Writers’ Guidelines
The Fifth Estate is an anarchist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian, non-profit project published cooperatively since 1965 by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades. We are committed to non-dogmatic, action-oriented writing and activity to bring about a new world.
The Fifth Estate accepts articles, essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry. We strive to maintain a tone in FE that is engaging and informative to all readers. To that end, we seek writing that is plainly written and free of jargon.
What “Submitting an Article” Means
- We will promise to read your article, but we may respectfully decline it and not publish it, or we may save it and publish it in a future issue.
- We also reserve the right to edit, shorten, or revise your article. Most of the time we contact authors about this ahead of time and get their comments, corrections, etc.
Original Material only please. We have a general policy to only publish articles that have not yet appeared online or elsewhere.
We accept short articles (around 800 to 1,000 words) and long articles (up to 1200 words, occasionally longer).
We recommend sending a proposal before sending us an article.
The proposal should include the subject, an outline of the article and the approximate word count.
We also accept short stories, plays and poetry.
We are interested in writings by and of interest to anarchists and anti-authoritarians including, but not limited to,
- current events and news from an anarchist perspective
- anarchist theory and practice
- struggles for civil liberties and civil rights and around labor, environmental, queer and feminist issues, and the arts—written from an anarchist/anti-authoritarian perspective
- anarchism or any subject pertaining to anarchism, i.e. against all forms of power—including the State, capitalism, war, alienation, salaried work, etc.
We will also consider pieces exploring ecological, social and economic justice, race, poverty,class and gender from an anarchist perspective.
We welcome work from anarchist and non-anarchist writers.
Our magazine is international in scope and we have an international readership, so it’s important that our stories be relevant to readers from Detroit, to Denmark, to Dakar. We are strongly interested in international coverage from writers outside the US, particularly on economic and social developments as seen from an anarchist perspective.
We are actively interested in investigative reporting, and in pieces that offer fresh and interesting analyses, and are happy to receive submissions from new and emerging writers, as well as established writers. We’ve published writings from hundreds of writers in our more than fifty years of publication.
As opposed to professionals who publish to secure wages, or those who invest in the media information industry, we produce this magazine as an expression of our resistance to an unjust and destructive society. Join us by submitting today.
Please follow our Style Sheet for manuscript formatting. Submit manuscripts for non-features and proposals for features, along with graphics and photographs to: fe [at] fifthestate [dot] org
Or by mail to: Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale, MI 48220
Please write “SUBMISSION,” and if submitting for a specific issue, the issue number, on the subject line of all email submissions.
Thanks for your time and attention.
