Alfredo M. Bonanno Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

These people cannot comprehend that it would be possible to not produce any surplus value, and that one could also refuse to do so. That it is possible to assert one’s will to not produce, so struggle against both the bosses’ economic structures and the ideological ones that permeate the whole of Western thought.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 rebellion of the exploited is never terrorism.