A review of James Stout, Against the State: Anarchists and Comrades at War in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava (Chico/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2026).
In Against the State: Anarchists and Comrades at War in Spain, Myanmar, and Rojava, activist-journalist James Stout looks at “three groups that have found themselves, through circumstances not of their choosing, at war with the state”. These three groups are anarchists in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1939; anarchist-leaning rebels who have joined the armed resistance against the military junta that took power in Myanmar in 2021; and anarchist internationals who help defend the ongoing revolution in Rojava. The selection appears a little random – as Stout himself suggests, various other examples, from early-twentieth-century Korea to today’s Ukraine, could have been chosen – but, sure, you can’t write about everything.
Out of the three, I found the Myanmar chapter the most interesting, but probably only because I knew least about it – so, subjectively, the educational value was highest. All chapters are well-written and well-researched.
In the second half of the book, Stout draws together analyses of the three case studies under the following topics: discipline, arms, solidarity, logistics, gender, and death. Some of these topics are rarely discussed among anarchists, particularly military formation and weaponry. Stout seems well-versed in these, although I wouldn’t know because I’m not.
My problems with the book relate to two aspects:
One, as appealing as each chapter is in and of itself, I kinda missed an overall punchline. Is there anything in particular that Stout wants to tell us, or is this mainly about shedding light on three examples of the military anarchist experience? At times, I felt the book read more like a collection of magazine articles than a rounded-out monograph.
The second aspect concerns Stout’s understanding of anarchism, which is very much in line with the non-ideological, small-a anarchism of a James C. Scott or a David Graeber (both anthropologists, perhaps no coincidence). In the introduction to his book, Stout writes: “The sine qua non of anarchism, to me, is the creation of systems that allow people to care for one another without reinforcing systems that allow people to control one another. It’s a commitment to mutual aid, consensus organizing, and horizontal structure.” That is nice, but the crucial question is to figure out how mutual aid, consensus organizing, and horizontal structures can serve as guidelines in the mass societies we live in. Without that discussion, anarchism remains in the utopian realm, something Marxists have been decrying for 150 years.
This problem also manifests in one of Stout’s concluding statements: “I have learned more about anarchism from making sandwiches for strangers and dropping jugs of water in the desert than I have from the substantial pile of books I have read on the topic.” Again, this sounds nice, but let’s be honest: What do you really learn about anarchism from making sandwiches for strangers and dropping jugs of water in the desert? Luckily, you do not have to be an anarchist to do that, and doing it doesn’t teach you anything beyond, perhaps, that doing good also feels good. You certainly don’t have to read books to learn about anarchism, but you need organizing experiences that tie good deeds together.
I have great sympathy for Stout because he wrote a book I would have liked to write. His dissertation is called The Popular Front and the Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics. Unfortunately, it was released by an academic publisher that charges too much money for it, but that’s the name of the game. A bigger drawback is that the International Olympic Committee probably made its way into the Against the State acknowledgments as a financial contributor because it co-sponsored Stout’s research into the Barcelona Popular Olympics (they are featured in Against the State as well). It might seem petty, but the IOC is evil and should not appear in the acknowledgments of a volume suggesting anarchist values “to be core to any group that claims to use the left libertarian model in its organizing as well as in its envisioned utopia”.
Does this impact the contents of the book? No. It’s a matter of principle. What kind of weight you want to give this matter, is up to you. I might be on the stricter side.
Gabriel Kuhn
(March 31, 2026)