Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
The Empire Exits Iraq

When President Barack Obama announced on October 21 that the nine year U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was ending, it didn’t even make first spot on many news reports. Another imperial slaughter had ground to an end, with many liberal publications, such as The Nation, declaring it an “ignominious end to a shameful debacle.”

...

Fifth Estate Collective
About this issue Revolution!

Just when the corporate bosses thought their world-racket was secure (give or take a few economic crises), the old mole of revolution has suddenly poked her furry head above ground and has put the question of power and wealth on everyone’s lips. Hence, this issue could not have appeared at a better time.

...

Bernard Marszalek
Happy Birthday, King Ludd! The Luddites’ 200th birthday

In the waning moonlight, three bands of sullen men with ash-blackened faces stealthed through the woods and dales of central Yorkshire, one of the first counties in England to industrialize.

Quietly, the three groups, each traveling from different villages, picked themselves through paths they traversed since childhood and assembled in a clearing near their target. Though they passed outlying cottages, no dogs betrayed them.

...

Various Authors
Letters

Send letters to fe — AT — fifthestate.org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten; letters may be edited for length

Creative Commons glitch

As a fellow traveler/indie film maker, I have had the chance to learn about copyrighting from posting and also utilizing other people’s videos. [ See Fall 2011 FE, “Copyright or Wrong.”]

...

Peter Werbe
Fran Shor
Dave Sands
Julie Herrada
Mike Sabbagh
David Watson

An Anarcho-Crossword Puzzle to test your knowledge of anarchist history and culture

View or download PDF [57 KB] fe-390-48-anarcho-crosswordHints are displayed below the puzzle.

See below for answers and annotationshttp://www.fifthestate.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/fe-390-48-anarcho-crossword.pdf

3-f-fe-390-48-anarcho-crossword.png

ACROSS

3. Brit anarcho-punk band; also rude or distasteful

5. Not charity; the Prince agrees 6,3

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Books and Publications Received

BOOKS

Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, by Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Harvard University Press, 2012, 528 pp., 36 photos, $35.

The story of “the most dangerous woman in America” and her long-time companion, begun by the late historian Paul Avrich and completed by his daughter. Goldman’s words, whose quotes adorn everything from coffee mugs to Occupy placards, still resonate with the passion and vision of anarchy.

...

Howard Besser
Audrey Goodfriend, 1920–2013 An Anarchist Life

3-s-fe-389-46-audrey-goodfriend.jpg
Audrey Goodfriend with Federico Arcos. —photo: J. Herrada

Lifelong anarchist Audrey Goodfriend died on January 19 at 92.

Over her lifetime, Audrey engaged with generations of anarchists, and in many ways served as a bridge between them. The fact that as a teenager in the late 1930s, Audrey hitch-hiked to Toronto to meet Emma Goldman, gave younger anarchists who met her a direct connection with anarchist history.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Five Ways to Help the Fifth Estate

  1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

  2. Donate. Postal and printing costs continue to rise, making financial stability an increasing challenge to publications which refuse commercial advertising. Donations also allow us to continue sending free subscriptions to prisoners and GIs.

  3. Distribute the FE. Sell or give away current or back issues. Get stores in your area to sell the magazine. Use them for tabling. Take them to events and demos. Bulk back issues are available for the cost of postage. Write us at fe@fifthestate.org for info.

  4. Hold a fundraiser for the FE. A house party or an event not only provides revenue for the magazine, but gets people together that share similar ideas.

  5. Become an FE Sustainer. Sustainers pledge a certain amount each issue or yearly above the subscription fee to assure our continuing publishing, and receive each issue by First Class mail.

Fifth Estate Collective
Second Edition of Ron Sakolsky’s Creating Anarchy Published

Ardent Press in Berkeley, California is publishing a second edition of Ron Sakolsky’s Creating Anarchy. Originally issued in 2005 by the Fifth Estate as a one-off publication, the book is a dynamic collage of ideas, images, and action--ranging widely from May Day to utopia, from refusal to autonomy, and from insurrection to imagination.

...

Nick Medvecky
Supporting Political Prisoners

a review of

Government Repression, Prisoner Support. Sacramento Prisoner Support, 2012, 157pp., P & L Printing, Denver CO $10, order through pandlprinting.com

Unknown to many U.S. citizens, federal and state governments currently imprison more people, 2.4 million+, in their gulag than any nation in history.

...

Franklin Lopez
Trafficking Anti-civ Thought Across Borders Film Review

In October 2010, I finally called it quits on my film END:CIV. By calling it quits, I mean that I decided that the film was done, and that I would not add or remove a single frame of video, tweak the audio or add any more titles. Like Coppola once said and I paraphrase, “One does not finish a film, one abandons it.” But far from abandoning it, the following November of that year, I embarked on an eighteen-month grassroots tour, where I would present my work to audiences in seventeen countries in over 150 screenings.

...

Steve Dalachinsky
Another Sexual Revolution, please

a review of

The Unbearables Big Book of Sex. Autonomedia, UnBearable Books, 2011. Editors: Ron Kolm, Carol Wierzbecki, Jim Feast, Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky, Shalom Neuman, 650 pages, $18.95

As a privileged co-editor of this brilliant anthology, I feel a bit abusive of my powers and morally wrong to be, at the same time, reviewing it. But with all due respect to those involved and to you, dear reader, and in the spirit of true anarchism, fuck that.

...

Rod Dubey
How Sex Got Bad Religion Makes It So

a review of

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz. Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, Calif., 2012

Hebrew law changed everything. Prior to this, homosexuality had generally gone without notice, but in Hebrew law it became (along with many other sex acts) punishable by death. Although many of their laws drew from past practices, for the Hebrews, private sex acts, and everything associated with them, became God’s business.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
London’s Freedom Bookshop Torched Neo-Nazis Suspected

The London bookshop Freedom was damaged in an arson attack in the early hours of February 28. Nobody was hurt in the fire which partially gutted the ground floor and damaged the building’s electrics.

However, there was extensive damage to the shop’s archives which contained publications dating back to the 1800s. Freedom Press is Britain’s longest running anarchist publisher and traces its history back to the original Freedom newspaper started by Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin in 1886. It is still printing and is available through freedompress.org.uk.

...

Quincy B. Thorn
Tales from the Cybersphere Fifth Estate on the Web

Since its radical beginnings the Fifth Estate has consistently been more than a magazine, indeed, more than a publication. From the start its staff and contributors--in Detroit and farther afield--have been engaged with anti-authoritarian activities and ideas that are hard to grasp simply by viewing single issues of the FE.

...

Margaret Killjoy
The Anarchist Utopian Imagination Second Reality: What the future could look like.

“There’s a kind of desire that, whenever it arises, is censored scientifically, morally, politically. The ruling reality tries to stamp it out. This desire is the dream of a second reality.”

-- P.M., bolo’bolo

In the introduction to his anarchist utopian book, bolo’bolo, author P.M. describes why we need visions of positive futures. Second realities, as he calls them, are necessary, else we find that “the only choice [is] that between the Machine’s own dream and the refusal of any activity.”

...

Peter Werbe
Anarchy for Kids Breaking Rules

a review of

A Rule is to Break: A Child’s Guide to Anarchy, John Seven and Jana Christy. Manic D Press, 48 pp, $14.95 www.manicdpress.com

Maybe you can’t tell a book by its cover, but a snappy title can gain an author attention where a lesser one might not. In an era where “everyone’s an anarchist,” James C. Scott’s book title, Two Cheers for Anarchism, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, was just the right formulation for even The New York Times to feature it. One suspects if he had given a full three cheers, it may have been ignored.

...

Kelly Pflug-Back
Back on the streets, Fifth Estate writer reflects on prison experience ...starts book tour but doesn’t forget those still incarcerated

I was released from state custody in February after serving seven and a half months in the Vanier Center for Women, a provincial jail in southern Ontario, for charges stemming from the G20 summit protests in Toronto during the summer of 2010. While the judge sentenced me to 15 months, I was given four months credit for the one month of jail time and two years of house arrest I served while awaiting sentencing.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Call for Submissions: Fifth Estate Fall 2013 Issue

Deadline: August 15 Publication date: September 15

Issue Theme: Mad! A word whose meaning ranges from rage to enthusiasm to mental illness and more, even as an acronym for the truly insane Cold War nuclear policy of the U.S. and the Soviet Union [Mutually Assured Destruction].

Your ideas for news articles, essays, and art are welcome. Submit manuscripts for short pieces and proposals for longer essays, along with graphics and photographs to:

...

David Porter
Emma Goldman: A Love for Revolution

a review of

Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets by Kathy E. Ferguson. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland, 2011, 362 pp, $35.

In her fascinating book on Emma Goldman, Kathy Ferguson focuses on Goldman as a dynamic anarchist thinker whose differing social activist contexts and personal challenges produced constantly evolving theoretical perspectives.

...

Kathy E. Ferguson
French Anarchists in the Algerian Revolution

a review of

Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria, by David Porter; foreword by Sylvain Boulouque. AK Press, 2011, 550 pp, $25

David Porter’s hefty new book is a remarkable resource for scholars and activists seeking to understand the relationship among French anarchists, French colonization of Algeria, and Algerian anti-colonial movements.

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
Neanderthal Liberation Front Four Percenters Unite

“...a little Neanderthal DHA, between one to four percent, exists in (some) people today...The Neanderthals are not dead; some of them live on in us.”

-- Svante Paabo, Max Planck Institute, Neanderthal Genome Project

Resistance against alienation begins

w/ Neanderthal Liberation Front circa

40,000 BC. Giants of folklore stand for

...

Goldie Silence
Northwest Anarchist Inquisition Update Anarchist Grand Jury Resisters Freed from Prison

Until late February, three courageous anarchist grand jury resisters, Matt Duran, Katherine “KteeO” Olejnik, and Maddie Pfeiffer, were held in solitary confinement in a federal detention center in Seattle. [See Winter 2013 Fifth Estate.]

The three are refusing to cooperate with a government investigation into the Northwest anarchist movement. It was initially believed the hearings were focused on vandalism that occurred on May Day 2012 in Seattle. However, based on the vast majority of questions asked at the grand jury hearings, it is obvious that federal and local law enforcement agencies are interested in much more.

...

Peter Werbe
Two Cheers For Anarchism?

a review of

James C. Scott: Two cheers for Anarchism; Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, Princeton University Press, 2012, 169 pp., $35 cloth and e-book

If we are expressing rankings by hurrahs, I would give James C. Scott’s book two cheers as he does for anarchism. Still, this middling mark is much higher than his slim volume of anarchist principles has garnered from other reviewers who express this philosophy.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Why is Marie Mason in the Fed’s Harshest Prison? Supporters ask for a transfer

3-s-fe-389-18-marie-mason-supporters-2012.jpg
Crowd at last year’s exhibit of Marie’s art at a Chicago gallery.

Supporters of imprisoned environmental activist Marie Mason, are fearful that the repressive conditions she currently experiences could worsen when a construction project inside of her unit in a Texas high security prison is completed.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
FE sales outlets

Listed below, by area, are all the stores which carry the Fifth Estate. For any further information regarding distribution of the FE, call Big Rapids Distribution at: 842–8888.

Downtown

Smoke Shop

Grand Circus News

Majestic News

Triangle News

World Headquarters Records

Little Professor Books

Wayne State Area

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Free Readers’ Ads THIS PAGE IS YOUR PAGE. All ads are FREE for the asking.

We hope this page becomes a place where we can communicate and take care of our basic needs outside of the capitalist, consumption market.

Categories are:

  • Abodes (available or wanted)

  • Wanted

  • Gigs (jobs offered or wanted)

  • Messages

  • Trade or Sell

  • Free Stuff

  • Prisoners

  • Rides (carpools too!)

All ads are run for one issue unless renewed, except Prisoners Ads which are run for 5 issues. We reserve the right to reject any ad at any time for any reason.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Jail John Now! Fifth Estate Parody of The Sun

2-s-fe-266-16-jail-john-now-229x300.jpg

THE SUN, Volume 3, Issue 18

(3 pages with 33-page ad supplement)

FLASH!

A high-energy, killer rally to “JAIL JOHN NOW!” has been announced by the Rainbow People’s Party (RPP) Minister of Information to be held at Ann Arbor’s Chrysler Arena on the eve of the Zenta New Year, Oct. 31. This monster event will climax several months of dynamite work by people of the Rainbow Nation to get RPP Chairman John Sinclair back into the Michigan prison system where he can best serve the people.

...

anon.
Find Jimmy Hoffa’s Body Contest

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters Presents

Find Jimmy Hoffa’s Body Contest

Dear Contestants,

As most of you know, things were getting pretty hot here at Teamsters Headquarters what with the “little guy” about to run for the presidency of our union and threatening to spill the beans about the Pension Fund and our links with the Mafia. Well me and some of the guys thought it best if Jimmy sort of disappeared; you know, take a sort of ‘extended vacation.’ Since then, everybody from his family to the FBI has been trying to find him.

...

Bill Rehahn
Sestina Produced as a free poem by the Great Mohasky Press, Detroit, November 4, 1974

This here’s Detroit,

home of hungering

dreams, home of my empty pockets

and tired worn fingers.

The shadows cast are Babylon’s,

that made scorpion death of my mother.

So many have sacrificed a mother

to become orphans of Detroit

grown cold in the shades of Babylon

that leave us hungering

with no place for our fingers

...

Guy Debord
Traffic and Human Space

“Traffic,” written by Guy Debord, originally appeared in 1959 in the Situationist International magazine, and is another reprint from Leaving the 20th Century, The Incomplete Work Of the Situationist International, translated and edited by Christopher Grey (which is available from Free Fall Publications, Box 13, 197 Kings Cross Road, London WC1, England, for $3.00).

...

anon.
Who Pays for Religion?

The costs of religion should be born by those who practice it! Whether you go to church or whether you stay away from it, if you believe in god and religion or if you don’t, you are the one who pays for it in the end.

2-s-fe-266-10-who-pays-for-religion.jpg
Section of a cartoon by 19th century artist, Thomas Nast, who saw the organized forces of religion ready to devour a hapless public--little has changed in 100 years.

...

E. Mett
Macintosh

Anti-Fascism Against the Working Class

Faced with economic collapse the bourgeoisie can no longer pretend that there is no crisis. In the face of skyrocketing trade and payments deficits, the bourgeoisie of each country must seek to make its national capital competitive on the world market again.

Everywhere events impose one policy and only one policy on the bourgeoisie: draconian austerity programs. To make the national capital competitive, to take away markets from rivals, and to restore an adequate rate of profit for capital, requires drastic cuts in “social” spending (education, health care, public transportation, housing) and the installation of controls over wages.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Detroit Seen

Sorry to be so late with this issue, but the FE staff had a lot of its time and energy sapped by Michigan Bell’s efforts to prosecute us out of existence. (See story elsewhere in this issue.) We just couldn’t pull the paper together after sitting in Recorder’s Court all day. However, our tardiness fueled more speculation (some of it gleeful) that we had finally gone under, but, after a rocky three months, the project has stabilized itself financially and has a functioning staff which is prepared to go ahead with long-range plans for the FE’s continued existence....We particularly want to extend our thanks to the many people who have shown their appreciation and support of our “new” direction by sending in subscriptions and donations--the money has helped cut into the still-large backlog of debts...Another reason we certainly don’t want to go under is that we want to be here to celebrate with you the 10th anniversary of the Fifth Estate. We are tentatively planning a dinner/music celebration for Halloween evening, October 31st at the Earth Center in Hamtramck. The first FE appeared in October of 1965--whew!

...

A. R.
Labor Trends through 1985 Capital: Stage Two Confronts Workers

Mystique of Capital

Before people began to understand their natural environment, the forces of nature presented real, awesome and bewildering problems in the struggle for survival. Today the problems remain awesome and bewildering, not because of our failure to understand the forces of nature, but because of Our ineptitude to cope with and transcend the perversity of a socioeconomic system which has usurped control over both people and nature.

...

Various Authors
Letters

Dear FE Readers:

Well, here we are with issue no. 2 from the new staff and only two letters--one a form letter that went out to all the left press. We can only conclude one of several things from the lack of reader response: a) all of you agree with everything we say and there is nothing to comment on; b) you don’t agree with anything we say, but are too disgusted to bother with a response; or c) you just don’t give a shit about anything we say and are doing something else. In any event, we would like your comments and criticisms of what is being said in the paper and welcome your letters.

...

anon.
Make Big Bucks Single Men And Women! Vets And Others!

Collect unemployment and earn up to $97 a week for 39 weeks, $67 a week for another 26 weeks!

And pay no taxes! (just like the big corporations!)

Find out how easy it is to get paid for not working!

Tired of getting screwed by your boss and having to break your back at a useless job? All for a couple dollars an hour?

...

anon.
Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Portugal Workers Councils or the Reorganization of Capital?

Trying to make sense of the situation in Portugal with facts gleaned from reading the daily newspapers and watching the nightly news has become an increasingly impossible task.

Both sources of bourgeois mystification report diligently on which general enjoys the support of what faction of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) today and which political party has trumpeted what particular demand.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Alice Allman, Millard Berry, Alan Franklin, Ralph Franklin, Mike Pinchera, Algirdas Ratnikas, Marilyn Werbe, Peter Werbe

THE FIFTH ESTATE Newspaper, a non-profit corporation is published every month at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201, (313) 831–6800. Office hours are 1:00 til 5:00 P.M. Tuesdays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 per year (12 issues). Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. Copyright protection is taken on all Fifth Estate issues for the sole purpose of protecting our labors from misuse by capitalist publishers only and will not be invoked against revolutionary publications. Distribution: call 842–8888 for store locations.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
What is Capital

To avoid any confusion over the usage of terms, let us give a brief definition of the way in which Capital or capitalism is used in articles in the Fifth Estate: Capital is based on wage-labor, the production and exchange of commodities, with an agency above the working class extracting surplus value (profits) from the value of goods and services produced, and then re-investing a portion back into the enterprise.

...

Julie Gagnon
A Mirror in Hand I would like to make one thing clear: this article is dedicated to women as an appeal for the appropriation of our bodies, our fantasies, and our sexuality. It is not meant to be moralizing or therapeutic.

Taboo, smelly, hidden, shameful, unsightly. Women’s sex has been described historically in these terms without explaining precisely why it qualifies as such. At the beginning of the 1960s, mores became less rigid and what was then labeled the Sexual Revolution commenced. But as many women authors have noted, this progress didn’t reduce the gap between the pleasure that men and women experience sexually.

...

Jeff Shantz
An Anarchist View of the Marriage Debate

For anarchists, marriage is defined not by the sexuality or gender of spouses, but by the presence of the Church and State. However, marriage, the legal and religious sanctioning of interpersonal relationships, rarely receives much attention in anarchist feminist circles. Major collections of anarchist writings cover many areas of social life but usually have no essays dealing with marriage. Those chapters in which important institutions and social relations are dealt with do not even include marriage as part of the discussion.

...

Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
A Response on Polyamory “Monogamy doesn’t work; non-monogamy doesn’t either.”

No comment can be made about the writings and ideas of Andy Smith without first recognizing the enormous contributions he made to the Fifth Estate for almost twenty years. During the first years of the century he and his comrades in Tennessee were the mainstay of this publication, and it is easy to say, that without his stewardship during that era, this magazine probably wouldn’t exist today. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was our 40th anniversary edition which at 102 pages, tracing our intense history beginning in 1965, was the largest and most colorful issue we’ve published. Long thought to be out of print, we recently discovered a cache of them and now have it available again.

...

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
Black Culture Behind Bars: An interview with Nikicia G. White supremacy, censorship, and resistance in an Ontario women’s jail.

Jail is an environment that has been engineered to starve the senses. While creativity and culture at times seem to flourish among prisoners, these manifestations of the human drive for self-expression truly exist against all odds, and are often short lived due to institutional suppression.

For racialized communities in particular, this suppression of culture is a heavy reminder of the white supremacist nature of colonial state power. However, while the punitive measures of the prison system aim to demoralize and break the spirit, they can also have the contradictory effect of galvanizing prisoners by giving us no choice but resistance or spiritual death.

...

Andrew William Smith
Polyamory and Power A Confession and Critique

It’s not news that much of modernity is all messed up about sex. Contemporary culture fluctuates between moralistic repression and hypersexual expression. Prudes use religion to promote abstinence for unmarried heterosexuals and celibacy for LGBT folks, and the more extreme libertines turn everything erotic and beautiful into a casual commodity.

...

Marie Mason
Sex & Revolution

my flesh is rippling music dancing

as I move my hands my lips across your supple

body blending everything becomes bewildered unpretended

in these moments of ecstatic rhythm

reggae sweat your breath so still

lingering upon my lips

your body mine the last of the wine

spilled between us in a kiss

...

Patrick Dunn
To Abolish Rape, Overthrow Male Desire Patriarchal sexuality as the cornerstone of authoritarian society

In at least some of its aspects, human culture functions as an elaborate system of sexual rituals--not substitutive satisfactions, in the Freudian sense, but social performances that organize sexual energies, and that bring sexual forces into a living, symbolic order of seduction, pleasure, power, and reproduction.

...

Richard Coreno
What is it?

Sex is Sweet

Sex is Defeat

Sex is Stars

Sex is Bars

Sex is Money

Sex is Honey

Sex is Euphoric

Sex is Demonic

Sex is Safe

Sex is Pace

Sex is Scintillating

Sex is Liberating

Sex is Singular

Sex is Plural

Sex is Derision

Sex is Religion

Sex is Heaven

Sex is Hell

Sex is War

Sex is Peace

...

A. Shady Character
FE Beats Bell Jury Deadlocks in Criminal Rap

Almost a year to the day after Bell Telephone first instigated charges against the Fifth Estate for publication of plans for an illegal “mute” box (a device for receiving free long-distance telephone calls), the Wayne County prosecutor’s office decided on August 20, that their case was still worth pursuing and hauled the current staff into court.

...

anon.
How to Cheat Ma Bell

Reprinted here are the instructions as they originally appeared in the FE for both the use of bogus credit card numbers (for free long-distance calls) and the subversion of computer-card billing (for reduced telephone bills). Also included is a description of the method whereby long-distance phone calls can be made by tapping into Bell’s own nation-wide test loop circuits, the bill for which goes directly to old Ma herself.

...