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A background to this issue's cover art by portraitist Robert Henri.

Anarchist Studies' artwork editor Allan Antliff explains the history behind this issue's cover image, 'Follow Your Leader' by David Wilcox.

This article opens with a press report of a particularly violent action involving anar-chists at an anti-fascist action in the USA, shows how it was inaccurately perceived by media and law professionals, and how this indicates a universal lack of under-standing about anarchists and militant anti-fascism. We then focus on the UK to see how anarchists prioritise anti-fascism and show their historical connections with militant groups like Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), No Platform and Antifa from the 1980s through to the early 2000s, and their current support for the militant Anti-Fascist Network.

The photo of Vice Admiral H.P. ‘Spike’ Blandy and his wife gleefully slicing up an atomic explosion angel cake was taken on November 6, 1946.

Often overlooked in histories of abstract expressionism is the role that anarchism as a philosophy played in the art of postwar American painters like Barnett Newman. For Newman, anarchism was not merely a programme for revolutionary action but an experimental way of life that, much like painting itself, sought to imagine a life lived free from coercive authority. Through his signature painting style, which featured vertical stripes painted on coloured canvases, Newman put forth a radical political theology based on the writings of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. In his art, Newman presented what might be called an anarchist sublime, an aesthetic experience that opened up viewers to the expressive capacity of being itself.

Eleanor Finley and Dr Federico Venturini review Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl

This paper examines the London squatting movement and argues that it was a key radical social movement which redefined the ownership of space and politicised housing.

This piece aims to demonstrate that now is not the time for the international Left to be disputing the Rojava revolution and whether it fits their theoretical framework, but to instead show communitarian solidarity with the Rojavans in what is arguably a fight for freedom and popular democracy against the forces of fascism.

Informed by anarchism, this article raises the possibility of viewing the state per se as a system of domination, oppression, appropriation and exclusion, one that is interwoven with other systems and influences them as much as they influence the state.

Kim Croswell’s, Portrait of Herbert Read (‘To Hell With Freee’), marks the first issue of Anarchist Studies devoted to a pivotal figure in the history of modern art (and much more), with a special focus on Read’s polemical pamphlet, To Hell with Culture (1941).

In 1941 Herbert Read – a British art critic, poet, novelist and political thinker – wrote an essay, to be published as a pamphlet in ‘The Democratic Order’ series, entitled ‘To Hell with Culture’. The essay sought to criticise the capitalist co-optation of culture, whilst simultaneously calling for a functional art within a democratic society.

The Anarchist Critic first appeared in the Vancouver anarchist journal Open Road in 1982. Robert Graham, who was a member of the collective, recalls Woodcock subscribed to Open Road though he never joined its social circle.

'Art is antithetical to violence' – so claimed George Woodcock (1912-1995) in his opening editorial for the first edition of the literary journal Now, which he edited from late March 1940 to fall 1947.

The historiography of nearly the past century and a half may render surprising – if not, to some, jolting – the juxtaposition, in the title, of the noun ‘anti-Jacobinism’ to the possessive form of Bakunin’s surname.

Rooted in Michel Foucault’s (2003: 15, 47) conception of politics – ‘[P]olitics is a continuation of war by other means’ – this paper seeks to support and draw attention to the ‘primitive or permanent war’ that underlies society in its modern manifestations.

This essay criticises ‘Leninism’. It addresses seven points on social change and transformation: change as a broad social movement, and issues of gender, management, authority, the state, the party and the union. It draws on perspectives from various anarchist, syndicalist, feminist, and socialist traditions.

It started with a small group of activists trying to defend a public park against government’s plans to build a huge shopping mall. In few days, as police used increasing violence against that tiny cluster of protestors, more and more people came to show their support.

The purpose of this article is largely theoretical. It asks what type of perspective is needed in order for left libertarians and anarchists to develop a deeper understanding of global warming.

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