Most Recent Additions

a review of

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott. Yale University Press, 2017 yalebooks.yale.edu

In his latest book, James Scott continues his exploration of the relationship between domestication and the development of hierarchies of power in pre-modern and modern societies. He is particularly interested in examining the situations of people who resisted being incorporated into states. Against the Grain rejects the view that human history is a story of linear progression leading to the conveniences of contemporary civilization.

...

a review of

In Search of the Masterless Men of Newfoundland by Seaweed & Ron Sakolsky. Ardent Press, 2017 ardentpress.com

Seaweed and Ron Sakolsky have put together a book to inspire current and future rebels. Much more than history, it relates a myth with the potential to nurture hope for freer ways of life.

...

Note: Last issue’s article on “State-Fetishism” has again given rise to the much debated question of revolutionary violence. We invite further reader response in this matter.

Dear Fifth Estate,

This is an answer to the article “State Fetishism” [FE #296, January 19, 1979].

The article points out many mistakes in the conception and carrying out of revolutionary violence in recent years.

...

The long delay between this issue and the last one published at the end of January resulted from our being confronted by a bout of cerebral paralysis which left us feeling empty of words and ideas. We mostly articulated this feeling to one another by stating rather aimlessly that perhaps “we no longer had anything to say,” which carried with it the vague suggestion that maybe we should even close up shop.

...

Joe Remiro, Russ Little, Bill and Emily Harris remain prisoners of the state as a result of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) urban guerrilla activity in 1973–74. All have been sentenced to long prison terms and have been subjected to continuing harassment and abuse while in custody. (See past FEs.) The following is a report from Russ on the legal and penal status of the four and centers on a recent judicial appeal of his and Joe’s conviction for the 1973 assassination of an Oakland, Calif. school official.

...

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Mr. Venom

Primitivo Solis

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN-0015-0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second-class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.

Bay Area-based PM Press celebrated its tenth anniversary of publishing in May with a bang-up party in Oakland, Calif., where staff, authors, and well-wishers howled at political sketch comedy, smashed a captured Amazon delivery drone, and danced the night away to punk rock.

PM was founded at the end of 2007 by a small group of people with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. At the outset we strived to create and distribute radical audio, video, and text releases through every available channel in all possible formats. True to one expanded variation of our name, “Print Matters,” however, we’re biased in favor of hardcopy books as the best format in which to communicate ideas for social change.

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a review of

The Transhuman Future: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Tor Books, 2003

Cory Doctorow has a clear vision of the future. In a way, I hate him for that, because it is not a future in which I want to live. But he is probably right.

He extrapolates current situations and trends to create a realistic vision of the future. Often these include business trends, making them even more fleshed out visions. However, he is not a world builder. He writes humanistic stories, but about transhumanism, the idea that people can evolve beyond our current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.

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A review of

Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street, Tom Goyens, ed. University of Illinois Press, 2017

New York City is well known for its radicals, past and present. The lives and deeds of some noteworthy anarchists who have lived there (including Emma Goldman, Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin), and the high points of local movement history have been discussed extensively in articles and books. Yet there is a shortage of bottom up histories describing and exploring the lives of non-famous anarchists of earlier times or currently.

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a review of

Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy by Yassin al-Haj Saleh. Haymarket Books 2017

This book is a necessary corrective to the dominant perception—left, right and center—that the opposition in Syria are all jihadists and dictator Bashar Assad the best bet for stability.

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a review of

Black Panther; Director: Ryan Coogler 134 min.

On the list of watershed films of 2018 will be Black Panther, Marvel Studios’ astronomically budgeted blockbuster, which raked in critical plaudits as well as ticket sales on an unprecedented scale. The film has struck a chord with both black and white audiences.

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a review of

Counterfeit Currency: How To Really Make Money, M. Thomas Collins, Loompanics Unlimited, P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend WA 98368, $15; $3 shipping.

Money is a fairly curious substance. Its official function is to represent value, but once said, you can immediately challenge all the assumptions inherent in such a formulation: Value?; its representation? Since value itself is a representation of abstract worth, money operates within economies as a representation of a representation! No wonder its properties seem so inscrutable.

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To the FE:

Cuban Greens/anti-authoritarians need our aid. Orlando Polo and Mercedes Paez of Cuba’s anti-authoritarian/ecological/ anti-Militarist Green Path group have been touring the U.S. recently.

Arrested many times in Cuba, they are being repressed again as Cuban authorities are refusing to allow them re-admission to the country.

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a review of

The People’s Republic of Everything by Nick Mamatas. Tachyon Publications 2018, tachyonpublications.com

Nick Mamatas, who first entered the radical literary scene two decades ago as one of the translators of Jae-Eui Lee’s Kwangju Diary, has been a consistent yet consistently surprising voice since.

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Excerpted and reprinted from Fifth Estate #385, Fall, 2011.

Without even knowing it, you’ve read anarchist fiction. There are literary greats like Leo Tolstoy (“The Anarchists are right in everything ... They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by revolution.” [“On Anarchy,” 1900]), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller (”[An anarchist] is exactly what I am. Have been all my life.” [Conversations With Henry Miller, 1994]), Dambudzo Marechera (“If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you.”), Ba Jin, Carolyn Chute, J.M. Coetzee (“What is wrong with politics is power itself.” [Diary of a Bad Year, 2007]), Jorge Luis Borges, and William Blake, and other popular fiction authors like Alan Moore, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Robert Shea, Norman Spinrad, B. Traven, Kurt Vonnegut, Ethel Mannin, and Edward Abbey.

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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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a review of

Worker-Student Action Committees: France ’68, R. Gregoire & F. Perlman, Black & Red, PO Box 02374, Detroit MI 48202, 1969 (reprinted 1991). Available from B & R or FE Books, $3 plus postage.

This is a pamphlet written almost a generation ago when revolution not only seemed possible, but imminent. The enthusiasm generated from the authors’ direct participation in the 1968 events almost leaps from the pages as they pen lively critiques of the successes and failures of the movement which almost toppled French society.

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The Fifth Estate office receives a large number of anarchist and environmental newspapers and ‘zines from the U.S. and the rest of the world. After we look at them, they rarely get much farther than a growing pile under a desk.

We feel this is too dismal an end for publications with so much information and creativity, so we are hoping FE readers would like to see them. We will send them out with book orders or on request if you send postage. Please indicate country of interest or language (including U.S., England, Australia, etc.). If you’re in the neighborhood, the papers can be picked up at our office or the 404 W. Willis space.

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a review of

Crashing the Party: Legacies and Lessons from the RNC 2000 by Kris Hermes. PM Press, 2015 pmpress.org

Crashing the Party was published three years ago, but it couldn’t be more timely in the age of Trump and Sessions. Kris Hermes’s book is an in-depth account of the legal saga that began with the repression and mass arrests of activists at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

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The animal hungers

for light and strength

He hungers

.

Killing himself while hunting

Groaning

fatally and the last

.

Hunger springs

Sleepless

.

There are beasts without burden

that dance / grow fiery

They warily drink water

.

Famine distorts

Tea or sugar or bread

or fuel

or a tender hand?

.

The animal hungers

for goodness

.

The famished grow fat

leaving scraps for neither him

nor her

who remained with her cubs

.

The animal hungers

Tramps through trenches

.

up slopes

Sets out

.

He rears up on both paws and ransacks a beehive

Spreads his wings and throws himself from a cliff

.

The animal hungers

when he moves with the flock

or sells his lungs, his eyes

his goodness, his fury

hangs from meat hooks

.

There is no slaughterer without slaughterhouses

there is a journal. a story. a bus

.

and the barrio where he who writes grew up

.

There are massacres

.

Slaughterers dressed as generals in plastic aprons

or doctors in white coats

the chemists the priests enrobed

.

Or gold buttons / stripes

or suits

Bare-chested

or sweaty

.

When the animal hungers

Everything trembles

Books crumble

The earth quakes

.

Autumn flowers bloom in the garden

In the gazebo unreal and necessary

the breeze rushes

people stroll by

.

Home is one

who smokes sitting in the patio of his house

or in a hotel

or silently waits in the corner of his

infancy

or lingers outside

until they open the door

.

Hunger squeezes through crevices

Cuts grooves

Breathes

Climbs fences

Feeds

.

But the animal doesn’t wait

grows weak or devours

He is hungry

and cold

.

He doesn’t know how to live

with pain and anguish

but tries

.

He prepares tea / bathes

or doesn’t

.

He has had enough

.

Slurps

Dips his bread

.

Sits still a moment

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Want to learn how to turn off GPS on your phone? Hear the latest from the pipeline blockade? Or, how to support pipeline resisters near you? The Final Straw Radio (TFSR) is a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast based in Asheville, N.C. TFSR has produced programs since 2010, airing on stations across the country, and offering free downloads at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org.

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a review of

Anarchy Explained to My Father by Francis Dupuis-Deri and Thomas Deri; Translated from the French by John Gilmore. New Star Books, Vancouver, 2017

Any set of ideas whose name defines it in terms of negativity has a lot of explaining to do when it speaks about the future. Proponents of anarchism—in plain English, “against authority”—tend to be adamantly against formulae or against determinism and quite legitimately refuse to describe the perfect, future anarchist society. Nonetheless, anarchism’s critique of oppression leads logically to a set of ideas that explicitly lay down principles for moving forward.

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Peter Kropotkin, called the “anarchist prince” because of his origins in the Russian nobility, stands out among the many classic anarchist writers for his breadth of subject matter and his concern with the problems of daily life. The following essay was included in a 1924 collection of his writings entitled Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, with an introduction by Roger Baldwin.

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a review of

Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching, Lynn Jacobs, 1991, P.O. Box 5784, Tucson, AZ 85703, 8-1/2 x 11, 602 pp, $28.

It is a cross between mean-spiritedness and stupidity for people to blame those on welfare for the current economic recession (or depression, depending on where you are situated in the pyramid). The real drain on the economy comes from the big money boys looting ever larger sums from the national treasury, through scams like the S&L bailout and from the classes below them. There is a welfare system which should be despised; it is the one which aids the rich.

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a review of

Darlingtonia by Alba Roja. Left Bank Books, 2017 akpress.org; albaroja.noblogs.org

Darlingtonia begins with a juxtaposition characteristic of the times we live in. Anton works in the service industry in San Francisco, commuting each day into the city because he can’t afford to live there and providing concierge services for well-off hotel guests.

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In September 1971, the political landscape of the American Empire was very different from today’s. Detroit, Newark, Watts, and other cities still smoldered with the embers of urban insurgency.

The imperial army in Vietnam was disintegrating from open mutiny in the last days of a failed foreign war. Guardsmen and cops gunned down college students at Kent State and Jackson State, and martial law ruled the streets of Berkeley, California following riots over People’s Park. Functioning as political police, the FBI coordinated a nationwide secret and sometimes murderous campaign against dissidents. But rebellion continued, and in the prisons the spirit of the times reverberated and intensified. The uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York in response to the everyday horrors of prison life became a conscious political insurrection that soon to be murdered inmate spokesman Elliot Barkley described as “but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”

...

walls smeared with

burnt campaign posters

cracks papered over

with yellowed collection

notices

.

we pass smokes

swap zip codes

wait for toxic

clouds to dissipate

.

eyes lay in darkness

and wait

.

wait to take it

all back and start

again.

—Jay Marvin

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a review of

Individualist Anarchism/Revolutionary Sexualism: Writings by Emile Armand. Pallaksch Press 2012 littleblackcart.com/books

This is a nice selected edition of mostly shorter tracts by the French sexpol individualist, Emile Armand (1872–1963). Alejandro De Acosta’s translations are excellent. Most informative are the essays “Life as Experiment,” “The Sexual Fantasists,” and “Revolutionary Sexualism.”

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a review of

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman. Princeton University Press 2017 press.princeton.eduititles/10925.html

The United States and Germany shared an important characteristic in the 1930s. Both were determined to cement white supremacy into Law. Racist statutes in the US were then state of the art. The Nazis sought to catch up after taking power in 1933.

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James Bay II—the so-called “Project of the Century”—is on hold this winter in Quebec, snarled by legal and political obstacles, but a furious battle looms again in a year’s time. On one side is Hydro-Quebec, a goliath of an electricity utility, and its owner the provincial government; on the other, a fast-growing coalition of native Cree people, aboriginal rights solidarity groups, environmental activists, economic policy critics, alternative energy advocates, and a few no-growth libertarians, too.

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The eco-feminism of Maria Mies stands at the crossroads of feminist, ecological and colonial liberation movements. Mies attempts to bring Marxian theory face to face with the newly emerging political crises of the late 20^th century. This has involved further investigation of Marx’s texts in the light of modern anthropology and what she calls “object-relations.” But Mies is as much an activist as academic sociologist. Her concerns range from prescriptive essays on methodology in social science and empirical studies of exploitation among Indian women lacemakers, to organized campaigns against pornography and the reproductive-technology industry in West Germany.

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FE readers may remember the case of Danny Gillis [Fifth Estate #337, Late Summer 1991], a black man from Baltimore, who refused to board the Marine Corps bus to Saudi Arabia last December 17, and was beaten up (with his hands cuffed behind his back) under his Sergeant’s orders by four white Marines. Gillis required an operation on his shoulder due to injuries received during that attack, and is serving out his 18 month sentence.

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I would like to invite your participation in an event that will remember Alexander Berkman on the centenary of his attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Strike of 1892. This will not be an event glorifying the assassination of individuals as a political method, a technique Berkman himself came to question long after his attentat against Frick. Rather, the purpose will be to remember Alexander Berkman—the person, the author, the radical—on the 100^th anniversary of the most important day of his life.

...

Just as the underground press movement of the sixties sprang up against corporate domination of information, so now is the rebel radio movement. For the first time, residents of Detroit’s Cass Corridor and surrounding areas will be able to tune in to the City’s first and only anti-commercial, non-government regulated radio station: Radio Free Detroit.

...

Bush is clearly gearing up for another “short” war before next year’s elections. Although many people have mentioned Cuba, Libya, and Korea as possible targets, it is likely he’ll go back into Iraq to “finish the job.”

Regardless of the location of the next “zap” war, however, anti-war activists in the U.S. have yet to seriously grapple with the inability of our movement to stop the last war. From the start of the “crisis” we were lied to by the government and corporate media, who carefully planned their deceptions to rouse the breast-beaters and militarize the public mind.

...

The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons held its third annual conference in Pittsburgh, June 8–10. It included lectures, workshops, and discussions about the Prison/Industrial Complex’s mass incarceration and its links to erosion of environmental health both inside and out.

Workshops ranged from toxic conditions in prisons (such as unsafe drinking water and air), to political repression and resistance inside and solidarity outside, to fighting white supremacy in prisons, support for those with disabilities, queer and trans prisoners, as well as support for undocumented detainees.

...

Cracker Barrel, a Southern restaurant chain known for its racist hiring policies and Confederate flag decor, instituted a company-wide policy in 1991 to not employ persons “whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values.” Twelve people were promptly fired from the chain because they were lesbian or gay.

...

Welcome to our Winter 1992 edition. This was our final issue for the 1991 year. continuing our recent pattern of three papers per year. As we’ve said in the past, the fact that we publish so infrequently comes neither from a lack of will nor is it a measure of the growing anti-authoritarian movement.

...

Seventeen years after a lawsuit begun by social activists, including this newspaper, against the Detroit Police Red Squad, the sordid episode of cop spying has almost come to its climax. During its 50-year history of dogging radicals, peeping over transoms, paying informers and keeping the most excruciatingly detailed list of license plate numbers taken from cars at radical gatherings, the gumshoes managed to amass over one million names in their files.

...

We put great emphasis on the phrase “the many books available” in our headline since the extent of titles that reflect the anarchist world view are so numerous that even if we were to publish a regularly appearing Anarchist Review of Books, it is doubtful if we could come close to noting them all.

There are many publishers of specifically anarchist literature, but as is mentioned in our article on anarchist fiction in this issue, the desire for freedom without the constraints of the bureaucratic administration of life, and the repression, exploitation, and discrimination inherent in capitalist society, expresses itself in literature internationally.

...

The battle for People’s Park began 22 years ago. The following is an excerpt from our lead article in FE #80, May 29, 1969, which was entitled, “Police Riot: Murder In Berkeley.” The cover price was 15 cents.

BERKELEY (LNS)—One man was murdered and over 200 people injured by police May 15 in the heaviest street battle in Berkeley yet over who controlled a city park.

...

The U.S. government got the pound of flesh it wanted from the radical environmental movement, but not from Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, the prime target of a three-year FBI entrapment scheme.

Foreman and four others, Mark Davis, Peg Millet, Ilse Asplund and Marc Baker, were charged with a long string of conspiracy violations including planning sabotage of a nuclear facility. (See Summer 1991 FE).

...

The Fifth Estate is a cooperative 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 M I. No copyright. No paid advertisements.

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“MOVE’s work is to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water, the soil. And, to put an end to the enslavement of life—people, animals, any form of Life.”

—MOVE Statement

I am driving south on Interstate-295 in a freezing April rain toward Portland, Maine. In the car with me are Ramona Africa and Fred Riley of the black liberation organization, MOVE. We pass an SUV that has slid off the highway into the ditch.

...

Confrontations over a contested Berkeley lot “legally” owned by the University of California (U.C.), known as People’s Park, continues. But increasingly, University and City attempts to reassert the rules of private property are succeeding.

Private seizure of common land, a process known as enclosure, was the essential basis for the imposition of the capitalist system. Starting in the 14^th century, peasants found land which had previously belonged to the community as a whole fenced off and claimed as private property. They had to move. Many small farmers also saw their meager holdings seized by larger landlords.

...

In an odd twist of democratization, the fires in California’s Oakland Hills this Fall, turned the tables on who usually are the victims of catastrophic house fires. Destruction by fire is an event usually suffered by the poor due to the conditions in slum properties, e.g., faulty wiring, structural faults, blocked escape routes, dangerous heating sources and slow official response.

...

Trauma is a subtle dominator of experience. Totalizing yet imperceptible, the massive mental shock re-contextualizes life so fully, one forgets what life was like before it.

Indeed, one forgets that there ever was a before. War, mass shootings, rape, famine, can all cause trauma. In fact, sometimes just hearing about these things (living with a loved one or being raised by a parent who once experienced them), creates its own trauma in the listener, causing a cycle that can intensify over generations.

...

Among the greatest obstacles to a working class revolution in the United States (and beyond) has been, and remains, white supremacy Far too many white people, past and present, have put their racial identity above their class interests.

A great many white people understand that racism, xenophobia, and other prejudices only divide workers to the benefit of bosses. But the sad truth for the United States is that, before the rise of industrial unions belonging to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, few unions treated African American workers equally.

...

The response of Detroit’s city government to the crisis of the homeless is what the poor can always expect: the cops were set on them! With the cutoff of the General Assistance welfare program (see accompanying article), entire buildings housing state aid recipients were emptied, the residents unceremoniously thrown out in the cold, rendering thousands homeless overnight.

...

Capitalism is never good to all of its subjects. Regardless of its carefully honed mythology of democratic access to success and class mobility, capitalist society is a system of looting whereby a few at the top and a small substratum below them hog the vast majority of wealth.

Looting, the forcible extraction of wealth by a powerful minority from a defenseless or passive majority, is the keystone of capitalism and has been since its inception. This hemisphere was looted from its original inhabitants, its minerals, forests soil and animals looted to finance the empires of Europe. Slaves were looted from Africa to create the original capital accumulation and industrialization through slave labor. And through looting and exploitation of the poor and working classes of this country and the world, a colossal empire of capital has been established.

...