Full list of texts

In Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, countless examples are provided of cooperation among animals, countering the social Darwinist concept of ruthless competition as the framework for both nature and human society.

Yet a frustrating exception to the seemingly ubiquitous importance of mutual aid was the apparent hyper-individualism of plants. Kropotkin dismissed this as due to their immobility, thus making competition a requirement for their survival. It is true that plants seem quite solitary, each concerned exclusively for its own survival.

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Bridegroom Tom Nixon and Bride Kate Tomaino stand with Ali of Monkey Boutique after their wedding ceremony at St. Joseph’s Church. Photo — Rick Burner.

To the sounds of Dylan’s “Love Means Zero—No Limit”, Tom and Kate were married Sunday, July 7. Tom Nixon, ex-chairman of the Draft Resistance Committee, and Kate Tomaino, of the Cambridge Book Stall on the Wayne Campus, chose St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church as the scene for their Episcopalian-Hindu rites wedding.

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Introductory note by Sunfrog

People connected with the ‘zine and mail art communities of the 1980s or with the rural, artistic, experimental music factions of the anarchist milieu in the 1990s might remember the co-founder of Dreamtime Village, Lyx Ish, also known as Elizabeth Perl Nasaw and Liz Was, who died on February 28, 2004 at the young age of 47.

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This article was written by Debby D’Amico and was reprinted from Up From Under (the August-September 1970 issue), a magazine by, for and about women.

We are the invisible women, the faceless women, the nameless women...the female half of the silent majority, the female half of the ugly Americans, the smallest part of the “little people.” No one photographs us, no one writes about us, no one puts us on TV. No one says we are beautiful, no one says we are important, very few like to recognize that we are here.

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Anarchist Alexander Berkman was sentenced to serve twenty-two years in prison for his attempt to shoot robber-baron Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead miners’ strike. While in prison, a plot was hatched to break him out. Who was the key figure involved in Berkman’s attempted prison escape?

Western Pennsylvania Warden Wright looks on as workers uncover the tunnel intended for Alexander Berkman’s escape (graphic by Rodrigo Quast)

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Without you reading what we struggle to write and creatively present, there obviously would be no point in our effort. And, without the generous financial support many of you give, we wouldn’t be able to publish at all!

We’re at a critical period for print publications. All daily papers are reporting declines in their readership (of course, in their case, it’s probably desirable), and many radical and anarchist papers are either cutting back on their publication schedule because of financial difficulties, or note no increase in their circulation at a time when the empire is functioning at a particularly vicious level.

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When the cops themselves say they acted illegally, you know it’s got to have been bad. It is also rare when the police (smiley-faced when helping kids across the street; brutal, out-of-control mercenaries when unleashed) make their misdeeds public.

So, it was a shock of some proportion to read parts of a 287-page report issued in May by Toronto’s Office of the Independent Police Review on the excessive force, illegal arrests, and attacks on peaceful demonstrators during the June 2010 G-8 meeting in that city.

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You jump into Toronto all of a sudden after driving four hours through the Ontario countryside.

Our first thought as we drove the station wagon downtown on Yonge St. was, “The youth revolt is international!” It was partly the pop festival that weekend, but all of downtown Toronto looked like Beverly St. when the Grande is playing.

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During last August’s Active Resistance gathering (see FE #352, Winter 1999) a discussion group on Community Organizing came up with a proposal to found a free school in Toronto.

I and others were approached to participate in the effort, and before long a core group of about eight people was meeting twice a week to hammer out the logistics. From the start we envisaged the school serving as a center for anarchist organizing and activism.

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Anarchist experiments in education in the Toronto area reflect a history of brief spaces carved out from commercialism, of flowerings of liberation followed by the seeds of the next project to emerge.

Experiments in popular education or free schools have often co-existed with experiments in collective living, and have also been tied to particular waves of activism, following radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s theories that liberation education only works when tied to a project of human liberation in general. Anarchist movements in urban areas, like Toronto and nearby cities, thrive in spaces at once marginal and central, and freeschools have emerged along with them.

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The following report appeared in the March-May 1992 Counter-Information, c/o 11 Forth St., Edinburgh, EH1, Scotland. Their four-page publication is free, but they welcome donations.

Over 12 million people are refusing to pay the unjust poll tax. People power has forced the Tories to announce its future abolition.

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Since its inception, Open City has served young people. Open City is now asking that members of the community return the favor.

In the past three years they have supplied the Wayne State area street people with free medical and legal aid, free clothing, rent-free crash pads and free job-placement for long-haired freeks.

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The “Man” is a veritable packaging genius. He has just about mastered the art of packaging the same old shit so that it looks like different new shit.

This is all very nice, until the packages are unwrapped. The same old funky odor wafts up to our poor, exploited nostrils every time.

“The Other Section,” a Detroit News supplement, is an example of the way “special groups” are handled in Amerika.

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1. Track removal is only one element in the total strategy to interfere with the flow of weapons and obstruct U.S. military intervention in Central America (and elsewhere).

2. The more tracks removed the better.

3. The more people who participate the merrier;

4. We should respond to those who disagree with this tactic in a friendly and open manner, while our comrades continue to dismantle the track.

5. This demo belongs to no one group: our movement is strengthened by diversity of actions, and by our respect for those differences.

6. We are here to continue the work in which we have all been involved, and to which Brian Willson gave part of his body, and the people of Central America their lives.

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See also: “The Machine against the Garden” (author’s introduction) in this issue, FE #321, Indian Summer, 1985.

Web archive note: Numbers in the text are related to references at the end. They are not errors in numbering endnotes.

While skimming through a recent issue of your magazine, I came across a caricature of a man baring his chest and exposing a letter stamped or branded on it. I supposed that the mark was intended to be a scarlet letter, even though the cartoon was black and white. I learned that the branded man in the cartoon was supposed to be Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of an unforgettable exposure of bigots who branded human beings with scarlet letters.

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Anarchy and surrealism have had many enchanting encounters over the years, and the convivial nature of their ongoing interplay is easy to understand. Much like anarchists, surrealists are dissatisfied with the impoverished version of reality that governs our relationship to the world and to one another.

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SHOCK! HORROR! It’s the basis for most of the non-events that fill the pages of so many British newspapers. Used the most often to spice up the trivial affairs of a newlyweds’ honeymoon of horror (“Dad made off with my wife” confesses a distraught groom) or a mother’s feeling of hopelessness over her teenager’s actions (“Susan shocked me with staying out late”), this SHOCK! HORROR! syndrome of British journalism was recently unleashed when Cienfuegos Press released their latest publication: Towards A Citizens’ Militia: Anarchist Alternatives to NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

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Puerto Rico is a United States colonial possession, but most North Americans know little about the island or its people. The U.S. government does not want our ignorance disturbed because then we are less likely to protest the exploitation of the island.

The people of Puerto Rico are also victims of a different type. The island is in the middle of the Caribbean, closer to Latin America than the United States, and shares the Spanish language with most of its neighboring nations.

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a review of

Toxic Psychiatry by Peter R. Breggin. St. Martins Press. 1991. 464 pages. $18.

“The only known biochemical imbalances in the brains of nearly all psychiatric patients are those caused by the treatments.”

--Peter Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac

This book is as important and radical as R.D. Laing’s “The Politics Of Experience” or Thomas Szasz’s “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Breggin has been a long time campaigner for reform of the mental health system and in the early seventies he led a successful movement to end the horrific practice of Lobotomy in the US.

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The long line of lights flickered above where the train passed in the dark tunnel. It was four am and Maggie sat on the wooden seats that were placed about five feet from the platform. Her feet were pressed flat on the cement floor, palms resting on the two seats on either side of her. She was feeling for the vibration the train made when getting nearer.

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A good voice and a standard arrangement just are not enough for today’s ears. Within that thought lies a lot of truth and a lot of music conforms to just that formula.

Creativity: if the record medium is to mean anything in that light, then the effort, big E, has to be there from the outset. To wit: Joan Baez’s latest cuts on Vanguard are what some would call competent, but to me they just sound lazy and uninspired. Joan’s ventures into the rock idiom, even if you called them interpretations, are almost funny due to their lack of fortitude or GUTS!

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Sept. 25, 1967

Dear Fifth Estaters,

The Spike-Drivers almost became America’s first folk martyrs while doing an innocent gig in Burlington, Vt. The club manager freaked out and demanded we stop playing this “Psydillik” music, because it irritated a few of his beer-swilling regulars. He craved our last year’s soft pap rock sound. When we told him it was impossible to go backwards, he plied the local gorilla movement with free beer to get them to harass us and goad us into quitting the gig so he wouldn’t have to pay us.

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Under this seemingly innocuous heading we initiate what we think is the first joint effort music column in literary annals.

The Fifth Estate’s heroic radical stance required something more than a bland record review column and this added something is what we hope to accomplish. The format and topics of each column will constantly change as the mood strikes us. So in the words of Jim Gurley, of Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Watch Out!”

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“Traffic,” written by Guy Debord, originally appeared in 1959 in the Situationist International magazine, and is another reprint from Leaving the 20^th Century, The Incomplete Work Of the Situationist International, translated and edited by Christopher Grey (which is available from Free Fall Publications, Box 13, 197 Kings Cross Road, London WC1, England, for $3.00).

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Editors’ Note: The following is a press release issued by Detroit Police Commissioner Johannes Spreen at 3:25 am on March 30 following the shoot-out between two police officers and 12 armed black men following a meeting of the New Republic of Africa. Events of the evening are still unclear as we go to press, but next issue we will feature in-depth coverage of the occurrence. All errors were in the original.

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In October 2010, I finally called it quits on my film END:CIV. By calling it quits, I mean that I decided that the film was done, and that I would not add or remove a single frame of video, tweak the audio or add any more titles. Like Coppola once said and I paraphrase, “One does not finish a film, one abandons it.” But far from abandoning it, the following November of that year, I embarked on an eighteen-month grassroots tour, where I would present my work to audiences in seventeen countries in over 150 screenings.

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a review of

The Tramp Printers: Forgotten Trails of the Travelling Typographers by Charles Overbeck. Eberhart Press, 2017

This handsomely and mostly hand-produced book is a tribute to the craft of printing and of historical insight, both of which verge on extinction in the modern world.

Tramp printers, like journeymen in a guild, learned skills as apprentices and then took to the road. Travel and work under different conditions and with a variety of other craftspeople enhanced their skills, but also meant the freedom to leave a workplace whenever they got tired of it.

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Transhumanism, which rarely rates a mention in the media, suddenly had a brief moment of infamy recently due to the reported interest in it by the late, evil, child sex trafficker, Jeffry Epstein.

Transhumanism claims that by utilizing technology it can artificially enhance the human body, and, if pursued far enough, will solve everything including victory over death, as futurist Ray Kurzweil and others promise. It involves a headlong leap of faith, viewing advanced technology as a transcendent breakthrough. Bio-ethecist Amy Michelle Debaets termed transhumanism “the Rapture of the geeks.”

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“Come and hear the views of two thinkers who arguably have defined the two polar opposite views on the effects of technology” blared the invitation to a November 15 debate between Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan and Anarcho-Primitivist John Zerzan at California’s Stanford University.

Grimacing at the clash-of-the-titans-esque rhetoric that epitomized the debaters, I nonetheless made my way eagerly to the college, just south of San Francisco, to watch the spectacle unfold.

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The SEE, the new concerthouse opened last month by Trans-Love Energies Unlimited of Detroit, closed its doors after only two weekends in operation.

The hippy-run coffeehouse, which featured music by the MC-5, the Spikedrivers, the Passing Clouds, Billy C. and the Sunshine, and the Charles Moore Ensemble during its brief history, along with lights by the Magic Veil Light Company, ran into business snags that made operation of the cooperative concerthouse impossible, according to former manager and Fifth Estate staff member John Sinclair.

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The Trans-Love Energies operation in the Warren-Forest community has undergone a number of changes lately, according to spokesmen for the hippie cooperative, of which the Fifth Estate is a member group.

The Artists’ WorkZshop, located on John Lodge, has been joined by the group for economic reasons. “We just couldn’t make the rent anymore,” said Trans-Love head John Sinclair, “and the building had pretty much outlived its usefulness to us. We’re hoping that some community group will take over the building and put it to better use.” The Artists’ Workshop Press, at 4863 John Lodge, will remain operative as headquarters for the Trans-Love publishing and printing operation, and will also continue to serve as office quarters for Trans-Love Energies, The Sun, and Detroit LEMAR.

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The Trans-Love Energies commune of Detroit, including the MC5 and the Trans-Love Light Company, have left the city of Detroit for good, to settle in Ann Arbor, that green and airy town some 45 miles west of Detroit.

The new address for Trans-Love and affiliates (including the Artists’ Workshop Press, LEMAR, Trans-Love Poster Company, and the Sun) is:

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The Trans-Love commune, as reported in the FIFTH ESTATE two issues back, is planning a move from their quarters on John Lodge and Warren to the corner of Forest and Second Avenues in the Warren-Forest. Originally scheduled for the first of October, the move will be held up until the middle of November due to machinations on the part of property owner Monte Korn, of Korn Realty.

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The Trans-Love Energies commune is now offering three new services in which you may be interested:

Dave Sinclair, manager of the UP and now resident at 1520 Hill Street in Ann Arbor, next door to the MC5-Trans-Love house, is now taking orders for custom-built speaker cabinets for guitar and p.a. amplifiers and for hi-fi and stereo sets. He will build what you need at a wholly reasonable rate. For example, a new SUNN speaker cabinet for a 200S bass amp would cost you $330 list (without speakers); Dave can do it for under $100. His cabinets are endorsed by the MC5 and the UP—these bands play and praise them.

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After two years on the corner of John Lodge and Warren Avenue the Artist’s Workshop (now known equally as Trans-Love Energies) has moved to the campus side of the expressway and will set up shop in a long-vacant former doctor’s office on the corner of Second and Forest.

The workshop, which had its original home in a house at 1252 West Forest, was founded three years ago this month by John Sinclair, Robin Eichele, George Tysh, Charles Moore, Jim Semark, Larry Weiner, Ellen Phelan, Magdalene Sinclair (then Arndt Martine Aligire, and a group of other neighborhood people). At the Forest Avenue headquarters the Workshop established itself through an eight month series of free Sunday afternoon concerts and poetry readings before the house was abandoned after being struck by fire on Memorial Day 1965.

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A group from Trans-Love had gone to Woodstock, to raise funds for brother John Sinclair’s defense and trial costs.

On the return trip through New Jersey the suspicious looking bunch, traveling in a rented van, were apprehended by the Law. While snooping around the pigs noticed one of the group had a knife. This was all the excuse they needed for searching the entire vehicle. Their efforts produced a substance they claimed to be the taboo weed, marijuana.

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Henri Simon and his daughter Claire spent three months in Russia during 1996. Simon is the author of numerous books and articles including the Black & Red title, Poland 1980–82: Class Struggle and the Crisis of Capital (see our book page), and contributes to Echanges, bulletin of the network Echanges et Mouvement, £7 for 4 issues, from BP 241, 75866 Paris Cedex 18, France.

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During my live shows, I often do a song I wrote about the San Patricios, a band of mostly Irishmen who deserted from the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American war and fought on the Mexican side.

I start by doing a call-and-response with the audience. “Give me a ‘T’,” “give me an ‘R.,’” cheerleader-style, until we spell out, “Treason,” to introduce the story of the “Saint Patrick’s Battalion.”

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The Vancouver Five are activists from British Columbia who are currently facing 17 counts of sabotage and conspiracy. Besides being charged with destroying an environmentally damaging hydroelectric generator and firebombing a porn shop, they also are accused of a massive bomb attack on a Toronto cruise missile plant. Our report is from a Toronto supporter of the Five.

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Suspended Detroit Patrolman Ronald August took the witness stand and told the jury at his trial that he killed 19-year old Auburey Pollard in self-defense.

August, who is white, admitted killing the black youth with a single blast from a shotgun on July 26, 1967 in the Algiers Motel.

Under examination by his Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA) supplied defense attorney, Norman Lippitt, August carefully told his version of the killing that occurred during the height of the rebellion that began on July 23.

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An interesting omen—a few days ago, barely preceding the Nixonian “renaissance” I received in the mail a strange newly-issued artifact of the Eisenhower-Nixon era. It was a pamphlet titled HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD, published by- none other than The Planetary Council, reminding me that not only is Dick Nixon still unfortunately alive (in a primitive biochemical sense) but so are FLYING SAUCERS, the favorite after-dinner conversation-topic of the former Eisenhower-Nixon era.

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Apparently there is honor among thieves and the anti-nuclear power struggle has exposed the totally reactionary tendencies of several marxist groups as they line up behind the governments of totalitarian regimes and mouth the same pro-nuclear statements as its most strident capitalist proponents.

One of the more authoritarian of the small Trotskyist sects plaguing the terrain, the Sparticist League has unleashed a torrent of pro-nuclear, anti-demonstrator rhetoric (“eco-freaks” their paper calls them) that rivals New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thompson.

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Reprinted from FE #284, July 1977.

Apparently there is honor among thieves and the anti-nuclear power struggle has exposed the totally reactionary tendencies of several marxist groups as they line up behind the governments of totalitarian regimes and mouth the same pro-nuclear statements as its most strident capitalist proponents.

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a review of

True Stories: Tales from the Generation of a New World Culture by Garrick Beck. iUniverse, 2017

Garrick Beck spans a personal journey through radical bohemia in the 1950s, hippie utopianism in the 1960s, back-to-the-land communalism in the 1970s, to applying those ethics today through community work and urban Land-reclamation back in the New York City of his youth.

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In a not-so-typical area of Detroit, close to Wayne State University, slowly redefined and made more attractive for investment and middle-class living, the Trumbullplex and some of its immediate neighbors stand out. Trumbull (for short) is a 17 year-old shabby DIY anarchist living arrangement more concerned with how to be supportive of one another and less how it’s seen by the broader community.

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TEHRAN — In the flurry of yellow ribbons, parades, and righteous indignation at a nation Ronald Reagan characterized as barbaric, the identity of the real barbarians has been obscured. The fact that the Shah was a corrupt despot propped up by the force of U.S. arms was becoming apparent to increasing numbers of Americans prior to the hostage seizure. But after the embassy take-over, the U.S. ideological apparatus was able to shift the public’s awareness from the tyranny of the Shah to the plight of the hostages at the hands of “terrorist fanatics”.

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I don’t dwell often on the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) protests, yet an acquaintance jarred my memory. En route to summer solstice ritual, she tells me she moved from Minneapolis.

“My only impression of Minneapolis was the RNC,” I sigh.

“I was on the welcoming committee,” she recalls with a knowing rearview mirror glance.

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The Bonnot Gang were notorious anarchist bank robbers whose daring exploits in pre World War One France were legendary examples of illegalism. In contrast to the stalwart proletarian solidarity prized by the anarcho-syndicalists of that time, the illegalists saw no need to wait for the Great General Strike to reappropriate the fruits of their labours. Instead they were determined to act on their immediate desire for a direct expropriation of wealth. And what better place to find it than at a bank.

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This article’s author, Ron Sakolsky (right) and another radical media activist protest corporate broadcasters, September 2002. Photo by Brad.

From September 10–15, the Cascadia Media Alliance hosted a Reclaim The Media Convergence in Seattle. Held during the week of the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), this occasion was an opportunity to protest the corporate-driven policies of the NAB/FCC/NPR triumvirate, as well as to gather for our own grassroots shadow convention. Community media activists from all over North America descended upon Seattle to hear speakers, do workshops, strategize and bounce off each others’ creative energy. By the end of the convergence 10 free radio stations had been set up just 2 band widths apart on the FM dial in open defiance of the censorious 3 bandwidth low power fm requirement of the FCC. This rule has in effect created a situation in which LPFM stations are not legally feasible in urban areas like Seattle. The eclectic programming mix of these pirate stations featured everything from guerrilla radio broadcasts of the FCC actually battering down the doors of Free Radio Austin, to a satirical piece about Clear Channel by Mark Hosier of Negativland, to a series of 3 minute airplay spots on the subject of “media and democracy.” I was invited to kick off the week’s events with a presentation at the Seattle IMC. Focusing on the affinities between anarchism and surrealism in relation to media activism. My talk, upon which the following article is based, consciously avoided the self-congratulatory approach of keynote speakers David Barsamian and Amy Goodman, and instead sought to raise thorny strategic questions for anarchists involved in the media democracy movement.

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“Everything I say will come out just a little bit different, I don’t mean on the transcript, but as it leaves my mind and comes through my mouth, it gets a little bit messed up just around about the mouth, where the words start doing it.”

  ~

Miles: Are there any particular influences on your music?

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The call to turn off television or even to lessen viewing hours certainly should not be interpreted as an inherently radical suggestion, since it emanates constantly from educators, parents, psychologists and others professing concern for the health and morals of the nation. Laying aside the fact that these well-meaning guardians undoubtedly are as hooked into extensive TV viewing as any other American, their pleas and advice should be seen as consistent with the continuing criticism television has experienced since its emergence as a mass medium 30 years ago.

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Reprinted from FE #283, June 1977.

“A nuclear power plant is infinitely safer than eating, because 300 people choke to death on food each year.”

—Dixy Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), now governor of Washington

“You can’t have a riskless society.”

—Nelson A. Rockefeller on the leakage of radioactive water from the two million cubic feet of buried radioactive trash and 600,000 gallons of highly radioactive liquid wastes at the West Valley, New York nuclear waste recycling plant

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“A nuclear power plant is infinitely safer than eating, because 300 people choke to death on food each year.”

— Dixy Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), now governor of Washington

“You can’t have a riskless society.”

— Nelson A. Rockefeller on the leakage of radioactive water from the two million cubic feet of buried radioactive trash and 600,000 gallons of highly radioactive liquid wastes at the West Valley, New York nuclear waste recycling plant

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Turn on! Consciousness is energy received and decoded by structure. Waves and particles.

There are as many levels of consciousness as there are levels of energy and structures for decoding.

There are as many levels of consciousness available to the human being as there are anatomical structures for decoding energy.

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First installment of a regular column syndicated by EVO [East Village Other] for L.A. Free Press, Berkeley Barb, Fifth Estate, & The Paper

This is the first of a series of columns by Timothy Leary, Ph.D. spelling out a theory and method of becoming a conscious person. The blueprint for a new religion. The working plan for a new species. The subsequent columns will present detailed, practical, day-by-day, step-by-step instructions, for rearranging your life, for establishing a harmony with your nervous system, your cells, your molecules and the multiple energy networks around you.

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John Watson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wayne State’s revolutionary student newspaper, the South End, has been charged with assault and battery on a TV newsman.

Watson, pleading innocent, was arraigned Feb. 14 in Judge Robert Colombo’s court. A jury trial was set for March 6^th. Ken Cockrel is his attorney.

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a review of

24 Reasons to Abandon Christianity: Why Christianity’s Perverted Morality Leads to Misery and Death by Charles Bufe. See Sharp Press, 2022

Charles Bufe’s jeremiad is a scathing rebuke of Christianity filled with lurid details that support the charge made in the subtitle of 24 Reasons. It traces religion’s fearmongering and fire and brimstone manipulation by faithful zealots in service to the powerful, but also chronicles its inherent dishonesty, authoritarianism, sexual morbidity, hypocrisy...,well it’s a long list.

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Without much fanfare, another of those 20^th anniversaries of the 1960s passed by recently. At 4:45 a.m. on December 4, 1969, a detail of fourteen Chicago and Illinois State’s Attorney’s police raided a modest apartment in the all-black near West Side ghetto, a crash pad for Black Panther Party (BPP) members.

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The first anarchists on the land which is today Turkey were probably Armenians. Active during the fin-de-siecle of the great Ottoman Empire, they included prominent figures such as Alexander Atabekian, who published pamphlets, participated in Armenian revolutionary organizations and most likely traveled to Istanbul and Izmir to promote anarchism in Armenian circles. The Armenian anarchists mixed anarchism and nationalism, although this exact relationship — and their broader relations with various nationalist and modernist activities — still needs to be looked at more closely. (Although there may be more detailed sources about Atabekian’s anarchist activities, a general picture can be found at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=3771)

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a review of

James C. Scott: Two cheers for Anarchism; Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, Princeton University Press, 2012, 169 pp., $35 cloth and e-book

If we are expressing rankings by hurrahs, I would give James C. Scott’s book two cheers as he does for anarchism. Still, this middling mark is much higher than his slim volume of anarchist principles has garnered from other reviewers who express this philosophy.

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Only later did some say that the first of what were to be many miraculous births was presaged in signs. Only much later did a long list of the omens appear. Some could not resist applying the veneer of old myths to circumstances that seemed entirely novel. Someone had reported a two-headed comet, but that was predictable. It had been done before. Different indeed and widely reported was the experience of being awakened from troubled sleep to the sound of a woman laughing, laughing, saying, “Oh my children, my beautiful children!”

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Three persons prosecuted for their participation in the raid last March 13 on the Piedras Negras jail in Mexico were acquitted October 1 of most of the charges against them although two still face jail terms.

Mike Hill, Billy Blackwell and Sterling Davis held Mexican prison guards at gunpoint while eleven Americans and five Mexicans fled the jail and crossed the Rio Grande border to Eagle Pass, Texas.

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Around Lower Manhattan, storefronts have been boarded up since the looting in June. The plywood has been covered with murals and graffiti art on the theme of Black Lives Matter. Throughout June, angry protests were a daily affair, as in cities across the country.

Since the murder of George Floyd, the moment seems ripe with potential for a truly revolutionary situation. Anarchist ideas like abolishing the police are entering mainstream discourse with astonishing rapidity.

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More than 200 peace, civil rights and church activists honored David M. Gracie at a testimonial dinner Friday, July 21, as the Rev. Gracie prepared to leave Detroit for a new job with the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.

The gathering represented a wide cross section of Detroit’s “Left” community, ranging in age from late teens to late sixties, and in ideology from pacifism to revolution. They came to listen to perhaps the one man in the city who could speak to, and listen to, all of them.

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a review of

Notes from a Holocaust: 20 Songs, 2024 David Rovics

Growing up on punk rock music as part of my introduction to anarchism, I always understood punk to be a variant of folk music.

Having missed the most prolific heyday of the people’s folk music of the 1960s, singers like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and their lesser-known contemporaries performed melodic, catchy, and often more accessible versions of what the underground papers (like this one) were doing with their radical articles. Passionate storytelling and principled advocacy are what make music a meaningful force for community and change.

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Two notes on last issue: It was dated February 1977, skipping the issue which would have been dated January to allow us to bring the publication in line with when the paper actually appeared; you did not miss an issue.

The unattributed quote on the cover of the last issue was by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and comes from a section of The Gay Science entitled “The Eulogists of Work” and bears a striking resemblance to contemporary critiques of wage work. A section is reprinted here:

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i’m scared walking

so i hold lori’s hand

and she says, its a trouble, mommy,

but don’t worry.

her strong little hand squeezes mine,

then she skips on ahead and i try

to be brave.

loreie j

i go to prepare a worki for you

the pain of it too much i want

you to live free breathe clean

drink clean walk safe, i

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The poetry of Christina Pacosz is remarkable for its insistent and deeply compassionate crossing of that deceptive boundary between what we have been tragically trained to think of as the separate domains of culture and nature. Grief, protest, nurture and celebration are woven together in a body of work that places history within the household of the natural world, promising imminent and continual renewal of the spirit.

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Just as in other periods of contestation with the ruling order, not only did the Vietnam era resistance create its own periodicals, but it also published an enormous number of posters and flyers. Their subject matter didn’t only call for an end to the war, but denounced the U.S. empire and its armed forces, the police, racism, sexism, and many contained calls for revolution against capitalism.

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As we write at the end of March, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is at full fury with deaths and destruction increasing daily. By the time you read this, the conflict will hopefully have ended. If not, any number of terrible scenarios may have taken place or are still continuing.

The best outcome will be the thwarting of Vladimir Putin’s plans by Ukrainian resistance, but also by the overthrow of the Russian president by popular forces within Russia. The consequences of a victory for the invaders would be a disaster and only come at a horrendous price.

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Over the past year, ruling elites in Russia and Ukraine—often in collaboration with fascist gangs—intensified active repression of those who dare to express dissident points of view on a wide range of topics, from workers’ demands for back pay, to the rights of ethnic minorities, to antifascist activities.

...

Harry Levin, the literary critic, once said that the achievements of such writers as Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and Hemingway “can almost be computed in terms of specific gravity.”

In other words, density, rather than volume, is the main characteristic of their work. However, in James Joyce’s novel, “Ulysses,” one finds both density and volume, which make it one of the most formidable books ever written.

...

A deadly drone war rages between Ukraine and Russia. A.I.-generated images are appearing on restaurant menus and as logos in grocery store aisles. Students all around the world are flooding ChatGPT essays into their online courses.

And, for some reason, the world’s richest man is now tampering with the secure government data banks of one of the world’s most powerful nations because the country re-elected a third-rate reality TV star who has a meme coin worth $180 billion dollars. Despite all of this, the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December by 26-year-old Luigi Mangione may be the most cyberpunk event of the 21^st century.

...

Whatever one thought of Ted Kaczynski before his trial, by January, when he admitted he was the Unabomber, thus avoiding a death penalty by pleading guilty to an 18-year bombing campaign, one had to feel a certain sympathy for him. After several weeks of struggling with a defense team apparently determined to portray him as severely mentally ill in order to save him from execution (even over his own objections and desire to represent himself), and with a federal judge who committed a number of egregious procedural errors that would have almost certainly led to successful appeals, Kaczynski apparently took the only option he thought he had to avoid a trial that would present him as an incompetent madman, and copped a plea.

...

During the outrage expressed in the national media following the delivery of over a dozen mail bombs in Late October addressed to prominent Democrats and a cable network, several commentators invoked the name of the Unabomber. (This ignores the role many of the targeted officials played in bombing other countries, but that’s a different story.)

...

Yevgeny Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev (1923)

FE notes: The following passage is from Evgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian sci-fi satire We (1919).

Zamyatin, a naval engineer who specialized in building ice-breakers, had been imprisoned and driven into exile twice by the tzarist regime for subversive activity. During World War 1, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary communist underground and was persecuted for antimilitarist activities.

...

AD RATES: 50 cents per line. Call 962–9334 with your message or stop by 937 Plum St.

BUTTON COLLECTION for sale: 120 different political, sexual, dirty buttons (NO CAMPAIGN BUTTONS). Collected in years of arduous labor; hardship case, must accept best offer over $50. Call 833–0387.

A motor trip to South America in quest of Nature’s psychedelics is leaving December 1, 1966. If interested write Gene Davis, Box 192, Lombard, Ill. 60148

...

The Fifth Estate

1107 W. Warren

Detroit, Mich. 48201

831–6800

UNCLASSIFIED costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. (A word Is a word, including 1 and 2 letter words. A phone number Is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.) (no limit on number of lines.)

...

UNCLASSIFIED costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. (A word is a word, including 1 and 2 letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.

Abbreviations should be sensible.) (NO LIMIT ON NUMBER OF LINES)

THE FIFTH ESTATE, 923 PLUM STREET, DETROIT, MICH. 48201

Liquidating entire collection of reptiles from all corners of the world. Interested persons call 935–2013 after 10 p.m.

...

Send to the Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Mich. 48201, phone 831–6800

All unclassified ads must be paid in advance by mail or personal delivery.

For Sale: IBM Executive electric typewriter, excellent condition, all we have left to sell. Trans-Love Energies, 4863 John Lodge, Detroit 48201. Call 831–6800 and make an offer. Will take electric Smith — Corona portable in trade, or will listen to what you might offer.

...

UNCLASSIEIEDS cost 50¢ per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

DISCOUNT RATES Five runs cost 35¢ per line.

I’m sending (blank) lines at 50¢ per line for a one issue run.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Get “High on Mt. Rushmore”

Self-employed bachelor wants uninhibited women for exotic fun and games Phone Charlie at 867–9218, 10am to 10pm.

...

Send to: The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Mich. 48201, phone 831–6800

Unclassified costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. A word is a word, including I and 2 letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. (No limit on number of lines)

...

Send to: The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Mich. 48201, phone 831–6800

Unclassified costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. A word is a word, including 1 and 2 letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. (No limit on number of lines)

...

AD RATES: 50 cents per line. Call 962–9334 with your message or stop by 937 Plum St.

WANTED—a multi-small-room apartment anywhere around Wayne — semi-cheap. If having one for rent—ring LI8-6434, ask for Larry Mahigian.

THE FIFTH ESTATE needs $500 dollars within one week after this ad appears. We’ve got soooo many bills. We can’t promise when you’ll get the money back, but we’ll work it out. If things go right and subscriptions, display ads and contributions keep coming in, I see a weekly ESTATE in Sept. or October. Stop in at 937 Plum St. and let’s talk about it.—the editor.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

A Psychedelic treat! Magic Veil Light Co.—Call Skip or Jerry (313) 833–9871.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word, including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

The FIFTH ESTATE can use the donation of two postage scales; a small ounce scale and one for packages over a pound. Also, does anyone have an old electric addressing machine and a small safe. If so, please contact the office. 831–6800

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

All unclassifieds must be paid in advance by mail. Or personal delivery

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Happy Birthday, Thomas C! May you always think of me...Bev.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50)

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Get ordained—Send name and address to Universal Life Church, 1766 Poland Rd., Modesto Ca. Get 4-D draft exemption, half fare on airlines and trains and marry people. No cost or obligation, only “What is right.”

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Bachelor, 28, well educated, seeks same for roommate and/or for companionship. Call 5670213 Evenings.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

White Broadminded male desires replies from other males for possible meeting. Send photo, phone, interests, etc. to Main Post Office Box 613, Flint, MI 48501. Let’s get together pronto!

...

THE FIFTH ESTATE 923 PLUM STREET, DETROIT, MICH. 48201. 962–9336

UNCLASSIFIED costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. (A word is a word, including 1 and 2 letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.

Abbreviations should be sensible.) (no limit on number of lines)

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Cinderella Wanted. Gentle sincere executive who needs grooming and contacts to realize her potential and who would like gifts of clothing or cash from an intimate friend. G. Arthurs, Box 301, Leamington, Ontario.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Wanted: Articles, photos, etc. on the MC5. Mag. 53270 Aulgur Dr., Rochester, MI 48063.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

PRO/JECT Magazine has a new address: 1240 West Forest, Det. 48201.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Overground paper: Independent Eye, a newspaper of southwest Ohio. P.O. Box 20017, Cincinnati, Ohio 45220. 6 issues for $1. Remember, the Queen City.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Overground paper: Independent Eye, a newspaper of southwest Ohio. P.O. Box 20017, Cincinnati, Ohio 45220. 6 issues for $1. Remember, the Queen City.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line. ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50).

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50).

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50)

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50)

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Kevin-remember the real cool time we had at Benedictine? Call me. If you don’t have my number, run an ad. Pam.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Lead guitar player needs work; Lead guitar player needs music; Call JoJo 863–2290 soon.

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Amazing opportunity for starting and operating your own successful small business. Free details: B&W Enterprises, P.O. Box 9175F. Boston, Mass. 02114.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Amazing opportunity for starting and operating your own successful small business. Free details: B&W Enterprises, P.O. Box 9175F. Boston, Mass. 02114.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Wanted—salesmen for Ann Arbor silk screen printing concern. Call 769–5160.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Amazing opportunity for starting and operating your own successful small business. Free details: B&W Enterprises, P.O. Box 9175F. Boston, Mass. 02114.

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Girls 18 and over who believe in free love. Pretty and sexy, come to 2641 E. Michigan Ave. Ask for California.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

I’m sending ... lines at 50 cents per line for a one issue run.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Bi-guy Wants to go straight. Send suggestions to: L.P.G., 2152 Dorchester, apt. 104, Troy, Michigan 48084.

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

All unclassifieds must be paid for in advance.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs are 35 cents per line.

Check one

I’m sending ... lines at 50 cents per line for a one issue run.

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

We dig the Fifth Estate, L.A. Free Press, and other undergrounds here in ‘Nam. Keep the truth coming.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Good looking bachelor likes to make love during the day. Works,4 to 12 shift. Call before 10 am 883–0068.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Send to: THE FIFTH ESTATE, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, 48201

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

All unclassifieds must be paid for in advance.

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Get “High on Mt. Rushmore”

Meditation in a “straight” evening, Proposes an accurate record to enlighten moment’s passion. Charles Lindblom, Wayne.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost .35 per line.

Send to: THE FIFTH ESTATE, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit 48201

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Print Your Message Here. Send to: THE FIFTH ESTATE 1107 W. Warren, Detroit 48201

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

This newspaper will not accept ads that slander other persons (institutions are OK). Also, ads that have as their purpose meeting others or receiving phone calls must be accompanied by the name and address of the person placing the ad. This will not be put in the ad, but will allow us to check if we doubt the authenticity of it.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. A word is a word, including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Wanted: Singer for Experienced Radical-Rock-Jazz Ensemble. Must be good, versatile, and over 18. Contact Wilson, 14 W. Elmhurst, Highland Park, Michigan.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word, including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

Wanted: Singer for Experienced RadicalRock—Jazz Ensemble. Must be good, versatile, and over 18. Contact Wilson, 14 W. Elmhurst, Highland Park, Michigan.

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. Discount Rates: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

This newspaper will not accept ads that slander other persons (institutions are OK). Also, ads that have as their purpose meeting others or receiving phone calls must be accompanied by the name and address of the person placing the ad. This will not be put in the ad, but will allow us to check if we doubt The authenticity of it.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four Words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words.) Abbreviations should be sensible, DISCOUNT RATES Five runs. cost 35 cents per line.

This newspaper will not accept ads that slander other persons (institutions are OK). Also, ads that have as their purpose meeting others or receiving phone calls must be accompanied by ‘the name and address of the person _placing the ad. This will not be put in the ad, but will allow us to check if we doubt the authenticity of it.

...

UNCLASSIFIEDS cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word, including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, 48201. phone 831–6800

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible).

DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

ALL UNCLASSIFIEDS MUST BE PAID IN ADVANCE BY MAIL OR PERSONAL DELIVERY

...

Send to: The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Mich. 48201, phone 831–6800

Unclassified costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. A word is a word, including I and 2 letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

(No limit on number of lines)

...

The English musical scene is really a bummer. English audiences are mostly composed of teenyboppers that still dig “The Midnight Hour.” Yet there is a growing group that is really beginning to get into the music thing and love to hear a band kick out the jams.

Probably the most interesting musical group on the English horizon is “The Family.” It is composed of some older college type cats who are not only saying something in their music about the conditions of the society that we live in, but also happen to be very expert musicians.

...

The letters which appear in this issue of the Fifth Estate do not represent the entire correspondence which has grown out of the discussion on technology. Some of our exchanges with readers of the paper became too broad, too lengthy, and too diffuse to make their publication possible, and so many of those debates will have to be deferred until they can be treated in a more organized manner. We also received many one- and two-line letters of support, some accompanied by donations and requests for more copies. We want to thank everyone who has shown support; we hope to do everything we can to strengthen our ties with them and aid them in the struggle against the sector of the machine in which they find themselves. To them we can only say: there is so much to do; let’s get moving.

...

a review of

Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire by Tim Harper. Harvard University Press 2021

This dauntingly detailed book on the roots of Asia’s anti-colonial movements documents the early influence of anarchism, and how it was ultimately displaced by nationalisms of different stripes.

...

New York, July 23 (LNS)—Former Supreme Court Justice and UN lackey Arthur Goldberg will defend Rev. William Sloane Coffin in the upcoming appeal of his two-year draft conspiracy conviction. Radio Station WBAI said that Goldberg left them with the impression that he would soon issue a statement on why he left the UN and why he decided to take up Coffin’s defense.

...

BERKELEY, Cal. (LNS)—Dick Gregory was a special visitor to the California Peace And Freedom Party headquarters in Berkeley recently: Gregory visited Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party twice while he was here. Gregory’s visit culminated in the opening of a state office for Gregory for President, and the announcement of a boycott against Olympia Beer of Washington State, in support of the Indians’ attempt to control the water that was stolen from them many years ago in Washington.

...

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 10 (Liberation News Service) — Two editors of LNS were busted on narcotics charges yesterday in the culmination of a series of arrests of Area radicals on petty charges during the worst days of the urban insurrection here.

Martin A. Jezer and Ray Mungo were charged with possession of marijuana after a small packet of the stuff was allegedly found under the back seat of the 1953 Cadillac hearse in which they were riding. Marshall Bloom, Craig Spratt, Bill Robinson, Jezer, Mungo, and Larry Dean, Peter Novick, and Austin Pyne of the Washington Free Press have all been arrested once or more for violation of curfew charges, despite their press credentials.

...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 20) LNS — Possession charges against LNS editor Ray Mungo and WIN [magazine] editor Marty Jezer were dropped June 20 in Washington. The defendants suspect the police smoked the evidence,

After the case was placed on the court calendar, the arresting Narc approached Mungo’s and Jezer’s lawyer, John Karr, and asked if he was going to contest: the evidence. Karr advised the Narc to have the evidence as well as a lab technician in court to give testimony. The Narc disappeared and when the case was called for trial, charges were dismissed, Mungo and Jezer were not surprised at the outcome. “After. all,” they chorused, “it was good shit.”

...

SAN FRANCISCO, June 12 — Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader, was released from the California medical facility prison at Vacaville this afternoon on a court order that criticized the cancellation of his parole.

He had been held since April 7 as a parole violator. But Solano County Superior Court Judge Raymond J. Sherwin ordered his release on a $25 nominal bail. Judge Sherwin was critical of the California Adult Authority for ordering the parole revoked.

...

FT. ORD, Calif., May 5 (LNS-SCN)—At Fort Ord today, the U.S. Army launched into the famous flexible-response strategy that has lost it a war in Vietnam.

Ten days ago, soldiers and officers on the base began promoting a love-in. They posted mimeographed fliers showing a hand sign of the V, with the simple caption, “5 May, First Brigade Parade Field.” That was all. The word spread through the ranks, and by the middle of this past week the Army had reacted with all the cool of a spastic ogre harassed by ants underfoot. Trying to stamp out the troublemakers, the ogre stepped on a lot of innocent ones, amply proving the organizers’ point that the ogre is no friend at all to the common GI.

...

The latest newspaper to make the UPS scene is Ann Arbor’s LOOKING GLASS. Editor and publisher Jeffrey Hoff, hoping to stress the political more than the psychedelic in his paper, predicts that “the white hippy scene, the black revolt, everyone who feels that a great many young people in Ann Arbor who do not bother to read regular papers such as The DAILY simply because it does not relate to them, will now create a substantial following for the underground press”. “White liberals read The DAILY, black and white radicals read the underground press,” explains Hoff.

...

San Francisco (UPS) The Underground Press Syndicate, of which the Fifth Estate is a member, was founded more than a year ago in order to facilitate the communication of information which the Establishment press ignores, suppresses, or never dreamed of.

Today, the UPS has member papers growing in almost all the glorious subterranean gardens across the country and in Canada and England as well. Recently the first national UPS conference was held in San Francisco, with representatives from the East Village Other (N.Y.), the L.A. Free Press, and The Oracle, The Communication Company (San Francisco), The Rag (Austin, Texas), Seed (Chicago), the Washington Independent (Washington, D.C. ), and The Illustrated Paper (Mendecino, Calif.)

...

ART & ARTISTS: c/o Mario Arnaya, 16 Buckingham Palace Rd., London SW1, Eng.

AVATAR: 145 Columbia Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02139

BERKELEY BARB: 2886 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, Calif. 94795

CANADIAN FREE PRESS: Student Co-op, Argyle House, 53 Argyle, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

CONNECTIONS: 22 North Henry Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53703

...

In response to “Lasch: Theory of Passivity Stumbles” by Bob Brubaker, in this issue, page 6.

Despite many excellent observations on fallacies in Lasch’s work, I think it necessary to clear up some questions of methodology raised in your article. In particular, I must dispute your claim that by focusing as we did on the motion toward social passivity and recuperated, (i.e. pseudo-) individualism, we are embracing a theoretical notion of humanity as passive object determined mechanistically by social conditions or that we are putting forth the idea that no other motion exists in society. This is the old conundrum of human beings making/being made by history, and hardly needs reiteration.

...

Lily So-too, What do they do to you? (oil on canvas, 72 by 72 inches, 2004)

Take me to

where my heart is sunken

deep into the land

stepped on, kicked, trampled, thought

nothing of,

to the place where people don’t know that

it is even there,

supporting their weight.

Let me love them anyway.

i am not divided from myself

let me feel the ache of the person

struggling to keep alive at the hands of another person

and under a mechanized system

designed to grind her back into stardust

mine is the same body and breath

that give her

material right to be, to exist.

...

San Francisco—When San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown testified against the three homelessness activists who threw pies at him last November, he repeatedly urged the court to make an example of the defendants. (See FE #352, Winter 1999.)

The trial ended in a split verdict for members of the Biotic Baking Brigade (BBB), Rahula Janowski, Justin Gross, and Gerry Livernois. Jurors deliberated for over nine hours, finally acquitting the defendants of the heavier charge of assaulting a public official, while convicting them of simple battery.

...

This poster appeared in the Fifth Estate, December 1976, vol. 12 no. 3 (279).

Un-Dewar’s Profiles

Leon F. Czolgosz

HOME: Everywhere. Moves freely in the world, recognizing no state boundaries.

PROFESSION: Czolgosz has no “profession,” refuses to sell his skills and resists definition by any of the categories of capitalist achievement. “If you must call me something,” he says, “call me an Urban Modality Redesigner--Explosives Division.”

...

Un-Dewar’s Profiles

Leon F. Czolgosz

HOME: Everywhere. Moves freely in the world, recognizing no state boundaries.

PROFESSION: Czolgosz has no “profession,” refuses to sell his skills and resists definition by any of the categories of capitalist achievement. “If you must call me something,” he says, “call me an Urban Modality Redesigner--Explosives Division.”

...

Unfuck the World, says the sign on this page and the next. It isn’t just a one-off, rude slogan held by someone justifiably angry at the state of things.

It stems from the 2017 rap/rock song of that name by The Prophets of Rage, a band comprised of members of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy, and Cypress Hill. It’s an anthem for what has become a worldwide movement that will host its 9^th annual UTW Day, September 18.

...

Tay-lor-ism n. 1. The scientific management of industrial operations. 2. The systematic reduction of work within a given industrial operation to separate, distinct, routinized tasks devoid of policy decisions. Each aspect is measured and timed for its highest efficiency. 3. The system of such developed by Frederick Taylor in the late 1880s.

...

The struggle for unionization in the 1930s has always been shrouded in myth and revered by both the labor movement and the Left as a period of labor militancy. A closer look at the developments shows a much different picture than was generally thought to be the case and exposes what the real role of the unions was.

...

In one of the largest steps in its history, the American Federation of Musicians has drafted plans for a huge apprentice program for teen-age rock musicians which could alter the present music industry considerably.

The program, to be implemented by Detroit’s Local 5 under the supervision of business agent Dennis Day, calls for concerted action by the union on two major fronts: to convince teen musicians to join the union under its new “affiliate membership” plan, and to convince club owners that they should sign “union shop” agreements with Local 5 which would provide for employment only for union bands at union scale.

...

a review of

“But What About the Workers?,” a pamphlet by James Boggs and James Hocker, available from the Advocators, Box 07249, Gratiot Sta., Detroit MI 48207; $0.75, 43 pp.

James Boggs and James Hocker, like so many other revolutionaries, desire a unified working class capable of a socialist revolution and set out in their pamphlet to examine the state of unions today and why so many workers employ “individualistic” solutions to their problems.

...

Reprinted from Internationalism No. 3

Unionism corresponded to a particular historical period of workers ‘ struggles. Its form was determined by its reformist content. Unions regrouped only a minority of the working class, just enough to be able to put pressure on the capitalist class. Unions organized workers in the image of the capitalist system itself: according to trade, job skills, industrial sector. Unions became increasingly bureaucratized as capitalism itself became more complex. Hierarchical relations became the norm as unions entered the field of bourgeois legality. Economic demands were the unions’ exclusive preoccupation and a political view of the system was relegated to a separate compartment: the political parties. But as long as reformism was a valid perspective, unions continued to play a role in improving the lot of the working class.

...

Both Marxist and liberal historians have always depicted the Nazi movement as the bitter enemy of unions and the victory of German fascism as the death knell of the labor movement. A critical examination shows that, in fact, the opposite was the case and the Nazis used the unions in the same manner as their predecessors.

...

From the May 3 Wall Street Journal comes some interesting information about the United Mine Workers (UMW) union that bears heavily on future energy schemes, especially those dictated by our peanut president. Carter’s new energy policy calls for increased use of coal as a major energy source, but the underground miners of Appalachia are not showing much enthusiasm for digging it out.

...

As has been the case throughout colonial conquest, the military police force of the Canadian state, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have facilitated the occupation of Indigenous lands by resource capital. Most recently, the state forced its way onto Wet’suwet’en territories in northern so-called British Columbia to secure access for a Coastal GasLink liquified natural gas pipeline (LNG).

...

SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Black Panther Party Chairman, Bobby Seale recently reiterated his call for a United Front against Fascism in America. The United Front is to be inaugurated at a National Conference called by the Panthers in Oakland, Calif., July 18–20.

To this Conference have been invited representatives of groups across the country, not just radicals, but all who consider themselves “progressive” and who “take a firm stand against the development of fascism in America.”

...

For two weeks after Burning Man, I felt like I was glowing, radiating spirals of energy that warbled just below the visible range. The constant brutality of the state, the frantic pace of life, the social isolation--none of these things could get me down. For years, I had heard about this experimental arts and cultural festival held annually on the playa on the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. I went for the first time this year and look forward to going again.

...

George Armstrong Custer, whose “last stand” has been depicted by more than 200 artists since it occurred during the summer of 1876, has been made into a prime symbol of this country’s “winning of the West” from American Indians.

Glamorized in scores of books, and depicted as a gallant cavalier by Errol Flynn in films such as They Died With Their Boots On, Custer might even be seen as the centerpiece of a whole genre of American imperial mythology.

...

Jacob and Workers of the Night breaking into the cathedral at
Tours, France, 1903, to steal the church’s riches (drawing by Flavio Costantini)

The excerpts on these pages are shortened versions of ones published in Defiance: Anarchist Statements Before Judge and Jury, a new title from Detritus Books in Olympia, Wash. detritusbooks.com. During the last 150 years, people identifying with the anarchist tradition have employed direct action many times against the state bringing repression and punishment upon them from the apparatus they seek to dismantle. This anthology chronicles 27 unrepentant voices of those facing courts and juries after apprehension and conviction.

...

Mackenzie High School, located on Wyoming and Chicago, has been the scene of picketing, walkouts and militant assemblies since the beginning of the fall semester in September. The cause of the conflict, as in many Detroit inner-city schools, has been racial tension and hostility over poor education building up to a point where the whole thing had to explode. As a spokesman from the Black Council, a militant student-community organization, put it, “The spark lit the fuse that blew up the place.”

...

I’m interested in unschooling because it’s an applied philosophy rather than a teaching method. This philosophy, which I strive to use daily with my son, who is now 16 years old, is also the one used in free schools. For me, this approach to life and to children’s’ development encourages independence, confidence, and pleasure in living. Experiencing unschooling with my son has permitted us to go beyond the simple accumulation of knowledge.

...

TOPEKA (LNS)—Pvt. Donald Till wasn’t happy when the MP’s busted him for being AWOL.

When they decided to fly him to Fort Riley, Kansas for a court-martial, Till hatched a plan. Feigning fear of flying, he conned a parachute out of his captors, and then questioned them at length about its use.

Mid-flight, the industrious soldier leapt 3,000 feet to his freedom. Unfortunately he was captured a short time later.

Pictured at right are Federico Arcos, Fifth Estate comrade, and veteran of the Spanish anarchist militias of the 1930s, with Julie Herrada, April 7, at Hamtramck, Michigan’s 2739 Gallery, during the opening of the exhibit, ‘Unthinkable,’ a display of artifacts from the collection of Fredy and Lorraine Perlman. Featured were posters and publications from Paris 1968, and from ones produced at Detroit’s Print Co-op, as well as a first French edition of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and a floor-to-ceiling display of huge timeline sheets for Perlman’s, The Strait.

...

Unlimited Reward offered for the elimination of power held by Republicans, Democrats, & other politicians.

Known to be engaged in a vast conspiracy to spread death & disease, poverty & rape—a conspiracy to completely dominate our lives & eliminate human freedom.

G8 Summit

Where: Sea Island, GA

When: June 8 to 10, 2004

...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Liberation News Service) A dynamite bomb blasted open the Institute of Science and Technology Building on the University of Michigan campus on Oct. 15. It was the latest in a series of 13 bombings to hit the Detroit area in recent months, and followed by two weeks the destruction of a semi-secret CIA recruiting office in downtown Ann Arbor.

...

NEW YORK (LNS)—Tuesday night, Oct. 22, the inmates of the Lower East Side, inspired by Julian Beck’s Living Theater and led by Up Against the Wail Motherfucker, laid cultural claim to the Fillmore East. They needed the space, a motherfucker leaflet declared, “To survive, grow freaky, breathe, love, struggle and turn on.” Graham said over his dead body, Julian Beck said right on and the rest of the script of that real, living theater can be summed up by this exchange:

...

November 9—the fourteenth anniversary of the popular uprising that destroyed the Berlin Wall—was also an international day of protest against the more than 400 miles of wall being built by the Israeli government around and through Palestinian communities in the West Bank. All over the globe, special events and actions took place in solidarity against this construction project.

...

Friday, 7pm-11pm, Community Church of Boston, 565 Boylston St.

Mitchell Verter, editor of Dreams of Freedom, on Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon and contemporary Magonism, a video and music.

The Bookfair. Saturday, 10am-7pm. Massachusetts College of Art, Pozen Center, 621 Huntington Ave. Tables from distros, radical bookstores, Info-shops, and publishers. Speakers, workshops, panel discussions, and films.

...

FE’s Bill Blank, wearing a Free Marie t-shirt, crosses the finish line at the Indianapolis Half-Marathon, Sept. 2009. Shirt and other Marie merch available at freemarie.org.

FE Note: Most of the following information on Marie Mason is from the web site supportmariemason.org. Check for updates.

Marie, a long-time Fifth Estate contributor, was sentenced in February 2009 to almost 22 years in prison following a guilty plea for two acts of property destruction. She is currently an inmate at the Waseca, Minnesota federal correctional institution, serving the longest sentence of any Green Scare arrestee. (See Fifth Estate Spring and Summer 2009 editions.) These are available at the FE web site.

...

ANN ARBOR—The long awaited single by the Up has been slated for release on Feb. 6. The tunes will be “Just Like An Aborigine” and “Hassan I Sabba.”

Artwork for the record label and jacket will be done by Youth International Party (YIP) Minister of Culture in exile, Gary Grimshaw. Grimshaw, who was working in California with the Berkeley Tribe fled for parts unknown recently after a Federal Fugitive Flight warrant was issued for him. He is wanted in Traverse City on a frame-up dope charge along with Pun Plamondon, Minister of Defense.

...

There are only two paths open to a country whose internal and external empires are in the state of decay prevailing in the United States. That of the left or fascism.

The trend toward fascism in the United States is accelerating at an incredible rate. It is beginning to acquire the kind of mass base which served Hitler in Germany. The catalyst for tendencies always present in American society, is the equally accelerating struggle for black liberation.

...

Dave Dellinger, Chairman of the Mobilization Committee, predicted that the response of the American people would be to speak out even more forcefully against the war and to insist on their democratic rights to do so. He reported that the Mobilization office had already received a flood of phone calls from persons who indicated that they would go to Washington on October 21. In a number of cases, people not previously planning to go to Washington on that date have phoned in to say that now nothing can keep them away.

...

Ursula K. La Guin, photo by Eileen Gunn

Reprinted from Fifth Estate #382, Spring, 2010. Issues are available as single copies & in bulk.

Related, in this issue: “Le Guin’s Anarchism & Mine” by Andrew William Smith

In a writing career spanning nearly six decades, Ursula K. Le Guin pushed the boundaries of fiction, transcending genre and style conventions to create a unique and distinctive literary voice.

...

In a writing career spanning nearly five decades, Ursula K. Le Guin has pushed the boundaries of fiction, transcending genre and style conventions to create a unique and distinctive literary voice. Her groundbreaking novels and stories have questioned gender constructions, challenging our notions about gender and identity, imagined an anarchist utopia, wrestled with ideas of free will and destiny, and subtly made commentary about race and race relations. At various times throughout her career critics have labeled Le Guin and her works feminist, anarchist, Taoist, and other labels, but they are both all of these and none of these things simultaneously. What is clearer than the labels of critics is her ability to think critically and turn that thought into finely wrought literature.

...

“To objectivise life means to destroy it.”

-- Ana Esther Cecune, Development Dialogue, January 2009.

The Marxist David Harvey, who has made an academic career out of tracking neoliberal thought from the bungled Chilean coup in 1973 to present, achieved near-notoriety in the fall of 2008, as did a lot of other radicals who found themselves suddenly in demand on lecture circuits. With derivative market/swaps surfacing like so much bilge at a gated resort, many of us were intellectually unprepared for the sweep and alarm of the panic. But Harvey’s analysis was a soothing tonic. Invariably, though, as Harvey recalled (in December 2008), those discussions came down to neoliberalism and its predicted end. And, inevitably, he’d reply: “Well, it depends on what you mean by neoliberalism.”

...

Via National Guardian

“This war is, I believe, a war for civilization.”

—Francis Cardinal Spellman

The bodies in the mass graves of Hue are not the victims of the National Liberation Front but of American bombs, bullets and napalm.

The NLF attack on Hue was coordinated with an internal uprising Jan. 31, 1968. The main part of the city was in the hands of liberation forces within hours—hardly a shot was fired.

...

The New Age of man finds more and more people interested in living together for the mutual benefit of one another’s growth and development.

While many communes have been set up in the past they have generally been of limited success. Despite all the difficulties that one encounters in communal living it is the belief of many that it is only through such living together and the sharing of lives that man can achieve his maximum potential.

...

a review of

We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe, script and story; Tamiko Nimura, story; art, Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki. Chin Music Press Inc, 2021

Resistance and oppression are perhaps the most consistent threads that link history. No matter what social system a population lives under, it is inevitable that people will at some point turn to resistance.

...

Rambo-man Reagan is gearing up the U.S. military machine for an escalation of his wars against the Empire’s pandemic array of enemies. A trident of battle plans was announced from the White House on January 21 which included a decision to seek $100 million additional aid for the murderous Nicaraguan contras, “assistance” to the troops of South African stooge Jonas Savimbi who is trying to oust the Cuban-backed Angolan government, and increased support for Reagan’s doomsday Star Wars system.

...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Nixon’s public relations men are calling it an “economic readjustment,” but in English it’s a full blown economic recession.

U.S. Labor Dept. unemployment figures show joblessness for April at 4.8%, the highest since 1965, when U.S. “escalation” of the Vietnam war began.

Lines at unemployment compensation offices in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Birmingham, Ala. are spilling out onto the sidewalks. 3,700,000 Americans can’t find jobs—and that’s one million more than a year ago.

...

It’s too bad that he had to hear the word from Allah, but still it is heartening to know that at least one Marine refused to be used as cannon fodder in Reagan’s reckless war schemes.

Marine Cpl. Alfred Griffen, a practicing Muslim, told his military superiors in October 1983 that the Koran forbid him to kill fellow religionists in Lebanon or to participate in “a war of egression” in Grenada. Griffin was court-martialed for being AWOL and sentenced to a relatively light four months at hard labor.

...

How could anyone fail to notice the sickening irony in the announcement from U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz that no reprisals would be taken against Nicaragua for shooting down an unmarked U.S. military helicopter and killing the pilot at the Honduras-Nicaragua border? Such a declaration is roughly equivalent to a bully saying he won’t retaliate for your biting his toe while he’s stomping your face in.

...

Media commentators have grown so fond of labeling President Reagan’s mad scheme for placing laser and particle beam weapons in space “Star Wars” that it is hard to see why they have failed to extend the movie analogy logically forward and call the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) by a more appropriate name emanating from the same movie—“The Death Star.” Also, the prez certainly makes a better Darth Vader than a Luke Skywalker.

...

Political speculation concerning rapidly changing political events in a journal such as this which appears so infrequently puts the writer at a distinct disadvantage, Even by the time this paper is published, a new crisis may have been created and the current ones described herein discarded or resolved.

...

Utah Phillips at IWW Centenary, 2005, Chicago. On ends, folk singers Len Wallace and Charlie King; to Utah’s right, Federico Arcos.

The IWW and the labor movement lose a troubadour Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music, who performed tirelessly on two continents for 38 years, died May 23 of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California, a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor. Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife.

...

The following is a portion of a transcript of a May 7 interview with Utah Phillips conducted by long-time Fifth Estate contributor, Peter Werbe. It aired on his May 11 Detroit radio show in part to provide publicity for a benefit concert for Utah held in Ann Arbor. It is available as a podcast at wrif.compodcastnightcall for the show on that date. It follows the first two hours of phone-in talk.

...

On February 6, progressive columnist Chris Hedges wrote a fairly predictable attack on Black Bloc militancy, “The Cancer in Occupy,” in Truthdig, the on-line news site.

It voiced, in general, the perspective of the liberal-moderate-reformist folks who have been mostly predominant in Occupy. Hedges’ screed against anarchists and others who “go too far” shows just what anti-authoritarians have been up against and why so few of them, in my experience, have been interested in Occupy.

...

Dave Valler passed his sanity tests with flying colors and has pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of grass.

Valler’s court-appointed attorney requested the sanity hearings contending that, “Valler’s habitual and heavy use of drugs impaired his mental ability.” (See FE #77, April 17–30, 1969).

...

Sanity tests have been ordered for Dave Valler who is facing trial on two counts of sales and possession of grass and for conspiring to dynamite several public facilities.

The police and prosecutor consider Valler to be the ringleader of the eight persons charged with the Detroit area bombings last year which hit police stations and cars, a draft board, the Ann Arbor CIA office and a research institute.

...

The heavy hand of “justice” has fallen on Dave Valler, who was sentenced to 7 to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of possession of marijuana.

Valler is still awaiting trial, along with six other persons, on conspiracy charges in connection with a series of dynamite bombings of a school, a draft board, and a policeman’s car.

...

The Vancouver Five are activists from British Columbia who are currently facing 17 counts of sabotage and conspiracy. Besides being charged with destroying an environmentally damaging hydroelectric generator and firebombing a porn shop, they also are accused of a massive bomb attack on a Toronto cruise missile plant.

...

The trials of the Vancouver Five are over and their long exiles in prison have begun (see FE #317, Summer 1984). The five pled guilty earlier this year to a series of guerrilla actions and bombings.

For those who missed the results of the sentencing, Ann Hansen was given a life term in prison; Brent Taylor sentenced 22 years; Julie Belmas received a 20 year sentence; Gerry Hannah, 10 years and Doug Stewart, six.

...

VANCOUVER BC—A tomato thrown at the Judge sentencing her to life in prison clearly articulated Ann Hansen’s contempt for the “Justice System” that is sending her and four other members of the Canadian guerrilla group Direct Action—the Vancouver Five—to lengthy terms in prison.

A viciously right-wing judge with a lengthy history of anti-labor and antiradical sentiments, Judge S.M. Toy, gave Hansen the life term for her conviction on a charge of conspiring to rob a Brink’s guard in order to obscure the political basis of Hansen’s other charges for which lighter sentences were handed down.

...

Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name.

—Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd by Woodie Guthrie

Seizing five anarchists on 17 charges of sabotage and conspiracy in British Columbia early this year (see FE #312, Spring 1983) gave the Canadian government the excuse it needed to begin “clearing” other unsolved bomb cases by attributing them to the arrested five.

...

Mohawk and the other booze peddlers hit by anti-sexist vandals moved quickly to restore their insults to women. Further action against them has been promised.

Billboards are so plentiful in and around Detroit that they could almost be taken for granted as part of the natural environment. Indeed, in a society where profit outweighs everything else, billboards fit-in quite naturally. They are the “Au-natural” voice of capital, and their mimicry of the population’s repressed desires flaunts the consumer only with the ideal of escape via sex, liquor and flights far away.

...

“Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco”
Chris Vanzetti
The artist’s great grandfather, Amleto Fabbri, was the Secretary of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.
This painting references the famous photograph of the two anarchists.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti lived in Plymouth, Mass., when he and his comrade Nicolo Sacco were charged with robbing a factory payroll and murdering two guards, a crime they did not commit, but for which they were executed in 1927.

...

H. Horatio Humphrey, United States vice-warlord, was welcomed to Detroit last week by a 200-man anti-war picket line in front of Cobo Hall.

Humphrey was in Detroit to speak about riots and other such domestic problems at the National Association of Counties Convention. Official U.S. policy on riots, according to Humphrey, is that the government is against them.

...

PRENSA LATINA—When asked “why did you come to Cuba” one black youth from Detroit answered earnestly: “To meet the beautiful Cuban people and help them with their harvest.” His friend, also from Detroit said: “To mix with the people and to get the truth of what’s happening here.”

“De pieeee...” followed by its English equivalent, “On your feeeet...” comes through the loudspeaker and echoes across the cane fields.

...

Six hundred young Americans are planning to show their support this winter for the Cuban revolution by taking to that country’s fields armed with machetes.

They will be members of the Venceremos Cane-Cutting Brigade and will join with Cubans in a battle to harvest 10 million tons of sugar cane.

Venceremos is Spanish for “We Shall Triumph” and is the motto of the Cuban revolution.

...

Note: This is a shortened version of an essay that can be found in several locations on the Internet. Some material is likely dated at this point, given the rapidly changing situation in Venezuela. Since the essay primarily has value as a first-hand account, and since we have not returned to Venezuela since it was written, we have not attempted to update this version in any way.

...

Barrel-assing around hair-pin turns at 6am in a crowded bus on a road with no barriers between us and a two thousand foot drop was not the manner in which I anticipated arriving in Venezuela for the Sixth World Social Forum (WSF).

This anus-clenching adventure was made necessary by the fact that a key viaduct on the highway from the airport into Caracas was recently determined to be on the verge of collapse. All traffic was forced to take an old mountain road, so what was normally a 40 minute ride had turned into a gridlocked six-hour nightmare journey.

...

The Fifth Estate received this communication prior to the December 3 presidential election from the Venezuelan Commission of Anarchist Relations (Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas) and its organ, El Libertario. Hugo Chavez won handily against his opponent. Venezuelan government officials announced that 70 percent of eligible voters had cast ballots.

...

FE Note: The comrades of Venezuela’s El Libertario magazine are unrelenting in their criticism of what they call the myth of Hugo Chavez’s “Eco-socialism of the XXI Century.”

They often write about the general unwillingness to see the authoritarian side of Chavez as an echo of how almost the entire Left, including many anarchists, refused to criticize the Cuban revolution.

...

In this interview conducted with Fifth Estate via email, Le Guin discusses influences on her life and work, some of the ideas behind her famous novel The Dispossessed, what needs to be done to cause a shift in the perception of anarchism in the popular imagination, and the inspirations for her most recent novel Lavinia (Harcourt 2008).

...

Despite its much publicized popularity, the film “Rambo...Part II”, has been blasted nationwide by many groups and individuals. A San Francisco Vietnam veterans group, calling themselves “Veterans’ Speakers Alliance,” picketed in July in front of a local theater showing the film.

This group of Vietnam vets, as well as others around the country, have been quoted as saying that Stallone’s film misrepresents the realities of the war, glorifies its horrors and exploits the sacrifices of the men who fought it.

...

Detroit Area Veterans Against the War will be joining veteran contingents from many other cities in a Memorial Day Demonstration in Washington, DC. The veterans plan to hold memorial services at Arlington Cemetery and also will demonstrate at the Pentagon.

“Veterans can play an important role in the antiwar movement,” said Ed Chalom, chairman of the new group. “It is becoming increasingly clear that the strategy of the Administration is to shift the blame for the continuation of the war onto the shoulders of the peace bloc and further, to discredit peace people as being “unpatriotic.”

...

Plymouth City Attorney Charles Lowe told a Detroit News reporter recently that “the Plymouth City Commission felt that the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office will no longer recommend warrants for violations of the state obscenity law and thus it has become necessary for us to write our own law.”

This comes on the heels of a well financed campaign by the local chapter of the VFW to “rub out smut” in Plymouth. They collected, according to a spokesman, more than 3000 signatures on petitions in support for new anti-obscenity legislation in the City of Plymouth.

...

Two summers ago all we heard on the news were stories about the gangs that were terrorizing the citizens of Detroit—vicious, sadistic teen-agers who beat people up during rapes or robberies. People on the East side were afraid to come out of their homes. (See FE #276, September 1976). All the publicity about the gangs has died down what with the “Renaissance City” hype and all, but there is one gang that was operating then and that is still at large today. The members of this brutal gang are employed by the City of Detroit.

...

We regret the loss of Germinal Garcia (Victor Garcia). Born in Barcelona August 24, 1919, he died in Montpellier, France May 10^th. He was a member of the Libertarian Youth and Quijotes del Ideal in 1936. Active in the anarchist movement, he was editor of Ruta and Solidaridad Obrera in 1947–48 in Spain, and of Ruta in Caracas from 1962–67 and 1970–80. A prolific writer, he published over thirty books and pamphlets. A more extensive article on the life of Victor Garcia will appear in our next issue. Our sincere condolences to his daughters and his companion.

...

In 1903, two young sisters, Helen and Olivia Rossetti, published a novel under the pseudonym Isabel Meredith, chronicling their lives as radicals, propagandists, and key figures in the European anarchist movement of that era. Prior to that, while still in their teens, they edited The Torch--An International Newspaper of Communist Anarchism, from 1891 to 1896, which scandalously called for sexual equality, the destruction of religion, and the end of state rule by violent means.

...

After seven years in a highly secretive, repressive unit of a Texas federal prison for women, environmental Green Scare political prisoner, Marius Mason, has finally been moved into a less restrictive section.

He is now able to go outside, touch the trees, and see the clouds and stars, something he reports he will never take for granted again.

...

Breakfield, Russell, Klug and Catlow, four of the Ft. Dix 38 (Shakedown/LNS)

FORT DIX, N.J.—The court-martial of Pvt. Terry Klug is over. He is the GI who the Ft. Dix brass had singled out as the “ringleader” in the now famous stockade rebellion on that base last June.

The surprise verdict: Not Guilty on all counts.

...

JACKSON, N.C.—The Army announced May 20 its “final disposition of the cases of the three anti-war soldiers who had been in the Fort Jackson stockade for two months.

There will be no courts-martial for Joseph Cole, Eugene Jose Rudder and Andrew Pulley; they were released from the stockade today and the Army says that they will be discharged from the service in short order.

...

When we left the Gandalf Three [“Building A Movement,” FE #351, Summer 1998], Noel Molland, Steve Booth and Saxon Burchnall-Wood, editors of England’s Green Anarchist, they were imprisoned following a guilty verdict for conspiring to incite others to cause criminal damage.

The charges and three year prison sentence stems from GA’s reporting of economic and ecological sabotage carried out by the shadowy animal and earth liberation fronts which have caused millions of pounds of damages to earth rapers and animal killers.

...

The man accused of murdering a Detroit policeman at the New Bethel Church last March had his charge reduced from first to second degree murder.

Judge Robert L. Evans, who has presided over the long Recorder’s Court pre-trial examination of Rafael Viera, bound Viera over for trial July 30 on the reduced charge.

...

A little more than a year ago, David Brown, Jr. of Compton, California sat isolated and frightened in a Wayne County jail cell awaiting trial on charges of assault with intent to commit murder.

He was charged with having shot at Detroit Patrolman Harkewitz from a loft inside the New Bethel Baptist Church on the night of March 29, 1969.

...

[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]Another window gone at the office of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

RING — RING!

“Hello--Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.”

“You Commie son of a bitch! If you have any more marches, you’re all going to wind up dead!”

Click!

And so it goes at the local office of one of the groups trying to bring about an end to the war in Vietnam. Committee members say this type of harassment increases when the organization is particularly active. Since last week the Committee announced in the FIFTH ESTATE its plans to hold a four — day long series of protests against the war, they are now bracing themselves for the inevitable bricks and phone calls.

...

NEW YORK (LNS)—Top secret operations are being launched in Vietnam to kill or capture American deserters fighting for the NLF, according to a London Express story reprinted June 24 in the New York Post.

The operations have been ordered as the problem of troops going AWOL in the war zone becomes increasingly serious.

...

U.S. “normalization” of relations with Vietnam ignores the slaughter of the war and continues the myth of the MIA/POW.

Why did President Clinton (whose opportunistic-draft dodging was the only worthy thing he’s ever done) lift the almost twenty-year ban on trade with Vietnam in February, beginning a process of “normalization” between the two countries?

...

EDITORS NOTE: The following speech was given to a meeting of the Detroit Circle held November 21 in the McGregor Memorial Building. Dr. Pollack is a History professor at Wayne and long active in the movement protesting the war in Vietnam.

Perhaps the biggest mistake many of us make when speaking about Vietnam is that we focus only on Vietnam, and in doing so, engage in a debate with the forces supporting the Administration on their own ground. Not that a case against the war could not be made even there, for it could. But I think the time has come to enlarge the inquiry and to make a case not simply against the war, but against the structure of American society which makes that war possible in the first place. Why are we in Vietnam? Until we dig deeply into that question and explore all the ins and outs, we will be forced to remain on a superficial level and to confront the war as a single issue--and in thinking of the war as a single issue. when and if this war is resolved, then the basis for the criticism is removed. This is not as it should be. I urge you to consider that the Vietnam war, as important as it is, is only a symptom--only a symptom of the larger course American society is pursuing. And one does not accomplish very much by confronting symptoms when the underlying causes remain unhampered.

...

With the Vietnam analogy on everyone’s lips, first for El Salvador and Nicaragua, and now for Lebanon, the signs of similarities arise ever more frequently. One such indication is shown here in the accompanying two photos. The first is from the front page of the January 15, 1967 Fifth Estate showing draftees marching in Ft. Polk, LA, beneath a racist portrayal of orientals exhorting the soldiers to “Bong the Cong.” “The Enemy Viet Cong” turned out to be all Vietnamese, whether soldier, guerrilla, civilian, woman or child, with a resultant one million Vietnamese slaughtered by the U.S. war machine. The second photo is from Lebanon, taken during October prior to the bombing of the Marine headquarters and similar to the Vietnam era, the soldiers are implored to “Kill All the Rag Heads.” All Arabs are reduced to their traditional headgear and all are the enemy. It is the same racism, the same arrogance, the same unquestioning obedience to the state military apparatus which masks another’s humanity in order to turn them into mere objects for murder.

...

This past week the D.C.E.W.V. conducted a survey in the segment of the 17^th district in which we intend to concentrate our efforts on the Lafferty campaign this summer.

In order to plan specific strategy we thought that it would be important to know something about the people who lived there. We felt that with a survey we would have more of a concrete estimation of prevailing sentiment than one painfully derived from an endless committee discussion.

...

Vietnam Newsletter

Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam

Vol. 1, No. 2

1101 W. Warren, 832–5700, May, 1966

The major activity of the DCEWV since the March 25–27 International Days of Protest was a demonstration at a fundraising function of the 17^th District Democrats. About 35 demonstrators carrying signs reading: STOP THE BOMBINGS; BRING THE TROOPS HOME; I WAS A LIBERAL UNTIL I DISCOVERED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SELLOUT: and MARTHA (Griffiths) MUST GO, formed an orderly picket line from 8 to 10 p.m. in front of the Latin Quarter where the affair was held. Three of the demonstrators, who managed to obtain tickets legitimately, participated in the cocktail party, despite police efforts to keep them out of the building. One of them, Dena Clamage, executive director of the Detroit Committee, engaged Rep. Martha Griffiths of the 17^th District in a discussion about the Vietnam war, which ended when Rep. Griffiths accused Miss Clamage of baiting her and suggested that if Miss Clamage were opposed to her (Griffiths’) Vietnam policies, she should support some other candidate running on a peace platform. Smiling, Miss Clamage assured Rep. Griffiths that she would.

...

At the outset, I would like to try to allay anyone’s concern about bias in a member of the Newsreel reviewing a Newsreel film. Clearly, I am not objective. I am partisan. So I would like to make clear the nature of that partisanship.

I once said in a rather superficial discussion within the Detroit Newsreel collective that my personal commitment was to the project of a people’s revolution in the United States, as part of the world revolution against imperialism and monopoly capitalism.

...

The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam will take initial steps to place a referendum on the war in Vietnam on the ballot in Detroit.

Dean Jabara, attorney for the Detroit Referendum Committee, submitted to the Corporation Council a proposed amendment to the Detroit City Charter, the amendment would create the office of the “Director of Peace Priorities,” who would work to bring about an “immediate withdrawal of all U. S. military forces from Vietnam.”

...

Reprint from Vietnam Report Vol. 1, No. 1, the official newsletter of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam (DCEWV), April 1966

All the way with LBJ—and Nguyen Cao Ky! (reprinted from Weekly People)

Using the occasion of the Tom Hayden speech during the International Days of Protest. James T. Lafferty, Chairman of the Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, announced his candidacy for the 17^th District U.S. Congressional seat presently held by Martha Griffiths.

...

We are all outlaws in the eyes of America...

We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young...

We are forces of chaos and anarchy

Everything they say we are we are

And, we are very Proud of ourselves

—“We Can Be Together” (Jefferson Airplane, from “Volunteers,” 1969)

And, traitorous.

...

SAIGON (LNS)—The following letter is directed to the American anti-war movement from Hugo Hill, an American civilian who lives in Saigon. For the past nine months, Hugo Hill has frequently contributed articles to Liberation News Service.

SAIGON

Sept. 6, 1969

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

As you well know, the Vietnamese people need no help in defeating U.S. military strategy. They have already smashed Maxwell Taylor’s “special war” and Westmoreland’s “search and destroy” operations. They have seized control of their own land from under the noses of half a million expeditionary troops and right now they surround all the American military bases in their country.

...

There is, even though you may not have noticed it lately, still a war going on in Vietnam.

More than forty people, representing virtually every white peace group in the city, met on Monday, June 5 to try to do something about it.

Despite the wide divergence of political viewpoints represented the group tenuously agreed to combine their efforts over the summer. Committees were established to probe programs in four areas including community organization; anti-draft action; marches, demonstrations, and mobilizations and political action. A fifth committee will make proposals for structure, coordination, the name of the group, the setting up of a central office and the like.

...

“It is time now to meet the escalation of the War in Vietnam with an escalation of opposition to that War. I think the time has come for all people of good will to engage in a massive program of organization, of mobilization. This is the purpose of Vietnam Summer. And I’m happy to join as one of the sponsors of what I consider a most necessary program, a program that may well determine the destiny of our nation.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at press conference announcing VIETNAM SUMMER, Cambridge, Mass., April 23, 1967

...

“There is too much concern about free love and not enough concern about free hate in this society,” stated William Sloan Coffin in an anti-war address at central Methodist Church on May 9, 1967.

Coffin, the Chaplain at Yale University, was speaking on behalf of Clergy and laymen concerned about Vietnam, a new addition to peace and anti-war groups in the city. Coffin is an officer of the national Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam which is co-chaired by Rev. Martin Luther King.

...

Shortly after we published our issue with a discussion of the war in Vietnam, [Looking back on the Vietnam War, FE #320, Spring, 1985] an article appeared in the New York Times about studies done by the Vietnamese government and the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources concerning the effects of the “ecocide” (a word coined during the Vietnam war to describe the U.S. war there) on the land since the end of the U.S. war. The study traces developments since 1945 in a 97-page document, portraying a rural and agricultural nation devastated by “deliberate destruction of the environment as a military tactic on a scale never before seen in the history of warfare.”

...

a review of

Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Richard Stacewicz, Twayne Publishers, 1997, New York, 471 pp.

FE Note: Nick Medvecky was a civil rights activist (1961–65) in the South and, later, an anti-war coordinator. He covered the VVAW Winter Soldier Investigation for Creem magazine. He is currently serving a federal prison term: #12155039, P.O. Box 8000, Bradford, PA 16701.

...

a review of

In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, by Ngo Van; Eds. Ken Knabb and Helene Fleury; Trans. Helene Fleury, Hillary Horrocks, Ken Knabb, and Naomi Sager; AK Press; 2010; $19.95

There is a sub-genre of science fiction called alternative history, which consists of works such as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, in which Germany wins World War II, and Hitler becomes the ruler of the U.S. Works of this type offer a counterfactual version of past events, allowing readers to think along different lines about how the world has developed.

...

I would like at this time to point out what I believe to be the central considerations involved in my position that the United States is totally unjustified in pursuing its current policy in Vietnam.

To begin with, the resumption of bombings of North Vietnam can lead only to escalation and intensification of the already dangerous war in Vietnam. Three presidents have warned us of the dangers of an all-out war on mainland Southeast Asia; and yet, this is exactly the situation which the United States is now confronting.

...

a review of

Vietnam Will Win by Wilfred Burchett (New York: Guardian Books, 1968)

Everyone should read Vietnam Will Win—including those who have already read Burchett’s earlier books, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (1965) and Vietnam North (1966).

These two works, especially the first, are important as the first successful attempt to introduce the Vietnamese struggle to Americans in human terms. Burchett’s unpretentious accounts of what he saw in NLF territory in late 1964, and his interviews with the people who live and fight there, continue to be more meaningful than all the abstract legal, political and moral arguments put forth by the U.S. left.

...

The Movement in town is gearing itself for a week of political action this month, covering a variety of issues but organized around the theme of “Solidarity with the Vietnamese People.” Actions will be held around the country on this day.

The main event of the week is a mass march down Woodward Avenue to Kennedy Square slated for Saturday afternoon, October 26. The demonstration will culminate in a rally at Kennedy Square, with Peggy Terry of the National Community Union, Andy Stapp of the GI Servicemen’s Union, and Tom Hayden of the National Mobilization Committee as the featured speakers.

...

A wave of strikes has been hitting Italy, France, and West Germany, in many cases over the opposition of official union leaderships. A recent strike in Italy was conceded by Fiat to have involved 1.3 million men and to have been 75% effective.

The main issue for European workers continues to be wages: for a 48-hour week at Pirelli (tires), the average worker makes $160 a month. A quarter-million coal miners in Germany recently won 14% pay increases:

...

Small-scale demonstrations on Wall Street around the October 15 Moratorium again raise the question, “Is Business Really for the War?” Fortune (Sept. and Oct., 1969) has come up with some answers through its own polls of the heads of the 500 largest corporations, banks, insurance companies, retailers, transportation companies and utilities.

...

Early this year, George Meany’s AFL—CIO pulled out of the International Confederation of “Free” Trade Unions because ICFTU, originally set up as an anti-Communist rival to a pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions in 1949, is getting closer to dealing with WFTU bodies.

“In the future,” said the Wall Street Journal, “AFL-CIO will spend the money on its own international programs,” that is, the ICFTU will no longer be directly on the CIA payroll. Unfortunately, nationally-isolated trade unions run into other kinds of problems.

...

The Establishment press has been full of three things lately: encounter groups, pollution-ecology-environmental control (which has got to be the most cooptable issue since sideburns) and wasteful spending by the Defense Department.

Two interesting mainstream views on the latter were in Look (Aug. 25, the second of a series) and Fortune (Aug. 1^st issue). Fortune lists the top 25 contractors, breaks down defense contracts by state and into dollars per head of the population per state (meaning: just how dependent a particular state is on the military), and shows how the 25 largest contractors account for nearly half the value of all contracts.

...

This column will be devoted to an exploration of Establishment thinking, as revealed primarily in power structure publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, etc. The assumptions of the writer are Marxian, Marcusian, and C.W. Millsian: in brief, that there is a power structure largely centered in the economy; that the Establishment, in particular its economic wing, is still remarkably flexible; that we, as radicals, had better know a lot more about how this Establishment functions; and, on a strategy for change must try to understand the divisions within the Establishment so as to make use of them for revolutionary purposes.

...

The possible trial and execution of United States airmen as war criminals by the Hanoi government has been handled by the administration and by the press as a crucial turning point in the war in Vietnam. Partially to justify the bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, partially to pave the way for bombings of the Red River dikes and, perhaps, China, and partially to silence the peace movement and other dissenters, the administration is conducting an incredibly effective propaganda campaign to project the impression that the trials represent a significant escalation of the war by Hanoi, justifying further escalation on the part of the U.S.

...

For as long as the “New Left” has been in existence, “New Leftniks” have talked about the need for serious thought and analysis within the various “movements” which have arisen: analysis of American society, its history, its power structure, its operating mechanisms; analysis of other countries, especially those of the under-developed (overexploited) Third World; analysis of the problems which this country is or very soon will be confronting, i.e., automation, foreign policy, poverty, etc.; and analysis of where we as a movement, should be concentrating our attention and organizing energies. Unfortunately, very few New Leftniks have actually undertaken this type of work.

...

Women,

step up to your place

as bounty hunters,

claim your $10,000 reward.

Grab your knitting needles,

pinking shears and nail files.

Maim, castrate or, if need be, kill,

at your discretion, each man

who approaches you in a

manner indicating he intends to engage

any of your body parts.

Remember,

...

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

...

A few days ago a friend of mine asked me to amortize my obligations to RFK’s assassination by rendering a stirring Stars and Stripes article titled something like—Ban the Guns (it occurs to me that we haven’t even Banned the Bomb yet). His idea was that I should create apiece of literary magic that would induce Fifth Estate readers (against their better judgment) to go out and contact their congressmen with personal letters, informing these panderers of democracy that some of their constituents are outraged by the inadequacies of existing gun laws.

...

Chants of “Shave my teeth!” and “Blood! Guts! Terror!” were the theme of a militantly irresponsible demonstration called by the recently founded Violent-Illegal Party (V.I.P.) on December 12 at Wayne State University.

The occasion was that tedious but finally terminated attempt to “save Monteith College,” a small college within Wayne which faced elimination due to cutbacks. Through the duration of the pseudo-struggle to keep their little academic turf, the Monteith administration and faculty, and their idealistic dupes among the student body, kissed the asses of innumerable bureaucrats and politicians.

...

The work/sleep, shop/discard, lose/win, simulated existence that is thrust upon us is fundamentally forced participation in an electro-sociopathic process.

With computer mediation steadily consuming discourse life is increasingly lived behind, and for, a screen. As contemporary civilization continues this conversion into omnipresent, digitized drudgery, antisocial propensities mushroom, a listless insatiability abounds, while feelings and insight are left behind.

...

It was an unheard-of event. For the first time a performer picketing the place he was supposed to play because he wanted to perform there.

Ted Lucas mans the picket line at the Ichth Coffeehouse –photo by Evan Soldinger

On Saturday evening Dec. 28, Ted Lucas put up a one-man picket line outside of the Church of Christ (located next to the Playboy Club); within the Church was the Ichthus Coffee House. Lucas was booked to play a concert there but was canceled out with less than 24 hours notice because of an alleged lack of funds. The booking agent for the Ichthus claimed that because the coffee house had been asked to leave their former home, the Old Mariners Church, they couldn’t afford a higher priced act because their new home held one third the capacity.

...

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Marilyn Olson is a pretty, blue-eyed blonde from Stockholm, Sweden. She and her husband, Bertil, operate the Cafe Marx in Stockholm.

She is a warm and friendly woman who talks easily. And she tells stories. She speaks of “a lot of CIA agents around” her and her co-workers. She tells the story of “one fellow who was hiding in a closet for three months” in Japan.

...

Note: The following is an excerpt from an article, “The Regime and the Working Class in the USSR,” by Viktor Zaslaysky which appeared in Telos No. 42, Winter 1979–80. Telos, “a quarterly journal of radical thought,” is available at Box 3111 St. Louis MO 63160. Subscriptions are $15 yearly; single copies, $4.

...

ANN ARBOR — The Voice Political Party is shifting emphasis from demonstrations and sit-ins to an in creased educational effort on the question of U.S. policy in Viet Nam. In a meeting last week, it was decided to attempt to bring the Viet Nam issue to both the student body at U of M and the community at large on a more personal basis.

...

The two publications to the right [in the print edition] and dozens more anarchist, feminist, abolitionist and prisoner zines are available from: South Chicago ABC Zine Distro, P.O. Box 721, Homewood, IL 60430; write for a catalog.

They Will Never Get us All — Harold Thompson

They Will Never Get Us All!, Harold H. Thompson, 2006, 50 pp., order from: Friends of Harold H. Thompson, 711 E. Holly St. PMB #748, Bellingham, WA 98225, send $3–7 (sliding scale) well concealed cash

...

A review of Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 2 edited by Ken Wachsberger, Michigan State University Press, 2012, 442 pp, $40

As you can see by the type on our cover, the Fifth Estate is approaching its 50^th anniversary of radical publishing. This makes us either the longest or one of the longest running English language anarchist publications in U.S. history. The “either or” is due to from what date you count our appearance as an explicitly anarchist paper.

...

As interest in the history of anarchism increases with each passing year, we stumble across more lost gold mines of sources. I recently discovered one in Philadelphia which connects Voltairine de Cleyre, the celebrated anarchist speaker, poet, essayist and activist, with an anonymously published feminist article “The Political Equality of Woman.” Publishing it here for the first time in 105 years is cause for a small celebration.

...

Reprinted from The Great Speckled Bird

Look what’s happening out in the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Hey, I’m dancing down the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet

Got a revolution Got to revolution

.

One generation got old

One generation got soul

...

Voodoo is a colloquial corruption of Vodo, the name of an African godhead, the Holy Serpent.

The practice of Voodoo has been, until recent years, the most consistently revolutionary and anti-establishment force among poor blacks in the United States. For this reason, Voodoos have always been, and-still are, secretive, especially where white people are concerned. Yet, as “the Power” of Voodoo is slowly assimilated into many secular forms, including some of the recent black nationalist movements, candid information becomes more and more generally available, and it is finally clear how profoundly important Voodoo has been in so many quarters of American life.

...

Reprinted from The Metro

ECOLOGY SUCKS! It sucks the life out of social reform. It sucks the energy out of campus movements. It sucks the irritants out of capitalism. It sucks change out of politics. It sucks reason out of thought.

Ecology has become the monster of our age. Unless revolutionaries, radicals, and liberal reformers soon recognize this, they, and humanism itself, will eventually be consumed.

...

The Vietnam war is exacting a cruel toll in lives and resources, detracting from constructive domestic programs, and threatening to lead to a third world war.

I PLEDGE to support and vote for candidates in 1966 who agree to work vigorously:

FOR U.S. steps to scale down the fighting to achieve a cease fire;

...

On December 3, a month after the Republican Party was swept from control of the U.S. Congress, Hugo Chavez was overwhelmingly re-elected president of Venezuela for a third four-year term. On the night of his victory, in a speech to thousands, Chavez said Venezuelans should expect an “expansion of the revolution” aimed at redistributing the country’s oil wealth among the poor.

...

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

...

As Tony Reay says [FE #65, October 31-November 13] “WABX strikes again.” And they did, with ripples from the blow coming all the way back to Detroit from England. The WABX audience was the first, anywhere in the world, to hear the new Beatles” double record album, “Sexy Sadie,” on tapes of the new release that came “from a source close to the Beatles,” according to station manager John Detz.

...

(UNDERGROUND PRESS SYNDICATE) The three-year-old kid, as the story goes, answered the door, took a cool look at the policeman standing there, raised his full blue eyes and declared: ‘Fuck off, cop.”

“Where’s your folks, son?”

The kid brushed his white cotton-hair out of his eyes. It fell in swirling puffs down his shoulders. “Fuck off,” he repeated, without blinking.

...

In August 2015, as refugees broke through a line of Macedonian police at the border between Greece and Macedonia going toward Western Europe, a phrase from the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) came forcibly to mind: “the barbarians are coming today.” But as in Cavafy’s poem, it wasn’t clear who the barbarians really were in 2015.

...

Chicago’s famed Waldheim Cemetery, final resting place for anarchists such as Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and Voltarine DeCleyre, has been plundered of its liquid assets and is now in bankruptcy. Waldheim is also the site of the crypt and monument to the Haymarket martyrs, four labor activists and anarchists murdered by the state of Illinois in 1887. The Martyrs Monument, which has often been vandalized by political graffiti, now has suffered the outrage of metal thieves.

...

A telephone call at noon on September 29 from Elektra Records confirmed our plans for an interview with Tim Buckley. His second album (GOODBYE AND HELLO) was just released and Tim was here to play the Canterbury House in Ann Arbor.

Elektra Records said we would all meet later that afternoon and cross over to Canada where Tim had to tape a “Robin Seymor Show” on CKLW.

...

PORT HURON—Two unidentified teenagers hurled broken concrete through two large plate glass windows of the Wallace Campaign Committee headquarters in Port Huron, according to state vice-chairman, James Hall.

Dean Cunningham, who is the chairman of the American Independent Party in St. Clair County, reported that police called him September 12 just after the vandalism had occurred.

...

On May 9, 1973, three prisoners of Washington State Penitentiary, Carl Harp, Shane Green and Clyde Washburn seized the Classification and Parole Building with ten hostages, and held it nonviolently for 12 hours. During that time they were in constant communication by phone and bullhorn with media, prisoners and people outside to whom they talked about maltreatment and cruel conditions inside the prison.

...

On November 13, 1979 I was snatched out of San Quentin in California and flown back to the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, for the Court case around the May 9^th take-over of this prison (Wash. State) behind human rights and justice. So far all is well and I’m doing fine. I won’t be here long they say, and will be taken back to San Quentin, but I’ve got no idea when. Logical to assume I will be here for a while for we are making moves to hold me here up to and through our trial.

...

During the last five months, the ongoing battle between prisoners and prison administrators over the inhuman conditions at the Washington State Prison at Walla Walla, Wash., has escalated to the savage beatings of hundreds of people by guards after an unprecedented one month lockdown, and 230 prisoners from Eight Wing have been forced to camp out in the “big yard.”

...

Rafael Mutis was part of the Brooklyn 7 arrested at an APOC (Anarchist People of Color) party raided by the police in 2003. They won and exposed the arrogant racist NYPD detectives. He currently works as an organizer against the Rockefeller drug laws, which are New York state’s version of the war on drugs. He is also active with the Escuela Popular Nortena. Rafael was interviewed by MaxZine Weinstein in May.

...

Some radicals see all “protest” as pointless while others have made public activism a way of life. Others are overcoming the atomization of protest as just another alienated activity.

Another persistent concern is choosing one’s terrain of struggle. Some radical environmentalists say we should all save the wilderness, even if it means making that a single issue. Meanwhile, social justice activists say that radical greens should put aside nature issues and work on labor, race, gender, etc.

...

Jim Jacobs is a member of the Detroit Organizing Committee.

The death of Walter Reuther ends the reign of the foremost social democratic unionist in American history. Since 1947, when Reuther took control over the UAW international, he has built a massive union organization behind his politics. It is tradition in Detroit left wing trade union circles to picture Reuther as a “sellout,” “opportunist” or “bureaucrat,” but these epithets hardly explain the actions of the man or his union. Reuther was guided by a political ideology of social democracy, an important one for revolutionaries to understand.

...

At Blue Bird Food Products, a union plant on Chicago’s South side, thirty-five television cameras mounted on moveable tracks keep constant surveillance on 450 workers on the factory floor. In the monitoring room, an “expert” in time-study keeps detailed charts on workers suspected of talking to their neighbors too often or working too slowly, with the bosses having an instant replay of any of the worker’s actions.

...

If you have information concerning this person, please contact your local FBI office. Telephone numbers and addresses of all FBI offices listed on back.

Identification Order 4343, December 30, 1969

Lawrence Robert Plamondon, as he is known to the pigs, or Pun as he is called by the people, is White Panther Party Minister of Defense. He is accused of conspiring with Jack Forrest, Detroit White Panther captain, and John Sinclair to dynamite the Ann Arbor CIA office in October of 1968. They were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury late last year on the testimony of imprisoned stoolie Dave Valler. Valler was head of a dynamite ring that carried out a series of bombings in 1968 and is now trying to get out of prison by finking on anyone the government mentions to him.

...

Montreal’s fourth annual International Anarchist Theatre Festival is seeking submissions of anarchist theatre pieces to be staged May 11 — 14^th, 2009.

We are looking for theatre pieces in English or French, from 5 to 60 minutes long, about anarchists, anarchist ideas and history, or any subject related to anarchism including anti-state, against capitalism, racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. We will consider plays or monologues that are original work, ones that have already been performed, or that have been written by anarchists (historical or contemporary).

...

“Sooner or later in each historic epoch, as objective conditions ripen, consciousness is acquired, organization achieved, leadership arises, and revolution is produced. Whether this takes place peacefully or comes to the world after painful labor does not depend on the revolutionaries; it depends on the reactionary forces of the old society: it depends on their resistance against allowing the new society to be born, a society produced by the contradictions of the old society.”

...

1) Subscribe. Send $2.50 for a one year subscription and 26 issues of the paper. Send a gift subscription to a friend.

2) Sell the Fifth Estate at school, on the streets or at public places. Our sales people earn 5 cents on each paper they sell. Call 831–6801 or write to: 1107 West Warren, Detroit Michigan, 48201.

...

Most movies leave us with so little that it probably seems unfair to dump on Sergei Bondarchuk’s film of “War and Peace” simply because it doesn’t leave us with enough.

What it does give us is some rich and memorable images: a pregnant woman sewing by the light of an open window, reminiscent of Vermeer. The coming of Spring heralded by a variety of colors and textures that send the senses reeling, almost as if you could touch and smell the infinite sweetness of that budding flower up there on the screen.

...

NEW YORK (LNS) — An ex-GI has charged that electrical torture of prisoners and civilians is official U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Peter Martisen, 25, interrogated prisoners-of-war for the 541^st Military Intelligence Detachment. He was trained for his job at Fort Holabird, Md., and was stationed in Vietnam from Sept. 1966 to June 1967.

...

Are the officials of Dow Chemical Company, the local Selective Service system, and the Wayne University administration guilty of complicity in war crimes? This will be the subject of public hearings to be held at Wayne University between April 8 and 15.

The decision to hold the hearings was made unanimously at a planning conference for Vietnam Week in late January. The conference was called by the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam and was chaired by Charles Larson, president of the Student-Faculty Council at Wayne. Also represented to the Conference were Detroit and Oakland Students for a Democratic Society, the Fifth Estate, the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Detroit Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, and the Young Socialist Alliance.

...

“a very great revolutionary force latent in the American people”

—Peking Radio, May 9

President Nixon’s announcement of the invasion of Cambodia effectively implemented the old SDS slogan “Bring the War Home!” Millions of people joined the revolutionary struggle, striking out at the war, racism and political repression. Almost 600 college campuses as well as countless high schools joined the national strike, as chaos swept the nation for many days. This sheet represents only the most advanced forms of struggle that have come down during the strike. The struggle continues. Venceremos!

...

Almost exactly two years ago, tens of thousands of demonstrators came down on Washington, D.C., to let the Pentagon feel the force of their opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Few of them got inside the Pentagon, nearly a thousand were arrested on the steps outside, beaten with clubs and rifle butts, gassed.

...

The nation’s first Mod Wedding will be held at the Michigan State Fairgrounds on Sunday, November 20^th, 1966. Pop-artist Andy Warhol will take the traditional role of father, and give the bride away.

Warhol, The Velvet Underground along with Nico (girl of the year) and Gerard Malanga, “the superstar” will be making their first appearance in Detroit to attend and film the wedding as part of the three day Carnaby Street Fun Festival which opens at the Fairgrounds on Friday, November 18^th, 1966 at 12:00 p.m.

...

Andy Warhol, slightly built with frosted blond on his hair and perpetually with shades, doesn’t grind out the pop culture he’s noted for.

It flits forth from his head instead.

Warhol, the man who started the whole pop art movement with his painting of a Campbell’s soup can, who filmed the epic kiss, who swathed the under-round in velvet, and brought the nation’s first wedding in a happening to this midwestern town, is thinking of following Leary into the Village Theater in New York with his own religion.

...

The Empire, gorged and sclerotic from its daily gnawing on the marrow of the world, has now called up its armies and declared its “new world order.” Its commander-in-chief, a mediocrity in a civilization of hollow mediocrities, lays aside his golf club and announces a holy war to “defend the American way of life,” its basis in the sacred nectar of capital, the “lifeblood of industry and the Western economies,” oil. Hundreds of thousands of troops, with more on the way, now await their orders to advance to the conflagration. Or perhaps as you read these lines, the armies have already clashed, littering the sand with corpses and industrial junk.

...

Excerpted from a longer statement, November 2005

For three weeks, in the ghettos of the poor suburbs, on the outskirts of the outskirts, thousands of cars were burned, public utilities devastated, troops of police deliberately attacked.

This is a movement without explicit demands. This is a movement impossible to reduce to ethnic or racial demands.

...

You, M. Pope, are a scoundrel and a cur. The more “personable,” the more popular and accessible you become, the more you inspire our absolute loathing for all that you represent: the self-alienation of the human subject and the invasion of the human spirit by the forces of domination. Let it be clear: we are your implacable enemies. Perhaps it is true that it is not you who pushes the button which sends screaming rocket bombs to annihilate whole populations, or who orders the dumping of murderous chemicals into the water supplies, or who dispatches the police to assassinate poets and rebels. And obviously it is true that the hullabaloo that you have stirred up with your visit to the United States should raise no more interest than the arrival of some anonymous charlatan astrologer. But you haven’t been ignored; you have been recognized, feted, adored, praised, gazed upon, cheered, and taken seriously. And you do represent the internalization of the forces which make it possible for the aforementioned crimes to continue unavenged. You are the living incarnation of the plague which legitimizes oppression, promotes passivity, and defuses rebellion. We are warning you: stay out of Detroit if you wish to avoid a sound, well-deserved thrashing.

...

The bulldozers are coming again to the Warren Forest area.

To complete Wayne University’s plans to obliterate the hip and poor community surrounding the school the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has approved almost $8,000,000 to wreck the area bounded by Warren, Trumbull, Forest and the John Lodge Freeway.

...

Wayne State University is about to be confronted by an angry Warren Forest community.

The University, which has been in the process of destroying the community surrounding it for the last five years, is trying to keep community people from using its gym facilities at Matthaei Building.

The gym complex, on Warren across from the Fifth Estate office, was built on land that previously housed 4,000 local residents. It now includes large areas for indoor and outdoor recreation that is denied to the very people that were removed to allow it to be built.

...

Reprinted from Liberation Magazine.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk doesn’t seem to appreciate the monumental irony of his own position. On the one hand he insists fervidly on the right of small nations like South Vietnam to independence”: on the other he damns the means by which such independence is usually achieved, namely “wars of national liberation.”

...

In March of 1966 Michigan Bell Telephone sent the following notice to its customers:

“Your telephone bill reflects an increase in the federal excise tax on local and long distance telephone and teletypewriter services.

“The increase is a result of the Tax Adjustment Act of 1966, enacted to help meet the country’s need for additional revenues during the Viet Nam emergency.

...

In response to “Readers dispute FE on Nuclear Freeze issue,” FE #310, Fall, 1982 (this issue).

On one point we all seem to be in agreement: the campaign for a nuclear freeze is not enough. So, I find it perplexing that rather than considering its inadequacies as a basis for investigating ways of moving rapidly beyond it (since we also apparently agree that time is very limited), our critics reiterate all of its conventional arguments. None of the specifics of our analysis are discussed. Instead, the Freeze is presented as the embodiment of the movement against nuclear weapons and war, rather than a single tactical approach among many possible ways to create an opposition.

...

WASHINGTON (LNS)--Karl Marx once said that a revolution is the festival of the oppressed and exploited. Washington wasn’t that. But it was some kind of festival. It was Woodstock without the rain or the mud. It: was the great silent majority of American youth come together and digging it. Quiet kids, kids who didn’t get really excited about any of the speeches they had come to hear, come to hear nothing more than what they already knew--that the war was bad, that the killing had to be stopped.

...

“‘You just have to turn on a television to see that those people need help, and no one else is going to help them but us,’ said Todd Schuppert, a truck driver from Pekin, Ind.”

—New York Times, Dec. 1992

“Who tries to hold what flashes in the worldly storm will drown.”

—Taoist poem

“They want bases and the oil in Somalia,” I told Ed, looking into his intense, sad eyes. I was responding to the same question he posed to me during the Persian Gulf war. A former leftist, Ed wanted to know whether I believed “the U.S. could ever do anything good.”

...

Thank you for bringing to my attention your Fifth Estate essay, “How Deep Is Deep Ecology? A Challenge to Radical Environmentalism” [FE #327, Fall, 1987]. I appreciate its extensive treatment of my book, Overshoot. Here are some thoughts stimulated by having read the essay twice.

I have no objection to being characterized in your essay as “a leading modernizer of Malthus” for I believe that our future would be much less endangered were Malthus more widely and more accurately understood. He never claimed human populations always and everywhere increase exponentially (“geometrically”) nor did he say nothing could prevent a population from outstripping increases in its food supply.

...

Excerpt from CrimethInc.

This is a painfully truncated version of a significantly longer text, which includes a thorough consideration of alcohol’s roles throughout the history of civilization, as well as several important disclaimers. The full version, in all its glory, can be obtained from the CrimethInc. chapter of Alcoholics Autonomous at 2695 Rangewood Drive, Atlanta, GA 30345 U.S.A. (cyberspace cadets: www.crimethinc.com)

...

a review of

The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories by Lorraine Schein. Autonomedia, 2022

Lorraine Schein, a friend of long-standing, has just published her latest book, The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories.

This writer has toiled for years within stultifying bureaucratic confines of the workaday world while maintaining sharp anarchist perspectives in her creative endeavors.

...

“I know one or 2 who have this year, for the first time, read a president’s message, but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves rather than a rise in the president. Blessed are the young for they do not read the president’s message.”

—Thoreau to Parker Pillsbury, April 1861

The Empire now has New Clothiers, and opportunely for the rulers. As the political management languished and the economy buckled, change became the only way to keep the Empire on its track. The apparatus of organized illusion called the slaves to the Lever: which figurehead could best keep the Empire slouching along? Which party would put them back to work mining the Mystery, with picks and shovels and a small particle of eternity for all, while soothing them with homilies of health and happiness and an economy that would grow and grow forever, amen? Who could provide bread and circuses, feed the unruly to the Coliseum, torch the rebel colonies?

...

During the past few months, Michigan activists fighting the global economy’s developing market for water extraction have fought a multi-national corporation, the legal system, and the state’s liberal governor.

Also, over a thousand people gathered at a local community college to protest water and utility shut-offs in 80,000 Detroit homes alone. But neither Gov. Jennifer Granholm nor any other public official will declare a health emergency or bill amnesty.

...

William Bunge, Geography Professor at Wayne State University, last week issued the following statement concerning his own steps in protesting the war in Vietnam. Mr. Bunge’s action was made known immediately after the recent Selective Service decision to draft those students who ranked in the lower quarter of their class:

...

A call for ending parking fees at Wayne State University was made last week by the Wayne Provos. The group, fashioned after the Amsterdam Provos in Holland, plans to protest by putting epoxy glue in parking meters and the coin slots in the automatic parking lots.

A Provo leader told the FIFTH ESTATE that parking fees and parking meters served as taxes on Wayne students. Something should be done now. These parking facilities should be free to all students.

...

Their Statement:

On Friday, March 4, 1966, Attorney General Nicholas D. Katzenbach presented the subversive Activities Control board with a petition asking them to list the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America as a “Communist front group” as provided under the McCarran Act.” This act would require the Du Bois Clubs to register as a “Communist Front Group.” For every day that we fail to register, we are subject to a $10,000 fine and five years in jail. We will not register.

...

Energies of the West Central Organization, since its formal emergence on the Detroit scene in June,1965, have exploded the myth of “apathy” inherent in the behavior of “poor folks.” Human beings—Negro, white, Mexican, Maltes, and Puerto Rican—who have never fully recognized and used their latent power are doing so now. “poor folk’s” organizations which thrive in one area of Detroit’s poor folk ghetto are merging into a poor folk liberation front popularly known as WCO. Presently, WCO is confronting the common enemy—those persons who by design or inability operate the existing educational, welfare, housing, law enforcement, and urban renewal machines, etc., in a way which conspires against poor people.

...

[Web archive note: The original print edition of this article did not list an author. The article was reprinted in David Watson’s Against the Megamachine (Autonomedia, 1998).]

The cinders of the funeral pyres at Bhopal are still warm, and the mass graves still fresh, but the media prostitutes of the corporations have already begun their homilies in defense of industrialism and its uncounted horrors. Some 3,000 people were slaughtered in the wake of the deadly gas cloud, and 20,000 will remain permanently disabled. The poison gas left a 25 square mile swath of dead and dying, people and animals, as it drifted southeast away from the Union Carbide factory. “We thought it was a plague,” said one victim. Indeed it was: a chemical plague, an industrial plague,

...

Expensive new cars—Lincolns, Cadillacs, Mercedes, Jaguars—arrive at the entrance to the Detroit Athletic Club (DAC). Rich, white men dressed in $750 suits, $200 wing-tip shoes, custom tailored shirts, sporting $2,000 Rolex watches are greeted brightly but obsequiously by uniformed black attendants.

...

Expensive new cars--Lincolns, Cadillacs, Mercedes, Jaguars--arrive at the entrance to the Detroit Athletic Club (DAC). Rich, white men dressed in $750 suits, $200 wing-tip shoes, custom tailored shirts, sporting $2,000 Rolex watches are greeted brightly but obsequiously by uniformed black attendants.

...

This fragment is from Jacques Camatte’s pamphlet translated in 1975 in Detroit by Fredy Perlman. It was a key text in developing Fifth Estate concepts during the 1970s and 80s, ones which remain today. It speaks of capital and technology that has “run away” from its initiators and domesticated humans. It is available at blackandred.org

...

3-f-fe-366-4-40^th-anniv.png

The Fifth Estate is the longest publishing, anti-authoritarian, English language publication in US history. Next year, we will celebrate our 40^th birthday...maybe!

Due to rising printing and postage costs, our future is in jeopardy if we don’t come up with several thousand dollars within the next two months. We are planning a special 100 page bound edition and a national tour to celebrate our fortieth anniversary, but you may be holding our last issue if we don’t solve our financial difficulties immediately.

...

Saturday, 24 August 2002

(www.truthout.org)

The image is chilling. A middle-aged woman, plainly dressed, with a puff of auburn hair, is clutched in a hammerlock by a Portland police officer dressed in full riot gear. His riot baton is jammed high under her chin. Around her, three more armor-clad police officers swarm in, face-masks down. The woman’s face is contorted in terror. In her hand is a sign protesting George W. Bush.

...

On the left: a white-haired shoemaker in checkered shirt and brown khakis, casting uneasy glances at the circle of people surrounding him. A smirk settles on his lips as he prepares a witty rejoinder; perhaps he’s amused by the tourists, too.

To the right: a tan young man with a single dreadlocked braid hanging from the back of his scalp, tattered pajama pants, dirty fingernails. His hands move in front of him as though describing a box, and the words come slowly, ineloquently. His eyes evince a friendly conviction.

...

DEC. 26–31, WEATHERMAN SDS IS PROCLAIMING A GATHERING OF THE TRIBES—A NATIONAL WAR COUNCIL! WEATHERMAN, MAD DOGS, THE CONSPIRACY, YAWF, YIPPIES, MEDIA FREEKS, JUVENILE DELINQUENTS, AND DOPE CRAZED HIPPIES FROM THE GUTS OF AMERIKA WILL BE THERE! PARTIES, FILMS, BANDS, DANCING AND POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS ON BRINGING THIS MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! PLACE SECRET UNTIL DEC. 24TH, THEN CALL DETROIT: 833–4323, CHICAGO (312) 666–3874.

...

CHICAGO, Ill.—An underground “Declaration of War” purportedly issued by the Weathermen warns that the revolutionary group will “attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice” within the next two weeks.

The announcement came in a three-page typed statement said to be a transcript of a tape recording by Bernadine Dohrn, a leader of the Weathermen faction of SDS.

...

James Peake, director of Du Bois Clubs (DBC) national publications, who lives in San Francisco, stated on March 11 that he knew of 2000 new memberships since the terrorist attacks. Of these, 700 are in the San Francisco Bay area. There is no way of estimating at this time how many more new members there are across the nation of which the national office had not then been notified. Except that a substantial number of people in other groups on the left have, like Staughton Lynd, joined as a protest against the recent attacks, it is not known just what these memberships signify. Only one thing can be said With certainty: this reaction is not what Attorney General Katzenbach wanted.

...

“President Reagan” was so moved by the presentation of five gallons of drug-free urine by the Citizens for Clean Urine that he dumped the sample over his head.

The lure of a spectacle and the fact that we love a parade made President Reagan’s Sept. 24 Detroit campaign stop-over irresistible to us. A protest had been called by a liberal/leftist/labor/religious coalition and one could only expect the ritual “peaceful, legal picket line” with its predictable slogans and all imagination corralled by official demonstration marshals.

...

The absolute removal of the blight of organized religion from the face of the planet. This will necessitate the immediate removal from every church, synagogue, mosque, temple, ashram, cathedral, etc. of any and every self-styled “representative of God on earth” including nuns, priests, ministers, rabbis, etc. and their (if necessary) forced dispossession of all the enormous wealth and power they have accumulated in centuries of domination and exploitation. Let the wealth, and the buildings, be used for the creation of playgrounds, abortion clinics, or whatever the people whose labor went to create them see fit.

...

January 20, 2017, the day Trump officially became President of the United States, was filled with many acts of defiance as well as foreboding.

This day had an additional sinister meaning for anarchists in Seattle. In the name of the liberal concept of free speech, and ignoring months of warnings and protests by students, workers, and faculty, the University of Washington’s administration permitted an appearance by the vicious arch troll and bigot, Milo Yiannopoulos. Previous appearances elsewhere clearly indicated that the worst was to be expected from him and his supporters.

...

“Things are in the saddle and ride Man.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

One blind man

leads many blind men

Into the fire hole

hand in hand.

—Zen saying

After several years of discussing and debating the implications of a newspaper which criticizes technology obtaining computer equipment, we were finally forced into making the big leap, and now possess one. It may seem hypocritical to denounce computers while typesetting on one, but no less so than if I had arrived at our office by car with money in my pocket and began writing about the harm the automobile does and the need to abolish capitalism.

...

Until now, I’ve tried to avoid computers at all costs, but now having had this forced upon us, I’ve begun to consider what effect this will have on our publishing efforts and those of us who work on the paper. Upon beginning to learn their use, computers seem like fiendish apparatuses which order you about on their terms, not the reverse.

...

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an edited transcription of a press conference held in the Greenville office of the Delta Ministry Tuesday evening, February 1, 1966. The participants include three spokesmen of the over 70 poor Negroes who occupied the barracks of the Greenville Air Force Base. They were Mr. Isaac Foster of Tribbett, a leader of last spring’s strike of plantation workers; Mrs. Unita Blackwell of Mayersville, a member of the Freedom Democratic Party executive committee; Mrs. Ida Mae Lawrence of Rosedale, chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union local; and Rev. Arthur Thomas of Greenville, director of the National Council of Churches.

...

The most important tasks for those of us who would wear the anarcho-primitivist label, are to wait and watch the acceleration of the collapse of modernity and technology while we learn how to live without them.

Anarcho-primitivism should not be labeled as re-wilding, and considering all the baggage attached to the word primitive, we should probably think of a new label for cultural and ecological organization that has a possibility of survival at the depths of a rapid global, environmental collapse and mass extinction.

...

It is a good time in American history to go back to roots, to “get down,” to forget speeches and lectures and concentrate on The Word.

The smallest practical unit of language is the word. Music is beyond language.

Without the word you can’t make a political speech. Without the word you can’t have nauseating ideological wars. Without the word you have to touch each other. Without the word you can’t quite call yourself human. Without the word we would all probably be happier, but less “human.” So who wants to be human if you can be happier being something else?

...

This is an excerpt from a 2003 essay, “Surrealism & Wilderness” that is included in Rosemont’s anthology Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous: Surrealist Contributions to the Critique of Miserabilism (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2004).

Many oppositional movements that burst on the scene in the 1960s and ‘70s have long since faded away or made their peace with Business-as-Usual. The radical ecology movement, however, has not only persisted and gathered momentum, but also has never ceased to develop its revolutionary implications. Its effectiveness, in the world-historical sense, has been demonstrated repeatedly during the past thirty-five years. Consider, for example, its impact on the world’s attitudes toward wolves.

...

“Patrick Murphy is no great shakes as Public Safety Director. He is a poor administrator; he is weak, and he has no rapport with his men.”

—Richard Judd, former aide to Sen. Wayne Morse on D.C. Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate

We wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to Patrick V. Murphy, Detroit’s new Police Commissioner, one of the first major appointments of Mayor Roman “Sheriff” Gribbs. Murphy was chosen by Gribbs because he says he agrees with Murphy’s philosophy on law enforcement.

...

Welcome to our Spring/Summer 2005 and 40^th anniversary commemorative edition of the Fifth Estate (FE). The effort needed to publish the largest and most colorful paper in our history required numerous resources, both creative and financial, from our collective members and our readers. While none of it would have occurred without the incredible vision and demanding effort /expended by the people at our Pumpkin Hollow headquarters, others participated as well, especially our staff in Detroit and those scattered across North America who make up the current FE editorial collective.

...

It has been proposed that the present era of life on earth should be called the Anthropocene to reflect the human domination of our planet.

However, an elegant, scientific-sounding term like anthropocene seems like a cop-out, a handy euphemism to hide exactly what kind of domination this is and what it’s doing to the planet.

...

After 691 issues, SchNEWS, “The free weekly direct action newssheet published in Brighton, England since 1994” is no more. A mix of serious reporting and irreverent humor, it was born in a squatted courthouse as part of “Justice?”--Brighton’s campaign against the repressive British Criminal Justice Act.

...

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

...

Back in the “uncivilized” days of American history, when a company or government wanted land they killed or drove off the people who lived there and claimed the land as their own.

The Indians were the first to feel the Man’s wrath. The Indian land was needed for “progress”—factories and railroads—and so foot by foot the Indians were driven West with guns, firewater and treachery.

...

FE Introduction

During the massive European anti-nuke demonstrations of the ‘70s, at squatter defenses and other actions across the Continent, shadowy groups of angry militants, often dressed in black, masked and armed with slingshots and stones became a common sight.

They were labeled “autonomes” and exhibited a discontent with tired leftist “protest” movements as well as a marked readiness to confront the police with violence in an attempt to go beyond the limits of bourgeois civility. They spoke of a desire not only to be autonomous of the dictates of capitalist society, but of all previous political movements including those in the anarchist tradition.

...

Staff Note: Several weeks ago LNS received a letter from some activist friends in West Germany, telling us about a huge anti-nuclear demonstration/ occupation that took place in mid-November (1976). Apparently demonstrations of 30,000 and severe police repression is not “news” to the commercial press here in the U.S., because the event passed almost entirely unnoticed, warranting only one paragraph in a New York Times article. With a little bit of digging into European papers, contacts close to the German scene, and some U.S. anti-nuclear activists, we’ve pieced together the story.

...

By the beginning of the second shift on Monday July 12, the huge East Pittsburgh Works of the Westinghouse Electric Company was shut tight by a wildcat strike of production workers.

This was the first plant-wide walk-out in twenty years, the last being a six month strike in 1956 which ended in bitter defeat and demoralization. While this re-emergence of mass activity at this central plant (where some 9500 blue collar workers manufacture gigantic turbines) alone makes these events deserving of analysis, the actual unrolling of the strike presents some patterns more than worthy of consideration by those of us who seek the destruction of capitalist society in all of its forms.

...

Supporting our imprisoned comrades should be a top priority for all anarchists. We need to raise funds for material aid. Prisoners need money for books, stamps, food, phone calls, Internet use, and legal fees. We need to establish steady relationships with our imprisoned comrades. There are too many to list here. For this go around, we focus on the five anarchist prisoners the Bloomington ABC war fund supports. To learn more, visit bloomingtonabc.noblogs.org .

...

25 november 2019. 7:30 am. husson university, bangor, maine.

The memory begins here: we’re young, us skicins, and we’re somewhere on the reservation, the island. We could have been anywhere, but when we look back on it, we’re in the woods alongside the dirt road that runs against the Penobscot River down to the graveyard, a dead end (unless you count the path at the end wide enough for a car to shoulder through, in which case it is not a dead end, but just a continuation to another part of this place). Again, we could have been anywhere, but we remember the sound of water crashing in the distance, the tumultuous noise as the brown river rose, crescendoed, smashed against rock, water spilling onto the shore like a bowl filled too high and set not gently on a table. It must have been spring, when the ice on the river thawed, the bowl of our world filled too high.

...

—and wait—for the wild power of nature—Om nama Shivaya—anything—could happen—to turn around—scream our lungs out—protesters in Gaza—under the burning—midday sun—Om Nama Shivaya—gun shots into the crowd—turn it off—turn it on—social programs slashed—corporate greed—protections for the environment—eliminated—the EPA rolls back—and David Buckel—self-immolates—in the meadow—in the park—Om Nama Shivaya—this winter—the coldest—since 1961—everyday when I hit—the sidewalk—I think—it will never end—and yet—slowly and surely—the temperature will rise—and the might and mystery—of the cold wind—will surely spread—Shiva—Brahma—Narayana—their seeds everywhere—Shiva—Brahma—Om nama Narayanaya—

...

FE note: Comrades working to revive anarchism in Cuba need our immediate financial support. For U.S. dollar donations, visit the Cuban Anarchist Solidarity Fund. For Euro-zone contributions, click here.

Isbel, Mario & Jimmy (photo: Gabriel Uchida)

Changes in the Cuban state’s regulation of private enterprise and in the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. over the last decade are opening up new possibilities and dangers for Cuban society.

...

You pick up the newspaper and it tells you that the governor has just inaugurated a new school in a far-off rural town. You turn on the television and you see a “reality” show where six men compete for the attention of one woman amidst unfathomable luxury on the beaches of Ibiza.

And then you walk out into the street and watch the walls as you walk and the walls tell you that the police assassinate, that 22 murders of activists in your town remain in impunity, and that people keep organizing, people rise up, people fight hack.

...

Jerry Koch is resisting a New York grand jury investigating anarchists.

We packed the courtroom to overflowing, some of our number forced to wait nervously in the hall outside. Jerry Koch, a New York City anarchist and legal activist, stood calmly and silently as his lawyer went through the motions of arguing against his incarceration and the judge yelled at her.

...

Struggle, Chairman Mao teaches us, moves in stages.

The West Central Organization (WCO) after a long series of internal problems previously reported in the Fifth Estate has moved to a new stage.

It represents an advance for the group.

A new staff headed by, former WCO organizer, 33 year old Lorenzo Freeman, has been created to bring new talent, energy and direction to the organization.

...

By withholding our participation, we are saying ‘No’ to the continuing barbarism of the Vietnam War. We are responsible for our actions. We openly say ‘No’ to conscripted military service.

Our refusal to participate in the madness of the Vietnam War in no way implies a renunciation of our country.

...

If you think the story to the right concerning the death of Hans-Martin Schleyer sounds absurd, then you know exactly how we feel every time we read the equally ridiculous stories of the “suicide” deaths of the three Red Army Faction (RAF) members now filling television screens and the pages of the print media everywhere. In fact, all the statements contained in our Schleyer article are either lifted verbatim from newspaper and magazine accounts of the RAF “suicides” or paraphrased from similar statements in those same accounts. Everywhere the most ludicrous contentions of the state are being taken at face value by the “media” and reproduced as “objective” fact, even when they fly full in the face of any normal human being’s perceptions.

...

The point is that man is literally undoing the work of organic evolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of concrete, metal and glass, by overriding and undermining the complex, often subtly organized ecosystems that constitute local differences in the natural world—in short, by replacing a highly complex, organic environment by a simplified, inorganic one—man is disassembling the biotic pyramid that supported humanity for countless millennia.

— Murray Bookchin, Ecology and Revolutionary Thought

...

What a Day!

Hostages Go Free; Reagan Sworn In

—Detroit Free Press Headline, January 21, 1981

“Kill the hostages; Turn them into sausages.”

—from “Kill the Hostages,” punk song by Benedict Arnold & the Traitors

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!... everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the struggle over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

—George Orwell, 1984

...

The “glorious” days of the Ford family empire seem to be numbered as its headcheese, Henry Ford II, finds himself in a swirl of legal, corporate, labor, marital and physical troubles.

Reports have floated into the Fifth Estate office that during his “emergency” press conference of May 1, 1978, the “chairman” not only seemed to be suffering from a bad case of the shakes, but also seemed to be losing his hearing. Oh, the woes of the super rich.

...

Werner Von Braun, 1912-soon

Although Wernher Von Braun is still alive, though bed-ridden with a terminal case of cancer, we feel that this is the appropriate time to wish him a speedy death.

The inventor of the V-2 rocket for Hitler during World War II and author of the book I Shoot for the Stars (and hit London?), Von Braun is directly responsible for the death of thousands of Britons during the final days of the War.

...

A review of <em>

The Clash: All the Albums, All the Songs</em> by Martin Popoff. PM Press, 2022

Prolific Canadian music journalist Martin Popoff has written a remarkably exhaustive, song-by-song exhumation of the Clash, the astonishing rock and roll group (1976–1986) once popularly dubbed, “The only band that matters.”

...

We put great emphasis on the phrase “the many books available” in our headline since the extent of titles that reflect the anarchist world view are so numerous that even if we were to publish a regularly appearing Anarchist Review of Books, it is doubtful if we could come close to noting them all.

There are many publishers of specifically anarchist literature, but as is mentioned in our article on anarchist fiction in this issue, the desire for freedom without the constraints of the bureaucratic administration of life, and the repression, exploitation, and discrimination inherent in capitalist society, expresses itself in literature internationally.

...

By the time most of you see this, you will have already read dozens of disturbing and horrifying accounts from international peace activists, solidarity workers, and others who have recently traveled to Palestine to participate in, observe, and learn about the situation that has grabbed the world’s attention for the past few months. That fact troubled me while sitting down to write. What more could I say about my journey that would interest anyone? My hope is that I can convey my experience in such a way that does not simply echo what others have already said or written, and that you don’t glance at this article with indifference (“not another article about the Middle East crisis.”)

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People always ask about the meaning of our publication’s odd name. It is odd, and for our purposes over the last thirty years or so, a particularly problematic one. The word Estate in the title refers to the three powerful French Estates of the Realm at the time of the 1789 revolution—the aristocracy, clergy, and common people. A wag in the 1920s quipped that the popular press exercised such power over public opinion, it was literally a fourth estate.

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a review of

The Transhuman Future: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Tor Books, 2003

Cory Doctorow has a clear vision of the future. In a way, I hate him for that, because it is not a future in which I want to live. But he is probably right.

He extrapolates current situations and trends to create a realistic vision of the future. Often these include business trends, making them even more fleshed out visions. However, he is not a world builder. He writes humanistic stories, but about transhumanism, the idea that people can evolve beyond our current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.

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Why do we send our kids to school? We’ve been told that it is in elementary school that the bases of learning to read, write, and do math are acquired, although anyone who spends any time with children can clearly see that children want to learn what we do. They want to learn to read if they see us reading, to write if they see us writing, and to count if they see us counting.

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SAN FRANCISCO—“Naked Angels” is the best movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen “2001” four times, and I thought that was better than “Wild Angels” which I saw only 3 times.

A new genre of films is being born from the low-count B-movie trade: Motorcycle flicks. They are destined to become as classic as Westerns—only Westerns were legends and dealt with the projected past. Motorcycle flicks define our future, and our future is one of gangland violence, measured in horsepower cubic centimeters and steel tonnage. Get ready.

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Nineteenth century capitalism generated the “true believer” in laissez-faire, and gave rise to a large body of oppressed workers; the condition of which was a contradiction of the justifying principles of capitalism—the “natural rights” of Man.

In Western industrial societies (as is well known) workers and capitalists coalesced and perpetrated a conspiratorial revolution, giving rise to synthesis unexpected by social critics—the modern corporational society of profit sharing, fringe benefits, and governmental protectionism.

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A book published several years ago purported to define for its readers what anarchism is and what it isn’t. Probably only the writer was satisfied with his definitions since adherents to anarchy come in many varieties.

However, delete the hyphenated suffix (anarchist-communist or anarcho-syndicalist, etc.) and all perspectives agree that the political state and the capitalist economy have since their inception been destructive of human freedom.

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To avoid any confusion over the usage of terms, let us give a brief definition of the way in which Capital or capitalism is used in articles in the Fifth Estate: Capital is based on wage-labor, the production and exchange of commodities, with an agency above the working class extracting surplus value (profits) from the value of goods and services produced, and then re-investing a portion back into the enterprise.

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Let us give a brief definition of the way in which Capital or capitalism is used in articles in the Fifth Estate: Capital is based on wage-labor, the production and exchange of commodities, with an agency above the working class extracting surplus value (profits) from the value of goods and services produced, and then re-investing a portion back into the enterprise.

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Today’s gang quiz question is one that the gangs themselves have often fought over: which of them is the toughest? We’ll give you a few hints. It’s not the Black Killers, the Coney Oneys or any of the other teenage groups you’ve heard so much about in the last few weeks. Mayor Coleman Young has called them the “toughest gang in this city” and has warned the populace of them.

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Sex is Sweet

Sex is Defeat

Sex is Stars

Sex is Bars

Sex is Money

Sex is Honey

Sex is Euphoric

Sex is Demonic

Sex is Safe

Sex is Pace

Sex is Scintillating

Sex is Liberating

Sex is Singular

Sex is Plural

Sex is Derision

Sex is Religion

Sex is Heaven

Sex is Hell

Sex is War

Sex is Peace

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I started this work a few years ago when I became fascinated by what prisons were like in other countries and what prisoners in Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and China had to endure. Then I became more involved in the local anarchist scene and was turned on to Independent Media and the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC). The original purpose of the ABC was to support the anarchists who were put in prison during the Russian Revolution.

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VIENTIANE, Laos (LNS)—Nixon’s desperate plunge into Cambodia, like his earlier escalation here in Laos, has made public an old secret: that the U.S. campaign to stall the Southeast Asian revolution is an international conspiracy. This campaign, involving half a dozen Asian client states, respects no boundaries and no laws.

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Earth Day supplement page 8

GM WORLD HEADQUARTERS

W. GRAND BLVD. AT SECOND AVE.

THURSDAY, APRIL 19, NOON

Assemble at WSU Gullen Mall

Call 831–6800 for more info.

1 CHANCE IN 10 MILLION

DIE FROM THE INCINERATOR

38 CHANCES IN 1 MILLION

Demonstrate Against the Detroit Trash Incinerator!

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a review of

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, 2011, 304 pages

I wrote So Much Pretty because I wanted to talk about family and community and the ways in which things that have become familiar to us are often not what they seem, are rife with meanings that elude our selective senses, that turn us into unwitting accomplices, secret sharers of observable but unspeakable things. Our desires for security, or belonging or freedom suddenly becoming the weight that sinks us...I wanted to discuss how well meaning people are often complicit in destroying the things they most want to preserve.

--Cara Hoffman

from www.carahoffman.com

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It is hard to reach you guys. Once you go through the doors of that induction center it is almost impossible to get to you. Well, you are inside now. Maybe you are at some base in the U.S. getting your basic training. Maybe you are stationed in Germany. Maybe you’ve gotten your orders for Vietnam. Maybe you are already there.

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SATURDAY

HANOI, Eyewitness Report by Dr. Herbert Apthekar. Central Methodist Church 8:00 p.m. 2/12

FILM: “Beauty and the Beast” (1946), directed by Jean Cocteau. Sponsored by UCAE at WSU Community Arts Aud, Cass and Kirby. 8 p.m. Adm. charge. 2/12

CONFERENCE on China. United Nations Assn. of USA at WSU Community Arts Aud. Cass and Kirby 2–5 p.m. 2/12

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SUNDAY

FILMS: The Bank, The Tramp, A Woman and Police, with Charlie Chaplin (1915). Henry Ford Museum Theater. 2 and 4 p.m Adm. chg. 3/20

MUSIC AND READING: The Detroit Contemporary 4 and reading by David Sinclair. Artists’ Workshop. 7 p.m. 3/20

THURSDAY

CONCERT: Det. Symphony Orchestra. Van Cliburn soloist, Ford Aud. 8 p.m. Adm, chg. 3/24, 26

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FRIDAY

LECTURE: An Evening With Clifford West. Bloomfield Art Association. 6 p.m. Admission charge. 11/19

“A SECOND NIGHT WITH THE WOBBLIES, with Ellen Stekert, folk singer. Sponsored by WSU Labor History Archives at WSU McGregor Mem. Conf. Center. 7:30 p.m. 11/19

COURT THEATER: “archy and mehitabel”--modern musical classic from an original story by Don Marquis; “Children on their Birthdays by Truman Capote, and a cutting from “Death of Bessie Smith” by Edward Albee. Detroit Institute of Arts, Kresge Court,8:30 p.m. Admission charge. 11/19

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Nuclear power is a primary threat in the ongoing global environmental struggles at the end of the twentieth century. However, nuclear power is an issue many shy away from because of its complex and technical nature and the opaque power structures of gigantic corporations and government bureaucracy that perpetuates this dangerous, decaying technology.

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Reprinted from the East Village Other (UPS)

What are the pot people doing? They are doing the next best thing to changing the world: they are changing the chemistry of the brain that perceives the world, as people have done in one way or another in every culture we know of since we know not when. People will chew herbs, roots, leaves, sticks and stones, anything, to get high. There’s no escaping it: getting high is apparently part of the human condition. It’s the question of what people use to get high, and how they get when they are on high, that is so vitally intriguing, because if you know how someone likes to be high, you also know how and why he doesn’t like not being high.

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No, this is not an astronaut—just a well-prepared demonstrator on his way to a march. photo: Dave Lindquist

The anti-war movement has recently become actively involved in the type of resistance protests that has brought a violent reaction from the forces of law and order. One has only to witness the police terror perpetrated on demonstrators at Oakland, Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wis., to realize that those involved in demonstrations should take some precautions before venturing out’ in the streets for confrontations with the police.

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WASHINGTON (CPS)—College students voted for Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) and an end to the war in Vietnam in Choice 1968, the national campus presidential primary held April 24.

McCarthy polled 26.7 per cent of the almost 1.2 million votes cast, followed by Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) with 19.9 per cent and Republican Richard Nixon with 18.4 per cent.

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In response to “Beginning of Time, End of Time,” FE #313, Summer, 1983.

The question of time and its relationship to domination is central to understanding our captivity. John’s article attempts to come to grips with this very difficult subject; while what follows is often critical of his attempt, I do not want to slight its radical intent or the hard work he put into it. Nor should these criticisms obscure the fact that it is an important introduction- to the question of time: it helps us to see our perception of time as unnatural, as something imposed upon us, as a force to be overthrown if we are to liberate ourselves.

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Bakunin is often credited with being the “father of anarchism.” While he rejected the title, he was the first to write extensively, systematically, and explicitly on anarchist principles. These ranged from organization from the bottom up, the rejection of the state and the vanguard party, the nature of the social, as opposed to the political, revolution, the nature of authority, and communism.

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Pull the window shade. Walk calmly to the nearest telephone and call the Fifth Estate.

We will immediately dispatch a reporter, perhaps even an editor, to the scene.

He will arrive in time to see Detective Walter Scott of the Detroit Narcotics bureau emerge empty—handed from the house which is the living quarters of several hippies and cyclists.

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Liberation News Service — That a hard rain (of some kind) is agonna fall on America soon is a fact apparent to mystics and rationalists, to leftwing political scientists and to rightwing economists, to European money speculators and to your local police, who’ve probably already ordered their tanks. The Hopi Indians can tell you all about it and so can the Black Power cats and the Brown Berets, not to mention Yippies, Provos, Zenarchists, and the rock group of your choice.

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

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BOULDER, COLO. Walking by the student center of the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) one late winter day early this year, I saw campus Republicans swarming around several seven-foot tall poster boards. Usually, they fill these poster boards with meaningless—and largely ignored—right-wing slogans. But this day was different because the press also crowded the area, and a throng of onlookers had gathered. At the cost of being late to my next class, I cut through the mob to read the garish, neon-colored posters.

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Who the hell needs bad news? Well, we all do. At least if it’s bad news for the state, capital, and patriarchy.