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Kristian Williams
Lives of the Great Enchanters

a review of

The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore. Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics, 2024

Two writers, life-long friends, became practicing magicians and decades later decided to share what they have learned. Alan Moore is almost certainly the most important comics writer of the last half-century, having greatly expanded both the range and the depth of the medium, subverting, deconstructing, or reinventing every genre in which he has worked.

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Peter Werbe
Man Responsible for Jen Angel’s Death Receives 7 years Would restorative justice been a better outcome?

The man responsible for the death of Oakland, Calif. social justice activist, anarchist, and baker, Jen Angel, was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for manslaughter and robbery. Twenty-year-old Ishmael Burch accepted a plea deal in August of last year.

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Angel was dragged to death in February 2023 when she became entangled in the car Burch was driving after he had stolen her purse.

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Eric Laursen
Gallows Humor, Beauty in Resistance World War III in Comics

a review of

World War 3 Now? World War 3 Illustrated, Issue #54 by Jordan Worley, Nicole Shulman, Seth Tobocman, Sue Simensky Bietila, eds. AK Press, 2024

The new issue of World War 3 Illustrated, the 54th, is one of the biggest in the history of this long-running project, with over 50 artists and writers contributing.

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Len Bracken
Zines as Means for Change

a review of

War of Dreams: A Field Guide to DIY Psy-Ops by Jason Rodgers. PM Press, 2024

At the height of the zine movement in the 1990s, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands—what could be thought of as armies of people—would march off to their post office boxes every day to engage in an ongoing assault on mainstream culture using low-circulation publications as their weapons of choice.

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Jess Flarity
Unabomber 2.0 Luigi Mangione: Internet Saint, Folk Hero, Assassin

A deadly drone war rages between Ukraine and Russia. A.I.-generated images are appearing on restaurant menus and as logos in grocery store aisles. Students all around the world are flooding ChatGPT essays into their online courses.

And, for some reason, the world’s richest man is now tampering with the secure government data banks of one of the world’s most powerful nations because the country re-elected a third-rate reality TV star who has a meme coin worth $180 billion dollars. Despite all of this, the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December by 26-year-old Luigi Mangione may be the most cyberpunk event of the 21st century.

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Max Shaver
Can Permaculture be Confrontational? Gardening for the middle-class or a challenge to capitalism?

The greatest alienation that capitalism has wrought on humanity is perhaps not labor power, as posited by Marx, but rather the ability to live a life reliant on nature. Where once humanity was in intimate contact with the natural world, cityscapes, abstract economies, and industrial technocracy now dominate our lives.

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Hank Kennedy
How political violence & resistance was represented in 1960s & 1970s arthouse & cult films

A review of

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse 1960–1990, Editors: Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan. PM Press, 2024

“Leftist terrorism and state terrorism, even if their motivations cannot be compared, are two jaws of the same mug’s game. The state hates terrorism, but prefers it to revolution.” So says Buenaventura Diaz in the 1974 French/Italian co-production Nada, one of the dozens of films profiled in Revolution in 35mm, edited by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan.

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Deep Strawberry
Harold and Maude & Generation Death

In the 1971 movie, Harold and Maude, a boy-man sewn into an upper class lineage headed by a satirically tyrannical matriarch stages his own suicide again and again. The first scene depicts his fake self-hanging, “OH HARRROLD!” His mother’s admonishment is delivered with all the horror-shock Harold meant for her, but also cloying authority, the absolute order Harold cannot escape.

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Emma Weiss
Black Futurism & Anarchism Tools for Liberation

a review of

Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time by Rasheedah Phillips. AK Press, 2025

In a discussion during the early winter of 2024 with radical political scientist Richard Gilman-Opalsky facilitated through Incite Seminars, there arose the essential thread of imagination and its usefulness as a tool for decolonization, along with the reaffirmation of future potentialities hidden within playful and creative anti-capitalist exercises.

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Ron Sakolsky
Out of the Fog

On Jan. 1, 2024, the city of San Francisco sent New Year’s greetings to its beleaguered citizens with the cheery news that a suicide net had been installed under the Golden Gate Bridge thanks to funding from the California Mental Health Services Act.

Heralded as a “suicide deterrent system,” the supposedly solid rationale behind this marine grade stainless steel safety net, upon closer examination, turns out to be not so surprisingly full of holes. The erstwhile proponents of this costly $217 million bridge boondoggle have simplistically argued that if access to the material means of suicide are reduced, then deaths can be prevented. Just put up a net under the bridge to catch would-be suicides...presto, problem solved!

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Chris Clancy
Going to set the night on Fire! Story of the Earth Liberation Front

a review of

Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: The FBI vs. The Earth Liberation Front (Second Edition) by Craig Rosebraugh. Microcosm Publishing 2024.

Burning Rage of a Dying Planet is a history of the rise of the radical environmental movement the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as told by Craig Rosebraugh, who served as the spokesperson for the ELF during its arguably most consequential years, 1997 to late 2001.

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Max Reynard
Neoliberalism’s Double Lives Naomi Klein on creating an “unselfing” to establish solidarity & community

a review of

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

Naomi Klein’s most recent book is a worthwhile analysis of fascist and reactionary organizing that began with the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to the present. Encompassing both liberatory and electoral politics, her jumping off point is the persistent confusion in public between herself and highbrow feminist-cum-MAGA acolyte, Naomi Wolf. But this is like the McGuffin in a detective story: it’s the animating ghost—doppelgangers often showing up as poltergeists—that takes us through a much more interesting journey than the initial question portends.

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David Finkel
Jews Confronting Zionism Exploring Solidarity and Collective Care

a review of

Taking the State Out of the Body: A Guide to Embodied Resistance to Zionism by Eliana Rubin. PM Press, 2024

A disclosure at the outset: Parts of this book lie outside the competence of this reviewer, notably sections at the end of each chapter called “Embodied Practices.” These are hands-on exercises intended for collective and individual healing from various forms of trauma and harm resulting from our colonial-settler, sexist, and oppressive system. Interested readers can evaluate their use for themselves.

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Thomas Martin
In the Spirit of Anarchist Illegalism The Man Who Robbed Banks With A Fountain Pen

a review of

To Rob a Bank Is an Honor: Lucio Urtubia, (translation Paul Sharkey) AK Press, 2024.

Lucio Urtubia’s name is not well known in anarchist circles. He produced no philosophical or polemical writings, and is mainly remembered for a successful scheme to rob–not with guns, but with fake checks–one of the world’s major banks.

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John Zerzan
Where is Home? Modernity & Emptiness

Acknowledging the existence only of individuals and families, Margaret Thatcher declared, “There’s no such thing as society.”

Mustafa Khayati went a little deeper, in one of my favorite quotes: “The university teaches everything about society. Except what it is.” Similarly, Peter Sloterdijk wondered what kind of “proverbial stuff” societies are made of.

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Fran Shor
How Draft Refusal Helped End Conscription & Stop the Vietnam War

a review of

Hell, No, We Didn’t Go! by Eli Greenbaum. University Press of Kansas, 2024

The U.S. invasion of Indochina not only unleashed horrific death and

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destruction resulting in the murder of millions of Vietnamese, but also engendered massive domestic opposition. One of the significant flash points was the military draft.

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Eric Laursen
Prisons as the Domain of Hidden Warfare in the U.S.

a review of

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton. University of California Press, 2023

When Heather Ann Thompson’s account of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, Blood in the Water, was published in 2016, I was one of the readers who was overjoyed to see that historical turning point brought back to life after decades when it seemed to be slipping from popular consciousness.

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Norman Nawrocki
The Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival An unofficial history

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1920s Chilean workers scene from El Montaje. ¿Quién conoce a Gómez Rojas?, Teatro Fresa Salvaje (Chile), at 2016 Theatre Festival Photo: Alvaro Pachec

A longer version of this article is available on the Fifth Estate site at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival-long-version/

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Mags Beall
The Praxis of Street Medics Ideas for Building A New World

It’s a grey, wet day, so everyone who can find a spot is packed into the warehouse instead of spreading out across the grounds outside. In pockets around the space, people are skilling up or building art.

Doc is teaching a small group how to be street medics. Mass arrests, street battles, teargas, and more rain will come in the days ahead and people are readying themselves for the tens of thousands arriving to fight the machinations of global capitalism. It is April 2000, Washington, D.C.

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Sylvie Kashdan
James C. Scott (1936–2024) An inspiration to anarchists

The anthropologist James Campbell Scott, who passed away on July 19, 2024, approached the world from an egalitarian perspective. While not identifying as an anarchist, he brought an anarchistic sensibility to his study of the dynamics of power relations and the varied ways peoples have resisted authority in the past and present.

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Rui Preti
Mutual Aid A Fight for a New Future

a review of

Fight for a New Normal? Anarchism and mutual aid in the Covid-19 pandemic crisis Ed. Jim Donaghey, Foreword by Ruth Kinna; Afterward by Rhiannon Firth. Freedom Press, 2024

People all over the world, including in the U.S., are facing increasing authoritarianism, natural disasters, industrially-produced destruction of the living environment and intensifying social breakdown. Nevertheless, there is some basis for hope because of the growing numbers of mutual aid projects with the potential to be part of strengthening community defense and decentralized liberatory communities, emerging everywhere.

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