A Modest Introduction:

It’s no exaggeration to say that we are putting these essays and comments together at a time of great changes. By now it is clear that the political and economic crisis which was triggered by 2008 was no passing episode. Eight years have passed and yet still no one is sure whether the global economy is stable or about to collapse. Rather than ending, the crises seem to just shift form and multiply. Nowhere is this clearer than in Greece. The political and economic crises of 2008 and 2010 ended neither with the ‘success story’ of 2014 nor with the ‘first time left’ government of 2015. Already at the start of 2016 the consequences of increasingly aggressive imperialism are shown to be ever more chaotic and bloody, while rhetoric and practices of the unhappy 20th century are swiftly sweeping across the US and Europe, as if old nightmares were once more coming back to life.
* Truly, we live in historic times: the Left is in terminal collapse after little over a year of pathetic and predictable defeat, the new form of authoritarianism for our era is taking shape, increasing regions of the earth fall under the sway of the undeclared global civil war, while refugees continue to cross into Fortress Europe and the new normal of austerity, repression and immiseration is only set to intensify. More and more grows the sentiment that no one, least of all these authority figures from left to right, really know what to do nor what will happen next, that things will only continue to get worse, and many secretly feel this subterranean wellspring of chaos opening up, from which unexpected events must undoubtedly arrive. In such a period where all things are advancing, so too does theory need to progress to a new shape, and more is expected of it than in quieter periods. Marxism is in collapse, its practitioners and proponents discredited: their power is broken. It remains now a purely historical legacy, having no more life in it. We need something new, this horizontal and innovating promise of anarchy that all now pay homage to in a variety of fashions. * In this time of generalized societal implosion, we need greater vision to see the strange beauty of our era of ruins. Great storms lie on the horizon, and with it, the shipwreck of an entire era, of a whole shape of the world. Let’s lose illusions and abandon once and for all the fixation with the ship of state and its art of κυβέρνησις. Let’s ready our small vessels to escape, let’s brace ourselves for hazards on the sea of Freedom, setting our twilit course for the archipelago of Anarchy, these floating forms and distant shores we discern only vaguely, twinkling like far stars and half-forgotten dreams. . .

In brief:

Nothing is finished. . .
. . .everything is only just beginning!

Issue 1:ATR1