Most Recent Additions

Friday, 7pm-11pm, Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston St.

Mitchell Verter, editor of Dreams of Freedom, on Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon and contemporary Magonism, a video and music.

The Bookfair. Saturday, 10am-7pm. Massachusetts College of Art, Pozen Center, 621 Huntington Ave. Tables from distros, radical bookstores, Info-shops, and publishers. Speakers, workshops, panel discussions, and films.

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a review of

The Man Who Killed Durruti, Pedro de Paz, Translated from Spanish by Paul Sharkie, Postscript by Stuart Christie, Illustrations by Richard Warren. Christie Books (Read and Noir, PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, U.K.), 2005, 135

In a book that’s both fiction and history, Pedro de Paz and Stuart Christie have combined to look once again at the question of who killed the anarchist militia leader, Buenaventura Durruti.

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War! Uh!

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing!

--Edwin Starr, “War”

The Motown great Edwin Starr asked and answered this question in his 1970 song that became a best-selling record and the anthem of another in a series of long, hot summers.

By then, tens of millions of people around the world had come to a similar conclusion about the U.S. empire’s brutal war in Vietnam that already had taken the lives of at least two million Indochinese and tens of thousands of those of the invaders. There was wide-spread realization that not only did America’s Asian war have nothing to do with “freedom,” but was about imperial domination of a region far from its shores.

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Freedom is a word with many meanings. What makes radio free from an anarchist point of view? In relation to the airwaves, the term commonly refers to a form of direct action broadcasting done without a government-approved license. It is popularly known as pirate radio.

The autonomous broadcasters of the free radio movement actively expand the everyday lived experience of freedom from state regulation by seizing the airwaves from their corporate and government masters, setting up unlicensed stations and helping others to do the same. On the other hand, the Prometheus Radio Project is a non-profit organization created by former radio pirates to facilitate the growth of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program known as Low Power FM (LPFM).

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On May 4, 1886, several hundred workers assembled in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the shooting of their comrades on a picket line at the McCormick Reaper Works the day before. The violence happened in the context of a largely successful general strike in support of the eight-hour workday. Anarchist labor organizers and journalists played a key role in the strikes.

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Welcome to the first issue in our 41^st year of radical publishing. This edition, no different than the preceding 371, takes up our desire for revolution, one that ends the monstrous systems of capitalism and the state. It begins with a critical look at what is billed by the Left as the Bolivarian Revolution. Michael Staudenmaier, with Anne Carlson, describing their month long visit through Venezuela and relates anarchist perspectives on Chavismo. The FE’s Walker Lane writes about the 2006 Caracas World Social Forum (WSF) he attended, and offers critiques of the gathering and the direction the country is taking.

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Note: This is a shortened version of an essay that can be found in several locations on the Internet. Some material is likely dated at this point, given the rapidly changing situation in Venezuela. Since the essay primarily has value as a first-hand account, and since we have not returned to Venezuela since it was written, we have not attempted to update this version in any way.

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Barrel-assing around hair-pin turns at 6am in a crowded bus on a road with no barriers between us and a two thousand foot drop was not the manner in which I anticipated arriving in Venezuela for the Sixth World Social Forum (WSF).

This anus-clenching adventure was made necessary by the fact that a key viaduct on the highway from the airport into Caracas was recently determined to be on the verge of collapse. All traffic was forced to take an old mountain road, so what was normally a 40 minute ride had turned into a gridlocked six-hour nightmare journey.

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Send letters to Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale Ml 48220

Congrats on changing anarchist to anti-authoritarian on your front page description. Too much baggage on the word anarchist. It’s glamorous for those with that identity; fear and mistrust for those outside the milieu.

There was that period from about 1880 to 1920 when anarchists were killing people. Like monotheists, they thought they were in touch with the higher moral values of the Universe and thus were free of morals in this world.

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Who’s Afraid of The Black Blocs?: Anarchy in Action Around the World, Francis Dupuis-Deri, 2013, PM Press pmpress.org

The Watcher, Nicholas P. Oakley, 2014, See Sharp Press, SeeSharpPress.com (Sci-fi)

The End of the World As We Know it?: Crisis, Resistance, & the Age of Austerity, edited by Deric Shannon, 2014, AK press, akpress.org

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Fifth Estate, #393, Spring 2015, Vol. 50, No. 1

2 Letters

4 Anarchy in Kurdistan

Bill Weinberg

7 Eric McDavid Freed!

FE Staff

8 Armed Madhouse

Bryan Tucker

9 Justice for Franco Fascists?

David Porter

11 Sam Mbah Dies

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back

12 Florida’s Burnpile Press

Matt Keene

13 An Anarchist in Berlin

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Don’t say you can’t turn back the clock—you do it every year, dupe of daylight savings time—as if you could add or subtract one hour from light by bureaucratic fiat. The really progressive position is reversion.

—Peter Lamborn Wilson “The Alchemy of Luddism”

Graphic: James Koehnline http://www.koehnline.com/

Our friends at Black and Red Books--another radical publishing project from Detroit--have finally put their catalog online at http://blackandred.org. It’s now easier than ever to find titles like Society of the Spectacle; Against His-story, Against Leviathan; The Strait; The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism; Love and Politics; The Wandering of Humanity, and more.

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The Wedding and Other Stories, Cara Hoffman, Factory School Southpaw Culture, 2006, 114 pp., factoryschool.org. Available from the Barn

Cara Hoffman’s seven tautly written, alternately ominous and humorous short stories are driven by her elegant use of language. She’s a writer in the now unfashionable old school where words and the images they create shape story and characters rather than breathless action scenarios waiting to be transferred from page to film. There’s great craft here where one can almost feel the work put into each sinuous sentence; sometimes each word.

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reviewed here:

The State, Harold Barclay, Freedom Press, London, 2003, 109 pp.

Longing for Arcadia: Memoirs of an AnarchoCynicalist Anthropologist, Harold B. Barclay, Trafford, 2005, Victoria, BC, 362 pp.

Harold Barclay’s thin volume on the political state packs into its pages everything we need to know to realize that there is nothing eternal about this inherently oppressive institution. A relatively recent phenomenon in human affairs, Barclay traces its origins to a few thousand years ago based on the desire of a few men to control others by establishing hierarchical societies in place of the egalitarian ones that preceded them.

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In response to “Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism,” FE #372, Spring, 2006]

Dear Fifth Estate,

When I saw the cover of FE which promised an article on the Amish and Anarchists, it piqued my interest. I live in Amish country, Pennsylvania. An Old Order Amish family are my next door neighbors.

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A valuable anarchist history resource, The Emma Goldman Papers archive, is being defunded by University of California, Berkeley, and will have to close if alternative funding can’t be found soon. The 34-year-old archive is currently the most comprehensive, organized collection of Goldman-related materials in the world.

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a review of

Live Free or Die. National Geographic Cable Channel

While I love the peace and challenges of backwoods camping, I admit that I don’t engage with them that often, and when I have, the thin lines between adventure and annoyance, between serenity and boredom, barely exist.

If you want to see a person with an intellectual critique of civilization get infatuated with civilization’s creature comforts, watch their most intimate reactions to home-cooked meals and hot showers after a few days or even weeks roughing it in the woods.

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a review of

I Saw Fire: Reflections on Riots, Revolt and the Black Bloc by Doug Gilbert. Institute for Experimental Freedom, 2014, $10. 204 pp. littleblackcart.com

I’ve often found myself frustrated by the lack of worthwhile media projects that accurately capture how anarchists struggle. Doug Gilbert’s I Saw Fire: Reflections on Riots, Revolt and the Black Bloc is the kind of book that you can hand to people encountering anarchist resistance for the first time.

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An experimental rant titled “Radical Poetry, Heretical Religion, and the Psychedelic Revolution” provided the germ and genesis for this rambling, review-essay.

I delivered that sermon in my over-the-top Reverend Bonobo mode for a gathering in western North Carolina called “Croatan.” Held in late April 2006, the event featured lectures by the likes of scientist and scholar of mind-altering substances Dennis McKenna (brother of the late Terence McKenna), late nights of electronic dance music, and thunderous spring rains that sprayed us all with epic torrents.

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When we put out the calls for this issue, we sought lists and commentaries on books that changed people’s lives. Apparently, many were too busy with summer reading to respond. Others may be too busy with life to read--or to write about what they might be reading if they’re reading. For me, I’ve decided to name writers more than books, and the shortlist is rather long, heavily populated by poets. Allen Ginsberg’s influence on me might always overshadow other writers, and to learn more about that, please see my article on him in a few pages. My world view has been so widely shaped by all of these visionaries that I would feel remiss not giving them their due in this issue.

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Just before 1998, he started taking advice from the talking crow.

It started like you might have imagined. The crow was perched on a spindly branch near the hospital parking lot. It quietly assessed him.

He was getting his car keys out of his pocket, and the crow was drawn in by his smooth knuckles as they slid into the denim of his jeans and then slid out barely concealing something shiny.

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From The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, Chelsea Green, 2006

Can any action avert humanity’s technological downfall? I try to remain hopeful and cast my lot with the possibility of change, but our situation and prospects both appear rather bleak. So many nightmare scenarios have been imagined for us. Science fiction anticipated genetic tinkering generations before the technology existed to actually do it. The dangers I have just briefly described are very real. Yet I find that every new revelation seems strangely familiar, as if we had been expecting it. Each sensational news report seems like it must have come from science fiction.

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a review of

Stealing All Transmissions: The Secret History of The Clash by Randal Doane, Foreword by Barry “The Baker” Auguste, 2014, PM Press, 192 pp. $15.95 pmpress.org

In December 1979, after stumbling through my first trimester at Michigan State University, I took the allotted three weeks off in suburban Detroit. While the media began priming the struggling city as host of the upcoming Republican National Convention (and a probable Ronald Reagan presidency), a vague desperation overtook me, to search for alternatives, first on the radio and then in the press.

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“[The poet never] voices received opinions, or gives clear expression to the confused feelings of ‘the masses’: that is the function of the politician, the journalist, the demagogue.”

-- Herbert Read, “Art and Alienation”

“Poetry is the end(s) of politics.”

--L. Mirari, “The Politics of Refusal vs. the Refusal of Politics”

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“The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it and mastering it?”

-- Walt Whitman

Early in 1905, Leo Tolstoy wrote to a close friend in England: “Yesterday and today I have been reading Edward Carpenter’s book, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, and am enraptured by it.... Please inform me of what you know about Carpenter himself. I consider him a worthy successor to Carlyle and Ruskin.” The query as to Carpenter’s identity may well be repeated a hundred years later; his striking originality, which at one time inspired poets and anarchists alike, has since been virtually forgotten.

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Daughter of itinerants,

ungrateful refusers of benefits and charity,

in terror of the all-embracing arms

I turned from the tabernacles of turkey

and progeny of toothpaste, I ran and hid

from the love that damns and pardons,

I dodged the draft from the golden doors

and let the wild west wind carry me

with torn newspapers, cigarette butts, condoms,

up against the chainlink fence at the world’s ends

in a red November evening.

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In America, the last vestiges of the liberal social contract and public safety net have been virtually erased. Under George W. Bush, the gap between the rich and poor increases at an alarming rate while privatization pushes forward. While Social Security is being slowly eviscerated and replaced by Individual Retirement Accounts, wealthy people can survive growing old while leaving those who cannot to fend for themselves. At the same time, the “richest 1% of Americans,” who, according to Peter Singer, “hold more than 38 percent of the nation’s wealth,” are forming what David Harvey calls “ghettoes of affluence (their ‘bourgeois utopias’),” which undermine “concepts of citizenship, social belonging, and mutual support,” while the poor, who are being “pushed off welfare into a stagnant labor market,” are left to make their way in what, for so many, looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape.

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for Diane di Prima

St. John’s Eve (Midsummer) 2006

It’s the idea

of code that’s cool not the actual

bother of decipherment: the utopia

of not having been in a state of

anticipation or regret. The Dowager Empress

took fresh honeysuckle petals in her green tea — yes even Civilization had its finer moments

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Looking at Gary Snyder’s writing is a geological experience. Picking up a copy of The Gary Snyder Reader or checking out his shelf at a library will reveal layers of poems, journals, and essays dating from the late fifties to the turn of the millennium--all written by a would-be Wobbly turned Zen poster child of the San Francisco Renaissance. Considered foundational texts for everything from the hippies and New Left to bioregionalism and Deep Ecology, Snyder’s work reads like a countercultural cross section of the last fifty years.

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Diane Di Prima, 1960s

archangel of fire

enwraps now melts glaciers

turf unexposed

angelic aeons trembles

naked

under a vengeful sun

--Diane DiPrima

August 3, 2002

green shack in Richmond

tag on the door sez “Merlin’s”

just that

--Diane DiPrima

March 23, 2003

Train to Sacramento

true poppies:

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Ekset City was on fire. Flares and napalm and hammers and bullets and the angry minds of angry men were tearing through three hundred years of architecture and three thousand years of culture. At the center of the city, a bonfire engulfed the seven pillars of Ekset. A frightful horde of humans paraded through, warming their hands on the pyre of victory and sacrificing every trace of goblin culture to the consuming flames. Black smoke rose up so thick and high it fought against the glory of the sun.

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Lily So-too, What do they do to you? (oil on canvas, 72 by 72 inches, 2004)

Take me to

where my heart is sunken

deep into the land

stepped on, kicked, trampled, thought

nothing of,

to the place where people don’t know that

it is even there,

supporting their weight.

Let me love them anyway.

i am not divided from myself

let me feel the ache of the person

struggling to keep alive at the hands of another person

and under a mechanized system

designed to grind her back into stardust

mine is the same body and breath

that give her

material right to be, to exist.

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While Marx developed some important tools for building a critique of capitalism from the perspective of the worker, he did not devote much thought to capital’s exploitation of women.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici critically revisits the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the historical analysis of which plays a significant role in Capital.

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Darcee began to realize she was in serious trouble, that notions of rebellion were growing beyond her control, during the President’s speech. She and her co-workers were crowded together in the workplace auditorium for mandatory daily socialization, all eyes on the huge teevee screen, watching the image of Our Benevolent Leader, the President of GovCentral. He was flinging words to his public like great faux pearls that promised nothing beneath their shiny surfaces; yet the people were scooping them up through their ears and stringing them in memory to recall when they needed something to believe in.

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When I learned of Octavia Butler’s death in late February 2006, I fought the feelings of loss. A longtime fan and student of her science fiction and fantasy, I never stopped sensing synchronicity and strangeness when I found that other radicals were reading her work. On the occasion of her passing, London’s Independent described her as “the central figure in the relatively close-knit community of black writers of the fantastic in America.”

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I have hidden and covied poetic mead within the thickets of prose bramble-rambles, come and gather in the weeds. There is sweet berry-nectar to gather, a treasure hunt in the hedgelands for random bottles of elderberry wine. Feel free to stumble. Who knows what you might stumble upon? The poet’s job is to woo world, with words that are hymns. Rosebushes, stones, mountains need hymns. Deer and rats and ravens need hymns. Trees, beautiful dresses, beer need hymns. Little children and old grandmothers need hymns. God is in all this Godding; God is tickled at praise and glows in gentle pride. Wandering through world, the poet rambles and rants, like Whitman meandering through rhapsodic New York City. Whitman had Leaves of Grass. I think I might have Brambles of Berries. These are the brambles Brueghelian peasants ramble through on their way to the lusty groves where they commune with wind-gods, satyrs, fairies, and beer-gods! You may ask, are these prose-poems, rants, short dissertative vignettes? And I will love your question, but I will not answer.

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Rafael Mutis was part of the Brooklyn 7 arrested at an APOC (Anarchist People of Color) party raided by the police in 2003. They won and exposed the arrogant racist NYPD detectives. He currently works as an organizer against the Rockefeller drug laws, which are New York state’s version of the war on drugs. He is also active with the Escuela Popular Nortena. Rafael was interviewed by MaxZine Weinstein in May.

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Nature played a big part in the 1960s Revolution, more than just flower-power and communes. Many of us left the city for natural living, for our physical and mental well-being. We sought freedom from a mercantile world of wage-slavery. We read Mother Earth News. Gardens were planted; fields were cultivated. New ideas of untainted healthy food flourished together with a new-born environmentalism and deep ecology. The chauvinism of the 1950s was confronted by movements of peace, civil rights, women’s rights, environmental rights, consumer rights and so on.

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FE cover, June 2002. Richard’s art was often mysteriously ambiguous. We ran this as emblematic of the ruthless US war machine. However, a Pentagon art buyer thought it accurately portrayed the military mission, and a print hangs in the headquarters of the masters of war.

Richard Mock, political cartoonist, painter, sculptor, educator, anarchist, died in Brooklyn July 28 from complications due to diabetes at 61. Richard had an epic vision that he gave to us piece by piece in his creative linocuts. He freely contributed use of his political cartoons to anarchist and worker publications such as the Fifth Estate, Anarchy and UNITE. Many, such as the one on this page, graced our front covers.

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Industrialized nations have procured their preliminary capital by expropriating, deporting, persecuting and segregating, if not always by exterminating, people designated as legitimate prey. Kinships were broken, environments were destroyed, cultural orientations and ways were extirpated.

Descendants of survivors of such onslaughts are lucky if they preserve the merest relics, the most fleeting shadows of their ancestors’ cultures. Many of the descendants do not retain even shadows; they are totally depleted; they go to work; they further enlarge the apparatus that destroyed their ancestors’ culture. And in the world of work they are relegated to the margins, to the most unpleasant and least highly paid jobs. This makes them mad. A supermarket packer, for example, may know more about the stocks and the ordering than the manager, may know that racism is the only reason he is not manager and the manager not a packer. A security guard may know racism is the only reason he’s not chief of police. It is among people who have lost all their roots, who dream themselves supermarket managers and chiefs of police, that the national liberation front takes root; this is where the leader and general staff are formed.

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Karl Marx is always approached as so many thoughts, so many words. What connection is there between lived choices--one’s willful lifetime--and the presentation of one’s ideas? By 1846 Marx and Engels had written The German Ideology, which contains the full and mature ideas of the materialist concept of the progress of history. Along with this tome were the practical activities in politics. In terms of his Communist Correspondence Committee and its propaganda work, Marx (also in 1846) stated: “There can be no talk at present of achieving communism; the bourgeoisie must first come to the helm.”

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FE staff note: Mike Ochs, a reader from Pennsylvania, sent us an obituary from The Nation for one of its former editors (1970–1976) Emile Capouya--saying “I thought of your efforts when I read it.” Remembering Capouya’s radical prose, Ted Solotaroff writes, “My favorite essay was ‘The Red Flag and the Black,’ a beautiful exposition of anarchism.... For all his dialectical agility and nuance, his black flag flew two simple principles that he had learned with his hands: People long to do better than they do, and they are naturally creative and cooperative. The categorical imperative of his politics was to act always in the spirit of the society we wish to bring about.”

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a review of

The Tyranny of Theory: A Contribution to the Anarchist Critique of Marxism by Ronald D. Tabor. Black Cat Press, 2013, 349 pages, $30.00

In The Tyranny of Theory, Ronald Tabor is adamant that anarchists need to hold Marxists accountable for the historical record of Marxist regimes. He writes, “these regimes represent the underlying logic of Marxism, and the efforts of Marxists and Marxist organizations to create revolutionary societies in the future (should they get a chance) will, in all likelihood, lead to similar systems.”

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Deadline: May 1

Publication date: June 1

The war in Vietnam, the first great defeat of American imperialism, came to an ignominious conclusion 40 years ago, at the end of April 1975.

The United States Congress has authorized the Secretary of Defense “to conduct a program to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Vietnam War.” This obscene commemoration of a shameful war should not go unanswered. We need to remind the world of its true heroes and victims--the Vietnamese people, the anti-war movement, and the draft resisters--and say No! to the celebration of the imperial war machine.

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“... [I]n my view, anarchism has no significant contribution to socialist theory to make.”

—Eric Hobsbawm, “Reflections on Anarchism,” 1969

Hobsbawm, the late British Marxist historian, in his snobbery, unintentionally poses the question as to the function of theory of any sort in revolutionary challenges to the present system. Marxists believe it is important to come to the confrontation armed with memorized critiques of capitalism and history, believing this provides them with the organizational and critical tools for overthrowing the system.

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This is an excerpt of Murray Bookchin’s 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist! A longer version appeared in the May 1976 Fifth Estate, which is available in our archives at FifthEstate.org.

“[The essay that follows] is not a series of hypothetical inferences; it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past century--the Social Democrats, the communists, and the Trotskyists.

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In September 2014, the people of Scotland voted on an independence referendum question, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” Following an intense campaign, the “No” side won with 55 percent voting against independence with a turnout of 85 percent.

Alexander writes from Glasgow with an assessment.

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The winter issue of FE will critically reflect upon contemporary anarchist and radical anti-authoritarian political movements. What directions should radicals--who wish to both create a revolution in our everyday lives, as well as to destroy the various and overlapping systems of oppression--take in our current political situation? We welcome theoretical, historical and practical pieces on political and cultural issues.

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Inside the walled compound of a Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Kyoto, Japan, the monks who reside there have created a meditation garden consisting of raked sand and about a dozen large stones. The stones are adroitly arranged so that no matter where one stands on the perimeter of the garden, at least one of the rocks is blocked from sight of the viewer. The Zen wisdom behind this arrangement suggests that the world in all of its aspects is never completely knowable; that something always remains hidden.

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