“Certainly, a lot of people in Britain, when you say ‘anarchists,’ they just think of riots. And the news will say, ‘Today, twenty anarchists went on a rampage.’ They don’t understand anarchism,” he said. “Politically, I’m a revolutionary. I believe in breaking the whole system down and f*cking starting again. And I can see that that’s not going to happen for a while. And when I say I’m a revolutionary, I’m an anarchist. I think that the political system we have right now lead to corruption at all kinds of levels,” he said.
Benjamin Zephaniah, interview from Psychology Today, 24 July 2018
People can write about anarchist theories as much they like but there are places that live without government and live peacefully and happily. A lack of power means people of course aren’t fighting over it and the main objective of society is to look after each other.
Benjamin Zephaniah, Palatinate, 27 October 2022
In a 2019 post, we shared Benjamin Zephaniah’s testimonial text, Why I am an anarchist. Today we mark his passing, celebrating the poetry and that artistry that he created, lived and shared with so many.
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For Alfredo M. Bonanno (1927-2023)
Being an anarchist does not mean one has reached a certainty or said once and for all, ‘There, from now on I hold the truth and as such, at least from the point of view of the idea, I am a privileged person’. Anyone who thinks like this is an anarchist in word alone. Instead the anarchist is someone who really puts themselves in doubt as such, as a person, and asks themselves: What is my life according to what I do and in relation to what I think? What connection do I manage to make each day in everything I do, a way of being an anarchist continually and not come to agreements, make little daily compromises, etc? Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, whether we are old people or children, is not something final: it is a stake we must play day after day.
Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension
Alfredo Bonanno’s elaboration and defence of “insurrectionalist anarchism” is undoubtedly his most significant theoretical-practical contribution to anarchism and, not coincidentally, his most contested.
Bonanno endeavoured to trace a path for anarchist politics in the wake of the waning of the working class as an agent of anti-capitalist struggle, born of changing social relations in modern capitalist society. His criticism of the anarchist-syndicalist tradition expresses what he understood as the need for a new orientation for anarchism, an orientation that could be described as an ethics and politics of militant opposition to the reign of capital in all social spheres. This translated into a rejection of formal mass anarchist organisations, as instruments of radical social change, and an ardent championing of “insurrection”: the permanent struggle against capitalist society, with the goal of its destruction, through concrete and situated actions that reflect and engender disruptive moments in the mechanics of capitalist social reproduction.
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