Fifth Estate 415, Summer 2024 Add to the Bookbuilder

Fifth Estate

Radical Publishing since 1965

Vol. 59, No. 1, #415 Summer 2024

The Fifth Estate is an anti-profit, anarchist project published by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades.

www.FifthEstate.org

No ads. No copyright.

Kopimi — reprint freely

Sharks dive deeper before hurricanes. Wolves howl when a storm is approaching. Snakes slither away from earthquakes. Something’s happening here, and definitely, what it is ain’t exactly clear. Unfortunately, our intellects don’t provide us the instinctual early warning system our animal cousins possess.

...

a review of

Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia by David Graeber. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023

David Graeber left us one last book before he died, sadly, at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia, originally published in French in 2019, brings together the related projects that bookended his career: the anthropology of Madagascar, including how its highland communities avoid (one of David’s favorite words) the state, and the many ways that humans have organized themselves into complex, nonhierarchical societies throughout history.

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a review of

Human Rewilding in the 21^st Century: Why Anthropologists Fail by James M. Van Lanen. Birch Top Hill Press, 2024

Recently, there has been somewhat surprising interest from mainstream media in topics of domestication and rewilding.

On January 1, National Public Radio devoted an hour to a conversation with Woniya Dawn Thibeault, whose book Never Alone recounts her victory in the televised “Alone” arctic competition, with a very sympathetic moderator.

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Before anything can be said or written about what has happened in Palestine and Israel since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, recognition must be given to the enormity of the crimes Israel’s merciless army has committed against the Palestinian people.

This is being written in late May 2024 and hopefully Israel’s genocidal intentions have been stilled by the time it is read.

...

This cry for justice appeared in the Fall 2011 Fifth Estate. In almost 13 years, little has changed. The article is available in our online archive at fifthestate.org.

Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA!

We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and in difference like the Israeli F16s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in.

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a review of

Reeling by Lola Lafon, translated from French by Hildegarde Serle. Europa Editions 2022

When violent acts seem isolated, rash, inexplicably singular, this gives all those forced to witness or have knowledge of it a way out. To rest somewhat easy in the knowledge that the particular and specific circumstances under which the violent acts took place are unlikely to reoccur.

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a review of

A Cultural History of The Punisher: Marvel Comics and the Politics of Vengeance by Kent Worcester. University of Chicago Press, 2023

Literally hundreds of comic books and graphic novels bear the imprint, directly and indirectly, of one luminous character: the Punisher. Most of us know little about this ultra-violent global icon who has been around since 1974 and continues to draw millions of readers. That the Punisher seems so deeply ambivalent, heroic or anti-heroic by turns, is obviously key to his status.

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There ought to be a test

to see if someone is suited

to be a cop: a simple test

of just one question.

Do you want to be a cop?

If the answer is yes

kick their asses out the door.

“Next!”

Kaz Sussman is a carpenter and disaster response worker who lives in a home he built in Oregon from abandoned poems. He has published in Nimrod, Kingpin Chess, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Prodigal, The Healing Muse and Gastronomica. kazsussman.com

a review of

Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed the Country & Its Sounds by Michael Broyles. Norton 2024

in his 1955 book, America’s Music, Gilbert Chase raised a question that has remained of central concern to academic musicologists in this country ever since: What, exactly, is distinctly American about American music?

...

Not going to do it

Or even pretend.

.

Go to church and swear

Obedience to inscrutable

Deities whose very existence

Strains credulity?

.

Not going to do it

Or even pretend.

.

Made-up stories starring

Anthropomorphic, jealous

Super-creatures with

Terrible tempers

Earn nothing from

Reasonable people but

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a review of

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2023

“Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom, and misery.”

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NIGREDO

Our darkening world has dressed itself up in vestment of blue Void. Has lain on its self-discrowned head the lazy eyelid corpse. Vacuum abhorrent naturam. That’s what they say. What they say. Forests burn in a world that has become an alchemist’s fire. In this stage, our naked feet are frozen, are hard. And we watch with drooping gaze a silent shadow, drifting allway over Deep. Hope? The hidden bedbug, mere bit of lice. And the Spectacle has hired itself a team of talented, well-trained exterminators. We are vampirized by our own atmospheres here, sucked well and through by selfset traps.

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Anarchist theorist and activist Alfredo Bonanno, a proponent of insurrectionary anarchism, died in December at his home in Trieste, Italy at age 86. Together with early 20^th century anarchists, Errico Malatesta and Luigi Galleani, Bonanno was a comrade who greatly influenced Italian and international anarchism.

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a review of

Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century by Raoul Vaneigem, translation by Bill Brown. ERIS, 2023

While evangelical Protestantism has for generations overwhelmingly been a force of deep reaction in this country and is poised, if Donald Trump regains the White House this November, to instate a situation such as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and its screen and TV adaptations).

...

Why did I translate Raoul Vaneigem’s La Résistance au christianisme: Les Héresies des origines au xviiie siècle, originally published in 1993 by Editions Fayard, into English?

This is a fair question because, after all, the book is more than 600 pages long, not counting the bibliography and the index, and it’s about a fairly esoteric subject: the so-called heresies that were identified (sometimes even fabricated), publicly denounced and ruthlessly persecuted by the Christian Church over the course of nearly 2,000 years.

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smachtini

comheiri lag

Sar gceannairi

.

police batons

collective semi-erection

of our rulers

Gabriel Rosenstock is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. He is a poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. He lives in Dublin.

Firestorm Books, a fifteen-year-old collectively-run anarchist bookstore and community event space in Asheville, N.C., is sending back thousands of children’s books banned from the Duval County Public School system in Florida.

The queer- and trans-owned bookstore has given away thousands of copies each of over fifty different titles exploring topics from racism and colonialism to social movement history and visionary organizing.

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a review of

Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

“I began to identify as an anarchist nearly 20 years ago, after a demonstration where I realized that the people cooking the food, doing the dishes, and administering first-aid were mostly anarchists. Rather than a rigid political doctrine, I understand anarchism as an ethical stance focused on making justice and caring for each other without hierarchy, without asking permission from power-brokers, and with whatever tools we have available. I call on these ethics daily.”

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a review of

Manufacturing the Threat, Dir: Amy Miller, 2023

Online archive note: Several paragraphs were inadvertently not included in the printed edition of the magazine, starting with “Still, I do recommend it as a powerful piece of storytelling...”

Below is the complete article.

John “Omar” Nuttall and Amanda “Ana” Korody were arrested July 1, 2013, after planting what they had been led to believe were functional pressure cooker bombs on the grounds of the provincial legislature in Victoria, British Columbia. Their arrests eventually led to the revelation of years of police dirty tricks, manipulation, and abuse in the name of anti-terrorism.

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a review of

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant. Little, Brown & Company, 2023

A February arson attack by a mob of Lunar New Year revelers in San Francisco on a Google driverless taxi, to the cheers of onlookers, brings to mind the early 19^th century assaults on factories and industrial machines by newly-marginalized workers who came to be known as Luddites. The attempt of these workers to hold on to social solidarity and community is the subject of Brian Merchant’s timely offering.

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We are entering another new epoch.

Things will only get far worse/much better from here.

No more trying to find the light or poke holes in the darkness. That time has passed.

Nor do we resolve ourselves to moving slowly through the night.

No, let’s just let our eyes adjust.

Eat carrots.

We’ll move in and out of time and plot quietly under the cover of dusk.

...

a review of

Poetic Reason in the Age of Digital Control by Jesús Sepúlveda. Bad Idea Publishing, 2023

Jesús Sepúlveda’s Poetic Reason in the Age of Digital Control addresses some of today’s most pressing threats and sketches out some promising ideas of a strategy in response, which will hopefully be elaborated in future works.

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a review of

Chevengur by Andrei Platonov. NYRB 2023 (Originally published 1929)

In his 1920 essay, “Anarchists and Communists,” journalist, engineer and author Andrei Platonov wrote “True Anarchy is the understanding that all power and authority on Earth is unnecessary and harmful, that people do not need to be led.”

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Following nearly ten years of incarceration and numerous attempts by the State to frame, break and murder him, anarchist prisoner Eric King was released in late December 2023.

Imprisoned for taking direct action in solidarity with the 2014 Ferguson, Mo. uprising, King survived Covid, attacks by neo-Nazi prisoners, and years of abuse from guards. His ten-year sentence was for an attempt to Molotov the Kansas City office of a Democratic Congress member following the murder of Michael Brown by a Ferguson cop.

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Most anarchists are familiar with Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian science fiction novel, The Dispossessed. But its fame has somewhat served to overshadow other works of science fiction that are also of great interest. Here are a few of those.

* Eric Frank Russell’s 1948 story, “And Then There Were None,” was the nearest sci fi work to an anarchist utopia prior to Le Guin’s 1974 novel, and was praised as such in the pages of Freedom and Anarchy at the time, starting with a full-length review in 1954, under the headline “An Anarchist Utopia,” saying it “makes an anarchist society not only attractive, but also eminently practical.” John Pilgrim, writing in 1963, speculated on “just how much influence this much anthologised tale has had in forming the political opinions of the fallout generation.”

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John Sinclair, poet, author of Guitar Army, manager of the MC5 rock band, anti-racist White Panther Party co-founder, and early Fifth Estate writer, died of heart failure at 82 in Detroit on April 9. Sinclair was remembered in publications across the U.S. and the world far from his Motor City base as a counterculture icon, a marijuana legalization campaigner, and a rock and roll enthusiast who was immortalized in a John Lennon song.

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Imagine if more people believed in the power and the magic of collective creativity, what a crazy wonderful new anarchist world we could build. Under capitalism, any form of creativity is usually seen as an individual pursuit, the domain of the rich, the elite and artistes. It’s something to be commodified, re-packaged, and sold back to others as pop culture to be consumed. People accept that they must subscribe to watch movies or hear music to get their cultural fix. For the average person, the high costs of attending live theatre or dance performances are usually prohibitive.

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a review of

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. Penguin Press, 2023

Historian Arnold J. Toynbee once insisted that history is not “just one damn thing after another.”

Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash, once insisted that, “The future is unwritten.”

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a review of

Notes from a Holocaust: 20 Songs, 2024 David Rovics

Growing up on punk rock music as part of my introduction to anarchism, I always understood punk to be a variant of folk music.

Having missed the most prolific heyday of the people’s folk music of the 1960s, singers like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and their lesser-known contemporaries performed melodic, catchy, and often more accessible versions of what the underground papers (like this one) were doing with their radical articles. Passionate storytelling and principled advocacy are what make music a meaningful force for community and change.

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a review of

It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History, Editors: Moe Bowstern, Mic Crenshaw, Alec Dunn, Celina Flores, Julie Perini, and Erin Yanke. PM Press, 2023

We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action by Shannon Clay, Kristin Schwartz and Michael Staudenmaier. PM Press, 2023

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a review of

Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape by Acid Horizon. Repeater

The New York City-based podcasting collective Acid Horizon’s book features anarchist-leaning text ranging from informative musings on our present cyberpunk era to densely twisted lexical corridors lined with the thoughts of those like Jung, Deleuze, and Agamben.

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a review of

Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, Editors: Eric King and Josh Davidson; forward by Angela Davis. AK Press, 2023

“I was told that I would be dead by the time I finished my sentence.”

—Oscar Lopez Rivera, sentenced to 55 years for 130 FALN bomb attacks in 1974–1983

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