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Fifth Estate Collective
Gary Snyder

Smokey The Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a

discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying

beings, and the sitting beings-even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed,

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Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Editorial

“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down! Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.”

—Henry David Thoreau

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Fifth Estate Collective
Contents of print edition

Features

Intro: Primitivism & The Wild, page 17

Derrick Jensen on the Future, page 18

Green Anarchy & Oil Depletion, page 23

Peter Wilson On Domestication & Luddism, page 27

Our Enemy, The State, page 31

All Isms Are Wasms, page 34

Swamp Fever, page 38

Wolves, page 41

Mars First, page 42

Against History! page 45

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Fifth Estate Collective
Empire Flounders in Iraq

Thirteen months into Operation Iraqi Humiliation (actually 14 years into the Bush Family’s well-financed takeover Of the Middle East), all of the predictions made by activists and other assorted radicals a year ago about the utter stupidity of the Empire’s expansion into the Fertile Crescent appear to have been fierce understatements.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Wal-Mart is the War

Some radicals see all “protest” as pointless while others have made public activism a way of life. Others are overcoming the atomization of protest as just another alienated activity.

Another persistent concern is choosing one’s terrain of struggle. Some radical environmentalists say we should all save the wilderness, even if it means making that a single issue. Meanwhile, social justice activists say that radical greens should put aside nature issues and work on labor, race, gender, etc.

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Chuck 0
Bring the War Home

The latest escalation of the fighting in Iraq is a clear sign that the people of Iraq reject their “liberation.” The United States, led by the Bush regime, can’t decide why it invaded Iraq and refuses to pull out of Iraq. The Bush regime is dedicated to the continuation of the American program of empire building. A withdrawal from Iraq would be seen as a setback of this ongoing effort to build a Thousand Year Reich in which the world would be run by America. The quagmire in Iraq has not deterred the United States as it continues to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries (Haiti) and actively threatens other countries (Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and on and on).

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Andrew Stern
The War against People has Never been More Globalized Iraq, on the first anniversary of the US-led invasion, March-April 2004

The U.S.-led invasion has taken what was already a nightmare and turned it into a catastrophe where everyone seems numb and shell-shocked. Thirty-five years of a brutally repressive dictatorship, 11 years of crippling sanctions, and two invasions in the past decade have warped this country into the bloody hellhole that it is today. Iraq is the ultimate confluence of the three types of warfare: military, economic, and psychological.

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Doug Graves
Hell No! We Won’t Go New threat of draft calls for new resistance

Over the course of a decade, almost ten million Americans served the US military in the Vietnam War, and one quarter of those were draftees. Almost 60,000 Americans died, and almost 60% of those were under the age of 21. In terms of sheer numbers, today’s all-volunteer army is much leaner. And many young people who signed up out of economic necessity aren’t that stoked about Bush’s War Without End.

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Doug Graves
Corporate Mercenaries in Occupied Iraq

Prostitution may indeed be the world’s oldest profession mercenary soldiering is probably a close second place. Like so many other late-contemporary capitalist service commercial enterprises, soldiering-for-hire has undergone particularly ugly mutations in the last fifteen years as the bosses and clients have become more internationalized and more committed to the successful business strategy of plausible deniability. The latest globalized incarnation of the mercenary trade is the burgeoning $100 billion-per-year corporate military service industry.

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anon.
The Social Peace is Over A Thousand “Have-Nots” Storm Montreal Elite Hotel

Over a thousand angry protesters marched on Montreal’s posh St. James Hotel, April 14, causing havoc and disrupting the tea-time of the idle rich. The protest was part of a province-wide day of action marking the one-year anniversary of the elections that brought the Liberal Party to government in Quebec.

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MaxZine Weinstein
Convention Crashes! Blackout Wrecks Republicans

NEW YORK, NY — August 31 (Dissociated Press) The campaign to re-appoint George Bush President is in full swing as a heat wave continued with Central Park recording its third consecutive 95 degree-plus day.

Delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) were arriving in droves. Tens of thousands of anti-Republican demonstrators were already in the city, gearing up for massive protests and showdowns with New York’s finest storm troopers. The corporate media was set to cover the coronation and the expected melee. They were looking for some new spin on a story they were billing as a rerun, as in “The Battle of Seattle, Part 6: Republicans at Ground Zero.”

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Fifth Estate Collective
Anarchists gather everywhere

This Spring saw many anarchist gatherings and book fairs. For the second consecutive year, Fifth Estate had a table at the mother of all anarchist book fairs organized by the Bound Together collective in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. In early May, the Madison, Wisconsin anarchists hosted the book fair called Pencils and Pandemonium (perhaps this tag is a play on Chicago’s “Matches and Mayhem,” which passed the torch of an early May Midwest book fair to the comrades further north). And finally, anarchists in nearby North Carolina hosted a South Eastern Anarchist Network Conference (see report).

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john johnson
Tales of Resistance

Timoney Three Acquitted!

Camilo Vivieros, Darby Landy, and Eric Steinberg, known as the Timoney Three, were acquitted April 6 of all charges against them arising from their arrests at the 2000 Republican National Convention protests.

Former Philly chief pig John Timoney (who later led the assault on demonstrators at the Miami FTAA protests) personally accused the three of property damage and assaulting him and other police officers.

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Wildroots Collective
Reconsidering Primitivism Technology and the Wild

This issue’s theme opens up a universe of vigorous discussion and argument. All three concepts invoked by the title can be defined differently, depending on contexts, philosophies, ideologies, and world-views. The subject of technology often raises emotional responses as we grapple with our dependence on complex industrial systems that we don’t understand or control for survival.

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Derrick Jensen
Beyond Backward and Forward On Civilization, Sustainability, and the Future

Introduction by Sunfrog

When I first connected with the radical milieu in the mid-1980s, certain books and writers changed me. Activists passed around dog-eared, marked-up volumes that would transform people forever. A certain work would be read by everyone in a scene, becoming a sort of collective scripture; backpacks brimmed with propaganda, the tastiest tome like a textual talisman.

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Richard Heinberg
Green Anarchism and Oil Depletion How Close Is The Collapse?

The march of human social organization is essentially the story of how people have found ways of harvesting ever more energy from their environments in order to sustain ever more humans. The story began with the harnessing of fire and the domestication of plants and animals, but it took a fateful turn at the commencement of the industrial revolution when we discovered fossil fuels.

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Peter Lamborn Wilson
Domestication

The hunter/gatherer school of anarcho-anthropology and the anarchist critique of Civilization (e.g., Perlman’s Leviathan) proposed the domestication of plants and animals as the first step toward separation and ultimately the State.

Sahlins posed the question: why would any sane free hunter/gatherers voluntarily take up the shit-work of the “primitive agriculturist” (or, by extension, pastoralist)?—the erosion of leisure, the impoverished diet, etc.? Given his premises, this unsolved puzzle hints at coercion and deprivation. With hindsight we see that domestication leads to misery. We assume it began that way.

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anon.
Luddism Begins at Home Random Meditations on Overcoming the Media Trance

Tragedy of the Sixties: If you turn on and tune in—such heavily technophilic metaphors!—you can’t really hope to drop out of the technocracy. Too bad turn off, tune out, and secede isn’t nearly so snappy a slogan.

Car ads make great play with our unconscious realization that we need cars to get away to some place where there are no cars. To escape. The “freedom” of the American automobilist is a freedom from community, from place, from the human. It accomplishes all this, as Virilio might say, by its speed, which alienates (or “liberates”) the human from organic connection to space. The car causes pollution, death and disease; it demands paved highways and parking lots. It transforms nature into a tourist destination. It “makes” constant omnipresent noise, global warming and aesthetic blight—to name a few “side effects.” But the car produces social breakdown. This is what people buy their SUV’s for. There is the hidden hook in all car ads.

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Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Our Enemy the State The Pyramid Against the Circle

A quick glance at the evening news should be enough to convince even the most disengaged citizen that we live in “grim times.” This recognition, although accurate, is a cliché, since the same could be said about almost every era for the last thousand years in the West.

That’s not to say there’s not joy to he had, moments in which the human spirit erupts with creativity or transcendence, or even years when things seem to work just right, for some people, that is, and usually only for a while. Simultaneously, though, even in the best of periods, often no less than a few miles away, some horror is being perpetrated, or the harmony of an entire era or locale is suddenly exploded by some monstrous event.

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David Watson
All Isms are Wasms

Introduction by Sunfrog

As one of the more outspoken non-atheists in the FE collective, it’s fitting that one of my early memories of the project was an argument about religion. I was hanging out in the office under the auspices of helping the collective members in their battle to stop the Detroit trash incinerator. While I could usually hold my rhetorical own, I was outnumbered and intellectually outgunned that afternoon in early 1988. Before I left the office that day, one of the collective members pulled me aside, sensing that I was feeling emotionally bruised after taking such a verbal beating. He encouraged me not to take the discussion personally, told me that he valued my participation, and gave me a book by Frederick Turner called Beyond Geography. If it weren’t for that gesture by David Watson, I wonder if I might not be here as a co-editor, writing this intro to his most recent article.

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David Watson
Swamp Fever (excerpts)

FE note. Excerpts from “Swamp Fever, Primitivism & the ‘Ideological Vortex’: Farewell to All That” first published in the Fall 1997 issue of Fifth Estate (vol. 32 #2 (Whole Number 350)). End note.

Civilizations, most people know, destroy themselves. Radical greens, anarchist or otherwise, need to ... develop a constructive politics of solidarity, justice and renewal that moves beyond one-dimensional opposition to and unintelligible confrontation with mass society.

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Franklin Rosemont
We know the Wolves are On our Side

This is an excerpt from a 2003 essay, “Surrealism & Wilderness” that is included in Rosemont’s anthology Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous: Surrealist Contributions to the Critique of Miserabilism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2004).

Many oppositional movements that burst on the scene in the 1960s and ‘70s have long since faded away or made their peace with Business-as-Usual. The radical ecology movement, however, has not only persisted and gathered momentum, but also has never ceased to develop its revolutionary implications. Its effectiveness, in the world-historical sense, has been demonstrated repeatedly during the past thirty-five years. Consider, for example, its impact on the world’s attitudes toward wolves.

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Don LaCoss
Mars First!

“The tighter that our humanity closes ranks to conquer nature on Mars, the tighter the elements close theirs to avenge the victory.”

—from Aleksandr Malinovskii Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908)

It’s easy to laugh off the Bush-Cheney regime’s plans for “establishing an extended human presence” on the Moon and Mars. “We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the Moon,” said Bush, a man who constantly fails to correctly pronounce the word “nuclear” and whose own scientific wisdom has had him publicly defending creationist fairy tales over Darwinian evolutionary theory. “We choose to explore space because doing so improves our lives and lifts our national spirit.” Coming out of the mouth of such a cowardly, belligerent, and proudly ignorant obscurantist like Bush, talk of interplanetary missions sounds as unbelievably silly as the music on a Christian rock CD.

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Fredy Perlman
Speaking to the Beast an excerpt from Against His-story, Against Leviathan

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Richard Mock: Anthropology Gone Bad

Who, then, is the wrecker of the Biosphere? Turner points at the Western Spirit. This is the hero who pits himself against the Wilderness, who calls for a war of extermination by Spirit against Nature, Soul against Body, Technology against the Biosphere, Civilization against Mother Earth, god against all.

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Luci Williams
Support the Forces of Darkness

People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it’s like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens.

—Sun Ra

According to The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness, human civilization is drowning itself in luminous smog. The Atlas is a joint project of astrophysicists from Italy and Colorado and measures the level of perpetual industrial brightness that is reflecting off the inside rim of the sky.

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Peter Lamborn Wilson
Take Back the Night ban electricity

Electricity was known to the ancients. Archaeologists found primitive batteries in Crete—probably based on lost Mesopotamian or Egyptian prototypes. Clearly the old mages kept it a deep secret. Franklin didn’t discover it, he appropriated it from Hermeticism and gave it to the very politicians and merchants deemed “profane” and kept in the dark by real alchemists for millennia.

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W. Hazel
A Race for Time?

The accusation calling primitivists gleeful beckoners of “the collapse,” or misanthropic proto-nazis, reflects a clear misinterpretation of most primitivist writing, and even more primitivist practice. Few who generally agree with the primitivist analysis of the origins of civilization, if any at all, envision “industrial collapse” as some sort of political strategy. In one sense, collapse can definitely be seen as nature’s reaction to the pushing of ecological limits by industrial economies, but this perspective is not a value-based judgment. This possibility is but an observation of the predictable nature of wildness to do whatever it must to maintain ecological equilibrium.

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Anu Bonobo
It’s the end of the world and I don’t feel fine

“Not only religious zealots but economists, social theorists, technologists, nuclear critics, population experts, ecologists and political ideologues agree that an unprecedented shift in man’s world—whether catastrophic or beatific—is inevitable within the next half-century.”

—Richard Heinberg, Memories and Visions of Paradise

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Various Authors
Letters

IDEAS AS SERIOUS

Over five different decades, though dogmas inside my head and your pages have come and gone, something seems to have largely been constant: the Fifth Estate treats ideas as serious things even worth pissing-off friends for (now and then).

And, that’s the sure sign of a genuine radical.

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Nutmeg Brown
Ally Greenhead

Ross Winn Digging Up a Tennessee Anarchist

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Ross Winn, circa 1901

A couple of years back, at a conference in Ohio, an acquaintance of ours described to us how he had, in some research, happened upon an anarchist publisher who had lived and died in our neck of the woods: central Tennessee. Did we, he asked, know where Mount Juliet was? This tiny Southern town was only twenty minutes from our front door, and we were surprised when he explained how this man published radical literature from there a century ago. Would we be interested in tracking him down, maybe finding his grave and doing a rubbing? Sure, we thought, it sounded like fun at the time, and genealogical research was something we were new at, but willing to put our heads together on.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Breaking & Entering Project to Document Harassment of Infoshops and Autonomous Zones

This project is seeking personal accounts of surveillance, violence, and repression upon temporary and permanent autonomous zones (convergence centers, info shops, community centers, squats, collectives, etc...). Titled Breaking and Entering: State Repression of Autonomous Zones, this book will be comprised of individual perspectives of raids, supplemented with theory-based analysis of repression. The effectiveness of this documentation relies on the participation of those who have been subjected to police repression.

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Chris Lugo
Firebrand New Radical Community Center Coming to Nashville

Middle Tennessee anarchists and community organizers gathered at Nashville’s Belmont United Methodist Church on May Day, traditionally a worker’s holiday, to celebrate their vision of social justice, and are working to create a vision for the Firebrand, a proposed community center in East Nashville.

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Peter Lamborn Wilson
Tombeau for L

Introductory note by Sunfrog

People connected with the ‘zine and mail art communities of the 1980s or with the rural, artistic, experimental music factions of the anarchist milieu in the 1990s might remember the co-founder of Dreamtime Village, Lyx Ish, also known as Elizabeth Perl Nasaw and Liz Was, who died on February 28, 2004 at the young age of 47.

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Various Authors
Reviews Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement + Rising Sun: A Field Guide to the Eastern Uprisings + Earth First! Journal

Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement by Katya Komisaruk. Illustrated by Tim Maloney. AK Press, 2003

reviewed by MaxZine

I was impressed by attorney Katya Komisaruk at the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair when she came to the podium to speak and said she did not want to give a lecture but preferred to simply answer questions about run-ins with the law. Her conviction to help arm people with an understanding of simple ways to use what rights we have to defend ourselves against the encroaching police state shines through in Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Calendar of Resistance

June 28-July 5 — Earth First! Round River Rendezvous

Annual gathering of the Earth First! Movement. Contact: www.maineef.org, maineEF@yahoo.com, 1-800-MY-YAHOO mailbox # 922-487-3887, 224 West Side Drive, Verona Island, ME 04416

June 30-July 4 — We Are Resisting! Conference Anti-Imperialist/Anti-Capitalist gathering in Lawrence, KS, followed by a day of action on July 4, in Leavenworth, KS. For more information, please visit the website http://www.kansasanarchist.net/WAR/

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Fifth Estate Collective
The Barn Infoshop, Bookstore & Clubhouse

Books

Bill Ayers

Fugitive Days (2001) $10

James Bell

The Last Wizards (2002) $5.00

Alexander Berkman

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist $15.00

— What Is Anarchism? $14.00

Hakim Bey

Millennium (1996) $8.00

— Immediatism (1992) $10.00

— T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991) $8.00

Bureau of Public Secrets

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