Most Recent Additions

The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (313) 831–6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

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

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Since its origin 55 years ago, the Fifth Estate has always supported draft refusal and mutinies among the troops as the best tactics along with anti-war mass demonstrations for stopping the empire’s endless wars.

However, a bipartisan bill is currently before the U.S. Congress that would abolish the requirement for draft registration and related penalties. This is welcome, but the impetus for it isn’t a sudden commitment to peace or a realization that conscription is slavery.

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We could spend all day reading here in the basement apartment which serves as the office for the Fifth Estate. Our mailbox gets stuffed with several ‘zines and newspapers a week, and a few hundred each year. The underground press continues to flourish, yet even our favorite ‘zines rarely get mentioned in these pages. We’ve often left such zine-scene surveys to those who do it best: Factsheet Five, Anarchy and Maximum Rock N Roll. For this issue I tried to pick out some of my favorite mags to mention in a completely biased and subjective manner.

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In the Third World, the possibility of economic development can bring a strange form of “modernity.” For example, Madagascar, formerly a jewel in France’s illustrious colonial empire (45,000 deaths resulted from the French quelling of the 1947 uprising), had long been self-sufficient.

By the end of the nineteenth century, a relatively numerous and prosperous bourgeoisie had started to emerge, but it was destroyed by colonialism. The global economic crisis (fall in prices of raw materials, breakdown of local industries) coincided with ruling class mismanagement and led to economic catastrophe and to a suffocating spiral of decline: agricultural collapse, dependence on food provisions, the need for imports without having anything to sell, debts and pressures from the International Monetary Fund, currency devaluation of 700%, poverty, the exodus from the countryside, etc.

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The cornerstone of traditional anarchism has always been a revolutionary critique of the concept of justice in all its variations, particularly as it relates to the state’s repressive apparatus and the oppressive nature of capitalism. Today, that has been extended even further to issues such as restorative and ecological justice. The insights of classical anarchist philosophers remain relevant, particularly when we add to them social-psychological observations of human behavior.

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by Lisa Last

My cunt is a battleground

of life and death

pain and pleasure

it opens up to swallow

whole beings

then spits them out on command

My cunt is a battleground

of senators and stockbrokers

of you and me

who gets the last draw

My cunt is angry and mean

it is sad and sorry

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Unlike the Green backsliding politicians denounced by Saral Sarkar in the adjoining article, no party in the U.S. has ever taken a principled stand on ecological issues. Even groups willing to make an effort to reform capital’s and technology’s worst abuses are few and far between. This absence causes a dilemma for radicals.

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a review of

The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of the Cannabis Plant, Marijuana Prohibition, & How Hemp Can Still Save the World, Jack Herer, HEMP/Queen of Clubs Publishing, 200 pp., Van Nuys CA, 1992 edition, $14.95

Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, Chris Conrad, Creative Xpressions Publishing, 312 pp., 1993, price not listed

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The success of the ecological movement in the First World is of vital importance to the movement in the Third. The industrialized societies have always provided the dominant global development model, and unless the paradigm of industrialism is rejected in the First World, there is little chance of the Third World turning back from the ecologically disastrous path of industrial development. If the ecological movement of the North is serious about the “solidarity” it expresses with the South, it is vital that it succeeds, not only in halting the juggernaut of industrial growth, but in actually forcing it back.

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From July 29 to August 1, “The Frenzy” anarchist gathering is scheduled for Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Music, workshops and a good time are planned.

For more information, contact Frenzy / P.O. Box 119 / 1895 Commercial Drive / Vancouver, BC V5N 486 / Canada.

On the same weekend, there are plans for a Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Gathering to be held in Philadelphia, PA. Donations to cover anticipated expenses or inquiries for more information can be sent to 1993 Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Gathering / P.O. Box 31889 / Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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Why isn’t anyone doing anything to protest Clinton’s bombing of Iraq? There seems to be a growing resignation about the U.S. bashing Saddam Hussein to boost the approval ratings of American politicians.

The reaction in Iraq, where 16 American Tomahawk cruise missiles slammed into the capital city of Baghdad June 26, was much different as 100,000 people took to the streets to protest the latest attack from the U.S. As usual, it was the civilian population who paid the cost in lives and destruction, not Saddam their belligerent ruler.

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Welcome to the Spring 1993 edition of the Fifth Estate. You probably noticed, it is different in two striking respects. First, the elaborate use of color by two of our favorite illustrators, Tony Doyle, on the cover, and Sean Bieri in the centerfold.

Color is normally an expense we think inappropriate to incur (particularly full-color), but the cost for this issue was picked up generously by the people responsible for the back-page Mao poster, which meant it could be used in the other sections as well. Contributions to further printing of the poster and to offset the cost of the color work in the FE, can be sent to their address listed elsewhere in the issue.

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One of the major topics debated in this newspaper and others like it is the reason(s) for the dramatic change in social organization during the transition from “primitive” societies to the “modern” one. Most contemporary anthropological accounts agree that the vast majority of human life has been lived in non-hierarchical, cooperative communities. Then why did the last ten thousand years or so result in a hierarchical, competitive society which has expanded its bounds to encompass virtually the entire globe?

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The Fifth Estate is a co-operative project, published by a group of friends who are in general, but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 00150800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $6.00 a year; $8.00 foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit MI. No copyright. No paid advertisements.

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Once upon a time in the future, perhaps closer than we dare dream, parents do not own children. Children are exposed to a kaleidoscope of possible relationships, and grow up in a world where they witness and freely experiment in consensual, sensual acts of their choosing. Wimmin safely and comfortably fondle and lick each others’ breasts in public, and in full view of passing “families,” men suck each other’s erect fingers.

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As we were going to press, Albert Meltzer, active in British anarchism for five decades, visited Detroit and told us of a devastating arson attack on Freedom Press in addition to the ones reported below.

We called England and learned that on June 4^th, Aldgate Press, which shares space with Freedom in Angel Alley on the first floor below the bookshop, was gutted by flames and its printing press destroyed. Damage was estimated to be $100,000. Although the first floor is a “burnt shell,” the Freedom book shop received only minor smoke damage.

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“Things are in the saddle and ride Man.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

One blind man

leads many blind men

Into the fire hole

hand in hand.

—Zen saying

After several years of discussing and debating the implications of a newspaper which criticizes technology obtaining computer equipment, we were finally forced into making the big leap, and now possess one. It may seem hypocritical to denounce computers while typesetting on one, but no less so than if I had arrived at our office by car with money in my pocket and began writing about the harm the automobile does and the need to abolish capitalism.

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WHO ARE THEY: Yu Zhijian, age 27, formerly a teacher at the Tantou Wan Primary School in Dahu Township, Liuyang County, Hunan Province. Yu Dongyue, former fine-arts director of the Liuyang News. Lu Decheng, 28, previously an employee of the Liuyang branch of the Hunan Provincial Bus Company.

WHY ARE THEY IN PRISON: On May 23, 1989, they attacked the giant picture of Mao Zedong in Tienanmen Square, Beijing, with ink and paint-filled eggshells, summing-up in a single bold stroke China’s experience with Marxism-Leninism. The three were immediately seized and were tried by the Beijing Intermediate Court in September 1989 on charges of “counterrevolutionary sabotage” and “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement”. They were sentenced to life, twenty and sixteen years imprisonment respectively.

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“Police shot at an angry crowd Saturday, killing three people just after the mob forced President Frederik W. de Klerk out of a black township where 39 died in a massacre last week...

“As soon as his motorcade arrived the crowd accused de Kirk of complicity in last Wednesday’s massacre of women and children by about 200 men. Some youths pounded on his car, shouting ‘Go away murderer’ and ‘Get the hell out of here.’

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FE Letters Policy

The Fifth Estate always welcomes letters commenting on our articles, giving reports of events in your area, or stating your opinion. We don’t guarantee we will print everything we receive, but all letters are read by our staff and considered.

Typed letters are appreciated, but not required. Length should not exceed two double-spaced pages. If you are interested in writing a longer response, please contact us in advance.

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a review of

Food Not Bombs: How to Feed the Hungry and Build Community, C.T. Lawrence Butler and Keith McHenry, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1992, 120 pp., $8.95.

Street Lives: An Oral History of Homeless Americans, Steven Vanderstaay, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1992, 244 pp., $14.95.

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The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (313) 831–6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

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

...

Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkey-wrenching, written by Earth First! founder, Dave Foreman and the probably pseudononymous, Bill Haywood, has sold out of five printings since 1985 and is now unavailable. The book figured heavily in the government’s case against Foreman and other EF!ers in 1991 and was seen by friend and foe alike as a manual of sabotage and destruction to be used against polluters, developers and loggers.

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a review of

The Coors Connection, Russ Ballant, South End Press, Boston, 1992, 149 pp., $9.00

Not only does Coors make lousy beer, but it’s bankrolling just about every right-wing extremist group it can find.

However, Detroiter Russ Ballant doesn’t critique Coors products in his book. He goes straight to the Coors family’s sponsorship of far-right groups ranging from the Heritage Foundation to Pat Robertson’s snake-oil-and-politics caravan.

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Media hoopla commemorating the Quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, however sanitized, should have convinced anyone paying attention that the Spanish conquest was a disaster for both Native Americans and Africans.

Newspaper, magazine, and television celebrations of the 1492 “discovery” have paid scant attention, however, to its effects on Europeans themselves. The unspoken assumption is that the Americans’ and Africans’ loss must have been Europeans’ gain, that all that misery, destruction, and death in the New World must have benefited people in the Old.

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a review of

The World of Zines: A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution, Mike Gunderloy and Carl Goldberg Janice, Penguin Books, New York, 1992, $14.

I wish I liked this book better since its authors, particularly Mike Gunderloy, have worked tirelessly through their magazine, Fact Sheet Five, to promote ‘zines as the independent publications of this generation. One problem is its cost which seems fairly high for those of us used to seeing the same information in publications such as Fact Sheet Five or Anarchy for a quarter of the price.

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a review of

Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader, by Gene Fellner, Four Walls Eight Windows, P.O. Box 548, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, 354 pp.

Historians don’t often agree on much, but for as long as I’ve been reading and learning about the life of Alexander Berkman, authors of books on anarchism and related subjects who make some mention of Berkman have decried in the same breath the lack of scholarship devoted to him.

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There are at least three reasons to suggest why Gulf War 1-1/2 came at the transition point between the end of the Reagan/Bush regime and the Clinton imperial inauguration.

One: The Last Desperate Act Theory. The bombing of Iraq by the murderous Bush in the last hours of his presidency was primarily a final act of vanity by the out-going President who realized he was going to be remembered by history solely for his failures and corruption—a crumbling economy, Iraqgate, the last minute pardons to stop the exposure of his role in Iran/Contra, etc. So, he played his one successful trump—the Sadaam card. Hopefully, thought the craven Bush, this would leave indelibly his only triumph. Gulf War 1. Problem: TV reruns never play as well as the original hit series.

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“Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the great educator.”

—Sigmund Freud

“Some day, men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, ready to receive, to partake and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the lives of men and women.”

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Women In Unity Against War blockaded the entrance to the Royal Oak, MI Armed Forces recruiting station for several hours, Jan. 29. Their flyer asked people to “disregard divisive boundaries imposed by empires that wage war.” The demo came in response to the Iraq bombing. Photo/Amy Morgan

War is inevitable. Since April, 1991 and the end of the Gulf War, we’ve witnessed George Bush and Saddam Hussein engaged in a quite deadly game of chicken, with Hussein often blinking but sometimes not fast enough. In addition, US Marines now occupy the strategic Horn of Africa, giving the Somalian’s bullets as well as bread as they try and “keep the peace” (a Pax Americana); yet another Bush “New World Order” legacy.

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“Here we cast anchor in rich earth.”

—Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918)

For our Mother the Earth, we set sail on Celestial Ships. Anchored in Erda, we ride the wind. For Gaia, we take flight, spreading terrifying Cafardic wings. No longer trembling at the emasculating, defeminizing sound: the Name of the Father. We re-member Mama. Papa dis-membered Mama. We now re-call the suppressed Names of the Mother. Anamnesis for anonymous Manna. A surre(gion)al celebration, a Mani festival for Mama Earth. This is dedicated to the One we love. For the One Big Mother, in her thousand forms, here it is: the Mama Manifesto (1989)

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October 21, 1992 marked 25 years ago that a huge anti-war demonstration swept past the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and over the bridges into Virginia, wave after wave of young anti-warriors crashing against the walls of the Pentagon.

GIs blocking entrance to the Pentagon, Oct. 21, 1967. Some demonstrators tried to levitate the structure while others put flowers in the soldier’s gun barrels. FE photo/Frank H. Joyce

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A review of

The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance (Ed., M. Annette Jaimes, South End Press, 1992)

“Native Americans as a group experience the most extreme poverty...far and away the greatest rates of malnutrition, plague disease, death by exposure, infant mortality, and teen suicide of any group on the continent.”

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“I know one or 2 who have this year, for the first time, read a president’s message, but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves rather than a rise in the president. Blessed are the young for they do not read the president’s message.”

—Thoreau to Parker Pillsbury, April 1861

The Empire now has New Clothiers, and opportunely for the rulers. As the political management languished and the economy buckled, change became the only way to keep the Empire on its track. The apparatus of organized illusion called the slaves to the Lever: which figurehead could best keep the Empire slouching along? Which party would put them back to work mining the Mystery, with picks and shovels and a small particle of eternity for all, while soothing them with homilies of health and happiness and an economy that would grow and grow forever, amen? Who could provide bread and circuses, feed the unruly to the Coliseum, torch the rebel colonies?

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Welcome to the Spring 1993 edition of the Fifth Estate. Our promise of a third issue for 1992 never materialized, so you are reading the edition which follows our Fall 1992 publication. Subscribers receive four issues even if the period extends beyond a calendar year, so fear not if we don’t produce the expected annual number. You can check whether you are receiving sequential issues by looking at the total number of issues printed since our founding in 1965. This issue is #341 and Fall’s was #340.

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Letters, page 2

Issue intro, page 3

The Logic of the Telescope Against the wisdom of Hawaii’s Native People

STEVE KIRK page 4

Seattle Far-Right Shooter’s Trial Ends in Hung Jury: How can we get justice in an unjust system?

RUI PRETI page 6

Museum Chronicles Fightback & Victories Against Gentrification: The storefront housing the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space in NYC.

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Welcome to our Winter 2020 edition. Although there is no specific theme this issue, the totality of our articles affirms a longstanding commitment to the philosophy of anarchism that is now an existential necessity given the political and environmental crises the world faces.

Can a body of ideas, considered impractical by many, and ignored by most, rise to the point where it is powerful enough to challenge centuries old modes of hierarchal rule and ecological destruction?

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Fifth Estate

Radical Publishing since 1965

Vol. 55, No. 1, #405, Winter 2020 — Follows our Summer 2019 issue.

The Fifth Estate is an anti-profit, anarchist project published by a

volunteer collective of friends and comrades.

No ads. No copyright.

Kopimi — reprint freely

www.fifthestate.org

Backwoods, Spring 2019, offers readers a discourse on anti-civilization thought and “autochthonous anarchy.”

Comprised of several central essays, including an impassioned and scathing examination of the atheist-materialist worldview by Backwoods editor Bellamy Fitzpatrick in “What Does the World Desire?,” the 72-page journal presents both practical and theoretical considerations in a well designed format.

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On a chilly Friday morning, November 6, 1992, a slight drizzle dabbed the sidewalk where the night before a man had been bludgeoned to death by a gang of Detroit policemen.

The story on the street was spreading faster than any newswire—how a black motorist was stopped and dragged from his car by two white cops who took turns brutally beating the unarmed man; how five other officers soon arrived to assist in the merciless discipline of a dying “suspect.”

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

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten. Letters may be edited for length.

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The Fifth Estate is a co-operative project, published by a group of friends who are in general, but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 00150800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $6.00 a year; $8.00 foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit MI.

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“On Gogol Boulevard” is the bulletin of the New York City Neither East Nor West Group which gives support and aids in communication between Eastern European anarchists and dissidents and similar movements in the West. It has functioned since the early 1980s and until recently was published as an autonomous section of Love and Rage newspaper. At an L&R conference held in Atlanta during Thanksgiving 1992 a decision was made to drop the OGB section in favor of an expanded “International Section.”

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“One hates to see Los Angeles go up in flames unless one’s got a camera running,” joked the British anarchist comedian Peter Cook after the 1992 LA riots. A variation on this idea applies to Western state-corporate media, which seldom covers the non-Western world unless it is gripped by disaster.

This is true of the Philippines today and its vicious president, Rodrigo Duterte, whose rule is characterized by a frenzied cocktail of leftish-style populism, state authoritarianism, cynical nationalism, toxic masculinity and, most appalling of all, the government-orchestrated mass-murder of drug abusers and traffickers.

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Hong Kong, 2019

In the latter half of 2019, the streets of Hong Kong, Santiago, Barcelona, Baghdad, London, Paris, and Beirut were flooded with huge demonstrations demanding reforms or the removal of politicians.

All displayed the outward exuberance of mass revolutionary upsurges, but generally raised only demands for fair governance rather than revolutionary alterations of the countries in which they are occurring.

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“To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason.”

—Henry Kissinger

Months before the United States sent troops to Somalia to supposedly protect food supply lines from the pilferage of “evil warlords,” Italy was completing arrangements to ship its toxic wastes to Somalia, with nary a protest from the U.S.

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“‘You just have to turn on a television to see that those people need help, and no one else is going to help them but us,’ said Todd Schuppert, a truck driver from Pekin, Ind.”

—New York Times, Dec. 1992

“Who tries to hold what flashes in the worldly storm will drown.”

—Taoist poem

“They want bases and the oil in Somalia,” I told Ed, looking into his intense, sad eyes. I was responding to the same question he posed to me during the Persian Gulf war. A former leftist, Ed wanted to know whether I believed “the U.S. could ever do anything good.”

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“News is the dialogue of fragmented power with itself. Notice how scientists, politicians or businessmen now complain that even they only learn about the events they manage from the news.

—“Some Fragmented Views from a Fragmented World” (Against Sleep and Nightmares)

Information bombardment from multiple media sources makes contemplation difficult. Everything is broken down into fragmented data having no relation to anything else presenting. It is superficially processed constantly. No rest, but neither exertion nor effort. Just continuous banality and superficiality.

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a review of

Glauber Rocha, Ismail Xavier, editor; I.B. Tauris, 2019

The fiftieth anniversary of the global upheavals of 1968 has provoked a spate of books examining political cinema and its relationship to the era.

It’s an almost frenzied demand to re-examine the camera as a weapon of rhetoric, and to grapple with cinema’s apparent decline as a radical medium over the decades.

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a review of

The Politics of the Joy of Printing: The Detroit Printing Co-op by Danielle Aubert. Artbook/D.A.P.

The text of this history of the Detroit Printing Co-op is engaging enough by itself, even without its colorful, graphic-filled pages of the work produced in the decade beginning in 1970 at an all-volunteer project amidst the city’s industrial ruins.

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