Armed Joy

A great essay written by the Italian anarchist Alfredo M. Bonanno in 1977. 'Armed Joy' compares his anarcho-insurrectionist comrades in Italy fighting the oppression imposed by the self-proclaimed 'revolutionaries' of the time; to our own opportunity today to join together in joyful destruction and tear down each and every wall that oppresses and regulates ourselves and our world. He was imprisoned for 18 months by the Italian government for writing this pamphlet. "This book was written in 1977 in the momentum of the revolutionary struggles taking place in Italy at the time, and that situation, now profoundly different, should be borne in mind when reading it today... It seemed essential to prevent the many actions carried out against the men and structures of power by comrades each day from being drawn into the planned logic of an armed party such as the Red Brigades...That is the spirit of the book. To show how a practice of liberation and destruction can come forth from a joyful logic of struggle, not a mortal schematic rigidity within the pre-established canons of a directing group."—from the introduction to the 1993 edition.