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THE RUSSIAN TRAGEDY Alexander Berkman

The Russian Tragedy first appeared in 1922 as three separate pamphlets (The Russian Tragedy, The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party & The Kronstadt Rebellion), and is compiled here under one cover for the first time. In it, Berkman lays bare the true facts of the Leninist ‘workers state.’

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Recent articles in the Michigan State News and in Penthouse Magazine have exposed the existence of a nation-wide “surveillance clearinghouse” which exchanges names and files collected by the intelligence units of over 200 member police agencies.

This clearinghouse is the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU). It was created in 1956 in California as a voluntary “club” of police intelligence agencies in seven Western states. Over the years it has grown to include over 200 agencies-in Michigan its affiliates include the Department of the Attorney General, the Detroit, Flint and Warren Police Departments and the State Police.

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The law suit seeking to stop Detroit and State Police political spy units and open up secret police files may be drawing to its final stages. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge James Montante has appointed liberal Detroit attorney Arthur Tarnow as a monitor for releasing the files after determining the best procedure “at a reasonable cost to the city and state.”

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Is it possible or desirable to build large-scale anarchist organizations? Maybe the question is premature. Re-building a human order is not a matter of a group of theoreticians or activists imposing its program on intractable people. Reclaiming a human existence depends, first of all, on people fashioning cooperative forms of life.

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“The area between 55^th and 62^nd streets, St. Clair Avenue and the lake became an inferno. Gas flowed down the streets and into the sewers. The slightest spark exploded it. Manhole covers flew high into the air, then fell like bombs back on the fleeing crowds.

“Twenty-nine acres of homes and stores were completely gutted. At the center of the death zone temperatures reached nearly 3000 degrees. Birds were incinerated as they flew and fell back to the blazing streets. Gas in the streets ignited, making them rivers of flame....

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In attempts to find new markets in which to extract more profit, drug companies are trying to find new ways to keep workers feeling well and on the job.

Their latest interest in industrial health was prompted by the alarming number of workers who are becoming ill from exposure to solvents, excess heat, mercury poisoning, etc.

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FE Note. The December 1976 Fifth Estate carried a critique by Charles Reeve (see “The Revolt Against Work or Fight for the Right to Be Lazy,” p. 9) of the contentions of John and Paula Zerzan that the crisis point in capitalism today revolves around worker alienation, job refusal, sabotage, absenteeism, etc. Reeve asserted that on one hand, the significance of this phenomenon is overplayed by the Zerzans and on the other, that to the extent that it does exist, it represents nothing new in workers’ struggles.

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According to all reputable climatologists, an immediate ninety percent reduction in material and energy production is required to meet the goal of limiting the average worldwide temperature increase by a disastrous two degrees Fahrenheit. At the current rate of fossil fuel extraction and use, the earth will experience a catastrophic increase of four to nine degrees by the end of this century.

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Lakabe, a Basque country village dating back to the Middle Ages, now an intentional, self-sustaining community.

Sales Santos-Vera and Itziar Madina-Elguezabal live in the heart of the Basque Mountains, where the borders between France and Spain are blurred and the mists hide the paths once serving smugglers and antifascist guerrillas. Sales moved here from Extremadura along with his family as a boy.

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Our finances present a decidedly brighter picture this month, although a few creditors like IBM are demanding large sums from us for back debts. The sole reason we are able to peek a little above the waterline is due to the generosity and support from our readers—from one-time donors, and especially from our growing list of sustainers. We will probably still need to hold a benefit in April, but we can get completely out of the entertainment business and concentrate on the newspaper if a score more people would become sustainers. If you are so motivated, please use the coupon farther back in the paper...

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On February 19, thousands of heavily armed riot police were massed on the Elbe River just outside of Brokdorf, W. Germany to prevent 10,000 demonstrators from occupying the site of a new nuclear power station as had been done on a previous occasion (see last issue).

Protest at Brokdorf, W. Germany, 1977

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Unlike any other living organism on the planet, women are confronted by their bodies. A woman’s biologic reproductive capacity functions inexorably until old age renders it obsolete; until that time they are faced with the possibility of pregnancy. But it is the very cognizance of the relationship between intercourse and childbearing that makes woman’s situation unique: reason presupposes some measure of choice over whether a woman will bear children or not.

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Dear Fifth Estate:

I refuse to renew my subscription to your radical rag for the simple reason I have some absurdist evidence you’ve been running a bogus journalistic revolution in the Motor City. That’s right! I talked to Mr. Green jeans yesterday and he said you guys are being FUNDED BY THE CIA! It does make sense, you know. After all, how can you freaks continue to run a radical rag with NO advertising, continually asking your subscribers to put up bucks here and there and go to benefit parties. Come on. I’ve got a degree from Wayne State and I’ve been out of work since November 1975 (actually I’m bragging but the point is where the hell are you guys getting your money?) I actually don’t give a shit since I don’t give a shit about money any more than you guys do. The thing is, if you guys are being funded by the CIA that means you can continue perpetually with your anarchist ideals and absurdist philosophies. Something fishy in Detroit, and it ain’t Mother Waddles.

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Two notes on last issue: It was dated February 1977, skipping the issue which would have been dated January to allow us to bring the publication in line with when the paper actually appeared; you did not miss an issue.

The unattributed quote on the cover of the last issue was by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and comes from a section of The Gay Science entitled “The Eulogists of Work” and bears a striking resemblance to contemporary critiques of wage work. A section is reprinted here:

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On October 17 and 18, 2015, anarchists in the small Catalan city of Manresa held the first Gathering of Libertarian Infrastructures. Outside of English speaking North America, libertarian is a synonym for anarchist. The event was the result of over a year of informal debates and longer collective processes in which comrades sought the ideal forms of coordination and organization, and the best methods for spreading anarchist ideas and practices.

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The Layabouts onstage at FE’s big birthday bash, September 19, 2015.

This edition of the Fifth Estate marks the 50^th anniversary of its publishing, with much of the celebrations occurring in a manner we never anticipated. There are exhibitions at two prestigious Detroit museums, a jammed packed dance/ concert with hundreds in attendance featuring The Layabouts, an anarchist rock/ska band, talks to the Detroit Press Club, radio and TV coverage, art and political workshops and panels at the museums, and tours with university classes and other groups at the museums which are selling Fifth Estate t-shirts. Whew!

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FE note: Comrades working to revive anarchism in Cuba need our immediate financial support. For U.S. dollar donations, visit the Cuban Anarchist Solidarity Fund. For Euro-zone contributions, click here.

Isbel, Mario & Jimmy (photo: Gabriel Uchida)

Changes in the Cuban state’s regulation of private enterprise and in the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. over the last decade are opening up new possibilities and dangers for Cuban society.

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a review of

Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity, Writings & Speeches, 1878–1937, Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, 2003

As a cop once said during her lifetime, Lucy Parsons is “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” So strong was her anti-authoritarian presence that 62 years after her death, the revolutionary spirit of Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) continues to arouse the ire of the Chicago police.

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a review of

We Want Freedom: A life in the Black Panther Party by Mumia Abu-Jamal. South End Press: Cambridge, 2004

In his new book We Want Freedom, acclaimed activist Mumia Abu-Jamal has re-examined the history of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and has situated them in a broader history of Black resistance for a new generation to learn from their successes and failures.

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John Moore was a controversial but intriguing English anarchist writer who passed away of a heart attack in October 2002 at the age of 45. He was the author of such short books as Anarchy & Ecstasy, Lovebite, and The Book of Levelling, and widely-read essays such as “A Primitivist Primer” and “Maximalist Anarchism/Anarchist Maximalism.” His “The Appeal of Anarchy” appeared on the back cover of Fifth Estate in the 1990s. When he died, he left behind an uncompleted anthology: I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. It featured essays from a dozen writers, from six countries, on the historical and conceptual relationships between Nietzsche and anarchism. I inherited the project the next year, and finally—eight years after its initiation—the book is finally complete and will be published in December by Autonomedia. I want to offer the following historical research, culled from both the anthology and elsewhere, to contribute to the discussion that will undoubtedly follow the publication of this work.

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This year marks the 30^th anniversary of publication of the pamphlet Wildcat: Dodge Truck, June 1974, written and produced by several of the people who became the core of the Fifth Estate collective the next year when it was transformed into an overtly council communist, and then, anarchist publication. A short excerpt is reprinted below.

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Related: Fifth Estate celebrates 50^th year with exhibits & festivities

Detroit Historical Museum

Runs to August 2016

Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner once famously said, “If you can remember anything about the 60s, you weren’t really there.”

He was wrong. Start the Presses reminds us why one of the country’s oldest and Detroit’s first 60’s era underground paper was so special and why, 50 years after its creation, we still remember.

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Federico Arcos, 1947

Federico Arcos (July 18, 1920-May 23, 2015), a lifelong anarchist, participated in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War in the 1930s, and later took part in the antifascist underground there. He immigrated to Canada in 1952, where he continued his commitment to anarchist goals. He eventually compiled an extensive archive of anarchist writings and other material.

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I have just left Black Rock City, the site of Burning Man, a yearly arts festival and temporary autonomous zone based on radical self-expression, and find myself in the paradoxical situation of being inspired to give written form to things that are utterly inexpressible.

In the desert of Nevada, Black Rock City is constructed entirely of art. It exists in material form for only one week in August every year, and then it disappears, as though into the ethers, its citizens dispersed to various faraway places.

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Pioneering French anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied “gift economies” like those of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. A former amateur boxer, he was a burly man with a playful, rather silly manner, the sort of person always juggling a dozen brilliant ideas rather than building a great philosophical system.

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Imagine an alternate dimension where

dervishes are roaming around America

sects of Swedenborgian hobos, etc.

You’re there camping in the cemetery

long black hair in tangles ghostwhite face

Sion County is remote, rural, and poor, and always has been. Around 1870 a breakaway sect of German Amish-type farmers—the Sabbatarian Anabaptists of the “Seventh Day Dunkers,” moved there from Pennsylvania and settled down in the river valleys of the county’s northeast.

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“Lady

with the very modern illness

agoraphobia

but ancient as fear

in a Greek marketplace

Lady

I have seen your face

crumple and break in ecstasy

of terror of horror of being

alive in the sewer world

feeling alien thoughts beating

at your mind an office desk

protruding from one ear

a subway train from the other

bells clanging gongs shouting

while you’re washing the dishes

terror

of the market place

and falling

falling into that white place

without shadows

where the rivers are milk

and Lethe dreams

and nothingness has no horizon...”

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The fear of communism comes with the notion that the State will take away our things, force us to share with unworthy neighbors, and leave us without self-determination. That contributes to why we need to replace communism with communalism.

To avoid old-school communism and the welfare office, the working-class and middle-class servants of post-industrial capitalism willingly suffer all sorts of indignities, while tolerating, for the global underclass, an unprecedented neo-slavery of staggering horror. A unipolar, neoliberal, global capitalism has emerged, and we face the accelerating influence of a global junta motivated by purely mercantile interests. The crushing one-world economic system has resuscitated the need for a revolutionary alternative; to counter the new boss, radicals might create a sustainable, communal opposition. To reclaim the communal alternative, we must un-hinge communism from its authoritarian baggage and purge forever the tendency to form vanguardist bureaucracies when voluntary, horizontal associations are all that we need. Abolishing wage work and private property, socializing all necessities such as food, land, and water: these demands continue the classic precepts of anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian communism. But today, we can extend these classic notions and envision an even more radical gift economy as the only alternative to capitalism.

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Perhaps it’s for the best that you don’t have a memory of yourself centuries ago as you looked proudly around your community—a community deeply embedded in a habitat. This is where you first made love, learned to swim, caught your first fish, perhaps even fought a first battle against belligerent neighbors. Practically everybody in your community knows the names of the flora and fauna of your habitat, where the berries are, when the birds leave and return. There is a common history that is told and re-told. Most of you have felt a kinship with the totality of your habitat—its weather patterns, rocks, streams, mountains and its unique smells and sounds—the singular music of your home. In short, you have a sense of place, you belong. These are all my relations, you will exclaim, as you look around.

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From July 1845 to September 1847, Thoreau lived at Walden Pond outside of Concord in a small cabin he built largely from scrap. Uninformed cynics typically criticize him either for staying close to town instead of seeking authentic wilderness—or for staying in the cabin only briefly; Thoreau himself made no great claims for his experiment, as he called it, explaining that he was attempting to “live deliberately,” to explore himself, to turn his attention to the woods. (In his essay, “Walking,” he also says that he prefers a kind of “border life” at the boundary between civilization and wilderness). Thoreau finished Walden after returning from the woods to embark on the “other lives” he said he still needed to live.

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“In view of the solutions that are asked of us, routine completely re-upholstered in velvet is dangerous. Routine hatches more distress and death than an imaginary utopia.”

—Andre Breton

Green Anarchy #17 (Summer 2004) featured a rather amorphous seven-page article by one A Morefus as to why utopianism and anarchy are fundamentally incompatible. The author criticizes the totalizing impulses of utopian thought with a totalizing critique that glibly and thinly covers a few thousand years, from Plato’s Republic and the Shakers to the Bauhaus, the Third Reich, anarcho-primitivism, and post-human cybertopias.

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The Republican National Convention (RNC) was the ultimate slight to New York: those who made careers and a quick buck off the September 11^th events returned to feast like vultures on the corpses of the dead, attempting to rally support for a failing war and a disastrous regime by parading around near the site of Ground Zero.

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As Bush’s Iraq quagmire begins to take on the same qualities as the war in Vietnam—fighting an insurgent population, mounting US casualties, increased slaughter of civilians, destruction of the country to “save it,” no exit strategy—so, too, does military opposition.

Ex-Sgt. Camilo Mejia holding an anti-war sign in Iraq. After refusing to report for duty, he was sentenced to a year in jail.

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This is the story about how I got a C- grade in my high school economics class. Mr. Burns told the class on the first day that we were going to spend all of our time playing the “Stock Market Game.”

We were given an imaginary lump sum of $10,000 at the beginning of September and our assignment was to invest it in stocks. We read the financial page of the local newspaper at the beginning of every class and compared notes from cable television financial news programs to track our make-believe investments. Mr. Burns said that the highest grade would go to the three people who made the most money in the class. Extra points would be given to those whose stock value had the greatest increase.

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I was in New York during the Republican convention, mostly staying as far as possible from Madison Square Garden, but greatly enjoying the joyous spirit of counter-cultural expression that filled the city simultaneous with the Republican invasion. On August 31, 2004, I went to participate in a “green bloc” action called “true security,” with the theme of creative representations of a better world. The meeting place was the steps of the public library on 42^nd Street and 5^th Avenue. I arrived early and sat on the steps reading. Those library steps epitomize public space and free speech and have served for generations as a meeting place.

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“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

— Eduardo Galeano

The following economy and community section deals at least as much with our visions for different and possibly better realities as it does with our critique of the current and devastating situations within capitalist economic relations. However, we can and should note that the statistics concerning global wealth and poverty are staggering. The elite classes experience unprecedented luxuries while the rest of the world struggles. The working class slips into disastrous debt and the under-class teeters toward catastrophic hunger, disease, and poverty.

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Class & Solidarity 15

Intro to Economics 16

Last Ticket to Utopia 17

Political Economy, Perennial Economy: Marx, Thoreau, & Us 18

Land & Liberty 22

Refusing The Marketplace 24

Communalism of Desire 26

Pastoral Letter 28

Give it Away 32

Burning Man 33

Wildcat Reprint 34

Nietzsche & The Anarchists 36

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The Haymarket Tragedy of 1886 has been remembered by anarchists, workers, labor organizers, and historians as a seminal event in humanity’s ongoing fight for free speech, free assembly, and the abolition of wage slavery. Around the world, major cities have erected monuments and named plazas in honor of the Haymarket martyrs and the importance of their trial, but until September 14, 2004, no substantial marker had ever been erected where the incident occurred, near the corner of Randolph and Des Plaines in Chicago.

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Mutiny. This word, fearsome to the brass of any army (but joyful to anti-war activists), was left out of October media accounts about a US Army Reserve unit whose soldiers refused to deliver fuel along a route in Iraq they considered too dangerous to travel.

Eighteen soldiers, including the commander of the 343^rd Quarter-master Company, refused to under-take a fuel delivery north of Baghdad in what they characterized as a “suicide mission,” given the frequency of attacks and the lack of armor for their unit. The commander was relieved of duty with the hope that the entire incident could be swept under a rug already showing great bulges from previous sweepings.

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Throughout 2005, we will celebrate our anniversary by spreading the ideas of revolution that made us notorious to authority and noted by readers everywhere as a consistent, intelligent, and even humorous tool for change.

From the suburban Detroit home of a 17-year-old high school student in 1965, to a gritty, inner-city Cass Corridor basement with an ever-changing revolutionary collective to a remote Tennessee barn of the current communal and editorial core group, the Fifth Estate has remained what the FBI called a voice “supporting the cause of revolution everywhere.”

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FIFTH ESTATE #367, Winter, 2004–2005, Vol. 39, No. 4, page 3

Special thanks to artist-activist Joy Garnett for providing us with our cover illustration, taken from her 2004 painting “Burn.” Garnett’s paintings are based on mass-media news photographs of figures swept up in states of extreme emotional or physical expression, from street riots to rock ‘n’ roll stage performances. One of her paintings, “Molotov,” is taken from a 1979 photograph of a Sandinista hurling a flaming Pepsi bottle; it prompted a copyright lawsuit claiming that Garnett “stole” the image. In response to threats from the intellectual property mafia, artists who challenge the idea that media images (especially those that are supposedly documentarian) can be owned, licensed, bought and sold have begun an action campaign called “Joywar.” For more information on Joywar, copyright, and political economy of images, see Garnett’s essay “Steal This Look” from the Summer 2004 issue of the on-line journal “Intelligent Agent”: intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol4_No2_ip_garnett.htm

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It’s finally over. Now we can get back to work. Over the last seven months a surprising number of our comrades were increasingly distracted by the seductive spectacle of humiliating Bush and Cheney on a grand scale. Anarchists I know, respect, and love voted, ferchrissakes, in their overwhelming desire to publicly rub Bush’s nose in it. But in the back of their minds they all knew that a Kerry victory wouldn’t change anything other than infinitesimally retard the atrocities, plunder, and human rights abuses carried out in the name of the USA.

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—Albo Jeavons (www.adanon.org)

This issue on economy marks the Fifth Estate’s last edition of 2004, and as we approach our 40^th anniversary edition, it feels critical to consider the decision we made 30 years ago to become explicitly anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist.

For a brief period in the early 1970s, FE flirted with the kind of alternative journalism that we expect from weeklies like Nashville Scene, Detroit’s Metro Times, and the hundreds of other free papers of that ilk. During this time, FE also attempted to run itself as a business. This phase of the project was a failure. To mark “the last issue of the FE as a capitalist enterprise,” the volunteer editors who had been working together as the Eat The Rich Gang (some still involved in the project), made a series of decisions that we affirm today.

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“That man over there say that a woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me a best place...And ain’t I a woman? Look at me. Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me...And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man when I could get it, and bear the lash as well...and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off into slavery. And when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard...”

—And ain’t I a woman? (Sojourner Truth: Speech before the Woman’s Rights Convention at Akron, Ohio, 1851)

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Your voice always whacked me right on the funny bone

of the great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy

that ruled me like a huge copper moon with its phases

until I could partially break free.

How could I help but cherish you for my bad dreams?

Your voice would grate right on the marrow filled bone

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CLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words, Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50)

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A couple of weeks ago I went to the Open City Health Clinic for the first time to see a gynecologist. I was a little nervous, but glad that Open City was there for people like me who have no money. I was excited about getting medical care in a comfortable place, rather than some: doctor’s sterile waiting room, and with people who are part of a new culture. People who are trying to create alternative institutions like the clinic, places that are free, that are staffed by people who are concerned for others, and who give concrete aid—places where all kinds of people can come together to talk, and not be as separated from each other as we usually are.

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Military life is no sweet deal for anyone. We are aware of the oppression and harassment meted out to our GIs, but what about our sisters, the WAFS in the service?

The WAFS I talked to are not gung-ho! So why do they join? One WAF I talked to put it this way: “We are tricked. They promise us a career, choices, job training and they tell us rosey stories about traveling the world. Once we are in it’s a whole different scene. They keep you busy with paper work or some shit job and the attitude of the guys is so bad. They treat us like scum.”

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A few of us got together to talk, as women, about masturbation, because we felt that it is an important and much-neglected topic. Here is the resulting conversation:

Carol: I can’t remember ever masturbating when I was a child. And I know I see little girls do it alt the time!

Joanne: I did it a lot when I was a little girl, with a stuffed elephant I had, and I always had this feeling that my mother was watching me. I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I used to look for her feet under the door. Then I just stopped. When I was five or six, I started believing the chastity thing—and thinking that sex and those parts of your body were nasty.

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I’ve just discovered why it’s been so hard to write this article. I was really hung up on the word “Lesbian.” I had never applied this label to myself. With this label came associations of sick, abnormal, neurotic and dyke. But if my actions and attitudes are labeled lesbian, then I know that those associations are wrong and only reflect the sick attitudes of this society.

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