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“Someday the power will die

the lights will fade...

the stars will shine...

WE ALREADY LIVE IN RUINS”

I recently sat down to a dinner of roadkill venison. As an ex-vegetarian who occasionally eats fish or poultry, I did not approach this culinary choice lightly. However, I love an adventure, and I savored each succulent morsel as it emanated wood-smoke and blood.

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July 19 marks the 85^th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution.

This seems an opportune time, then, to reflect on multiple aspects of that revolution. It began as a response to an attempted right-wing military coup against the legally-elected left-wing government, unfolded in the midst of a brutal civil war, and came to an end with the victory of fascist armies in the spring of 1939.

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Related: see “Anarchy, food and sustainability” (theme intro) in this issue.

It doesn’t take a health food nut to see that modern society has a dysfunctional relationship with food. As in almost every other arena of life, our priorities are elsewhere--if not in wage slavery and staying out of debt, then in escapist entertainment or self-numbing addictions. Even among radicals and anarchists, healthy and mindful dietary practices are often considered a luxury reserved for that mythical post-revolutionary era that we are supposedly laying the groundwork for, when our children’s children, or their children, can enjoy safe, pure, nutritious food. Sounds like a plan. Except for a few things...

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The deportations, detentions, and disappearances have begun. Matched only by mass denial among Babylon’s denizens, the brave new empire has struck back. The many-headed capitalist dragon is licking its lips for an Easter dinner of Iraqi children. No, it shouldn’t be news that someone’s stolen the century. Clearly, the global Godzilla of geopolitical, techno-industrial trauma has treated us all to a gory preview of hell.

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In this section:

• Anarchy, food and sustainability

• Against agriculture

• The Hungry Sheep Look Up And Are Not Fed

• Feral Forager #1

• Someday the power will die

• Grange Appeal

• Two Ecological Fancies

• Biophilia

• Wasted, Indeed

Grow Food or Die! exclaims the headline from Live Wild or Die! (an eco-anarchist “breakaway” zine circulating in the Earth First! milieu in the ‘90s). The message rings true today. How will food be dealt with before, during, and after a potential catastrophe or our anarchist revolution? With farmers making up less than two percent of the US’s population and farmland giving way to generic subdivisions, we must wonder what and how we are going to eat after a crisis or in our future Utopia.

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Related: see “Anarchy, food and sustainability” (theme intro) in this issue.

“But what can they hope to gain by attacking the only company that devotes itself exclusively to pure foods?

“My guess...Maybe collect data on as many slip-ups as possible—in an operation that size, some stuff must leak through now and then which isn’t as good as the advertising claims—and use these as a pistol to hold to the company’s head.”

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The late David Graeber perhaps said it best. “Bureaucracy has become the water in which we swim.”

For over 20 years, I was embedded within the New York City Board of Education as a licensed agent authorized to deploy weapons of mass instruction. These weapons were placed in our arsenal to control, and perhaps teach, but above all avoid scenes like the following, which happened just days after I started:

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Love dolls. Robo-whores. Slutbots. Synthetic options. Whatever you call the life-sized Barbies made by California-based Abyss Creations and other companies around the world, these 70-lb, orifice-slotted mannequins have one primary purpose: to be the ever-obedient, surrogate sexual partners of their owners, which are almost always men.

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An art historian announced recently that he had uncovered proof that anarchist artists had constructed secret psychological torture chambers in Barcelona for prisoners of war and political enemies during Spain’s civil war.

According to him, a team of anarchists led by Alphonse Laurencic had designed a warren of jail cells that utilized advanced principles of color, abstraction, and perception developed by Bauhaus artists and the surrealists. These rooms were meant to mentally destabilize and emotionally grind down inmates who fought on the side of the clerico-fascists or who were the left-wing rivals of the CNT anarchist labor federation.

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WE HAVE NO WORDS FOR THE HORROR TO COME, for the screams and carnage of the first days of battle, the fear and brutality of the long night of occupation that will follow, the truck bombs and slit throats and unstoppable cycle of revenge, the puppets in the palaces chattering about “democracy,” the exultation of the anti-Crusaders, Baghdad descending into the shambles of a new, more dreadful Beirut, and the inevitable retreat (thousands of bodybags later) from the failed McJerusalem.

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On June 16, 1918, four months before World War One’s end, prominent labor organizer and political activist, Eugene V. Debs, delivered a speech at a Socialist Party convention in Canton, Ohio. The speech led to his prosecution under the Espionage Act for interfering with the draft. He received a 10-year prison sentence and was stripped of his US citizenship. He eventually served two years and eight months behind bars before President Harding commuted his sentence.

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FE Note: As we write, the U.S. is in the final stages of preparation for its imperial invasion and occupation of Iraq, so the question posed in the upper right headline may be in the first stages of being answered.

A look into a past period of powerful resistance and radical agitation against imperialist war is instructive. Already, far-right-wing talk show hosts are advocating that the 1917 Sedition Act be used to silence anti-war demonstrators.

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FE Note: The Fifth Estate has a long history of granting free subscriptions to prisoners of the state—inmates and GIs, but often their masters object to our content. No wonder since our ideas challenge the concept of rulers and ruled that the dominant institutions are built on.

Recently, we have had numerous penitentiaries reject our paper, denying our prison subscribers access to ideas. Typical is the rejection notice we received from several inmates in the Oregon “Corrections” system charging our paper “Contains material that threatens or is detrimental to the security, safety, health, good order, or discipline of the facility.” They specifically point out “Front Cover—Anarchist Symbols” as the offending item. To the morons doing the censoring, this symbol of human freedom is a “gang emblem.”

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New information sheds light on the recent “accidental” disaster that destroyed the space shuttle Columbia. In a secret communiqué from the Intergalactic Liberation Front (ILF), spokesperson Ivan Von Kropotkin from the planet Berkman warned NASA and all the governments of the globe: “Earthlings stay home! Your space program is a massive waste of resources for capitalist profit and military domination. Don’t even think of doing to outer space what you’ve already done to your own planet.”

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Hundreds of well organized campesinos (agricultural workers) stormed and broke into the Mexican Congress on December 10^th, forcing many of the congressmen to run for their lives.

The campesinos are extremely desperate because of the worsening conditions in the agricultural sectors of Mexico and the lack of forthcoming solutions by the legislature. Thousands attended a protest at the Congressional building, parking 6 tractors in the front entrance to the building, spreading manure and throwing rotten vegetables against the walls. The group was accompanied by two pigs, named after President Vincente Fox and of Secretary of Foreign Relations Jorge C. Gutman.

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World wide resistance to Bush II’s war of conquest and empire is growing. On February 15^th, in the largest single day of protest ever, an estimated 10 to 30 million people took to the streets across the world to prevent the slaughter of thousands of Iraqis.

Major demonstrations occurred in almost every city on the planet. There was even an anti-war rally in Antarctica! Police brutality and suppression of dissent were reported in New York City, Colorado and Greece. In San Francisco, a sizable anarchist breakaway contingent targeted capitalists with spray paint and window trashing.

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The prisons? Open. The army? Disbanded. And much more, besides.

Capitalism’s debraining machines have ceased all their debraining. Capitalism’s debraining machines lay rusty kudzu covered dead gone utterly forgotten.

It’s a love sex & shamanism world now, baby, yeah it’s everywhere ya look. Here, now, in this strange and marvelous and most lackadaisical of places—we all wear masks. Cuz we’re tricksters, kiddo, cuz we’re Monkey cuz we’re Crow. The ol’ Br’er Rabbit, reincarnated. But these masks of futurekind, they aren’t like any old mask that you knew from the waybackwhen, no siree.

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The Selective Service Repeal Act of 2021 was introduced in Congress on April 14 with bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. If this becomes law, registering for the hated draft will no longer be required.

The draft laws have always contradicted the 13^th Amendment that forbids involuntary servitude. The draft laws are the worst kind, forcing citizens to do the dirty, and often criminal work of the government in its endless wars, almost all of which are based on lies.

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Welcome to the first FE of 2003!

One year ago, when the Tennessee Collective stepped up to take over primary editorial responsibilities for the Fifth Estate, many of us were discouraged and disillusioned by the dreadful lack of public opposition to empire in the weeks and months following 9/11. One year ago, when we wrote about “the emergence of a mass-based movement...contesting the state and capital,” it was speculation. Today, the mass-based anti-war movement that boldly connects the dots between corporate tyranny and its bloodbaths is here.

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Fifth Estate

North America’s Oldest Anti-Authoritarian Periodical

Promoting rebellion since 1965

FIFTH ESTATE #360, Spring, 2003, Vol. 38, No. 1

The Fifth Estate (ISSN 00-15-0800) is published quarterly.

Subscriptions are $10 for four issues; $20 for international including Canada and Mexico.

No copyright; no paid advertising

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A radical publishing project, “We are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism,” is being put together by a collective of activists, artists and writers. We are looking for more photographs, street art and posters/flyers for the book. The book will celebrate, document, explore and critique the recent rise of the global movement(s) against capitalism and for life, autonomy, land, dignity and justice.

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From the text of the Puppetista Street Theater pageant at the School of the Americas action, November 16–17, 2002.

the people of Argentina

freed their imagination

and made a situation where change is near

their example makes the alternatives clear

neighborhood assemblies

direct democracy and

worker control of factories

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a review of

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Judith Levine. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Before Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002) was even published, many people were out in force condemning the book. Minnesota House Majority Leader and Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Pawlenty called the book “trash.” E-mails and phone calls to the University of Minnesota Press admonished the publishers to “burn in hell.” Neither considerations of free speech nor the fact that Pawlenty and other critics had read only a couple of chapter excerpts restrained them from pressuring U of M Press to stop publication. The Press continued with publication, but the University of Minnesota, which provides less than six percent of the Press’s funding, initiated an external review of the Press to evaluate its publishing criteria.

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Send check, money order, or well-concealed cash to:

Fifth Estate Books

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Please add $2 shipping/handling for first item ($1 for the 2^nd, .50 for the third, & so on).

All book orders include a sampling of free ‘zines & assorted propaganda! We carry current issues of the Earth First! Journal, Slingshot; Clamor, & Crimethinc’s latest Fighting for Our Lives!

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a review of

Let’s Get Free: a zine about Jeff “Free” Luers: Earth Defender, Anarchist, and Political Prisoner 11x17, 28 pages. Order for $5 (postage paid) from Break the Chains (checks made out to “Howl For Freedom”, and well concealed cash only) POB 11331 Eugene, OR 97440

Let’s Get Free is a new zine created by the Defense Network for ELF prisoner Jeff “Free” Luers. Serving a 22 year sentence for burning 2 SUVs in the summer of ’00, Free continues to fight for his freedom through the legal system, and to speak out for the liberation of all life. This zine is a major forum for Free’s writings, and a useful introduction to his case and his motivations for those who are just learning about radical eco-defense. The zine features reprints of mainstream media reports, letters and op-eds (some by Free himself), Free’s poetry, personal letters of support from Lorenzo Ervin and Grand Jury resistor Josh Harper, and an interview between Free and another Oregon anarchist prisoner, Rob “Los Ricos” Thaxton.

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Please send calendar events to the Fifth Estate keeping in mind our quarterly schedule. We are especially interested in events for the Spring and Summer of ’03 to be published in our next edition.

fifthestatenewspaper@yahoo.com

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

December 21—(Winter Solstice) Everywhere. You are invited to join a national mobilization of creative, autonomous local acts of resistance to the war at shopping malls around the country on the last Saturday before Xmas. We encourage invasion of shopping malls across the country to disallow business as usual and tell consumers, “Stop the buying! Stop the dying!” For more info: tcap@mutualaid.org

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We welcome letters commenting on our articles, ones stating opinions, or reports from your area. We can’t print every letter we receive, but each is read by our staff and considered for publication.

Letters via email or on disk are appreciated, but type- or handwritten ones are acceptable. Length should not exceed two double spaced pages. If you are interested in writing a longer response, please contact us.

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“What is inflated too much will burst into fragments.”

—Ethiopian proverb

“Spiritual zombies no longer hear their inner guide.”

—Alice Walker

In 1986, at the Haymarket anniversary anarchist gathering in Chicago, I landed in a “radical ritual.”

We’re told that we would start by calling in the directions. They get to West and call in the spirits of the water. We are just blocks from Lake Michigan. This body of water has nothing to do with the West because it sits to the East! I point this out and am shushed with comments about “tradition” and “how things are done”. That moment helps define me as an anarcho-disillusionist, brought on by the anarcho-superstitionists who wanted me to accept some important tradition.

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a review of

Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration Edited by Chris Carlsson. AK Press, 2002, 256 pp. $18.95

Hop on a bike. Head downtown. Reclaim the streets. It is a critical mass of bicyclists boldly pedaling through public space with a festive challenge to car culture.

Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, is a collection of articles, photos and graphics published on the occasion of the ten year anniversary of Critical Mass. CM started as a monthly group bicycle outing in San Francisco and has spread around the world. The breadth of writings show many reasons people participate in Critical Mass rides: adventure, community, to protest pollution, to challenge authority, and to demonstrate against wars for oil.

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In mid-August, a three year-old lawsuit charging that environmentalist groups were religious extremists comparable to some of the more violent, intolerant ultra-orthodox Islamic sects collapsed when the attorney failed to meet a re-filing deadline with the U.S. Supreme Court.

The suit had been brought against Forest Guardians, the Superior Wilderness Action Network, and the U.S. Forest Service by the 125 companies that make up the Associated Contract Loggers (A.C.L.) of northern Minnesota. The loggers were asking for $600,000 in damages and permission to plunder timber from the Superior National Forest.

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Three Tennessee activists bicycled back roads through Tennessee and Georgia for more than a week to join the annual demonstration to shut the School of the Americas (SOA), held in Columbus, Georgia, each November. The SOA is a U.S. government school dedicated to teaching Latin American military forces combat skills; thousands of its graduates have been implicated in horrific forms of state terrorism throughout Latin America. We biked 360 miles to the SOA from the neighboring queer communities where we live, IDA (MaxZine and TomFoolery) and Short Mountain Sanctuary (Sandorkraut) in middle Tennessee.

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The Autonomadic Bookmobile is an independent press bookstore and Info-Shop on wheels. It has spent a good part of the last year touring the US, visiting over a hundred cities, covering over 50,000 miles. The Bookmobile supports small, independent and radical publishers of books, zines, newspapers and pamphlets, against the corporate hegemony on printed matter and ideas by chain bookstores and distributors.

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In mid October, I met up with radical songwriter David Rovics on the US Out of Colombia roadshow. He and his singing partner Allie Rosenblatt provided a musical backdrop to this powerful traveling presentation, which featured a descriptive slideshow and a talk by Colombian labor organizer William Mendoza.

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Buddhism holds that the universe and all creatures in it are intrinsically in a state of complete wisdom, love and compassion; acting in natural response and mutual interdependence. The personal realization of this from-the-beginning state cannot be had for and by one-“self’ because it is not fully realized unless one has given the self up; and away.

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“Cowper came to me and said: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton and Locke.’”

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a review of

Webs of Power, Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk. New Society Publishers, 2002. 288 pages $17.95 (available from FE Books)

This book is a must read for understanding the revolution of our time. Anarchist, feminist, pagan—Starhawk speaks to everyone who has been on the barricades, actively or supportively, against the multinationals working to maximize their control over our lives. This is the story of the anti-globalization movement since Seattle 1999 when we exposed the WTO and its corporate agenda to the media spotlight.

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The following essay is a slightly abridged version of a longer work that will appear in Max Cafard’s forthcoming book: The Surregionalist Manifesto and Other Essays, to be published by Exquisite Corpse (and available through FE).

“Wander where there is no trail. Hold on to all that you have received from Heaven, but do not think that you have gotten anything. Be empty, that is all.”

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“For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion & abstraction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult & exoteric, no gifted kids a slow achievers. No wild & tame, no bound & free, no natural a artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.”

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The direct action-oriented Earth First! radical environmental movement and its public-facing arm, the Earth First! Journal, turned 40 years old in 2020. And, 2020 almost killed the venerable Journal.

An Earth First! direct action blockade to defend a forest

The scrappy and irreverent publication was plunged into pandemic and quarantine hell, as its volunteers and tiny staff at its office in southern Oregon, used to working collectively in person, passing around articles being edited, was suddenly in chaos, navigating through poor internet in rural Oregon and steering over other considerable bumps in the road.

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In Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, countless examples are provided of cooperation among animals, countering the social Darwinist concept of ruthless competition as the framework for both nature and human society.

Yet a frustrating exception to the seemingly ubiquitous importance of mutual aid was the apparent hyper-individualism of plants. Kropotkin dismissed this as due to their immobility, thus making competition a requirement for their survival. It is true that plants seem quite solitary, each concerned exclusively for its own survival.

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We need to affirm the value of music, especially undomesticated music, particularly during the social deprivations of the current pandemic. The past year has been a blur of social isolation, sheltering-in-place, and lockdowns.

The muted horrors of 2020 and beyond have led to increasingly isolated pleasures, fearful desires, little moments of secret forgetting (or seeking forgetting), private escapes that often only exacerbate the effects of being alone and afraid. In this situation, for many people, the experience of media, watching movies, reading, or listening to music, becomes a coveted refuge, a vain attempt at relaxation and respite from constant, only half-acknowledged anxiety, a survivors’ kit for augmenting the effects of collectively (though unevenly) distributed, and privately suffered, cultural trauma. But the isolation of music, the intertwining of the musical experience with our increasing domestication, means that our attempts to heal may fall short.

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The movement for social change must be comprehensive and multi-dimensional. There is no simple Solution and no single Best Way to get from here to there.

But there has recently been a shift of sentiment regarding where and how our efforts for social change are most likely to be rewarded. Individuals and families, increasingly atomized within mass society, lack the resources and leverage to have that much of an impact. At the other end of the spectrum, the dominate institutions (corporations, government agencies, large universities, non-profits, etc.) possess institutional inertia to a degree that frustratingly impedes change.

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This article’s author, Ron Sakolsky (right) and another radical media activist protest corporate broadcasters, September 2002. Photo by Brad.

From September 10–15, the Cascadia Media Alliance hosted a Reclaim The Media Convergence in Seattle. Held during the week of the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), this occasion was an opportunity to protest the corporate-driven policies of the NAB/FCC/NPR triumvirate, as well as to gather for our own grassroots shadow convention. Community media activists from all over North America descended upon Seattle to hear speakers, do workshops, strategize and bounce off each others’ creative energy. By the end of the convergence 10 free radio stations had been set up just 2 band widths apart on the FM dial in open defiance of the censorious 3 bandwidth low power fm requirement of the FCC. This rule has in effect created a situation in which LPFM stations are not legally feasible in urban areas like Seattle. The eclectic programming mix of these pirate stations featured everything from guerrilla radio broadcasts of the FCC actually battering down the doors of Free Radio Austin, to a satirical piece about Clear Channel by Mark Hosier of Negativland, to a series of 3 minute airplay spots on the subject of “media and democracy.” I was invited to kick off the week’s events with a presentation at the Seattle IMC. Focusing on the affinities between anarchism and surrealism in relation to media activism. My talk, upon which the following article is based, consciously avoided the self-congratulatory approach of keynote speakers David Barsamian and Amy Goodman, and instead sought to raise thorny strategic questions for anarchists involved in the media democracy movement.

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Groups in Argentina and across the globe are calling for global days of Action to demonstrate that those who are building alternatives to the dictatorship of the markets are not alone. On the 20^th of December, a day when tens of thousands will take to the streets of Argentina to celebrate the first anniversary of last years’ uprising, actions and events will take place across the world in solidarity with the people of Argentina.

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Argentina may well prove to be the crisis which irrevocably splits the ever-widening crack in the neoliberal armor, especially if things continue to unravel in other parts of Latin America. Recent events in Venezuela, and the possibility of left wing gains in this year’s Brazilian presidential elections, point to a shift away from the “Washington Consensus” across much of the region.

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December the 19^th was the turning point, the day when the Argentinean people said “enough!” The stage was set the day before, when people began looting shops and supermarkets, so they could feed their families. The president, Fernando De La Rua, panicked. De La Rua declared a state of emergency, suspending all constitutional rights, and banning meetings of more than three people. That was the last straw. Not only did it bring back traumatic memories of the seven year military dictatorship which killed over 30,000 people, but also it meant that the state was taking away the last shred of dignity from a hungry and desperate population — their freedom.

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In the late 1990s in Argentina, a new form of struggle emerged from the unemployed workers (who make up 20% of the people while another 20% are underemployed). This expression of resistance came from the provinces to the capital of the country and consisted of blocking roads to claim a subsidy for unemployment. Blocking roads has its origin with the well-known workers’ tactic called “piquete” (picket). It consisted of people preventing the entrance of scabs who were trying to break the strike. Its goal was to prevent production in support of the workers’ demands. Today, thrown out from production, the unemployed block the transportation of merchandise to support their demands. Not only is this blocking of circulation novel, but so is their organizational practice: direct democracy.

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Anarchist utopias are alive and well, not only in Chiapas or Rojava but also in the heart of capitalist Europe. In Germany, police repression and gentrification have dealt a decisive blow to traditional anarchist strongholds like Berlin, with numerous free spaces closed down since the pandemic started.

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The Fifth Estate

Radical Publishing since 1965

FIFTH ESTATE #409, Summer, 2021, Vol. 56 No. 2, page 3

The Fifth Estate is an anti-profit, anarchist project published by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades. www.FifthEstate.org

No ads. No copyright. Kopimi — reprint freely

Unfuck the World, says the sign on this page and the next. It isn’t just a one-off, rude slogan held by someone justifiably angry at the state of things.

It stems from the 2017 rap/rock song of that name by The Prophets of Rage, a band comprised of members of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill. It’s an anthem for what has become a worldwide movement that will host its 9^th annual UTW Day, September 18.

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