What a great thing the Rebel City collective are doing! The London anarchist group are going into schools as part of ‘the national curriculum’ and talking to young people about a world without bosses, states, money or oppression.
They are opening a vista onto a possible future of mutual aid, co-operation and equality.
This book consists of questions asked by students with answers from Rebel City plus their friends and relations. This means that the book is written in plain language about common sense ideas.
It offers a political framework for thinking about how to organise a better society but does not intimidate the reader with heavyweight theory.
Nevertheless the writers don’t dumb down the content but offer at the back of the book a substantial glossary of ideas from ‘accountability’ to ‘Zapatistas’.
As I read this book, a lot of community energy was being put into, as Chomsky puts it, ‘expanding the floor of the cage’, by using the electoral process for harm reduction. But, at this time of worldwide parliamentary and presidential elections, unenfranchised young people are eager for completely different models of society.
When I was about five, I had a red and black soft toy with ‘Bakunin Lives’ embroidered across his belly. Perhaps understandably, I had no idea who Bakunin was but his name was part of my infant landscape.
We have to make anarchism part of mainstream culture so that its rational, compassionate, horizontalism is a way of looking at the world that children take into adulthood.
For a future made by us all is a useful part of that journey and I hope that in the recommended reading list for the second edition there will be novels by Ursula Le Guin, some graphic novels like the Emma Goldman bio A Dangerous Woman, and music by Crass and Poison Girls.
Violence as a form of ‘power over’ is not directly dealt with, although the question is posed: ‘Would a revolution be violent?’ The answer starts with an assertion that to presume that an anarchist revolution would be violent and destructive would be a misunderstanding of anarchism and continues by suggesting that change would come through community organising and decision-making. But an oddity of editing has placed a non-captioned photograph of a machine gun-carrying Kurdish woman on the facing page.
I sensed the complexities of creating this book. The authors want to show that a different world is possible and practical for young Londoners, but leave the armed defence of Rojava strangely floating.
Although I myself am an atheist and understand that the authors are writing from that perspective, the book would have greater reach among young multi-cultural Londoners if it also recognised and gave space to Hindu, Christian and Muslim anarchist traditions.
If you want answers to, for example, ‘How do we get the rich to give up their wealth?’, ‘Would media/social media be regulated?’ or ‘What if no one wanted to do unpleasant tasks?’, then this is a book for you.
And if you are a teacher or student, then invite Rebel City to your school.