Fifth Estate 355, Fall-Winter, 2000 Add to the Bookbuilder

FE note: A quarterly publication cannot hope to keep up with fast breaking events such as the actions that have taken place against capitalist rule over the last year. However, we think it is urgent to report these stories to encourage more such activity, and also, if even belatedly, to counteract the lies posing in the corporate media as news.

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Anarchists from all over Europe and the Americas, as well as several from Israel, attended an International Study Conference on Anarchism and Judaism, held in Venice, Italy, May 5–7.

It was organized by Milan’s Centro Studi Libertari Archivio G. Pinelli and the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme in Lausanne, in collaboration with the Venice City Council and held on the University of Venice campus.

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The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, nonprofit project, 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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There is so much going on in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the death row ex-Black Panther framed by a conspiracy of cops, prosecutors, judges, and politicians, that it would take pages to report it all.

We hope supporters of Mumia will avail themselves of the great amount of information necessary for an understanding of the case and the forces aligned against him who are intent on strapping an innocent man to the execution gurney.

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Quick! Call the Anarchist Anti-Defamation League (AADL). It’s bad enough when every corporate media outlet uses anarchism as a synonym for chaos, but now an English company has gone even further.

Superdrug PLC is marketing a commercial bath product line using the brand name “Anarchy,” complete with a circle A over the first letter, which includes a body shower gel they call “Havoc.” “Wreak Havoc,” the plastic container urges; “Get Refreshed.”

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Welcome to the Fall/Winter 2000 Fifth Estate which follows our Spring 2000 edition. This issue marks the 35^th anniversary of this paper, now the longest running English language anarchist publication in U.S. history.

It’s quite a legacy, one we continue to build on, but only with your ongoing support. Thanks to everyone who subscribed, renewed, sent donations (especially our Sustainers), bought books, came by, wrote articles and letters, sent graphics and photos, and a hundred other things that make issues happen.

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This is dedicated to all those who are suffering.

In the Summer of 1998, following a fed-up trip to city life, I resolved to live without electricity or running water in a trailer in Montana in complete social isolation. How long it would last I hadn’t considered. Turns out it was a year before the hermitism (literally not speaking to a soul for six months, broken only by a passerby requesting directions, and thereafter resumed), and tedium took its toll.

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Three hundred and fifty supporters of two Earth First! forest defense activists rallied outside the San Francisco FBI field office May 24 on the tenth anniversary of the day when a shrapnel-stuffed pipe bomb exploded in a car driven by Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, crippling her.

(Ieft) Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, victims of an assassin’s bomb, playing earlier at a Redwood Summer benefit. (right) The car they were driving when the bomb exploded.

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Lao Tzu was the mythic “Old Sage” of ancient China. We’re not sure whether he actually existed, but we do know that he founded Taoist philosophy. His legendary Tao te Ching, the “Classic of the Way and its Power,” is a subtle treatise that radically challenges our views of everything—including ourselves, nature and the world around us. I like to call it “The Anarchist Prince,” for just as Machiavelli’s The Prince is a manual for rulers who wish to learn to rule, Lao Tzu’s classic is written for rulers who want to learn how not to rule.

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In the year since the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate demonstrations in Seattle, intense actions have occurred in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London, Prague, and dozens of other cities across this country and the world.

They have functioned as models of resistance to global capitalism’s exploitation of labor, environmental degradation, and state repression Hence, it is disturbing to see some activists now advocating participation in the domesticated arena of electoral politics.

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Fifth Estate Note: Since his 1991 review/essay “Operation Gender Blur” [FE #336, Spring, 1991] Sunfrog has written about radical sexuality for the Fifth Estate. Both 1992’s “Pornography and Pleasure: Beyond Capital, Beyond Patriarchy” [FE #340, Autumn 1992] and 1993’s “Queer Anarchy: Anarcha-Faggots Demand to be De-Manned, a (de)Manifesto” [FE #342, Summer 1993] garnered extensive reactions from our readers, from thankful praise to condemnatory criticism. With “Group Sex,” we welcome the return of Sunfrog’s thoughtful, passionate, and uncompromising erotic politics to our pages.

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a review of

Utopian Prospects, Communal Projects: Visionary Experiments in Literature and Everyday Life, Andy Sunfrog Smith, self-published, 2000, 65 pages, $12. Available from the author, post paid, at 1467 Pumpkin Hollow Rd. Liberty, TN 37095

As the late Middle Western novelist, Meridel Le Sueur, once advised her younger anarchist biographer Neala Schleuning in relation to a question about her philosophy, “That’s the problem with you intellectuals. You constantly want to analyze. Life’s not like that. I’m not like that. Writing isn’t like that. Not real writing. You have to be in a wholly different place. Get rid of those dead, lifeless forms! How do they teach you to write? Beginning, middle, end? That’s not life. And that’s not writing.” As the illusions of objective scholarly research fell away at Merida’s prodding, Schleuning’s approach was liberated from the weight of academic posturing, and the insightful nature of her understanding of the subject of her thesis was heightened accordingly.

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The Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris contains many tombs honoring artists and rebels, but the most striking of them all is the monument to the gay English playwright and anarchist Oscar Wilde. [1]

Oscar Wilde’s Paris tomb became a battleground for sexual liberation.

The story of Wilde’s trial for homosexuality and subsequent imprisonment in England is well-known. After his release from jail in 1897, he fled to the continent and settled in Paris. He died there in exile in 1900 and was quietly buried in Pere Lachaise.

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Environmental activists, anarchists, and other concerned individuals began organizing against the June 2000 meeting of the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, six months in advance of the event.

The Congress, founded in 1933, is composed of such oil producing nations as the U.S., Canada, Croatia, Indonesia Kuwait Nigeria and Libya. Its focus is industry issues, such as down-playing global warming.

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In the garden of 45 Colorado, Highland Park — 1981. Mel Rosas, Stephen Goodfellow, Alan Franklin, Ralph Franklin, Lowell Boileau & Silver

With a name like the Layabouts, it should come as no surprise that Detroit’s Cass Corridor premier anarchist dance band has taken 15 years to produce a follow-up recording to 1985’s blazing combination of infectious beats and insurrectionary lyrics, No Masters.

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a review of

Communities Directory: A Guide to Intentional Communities and Cooperative Living, Third Edition, Jillian Downey and Elph Morgan, eds., 2000, $30 from the Fellowship for Intentional Community, www.ic.org, or RR 1, Box 156-D, Rutledge, MO 63563

“We tried living communally in the Sixties and it didn’t work.” “I didn’t know communes still existed, except in California.” “Do you all sleep in the same room?”

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a review of

The Golden Book of Springfield, Vachel Lindsay, 1920, Re-Introduction by Ron Sakolsky, 1999, Charles H. Kerr Publishers, Chicago

Nearly three decades after moving to central Illinois to share radical ideas with students at Sangamon State college, activist-writer-anarchist-musicologist-deejay-and-dreamer Ron Sakolsky is planting the seeds of his exodus from the job that brought him there, at the now sanitized, corporatized, and renamed University of Illinois at Springfield.

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The several thousand unapproved, pirate radio stations operating in the U.S. won a Pyrrhic victory in July when the Federal Communication Commission agreed to license hundreds of the low power broadcasting operations, many which feature anarchist, punk, black, and community programming.

The catch is that the FCC will demand that licensed frequencies broadcast a certain number of hours a week. Also, about half of the applications for licensing have come from right-wing, fundamentalist churches.

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Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Avenue, just south of W. Forest, in Detroit, in the same space as the Fifth Estate newspaper. Hours vary, so please call before visiting.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL

1) List the title of the book, quantity, and the price of each;

2) add 10% for mailing costs—not less than $1.13 U.S. or $2.00 foreign (minimum for 4^th class book rate postage);

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Fifth Estate Letters Policy

We welcome letters commenting on our articles, stating opinions, or giving reports of events in your area. We don’t guarantee to print everything received, but all letters are read by our staff and considered for publication.

Typed letters or ones on disk are appreciated, but not required. Length should not exceed two double-spaced pages. If you are interested in writing longer responses, please contact us.

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The Anarchist Prisoners’ Legal Action Network (APLAN) is a prisoner-guided initiative formed to provide legal aid and outside support for imprisoned anarchists and their allies. Anarchists in prison experience the prison-industrial complex first-hand and are thus subject to a variety of unusual punishments and restrictions.

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Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

A Direct Action Anarchist Newspaper

Active Transformation is a direct action anarchist newspaper that has been publishing in whole and in part since 1993. Two separate collectives make up the newspaper collective, one in Detroit and the other in Lansing. We mainly focus on the institutions and social relationships that oppress us in our daily lives. From the prison industrial complex, to homophobia to capitalism — we try and cover it all. Our struggle for freedom is as diverse as our lives!

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Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

“We make war upon the State as the chief invader of person and property, as the cause of substantially all the crime and misery that exist, as itself the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals faster than it punishes them. It exists to create and sustain the privileges which produce economic and social chaos. It is the sole support of the monopolies which concentrate wealth and learning in the hands of a few and disperse poverty and ignorance among the masses to the increase of which inequality the increase of crime is directly proportional. It protects a minority in plundering the majority by methods too subtle to be understood by the victims, and then punishes such unruly members of the majority as an attempt to plunder others by means too simple and straightforward to be recognized by the State as legitimate, crowning its outrages by deluding scholars and philosophers...into pleading, as an excuse for its infamous existence, the necessity of repressing crime which it steadily creates.”—Benjamin R. Tucker, 1882

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Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

What follows is a first hand account of a participant in the actions in Philly against the Republican National Convention....

Monday’s event was a march against financial inequality. Marchers were gathered at the base of the city hall building in the center of downtown. There were several helicopters overhead and it was clear that there were more police around than a typical Monday afternoon, but they were not excessively flaunting their numbers (yet).

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Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

I recently traveled to Los Angeles for the North American Anarchist Conference (NAAC) and Democratic National Convention (DNC). The NAAC was held August 11^th through the 13^th, while the DNC was the 14^th through the 17^th. Both events had an extremely strong anarchist presence. In my eyes, the NAAC was a major success. I was one of the first people to arrive, and I was energized by the numbers of people constantly outside the front doors waiting to sign in. All in all, over 500 people attended, but they were not all there at once. Many people were only at the conference for a day or so, or spent a lot of time at the events at the Direct Action Network’s convergence center, so it seemed like it was smaller because there were only 100 to 200 people at the conference at any given time.

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