Fifth Estate 417, Winter 2025 Add to the Bookbuilder

Marius Mason, an anarchist, environmental/animal rights activist, vegan, and trans advocate was denied his scheduled Gender Affirming Surgery by the Trump administration and transferred to a women’s prison. The Republican candidate’s campaign spent $27 million on ads condemning gender surgery for prisoners and the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) quickly remanded those detained back to prisons corresponding to their birth gender.

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Fifth Estate

Radical Publishing since 1965

Vol. 60, No. 2, #417 Winter 2025

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

Prisoners, please note: You are an important part of our subscribers, but our small staff usually cannot answer personal letters asking for resources, legal advice, addresses, or pen pals, and cannot accept emails. We are pleased to be able to provide free subscriptions to the incarcerated through our Prisoner Fund, but this is all we can manage.

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The Fifth Estate is in its 60^th year of continuous publication and for the last 40, our front-page usually bears artist Stephen Goodfellow’s graphic assault on power accompanied by the Latin phrase, Non Serviam. Its translation is “I will not serve.” This statement of rebellion is taken from John Milton’s 1667 poem, Paradise Lost. It is the ultimate statement of the refusal to serve authority as it is Lucifer’s rejection of obedience to the Christian god for which he is expelled from Heaven.

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a review of

Anarchy in the Big Easy: A History of Revolt, Rebellion, & Resurgence by Max Cafard. Illustrated by Vulpes. PM Press 2025

The Big Easy is the Isle of Orleans, an archipelago of a long and narrow, always unsure island in a surregional stream. The Isle is a meandering Möbius half-twist in a topologically peculiar place connecting the inside and outside. If you start on one side and move along the strip, you will eventually reach the other side, which is supposed to be land but may not be, without crossing an edge. It goes by “Big Easy.”

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We mourn the loss of David Chichkan, 39 years old, a renowned Ukrainian anarchist, artist and comrade who died on August 10 from wounds inflicted by fascist Russian forces the day before. He died defending the Zaporizhzhia front in southeast Ukraine on land which Nestor Makhno’s anarchist army once controlled from 1918 to 1921. Always on the side of justice, David fought for solidarity without borders, for a world with no masters, where everyone could live free.

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They are fighting for the sovereignty of capital. Warlike adamance, pressurized plunder. Capitalism has always been war, but this sadism is evangelism in the name of their only belief. Fully activated and pushed to its furthest limits, this version ends in pure nihilism: everything is value, therefore, nothing has value. This time, we are inside the machine. The weapon is technological enclosure. Inside this nightless regime, language is code.

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In an environment like prison, people are strictly regulated both physically and emotionally. We’re confined to our facility and told where and when we can move. Both bureaucratic and social rules also dictate that our range of emotional expressions be limited.

An outburst or meltdown can be misinterpreted as an attack, a risk of self-harm, an embarrassment other prisoners need to “correct,” or another infraction against the social structure of guards or inmates.

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a review of

Ten Little Anarchists by Daniel de Roulet. Autonomedia, 2023

Daniel de Roulet’s novella, Ten Little Anarchists, is a masterful weave of fantasy and fact, history and histrionics, ideology and imagination.

It is a blend of feminist thought, pragmatic practice, and an open dialogue about strategy and priorities for the anarchist movement.

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a review of

Beyond the Final Whistle, Soccer for a Better World by Vasilis Kostakis. Pluto Press, 2025

On a hot night in Houston Texas, two teams played during a social and political moment that carried more meaning than just the end result of the match. The significance was shown by supporters’ shirts depicting half split Mexican and American flags worn by those in attendance.

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Wooden Shoe, as a publicly facing anarchist infoshop, was established in 1976 and, using capitalist projections, shouldn’t exist. Amazingly, it still does. Many visitors share stories about their parents as youthful hippies or punks hanging out on South Street in Philadelphia and coming to the Shoe to learn about the system.

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Justice is vengeance in a world mad for blood.

Justice is debt when the slavers need their quota.

One-million innocents in one-million shackles:

one-million head of oxen

and the cops lick their lips like cannibals

when the masses scream ‘They deserve to suffer!’

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Animal experiments extend to the wretches,

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a review of

Nadja by André Breton, translated from the French and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti. New York Review Books, 2025

“I love the disappeared, the dying, the forgotten... I love those who vanish into dreams.”

—Renée Vivien

Mark Polizzotti’s 2025 translation of André Breton’s 1928 Nadja, the most iconic novel of the Surrealist canon, is a revelation.

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Contemporary society has been engulfed and determined by the immateriality of cyberspace. A new remote-control e-reality lived online. It was preceded by another kind of immateriality, that of the move to the Age of Plastics.

Plastic is that rare substance that is not found in nature. In 1957, post-structuralist Roland Barthes called it “the stuff of alchemy” embodying “the very idea of its infinite transformation.”

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This wild account of a plan to decapitate the Chicago ruling class in 1916 first appeared on the website of the Hoosier State Chronicles: Indiana’s Digital Newspaper Program.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250401081025/https://blog.newspapers.library.in.gov/the-anarchist-soup-plot/

The Fifth Estate rarely publishes reprints, particularly if they have first appeared online. However, this story of extreme class warfare seems unknown to most of those interested in the history of the anarchist movement, so an exception is being made.

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G. Kim Blank is a writer and professor in Victoria, British Columbia

a review of

Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy by Catherine Malabou, trans. Carolyn Shread. Polity Press, 2023

Catherine Malabou’s challenging, provocatively titled book reminds us how philosophically radical anarchism is, beginning with Pierre Proudhon’s deceptively simple decision to call himself an anarchist in the 19^th century. It then investigates a curious fact about post-WWII European philosophy: that so many of its most celebrated figures were drawn to the idea of anarchy, yet dismissed anarchism as a political philosophy: a “thieving disavowal of anarchism,” as Malabou calls it.

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a review of

Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era by Sara Colling. Michigan State University Press, 2021

Animal Revolution by Ron Broglio. University of Minnesota Press, 2022

In the spring of 2020, a pod of orcas began ramming fishing boats in the Strait of Gibraltar, sinking three boats and damaging over 250. Marine biologists speculated that the whales were retaliating for a head injury inflicted by a vessel’s propeller on the pod’s matriarch, White Gladis. She was teaching her mates how to smash into boats and dismantle rudders in attacks lasting up to forty-five minutes. During a cockfight in the village of Lothunur, in the state of Telangana, India, a rooster killed its owner by jumping at him and slashing him with the three-inch blade tied to its leg. In July 2012, shortly after a rope-and-branch trap killed an infant mountain gorilla, two young ones worked together to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan Volcanoes National Park forest.

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a review of

Snow Day by Willow Page Delp. The Amazine, 2023 theamazine.com

You stare at oblivion or maybe just at your social life—a sky darkening from blue to black, a group of college students fighting over foraged meals, a building decaying—and wonder what to believe. This is a snow day, but something more, too, a bonding experience that can only shatter and release you. When you belong somewhere, or maybe more often when you don’t, “things [have] to erupt.”

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When we talk about settler colonialism, we’re not just recounting the past, we’re describing a system that is alive and expanding today. It’s important to break down the terms: colonialism today often means invading a place to extract resources—a mine, a plantation, an oil field—before retreating. Canadian companies, for instance, loot minerals from Latin America and Africa, but when the mine runs dry, no “New Canada” pops up in Ghana or Guatemala. The colonizers take and leave.

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a review of

The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim, T-Bone Slim, Edited by Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre, Foreword by David R. Roediger. University of Minnesota Press, 2025

There’s a new book out which should be of interest to all fans of poignant and witty anecdotes, whether or not they’re interested in history or in union organizing, and whether or not they’ve ever experienced police brutality, prison, or poverty. But for those who appreciate the written word, who have an interest in history or in union organizing, and especially for those among us who have ever gone to bed hungry and broke, this book will provide you with sustenance of all kinds.

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a review of

Down By Law: Criminalization, Solidarity and Survival in Europe Edited by the CrimScapes Research Group. PM Press/Kairos, 2025

Graphic novels (GNs) and anthologies very often effect personal experiences, and for that matter, the non-fiction shelf is comparatively thin. The GN treatment of homeless and semi-homeless people, even amidst the world-wide explosion of that hard-hit slice of humanity, remains almost invisible.

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Does your book club or reading group need challenging titles?

Books with big ideas at 50% off when ordered in bulk.

Black and Red — Detroit has published books and pamphlets with an anti-authoritarian perspective since 1968. Through the Fifth Estate, they are offering discounts on their titles to reduce their stock and get books into the hands of readers.

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if it dies I will not shed a tear.

I don’t really know her or what she

wants from me,

the men who made her, or how I’m

supposed to live here-

sweltering in a chaos

that ain’t for my

sake.

Unwilling as I am to bear the responsibility

of accumulated force.

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Collective destiny can only be spread

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a review of

Shadows in the Struggle for Equality: The History of the Anarchist Red Cross by Boris Yelensky, Edited with a new Foreword and Introduction by Matthew Hart. Illustrated by N.O. Bonzo. PM Press, 2025

From Cop City to the Dakota pipelines and Jane’s Revenge to numerous struggles worldwide, anarchist organizers are relentlessly targeted by the state today as they have been for over a century.

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Even before taking office, the incoming Trump Administration began discussing the possibility of American military intervention in Mexico to suppress that country’s drug cartels.

While shockingly brazen, it is not without precedent. The U.S. has a history of imperial intrusion in Mexico in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. There have also been instances where recent immigrants and U.S. citizens fought alongside Mexicans who opposed not only American intervention, but also sought to bring about a revolution.

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mayflies dead on the streets of Selma

mayflies dead on the Edmund Pettus

Bridge

David and I are there to remember

to pay our respects, to see

but everywhere we look

the streets and sidewalks are covered

with drifts of mayfly carcasses

heaps of translucent white wings

uncountable numbers of corpses

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Forty years after his untimely death in 1985, Fredy Perlman’s last work has been published, a second volume of his novel, The Strait, which he left in handwritten form.

In 1986, the anarchist activist/historian (and FE contributor) David Porter commented in the journal Kairos on Perlman’s contribution to anarchist ideas, identifying a central, unifying concern in the work as “the obstacles, inhibitions, and illusions that prevent genuine social liberation.” Although Fredy had begun with a critique of capital as the “overall framework for domination and self-repression in the modern era,” he continued, “Fredy’s special talent was to demonstrate the variety of its political forms,” a dialectic he described in his essays and books, in which “accumulation of unequal power leads to the privilege of a few and the degradation of the others.” Moreover, resisting tended to produce its own feedback “Every major step toward apparent liberation produces further domination...”

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The Berkeley, Calif. Slingshot collective has published its 31^st annual Organizer, a radical day planner that comes in three formats. The press run has been increased to 24,000 copies and the all-volunteer staff expects it to run out as it did last year. The proceeds go to publish Slingshot newspaper, the following year’s Organizer, and grant generous mutual aid to anarchist projects around the world, including the Fifth Estate.

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a review of

Hurt, Baby, Hurt by William Walter Scott III. University of Michigan Press, 2025

First self-published in 1970, Hurt, Baby, Hurt is a fast-paced and brief yet intimate look into the life of William Walter Scott III, the man credited with inciting the so-called Detroit riots of July 1967. Known to city residents as The Rebellion, the five days of fires and police and National Guard repression resulted in 43 deaths, 1,200 injuries, over 7,000 arrests, and hundreds of buildings and homes destroyed.

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a review of

“All Will Be Equalized”: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands 1526–1890 by Andrew Zonneveld. On Our Own Authority Publishing, 2024

Plans for a major celebration of the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992 led to an upswelling of radical resistance. Indigenous groups, Black radicals, the Chicano movement, anarchists and others fought hard to disrupt the glorification of the five-hundredth anniversary of genocide and settler colonialism.

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Early in the first part of his recent book, The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing to his former students at Howard University, reflects on what made this particular cohort and their relationship with him special, honing in on Howard’s importance as a university “founded to combat the long shadow of slavery—a shadow that we understood had not yet retreated.”

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a review of

Jobs, Jive, & Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit by Bernard Marszalek (Ztangi Press and Charles H. Kerr, 2024)

“Certainly, contending with climate catastrophe and civilization collapse requires a cultural revolution to match the devastation before us.” —Bernard Marszalek

The environmental, health, social, economic and political stresses of the last few decades have spurred the formation of increasing numbers of mutual aid groups for sharing resources and solidarity. Especially since the emergence of the Covid pandemic, people are reflecting on how to move their lives beyond working in the current world’s humiliating, boring, and unhealthy jobs.

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It’s an hour before sunset and I am sitting between two spindly coffee trees with a larger tree stump in front for a blind to partially hide behind. The brim of my grass hat is pulled low to block a pin hole of sunlight that beams through the canopy of a tall mango tree. Leaves rustle in the breeze blowing up the hill from the ocean a thousand feet below.

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