Ken MacLeod: Red Futures in the Gutter

From The Dark Forest

This is MacLeod’s great refusal: no radiant tomorrows, no shining cities in orbit, no anarchist communes beyond corruption. Every faction is cracked. Every ideology is compromised. Every rebellion curdles into dogma, every revolution ossifies into bureaucracy, every insurgency becomes indistinguishable from the power it once opposed. And yet it never stops. People still fight, because they cannot not fight. Ideas still mutate, because they cannot die. The wheel of ideology keeps turning, grinding flesh beneath it, even when all that’s left is rubble.

Spring 2023 Issue of Fifth Estate Out Now!

The new Fifth Estate is published and has arrived to many domestic subscribers. Bulk mailing to stores and distributors are on their way. Thanks for all your support and interest.

Spring 2023
Fifth Estate #413
Subscribe to our print edition here: https://www.fifthestate.org/product-category/print-edition/

CONTENTS
ANARCHIST REVIEW OF BOOKS

WORKS REVIEWED

The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism
JOHN P. CLARK

Review: Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Everyday Life

From Freedom News by Uri Gordon

OMG it’s an anarchist self-help book! No, not an ironic one for burnt-out activists. This is a guide to rethinking everyday life for readers with no priors. Each chapter in Practical Anarchism starts with a few bullet points (‘you aren’t your job’; ‘study can take place anywhere’; ‘rethink the arrangement of our lives’) and ends with FAQ (‘do I have to be polyamorous?’; ‘can I have my own toothbrush’?)

Eco-Utopia from Below

From New Politics By Daniel Fischer

At a time when much climate literature emphasizes inadequate “deals” with capitalism or catastrophe-prone nuclear and geoengineering technologies, it’s refreshing to read two uncompromising proposals for ecological revolution. Despite coming from different political traditions, anarchist and Marxist, they reach overlapping conclusions regarding the necessity to reject elites’ false solutions, reduce global production, support participatory planning, and establish healthier relations with nonhuman beings. With solutions at hand, and the dead-ends increasingly obvious, the ways forward appear to be getting clearer.

An Anthology of Puerto Rican Anarchist Texts from the Start of the 20th Century

From 80grados.net English translation by Anarchist News

[Free Pages: A Brief Anthology of Anarchist Thought in Puerto Rico (1900-1919)], edited by Dr. Jorell Meléndez Badillo and published by [Emergent Education Editions] in 2021, compiles a sample of texts from anticlerical and secular Puerto Rican anarchism from the first two decades of the 20th Century, one of the least studied periods of that century.

Dancing & Digging: A Review

My takeaway is that Seaweed’s language is both easy and intense, and has utility whether you throw it piecemeal into conversations with friends outside the green anarchist tendency or examine it deeply with accomplices to deepen and broaden your perspectives and tactics. Day-Woods suggests that you “memorize [their] words and make them your own”, and there are blank pages at the back for noting down your own proverbs and those of your friends. This book is a pointing text aimed at fighting text generally, a collection of wise insights aimed at weaving together a wise culture more than elevating wise individuals, and a nourishing ground in which the flower of liberatory oral skills can begin to root. I have some battered trousers with big pockets that I wear most days, and now most days this beautiful little book sits in one of those pockets.

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