Writers’ Guidelines

The Fifth Estate is an anarchist, non-commercial project published cooperatively since 1965 by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades. We are committed to non-dogmatic, action-oriented writing and activity to bring about a new world.

The Fifth Estate accepts articles, essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry. We strive to maintain a tone in FE that is engaging and informative to all readers. To that end, we seek writing that is plainly written, free of jargon, and in a non-academic style.

What “Submitting an Article” Means

  • We promise to read your article, but we may respectfully decline it and not publish it, or we may save it and publish it in a future issue.
  • We also reserve the right to edit, shorten, or revise your article. Most of the time we contact authors about this ahead of time and get their comments, corrections, etc.

We only accept original material that has not appeared in other publications or online.

We accept short articles (around 800 to 1,000 words) and longer essays (up to 1200 words; occasionally longer).

We recommend sending a proposal before sending us an article.

The proposal should include the subject, an outline of the article and the approximate word count.

We are interested in writings by and of interest to anarchists and other anti-authoritarians including, but not limited to,

  • current events and news from a revolutionary anarchist perspective
  • history of anarchist struggle, thought, and individuals
  • anarchist theory and practice
  • anarchist perspectives on struggles for civil liberties and civil rights and around labor, environmental, queer and feminist issues, and the arts
  • resistance against all forms of power—including the state, capitalism, war, alienation, and salaried work.
  • anarchist perspectives on ecological, social and economic justice, race, poverty, class and gender.

We welcome work from anarchist and non-anarchist writers.

We do not consider anarchism part of the left. Hence, as anarchists, we are not interested in articles that promote or recommend leftist groups or their plans to reform capitalism, either by the so-called free market or by participating in state power through democratic or dictatorial governments; neither permit ordinary people to achieve control of their lives.

If authors wish to discuss authoritarians such as Marx, it should be done from an anarchist perspective.

Our magazine is international in scope and we have an international readership, so it’s important that our stories be relevant to readers from Detroit, to Denmark, to Dakar. We are strongly interested in international coverage from writers outside the US, particularly on economic and social developments as seen from an anarchist perspective.

We are actively interested in investigative reporting, and in pieces that offer fresh and interesting analyses, and are happy to receive submissions from new writers as well as established authors. We’ve published contributions from hundreds of writers since our beginnings in 1965.

As opposed to professionals who publish to secure wages, or those who invest in the media information industry, we produce this magazine as an expression of our resistance to an unjust and destructive society. Join us by submitting today.

Very important for all submissions: Please follow our Style Sheet for manuscript style and formatting.

Submit manuscripts for non-features and proposals for features, along with graphics and photographs to: fe [at] fifthestate [dot] org

Or by mail to: Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale, MI 48220

Please write “SUBMISSION,” and if submitting for a specific issue, the issue number, on the subject line of all email submissions.