Most Recent Additions

A Federal indictment was returned May 3 charging three suspended Detroit cops and a private guard with violating the civil rights of ten persons during last summer’s uprising.

Included among those whose civil rights were violated were two of three black youths shot to death by the cops at the Algiers motel.

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As part of the April 26 Student Strike against the Vietnam War, hundreds of high school students from the metropolitan area walked out of school or protested by other means.

At Cass Technical High School, which draws students from the entire city and beyond, 300 walked out at 9:30 under the direction of the Cass Afro-American Club and the Detroit High School Student Mobilization Committee. An undeterminable number of other students stayed in school wearing black armbands, which were distributed by DHSSMC.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I have an unusual “problem” concerning my penis when I have an erection. When not aroused, it is small and appears to be very normal. When I have an erection, it grows very large and has a pronounced curve downwards. In other words, it is bent toward the ground.

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The Fifth Estate has always looked beautiful to me, from the very beginning, typos and all. But even more so lately. It’s always saying something provocative visually, too. There is such a wonderful vitality about it. And obviously the only way to keep it alive and assure longevity is to print the Fifth Estate “at home”—with a printer who is sent to school by the Fifth Estate and Inner City Voice jointly.

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The Metro, Detroit’s city-wide college paper, will be showing the 1965 and 1966 winners of the National Student Association Film Festival. No CIA agents will be present.

The films will be shown at the Detroit Institute of Arts with the 1965 winners being shown at 7:15 and the 1966 ones at 9:30 p.m. Admission will be $1.50 for each showing.

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BERKELEY, Cal. (LNS)—Dick Gregory was a special visitor to the California Peace And Freedom Party headquarters in Berkeley recently: Gregory visited Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party twice while he was here. Gregory’s visit culminated in the opening of a state office for Gregory for President, and the announcement of a boycott against Olympia Beer of Washington State, in support of the Indians’ attempt to control the water that was stolen from them many years ago in Washington.

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WASHINGTON (CPS)—College students voted for Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) and an end to the war in Vietnam in Choice 1968, the national campus presidential primary held April 24.

McCarthy polled 26.7 per cent of the almost 1.2 million votes cast, followed by Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) with 19.9 per cent and Republican Richard Nixon with 18.4 per cent.

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James C. Scott has written extensively on how people have transitioned from tribal societies to civilization as part of the process of state formation, and how resistance to state domination has occurred in this context.

In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, he explores tools for state control of subjects, such as permanent last names, standardization of Language and legal discourse, regularized weights and measures, records of numbers of people and wealth in land and other property, as well as the design of cities and transportation.

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There is a book about the founder of Dow chemical called “Herbert Dow and Creative Chemistry.” Dow Chemicals is the primary manufacturer of napalm. Midland, Michigan is the seat of this bed of creativity.

Last week the Clergy and Layman Concerned about Vietnam sponsored a protest rally of 400 persons at the Dow Corporation stockholders meeting.

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Eldridge Cleaver is Minister of Information for the Black Panthers.

“... the pressing social problems which are feeding the conflagration raging in America’s soul... can no longer be compromised or swept cleverly under the national rug of self-delusion. The possibility of concealment no longer exists, and the only ones deceived are the deceivers themselves. Those who are victimized by these “social problems”—the Negroes, the aged, unemployed and unemployable, the poor, the miseducated and dissatisfied students, the haters of war and lovers of men—have flung back the rug in outraged rebellion, refusing to be silenced until their grievances are uncompromisingly redressed. America has come alive deep down in its raw guts, and vast contending forces of revolutionary momentum are squaring off in this land for decisive showdowns from which no one can purchase sanctuary.

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It’s Late February in central Maine. A group of anarchists and other anti-racists have gathered at the Margaret Chase-Smith bridge in Skowhegan to respond to recent Ku Klux Klan activity around the state.

Anti-Racist Action says “No,” to the Klan in Skowhegan, Maine in Feb. 2017

Anti-Racist Action Maine put out the call to condemn these racist terrorists. Mainers are out on the streets to let our neighbors know we will defend each other from KKK terror. This is not a plea for the authorities to protect us. Only we can protect ourselves.

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EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

Pat Klees

DISTRIBUTION

Eric Watkins

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

ART DIRECTOR

Ed Bania

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Frank Joyce

STAFF

Wilson Lindsey

Ed Rom

Richard Stocker

Marlene Tyre

Michael Tyre

Marilyn Werbe

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“Some people believe that all Negroes carry switchblade knives. Well, it’s not true.”

Thus Detroit’s local TV commentator Lou Gordon ‘continues his technique of cute rumour managing. He’s pretty smooth. He states the rumour first making sure that everyone hears it clearly then, after it has sunk in deeply among his gun-toting white viewers, he makes a mild renunciation of the rumour.

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What RFK’s election would prove is that America is further ahead in its cheerfully cynical acceptance of corruption and back-room deals than had been feared...

First winner of the Other Scenes Yellow Journalism Award (“the underground Pulitzer”) is the New York Free Press for its outrageously creative publication of the names, addresses and telephone numbers of local draft board members. Citation of the OSYJ award reads: “In a time when newspapers prefer to follow rather than lead, when the apparent aim is to mollify the advertisers rather than rock the boat, and when most newspapers put the maintenance of the status quo ahead of the best interests of the readers’, the New York Free Press reminds us that traditionally the best newspapers have always been troublemakers. May their example be widely copied”...

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“To build communism, a new man must be created simultaneously with the material base.”

— Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba.

In the preceding articles, I have dealt with the quality of life in Cuba, the laying of the base of material production, international relations, and other facets of the Cuban revolution. But the most important aspect of the revolution is yet to be described: the creation of the “new man.” This act of creation is the heart of the Cuban revolution. Although there has been little formally written about it, except for Che’s small but important book, Man and Socialism in Cuba, the task of this creation is reflected in the daily lives and the daily consciousness of every participant in the revolution.

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I saw Maharishi speak here January 21^st and then went up to the Plaza Hotel that evening (I’d phoned for tickets to his organization and on return telephone call they invited me up, saying Maharishi wanted to see me)... so surrounded by his disciples I sat at his feet on the floor and listened while he spoke.

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Germinal Gracia (Victor Garcia) August 24, 1919-May 10, 1991

Among Germinal Gracia’s many pseudonyms (Germen, Julio Fuentes, Quipo Amauta), Victor Garcia was the most common. Born in Barcelona, Spain on August 24, 1919, he spent his infancy and boyhood in Mequinenza, a village in Aragon, a fact that he always mentioned with pride. But it was in Barcelona, at the age of 14, that he started working in a textile plant and became a member of the anarcho-syndicalist union, the C.N.T.

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NEW YORK, April 29 (LNS, NY) A new, more fluid style of revolutionary activity on the American campus has been introduced by Columbia University students, black and white, who held physical control of the campus for a week.

The following is a day-by-day recounting beginning with the original demonstration Tuesday, April 23^rd, on Low Library Plaza at noon.

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Please send calendar events to the Fifth Estate, keeping in mind our quarterly schedule.

Deadline for the Winter 2003/04 edition is November 1.

fifthestate@pumpkinhollow.net

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Various dates, cities—Just say no to Dick and Bush Tour All along the west coast and throughout the rest of the country, as Bush travels around to raise funds, people are organizing to stop him. People are coming out for a myriad of reasons, protesting war, heckling the rich, and generally causing trouble. Contact your local Republican headquarters to target the fundraiser near you.

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This fall, people will gather in Detroit to lay the foundations for an anti-authoritarian, grassroots movement of people of color that will organize in their communities against racism and repression. Described as “an organizers’ conference of people sympathetic to the Anarchist movement in various communities of color”, the APOC conference will consist of a weekend of workshops, networking and strategy sessions. Already, groups around the US are organizing benefit concerts to show solidarity and physically support the conference. This conference is for community activists, oppressed and Indigenous peoples, Anarchists and anti-authoritarians of color. THIS IS A PEOPLE OF COLOR ONLY EVENT, sponsored by the Students Movement for Justice at Wayne State U., the Black Autonomy Network of Community Organizers-S.W. Michigan chapter, and our friends in the Anarchist movement.

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Graphic: photo of US Army installation with overhead sign reading Obedience to the law is freedom.

Text superimposed on photo reads:

Rather than inanely repeating the old formula ‘Respect the law’ we say, ‘Despise law and all its attributes!’ In place of the cowardly phrase ‘Obey the law,’ our cry is, ‘Revolt against all laws!’ — Kropotkin

Stencil art is a fun and easy way to reclaim and beautify your neighborhood. Above is just one example—experiment with your own.

Directions:

1. photocopy and enlarge (bigger for better visibility)

2. glue to thin non-corrugated cardboard

3. cut out with exacto knife

4. spray paint (don’t hold the can too close)

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The barn is bursting with new titles & more to come. If you’d like us to review and/or distro your independent publication, bring it on

Midnight Notes, Auroras Of the Zapatistas (2001) $14.00

James Bell, The Last Wizard (2002) $12.00

Paul Garon, The Devil’s Son-in-Law: Petiie Wheatstraw (2003) $15.00 (w/CD)

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a review of

Wild Fermentation by Sandor E. Katz, 2003, 180 pp, $25. vvww.chelseagreen.com

The “hundredth monkey” suggests that if enough animals (including people) begin doing something, the rest will follow. “Chaos theory” suggests that a very small change can set a process in motion which causes an enormous effect. As a single yeast cell will divide and change barley to beer, we can feel empowered to change our lives.

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a review of

Direct Action: An Historical Novel by Luke Hauser

In Direct Action, Luke Hauser writes fiction so steeped in reality that he reproduces an era for us, with all of its excitement and frustrations.

Although the 1980s are generally thought of as a kind of dead zone for progressive activism, in the San Francisco Bay Area the early part of the decade was a time of fervent activism around nuclear issues.

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a review of

A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of Writing from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, edited by Roy San Filipo. AK Press, 2003, San Francisco, 139pp.

Letters to a Young Activist, Todd Gitlin, Basic Books, 2003, 174 pages

I haven’t read either of the books listed above and have no intention of doing so. I’m reviewing them in the manner all of us do each time we peruse a library or bookstore shelf. “Hmm, that looks interesting; no, that probably will be boring,” etc.

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Never SUBMIT! Contribute to the Fifth Estate!

Next issue: CULTURE, RACE, & RITUAL

deadline: November 1^st

Q: When radicals adopt, appropriate, or adapt the cultures and rituals of marginalized minority groups, they

(a) disrespect the integrity of the original forms through cultural tourism and neo-racism;

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Black Indian identity charts a course that, by its own hybrid nature, sails beyond the simplistic binaries commonly associated with racial nationalism, while at the same time carving out its own cross-cultural position in the struggle against white supremacy.

In relation to the anarchist/Black Indian connection, as Wilson Harris has noted, “The very ground beneath us has been stolen. I think that’s why Proudhon wrote his book, Property IS Theft.” Harris then goes on to trace his own struggle as a Black Guyanan to the anti-colonial revolt of 1687 fomented by the combined forces of African maroons and Arawak Indians.

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Josh MacPhee of Chicago has been very busy this summer. Touring his stencil graffiti art show to infoshops, cafes, independent art galleries, and even the Allied Media Conference, selling prints from five to fifty dollars to raise funds for a book of collected stencils from around the country.

MacPhee facilitates “Just Seeds,” organizing artists from all walks, styles, and artistic backgrounds to create beautiful works of educational art entitled “Celebrate Peoples History.” Each poster is a highly unique tribute, honoring radical speakers, thinkers, organizers, agitators, and events. This is the history our textbooks seemed to have “left out.” The series pays homage to such prominent figures as Harriet Tubman, Augusto Sandino, and Fred Hampton. Shining light on events like Little Bighorn, the Stonewall riots, and the Battle of Homestead. This project continues to grow as new artists approach MacPhee with new ideas.

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Fifth Estate Letters Policy

We welcome letters commenting on our articles or other topics, but can’t print every one we receive. Each, however, is read and considered for publication.

Letters via email or on disk are appreciated, but typewritten and legibly handwritten ones are acceptable. Length should not exceed two double-spaced pages. All submissions must have a name and return address, which will be withheld upon request.

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Since our Fall 2002 edition, we’ve begun to use regular themes to encourage wider participation from our extended community of collaborators and to provide an opportunity to look more deeply into the most compelling ideas, questions, and struggles facing anti-authoritarians today. To that end, we’d like to provide a “sneak preview” into probable future themes. This winter, we’ll look at “Culture, Race, and Ritual” (see page 45 for “the call”). Next spring, we’ll take on two taboo topics: Conspiracy and Elections. Over the summer, we will turn our hearts and minds to The Wild. In the Fall of 2004, we’ll address unschooling and anti-authoritarian education for people of all ages. By Spring 2005, we’ll be ready to look at the History of the FE in more depth as we begin to celebrate our 40^th anniversary. We’ve already started planning the Revolution Everywhere Tour for 2005, including stops at the Anarhchist Book Fair in San Francisco, the Allied Media Conference in Northwest Ohio, and other key gatherings TBA.

Analyzing the contemporary struggle against the increasingly concentrated power of mega-corporations (and of those politicians who serve them) is actually a struggle against the pathologies of an international ruling class. In the most general terms, it is a fight for non-alienated self-realization, decentralization, and voluntary social relations, against individuals, institutions, and structures that are fixated on expanding the capacities for domination.

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In late March, Takoma, a 22 year-old Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin trained by the US Navy to detect underwater mines for Marine Corps reconnaissance divers, went absent without leave while on patrol in the Persian Gulf outside of Umm Qasr. In an effort to cover their embarrassment, a public relations official for the Marines claimed that Takoma was recaptured on May 5, but these reports have not been confirmed by independent investigators. Given all the other lies about the Iraqi invasion issued at Pentagon press conferences, we at Fifth Estate consider Takoma to be on the run somewhere in the Indian ocean.

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As long as people have been ruled, they have expressed their dissent. Throughout the modern era, art has been a powerful tool to voice this political defiance.

With their bold woodcut images of ruling classes and mocking skeletons, art movements like the Taller de Graphica Popular (“the People’s Graphics”) founded in Mexico City in 1937 served not only as satirical commentary but were inclusive enough to inform illiterate people of current events. Further, the Dadaist’s anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities were fueled by their disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. Their disregard for traditional artistic values still resonates today, especially in punk and avant-garde communities.

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I had seen the skinny man with the beard before. The last time was at an anti-war rally in Duluth, I think. He had been collecting signatures for a petition to legalize hemp, or to urge the UN into investigating voter fraud in Florida in 2000, or some such thing. He didn’t have his clipboard this time. He had on a faded-out “Wellstone for Senate” t-shirt which must have been a few years old since Wellstone had been conveniently killed in a strange small plane crash three weeks before the 2002 congressional elections. But this guy didn’t look like he was wearing the t-shirt ironically.

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Reprint from Fifth Estate #128, April 1–14, 1971

KHESANH, South Vietnam—53 men of Bravo Troop, 1^st Squadron, 1^st Cavalry, Americal Division refused orders to move into a battle zone near the Laotian border March 20 to retrieve abandoned equipment.

One of the men in the two platoons, which refused to obey the command, said he did not follow orders because “the reason given wasn’t a very good one... I didn’t see any sense in risking any more lives.”

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Issue #12 of Internationale Situationniste reported that, during a general strike in Paris on March 10, 1969, a group identified only as the “Guy-Lassac Street Barricaders” erected a handmade bronze-coated plaster statue of Charles Fourier. The new monument was placed on the empty pedestal where his statue had stood before being torn down during the Nazi Occupation of the 1940s. Within a day, however, French security forces had restored control to the street and the technical service of the Paris prefecture tore the Fourier statue down; like the Nazis, the French government obviously regarded the presence of this early nineteenth-century utopian writer to be a distinct threat to public order.

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SAN DIEGO (August 1) A banner reading “You build it, we burn it. ELF” was found at the site of a blaze that destroyed the wooden frame of an upscale five-story apartment complex, prompting suspicions that the fire was part of an anti-urban sprawl initiative. The construction site is in northern San Diego, near the University of California in the so-called Golden Triangle, one of the region’s faster-growing areas. The project was being built by a corporation that is Southern California’s second largest apartment developer. The day after the fire, a small hand-printed sign taped to a nearby traffic barrier read: “Thank You, E.L.F. Burn Baby Burn.”

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Mother

It is time you knew

I am guilty of the following charges:

Attempting to lead an unarmed insurrection,

33 unpaid parking tickets (to date)

compulsive jaywalking,

second helpings with my fingers,

embezzlement of milk money for 45-rpm records,

forced humor,

passing on sensitive information,

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“Welcome to the Republic of Darkness and Unemployment”

— Baghdad graffiti

It’s hard to be gleeful about the deteriorating situation in Iraq even when realizing that everything the anti-war movement predicted about Bush’s invasion for oil and empire has come true. Even mainstream publications are using the word “quagmire” to describe the situation while seventy percent of American’s in a recent Newsweek poll think the US will be bogged down in its $1 billion a month occupation efforts for years.

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Mutiny is such a potent threat to military organizations—and the States who use them avoid even mentioning the word. Instead, military commanders and civil authorities fall back on euphemism in order to avoid announcing the news that they most fear—during the First World War, for example, a major mutiny by French troops was mentioned in murmurs as “collective indiscipline”; while the war dragged on in Vietnam, the US Army reported increasing numbers of “battlefield refusals.”

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Civil disobedience

Has many permutations

You can block the streets in front of

The United Nations

You can lay down on the tracks

Keep the nuke trains out of town

Or you can pour gas on the condo

And you can burn it down

..

Chorus:

So here’s a toast to the night

Three cheers and a grunt

To the Earth Liberation Front

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In Southern California, the wild summers of 1960 and 1961 were a prelude to a series of famous youth insurrections: the watts riot of 1965, the so-called “Hippie riots” on Sunset Strip between 1966 and 1970, and the Eastside high school “blowouts” of 1968–69. [In the early sixties], Black youth in Los Angeles and elsewhere began to fight spontaneously for substantive control over community space—a thrust that would later become enshrined in the Black Panther Party’s program for “self-determination.”

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For me, daydreaming is a kind of prayer. To drift, to feel my body gently floating, to move with memory and the suggestiveness of phenomena, to be thankful, to enjoy, to praise this life with its wonder and vitality...this is prayerfulness. And sometimes I wonder, there must be nothing better than to be a Master of Ceremonies, making pilgrimages out for the pine boughs to bring back to the village to reanimate the village goddess, and bring people closer together. This world of beauty and dreams -and making peace with life.

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translated & edited by FE collective members

This article was written by a participant in the VAAAG, the Village Alternatif Anticapitaliste et Anti-guerre (the Alternative Anti-capitalist and Anti-war Village) that was created during the Group of Eight summit meeting (G8) in Evian, Switzerland during June 2003. The anonymous author wants to make it clear that s/he was not a member of the coalition protesting the summit, the Convergence des Luttes Anti-Autoritaires et Anticapitalistes Contre le G8 (CLAAAC G 8). This text, the author says, is “addressed to comrades and companions on the other side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.”

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Insubordination—literally, the utter refusal to submit to order—is not always revolutionary, but it may be one of the first signs that a revolution is brewing.

The insubordinate can be someone rebelling against an institution to which she formerly conformed or someone who never has been any part of the system of authority. Sometimes ideological and sometimes instinctual, insubordination burns the nerves.

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In November 2003, Miami, Florida, is hosting both the eighth round of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) trade negotiations and the eighth Americas Business Forum. Trade Ministers from 34 nations in the Western hemisphere, and hundreds of their closest commerce-inclined friends, will descend on this city for a week of business and pleasure: the business of advancing capitalism’s parasitic agenda, and the pleasure of getting away with it. This is to be our region’s principal contribution to the much-heralded age of globalization.

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These excerpts come from the English section of the El Libertario website. El Libertario is a collective in Venezuela that has been active for eight years now.

Everything with the people, nothing with the power!

Against a broken State and an inefficient market economy, self-management!

Against the maneuvering of the few, the autonomy of the many!

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In August, Starbucks stores in San Francisco had “for lease” signs and letters saying, the stores were closing pasted on the windows and doors. In all 17 Starbucks were hit with the official-looking signs, mostly in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. At many stores, the windows were soaped up and the locks were jammed, leaving employees waiting outside to start their shifts. One flyer posted outside one store said, “We are moving over and making room for local coffee bars, our last best example of our commitment to fine coffee and local culture that got us into the business in the first place.”

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We gather today not to praise capitalism, but to bury it. Rejoice, the great god greed is dead! It lived far too long, laying waste to all it touched. Its chains have been broken, its tentacles severed. The world is free to breathe again; to grow, to flourish, no longer weighed down by this voracious monster.

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