ARB #8 Summer/Fall 2024
The Anarchist Review of Books publishes intelligent, non-academic writing with an anti-authoritarian perspective. We are dedicated to transforming society through literature and through open, incisive critique of the media, politics, history, art and writing that shape our world.
Cover image: Whose Streets by Tabitha Arnold. Punch needle embroidered wool yarn on linen, 2020
Welcome to the eighth issue of the Anarchist Review of Books, produced by a collective based in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Exarchia, New York, Oakland, Richmond, and Seattle.
As ARB editor Nick Mamatas likes to say, “if you don’t use your imagination someone else will do it for you.” Nowhere is this more salient than in the United States, where two political parties educated in the same institutions, invested in the same stocks, beholden to the same corrupt corporations and judicial system, and employing the same military, police, and secret service have created a mass delusion of extreme difference between themselves; a hysteria that has Americans imagining Nazis where conservative uncles stand and terrorists in the guise of college freshman. The clear, undeniable fact is that a single ideology has its teeth sunk deep in the throat of America. Capitalism governs, and class is the only forbidden subject in a nation viciously pitted against itself over the choice to elect a smiling cop or a snarling billionaire.
This hallucination of difference isn’t limited to true believers and political parties. It extends into radical spaces where people who fundamentally agree, and who have been attacked by the same forces, have forsaken the solidarity required to confront the crises at hand; have in fact come to believe that they must police one another and explain the world to one another; effectively boring, enraging, and alienating one another into a state of despair. A general strike would be much more fun.
How this happened is not a mystery, and one can find ample analysis of it, including in the pages of this magazine, but the mechanisms by which it is produced and sustained are something to which anti-authoritarians should give their full attention. The illusion of “choice” and “meaning” created through information overload, endlessly refreshable news cycles, and the proliferation of AI-generated bullshit is the Situationists’ nightmare come true. Beneath the monopolization of attention and the capture of imagination, new possibilities, collective action, and individual thought become increasingly difficult. How do we dream of something new from within this framework? How do we bring that dream to life and protect it?
As Shellyne Rodriguez has said in these pages, the NGO take-over of groups like Black Lives Matter in the U.S., and of migration rights in the Mediterranean is a warning to us all. This kind of counter-revolutionary management of movements is coming fast for smaller mutual aid projects too, turning longstanding successful practices such as squatting, peoples’ assemblies, volunteer food distribution, and health initiatives into privatized or state funded endeavors, or into elite buys-ins akin to the Park Slope Food Coop. Entering into the numbing and isolating logic of empire, and arguing from within that logic is to not only lose possibilities for change, for solidarity, for self-direction, but to also lose joy and peace of mind.
The empiric and market imaginary; the myth of meritocracy; of humanitarian professionals and altruistic technocrats; of self-made men and hard-working patriots from the heartland—these are themes, characters, and settings that engage the human desire for story, but have little to do with the observable world.
There are few resources to battle an enemy that employs our innate desire for fantasy and meaning-making in order to pacify, stupefy, and control. Giving over one’s imagination is a guarantee of defeat. It is to give up the last ground on which we might truly stand.
As every good soldier or mystic knows, it’s hearts and minds that count; bodies are always expendable.
In these pages we bring you no solutions but rather cracks in the armor, holes in the fortress walls, spaces to think of something new. What we do with these spaces is up to us. In this issue we have dispatches from people’s movements in the West Bank, Argentina, and the U.S., Philip Shelley reminds us what it is to transgress, Aleksandra Kaminska interviews Eileen Myles, Dread Scott and David Baillie expound on the anti-fascist (and fascist) roots of Punk, Elly Bangs brings us a picture of the future, and Maria Xilouri shows us how to dream and drift; plus reviews by Heather Bowlan, Jules Bentley, and Agnes Borinsky, and art by Tabitha Arnold, Jess Vieira, Jesse L. Freeman, John Ahearn, Scott Treleaven, Joy Drury Cox, and Sylvia Plachy.
ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION
Cara Hoffman
August 2024
