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Bolo Bolo, Anarchy Comix & other FE Favorites
SOCIETY AGAINST THE STATE by Pierre Clastres
Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing, he refuses the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a critique of Western society.
Zone Books 218 pp. $11
BOLO BOLO by P.M.
Bolo Bolo ranges somewhere between a satirical sci-fi novel and a (non-violent) battle plan for the “substruction of the capitalist and/or socialist Planetary Work Machine.” Bolos are tribal sized units which group people around specific interests/ideologies/ideas/tastes or whatever sphere of commonality they choose. P.M. devises a time table and even a language necessary for the transition to a world of Bolos, and even if one refuses to take it completely seriously, there is a wealth of insight and humor to make the reading worthwhile.
Autonomedia 192 pp. $8.00
ANARCHY COMICS #1 and #4
In these hilarious -spoofs of modern life by a talented assembly of international cartoonists, authority enters the laughing-gas chamber of anarchist humor.
Last Gasp $2.50 each
AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY: TECHNICS OUT-OF-CONTROL AS A THEME IN POLITICAL THOUGHT by Langdon Winner
Readers interested in technology, politics and social change will find Autonomous Technology a useful guide and a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between technology and society. In it Winner outlines the paradoxes of technological development, the image of alienation and liberation evoked by machines, and he assesses the historical conditions underlying the exponential growth of technology.
M.I.T Press 386 pp. $11
ANARCHY OR CHAOS by George Woodcock
Written as World War Two raged around him, Woodcock’s writing is learned, yet filled with youthful enthusiasm. This volume is as fine a brief history of anarchism as is available today.
Lysander Spooner 124 pp. $9.50
RADIO SERMONETTES by Hakim Bey
Libertarian Book Club 40 pp. $3.50
Other titles of current interest:
FUTURE PRIMITIVE by John Zerzan
Even (or especially) for those who disagree with him, Zerzan’s essays are well worth reading as much for the questions they raise as for the (hyper) critical perspective of civilization he promotes. Included are his recent positions on primitivism, alienation and postmodernism, many of which first appeared in Anarchy magazine. Since many of these ideas are ones we have debated heatedly with him over the years, his swats at the Fifth Estate are a tolerable diversion.
Autonomedia/Anarchy 185 pp. $7
DRUNKEN BOAT: ART, REBELLION, ANARCHY editor Max Blechman
From the sagging dock of modernity, Drunken Boat sets out to sea. Leaving the shores of liberalism and Marxism, it aims to reveal and revitalize unexpected regions of anarchist culture: Kandinsky’s art of the future, John Cage’s zen-soundscape, B.Traven’s pseudonymous itineraries, and beatitudes of Kali-ma.
—from the introduction
Autonomedia/Left Bank Books 288 pp. $12
THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE by Raoul Vaneigem
This is a revised version of the 1983 translation, reviewed and approved by the author and includes Vaneigem’s 1991 preface to the first French paperback edition. Written in 1963–65 and first published in France in 1967, Vaneigem’s book complements Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle which appeared in the same year. As the main programmatic statements of the Situationist International, these two works played a large part in the gestation of the French May events of 1968.
Left Bank Books 216 pp. $16
THE STORY OF TATIANA By Jacques Baynac
In 1906, at a Swiss luxury hotel, Tatiana Leontiev, a young aristocratic intellectual and revolutionary, assassinated a French businessman in the mistaken belief he was the Tsar’s Interior Minister. While tracing Tatiana’s life, the book evokes the repression, tragedy, intrigue, and commitment leading up to the overthrow of Tsarism.
Black & Red 225 pp. $6
GONE TO CROATAN: ORIGINS OF NORTH AMERICAN DROP-OUT CULTURE edited by Ron Sakolsky & James Koehnline
America was founded as a land of dropouts, and produced a crop of dissidents, visionaries, utopians, escaped slaves, white and black “Indians,” sailors and buccaneers, tax rebels, angry women, “tri-racial isolate- communities—all on the lam from Babylon. 25 essays tell a hidden history of this continent.
Autonomedia-USA 382 pp. $12
Live from Death Row by Mumia Abu-Jamal
A collection of essays by the condemned journalist. See details on Page 3. All profits go to the Mumia defense fund.
Addison-Wesley 208 pp. $20
T.A.Z: THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE, ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM, POETIC TERRORISM, by Hakim Bey
This collection of beatific verse, post-situationist pronouncements, anarchist animadversions, and postmodern speculations register various figures of Utopia (the hermetic margins of the East, romantic experimental communities of Europe and early America, and the drop-out cultures of the recent past and present) that have, as we approach the millennium, become rootless and worldly.
Autonomedia 141 pp. $7
PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn
“Engaging, informative, passionate and extremely well-written: the best critical survey of American history available.”—FE Review Highly recommended as a basic radical history text.
Harper and Row 614 pp. $13
MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST by Peter Kropotkin
Kropotkin’s best known book and one of the great works of revolutionary literature. In it he brings alive the ferment of ideas and movements in late 19th century Europe. If one wishes to know what it was like to be a revolutionary when it meant being hounded, exiled, Siberia, imprisonment or death, here is the book that tells it first-hand.
Dover Publications 557 pp. $12
New from the Eastern North American Native Forest Network
THE ALARM: A Journal of Revolutionary Ecology SPECIAL WOMYN’S EDITION International actions in support of the planet, indigenous struggles, tactics and strategy, sexual politics, political philosophy from the womyn of NFN. See review on page 25.
NFN 40 pp. $4
HAVING LITTLE, BEING MUCH: A CHRONICLE OF FREDY PERLMAN’S FIFTY YEARS by Lorraine Perlman
A remembrance of a friend, and the times and community in which he lived. “Lorraine’s direct and unadorned style lets Fredy’s life speak for itself; one cannot help but see it as exemplary.”—FE Review
Black and Red 155 pp. $3.50
LOVE, SEX, AND POWER IN LATER LIFE: A Libertarian Perspective by Tony Gibson
The revolution in sexual mores experienced in Western Europe over the past 30 years has largely bypassed the needs of older people. Gibson describes the contribution anarchist and libertarian writers have made towards the extension of the social revolution to older people and especially older women, who have suffered from aspects of sexism as well as ageism.
Freedom Press 104 pp. $8.50
THE LAST DAYS OF CHRIST THE VAMPIRE by J.G. Eccarius
One of the most blasphemous books we have seen since the classics of sacrilege. The book jacket states: “His power grew over the ages. Enslaving minds and bodies through both religious hierarchies and direct telepathic control, Jesus Christ the Vampire promises people eternal life for the price of their minds.”
111 Publishing 180 pp. $6
MUTUAL AID: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin
An anarchist classic which profoundly influenced theories of human biology. His thesis was propounded as a counterblast to the social conclusions drawn from the Darwinian “struggle for existence.”
Freedom Press 278 pp. $11
BEYOND GEOGRAPHY: THE WESTERN SPIRIT AGAINST THE WILDERNESS by Frederick Turner
Traces the “spiritual history” that led up to the european domination and decimation of the Western hemisphere’s native peoples who were as rich in mythic life as the new arrivals were barren. Turner follows the unconscious desire in the Western invaders for the spiritual contentment they sensed in the primitives they destroyed.
Rutgers U. Press 329 pp. $15
FACING WEST: THE METAPHYSICS OF INDIAN HATING & EMPIRE BUILDING by Richard Drinnon
From the first Puritan confrontation with Native Americans to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, there have been two constants in American policy and purpose. One is a racism that perceives nonwhites as at once childlike inferiors and murderous savages. The other is a hunger for new land and economic markets over which to exert control. Drinnon examines the bloody course of American expansion westward to the Pacific, then to the Philippines, and finally to Vietnam. Highly recommended as a “core Fifth Estate text.”
Schocken Books 570 pp. pub. at $17; now $7
THE FINAL EMPIRE: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION by William H. Kotke
Kotke’s target is the entire course of civilized human society over the past 10,000 years.
Arrowpoint Press 396 pp. $15
Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit, in the same space as the Fifth Estate Newspaper. Hours vary, so please call before coming by.
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