Ciao, Alfredo

Via Il Rovescio, machine translation

Last Wednesday Alfredo Bonanno died at the age of 86.

For over fifty years, Alfredo has made a very important contribution to revolutionary anarchism, as a publisher, as a theorist, as a man of action, as an experimenter of organizational methods based on affinity and informality. What radically differentiated him from any intellectual was not only his rejection of every academic career and every media representation, but the fact that analyzing the State and capitalism did not serve for him to go to sleep with the clearest ideas, but to draw from it the precise consequences – ethical, practical, organizational – in everyday life. Inside some invariants of anarchism – Bakunin, first of all, that Alfredo did not mummify in historical ducts, but dragged into the battles of the present – his constant commitment was to think and practice an insurrectionary model suitable for the technological restructuring of capitalism. Not the insurrection as an expectation of the “X” hour, but as an attempt to attack here and now specific power projects with a very precise methodology: the affinity group as a thruster, the informal structure autonomous from parties and trade unions as a proposal. From the individual to the group in more or less substantial pieces of the class of the excluded, in the anarchist revolutionary intervention an artistic concept was articulated for Alfredo a qualitative concept of strength (and life).

But it is not of his theoretical contribution that we want to speak today, nor of his stubborn determination as a publisher, organizer, robber, prisoner, but of what he meant for some of us, at the time very young comrades, to know him. And to know him not only in the debates and initiatives of struggle, but in the daily commitment, where he emerged, together with his impressive ability to work, his willingness to confront, his overabundance of life, his thunderous laughter. Our thoughts do not run today to the tomes, the pamphlets, the rambles, but to the agnolotti that Alfredo prepared in the middle of the night after we had finished writing, formatting and printing a weekly, at the unlikely mise – pajamas, leather shoes, scarf and cap – with which he presented himself to the technicians of the printing press or the agents of Digos, to the way he knew how to reconcile an ego undoubtedly unspeaking.

Two aspects of Alfredo really formed us. Tendency towards coherence and the spirit of design adventure. On the other hand of the verbiage of some of his texts, some of his formulas were short and strong as only reasons of life know how to be.

Why the consistency? Because when we do not react to injustices we feel like shit, and we do not want to live feeling shit. Need to add something else?

And then the most precious of his suggestions, which resonates us now that we are witnessing an unspeakable horror in his beloved Palestine: we must conceive ourselves projectedly without limits, letting reality be thrown in front of them, something that is entrusted to him too generously, without ever anticipating it.

Because the quality of our lives is stronger than everything. Even of death.

- Thank you, Alfredo.

There are 3 Comments

pasta if you have ambitions plans to attack the state, i don't see an issue with it.

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