Full list of texts

David Rockefeller (left) President of the Chase Manhattan Bank and an unknown accomplice

Roy E. Weber, President of the Michigan Savings & Loan League

Robert McNamara, President of the World Bank

THE SUPPRESSION AND ELIMINATION OF BANKERS

You can help eliminate the number of BANKS and BANKERS who hold up and rob people every day, and win a new and creative life for yourself and others. If you have information that you believe will lead to the suppression and consequent elimination of any BANKERS responsible for the daylight robbery of you and your fellow workers, call your neighbor or friend for assistance.

...

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following story is a true one and illustrates the truth that police brutality in Detroit is not a myth. It is not entirely a black man’s problem either as this story points out. Solid oak is colorblind. It only sees red.

We were walking down Woodward thinking about which all-night movie to see. It was 1:00 in the morning and cold. We were walking fast with our heads down against the wind.

...

When eager crowds pushed through the turnstiles of Detroit’s North American International Auto Show last winter, they had the look of fans at a championship game or dreamy-eyed kids thinking of presents under the Christmas tree. Although all of them must have been aware, at some level of consciousness, of the carnage, property damage, and pollution these icons of fantasy and desire create, they were there to ooh and aah the futuristic concept cars and the latest models.

...

In 1917, unable to break the unity of the miners, armed vigilante gangs organized by the copper corporations, rounded up 2,000 strikers at gun point in Bisbee, Az. They were forced onto crammed cattle cars and dumped in the desert.

A hundred years ago, in September 1918, more than a hundred leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were convicted of conspiracy to obstruct World War I. The trial marked a critical turning point for the union and the Left. In marking this centenary, we remember the Industrial Workers of the World as the most successful organization holding to a radical vision in U.S. history.

...

The 12^th annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, which takes place during Montreal’s month long Festival of Anarchy, will be held on May 21 and 22, 10am-5pm at the CEDA, 2515 rue Delisle, (a short walk from Lionel-Groulx metro).

The bookfair is one of North America’s largest, and features publishers, distributors, and book sellers from across the continent and Europe. There is a zine room, films, art exhibits, and introductory as well as in-depth workshops, some in French and others in English. The Fifth Estate will be present with its latest edition.

...

Many are marking 2019 as the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the first captured Africans in Jamestown. So, even more than usual, we will hear chattel slavery referred to as the nation’s original sin.

It isn’t.

That framing is itself a window into the white way of thinking. It’s meant to perpetuate the mythologies of Christianity That doctrine incorporates the belief that humans are flawed, weak and often badly behaved. And, since that’s God given, it will always be true.

...

a review of

The Blast by Joseph Matthews. PM Press, 2022

The Blast, a new novel by Joseph Matthews, takes place in San Francisco in 1916, just as the United States edges its way into the general European slaughter known as World War I.

We learn that three years before the current moment, labor radicals and anarchists of various denominations agitated mightily for workers’ rights and union recognition in that thriving waterfront shipping town, but failed to make lasting progress.

...

Three artists spent the night in the mansion, since outside the museum a studio was set aside for making art. As the artists told it, that memorial morning We were awakened by shouts of “We’ll shoot! Hands up!” Armed soldiers ordered them to get dressed, took them out to the courtyard and together with anarchists sent them off to the Kremlin.” [1] This is Alexandr Rodchenko’s description of the Cheka’s raid on the anarchist-held Morozov Museum in Moscow in the early morning of April 12, 1918 published in Anarkhiya (Anarchy). The report survives as an undated fragment in the New York Public Library, where North America’s only copy of the short-lived revolutionary newspaper was allowed to disintegrate, neglected and forgotten, until the remains were microfilmed some years ago.

...

The 1967 Detroit Rebellion began unexpectedly. Still, it should have been anticipated. At 3:45 a.m. on a still scorching hot early morning on July 23, 1967, cops raided an all black, after-hours drinking spot, locally called a blind pig, and began roughly herding patrons into police wagons.

This was no different an occurrence than had happened numerous times previously. The Detroit police were roundly hated by black people as a white occupation force staffed by corrupt and brutal racists who routinely made life even more miserable for a mostly impoverished community. Normally, arrests and police harassment went unanswered.

...

Liberation News Service — You don’t have to be (or even read Marshall McLuhan to realize that without an iron grip on the media—and most importantly on television—the rulers of this country could hold power approximately one month. The average person here is not so happy that given an easy and acceptable access to honest explanations of what goes on here he would not take action as we have.

...

Although Bell Telephone’s security around its long distance telephone codes rival that of the state’s nuclear secrets, its usually only a matter of days after they are devised each January before they are in the hands of phone phreaks.

The publication of these secret codes is an annual event in this newspaper as our continued retribution against the profit-swollen Bell monopoly for prosecuting the Fifth Estate several years ago on trumped up charges relating to the publication of mechanical phone devices.

...

During America’s most highly watched television spectacle, the Super Bowl, viewers in ten major television markets were shown an advertisement from Apple Computer Corporation on the theme of George Orwell’s 1984. In the ad, the face of Big Brother speaks from a giant telescreen to a hall full of automatons (young people with fashionably shaven heads recruited for the role). Suddenly, a young woman runs into the room and hurls a sledgehammer through the screen, shattering it. A message follows, declaring a new model computer the machine which will ensure that the year 1984 cannot be come the nightmare world of Orwell’s novel.

...

Somehow, the giant organizations which produce and disseminate all of this junk employ our very fear of technology to further its “unprecedented control” over our lives. The contemporary worship of this tremendous power arises from our actual powerlessness in the face of it, and the corporate-conjured image of our empowerment by technology corresponds directly to technology’s disabling suppression of human action. “Taking control with technology” adds up to our complete surrender to it--its taking control of us.

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Final planning is in high gear for the 1989 Anarchist Conference/Festival to be held in San Francisco on July 20–25. Its theme and name are “Without Borders.” Over 3,000 anti-authoritarians and anarchists from around the world are expected to attend, which would exceed the total participants for the last three previous gatherings in Toronto, Minneapolis and Chicago.

...

Plans are under way for the 1989 continental anarchist gathering tentatively scheduled for July 30-August 7 in San Francisco. Since the 1986 Haymarket centenary commemoration, there have been yearly anarchist assemblies with a 1987 meeting in Minneapolis and Toronto this year. About 1,000 people attended the 1988 gathering (FE Summer 1988); planners are expecting upwards of 3,000 participants for a variety of political and cultural events. The FE will have a full schedule as soon as it is available.

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In a previous issue of the Fifth Estate critic Thomas Haroldson airily dismissed Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” as a “crashing bore.” One wishes critics like Mr. Haroldson could be just as easily dismissed, critics who confuse art forms. If one is to criticize art, it is necessary one has a theory of art on which to base his criticisms.

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Please send calendar events to the Fifth Estate, keeping in mind our quarterly schedule.

Deadline for the summer 2003 edition is May 1.

fifthestatenewspaper@yahoo.com

PO Box 6, Liberty, TN 37095

April 4–6—New Orleans, LA Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex: Critical Resistance South. Regional conference and Strategy Session.

...

Please send calendar events to the Fifth Estate, keeping in mind our quarterly schedule.

Deadline for the Winter 2003/04 edition is November 1.

fifthestate@pumpkinhollow.net

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Various dates, cities—Just say no to Dick and Bush Tour All along the west coast and throughout the rest of the country, as Bush travels around to raise funds, people are organizing to stop him. People are coming out for a myriad of reasons, protesting war, heckling the rich, and generally causing trouble. Contact your local Republican headquarters to target the fundraiser near you.

...

2004 is a leap year—a fantastic opportunity to leap into something new. Are you gonna use your extra day like you use so many other days—using up more of the earth’s resources while the forests, the oceans, and tree communities wither and die? Watching it all go on around you—an “information consumer”—feeling helpless to do anything to resist it?

...

This poster originally appeared in the Daily Barbarian and was reprinted in the Fifth Estate, June 19, 1979--vol. 14, no. 3 (298).

Rarely does a horror movie of such magnitude reach the public, but when it does, it holds an unshakable grip on our imagination, if not our very being. Such is the latest film from 20^th Century Technology--MEGA DEATH.

...

On the occasion of a past anniversary, we noted that the Fifth Estate had been described by the FBI in its files as “supporting the causes of revolution everywhere.” It has been a pleasure and an honor, a calling and a commitment over the past twenty years for the hundreds of people who have comprised the newspaper staff and the hundreds of thousands of readers to make that description accurate. In an age dominated by a mass media whose message is that no resistance exists to the empire and its culture, we are proud to be one of the many centers that boldly announces that this is not true.

...

On the occasion of a past anniversary, we noted that the Fifth Estate had been described by the FBI in its files as “supporting the cause of revolution everywhere.” It has been a pleasure and an honor, a calling and a commitment over the past twenty years for the hundreds of people who have comprised the newspaper staff and the hundreds of thousands of readers to make that description accurate. In an age dominated by a mass media whose message is that no resistance exists to the empire and its culture, we are proud to be one of the many centers which boldly announces that this is not true.

...

Chicago and the Democratic Convention were the end of a fantasy trip. The last illusion that social change could be brought about through popular pressure on the Democratic Party was shattered beneath the clubs of Daley’s pigs and the manipulations of the Humphrey political machine.

The Party has shown itself for what it is—a cynical, corrupt political tool of a power elite working behind a military shield to prevent any popular interference with its operation.

...

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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On Sunday, November 12, approximately 300,000 pro-choice demonstrators, participating in a “Mobilization for Women’s Lives,” filled the lawn beside the reflecting pool facing the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

At one point during the four hour rally, the folk group, Peter, Paul and Mary sweetly sang choruses from Holly Near’s, “We Are A Gentle, Angry People,” but it was clear that the main sponsor of the event, the National Organization for Women (NOW), wanted the emphasis on “gentle” and not “angry.”

...

One of the most remarkable men in Michigan runs the only Vegetarian Cafeteria in this area: Stanley Filipzcak has operated the Health Food Center at 5255 Schaefer Road, Dearborn, for the last six years.

Filipczak is now eighty years old. When he reached the age of forty, he was suffering from arthritis, lumbago, headaches and other diseases, which three Ann Arbor doctors could not cure. A friend turned him on to vegetarianism and by the age of forty-five he was cured and a confirmed vegetarian.

...

After 3 years of action, an anarchist center closes its doors, but a more ambitious project opens down the street.

“The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can “occupy” these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace.”

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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.

...

a review of

In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations. Jerry Mander. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco. 1991. $25.00. 446 pp.

From my window overlooking Detroit’s entropic landscape, no earth is visible. The ground is comprised of layers of pavement spread through eras over an anonymous “fill,”—dirt, roots, decimated bits of life systems, ripped out and hauled in long ago from some other abused place on Earth. This is the true landscape of the western spirit.

...

Reprinted from The Daily Collegian

Looking for something different in newspapers? Like to see current topics treated from a new angle? Interested in cultural events that don’t appear in the major papers? You might take a glance at “The Fifth Estate,” a Collegian-size four-page paper, and a product of a University freshman, Harvey Ovshinsky.

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The ruling elite’s successful management of mass-mediated news coverage during the US invasion of Kuwait and Iraq in 1990 was a revolution in governmental social control. Of course, psychological warfare has been a vital component in all war efforts since civilization’s first forays into organized butchery thousands of years ago, but arguably it was the Gulf War campaign that taught the Pentagon and the White House what Orwell had tried to warn us all about in 1948: in times of international conflict, the State’s administration of perception is the most critical part of any war strategy.

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From May to October of 1976 the workers of the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant in France struck following what was euphemistically described as a radical “deterioration of working conditions” as a result of a shift from the reprocessing of conventional nuclear power plant fuel (graphite gas) to the reprocessing of spent fuel from light water reactors.

...

On June 16, 1918, four months before World War One’s end, prominent labor organizer and political activist, Eugene V. Debs, delivered a speech at a Socialist Party convention in Canton, Ohio. The speech led to his prosecution under the Espionage Act for interfering with the draft. He received a 10-year prison sentence and was stripped of his US citizenship. He eventually served two years and eight months behind bars before President Harding commuted his sentence.

...

FLASH! The Ann Arbor Free School and in particular John Sinclair’s class “Total Assault on the Culture” have been doing some truly revolutionary things. Total Assault Class meets every Monday night and takes its assault to the street, where the class hands out free poetry books, newspapers and information. This is a class of about 10 to 20 who sweep down S. University yelling and screaming, handing out all sorts of great shit, then on to the Diag, where the class shows free movies on the side of the library.

...

Three collectives belonging to the history of Portuguese anarchism, Zentro de Cultura Libertaria, BOESG (library) and A Batalha (newspaper), have purchased an Anarchist Center in the Lisbon region: a common space, open to old and new collectives, that will rid them of the pressure brought about by gentrification and real estate. The new Center will also host the archives and libraries of the three collectives. They are asking for contributions of solidarity.

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NATO bombs rained down on her city, beginning in its suburbs and then moving into the heart of Belgrade. First the planes and cruise missiles came just at night. But then their aerial assault seemed to know no set time of day.

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Introduction

It is said that the automobile industry created and brought life to the cities, but once again official history dangerously misrepresents and distorts the facts. In reality, it is responsible for the destruction of viable human communities and emblematic of death culture all over the world. The auto industry’s monopolistic power kept Detroit and the rest of the world from creating alternative urban environments and consciously built car cities and a car world, chopped up and destroyed by incredible expressway systems—cities and a world for cars, not for people.

...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

— W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

...

Don Lobsinger, leader of the right-wing Breakthrough group, was sentenced April 3 to 15 days in jail for disrupting a church forum on black power last December 3.

He was accused of trying to break up a meeting at St. Lucy’s Catholic Church in St. Clair Shores where Frank Ditto of the East Side Voice of Independent Detroit was telling the all white audience about black power.

...

“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

...

a review of

Abolish the Family! by Sophie Lewis. Verso, 2022

Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care by M.E. O’Brien. Pluto Press, 2023

As we all navigate the perilous shoals of capitalist austerity and precarity, many turn to the family as the last reserve of collectivity, care, and survival. For a lucky few, this is enough, but this notion of the “last reserve” is a deep structural problem that leaves too many people vulnerable to abandonment or abuse.

...

It is small wonder that most Americans are not the least big cognizant of the plight of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia; the mainstream press here in the United States does not even recognize the struggles of its own indigenous population. From our perspective, the systematic statist degradation of primitive and indigenous peoples and their spirited refusal to submit to the powers of progress are central to the complex question of social domination all over the world.

...

These are two interviews with women who experienced abortions. One was illegal, the other was a legal.

I didn’t know where to go when I found out I was pregnant. My boyfriend didn’t have enough bread to support a kid, and I work as a waitress in a bar. I was going through changes trying to decide what to do. I was in a desperate position.

...

I remember being carried from the treatment room to a pleasant, sun-filled living room as I regained consciousness. The doctor carefully tucked a blanket around me and presented me with a smile and a cup of tea and asked how I felt.

I could hardly believe that I’d just had an abortion and remember the multiple crash of feelings I experienced at that moment—relief, tenderness, despair. The relief was due to the fact that it was over and that I was free again to make plans, to take up my life where I had left it, and that through the whole thing I had been treated with simple human dignity.

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Michigan women will demonstrate in Lansing March 13 for one aspect of our liberation—the right to abortion. Our demands are: free and legal abortion on demand; no forced sterilization; repeal of all existing abortion laws.

Abortion should be a human right. To a woman who has no choice but to bear children, liberation is no more than a bad joke. When we can control our own fertility, we can each work and plan our future. We will be better able to fight against the other forms of oppression that we encounter. We must be free to govern our own bodies and it is for this basic freedom that we will march in Lansing.

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The Fifth Estate (FE) is a cooperative, nonprofit project, publishing since 1965. As opposed to professionals who publish to secure wages or invest in the information industry, our collective consists of volunteer writers, artists, and editors—friends who produce the paper as an expression of resistance to an unjust and destructive society.

...

Since our Fall 2002 edition, we’ve begun to use regular themes to encourage wider participation from our extended community of collaborators and to provide an opportunity to look more deeply into the most compelling ideas, questions, and struggles facing anti-authoritarians today. To that end, we’d like to provide a “sneak preview” into probable future themes. This winter, we’ll look at “Culture, Race, and Ritual” (see page 45 for “the call”). Next spring, we’ll take on two taboo topics: Conspiracy and Elections. Over the summer, we will turn our hearts and minds to The Wild. In the Fall of 2004, we’ll address unschooling and anti-authoritarian education for people of all ages. By Spring 2005, we’ll be ready to look at the History of the FE in more depth as we begin to celebrate our 40^th anniversary. We’ve already started planning the Revolution Everywhere Tour for 2005, including stops at the Anarhchist Book Fair in San Francisco, the Allied Media Conference in Northwest Ohio, and other key gatherings TBA.

It’s been said that a revolutionary’s first weapon is a book.

When the Fifth Estate occupied a physical office in its first thirty years of existence, it always had a bookstore space where texts supporting ideas we published and stimulated us lined the shelves. The last one, in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, carried the name of Ammunition Books and in one listing of our titles used a photo of a .357 magnum pistol as an illustration.

...

Just when the corporate bosses thought their world-racket was secure (give or take a few economic crises), the old mole of revolution has suddenly poked her furry head above ground and has put the question of power and wealth on everyone’s lips. Hence, this issue could not have appeared at a better time.

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The following essay by George Bradford continues the discussion of environmental perspectives begun in these pages in our Fall 1987 edition. Our previous special issue, published at that time, “How Deep Is Deep Ecology? A Challenge to Radical Environmentalism” (also by Bradford), appeared as a major statement coming out of the theoretical work the Fifth Estate has been undertaking since 1979 in examining the character of technology, industrial capitalism and the worsening ecological crisis.

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When we set out to produce an issue on and of literature, we had wide eyes and wild ideas. Ideas like Thoreau suggested, “In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness.” Guided by these instructions, we set out searching for the same sense of “uncivilized free and wild thinking” that Thoreau found “in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools.” Rather than see books as stuffy culture, we would endorse Thoreau’s claim: “As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild-mallard-thought, which ‘mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself ...”

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This special issue of the Fifth Estate is a collaboration between the Detroit staff and our friend and comrade, Freddie Baer in San Francisco. The essay on deep ecology was written and edited here, but with invaluable suggestions and criticisms from several people around the country. The typesetting, graphic selection and lay-out were done by Freddie, and for this herculean effort, as well as for her patience, her suggestions and her eye for graphically attractive design, she has our immense gratitude.

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Welcome to Fifth Estate’s Anarchist Review of Books, edited by a collective based in Austin, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Oakland and Seattle. ARB brings you intelligent, subversive, non–dogmatic writing with an anti-authoritarian perspective.

We put this issue out at a time of grave concern in American publishing. A deadening combination of corporate consolidation and academic professionalization of writing has produced decades of embarrassing, dull work and uninspired critique that stands as a record of cowardice and complicity in literature; a one-two punch that has brought wily, vibrant work to its knees.

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As opposed to the mechanistic, cold, pseudo-scientific dogma of Marxists and others, we know that the urge for revolution has to come from a deeper place in our lives. The Spanish anarchists said they had “a new world in their hearts,” which provided a vision for their struggles. The idea of re-enchantment of the world mirrors that longing as a prefiguring of what we want. We dedicate this issue to those in the past who have fought for a new world and to those today who continue in their footsteps.

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There is no phrase that is more threatening to those in positions of power at any level of society than that of our theme, “I will not obey!” From the shop floor to the highest echelons of the state, the rulers depend on that short sentence not being uttered or, worse, acted upon, and in their worst nightmare, taken up by multitudes of us.

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This issue’s theme--The Psychology of Freedom--comes to the reader without pretension or self-righteousness. We are not trying to instruct others on how they should conduct themselves in their personal or collective lives. Rather, we feel it is important to explore the anti-authoritarian ideals we often project onto society from the inside of our communities and lives.

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Welcome to the second issue in the fortieth anniversary year of this publication. The first was published in February and was our official commemorative edition. It was the largest and most colorful issue ever printed since we began in 1965. The anniversary issue was a double one constituting our publishing efforts for both Spring and Summer 2005. Hence, you have not missed an issue and you are reading the next in our series.

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The question of what constitutes revolutionary activity is raised again on these pages in two articles; 1) an in-depth analysis of the Italian situation and 2) a review of a book on anarchism in the U.S. Claudio Albertani explodes the mystification surrounding the militancy of the autonomous groups and the fetish of armed struggle held by organizations such as the Red Brigades. The article by Marcus Graham, a long time friend of the Fifth Estate, raises the question in a more subtle way (see FE #293–294, August 21, 1978, page 14). We have had his manuscript for several months, but had declined to print it due to a staff disagreement over his usage of the terms “anarchist” and “anarchism.”

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Welcome to our Fall 2020 edition. It immediately follows our Spring number, so you haven’t missed an issue. How glorious yet challenging when reality becomes so radical that it easily outstrips anything the printed word can provide. Still, we think the articles in this issue bring a unique perspective to the crises of race and pandemic the world faces. A great reckoning is at hand around the question of racial justice, while the Covid-19 virus raises the question of whether mass civilization can meet the existential challenge it poses. This is the time to advocate and act for what we need for justice and perhaps existence. The old ways spell only disaster.

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Welcome to our Spring 2020 edition. Its theme is Justice. Since the political state arose thousands of years ago and began replacing communal societies, justice has meant “Just Us.” That is, the construction of legal systems solely benefiting the top of the social pyramid designed to protect the property of the ruling class and to thwart attempts to alter the repressive power and wealth arrangements. Our writers look at the history of justice, how it is used for class rule, and what would be an equitable solution. We know it as anarchism.

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The theme for this issue, Anything Can Happen, originated as the title of a 1968 Fredy Perlman essay at a time when everything did, indeed, seem possible. The ebullience of that era, in which many believed revolution was on the horizon has faded, but the engagement of activist projects in confronting the worst abuses of the system continue apace.

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Welcome to the first issue in our 41^st year of radical publishing. This edition, no different than the preceding 371, takes up our desire for revolution, one that ends the monstrous systems of capitalism and the state. It begins with a critical look at what is billed by the Left as the Bolivarian Revolution. Michael Staudenmaier, with Anne Carlson, describing their month long visit through Venezuela and relates anarchist perspectives on Chavismo. The FE’s Walker Lane writes about the 2006 Caracas World Social Forum (WSF) he attended, and offers critiques of the gathering and the direction the country is taking.

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Excerpted and reprinted from Fifth Estate #385, Fall, 2011.

Without even knowing it, you’ve read anarchist fiction. There are literary greats like Leo Tolstoy (“The Anarchists are right in everything ... They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by revolution.” [“On Anarchy,” 1900]), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller (”[An anarchist] is exactly what I am. Have been all my life.” [Conversations With Henry Miller, 1994]), Dambudzo Marechera (“If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you.”), Ba Jin, Carolyn Chute, J.M. Coetzee (“What is wrong with politics is power itself.” [Diary of a Bad Year, 2007]), Jorge Luis Borges, and William Blake, and other popular fiction authors like Alan Moore, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Robert Shea, Norman Spinrad, B. Traven, Kurt Vonnegut, Ethel Mannin, and Edward Abbey.

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People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all

-- Oscar Wilde

I used to see my interests in anarchism and fiction as wholly separate things, because I didn’t know there was any overlap. None of my activist friends were writing stories--at least that they told me about--and I hadn’t yet realized how rich the history of anarchist fiction is. But there are anarchists, philosophical and active alike, in mainstream fiction--it’s just that their politics are rarely shown to the world. There are writers among the activists, but their writing is rarely distributed. And there is a remarkable, broad history of multilingual anarchist culture from around the world, although most of it is hidden by obscurity or time.

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Stimulator, the disembodied, foul mouthed host of ITEOTWAWKIAIFF, a subMedia satirical news show.

A strange looking man walks out of a Sam’s Club superstore with a shopping cart filled with diapers, food, and chocolate, without paying. He fooled the cart checkers with a fake receipt. As his feet touch the parking lot pavement, a rent-a-cop yells, “Stop!!”

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a review of

Stealing All Transmissions: The Secret History of The Clash by Randal Doane, Foreword by Barry “The Baker” Auguste, 2014, PM Press, 192 pp. $15.95 pmpress.org

In December 1979, after stumbling through my first trimester at Michigan State University, I took the allotted three weeks off in suburban Detroit. While the media began priming the struggling city as host of the upcoming Republican National Convention (and a probable Ronald Reagan presidency), a vague desperation overtook me, to search for alternatives, first on the radio and then in the press.

...

You seldom wavered

You always questioned

When we never trusted

the smoke, the steam, the fog

or more precisely

the cooling towers

and modern chimneys

and their endless denials

in the names of our children;

Can you still detect the distant battle drums

beyond their crude walls

The silica source of our glass embrace

The contrast against concrete monuments

of their unrestricted restrictions,

Bringing us closer to fermented red serenities

and the eventual savoring

of the fresh water’s edge,

Long after the shareholder meetings we disrupted

We recall your robin song voice

and better futures

with frank sense and mirth

Respecting zebra mussels

and mocking invasive authorities

Toasting unnamed friends

and unimaginable foes;

...

a review of

Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed the Country & Its Sounds by Michael Broyles. Norton 2024

in his 1955 book, America’s Music, Gilbert Chase raised a question that has remained of central concern to academic musicologists in this country ever since: What, exactly, is distinctly American about American music?

...

Reality is a tunnel constructed between the realm of the possible and all that is deemed impossible. Under the aegis of reality, the conceptual limitations of tunnel vision are normalized. By breaking down the tunnel walls, we fully reveal what is ignored, dismissed, or hidden from view by the fetters of reality. Even though we are born in the tunnel, we can imagine life beyond its walls--we can be tunnel visionaries!

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a review of

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021

“In one sense,” David Graeber and David Wengrow write, “this book is simply trying to lay down foundations for a new world history” Simply?

As the title indicates, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is an extremely ambitious, 692-page book. It’s also a bit of an anomaly in contemporary anarchist writing, which tends to shy away from Big History, with its overtones of imperial sweep and Smart White Guys explaining to everyone else How It Went Down.

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The success of the ecological movement in the First World is of vital importance to the movement in the Third. The industrialized societies have always provided the dominant global development model, and unless the paradigm of industrialism is rejected in the First World, there is little chance of the Third World turning back from the ecologically disastrous path of industrial development. If the ecological movement of the North is serious about the “solidarity” it expresses with the South, it is vital that it succeeds, not only in halting the juggernaut of industrial growth, but in actually forcing it back.

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The pretrial examination of 14 street people for dynamite conspiracy has been marked by the incredible legal buffoonery of Judge Thomas Poindexter. the assault of a defendant by a bailiff. and the testimony of a freek turned stool pigeon.

The fourteen are charged with con-spring to dynamite several police stations, a draft board, the CIA office in Ann Arbor and several other sites in the Detroit area.

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(by the Demolitions Editor)

“Send a boy to do a man’s job and naturally you can expect those involved to start falling apart when they get caught.”

This is the opinion of one of the defense attorneys for those accused of setting eight terrorist bombs in the Detroit area.

Halfway through the preliminary examination, where the prosecution is required to show the commission of criminal acts and the defendants’ connection with them, Judge Thomas Poindexter agreed to drop charges against six persons.

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FE Note: The following article was sent to us anonymously several months ago and has generated an enormous amount of discussion among us by its charges that prisoners who are “thugs, murderers, pimps, rapists, conmen of every sort” have been “elevated to the level of anarchist heroes” and that the prison support movement showers “slavish devotion” on them.

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Having lived and worked in Vietnam for a year now, I have only a slightly better understanding of the country than when I first arrived. This is a country of extremely complex paradoxes and antagonisms. I remain dumbfounded by the disparities, hypocrisies and corruption that are endemic at every level of every institution.

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The burning of witches and healers, the destruction of sacred places, forced conversion to the christian cross: this is not a description of the christian conquest of Europe and the original invasion of the Americas, but rather of the recent christian pogrom in Haiti being carried out against practitioners of voodoo, the syncretic christian-animist spiritual tradition of more than three quarters of Haiti’s people. Describing it as a “devil’s religion” practiced by “sons of Satan” and a “national curse” to be “uprooted,” Radio Lumiere, run by the Baptist Group of Southern Haiti (which is in turn funded by an evangelical group in Florida) has declared war on voodoo, fomenting a wave of violence against voodoo communities.

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Note: Originally, FE special correspondent Kellie Button valiantly embedded herself with a group of anarchist LSD enthusiasts (represented here by the initials “HO”, “KG.”, and “AJ”) in order to report on recreational drug use for this issue’s special “Escape” feature. Unfortunately, a very long weekend in southeastern Minnesota among these self-described “anarcho-acidheads” yielded very little usable material, but something that did come up that has a bearing on the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist anti-RNC and anti-DNC actions currently under preparation. The relevant portion of one morning’s recorded discussion is excerpted here. Clarifying information provided by the editors appears in brackets.

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The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan (ACLU) has condemned the announced intent of Colonel Arthur A. Holmes, state Selective Service Director, to use the Selective Service Act “as a device to punish dissent”.

Colonel Holmes was reported earlier as calling for “the immediate induction” of Vietnam war protesters who had violated Selective Service regulations or had caused any interruption of procedures.

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The American Civil Liberties Union urged the United States Supreme Court last week to review the constitutionality of Virginia’s state laws making racial intermarriage a criminal act.

The civil liberties organization argued that the miscegenation laws violate the equal protection and due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the right of privacy, the right to marry, and civil rights provisions of the US Code.

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NEW YORK—In a Supreme Court brief filed recently, the American Civil Liberties Union called for the protection of free expression on behalf of a World War II Bronze Star veteran who burned an American flag as a protest gesture.

Representing Sidney Street, a World War II medal winner, the ACLU and its New York affiliate, the New York Civil Liberties Union, challenges New York state’s law prohibiting desecration of the flag. (Similar statutes exist in all the states plus the District of Columbia).

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The American Civil Liberties Union asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case of a Richmond Professional Institute student who was kept out of the college for his senior year because he sported a beard and long hair.

The Virginia liberal arts college refused to allow Norman Thomas Marshall to register in September, 1965. In a brief filed with the high court on behalf of Marshall, a 26 year old scholarship student and past editor of the college’s literary magazine, the civil liberties group contended that the school’s “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable” action refusing him registration on account of his groom violated the constitutional rights to free expression, due process of law, privacy and protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

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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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The American Civil Liberties Union will challenge the court-martial conviction of an Army lieutenant for participating in a demonstration against US policy in Vietnam, arguing that the articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice under which he was convicted violate freedom and are unconstitutionally vague.

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The American Civil Liberties Union last week urged the U.S. Post Office Department to reverse its decision to issue a 1966 Christmas stamp representing a religious scene, calling such governmental support of religion a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of separation of church and state.

In a letter to Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien, ACLU executive director John de J. Pemberton Jr. sharply criticized the Post Office’s plan to reproduce Hans Memling’s “Madonna and Child with Angels” on a Christmas stamp. The ACLU spokesman declared that the government “has no mandate or authority to indoctrinate minorities in the religion of the majority, or to lend its instrumentalities and vast prestige to the celebration of the religious holidays of the majority.”

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The American Civil Liberties Union has called on 900 college and university presidents throughout the nation to deny the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) information concerning the makeup of anti- Viet groups on their campuses.

The civil liberties group’s plea came in the wake of subpoenas of membership lists of anti-war groups at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley last summer. The ACLU called this “one of the most serious breaches of student academic freedom in recent decades, including the McCarthy era.”

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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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“Over North Vietnamese radio the voice of ‘Hanoi Hannah’ constantly harangues the Americans: ‘Don’t be the last G.I. to die in Vietnam.’”

—Ian Brodie, London Express

“Battles for bunkers in the Song Chang valley are merely tactical moves in the President’s strategy of retreat. He is asking Company A to fight for time to negotiate a settlement with Hanoi that will save his face, but may very well lose their lives. He is also carrying on the battle in the belief, or pretense, that the South Vietnamese will really be able to defend their country and our democratic objectives, when we withdraw, and even his own generals don’t believe the South Viet Namese will do it. It is a typical political strategy, and the really surprising thing is that there have been so few men, like the tattered remnants of Company A, who have refused to die for it.”

—James Reston, New York Times

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On March 21, four people, including one from the Bad Attitude collective, demonstrated at the Federal Bldg. in downtown Detroit for the right to be anti-patriotic. In so doing, they burned a small american flag much to the outrage of passersby and security guards. The date of the protest coincided with a U.S. Supreme Court hearing of a criminal conviction of a demonstrator who also burned a flag as a political statement at the 1984 Dallas Republican Convention. Flags have also been in the news recently involving an exhibition in Chicago in which an art student placed a flag in front of his work so people would be forced to walk on it Veterans and other patriots demonstrated at the art school, and the U.S. Senate passed a law 97–0 making walking on a flag a federal crime.

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Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

A Direct Action Anarchist Newspaper

Active Transformation is a direct action anarchist newspaper that has been publishing in whole and in part since 1993. Two separate collectives make up the newspaper collective, one in Detroit and the other in Lansing. We mainly focus on the institutions and social relationships that oppress us in our daily lives. From the prison industrial complex, to homophobia to capitalism — we try and cover it all. Our struggle for freedom is as diverse as our lives!

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St. Paul, Minn. — Three activists and their attorneys won a $50,000 settlement May 23 in a lawsuit that challenged an August 30, 2008 police raid on a St. Paul home before that year’s Republican National Convention (RNC).

The plaintiffs in the case, Sarah Coffey (who wrote the FE’s Detroit anarchist convergence article in the Spring 2011 edition), Erin Stalnaker and Kris Hermes, are giving most of the award to the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and the formation of a national legal defense fund for political activists.

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In December 2004, Earth First! activists Matthew Crozier and Rod Coronado, along with Esquire magazine journalist John Richardson, were charged with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer. The indictment followed a Tucson-based Chuk’shon Earth First! (CEF!) action that sabotaged a mountain lion hunt in Sabino Canyon that March.

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FE note: This is one of three responses to John Zerzan’s “The Case Against Art,” in FE #324, Fall 1986. The other two articles are: “Art, Life & Death” by Ratticus and “Journal Notes on Art” by George Bradford.

“Culture is dead. Create!”

—Paris graffito, 1968

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

—Emma Goldman

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I’ve been giving the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) to my 3^rd graders this week. I could be fired, possibly arrested, for telling you this, but do you want to know what’s on the test? Here’s one of the questions:

Why do cities have laws?

a. to take people’s money

b. to make leaders powerful

c. to give police officers jobs

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“Everybody comes to you for gasoline boy, that’s some filling station you got there.”

--Jack Kerouac The Subterraneans

Hi, kids, it’s me, Artie, again. I got a story to tell you and something else too. You see, last Sunday (Nelson watches the gas station on Sunday) I was sleeping late with a pretty lady and a friend came over to my house & so did Sammy, my brother, & Sammy said what you gotta do is go to the Art Museum with me. So I said but I went there before & seen all that stuff before & it’s just a big shithouse, with old pictures by dead people & he said, no man they changed it so me and my lady got up & went after we had a hamburger cuz he would not let me get out of going.

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A friend and I, one recent evening, stroll into the Oak Park Community Center. Sundry activities are taking place, bridge-playing, music groups, etc. We’re not there 60 seconds when this guy—janitor, custodian or whoever he was—barges up with the cop-like “CAN I HELP YOU FELLAS?” At first, but eyeing the man, my friend tells him that, since it’s a public place, we’re simply looking around. The worker takes on an increasing anxiety, as though wondering who we are, what we’re up to. Like maybe we’ll steal the building! Or rape the females! (even though most, that evening, were there taking karate lessons).

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Tie 30^th annual G8 summit meeting of the major industrial nations was held this June on Sea Island, Georgia within a day’s drive of the Fifth Estate’s southern headquarters, so some FE collective members traveled to participate in the planned protests and counter-summit.

Approximately 300 resisters assembled in Brunswick, Georgia—the closest the demonstrators were allowed to the royal elite—to greet some of the 30,000 military and police personnel stationed throughout the region.

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“That man over there say that a woman needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me a best place...And ain’t I a woman? Look at me. Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me...And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man when I could get it, and bear the lash as well...and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off into slavery. And when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard...”

—And ain’t I a woman? (Sojourner Truth: Speech before the Woman’s Rights Convention at Akron, Ohio, 1851)

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FE Note: About 100 anarchists joined an Oct. 17^th demonstration at the Pentagon to protest U.S. intervention in El Salvador which has resulted in 65,000 deaths to date. The action entitled “Blockade the Pentagon,” resulted in 200 protesters being arrested in civil disobedience actions and a raging controversy over the more militant activities of the anti-authoritarian contingent.

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We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, hereby state that until the demands of the Black United Front are met, we will maintain a complete boycott of the Detroit News. Specifically, we will not assist the News in its so-called news gathering functions; we will not buy copies of the News, nor advertise in it, and will encourage others to join us.

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In all the-publicity and controversy over the film “Rambo: First Blood, Part II,” an interesting comparison of fictional characters named Rambo might add to our understanding of how and why such characters are created and received. While Johnny Rambo is quickly becoming enshrined in popular and political discourse as a symbol of a vengeful “Captain America” here, a much lesser known Rambo is hidden away.

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