Fifth Estate 375, Spring 2007 Add to the Bookbuilder

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I appreciate the thoughtfulness of Cookie Orlando’s “Unlocking the Girl Lock: Gender Trouble at Burning Man.” (FE, Winter 2007). However, what’s missing is the girl’s point of view.

The article tells us that she didn’t feel like going to a lecture at the Burning Man festival in Nevada that her boyfriend wanted to attend, so he left her in the “Girl Lock,” a service much like left luggage at the airport.

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This edition begins our 42^nd year of continuous publishing as the longest running, English language anarchist publication in American history. We’ve got a ways to go to catch the Yiddish language Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) which printed for 87 years, but we’re hot on the heels of the Italian Dunata dei Refrattari, which published between 1922 and 1971.

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“When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modern city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising is why this life goes on--what purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue.”

--George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

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Perhaps the only positive result of the reign of the murderous moron in the White House as chieftain of the American empire is to what depths he has sunk the popular perception of Christianity.

The Bush mob’s initial political approval following the 9/11 catastrophe he allowed to occur, utilized both the flag and bible as its key iconography to fool the rubes. Although this is standard fare for craven politicians, the Republicans raised this cultural imaging to levels not seen in a hundred years. But, the unraveling of the reigning racket’s lies, the exposure of their greed, corruption, and their hypocrisy and that of their most pious spokesmen, both in the Congress and the pulpit, have created an opening for atheism that would have seemed impossible even a short time ago.

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In most old capitalist countries, religion has obviously declined as an institution and a social habit: fewer students in the seminary, a smaller audience at Sunday mass. But it flourishes as an attitude and a vision of the world. Stalinism and fascism (both secularized millenarianisms) promised paradise on Earth for later.

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A rare judicial victory was achieved in February as forest defense activist Jefrey “Free” Luers’ 23-year prison sentence for eco-sabotage was overturned by the Oregon Court of Appeals.

In 2001, then 23 year-old Jeff and his codefendant, Craig “Critter” Marshall, were convicted for torching three SUVs at a Eugene, Oregon car dealership. Their stated purpose was to raise awareness about global warming and the role SUVs play in that process.

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Note. El Libertario, the voice of the Comision de relaciones anarquistas of Venezuela, analyzes the how and why of the increasing state repression against the growing social discontent that belies the pseudo-revolutionary discourse of the Chavez regime. See also: “In Chavez’s Venezuela” in this issue.

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Just the headline above alone probably condemns us to the gulag by uncritical leftist supporters of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian socialist revolution. But like most issues that vex the left, a look beneath the surface always provides more than what initially presents itself, and almost always, something worse.

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“The Authorities came to their Adam. And, when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him they became agitated and they became enamored with her. They said, ‘Come, let us sow our seed in her.’

“And, she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches she became a tree, and left them her shadowy form, resembling herself, and they defiled it foully, and they defiled the stamp of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled with their own image, they had made themselves liable to condemnation.”

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-- drawing by Peter Welleman

“Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence--virtual--let us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be free.”

-- Cornelius Castoriadis

There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within this world we must leave behind.

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-- drawing by Peter Welleman

Often, when I turn to the anarchist press these days, it’s certain I’ll find someone commenting on the lack of “clarity” in the discourse of the movement. In a recent editorial in Anarchy, for example, Lawrence Jarach writes “there is an overflow of ambiguous (at best) terminology in much contemporary anarchist discourse.”

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I begin with two insights. Global systems theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that throughout capitalist history the working class has been divided into a proletariat, which makes a living solely through waged labor, and a semi-proletariat which in its contemporary incarnation, juggles such pursuits as temp work, freelance projects, state subsidies (food stamps, artists in residence grants, or student loans), and maxing out on credit cards.

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The 2007 Left Forum was held March 9–11 in New York City’s historic Cooper Union, featuring 92 workshops, two plenaries, a film festival, two plays, and attended by 1,500 people. It is the largest annual North American gathering of left intellectuals and organizers (it used to be called the Socialist Scholars Conference until--surprise, surprise--a split occurred). One of the 80 panels was entitled, “Anarchism and the Left: An Uneasy Relationship?”

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The Society of the Spectacle</em> (La Société du Spectacle), by Guy Debord, is the best-known and most influential text issued by the Situationist international (SI), and it informed--theoretically and practically--the most revolutionary sectors that emerged a year after its publication in Paris during the massive French uprising of May-June 1968.

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There are certain things that jump out at you as soon as you arrive in Denmark. One thing you’ll notice, especially if you come from a place within that large mass of the world that is a bit closer to the equator, is that there is rarely anything you’d call direct sunlight.

It’s twilight most of the time. In the summer, it’s only really dark for an hour or so, but never completely light, either. In the winter, it’s dark most of the time, often accompanied by a cold, light rain.

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In fall 1997, in Sechelt, a small coastal town in southwest British Columbia, Canada, Jamie Elder, owner of the Unity Skateboard Shop and drop-in point for local youth, approached me about painting a mural on the side of the trailer that housed his store which faced the highway directly opposite from a McDonald’s.

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“Unlike the French uprising of May-June 1968, the youth rebellion of November 2005 had no demands and no critique; just the fires.”

--Le Monde Libertaire

Early in November 2005, three young men were trying to escape from being questioned by police and took refuge inside an electric transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois, a poor working class suburb outside Paris. Two of them were electrocuted and the third was severely burned.

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September 7, 8, 9, at the Victoria Coolaid Society, 749 Pandora St., Victoria, BC

The only Anarchist Bookfair on the Canadian west coast will be part of a week-long Festival of Anarchy. Events include book and information, tables, workshops, readings, films, and presentations.

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Mick Kubiak: Here Comes Spring

cdbaby.com

reviewed by Sean Flynn

Mick Kubiak is the girl you were in love with in school. Who read novels and wrote in a notebook during class, despised convention and carried her otherworldly beauty and sexuality as simple givens. A part of no clique, Kubiak began to form her eviscerating and hilarious social critique of a culture obsessed with possessing women when she was barely seventeen.

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reviewed in this article

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck

Other Cinema, San Francisco, 2003

www.othercinemadvd.com/net.html

“Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

--Werner Herzog, filmmaker.

“Truth is the invention of a liar.”

--Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician.

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reviewed in this article

The Big Red Songbook, Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno, editors; 2007; 538 pp.; $24; Charles H. Kerr Co., 1740 West Greenleaf, Chicago, IL 60626. Available from The Barn (see page 55).

In a 100^th anniversary commemorative edition of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook, the editors have compiled over 250 IWW songs along with their histories and anecdotes about them. Covering songs that appeared in the notorious and ubiquitous volumes, from the 1909 to the 1973 edition, each entry includes lyrics and a brief description.

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Robert Anton Wilson at the National Theatre, London, for the 10-hour stage version of Illuminatus! in 1977

For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive basis--i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness--we decided we were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves connected to the Wilsons who play so murky a role in the “Montauk Mysteries” (Aleister Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel experiments gone awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology (including Colin, S. Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was Wilson) never materialized--although we did collaborate in editing Semiotext(e) SF, together with Rudy Rucker.

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On February 24, I joined a large crowd to march in a jazz funeral celebrating the life of our friend, the filmmaker and community activist, Helen Hill. Helen was murdered at her home on January 4 by an intruder whose motives remain a mystery.

Hundreds of people gathered in the Mid-City neighborhood at the home that she once shared with her husband, Paul Gailiunas, a doctor, musician, and fellow community activist, and their small child, Francis Pop.

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Studying in Paris during the intense final year (1961 through 1962) of the Algerian war for independence, I became hooked on Algeria and the potentials of revolutionary politics. In 1965 through 1966, I pursued on-site doctoral research on Algeria’s most radical political innovation after independence--a large-scale realm of worked’ self-management in farms, factories and shops throughout the country.

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The most insidious biases one carries are those of which we are unaware. Philosophy and history, as far back as the very origins of our present civilization, have carried within them an enormous bias that remains strangely transparent, yet hidden. They have, almost in their entirety, been thought, discussed, constructed, analyzed and transmitted by men, for men.

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Murfreesboro, Tennessee is hardly known worldwide as a hotbed of radical activism, underground publishing, or anarchist feminism.

Other than a small but surprisingly relevant independent music scene and a handful of college professors and students at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), the overwhelming political mood of the place gravitates to the far right.

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The CIRA (Centre International de Recherches sur Anarchisme) in Lausanne, Switzerland is a large archive and small research facility. It has existed for over 50 years, but today, its existence is threatened. The CIRA works to retain the memory of the anarchist movement.

For 50 years they have collected texts written by anarchists from all over the world which are available for militants, researchers, and the curious. The collection includes nearly 20,000 books and brochures, hundreds of titles of magazines (the oldest of which is from 1848), films, and a personal archive of militants’ correspondence, etc., in over 20 languages.

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