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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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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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

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

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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