Fifth Estate 362, Fall, 2003 Add to the Bookbuilder

Perhaps the most important thing we learned in Chicago is that we are right. We suspected it all along, but it took clubs and gas and Humphrey’s grinning face to cinch it. We know now for sure that the values of this society are fraudulent and used only to support the unjust system that benefits only the few in positions of economic and political power. The values that we have begun to devise through living and struggling together are superior to the ones of this society. They are revolutionary values and all of us that are serious must begin to live the revolution now as well as struggling to make it a reality.

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The burden of war always falls heaviest on the toilers. They are taught that their masters can do no wrong and go out in vast numbers to be killed on the battlefield. And what is their reward? If they escape death they come back to face heavy taxation and have their burden of poverty doubled. Through all the ages they have been robbed of the just rewards of their patriotism as they have been of the just rewards of their labors.

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In early August 2003, African-American anarchist revolutionary Sherman Austin was sentenced to one year in jail, a $2000 fine, and three years probation. His crime? Being a black man who published a website with links to bomb-making information.

Sherman Austin

According to experts, the data Austin linked to is widely available—on the Internet and in public libraries. The state attacked Austin because he is black and because he is an anarchist.

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FIFTH ESTATE #362, Fall, 2003, Vol. 38, No. 3, page 4

The Fifth Estate (FE) is an unincorporated, cooperative magazine publishing since 1965. As opposed to professionals who publish to secure wages or invest in the media information industry, our collective consists of volunteer writers, artists, and editors--friends who produce the paper as an expression of resistance to an unjust and destructive society.

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In two years, this newspaper will celebrate its 40^th anniversary and carries the distinction of being the longest running, English language, anti-authoritarian publication in American history. Yet, the substantial upsurge in computer use in recent years as a major source for ideas and information may be putting our existence in jeopardy.

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Our backyard bonfire crackles, dimly lighting the faces of neighbors and their dogs emerging from the shadows. Secure with our bottled water, red wine and campfire grill, over a dozen of us trade clumsily barbecued chicken, whitefish, and green peppers, along with vignettes of the worst power outage in American history.

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This summer, the Rule of Thirds recently dubbed by the Nashville Scene as a “subversive art space”—played host to numerous politically proactive collectives. June saw the educational and entertaining Upside Down Culture Collective hailing from our other outpost: Detroit. They shared a mix of radical art history, puppetry, music, and readings, in promotion for their newly released book All the Days After, a collection of art and poetry ranging from creatively pissed off to outright heart wrenching, in response to the events on and after September 11^th. These guys are warm, funny, and intelligent: turning a culture upside down in a city near you or at

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Since the Fifth Estate refuses to publish the voice of capital, advertisements—the normal source of financing ‘newspapers—we depend on you through your subscriptions, newsstand purchases, and donations to insure our survival.

This issue was made possible through a combination of the above sources as well as a series of regional benefits held on our behalf. The most recent ones occurred in Chattanooga, Asheville, “Punk-n-holler,” and Detroit and combined raised over $1000, with $850 coming from the latter event alone. This provided us with almost half of what we needed to print, mail, and ship this issue. So, thanks to the many performers, organizers, and attendees who made them so successful.

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Asheville Global Report

P.O. Box 1504

Asheville, NC 28802

Phone/fax: 828-236-3103

Web: www.agrnews.org

Email: editors@agrnews.org

A sister publication to FE and an ambitious weekly, the AGR crew covers news underreported by mainstream media, believing that a free exchange of information is necessary to organize for social change. AGR is distributed free every Thursday in Asheville and other cities, and is published weekly on the world wide web at www.agrnews.org. For out-of-towners, AGR is available for $50 for one year, 52 issues; $25 for six months, 26 issues. Donations: We gladly accept donations. Asheville Global Report is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Asheville, North Carolina, August 6. Ten Asheville women from Women in Black (WIB) found themselves in court on Aug. 6 faced with charges of trespassing. WIB is an international peace network that was started in Israel in 1988 by women protesting against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. They wear black as a symbol of sorrow for all victims of war, for the destruction of people, nature, and the fabric of life.

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It’s Friday night, and a hundred sweaty freaks are dancing their asses off to the sounds of a Cyndi Lauper cover band. Courtney is standing on a stool by the front collecting money, but no one’s ever turned away for lack of funds around here. The cash she collects will go to benefit the local women & transgendered health collective. Paintings from the last art opening are still hanging on the walls, and out front dozens of beautiful, grungy people are smoking cigarettes and networking like mad.

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This year the Ford motor company celebrates its 100^th anniversary. To proponents and critics alike, Ford is the perfect illustration of the corporate world-view. Henry Ford’s rationalization of the assembly-line process was a great advance for industrial technology, and the mass production of the automobile led inevitably to the creation of a world—through auto-centric urban design and the creation of America’s highway system—in which the automobile became an expensive necessity rather than a luxury.

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Recently, several American peace activists, who traveled to Iraq to act as “human shields”, have been notified that they are subject to fines and jail time by the US Government. The government is fining the activists $10,000 for traveling to Iraq in violation of US sanctions against Iraq.

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In August, Starbucks stores in San Francisco had “for lease” signs and letters saying, the stores were closing pasted on the windows and doors. In all 17 Starbucks were hit with the official-looking signs, mostly in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. At many stores, the windows were soaped up and the locks were jammed, leaving employees waiting outside to start their shifts. One flyer posted outside one store said, “We are moving over and making room for local coffee bars, our last best example of our commitment to fine coffee and local culture that got us into the business in the first place.”

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These excerpts come from the English section of the El Libertario website. El Libertario is a collective in Venezuela that has been active for eight years now.

Everything with the people, nothing with the power!

Against a broken State and an inefficient market economy, self-management!

Against the maneuvering of the few, the autonomy of the many!

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In November 2003, Miami, Florida, is hosting both the eighth round of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) trade negotiations and the eighth Americas Business Forum. Trade Ministers from 34 nations in the Western hemisphere, and hundreds of their closest commerce-inclined friends, will descend on this city for a week of business and pleasure: the business of advancing capitalism’s parasitic agenda, and the pleasure of getting away with it. This is to be our region’s principal contribution to the much-heralded age of globalization.

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translated & edited by FE collective members

This article was written by a participant in the VAAAG, the Village Alternatif Anticapitaliste et Anti-guerre (the Alternative Anti-capitalist and Anti-war Village) that was created during the Group of Eight summit meeting (G8) in Evian, Switzerland during June 2003. The anonymous author wants to make it clear that s/he was not a member of the coalition protesting the summit, the Convergence des Luttes Anti-Autoritaires et Anticapitalistes Contre le G8 (CLAAAC G 8). This text, the author says, is “addressed to comrades and companions on the other side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.”

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Since our Fall 2002 edition, we’ve begun to use regular themes to encourage wider participation from our extended community of collaborators and to provide an opportunity to look more deeply into the most compelling ideas, questions, and struggles facing anti-authoritarians today. To that end, we’d like to provide a “sneak preview” into probable future themes. This winter, we’ll look at “Culture, Race, and Ritual” (see page 45 for “the call”). Next spring, we’ll take on two taboo topics: Conspiracy and Elections. Over the summer, we will turn our hearts and minds to The Wild. In the Fall of 2004, we’ll address unschooling and anti-authoritarian education for people of all ages. By Spring 2005, we’ll be ready to look at the History of the FE in more depth as we begin to celebrate our 40^th anniversary. We’ve already started planning the Revolution Everywhere Tour for 2005, including stops at the Anarhchist Book Fair in San Francisco, the Allied Media Conference in Northwest Ohio, and other key gatherings TBA.

Insubordination—literally, the utter refusal to submit to order—is not always revolutionary, but it may be one of the first signs that a revolution is brewing.

The insubordinate can be someone rebelling against an institution to which she formerly conformed or someone who never has been any part of the system of authority. Sometimes ideological and sometimes instinctual, insubordination burns the nerves.

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SAN DIEGO (August 1) A banner reading “You build it, we burn it. ELF” was found at the site of a blaze that destroyed the wooden frame of an upscale five-story apartment complex, prompting suspicions that the fire was part of an anti-urban sprawl initiative. The construction site is in northern San Diego, near the University of California in the so-called Golden Triangle, one of the region’s faster-growing areas. The project was being built by a corporation that is Southern California’s second largest apartment developer. The day after the fire, a small hand-printed sign taped to a nearby traffic barrier read: “Thank You, E.L.F. Burn Baby Burn.”

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Civil disobedience

Has many permutations

You can block the streets in front of

The United Nations

You can lay down on the tracks

Keep the nuke trains out of town

Or you can pour gas on the condo

And you can burn it down

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Chorus:

So here’s a toast to the night

Three cheers and a grunt

To the Earth Liberation Front

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“Welcome to the Republic of Darkness and Unemployment”

— Baghdad graffiti

It’s hard to be gleeful about the deteriorating situation in Iraq even when realizing that everything the anti-war movement predicted about Bush’s invasion for oil and empire has come true. Even mainstream publications are using the word “quagmire” to describe the situation while seventy percent of American’s in a recent Newsweek poll think the US will be bogged down in its $1 billion a month occupation efforts for years.

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Mutiny is such a potent threat to military organizations—and the States who use them avoid even mentioning the word. Instead, military commanders and civil authorities fall back on euphemism in order to avoid announcing the news that they most fear—during the First World War, for example, a major mutiny by French troops was mentioned in murmurs as “collective indiscipline”; while the war dragged on in Vietnam, the US Army reported increasing numbers of “battlefield refusals.”

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For me, daydreaming is a kind of prayer. To drift, to feel my body gently floating, to move with memory and the suggestiveness of phenomena, to be thankful, to enjoy, to praise this life with its wonder and vitality...this is prayerfulness. And sometimes I wonder, there must be nothing better than to be a Master of Ceremonies, making pilgrimages out for the pine boughs to bring back to the village to reanimate the village goddess, and bring people closer together. This world of beauty and dreams -and making peace with life.

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In Southern California, the wild summers of 1960 and 1961 were a prelude to a series of famous youth insurrections: the watts riot of 1965, the so-called “Hippie riots” on Sunset Strip between 1966 and 1970, and the Eastside high school “blowouts” of 1968–69. [In the early sixties], Black youth in Los Angeles and elsewhere began to fight spontaneously for substantive control over community space—a thrust that would later become enshrined in the Black Panther Party’s program for “self-determination.”

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In late March, Takoma, a 22 year-old Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin trained by the US Navy to detect underwater mines for Marine Corps reconnaissance divers, went absent without leave while on patrol in the Persian Gulf outside of Umm Qasr. In an effort to cover their embarrassment, a public relations official for the Marines claimed that Takoma was recaptured on May 5, but these reports have not been confirmed by independent investigators. Given all the other lies about the Iraqi invasion issued at Pentagon press conferences, we at Fifth Estate consider Takoma to be on the run somewhere in the Indian ocean.

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As long as people have been ruled, they have expressed their dissent. Throughout the modern era, art has been a powerful tool to voice this political defiance.

With their bold woodcut images of ruling classes and mocking skeletons, art movements like the Taller de Graphica Popular (“the People’s Graphics”) founded in Mexico City in 1937 served not only as satirical commentary but were inclusive enough to inform illiterate people of current events. Further, the Dadaist’s anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities were fueled by their disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. Their disregard for traditional artistic values still resonates today, especially in punk and avant-garde communities.

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Issue #12 of Internationale Situationniste reported that, during a general strike in Paris on March 10, 1969, a group identified only as the “Guy-Lassac Street Barricaders” erected a handmade bronze-coated plaster statue of Charles Fourier. The new monument was placed on the empty pedestal where his statue had stood before being torn down during the Nazi Occupation of the 1940s. Within a day, however, French security forces had restored control to the street and the technical service of the Paris prefecture tore the Fourier statue down; like the Nazis, the French government obviously regarded the presence of this early nineteenth-century utopian writer to be a distinct threat to public order.

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Mother

It is time you knew

I am guilty of the following charges:

Attempting to lead an unarmed insurrection,

33 unpaid parking tickets (to date)

compulsive jaywalking,

second helpings with my fingers,

embezzlement of milk money for 45-rpm records,

forced humor,

passing on sensitive information,

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I had seen the skinny man with the beard before. The last time was at an anti-war rally in Duluth, I think. He had been collecting signatures for a petition to legalize hemp, or to urge the UN into investigating voter fraud in Florida in 2000, or some such thing. He didn’t have his clipboard this time. He had on a faded-out “Wellstone for Senate” t-shirt which must have been a few years old since Wellstone had been conveniently killed in a strange small plane crash three weeks before the 2002 congressional elections. But this guy didn’t look like he was wearing the t-shirt ironically.

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Analyzing the contemporary struggle against the increasingly concentrated power of mega-corporations (and of those politicians who serve them) is actually a struggle against the pathologies of an international ruling class. In the most general terms, it is a fight for non-alienated self-realization, decentralization, and voluntary social relations, against individuals, institutions, and structures that are fixated on expanding the capacities for domination.

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Fifth Estate Letters Policy

We welcome letters commenting on our articles or other topics, but can’t print every one we receive. Each, however, is read and considered for publication.

Letters via email or on disk are appreciated, but typewritten and legibly handwritten ones are acceptable. Length should not exceed two double-spaced pages. All submissions must have a name and return address, which will be withheld upon request.

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Black Indian identity charts a course that, by its own hybrid nature, sails beyond the simplistic binaries commonly associated with racial nationalism, while at the same time carving out its own cross-cultural position in the struggle against white supremacy.

In relation to the anarchist/Black Indian connection, as Wilson Harris has noted, “The very ground beneath us has been stolen. I think that’s why Proudhon wrote his book, Property IS Theft.” Harris then goes on to trace his own struggle as a Black Guyanan to the anti-colonial revolt of 1687 fomented by the combined forces of African maroons and Arawak Indians.

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a review of

A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of Writing from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, edited by Roy San Filipo. AK Press, 2003, San Francisco, 139pp.

Letters to a Young Activist, Todd Gitlin, Basic Books, 2003, 174 pages

I haven’t read either of the books listed above and have no intention of doing so. I’m reviewing them in the manner all of us do each time we peruse a library or bookstore shelf. “Hmm, that looks interesting; no, that probably will be boring,” etc.

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Never SUBMIT! Contribute to the Fifth Estate!

Next issue: CULTURE, RACE, & RITUAL

deadline: November 1^st

Q: When radicals adopt, appropriate, or adapt the cultures and rituals of marginalized minority groups, they

(a) disrespect the integrity of the original forms through cultural tourism and neo-racism;

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Josh MacPhee of Chicago has been very busy this summer. Touring his stencil graffiti art show to infoshops, cafes, independent art galleries, and even the Allied Media Conference, selling prints from five to fifty dollars to raise funds for a book of collected stencils from around the country.

MacPhee facilitates “Just Seeds,” organizing artists from all walks, styles, and artistic backgrounds to create beautiful works of educational art entitled “Celebrate Peoples History.” Each poster is a highly unique tribute, honoring radical speakers, thinkers, organizers, agitators, and events. This is the history our textbooks seemed to have “left out.” The series pays homage to such prominent figures as Harriet Tubman, Augusto Sandino, and Fred Hampton. Shining light on events like Little Bighorn, the Stonewall riots, and the Battle of Homestead. This project continues to grow as new artists approach MacPhee with new ideas.

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a review of

Direct Action: An Historical Novel by Luke Hauser

In Direct Action, Luke Hauser writes fiction so steeped in reality that he reproduces an era for us, with all of its excitement and frustrations.

Although the 1980s are generally thought of as a kind of dead zone for progressive activism, in the San Francisco Bay Area the early part of the decade was a time of fervent activism around nuclear issues.

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a review of

Wild Fermentation by Sandor E. Katz, 2003, 180 pp, $25. vvww.chelseagreen.com

The “hundredth monkey” suggests that if enough animals (including people) begin doing something, the rest will follow. “Chaos theory” suggests that a very small change can set a process in motion which causes an enormous effect. As a single yeast cell will divide and change barley to beer, we can feel empowered to change our lives.

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The barn is bursting with new titles & more to come. If you’d like us to review and/or distro your independent publication, bring it on

Midnight Notes, Auroras Of the Zapatistas (2001) $14.00

James Bell, The Last Wizard (2002) $12.00

Paul Garon, The Devil’s Son-in-Law: Petiie Wheatstraw (2003) $15.00 (w/CD)

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This fall, people will gather in Detroit to lay the foundations for an anti-authoritarian, grassroots movement of people of color that will organize in their communities against racism and repression. Described as “an organizers’ conference of people sympathetic to the Anarchist movement in various communities of color”, the APOC conference will consist of a weekend of workshops, networking and strategy sessions. Already, groups around the US are organizing benefit concerts to show solidarity and physically support the conference. This conference is for community activists, oppressed and Indigenous peoples, Anarchists and anti-authoritarians of color. THIS IS A PEOPLE OF COLOR ONLY EVENT, sponsored by the Students Movement for Justice at Wayne State U., the Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizers-S.W. Michigan chapter, and our friends in the Anarchist movement.

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Please send calendar events to the Fifth Estate, keeping in mind our quarterly schedule.

Deadline for the Winter 2003/04 edition is November 1.

fifthestate@pumpkinhollow.net

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Various dates, cities—Just say no to Dick and Bush Tour All along the west coast and throughout the rest of the country, as Bush travels around to raise funds, people are organizing to stop him. People are coming out for a myriad of reasons, protesting war, heckling the rich, and generally causing trouble. Contact your local Republican headquarters to target the fundraiser near you.

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Graphic: photo of US Army installation with overhead sign reading Obedience to the law is freedom.

Text superimposed on photo reads:

Rather than inanely repeating the old formula ‘Respect the law’ we say, ‘Despise law and all its attributes!’ In place of the cowardly phrase ‘Obey the law,’ our cry is, ‘Revolt against all laws!’ — Kropotkin

Stencil art is a fun and easy way to reclaim and beautify your neighborhood. Above is just one example—experiment with your own.

Directions:

1. photocopy and enlarge (bigger for better visibility)

2. glue to thin non-corrugated cardboard

3. cut out with exacto knife

4. spray paint (don’t hold the can too close)

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