Alfredo M. Bonanno Quotes

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

We are all responsible for our dream of storming the heavens. We cannot turn ourselves into dwarves now, after having dreamed, elbow to elbow, each feeling the others' heartbeats, of attacking and overthrowing the gods. This is the dream that makes power afraid.

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.

Joy is arming itself. Its attack is overcoming the commodity hallucination, machinery, vengeance, the leader, the party, quantity. Its struggle is breaking down the logic of profit, the architecture of the market, the programming of life, the last document in the last archive. Its violent explosion is overturning the order of dependency, the nomenclature of positive and negative, the code of the commodity illusion.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The reign of capital, which denies our very existence as human beings and reduces us to ‘things’, seems very serious, methodical and disciplined. But its possessive paroxysm, its ethical rigour, its obsession with ‘doing’ all hide a great illusion: the total emptiness of the commodity spectacle, the uselessness of indefinite accumulation and the absurdity of exploitation. So the great seriousness of the world of work and productivity hides a total lack of seriousness.

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

Play is characterised by a vital impulse that is always new, always in movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it.

The neutralisation of the individual is a constant practice in capital’s reified totality. The flattening of opinions is a therapeutic process, a death machine. Production cannot take place without this flattening in the spectacular form of capitalism.

The search for joy is therefore an act of will, a firm refusal of the fixed conditions of capital and its values. The first of these refusals is that of work as a value. The search for joy can only come about through the search for play.

If I don’t feel like carrying on, given that no one can be forced to continue if they don’t feel like it, I say, ‘My friends, a man is made of flesh and blood, he can’t go on to infinity. So, if I don’t feel I can make it, what must I do? Sign a piece of paper? I don’t carry out impure actions, I don’t get comrades arrested, I’m simply making a declaration of my own desistence.’ I have always considered this to be a legitimate position, because nobody can be obliged to carry on if they don’t feel up to it. But desistence is no longer legitimate if, in order to justify it, I come out with the statement, ‘I can’t carry on because the war is over’. No, I no longer agree, because where does that lead us? To all the others both inside and outside prison for whom it isn’t true that the war is over, or for whom this concept is dubious, but end up believing it because everybody is saying so. And, desisting or not desisting, they end up reaching the same conclusion. It would be quite indecorous for me to push others to desist in order for me to justify my own personal decision to give up the struggle.