Fifth Estate 415, Summer 2024 Add to the Bookbuilder
Fifth Estate Collective
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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
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Kopimi — reprint freely
Jul 25, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
The Calm before...What?
Issue intro
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.
Jul 25, 2024 Read the whole text...
Eric Laursen
David Graeber’s Pirate Utopias
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.
Jul 25, 2024 Read the whole text...
John Zerzan
Rewilding
As civilization increasingly fails, radical alternatives are before us
a review of
Human Rewilding in the 21st 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.
Jul 26, 2024 Read the whole text...
Peter Werbe
End Game in the Levant
One-State, Two-State, No-State Solution? Maybe No Solution.
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.
Jul 26, 2024 Read the whole text...
Gaza Youth Breaks Out
Gazan Youth Manifesto for Change
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.
Jul 29, 2024 Read the whole text...
Marieke Bivar
The Bad Victim
The psyches of young girls and their resilience
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.
Jul 29, 2024 Read the whole text...
Paul Buhle
Justice in the World of The Punisher
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.
Jul 29, 2024 Read the whole text...
Kaz Sussman
Next!
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
Jul 29, 2024 Read the whole text...
William D. Buckingham
Academic Musicology and Its Revolutions
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?
Aug 30, 2024 Read the whole text...
John G. Rodwan, Jr.
Non Serviam
(to be read horizontally & vertically)
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
Aug 20, 2024 Read the whole text...
David Tighe
Surrealist Manifesto
2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the formal announcement of surrealism in the Surrealist Manifesto written by French poet, André Breton. It gathers strength today as it combines with anarchism to shout: ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION!
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.”
Sep 11, 2024 Read the whole text...
Steven Cline
The Alchemy of Revolt
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.
Aug 20, 2024 Read the whole text...
Andrea Chersi
Alfredo Bonanno
Insurrectionist Anarchist, 1937–2023
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 20th century anarchists, Errico Malatesta and Luigi Galleani, Bonanno was a comrade who greatly influenced Italian and international anarchism.
Sep 11, 2024 Read the whole text...
Bill Brown
A Fair Question
Why translate a 600-page book about ancient Christian rebels?
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.
Sep 17, 2024 Read the whole text...
Barry Stringer
Two New David Rovics Albums
Internet trolls dog his every step, but he keeps on singing for peace and liberation
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.
Jul 29, 2024 Read the whole text...