Alfredo Maria Bonanno (4 March 1937 – 6 December 2023) was an Italian anarchist and prominent theorist of insurrectionary anarchism. He was imprisoned multiple times for his political activities and was an editor of Anarchismo Editions, producing texts in Italian that have been translated and circulated internationally across anarchist networks.
Significance for This Research
Bonanno’s contribution to the anti-work tradition is his insistence on informal organization — resistance that does not crystallize into party structures, unions, or formal organizations that can be captured, co-opted, or bureaucratized. For Bonanno, the revolutionary act is immediate and relational: it happens between specific people in specific situations, not between abstract classes and historical forces.
This emphasis on immediacy and informality connects to the relational framework: resistance is itself a relational act, constituted through the specific encounters between people and the conditions they resist, rather than through adherence to a pre-given program or ideology.
Bonanno’s analysis of work as a structure of domination — a fundamental restructuring of one’s relationship to time, land, and other people, beyond the Marxist category of exploitation — is foundational to the anti-work research here. His Italian autonomist roots, his engagement with the Refusal of Work tradition, and his critique of leftist organizational forms that reproduce the hierarchies they claim to oppose all inform emsenn’s analysis of the colonial dimensions of waged labor.
Key Texts
Bonanno’s most circulated texts in English translation include Armed Joy (1977), written in response to what he saw as the left’s fetishization of the party and the program, and The Anarchist Tension (1996), a short lecture on why anarchism is uncomfortable to all sides.
Related people and concepts
- anti-work — the tradition he contributed to
- total liberation — the goal his insurrectionary anarchism aims toward