Most Recent Additions

In our last issue George Bradford reported there are some five thousand pieces of junk floating around in space, including several nuclear reactors that will eventually fall back to earth. (See “Biosphere 2: The Future of the Planet?” FE #343, Fall-Winter, 1993.)

Alas, the situation is even worse. The broken solar panel thrown overboard by space shuttle astronoids working on the Hubble telescope last December actually became another of at least 7,300 pieces of junk out there bigger than a softball.

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“The political status quo in Mexico died on January 1. Every Mexican institution is now in a state of crisis.”

—El Financiero (Mexican business newspaper)

“If 53 people died in the riots in the Dominican Republic, 53,000 people could die if the Mexicans remember that they are a people with a history of rebellion. If that happens, capitalism in Latin America will go to the devil!”

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Send letters to fe@fifthestate.org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten.

Letters may be edited for length.

Your Winter 2019 issue [FE #405] is full of fine writing and provocative thinking, particularly so in the review of Godless: 150 Years of Disbelief by Peter Werbe. The final section, beginning with “Let’s devise a spiritual belief system...” is a beautiful manifesto worth sharing. I wish I’d written it!

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Brandon Jones Mooney, Tracy Michelle Hughes and Aishe Keita in “Reparations.”—photo: Aaron Jin

a review of

“Reparations”

Darren Canady, Playwright,

Jay O’Leary, Director

World Premiere, Sound Theatre Company, Seattle, Jan. 10, 2020

Reparations examines inherited historical trauma, whether that trauma can be healed, and, if so, how.

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a review of

Luigi Galleani: the Most Dangerous Anarchist In America by Antonio Senta. AK Press, 2019 akpress.org

Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-American anarchists executed in Massachusetts in 1927 for a robbery and murder they probably had nothing to do with, had a favorite newspaper. They regularly visited its editor and his family on their farm outside of Boston.

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Recently paroled MOVE9 political prisoners Debbie and Michael Africa, and their son Michael Africa Jr., delivering the keynote talk at the 2019 Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) Convergence in Gainesville, Fla, in June.

After surviving a police siege on their Philadelphia home and forty years in prison on frame-up charges, Mike and Debbie were released from prison in 2018. They were imprisoned along with seven other members of MOVE, a revolutionary environmental Black liberation organization, in 1978.

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a review of

The Cull of Personality: Ayahuasca, Colonialism, and the Death of a Healer by Kevin Tucker. Black and Green Press, Blackandgreenpress.org, 2019

For those familiar with Kevin Tucker’s essay writing since the start of Black and Green Review, now Wild Resistance, there is a familiar structure to the book, reading much like an expanded essay that might appear in those journals. Divided into six sections, Cull delivers colonial history through the lens of its contemporary manifestations.

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a review of

Nisi Shawl, Talk like a Man. PM Press/Outspoken Authors series, 2019 pmpress.org

“My hair was not my own. My blood was not my own. My life was not my own. I am not free. I am a political prisoner on a North American game preserve.”

Thus began the 1989 science fiction story, “I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer,” by an unknown author in an anthology by a little known indie publisher. The book was Autonomedia’s Semiotext(e) SF, and the author was Denise Angela Shaw.

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In 1970, Chileans elected a social-democratic government headed by Salvador Allende. On September 11, 1973 it was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored military coup, ushering in the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The new regime instituted draconian free market policies resulting in low salaries and poor pensions, high prices and big debts, deficient public healthcare and education systems, and ecological depletion.

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Catrillanca, Wounded Jewel,

your spirit rides through the ravaged

fields of Temucuicui.

Your head destroyed,

your spirit crushed

by the fickle language

of the powerful.

Tear gas whistles, flying

in your funeral procession.

Children, mothers, old people moan

no longer able to harvest

the Mapuzugun of their dreams.

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“You could say that cyberpunk is intrinsically anarchistic. It’s endlessly anti-authoritarian, and it can be employed like a weapon, like a computer virus, injecting new information by means of the existing mechanisms. The pop image of anarchism has always been a bomb—yeah, well, this is an ideological bomb that has been planted in the culture.”

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The most interesting connection between queerness and anarchy is the breakdown of categories and hierarchies. The whole notion of breaking people into two distinctly defined groups, whether on the basis of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc., seems to lead inexorably to hierarchy and all the problems of authoritarianism that come with it. When I think of queer anarchism, I think of breaking down the strict boundaries constructed between the categories of sexuality. So, I guess I think of bisexuality, omnisexuality, pansexuality as being more “anarchist” than strict homosexuality or heterosexuality.

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Supporting our imprisoned comrades should be a top priority for all anarchists. We need to raise funds for material aid. Prisoners need money for books, stamps, food, phone calls, Internet use, and legal fees. We need to establish steady relationships with our imprisoned comrades. There are too many to list here. For this go around, we focus on the five anarchist prisoners the Bloomington ABC war fund supports. To learn more, visit bloomingtonabc.noblogs.org .

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The nexus linking resistance and protest movements with underground artistic practices is distinct, with significant overlap existing between the participants and qualities of both. It’s no surprise that overt resistance to existing circumstances intersects naturally with activities that are radically discontinuous with production/consumption-based existence.

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The only time it’s legal to mask in town these days is Mardi Gras. In fact, an old law on the books predating this regime says it’s illegal to be in a parade and not mask. Meanwhile, the Icemen arrest anybody on a non-parade day who dares even to wear a head scarf like those Yemeni women I saw in my neighborhood until they fell under the ban and got shipped offshore.

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Fifth Estate

Radical Publishing since 1965

Vol. 55, No. 2, #406, Spring 2020 — Follows our Winter 2020 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

Jacob and Workers of the Night breaking into the cathedral at
Tours, France, 1903, to steal the church’s riches (drawing by Flavio Costantini)

The excerpts on these pages are shortened versions of ones published in Defiance: Anarchist Statements Before Judge and Jury, a new title from Detritus Books in Olympia, Wash. detritusbooks.com. During the last 150 years, people identifying with the anarchist tradition have employed direct action many times against the state bringing repression and punishment upon them from the apparatus they seek to dismantle. This anthology chronicles 27 unrepentant voices of those facing courts and juries after apprehension and conviction.

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It has been said that self-preservation is the first law of nature, and that the basis of justice lies in protecting ourselves from one another. This is a perennial lie of the system of domination.

In reality, the flourishing of the community is the primary aim of nature, and mutual aid and solidarity in pursuit of this aim is the primal, originating law of nature. Nurture is the first law of nature. All justice flows from this source.

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“What have you got in your pockets, Apple Hat?” asked Mr. Anthill pulling at them. “Guts? Electric trains? Horseshoe crabs?”

—W.A. Davison and Sherri Higgins, La Chasse A L’Objet Du Desir

Once, while in my teens, my girlfriend and I were walking along the shores of Plum Beach in Brooklyn on a sultry summer evening to get a breath of fresh air under a full moon. As we walked along the shoreline, we spotted lots of horseshoe crabs that had been overturned on their backs when the tide had gone out.

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When 17^th century Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region, they discovered Native Americans living in what today we would call an anarchist society. These Lake natives had horizontal social relationships governed by kin obligations and employed consensus decision-making.

A frustrated missionary called them “strangers to civil power and authority:” Another observer noted that “no chief dared to rule over the people, as in that case he would immediately be forsaken, and by the whole tribe, and his counselors would refuse to assist him.”

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The liberation of the word & the liberation of the world are codependent. Revolutionary writing should not be grammatically pure, disinterested or unpoetic. It should not be written from the cold vantage point of an absent silent god.

Anarchists we call ourselves—and yet we still gaze out towards Papa/Mama Syntax for permission, still we coo. We control & we deny. We hold back the shy yet flickering wet orifice of imagination’s best trickster—Wildness.

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A four year old from Colorado recently died from influenza. According to news accounts, the child’s mother frequented Facebook sites run by groups promoting conspiracy theories about the dangers of vaccines and conventional medical treatments; so-called anti-vaxxers.

Instead of giving the anti-viral medication prescribed by the child’s pediatrician, the mother followed online advice she received and treated her child with home remedies involving placing cucumbers and potatoes on his head.

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For every child born craving and abandoned

every child whose belly bulged with emptiness

every child who cried alone in a bare white room

every child wounded by a father, uncle, grandfather

every child told to pick up guns against other children

every child who worked below dank ground

every child shaken, burned, bruised:

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More than a decade ago I worked as a newspaper reporter in a rural New York State town. For a time, I covered the police beat, and was tasked with picking up the crime blotter each morning to see if there were noteworthy crimes.

On my first day of work in a town with a population of 1,800, the chief of police told me he wouldn’t release the blotter. “We got no crimes to report,” he said. “only domestics.”

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The 2020 Michigan presidential primary on March 10 marked the end of the progressive fantasy that the American political landscape could be altered by supporting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Party nominee.

Instead, it was bye-bye, Bernie, as Joe Biden swept every county in the state as voters overwhelmingly went for a candidate they thought had the best chance of defeating the execrable Trump in November.

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Why would someone continue to read and publish xeroxed zines two decades into the 21^st century? Didn’t the technocracy announce that this variety of underground publishing was superseded by the hyper-mediated cybernetic dream web?

Yet people still cut up words and images and glue them on paper. They stand in front of xerox machines to copy them, and then staple the pages together.

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Maybe the best single word that describes things today is withdrawal.

From less sexual intimacy to NASCAR attendance, there’s just little interest. Clubs are closing as people retreat further into their little screens. When people go out, they are so very likely to be at their tables on their phones. Might as well be at home on the couch. (As obesity rates shoot up in an ever more sedentary culture.)

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Athens Neighborhood is Home to Anarchy

ATHENS — In February, The National Herald, a right-wing Greek newspaper based in the U.S., boasted, “Exarchia Anarchists will be Wiped Out.” For nearly fifty years, Exarchia, a neighborhood in central Athens, Greece has been an example of autonomous living.

The neighborhood, which is the site of a number of uprisings has achieved what anarchists long believed possible; a self-organized city within a city. For decades, police who entered would be immediately attacked and pushed out.

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The Internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. John Perry Barlow, Internet pioneer and friend of the Grateful Dead and contributor to their very early virtual community, The Well (or Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), wrote this in his 1996 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

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Faces covered with white masks, carrying a banner reading “Reclaim America,” chanting re-worked Nazi slogans, and waving stylized U.S. flags, 150 members of the white nationalist Patriot Front marched through Washington D.C. in early February.

Antifascist protesters blocking white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascist sympathizers from entering Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017

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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 or ones on disk are appreciated, but not required. Length should not exceed two, double-sided pages. If you are interested in writing a longer response, please contact us in advance.

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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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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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