Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed is a
North AmericaNorth America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
n
anarchistAnarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
magazine, and is one of the most popular anarchist publications in North America. It could be described as a general interest and critical, non-ideological anarchist journal. It was founded by members of the Columbia Anarchist League of
Columbia, MissouriColumbia is the fifth-largest city in Missouri, and the largest city in Mid-Missouri. With a population of 108,500 as of the 2010 Census, it is the principal municipality of the Columbia Metropolitan Area, a region of 164,283 residents. The city serves as the county seat of Boone County and as the...
, and continued to be published there for nearly fifteen years, eventually under the sole editorial control of
Jason McQuinnJason McQuinn is an American anarchist, founder and co-editor of Alternative Press Review, and founder and former co-editor of the journal Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed from 1980 to 1995, when Tad Kepley took it over, and again from 1997 to 2006...
(who initially used the pseudonym "Lev Chernyi"), before briefly moving to New York City in 1995 to be published by members of the
AutonomediaAutonomedia is one of the main North American publishers of radical theoretical works, especially in the anarchist tradition. For many years, it was linked with Semiotext, one of the major sources for English language translations of post-structuralist literature, especially in the 1980s...
collective. The demise of independent distributor
Fine PrintFine print, small print, or "mouseprint" is less noticeable print smaller than the more obvious larger print it accompanies that advertises or otherwise describes or partially describes a commercial product or service...
nearly killed the magazine, necessitating its return to the Columbia collective after just two issues. It remained in Columbia from 1997 to 2006. it is published bi-annually by a group based in
Berkeley, CaliforniaBerkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
. The magazine accepts no
advertisingAdvertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
. It has serially published two book-length works,
The PapalagiThe Papalagi is a book by Erich Scheurmann published in Germany in 1920, which contains descriptions of European life, supposedly as seen through the eyes of a Samoan chief named Tuiavii...
and
Raoul VaneigemRaoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines . After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970...
's
The Revolution of Everyday LifeThe Revolution of Everyday Life is a 1967 book by Raoul Vaneigem, Belgian author, philosopher and former member of the Situationist International . In French the title of the work was more elaborate: Traité du savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, or Treatise on Living for the Younger...
.
Perspective and contributors
The magazine is noted for spearheading the
Post-left anarchyPost-left anarchy is a recent current in anarchist thought that promotes a critique of anarchism's relationship to traditional leftism. Some post-leftists seek to escape the confines of ideology in general also presenting a critique of organizations and morality...
critique ("beyond the confines of
ideologyAn ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
"), as articulated by such writers as
Lawrence Jarach- External links :* official website.Publications*"" by Lawrence Jarach at the Berkeley Daily Planet...
,
John ZerzanJohn Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like...
,
Bob BlackBob Black is an American anarchist. He is the author of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and numerous political essays.-Writing:Some of his work from the early 1980s includes...
, and
Wolfi LandstreicherWolfi Landstreicher is the former nom de plume of a contemporary anarchist philosopher involved in theoretical and practical activity...
(formerly Feral Faun/Feral Ranter among other noms de plume). Zerzan is now best known as the foremost proponent of
anarcho-primitivismAnarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence gave rise to social stratification, coercion, and alienation...
. The magazine has been open to publishing the primitivists, which has caused leftist critics and academics like
Ruth KinnaRuth Ellen Kinna is a politics lecturer at Loughborough University, working in the Department of Politics, History and International Relations where she specialises in political philosophy. Since 2007 she has been the editor of the journal Anarchist Studies....
(editor of
Anarchist StudiesAnarchist Studies is a biannual academic journal on anarchism. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining the history, culture, and theory of anarchism...
) to classify the magazine as primitivist, but McQuinn, Jarach and others have published critiques of primitivism there. Bob Black is best known for "
The Abolition of Work"The Abolition of Work" is an essay written by Bob Black in 1985. The essay was part of Black's first book, an anthology of essays entitled The Abolition of Work and Other Essays published by Loompanics Unlimited. It is an exposition of Black's "type 3 anarchism" – a blend of post-Situationist...
" (1985), a widely reprinted and translated essay (first widely circulated, in fact, as an insert in
Anarchy in 1986), but for
Anarchy he has mainly contributed critiques of leftists and anarcho-leftists such as
Ward ChurchillWard LeRoy Churchill is an author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government...
,
Fred WoodworthFred Woodworth is an anarchist and atheist writer based in the United States. He is an anarchist without adjectives, saying: "I have no prefix or adjective for my anarchism. I think syndicalism can work, as can free-market anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, even anarcho-hermits, depending on...
,
Chaz BufeCharles Bufe, better known as Chaz Bufe, is a contemporary American Anarchist author.Bufe writes most notably on the problems faced by the modern anarchist movement...
,
Murray BookchinMurray Bookchin was an American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher. A pioneer in the ecology movement, Bookchin was the founder of the social ecology movement within anarchist, libertarian socialist and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books on politics,...
, the Platformists and most recently
AK PressAK Press is a worker-managed independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical left and anarchist literature. It is collectively owned and operated.-History:...
. Wolfi Landstreicher now writes from the "insurrectionalist" perspective of
Renzo Novatore- Life :Abele Ricieri Ferrari was born in Arcola, Liguria, Italy on May 12, 1890 in a poor peasant family. He did not adjust to school discipline and quit in the first year never coming back after that. While he worked in his father's farm, he self educated himself with an emphasis in poetry and...
and Alfredo Bonanno (he has translated both) which combines a sympathy for generalized, spontaneous, unmediated uprising with the egoism of
Max StirnerJohann Kaspar Schmidt , better known as Max Stirner , was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism...
.
External links