Workspace of Elephant Editions

Wednesday 4 August 2010

List of Titles

Elephant Editions

Anarchist Pocketbooks

1) Antonio Tellez, Sabate, Guerilla Extraordinary
This book tells of the life and action of anarchist guerilla Francisco Sabate in the struggle against Franco’s dictatorship, until he was killed in 1960. It shows the many ways in which it is possible to strike the enemy no matter what form it takes, so is still of great validity today.

2) Midnight Notes, Strange Victories. The anti-nuclear movement in the US and Europe An interesting analysis of the anti-nuclear movement, it looks at its composition, lack of class analysis and the question of violence, opening a much-needed debate on struggle and organisation against the nuclear project within that of capital as a whole.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/strange-victories-anti-nuclear-movement.html

3) The Angry Brigade, Documents and Chronology
Shows some extent of the armed struggle that was carried out in Britain in the late sixties and early seventies, reproposing the validity of armed attack against capital in all its forms.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/angry-brigade-documents-and-chronology.html

4) Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
Introduction by Alfredo M. Bonanno
One of the fundamental classics of anarchism, its validity today lies in Kropotkin’s vision of the revolutionary project as a totality, something that would be impossible if it were not already in act. Within this totality the movement finds its orientation, becomes both process and project in the immense task of the class struggle between exploiter and exploited. All that would be impossible if the final dream had not really begun here and now.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/conquest-of-bread.html

5) Oswaldo Bayer, Severino di Giovanni: Anarchism and Violence
The figure of Severino Di Giovanni and his activities in Argentina in the ’20s highlights a problem that has divided the anarchist movement from the beginningthat of revolutionary action against the State. The narrative form and documented accounts supply the reader with both a knowledge of this anarchist and the little known period in which he lived and carried on his struggle.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/anarchism-and-violence-severino-di.html

6) Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution Vols I & II
Introduction by Alfredo M. Bonanno
A fundamental interpretation that provides us with a number of observations of great relevance as Kropotkin ties his interpretation of the Revolution to the continuous stream of popular action which he sees as having begun before the Revolution itself. In the second volume he concentrates on the clash between the Jacobins and their opponents, the Enragés and the Anarchists. It is in this clash between authoritarians and antiauthoritarians that Kropotkin identifies the origins of Marxism and Leninism.

7) Alfredo M. Bonanno, From Riot to Insurrection
The riots of the future will be more bloody and terrible. And they will be even more so when transformed into mass insurrections. And just as industrial conditions once made the syndicalist struggle reasonable, in a post-industrial perspective the only possible strategy for anarchists is the informal one. Groups of anarchists who come together with precise objectives based on intermediate aims, who are at the same time building the minimal conditions for transforming situations of simple riot into those of insurrection.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/from-riot-to-insurrection.html

Anarchist Pamphlets

1) Alfredo M. Bonanno, Armed Joy
Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a new police prevent you. Hurry to say No, before the new repression convinces you that saying no is pointless, mad, and that you should accept the hospitality of the mental asylum. Hurry to attack capital before a new ideology makes it sacred to you. Hurry to refuse work before some new sophist tells you yet again that ‘work makes you free’. Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/armed-joy.html

2) Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension
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 is a stake we must play day after day.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/anarchist-tension.html

3) Dominique Karamazov, The Poverty of Feminism
In spite of its emancipatory and radical airs, feminism remains in the area of capitalist society to the point of even becoming the guardian of female alienation. It is not enough to define it an incomplete revolt, soliciting it to become total by abandoning the purely women’s point of view. We need to show up its content and the inversions that it involves in terms of real solutions.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Poverty%20of%20Feminism

4) Anon, Albania, Laboratory of Subversion
Introduction Alfredo M. Bonanno
In Albania just three years ago a sudden explosion of popular rage demonstrated yet again that the State only exists thanks to the complicity of those it dominates. Written when the insurrection in Albania was at its peak, this inspiring account pushes us to reflect upon our limitations in the light of such events, and to seek ways to go beyond chatter and idle talk.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/albania-laboratory-of-subversion.html

5) Alfredo M. Bonanno, The Insurrectional Project
Today as never before, striking at the root of inequality means attacking that which makes the unequal distribution of knowledge possible directly. But not blind attack. Not desperate illogical attack. Projectual, revolutionary attack, with eyes wide open in order to understand and to act.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/insurrectional-project.html

6) Anon At Daggers Drawn
One part of this society has every interest in continuing to rule, the other in it all collapsing as soon as possible. Deciding which side one is on is the first step. But resignation, the basis of agreement between the parts (improvers of the existent and its false critics) is everywhere, even in our own livesthe authentic place of the social warin our desires and resoluteness, just as in our little daily submissions. With all this it is necessary to draw daggers, to finally draw daggers with life.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/anon.html

7) Charles Reeve Beyond the Balaclavas in South Mexico
Introduction Massimo Passamani
The necessary criticism, which no one has ever made, of the EZLN and mercantile indigenism. The basic common sense to be said on the subject, if you like.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/beyond-balaclavas-of-south-east-mexico.html

8) Alfredo M. Bonanno Apart From the Obvious Exceptions, Interview with Radio Onda Rossa, A Few Considerations by a Frequenter of the Courts
Two well dressed little men, frequenters of the Courts of Rome by profession, have decided to arrest a few dozen comrades and incriminate as many more… A girl just turned twenty ends up reciting the role of the ‘penitent’ under the protection of a forest of bayonets… But we are defending ourselves. Because we are not convinced that the game is over completely, or that the State is winning even this ongoing small battle, and we believe there are still possibilities, even legal technicalities, in our favour. Apart from the obvious exceptions of course.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/apart-from-obvious-exceptions.html

9) Alfredo M. Bonanno Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism
A few notes To study methods of revolutionary struggle without first having a clear idea of what we mean by revolution can be extremely dangerous and could lead to quite disconcerting consequences… …That is why, before examining methods, it is necessary to clarify a few points: the concept of revolution, the alternative (only apparent) between violence and non-violence, and the (concrete) alternative between authority and freedom.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/revolution-violence-anti.html

10) Filippo Argenti Nights of Rage
On the recent revolts in France This booklet is a modest contribution to understanding to the recent revolts in France. Needless to say, it is not sociological nor, in a nobler sense, theoretical insight. Revolt can only be understood by those who have the same needs as the rebels, that is to say by those who feel they are part of the revolt.. After a brief chronology, in fact, the pages that follow pose the question of how the events of November in France concern all of us, and also try to give a possible answer.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/nights-of-rage-on-recent-revolts-in.html

11) Alfredo M. Bonanno Palestine, mon amour
There is no prospect of peace in sight. The ideal solution, atleast as far as all of those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalised insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people, that is capapble of destroying the institutions that govern them and of proposing peace based on collaboration and mutual respect with the Palestinian people directly, without intermediaries. But for the time being this perspective is only a dream. We must prepare for the worst.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/palestine-mon-amour.html

12) Alfredo M. Bonanno Locked Up

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/locked-up.html

13) Alfredo M. Bonanno Why a Vanguard

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-vanguard.html

Work in Progress

1) Alfredo M. Bonanno, Propulsive Utopia
Propulsive utopia, the life-blood of the real movement… feeds off a hidden but burning collective desire… then suddenly you find it at the street corner.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/propulsive-utopia.html

) Aldo Perego, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Pierleone Porcu, Revolutionary Solidarity.
When individuals find themselves alone at night, no longer supported by ‘collective strength’, the arms of Morpheus transform the imprisoned comrades one wanted to support, to whom one wanted to express one’s solidarity, into a real nightmare with no escape. Solidarity lies in action. Action that sinks its roots in one’s own project that is carried on coherently and proudly too, especially at times when it might seem dangerous to express one’s ideas publicly. A project that expresses solidarity with joy in the game of life that above all makes us free ourselves, destroys alienation, exploitation, mental poverty, opening up infinite spaces devoted to experimentation and the continual activity of one’s mind in a project aimed at realising itself in insurrection.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/search/label/Revolutionary%20Solidarity

3) Alfredo M. Bonanno, A Critique of Syndicalist Methods.
Information technology has led to the ultimate breaking up of the working class. This is also visible with the disappearance of the great industrial complexes which were often strategically located in underdeveloped areas. These are now being broken down and spread over the whole country as the fragmentation has become even more profound, penetrating proletarian consciousness to the point of making it well disposed, maleable and open to all the perspectives suggested by the unions to the benefit of capital. Today, if we want to move ahead at a time when nearly everything that needs to be done will have to be changed from top to bottom as the invisible mist of the technological swindle settles on humanity, it is indispensable to get rid of the obstacle of the trade union or syndicalist mentality. This text, which marked throwing suspicion on the unions, all unions including the so-called anarchist ones, has become topical once again.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/critique-of-syndicalist-methods.html

4) Alfredo M. Bonanno, Dissonances.
Something meaningful appears in the crossroads of rythms between re-evoked facts, the time of writing and the time of fruition, that is, in the task freely taken on by the reader. Questions as varied as anti-fascism, drugs, racism, loss of language, illness and life itself are examined here in this dissonant collection of articles which first saw the light in the anarchist paper ProvocAzione two decades ago.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/dissonances.html

5) Feral Faun Feral Revolution
Introduction Alfredo M. Bonanno
Feral revolution is an adventure. It is the daring exploration of going wild. It takes us into unknown territories for which no maps exist. We can only come to know these territories if we dare to explore them actively. We must dare to destroy whatever destroys our wildness and to act on our instincts and desires. We must dare to trust in ourselves, our experiences, and our passions. Then we will not let ourselves be chained or penned in. We will not allow ourselves to be tamed. Our feral energy will rip civilisation to shreds and create a life of wild freedom and intense pleasure.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/feral-revolution.html

6) Alfredo M. Bonanno. Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy.
If we are to play with our lives and during our lives, we must learn how to do so and set the rules of the game ourselves, doing it in such a way that these are clear to us and incomprehensible labyrinths to others. We cannot just say that a game with rules is still work and that if the rules are abandoned the game becomes free, therefore libertarian. The absence of rules is not synoymous with freedom… If we want to destroy work we must build roads of individual and collective experimentation which take no account of work except to cancel it from the reality of what is possible.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/lets-destroy-work-lets-destroy-economy.html

7) Leila and Sacha - Killing King Abacus The Anarchist Ethic in the Age of the Anti-globalisation Movement
Taking the anti-globalisation movement as its starting point, this article has wider connotations, which should make it of considerable interest to anarchists and anti-authoritarians today. Armed with a lucid awareness of the quality and potential of our ethical strength and methods, we could direct our passionate free spirits towards an incisive, horizontally spreading attack, regardless of the deadlines of power.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/anarchist-ethic-in-age-of-anti.html

8) Chrissus and Odotheus Barbarians: disordered insurgence
Why take the trouble to criticize the theses of Empire, when reality has so generously seen to it? Criticising all this only makes sense if one deepens one’s subversive project. To speak about pacifiers means to speak about violence and non-violence, about revolt and collaboration, about solidarity and dissociation, about anti-capitalism and its stunt-double, direct action and mass media.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/barbarians-disordered-insurgence.html

9) Guerrasociale/Venomous Butterfly Where is the Festival? Notes on Summits and Counter-Summits
Capitalism is a social relationship and not a citadel for the powerful. It is starting from this nabality that one can confront the question of summits and counter-summits. Representing capitalist and state domination as a kind of general headquarters (the G8, the WTO or some other such organisation) is useful to those who would like to oppose that managing centre with another centre: the politicalstructures of the so-called movement, or better, their spokes-people.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/where-is-festival.html



10) Alfredo M. Bonanno Insurrectionalist Anarchism Part One

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/insurrectionalist-anarchism-part-one.html

Act for Freedom

1) Solidarity with the Aachen 4
On June 24 2004, just over the border from Belgium, the German police stopped a car carrying three men and a woman for a routine ‘drugs control’. The reaction of one of the passangers was immediate: he pulled out a gun and fired a shot in the air. A car chase ensued and shots were exchanged. Eventually they gave themselves up. They did what they did because their lives and freedom were at stake. Because they do not want to return to the cells and torture chambers in Spain, because solidarity and friendship are stronger then fear, because friendship and love binds them.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/solidarity-with-aachen-4.html

2)
What’s going on in Italy?
Concentration camps for immigrants where torture is the rule, arrests of anarchists all over the country, police raids and the storming of solidarity demonstrations: this is Italy today. This pamphlet is a contribution to exposing what’s going on in Italy and is in solidarity to all the comrades in jail. Walls are made to be scaled, chains are made to be broken: we want our comrades free, all prisons and borders smashed down.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/whats-going-on-in-italy.html

3) The Unwanted Children of Capital Angry protestors, disgusted by the fact that human beings are imprisoned simply because they are foreigners, poor and without the right documents, have been struggling fiercely againstCPTs (immigration detention centres ) in Italy since their introduction in 1998. This struggle led to the arrest of five anarchists in Lecce, southern Italy, in May 2005. This pamphlet presents a few contributions concerning the struggle against the CPTs in Italy and actions carried out in other countries in solidarity with imprisoned immigrants and with the anarchists arrested in Lecce.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/unwanted-children-of-capital.html

4) The Finger and the Moon This pamphlet is a contribution to explaining what so-called operation ‘Cervantes’ is about, as a result of which a great number of Italian anarchists were under investigation, four of them in prison, on conspiracy charges. The conspiracy charge was dropped in February 2006, but, although there was no concrete evidence against them, sentences from 9 – 3 years were meted out. Laws, in this case the much-used 270bis which can put comrades in prison in Italy on the basis of a simple letter or phone call (subversive association), are nothing more than instruments in the service of those who practise oppression. They not only strike those who are behind bars today, but, like a collective scourge, they strike all of us. That is why fighting back without wasting time is an absolute necessity, which everyone must accomplish according to their own aspirations and means, passion and anger.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/finger-and-moon.html

Bratach Dubh Anarchist Pamphlets

1) Alfredo M. Bonanno Anarchism and the National Liberation Struggle
The anarchist project concerning national liberation struggle is very clear: it must not go towards constituting an ‘intermediate stage’ towards the social revolution through the formation of new national States. Anarchists refuse to participate in national liberation fronts, they participate in class fronts which may or may not be involved in national liberation struggles. The struggle must spread to establish economic, political and social structures in the liberated territories, based on federalist and libertarian forms of struggle.
http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/anarchism-and-national-liberation.html


2)Alfredo M. Bonanno Workers’ Autonomy
The reformist parties, trades unions and employers have coalesced to obstruct any growth in the level of the struggle, or any conquests that could lead to a revolutionary transformation. The proletariat have only one alternative: to build communism directly, passing over the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic structures. In this perspective we must provide analyses of autonomous workers’ nuclei and realise them in practice.
http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/workers-autonomy.html

3) Armed Struggle in Italy 1976-78 A chronology During these years the antagonist movement in Italy shed all its taboos concerning destruction, violence and the use of arms against the class enemy. It became normal to respond to the humiliation and tyranny of capital with the arms considered most effective, and the violence of the bosses, police and fascists found and immediate response both in the streets and in specific retaliatory actions. When this counter-information was first published, the aim was to make known and extend the whole dimension of armed struggle, so it contains little criticism of the forms that struggle took. Now it is time to contribute to the qualitative aspect of the struggle that is spreading today, using methods that include sabotage against the structures of capital carried out by small groups of comrades who have come together on the basis of affinity. These contain a strong element of creativity and joy, in the knowledge that it is simple to attack what is oppressing us directly and that there is no need for endless documents of ideological justification for doing so.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/armed-struggle-in-italy-1976-78.html

4) Otto Ruhle, The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolchevism
As the tragic history of both fascism and bolshevism complete their course, culminating in the modern democratic State, Ruhle’s article becomes more readily comprehensible….In understanding the fascist nature of State forms such as the so-called communist ones, we realise that the only solution is the immediate and definitive destruction of power in whatever form.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/struggle-against-fascism-begins-with.html

5)Errico Malatesta, Fra Contadini
With Fra Contadini, a dialogue between two peasants in the north of Italy at the end of the last century, Malatesta’s intent was to supply the anarchist movement with an agile instrument of propaganda. Due to its clear, simple argumentation this text is still of interest today.

6) Ratgeb
Whilst sabotaging production, hasn’t it ever ocurred to you what fun it might be to sabotage the weapons of repression (such as the bureaucratic machine, the cops, the quality control people, the information services or the town planners?) In that case you have come to realise that 1) the commodity system is proficient at recuperating partial sabotage; 2) what allows a product to be turned into a commodity is obligatory work and those forces which protect and maintain it; 3) the destruction of commodity by means of ending of obligatory work is inseparable from the liquidation of the State, of hierarchy, constraint, the commendation of sacrifice, and the lies of those who organise the universal commodity system.

http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/contributions-to-revolutionary-struggle.html

7) For an Anti-authoritarian Insurrectionalist International Proposal for a debate. At a time when the Mediterranean region is involved in political games worse perhaps than ever before it is important to reflect on the social, economic and political conditions that are intermingling and interacting, producing situations of extreme tension but also opening up a vast field of intervention to all revolutionaries. We consider the form of struggle best suited to the present state of class conflict in practically all situations is the insurrectional one, and this is particularly so in the Mediterranean area. By insurrectional practice we mean the revolutionary activity that intends to take the initiative in the struggle and does not limit itself to waiting or to simple defensive responses to attacks by the structures of power. http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/for-antiauthoritarian.html

DERANGED Issue 0 1.50

NSURRECTION Anarchist paper, nos 0 - 6. December 1982-September 1989. We address ourselves to anarchists and all those who feel themselves to be in a situation of antagonism against the domination of the State and capital. We address ourselves to those who see that science is no longer neutral, and to those who see that the struggle against the vile experimentation on animals cannot be fought as a single issue but must be brought into the global project of the capitalist enterprise. To those who see that moral indignation is not enough. That simply adhering to a movement in name and having no concrete project is not enough. We address ourselves to those who want to take the risk of throwing old schema out of the window and look for a new road. An informal, flexible road. One which requires constant engagement in a dimension of permanent conflictuality, not sporadic moments, spectacular displays of numerical strength. For those who want everything now and are prepared to make sure they get it and realise that this road is one that we must work to create, experimenting together. What we are offering here is one instrument in that project. Not abstract theory but an attempt to go forward and develop means that are adequate to the present day in the struggle towards a free society. Much of the analytical and theoretical contributions are the fruit of involvement in the struggle elsewhere in recent years. It is therefore also an attempt to break down some of the geographical and linguistic barriers that are an obstacle and prevent a full development of the struggle. Elephant Editions is no more than a collection of texts, a contribution to the great cauldron of dreams, ideas and experimentation for those who have decided to make their desires reality, now, without delay. The prices are orientative, with the usual reductions for bulk orders, distributors, etc. For a contribution of fifty pounds you could receive a copy of each publication mentioned in this catalogue, including those in preparation. If you find any of the texts of interest and wish to receive them, send what you can. No amount is too little—or too much. Obviously, the less time spent procuring the necessary means, the more could be spent making available material that might be useful to us all. So it’s also up to you. It goes without saying that books and pamphlets will be sent on request to those in the clutches of State repression. Looking forward to hearing from you.

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