Most Recent Additions

“I shall never be able to forget where I was standing on that dramatic day when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me. It was during the nuclear confrontation that arose out of his war on Cuba.”

—Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, Feb. 3, 1992

John Kennedy has been described as a popular president who stood up to powerful business interests and was ready to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam. His assassination, assert many, including Oliver Stone in his latest film JFK, resulted from his impending shift of Indochina policies; it marked the end of democracy in the U.S. and the beginning of a military dictatorship dominated by military-oil interests and executed by the CIA.

...

Hi:

In his review of Counterfeit Currency, E.B. Maple asserted that gold has served as money because of arbitrary human assignation, an analysis which treats money in general as a mere sign. (See Winter 1992 Fifth Estate.)

In actuality, processed gold assured its role because, like other commodities, it is (even in its rawest form, sifted flakes) the product of human labor. But unlike other commodities, it is chemically stable, compact, and generally useless except as a medium of exchange.

...

James Koehnline’s inventive collages often grace our pages including this issue. His mixture of the ancient with the modern, sacred idols with the banal, and the improbable alongside the ordinary, are often ominously unsettling. The jarring juxtaposition creates a combination of images which reveals much more than the constituent parts.

...

In May 1992, 404 Willis will celebrate its first anniversary as a collectively-run community center and autonomous zone in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. The evolution of 404 has been the combined effort of many individuals united in their desire to create a gathering place that is an alternative to the bars and spectacular culture as a whole—an all ages, Do-It-Yourself, volunteer-run, inclusive yet anti-authoritarian atmosphere for people to come to and create, share ideas or simply hang out.

...

“Safe sex” has put sex in the safe. The three number combination lock reads: heterosexuality (two turns to the right) ultra-monogamy (two more turns to the right)—and condoms (one reluctant turn to the left), unlocking the Final Solution for the far right. Even if AIDS isn’t the result of covert germ warfare testing (see “Did U.S. Cause AIDS?” FE #326, Summer, 1987) the CIA couldn’t have created a better weapon against the subculture of drug use and “deviant” sex. Is it time to raise the white flag of celibacy and wait for science to invent a new pill, or do we have some real choices beyond the modern black plague hysteria?

...

Related story: “Tony” Revealed, Fifth Estate #377, March 2008

On July 26, 1900, officials of Western Penitentiary in Woods Run, Pennsylvania, discovered a tunnel which zigzagged some three hundred feet from the basement of the red brick house of 28 Sterling Street, which bordered the southern wall of the prison, to a point just inside the east wall. A superlative feat of engineering, the underground passage was equipped with an ingenious ventilation system as well as an electric warning device.

...

Welcome to the Spring 1992 issue of the Fifth Estate (Vol. 27, No. 1, our 339^th paper)! As usual, we are later than we had planned, due in part to our worst nightmare: the breakdown, in the heat of production, of our IBM Composer. Most of this issue has been typeset on Macintosh computers by a host of busy friends stealing time at work, home and in school computer labs.

...

In an era when almost all environmental battles seem doomed to defeat, it was heartening to see Quebec’s energy megaproject at James Bay dealt a crippling blow by the decision of the State of New York to cancel a 20-year power contract.

The giant hydroelectric complex in the Canadian sub-Arctic is devastating the James Bay wilderness and destroying the traditional way of life for thousands of Cree and Inuit who live there. (See FE, Winter 1992.)

...

It was with shock and sadness that we learned of the sudden death of our friend and collaborator Bob Brubaker, of a severe asthma attack at his home in Numazu, Japan. Bob died in the night of April 23–24. Memorials for him were organized by friends, coworkers and his students in Japan; by his family in Pittsburgh; and by friends in Detroit.

...

1992 marks the five hundred year anniversary of the Columbus expedition, which many governments and corporations are celebrating as “An Encounter of Cultures.” To counter this, a loosely organized movement under the banner of “500 Years of Resistance,” seeks to overturn the prevailing mythology about the Columbus voyages. Many people in Europe and the Americas are organizing cultural and educational events toward that end.

...

The Fifth Estate is a cooperative project, published by a group of friends who are in general but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 00150800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $6.00 a year; $8.00 foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit MI. No copyright. No paid advertisements.

...

“Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.”

—George Orwell, 1984

Although Orwell’s intent in writing 1984 was to shatter illusions held by stalinists and liberals about the Soviet Union, his book quickly became a metaphor for all modern bureaucratic societies, including the U.S.—and, with recent events in mind, perhaps especially the U.S.

...

Next year will mark the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Revolution, an event which most of those involved with the Fifth Estate only learned of in the 1970s, but one which profoundly contributed to what the paper and the broader anarchist milieu have become.

The ideas and the practices of solidarity and mutual aid learned from the Spanish anarchists who lived through that moment taught people at the Fifth Estate and many others a lot that shaped who we are now. Knowing people like Federico and Pura Arcos, both veterans of the Spanish struggle who lived in Windsor, Ontario across the river from Detroit, helped younger anarchists think of an anti-authoritarian revolution of everyday life as a real possibility.

...

Different cultures view the world in different ways, especially if we take into consideration the large number and diversity of the means to engage in conversation beyond speech.

Just like language, each communication medium creates a unique way to converse, providing a new field of thought, expression and sensitivity In our culture, each image type, whether as a photograph or in its television version, is a historically specific paradigm of creating a certain instance of what we call a worldview. What is not so easy, though, is to decode what it is the image proposes, that is what kind of worldview it creates.

...

I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America.

—David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

I think of Wojnarowicz’s disgust as I sit across from my friend, Marius Mason, in this maximum-security prison visitor’s room. We are allowed one embrace before we seat ourselves. A surveillance camera looms over head. A guard is posted a few feet away in this sterile cement room. The echo is oppressive as our thoughts and feelings spill out, hurried by the time allotted to us. No paper, no pens or photos of home; only our voices.

...

The original full-length article is online in the Fifth Estate archive; see Issue 346, Summer 1995.

As America’s involvement in Vietnam deepened in 1965, political and social turbulence at home reached proportions unimaginable at the beginning. Within two years, the army started falling apart.

Low morale and outright rebellion eroded its combat effectiveness, and the malaise began spreading beyond Southeast Asia to brigades garrisoning more vital imperial frontiers, especially Central Europe. The conscripted sons of the men who fought World War II came to see not Asian communists but the United States military machine as the real enemy.

...

a review of

The Anarchist Cookbook

Keith McHenry, with Chaz Bufe Introduction by Chris Hedges, 2015

See Sharp Press, 154 pp.

It’s unfortunate that the best selling book with the word anarchist in the title is a terribly flawed bomb- and drug-making manual.

The original Anarchist Cookbook was first published in 1971, compiled by William Powell, then a 19-year-old living in New York City.

...

Cass City Cinema, 1^st Unitarian Church, Cass and Forest: March 4–5—MEAN STREETS, Martin Scorsese (1974); March 11–12, ‘HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMAN, Brazil (1971); March 18–19, EXTERMINATING ANGEL, Luis Bunel (1962), Mexico; April 8–9 ROMA (1971) Fredrico Fellini; March 25–26 and April 1–2 NO films.

...

“Making money” has never been so easy.

Thanks to the Xerox 6500, anything from stock-swindling to bank-liberating is now just a button-touch away! It’s fun, it’s quick, it’s easy, and chances are better than ever there’s a 6500 in the office where you work.

With the 6500, our new, high-quality color copier, anyone can now duplicate all the important-looking documents which were formerly off-limits to the average citizen.

...

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.’

...

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.

...

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.”

...

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.

...

“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....

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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...

...

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

...

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.

...

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.

...

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:

...

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.

...

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!

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

“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...”

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

“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.

...