The Armed Joy (La gioia armata) is a 1977 text by Alfredo Bonanno, written during the Italian movement of 1977 and addressed to the revolutionary currents then active in Italy. The text was banned by the Italian state, and Bonanno was imprisoned for its publication.
Bonanno argues against the left’s reduction of revolution to duty, sacrifice, and organizational discipline. The “armed joy” he describes is not recklessness but the insistence that the experience of freedom cannot be deferred to a post-revolutionary future — it must be present in the act of resistance itself. The text critiques both the parliamentary left (which defers freedom to legislative reform) and the armed Leninist groups (which defer it to the seizure of state power), arguing that both reproduce the logic of the systems they oppose.
The work is foundational to insurrectionary anarchism and its emphasis on direct action, informal organization, and the unity of means and ends.