F*KIT MAG (Issue 5)

"Radical ideas and action in the South-West"

Fkit Mag is a new project from the South West of the WISE isles, combining original art and design, poetry, and theoretical and practical pieces from local activists. We include news and action reports, critical reflections, fiction, and autobiographical writing. Most of the articles are short-form, and we encourage submissions to be readable for a non-academic and non-activist audience.

Our approach is inspired by the photocopied zines and news-sheets of the 1980s and 1990s and the DIY- and punk ethics and aesthetics. If your writing emerges from an anti-authoritarian, anti-oppression and revolutionary framework, we're interested in reading it and probably keen to publish it. We intend Fkit to be cheap, accessible, and easily passed around. It's about talking to each other and building a scene, not getting every word and picture perfect.

The zine is 24 A4 pages in black and white. It's edited by a two-person team associated with Exeter Radical Learning, who you can find on instagram here (instagram.com/radical_learning_exe). We're currently in the process of getting a website up and running. In the meantime, you can email us with submissions, complaints, and ideas here (email:anarchistlearningexe@proton.me).

Issue 5
This summer has been political. The heatwave has driven the costs of the climate crisis home to Europe, and our politicians and media have responded with dithering, half-measures, and racism. National self-interest continues to be used to distract our society from the catastrophe. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions has always required international cooperation. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is impossible within an imperialist and colonialist order dominated by Europe and the United States. A revolutionary orientation towards reparations - and towards justice - is essential to preventing the 21st century becoming a new century of mass, unnecessary death. The articles and art included here try to point from this starting point of the nation, in all its toxicity, towards something better. Or occasionally they just say “fuck your flags” in old flag material.

With the Labour Party and the Greens claiming to offer a political option to the once-homeless left, what does a radical response look like? In particular, how can we break apparently liberal or conservative communities away from their so-called representatives? Are there pockets of radicalism that we don’t know about - in the countryside, amongst the elderly, or in otherwise far-right areas? One thing we can be confident of in the coming years is that the state will continue to fail its subjects. Who are the unexpected radicals who are finding ways to oppose these failings and develop their own, local, inclusive alternatives? We’d love to hear about this in the next issue.