Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed is a North American anarchist 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, Missouri, and continued to be published there for nearly fifteen years, eventually under the sole editorial control of Jason McQuinn (who initially used the pseudonym "Lev Chernyi"), before briefly moving to New York City in 1995 to be published by members of the Autonomedia collective. The demise of independent distributor Fine Print nearly killed the magazine, necessitating its return to the Columbia collective after just two issues. It remained in Columbia from 1997 to 2006. As of 2008 it is published by a collective based in Berkeley, California. The magazine accepts no advertising. It has serially published two book-length works, The Papalagi and Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Perspective and contributors

The magazine is noted for spearheading the Post-left anarchy critique ("beyond the confines of ideology"), as articulated by such writers as Aragorn! and Lawrence Jarach (members of the Berkeley collective), John Zerzan, Bob Black, and Wolfi Landstreicher (formerly Feral Faun/Feral Ranter among other noms de plume). Zerzan is now best known as the foremost proponent of anarcho-primitivism. The magazine has been open to publishing the primitivists, which has caused leftist critics and academics like Ruth Kinna (editor of Anarchist Studies) 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" (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 Churchill, Fred Woodworth, Chaz Bufe, Murray Bookchin, the Platformists and most recently AK Press. Wolfi Landstreicher now writes from the "insurrectionalist" perspective of Renzo Novatore and Alfredo Bonanno (he has translated both) which combines a sympathy for generalized, spontaneous, unmediated uprising with the egoism of Max Stirner. Other Anarchy contributors also often try to reconcile an egoist valorization of desire and the renunciation of any sacrificial moralism with aspirations for the collective transformation of everyday life.

External links

• Anarchy magazine's official website.
• North American Anarchist Thought Since 1960
• Institute for Anarchist Studies: Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind