Most Recent Additions
John Zerzan
Industrialism and its discontents
the Luddites and their inheritors
Download PDF [174 KB] fe-389-19-industrialism-and-its-discontents
Nearly two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley gave us a classic warning about the hubris of technology’s combat against nature. Her late Gothic novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), depicts the revenge nature takes upon the presumption of engineering life from the dead. Victor Frankenstein and his creation perish, of course; his “Adam” is as doomed as he is. If this monster cannot be saved by his father/creator, however, today’s cyborg/robot/Artificial Intelligence products do expect to be saved. For those at the forefront of technological innovation today, there will be no return to a previous, monster-free state.
Jun 14, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Schools: Kicking the Animal Out of You
Education Theme Intro
Fifth Estate staffer, playwright, and madcap prankster, the late Pat Halley, once wrote in these pages, “The purpose of education is to kick the animal out of you.” That is, to make individuals conform to a society based on constraint of one’s desires and autonomy. This is true to one degree or another of every culture although within the modern state and capitalist social order, this is carried out to the extreme by the necessities of their definitions.
May 21, 2013 Read the whole text...
John Zerzan
The Sea
Last remaining lair of unparalleled wildness. Too big to fail?
The whole world is being objectified, but Melville reminds us of all that remains. “There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea.” What could be more tangible, more of a contrast with being lost in the digital world, where we feel we can never properly come to grips with anything?
Oceans are about time more than space, “as if there were a correlation between going deep and going back,” he writes. The Deep is solemn; linking, in some way, all that has come before. Last things and first things. “Heaven,” by comparison, is thin and faintly unserious.
May 21, 2013 Read the whole text...
anon.
What do we learn in school that couldn’t be learned elsewhere?
Why do we send our kids to school? We’ve been told that it is in elementary school that the bases of learning to read, write, and do math are acquired, although anyone who spends any time with children can clearly see that children want to learn what we do. They want to learn to read if they see us reading, to write if they see us writing, and to count if they see us counting.
May 21, 2013 Read the whole text...
Miles Pouchez
Drones
Terminators guided by algorithms
A July 13, 2012 New York Times article, “That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker,” by Peter Maass, suggests that we should consider smartphones, computers, and other connected devices as tracking machines rather than appliances of personal convenience.
The manufacturers of these now ubiquitous gadgets claim that aggregating data about individuals favors the consumer, so when you visit a web page, it might display ads relevant to your tastes and needs. But it’s widely speculated that far more sinister use is made of this information--that the government enjoys a cozy relationship with the private data gatherers, that information can and will be used against us, and/ or to the advantage of the military-industrial complex.
Apr 26, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Kelly Pflug-Back Sentenced — Issue 388
The two accounts below of the sentencing of Kelly Pflug-Back, illustrate the gulf between alternative and mainstream journalism. The writing in the latter comes from Canada’s Toronto-based, right-wing, The National Post.
Kelly Pflug-Back sentenced to 15 months for attacks in Toronto
by Fifth Estate
Fifth Estate writer and editor, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, was sentenced by a Canadian court July 19 to 15 months in prison for militant actions carried out by a Black Bloc contingent during protests at the 2010 Toronto G20 meeting.
Apr 22, 2013 Read the whole text...
Kelly Pflug-Back
Life in the Body Dump
How Prisons Warehouse Discarded Women
At 47, Edith Marie Price shows more than a few signs of wear. While her mannerisms generally convey a buoyant and carefree geniality, her face’s gauntness betrays the ravages of decades of intravenous drug use, poverty, and the inevitable progression of HIV. Even when she laughs, her dark eyes seem to sparkle with the disarming intensity of all that they have seen.
Apr 22, 2013 Read the whole text...
Valerie Morse
Operation 8: Terror Down Under
New Zealand government repression against Maori people and their supporters
Ka whawhai tonu matou. Ake! Ake! Ake!--“We will fight forever and ever and ever.”
-- Rewi Maniapoto, leader of the armed resistance against colonial settlement in New Zealand, at the Battle of Orakau, 1864
It is hard to imagine the reach of the United States if you have never lived outside of it. In New Zealand, it is pervasive and simultaneously invisible: ideas, culture, and laws are imported and imposed. Following 9/11, New Zealand (NZ) jumped to ratify its own version of the US Patriot Act.
Apr 22, 2013 Read the whole text...
Jenny from Sacramento Prisoner Support
Three from Cleveland 4 Sentenced — Issue 388
Government provocateur invented crime claims more victims.
Three entrapped anarchists, part of the Cleveland 4, were sentenced November 21 to harsh but lighter prison terms than what the federal prosecutors requested for an alleged conspiracy to blow up a highway bridge near Cleveland on May Day.
Three of the Cleveland 4, Douglas Wright, Connor Stevens, and Brandon Baxter, received 11 years, eight years, and almost ten years respectively on federal terrorism charges, followed by lifetime probation. The fourth, Joshua Stafford, as of this writing, is in a federal facility undergoing competency testing.
Apr 22, 2013 Read the whole text...
Contents of Print Edition

Woodstock Music Festival, 1969. The Fifth Estate was in its fourth year of publication and was part of the counter-culture music scene as much as the anti-war and resistance movements of the times. The festival gave the then-tabloid paper press passes and bought a full-page ad.
On the Cover
Stephen Goodfellow’s art once again graces our front page as it has in numerous previous issues. The Non Serviam ball is also his creation. See goodfelloweb.com
Apr 16, 2013 Read the whole text...
Jonny Ball
A Changing Vietnam
After decades of war and revolution, a communist country looks increasingly like the capitalist countries it fought against.
Having lived and worked in Vietnam for a year now, I have only a slightly better understanding of the country than when I first arrived. This is a country of extremely complex paradoxes and antagonisms. I remain dumbfounded by the disparities, hypocrisies and corruption that are endemic at every level of every institution.
Apr 15, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Art in Support of Political Prisoners
Marie Mason and Kelly Poe Exhibit: “What keeps you sane?”
When you receive a phone call or a letter from Marie Mason, the Green Scare pri

soner serving the longest sentence for eco-sabotage, one is almost startled at how buoyant she is, filled with questions about what you’re doing and wanting to give her opinion on what is happening in the world.
Apr 15, 2013 Read the whole text...
Goldie Silence
Inquisition 2012
Northwest federal grand jury targets anarchists. Activists jailed for their resistance to the attempt to criminalize a philosophy.
As of early November, three people were detained in the SeaTac Federal Detention Facility near Seattle because of their refusal to provide a federal grand jury with information about anarchist beliefs and associations.
Federal government prosecutors claim they are investigating violent actions at demonstrations, but the Portland-based Committee Against Political Repression says the extensive surveillance, SWAT raids, and grand jury subpoenas are not simply a response to a few broken windows, but an effort to criminalize the political philosophy of anarchism.
Apr 15, 2013 Read the whole text...
John Zerzan
London Calling
John Zerzan in London, but not for the Olympics
The first half of August 2012 found my wife Alice and I in London, but not for the Olympic Games. The nonprofit contemporary art gallery Raven Row invited me to participate in a series of talks and displays titled “The Real Truth: A World’s Fair.”
The talks took place on successive weekends at the gallery on Artillery Lane in the East End just north of Whitechapel. We arrived too late to take in the first one on the history of wor
Apr 15, 2013 Read the whole text...
Jeff Shantz
Taking it OFF the streets!
From Ritual to Resistance — A new world can’t be built in the streets. Making resistance real means creating an alternate social structure.
The Occupy mobilizations of the last year have offered to many some hope for a renewal of popular movements and alternatives to state capitalist arrangements Yet, perhaps few recurring events show the great disparity that exists between activist subcultures and broader working class and poor communities in North America than the privileging of street protests and demonstrations within activist practices.
Apr 15, 2013 Read the whole text...
Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Anarchist Violence or State Violence?
Anarchists are portrayed as the boogeyman by the media, but governments are the real source of organized violence.
The question of violence as a revolutionary tactic is neither new nor unfairly associated with anarchists, although debate has recently emerged over its use by Black Blocs during mass demonstrations, including Occupy events. [See FE, Summer 2012; John Zerzan, “The Vagaries of the Left.”]
However, many are quick to insist that breaking bank windows or torching police cars doesn’t constitute violence but rather should more precisely be described as property damage or political vandalism [Hey, the original Vandals carried out a final blow to a pretty nasty empire].
Apr 14, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Introduction
With the defeat of the White Christian Nationalist Party in the U.S. presidential election, liberals and progressives are understandably relieved that the politics of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and the rest of the right-wing panoply were rejected by American voters, even if only by a fairly small percentage. We share that sense, but hold no illusions about the second term of Barack Obama containing any possibility for authentic hope or change, or even mild reform.
Apr 14, 2013 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
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Florida Kollective
I’m writing on behalf of our small and growing kollective in northeast Florida.
Apr 14, 2013 Read the whole text...