Most Recent Additions

On March 15, our last day in Cuba, my wife and I boarded the Hershey Electric Railway in Casablanca, across the harbor from Old Havana, for a 57-mile trip to the town of Matanzas. We were flying back to Toronto from the airport near that city the next morning after eight days on the island. The line was built a century ago by the U.S. candy manufacturer to bring sugar from the fields to Havana harbor, and is the only remaining train of what was once the most developed rail system in Latin America.

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Raoul Vaneigem, along with Guy Debord, was one of the principal theorists of the Situationist International. Active with the SI from 1961–1970, Vaneigem’s most well known book, The Revolution of Everyday Life, contains the slogans that frequently made it onto the walls of Paris during the May 1968 uprising.

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Fifth Estate note: The following text was sent to us anonymously via email. It contained a section following what is here describing an intense prison rebellion at an unnamed institution and without a date of its occurrence.

Although the uprising report was exciting, we had no way to check its authenticity, plus we knew its inclusion would guarantee that our prison subscribers would be denied this edition.

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Syria’s current borders were drawn up by imperial map makers a hundred years ago in the midst of World War I as part of a secret accord between France and Britain to divide the Mideast spoils of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. As the colonial state gave way to the post-independence state, power was transferred from Western masters to local elites.

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Ammunition Books

4403 Second Ave.

Detroit, Michigan, 48201

Bookstore hours:

Mon. thru Fri. 1 pm — 5 pm

A SPECIAL NOTE!

For those of you who have been waiting for your copies of Chris Gray’s book, Leaving the 20^th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, we have just received a letter from a comrade in England saying that he has recently sent us 50 copies by surface mail. They should arrive here in about a month, at which time we shall mail it out to those who have ordered it. Sorry about the delay, and thanks for bearing with us.

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B.K. Brings You the All New SELF-BURGER!!!

A new feature at our inner-city Burger King allows you, the customer, to come through our doors in search of a hamburger and take a chance on becoming hamburger yourself! Continuing our policy of giving random surprises to our customers, Burger King regional supervisor Dan Dilldy hired an armed guard equipped with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun.

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David Rockefeller (left) President of the Chase Manhattan Bank and an unknown accomplice

Roy E. Weber, President of the Michigan Savings & Loan League

Robert McNamara, President of the World Bank

THE SUPPRESSION AND ELIMINATION OF BANKERS

You can help eliminate the number of BANKS and BANKERS who hold up and rob people every day, and win a new and creative life for yourself and others. If you have information that you believe will lead to the suppression and consequent elimination of any BANKERS responsible for the daylight robbery of you and your fellow workers, call your neighbor or friend for assistance.

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This article is the first in a two-part series on the effects that the indiscriminate handling and usage of radioactive waste materials and dangerous chemicals are having, and will have in the future, on human beings and their environment. Part One focuses on the results of chemical accidents and nuclear leakages in the United States and around the world. Part Two, Is Michigan Slated For Nuclear Landfill?, Fifth Estate #277, October 1976, will concern itself specifically with Michigan, and the Federal Government’s intention to test land here for the possible construction of a nuclear waste disposal system.

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“Mistuh Chairman,” the fleshy faced delegate droned, “the Great State of Mississippi, last bastion of slavery, casts all of its redneck ballots for...CLICK!

“CLICK!” The sound was unmistakable—all over America, in cities and small towns, high-rise apartments and wooden shacks, people were busy flipping their television sets to another channel as the Republican party exposed itself on all three major networks for nearly a week of unending boredom.

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1976—A national identification card, as well as 53 other “proposed solutions” to the problems of false identification, drug smuggling, fugitives, welfare abuse and check fraud are currently under debate by the Federal Advisory Committee on False Identification (FACFI), according to a recent issue of Counterspy magazine (Spring ’76).

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To: Judd Arnett, The Detroit Free Press

Lou Gordon, The Detroit News

Lift up a rock in Detroit these days—more correctly, in one of its outlying suburbs—and out will crawl a newspaper columnist.

Regarding your respective columns of August 25 in the Free Press and the News on the subject of street gang violence in the city: In general, when we have been forced to think about you at all, we’ve been inclined to think of you as just two more transparent apologists for the status quo. We’ve always felt it symptomatic of your distorted self-perceptions that you should think your banal and witless observations deserving of the least attention, and symptomatic of this sick society that it should pay you to make them public. We have thought of you, in other words, as fit only to be ignored.

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By the beginning of the second shift on Monday July 12, the huge East Pittsburgh Works of the Westinghouse Electric Company was shut tight by a wildcat strike of production workers.

This was the first plant-wide walk-out in twenty years, the last being a six month strike in 1956 which ended in bitter defeat and demoralization. While this re-emergence of mass activity at this central plant (where some 9500 blue collar workers manufacture gigantic turbines) alone makes these events deserving of analysis, the actual unrolling of the strike presents some patterns more than worthy of consideration by those of us who seek the destruction of capitalist society in all of its forms.

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Today’s gang quiz question is one that the gangs themselves have often fought over: which of them is the toughest? We’ll give you a few hints. It’s not the Black Killers, the Coney Oneys or any of the other teenage groups you’ve heard so much about in the last few weeks. Mayor Coleman Young has called them the “toughest gang in this city” and has warned the populace of them.

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Once again we have to extend gratitude to our subscribers for their generous contributions to insure this paper’s continued existence. Every time we thought the flow of letters containing checks or cash had ceased, we would receive yet another with an explanation that the delay was due to a wait for an unemployment check or paycheck to arrive. It’s this sort of support that provides not only the money for us to continue, but also the motivation. Some of us felt that a notice of thanks this small is insufficient to thank those that provided the funds, but really the whole paper is our response...

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Greetings!

Me, and some good comrades are being held prisoner in this pigsty called prison, and we came upon a copy of the April Fifth Estate. Needless to say, we are always trying to Fuck Authority, but there are no RICH around here to EAT, so we ate your newspaper, and that fucker sure was good food for thought.

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Seventeen-year-old Gary Tyler, the young black student convicted and sentenced to death by an all white jury on a trumped-up murder charge, still sits waiting for release from Death Row in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. (see Fifth Estate #273 and #274 for more details.)

Rescued from the electric chair by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on capital punishment—a ruling which approved the reconstitution of the death penalty under strict new guidelines—Tyler nonetheless is far from out of the woods.

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After being dropped by the media as no longer newsworthy, and being submerged in a myriad of bureaucratic committees on the State Legislature—a process so utterly boring that we have failed to follow its developments (you’ll forgive us, won’t you?)—the issue of PBB (polybrominated biphenyl, a component of a fire-retardant chemical which was introduced by mistake into Michigan livestock feed starting in 1973) has again hit the headlines, this time in a particularly gruesome development. (See “PBB: Case Study of an Industrial Plague,” FE May 1976).

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Gang fever is sweeping Detroit. Everywhere the gangs are the main topic of conversation—the Black Killers, the Errol Flynns, the Coney Oneys, the Chene Gang. The cops are puffed with importance—they’re the thin blue line between the hordes and the populace; the media are ecstatic—they have found a story that can be milked every day to break the monotony regularly presented; and for the average citizen: a concrete discernible reason for why Detroit is falling apart—1,000 teenage gang members.

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Through September 2

A traveling RV-gypsy gathering that will join with local people in 14 cities across North America to create temporary autonomous zones, make art, cook food, establish squats, play music, celebrate, & protest. For a complete list of cities, call Arrow at 212/ 614–0393 or write: 209 E. 7^th St., NY, NY:

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Dear Friends:

The Primitivist Network aims to promote networking of broadly defined anarcho-primitivists. The network is not an organization and has no fixed ideological line. It is designed to act merely as a means of fostering contact between like-minded people with the aim of generating projects that are broadly anarcho-primitivist in nature.

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A scene from “The Good War”: American marines boil the flesh off of a Japanese soldier’s skull, Guadalcanal, South Pacific, 1942.

After reading your articles in FE #345, Winter 1995 on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of historical and moral context was needed to balance the distortion contained therein.

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Anti McDonald’s campaigners, Helen Steel and Dave Morris protest against McDonald’s 50^th anniversary celebrations outside the fastfood chain headquarters in East Finchley, April 15, 2005.

April 15 marked the 40^th anniversary of the opening, in Des Plaines, Illinois of the first McDonald’s Hamburger Corporation restaurant. Helen Steel and Dave Morris, defendants in the United Kingdom McDonald’s libel trial, flew to the U.S. to join an alternative, anti-birthday celebration in the Chicago suburb.

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a review of

Ishmael, Daniel Quinn, 1993, Bantam/Turner, New York, 262 pp., $6.00.

Ishmael is a gorilla who places classified ads in search of those who would learn “how to save the world.” The narrator of Daniel Quinn’s critique of civilization is the (human) applicant to Ishmael’s one-gorilla school on what went wrong with humanity. In Socratic dialogue-type style, the nameless student learns the story of how Homo lived as a “Leaver” for two or three million years, only to become a planet-destroying “Taker” in the last 10,000 years.

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Los Angeles’ (De)Center is an autonomous, non-profit, collectively organized space providing access to anarchist ideas and culture, open daily 3-7pm. It offers hard to find anarchist and radical books, periodicals, zines, CDs and tapes and t-shirts. There are regular political events, a film series, and a Tuesday night coffeehouse. (De)Center is at 6122-1/2 N. Figueroa, Los Angeles CA 90042; phone (213) 344–7017.

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Bolo Bolo, Anarchy Comix & other FE Favorites

SOCIETY AGAINST THE STATE by Pierre Clastres

Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing, he refuses the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a critique of Western society.

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Both of the best selling issues of this newspaper, our 1970 Special Women’s Issue, which had to be reprinted three times to meet the demand for it, and our recent Queer Anarchy edition met with high acclaim for their coverage of gender issues. However, each was met with criticism for being “sectoralist” or even “pornography” in the case of the later edition.

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a review of

Radio Sermonettes, Hakim Bey, The Libertarian Book Club, (339 Lafayette St., Room 202, New York NY 10012), 40 pp., $3.50.

Hakim Bey’s earlier work, along with his more recent Radio Sermonettes, reflects the outlook of one who has centered himself in two often disparate schools of thought—Eastern mysticism and anarchism. And, while the (sometimes) richness of these two fields should promote an interesting cross-fertilization, Bey’s oft inability to pare down to the vital essence of the ideas he works with has seriously hindered his accomplishments.

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On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. A similar section also appears in Black Fist.

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The Public Broadcasting System produces “programming” toward a more manageable society. In fact, it is the network rather expressly for managers, and what it airs can best be understood by keeping in mind this service to the managing class. The exact ration of corporate to government funding of PBS is inconsequential to its basic nature and function.

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a review of

TAZ: The Album, Hakim Bey, Axiom Records, 1994

When I first discovered that anarchist author Hakim Bey had released an album of readings on the Axiom label, a subsidiary of the corporate monolith Island Records, I was both eagerly fascinated and smugly repelled. It would be easy to scoff at what, on the surface, seems like a calculated sell-out.

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As we travel north on Oregon’s Highway Five, from Portland towards Seattle, places and names go by: Castle Rock, Cougar, Mt. St. Helens, Onalaska. A November rain is falling, light rain, blessed rain. We cross the Chehalis river and then approach Centralia, Washington.

There are places whose names remain connected with the past, with a specific event that will forever remind strangers of their existence. Bhopal, Selma, Auschwitz, Soweto and Chernobyl are such places. People begin lives anew on those sites, building houses, giving birth, loving, but the associations persist. Centralia also has its beast of memory.

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Attilio Bortolotti (Toronto, 1993) photo / CIRA-Lausanne

Attilio Bortolotti died of pneumonia on February 10, 1995, in a nursing home near Toronto. He was born on September 19, 1903, in Codroipo, Friuli, Italy, the fifteenth of eighteen children of Luigi Bortolotti, a builder, and Maria Pittana.

Tilio emigrated to Canada in 1920 and became active in the anarchist and antifascist movements in Windsor and Detroit during the agitation for Sacco and Vanzetti. Arrested in Detroit in 1929 for distributing a leaflet announcing a Sacco-Vanzetti meeting, he was held for deportation to Italy, but jumped bail and fled to Toronto. There he worked as a tool-and-die maker and resumed his anarchist activities, editing Il Libertario from 1933 to 1935 and The Libertarian in 1968 and 1969.

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Welcome to the long time coming Summer edition of the Fifth Estate. It is our first since the Winter 1995 issue which was published Dec. 31, 1994. Subscribers (and particularly libraries) frequently think they have missed issues when six months go by between our papers. For instance, they’ll understandably inquire, “Where’s the Spring 1995 edition?” although there wasn’t one.

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Opposition to M77 Motorway: still from “Given to the People” (film documentary) http://www.giventothepeople.org/

Just to the south of Glasgow, amid the woodlands and park lands of Pollok estate, a site of extraordinary resistance has emerged.

From the roadside, a huge red banner with bright yellow letters proclaims “Pollok Free State,” and where the road gives way to a dirt track, amid tall beech trees, one enters a place transformed.

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The people eagerly awaiting Armageddon, from religious fundamentalists to paranoid Nazis, have no choice but to wish a fiery end. They’ve been such failures in this world, only the end of it can justify their miserable, creepy existence.

The fact is that their world has already ended, a long time ago, despite their protophilosophy’s occasional spurts of life. The apparent strength of fanatics from Iran to Michigan is no more than the jerky motions of a corpse animated by electric shocks. The God buried by Nietzsche in the last century found scores of other gods in that grave: one of humanity’s best tricks is the invention and disposal of gods.

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On June 12, Pennsylvania Gov. Thomas Ridge signed a death warrant for Mumia Abu-Jamal—meaning that unless a judicial stay is granted, he’ll be executed in the state’s electric chair at 10 p.m. on Aug. 17.

[News came as we were going to press that San Francisco police attacked a peaceful Free Mumia demonstration June 26 in San Francisco’s UN Plaza. Police charged 270 people with felony arson, riot and jaywalking. Several demonstrators were beaten including journalists.]

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Michigan militiamen at a gun rights rally, Lansing, Mich., Sept. 25, 1994. Photo/Bruce Giffin

We live in a world where television announces what is important and solemnly pronounces how loyal citizens are to respond—patriotism: the Gulf War; mourning: the death of the war criminal Nixon; joy: the Olympics; or indignation: the Oklahoma City bombing. The public is inundated with carefully selected images, which are dropped as soon as they fulfill their function of affirming the ruling scheme of things.

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LONDON (Special to the Fifth Estate)—The last remaining group of 25 houses in the path of a contested road construction in London were cleared and bulldozed late last year.

The “No M11 Link Campaign” created Operation Roadblock to stop work on Claremont road in Leytonstone, an East London working class district situated on the southern end of a seven kilometer construction project linking the M 11 motorway from Wanstead to the Blackwall Tunnel.

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A demo in London: photo / Alec Smart

Proving our contentions a few issues ago that, “all money is fake,” a ring of Iranian and Syrian high tech counterfeiters have been printing $100 bills at a clip faster than the government. The quality of these bills is so good that for a while they were honored by the Federal Reserve when submitted for collection.

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Chicago’s famed Waldheim Cemetery, final resting place for anarchists such as Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Voltarine DeCleyre, has been plundered of its liquid assets and is now in bankruptcy. Waldheim is also the site of the crypt and monument to the Haymarket martyrs, four labor activists and anarchists murdered by the state of Illinois in 1887. The Martyrs Monument, which has often been vandalized by political graffiti, now has suffered the outrage of metal thieves.

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Send letters to fe--at--fifthestate--dot--org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220. All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten; letters may be edited for length.

Enclosed is $30. Please send us a bundle of the Summer 2015 Vietnam issue. Thank you for putting out this paper! Printed propaganda is where it’s at!

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One day in the prison yard, the resident grey cat chased heedlessly

A bird, who’d landed on the roof, all enclosed with steely swirls

And slipping through the curling razor wire, stalked

Until it caught her leg and stopping

Shaking as it sliced her paw...open...raw

The sharp barbs cutting fur and muscle, white and wounded to the bone

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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 2004 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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And, so we return to Spain. Nearly 70 years after the people’s response to a right-wing military uprising, those events remain a source of wonder, optimism, confusion, strife and tragedy. It was a high mark of personal and social possibility that has yet to be matched. It was a real revolution of everyday life that shattered the patterns and relationships created by the agencies that constituted a growing capitalism.

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Let us give a brief definition of the way in which Capital or capitalism is used in articles in the Fifth Estate: Capital is based on wage-labor, the production and exchange of commodities, with an agency above the working class extracting surplus value (profits) from the value of goods and services produced, and then re-investing a portion back into the enterprise.

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Foucault’s happy pre-Enlightenment “ship of fools” was a fantasy: the reality of life with disability (particularly developmental disability and mental ill health) before charitable/government involvement ranged from outright murder, to banishment into charitable and religious institutions, to imposing the full duty of care on women within the confines of the family home. All of these practices continue alongside government and corporate services today.

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So intense was the air war against Vietnam, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, that more bomb tonnage was dropped on this small nation than the combined total expended during World War II.

These raids contributed heavily to the enormous Vietnamese casualties ranging up to four million dead, numbers which dwarf those suffered by the U.S. invaders.

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The question of whether to combine in organizations, associations, federations, etc., has become a subject of some debate and much interest. Many feel that the only obstacle to organization is the relative weakness of the small numbers of persons who identify with a libertarian perspective, while still others feel organizations in and of themselves are bureaucratic and are incapable of producing the desired goal.

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We are all outlaws in the eyes of America...

We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young...

We are forces of chaos and anarchy

Everything they say we are we are

And, we are very Proud of ourselves

—“We Can Be Together” (Jefferson Airplane, from “Volunteers,” 1969)

And, traitorous.

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by Ken Wachsberger

Preceding the Fifth Estate by two weeks, the Berkeley Barb celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with exhibits, films, poetry, and panel discussions on August 9, 2015.

The two papers were among the first five members of the Underground Press Syndicate. The Barb was known for its radical news coverage, outrageous visuals, support for liberation movements, and its explicit sex ads.

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