One month ago—to be precise, at dawn on September 1 in St. Paul, Minnesota—a bleary-eyed ex-worker gave the final go-ahead for the sixth issue of Rolling Thunder to be sent to press, before donning a sweatshirt to attend to other business. So it is that the new issue of our biannual journal has now returned from the printers, only a few weeks behind schedule. We tried a new printer for this issue, incidentally, and are quite pleased with the improvements.
Rolling Thunder #6 focuses on experimentation—the processes by which radicals invent and refine new approaches. It features an evaluation of the model activists have used to target the animal testing corporation HLS, discussing whether it could be effective in other contexts; a photoessay documenting the efforts of Swedish anarchists who, unable to defend a squat, built a social center from the ground up; a consideration of the role proper support plays in cultivating communities of resistance; a report from student strikes and riots in Colombia; and an analysis of the past decade of anarchist organizing in NYC. In addition, the issue includes an investigation of the function of gift shops in maintaining global empire, historical accounts of Bakunin’s daring escape from Sibera and the riots that killed off the hated poll tax in Britain, and lots more. As usual, there are 16 pages of full color, plenty of fun tidbits, and no advertisements or filler.
The next Rolling Thunder will be out precisely on schedule, to offer definitive coverage of last summer’s DNC/RNC protests and a great deal more.