to time in prison for writing and publishing the text, Armed Joy, which is presented here. Many more texts, social struggles, speaking events, actions and prison terms would follow. Bonanno’s collaborative publishing efforts also continue today via Edizioni Anarchismo.

His work strikes me now much the same way it did when I first read it two decades ago, even if not all his predictions came true, and not each of his choices appear comprehensible from afar. If one thing is certain, it’s that we don’t need any Bonannoists, but rather anarchists who can think for themselves, take what’s useful and adapt it to their own contexts, not simply copy-and-paste.

What caught my interest back then was Bonanno’s attempts to analyze ongoing developments in capitalism, such as the growth of the non-industrial sectors of the economy, and his efforts to theorize and put into practice new and more flexible means of organization for engaging in social struggles. If anarchism is allowed to stagnate, to dwell on the past, or be reduced to a superficial style, we are surely lost. But with a determined project, who knows what’s possible?

A handful of comrades from across North America have been influenced by Bonanno and Weir’s writing and struggle since at least the 1980s. In the Coast Salish territories that the city of Vancouver occupies, comrades consciously deployed and molded the theory of insurrectionary anarchism to circumstances very different than those of Italy in the 1970s, but within social struggles nonetheless, from squats and strikes to anti-police organizing and solidarity with Indigenous struggles.

As comrade Weir indicates in her introduction to From Riot to Insurrection, if we want to change reality, we first have to look at it for what it actually is and not just what we would like it to be. And this includes the level of class conflict, local particularities, our own limitations and much more. Hopefully this collection can continue to contribute in that direction. Which is to say, self-direction, as well as coordination with others, within every sort of social tumult, in whatever state we find ourselves.

Mike Gouldhawke, December 2022

An introductory collection of Bonanno’s writing:

“Because anarchism is not a political movement. Or rather it is, but only in a minor aspect. The fact that the anarchist movement presents itself historically as a political movement does not mean that this exhausts all the anarchist potential for life.”

The Anarchist Tension

“The informal organisation of affinity groups and the consequent development of base nuclei in specific mass struggles, are the organisational forms I consider most useful today for the generalisation of the struggle, armed or otherwise.”

The Insurrectional Project

“In the evolution of social contradictions over the past few years, certain tendencies have become so pronounced that they can now be considered as real changes.”

From Riot to Insurrection

“This book was written in 1977 in the momentum of the revolutionary struggles that were taking place in Italy at the time, and that situation, now profoundly different, should be borne in mind when reading it today.”

Armed Joy

“The prison question is something that anarchists and the revolutionary movement in general have been involved in for a long time. We come back to it periodically because for many of us it is something that touches us directly, or touches comrades close to us, whom we love.”

Locked Up

“Capital has stolen our time from us (it needed it for production) and it has stolen our space (it needed it first as places of production, then as a system of control and repression, then to get general consensus).”

The Struggle for Self-Managed Social Space

Some further Bonanno readings:

The Revolutionary Project (PDF layout by Fugitive Distro)

Insurrectionalist Anarchism

A Question of Class

Strategy and Methods

Towards Anarchist Antimilitarism

Anarchism and the National Liberation Struggle

Some very common theoretical errors

A few notes on Sacco and Vanzetti

The Logic of Insurrection

Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism

Why a Vanguard?

Fictitious Movement and Real Movement

And We Will Always Be Ready to Storm the Heavens Again

A Critique of Syndicalist Methods

Workers’ Autonomy

Propulsive Utopia

Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy

Palestine, mon amour

Apart from the Obvious Exceptions

Introduction to The Conquest of Bread

Introduction to Sabaté: Guerrilla Extraordinary

Introduction to A Mano Armata (Armed)

A couple of Bonanno quotes:

“Many ghosts crowd in front of the entrance of the cavern of massacres, inside which is the gurgling slime of human activity that boasts this not very commendable title, the title of ‘politics’”

Alfredo M. Bonanno, Critica della ragione politica (2015)

“Anarchists are never individualists, communists, collectivists, anarchists are open to a pluralism of possibilities in which none of these solutions can be radically denied, because if one denied the possibility of real communism, anarchist, not communism as it has been created up to now, one would end up preventing a real development of the individual, a concrete development. Equally, if one denied the possibility of the development of the individual, one would deny the possibility of realizing communism.”

Alfredo M. Bonanno, Incontro con Alfredo Salerni: Dibattito su Stirner e Kropotkin (1994)