Welcome to the ninth issue of the Anarchist Review of Books, produced by a collective based in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Chicago, Exarchia, New York, Oakland, and Richmond.
As we go to press, Americans are learning the hard way what democracy looks like. The 47th U.S. President and First Lady have released cryptocurrencies named $TRUMP and $MELANIA; the richest man in the world has taken over the U.S. treasury; wildfires have reduced multiple neighborhoods in Los Angeles to rubble and ash; and street lamps across the U.S. are wheat-pasted with WANTED posters of American CEOs in the crosshairs of a gun. This not fiction.
Legacy media’s attempts to humanize UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Johnson have been met with mockery and outrage: it turns out Americans don’t care if someone personally responsible for denying life-saving medicine to children was a “family man.” Collective experiences of devastation, rage, and loss can’t be whitewashed away.
People want accountability for the actual terror enacted by corporations and governments. And in the absence of accountability, they dream of avenging angels—the internet is flooded with images of Mangione, his head illuminated with a golden halo as in a renaissance painting of Christ. Or they want revenge in the form of an all-powerful strongman who will “clean up” the nation—images of Trump with blood on his face and his fist in the air adorn T-shirts and Facebook pages. But accountability is not going to come from either, and responding to the spectacles of fascist provocation with spectacles of resistance is a losing game. What’s needed, and what is proven to work, is class-focused, intergenerational organizing, shoulder to shoulder, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Globally, enthusiasm for collective action and mutual aid has never been higher. In North Carolina, Firestorm Co-op became a hub of decentralized organizing to rebuild and care for others after Hurricane Helene. The week of the inauguration saw dozens of peoples’ assemblies across the country. In Richmond, where ARB has an office, hundreds turned out ready to cooperatively take charge of their neighborhoods. Texas, Florida, Kansas, North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois—in nearly every state people are coming together. This type of organizing is where dreaming of a new world ends and creating one begins. This work work is how the Zapatista collectives, the Kurdish-led Rojava movement in Northern Syria, and the Greek anarchist collectives in autonomous neighborhoods like Exarchia started. All of which grew into standing self-governing communities that still exist today, decades later.
Generations of antifascists built Exarchia, from militants who fought to topple Hitler and the U.S. backed dictatorship to anarchist groups who squatted spaces to create migrant shelters, parks, community centers, free food kitchens, pharmacies, and medical clinics. They evicted police from the neighborhood, fought gentrification, and continue to fight today.
American history, too, has a startling number of autonomous peoples’ movements—networks of enslaved people working as cells to transport themselves and others to freedom, the abolitionists who helped them, indigenous resistance groups, the Industrial Workers of the World, SNCC, underground abortion networks, ACT UP, anti-pipeline activists, and the Earth Liberation Front, to name a few.
In America, the desperate grab of a failing state trying to hold power by any means is in full swing. The mask is off. Caught now in the snare of a hostile government, it is essential for people to understand how to organize without a leader, and how to organize offline.
At this time of great fear and rage, with so much work ahead, I think of the words of David Wojnarowicz, whose work features prominently in these pages: “Art,” he wrote, “is not about escaping reality, it is about facing it head on and turning it into something beautiful and meaningful.”
In this issue, ARB celebrates those who have faced reality head on, created communities, toppled dictators, and fought for their lives and the lives of others. We talk with Pansy Collective about mutual aid in Appalachia; N. Masani Landfair speaks on art as a tool of problem solving; James Kelman looks beyond medical reparations; Ben Morea has revolutionary advice; Sarah McCrary considers class, war, and the allure of fascist artists; Ryan King takes a magnifying glass to army ants; and Jules Bentley dishes on anarchists in literature.
ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION
Cara Hoffman
Februrary 2025