Full list of texts

“We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.”

-- Durruti

...

Fifth Estate #381, Summer-Fall 2009, Vol. 44, No. 2

2 LETTERS

4 MARIE MASON INTERVIEW

5 RNC FRAME-UP UPDATE

6 THE SHIT HITS THE FAN by Ron Sakolsky

8 KILLER APE THEORY DISPROVED by Tim MacGowan

10 THE FUTURE OF LEARNING by Christopher J. Schneider

12 MURDER IN OAXACA by John Gibler

13 TUNING INTO THE ILLEGALIST CONTINUUM by Ron Sakolsky

...

Intro: Primitivism & The Wild, page 17

Derrick Jensen on the Future, page 18

Green Anarchy & Oil Depletion, page 23

Peter Wilson On Domestication & Luddism, page 27

Our Enemy, The State, page 31

All Isms Are Wasms, page 34

Swamp Fever, page 38

Wolves, page 41

Mars First, page 42

Against History! page 45

...

Fifth Estate Issue #377, March, 2008, Vol. 43 No. 1

4 Readers’ letters

6 Green Scare News: Police Terrorize Earth First!er in Ohio

7 Powerlessness & the Power of the Prank from La lettre versatile de Jimmy Gladiator

8 Bowling with the Bonobo Bashers by Pieter Primatus

10 Stronger Wine! Madder Music! A manifesto by Apio Ludd

...

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

...

Cover photo: Pierre Garine: Bridge across the Yalu River to N. Korea

4 Mutual Aid in Times of Crisis scott crow

6 Mutual Aid in Action Dr. Zak Flash

8 16 Theses on the Cell Phone Jason Rodgers

9 “You are not welcome in New Zealand. Mr. Rovics.” David Rovics

10 Grand Jury Resister Margaret Killjoy

...

5 Occupied Iraq: The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill

7 First They Came For Ward Churchill

9 The New McCarthyism: On The Recent Purge Of David Graeber

11 Fear And Loathing At The University

12 Introduction: Wobblies At 100; Work At 4,000

15 Why I Was A Burglar

...

FE Histories & Memoirs

No Anarchy, No Money page 6

Offices as Autonomous Zones page 7

The History of the Fifth Estate by Peter Werbe page 8

Music as Revolution page 20

Giving Up the Gun Fetish page 21

Zapping the Pyramid by Don La Coss page 22

Notes toward a history by David Watson page 26

Detroit’s Jovial Community by Lorraine Perlman page 40

...

Woodstock Music Festival, 1969. The Fifth Estate was in its fourth year of publication and was part of the counter-culture music scene as much as the anti-war and resistance movements of the times. The festival gave the then-tabloid paper press passes and bought a full-page ad.

On the Cover

Stephen Goodfellow’s art once again graces our front page as it has in numerous previous issues. The Non Serviam ball is also his creation. See goodfelloweb.com

...

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

4 Anarchists & Sex Work

Aaron Lakoff

6 Wholly Shit — Church Reviews

Stephane

7 Grand Jury Resister Freed

*8 Education as Domestication of Inner Space

Layla AbdelRahim

11 Agriculture History Misses Mark

John Zerzan

12 Ken Kesey & the Merry Pranksters

...

FIFTH ESTATE #376, Halloween 2007, Vol. 42, #2

Issue Theme: End of the Worldism

Cover, centerfold, & back page art

Tammy Wetzel

http://tammywetzel.zenfolio.com/

End of the Worldism (but not for us), Editorial

“Great Dismal Mercenaries” Blackwater & Iraq

Don LaCoss

“Elves Sentenced” ALF/ELF Activists Sentenced

...

FIFTH ESTATE

ANARCHIST FICTION ISSUE

FIFTH ESTATE #385 Fall, 2011, Vol. 46, #2, page 1

2 LETTERS

4 COPYRIGHT OR WRONG by Walker Lane

6 INTERNATIONAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY WITH MARIE MASON

9 HOCKEY RIOTS IN VANCOUVER by Ron Sakolsky

11 A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANARCHIST FICTION by Margaret Killjoy

...

The response to last issue’s “Contest of Contests” [FE #289, January 24, 1978] was underwhelming to say the least, but we did receive enough entries to fill the first three winning spots (in fact, exactly that number). The contest was to describe what you could imagine doing at the gathering of ghouls assembled for Hubert Humphrey’s funeral at the Capitol in Washington D.C. Here are the winners:

...

Buster Brown

Bob Brubaker

Angela Di Sante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Jim Gilman

Blue Jesus

E.B. Maple

Richard Rollins

Primitivo Solis

Larry Talbert

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

Suzie

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads accepted.

The Detroit Police are out of control. They have completely slipped out from under the authority of the Mayor and his Police Commissioner and now comprise a vigilante force dedicated to maintenance of the status quo.

They have resorted to criminal methods and produced a string of murders, mass assaults, and severe injuries to citizens engaged in lawful conduct. Their connection with the Mafia and right-wing groups is well known and documented.

...

The central argument in the New Bethel Incident is over the administration of law in Detroit’s Recorder’s Court. [See The New Bethel Incident, FE #77, April 17–30, 1969.]

This was underscored by what transpired during the pre-trial examinations of two suspects in the shooting of Patrolman Richard E. Worobec outside the New Bethel Baptist Church on March 29.

...

As we were completing work on our current issue, we received a letter for publication from the Wooden Shoe collective in Philadelphia regarding the vandalism of their bookstore last October. At that time the premises were entered with a key, a sink stopped up with towels and books and periodicals thrown into the overflowing water. A quantity of record albums and $150 in cash was stolen as well. Although the damage was extensive, collective members worked all through the night and were able to open the next morning.

...

We should have realized that the anti-convention efforts in Detroit were going to be a flop when only two people responded to the FE article about planned activity which invited others to “join us in a game with no rules” (See FE #301, Feb. 26, 1980). And a flop it was. Only about 200 people turned up here to greet the Republicans July 13–16 coming mostly from cult/sect/political groups like the Communist Workers Party but also including a few valiant Yippies who refused to believe it wasn’t 1968. A sponsoring coalition of leftists and liberals (the FE declined to participate) planned a series of protests aimed at the delegates and the media but each event proved to be more disastrous than the one preceding it.

...

NEW YORK, NY — August 31 (Dissociated Press) The campaign to re-appoint George Bush President is in full swing as a heat wave continued with Central Park recording its third consecutive 95 degree-plus day.

Delegates to the Republican National Convention (RNC) were arriving in droves. Tens of thousands of anti-Republican demonstrators were already in the city, gearing up for massive protests and showdowns with New York’s finest storm troopers. The corporate media was set to cover the coronation and the expected melee. They were looking for some new spin on a story they were billing as a rerun, as in “The Battle of Seattle, Part 6: Republicans at Ground Zero.”

...

Two interviews with the poet on life, death, sex, poetry, Kerouac, and meditation—the first from 1991, published here for the first time; the second from the October 1969 issue of Fifth Estate.

Note: In October 1991, Fifth Estate staff member Peter Werbe interviewed poet Allen Ginsberg on the radio talk show he hosts. Ginsberg was in Ann Arbor for the performance of his opera, “Hydrogen Jukebox,” a collaboration with composer and pianist Philip Glass. As were so many of Ginsberg’s Michigan appearances, the opening was a benefit for Jewel Heart, an international organization of Tibetan Buddhist and cultural centers.

...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed its regret and dismay July 25 that the conviction of Arthur Kinoy for disorderly conduct had been affirmed by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. The conviction of Prof. Kinoy stems from the attorney’s forcible ejection by the House Un-American Activities Committee during its probe in August, 1966, of anti-Vietnam War groups.

...

Food Not Bombs is one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements in North America today and is gaining momentum all over the world. There are over 120 autonomous chapters sharing vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty throughout the Americas, Europe and Australia. The first group was formed in Cambridge, Mass. in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists. Food Not Bombs is an all volunteer organization dedicated to nonviolence. Food Not Bombs has no formal leaders and strives to include everyone in its decision making process. Each group recovers food that would otherwise be discarded and makes fresh hot vegetarian meals that are served in city parks to anyone without restriction. The groups also serve free vegetarian meals at protests and other events. San Francisco chapter members have been arrested over 1,000 times in the city’s effort to silence protests against the Mayor’s anti-homeless policies. The Arcata, Calif. group faces civil contempt charges for sharing food and the Whittier, Calif. group has been issued tickets for feeding people. Seattle and Burlington, Vt. Food Not Bombs are being threatened by the cops. Amnesty International says it may adopt imprisoned Food Not Bombs volunteers as “Prisoners of Conscience.”

...

On October 17 and 18, 2015, anarchists in the small Catalan city of Manresa held the first Gathering of Libertarian Infrastructures. Outside of English speaking North America, libertarian is a synonym for anarchist. The event was the result of over a year of informal debates and longer collective processes in which comrades sought the ideal forms of coordination and organization, and the best methods for spreading anarchist ideas and practices.

...

Gang fever is sweeping Detroit. Everywhere the gangs are the main topic of conversation—the Black Killers, the Errol Flynns, the Coney Oneys, the Chene Gang. The cops are puffed with importance—they’re the thin blue line between the hordes and the populace; the media are ecstatic—they have found a story that can be milked every day to break the monotony regularly presented; and for the average citizen: a concrete discernible reason for why Detroit is falling apart—1,000 teenage gang members.

...

Justice—Detroit style. Danny Royster was convicted last week of manslaughter in the slaying of the only pig killed during the July 1967 uprising. One problem—Danny didn’t off the pig and everyone including the State admits to that fact.

What happened was that Danny and a buddy were liberating some goods from a store on the near Eastside when they were discovered by the 13^th Precinct Big 4. One particularly vicious pig, Roy (Butterfingers) St. Onge who works the Warren-Forest area entered the smashed out storefront and whopped Royster upside the head with his shotgun.

...

The Detroit Police has begun a reign of terror in the Warren-Forest area near Wayne University.

Almost all of it has been aimed at the local freaks. “It’s getting to be too much,” said Skip Cooper, who lives in the Castle on John Lodge. “All the cops do is hassle with anyone with long hair.”

Other people in the area have reported a marked increase in illegal searches and entries by the cops. Mostly, the cops involved are from the Tactical Mobile Units and the “Big Four.” The latter is the precinct cruiser that travels in a Dodge sedan with three plainclothes (and they are) patrolmen and one uniformed driver.

...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—The U.S. Justice Department has released results of a study conducted for it by the University of Michigan which states that twenty-seven per cent of all policemen “were either observed in misconduct situations or admitted to observers that they were engaged in misconduct.” Two-thirds of this group were seen “in some form of conduct that could be classified as a felony or misdemeanor,” while the rest admitted such naughty acts.

...

a review of

“BlacKkKlansman”

Director: Spike Lee

135 min.

“The cops and Klan go hand in hand!”

—frequent chant at anti-cop demonstrations

Spike Lee’s latest film “BlackKkKlansman,” the story of an African American police officer’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s, has received generally excellent reviews in mainstream publications and from anti-racist activists.

...

Police representatives from twelve suburban communities have been training in methods of riot control on the Cranbrook School campus once a month throughout the year.

The newly-formed Cranbrook SDS concentrated on their removal as a primary goal. A victory was scored May 8, when the pigs failed to appear, apparently aware of the increasing militancy of certain students at Cranbrook School. This eliminated the necessity of an open confrontation between SDS and the cops, as this was the date when such a confrontation was supposed to have occurred.

...

The Stoepel Park Incident of Sunday, August 24 was not an isolated instance of police harassment [see “Pigs Riot in Park,” FE #87, September 4–17, 1969]. On-duty and off-duty, legally and illegally, police harassment of the young people who gather in Stoepel Park continues. But the latest round has been won by the kids.

...

For once it appears that it pays to be black.

At least the sons of prominent black ministers and politicians.

The Detroit Police Department actually disciplined several of it’s men for their drunken and cowardly beatings of several black youths after a church dance Nov. 2 of last year.

Commissioner Johannes Spreen called the attack “unprofessional, uncalled for and unexcusable.”

...

Fernando Gonzalez was 16 years old.

He won’t be getting any older.

As his name implies, Gonzalez was a Chicano youth from southwest Detroit. And in a wanton display of insane racism, four crazed pigs from the Fort-Green Station of the Detroit Police Department, savagely clubbed the man to death on a Detroit street.

...

“Both police and armed forces follow orders. Orders. Orders flow from the top down. Up there, behind closed doors, in antechambers, in conference rooms, gavels bang on tables, the tinkling of silver decanters can be heard as ice water is poured by well-fed, conservatively dressed men in horn-rimmed glasses, fashionably dressed American widows with rejuvenated faces and tinted hair, the air permeated with the square humor of Bob Hope jokes. Here all the talking is done, all the thinking, all the deciding.”

...

2000 may be the decisive year in the legal and political battle for the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal. As the campaign to save the falsely imprisoned journalist and ex-Black Panther gathers momentum, the police, politicians and media are stepping up their efforts to have him strapped to the execution gurney.

...

“When you have $50 billion invested in defense what you need most isn’t allies but an enemy.”

— Nelson Algren said in Ramparts, May, 1967.

When you have policemen on horses and Tactical Mobile Units with little baseball bats and “riot-trained” commandos, what you need most is not a Love-In but a riot.

...

HOUSTON, Texas—The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has requested the U.S. Attorney General to launch a “vigorous investigation” of Houston police who “engaged in a vengeful and destructive rampage” against students and property at Texas Southern University during a five-hour riot on May 17.

...

OAKLAND, CALIF. (UPS) What began as an anti-draft teach in grew into issues of both anti-war and free speech and ended as 400 helmeted police, sheriff and California Highway Patrol officers using eye-stinging mace and swinging billy clubs broke up an anti draft demonstration along with some two dozen skulls in front of the Oakland Induction Center in the early dawn of Oct. 17. When the first of four groups of demonstrators arrived at the Oakland Induction Center early that Tuesday morning it was greeted by some 150 persons who had already gathered across the street.

...

Most everyone knows that the small encircled, lower case letter “c” indicates that a piece of work is copyrighted, and that it designates legal protection of creative work and intellectual property. Perhaps the key word for this discussion is the last one in the sentence--property.

How copyrights are applied and the protection they provide for work that is intended as property within the commercial marketplace, on the face of it, wouldn’t seem to need much elaboration. However, its definitions and applications are quite complex, but fortunately aren’t what will be under discussion here. This article will center on how anti-statists can or should relate to state protection.

...

Floyd McKissick, National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), will be speaking in Detroit on Monday, November 7. The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam have announced that McKissick will be one of the main speakers at a teach-in which is scheduled for that day on the Wayne State University campus.

...

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.

...

Prostitution may indeed be the world’s oldest profession mercenary soldiering is probably a close second place. Like so many other late-contemporary capitalist service commercial enterprises, soldiering-for-hire has undergone particularly ugly mutations in the last fifteen years as the bosses and clients have become more internationalized and more committed to the successful business strategy of plausible deniability. The latest globalized incarnation of the mercenary trade is the burgeoning $100 billion-per-year corporate military service industry.

...

Although we’ve gotten an excellent response from last issue’s article, “Industrial Domestication” [FE #329, Summer, 1988] which originally appeared in the French magazine Os Cangaceiros, we were informed by the translators that we had inadvertently typeset it from a working, rather than final, version.

...

Is this a class? It is at Corvid College.

Forty-two years ago, philosopher Ivan Illich wrote, “I also believe that the end of the ‘age of schooling’ could usher in the epoch of a global schoolhouse that would be distinguishable only in name from a global madhouse or a global prison in which education, correction, and adjustment became synonymous.”

...

Intelligence finally reigned supreme recently when Detroit’s Common Council tore apart Ray Girardin’s stupid proposal to ban motorcycles from city parks without a special permit.

The proposal was immediately condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union as unconstitutional and in violation of the civil liberties of individuals because of its vagueness.

...

The nexus linking resistance and protest movements with underground artistic practices is distinct, with significant overlap existing between the participants and qualities of both. It’s no surprise that overt resistance to existing circumstances intersects naturally with activities that are radically discontinuous with production/consumption-based existence.

...

“Counterfeit coin is said to prove the existence of genuine--the terms being purely relative. But because there can be no counterfeit where there is no original, does it in any manner follow that any undemonstrated original exists? In seeing a spurious coin, we know it to be such by comparison with coins admitted to be genuine; but were no coin admitted to be genuine, how should we establish the counterfeit, and what right should we have to talk of counterfeits at all?

...

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848, asserts that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” that social transformations grow out of the contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production when the latter become too constricting for the development of the former. In every epoch a revolutionary class incarnates these productive forces. [For Marxists, the classic historic example of a class struggle which is followed by a radical social transformation is the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this example the bourgeoisie incarnated the new productive forces: the feudal relations of production (the way society was organized), were too inflexible to accommodate the increasing commodity production.

...

a tree shivers shade

to protect the thief, the wolf

from the prying sun

.

it is no coincidence that

the gods of the forest

are the patrons

.

are the patrons of

witches, slaves, outcasts,

are the patrons of outlaws

.

for the earth was a sanctuary

before a mortar-mediated sky

imposed survival on the living

...

Outside the Detroit Recorder’s Court in July 1969, supporters gather at the trial of White Panther leader and former FE columnist John Sinclair. Comrades, who did not want their photos in any pig paper, flip the bird to Detroit Free Press photographer Tom Venaleck. Sinclair was sentenced to ten years for the possession of two joints of marijuana. Before he was released from prison in late 1971, he garnered international attention and support as a political prisoner. Three days before his release, 15,000 friends gathered for a benefit concert including Abbie Hoffman, Bobbie Seale, Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Phil Ochs, and Stevie Wonder.

I was seven years old when my mother fell in love with our landlord. The apartment we lived in, in retrospect, was a slum.

It was a three story red paneled building with eight units, two on each floor, all occupied by cartoonish caricatures of poverty, myself and my mother included. My father was battling alcoholism, and my mother, yearning for stability, filed for divorce and moved us into the red apartment. She got a job down the street waiting tables at a restaurant, and we lived in that apartment for the next five years.

...

Cracker Barrel, a Southern restaurant chain known for its racist hiring policies and Confederate flag decor, instituted a company-wide policy in 1991 to not employ persons “whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values.” Twelve people were promptly fired from the chain because they were lesbian or gay.

...

a review of

Breaking the Alphabet by Sascha Engel. Ardent Press 2022

Critiques of language and its objectifying, alienating effects are older than history itself (history defined as the linear, language-based story of civilization). Those early incarnations still exist today in mystical and spiritual practices like no-mind meditation, ecstatic dance, and mantra.

...

NEW YORK, N.Y. June 25 (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)—A group of about 40 hippie types, bearded, beaded and foul-mouthed, invaded the studio of WNDT-TV, Channel 13, last night and, within sight and sound of thousands of viewers, tried to take over the station.

Reality was performed on Channel 13, WNDT-TV, Tuesday night, June 25^th, at 10:30 p.m. A live reenactment of chaos sent shock waves through the New York metropolitan area as thousands of viewers witnessed the first physical confrontation between the underground and the establishment media. What was happening in Paris, in Vietnam, in Berlin, in Tokyo, in practically every major city in the world was happening at that exact moment on the third eye of living room consciousness: REBELLION.

...

When the Rolling Stones came to Detroit, 14,000 kids gave Mike Quatro over $100,000. The Stones were great and the whole crowd was really into it.

Around 100 SDS Weathermen were digging the Stones too. Only they didn’t pay anything; neither did about 200 other kids.

They didn’t pay because they were fed up with the entire bullshit line about paying money to establishment pigs just so you can dig your own culture. So all the Weathermen got together and crashed the gates at Olympia.

...

a review of

On Community: Field Notes #8 by Casey Plett. Biblioasis, 2023

Casey Plett’s new book, On Community, weaves a nexus of themes and concepts, including compassion, needs, the pleasure of sharing coffee, the mutual support queers and transsexuals provide, the power of the group, and an ongoing space of encounter.

...

A review of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, Edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai DuLani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Preface by Andrea Smith. South End Press, 2011, 325 pp, $16

The Revolution Starts at Home is a series of articles, accounts, and discussions aimed at not only dealing with the aftermath of abuse, but also challenging the underlying institutions and values that perpetuate abuse and violence. The aim of the anti-violence movement, as Rebecca Farr of Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) writes, is to “create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support one another that there is no longer the need for anonymous hotlines.”

...

Editors’ Note: The following is from Abbie’s book Revolution For the Hell of It, to be published by Dial Press later this month, by the author “Free.”

LIBERATION News Service — Perhaps the best way to begin to relate to Chicago is to clear your throat of the tear gas fumes, flex those muscles stiff from cop punches, write lying down, collapsing from fifteen solid days on no more than three hours sleep each night, mouth AUM, smile and then roll on the floor laughing hysterically. I can only relate to Chicago as a personal anarchist, a revolutionary artist. If it sounds egotistical, tough shit. My concept of reality comes from what I see, touch and feel. The rest, as far as I’m concerned, didn’t happen. If it did, so what, then it happened. Great!

...

San Francisco (LNS) — The people of People’s Park received token retribution recently. Twelve sheriffs deputies involved in the struggle last May were indicted by a San Francisco Grand Jury on charges of conspiring to mistreat prisoners (many of the 423 arrested were brutally beaten), shooting persons with shotguns, and beating persons who were arrested.

...

Power authority creeps have reared their puffy bourgeois heads once again in the Detroit area, this time at Clarenceville High School in Livonia.

Any Clarenceville student caught displaying the Fifth Estate inside the school will have his copy of the paper confiscated and his parents will be informed.

...

Law is the framework that props up the state, the matrix that nourishes authority. Law is a web of prohibition and mandate. It is one of the mechanisms that ensure that each individual fills an assigned role. It is a particularly complex and abstract system of power.

While there are attempts to use law in constructive ways, such as discourses on rights and liberties, the law is not something that can be used for liberation. It must be rejected and overcome.

...

Somewhere in Washington D.C. there resides a President’s Crime Commission, and on this Commission there is a man called Dr. Richard H. Blum. Dr. Blum is one of six doctors reporting on narcotics and drug abuse in the United States.

In his report, Blum stated that he thought alcohol the most dangerous drug Americans use, that smoking “Marijuana may be less harmful than drinking,” and “there is no strong evidence that marijuana (or any other drug) is a cause of crime.”

...

reviewed in this article:

Expect Resistance: a field manual, CrimethInc., $8, CrimethInc.com

Rolling Thunder: an anarchist journal of dangerous living; P.O. Box 494, Chapel Hill NC 27514; rollingthunder — at — CrimethInc — dot — com

Why is the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective (CWC ) the crew that the workerists love to hate? The rigidly anti-lifestyle critique leveled at-these so-called “arrogant middle-class kids” has become so commonplace that it’s as much a caricature of itself as it is an unsophisticated slag at these prolific publishers of beautifully-crafted anarchist propaganda.

...

During Autumn NATO maneuvers in West Germany, thousands of people demonstrated at U.S. military bases, and hundreds were arrested. U.S. military commanders protested, calling on the West German government to crack down on “anarchists and criminals” who have damaged military vehicles, cut fences, sprayed paint and thrown stones at soldiers.

...

The confrontation between Iran and the United States over the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran Nov. 4 and taking of 63 hostages (later reduced to 50) by Islamic student militants has brought to the fore the worst features of this epoch. The grotesque spectacle of a million Iranians marching in lockstep, chanting praises of a decrepit mullah and a reactionary religion is matched in this country by a sudden upsurge of patriotism one would have thought impossible just a few weeks ago.

...

George Orwell’s 1984, in which he potently describes a totalitarian society of the future, has been used by both capitalists and communists in describing each other’s society. The saddest thing of all is that they’re both right.

The photos on this page show the military forces of Germany (1936) and China (1977) practicing the art of criticism/self-criticism in attempts to clear the nation state of unwanted elements.

...

cited in this article:

The Decline of (Anti-)Western Civilization: A Critique of Fifth Estate, by Dan Todd, 27 pages, $1.00 from New Rage, PO Box 11492, Eugene OR 97440

This rather cunningly written essay/dialogue expands on comments made by its author in a letter to the FE (see “Critical Flab” in Letters, FE #322, Winter/Spring 1986) in which he identified what he thought to be a generalized decline in the quality and critical coherence of the paper. And though I was intrigued by the title and welcomed such a discussion, the product of this critique was disappointing. Todd had simply taken two rambling, hastily-written letters I’d sent him and retyped them with a blow-by-blow, paragraph-by-paragraph response, thus creating a straw FE and knocking it down. But an exchange of letters does not add up to a critique of our ten-year effort.

...

The following is a statement issued from Stammheim Prison by jailed RAF lawyer Klaus Croissant, dated Nov. 20, 1977. Thanks to LNS.

“At Stammheim I have been subjected to the same conditions of isolation against which I have struggled for years as defense attorney for the RAF prisoners. I am systematically and completely deprived of all contact with other prisoners...Food is passed to me by a prison employee through a hole in the door of the cell...

...

“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep.”

—Frank Zappa, December 1965

Some very strange action has been coming down at Southfield-Lathrup High School. Rick Cricow, a student there, has been selling Fifth Estates in the area and distributing them at his school. Last month the Assistant Principal of the school, Richard Leland, confiscated the papers and instructed Cricow to discontinue selling them on school property.

...

a review of

Welcome Home by Clarrie and Blanche Pope. Minor Compositions 2022

When I picked up Clarrie and Blanch Pope’s Welcome Home and saw the tower block on its cover, it shook out of me a memory of watching the BBC documentary series The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities about the privatization of the Aragon Tower at the Pepys Estate (housing estate is the British euphemism for public housing, or projects for Americans unfamiliar).

...

Staff Note: For nine years, the tenants of San Francisco’s International Hotel have been battling to save their residence from the attempts by the Four Seas Investment Corporation, a Hong Kong based firm, to turn the area into a multi-story shopping center. The cause of the elderly Chinese and Philippino residents has been taken up by a variety of leftist groups, even supported for a while by the local sheriff, and criticized by others as a defense of squalor. Our writer, a Fifth Estate staff member emeritus, has been wandering the hemisphere and arrived at the I-Hotel as the final confrontation with the bodyguards of property began.

...

Cuba secured the World Amateur Baseball Championship by scoring a 2-to-1 victory over the United States at a playoff match in Santo Domingo Aug. 26.

More than 18,000 fans watched the Cuban team win their tenth straight game to take the championship series unbeaten.

According to the Cuban press, Western news agencies “had been emphasizing for some time the political nature of this game.” But the Dominican fans enthusiastically rooted for the Cubans and continually greeted the U.S. team (composed of outstanding college players) with shouts of “Go home” and prolonged booing.

...

(Reprinted from the Guardian, New York City)

New Year’s day marks the tenth anniversary of the victory of the rebellion (Fidel’s terminology) and the beginning of the Cuban revolution.

This tenth year, just completed, will be remembered as the Year of the Revolutionary Offensive. It is not that the other nine years lacked the elements of a revolutionary offensive: this revolution has always been revolutionary and has always been on the offensive. But in 1968 a new height was scaled, made possible by the great transformations of character and ideology which millions of Cubans have undergone.

...

1976, being America’s 200^th anniversary--with all the commercial pomp and whitewashed historical hoopla that’s riding along with it--would be the ideal year to miss entirely and go abroad.

Between television’s “‘Buy-Centennial’ Minutes” and the countless newspaper and magazine articles extolling our so-called grand and glorious history, it’s going to be kind of hard to keep our food down and our spirits up.

...

HAVANA — We entered the elevator on the ground floor of Havana’s renowned FOCSA building in the city’s Vedado district and were quickly whisked, non-stop, to the 33^rd floor. When the doors opened, tuxedoed waiters welcomed us to La Torre, an elegant, candle-lit restaurant with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city and harbor twinkling in the night below us.

...

This May was a very exciting time for anarchists in Cuba, full of both inspiration and anxiety. On the positive side, the Anarchist Social Center and Library (ABRA: Centro Social y Biblioteca Libertaria) hosted the Fourth Libertarian Spring Conference in Havana, from May 4 to 11.

Cuba Pride March, May 11, despite being banned by authorities.

...

When a reader sent us this page from the December ’76 issue of Granma (the official organ of the Cuban Communist party) pictured at the right, we thought the goose-stepping troops must have been from the army of Argentina or Chile. The pictured style of marching has always been identified with fascist armies and represents the extreme to which the male body at the service of the state can be distorted. Any leader knows that once troops have been submitted to the sort of discipline necessary to create a well-oiled military machine, the individual components lose any uniqueness and become a faceless, headless mass willing to follow any order that comes from above.

...

Cuban women are beginning to see solid results of the many years of struggle that they have been through. Before the revolution, there was little or no work for any women. The only way a single woman could get money for her children or herself was to beg or else sell herself. Most women were totally dependent upon their husbands or fathers. A divorced woman was considered to be nothing but a prostitute, because that was the only way she could support herself. Virginity became even more of a prize for a marriage dowry. Young women were “protected” to the point where they couldn’t leave the house without a chaperone.

...

Groups like this performing at El Tanque at Havana’s Proyecto Cultural Muraleando will soon be subjected to official censorship.—photo: Peter Werbe

Pity the poor Marxist-Leninist militants now bereft of the police states for which they so earnestly apologized. But, not real pity as their dishonesty has caused as much damage to revolutionary possibilities as have the objects of their political ardor.

...

On Wednesday, February 5^th, the Rev. Peter Pillsbury will talk on his recent tour of Cuba at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Paul Lowinger, 2170 Iroquois (Indian Village) at 8:00 p.m.

The lecture is sponsored by the Lafayette Park Vietnam Committee.

The Rev. Pillsbury was invited, as one of a small group of American churchmen, by the Cuban Government to visit the country. While in Cuba, Rev. Pillsbury traveled through four provinces, and visited social, political and economic institutions, in all of them.

...

LIBERATION News Service

(Editor’s note: On New Year’s Day in 1959, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and their victorious guerrilla army strode into Havana. The day before, Fulgencio Batista, the ruthless dictator who had been the prime object of the political and military movement led by Fidel, fled in an airplane to the Dominican Republic, en route to Spain.

...

The Cuban state has usually been able to keep a tight lid on protests. Generally, it only allows demonstrations that have been organized by government ministries. However, during the fall and winter of 2020–21 the dissident San Isidro Movement in Havana began publicly defying the rules by demonstrating for freedom of expression for artists. The government responded with intimidation and even arrests.

...

On March 15, our last day in Cuba, my wife and I boarded the Hershey Electric Railway in Casablanca, across the harbor from Old Havana, for a 57-mile trip to the town of Matanzas. We were flying back to Toronto from the airport near that city the next morning after eight days on the island. The line was built a century ago by the U.S. candy manufacturer to bring sugar from the fields to Havana harbor, and is the only remaining train of what was once the most developed rail system in Latin America.

...

a review of

33 Revolutions by Canek Sánchez Guevara, Translated by Howard Curtis. Europa Editions 2015

Les Héritiers du Che (The Heirs Of Che) by Canek Sánchez Guevara and Jorge Masetti. Presses de la Cite 2007

“The persecution of homosexuals, hippies, free thinkers, syndicalists, poets (dissidents of a sort) certainly seems in excess of what was being combated. The criminalization of being different has nothing to do with freedom. Neither does the concentration of power in the hands of a few form part of anarchist ideas, and even less so the perpetual surveillance of individuals or the prohibition of any associations that may be formed on the margins of the State.”

...

Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, a fugitive animal-rights activist, was intercepted by Cuban authorities in early August and turned over to the FBI.

Popped by Cuban cops on an INTERPOL Red Notice, Dibee was flown to Portland, Ore., where he pleaded not guilty to taking part in a 1997 arson attack on a meatpacking plant—the first of several charges he faces.

...

Acceding to the exigencies of global capital, the U.S. and Cuban governments finally admitted their mutual interests after some 16 years of mutual denunciation.

The first trade agreements are being hashed out in the Congressional carnival while fishing accords are already operative, confirming a 200-mile coastal limit which will put Cuban and American trawlers in equal competition off the Florida coast.

...

FE Note: Usually, Fifth Estate essays are filled with the vision that alternatives exist to our current predicament. This article explores the possibility that humanity has already been extinguished and that there may be no hope of fashioning a different world. If that’s the case, do we just cease our resistance? Comments welcome.

...

On college campuses, in urban squats, at hip city venues, and at anarchist events, one often sees young white people sporting dreadlocks or Mohawk haircuts. However, there has been an increasingly aggressive push-back by those who designate this as cultural appropriation and are confronting and shaming those they deem guilty of the practice.

...

Culture shock: back in Detroit, my life of freedom lies neglected as I de-mothball the artifacts of this daily life. One always returns to Detroit; everyone told me, “You’ll be back,” just as they snicker along the line when you take your vacation. You’ll be back. You can’t kick, you are strung out.

...

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

To an admiring bog!

—Emily Dickinson

Dogwoods swathed in delicate white, gently clear their winter throats as cable news updates crawl and grovel for her attention. But she doesn’t blog, pin, Snapchat, Instagram or—God No!—tweet, and her dumb phone shortcomings are just fine. She the freak in the waiting room without an umbilical glow in her palm, just a paperback copy of something she fills with marginalia.

...

[by R. Fleck, Little Nancy Goodvibes & Alfie]

What’s worse than watching Walt Disney’s version of Winnie the Pooh? Sitting through “I Am Curious Yellow.” At least Disney is a goof for the kids.

Drawn by the press’s public publicity, the over and under-40s righteously attended their first opportunity to legally dig a skin-flick and feel “real arty” at the same time. Poor fools. Shucked again.

...

Author’s Note: This article is not intended to define or thoroughly explain the muddled swamp which is today’s world of art/life/experience. In fact, its only a visceral (gut) reaction to looking at cars, looking at Lennon-Ono prints. In the next issue a more detailed exploration of art and people will be presented. But for the time being....

...

a review of

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile by Eden Medina. MIT Press, 2014, 344 pp., $20

Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries provides an account which is sympathetic to Chile’s Project Cybersyn. She uncovers and details the largely forgotten and extraordinarily fascinating history of how information and communication technology was seized upon as a way to realize President Salvador Allende’s socialist aspirations.

...

The week of April 12 was a very bad one for pirates. It began that Sunday when Navy SEALs executed three pirates off the coast of Somalia who had captured an American ship’s captain. For days, the “daring” rescue dominated headlines in the U.S., without any mention of the socio-economic circumstances that have led to a resurgence of piracy in the region--or of the role the West has played in contributing to those circumstances. Rather, countless stories focused on the Hollywood-style operation: how three snipers parachuted under cover of darkness into the sea, swam to a nearby ship and took out the pirates with three bullets fired nearly simultaneously.

...

When the President appointed a Commission to study violence after Chicago’s freak-out Convention activity last August, not even the most turned on prophet in the movement could have suspected the bombshell report which would become, after a single day on the stands, a runaway best seller.

Maybe hippies, Yippies, Panthers, college students, politicos, and assorted freeks have been saying it all along, but now the Establishment has come out and said it.

...

Barbarian: 1. A fierce, brutal or cruel person. 2. A brute, uncivilized, rude, savage, cruel, barbarous.

Example: “he is merely a barbarian on the loose in a museum” (Yvor Winters).

Civilization: 1. The process of civilizing or becoming civilized. 2. To civilize; to bring out of a condition of savagery or barbarism; to better the habits or manners of; refine.

...

<em>

</em>

FE Home > Issue 316, Spring, 1984 >

• Nature Imprisoned at the Zoo

• Why, What, Who Barbarian

• Poetry Page

• Absolute Divergence

• Fuck Governments

This issue of the Daily Barbarian is not only being distributed throughout the Detroit area for free, but thanks to the members of the Fifth Estate collective, it is also appearing as the center four pages of their paper. This means that along with the 3,000 copies we’re printing, an additional 3,000 will be sent all over the U.S. and different parts of the world through the subscription and bookstore sales of the FE.

...

Fifth Estate Home > Issue 319, Winter, 1985 >

Back so soon?

Well, we didn’t make it as a monthly publication, but we did make it back. This issue—#3—marks a turning point for the Daily Barbarian...this broadsheet can no longer be considered a bi-decadal. In fact, we’re pushing for quarterly status, if we can get the next issue—#4—out by 1989?!

...

Daily Barbarian > Thoughts on the Disappearance of History

“so that when there is no more story that will be our story when there is no forest that will be our forest”

—W.S. Merwin, “One Story”

...

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution,” said Emma Goldman (1869–1940), feminist heroine, anarchist activist, editor, writer, teacher, jailbird, and general troublemaker. Or did she?

Perhaps she said, “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” as my purple T-shirt claims under a picture of Emma looking demure in a wide-brimmed hat. Or was it rather, “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution,” as the quote appears in a 1983 “non-sexist yet traditional” Passover Haggadah?

...

The following essay [“The Decline of the Choral Dance,” FE #361, Summer 2003] couldn’t have entered my consciousness at a better time. It was 1962, and I had spent my late teens and early twenties reading intensely in an attempt to discover the fundamental qualities of existence.

Reality seemed pretty bleak. Rigid conformity, compulsory patriotism, fear of atomic annihilation, and a cultural wasteland of had movies and boring music predominated in 1950s mainstream society.

...