Cover image: Green Organic by Narsiso Martinez

From The Anarchist Review of Books

Welcome to the 11th issue of the Anarchist Review of Books, produced by a collective based in Atlanta, Baltimore, Belfast, Brussels, Chicago, Detroit, Dublin, Exarchia, London, New York, Oakland, and Richmond. We bring you this issue at the heart of a bitter cold winter as U.S. federal troops hunt, detain, deport and murder human beings in the name of the law.

The word fascism is everywhere right now, but what is emerging around the globe today should not be mistaken for the industry-fueled state mobilization which characterized 20th century fascist movements. What we are facing today is more slippery, moves more quickly, and is inseparable from digital technology. Again and again, it destroys the bonds between humans and the world around them, and obliterates any feeling of consensus reality using a blindingly bright device which is already in your pocket. It is the rhizome in its destructive, world-devouring manifestation and a force that would create a utopia for a tiny handful of people.

This new techno-authoritarian push (which sees no irony in describing ANTIFA as an organization that has “dangerous roots” fighting fascism in 1930s Germany) is a multi-class, multi-ethnic, and multigenerational movement that, as Joe Schmidbauer describes in this issue, has itself grown from liberal utopian ideas.

In Klee Benally’s final work No Spiritual Surrender, he criticized the anarchist call to build “a new world from the shell of the old.” “Their urge is utopic,” he said, “(and utopia is a colonial logic).” Benally knew what Plato suggested nearly 2500 years ago—that one person’s utopia is always someone else’s hell.

The specter of that techo-authoritarian utopia has spurred collective action across the U.S., born from self-preservation. Minnesota has spontaneously birthed the largest decentralized action network in more than half a century, one that independent jounalists have described as leaderless and leaderful, populated by individuals acting on the authority of their own convictions. The fantasies of an emerging revolutionary vanguard remain just that, fantasies. What we are seeing instead is logistical organizing undertaken neighborhood by neighborhood, sometimes block by block.

This is how crisis is met. The most important moments of collective risk are those in which we see how subjectivity, identity, and sense of a separate self are plainly used as divide and conquer tactics. Spontaneous, emergent collective risk comes before politics, which, as Hannah Arendt tells us, is always the territory of compromise. What follows these revolutionary moments is impossible to predict.

If we are to achieve more than a campaign of survival, we have to imagine a future outside the limited use of the imagination that dead-ends in one kind or utopia or another. Liberation begins in the realm of dream and fantasy, and it is only achieved through tactical proficiency and understanding of material reality.

One example comes from the Zapatistas who successfully collectivize risk by building solid community bonds through self-management based in grassroots and international solidarity. Logistically, they organize autonomous councils at the local level, rotating responsibilities. When paramilitaries attack one community, the network is already in place through which all surrounding communities can respond immediately and collectively to the risk. This is also how the New York City Fire Department organizes. Each FDNY firehouse functions like an individual Zapatista council, and each firefighter a militant. These are structures that can not only be sustained, they already form the foundations of collective life.

But whether one is fighting fire or fighting ICE, the material reality is this: it is not safer at the front, no matter what the memes say. Those at the front of every conflict understand the risk of harm, arrest, and death is greater. It is safer when risk is collectivized, when there are multiple points of engagement and shelter, when communication is clear and the foundation is steady. Those at the front know that to take up that position is to live on the edge of a great wave. To ride it we must remain absolutely present, as if on the edge of time itself, not knowing what will come next. The wind in our faces is terrifying, and it is fresh, and in it together, we are alive and strong.

In every issue we declare the power of the imagination. In this issue we bring you interviews and profiles of those who have put that declaration into action. We contemplate utopias past and present; heavens and hells, art movements, shared delusions, and struggles for liberation. T Fleischmann illuminates the bravery of Claude Cahun; Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin and Joe Schmidbauer muse on the fire, failings, and future of the counter culture; Shellyne Rodriguez eulogizes Assata Shakur; Ella Ray witnesses resurrection with Bread and Puppet; Jules Bentley unleashes his wit on a purveyor of anarchist chic; and Carrie-Edmund Laben’s fiction puts the fear of Pan in us all. Plus reviews, and art by Narsiso Martinez, Élan Cadiz, Ben Durham, Molly Crabapple, N. Masani Landfair, and Elektra KB; and dispatches from the West Bank, Minnesota, Rojava, and the Edge of Order and Chaos.

All Power to the Imagination
All Power to the People

—The Editorial Collective
February 2026

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