Fifth Estate 413, Spring, 2023 Add to the Bookbuilder

The photo above of a traffic jam on a Brazilian highway could be a metaphor for life today. A scarred landscape littered with trucks filled with the everyday stuff of commerce going nowhere.

The trucks carrying what are now the necessities of modern society are stalled at a local level but reflect the entire global economy and culture. As the planetary integrated system becomes increasingly complex, so does its capacity for collapse.

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Despite the appeal of nationalism among today’s Ukrainians, the legacy of anarchism in that tormented region has not been forgotten. In fact, it is resurgent, though not always in ways that anarchists in more comfortable lands might like.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine is historically part of Russia is almost accurate. However, Russia is the child of Ukraine. The ancient state of Kievan Rus grew up around Kyiv, the pivot of a Baltic-to-Constantinople trade route.

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She was known as either Maria or Marusya Nikiforova, a fearless and feared, bad-ass Ukrainian anarchist warrior who led her own army during the Russian Civil War and peasant rebellions in the early 20^th century. But few people have heard about her, either in Ukraine or elsewhere.

A contemporary of another famous Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno, Nikiforova (1885–1919), was at one point better known in parts of Ukraine than him and also considered more important. But because she was a woman, she is mostly ignored in histories of the period, including anarchist ones. There are also few documentary sources about her life since she spent most of it underground and only surfaced in the public eye as part of the Makhnovist movement for two remarkable years from 1917 to 1919.

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“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin

ChatGPT has lit up the West in the last three months evincing delight among enthusiasts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but great fear and loathing among critics who see its entry into a world already diminished by machines as a further ratcheting downward of what it means to be human.

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a review of

The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism, Second Edition by John P. Clark. PM Press, 2022

Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, was “the most devastating experience I have lived through, but also the most uplifting and inspiring,” writes NOLA native John P. Clark, whose family goes back generations in the Crescent City.

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a review of

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Milkweed Editions, 2020 (original: 2013)

Don’t mistake the long lifespan on bestseller lists of Braiding Sweetgrass as something superficial. Certainly, Kimmerer’s excellent prose style attracts a broad range of readers. Yet the complexity of her ideas surely challenges those for whom nature equates to the landscape videos they capture on their smartphones.

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Emma Goldman is reputed to have said, “If voting could change things, they’d make it illegal.” Contempt for the franchise permeates anarchism, so that anarchists who favor participating in state elections are both in the minority and on the defensive.

This essay places the struggle for Votes for Women in the context of anarchist aspirations for radical social transformation, and also reconsiders the anarchist rejection of voting in contemporary times. A century after “The Great Reform,” I suggest we reformulate Goldman’s logic: perhaps authorities try so hard to make voting illegal because it could actually change things.

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a review of

Surrealism and Anarchism by Pietro Ferrua, edited by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2022.

Ron Sakolsky has uncovered a previously lost piece of anarchist history, one that explores the fertile crossroads of surrealism and anarchy.

This text originated as a 1982 lecture given by Pietro Ferrua (1930–2021), inaugurating the Anarchos Institute at the University of Montreal. The pamphlet provides a useful biographical sketch of Ferrua that helps situate his scholarship within a lifelong commitment to anarchism.

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“Surrealism is the collective experience of individualism”

—André Masson

What is surrealist collectivity? A mutually opened wound, ever seeded by poetry, by revolt. A soft spectral voice in the darkness, urging all nonconformists to come out, and to play. An extradimensional vehicle for thought and action beyond all controls, a device powered by collective vulnerability and individual Becoming.

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a review of

Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror by Johanna Isaacson. Common Notions 2022

Johanna Isaacson, a professor of English at Modesto Junior College, presents a thought-provoking and exhaustively researched addition to contemporary horror criticism in Stepford Daughters.

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A review of <em>

The Clash: All the Albums, All the Songs</em> by Martin Popoff. PM Press, 2022

Prolific Canadian music journalist Martin Popoff has written a remarkably exhaustive, song-by-song exhumation of the Clash, the astonishing rock and roll group (1976–1986) once popularly dubbed, “The only band that matters.”

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Inching his way downtown, he hits the first food cart he can find, not an easy feat in this neighborhood. The cart stands in front of a worn old church converted into a disco, famous for getting shut down repeatedly. He devours a stale, greasy, half-cooked knish.

Across the street from the cart, appearing as a mirage, a bookshop. Real fringe spot. Rollie has been inside a few times over the years. He generally avoids that sort of place, owing to the aspects of their ideology he finds offensive. But none of that matters. Now, it is raining. Now, he needs to use the bathroom. Good reasons to enter a place as any.

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a review of

Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane by Will Alexander. City Light Books, 2022

Will Alexander’s latest poems, collected in Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane, “remain (in the author’s own prefatory words) parallels to nanograms as dazzling wattage.”

A nanogram, a billionth of a gram, is light on its feet, and the poet is asking the reader to be similarly nimble in responding to his lines, images, and appropriations of vocabulary from the sciences, mathematics, and non-Western dialects.

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Leni Sinclair, 1960s

Using the descriptor, ironic, to define almost anything has become an overused cliché. However, Leni Sinclair’s 1966 photo of John Coltrane taken at Detroit’s Drome Lounge deserves that adjective. The image has been displayed in museums and reproduced hundreds of times.

Leni Sinclair’s photos first appeared in the Fifth Estate that same year in the then-tabloid’s second edition. Although the paper’s content was filled with articles about opposition to the Vietnam War and support for civil rights, the cover story was entitled, “The New Sound of Sound,” written under her full name, Magdalene Sinclair, and was accompanied by her photographs of Detroit musicians who were turning the world of jazz upside down [FE #2, December 2–16, 1965].

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a review of

Welcome Home by Clarrie and Blanche Pope. Minor Compositions 2022

When I picked up Clarrie and Blanch Pope’s Welcome Home and saw the tower block on its cover, it shook out of me a memory of watching the BBC documentary series The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities about the privatization of the Aragon Tower at the Pepys Estate (housing estate is the British euphemism for public housing, or projects for Americans unfamiliar).

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a review of

Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, The Insurrection Game 3^rd edition (Out of Order Games)

Bloc by Bloc is a strategy game inspired by contemporary protest movements. Designed and self-published by Greg Loring-Albright and TL. Simons from Out of Order Games, it uses the tabletop board game format to illustrate the impact of gentrification and the power of popular uprisings. As in the two previous editions, the goal is to liberate the city before the military arrives to reestablish order. In accordance with their anarchist ethics, low-cost upgrade kits are available for owners of the second edition, and the source files are free online.

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a review of

On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death by Jack Z. Bratich. Common Notions, 2022

97-year-old Irmgard Furchner does not fit the stereotype of a murderous fascist. The diminutive German woman was slumped over in a wheelchair, cane in hand, when she was sentenced in court last December for her part in the murder of over 10,000 people during World War II.

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Based on contraband, based on stealing fire, based on the thrill of nothingness I could consider paying taxes if reading is all you want and maybe a little tidying up. But as it is each night a new piece of shit falls from the hole in the sky. The vast arms that encircle us with their discontinuities remain unable to reach me aside from the occasional caress.

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a review of

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernández. WW Norton, New York, 2022

It is definitely a hopeful sign that a briskly selling book from a mainstream publisher (one long-listed for the National Book Award) not only features anarchists, but actually treats them with seriousness and presents them as the good guys—even heroes.

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a review of

The Menu. Dir: Mark Mylod (2022)

Judging from The Menu’s trailer and promotional images, it seemed as though it was going to literally be an Eat the Rich story. While a movie with a cannibal revenge plot would have been entertaining, there was some welcomed nuance and style within the film that made up for some of its disappointments.

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On May 16, 1871, one of the most famous monuments in Europe, the Vendôme Column celebrating Napoleon’s imperial regime, was toppled to the cheers of thousands. It was one of the largest public ceremonies of the short-lived Paris Commune, where revolutionaries controlled the city, establishing a free and egalitarian society that lasted a little over two months until suppressed by force.

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a review of

Spoor (Pokot). Dir. Agnieszka Holland 2017

Deemed by some to be an eco-terrorist story, Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is adapted by director Agnieszka Holland into Spoor, an exceptionally accurate rendering of a Polish language anarchist thriller.

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a review of

Passages of Rebellion by Fran Shor. Smart Set, 2021

Passages of Rebellion, with its focus on 1960s activism, feels perfectly curated for 2023 readers.

Just as the country was polarized and divided in the 1960s, today’s activists challenge convention and institutions, albeit with far more sophisticated technological capabilities, but with similar intent to their messaging.

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From the Fifth Estate photo archives. A reader holding a Fifth Estate extra prepared for the 1980 Republican National Convention. The article archive is available at fifthestate.org/archive/

Readers of the Fifth Estate know how much we value the history of opposition to oppression. Accounts of resistance have always filled numerous pages in the 413 issues we’ve published since 1965.

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a review of

Breaking the Alphabet by Sascha Engel. Ardent Press 2022

Critiques of language and its objectifying, alienating effects are older than history itself (history defined as the linear, language-based story of civilization). Those early incarnations still exist today in mystical and spiritual practices like no-mind meditation, ecstatic dance, and mantra.

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The simple and obvious freedoms that first inspire the imagination of young kids, freedom of movement and freedom from the constraints of physical laws, are so simple as to hide a much deeper liberatory kernel.

From the blood sacrifice initiatory trials of learning to skate to the insular lingo, skateboarding is every bit the revolutionary community, in many ways like the revolutionary secret societies of Haiti. In contemplating a subject as broad as and as theoretical as global anarchism, it seems to be much more productive to explore areas of inspiration rather than explain proper applications. To this end, I’d like to explore the radical potential of one of my lifelong passions. Skateboarding.

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Since 2013, the Fifth Estate Archive (fifthestate.org/archive) has been an online source for this magazine’s radical reporting, essays, and other texts published in our print edition for more than fifty-seven years. The archives contain 5,221 articles online to date, with more being added constantly.

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a review of

The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below by Peter Gelderloos. Pluto Press 2022

The climate crisis is here. While climate change coverage in mainstream media remains paltry, it is impossible to miss the ways the climate crisis is unfolding. Year after year of record wildfire seasons, of the warmest years on record, of devastating heat waves in Europe and Asia. And, this is only the beginning.

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Walking along the river’s edge,

The water level low this year

The receded river reveals

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A lifetime’s worth of accumulated

Garbage. A bicycle straddles

A burned out, gutted blue

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Sofa, spilling its soggy innards

To a sun close and ragged.

I step through tall grasses

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And reeds and feel the ground

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a review of

War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance by Daniel Akst. Melville House, 2022

Violence is not all the same. Context matters.

There’s something much worse about violence when it’s perpetrated by or with the tacit acceptance of the State. It’s not just that governments and their allies in the capitalist class and the patriarchy have more resources, more weapons, and fewer ethical qualms about killing than most. Beyond these obvious assets, they can hide behind the veil of legitimacy that the State (allegedly) offers them. Hitler, George W. Bush, and Derek Chauvin may not have a lot in common personally, but all committed their crimes under the reasonable presumption that the social and political order sanctioned such behavior.

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Alfredo Cospito is a 55-year-old incarcerated Italian anarchist who has been on hunger strike since October 2022, protesting the brutality of his imprisonment. As we publish in March 2023, his condition is uncertain. His comrades fear he is near death.

In 2012, Cospito and a comrade kneecapped Roberto Adinolfi, the CEO of Italy’s main nuclear power company, shooting him in the leg three times. Cospito was apprehended and sentenced to 10 years in prison. While imprisoned, he was convicted for planting bombs at a school for Carabinieri, the Italian elite police force. Although no one was injured in the explosions, he was given a life sentence without parole. The government decided that Cospito should be permanently removed from society as a dangerous anarchist terrorist.

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Beloved long-time social justice activist, anarchist, and owner of the Oakland, Calif. Angel Cakes bakery, Jen Angel, died on Feb. 9. Jen passed on after three days on life support following critical injuries suffered in a robbery outside of an Oakland bank.

For over 30 years, Jen Angel was a visionary influence and pioneering participant within multiple movements and sub-cultures that significantly informed and shaped our lives.

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