Fifth Estate 353, Summer, 1999 Add to the Bookbuilder

On April 24, the 45^th birthday of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, approximately 20,000 people gathered in Philadelphia and other cities, to demand a new trial for the former Black Panther and revolutionary journalist known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.”

One of the many colorful, giant puppets which marched in Philadelphia April 24. Judge Albert Sabo is the hanging judge who sentenced Mumia to death in 1982 and then denied his appeal in 1995. photo/Julie Herrada

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The “Whiteaker” is Eugene, Oregon’s oldest and poorest neighborhood. Over the past few years some significant anarchy-type situations have developed in Eugene, especially in Whiteaker.

Icky’s Tea House, open from 1994 to 1997, was an anti-institution institution, a haven for the dispossessed and disaffected. Everything at Icky’s was mainly free, including a library, video night, food for the homeless, and bike repair.

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“Alone we cannot change the terms of this rotten deal, but together anything is possible. Undo the leash of time and money. Take back your lives. We have the right, and we have the ability to make life worth living, to make our lives what we want them to be, not what the absurd logic of private property and wage labor says they must be.”

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The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, nonprofit publishing since 1965. The people who produce it are a group of friends who do so neither to secure wages nor as an investment in the newspaper industry, but to encourage resistance to an unjust and destructive society.

The Fifth Estate (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA;

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It’s a pleasure to launch our Summer 1999 edition with a rare splash of color on our front page and center section. The other art and photos also provide an excellent setting for a diverse set of articles.

There are probably more people contributing to this issue than we’ve had in a long while. We haven’t had a color front page in six years, but Stephen Good-fellow’s terrific art and the page one photos made it almost a necessity.

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Harvest moon. Moon of the spirits. Cactus moon. Grandmother moon. Nike moon.

Nike moon??

To the many faces and many names honoring the moon, a corporate imprint may soon be added, if a new advertising idea materializes.

Two London-based ad executives, Malcolm Green and Gary Betts, announced plans last year to turn the moon into a giant billboard. By using reflected sunlight from two large umbrella shaped mirrors, they propose projecting corporate logos onto the surface of the moon. They claim to have the assurance of NASA scientists that the plan is feasible.

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The United Nations Charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UD) guarantees the rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of “humanitarian intervention” arises from this tension. It is the right of “humanitarian intervention” that is claimed by the US/NATO in Kosovo, and that is generally supported by editorial opinion and news reports.

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The articles on Kosovo were written in early April. The death rates from Serbian ethnic cleansing increase daily.

The articles have been edited for length; full text of the Chomsky and Cockburn pieces are available at www.zmag.org, a web site which contains many useful observations about the war in the Balkans.

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NATO bombs rained down on her city, beginning in its suburbs and then moving into the heart of Belgrade. First the planes and cruise missiles came just at night. But then their aerial assault seemed to know no set time of day.

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Women in Black is against the whole continuum of violence, from male violence against women, to militarism and war. It is for justice and peace. It is for multi-ethnic democracy. It is for nonviolent, negotiated, means of resolving differences. There is an implicit analysis that a certain kind of masculinity fuels and is fueled by militarism and war, and that this is harmful not only for women, but also for men.

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Hi! My name is CBU-871B, but let’s not be formal. A lot of my friends call me Cluster Bomb. I’ve been busy lately, doing what I’m supposed to. And, I sure appreciate the careful treatment that I receive from the American news media.

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The following interview with Chris Clark, editor of the Earth Island Journal, publication of Earth Island Institute, was taped the week of January 18. I chose Clark to interview since he and his organization seem sensible in their theoretical and activist approach to defense of the environment. This may appear as an endorsement to some and a condemnation to others.

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Previous to this era, opponents of capitalism, particularly marxists, but also anarchists, saw the internal contradictions inherent in the political economy as the basis of the system’s overthrow; the working class was to be the agency of revolution. Other marxist theorists postulated that resistance to imperialist domination and colonial oppression, or a revolutionary peasantry, could carry out this task.

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The present society produces an ever-increasing series of disasters, from stock market crashes to mass starvation. Most of this chaos winds up hurting the most dispossessed while the capitalists laugh all the way to the bank. Knowing this, as a revolutionary and professional programmer, I want to outline why the Man will get hit worse than he is anticipating by the particular crisis known as the Year 2000 or Y2K problem.

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Painting by Stephen Goodfellow

I contend the state is extraterrestrial (E.T.) in origin and that the city emanated from the state. The city is, therefore, also E.T. in origin. I will also demonstrate that the abolition of slavery necessitates the eradication of both. In the 1960s, author Erich Von Daniken asserted in his controversial Chariots of the Gods? that E.T.s had mated with monkeys and apes via artificial insemination and gene-splicing, producing early hominids. The repeating of the E.T. mating, gene-splicing process with hominids eventually produced Neanderthals and finally Homo Sapiens, according to Von Daniken.

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San Francisco—When San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown testified against the three homelessness activists who threw pies at him last November, he repeatedly urged the court to make an example of the defendants. (See FE #352, Winter 1999.)

The trial ended in a split verdict for members of the Biotic Baking Brigade (BBB), Rahula Janowski, Justin Gross, and Gerry Livernois. Jurors deliberated for over nine hours, finally acquitting the defendants of the heavier charge of assaulting a public official, while convicting them of simple battery.

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During last August’s Active Resistance gathering (see FE #352, Winter 1999) a discussion group on Community Organizing came up with a proposal to found a free school in Toronto.

I and others were approached to participate in the effort, and before long a core group of about eight people was meeting twice a week to hammer out the logistics. From the start we envisaged the school serving as a center for anarchist organizing and activism.

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a review of

All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement, Carlotta R. Anderson, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1998, 324 pp., $34.95

As a native Detroiter, I was raised with a belief in the strength of the labor movement, the power of the unions, and the importance of the Almighty Henry Ford to the economic life of Detroit.

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a review of

Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections, edited by John Zerzan. Uncivilized Books, Eugene, Ore., 1999, 214 pp., $10 (available from FE Books)

Against Civilization is an essay collection taking the radical perspective that the society we toil ceaselessly to maintain and reform may not be worth sustaining.

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a review of

Public Secrets, Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, California 94701, 408 pp., $15 (available from FE Books)

Do radicals get more pleasure from life?

For most of us around the Fifth Estate, the answer is yes. We might not all agree on why, but our detachment from many of this society’s ideological bonds lets us laugh at, ridicule, and debunk antics of popes and politicians. We distinguish ourselves from obedient zeks and this gives us satisfaction.

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a review of

Graham Purchase, Evolution & Revolution: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Peter Kropotkin (Petersham, Australia: Jura Books, 1996)

Graham Purchase’s recent book, Evolution & Revolution, is a concise and generally useful assessment of Kropotkin’s-life and work from a social anarchist perspective. In addition to presenting a brief biography of the famous anarchist, Purchase analyses Kropotkin’s ideas on such topics as mutual aid, evolution and revolution, conflict resolution, social individuality, and the “metaphysics of nature.”

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The 15 minutes of fame for Ted Kaczynski, the convicted Unabomber, are not up after all. He’s been in the news several times recently. Kaczynski is releasing an autobiographical account of his life, entitled Truth Versus Lie, printed by Context Media. This new, small, New York City publisher picked up the manuscript after hearing that Simon and Schuster rejected it.

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