Most Recent Additions

Developments in what is being called the “Green Scare” continue at a fast pace as the government increases its attack on forest, animal, and earth defenders.

Four environmental campaigners from Detroit including a Fifth Estate writer were arrested in March for eco-sabotage. Other activists around the country were subjected to the heavy hand of justice with harsh sentences and arbitrary acts. The possibilities of more arrests and indictments are on the horizon.

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Up until March 10, I lived in a small, wooded, old neighborhood on the edge of Northside in Cincinnati.

That morning, I left the house with just enough time to get to my job while my 16-year-old daughter, Arianna, was asleep in her room. I drove to the end of my block and was startled to see an SUV come around the corner and stop directly in front of my car, blocking my way.

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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.

I’m writing to ask about the amazing excerpt on the back cover of Spring 2008 Fifth Estate.

Who is or was Erica A. Smith? When was “On the Political Situation Experienced in Our Era” written? Most of the language in the excerpt seems to be late 19^th or early 20^th Century. But “colonization,” in context, seems to be contemporary. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I don’t believe it was used in quite that way a century ago.

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THIS PAGE IS YOUR PAGE. All ads are FREE for the asking. We hope this page becomes a place where we can communicate and take care of our basic needs outside of the capitalist, consumption market. Send to THE FIFTH ESTATE, 4403 Second Detroit, MI. 48201 No ads accepted by phone.

SALE OR TRADE--Ex-sci-fi devotee wishes to divest self of remnants. Large and very fine collection of sci-fi hard and paperback books, many first printings. Will trade for Art, “serious” literature, interesting stuff or will sell 3 paperbacks for $1.00. Call 894–7753 and keep trying (nights).

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Guru Snatchyurbananas has just arrived from Goa, India, to enlighten the western world with his proven, scientific method of T.M. (Transportation Meditation) to solve your problems of irrational hatred for your job and your superiors.

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Ammunition Books

4403 Second

Detroit, Michigan 48201

Telephone: (313) 831–6800

Office Hours: Tuesday thru Friday, 1pm--5pm

AUTHORITARIAN CONDITIONING, SEXUAL REPRESSION & THE IRRATIONAL IN POLITICS

Maurice Brinton

An analysis of Reichian psychology in its relation to politics and the Russian revolution. Its title pretty much says it all.

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Except for the contemptuous throwing of animal entrails, blood, and a decomposed lamb’s head all over Wayne State University President George Gullen’s office, February 19 was a typical day at the school.

Secretaries were processing records while tender-bellied professors busily tried to seem important. The faceless administrators like Gullen would occasionally leave their 12^th floor cocktail lounge to flirt with their secretaries or sign some orders that a petty aide had drawn up.

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The juxtaposing of anti-sexual statements on this page by the Vatican and certain leftist leaders and groups is not meant as an exercise in cynicism, but rather to illustrate in graphic terms the role sexual repression plays within all authoritarian systems.

The Church, for example, is easily identifiable as a repressive institution. Its power to regulate moral conduct grew as did the centrality of its wealth and authority within the feudal system of the Middle Ages.

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The following are quotations from a variety of “leftist” politicians and organizations:

“Any romantic attachment that goes beyond the distance, outside the marriage bed, is actually a statutory offense, worth six months in jail for the over eager young man...”

-- from Women in China by Helen Snow

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This article is the second in a series of counter-Bicentennial pieces dealing with the more sordid and less-acknowledged incidents in America’s 200-year-old history.

March 16, 1968, My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, 7:30 A.M. Under direct orders from Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker Jr., command leader of assault unit Task Force Barker, nine troop-transporting helicopters preceded by two gunships enter the My Lai area.

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The following is taken from a declaration on sexual ethics published by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was issued in January of this year and is considered church doctrine by Catholics.

“Experience teaches us that love must find its safeguard in the stability of marriage if sexual intercourse is truly to respond to the requirements of its own finality and to those of human dignity. Those requirements call for a conjugal contract sanctioned and guaranteed by society.”

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The Fifth Estate’s benefit party on February 20^th was a rousing success which saw the paper raise $400 over expenses and provided a party-down good time for about 450 revelers. Although the 5 kegs of beer went out faster than we expected, brilliant performances by the Shadowfax Band, creative theater by The Acme Theatrical Agency and Primitive Lust, and mystifying magic by Art DeAwful combined with the resources of the people in attendance made for a fun night for all.

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Lawyers involved in the State Police Red Squad case are urging people who believe they may be the victims of spying activity to request a court hearing in Lansing to view the dossiers compiled on them. And recent revelations about Detroit Police spying show that local cops were working with plant protection agents in Chrysler Corp. plants to blackball leftist organizers.

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When Chou En-lai, the first and only Prime Minister of the Peoples Republic of China, died in the beginning of this year, a struggle between the so-called “moderate,” pro-managerial and “radical left,” pro-Maoist factions within the Party burst into the open.

The rift has taken the form of an apparent battle between two personalities within the standing committee of the powerful Politburo of the Communist Party’s Central Committee (China’s ruling body).

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Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Dennis Rosenblum

Bob Nirkind

Pat Halley

Colleen Jensen

E. B. Maple

J.J. Markin

Mr. Venom

Sonny Tufts

Pat O’Bryan

Peter Werbe

Algirdas Ratnikas

Marilyn Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second, Detroit, MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays thru Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.

Cazzaarola!: Anarchy, Romani, Love, Italy by Norman Nawrocki, PM Press, 2013, 300 pp, $18, pmpress.org. Anarchy and the anti-fascist struggle in 20^th century Italy and the oppression of the Roma and other immigrants in contemporary Italy are intertwined in this excellent novel.

Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, edited with commentary by Peter Glassgold, Counterpoint Press, 2012, 458 pp, $22.95, counterpointpress.com, is a new and expanded edition of this collection of work drawn from the pages of Goldman’s wildly anarchic magazine, which she and others published between 1906 and 1917, until it was suppressed by the government. These century old articles remain relevant and exciting today.

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Deadline: July 1

Publication date: August 1

Issue Theme: Art & Anarchy. The creative spirit of anarchy often acts as muse in all aspects of the arts, historically and today. We welcome your help in celebrating this in essays and graphics. Also, general articles in keeping with the ideas of this publication are sought.

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*Articles with Asterisk have extended versions on our web site.

4 Anarchists & Sex Work

Aaron Lakoff

6 Wholly Shit — Church Reviews

Stephane

7 Grand Jury Resister Freed

*8 Education as Domestication of Inner Space

Layla AbdelRahim

11 Agriculture History Misses Mark

John Zerzan

12 Ken Kesey & the Merry Pranksters

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1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

2. Donate. Postal and printing costs continue to rise making financial stability an increasing challenge to publications which refuse commercial advertising. Donations also allow us to continue sending free subscriptions to prisoners and GIs.

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Welfare Hit

Dear Fifth Estate:

I would like twelve copies of your FUCK AUTHORITY poster. The day after I received it I put it up on a wall in my office in the Welfare Dept. here in San Francisco. Great responses of approval from the welfare applicants whose intake papers I process--“I’d like one,” and from fellow employees. Even more than from the “Fight Celibacy” bumper sticker I’ve put up.

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In House appropriations Bill 4445 for fiscal year 1975–1976, the State Legislature has instructed the Department of Social Services (DSS), the Department of Labor (through the MESC) and the Department of the Treasury to “develop a plan for the exchange of data as a check on the financial eligibility of recipients of financial aid.”

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a review of

Informant: A documentary directed and written by Jamie Meltzer. Information at informantdoc.com; also Netflix.

In Jamie Meltzer’s 2012 documentary, “Informant,” we’re taken into the home and mind of the FBI informant of the title, Brandon Darby, infamous within U.S. anarchist circles for responsibility for the arrests and conviction of activists during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

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a review of

Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain by Frank Mintz. AK Press, 2013, 326pp., $19, akpress.org

Following his brief synopsis about the Spanish anarchist movement before 1936, the central concern of French anarchist Frank Mintz is the very core of the 1930s Spanish revolution--the grassroots movement of urban and rural collectivization throughout republican Spain.

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The Dadaists were writers and artists who made it their raison d’etre to destroy culture, or at least literature and art. They carried to its ultimate and absurd conclusion the distinction between form and content in art, rejecting literary conventions, the frame round a canvas, and even the ‘laws’ of normal speech--all these restricted and deformed the authentic complexity of mental reality.

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a review of

Anarchists Against the Wall: Direct Action and Solidarity with the Palestinian Popular Struggle, Edited by Uri Gordon and Ohal Grietzer, AK Press, 2013 139 pages, $12. akpress.org

“Two States for Two Peoples--Two States Too Many,” has to be one of my favorite slogans coming from the against-all-odds struggle for a human future in Palestine and Israel.

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“...all poets are outlaws.”

--Stephane Mallarmé, The Evolution of Literature (1891)

Art historians, literary historians and theorists seldom bother to learn anything about their subjects outside their own little bailiwicks, especially when it comes to anarchism.

A painter or poet might have been an anarchist, but entire biographies and studies of him or her can be (and are) written without mentioning the fact. If any academic bothers to notice the matter, it will be done perfunctorily and with embarrassment.

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INTRODUCE A LITTLE ANARCHY

UPSET THE ESTABLISHED ORDER

AND EVERYTHING BECOMES CHAOS

I AM AN AGENT OF CHAOS

OH AND YOU KNOW

THE THING ABOUT CHAOS IT IS FAIR

DO NOT TALK LIKE ONE OF THEM

YOU ARE NOT! EVEN IF YOU WOULD

LIKE TO BE

TO THEM

YOU ARE JUST A FREAK LIKE ME

THEIR MORALS THEIR CODE

IT IS A BAD JOKE THEY ARE DROPPED AT THE

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Montreal’s fourth annual International Anarchist Theatre Festival is seeking submissions of anarchist theatre pieces to be staged May 11 — 14^th, 2009.

We are looking for theatre pieces in English or French, from 5 to 60 minutes long, about anarchists, anarchist ideas and history, or any subject related to anarchism including anti-state, against capitalism, racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. We will consider plays or monologues that are original work, ones that have already been performed, or that have been written by anarchists (historical or contemporary).

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Our reviewer (who was there) thinks it did a pretty good job!

It was with a mixture of anticipation and dread that I began watching actor Stuart Townsend’s directorial debut, Battle in Seattle. I took part in the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization and participated in the spirited marches, the intersection take-overs, and the blockading of WTO delegates depicted so graphically in the film.

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SUBTEXT, SUBVERSION and SABOTAGE

This winter, Fifth Estate seeks to put out good reading for hibernation. Work that focuses on underground political, cultural and social activity as well as subtextual analysis. We seek discussion on how radicals and everyday folks subvert the dominant culture in a meaningful way. We seek analysis on the unspoken meanings of current social, economic, semiotic and political phenomena such as the environmental crisis and the Green Scare, bio-ethical decisions, entertainment, gender, institutionalized violence. We seek to examine the parts we play in subjection and subjugation This winter we seek to exhume the churchyard and provide readers with an invisible choir that will sing audibly and precisely about the hidden meanings of things.

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Oystercatcher #5 Review by J.L. Dale

I’m young, but I still had grade-school fantasies about bathing my neighborhood in a heavy wave of pirate radio--my voice and my songs out into the world.

So, I respect a man that can keep that way of thinking alive. The Oystercatcher #5, edited by Ron Sakolsky, though rather diverse in content and forms, keeps a strong, unified voice. Each piece is well edited and laid out nicely, taking advantage of The Oystercather’s full-size format.

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Audiences stand in front of a band at a music festival receiving the sound. Some dance; others just absorb. I’ve always been ...one of the dancers. When I began to write and direct theatre, I wanted the audience to be moved, to be allowed to respond in some way other than clapping their hands at the end of a scene. I wanted the audience members to play the way they did when listening to a band at a concert.

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Game (1) “Shelf Life”

How to Play: You take a series of books off your shelf in the order they sit there. Working through them in sequence, you open them at random, selecting the phrase or clause that strikes you, and create a text in this way. (It’s also possible to make a title in this way). As a variant, this can also be played with more than one player, by taking it in turns to add a sentence, phrase, clause or half-sentence.

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If you are reading these words, it is almost certain that you are ill, sick, and infected. “With what?” you ask. The blight destroying our nation known as Free Enterprise, Supply & Demand, Capitalism, and more commonly Consumerism. It is a worm boring through the minds & souls of all our citizens.

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Unruh Lee: In 1994, we started the Gardeners Against the Work Ethic Association (or GAWE) together. I later wrote in a ‘zine with this name, that this project was an “anti-work experiment in self-sufficiency, creating a new way of life based on play. And much playful subversion of all that gets in the way.” Really, it was a joke of a formal organization, that was part of an upsurge of Surrealist-oriented experimentation towards expanding the quality and quantity of our realm of play, no? The core of it was trying to seduce people to rip up their lawns with us and plant gardens for free feasts. But as I remember it, a lot of zany and erotic stuff, in private and public, was going on under the GAWE umbrella.

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Vi Landry (1974 — 2008)

“What have you done for New Orleans? What separates you from the tourists who come down here, party, maybe absorb a little culture and leave, besides the length of your stay?” Vi Landry asked me these difficult questions with her characteristic unflinching gaze as we sat in my kitchen during the spring of 2007, a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina.

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Chaos is a dragon. The dragon’s heart beats with the tides, the rhythm of the dance, the thump of the bass. Her blood flows as the rivers & the creeks, the trade winds, the migrations of people and animals, the waste streams of our cities. Her breath is the humid air, the song, the smoke from the factories.

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a review of

The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore. Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher. Ardent Press, 2012, $13, 300 pp., ardentpress.org

The Italian insurrectionary and individualist anarchist, Renzo Novatore (the pen name of Abele Rizieri Ferrar, 1890–1922), died at the brink of a great confrontation with Fascism. His comrade Enzo Martucci claimed that at his death, Novatore “was preparing to strike at society and tear from it that which it denies the individual.” Unfortunately, he died in a gun battle with carabinieri in 1922 who had ambushed him.

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Prison is

Hushed and heavy

Like water near the Ocean’s floor,

Then loud and bitter,

Like fractious storms lashing the sky

Everything cement and nerves

And too many years gone by...

The heart requires a place to rest

From all its maddened wanderings

The raft of the Medusa tossed

And trembling in the sea.

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It’s 7 a.m. on Fat Tuesday, the final and peak day of New Orleans carnival. I’m up, or waking up, drinking my first bloody mary of the day, hot glue gun in hand sticking dozens of oversized fake chrysanthemums to my cape in the last calm minutes before the madness resumes.

I’ve had a few hours sleep since last night’s event, the coronation ball of the brilliant Krewe du Poux (yeah, that’s “poo”), where my group appeared wearing tall conical hats made to look like piles of shit with flies buzzing around them. We scavenged the hats from the trash of a major parade, then repainted and adorned them for our purposes at the last minute. The Poux party was a real circus, featuring a midway of homemade carnival games and a raucous shopping cart smash-up derby followed by a parade through the neighborhood. I barely made it there because I’d been in bed all day recovering from my own krewe’s parade and the afterparty where I alternated bartending and dancing until 4 a.m.

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1. There is a paradox at the heart of the global capitalist power structure we live in. It is the result of two contradictory truths.

2a. The first truth is that capitalism is destroying our planet. Through global warming, extinction, impoverishment, racism, sexism, homophobia, propaganda, war, the burgeoning security state, computerized isolation, and more, it is literally killing us.

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What kind

of anarch

am I

on my

best days?

The kind

that eludes

the prisons of

“ists” and “isms”

for the

freedom

of the

“Y”.

Why?

That is

the question.

During

my childhood

daze

my mother

dismissed

my incessant

questioning

of her

authority

(my why-ning

as she called it)

with her favorite

parental

pronouncement,

“Y

is a

crooked letter.”

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Clown school, summer 2007. I’m doing an improv exercise, still soaked from the spit takes and bucket sloshes we practiced in the last class. The teacher catches me struggling for a witty response and hollers “Stop!”

“You’re thinking too hard.” He looks straight into my eyes: this guy’s been a clown for so long that he needs just a facial twitch to remind me of the only imperative. Play. A noun and a verb--just like “clown.”

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A police and FBI raid of the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, Calif. August 27--supposedly to figure out who might have sent threatening emails to University of California animal researchers traced back to the Long Haul internet connection--succeeded in seizing 14 computers from the Long Haul, but failed to break the spirit of Berkeley activists.

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Play sets up temporary arbitrary rules for itself to test the very boundlessness of its freedom.

If not for the emergence of the State, we would by now have a science based on the principle of play rather than terror.

At the moment the first Pharoah enslaves the first fellahin, play becomes childish frivolity and the serious adult appears. Hitherto play itself had been quite serious; archaeologists call it “culture”.

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“I’m an advocate of free love. What else can I say? I think people should do what they like, enjoy what they enjoy, and we should enjoy their enjoying what they enjoy.”

--Judith Malina

(interviewed by Jim Feast and Steve Dalachinsky)

“The work of liberation from sexual repression must be a parallel of all revolutionary work and must take place during all revolutionary stages. But there comes a point at which no further progress can be made without abolishing standards that cripple the natural man sexually, and this point comes precisely when we confront the fundamental problem of violence.

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Back in the salad days of the 1990s, the North American anarchist scene adopted play, not just as a personal tactic of freedom, but as a revolutionary strategy. Play was thought to be a way out of the dead-ends of civilization: work, hierarchical relationships, commodity culture, and even the old ways of making revolution that had failed again and again. It’s tempting to say that we were naive, living in the calm before the storm. But even if the past forecloses some possibilities, a critical look back at our experiences can open up others.

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“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

-- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

What is anarchy? That question and its impacts have reverberated before and since the elusive idea was named in the 1800s Europe. The concepts of freedom and liberation from authority, whether individual, community or state have existed probably since before humans could speak.

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Since 1995, I’ve helped compile the radical contact list that Berkeley’s Slingshot collective publishes each year in its Organizer calendar date book. The 2014 list runs 21 pages and features autonomous spaces and projects in 45 states and dozens of foreign countries.

The Organizer pocket version classic is a 176 page pocket planner with radical dates for every day of the year, the contact list, a menstrual calendar, information on police repression, plus other features. There is also a large-size version with a spiral wire binding and is twice the size of the smaller classic.

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During the Cold War period, there was a sector of anarchists/left-libertarians in the West who took special interest in developments and repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries.

Their interest was in part due to the ultra-closed nature of Soviet Bloc societies and the lack of information about activism within them that wasn’t Western oriented.

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