Doing time

"The Armed Joy" is a bizarre pamphlet written by Italian anarchist Alfredo Bonanno in 1977. The author actually served an 18-month jail sentence for writing it, and the text is still banned in Italy. In the US, Bonanno could probably have gotten away by claiming that "The Armed Joy" is avantgarde art á la Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, but in Italy the threat from the terrorist Red Brigades made the authorities less sympathetic to screeds preaching armed struggle. I suppose their enthusiasm reached an even lower point when Bonanno started robbing banks, ostensibly to finance the anarchist movement...

Personally, I was struck by the apparent frivolity of "The Armed Joy". Had Bonanno not been an outlaw anarchist, his musings would have been difficult to take seriously. The author couldn't care less about revolutionary organization or the problem of production in a post-revolutionary society. There is a "primitivist" streak in the pamphlet, as if people could just walk away from technology and live closer to nature. At one point, Bonanno writes: "Anyone who decides to organise my life for me can never be my comrade. If they try to justify this with the excuse that someone must `produce' otherwise we will all lose our identity as human beings and be overcome by `wild, savage nature', we reply that the man-nature relationship is a product of the enlightened Marxist bourgeoisie. Why did they want to turn a sword into a pitchfork? Why must man continually strive to distinguish himself from nature?". Ted Kaczynski, are you listening?

Instead of petty, boring problems such as organizing, feeding and keeping order, Bonanno wants "joy". In his vision of the good life, anarchists make love, listen to music...and kill cops or maim judges. There is also a bizarre pseudo-religious streak in the pamphlet. One should not kill people out of revenge. The true revolutionary is calm and peaceful inside, even while murdering police officers and other adversaries. Finally, Bonanno cracks a truly weird conspiracy theory, claiming that the state is planning to incarcerate all dissidents in mental asylums (as in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev). This probably tells us more about the private psychological phobias of the author, than about the real situation in Italy circa 1977.

Who could be attracted by a pamphlet like this one? I think we all know the answer: pampered, bored middle-class hippies who don't understand that in order to eat, you must first work, and who really have too much spare time on their hands... They may want to kill the police, but actually they're just killing time.

Or doing time, if the boys in blue get them first.