Full list of texts

Since the 19^th century, anarchists have made opposition to representative democracy and electoral politics central to our critique of the state and all forms of hierarchy. As radicals who envision a world without government, we don’t want to lend legitimacy to the system of politicians and parties. The theme of this Fifth Estate issue is Anything Can Happen. This is not an empty slogan!

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Since the 1960s, Ernesto (Che) Guevara has been celebrated in leftist circles, and even among some anarchists, as the model of a revolutionary. A wide variety of musical and theater productions, political posters, T-shirts, bumperstickers, as well as advertisements for vodka, jeans, laundry soap, and promotions for church attendance bear his iconic image and proclaim: “Che, live like him!”

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The word entrapment conjures images of agent provocateurs, phone taps, and men in suits listening to fuzzy conversations in white vans down the street. But most of all, it feeds into the myth of justice in a system that is hell-bent on pursuing the malicious prosecution of any and all movements that dare to oppose it.

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This is an excerpt of Murray Bookchin’s 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist! A longer version appeared in the May 1976 Fifth Estate, which is available in our archives at FifthEstate.org.

“[The essay that follows] is not a series of hypothetical inferences; it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past century--the Social Democrats, the communists, and the Trotskyists.

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Much of the population of Israel, no different from people in the United States, denies its past as an invader/settler nation, is oblivious to the suffering which creates its plentitude, revels in self-generated myths of its goodness and bravery, and cannot fathom why such rage is directed at it.

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A protester raises a black flag during the Pittsburgh G20

A voice says, “Step Forward,” and we do.

We stand one heel touching the other. We are haggard. We have slept coiled next to and on top of one another for weeks, maybe months, it’s impossible to know.

“Remove your clothing.“The voice says.

We do. Our bones jut, poke, and hang from our skins. We are not fed. The woman in front of me, my forward toe touching her back heel, is my wife. We are twenty-eight and will remain twenty-eight for eternity. At this point, I can’t care. I haven’t seen my wife naked in so long I don’t recognize her anymore. There are others behind me, five total.

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For the godless anti-authoritarian, the hope that the current order of reality will come to an end during our lifetimes may be the last possible form of big, world-encompassing faith. For those who are faithful in this sense--whether that faith is based in scholarly readings or is purely intuitive--Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl wants to be the next Bible--or at least a book of psalms.

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July 19 marks the 85^th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution.

This seems an opportune time, then, to reflect on multiple aspects of that revolution. It began as a response to an attempted right-wing military coup against the legally-elected left-wing government, unfolded in the midst of a brutal civil war, and came to an end with the victory of fascist armies in the spring of 1939.

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Anarchism is everywhere in the media recently. Anarchists are blamed and denounced by a wide spectrum of politicians. Trump and his followers denounce anarchists and antifa as being the central figures in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Democrats make a distinction between those they designate as peaceful protesters and bad, violent anarchists who, echoing the Republicans, they charge are responsible for property damage and engage in looting.

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Members of the Black United Front mass on the steps of the Old County Building on April 3 in one of the many demonstrations of support for Judge George W. Crockett. During the day over 3,000 persons took part in pro-Crockett picket lines at Recorder’s Court, Police Headquarters, and the City-County Building. White organizations such as the Ad Hoc Group and People Against Racism gave inter-racial support to the embattled judge. Photo by Gerald Simmons.

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Dear Fifth Estate:

As an Earth First! sympathizer and subscriber to many deep ecology principles, I read David Watson’s How Deep Is Deep Ecology? with great interest. I learned a tremendous amount from it. His criticisms were penetrating and well taken. I also appreciated the tone of sympathy despite profound differences.

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Editor’s Note: The following is an interview conducted by the Fifth Estate with representatives of the Free University of Detroit, a new independent educational institute which will open it’s doors at the end of the month. A full schedule of courses offered at the Free University is printed elsewhere in the paper.

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We are entering another new epoch.

Things will only get far worse/much better from here.

No more trying to find the light or poke holes in the darkness. That time has passed.

Nor do we resolve ourselves to moving slowly through the night.

No, let’s just let our eyes adjust.

Eat carrots.

We’ll move in and out of time and plot quietly under the cover of dusk.

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“The development of capital is delinquency and madness. Now everything is permitted; there are no longer taboos, bans. But, in living out various ‘perversions, men and women can lose themselves, destroy themselves, and no longer be operational’ for capital; out of this there appears-the necessity of a community which can reinsert them into the community of capital (to be more exact, this takes on the dimension of a therapeutic community). An ensemble of specialists-therapists will serve as the mediators for this reinsertion.”

—Jacques Camatte, in Invariance Serie III, No. 1

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Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s recent purge from Yale University—coming hot on the heels of the trial-by-media of Native American radical Ward Churchill—is one of many recent attacks on radical professors that have shaken the supposedly safe zone of the ostensibly liberal academy. Graeber’s contract was recently not renewed under highly suspicious circumstances after many years of teaching at the Ivy League school.

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Very soon now Wayne State University will finally become known across the country--not for its football team (I hope that will never happen), or for its student sit-ins (unfortunately, that will never happen either), but for the fine presentations of contemporary music sponsored by a small group of students known as the WSU Artists’ Society. Formed only 5 months ago, this group has already presented a total of 7 concerts of the new music, plus two readings by young Detroit poets.

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WEST BERLIN—Situated on 3 acres of land in Kreuzberg, West Berlin, between the colorful graffiti art on exhibit at the Berlin Wall and a hundred year old building, there exist some of the last remains of the West Berlin squatter hey-day of the ‘eighties—a small trailer village of squatters and a children’s farm, both founded in the spring of 1981.

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At this moment, everyone on the planet is watching the people of the USA and wondering how they are reacting to the present global crisis. For the most “dangerous” working class on this planet is the US working class. When its compliance with capital ends, US capital will collapse, and thereafter, like dominoes, all the secondary capitals. Some of those lesser proletariats seem ready for such an eventuality, are even preparing for the “day after,” expecting the big holiday.

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Lately, I’ve been immersed in thoughts of surviving “after the crash.” It all started three years ago when our theatre group, unable to find a suitable published play for us to perform, decided to collectively write a play of our own about “the end of the world as we know it.” In The Wobble, as it soon came to be known, five actors on tour get stranded on an island (similar to the one on which we all live in the Georgia Strait between the southwestern coast of British Columbia and Vancouver Island) when they experience ‘a wobble’ that appears to be the cause of the permanent collapse of all power and communication systems.

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a review of

The Nirvana Blues by John Nichols. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981, 527 pp., $14.95 hardcover.

The Nirvana Blues completes the New Mexico trilogy of John Nichols which began with his The Milagro Beanfield War in 1972, includes The Magic Journey in 1978 and which maps the destruction of the indigenous Chicano culture of fictional Chamisa County by development-crazed Anglos.

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The condition of education in America is not an education towards realizing the possibilities of one’s own life, but is in fact an arm of the larger system of the nation with the duty to turn out people who will maintain whatever that system is or has become.

The education is generally aimed toward preserving, and eradicating what is considered worthless (or, it might better be said, what is considered dangerous—considered so by this segment that determines, in that what is kept out of reach is generally this history and traditions of such minorities as Negroes, any respect for the quality of language they’ve developed-the very things that would render them a sense of their own worth; that is, roots of their own strength).

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a review of

“The Northman”

Dir: Robert Eggers, 2022

There was an unavoidable discomfort in my bones upon deciding to view “The Northman.” It felt difficult to ignore how, from advertisements, the film’s early Norse historical setting seemed like unfortunate—if unintentional—catnip for fascists with a tendency for perverting Paganism to justify ideologies of volkisch nationalism. And yet, I was happily surprised.

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The rapidity with which a movement against nuclear weapons and war has blossomed has been as surprising to us as it has been to everyone else. There can be no doubt that the possibility of nuclear holocaust, and the understandable concern if not out-and-out terror which accompanies it, is one of the foremost questions on people’s minds today. The upsurge began in Europe and quickly spread to the United States. Conferences and convocations; demonstrations (20,000 in Chicago, 30,000 in Vancouver, 12,000 in Seattle to name just a few); the repudiation of civil defense plans in towns and cities throughout the U.S.; the growth of peace and disarmament organizations; and the storm of books and articles on the subject have all revealed a pervasive urgency and a growing sense of horror and resistance to the Reagan administration’s recent talk of “limited” and “winnable “ nuclear war, demonstration shots, and “first strike” capability.

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Robert Neuwirth, in his important book, Shadow Cities, says squatters in countries such as Turkey, Brazil, and India, are the poor, usually excluded from the adequate wage work, who do not have the wherewithal to enter the capitalist real estate market either as owners or renters.

They are “simply people who came to the city, needed a place to live that they and their families could afford, and, not being able to find it on the private market, built it for themselves on land that wasn’t theirs.” Of special note here are the numbers. “Estimates are that there are about a billion squatters in the world today [2005]--one of every six humans on the planet.” The best guesses see this group as swelling to about one in four by 2030.

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a review of

The Relevance of Rexroth by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA 94701. 1990. $5. (Available from FE Books)

Ken Knabb, who in recent years has made available in English a large number of French Situationist texts, has written this 80-page essay on author-poet-translator, Kenneth Rexroth.

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As WSU enters her centennial year, the big word is “changes.” The time for a change has been reflected in two areas, the student newspaper, and the Student-Faculty Council. The first editorial in the South End, formerly the Daily Collegian, paralleled the changes with the Beatles. The cover of the most recent Beatles album, shows the group declaring themselves to be ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’—standing over their own casket, with the name ‘Beatles’ arranged in flowers over the casket. They are announcing their conversion from a mechanical fixation trivia (I want to Hold your Hand) to a vital concern with real—even if unpopular or taboo—issues. The Beatles, so to speak, are ‘turned on’ to the issues of our generation. This newspaper, so to speak, is ‘turned on’.”

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a review of

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Danilo Kis, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1978

Few Fifth Estate readers have illusions about the revolutionary nature of the Bolshevik state, but in case any do remain, this book effectively dispels such illusions. Strictly speaking, Kis’s book is not just one more denunciation of the Soviet Union and it does not self-righteously condemn the individuals who were caught up in the revolutionary fervor in the days when the overthrow of the Tsar seemed to promise fulfillment of long-awaited hopes.

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7:58 pm

in this quiet, working class

Montreal residential neighbourhood

the orchestra starts

one person

walks slowly down her stairs

sets a solitary rhythm

taps a pot with an egg beater

looks around hopefully

8 pm

half way down the block

a smiling grandfather

and his shy teen grandson

leave their apartment

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adapted from Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

The following essay, “The Original Affluent Society,” is written by Marshall Sahlins and was taken from the book Stone Age Economics published by Aldine-Atherton, Inc. We have liberally edited Sahlins’ important investigation into societies prior to the rise of what we generously call “civilization” but hope we have maintained the author’s clarity and purpose. We would suggest a reading of the original piece if at all possible.

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Marshall Sahlins

FE Note: The following is an edited version of the first chapter of Marshall Sahlins classic and groundbreaking work, Stone Age Economics (Aldine, 1972), entitled “The Original Affluent Society.”

In it, Sahlins confronts prevailing academic and popular myths regarding life before the state and technology which is usually conceived of, after Hobbes, as being “nasty, brutish and short.” As with most governing modern mythologies, this one turns out to be another apology for the reigning misery and a projection of our reality onto social forms that have all but been destroyed.

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I concluded last issue by saying that, whereas in previous ages, nonconformists were able to “escape” society by taking refuge in an agrarian life, etc.; nonconformists in the interdependent society cannot escape. They can only rebel. And their rebellion demonstrates the absolute contradiction between the Social System and the Human Id (as a symbol of human freedom and satisfaction).

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A review of

The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Vaselka. Knopf Penguin/Random House (Bertelsmann) 2020

In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, an indecent woman comes gives birth to a set of twins: one cheats poor farmers to make back money for his father, one drops out of college and is eventually killed in World War I. Before all that can happen the sociopathic mother tells the cheating son that they are just alike but he refuses to believe it. He brings his altruistic brother to meet her and the shame he inflicts upon her is the end of her life. These characters are a mix of settlers: early colonial era, as well as recent Irish and Chinese immigrants. Of these settlers, only one set achieves whiteness in America. All benefit from stolen land. All think they have a choice like Cain and Abel. They can choose righteousness or they can choose sin. This is supposed to be freedom; that they can undo generational harm.

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“What have you got in your pockets, Apple Hat?” asked Mr. Anthill pulling at them. “Guts? Electric trains? Horseshoe crabs?”

—W.A. Davison and Sherri Higgins, La Chasse A L’Objet Du Desir

Once, while in my teens, my girlfriend and I were walking along the shores of Plum Beach in Brooklyn on a sultry summer evening to get a breath of fresh air under a full moon. As we walked along the shoreline, we spotted lots of horseshoe crabs that had been overturned on their backs when the tide had gone out.

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1. There is a paradox at the heart of the global capitalist power structure we live in. It is the result of two contradictory truths.

2a. The first truth is that capitalism is destroying our planet. Through global warming, extinction, impoverishment, racism, sexism, homophobia, propaganda, war, the burgeoning security state, computerized isolation, and more, it is literally killing us.

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“Work, now? Never, never. I’m on strike.”

—Rimbaud

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the Paris Commune, an experiment in self-governance that is still inspiring today. It was born in response to the suffering caused by the Franco-Prussian War and the betrayals of the French central government.

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Detroit lost a unique anarchist prankster, mechanical genius, underground musician and reluctant sage, Linus J. O’Leary, after a two month battle with multiple complications from a brain aneurysm on February 25, 2015. He was 58.

Linus grew up during the 1960s in a large working class Catholic family (with proud Irish roots) in Dearborn, Michigan, exposing him to one of metro Detroit’s most infamous examples of bitter segregation, while developing a radical political consciousness against racial injustice and other forms of oppression.

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The movement for social change must be comprehensive and multi-dimensional. There is no simple Solution and no single Best Way to get from here to there.

But there has recently been a shift of sentiment regarding where and how our efforts for social change are most likely to be rewarded. Individuals and families, increasingly atomized within mass society, lack the resources and leverage to have that much of an impact. At the other end of the spectrum, the dominate institutions (corporations, government agencies, large universities, non-profits, etc.) possess institutional inertia to a degree that frustratingly impedes change.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.— (Liberation News Service) The Pentagon still clings to its original statements, attributing the use of tear gas at the Oct. 21 demonstration solely to demonstrators, despite eye-witness accounts to the contrary by the Washington Post’s Paul Valentine, Jed Stout of UPI, and many individuals.

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“Light My Fire” rises through the radio ranks for weeks and, when it hits number one on the stations, the people respond and burn the city down. Or play Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music” album as background music for the Detroit purification: the scope and feeling of the peoples’ mood is there--an elegy for Malcolm X.

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For the past two summers, I accompanied my wife, who speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, to China so we could tour part of the country before she started summer school in a master’s program in Chinese literature in Nanjing, a city famed not only for being pillaged by Japan in World War II, but also as the country’s center of teacher education.

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a review of

The People’s Republic of Everything by Nick Mamatas. Tachyon Publications 2018, tachyonpublications.com

Nick Mamatas, who first entered the radical literary scene two decades ago as one of the translators of Jae-Eui Lee’s Kwangju Diary, has been a consistent yet consistently surprising voice since.

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About 400 men a day take their Pre-Induction Physical at the Fort Wayne Armed Forces Entrance & Examining Station (AFEES) at 6300 W. Jefferson Avenue. The physical is usually the final step in the Selective Service system prior to induction.

For most men this is it. They are 1-A. If they pass the physical, they go into the Army or face prison for draft refusal.

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Leni Sinclair, 1960s

Using the descriptor, ironic, to define almost anything has become an overused cliché. However, Leni Sinclair’s 1966 photo of John Coltrane taken at Detroit’s Drome Lounge deserves that adjective. The image has been displayed in museums and reproduced hundreds of times.

Leni Sinclair’s photos first appeared in the Fifth Estate that same year in the then-tabloid’s second edition. Although the paper’s content was filled with articles about opposition to the Vietnam War and support for civil rights, the cover story was entitled, “The New Sound of Sound,” written under her full name, Magdalene Sinclair, and was accompanied by her photographs of Detroit musicians who were turning the world of jazz upside down [FE #2, December 2–16, 1965].

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“Nationalism offers them something concrete, something that has been tried and tested and is known to work.”

—Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism

On the corner of my block lies an empty lot. One day fifty trees, mainly conifers, each set into a metal container, appeared in the space.

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We might venture to speculate that it was not with deep regret that the Ford Administration finally called an official halt to its embarrassingly disastrous swine flu mass immunization program recently. Most assuredly an unmitigated scam that simply didn’t cut it, -the project was put out of our misery with scarcely a raised eyebrow or a whimper in the waning days of 1976—a fitting Bicentennial finale.

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Throughout his life, David Graeber remained an eternal optimist who refused to accept the world as it is, and saw only what it could be. He envisioned international, directly democratic, and egalitarian politics. To achieve this required practice.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber made an hypothesis: majoritarian democracy was in its origins essentially a military institution, a coercive political process in which the minority was compelled by force to do as the majority wanted. Often the “majority,” as in the case of Ancient Athens, was comprised only of white property-owning men. A real democracy could be found in non-Western examples, where people made decisions based on consent rather than coercion. He wrote, “If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose.” Thus, in communities where the mechanism of coercion, most commonly the state, was absent, there was no reason to engage in a majoritarian process. Instead, he claimed, they operated by not only a formal consensus decision-making process, but a culture of consensus.

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FE Note: In the random manner carnivals can get out of hand, so, too, does this article appear in our pages. A staff member sent it to us months ago, and we found it tucked away in our on-line files. It seemed like a good fit for our theme and we liked the subject matter, but upon reading it, realized that it had been printed elsewhere, particularly since it makes reference to an accompanying CD which obviously isn’t here.

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A dedicated band of idealistic working-class teenagers crash a meeting of techno-fascists at a New York hotel, confronting the group’s dictatorial leaders.

It sounds like an Antifa adventure plucked from today’s headlines—but in fact, this plot unfolded at the first ever World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Despite its reputation for campy story-telling and escapist plots, science fiction (SF) has always been highly political at its core, and this story began when Dave Kyle, a member of a fan club known as The Futurians, attempted to distribute a pamphlet criticizing the convention organizers.

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[The] utopia of domination is utopia as escapism. This danger is especially real for those utopians who have been frustrated in their efforts to realize their dreams, or who do not even reach the level of praxis. Utopia as escapism remains in the vacuous realm of what Hegel called the Beautiful Soul, of those Dreamers of Moral Perfection who are unable to cope with the ugliness and ambiguity of the world, and therefore cling to a bloodless ideal.

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The wind in a room. Often, though the club would be a hive of activity, with waiters, sunners, diners by the food counter, and children bounding through the wading area, the main indoor pool would be empty. A current of air would undulate along its placid surface, raising a single wavelet that glittered outstandingly like one flounce on a plain dress.

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A review of The Listener: Memory, Lies, Art, Power, A Graphic Novel by David Lester, Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011, 310 pp, $19.95; distributed by AK Press, akpress.org.

All works of art, regardless of their form, offer a message to their audience. Some may be conceived as more deliberate acts of communication, while others allow room for nuanced interpretation. As a political tool, art can even inspire an audience to risk their own lives or take the lives of others in the name of social change.

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Karl Marx is always approached as so many thoughts, so many words. What connection is there between lived choices--one’s willful lifetime--and the presentation of one’s ideas? By 1846 Marx and Engels had written The German Ideology, which contains the full and mature ideas of the materialist concept of the progress of history. Along with this tome were the practical activities in politics. In terms of his Communist Correspondence Committee and its propaganda work, Marx (also in 1846) stated: “There can be no talk at present of achieving communism; the bourgeoisie must first come to the helm.”

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FE Note: The following article, an attempt to come to grips with the implications of Karl Marx’s everyday life by long-time FE contributor John Zerzan, has stirred considerable controversy among those of us presently working on the paper and necessitates, we feel, a few brief introductory observations.

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It’s a grey, wet day, so everyone who can find a spot is packed into the warehouse instead of spreading out across the grounds outside. In pockets around the space, people are skilling up or building art.

Doc is teaching a small group how to be street medics. Mass arrests, street battles, teargas, and more rain will come in the days ahead and people are readying themselves for the tens of thousands arriving to fight the machinations of global capitalism. It is April 2000, Washington, D.C.

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“Police shot at an angry crowd Saturday, killing three people just after the mob forced President Frederik W. de Klerk out of a black township where 39 died in a massacre last week...

“As soon as his motorcade arrived the crowd accused de Kirk of complicity in last Wednesday’s massacre of women and children by about 200 men. Some youths pounded on his car, shouting ‘Go away murderer’ and ‘Get the hell out of here.’

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A good peace never did come easy.

One of the real tough things about involvement in a resistance movement is your total lack of power. When LBJ (of “Hey, Hey” fame) addressed a thousand-dollar-a-couple Democratic Party fund raising dinner in L.A. a few thousand people gathered outside to tell Lyndon they didn’t like his policy in Vietnam.

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Hey! Hey! LBJ—Look What’s happenin’ in America today:

Vietnam Summer, 1967. From coast-to-coast 4,000 people in 48 states have stepped forward to work on Vietnam Summer projects to end the war...and that number is on the rise.

Here in Detroit a hard core of 75 peace activists ranging from Democrats to Socialists have forged a nucleus for a summer of draft counseling, community and political organizing, rallies and demonstrations.

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

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a review of

Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives by Marianna Torgovnick, University of Chicago, 1990, 328 pp.

Gone Primitive is about the cliched, figurative concepts (now fashionably called “tropes” in academic, literary deconstructive and critical theory circles) of the primitive which haunt the modern West. However, the actual intricate complexities of the primitive societies not yet physically or culturally obliterated are of no real interest to most Western observers and never have been. According to Torgovnick, the fascination with those who the European invaders conquered and later came to see as discrete objects for inquiry, furnish a disguised way to talk about Western power relationships, particularly the issues of gender and sexuality.

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If you or your loved ones don’t have citizenship, are Native American, aren’t white, aren’t Christian, are women, queer, or trans, live near environmental sacrifice zones, depend on the natural environment for your health or subsistence, work a non-white-collar job, or participate in a radical movement, you are at risk under the Trump presidency. Fighting back against the government is a question of self-defense.

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For many, the 1970s were—and the 1980s bid fair to continue—a kind of “midnight of the century,” an arrival at the point of complete demoralization and unrelieved sadness. What follows is one attempt to gauge the obviously unhappy landscape of capital’s American rule and see whether there indeed exists no prospect for the ending of our captivity.

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Demonstrations, peaceful and anarchic, planned and spontaneous, continue to reflect the mood of the times locally and across the nation. In this area, peace marchers paid their respects to the Dow Chemical Corporation’s NAPALM facility in Midland; anti-war and pro-war voices were raised at Campus Martius; and bricks were thrown at the TMU’s in the ghetto.

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FE Note: Bob was working on the article below for us about his psychiatric incarceration. It is unfinished, but is 100% Bob, in its rebellious spirit and its idiosyncratic style.

Another Anti-Authoritarian Put Away

My Christmas bombing of Hanoi began March 10, 2016. No it wasn’t years in a federal pen, but 76 days in “mental” hospitals, 5 stays, and being stuck in harassment and “programs” until at a minimum the end of ’16 is enough; it’s like decades—NOBODY fucks with me.

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This is an excerpt from Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of The Human Species by William H. Kotke. AuthorHouse, 2005. 146 pages. $11. Available from the Barn.

Fear is the fundamental of this cultural form. The assertion is that the basic spiritual shift in consciousness was from a reality-view that saw the entire cosmos as alive and fecund to a reality-view that saw the earth as meaningless matter to be used to battle the scarcity of the world. On the one hand, the human is at home on the earth sharing space with other cooperating neighbor species in a reality of mystery and power. On the other hand, one lives in a world of accumulation where fear of scarcity and survival is prevalent.

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a review of

Evasion. by CrimethInc ex-workers collective

DIY Guide II by CrimethInc ex-workers collective

Hunter/Gatherer. Journal of folklore and folkwar. CrimethInc ex-workers collective

Editorial note: In the last issue, I began to express my solidarity with the far-flung posse of revolutionary neo-Situ, post-punk poets known as CrimethInc. Now, I’d like to re-state that the CrimethInc (ex)Workers Collective is one of the best and brightest things to happen to N. American anarchism since TAZ hit the streets in 1991.

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It always has to be something new//new stuff gets old begins to swallow//old stuff is not

good//a new thing//routine//order//success//yes//that will keep the head above water//at least

until it gets old and begins to sag//to pull down//to swallow//equilibrium is an

idea//fleeting//taken when it comes//enjoyed//but then a new thing is needed

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Occasionally, the liberal-democratic system nobly affords us the chance to select our representatives from a shallow gene-pool of political management professionals.

Save for this transient moment in the ballot booth, we’re separated from the exclusive franchise of governance altogether. Voting is our only momentary and tenuous connection to the establishment. Best to leave power and responsibility up to the professionals; the experts, the think-tanks, policy-wonks, lobbyists and journalists.

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March in support of the 2012 Quebec student strike. Banner reads, “When injustice is the law; resistance is our duty.’

The 2012 Quebec student general strike lasted for six months, between February and September. Participation peaked at around 300,000 out of 420,000 university and CEGEP (junior colleges) students in the province. During the high points, demonstrations took to the streets multiple times daily with growing militancy met with rampant police violence, especially during marches taking place after dark.

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Was it really only ten years ago that Main Resnais shocked the world by graphically demonstrating that lovers do not always wear pajamas to bed?

My, how far we’ve come since “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Bared breasts, bellies and buttocks no longer hold the shock value they had back in 1959. And with the upcoming release of Vilgot Sjoman’s “I Am Curious: Yellow,” we will have witnessed every possible “normal” human sexual activity on the screen, and then some.

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One irony of the deep ecology discussion is that almost at the same time that some deep ecologists were taking an explicit position for the abolition of agriculture as the prime cause of the widening spiral of civilization and ecological destruction, John Zerzan wrote an almost identical thesis in the pages of the Fifth Estate. (See “Agriculture: Essence of Civilization,” FE #329, Summer 1988.) For a response to Zerzan, see Bob Brubaker’s “Comments on Zerzan’s Critique of Agriculture” in FE #330, Winter 1988–89.)

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a review of

Snow Day by Willow Page Delp. The Amazine, 2023 theamazine.com

You stare at oblivion or maybe just at your social life—a sky darkening from blue to black, a group of college students fighting over foraged meals, a building decaying—and wonder what to believe. This is a snow day, but something more, too, a bonding experience that can only shatter and release you. When you belong somewhere, or maybe more often when you don’t, “things [have] to erupt.”

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a review of

The World of Zines: A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution, Mike Gunderloy and Carl Goldberg Janice, Penguin Books, New York, 1992, $14.

I wish I liked this book better since its authors, particularly Mike Gunderloy, have worked tirelessly through their magazine, Fact Sheet Five, to promote ‘zines as the independent publications of this generation. One problem is its cost which seems fairly high for those of us used to seeing the same information in publications such as Fact Sheet Five or Anarchy for a quarter of the price.

...

Looking at Gary Snyder’s writing is a geological experience. Picking up a copy of The Gary Snyder Reader or checking out his shelf at a library will reveal layers of poems, journals, and essays dating from the late fifties to the turn of the millennium--all written by a would-be Wobbly turned Zen poster child of the San Francisco Renaissance. Considered foundational texts for everything from the hippies and New Left to bioregionalism and Deep Ecology, Snyder’s work reads like a countercultural cross section of the last fifty years.

...

FE Note: Mike Davis’s captivating new collection of essays, Dead Cities, and Other Tales (New Press) chronicles many facets of the long-running anti-authoritarian struggles to reclaim public spaces. The book includes a 2001 article for on teenage riots in California before 1965, “As Bad as the H-Bomb.” Police, professional Red baiters, and Hearst’s newspapers warned that California’s teenage riots, illegal drag races, beatniks, and heavy petting at drive-ins was a dangerous pattern of subversion orchestrated by ingeniously sinister Communists.

...

A recent issue of Scope magazine carries a bullshit hype by Peggy Cronin called “The Young Radicals In Our High Schools.” In the article Miss Cronin attempts to show how high school activists are “not quite radical.” She went to two individuals, one from Cass Tech and one from Seaholm High in Birmingham, to give her an “objective” analysis of the high school situation.

...

a review of

Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching, Lynn Jacobs, 1991, P.O. Box 5784, Tucson, AZ 85703, 8-1/2 x 11, 602 pp, $28.

It is a cross between mean-spiritedness and stupidity for people to blame those on welfare for the current economic recession (or depression, depending on where you are situated in the pyramid). The real drain on the economy comes from the big money boys looting ever larger sums from the national treasury, through scams like the S&L bailout and from the classes below them. There is a welfare system which should be despised; it is the one which aids the rich.

...

On Tuesday evening, June 4, just one hour before the polls closed in the California primary, I was being interviewed in Washington, D.C. by John Hightower over television station WEAN.

I was asked why Robert Kennedy appeared to accept the findings of the Warren Commission. For some months I had been aware of conversation between emissaries from Robert Kennedy to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. (Since the confidence was not originally shared with me, I am not at liberty to reveal the names of the emissaries. However, should Garrison be asked for that information by the press, It is conceivable that he might reveal the names.) Yet I felt that it would be unfair to breach a confidential relationship while the primary campaign proceeded.

...

I have hidden and covied poetic mead within the thickets of prose bramble-rambles, come and gather in the weeds. There is sweet berry-nectar to gather, a treasure hunt in the hedgelands for random bottles of elderberry wine. Feel free to stumble. Who knows what you might stumble upon? The poet’s job is to woo world, with words that are hymns. Rosebushes, stones, mountains need hymns. Deer and rats and ravens need hymns. Trees, beautiful dresses, beer need hymns. Little children and old grandmothers need hymns. God is in all this Godding; God is tickled at praise and glows in gentle pride. Wandering through world, the poet rambles and rants, like Whitman meandering through rhapsodic New York City. Whitman had Leaves of Grass. I think I might have Brambles of Berries. These are the brambles Brueghelian peasants ramble through on their way to the lusty groves where they commune with wind-gods, satyrs, fairies, and beer-gods! You may ask, are these prose-poems, rants, short dissertative vignettes? And I will love your question, but I will not answer.

...

In the existing world, largely governed by the logic of capital and the pathologies of accumulation, real madness is the absence of revolt.

Wherever revolt is absent in the world today, we should worry about human health and sanity. A society that does not revolt against a social order that damages it with such escalating facility--psychologically, collectively, ecologically--is a society at the terminal stage.

...

FE staff note: Mike Ochs, a reader from Pennsylvania, sent us an obituary from The Nation for one of its former editors (1970–1976) Emile Capouya--saying “I thought of your efforts when I read it.” Remembering Capouya’s radical prose, Ted Solotaroff writes, “My favorite essay was ‘The Red Flag and the Black,’ a beautiful exposition of anarchism.... For all his dialectical agility and nuance, his black flag flew two simple principles that he had learned with his hands: People long to do better than they do, and they are naturally creative and cooperative. The categorical imperative of his politics was to act always in the spirit of the society we wish to bring about.”

...

FE Introduction: Members of the Fifth Estate staff and our friends (as well as some not so friendly) have been debating the role of technology and its function within the larger system of domination almost since the inception of our tenure with this paper. At that time we were greatly influenced by the writings of the French Situationists and giddily shared their utopian dreams of cities on tracks that could be wheeled to the seashore each day and similar exotic visions of what a “liberated” technology could bring.

...

Revolutions, Revolts, Riots, and Rebellions have been a constant in human affairs since the emergence of the state 8,000 years ago. They are popular responses to life being administered by a political apparatus which governs on behalf of a class of rulers. They are sometimes planned; other times, spontaneous.

...

“Leaders” are created by the media image freaks and sold to the people to keep them happy. They have to have “leaders” or nothing could get done-why, they certainly couldn’t do it themselves. Or could they? The media exists to keep people from asking that question, and it has done a pretty good job of blinding them to their own absolute reality, that they are FREE and can do anything they want to, if they believe in it hard enough.

...

Gang fever, like the Bird’s pitching, seems to have been just a-passing summer phenomenon. Both served their purpose for the Motor City and then disappeared. Of course, youth crime has not disappeared—just its exploitation by the media and city hall politicians has waned.

Hizoner Coleman Young is now preoccupied with concern about how far up in his administration the Federal drug probe will go (it’s already touched his political associates and relatives), and with the exception of a few feeble attempts like Channel 7’s “Summer of Terror” series, the media has gone back to its usual drab fare.

...

An excerpt from an exclusive Detroit interview with Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, one of the more famous hardcore bands. In 1979 Jello ran for mayor of San Francisco, finishing fourth out of ten with a ‘platform’ which included requiring all businessmen to wear clown suits from nine to five. Exclusive here because there was only one other interviewer backstage, asking the usual ‘How did you get your name?’ and ‘How long have you been together?’ questions while I kept asking Jello if he needed a ride.

...

“The question is always how to move from a social insurgency to an anarchistic society?”

—Voline, The Unknown Revolution

In early October, as the Russian military assault on Ukraine enters its eighth month, radical publications have been reporting on anarchists participating in the popular struggle against the invasion. Surprisingly, several mainstream journalists have also published articles presenting anarchists in a positive light.

...

“Bread and roses.”

(Paterson, N.J., 1912, slogan of the revolutionary women)

“Molotov, Champagne!”

(Milan, 1977)

For all those who, due to opportunism or congenital idiocy, believe it impossible that the communist movement should ever reappear, the Italian events of the past year have demonstrated that the capitalist project of domesticating humanity has encountered insoluble contradictions. If after the days of May the Situationists could write of the mouvement des occupations that it was “the refusal of all authority, of all specialization, of all hierarchical alienation; the refusal of the state and thus of parties and unions as well as sociologists and professors, of repressive morality and of medicine” (Internationale Situationniste No. 12, September 1969), we perceive in the 1977 riots of the “Italian Spring” a continuity with the modern revolutionary project contra the real domination of capital, a project which, having announced itself near the end of the ‘60s, having been suppressed and recuperated afterwards, is now returning to express itself with renewed radicalism in one of the weakest spots in the whole precarious world economy.

...

FE Note: David Watson’s “Swamp Fever” appears in Fifth Estate #350, Fall, 1997

Dear Fifth Estate:

Since I am someone drawn into the dispute between Green Anarchist (GA) and the so-called “Neoist Alliance” because of my long-standing support for GA against state repression, I would like to make the following comments concerning your article.

...

During the last year the Fifth Estate has published numerous essays by John Zerzan (and others co-authored with Paula Zerzan) on the decomposition of daily life, the revolt against work, and the police role of unions. The following essay challenges many of the author(s)’ contentions about the importance of sabotage, absenteeism, and other daily acts committed by a frustrated and distraught working class. The article originally appeared as “‘Refus du Travail’ ou lutte pour le Droit à la Paresse” in Spartacus, juillet-août 1976 (5, rue Ste-Croix de-la-Bretonnerie, Paris IV).

...

A Political Art Show—January 22-February 12, 2017

Produced by 333 Midland at their Annex Gallery,

Highland Park, Michigan www.333Midland.com

Cary Loren, found urinal, gold paint, stickers

Curator: Rick Cronn

33 Artists; 66 works

333 Midland is located in a complex of abandoned postindustrial factories brought back to life by a renaissance of Detroit artists.

...

* An October issue of Earth News reported that a cow in the mid west United States came down with a bad case of the farts after continually eating vegetation that was gas producing. Disgusted by his cow’s continuous expelling of toxic fumes, the owner (an unnamed dairy farmer) called upon the expert help of a local veterinary (who was also unnamed) to plug up the milcher’s exhaust.

...

a review of

Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror by Johanna Isaacson. Common Notions 2022

Johanna Isaacson, a professor of English at Modesto Junior College, presents a thought-provoking and exhaustively researched addition to contemporary horror criticism in Stepford Daughters.

...

LIBERATION News Service — Columbia Records is owned by CBS. It owns the Yankees and God knows what else. Its offices are at 51 West 52 Street in New York in a new skyscraper whose walls are already peeling and crackling.

Right now it is the home of the revolution.

Or almost. It is certainly spending more money promoting the Youth Revolution than one would think possible for a standard American corporate enterprise. Columbia ads divide the world into “we” and “they,” with the “we” including the longhairs, the youth and Columbia and “they” including anyone you want to include because you happen to be against him or he against you.

...

Painting, Michelle Waters, “Luddites,” acrylics. www.michellewatersart.com

Anarcho-primitivism comes in several flavors. In fact, there are probably as many varieties of anarcho-primitivism (AP) as there are anarcho-primitivists.

Some varieties focus more on primitivism, and emphasize the negative impact of industrial technology and the positive benefits of a return to a technological state better aligned with our evolutionary roots.

...

For me, daydreaming is a kind of prayer. To drift, to feel my body gently floating, to move with memory and the suggestiveness of phenomena, to be thankful, to enjoy, to praise this life with its wonder and vitality...this is prayerfulness. And sometimes I wonder, there must be nothing better than to be a Master of Ceremonies, making pilgrimages out for the pine boughs to bring back to the village to reanimate the village goddess, and bring people closer together. This world of beauty and dreams -and making peace with life.

...

“Free festivals are a threat to mainstream capitalist society in amerika. Anyone questioning the commodification of our public lands and national forests, anyone who believes in the right to peaceably assemble, or anyone supporting a worldview where human rights come before property rights will be seen as a threat.”

...

I traveled to Dharamsala, India in 2005 to set up a one-month summer study program, in collaboration with the Louisiana Himalaya Association, and have taken groups of students there periodically since then. During last summer’s trip, we visited renowned ecofeminist theorist and activist Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya Biodiversity Farm. We toured the fields and the seed bank, heard lectures by staff members specializing in various areas of agroecology, and were extremely fortunate that Shiva herself could speak to our small group about Navdanya and the ecofeminist politics of Earth Democracy.

...

This issue of the Fifth Estate, appearing on the 61^st anniversary of International Women’s Day, is dedicated to all our sisters around the world. It is the product of the Fifth Estate staff, women from the Women’s Media Co-op and women involved in other activities around the city.

When we started work on this paper, many of us didn’t know each other. Most of us had few newspaper skills and some of us had never written before. But we decided to pool our skills, energy and time-we were determined to put out a good newspaper.

...

This issue of the Fifth Estate, [#126, March 4–17, 1971] appearing on the 61ist anniversary of International Women’s Day, is dedicated to all our sisters around the world. It is the product of the Fifth Estate staff, women from the Women’s Media Co-op, and women involved in other activities around the city.

...

This issue of the Fifth Estate, appearing on the 61^st anniversary of International Women’s Day, is dedicated to all our sisters around the world. It is the product of the Fifth Estate staff, women front the Women’s Media Co-op and women involved in other activities around the city.

In this issue of the paper we wanted the chance to express our ideas, art, anger and feelings about our own lives. We wanted to publicize and support the struggles of women in other countries. We also hoped that by making available a list of women’s organizations and services, we would make it easier for women to meet together and find activities they would like to participate in.

...

Editors’ Note: As of this writing the Woodstock Rock Festival may not happen. It seems the town council of Wallkill, N.Y. (the site of the festival) voted unanimously not to allow the festival to be held in their town. This came after almost a quarter of a million dollars in advance sales had been taken in.

...

On May 17, military forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured Ramadi, Iraq, and with it another huge stock of US-supplied modern weaponry. Six thousand US-trained Iraqi soldiers fled the city without putting up much of a fight. The ISIS force was considerably smaller and reliant on waves of suicide car bombs for its final attack. It’s not hard to see why ISIS has been successful in establishing the idea that it is an unstoppable force carrying out their god’s will.

...

a review of

Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS by Janet Biehl, PM Press, 2021

This is a remarkable graphic novel that could be described as part of an emerging genre of comics journalism. Joe Sacco famously showed the way with his on-the-scene descriptions of conflict in the Balkans and the West Bank, graphic novels that reached all the way across the world in many languages.

...

a review of

The Rolling Stones, “Let It Bleed,” XZAL 9363, London Records

You must somehow listen to this album—whether you steal it, buy it, or play it with your nose is irrelevant, or rather, up to you.

As is everything.

If you do listen to “Let It Bleed,” and hear it, there’s not much I can say to you. If you don’t—nothing.

...

This article is the fifth in a series of counter-Bicentennial pieces dealing with the more sordid and often less-acknowledged incidents in America’s 200-year-old history.

AMERICA—(1950) Only five years removed from the holocaust of World War II, the country stood on the brink of a new reaction: the paranoia of the Cold War, engineered for the most part by the Western powers.

...

On November 24–25, 1989 I attended the Continental Anarchist Newspaper Conference in Chicago. Originally, I was a very enthusiastic supporter of this project and still endorse the concept of a continental anarchist newspaper.

However, after attending this particular conference, I have serious doubts as to whether the newspaper launched in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend is the sort of publication that should serve as any sort of organ for the North American Anarchist movement.

...

Detroit Anti-Racist Action (ARA) formed over a year ago. Since its formation, it has been involved in campaigns against the gentrification of downtown Detroit with all the money going to rich folks (Illich, Ford, etc.) who don’t live in the city or really care about the welfare of people who live here. We have been involved in supporting groups like UPSET, which is fighting for a decent education for Detroit’s children. We have done support work for the Dineh people in the Southwest who are facing forced relocation to benefit big business so they can strip mine the land for coal. We have been involved in fighting the upsurge of right wing groups in the U.S. and the Midwest by working to shut down Nazi and Klan rallies. A recent campaign succeeded in getting Nazis out of an Eastside clubhouse in Detroit.

...

“Whether one chooses to examine the opening phases of the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the French general strike of 1968, the opening stages are generally the same: a period of ferment that explodes spontaneously into a mass upsurge.”

—Murray Bookchin, “Myth of the Party: Bolshevik Mystification and Counter-Revolution,” Fifth Estate #272, May 1976 and in our anti-Marx issue, #393, Spring 2015.

...

“What really has me scared is I remember, I was ten years old during the last depression. There had never been much to worry about before. One time I asked my mother what there was for dinner. She told me, “Nothing.”

“I didn’t believe her—there was always something. Not this time though. There was really nothing at all...

...

Milosevic by Richard Mock

Slobodan Milosevic has been at The Hague for a little more than a year, the first head of state to face a war crimes tribunal since the crime of genocide was codified in the UN Charter. The former autocrat stands accused of sixty-six accounts of war crimes, including ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova; the murder of civilians and prisoners; and genocide in Bosnia.

...

The charge that genocide was committed against the American Indian peoples of the United States in the process of that nation state’s formation is typically treated as a rhetorical device unsubstantiated by fact and designed only to attract “unwarranted” sympathy to North America’s indigenous population.

...

And now ladies and gentlemen...

The San Francisco Mime Troupe is preparing for its third annual cultural assault on Detroit. Presented by this newspaper, the guerrilla theatre group whose home ground is the public parks of San Francisco and Berkeley, will present a new commedia dell’arte play, “The Farce of Patelin,” at Upper DeRoy Auditorium on the WSU campus, October 25, 26, 27 at 8:00 p.m.

...

Editor’s Note — The San Francisco Mime Troupe will perform Saturday, October 28 at 8:15 in The Detroit Institute of Arts Auditorium in a benefit performance for the Fifth Estate. The Mime Troupe was in Detroit last Fall and received rave reviews (from us) for their “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.”

...

The title of this article suggests an attitude, which has characterized a generation of adolescents, recently departed. It is, as far as I can tell, a lost attitude, upended and overwhelmed in the maelstrom of homogenized eyes and freak-outs.

Considered as a species, I have to refer to them as The Science Hipsters, young people, like myself, who grew up surrounded by the romantic aura of modern science.

...

a review of

S.C.U.M. Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. Olympia Press, 1968, Paperback 75 cents.

Miss Solanas, best known for trying to cut up Andy Warhol with a .38, presents a “rationale and program of action for SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) which will eliminate through sabotage all aspects of society not relevant to women (everything). It will bring about a complete female take-over, eliminate the male sex and begin to create a swinging, groovy, out-of-sight female world.”

...

At the September 1965 National Council meeting, members of Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS), decided that the time had come for a thorough re-examination of the organization, its ideology, its programs and strategies, its coalitions, and its goals. In order to insure a broad number of participants in this reexamination, the organization decided to hold a conference in late December, a conference free from the normal pressures of decision-making, which could at least begin to define the questions which arise from a serious commitment to social change.

...

The whole world is being objectified, but Melville reminds us of all that remains. “There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea.” What could be more tangible, more of a contrast with being lost in the digital world, where we feel we can never properly come to grips with anything?

Oceans are about time more than space, “as if there were a correlation between going deep and going back,” he writes. The Deep is solemn; linking, in some way, all that has come before. Last things and first things. “Heaven,” by comparison, is thin and faintly unserious.

...

[three_fifth padding=“0 20px 0 0”]In George Orwell’s 1984, protagonist Winston Smith has acquired a copy of the arch-traitor Emmanuel Goldstein’s manual for totalitarian domination, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism, in which he reads that the ideal party member “should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.” The novel functions in great part through ironic reversals (the subversive conspiracy is contrived by the police, etc.); it should come as no surprise, then, that the reality it illuminates is not so much the otherness of the state socialist dictatorships that it originally resembled, but rather the oligarchic collectivism of modern corporate capital and its military-industrial garrison states—those states waging their brutal crusade against “Eurasia,” now that former enemies appear to be vanquished and incorporated into the empire.

...

WASHINGTON, DC—A noted New Jersey physician of social malaises, Dr. Maynard G. Krebs, recently told a federal panel investigating the causes behind the current epidemic of job refusals, “The less you have to do, the more you must ask a high salary for it, because even this modest employment is the sign of the even more evident absurdity of your forced presence.”

...

The draft resistance action at the Cadillac Tower Selective Service headquarters on October 16 and the busloads of people from Detroit who joined the assault on the Pentagon in Washington, DC brought the first winds of the new turn taken by the antiwar movement. People in this country are now moving to BLOCK rather than protest the mobilization of this country’s forces for the inhuman war in Vietnam.

...

May the intercession of the glorious gift, o holy Thief, free us from the bitter commodity & deliver us from the spiritual anorexia of capitalism—

O my goddess of perpetual potlatch, protect us today & always from the police, the managers, the mirrors, the security guards & electronic surveillance devices! O perfect parasite, divine for us impunity & the imperfect passions of free abundance.

...

This account of the blockade of the Rock Island Army Arsenal on June 4^th was written by Mike Haywood of the Disarm Now Action Group, 407 South Dearborn No. 307, Chicago IL 60605. This is neither an endorsement of the anti-war group nor of its politics, although we do not necessarily disagree with either. What interests us is Disarm Now’s creative use of civil disobedience and their call for an autonomous anti-war movement.

...

The cessation of praying daily, of praying up against dry trees,

the cessation of asking and answering, pondering no more, no

more will, no take, not bound, instead only undone down to

laces; shoes upon dogs still for haste may remain yet to be made.

Not for gesticulation but emergence. Not for the writings but

...

Much of the population of Israel, no different from people in the United States, denies its past as an invader/settler nation, is oblivious to the suffering which creates its plentitude, revels in self-generated myths of its goodness and bravery, and cannot fathom why such rage is directed at it.

...

A demonstration against Iran’s execution of gays during a Christopher Street Day gay pride parade in Berlin.

My name is Arsham Parsi, a 37-year-old gay man born and raised in Iran. Neither of these facts were my choice. Discovering my difference from other men—not being interested in women—terrified me because I could be killed for who I was.

...

Editors’ Note: The following is the introduction to a speech written by John Sinclair at Marquette prison and read by Jesse Crawford at the Free John Sinclair Day benefit at the Grande Ballroom, Jan 24. Contrary to reports on WABX’s Rock and Roll news the audience received the fifty minute reading with great interest and solemnity.

...

To the hysterical marxist-leninist cult, the Spartacist League, the above photos from their publication illustrate their view of what is possible for Asian women: “A woman computer technician in Soviet Central Asia [or] an enslaved Afghan woman under the veil.” That’s what History’s implacable railroad of Progress offers, according to socialist politicians: wage slavery to socialist technology shut inside with machines every day or slavery to a religious patriarchy—some choice. Hopefully, there are women and men with a more liberatory vision than that of these two sad choices.

Over a thousand angry protesters marched on Montreal’s posh St. James Hotel, April 14, causing havoc and disrupting the tea-time of the idle rich. The protest was part of a province-wide day of action marking the one-year anniversary of the elections that brought the Liberal Party to government in Quebec.

...

a review of

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Newly translated & annotated by Ken Knabb,

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

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

...

In a town with no law, in a far away land, there lived people without protection. In square, boxed houses, they made sections out of walls to shield them from something unknown. It was the something that drove them to worry.

“Do you think it will happen tomorrow?” One asked.

“What do you think it could be?”

...

Just as the underground press movement of the sixties sprang up against corporate domination of information, so now is the rebel radio movement. For the first time, residents of Detroit’s Cass Corridor and surrounding areas will be able to tune in to the City’s first and only anti-commercial, non-government regulated radio station: Radio Free Detroit.

...

As striking university workers joined forces with Detroit’s labor community at the annual Labor Day Parade, WSU president David Adamany took the Board of Governors by surprise when he called an emergency meeting to give notice of his immediate resignation.

...

And, so we return to Spain. Nearly 70 years after the people’s response to a right-wing military uprising, those events remain a source of wonder, optimism, confusion, strife and tragedy. It was a high mark of personal and social possibility that has yet to be matched. It was a real revolution of everyday life that shattered the patterns and relationships created by the agencies that constituted a growing capitalism.

...

And, so we return to Spain. Nearly 70 years after the people’s response to a right-wing military uprising, those events remain a source of wonder, optimism, confusion, strife and tragedy. It was a high mark of personal and social possibility that has yet to be matched. It was a real revolution of everyday life that shattered the patterns and relationships created by the agencies that constituted a growing capitalism.

...

“History is one more battlefield among the many that exist in the class war. We must learn the lessons of the defeats of the proletariat, because they are the milestones of victory.”

—Agustin Guillamon, Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938

In July 1936 there was a military-fascist rebellion against the Spanish bourgeois Republic. It was immediately met by anarchist-inspired armed resistance of the urban proletariat who, after defeating the military rebels in half of Spain, began the revolutionary process of establishing grassroots self-management in expropriated industry.

...

Next year will mark the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Revolution, an event which most of those involved with the Fifth Estate only learned of in the 1970s, but one which profoundly contributed to what the paper and the broader anarchist milieu have become.

The ideas and the practices of solidarity and mutual aid learned from the Spanish anarchists who lived through that moment taught people at the Fifth Estate and many others a lot that shaped who we are now. Knowing people like Federico and Pura Arcos, both veterans of the Spanish struggle who lived in Windsor, Ontario across the river from Detroit, helped younger anarchists think of an anti-authoritarian revolution of everyday life as a real possibility.

...

All right, I admit it. I started the World Series riot in Detroit on October 14, 1984. I tore up the outfield turf, ripped down the entrance signs and tore off other bits of Tiger Stadium to take home with me as souvenirs. Yes, I set fire to that police squad car, then trashed several others while the cops were distracted. Later in the evening, I stood side-by-side with other diehard celebrants at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, throwing rocks and bottles at the riot police on horseback as they made their way down the street. And, yes, that was me emerging from a looted store on Woodward Avenue with the upper half of a mannequin in my arms, waving the surreal trophy over my head in triumph.

...

THE SPECTRE OF TERRORISM HAUNTS THE WORLD

CAUTION! There are terrorists among us.

THEY infest this planet from Washington to New York, from Baghdad to London, from Moscow to Jerusalem.

THEY detain millions of hostages every day and give them the ultimatum—become a slave to the state or an enemy.

...

a review of

Webs of Power, Notes from the Global Uprising by Starhawk. New Society Publishers, 2002. 288 pages $17.95 (available from FE Books)

This book is a must read for understanding the revolution of our time. Anarchist, feminist, pagan—Starhawk speaks to everyone who has been on the barricades, actively or supportively, against the multinationals working to maximize their control over our lives. This is the story of the anti-globalization movement since Seattle 1999 when we exposed the WTO and its corporate agenda to the media spotlight.

...

The only task left for thinking men & women in the world today is conscious preparation for the revolution.

Brothers! The social revolution now in progress & vanguarded by black revolutionaries is a weapon of cultural revolution.

The cultural revolution seeks not only to transform the entire political & social status quo but in so much as it seeks to liberate the creative spirit inherent in all men then we can say that it tends to transform the revolutionary socialist’s task of ‘making history’ into the revolutionary Poet’s task of destroying the whole SPECTACLE of history as narrated sequences of events. The cultural revolution, as if she were the beautiful woman who sleeps in the hearts of all men, whispers, & in critical times like these, shouts -THINK OF YOUR DESIRES AS REALITIES. Again & again this great vision of the world transformed, as if this woman were the very organic source of the planet herself, has called her men to arms that they might re-establish themselves in joyous harmony with all things alive & growing, Yet again & again the infamous cities, regardless of what small reforms they have granted & now seek to take back, have managed to contain the struggle. Our vision gnawed into a kind of blue death. OVER THE PAST 150 YEARS MORE DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE TO THE ORGANIC PRODUCTIVE PROCESS OF THE PLANET THAN IN ALL HUMAN HISTORY PRECEDING.

...

Related: see “Technology and the State: An Introduction” in this issue.

For the anti-nuclear movement the question “What forces have pushed the development of nuclear power in the U.S.?” should be an important one. For in the cause one usually finds the cure. The fact that this question is so infrequently raised, and where raised, so narrowly answered, says something about the nature of American opposition to nuclear power at this time.

...

if it dies I will not shed a tear.

I don’t really know her or what she

wants from me,

the men who made her, or how I’m

supposed to live here-

sweltering in a chaos

that ain’t for my

sake.

Unwilling as I am to bear the responsibility

of accumulated force.

.

Collective destiny can only be spread

...

a review of

Manufacturing the Threat, Dir: Amy Miller, 2023

Online archive note: Several paragraphs were inadvertently not included in the printed edition of the magazine, starting with “Still, I do recommend it as a powerful piece of storytelling...”

Below is the complete article.

John “Omar” Nuttall and Amanda “Ana” Korody were arrested July 1, 2013, after planting what they had been led to believe were functional pressure cooker bombs on the grounds of the provincial legislature in Victoria, British Columbia. Their arrests eventually led to the revelation of years of police dirty tricks, manipulation, and abuse in the name of anti-terrorism.

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a review of

The Stooges (Elektra EKS-74051)

The Stooges’ earliest live appearances consisted of the band playing 25 minutes or so of uninterrupted music while Iggy danced, contorted and otherwise acted strange in front of them. They never did the same thing twice. The music was always different. Iggy once covered his body with raw hamburger before he went on stage.

...

It is where the old man who said nothing Becomes the hero of the day

Where the time I choose to leave

Becomes the time I am willing to stay

It is where the cockroaches do not fly Scaring the shit out of me and my wards Where avocados are always in season And everyone will fight for a worthy cause

...

July 1989 marks the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Self-organized Parisians liberated the hated Bastille prison on July 14, 1789; it was their first major victory. Unlike the American revolution which was mounted by racist land speculators and greedy commercial entrepreneurs, the French revolution resulted from a vast groundswell of people determined to rid themselves of their oppressors. In the French countryside as well as in cities, determined individuals lashed out against the clergy, aristocrats, and tax collectors. Peasants seized land from absentee nobility; throughout the country, property of the Catholic Church and the aristocracy was confiscated, desecrated, destroyed.

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a review of

The Strait: An Unfinished Novel by Fredy Perlman. Black & Red, Detroit

FE note: At the time of his unexpected death in July of 1985, Fredy Perlman was in the midst of working on his second historical novel to be called The Strait (d’etroit) (see FE #321, Indian Summer 1985 for an appreciation of his life and writings). What follows are Lorraine Perlman’s impressions of his massive, two-volume manuscript, which she is currently editing with the prospect of printing it at some future time.

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Surprisingly, the Founding Fathers of the United States were anti-democrats. Democracy is supposed to be a regime where the people rule themselves directly. Such a system was thought to be favourable to the poor, who would easily have the majority at assembly. Writers and politicians who used the word “democracy” shared a quite negative opinion of the political value of such a regime.

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a review of

The Strange Odyssey of Howard Pow! by Bill Hutton, Detroit Artists’ Workshop Press, 1967. $1.00.

“Ed Dream pushed the big barn doors open and the morning light poured in. The cow mooed. She was in her milking stall. The bull rubbed his horns against the slats of his pen and the goat was eating some straw. The chickens squawked and laid a few eggs. “Good morning, cow,” sang Ed Dream, setting a bucket under the cow and pulling a milking stool up for himself. He jerked the cow’s tail twice. ‘That’s for good luck,’ he said. ‘I’ve never milked a cow before.’

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I have yet to read a really worthwhile movie review of “The Stranger,” and I’m not sure I can remedy the situation.

Like most film critics, I am tempted to write a long opinionated description of how well Albert Camus’s novel was transferred to the screen. I am even tempted to display my erudition, as many reviewers have done, by launching into a profound discussion of Existentialism.

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-- drawing by Peter Welleman

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

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In so many ways, the fault lines in the U.S. and other countries are being violently exposed by the pandemic, and especially by the economic fallout in the many parts of the world where life was precarious for most people before Covid-19 struck. This includes a large and growing swath of the population of the U.S.

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Painting by Stephen Goodfellow

I contend the state is extraterrestrial (E.T.) in origin and that the city emanated from the state. The city is, therefore, also E.T. in origin. I will also demonstrate that the abolition of slavery necessitates the eradication of both. In the 1960s, author Erich Von Daniken asserted in his controversial Chariots of the Gods? that E.T.s had mated with monkeys and apes via artificial insemination and gene-splicing, producing early hominids. The repeating of the E.T. mating, gene-splicing process with hominids eventually produced Neanderthals and finally Homo Sapiens, according to Von Daniken.

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There have been long standing political and theoretical debates about whether a particular political movement or leader is fascist. In the article before this one, as Bill Weinberg attests in the previous pages, it can come down to hairsplitting. Is Trump a fascist? Was the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco? Or, Argentina’s Juan Peron? Or, is the term fascist applied indiscriminately to any oppressive government and politician?

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—If Americans ever believed there was an Olympus within their borders, the location had to be the chambers of the United States Supreme Court.

“I’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court” has long been the sputtered refrain of the miffed and abused. Changes in personnel at the Supreme Court amount to a changing of the gods for Middle America.

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Eleanor and Frank Perry, who made “David and Lisa,” have come out with a new film called “The Swimmer.” Although it does not resemble, or live up to, their previous effort, it’s a better movie than most critics would have you believe.

I feel, despite what you might have heard to the contrary, that “The Swimmer” is a motion picture worth seeing. I should point out, however, that I’m probably the only reviewer in the country who feels this way.

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A family in Idlib Province, Syria, home to three million people, half of them displaced, or forcibly evacuated. Idlib was recently captured by hard-line Islamists. The sign reads “We are one of 760,000 families in Idlib.” / #HumansOfIdlib

If 2011 looked like the moment when people could unite, both within and across countries, to topple decades-old dictatorships with the demand for freedom and social justice, today looks like the moment of counter-revolutionary success. After eight years of increasingly brutal conflict in Syria, Bashar al-Assad still presides as president over a now destroyed, fragmented and traumatized country. The dominant narrative is that the war is nearing its end. States once vocally opposed to Assad now have other strategic concerns which take precedence over the victims of his savage efforts to hold onto power. Yet, on the ground, conditions are far from stable and civilians remain trapped and are paying the price for ongoing struggles for power and territory between the regime, foreign states and ideological war lords.

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This essay originally appeared in John Clark’s now out-of-print The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on Culture, Nature and Power (Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1984) as “Master Lao and the Anarchist Prince.” John is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Environmental Studies at Loyola University, New Orleans. He edits the Freeport Watch Bulletin, covering the activities of the evil Freeport-McMoRan mining corporation from POB 79, Loyola Univ., New Orleans LA 70118.

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Lao Tzu was the mythic “Old Sage” of ancient China. We’re not sure whether he actually existed, but we do know that he founded Taoist philosophy. His legendary Tao te Ching, the “Classic of the Way and its Power,” is a subtle treatise that radically challenges our views of everything—including ourselves, nature and the world around us. I like to call it “The Anarchist Prince,” for just as Machiavelli’s The Prince is a manual for rulers who wish to learn to rule, Lao Tzu’s classic is written for rulers who want to learn how not to rule.

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“Tell me you support the government’s policy if you like, but don’t try to tell me you didn’t know what was going on.”

—Tom Paxton

The first issue of the Fifth Estate [FE #1, November 19-December 2, 1965] featured a review of DANTON’S DEATH, a powerful drama about the French Revolution. During that performance, our reviewer noted that in many of the programs, several pages were omitted. He later realized that these pages consisted of notes written by the director Herbert Blau. Titled “THE TERROR IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE TERROR!”, Blau’s insert compared Mao Tse-Tung with Lyndon Baines Johnson in that both are equal distributors of terror.

...

Reprinted from Learning Good Consent: On Healthy Relationships and Survivor Support Edited by Cindy Crabb. AK Press, akpress.org 2016

FE Note: With people today left adrift to face conflicting social cues coming from every direction, this collection looks directly at the complications which arise from sex, consent, abuse, and survivor support. This, and the other essays in Learning Good Consent, is a guide to preventing sexual violence, helping survivors heal, and creating lives which correspond to our ideals. This essay has been shortened by the Fifth Estate editors.

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This is the square and the building it serves is black and from above the glorious midday sunlight falls in long beams like wooden staves driven into the ground. I stand outside the entrance. The square is built in such a way that its four sides slope gently downwards to a wide flat surface at its center. The building is made of marble and granite and slate, all black and shining darkly. I am here. The double gates stand open. The air inside is cool and inviting. I am here, in the island of Myrmidon, in the Mandragora Archipelago, because I have to know.

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

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

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“To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason.”

—Henry Kissinger

Months before the United States sent troops to Somalia to supposedly protect food supply lines from the pilferage of “evil warlords,” Italy was completing arrangements to ship its toxic wastes to Somalia, with nary a protest from the U.S.

...

Rudy Simons, a 71-year-old social justice activist, was one of 13 people from Metro Detroiters Against Sanctions who visited Iraq in December 1999 to witness first-hand the effects of U.S. policies on the civilian population. Fifth Estate staff member Peter Werbe interviewed Simons soon after his return. A section of it follows.

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The Fifth Estate has published information exposing the Torch Drive hustle for the past several years. In keeping with this tradition, the following article presents an up-to-date account of what the Torch Drive is really about; how they initially get their money, who they eventually give it to and why.

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We here at Fifth Estate feel that a few words of remembrance are necessary to mark the passing of “Smiling General” Suharto. Beginning in 1967, this brutal terrorist’s “New Order” military regime was as vicious as the similarly well-funded US client-state dictatorships of Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet, and the Shah of Iran. His government was a particularly spectacular showcase of nepotism and cronyism that rivaled that of Ferdinand Marcos thanks to hundreds of millions of Cold War dollars in US aid and crazily lucrative exclusive corporate concessions (with Chase Manhattan Bank, US Steel, British American Tobacco, General Motors, ICI, and a number of US petroleum combines) that allowed his closest friends and family to build monopolies and amass fortunes. Almost all of Indonesia’s current environmental disasters can be linked directly to the Suharto ruling clique’s industrialized pillaging of the archipelago. When he was finally forced from power in 1998 after the Pacific Rim economic crisis, Suharto had hoarded away more than $10 billion in personal wealth in foreign bank accounts, an inconceivable amount of money equivalent to more than 10% of Indonesia’s total foreign debt.

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During Whale Head’s sleep, her organs grew very impatient and bored since they had become hyper intelligent. In order to amuse themselves, they read all the books in a twenty-seven-mile radius by spatial osmosis, and also managed to solve the paradox of the radial ostrich, which had been plaguing the King’s court philosophers for many decades now.

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“Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.”

—George Orwell, 1984

Although Orwell’s intent in writing 1984 was to shatter illusions held by stalinists and liberals about the Soviet Union, his book quickly became a metaphor for all modern bureaucratic societies, including the U.S.—and, with recent events in mind, perhaps especially the U.S.

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Check out the December 15, 1999, San Francisco Bay Guardian (www.sfbg.com). Page 13 is devoted to a debate regarding property destruction in Seattle.

Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, one of the organizations that formed the Direct Action Network, finally clarifies her position (along with a welcome apology for statements she made regarding calling the police on black bloc activists).

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Opposition to M77 Motorway: still from “Given to the People” (film documentary) http://www.giventothepeople.org/

Just to the south of Glasgow, amid the woodlands and park lands of Pollok estate, a site of extraordinary resistance has emerged.

From the roadside, a huge red banner with bright yellow letters proclaims “Pollok Free State,” and where the road gives way to a dirt track, amid tall beech trees, one enters a place transformed.

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1. Andy Warhol would have given his right arm (and probably his left buttock) to have created that epically-dull 2-1/2 hour underground film (starring Neil “Jack” Armstrong and Edwin “Archie” Aldrin) that was shown on American TV under such unusual circumstances a couple of weeks ago.

2. Weird-picture-of-the-Century-Award goes to a three minute TV segment during moonwalk: Nixon intruding (in color) with a pink telephone on split-screen image, talking to Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon; they are standing at military attention, with the American flag-prop reduced to red (and symbolic) black and white in foreground, LEM in background. Very weird unconscious satire. Deep-meaning picture.

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“...If one has courage and daring without benevolence, one is like a madman wielding a sharp sword; if one is smart and swift without wisdom, one is as though riding on a fast mount but not knowing which way to go.

“Even if one has talent and ability, if one uses them improperly and handles them inappropriately, they can only assist falsehood and dress up errors: In that case it is better to have few technical skills than many.

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The host of TV’s “60 Minutes II” in front of a panel for a segment on Eugene’s anarchist community following WTO.

FE Note: Most of this article was written prior to the WTO demos and is not a contribution to the debate over tactics used there.

Ted Kaczynski, who pled guilty to the bombing campaign of the Unabomber, continues to pop up as a convenient mass media symbol of anarchism.

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Last December, Lawrence Summers the chief economist for the World Bank issued a surprisingly forthright memorandum to other senior World Bank staff in which he called for the distribution of toxic wastes and pollution away from the big industrialized nations and into relatively non-polluted areas of the world, as a means of rectifying the current toxic “imbalance.” “I’ve always thought,” Summers wrote, “that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”

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From the “Action Line” column, Detroit Free Press, Wednesday, November 23, 1966:

I saw a bumper sticker on a car that read: “Stamp Out Reality.” Any idea where I could get one?

—M.R., Ferndale.

Fifth Estate Book Store on Plum Street is sending you one. They’ve got the most off-beat selection, about 100 messages to choose from. Caution: Some folks might find a few of ‘em offensive. Proceeds go to a left-wing publication. Most popular stickers are anti-Johnson and anti-Vietnam: “God is Alive—He’s in the White House,” “Draft Beer, Not Students.” Other big sellers: “Support Your Local Batman,” “If You Drive, Don’t Drink (You Might Hit a Bump and Spill Some).” For the uncommitted, there’s one that says, “Bumper Sticker ”

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Doc Greene is confused. So are 170 million other white Americans, including Hubert Humphrey and Roy Wilkins.

It all started when they were born white in a society which told them all their lives that they were better because they were whiter. And which then organized itself to make it come true.

In a column he writes regularly for a newspaper which calls itself The Detroit News, Doc Greene spoke for most Americans when he condemned Dr. Martin Luther King for finally coming out against the war in Vietnam.

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Back in the salad days of the 1990s, the North American anarchist scene adopted play, not just as a personal tactic of freedom, but as a revolutionary strategy. Play was thought to be a way out of the dead-ends of civilization: work, hierarchical relationships, commodity culture, and even the old ways of making revolution that had failed again and again. It’s tempting to say that we were naive, living in the calm before the storm. But even if the past forecloses some possibilities, a critical look back at our experiences can open up others.

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In considering the anti-nuclear movement in Germany—the growing opposition, agitation and the emergence of hundreds of local citizen’s initiatives that are directly organizing to stop the nuclear designs of the government and the electric utility companies—we must keep in mind that Germany, as Europe’s most highly industrialized national economy, is a much more densely populated territory than, for example, the United States. Nuclear plants here are unavoidably in closer proximity to small and large population centers and adjacent or directly on top of farming areas. There are no large, empty flatlands and unpopulated regions in which nuclear plants can be tucked away out of sight and out of the relatively close environmental range of the urban and rural communities.

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If you were to ask most people in this country to define the Persian Gulf War, they probably would describe it as a victorious, six-week long military conflict, in which the U.S. repelled Iraq, a hostile invader, and restored the sovereignty and dignity of a small nation, Kuwait.

Very few would include in that definition the unabated slaughter taking place in Iraq as a result of the US/UN sanctions as well as the almost daily bombings of that country.

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a review of

Among the Boat People: A Memoir of Vietnam by Nhi Manh Chung. Autonomedia 2019 autonomedia.org

“When wars are over, people only want to know who won, what exciting battles took place, and all that military idiocy. People never know what the innocent victims have to say.”

—poet and artist Yuko Otomo

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The following is taken from a declaration on sexual ethics published by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was issued in January of this year and is considered church doctrine by Catholics.

“Experience teaches us that love must find its safeguard in the stability of marriage if sexual intercourse is truly to respond to the requirements of its own finality and to those of human dignity. Those requirements call for a conjugal contract sanctioned and guaranteed by society.”

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a review of

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Keith, 320 pp, PM Press, 2009, $20

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World. Revised edition, expanded & updated by Bob Torres and Jenna Torres, 222 pp, PM Press, 2010, $14.95

Once, at a Tai Chi workshop I attended, an elderly Chinese master of the discipline suddenly stopped in the middle of the demonstration and asked, completely out of the blue, “Why do so many of you not eat meat?”

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Have you who are reading this article expecting to be told how good or how bad whatever record I have chosen to review really is, ever stopped to analyze what you personally think is good music? Have you ever tried to think of music (Rock music) outside of the context of an immediately occurring pleasure-displeasure-boredom reaction?

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An enduring image of Vietnam War resistance is men burning their draft cards. And, draft resistance played a big role in raising the profile of war tax resistance. Vietnam era draft resisters like Randy Kehler and Ed Hedemann followed up their refusal to fight with a refusal to pay for fighting, following the example of World War I and II draft and war tax resisters like Ammon Hennacy and Wally Nelson.

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When this essay first appeared in the Fifth Estate in Spring 1985, the Vietnam War already seemed to be receding into ancient history. Central America was at that time being battered with money and proxies, rather than with “American boys,” who tend to get themselves unceremoniously killed while smashing up other people’s neighborhoods. A few hundred thousand deaths and mutilations later, we still await the tearful retrospectives with their admixture of regret and denial.

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Here and There and Where

Surprising how many people still don’t realize how important and far-reaching is Madelyn Murray’s suit to Tax the Churches and how, when it reaches the Supreme Court, it might change the entire real estate tax structure of this country. Being a tough determined woman she’ll almost certainly fight the case all the way—and win. In a recent letter she told me that she keeps reading about all the people who are collecting money in her name, but she never sees any of it. Her ONLY address is Madelyn Murray O’Hair, P. O. Box 2117, Austin, Texas 78767. Baltimore assault case against her has been dropped...

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The U.S.-led invasion has taken what was already a nightmare and turned it into a catastrophe where everyone seems numb and shell-shocked. Thirty-five years of a brutally repressive dictatorship, 11 years of crippling sanctions, and two invasions in the past decade have warped this country into the bloody hellhole that it is today. Iraq is the ultimate confluence of the three types of warfare: military, economic, and psychological.

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The orchestration of the Gulf war was a glaring expression of what the situationists call the spectacle—the development of modern society to the point where images dominate life.

The public relations campaign was as important as the military one. How this or that tactic would play in the media became a major strategical consideration. It didn’t matter much whether the bombing was actually “surgical” as long as the coverage was; if the victims didn’t appear it was as if they didn’t exist. The “Nintendo effect” worked so well that the euphoric generals had to caution against too much public euphoria for fear that it might backfire.

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The State’s response to the protests in Miami reveals the stark similarities between war, counter-terrorism, and the suppression of dissent at home. Congress slipped $8.5 million to security in Miami from a recent appropriation earmarked for the “war on terror” in Iraq, ostensibly to rebuild that shattered nation.

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“Your calendar June, 1968—The body has been there a long time...he has been dead a long time...those of you who want to understand, will understand. —Tom Sincavitch

Editors’ note: The following opinion was written by folksinger Phil Ochs and originally appeared in the LA Free Press. The article was written before President Johnson was in Los Angeles on June 23, when thousands greeted his holiness.

Phil Ochs, 1960s

The war is over and what a relief. It sure was depressing—but now, thank God, we can celebrate. It has been called off from the bottom up, and now the only ones participating in it are those that still believe it exists.

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Poster: Ernesto Yrena. One of many available for free download at theamplifierfoundation.org. Hundreds of them were put up all over Washington for the Trump inauguration.

Now that Donald J. Trump has brought bogus right-wing populism back to the White House and Congress is under firm Republican control, serious talk about gutting Social Security and Medicare is again coursing through Washington.

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Capitalism is never good to all of its subjects. Regardless of its carefully honed mythology of democratic access to success and class mobility, capitalist society is a system of looting whereby a few at the top and a small substratum below them hog the vast majority of wealth.

Looting, the forcible extraction of wealth by a powerful minority from a defenseless or passive majority, is the keystone of capitalism and has been since its inception. This hemisphere was looted from its original inhabitants, its minerals, forests soil and animals looted to finance the empires of Europe. Slaves were looted from Africa to create the original capital accumulation and industrialization through slave labor. And through looting and exploitation of the poor and working classes of this country and the world, a colossal empire of capital has been established.

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a review of

A People’s History of Civilization by John Zerzan. Feral House, 2018 feralhouse.com

Beginning with John Zerzan’s 1970s jeremiads in this publication, his predictions of social collapse and later of civilization’s were best summed up by the title of his FE #276, January, 1976 article, “The Decline and Fall of Everything.”

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“All over the world, people are laughing at America because they’re so stupid. They don’t know what time it is. This is a late hour for America. America is on her way out.” (Robert Williams at a Detroit press conference following his release on bond from two courts after returning to the United States from eight years of exile.)

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Editors’ Note: William Leach is a member of the Detroit Black Panther Party and a staff member of the Inner City Voice and The South End newspapers.

“Look, we ain’t going to work with white people...they aren’t serious...why do we have to work with those honkies?”

This is an attitude expressed by many black people. The question is why? The answer: they feel white folks (revolutionaries) are bullshitting.

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I visited the Grande for the first time in quite a while. Seems to have grown up. The lights are better, more people, wild pop clothes, and less self-conscious of ‘freaking out.’ The MC-5 played what has got to be the sound of the Big City. They come on with a rush of muscle; like being in the middle of a factory. It crashes and bangs and swirls you around; and it’s not a particularly easy trip. You sweat with them through some hard music.

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I ride a bike. Not the kind you pedal—I used to do that. I mean a motorcycle. There’s nothing like it.

Motorcycles mean a special thing to the people who ride them.

Some people (I suspect fewer than one might expect) use their scooters primarily for transportation. Undoubtedly they are economical, easy to park, and maneuverable: Nonetheless, in a nation used to traveling in commodious comfort, rolling houses with stereo entertainment centers and sexadelic pin-striping are far more the norm.

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On May Day 1919, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, a general strike began that shut down all economic activity in Winnipeg, Canada. The general strikes that took place in Glasgow, Scotland in January 1919, in Seattle in February 1919, along with the Winnipeg strike remain some of the high watermarks in North American working class history.

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a review of

The Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, Verso, New York, 256pp., $25

In the book, Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, acclaimed New Left historian Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman of World War 3 Illustrated have put together a unique, lively, accessible and entertaining history of the most important union in American history. They use the style of a graphic novel and the contributions of many artists to show this complex history from the point of view of the participants.

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Last year, Starbucks’ “baristas” in New York continued to organize for the first union shop in an outpost of the notorious coffee chain. In January, criminal charges were dismissed against an IWW Starbucks organizer stemming from a march at the 2004 Republican National Convention against the Bush administration’s collaboration with union-busting at the coffee shop giant. IWW Starbucks Workers Union co-founder Daniel Gross was arrested for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct during the protest. He previously rejected a plea bargain to serve a week in jail.

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WHITE LAKE, N.Y. (Good Times/UPS) —The Woodstock Festival was a huge nonviolent explosion of people and music. The New York Times called it a nightmare but it was more of a fantastic dream. True, there were low scenes—three accidental deaths, the drug freakouts, the rain, the garbage and the strong scent of shit. But there were no fences and no riots, and the Fair was less of a disaster than the straight media made it seem.

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a review of

Glauber Rocha, Ismail Xavier, editor; I.B. Tauris, 2019

The fiftieth anniversary of the global upheavals of 1968 has provoked a spate of books examining political cinema and its relationship to the era.

It’s an almost frenzied demand to re-examine the camera as a weapon of rhetoric, and to grapple with cinema’s apparent decline as a radical medium over the decades.

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World wide resistance to Bush II’s war of conquest and empire is growing. On February 15^th, in the largest single day of protest ever, an estimated 10 to 30 million people took to the streets across the world to prevent the slaughter of thousands of Iraqis.

Major demonstrations occurred in almost every city on the planet. There was even an anti-war rally in Antarctica! Police brutality and suppression of dissent were reported in New York City, Colorado and Greece. In San Francisco, a sizable anarchist breakaway contingent targeted capitalists with spray paint and window trashing.

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Reality, grown so thick with itself, became a fungus years ago with inbred spores and long reaching strands that have become the vampiric architecture of experience on every street in town. Thriving on dampened spirits in the totally human swamp, the fungus is the protective covering for the swamp, made to keep the animal from moving around in it as it slowly consumes its hosts leaving lifeless automatons where biological entities once thrived.

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“Making money” has never been so easy.

Thanks to the Xerox 6500, anything from stock-swindling to bank-liberating is now just a button-touch away! It’s fun, it’s quick, it’s easy, and chances are better than ever there’s a 6500 in the office where you work.

With the 6500, our new, high-quality color copier, anyone can now duplicate all the important-looking documents which were formerly off-limits to the average citizen.

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The X-Files, the science fiction television series that aired from 1993 to 2002, featured fictional FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully concerned with unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena and aliens. Its popularity was such that it made many young people aspire to be FBI agents of the same type. However, I never wanted to be Mulder or Scully. I wanted to be a member of the Lone Gunmen, three geeks on the program who published a conspiracy research zine which was often Mulder’s source for information related to his cases.

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(Other Scenes/UPS) Tom Cushing added the last line of his play about nudism 40 years ago, then wrote above its original title: “The Unplayable Play.” The play jocularly concerned a nudist girl who invited her swain home, on the condition that he observed all the customs her family observed. The suitor soon learned that this meant taking off all his clothes before sitting down to tea, as the family did.

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The present society produces an ever-increasing series of disasters, from stock market crashes to mass starvation. Most of this chaos winds up hurting the most dispossessed while the capitalists laugh all the way to the bank. Knowing this, as a revolutionary and professional programmer, I want to outline why the Man will get hit worse than he is anticipating by the particular crisis known as the Year 2000 or Y2K problem.

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a review of

The Year of the French, Thomas Flanagan, Pocket Books, New York, 1980, 642 pp., $4.50 (Canadian)

At first glance at the dust jacket of Thomas Flanagan’s book, one expects either the usual fluff which passes for “historical” novels these days or an exposition on England’s bloody-handed colonial rule as setting the stage for sympathy to the modern day IRA, much in the way accounts of the Nazi holocaust wind up to be sales pitches for Israel. Fortunately, this is not to be the case.

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When 1976 is all over and done with not long from now and we look back on it as history, it may well be remembered as the “Year of the Swine.” No, not the Jimmy Carter variety, but the four-legged, corkscrew-tailed, snouted species currently being much maligned as the source of virus strain A/New Jersey/’76, more commonly referred to as swine flu.

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Outside my window a dusting of snow frosts the ground and an October moon illuminates a wintry night. It is hard to believe that, little more than a month ago, the air was acrid with woodsmoke, hot, dry winds raked the baked earth, and the town hummed with hysteria like an over-stoked furnace. Yellowstone was afire.

...

In 1970, Chileans elected a social-democratic government headed by Salvador Allende. On September 11, 1973 it was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored military coup, ushering in the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The new regime instituted draconian free market policies resulting in low salaries and poor pensions, high prices and big debts, deficient public healthcare and education systems, and ecological depletion.

...

a review of

In The Time Of Job When Mischa Was a Zippie by Michele Dawn Saint Thomas (check facebook.com/msaintthomas for ordering info)

I didn’t know the Yippies were still around. As it turns out, they are still alive and well in 2021.

For those unfamiliar with the Yippies (formally the Youth International Party), they are a radical group that emerged during the 1960s that was notorious for its wild street theater, revolutionary anti-authoritarian politics, and humorous stunts like running a pig named Pigasus for president in 1968. The Zippie of the title were a Yippie faction.

...

Our courageous contemporaries in Eastern Europe had clear ideas about the urgency to do away with a malignant growth which usurped their self-powers and which claimed to be indispensable to social well-being. They were less clear about what, if anything, might replace it. The toppling of governments in Eastern Europe was the opposite of a palace coup. Did the people who came out to challenge the entrenched regimes realize how insecure the position of the bureaucrats was?

...

a review of

Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century by Raoul Vaneigem, translation by Bill Brown. ERIS, 2023

While evangelical Protestantism has for generations overwhelmingly been a force of deep reaction in this country and is poised, if Donald Trump regains the White House this November, to instate a situation such as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and its screen and TV adaptations).

...

LOS ANGELES (LNS)—Over 5,000 people massed at Los Angeles City Hall on Thursday, Dec. 11 to protest the Dec. 8 attack on the Black Panther Party headquarters here in which 13 Panthers held off 300 police for close to five hours.

Speakers at the City Hall rally included representatives of NAACP and the Urban League as well as the Panthers.

...

They’re at war! They appear nightly on television with their lying speeches trying to defend the growing slaughter. The body bags come home by the hundreds filled with the shattered remains of young men who swallowed the patriotic justifications for war, leaving grieving families, consoled only by the hollow speeches of politicians and generals.

...

The combination of anarchism with spiritual or religious beliefs is almost always controversial, even in the pages of Fifth Estate. Opposition to church, state, and capital is the holy trinity of the “classical” anarchist tradition, and the movement’s anti-clericism was one of its appeals to the Spanish in the 30s. But there is also a long history of spiritual anarchism--which is not to say that those in this tradition always accepted being categorized this way. The most common hybrids are with the European religious traditions, such as Christianity (Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Ammon Hennacy, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich immediately come to mind) or Paganism (Starhawk in particular).

...

from Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth, pp. 251–252

One peculiarity of Spanish Anarchism...was the inclusion within its ranks of professional criminals-thieves and gunmen who certainly would not have been accepted by any other working-class party-together with idealists of the purest and most selfless kind. Occasionally, as we have already pointed out, the two elements were combined in the same person, but more often they were separate. One may explain this historically. The bandit has always been a popular figure in Spain because he preys on the rich and defends the poor. Then during the Napoleonic Wars the guerrilla leader and the bandit fused in the same person. This tradition was continued by the Carlists. Their famous guerrilla leaders, Cabrera, Father Merino, Father Santa Cruz and Cucala, belonged to the same type of men as Durruti and Ascaso. But the Anarchists were also lax in allowing ordinary thieves and murderers to join their organization. The first sign of this was seen during the Cantonalist rising of 1873, when the convict prison of Cartagena, containing 1500 of the most desperate criminals in Spain, was opened on the insistence of the Internationalists and the inmates were invited to join in the defence of the city. Then, during the troubles of 1919 through 1923 at Barcelona, dozens of pure pistoleros entered their ranks. No doubt most of them took care to put a certain ideological colour on their actions, but this would not have been sufficient if the Anarchists had not had a sentimental feeling for all those people who have taken to criminal ways because they have been thwarted or injured by society. A typically Spanish inability to distinguish between those who have enriched themselves by “lawful” means and those who attempt to do so by pure robbery and violence lies at the bottom of this.

The surging waters of the collective unconscious that were unleashed in the Vancouver “Hockey” Riot of June 2011 made it abundantly clear just how fragile the artificial ice age of industrial civilization can be when it comes in contact with the searing heat of the moment.

Faced with the nagging miserabilism of daily life, the emotional dam of mutual acquiescence finally burst its walls and a tidal wave of repressed desire obliterated the illusion of social peace.

...

Discussed in this article

Joe Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook. Jenkins Publishing: PO Box 607, Grove City, PA 16127 (jenkinspublishing.com). To order, call the distributor (1–800) 639–4099.

First published in the mid-1990s, Joe Jenkins’ Humanure Handbook—now in a second printing and a revised, expanded version—is already a classic among the down-to-earth, back-to-the-land crowd. The book’s premise is simple: composting crap can create a better world; in other words, recycling human excrement is part of a larger spiritual, scientific, and social program to redeem the biosphere and curb humanity’s role as an ecological parasite and cultural pathogen. Without changing our waste management policies and philosophies, Jenkins knows we are on the path to pooping up the planet with pollutants. until the former paradise is soiled beyond repair. picking up where many hippy-type r composters left off in the 1970s, Jenkins wants the shit to hit the fan concerning our attitudes towards the stuff that comes out of our collective assholes. While dozens of new-age, self-help, and green-living manuals are cranked out each year to peddle paradigm shifts and lifestyle tweaking; Jenkins’ manure manifesto distinguishes itself from so much touchy-feely gobbledygook due to the precise manner in which he makes his arguments. He combines humor and humility, extensive empirical research and compelling unpretentious rhetoric to dispel myths about—and create an appreciation for-our doo-doo. That is, while many books of the eco-living genre read as though their writers are full of shit, Jenkins clearly has his shit together.

...

A recently formed organization set up to oppose West German militarism has complained of that country’s territorial demands on its European neighbors.

The group, the Ad Hoc Citizens Council Against West German Militarism, stated in a letter to this newspaper that the Bonn regime officially claims not only all of East Germany, but large parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, territories that were taken from Germany by the Potsdam Agreement at the close of World War II.

...

Monogamy, Monogamy

God Shed His Grace on Thee,

And Crown Thy Mane

With Ball & Chain,

From Sea to Bourgeoisie

—An S. Cohen special doggerel

Mom, dad, kiddie—cozily huddled around the TV. Symbol of Monogamy, of the one-with-one “until death shall do you part.” Symbol of a Good, the insurance against sexual chaos, shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous promiscuity.

...

Welcome to BioMorph. I’m Herb Fanley. You’ve read the brochures and watched our holograms I see. Please have a seat and I’ll be happy to answer your questions.” “Would you care for coffee? Good. We can relax a little before we get to your questions and take the opportunity to have a good look at a C-Drone.”

...

Last spring, I became a prisoner in a rural California county jail for 90 days having been sentenced for a non-political offense.

I did some research before surrendering to the authorities, so in many ways I knew what to expect when I arrived. Nothing, however, can really prepare you for the full range of indignity and repression you experience.

...

The U.S. government indicted 13 suspected members of the hacking group Anonymous Oct. 3 accusing them of attacking government, credit card, and lobbying websites. They are charged with “conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to protected computers” as part of Anonymous’ Operation Payback. Defense for these comrades will be forthcoming.

...

The forces of capital have once again called upon their storm troopers and talking heads to physically and symbolically crush the growing, global anti-capitalist movement. In the United States, building from the tragic embarrassment of September 11 and overreacting to political defeats like Cancun and the Battle of Seattle, the State has intensified its sustained 150-year-old campaign to defile the public reputation of anarchists.

...

a review of

Deciding For Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy, Cindy Milstein, Editor. AK Press, 2020, akpress.org

“There are always movements, societies and communities in existence that are intimate and locally organized, where no one person owns every damn thing, and people can talk to each other and work things out among themselves; where everybody is relatively equal. Our most immediate work should be to learn how to adjust our vision so we can see these examples for what they are.”

...

More than a decade ago I worked as a newspaper reporter in a rural New York State town. For a time, I covered the police beat, and was tasked with picking up the crime blotter each morning to see if there were noteworthy crimes.

On my first day of work in a town with a population of 1,800, the chief of police told me he wouldn’t release the blotter. “We got no crimes to report,” he said. “only domestics.”

...

After only three hours of deliberation on December 22 a half black half white Detroit Recorder’s Court jury found Alfred Hibbitt, member of the Black Legion, the paramilitary arm of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), innocent of assault with intent to kill. This was the first of three trials that are the result of charges stemming from a shooting at the New Bethel Church last March.

...

...was taken at Cam Che in South Vietnam by a U.S. news photographer. It shows a mother seeking to comfort her child burned by napalm dropped by a U.S. plane during “Operation Colorado.”

The child most likely has died since—and one is almost tempted to say, mercifully, because for most victims of napalm, survival is living death. You will note the care with which the numbed mother seeks to avoid touching her child’s skin. If she did, her fingers would sink into the destroyed flesh.

...

more joy

young or old

See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.

a review of

When We Are Human by John Zerzan. Feral House 2021

John Zerzan is a longtime advocate of anarcho-primitivism, the form of anarchism that draws inspiration from hunter-gatherer band society and expands the anarchist evaluation to a more total critique of civilization. Many of his original essays laying out this perspective first appeared in these pages in the 1970s.

...

A new United States postage stamp commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau has been designed by painter Leonard Baskin.

The stamp was first placed on sale July 12 at the writer-anarchist’s home town of Concord, Massachusetts.

The stamp came under fire recently from Thoreau devotees on the grounds that it makes bearded, long-haired Henry look like a “hippie.” Indeed, Thoreau’s appearance and his life style may qualify him as one of America’s first “hippies.”

On July 7, three American GI’s were arrested in New York City as they prepared to speak at an antiwar rally. Pvt. Dennis Mora, PFC James Johnson, and Pvt. David Samas, had, on June 30 held a news conference to announce that they had begun action in court to prohibit the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army from ordering them to Vietnam. With the belief that the war is “unjust, immoral and illegal” they stated that they would report to the Oakland Army Terminal in California on July 13 as ordered but they would refuse to board a ship for transfer to Vietnam.

...

Paris, May 1968: Taking to the streets is more than building barricades and fighting the police. Perhaps more importantly, it’s also a time for many hours of discussing ideas and passions that escape the mundane.

One of the most important things May ’68 achieved was to make rebellion feel exciting, thrilling, and urgent. People took to the streets of France for a variety of reasons but they took to the streets.

...

On April 24, the 45^th birthday of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, approximately 20,000 people gathered in Philadelphia and other cities, to demand a new trial for the former Black Panther and revolutionary journalist known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.”

One of the many colorful, giant puppets which marched in Philadelphia April 24. Judge Albert Sabo is the hanging judge who sentenced Mumia to death in 1982 and then denied his appeal in 1995. photo/Julie Herrada

...

Before the bombing of Iraq started, the paper of record—The Star (yes, that’s right, the supermarket tabloid)—reported that Sylvester Stallone had turned down an invitation from Marine Commandant Alfred Gray, Jr. to entertain the troops in the Gulf.

Said Rambo: “No, I won’t go... I don’t think what’s going on over there is right. So, why go over there and support it? Is the fact that we’re going to pay more for gas a situation which justifies sending 500,000 men over there to put their lives in jeopardy? Because Exxon is feeling the pinch?”

...

Hundreds of films take on anarchist themes in some manner, but only a handful deal with anarchist governance. Three of the most interesting of these are, Alexander the Great (Megalexandros, 1980, Greek), Viva Zapata! (1952, United States), and Rebellion in Patagonia (La Patagonia Rebelde, 1974, Argentina).

...

a review of

Israel’s Global Role: Weapons for Repression. Israel Shakak. Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc., Belmont MA, 61 pp., 1982, $2.95.

Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People. Peoples Press Palestine Book Project, Institute for Independent Social Journalism, New York, 1981, 190 pp., $5.45.

...

FLINT—The acquittal by an all-white jury here on Feb. 25 of three white Detroit cops and a black private guard in connection with the beating of eight black youths and two white girls in the Algiers Motel in 1967 was not unexpected.

Auburey Pollard, Carl Cooper, Fred Temple, three black youths, were gunned to death in the motel by Detroit cops and after 3 years no one has been convicted of the massacre. Ronald August, one of the cops, was acquitted of first degree murder charges last summer even after he had admitted killing Pollard, whom he said grabbed at his shotgun. Pollard was unarmed, while August had a pistol, blackjack and shotgun and the aid of several cops in and around the room.

...

Three entrapped anarchists, part of the Cleveland 4, were sentenced November 21 to harsh but lighter prison terms than what the federal prosecutors requested for an alleged conspiracy to blow up a highway bridge near Cleveland on May Day.

Three of the Cleveland 4, Douglas Wright, Connor Stevens, and Brandon Baxter, received 11 years, eight years, and almost ten years respectively on federal terrorism charges, followed by lifetime probation. The fourth, Joshua Stafford, as of this writing, is in a federal facility undergoing competency testing.

...

a review of

The Tyranny of Theory: A Contribution to the Anarchist Critique of Marxism by Ronald D. Tabor. Black Cat Press, 2013, 349 pages, $30.00

In The Tyranny of Theory, Ronald Tabor is adamant that anarchists need to hold Marxists accountable for the historical record of Marxist regimes. He writes, “these regimes represent the underlying logic of Marxism, and the efforts of Marxists and Marxist organizations to create revolutionary societies in the future (should they get a chance) will, in all likelihood, lead to similar systems.”

...

a review of

None of This Is Real by Miranda Mellis, Sidebrow Books, San Francisco, 2012, 115 pp., $18, sidebrow.net.

Leonora Carrington, the great surrealist creator of paintings and stories, is quoted as saying, “The duty of the right eye is to plunge into the telescope, whereas the left eye interrogates the microscope.”

...

One of the challenges today is to exist in a world in which you have no real control over your destiny. Our options are limited depending on demographics of ethnicity, gender, and wealth (or lack of). In conjunction with “the System” as it stands, we also must contend with cultural trends that negate our independence and interest in freedom from the ruling class.

...

Guru Snatchyurbananas has just arrived from Goa, India, to enlighten the western world with his proven, scientific method of T.M. (Transportation Meditation) to solve your problems of irrational hatred for your job and your superiors.

...

In at least some of its aspects, human culture functions as an elaborate system of sexual rituals--not substitutive satisfactions, in the Freudian sense, but social performances that organize sexual energies, and that bring sexual forces into a living, symbolic order of seduction, pleasure, power, and reproduction.

...

The old fashioned mail surveillance described on the opposite page is surprising since now most government snooping is done by modern technology. Apparently, however, the old-fashioned, J. Edgar Hoover-type is still around, although it too is being replaced by technology.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

It’s recently been exposed that every piece of U.S. mail which goes through the postal system is scanned and its exterior digitally retained just like the NSA files.

...

(page 1 of The South End insert)

The South End Political Affairs advisor has thrown his hat into the ring. No, he’s not running, but has gone out on a limb to predict the 1976 Republican candidate for president. Nelson Rockefeller is his name, ruling class, go-getting is his game. SEPA’s theory is that Rocky just ain’t acting like a submissive VP for nothing and that just as Ford arranged to pardon Nixon in advance, he also only planned to be Pres for the duration of Nixon’s term. Betty’s health, among other things, will give Jerry an out. What will Jerry do after his time is up? Return to Michigan and act as official target for the Michigan Police Pistol Team, a source has told the South End.

...

2 Felix the Cat (Cartoon)

Thinking that they will save the world, Felix & the professor make and sell enough acid to finance a communal farm, but Rock Bottom turns it into a gambling casino.

4 George Pierrot (Travelogue)

George’s guest today is distinguished Korean traveler, Tungsen Park, who shows films of mating customs in a small town in the District of Columbia.

...

7:00

channel 2 Bozo the Clown

Bozo and Mr. Houdini are joined by Lyndon La Rouche (aka Lyn Marcus) of the U.S. Labor Party for kiddie games and a masquerade.

channel 4 Sesame Street

The Fonz (Henry Winkler) shows up on Sesame Street and teaches the children how to smoke cigarettes and sniff glue.

...

a review of

Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, by Joanna Macy, John Seed, et al, illustrations by Dailan Pugh, New Society Publishers, 122 pages, paper, $8.95

“The earth is perishing,” this book warns, and attempts to aid in answering the inevitable next utterance: how to respond? What it makes very clear from the start is that more political economy, more detailed scientific data, more facts, more theory are inadequate. This slim manual on what the authors call “despair work” argues that people will change not when they have received certain information but when they have confronted despair. They don’t change because society has institutionalized “taboos against the communication of expression of such anguish,” and thus its release and the healthy renewal of energies of resistance and change.

...

Brother Warner Mach, currently living out in the hinterlands of Rochester, sent us a box of “Uncle Sam Cereal” he came across while shopping in the local A&P out there.

Although the advertising puffery on the box claims that good ol’ “Uncle Sam’s” (“a natural laxative”) has been “keeping Americans regular since 1908,” none of us had ever heard of the stuff. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to explore this phenomenon that might be branded “toilet paper patriotism.”

...

On April 30, the professional headbusters of the Detroit Police Department turned a love-in into a violent hate-in.

On Sunday, May 22, at a Toledo, Ohio mock war show, several hippies and new leftists tried a reverse procedure. They tried to stage a love-in at the cite where the Toledo Chamber of Commerce and the local military had built a Vietcong village which they planned to destroy as an exercise for Armed Forces Day.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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)

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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!

...

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.

...

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!”

...

“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).

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.”

...

“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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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:

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.”

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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”.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

“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?

...

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.

...

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

...

“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

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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)

...

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.

...

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!”

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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:

...

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

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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).

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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)

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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