Fifth Estate 395, Winter 2016 - 50th Anniversary Add to the Bookbuilder

Federico Arcos, 1947

Federico Arcos (July 18, 1920-May 23, 2015), a lifelong anarchist, participated in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War in the 1930s, and later took part in the antifascist underground there. He immigrated to Canada in 1952, where he continued his commitment to anarchist goals. He eventually compiled an extensive archive of anarchist writings and other material.

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Related: Fifth Estate celebrates 50^th year with exhibits & festivities

Detroit Historical Museum

Runs to August 2016

Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner once famously said, “If you can remember anything about the 60s, you weren’t really there.”

He was wrong. Start the Presses reminds us why one of the country’s oldest and Detroit’s first 60’s era underground paper was so special and why, 50 years after its creation, we still remember.

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The Layabouts onstage at FE’s big birthday bash, September 19, 2015.

This edition of the Fifth Estate marks the 50^th anniversary of its publishing, with much of the celebrations occurring in a manner we never anticipated. There are exhibitions at two prestigious Detroit museums, a jammed packed dance/ concert with hundreds in attendance featuring The Layabouts, an anarchist rock/ska band, talks to the Detroit Press Club, radio and TV coverage, art and political workshops and panels at the museums, and tours with university classes and other groups at the museums which are selling Fifth Estate t-shirts. Whew!

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4 The Future is Now!

Jesús Sepúlveda

7 Sabotage & the Flows of Capital

Jeff Shantz

10 Transgender Struggle in Prison

Anonymous

12 Image Worshipping

Panos Papadimitropoulos

13 Mega-Cities

Bellamy Fitzpatrick

16 Wolf Patrol

Rod Coronado

Vietnam: The Resistance

Pages 17–30

Mutinies at the Outposts of Empire

Rob Blurton

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Just so readers don’t think all of the celebration around the 50^th anniversary of publishing has brought forth a bout of hubris in us, let us be clear. Those of us working on the Fifth Estate today know this publication couldn’t have lasted this long without connection to a vibrant tradition and social solidarity from contemporary comrades.

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by Ken Wachsberger

Preceding the Fifth Estate by two weeks, the Berkeley Barb celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with exhibits, films, poetry, and panel discussions on August 9, 2015.

The two papers were among the first five members of the Underground Press Syndicate. The Barb was known for its radical news coverage, outrageous visuals, support for liberation movements, and its explicit sex ads.

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Lakabe, a Basque country village dating back to the Middle Ages, now an intentional, self-sustaining community.

Sales Santos-Vera and Itziar Madina-Elguezabal live in the heart of the Basque Mountains, where the borders between France and Spain are blurred and the mists hide the paths once serving smugglers and antifascist guerrillas. Sales moved here from Extremadura along with his family as a boy.

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According to all reputable climatologists, an immediate ninety percent reduction in material and energy production is required to meet the goal of limiting the average worldwide temperature increase by a disastrous two degrees Fahrenheit. At the current rate of fossil fuel extraction and use, the earth will experience a catastrophic increase of four to nine degrees by the end of this century.

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This issue of the Fifth Estate, appearing on the 61^st anniversary of International Women’s Day, is dedicated to all our sisters around the world. It is the product of the Fifth Estate staff, women from the Women’s Media Co-op and women involved in other activities around the city.

When we started work on this paper, many of us didn’t know each other. Most of us had few newspaper skills and some of us had never written before. But we decided to pool our skills, energy and time-we were determined to put out a good newspaper.

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The discovery of Columbus by the Arawaks was fortuitous as the three ships might have made landfall almost anywhere else on the continent that lay between the explorers’ intended destination in eastern Asia. The random meeting had deadly consequences for the tribal people who had cheerfully welcomed their strange visitors.

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Why save Wall Street when the shit hits the fan and the economy plunges down the toilet? Let it drown in its own cesspool of toxic debt. Since money is symbolically a form of excrement, poetic justice demands that stockbrokers and bankers suffocate in their own shit.

The global capitalist economy has collapsed like a house of cards in a shitstorm. Yet, instead of celebrating the crash by dancing in the ruins, the wage slaves and their overseers are busily deciding how to shore it all up again.

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People always ask about the meaning of our publication’s odd name. It is odd, and for our purposes over the last thirty years or so, a particularly problematic one. The word Estate in the title refers to the three powerful French Estates of the Realm at the time of the 1789 revolution—the aristocracy, clergy, and common people. A wag in the 1920s quipped that the popular press exercised such power over public opinion, it was literally a fourth estate.

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I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America.

—David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

I think of Wojnarowicz’s disgust as I sit across from my friend, Marius Mason, in this maximum-security prison visitor’s room. We are allowed one embrace before we seat ourselves. A surveillance camera looms over head. A guard is posted a few feet away in this sterile cement room. The echo is oppressive as our thoughts and feelings spill out, hurried by the time allotted to us. No paper, no pens or photos of home; only our voices.

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Foucault’s happy pre-Enlightenment “ship of fools” was a fantasy: the reality of life with disability (particularly developmental disability and mental ill health) before charitable/government involvement ranged from outright murder, to banishment into charitable and religious institutions, to imposing the full duty of care on women within the confines of the family home. All of these practices continue alongside government and corporate services today.

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Different cultures view the world in different ways, especially if we take into consideration the large number and diversity of the means to engage in conversation beyond speech.

Just like language, each communication medium creates a unique way to converse, providing a new field of thought, expression and sensitivity In our culture, each image type, whether as a photograph or in its television version, is a historically specific paradigm of creating a certain instance of what we call a worldview. What is not so easy, though, is to decode what it is the image proposes, that is what kind of worldview it creates.

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“...the city is not fitting human habitat. Architecturally, in form and function, they resemble nothing so much as endless aisles of battery hen cages.”

—Dion Workman, Thinking Like A Forest: Towards an Agricultural Counter-Revolution

It is pessimistically seductive to perceive a recently announced Chinese government plan to construct the apotheosis of urbanity—a mega-city centered around the capital of Beijing—as our herald of the end times.

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The question of whether to combine in organizations, associations, federations, etc., has become a subject of some debate and much interest. Many feel that the only obstacle to organization is the relative weakness of the small numbers of persons who identify with a libertarian perspective, while still others feel organizations in and of themselves are bureaucratic and are incapable of producing the desired goal.

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Winter is approaching in wolf country. The last of the sugar maples have surrendered their leaves, and there’s a colder bite in the air that tells you its time to die. It’s nature at its realest, the life cycle of the wild that will never be stopped. Winter is coming and if you are not strong, you will not survive.

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We are all outlaws in the eyes of America...

We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young...

We are forces of chaos and anarchy

Everything they say we are we are

And, we are very Proud of ourselves

—“We Can Be Together” (Jefferson Airplane, from “Volunteers,” 1969)

And, traitorous.

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The original full-length article is online in the Fifth Estate archive; see Issue 346, Summer 1995.

As America’s involvement in Vietnam deepened in 1965, political and social turbulence at home reached proportions unimaginable at the beginning. Within two years, the army started falling apart.

Low morale and outright rebellion eroded its combat effectiveness, and the malaise began spreading beyond Southeast Asia to brigades garrisoning more vital imperial frontiers, especially Central Europe. The conscripted sons of the men who fought World War II came to see not Asian communists but the United States military machine as the real enemy.

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Just as in other periods of contestation with the ruling order, not only did the Vietnam era resistance create its own periodicals, but it also published an enormous number of posters and flyers. Their subject matter didn’t only call for an end to the war, but denounced the U.S. empire and its armed forces, the police, racism, sexism, and many contained calls for revolution against capitalism.

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Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and other entertainers performing in FTA, a satire on the army & Vietnam war. From the documentary “F.T.A.: (F**k the Army)” available from StoneyRoadsFilms.com

“Jane Fonda, Traitor Bitch”

—Bumper Sticker at Old Miami, a Detroit Bar

In 1968, Jane Fonda was best known for the role she played as the scantily-clad Barbarella in the film by the same title. Shortly thereafter, she emerged as an influential voice in the movement against the war in Vietnam, leaving as her most lasting contribution the support she gave the resistance efforts of GIs and veterans.

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One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fuckin’ war!

Again and again they chanted the couplet as they slowly made their way downtown along New York City’s Fifth Avenue, and then crosstown on 42^nd Street to the United Nations. There, they would hear Martin Luther King and several other luminaries express these same sentiments against the Vietnam war, albeit in somewhat milder language.

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So intense was the air war against Vietnam, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, that more bomb tonnage was dropped on this small nation than the combined total expended during World War II.

These raids contributed heavily to the enormous Vietnamese casualties ranging up to four million dead, numbers which dwarf those suffered by the U.S. invaders.

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An enduring image of Vietnam War resistance is men burning their draft cards. And, draft resistance played a big role in raising the profile of war tax resistance. Vietnam era draft resisters like Randy Kehler and Ed Hedemann followed up their refusal to fight with a refusal to pay for fighting, following the example of World War I and II draft and war tax resisters like Ammon Hennacy and Wally Nelson.

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Mutiny. This word, fearsome to the brass of any army (but joyful to anti-war activists), was left out of October 2004 media accounts about a US Army Reserve unit whose soldiers refused to deliver fuel along a route in Iraq they considered too dangerous to travel.

Eighteen soldiers, including the commander of the 343^rd Quarter-master Company, refused to under-take a fuel delivery north of Baghdad in what they characterized as a “suicide mission,” given the frequency of attacks and the lack of armor for their unit. The commander was relieved of duty with the hope that the entire incident could be swept under a rug already showing great bulges from previous sweepings.

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Next year will mark the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Revolution, an event which most of those involved with the Fifth Estate only learned of in the 1970s, but one which profoundly contributed to what the paper and the broader anarchist milieu have become.

The ideas and the practices of solidarity and mutual aid learned from the Spanish anarchists who lived through that moment taught people at the Fifth Estate and many others a lot that shaped who we are now. Knowing people like Federico and Pura Arcos, both veterans of the Spanish struggle who lived in Windsor, Ontario across the river from Detroit, helped younger anarchists think of an anti-authoritarian revolution of everyday life as a real possibility.

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And, so we return to Spain. Nearly 70 years after the people’s response to a right-wing military uprising, those events remain a source of wonder, optimism, confusion, strife and tragedy. It was a high mark of personal and social possibility that has yet to be matched. It was a real revolution of everyday life that shattered the patterns and relationships created by the agencies that constituted a growing capitalism.

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On October 17 and 18, 2015, anarchists in the small Catalan city of Manresa held the first Gathering of Libertarian Infrastructures. Outside of English speaking North America, libertarian is a synonym for anarchist. The event was the result of over a year of informal debates and longer collective processes in which comrades sought the ideal forms of coordination and organization, and the best methods for spreading anarchist ideas and practices.

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Some might have thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, along with the abandonment of socialist economics across less industrialized countries would have sounded the death knell of Marxism. But Marx’s loyal tribe are keen to regurgitate his mantras at any available opportunity.

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The article from which this excerpt is taken, “Stopping the Industrial Hydra: Revolution Against the Megamachine,” appeared in our Winter 1990 issue. It provides analyses of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 1989 from the standpoint of a global criticism of industrial capitalist society.

The Valdez was the source of the worst oil spill to that date in U.S. history, spilling eleven million gallons into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where it ran aground.

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a review of

The Anarchist Cookbook

Keith McHenry, with Chaz Bufe Introduction by Chris Hedges, 2015

See Sharp Press, 154 pp.

It’s unfortunate that the best selling book with the word anarchist in the title is a terribly flawed bomb- and drug-making manual.

The original Anarchist Cookbook was first published in 1971, compiled by William Powell, then a 19-year-old living in New York City.

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Let us give a brief definition of the way in which Capital or capitalism is used in articles in the Fifth Estate: Capital is based on wage-labor, the production and exchange of commodities, with an agency above the working class extracting surplus value (profits) from the value of goods and services produced, and then re-investing a portion back into the enterprise.

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a review of

Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization by John Zerzan; introduction by Lang Gore. Feral House, 2015, 136 pp.

John Zerzan’s latest book, Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization, continues his ongoing critique of civilization and its consequences. The collection of essays--many of which originally appeared in Fifth Estate and other anarchist publications during the past few years--explore familiar topics: the origins of civilization, the techno-culture, industrialism, the Left, and collapse.

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a review of

Lives of the Orange Men by Major Waldemar Fydrych, edited by Gavin Grindon, translated by David French, with an introduction by the Yes Men Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2014, 330 pp.

While many historically-minded radicals are familiar with the imaginative counter-cultural actions undertaken by the Dutch Provos in the 1960s, the Orange Alternative’s subversive cultural resistance tactics emanating from Poland in the 1980s are less well known.

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a review of

Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish & Italian Anarchism in America by Kenyon Zimmer. University of Illinois Press, 2015, 300 pp.

The campaign in the 1920s to save Sacco and Vanzetti from execution brought anarchists to national attention, but not the fact that they were part of a large community of comrades in Boston.

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Send letters to fe--at--fifthestate--dot--org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220. All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten; letters may be edited for length.

Enclosed is $30. Please send us a bundle of the Summer 2015 Vietnam issue. Thank you for putting out this paper! Printed propaganda is where it’s at!

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FE note: Comrades working to revive anarchism in Cuba need our immediate financial support. For U.S. dollar donations, visit the Cuban Anarchist Solidarity Fund. For Euro-zone contributions, click here.

Isbel, Mario & Jimmy (photo: Gabriel Uchida)

Changes in the Cuban state’s regulation of private enterprise and in the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. over the last decade are opening up new possibilities and dangers for Cuban society.

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One day in the prison yard, the resident grey cat chased heedlessly

A bird, who’d landed on the roof, all enclosed with steely swirls

And slipping through the curling razor wire, stalked

Until it caught her leg and stopping

Shaking as it sliced her paw...open...raw

The sharp barbs cutting fur and muscle, white and wounded to the bone

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