This is the first full issue produced under the stewardship of Professor of European Thought Dr. Ruth Kinna (author of Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide, reviewed in #63), and there have been some clunky transitions. First, this issue is almost half the size of its predecessors, without comment or explanation; second, two of the three main essays are dull, dull, dull. How can we get excited about Tolstoy’s Christian-pacifist quasi-anarchism? For some it may be a revelauses tion (ahem), but for me it was tedium piled on top of irrelevance. Perhaps if I were a Christian of some kind I might find it curiously appealing to know that there was once a former Russian aristocrat who talked about ignoring the state or resisting its apparatus by playing the martyr. Christianity in all its various heresies holds a slight-to-nil interest for me; Tolstoy’s ruminations on the manifestations of institutionalized violence and deception as the antithesis of the message of Jesus are hardly inspiring. The other dull essay is called “Beyond Primitivism: Towards a 21st century Anarchist Theory and Praxis for Science and Technology.” It is an attempt to recapture the alleged skeptical spirit of the 19th century Anarchist Masters— despite their fawning (and extremely unskeptical) praise for Science as an abstract pursuit of pure knowl e d g e . Rather than a plea to move beyond a simplistic primitivist critique which holds that Science is far too intertwined with the most alienating aspects of modern industrial capitalism to be redeemed without some serious restructuring, the authors wish to turn back the clock of criticism by (re-) embracing an archaic and naïve faith in Science. The title of the essay is totally misleading. Rather than moving the discourse on Science through and then beyond the valid (but to the authors, simplistic) primitivist critique, the authors instead assure readers that there’s nothing really that interesting to learn from the modern skepticism of how Science (through the myth of Progress) has become another ideology and institutionalized practice in the toolbox of the Enlightenment project of Herrschaft, which is a real pity. The first essay is another art history/radical interpretation of art, focusing on Herbert Read; not nearly as dull as the other two, but somewhat obscure for the non-specialist...

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