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Sometimes it seems that history does, indeed, repeal itself. The mistakes of a radical movement are sometimes repeated several generations later by another radical movement. At other limes, a radical movement will repeat its own mistakes within the same generation. Mistakes are, of course, inevitable. They ate not bad in and of themselves if the factors which caused the mistakes are recognized and corrected. Ignorance is our greatest enemy. To know what to do, when to do it and why it is being done is the preeminent task at all times. When mistakes are repeated, it 1 an indication that there is a serious, perhaps fatal, hick of revolutionary consciousness.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

One in every 40 deaths in the United States is caused by lung cancer, and this ratio is expected to increase in the next ten years. according to the October 7^th issue of the Journal of the A.M.A. But this year sales of cigarettes declined for the first time: hopefully a snowballing trend. What has been the response of cigarette manufacturers?

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(by the Fifth Estate Creep Scene Editor)

Creep scenes abound from the Detroit area to Florida as power-authority heads try to suppress the Fifth Estate.

In Royal Oak, the Gas Company, at 290 W. Ten Mile Road, a head shop run by Andy Gingold, has had its request for an operating permit denied by the Royal Oak city commission solely on the grounds that he is selling “lewd and lascivious literature,” i.e., our paper.

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Just how do you go about opening a good movie in this town without getting jumped on? Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf is the best film to appear in Detroit since his earlier Persona, yet by the time you read this, it will probably have already left the Studio North Theatre.

The mechanics of film distribution is often a complicated and unfair process: The survival of a small specialized film—Alain Resnais’ classic La Guerre Est Finie, for instance—depends entirely on the support of local critics. Hard-core Resnais buffs can fill a small theatre for maybe four nights, but after that, the film is on its own, La Guerre Est Finie opened in Detroit during the newspaper strike and, despite the rigorous attempts of the distributor and exhibitor to save it, it barely stayed above water for two weeks. If a Resnais film results in financial loss, will that same exhibitor be willing to risk playing any future films by Resnais? We can only hope and pray.

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UNCLASSIEIEDS cost 50¢ per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

DISCOUNT RATES Five runs cost 35¢ per line.

I’m sending (blank) lines at 50¢ per line for a one issue run.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Tuesday night, Oct. 22, the inmates of the Lower East Side, inspired by Julian Beck’s Living Theater and led by Up Against the Wail Motherfucker, laid cultural claim to the Fillmore East. They needed the space, a motherfucker leaflet declared, “To survive, grow freaky, breathe, love, struggle and turn on.” Graham said over his dead body, Julian Beck said right on and the rest of the script of that real, living theater can be summed up by this exchange:

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Frank Zappa

Mothers of the American Revolution

Zappa, in England. must wield much power. Granada TV, a semi-national TV station, has asked Frank to produce an hour for their station to show.

Frank, when asked of the proposed idea for the show, said, “Visualize a huge aircraft hanger with at one end a huge form, 15 feet high, completely concealed by canvas and screened off with velvet ropes, with armed sentries pacing up and down in front of it.”

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People need music to live. We know that and act on it, all ways. Only straight people—honkies—think music is superfluous, that it doesn’t make any difference what you listen to, and their lives demonstrate their ignorance. Music shapes us and makes us whole, as we would never be without it. We have to have it. There’s no way you can get around it. For our generation music is the most vital force in most of our lives.

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Talking-pre-holiday-pre-final-two-papers-due-blues. No feel for cooking; no money for eating out and Peter says get your column in.

Heat oil, brown pork on both sides, salt and pepper. Peel 5–6 onions, cut in slices and smother the pork. Pour in a little water, reduce the heat and simmer 20 minutes.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld,

Regarding your column warning about literal blow jobs.

A few years ago, one of the psychiatric journals carried a paper on an unusual accidental death of a woman following coital foreplay.

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On the afternoon of November I, there was a demonstration in front of the 13^th precinct police station on Woodward. The purpose of the demonstration was to protest the brutal treatment which the police inflicted upon a group of anti-Wallace demonstrators at a rally earlier in the week.

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The Living Theatre, triumphantly poised at the controversial edge of the avant-garde theatrical movement, will sweep into Detroit to take the chill off December.

The repertory troupe known as America’s most original and acclaimed by critics as the most artistic, Julian Beck and his energetic band will present three different productions December 12, 13, 14.

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George Wallace stood up and said all the magic words, “Dope Fiend, Outlaw, Pervert, Cuba, Masses, Red, Mao, Free, Fidel, Workers, Black, White!” These are magic words in America. These arc the words that make white America go to its knees in fear George Wallace got 9 million votes, 9 million honkies are behind George.

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by the Roach Editor

The Red Roach coffee house is open!

It’s hard to find, but look around the corner at Plum and Fifth, the barnwood door between two red and purple gaslights, go upstairs, you’re there,

The place is improvisional, a room for artists to meet, play their music, read they poems, just do their thing. There are two stages, one for the performer, one for the audience, a groove stage with bath tub and a large screen for light shows.

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Liberation News Service/The Movement

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—Twenty-seven GIs at San Francisco’s Presidio Army Base stockade face the death penalty for staging a non-violent sit-down to protest the Oct. 11 murder of a fellow prisoner.

The victim, Richard Bunch, 19, was mentally ill. He had gone AWOL, returned to his home in Ohio, and told his mother he had died and been reborn as a warlock, able to kill enemy soldiers at a glance.

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Santiniketan, India

Special to the Fifth Estate

It’s weird.

Future historians, in analyzing the causes of the Laotian War (or World War II as the case may be) will be stumped by a curious footnote which will cause them to take off (or put on) their spectacles, shake their heads slowly, and say, “it’s weird.” They will be amazed, of course, at the presence of “hippies” in Laps and the part they play politically in the games of intrigue that are so characteristic of Laotian government.

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I’ve been in jail for so long now that I’ve lost count of the days, But such is the fate of the man who doesn’t have the money for bail ($10,000 or $1,000 for a bondsman).

I’ve found that there’s two types of justice in our illustrious nation: one for the rich, and one for the poor.

But if life in a “democracy” hands you a lemon, you don’t bitch. You find that there’s only steel bars to listen to you. So you do what any man who wants to make the world a better place to live would do. You squeeze the lemon and start a lemonade stand.

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Editors’ Note: Art Wohl studied exercises in T’ai Chi Ch’uan with various Chinese practitioners in New York. He has taught body sensitivity and coordination to athletes, dancers, actors, singers, and the physically and mentally disabled.

He will lead a workshop in body awareness and control on December 3, from 2 to 4–30 p.m. at St. Joseph’s Church, Woodward at King. The cost will be $2 for the session which will be an intensive series of guided experiences bringing about a progressively deepening state of concentration and awareness of the body’s spontaneous tendencies to release tensions and rigidities, center and realign itself, establish a state of dynamic equilibrium and to enhance its use as a vehicle for self expression.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Mark Rudd has asked his local draft board to give him an occupational deferment on the grounds that he is a “revolutionary” working for SDS and engaged in fighting against “a small number of people who are bleeding and destroying our country.”

Rudd, a former chairman of SDS at Columbia and an active participant in last spring’s rebellion, wrote to his draft board in Irvington, N.J., on Nov, 14: “My occupation, revolutionary, is vital to the national interest of the United States.” Rudd was re-classified 1-A by his draft board in Irvington recently, after the Columbia registrar’s office notified the board that Rudd had been suspended from the college. The chairman of the draft board, Clifford Day, told the Columbia Spectator that the decision was not based on political considerations.

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Movement people should be familiar with the “conspiracy trial,” Its a favorite government tool to stop a radical movement it can no longer absorb or put to good use. It parallels the “Committee Hearing” but doesn’t get the same publicity.

Conspiracy trials are easy for the government to initiate. They usually deal with planning to break a law, a useful device since it is bound to catch the leaders who are the planners. Leaders have to talk to their constituents in court if the plan is to break the law.

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The pretrial examination of 14 street people for dynamite conspiracy has been marked by the incredible legal buffoonery of Judge Thomas Poindexter. the assault of a defendant by a bailiff. and the testimony of a freek turned stool pigeon.

The fourteen are charged with con-spring to dynamite several police stations, a draft board, the CIA office in Ann Arbor and several other sites in the Detroit area.

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Reading the Fifth Estate last issue was sort of a magical mystery tour with none of the teasers on the front page corresponding to the proper pages and a number of other horrors.

This was caused by last minute surgery when our printer decided he would be unable to print a two-page spread photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono posing nude because he felt it would hurt his other business.

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DETROIT Nov. 14—In a joyous celebration at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, eight men returned their draft cards to the Selective Slavery System, including the pastor of the church.

In breaking their ties with the draft the men stated, “Young men are being forced to choose between being free to celebrate their existence and being forced to engage in acts of destruction. We choose freedom, life, and the joy involved in being true to ourselves.”

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Fifth Estate

A Newspaper of Detroit

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tormnye Wiese

NEWS EDITOR

Alan Gotkin

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

ART DIRECTION

Blalren

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

CALENDAR

Resa Jannett

IDEOLOGUE

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Is Detroit Police Commissioner Johannes Spreen serious about trying to alter the brutal, racist and corrupt nature of the force he commands?

Some think he is.

He ordered the suspension on Nov. 13 of nine policemen in the unprovoked beating of several black teen-agers after a dance given by the Detroit Pig Officers Association (DPOA) at the Veterans Memorial Building. The youth were attending a church dance.

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Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

A Direct Action Anarchist Newspaper

Active Transformation is a direct action anarchist newspaper that has been publishing in whole and in part since 1993. Two separate collectives make up the newspaper collective, one in Detroit and the other in Lansing. We mainly focus on the institutions and social relationships that oppress us in our daily lives. From the prison industrial complex, to homophobia to capitalism — we try and cover it all. Our struggle for freedom is as diverse as our lives!

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The Anarchist Prisoners’ Legal Action Network (APLAN) is a prisoner-guided initiative formed to provide legal aid and outside support for imprisoned anarchists and their allies. Anarchists in prison experience the prison-industrial complex first-hand and are thus subject to a variety of unusual punishments and restrictions.

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Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

I recently traveled to Los Angeles for the North American Anarchist Conference (NAAC) and Democratic National Convention (DNC). The NAAC was held August 11^th through the 13^th, while the DNC was the 14^th through the 17^th. Both events had an extremely strong anarchist presence. In my eyes, the NAAC was a major success. I was one of the first people to arrive, and I was energized by the numbers of people constantly outside the front doors waiting to sign in. All in all, over 500 people attended, but they were not all there at once. Many people were only at the conference for a day or so, or spent a lot of time at the events at the Direct Action Network’s convergence center, so it seemed like it was smaller because there were only 100 to 200 people at the conference at any given time.

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Fifth Estate Letters Policy

We welcome letters commenting on our articles, stating opinions, or giving reports of events in your area. We don’t guarantee to print everything received, but all letters are read by our staff and considered for publication.

Typed letters or ones on disk are appreciated, but not required. Length should not exceed two double-spaced pages. If you are interested in writing longer responses, please contact us.

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Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

“We make war upon the State as the chief invader of person and property, as the cause of substantially all the crime and misery that exist, as itself the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals faster than it punishes them. It exists to create and sustain the privileges which produce economic and social chaos. It is the sole support of the monopolies which concentrate wealth and learning in the hands of a few and disperse poverty and ignorance among the masses to the increase of which inequality the increase of crime is directly proportional. It protects a minority in plundering the majority by methods too subtle to be understood by the victims, and then punishes such unruly members of the majority as an attempt to plunder others by means too simple and straightforward to be recognized by the State as legitimate, crowning its outrages by deluding scholars and philosophers...into pleading, as an excuse for its infamous existence, the necessity of repressing crime which it steadily creates.”—Benjamin R. Tucker, 1882

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Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

What follows is a first hand account of a participant in the actions in Philly against the Republican National Convention....

Monday’s event was a march against financial inequality. Marchers were gathered at the base of the city hall building in the center of downtown. There were several helicopters overhead and it was clear that there were more police around than a typical Monday afternoon, but they were not excessively flaunting their numbers (yet).

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Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Avenue, just south of W. Forest, in Detroit, in the same space as the Fifth Estate newspaper. Hours vary, so please call before visiting.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL

1) List the title of the book, quantity, and the price of each;

2) add 10% for mailing costs—not less than $1.13 U.S. or $2.00 foreign (minimum for 4^th class book rate postage);

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The several thousand unapproved, pirate radio stations operating in the U.S. won a Pyrrhic victory in July when the Federal Communication Commission agreed to license hundreds of the low power broadcasting operations, many which feature anarchist, punk, black, and community programming.

The catch is that the FCC will demand that licensed frequencies broadcast a certain number of hours a week. Also, about half of the applications for licensing have come from right-wing, fundamentalist churches.

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In the garden of 45 Colorado, Highland Park — 1981. Mel Rosas, Stephen Goodfellow, Alan Franklin, Ralph Franklin, Lowell Boileau & Silver

With a name like the Layabouts, it should come as no surprise that Detroit’s Cass Corridor premier anarchist dance band has taken 15 years to produce a follow-up recording to 1985’s blazing combination of infectious beats and insurrectionary lyrics, No Masters.

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a review of

Communities Directory: A Guide to Intentional Communities and Cooperative Living, Third Edition, Jillian Downey and Elph Morgan, eds., 2000, $30 from the Fellowship for Intentional Community, www.ic.org, or RR 1, Box 156-D, Rutledge, MO 63563

“We tried living communally in the Sixties and it didn’t work.” “I didn’t know communes still existed, except in California.” “Do you all sleep in the same room?”

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Fifth Estate Note: Since his 1991 review/essay “Operation Gender Blur” [FE #336, Spring, 1991] Sunfrog has written about radical sexuality for the Fifth Estate. Both 1992’s “Pornography and Pleasure: Beyond Capital, Beyond Patriarchy” [FE #340, Autumn 1992] and 1993’s “Queer Anarchy: Anarcha-Faggots Demand to be De-Manned, a (de)Manifesto” [FE #342, Summer 1993] garnered extensive reactions from our readers, from thankful praise to condemnatory criticism. With “Group Sex,” we welcome the return of Sunfrog’s thoughtful, passionate, and uncompromising erotic politics to our pages.

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Three hundred and fifty supporters of two Earth First! forest defense activists rallied outside the San Francisco FBI field office May 24 on the tenth anniversary of the day when a shrapnel-stuffed pipe bomb exploded in a car driven by Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, crippling her.

(Ieft) Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, victims of an assassin’s bomb, playing earlier at a Redwood Summer benefit. (right) The car they were driving when the bomb exploded.

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Environmental activists, anarchists, and other concerned individuals began organizing against the June 2000 meeting of the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, six months in advance of the event.

The Congress, founded in 1933, is composed of such oil producing nations as the U.S., Canada, Croatia, Indonesia Kuwait Nigeria and Libya. Its focus is industry issues, such as down-playing global warming.

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In the year since the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate demonstrations in Seattle, intense actions have occurred in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London, Prague, and dozens of other cities across this country and the world.

They have functioned as models of resistance to global capitalism’s exploitation of labor, environmental degradation, and state repression Hence, it is disturbing to see some activists now advocating participation in the domesticated arena of electoral politics.

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The Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris contains many tombs honoring artists and rebels, but the most striking of them all is the monument to the gay English playwright and anarchist Oscar Wilde. [1]

Oscar Wilde’s Paris tomb became a battleground for sexual liberation.

The story of Wilde’s trial for homosexuality and subsequent imprisonment in England is well-known. After his release from jail in 1897, he fled to the continent and settled in Paris. He died there in exile in 1900 and was quietly buried in Pere Lachaise.

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a review of

The Golden Book of Springfield, Vachel Lindsay, 1920, Re-Introduction by Ron Sakolsky, 1999, Charles H. Kerr Publishers, Chicago

Nearly three decades after moving to central Illinois to share radical ideas with students at Sangamon State college, activist-writer-anarchist-musicologist-deejay-and-dreamer Ron Sakolsky is planting the seeds of his exodus from the job that brought him there, at the now sanitized, corporatized, and renamed University of Illinois at Springfield.

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a review of

Utopian Prospects, Communal Projects: Visionary Experiments in Literature and Everyday Life, Andy Sunfrog Smith, self-published, 2000, 65 pages, $12. Available from the author, post paid, at 1467 Pumpkin Hollow Rd. Liberty, TN 37095

As the late Middle Western novelist, Meridel Le Sueur, once advised her younger anarchist biographer Neala Schleuning in relation to a question about her philosophy, “That’s the problem with you intellectuals. You constantly want to analyze. Life’s not like that. I’m not like that. Writing isn’t like that. Not real writing. You have to be in a wholly different place. Get rid of those dead, lifeless forms! How do they teach you to write? Beginning, middle, end? That’s not life. And that’s not writing.” As the illusions of objective scholarly research fell away at Merida’s prodding, Schleuning’s approach was liberated from the weight of academic posturing, and the insightful nature of her understanding of the subject of her thesis was heightened accordingly.

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Lao Tzu was the mythic “Old Sage” of ancient China. We’re not sure whether he actually existed, but we do know that he founded Taoist philosophy. His legendary Tao te Ching, the “Classic of the Way and its Power,” is a subtle treatise that radically challenges our views of everything—including ourselves, nature and the world around us. I like to call it “The Anarchist Prince,” for just as Machiavelli’s The Prince is a manual for rulers who wish to learn to rule, Lao Tzu’s classic is written for rulers who want to learn how not to rule.

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This is dedicated to all those who are suffering.

In the Summer of 1998, following a fed-up trip to city life, I resolved to live without electricity or running water in a trailer in Montana in complete social isolation. How long it would last I hadn’t considered. Turns out it was a year before the hermitism (literally not speaking to a soul for six months, broken only by a passerby requesting directions, and thereafter resumed), and tedium took its toll.

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Welcome to the Fall/Winter 2000 Fifth Estate which follows our Spring 2000 edition. This issue marks the 35^th anniversary of this paper, now the longest running English language anarchist publication in U.S. history.

It’s quite a legacy, one we continue to build on, but only with your ongoing support. Thanks to everyone who subscribed, renewed, sent donations (especially our Sustainers), bought books, came by, wrote articles and letters, sent graphics and photos, and a hundred other things that make issues happen.

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Quick! Call the Anarchist Anti-Defamation League (AADL). It’s bad enough when every corporate media outlet uses anarchism as a synonym for chaos, but now an English company has gone even further.

Superdrug PLC is marketing a commercial bath product line using the brand name “Anarchy,” complete with a circle A over the first letter, which includes a body shower gel they call “Havoc.” “Wreak Havoc,” the plastic container urges; “Get Refreshed.”

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Perpignan, 18 September 2020

The untimely death of anthropologist and activist David Graeber has triggered a wave of emotion in social networks and, in the world press, generated headlines recognizing the intellectual worth of his wide-ranging work and militant activism.

Which is why, in the posthumous tributes, there have been frequent references—more or less well-meaning—to his anarchist activism and his conception of anarchism. Although it needs to be highlighted that he did not enjoy being classified as an “anarchist anthropologist” because, in his view, anarchism is a practice rather than an identity: “anarchism is a matter of doing, not of being.”

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Anarchists from all over Europe and the Americas, as well as several from Israel, attended an International Study Conference on Anarchism and Judaism, held in Venice, Italy, May 5–7.

It was organized by Milan’s Centro Studi Libertari Archivio G. Pinelli and the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme in Lausanne, in collaboration with the Venice City Council and held on the University of Venice campus.

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The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, nonprofit project, publishing since 1965. The people who produce it are a group of friends who do so neither to secure wages nor as an investment in the newspaper industry, but to encourage resistance to an unjust and destructive society.

The Fifth Estate (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA;

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There is so much going on in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the death row ex-Black Panther framed by a conspiracy of cops, prosecutors, judges, and politicians, that it would take pages to report it all.

We hope supporters of Mumia will avail themselves of the great amount of information necessary for an understanding of the case and the forces aligned against him who are intent on strapping an innocent man to the execution gurney.

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