Most Recent Additions

a review of

Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, The Insurrection Game 3^rd edition (Out of Order Games)

Bloc by Bloc is a strategy game inspired by contemporary protest movements. Designed and self-published by Greg Loring-Albright and TL. Simons from Out of Order Games, it uses the tabletop board game format to illustrate the impact of gentrification and the power of popular uprisings. As in the two previous editions, the goal is to liberate the city before the military arrives to reestablish order. In accordance with their anarchist ethics, low-cost upgrade kits are available for owners of the second edition, and the source files are free online.

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Once upon a time there was a large shopping center in a Land to the North, and a plastic store called (1 across). For many weeks long-haired freeks and greasers had hung around with nothing to do but laugh at (1 down) shoppers and hassle pigs.

Kind of a bogue life, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do.

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“Surrealism is the collective experience of individualism”

—André Masson

What is surrealist collectivity? A mutually opened wound, ever seeded by poetry, by revolt. A soft spectral voice in the darkness, urging all nonconformists to come out, and to play. An extradimensional vehicle for thought and action beyond all controls, a device powered by collective vulnerability and individual Becoming.

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TACOMA, Wash. (LNS)—The Army has declared the Shelter Half coffee house near Ft. Lewis here “off limits to all personnel serving in the Armed Forces.”

It is the first time the brass has tried this tactic in its campaign to squash GI rights.

The Shelter Half is an anti-war coffee house, and like most of its counterparts across the country, its warmth and lively political discussion has become increasingly popular for the young men trapped in the monstrous machinery of the U.S. military.

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If you are a serviceman in Vietnam receiving a free Fifth Estate subscription the only notice you will get of its expiration is the sudden disappearance of the paper from your life.

We still want to get you guys the news about our culture, the GI movement, and anti-war activity, so if you qualify for a renewal (still in ‘Nam) send us a letter telling us to put you back on our subscription list. If you are short we will be glad to send you papers for your remaining time. If you are still in the service, but not in ‘Nam, a year’s sub is $2; if you’re completely free of the green machine it’s $3.75. Power to you.

FT. HOOD, Texas (LNS)—Richard Chase, 26, was sentenced to two years hard labor in a Kangaroo Court-Martial here Dec. 20 for refusing to participate in riot control training.

In Jan., 1969 Chase informed his Company Commander that he was a Conscientious Objector and would not participate in riot control training. He was given unofficial C.O. status and became the company clerk. When Chase asked for the official C.O. application forms he was given only a blank sheet of paper.

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HANOI (LNS)—A U.S. Marine has left his unit, has joined up with soldiers of the National Liberation Front (NLF), and has issued an open letter to his former comrades-in-arms inviting them to follow him in this ultimate act of GI rebellion.

A dispatch from Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency, identified the rebel Marine as Paul M. Sweeney, serial number 2467056.

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WASHINGTON, DC. (LNS)—An Army officer who sent out Christmas cards last year decorated with photos of stacks of Viet Cong killed by his regiment has been promoted, according to columnist Jack Anderson.

George Patton 3d has received a Brigadier General’s star. Last Christmas he sent his greetings out with a picture of him waving another war trophy—a polished Viet Cong skull, with a bullet hole above the left eye. The skull was a present from men in Patton’s 11^th Armored Cavalry.

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The following article was taken from “A Handbook for Radicals; Revolutionaries and Easy Riders” published by the International Liberation School. It is available for fifty cents and is an invaluable guide to small arms weaponry. Send to: People’s Office, 1925 Grove St., Berkeley CA.

America has a long tradition of vigilante paramilitary violence. Usually it has been directed against blacks and Third World people, poor whites and dissident political groups.

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Three ramshackle, trash-can heated huts on York Avenue between Second and Third stand as mute testimony to a strike against the General Electric Corporation which has gone on in Detroit and across the nation since October 26^th of last year.

Inside these cramped quarters GE workers from Detroit local 947 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) huddle together drinking hot coffee, between stints on the picket line, in an attempt to fight off the chill of subfreezing Michigan winter.

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Editors’ Note: The trial of the Chicago Conspiracy 7 is a trial of one consciousness by another. On December 11, Allen Ginsberg, poet and man of the planet, came to Julius Hoffman’s courtroom to speak in behalf of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the Yippie Festival of Life that fell before police clubs in Lincoln Park and on Michigan Avenue last August at the Democratic Convention.

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Emma Goldman is reputed to have said, “If voting could change things, they’d make it illegal.” Contempt for the franchise permeates anarchism, so that anarchists who favor participating in state elections are both in the minority and on the defensive.

This essay places the struggle for Votes for Women in the context of anarchist aspirations for radical social transformation, and also reconsiders the anarchist rejection of voting in contemporary times. A century after “The Great Reform,” I suggest we reformulate Goldman’s logic: perhaps authorities try so hard to make voting illegal because it could actually change things.

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a review of

Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane by Will Alexander. City Light Books, 2022

Will Alexander’s latest poems, collected in Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane, “remain (in the author’s own prefatory words) parallels to nanograms as dazzling wattage.”

A nanogram, a billionth of a gram, is light on its feet, and the poet is asking the reader to be similarly nimble in responding to his lines, images, and appropriations of vocabulary from the sciences, mathematics, and non-Western dialects.

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A review of <em>

The Clash: All the Albums, All the Songs</em> by Martin Popoff. PM Press, 2022

Prolific Canadian music journalist Martin Popoff has written a remarkably exhaustive, song-by-song exhumation of the Clash, the astonishing rock and roll group (1976–1986) once popularly dubbed, “The only band that matters.”

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a review of

Surrealism and Anarchism by Pietro Ferrua, edited by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2022.

Ron Sakolsky has uncovered a previously lost piece of anarchist history, one that explores the fertile crossroads of surrealism and anarchy.

This text originated as a 1982 lecture given by Pietro Ferrua (1930–2021), inaugurating the Anarchos Institute at the University of Montreal. The pamphlet provides a useful biographical sketch of Ferrua that helps situate his scholarship within a lifelong commitment to anarchism.

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a review of

Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror by Johanna Isaacson. Common Notions 2022

Johanna Isaacson, a professor of English at Modesto Junior College, presents a thought-provoking and exhaustively researched addition to contemporary horror criticism in Stepford Daughters.

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OTTAWA, Ont. (LNS)—Canadian Health Minister John Munro has indicated that the Canadian government is considering action within months to liberalize, and possibly abolish, laws which ban possession and use of marijuana.

Munro told a Canadian newspaper that increasingly widespread use of pot showed that harsh penalties were not working as a deterrent. He did not give any indication, however, that the government would change its stiff laws against the sale of grass.

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ALGIERS, Algeria (LNS)—Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther Party Minister of Information, has had his request for a U.S. passport denied.

Conrad Drascher, a U.S. diplomat acting for the State Department, denied Cleaver a passport, offering instead papers good for a one-way passage to the States plus plane fare with immediate arrest at port of entry guaranteed.

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“THERE IS NO LAW IN AMERIKA TODAY—only the racist power structure and its victims. The revolutionary youth of this weirdo country are an oppressed people—the victims of a calculated cultural repression movement instigated and carried out by the Government and certain monied interests who are committed to maintaining a decadent status quo. They will kill us if they can; they will incarcerate their own children and have them beaten if they can get away with it. They would jail us all if they could—all in the name of freedom, democracy and the unspeakable obscenity they call the Amerikan Way!”

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Fifth Estate

“To Serve the People”

FIFTH ESTATE #96, January 8–21, 1970, Vol. 4 No. 18, page 2

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

MANAGING EDITOR

Bill Rowe

DISTRIBUTION

Keep On Truckin’ Co-op

ADVERTISING

Steve Dunn

STAFF

Jane Capellaro

David Gaynes

Jim Kennedy

Rick London

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TO SERVE THE PEOPLE. Brothers and sisters all over pigamerika are waging war, making revolution. To so serve the people, the STP coalition has been formed.

As brother Fred Hampton said: “...theory’s cool, but theory without practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them—the two go together.” He was talking the truth.

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Wayne State University is about to be confronted by an angry Warren Forest community.

The University, which has been in the process of destroying the community surrounding it for the last five years, is trying to keep community people from using its gym facilities at Matthaei Building.

The gym complex, on Warren across from the Fifth Estate office, was built on land that previously housed 4,000 local residents. It now includes large areas for indoor and outdoor recreation that is denied to the very people that were removed to allow it to be built.

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She was known as either Maria or Marusya Nikiforova, a fearless and feared, bad-ass Ukrainian anarchist warrior who led her own army during the Russian Civil War and peasant rebellions in the early 20^th century. But few people have heard about her, either in Ukraine or elsewhere.

A contemporary of another famous Ukrainian anarchist, Nestor Makhno, Nikiforova (1885–1919), was at one point better known in parts of Ukraine than him and also considered more important. But because she was a woman, she is mostly ignored in histories of the period, including anarchist ones. There are also few documentary sources about her life since she spent most of it underground and only surfaced in the public eye as part of the Makhnovist movement for two remarkable years from 1917 to 1919.

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Despite the appeal of nationalism among today’s Ukrainians, the legacy of anarchism in that tormented region has not been forgotten. In fact, it is resurgent, though not always in ways that anarchists in more comfortable lands might like.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukraine is historically part of Russia is almost accurate. However, Russia is the child of Ukraine. The ancient state of Kievan Rus grew up around Kyiv, the pivot of a Baltic-to-Constantinople trade route.

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a review of

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Milkweed Editions, 2020 (original: 2013)

Don’t mistake the long lifespan on bestseller lists of Braiding Sweetgrass as something superficial. Certainly, Kimmerer’s excellent prose style attracts a broad range of readers. Yet the complexity of her ideas surely challenges those for whom nature equates to the landscape videos they capture on their smartphones.

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As a result of a pre-Christmas anti-war march the brass at Selfridge Air Force Base are trying to bring down a cloak of repression on GI activists.

The Detroit Coalition to End the War Now sponsored a candle light march on the evening of Dec. 23 in support of anti-war GIs and for an end to the war. Approximately 1,200 persons joined the parade in a driving snow storm that soon left almost all the participants with extinguished candles.

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American Civil Liberties Union 961–4662

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee (Police Brutality Complaints) 872–2828

Creem Magazine 831–0816

Draft Resistance (info on counseling) 874–4334

Detroit Anti-war Coalition 873–4322

Fifth Estate Office 831–6800

Fire Department 962–0400

Grape Boycott Office 825–4811

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Unlimited rewards offered for the elimination of Republicans, Democrats and other politicians.

Known to be engaged in conspiracy to further spread diseased and death-oriented politics.

Aim of this conspiracy: Complete domination of our lives and destruction of all human freedom.

Recent crimes include promotion of global poverty, genocidal war plans, moronic christian morality, debasing of all human life, and rape of the planet.

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What with all the hoopla going on around the Republican Convention—free parties, banners and balloons every where, a city-wide clean-up and the media trying to make us forget the depression—it’s easy to ignore the mammoth police state apparatus the politicians have also brought to town.

Seizing an opportunity to cash in on the convention, the cops have used the “security” needs of the political parlay to extend even further their technology and ever growing presence. Detroit, State and Wayne County police have secured over $3.6 million in federal grants from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) which will provide funds for the convention, but much of the “special” projects will remain as a permanent part of the police machine.

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REPUBLICANS! We mean it: pack your bags and leave Detroit! Take your vile political party, your cadaverous candidate, your stinking love for the state, your vicious racism, your blatant sexism, your hatred for the poor, your insane war plans, your nauseating patriotism, your putrid Christianity, your antiquated sexual morality, your contempt for the rest of the world, your millionaire officials, your middle-class sensibilities and your pathetic lack of vision and get out of our city!

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“What really has me scared is I remember, I was ten years old during the last depression. There had never been much to worry about before. One time I asked my mother what there was for dinner. She told me, “Nothing.”

“I didn’t believe her—there was always something. Not this time though. There was really nothing at all...

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a review of

The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism, Second Edition by John P. Clark. PM Press, 2022

Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, was “the most devastating experience I have lived through, but also the most uplifting and inspiring,” writes NOLA native John P. Clark, whose family goes back generations in the Crescent City.

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a review of

Welcome Home by Clarrie and Blanche Pope. Minor Compositions 2022

When I picked up Clarrie and Blanch Pope’s Welcome Home and saw the tower block on its cover, it shook out of me a memory of watching the BBC documentary series The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities about the privatization of the Aragon Tower at the Pepys Estate (housing estate is the British euphemism for public housing, or projects for Americans unfamiliar).

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In order to convey some indication of the unique technical challenge represented by “Fantastic Voyage,” including the never-before-encountered photographic problems which it posed, it becomes necessary to present a brief synopsis of the extremely off-beat story:

Grant, a special American agent, delivers Czech scientist Jan Benes to an airport in the USA after helping him escape from behind the Iron Curtain. The entire Secret Service is involved in getting Benes safely from airport to city. But still the enemy manages to make one last desperate attempt to destroy Benes and the precious secret he carries in his brain. Benes suffers a severe head injury. A normal brain operation is impossible.

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An open letter can be read by anyone. You are welcome to read it or not, but let me explain what this letter is about and to whom it is addressed. It is a letter about Vietnam and Johnson and Death.

If you support the war in Vietnam because you want the National Liberation Front to win, this letter is not addressed to you. (I admire and respect the courage of the N.L.F. but I think I respect the Buddhists there more, struggling without guns, and in their naivete hoping to touch the mechanical heart of McNamara through self-immolation. They have died without killing—the greatest courage—and if anyone were to have my loyalty it would be the Buddhists.)

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Leftovers from the Right-wing Film Phantasmagoria [see FE #14, September 15, 1966] came in the form of letters to and from Fulton Lewis, III. Peter Werbe, News Editor of the Fifth Estate and Executive Board Member of the DCEWV, wrote to Mr. Lewis thanking him for his cooperation in helping to raise funds for this paper and the Vietnam Committee. Being the producer of the right-wing films and a key figure in exposing ‘communists’ and tennis-shoe wearers, Lewis sent a quick reply to Werbe. Both documents are reprinted below.

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In the last issue of the Fifth Estate [FE #14, September 15, 1966] I said that film was dead in Detroit. I wrote that shortly after arriving in San Francisco, and have since managed to see what film makers here are doing to promote films and film making in the Bay area.

The film makers in this area have banded together and are forming the Canyon Cinema Co-op, patterned after the Filmmakers Co-op in New York, the arrangement being that anyone who has a film that they would like to see distributed arranges to have it listed in the co-op’s catalogue, and every time the film is rented the film-maker receives 75% of the rental fee and the co-op gets 25% to help cover operating expenses.

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Franz J.T. Lee, South African liberation leader, will be the featured speaker on Friday, Oct. 14, 8:00 P.M., at the Hartford Avenue Baptist Church, 6300 Hartford. Mr. Lee will speak on the Freedom Struggle in South Africa and discuss the assassination of Henry Verwoerd. There is a donation of $1; 75 cents for students and the unemployed. The talk is being sponsored by the Alexander Defense Committee.

Just finished reading a friend’s copy of THE FIFTH ESTATE.

Enjoyed very much Mr. Ovshinsky’s article about Dr. Hoffer and LSD [FE #13, August 30, 1966]. It was refreshing to read an article that dealt with experimental facts and a word of expert caution, rather than a shocking expose attempting to scare the pants off you!

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A few days before recording artist Richard Farina died in a motorcycle accident last May, Random House released his first novel, “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.” The book, a story of the escapades of one Gnossos Pappadopoulis, shows Farina almost as skilled at prose as he was at folk singing and composing.

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“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin

ChatGPT has lit up the West in the last three months evincing delight among enthusiasts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but great fear and loathing among critics who see its entry into a world already diminished by machines as a further ratcheting downward of what it means to be human.

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The photo above of a traffic jam on a Brazilian highway could be a metaphor for life today. A scarred landscape littered with trucks filled with the everyday stuff of commerce going nowhere.

The trucks carrying what are now the necessities of modern society are stalled at a local level but reflect the entire global economy and culture. As the planetary integrated system becomes increasingly complex, so does its capacity for collapse.

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The American Civil Liberties Union asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case of a Richmond Professional Institute student who was kept out of the college for his senior year because he sported a beard and long hair.

The Virginia liberal arts college refused to allow Norman Thomas Marshall to register in September, 1965. In a brief filed with the high court on behalf of Marshall, a 26 year old scholarship student and past editor of the college’s literary magazine, the civil liberties group contended that the school’s “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable” action refusing him registration on account of his groom violated the constitutional rights to free expression, due process of law, privacy and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

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The court-martials for the three GIs who have refused to go to Vietnam began on September 6. All three were convicted—Pvt. David Samas and Pfc. James Johnson to five years at hard labor, forfeiture of pay and dishonorable discharges, and Pvt. Dennis Mora to three years at hard labor—and appeals are now being prepared by lawyer Stanley Faulkner. Each of the three were tried by a different trial panel of 10 officers, all of whom reached verdicts in less than a half hour.

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Well, attentive readers, I must say there is nothing like an occasional attack to sharpen up one’s reflexes... Having had several lately, I shall at this point contribute several counter-attacks...

To our friendly neighbor “Virile American”...(see letters, last issue) I would not ordinarily dignify such arch-type fascist ravings with a response, however I feel that this letter is representative of the thinking of a good many people, so therefore: Dear V.A.: Thank OM that there is no F.C.C. type of agency monitoring the papers... In the popular Press, the effect is much the same when you consider the fact that the AP and UPI must pass along to the public the obvious propaganda as delivered to them by the government news agencies, or risk losing their sources...There is, however, still room for some free journalism...The “pasty-faced faggoty followers” in my comparison were actually the “Virile Romans,” as they called themselves... As a humane person, genuinely concerned with the welfare of my fellow Americans, I hope, Mr. V.A., sir, that you will be able to overcome your rather psychotic hang-ups about “org**m”, “Pasty-faced faggots,” and “commie perverts”...Moreover, I am quite sure that your stated intention of being in Hell will be easily fulfilled...Just continue to be a “Virile American” and before long you’ll be living right in the middle of hell, right here in the good old virile U.S. of A...

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The San Francisco Mime Troupe, fresh from a successful ten months run in Northern California, and as a part of their nationwide tour, will bring its current production, “A MINSTREL SHOW/OR: ‘CIVIL RIGHTS IN A CRACKER BARREL’ “ to the Detroit Institute of Arts, Oct. 7, under the sponsorship of the American Civil Liberties Union. See ad for details and ticket information.

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A national conference was held in Cleveland Sept. 9–10 to plan for a united nationwide peace action this fall.

The conference was called by the University Circle Teach-In Committee of Cleveland, with the assistance of the Inter-University Committee. The meeting was attended by a wide range of Peace, Civil Rights, and religious groups.

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Detroit’s first Participatory Zoo Dance, originally scheduled for September 16 and 17, was postponed, but an October opening is planned. Russ Gibbs, promoter of Detroit’s Grande Ballroom psychedelic dance, said that the original opening date had been cancelled due to technical problems.

The weekly dance, the first of its kind in Detroit, modeled in the San Francisco style, involves a great deal of electrical lighting equipment, and Russ said We ran into some unforeseen difficulties with the electrical wiring code in Detroit, but that has all been taken care of and we will open October 7 and 8 for sure.” Kicking off the grand opening will be the MC5 and the Woolies. Anyone interested in getting more information should call Russ Gibbs at 834–4904.

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THE MFS MESS: Emil Bacilla’s article on the Midwest Film Society last issue touched off a lot of under-the-table shit, which was, even weirder since Emil was in SF when the paper came out and couldn’t see what was happening. Briefly: Noel Cooper of the MFS contacted me through Peter Werbe about screening the MFS films at the Artists’ Workshop, which was for me a happy occurrence and was immediately implemented. JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS was shown at the Workshop Saturday, September 17, to a good-sized crowd, and flyers were passed out advertising the MFS fall lineup at the Workshop. Everything was groovy.

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Sept. 11^th the Green Berets came to town.

They got together for a little show at the foot of Woodward, about two dozen of them in the bright sunshine. Maybe 150 Detroiters turned out to see the military elite, vaunted in press and song.

The first thing that struck the viewer was their youth. They looked for the most part barely two and three years out of their teens. Young faces for the most part, smooth, unwrinkled and without real worries.

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