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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

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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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This year the Ford motor company celebrates its 100^th anniversary. To proponents and critics alike, Ford is the perfect illustration of the corporate world-view. Henry Ford’s rationalization of the assembly-line process was a great advance for industrial technology, and the mass production of the automobile led inevitably to the creation of a world—through auto-centric urban design and the creation of America’s highway system—in which the automobile became an expensive necessity rather than a luxury.

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People arrested during the January 20 Inauguration Day demonstrations are facing up to 75 years in prison as the Trump administration is bringing the hammer down on protests.

This is being met by an organized legal pushback on the part of the defendants, and by increased solidarity actions.

On January 20 (J20), thousands of people went to Washington D.C. to oppose the inauguration of President Donald Trump. While the day’s events were largely overshadowed in the mainstream media by the Women’s March on January 21—which drew hundreds of thousands of people to the capital—January 20 was an inspirational day of resistance.

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Recently, several American peace activists, who traveled to Iraq to act as “human shields”, have been notified that they are subject to fines and jail time by the US Government. The government is fining the activists $10,000 for traveling to Iraq in violation of US sanctions against Iraq.

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The Museum of Capitalism (MOC), in Oakland, California, was a provocation not solely for being situated in the Jack London waterfront district, a gentrified marina area, but also for occupying a white elephant of a building erected just as the entire US economy collapsed.

The so-called Great Recession of 2007 could just as appropriately be called the Great Economic Coma, and the capacious future food market that the Museum reclaimed for its quarters, stands as the unintended main exhibit—a cadaver of capitalism.

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Anarchist solidarity can take many forms, including collecting books, pamphlets, and letters. Through such activity, comrades active in the world’s anarchist archives are part of anchoring an important segment of the struggle for a libertarian and egalitarian world.

They are helping to maintain a living connection between present-day anarchist activities and that of yesterday’s rebels whose values and goals continue to inspire.

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The rising tide of fascism and organized political violence of the Right, particularly the mobilization of street-level right-wing forces, such as the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, have returned the question of self-defense to the center of anarchist and antifascist concerns. This has become more burning following the brutal fascist mobilization and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. The murder there of Heather Heyer by a neo-Nazi gives the issue of self-defense life or death importance.

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Solidarity and Mutual Aid, two anarchist bedrock principles, are being tested in the real world with the rise of the fascist right.

Although small in numbers, they have gained social and political space as the result of the election of Donald Trump.

We, like many others, pledge they will find no home, no safe haven from which to spread their toxic message of racism and authoritarianism. We will also defend ourselves and at-risk populations from the physical and political threat they pose.

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Asheville Global Report

P.O. Box 1504

Asheville, NC 28802

Phone/fax: 828-236-3103

Web: www.agrnews.org

Email: editors@agrnews.org

A sister publication to FE and an ambitious weekly, the AGR crew covers news underreported by mainstream media, believing that a free exchange of information is necessary to organize for social change. AGR is distributed free every Thursday in Asheville and other cities, and is published weekly on the world wide web at www.agrnews.org. For out-of-towners, AGR is available for $50 for one year, 52 issues; $25 for six months, 26 issues. Donations: We gladly accept donations. Asheville Global Report is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

It’s Friday night, and a hundred sweaty freaks are dancing their asses off to the sounds of a Cyndi Lauper cover band. Courtney is standing on a stool by the front collecting money, but no one’s ever turned away for lack of funds around here. The cash she collects will go to benefit the local women & transgendered health collective. Paintings from the last art opening are still hanging on the walls, and out front dozens of beautiful, grungy people are smoking cigarettes and networking like mad.

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FIFTH ESTATE #362, Fall, 2003, Vol. 38, No. 3, page 4

The Fifth Estate (FE) is an unincorporated, cooperative magazine publishing since 1965. As opposed to professionals who publish to secure wages or invest in the media information industry, our collective consists of volunteer writers, artists, and editors--friends who produce the paper as an expression of resistance to an unjust and destructive society.

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This summer, the Rule of Thirds recently dubbed by the Nashville Scene as a “subversive art space”—played host to numerous politically proactive collectives. June saw the educational and entertaining Upside Down Culture Collective hailing from our other outpost: Detroit. They shared a mix of radical art history, puppetry, music, and readings, in promotion for their newly released book All the Days After, a collection of art and poetry ranging from creatively pissed off to outright heart wrenching, in response to the events on and after September 11^th. These guys are warm, funny, and intelligent: turning a culture upside down in a city near you or at

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Since the Fifth Estate refuses to publish the voice of capital, advertisements—the normal source of financing ‘newspapers—we depend on you through your subscriptions, newsstand purchases, and donations to insure our survival.

This issue was made possible through a combination of the above sources as well as a series of regional benefits held on our behalf. The most recent ones occurred in Chattanooga, Asheville, “Punk-n-holler,” and Detroit and combined raised over $1000, with $850 coming from the latter event alone. This provided us with almost half of what we needed to print, mail, and ship this issue. So, thanks to the many performers, organizers, and attendees who made them so successful.

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Our backyard bonfire crackles, dimly lighting the faces of neighbors and their dogs emerging from the shadows. Secure with our bottled water, red wine and campfire grill, over a dozen of us trade clumsily barbecued chicken, whitefish, and green peppers, along with vignettes of the worst power outage in American history.

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Asheville, North Carolina, August 6. Ten Asheville women from Women in Black (WIB) found themselves in court on Aug. 6 faced with charges of trespassing. WIB is an international peace network that was started in Israel in 1988 by women protesting against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. They wear black as a symbol of sorrow for all victims of war, for the destruction of people, nature, and the fabric of life.

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Coming out of antifa smashups with fascists, in Charlottesville and Berkeley in August, condemnation of those physically fighting the alt-right has given new life to Trump’s charge that “many sides” are responsible for violence at anti-fascist actions.

And, some on the left are contributing to this.

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These are anarchistic times—times in which increasing numbers of people are resisting the horrors of contemporary society by engaging in direct action without waiting for leaders to tell them what to do. So, it is no surprise that anarchists are once again at the center of fights against the capitalist system and the subjugation of the many to the will of the few.

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A former community center that hosted a youth rock scene is now being occupied by activists, seemingly ignored by the authorities. A few blocks away, urban farms are bright patches of green in the landscape, producing vegetables and fruits for the community.

Oakland? Detroit? Manhattan’s Lower East Side?

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This article originally appeared as “Berkeley Strikes the Coral Sea” in Fifth Estate #146, November 25 — December 8, 1971 (Vol. 6 No. 18) page 2

ALAMEDA, Calif.—With a Navy band blaring “Anchors Aweigh,” the USS Coral Sea sailed out of the Golden Gate for Vietnam Nov. 12 despite a mass petition drive by anti-war sailors, an offer of sanctuary to deserters from the Berkeley, Calif. City Council and a threat of mass disruption from civilian picketers.

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From a leaflet by the Angry Workers Group, 2000 Center St., No. 1200, Berkeley CA 94704, which was passed out during Fleet Week in San Francisco, October, 1985.

The past few years have seen a wholesale rewriting of the history of American involvement in Vietnam. From the official government versions of the events to extremely violent television shows and movies like “The Deer Hunter” and “Rambo,” the people who rule us are attempting to glamorize the slaughter of the Indochinese Wars as a prelude to the next war. It might be in the Philippines or Southern Africa, Central America or Korea. It might be fought on five or ten fronts simultaneously with the Soviet Union. Or maybe they’ll send us off to massacre the populations of Spain or Italy or Britain in the suppression of a revolutionary civil war in Western Europe.

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President Reagan came into office with an understanding apparently lacking in the two previous administrations which had been still reeling from the egregious defeat of the U.S. imperial forces in Vietnam: If U.S. capital was to continue to function successfully as a permanent war economy (as it has since 1942), a corresponding war psychosis was going to have to be created to justify programs of economic austerity for the working class and poor while making enormous expenditures of state funds for armaments.

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Errekaleor Bizirik is a large squat occupied by over 150 adults and children in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital city of the Basque Autonomous Community in northern Spain.

Defenders of the Basque Squat are prepared for police assault.

The name, Errekaleor, a contraction of a basque word that means dry river, refers to the plateau on which the neighborhood is situated. Like other large squats in Spain, such as Can Vies (see Fifth Estate, Summer 2017), Errekaleor is resisting police and government efforts to evict the residents.

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In two years, this newspaper will celebrate its 40^th anniversary and carries the distinction of being the longest running, English language, anti-authoritarian publication in American history. Yet, the substantial upsurge in computer use in recent years as a major source for ideas and information may be putting our existence in jeopardy.

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In early August 2003, African-American anarchist revolutionary Sherman Austin was sentenced to one year in jail, a $2000 fine, and three years probation. His crime? Being a black man who published a website with links to bomb-making information.

Sherman Austin

According to experts, the data Austin linked to is widely available—on the Internet and in public libraries. The state attacked Austin because he is black and because he is an anarchist.

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The burden of war always falls heaviest on the toilers. They are taught that their masters can do no wrong and go out in vast numbers to be killed on the battlefield. And what is their reward? If they escape death they come back to face heavy taxation and have their burden of poverty doubled. Through all the ages they have been robbed of the just rewards of their patriotism as they have been of the just rewards of their labors.

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Perhaps the most important thing we learned in Chicago is that we are right. We suspected it all along, but it took clubs and gas and Humphrey’s grinning face to cinch it. We know now for sure that the values of this society are fraudulent and used only to support the unjust system that benefits only the few in positions of economic and political power. The values that we have begun to devise through living and struggling together are superior to the ones of this society. They are revolutionary values and all of us that are serious must begin to live the revolution now as well as struggling to make it a reality.

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Comrades:

You have won a place in my heart forever. The lions’ response to the letter, “Pretty Bad Taste” (FE Vol. 21 No. 1) was right on!

When I started reading the letter, I kind of slunk back, kind of anxiously awaiting the FE’s response. Then, when I read the lions’ response, a roar of laughter came out of me that took the roof off, strung my intestines out of my split gut, and kept me laughing my ass off two blocks down the street!

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a review of

And Yet It Moves: The Realization and Suppression of Science & Technology, by Boy Igor, 1986, 120 pp., $5, Zamisdat Press, GPO Box 1255, Gracie Station, NY NY 10028.

Boy Igor’s provocatively titled text gets off to a start that suggests a real depth. It challenges modern science as inseparable from the development of capitalism and pronounces “proletarian” science as bourgeois as proletarian art or the proletarian state.

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The FE Bookservice may be reached at the same address as the Fifth Estate Newspaper, P.O. Box 02548, Detroit MI 48202 USA, telephone (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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When Cienfuegos Press ceased publishing books several years ago, it left unfilled the anarchist movement’s need for regularly appearing quality titles. Their energetic efforts produced numerous volumes which ranged from the arcane and theoretical (Proudhonist Materialism & Revolutionary Doctrine) to the practical (Towards a Citizens’ Militia) with stops along the way for anthropology, criminology, history, several autobiographies, biographies, and assorted essays on anarchist themes. We thought most of the volumes unavailable, but fortunately they can be obtained through an American affiliate, Cienfuegos Distribution, c/o Soil of Liberty, Box 7056, Powderhorn Sta., Minneapolis, MN 55407. They have a catalog of their titles available, many of which the Fifth Estate Bookstore will soon be ordering.

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Introduction

It is said that the automobile industry created and brought life to the cities, but once again official history dangerously misrepresents and distorts the facts. In reality, it is responsible for the destruction of viable human communities and emblematic of death culture all over the world. The auto industry’s monopolistic power kept Detroit and the rest of the world from creating alternative urban environments and consciously built car cities and a car world, chopped up and destroyed by incredible expressway systems—cities and a world for cars, not for people.

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FE note: This is one of three responses to John Zerzan’s “The Case Against Art,” in FE #324, Fall 1986. The other two articles are: “A ‘Culture-in-Action’” by George Bradford and “Journal Notes on Art” by George Bradford.

Art, Life & Death

John Zerzan’s “Case Against Art” is an opus to the reality principle, Rationalist reaction, a puritanical attempt to reduce the multiverse into a limpid, linear, static version of nature and consciousness. Except for that, it is well-written and a masterly example of philosophical name-dropping.

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Fifth Estate Note: In “Earth Culture-Earth Diet” author William H. Koethke chronicles the life and culture of the inhabitants along New Mexico’s San Francisco River watershed over a millennium up to the present time. At the time he wrote the article William lived in the area described, but has since become a member of the consensus community of Breitenbush Hot Springs in Detroit, Oregon. He recently was arrested for blockading logging crews trying to cut the last remnant of undamaged old growth forest near his community.

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FE note: This is one of three responses to John Zerzan’s “The Case Against Art,” in FE #324, Fall 1986. The other two articles are: “A ‘Culture-in-Action’” by George Bradford and “Art, Life & Death” by Ratticus.

Of course, while in Paris it is one’s duty to see the art and the many monuments. This is called “sightseeing.” You travel thousands of miles; peasants must be killed, perhaps, to get you there. Certainly whole estuaries have been fouled and species pushed over the critical edge toward extinction. But you cannot deny it: you are in Paris to see the sights and the sites. (Some sociologist has written a book describing tourism as paradigmatic of modernity. Without knowing the details of his argument, it is possible to agree that the rootlessness, the craving for authentic experience, and the pseudopraxis which is only another variant of commodity passivity, all of which characterize the modern traveler or tourist, do represent central elements in modern life. By criticizing it, we in no way escape its implications.)

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