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One characteristic that seems pervasive recently among many political actors (including anarchists) is a fixation with the State’s incessant “failures.” From the vulnerability that the State experienced on 9/11/01 to the breakdown of the State during Hurricane Katrina, there is a palpable sense that we are witnessing a “crisis” that is strategically exploitable. But who finds this account compelling? It is no revelation to say that State “failure” is often a way of developing a more powerful State. This narrative fuels Leninists and other shadow-dwellers waiting to seize opportunities for a revolutionary moment. Failure can happen within capitalist states (e.g. “failure of communication” among intelligence agencies leading to more integration via the Department of Homeland Security) or within a Marxist critique (“your State and its service-providing function has failed you, we will enter and fill the lack with our bigger State provider”).

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Another Saturday afternoon rally. Signs wave above the Crowd. Someone has been speaking semi-audibly through a borrowed PA system.”\What do we want” they shout. “Fill in the blank!” cries the crowd, a little bored. A bass drum becomes audible a block away, and people begin to tap their toes. As it comes closer, people begin to shift their balance in time with the tune. Why not wave that banner like a flag? Why not dance instead of shuffle? As a festive mood rises, the band leads the rally down the street.

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Almost all contemporary radical thought is marked by dialectics. Classical anarchism, Marxism (in all its variants), and the Situationists owe a huge debt to the thought of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, and hence, to dialectics. For example, the political thought of anarchist and anti-authoritarian theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin, Guy Debord, Murray Bookchin and Fredy Perlman all rely on dialectical thinking. Poststructuralist social theorist Michel Foucault even characterized Hegel’s theories as the ghost that prowls through the 20^th century. In fact, dialectics are so hegemonic in radical circles that a common objection to a perspective is that it is “insufficiently dialectical.”

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Welcome to the New York City issue of Fifth Estate. The editorship of the magazine now rotates, and two of us in NYC have stepped in to give the peops in Detroit and Tennessee a rest (making this the first issue in 41 years that has been produced in the northeast!). The people that put out this publication have a variety of views and backgrounds (we range in age from our 20s to 70s, and live across North America); this issue reflects our reality and issues here in NYC.

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Tonight I am alone, which is rare, and the air is cold and clear, so I blow out the oil lamp and make my way down to the clearing to take in the new moon, the milky way, and the unsilent forest. It’s autumn, the season when we harvest the last of it from our gardens and the rest becomes compost to build on next year. It’s a natural time to look around, evaluate what we’ve been doing, and think about where we might go from here.

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The Fifth Estate welcomes letters at PO Box 201016, Ferndale MI 48220, or fe-AT-fifthestate-DOT-org

I am no fan of the United States Government, nor of any of its agencies, including the FCC. As far as I can tell, we have government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, and only a revolution in the human psyche will change that. Nevertheless, I found much to disagree with in Ron Sakolsky’s article “No More Safety Valves” (#372, Spring, 2006).

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I won’t name the city or the group--it isn’t necessary. Similar situations have occurred in every anarchist community. A middle-aged man with obvious mental health difficulties attached himself to an anarchist activist project in a major city. He had time and energy to spare. He also had difficulties managing his behavior sometimes. A group of young women thought his occasionally aggressive words and actions were threatening, and they were lobbying for his expulsion from the collective. Others grumbled that his personal hygiene was lacking, and that his presence drove away potential members.

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The release of several reports this fall concerning environmental collapse has introduced us to a new and powerful way to discuss nature, one that we may have overlooked in our concern for life.

The destruction of the natural world, as it turns out, is going to be expensive. No, silly, not like you’re thinking--loss of human and animal lives, loss of culture, loss of pleasure, loss of hope. Not those expenses. I’m talking about money.

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“The condition today described as that of the precarious worker is perhaps the fundamental reality of the proletariat. And the modes of existence of workers in 1830 are quite close to those of our temporary workers.”

-- Jacques Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France

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a review of

The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual, Strike Debt, PM Press, 2014, 256pp. Available online from strikedebt.org or PMpress.org

The good people of Strike Debt have revised and expanded their very popular “Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual,” (DROM) into a full-length book. It is half political and historical analysis of how indebtedness has come to define so many aspects of our lives and half a practical how-to guide for people struggling with various forms of debt to seek individual relief and collective action.

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FE note: Berlin is a city whose rich history rings with memories of anarchist martyrs who organized clandestinely against the Nazi and communist East German regimes, suffering tremendous repression. Since WWII, Berlin anarchists have been at the forefront of militant activities opposing the state and are known for their networks of communal, often squatted buildings.

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Anarchists sweat in Florida. Dumpstered foods spoil quicker, black bloc protests require balaclavas made with moisture-wicking, breathable materials, and mosquitoes relentlessly target the sugary-sweet blood of anti-capitalists.

Out of this sultry subtropical environment has sprouted Burnpile Press. Founded in 2012, Burnpile is an informal, community supported project dedicated to producing, printing, and distributing radical literature free-of-charge. They often distro as many as 200 Fifth Estates each issue as well as Berkeley’s Slingshot periodical, and many other radical used books, zines, and accessories at no cost to the reader. With no current info-shop location, all material is literally hand distributed through face to face interactions with those living in the region.

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Sam Mbah (1963–2014)

Sam Mbah, Nigerian activist, journalist, lawyer, and co-author of African Anarchism: The History of a Movement, passed away November 6, after suffering unexpected complications from a heart condition for which he had recently undergone surgery.

Mbah was an outspoken advocate of anarchist alternatives to global capitalism, and dedicated his life to providing anarchist models of organizing against government corruption, militarism, climate change, and other social and environmental issues.

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a review of

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Newly translated & annotated by Ken Knabb,

Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014, 150 pages. $15. bopsecrets.org

For those interested in Situationist ideas, this is an auspicious time to reconsider Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, originally published in 1967. Ken Knabb’s recently revised translation is a valuable resource for the study of Debord and the Situationists.

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As the disturbing trend of mass shootings has steadily become a staple of American society, they serve as one extreme example of the collapsing modern social order.

Factors related to the rampages are isolation, hierarchy, the nature of school (where spree shootings often occur), militarization, and language.

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SACRAMENTO, CALIF.--On January 8, Green Scare prisoner Eric McDavid was ordered released from prison after nine years because the government admitted to withholding documents from the defense at his 2007 trial.

Eric McDavid leaves prison with his lawyers after serving nine years after a rigged trial in which the government withheld evidence.

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On October 31, an Argentine judge, Maria Servini de Cabria, issued international arrest warrants and extradition requests to question and try 20 Spanish Franco-era officials accused of crimes against humanity from 1939 to 1975.

Spanish General Francisco Franco led the Nationalists, a military/fascist rebel group, to eventual victory in a civil war (1936 to 39), overthrowing the democratically elected republican government and quashing revolutionary social change led by anarchists and others.

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The CIRA (Centre International de Recherches sur Anarchisme) in Lausanne, Switzerland is a large archive and small research facility. It has existed for over 50 years, but today, its existence is threatened. The CIRA works to retain the memory of the anarchist movement.

For 50 years they have collected texts written by anarchists from all over the world which are available for militants, researchers, and the curious. The collection includes nearly 20,000 books and brochures, hundreds of titles of magazines (the oldest of which is from 1848), films, and a personal archive of militants’ correspondence, etc., in over 20 languages.

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Murfreesboro, Tennessee is hardly known worldwide as a hotbed of radical activism, underground publishing, or anarchist feminism.

Other than a small but surprisingly relevant independent music scene and a handful of college professors and students at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), the overwhelming political mood of the place gravitates to the far right.

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The most insidious biases one carries are those of which we are unaware. Philosophy and history, as far back as the very origins of our present civilization, have carried within them an enormous bias that remains strangely transparent, yet hidden. They have, almost in their entirety, been thought, discussed, constructed, analyzed and transmitted by men, for men.

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Studying in Paris during the intense final year (1961 through 1962) of the Algerian war for independence, I became hooked on Algeria and the potentials of revolutionary politics. In 1965 through 1966, I pursued on-site doctoral research on Algeria’s most radical political innovation after independence--a large-scale realm of worked’ self-management in farms, factories and shops throughout the country.

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reviewed in this article

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck

Other Cinema, San Francisco, 2003

www.othercinemadvd.com/net.html

“Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

--Werner Herzog, filmmaker.

“Truth is the invention of a liar.”

--Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician.

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On February 24, I joined a large crowd to march in a jazz funeral celebrating the life of our friend, the filmmaker and community activist, Helen Hill. Helen was murdered at her home on January 4 by an intruder whose motives remain a mystery.

Hundreds of people gathered in the Mid-City neighborhood at the home that she once shared with her husband, Paul Gailiunas, a doctor, musician, and fellow community activist, and their small child, Francis Pop.

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Robert Anton Wilson at the National Theatre, London, for the 10-hour stage version of Illuminatus! in 1977

For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive basis--i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness--we decided we were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves connected to the Wilsons who play so murky a role in the “Montauk Mysteries” (Aleister Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel experiments gone awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology (including Colin, S. Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was Wilson) never materialized--although we did collaborate in editing Semiotext(e) SF, together with Rudy Rucker.

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reviewed in this article

The Big Red Songbook, Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno, editors; 2007; 538 pp.; $24; Charles H. Kerr Co., 1740 West Greenleaf, Chicago, IL 60626. Available from The Barn (see page 55).

In a 100^th anniversary commemorative edition of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook, the editors have compiled over 250 IWW songs along with their histories and anecdotes about them. Covering songs that appeared in the notorious and ubiquitous volumes, from the 1909 to the 1973 edition, each entry includes lyrics and a brief description.

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Mick Kubiak: Here Comes Spring

cdbaby.com

reviewed by Sean Flynn

Mick Kubiak is the girl you were in love with in school. Who read novels and wrote in a notebook during class, despised convention and carried her otherworldly beauty and sexuality as simple givens. A part of no clique, Kubiak began to form her eviscerating and hilarious social critique of a culture obsessed with possessing women when she was barely seventeen.

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September 7, 8, 9, at the Victoria Coolaid Society, 749 Pandora St., Victoria, BC

The only Anarchist Bookfair on the Canadian west coast will be part of a week-long Festival of Anarchy. Events include book and information, tables, workshops, readings, films, and presentations.

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There are certain things that jump out at you as soon as you arrive in Denmark. One thing you’ll notice, especially if you come from a place within that large mass of the world that is a bit closer to the equator, is that there is rarely anything you’d call direct sunlight.

It’s twilight most of the time. In the summer, it’s only really dark for an hour or so, but never completely light, either. In the winter, it’s dark most of the time, often accompanied by a cold, light rain.

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“Unlike the French uprising of May-June 1968, the youth rebellion of November 2005 had no demands and no critique; just the fires.”

--Le Monde Libertaire

Early in November 2005, three young men were trying to escape from being questioned by police and took refuge inside an electric transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois, a poor working class suburb outside Paris. Two of them were electrocuted and the third was severely burned.

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In fall 1997, in Sechelt, a small coastal town in southwest British Columbia, Canada, Jamie Elder, owner of the Unity Skateboard Shop and drop-in point for local youth, approached me about painting a mural on the side of the trailer that housed his store which faced the highway directly opposite from a McDonald’s.

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The 2007 Left Forum was held March 9–11 in New York City’s historic Cooper Union, featuring 92 workshops, two plenaries, a film festival, two plays, and attended by 1,500 people. It is the largest annual North American gathering of left intellectuals and organizers (it used to be called the Socialist Scholars Conference until--surprise, surprise--a split occurred). One of the 80 panels was entitled, “Anarchism and the Left: An Uneasy Relationship?”

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<em>

The Society of the Spectacle</em> (La Société du Spectacle), by Guy Debord, is the best-known and most influential text issued by the Situationist international (SI), and it informed--theoretically and practically--the most revolutionary sectors that emerged a year after its publication in Paris during the massive French uprising of May-June 1968.

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I begin with two insights. Global systems theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that throughout capitalist history the working class has been divided into a proletariat, which makes a living solely through waged labor, and a semi-proletariat which in its contemporary incarnation, juggles such pursuits as temp work, freelance projects, state subsidies (food stamps, artists in residence grants, or student loans), and maxing out on credit cards.

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-- drawing by Peter Welleman

Often, when I turn to the anarchist press these days, it’s certain I’ll find someone commenting on the lack of “clarity” in the discourse of the movement. In a recent editorial in Anarchy, for example, Lawrence Jarach writes “there is an overflow of ambiguous (at best) terminology in much contemporary anarchist discourse.”

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-- drawing by Peter Welleman

“Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence--virtual--let us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be free.”

-- Cornelius Castoriadis

There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within this world we must leave behind.

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“When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modern city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The question I am raising is why this life goes on--what purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue.”

--George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

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Perhaps the only positive result of the reign of the murderous moron in the White House as chieftain of the American empire is to what depths he has sunk the popular perception of Christianity.

The Bush mob’s initial political approval following the 9/11 catastrophe he allowed to occur, utilized both the flag and bible as its key iconography to fool the rubes. Although this is standard fare for craven politicians, the Republicans raised this cultural imaging to levels not seen in a hundred years. But, the unraveling of the reigning racket’s lies, the exposure of their greed, corruption, and their hypocrisy and that of their most pious spokesmen, both in the Congress and the pulpit, have created an opening for atheism that would have seemed impossible even a short time ago.

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Just the headline above alone probably condemns us to the gulag by uncritical leftist supporters of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian socialist revolution. But like most issues that vex the left, a look beneath the surface always provides more than what initially presents itself, and almost always, something worse.

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Send letters to Fifth Estate, P.O. Box 201016, Ferndale MI 48220

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of Cookie Orlando’s “Unlocking the Girl Lock: Gender Trouble at Burning Man.” (FE, Winter 2007). However, what’s missing is the girl’s point of view.

The article tells us that she didn’t feel like going to a lecture at the Burning Man festival in Nevada that her boyfriend wanted to attend, so he left her in the “Girl Lock,” a service much like left luggage at the airport.

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Note. El Libertario, the voice of the Comision de relaciones anarquistas of Venezuela, analyzes the how and why of the increasing state repression against the growing social discontent that belies the pseudo-revolutionary discourse of the Chavez regime. See also: “In Chavez’s Venezuela” in this issue.

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This edition begins our 42^nd year of continuous publishing as the longest running, English language anarchist publication in American history. We’ve got a ways to go to catch the Yiddish language Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) which printed for 87 years, but we’re hot on the heels of the Italian Dunata dei Refrattari, which published between 1922 and 1971.

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A rare judicial victory was achieved in February as forest defense activist Jefrey “Free” Luers’ 23-year prison sentence for eco-sabotage was overturned by the Oregon Court of Appeals.

In 2001, then 23 year-old Jeff and his codefendant, Craig “Critter” Marshall, were convicted for torching three SUVs at a Eugene, Oregon car dealership. Their stated purpose was to raise awareness about global warming and the role SUVs play in that process.

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In most old capitalist countries, religion has obviously declined as an institution and a social habit: fewer students in the seminary, a smaller audience at Sunday mass. But it flourishes as an attitude and a vision of the world. Stalinism and fascism (both secularized millenarianisms) promised paradise on Earth for later.

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“The Authorities came to their Adam. And, when they saw his female counterpart speaking with him they became agitated and they became enamored with her. They said, ‘Come, let us sow our seed in her.’

“And, she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their clutches she became a tree, and left them her shadowy form, resembling herself, and they defiled it foully, and they defiled the stamp of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled with their own image, they had made themselves liable to condemnation.”

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Senator Philip A. Hart and Theodore Sachs were recipients of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Annual Bill of Rights Award on Saturday evening, December 4. The Award was made during the intermission of the show “VOICES, Inc.”, the musical production from New York brought to Detroit for one night only.

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On Saturday, December 4, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) will hold: a rummage sale in its office at 8906 12^th St. The sale will run from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a great variety of articles up for sale: clothes, kitchen utensils, art objects and some furniture.

Anyone interested in articles to donate can bring them to the CORE office between 2 and 6 p.m. or call 872–8703.

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Bruce Whitten, age 26, held the rank of Staff Sergeant in the Air Force until he received a general discharge on May 23, 1965. Whitten was assigned to the First Air Commando group and spent two years in Vietnam.

Q. How do the people feel about the governments that have been set up?

A. They don’t even discuss them. It just seems to be a taboo subject. You don’t speak to an Englishmen about the Queen in a sexual manner and it’s like that here. You’ll get your throat cut. I never got anywhere discussing that subject.

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To the Editor,

I would like to congratulate you and your staff for being so ambitious as to save our city from the blight which exists at the present time. The blight which I refer to is the lack of communication between the people of Detroit as a result of our inadequate news media. The result has been an uninformed, robotic society.

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The Northwest Folklore Society presented a blues show on Wednesday night, November 24. Included in the show were performances by Washboard Willie, Willie “61” Blackwell, Sippie Wallace, Doctor Isaiah Ross, and climaxed by Little Sonny and the Rhythm Rockers. The show put on by the audience was disgusting.

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It shouldn’t be news to anyone--but it probably is--that the local gestapo is responsible for ending the performance of LeRoi Jones’ “the toilet” and “the Slave” at the now shut-down Concept East Theatre. The plays, directed by Woody King (who is now back in New York) and performed brilliantly by such Detroit actors as Sam Blue (Toilet) and Harrison Avery (Slave), began their run in August, made it through a couple of weeks, and then were brutally closed by the guardians of law & order--and “morals”--in our fair city.

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