Perspectives On Anarchist Theory

Hillary Lazar (Editor); Lara Messersmith-Glavin (Editor); Paul Messersmith-Glavin (Editor); Maia Ramnath (Editor); Theresa Warburton (Editor)

$16.00

Publisher: Institute For Anarchist Studies
Format: Book
Binding: Journal
Pages: 208
Released: March 31, 2023

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory is an essential journal published by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (an organization established to support the development of anarchism, and copublishers with us of the "Anarchist Interventions" series). The journal includes recent essays by IAS-supported writers and translators, features with anarchist views on contemporary issues, book reviews, updates, and more. We highly recommend checking out Perspectives—its editors assemble a solid range of pieces exploring a different topic with each issue. Always worth reading and considering how these topics play out in our struggles.

New issue, number 33, is "Transformations"

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, N.33, on the theme of "Transformations," is over 200 beautiful pages and features the Abolitionist Tarot art of Kai Lumumba Barrow throughout. Describing what ties the thirteen essays in this issue together, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, in the introduction explains, “It is (the) push and pull of the old and the new that we see in this issue, a collection of investigations into both our histories and our futures, inquiries into the symbols and memories that have shaped the world in which we find ourselves, and visions for the ones we hope to create. We are also honored to share the work of a new set of archetypes, the Abolitionist Tarot, from which we may draw the clear understanding of the moment in which we find ourselves.” The issue features Jesse Cohn’s “Demodernizing Anarchism,” as well as articles on consensus decision-making in the intentional community of Christiania; anarchist cybernetics; communicating climate catastrophe through performance; and explorations of how major social change happens and why. Using tarot as a guide, Messersmith-Glavin explains, “Our hope is that these works will help provide a path for us as we grow from fools to abolitionists and beyond.”

Number 32 is titled "Power"

The Perspectives collective collaborates with Kai Lumumba Barrow who provides art from Gallery of the Streets in the new 208 page “Power” issue. Gallery of the Streets is a network of autonomous artists, activists, and scholars committed to abolitionist movement building. Led by queer Black feminist politics, their work is created by people who live, love, fight, work, and play in the margins of racial and gendered capitalism, carceral control, and environmental violence. Lovingly laid out with full color art and design by Eberhardt Press, this is an impressive publication, produced despite the pandemic and amidst the Uprising. This issue features essays on surrealism and climate change; Rojava and anarchism; solidarity and mutual aid from Puerto Rico to the embattled streets of Minneapolis and Portland; building online power, raising money, lessons in organizing, working out, building community; police abolition, and insights into George Floyd Square; organizing amidst this age of protest and pandemic; David Graeber and the power of imagination; building another world of communalism against Covid capitalism; surviving the pandemic, what to do if you’re teargassed; recovering from trauma; successfully organizing revolution; and new book reviews!

Issue No. 31,  Winter 2020, "Imaginations":

The thirty-first issue of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, 96 page collection of essays, fiction, poetry, art, and book reviews gathered around the theme of "Imaginations." From the introduction: "Now is a time for courageous imagination, for risking new and untested methods, for allowing our minds to fire and associate freely, and for relying on the darker wisdom of the subconscious. The collective dreaming and deep creativity that drive our connections may be the new tools we need to engage. In this issue, you will find games, pleasures, dancing, and nightmares—new ways to look at the moment in which we find ourselves, and new approaches to build the world we want.” 

Here's what happened in issue #30 "Beyond the Crisis"...

"The world is on fire. It has been, for quite some time. If you’ve done any organizing, you’ve felt it—that sense of racing about, extinguishing this flare up or that, spending precious energy and resources surviving the immediate emergency and hoping the future will somehow save itself. If you’ve watched the news, you’ve felt it—disbelief combined with the raw hilarity of the media circus; just when it seems things couldn’t get worse, or more frightening, or more absurd, they do. If you’ve ever worked three jobs to keep your family afloat, you’ve felt it. If you’ve listened to climate scientists, or survived a hurricane, or watched helplessly as an unseasonable forest fire tore through a landscape you loved, you’ve felt it—the rising certainty that we have waited too long, that global temperatures are edging toward tipping points from which we will never return. We are burning. ... We don’t yet know what strategies are going to work, or what life forms and social forms will survive the transition from past to future. We don’t know what culture and society will look like—which ingredients it might revitalize from ancestral knowledge systems, and which innovations it might incorporate from emergent social contexts and experiences. There will be transformation. There will be evolution—and revolution. There will continue to be change. ... The civilization that brought us to this point of peril will not be the one that gets us through and out the other side to a society that is ecologically sustainable, equitable, and free."

No. 29 is titled "Anarcha-Feminisms":

This issue contains essays on the history of anarcha-feminism, the ways in which anarchism falls short from a feminist perspective, and the relation between anarchism and feminism. It also contains essays on how Black feminism informs anarchism, women in prison, eco-queer indigenous anarchist feminism, Hep C & HIV Organizing, language and exclusion, and an anarchist feminist manifesto by members of Black Rose Anarchist Federation. Further, it contains a graphic on anarchism and feminism by the creator of the 'zine Doris, book reviews, and more.

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