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Welcome to the Winter 1999 issue of the Fifth Estate, #352. This edition follows our Summer issue by about six months. Maybe, like Anarchy has in its recently published issue, we should stop any pretense of quarterly publication, and openly state that we are publishing twice yearly for the time being. One problem with that is the Post Office demands a four time yearly schedule for us to remain eligible for our special mailing status. This issue was delayed even longer than normal due to the great Blizzard of ’99 which hit Detroit.

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Clinton’s US/UN imposed sanctions have already killed 10 percent of the Iraq population. 1.5 million people are dead which includes 6000 children who die monthly. The economic sanctions are weapons of mass destruction. They are a crime against humanity that have served to strengthen Hussein, weakened his opposition, and failed to force him to comply with UN resolutions.

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Stuart Christie, Scottish anarchist, who practiced both the propaganda of the deed and the book, died at age 74 on August 15, 2020. Farewell and thank you good comrade.

Stuart came of age and political awareness in Glasgow in the early 1960s. The arc of his early politics went from a prospective Protestant Orange Lodge member to the anti-nuclear war movement of the Committee of 100 to the Glasgow Federation of Anarchists by the time he was 16. He was drawn to anarchism because it “was a way of life rather than an abstract view of a remote future. It was not a theory, a philosophy, a ‘programme for life,’ nor yet a description of how individuals and society should one day be, but a whole new way of looking at the world we were in.... [It was] something I could measure myself in my actions right now.”

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David “Gypsy” Chain, forest defender (June 17, 1974 – September 17, 1998)

On September 17, 24-year-old Earth First! activist David “Gypsy” Chain was pronounced dead in the woods he was working to defend.

Gypsy died from massive head injuries after being struck by a giant redwood purposely felled towards a small group of North Coast EF! activists who had gathered to protest an illegal logging operation on Pacific Lumber/Maxxam company land near Grizzly Creek State Park in Humboldt County, California.

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FIFTH ESTATE #352, Winter, 1999, Vol. 34, No. 1, page 2

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.

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If a death warrant for Mumia is signed, demonstrate the next day, 6 p.m. at local federal buildings & city halls.

Death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new trial was denied by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court October 30 in an order upholding every detail of his racist and unfair frame-up. He is now under immediate threat of being executed.

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Kent State University (KSU) announced that on May 4, 1999, the Ohio college parking lot where Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, and Bill Schroeder were shot to death by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, will be closed to traffic and a full memorial created. The deaths occurred during a campus demonstration when troops fired armor-piercing ammunition at unarmed student anti-war protesters. The 67-shot barrage also wounded nine youths.

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As striking university workers joined forces with Detroit’s labor community at the annual Labor Day Parade, WSU president David Adamany took the Board of Governors by surprise when he called an emergency meeting to give notice of his immediate resignation.

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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;

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Boa No. 2 (June 1988), a publication of the Bevy of Anarchist-Feminists from Vancouver and Montreal, is a wild, provocative, angry, often depressing but also humorous collection of poems, graphics, short essays and stories (some in French) covering a wide range of topics: Voltarine De Cleyre, women’s prison, AIDS, prostitution, poverty, consumerism, institutionalized medicine, work, lesbianism, romantic love, heterosexual love, repression, militarism, the stereotyping of women in literature, women and theory and more. There are personal accounts of rape, child abuse, abortion and a number of bitingly satiric and sardonic graphics.

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A review of

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle: Beyond the Periphery of the Skin by Silvia Federici PM Press 2020

Before history appears on any page, it is written on the bodies of those who live it—as muscle, callous, stretch mark, wound. “The history of the body is the history of human beings,” writes Marxist and feminist scholar Silvia Federici, “for there is no cultural practice that is not first applied to the body.” The history of capitalism, then, is a history of bodies and their subjugation: of bodies exploited, enslaved, colonized and mechanized, bodies made work-machines in service of productive labor—or, for those bodies called “woman,” reproductive labor.

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A review of

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade. Verso 2020

With Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), the trans activist and law professor Dean Spade challenges the reader, and the radical left as a whole, to realize the power of Mutual Aid in collective struggles toward liberation. Spade helps to define the long and often untold history of Mutual Aid as an act of “building subversive networks of care which are of utmost importance to engage, radicalize, and directly provide for our communities.” Citing revolutionary history and contemporary struggle from the Black Panther Party, the efforts of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, to Hong Kong’s anti-government protest movement, Spade has dropped in our collective laps an easy-to-read road map toward seeding, cultivating, and strengthening our movements, exactly when we needed it most.

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Dear Folks,

Re: Toronto Anarchist Gathering coverage (FE #329, Summer 1988): I am trying to scrape together a ‘zine to write about, among other things, The Gathering. Time is running on and it’s almost old news now but I still think it’s important that there be an ongoing discussion about the events surrounding the July 4 Day of Action.

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Friends:

In the FE report of the July ’88 Toronto @ Un-convention [FE #329, Summer, 1988], the description of a workshop that I gave, “Empire and Ecological Destruction,” contained a misleading inaccuracy. Since I was not in town when the FE was produced, I wasn’t able to clear it up then but would like to do so now.

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3-panel cartoon From P.O. Box 11492, Eugene, OR 97440

Panel 1 Text: Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible without its dissolution.

Description: Drawing of a woman in a bed waking up at 6 o’clock. Speech balloon contains the panel text.

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WEST BERLIN—Situated on 3 acres of land in Kreuzberg, West Berlin, between the colorful graffiti art on exhibit at the Berlin Wall and a hundred year old building, there exist some of the last remains of the West Berlin squatter hey-day of the ‘eighties—a small trailer village of squatters and a children’s farm, both founded in the spring of 1981.

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Bob Brubaker’s defense of agriculture [this issue, FE #330, Winter, 1988–89] seems to have two main components, one in which agriculture itself recedes in favor of “symbolic exchange.” Here it is argued that “symbolism, not agriculture, was the sun around which primitive life revolved,” and that “where there is symbolic interaction with nature, ecological destruction doesn’t take place.” But while it is more pleasant to hear the voices of ceremonials and rituals than to contemplate the ravages of agriculture, reality must also be encountered.

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John Zerzan’s essay, “Agriculture: Essence of Civilization,” appeared in FE #329, Summer 1988 and is available for one dollar from 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48201. It is also part of a collection of John’s essays entitled Elements of Refusal and can be obtained through our book service for $9.00.

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Welcome to Fifth Estate’s Anarchist Review of Books, edited by a collective based in Austin, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Oakland and Seattle. ARB brings you intelligent, subversive, non–dogmatic writing with an anti-authoritarian perspective.

We put this issue out at a time of grave concern in American publishing. A deadening combination of corporate consolidation and academic professionalization of writing has produced decades of embarrassing, dull work and uninspired critique that stands as a record of cowardice and complicity in literature; a one-two punch that has brought wily, vibrant work to its knees.

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FE Note: About 100 anarchists joined an Oct. 17^th demonstration at the Pentagon to protest U.S. intervention in El Salvador which has resulted in 65,000 deaths to date. The action entitled “Blockade the Pentagon,” resulted in 200 protesters being arrested in civil disobedience actions and a raging controversy over the more militant activities of the anti-authoritarian contingent.

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by Mick Vranich

America’s totem is the hamburger

don’t look at me look at tv

chains across the trees

generations bread on cheap meat

glass cars with flashy decals

x this z that magnum force

for minute sight

name a town where the demons

don’t lurk lead heads zapped on crack

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The 1988 Presidential electoral farce was all over by midnight on Tuesday, Nov. 8. Vice-President George Bush victoriously declared, “The people have spoken.”

Bush was right in one regard: the people had spoken but in a manner reported virtually nowhere. Those eligible to vote avoided the polls in record numbers to the point where Nobody won an absolute majority among the potential electorate for the first time in 64 years.

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FE NOTE: When we first published a critique of the deep ecology movement last fall (“How Deep Is Deep Ecology? A Challenge to Radical Environmentalism,” [FE #327, Fall, 1987] available through our book service for $.75 plus postage), we did so not simply to criticize, but also to connect with people in that movement (outside the handful of “leaders” and stars) who might share or at least be open to a vision that recognizes the interrelated character of the industrial-capitalist (work-commodity) system, mass technics, statism and empire, and the destruction of nature and human societies. The articles printed here are a result of such connections (which is not to imply that the writers agree entirely with us, either). We hope to continue our dialogue and collaboration with EF! people where possible while furthering our discussion of environmental politics.

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Maurice Spira, “His-story Lesson,” 1983, acrylic on paper

I conceived of “His-story Lesson” as being like a little lecture, demonstrating the development that can be observed as a central tendency, throughout all of human history. Our lecturer is holding his spray can, which is a symbol of hostile technology: it could be destroying the ozone layer or it could be for graffiti, or it could be poison, some toxic substance, it could be mace, whatever comes in a can, it could be hairspray or some hideous perfume out of the drugstore. He’s wrapped in a map of the world to emphasize the essential underpinning of human development and progress on this planet which has always been conquest and domination...in effect colonialism, colonial expansion. Up on the wall to the right you have the factory system, you have the pyramids which represent the ancient bureaucratic state, you have some other little motifs which have to do with the pillars of society—the judiciary, the church and so on. To the left of the lecturer is Roman time, symbolized by a clock with no hands, and below it is our lethal contemporary obsession with cybernetic time and the so-called information revolution which is nothing but an insane and obnoxious plot to fill up all us empty vessels—apparently we’re all empty vessels to be filled up with all this worthless bullshit that technocratic civilization deems purposeful, which I reject out of hand.

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FE Note: The essay below explores and criticizes the theory of the “decadence of capitalism,” a view held by several ultra-left sects here and in Europe. This view contends (a la Marx) that capital once had a dynamic phase in which it created the material base for a transition to socialism, but since the advent of World War I in 1914 has entered a decadent phase marked by cycles of war, reconstruction, depression and war again.

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Outside my window a dusting of snow frosts the ground and an October moon illuminates a wintry night. It is hard to believe that, little more than a month ago, the air was acrid with woodsmoke, hot, dry winds raked the baked earth, and the town hummed with hysteria like an over-stoked furnace. Yellowstone was afire.

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from Le Brise-Glace, No. 1, translated by Lorraine Perlman

However repressive it may have been from its very origins, Zionism represented a movement of emancipation for many oppressed Jews. Once Israel was established, Zionism—whether left or right—has been nothing more than a project to defend a state which, to survive, is condemned to practice a policy of apartheid internally and imperialism externally, where the constant recollection of past adversity serves as a justification for present coercion.

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From photography collection ‘Resistance to the Detroit Incinerator, 1986–1990.’ All black and white images: Millard Berry.

There were a number of inaccurate and misleading statements made in E. B. Maple’s both congratulatory and critical article on the Evergreen Alliance and its May Mobilization to Save the Great Lakes in the last issue [FE #329, Summer, 1988].

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Dedicated to the Clayoquot people of Meares Island

No one in the small rural village knew exactly how old the fir tree was. To one native old-timer, it was a survivor from the days of his ancestors. The tree had been enormous even in his youth.

It stood, tall and majestic, a solitary tree near the edge of a cliff in a small park. From the foot of the tree, its roots went deep into the earth. Surrounding the tree at its trunk was soft, thick grass where many generations of children had played. Below the cliff, on the sea, people in their small boats sought it as an infallible landmark. To the young, it symbolized romance; to the old, it gave peace.

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We can tell when it’s been a long time between issues when we start getting letters from subscribers asking if they’ve missed an issue or it we’ve stopped publishing. This issue is the third we’ve published this year, which doesn’t meet our official status as a quarterly, but this should not be taken as a measure of our enthusiasm for our project. While this past year has seen both personal and other commitments interrupt our plans for publishing more issues, 1989 could be an improvement. We are simultaneously preparing a special issue along with this one which will feature a further investigation by George Bradford into the philosophy of deep ecology, the grounding of environmental ethics and concepts of wilderness. This will come out hopefully early in February.

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A minor victory in the midst of an ongoing major disaster, the “Evergreen 19” have walked free, but only from the stench of a courtroom. After prolonged exposure to exhausting testimony on our disorderly conduct charges and a judge who later admitted he wanted us punished with maximum fines, a sympathetic jury found us not guilty in the May 1988 sit-in demonstration at the construction site of the world’s largest trash incinerator (see FE #328, Summer 1988). But as the defendants cheered and hugged one another, the smoke and ash from test burns floated over our community and the Great Lakes region.

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The cars, cabs, trucks, and buses of Seoul constitute the worst traffic I’ve ever seen. I didn’t dare jay-walk during the entire week I was there. Students know how to stop traffic though: just use, or threaten to use, Molotovs.

In late October, about two dozen delegates arrived from almost as many countries in North America, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere to attend the first International Seminar for World Peace sponsored by the Federation of Anarchists in Korea (FAK). Rather than trying to recover from severe jet-lag on our first full day in Seoul, a handful of us said to ourselves: “Hey let’s go to a university and meet some student radicals!” While some might have argued this to be a needlein-a-haystack situation, given Seoul’s population of around nine million, we figured that at least it was a good opportunity to see more of the city and less of the hotel we were collectively booked into.

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Plans are under way for the 1989 continental anarchist gathering tentatively scheduled for July 30-August 7 in San Francisco. Since the 1986 Haymarket centenary commemoration, there have been yearly anarchist assemblies with a 1987 meeting in Minneapolis and Toronto this year. About 1,000 people attended the 1988 gathering (FE Summer 1988); planners are expecting upwards of 3,000 participants for a variety of political and cultural events. The FE will have a full schedule as soon as it is available.

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The Korean Anarchist Federation hosted an international peace conference October 28–31 in Seoul. Approximately two dozen delegates from 15 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America attended, with all expenses paid for by the Korean comrades.

It was a rather formal academic conference held in a hall that resembled a City Council’s chambers. Each delegate presented a paper related to the general topic of international peace, and most of the papers reflected an anarchist perspective. Papers covered the relationship between military technology and capitalism, the necessity of world revolution to assure international peace, the de-radicalization that occurs when peace groups lobby governmental bodies, the necessity of assuring alternative sources of information regarding radical movements, and a number of other topics. [The published complete text of all the talks is available (in english and korean) from: Professor Ha Ki Rak, 706–022 Suseongku, Manchon 2-Dong 990–44, Taegu, Korea.]

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Although we’ve gotten an excellent response from last issue’s article, “Industrial Domestication” [FE #329, Summer, 1988] which originally appeared in the French magazine Os Cangaceiros, we were informed by the translators that we had inadvertently typeset it from a working, rather than final, version.

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Welcome to our Fall 2020 edition. It immediately follows our Spring number, so you haven’t missed an issue. How glorious yet challenging when reality becomes so radical that it easily outstrips anything the printed word can provide. Still, we think the articles in this issue bring a unique perspective to the crises of race and pandemic the world faces. A great reckoning is at hand around the question of racial justice, while the Covid-19 virus raises the question of whether mass civilization can meet the existential challenge it poses. This is the time to advocate and act for what we need for justice and perhaps existence. The old ways spell only disaster.

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p. 4, 14, 25 Dennis Fox writes and has taught about the intersections of anarchism, law/justice, radical/critical psychology, and interpersonal connection. dennisfox.net He explores abstract, street, ft other forms of photography dennisfoxphoto.com

p. 6 Tylonn J. Sawyer lives and works in Detroit as a multidisciplinary artist educator and curator. His work juxtaposes themes of identity, both individual and collective, with investigations of race and history in popular culture. tylonn-j-sawyer.com

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

Phone (313) 831–6800.

Subscriptions: $5.00 per year; $7.00 per year foreign including Canada.

Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan.

No copyright. No paid ads.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Fifth Estate, P.O. Box 02548, Detroit MI 48202.

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For over five years, villagers in Portugal have been battling the mass planting of eucalyptus trees, a “quick money,” fast-growing, drought resistant tree which, according to its advocates, provides a good light fuel and prevents soil erosion.

In reality, the eucalyptus planting is truly life-threatening for what remains of Portugal’s small farming communities. The tree, which drives its roots deep into the ground, robs the villages of their already meager water supplies, quickly drying up the wells and small streams.

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a review of

Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism, by Richard Drinnon, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987, 340 pp. $24.95.

Although it was his profession, “a keeper of concentration camps” was hardly Dillon S. Myer’s self-image. He considered himself to be an enlightened administrator, a tolerant, generous individual who incorporated what is best in the American tradition. In focusing on Myer’s career as chief of the War Relocation Authority which incarcerated Japanese-Americans during W.W. II and later as commissioner of the Bureau of Indian affairs, Richard Drinnon agrees that Myer is a typical representative of the American tradition but insists on the odious effects of his practice.

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The Alternative Press Center, Box 33109, Baltimore MD 21218, indexes this newspapers and dozens more radical, socialist, feminist and alternative publications as well. They have just released the 1988–89 Directory of Alternative and Radical Publications with over 300 periodicals listed; $3. They also publish quarterly the Alternative Press Index, which lists 200 alternative publications by subject; individuals $30 per year; Libraries $110.

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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;

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I’m reading the latest (FE #328, Spring 1988) and finding it enjoyable as always, I would like to take issue, however, with your slam on the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL). [See “Even More Minneapolis Anarchy,” FE #328, Spring, 1988.]

It appears to me that your anti-organizational ideology is blinding you to the real activity of real people.

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Almost all John Zerzan essays feature accompanying introductions in which the word most frequently used to describe his method and conclusions is “provocative,” (see, for instance, Anarchy, Summer 1987). Some may think this only an ugly little term meant to distance a publication from the wild assertions that John so often makes in his writings (“wild,” by the way, is a word which I know he will not take as a pejorative). Realistically though, provocative accurately describes what is the common reaction to reading a Zerzan article—you are provoked, to anger or to thought.

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In the musical Rent, the archetypal hip, Lower East Side New York Bohemian protagonists call their landlord “the enemy of Avenue A” when he enters their chosen coffee shop, in the song “La Vie Bohême.” The title recalls that of the Puccini opera, La Bohême, on which Rent is based.

This in turn was based on stories published by the French writer Henry Murger in 1851, that established the archetype of the urban, artistic, liberal Bohemian that still prevails in gentrifying areas throughout today’s world.

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a review of

World War 3 Illustrated

Assorted Authors & Artists

AK Press akpress.org ww3.nyc

This graphic zine started by art-activists and squatters on New York’s Lower East Side back in the Reagan 1980s (hence, the apocalyptic name), has just published its 51^st issue.

There’s the sense of an historical cycle completing, as this edition grapples with the actually near-apocalyptic realities of Trump’s America—and windows of possibility they open. “Pandemic as Portal,” announces a full-page image by artist Kill Joy; “The time is now—imagine another world and fight for it.”

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a review of

Deciding For Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy, Cindy Milstein, Editor. AK Press, 2020, akpress.org

“There are always movements, societies and communities in existence that are intimate and locally organized, where no one person owns every damn thing, and people can talk to each other and work things out among themselves; where everybody is relatively equal. Our most immediate work should be to learn how to adjust our vision so we can see these examples for what they are.”

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FE Note: The following letter comes to us from Bob McGlynn of On Gogol Boulevard, a bulletin of Soviet and Eastern Bloc opposition to the official regimes OGB is available from 151 1^st Ave., No. 62, NY NY 10003 and attempts to link individuals and groups in the West with the existing and emerging trends in the East for mutually supportive actions.

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Top: Sunday in the park spontaneous music and dancing were continuous.
Middle: We were treated to a variety of performances, including poetry, improvisational jazz, acoustic and electric music, and theater.
Bottom: It is interesting to note that although the police were not in control of the demonstrators they did have some finely tuned methods of dealing with them. A protestor grabbed by an officer was quickly isolated as mounted police surrounded them pushing the crowd outward while police on foot reinforced the widening circle.
Photos by Rebecca Cook

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Edward Abbey, author of the fictional eco-sabotage novel, The Monkeywrench Gang, and numerous other volumes on the Southwestern deserts and wilderness is both the eminence grise and bête noire of Earth First! Abbey is highly revered by the EF! leadership and many of its supporters for his eloquence in expressing a sense of things wild, but also for his misanthropic irreverence towards “humanistic” values.

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