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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The “Deaths” of Poet Writers: Nour El-Din Haggag and Refaat Alareer
From lundimatin, #407, December 11, 2023 …
The young Palestinian writer and poet Nour El-Din Haggag has just died on December 5, followed on December 7 by the poet Refaat Alareer, after the bombing of their house in Gaza. One of Nour El-Din’s last writings explained why, at the risk of his life, he refused to leave his land and remained in Gaza.
These writer-poets in whom the Palestinian people recognised themselves at the height of their resistance through the poem, are today among the 17,000 victims of the war ordered against the Palestinians.
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