Most Recent Additions

a review of

Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters

San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2007.

160 pages, available for $15 from the Barn

Diane Di Prima, 1960s

Diane di Prima, America’s (and probably the world’s) leading anarcho-Hermetic poet, has issued a new edition (the fifth) of her famous Revolutionary Letters, containing all of the poems from the City Lights versions from 1971 through 1980, plus 23 new and more recent pieces. This new edition emanates--rather oddly but not inappropriately-- from Last Gasp, a publisher mostly known for underground comics.

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It was a full scale beggar’s banquet, the return of the repressed, a surprise party. The city people, young and old, black and white, went through the pawnshop windows like meteorites. Nervous exorcists, trembling before a mortal turned evil and massive and enigmatic, the politicians asked, “Who are you?” And like demons unleashed from an inferno, they answered, “Many.”

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As long as we’re on the subject of endings--or rather, the rhetoric of “the end”--I’d like to intervene in the ongoing conversation about what Roger Farr recently referred to in these pages as “the end of an era,” i.e., the era of anarchism as a “communicative” project (“Anarchist Poetics,” Fifth Estate #373, Fall 2006).

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“One never really contests an organization of existence without contesting all of that organization’s forms of language.”

--Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons...

If capital must continually decompose and then restructure standardized communication in order to maintain just enough cooperation as is needed to ensure efficient production, then the defection from this campaign in favor of creating autonomous and “unreadable” modes of communication and dissent emerges as a viable, if limited, tactic. Language and communication become critical sites of anarchist critique and experimentation.

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No discussion of end-of-the-world imaginings would be complete without some reference to wacky conservative Christian dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is a school of Protestant theology that favors a millennial interpretation of history--all roads lead to God cracking open a cataclysmic can of whup-ass on humans.

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What do we find so compelling about the end of the world? While some people are unconvinced or uninterested, others find fictional accounts of nuclear war, plague, or environmental disaster to be mesmerizing. In an unscientific survey recently conducted in a utopia/dystopia class, a majority of the students--who read fiction, watched movies, or thought about the end of the world--also imagined themselves surviving such events.

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For the godless anti-authoritarian, the hope that the current order of reality will come to an end during our lifetimes may be the last possible form of big, world-encompassing faith. For those who are faithful in this sense--whether that faith is based in scholarly readings or is purely intuitive--Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl wants to be the next Bible--or at least a book of psalms.

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I’m not entirely sure when the world ended. I mean, I’ve got some ideas, but I really don’t think that it’s important. That’s why I don’t have much patience for this end-of-the-world baloney.

My anarcho-primitivist comrades rhapsodize about the decline and fall of civilization, but it looks to me like that happened a very, very long time ago. The history of world civilizations has been one astonishing full-scale catastrophe after another for the last six thousand or so years and that makes it hard to choose any single, defining climax of human existence before the degeneration began.

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We catch ourselves reading the Book of Revelation because we cannot face the failure of the revolution. We consult the Mayan calendar and post-modern prophecies about the year 2012 because we can no longer realize mutual aid as an interpersonal policy that suffuses all of daily life.

The prevailing critique of all forms of “collapsism”--the notion that the end is both inevitable and imminent coupled with the subsequent idea that all radical acts for present transformation are thus futile--correctly chides its proponents. The latter half of the formulation finds collapsist rhetoric contributing to the contagion of apathy; this apathy then acts as a mental pesticide, drowning and choking the roots of resistance deep inside the collective consciousness of our culture. But if we are so brash as to suggest we break apart the collapsist formula, decoupling our acceptance of the inevitable from our subsequent sense of defeat, then all things are possible. It really is a go-for-broke moment, then, when we realize that tomorrow is in fact today. But why don’t our actions reflect this?

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Publication date: Early 2008

Issue theme: ESCAPE!

Prisoners. Deserters. Divorcees. Vacationers. Junkies. Exile, exodus, emigration, and escape velocity. Shelters, sanctuaries, and safe-houses. Escaping consequences, escaping responsibility, and escaping attention. Escape to or escape from? Is escapism helpful or harmful? Is it useless to try to escape? We seek original, critical, and analytical assessments of theory and practice of escape, as well as essays, articles, and artwork on general themes.

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What if the lights went out? What if you couldn’t get clean water to drink? What if there were no police, no schools, and no place to go if you were sick or hurt? If the shelves, in the grocery store were never re-stocked, and no one came to pick up the trash?

What if most everything we take for granted about the rhythms of life ceased to be? If the relentless motion--the motion that pushes us on to the next paycheck, the next month’s rent, the next deadline, social event, vacation, the next goal in our imagined future--came to a halt, and these landmarks in our lives were suddenly irrelevant?

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Lately, I’ve been immersed in thoughts of surviving “after the crash.” It all started three years ago when our theatre group, unable to find a suitable published play for us to perform, decided to collectively write a play of our own about “the end of the world as we know it.” In The Wobble, as it soon came to be known, five actors on tour get stranded on an island (similar to the one on which we all live in the Georgia Strait between the southwestern coast of British Columbia and Vancouver Island) when they experience ‘a wobble’ that appears to be the cause of the permanent collapse of all power and communication systems.

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This conversation between writers Anu Bonobo & Daniel Pinchbeck--author of 2012: The Return of Quetzacoatl (2006) and Breaking Open the Head (2002) (and co-founder of RealitySandwich.com)--transpired over email in February 2007. Pinchbeck’s latest book 2012 is just out in paperback: a critical assessment of Pinchbeck’s work by Cookie Orlando follows this interview.

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In late May and early June 2007, sentences were handed down for ten activists who pled guilty to a series of Earth Liberation Front/Animal Liberation Front (ELF/ALF) actions.

In addition to jail time, eight of the activists also received a federal “terrorism enhancement,” which allows for increased penalties of up to 20 additional years. The Civil Liberties Defense Center said this was the “first time in US history that the federal government” had sought “such a sentence enhancement for property crimes that neither intended nor resulted in injury or death to humans.”

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This issue arrives late, but we think you’ll find it worth the wait. We published 1 last in March 2007, but our plans for timely Summer and Fall issues faltered due to a lack in finances and in our issue-editor’s free time. But unlike some publications that have recently ceased operations, we’re as motivated as ever, which should be self-evident from the articles and art in our “End of the Worldism” edition.

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Three years ago, Fifth Estate ran an article on the activities of the two dozen or so privatized armies in Occupied Iraq. The essay claimed that the name of one rent-a-gun company--Blackwater USA--was derived from the term used by the US Navy to describe stealthy, night-time Swift Boat assaults (like the one that former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey went on in 1969 when he single-handedly cut the throats of at least twenty women, children, and old men in the small Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong).

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“Don’t tase me, bro! I didn’t do anything”

--Florida

“It was like touching an electric fence they use, to keep cattle in, but instead of just where the initial shock goes in, the electricity goes through your entire body. It feels like every nerve cell is on fire.”

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The first Burning Man festival in China, with several hundred in attendance

Burning Man began with a wooden effigy and a single match on a beach in San Francisco in the late 1980s. When the police came and closed down the beach burning of the Man it was John Law and Michael Michael, two members of the Cacophony Society, a group of legendary urban pranksters, who told local artist Larry Harvey of a place they knew of in the desert “where you could burn things.”

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1. So he thinks he’s got my arms pinned, does he! Little does he know I’m.

2. Super Woman! I’ll drop back and thrust my thumbs into his groin...then he’ll move back and I’m ready for my next move...

3. Right in the groin! I’ve got his arm and head too!

4. Now I’ll kick with the knife-edge of my foot--right to the inside of his knee!

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The revolution is a thing of the people, a popular creation; the counterrevolution is a thing of the State. It has always been so and will always be so, whether in Russia, Spain or China.

--Anarchist Federation of Iberia (FA I), Tierra y Libertad, July 3, 1936

Ammunition Books, 4403 Second, Detroit, Michigan 48201--Telephone: (313) 831--6800, Office Hours: Monday through Friday, 1 p.m.--5 p.m.

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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.

PLUMBER--drain cleaning, plumbing repairs, sinks, toilets, tubs. Call 368–9754.

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At a time when the Pinochet dictatorship’s murderous repression of political opponents has isolated it internationally to the point that the blood-soaked regime is even a public embarrassment to the White House, help has arrived from the Maoist bureaucracy in Peking.

“The Chilean military junta, increasingly isolated and beleaguered at home and abroad, is seeking stronger ties with China, one of its few remaining friends,” Hugh O’Shaughnessy reported in the November 23 issue of the Observer.

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All too often, we tend to ignore what we don’t see in favor of that which we do see. Take space for example. As it hangs unseen we ignore it, but as it becomes fixed under the onslaught of mechanized forces, we suddenly notice huge obstacles debauching our vision and engulfing our lives.

When space first originated it was everywhere, except where it wasn’t--i.e. where objects existed in its place. For space to exist it must be free of objects (for objects utilize space and not vice versa as some would have us believe).

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It’s not easy being a fool. All the fools on television and in Hollywood make competition stiff but it has been worse. From the sixth to the tenth century, for nearly four hundred years, the Catholic church and the European nobility declared total war on theatrical activities, and wherever these feudal forces attained power it was at the expense of fools, pagans and local shamans.

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Ludlow miners, 1914

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

The era from 1865 to 1919 signaled an important, pivotal development in America’s economy. It was a period in which the dominance of individual, agrarian-based capitalism, often characterized as “rugged individualism,” was overthrown by the organized forces of corporate monopoly capitalism, bringing about irrevocable economic and social transformations in the lives of millions of people.

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As promised in our March issue, the FE will be throwing another rip-roaring benefit, to raise money for the paper’s maintenance and provide a great time for all. To be held on Saturday, April 10 (9 until ?) at Formerly Alvin’s Delicatessen (on Cass between Antoinette and Palmer near the WSU campus), the $2.50 admission charge will include dancing to a great blues band headed by Detroit’s own BoBo Jenkins and lots of free beer. As before, all money goes toward the continued appearance of this paper and we are looking forward to your support and participation.

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(The Sunday News supplement)

Caption: The feet that once walked the Sea of Galilee here protrude from the mud, still showing the nail scars from the crucifixion.

JERUSALEM--UPI-- The Christian Faith lies in ruins today as the central myth of the world-wide religion--the Resurrection of Christ-- was shattered by the discovery of a 2,000 year-old corpse and its positive identification as that of Jesus of Nazareth.

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The argument that the advent of capitalism brought a rise in the standard of living for workers has been refuted before, but is shown graphically in these two prints. Prior to the dominance of the capitalist economy and the establishment of the first factories in England, manufacturing was done in small shops and cottages overseen by a working master craftsman employing several apprentices and helpers. At left is a typical 18^th Century establishment (1740) using foot and crank powered lathes. Large windows were the only source of light and regulated working time.

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NEW YORK (LNS)--A little more than three years after the first Attica indictments were handed down at a snow-covered courthouse a few miles from Attica State Prison in upstate New York, the Attica defendants and their supporters have won an almost complete victory.

On February 26 and 27, all but one of the remaining indictments were dismissed by a Buffalo, New York judge. Under the shadow of pre-trial defense revelations of improprieties by state officials, a major indictment charging ten former Attica prisoners with kidnapping guards was dismissed. The next day two indictments charging three inmates with assaulting prison guards was also dismissed.

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FIFTH ESTATE #271, April, 1976, Vol. 11, No. 7

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Dennis Rosenblum

Bob Nirkind

Pat Halley

Colleen Jensen

E. B. Maple

Mr. Venom

Paula Zerzan

Pat O’Bryan

Peter Werbe

Algirdas Ratnikas

Marilyn Werbe

John Zerzan

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.

“Shit, I beat my wife once a week--and she LOVES it!”

The above quote, issued from the lips of my supervisor one day at work last week, did not particularly surprise me. It seemed the “typical” American macho male’s rationale to any implication that women/wives may not enjoy playing subservient roles.

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To The Fifth Estate:

We had a dim premonition the shallow-minded comedians would one day use what they thought to be DADA as a way of deadening men’s minds.

“Propagandada Discovered in Detroit” (Fifth Estate, March 1976) confirms this. YOU NORMALS are too weak to be good, too good to be really bad....only weak and in consequence, pathetic.

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Coming to grips with the totality of Wilhelm Reich’s anti-authoritarian social psychology is beyond the scope of any short article. [1] Instead, this will be a brief summation of his notion of Sex-economy, which, along with Work-democracy constitute two of his major concepts.

To present Reich in such a manner means by necessity that many apparent inconsistencies in his work must be neglected. [2] To call oneself a Reichian (or a Marxist) means you raise insightful thought to the level of an ideology--a doctrine to be defended in all of its peculiarities.

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The voter is a man who comes where he is summoned one day like a flunkey, to one who whistles for him as for a dog trained to obey, who comes on the said day only and not on any other day. He is a man who comes when authority says: “The moment is here to sanction one more time a system established by others and for others than yourself.

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FIFTH ESTATE #392, Fall/Winter, 2014, Vol. 49, No. 2

Cover: D. Sands

4 Welcome to the Idiocene

Max Cafard

5 Logistical Anarchism

Jeff Shantz

7 VR Troopers:

Jason Rodgers

8 Seattle’s Left Bank Books

Sylvie Kashdan

9 Anarchist Golf?

Joseph Winogrond

11 Free Marius Jacob Mason

12 Dirty Yeti: DIY House

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Margot Adler, 1946–2014, at an NPR mic.

Margot Adler, if known to Fifth Estate readers at all, is probably known as a longtime correspondent for NPR radio since 1979. She died on July 28 of cancer at the age of 68.

However, those who do know of her may also be aware that she considered herself a Wiccan high priestess who adhered to the tradition for more than 40 years. Also, there is a specific Fifth Estate connection quite distant from Nationalistic Pentagon Radio (more fitting for its acronym than its actual name).

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I played the guitar once when I was seventeen in front of a crowd of college students. The building had a sign outside that read, Built During World War II. There was a spiked fence that ran a mile around Orange St. and the workers sold cheap beer in the back. I sang a song that was written by yours truly; it was about war and conformity in America.

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MILITARIZED POLICE AROUND THE WORLD routinely use what they designate as “riot control agents” against their rebellious civilian populations. Because the substances travel with the whims of the wind and are often used in large quantities, a person does not even have to attend a demonstration to become exposed.

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It’s been an open secret for months that Nathan Block (better known as “Exile”), a former Green Scare prisoner who served a number of years in prison for several Earth Liberation Front actions, has become a fascist. This has been known not just through numerous personal accounts from Olympia, Wash., but from copious postings on Block’s tumblr blog, Loyalty Is Mightier Than Fire.

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So famous is the quote (rendered in a variety of ways), “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution,” that it is even emblazoned on a souvenir coffee cup peddled by the Berkeley, Calif.-based Emma Goldman Papers project, and attributed to the turn of the last century anarchist and free love advocate.

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Longtime Fifth Estate friend and supporter Julie Herrada has contributed many articles and photos to the magazine over the last 15 years. These can be found by searching the growing archives on our site at FifthEstate.org. Use the Search box or the FE Authors drop-down list on our home page to find what we currently have online.

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There is a common notion of the art world, a shared idea of what it is and what it is about. However, that also comes with a popular misconception: the perception of the art world as one, univocal concept when in fact there is a multitude of art worlds. Some intersect and overlap while others function isolated from the others, often informed by a number of opposing principles.

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Way back in the 1990s, the bleeding edge of the cyberpunk counterculture was in conflict over what the next stage of technological transformation was to be. On one side were the psychedelic, techno-shamans of virtual reality (VR). On the other, the data pirates of the web. The advocates of virtual reality argued that cheap VR units would soon appear in every home, providing an endless array of sensory stimulation for all participants, a world of unheard of experience.

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Civilizations have come and gone over the past 6,000 years or so. Now, there’s just one----various cultures, but a single, global civilization.

Collapse is in the air. We’ve already seen the failure, if not the collapse, of culture in the West. The Holocaust alone, in the most cultured country (philosophy, music, etc.), revealed culture’s impotence.

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Modern modes of handling concerns in the death and dying spheres seem emblematic of disturbing trends found throughout mass culture.

Due to regrettable circumstances, I have had recent exposures to a body kept fresh on a mechanical ventilation machine in an intensive care unit; some aspects of the evaluation of the worth of a life lost in an accident; and services offered to the terminally ill and their families.

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On the Anarchist Origins of Golf (Expanded version--MS Word, 110 KB)

Although golf’s popularity has waned in recent years, losing millions of players, its abuse of land, water-use and chemicals continues on a mass world-wide scale according to the World Anti-Golf Movement.

The multi-billion dollar industry has introduced an insignificant number of organic courses to address the criticism of golf’s horrid impact on the environment, and one can note a degree of panic when larger pizza-sized holes on the greens are being considered to increase its appeal.

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Neither the fire marshal nor the police have ever paid a visit to the Dirty Yeti. It’s a small house in Spokane, Wash. which has hosted shows for local bands and a variety of musicians and artists on tour, travelers from around the world, has been a kitchen and pantry for the local Food Not Bombs, and a zine publishing and workshop space alongside its rotating cast of permanent residents.

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It seems that the more art school training one receives at the academy, the more one is likely to be confused about surrealism or overtly hostile to it. Much of the malaise around surrealism in art circles stems from the insularity of the art world itself.

While surrealist ideas and practices can be expressed artistically, surrealism cannot be reduced to a style or school of art, even one aimed at inspiring radical political action. Nevertheless, surrealism is typically portrayed by academics as merely one historical moment in the grand cavalcade of failed avant-garde art movements of the 20^th century.

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a review of

The Failure of Non-violence: from the Arab Spring to Occupy by Peter Gelderloos, Left Bank Books, Seattle, 2013, 306pp. leftbankbooks.bigcartel.com

Peter Gelderloos’s The Failure of Nonviolence is a thought-provoking invitation to authentic debate.

This kind of discussion is especially relevant for those of us who welcome the recent worldwide social insurgencies, and are not committed to pacifism as an ideology. The book focuses on tactics and strategies used by social movements, and encourages critical debate about defining success and evaluating which struggles have been successful and which ones have not.

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Chicago 1996 Democratic Convention

“Puppet theater...[is] an anarchic art, subversive and untamable by nature, an art which is easier researched in police records than in theater chronicles.”

--Peter Schuman, founder of Bread and Puppet, the great grandparents of political giant puppetry in North America

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