It feels poignantly fitting that Alfredo M. Bonanno should die today, on December 6—the anniversary of the 2008 Greek uprising, or one could say insurrection, sparked when a cop murdered 15-year-old anarchist Alexandros Grigoropoulos in the Exarcheia neighborhood of Athens.
I’m no “insurrectionist”; to my mind, insurrections happen, whether we want them to or not. They aren’t something we anarchists—or anyone—can kick off. When they are filled with an abundance of anarchic sensibilities, as in Greece in 2008 or the George Floyd rebellion in 2020, or so many other moments of liberatory joy arising from the direct actions of the grieving and aggrieved, they are a thing of beauty and possibility, generating the forms of social relations and social organization as windows into the worlds we dream of—fight and live for. But insurrections—when fascistic and/or authoritarian—can be ugly, brutal, and deadly.
Still, I’ve been drawn to the always-provocative writings and life of insurrectionist anarchist Bonanno precisely because of how he embraces such tensions in every rebellion, not to mention everyday life.
I urge you, as a way to honor the memory of this now anarchist ancestor on this day of his death, to read his piece “The Anarchist Tension,” which offers this spot-on “definition” of anarchism:
“[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 a way of conceiving life . . . [I]t is a stake we must play day after day.“
And read, too, his piece “Palestine, mon amour,” which concludes:
“Either the theocentric Israeli State disappears, giving life to another federalist kind of formation that is open to the possibility of a communitarian cohabitation with the Arab Palestinians and eventually with other peoples, or the Jews will be moving towards a catastrophe once again.”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/alfredo-m-bonanno
#MayHisMemoryBeABlessing
#MayHisMemorySparkABlessedRevolution
Baeddelia 
