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PARIS—As the secret Vietnam peace negotiations between Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho remain deadlocked here after two weeks of talks, it is becoming clearer each day that the responsibility for the current impasse rests largely with the U.S. government.

Weeks ago, the North Vietnamese announced the existence of a nine-point plan to end the military conflict in Vietnam. The plan included an immediate cease-fire, complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces in return for release of all American prisoners of war, and eventually national elections, among other points.

...

a review of

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

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

...

a review of

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

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

...

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

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

...

a review of

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

A campus-wide referendum on the war in Vietnam will be held at Wayne State University on April 6 as part of Student Vietnam Week in Detroit. Student Vietnam Week, April 3–14, will culminate in a mass mobilization against the war on April 15 in New York.

In the elections last November, 40% of the voters in Dearborn voted in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. The final vote was 20,667 against withdrawal and 14,124 in favor of it. The high percentage of those voting for withdrawal prompted the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam to decide to hold a campus referendum and compare students’ attitudes toward the war with those of the Dearborn citizens.

...

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

...

Women,

step up to your place

as bounty hunters,

claim your $10,000 reward.

Grab your knitting needles,

pinking shears and nail files.

Maim, castrate or, if need be, kill,

at your discretion, each man

who approaches you in a

manner indicating he intends to engage

any of your body parts.

Remember,

...

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

...

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

...

Violence in our society will be discussed in a day-long conference sponsored by Detroit Women for Peace on Saturday March 18. Beginning at 9:30 a.m. with luncheon at 12:30; the sessions will be held at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, Woodward at King in Detroit. A registration fee of $3.00, $2.00 for students, includes coffee and the luncheon.

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

They Will Never Get us All — Harold Thompson

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

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

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

...

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

...

Reprinted from The Great Speckled Bird

Look what’s happening out in the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Hey, I’m dancing down the streets

Got a revolution Got to revolution

Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet

Got a revolution Got to revolution

.

One generation got old

One generation got soul

...

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

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

...

Reprinted from The Metro

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

“Where’s your folks, son?”

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

When we talk about settler colonialism, we’re not just recounting the past, we’re describing a system that is alive and expanding today. It’s important to break down the terms: colonialism today often means invading a place to extract resources—a mine, a plantation, an oil field—before retreating. Canadian companies, for instance, loot minerals from Latin America and Africa, but when the mine runs dry, no “New Canada” pops up in Ghana or Guatemala. The colonizers take and leave.

...

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

...

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

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

...

Jim Jacobs is a member of the Detroit Organizing Committee.

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

...

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

...

WANTED

for attempted murder of the New Spirit of Detroit

VAHAN KAPEGIAN ALIAS “LOUIE” OFFICER NARCOTICS BUREAU, DETROIT POLICE

Description:

Kapegian is approximately 30–35 years old. He is of medium height and build; has brown hair and eyes; he has a dark complexion. He has been a member of the Detroit Police for 13 years; 4 of them as an undercover agent. When working in a role as an informer he may appear as in the photos above. However, when he is in Recorders’ Court testifying against innocent marijuana smokers he will appear in a suit and tie and be clean shaven. Look for him, and others like him, in either garb.

...

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

Identification Order 4343, December 30, 1969

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

July 1^st is called “International Freedom Day” on the Detroit River.

On the Mekong River, which runs through Cambodia, Laos and south Vietnam, it is international freedom day. While the United States and Canada celebrate the pollution of the Detroit River and the brotherhood of imperialist policy, we will celebrate and explore the real potential for international freedom.

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

—Peking Radio, May 9

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

It flits forth from his head instead.

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

...

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

...

Excerpted from a longer statement, November 2005

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

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

...

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

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VENEREAL DISEASE is a general name given to diseases caused by germs that are passed from one person to another by skin-to-skin contact—usually by intimate sexual contact. The two most common venereal diseases are SYPHILIS and GONORRHEA. These two serious and dangerous diseases strike people of all races, classes and ages, in all areas of the country. Teenagers and young adults are attacked at the rate of 1,500 a day! In Michigan alone, it costs the taxpayers about $1.5 million to maintain in state institutions persons afflicted with syphilitic psychosis.

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The bulldozers are coming again to the Warren Forest area.

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

...

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

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

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

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Reprinted from Liberation Magazine.

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

—New York Times, Dec. 1992

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

—Taoist poem

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

...

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

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

...

Excerpt from CrimethInc.

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

...

a review of

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

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

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

...

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

—Thoreau to Parker Pillsbury, April 1861

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

...

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

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

...

Open City office manager, John Martin, will meet soon with Wayne State University officials in an attempt to re-schedule free concerts on the campus Mall.

Wayne State Public Safety Director, William McDaniels, cancelled the concerts because of alleged “sexual intercourse taking place throughout the Mall.”

...

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

...

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

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

...

Their Statement:

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

“The nation’s young revolutionaries feel they are modern-day barbarians attacking the diseased Rome of the 1970s”

—Major General Glenn C. Ames (California National Guard Commander) addressing 1,500 pigs from across that state last month.

A couple of weeks ago, narc pigs seized 1,500 pounds of marijuana at a farm in Oakland County. Reports say that it was hauled from Mexico to the U.S. in a camper.

...

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

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

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

...

Saturday, 24 August 2002

(www.truthout.org)

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

...

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

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

...

NEW YORK (LNS)—An explosive device estimated by police to have the force of 10 to 15 sticks of TNT went off in a men’s toilet on the second floor of the New York City Police Headquarters at 6:57 p.m. June 10.

The explosion tore a hole in the wall between the men’s room and an adjacent office belonging to high-ranking police officials. Seven persons were injured, none of them seriously.

...

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

...

Lay, Elrod, lay;

Lay in your iron lung for awhile.

Play, Elrod, play;

Play with your toes for awhile.

—Weatherman song to the tune of Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay”

Last October the SDS Weathermen went to Chicago to take on Mayor Daley’s oink city. Many felt the “Days of Rage” were successful despite the heavy toll in busts.

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

“Things are in the saddle and ride Man.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

One blind man

leads many blind men

Into the fire hole

hand in hand.

—Zen saying

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

FE Introduction

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

Isbel, Mario & Jimmy (photo: Gabriel Uchida)

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

Struggle, Chairman Mao teaches us, moves in stages.

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

It represents an advance for the group.

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

— Murray Bookchin, Ecology and Revolutionary Thought

...

What a Day!

Hostages Go Free; Reagan Sworn In

—Detroit Free Press Headline, January 21, 1981

“Kill the hostages; Turn them into sausages.”

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

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

—George Orwell, 1984

...

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

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

...

Werner Von Braun, 1912-soon

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

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

...

A review of <em>

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

a review of

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

Sex is Sweet

Sex is Defeat

Sex is Stars

Sex is Bars

Sex is Money

Sex is Honey

Sex is Euphoric

Sex is Demonic

Sex is Safe

Sex is Pace

Sex is Scintillating

Sex is Liberating

Sex is Singular

Sex is Plural

Sex is Derision

Sex is Religion

Sex is Heaven

Sex is Hell

Sex is War

Sex is Peace

...

a review of

Portraits of Struggle: Photos from 1972–2023 by Orin Langelle. Global Justice Ecology Project 2024

The old newspaper adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” has mostly been vitiated by Photoshop and AI. Photos have joined words in the realm of suspicion as now any image can be manipulated or even fabricated out of thin air with a few keystrokes.

...

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

...

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

...

Earth Day supplement page 8

GM WORLD HEADQUARTERS

W. GRAND BLVD. AT SECOND AVE.

THURSDAY, APRIL 19, NOON

Assemble at WSU Gullen Mall

Call 831–6800 for more info.

1 CHANCE IN 10 MILLION

DIE FROM THE INCINERATOR

38 CHANCES IN 1 MILLION

Demonstrate Against the Detroit Trash Incinerator!

...

a review of

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

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

--Cara Hoffman

from www.carahoffman.com

...

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

...

As is the woeful and morose custom, late February salutes George Washington, who reputedly fathered a nation of sheep, and the motion picture industry boosts itself despite its fathering a low grade of mutton in the disguise of art.

1966 proved the physics maxim that nature abhors a vacuum as the field raised some rather substantial fare to credit with this year’s Academy Awards. No lily white fields for shuffling Negroes to help make nuns in or out of, but rather what approaches an honest effort at resolving the elephantine puzzle of the year’s best performances by actresses, writers, cameramen and directors.

...

SATURDAY

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

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

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

...

SUNDAY

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

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

THURSDAY

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

...

FRIDAY

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

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

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

...

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

...

Reprinted from the East Village Other (UPS)

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

B(A)D News is a monthly English language info show founded at the 2013 Anarchist Balkan Bookfair in Slovenia as the International Network of Anarchist and Anti-authoritarian Radio Projects, known as A-Radio Network (A-RN). Participants were Anarchist Radio Berlin, Radio Libertaire from Paris and Crna Luknja (“Black Hole”) from Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, as well as by individual radio activists from Eastern Europe.

...

Last October 3 marked twenty-five years since eighteen US soldiers died in Mogadishu, Somalia during a famous firefight that most Americans know as Black Hawk Down, for the crashed US helicopters. The loss is embedded in the American consciousness through a self-pitying book and film, and was widely commemorated on the 25^th anniversary.

...

a review of

We’re Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and The Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson. Oxford University Press 2020

This book reminds us that the 1980s—in addition to being a period of reactionary politics (Reagan’s efforts to “make America great again”) and reactionary music (synthesizer-dominated pop and MTV videos)—was also the decade of hardcore punk.

...

They’re hee-ere! Yes, folks, it’s the quadrennial electoral charade where power-seeking charlatans attempt to craft tricky speeches and programs designed to convince people to abandon common sense and reason and elect them to political office.

Although one of the fast-talking money boys glad-handing the populace will eventually attain the position of chief executive officer of the Empire, he will attain this status only through the participation of a minority, one growing smaller with each election.

...

A review of

SDS: Students For A Democratic Society: 50^th Anniversary Edition by Kirkpatrick Sale. Autonomedia, 2023

The 50^th anniversary edition of Kirkpatrick Sale’s history of SDS, the 1960s radical student organization, is more than a time-capsule. It is a breathing, encyclopedic compendium of hope and outrage, a chronicle of chaos and courage. The book connects contemporary readers with a radical lineage filled with inspiring stories of the contagious movement among rebellious youth during that tumultuous decade.

...

You are like a boulder

and I was trapped under you

I am like that kid

who went climbing,

like that kid who was smashed

between you

and a hard place

who had to cut off his own arm

just to get away

from you.

There is a sea anemone

that can reverse the flow of its own heart.

Can you imagine?

...

a review of

Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, paper edition 2015, 289 pp. $26

What sacred thing could pass through her lips now? What choir could shield her from the sound of her own voice?

“I did terrible things,” she said.

“Of course you did, Troy said calmly. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

...

Birds of a Feather: Flights of the Anarcho-Surrealist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2017 eberhardtpress.org

Anarchists of many tendencies have long fought for freedom of the individual and the realization of solidarity within communities. Surrealists, in and out of formal groupings, have had their own take on modern un-freedom and the potential for subverting it. In parallel, and sometimes together, anarchists and surrealists have fruitfully explored new avenues of revolt.

...

Though he never recorded, his spirit hovers over the American musical imagination, whispering his hidden secret worldwide to all those with ears to listen to the interraciality of what is typically portrayed as racially separate.

Receiving his slave name from Revolutionary War veteran and slavemaster Mathias Shultz of the Green River region of western Kentucky, Arnold was the child of the last of his ancestors to have once lived in slavery. He began as a songster playing guitar around the turn of the twentieth century. At this time in isolated mountain communities, those of African-American and European-American descent made music together at square dances, picnics, and other occasions calling for string bands.

...

Acknowledging the existence only of individuals and families, Margaret Thatcher declared, “There’s no such thing as society.”

Mustafa Khayati went a little deeper, in one of my favorite quotes: “The university teaches everything about society. Except what it is.” Similarly, Peter Sloterdijk wondered what kind of “proverbial stuff” societies are made of.

...

Reprinted from San Francisco Express Times

Surely it isn’t brazen self-confidence that drives Nelson Rockefeller, scion of the most powerful network of vested interests in the Free World, to appear as the Galahad of the forces of Change in the pre-convention scramble. After all, empires are not administered by headstrong individuals but by hereditary networks, families, tribes—Nelson does not go off on his own to contest control of the Republican Party. Then what could he have in mind?

...

Fueled by the massive international antiwar demonstrations of February 2003, people have increasingly turned to the Internet, lured by the hype of a global virtual community, to organize resistance against the murderous plans of the corporate state. Yet in most cases, the results have been demoralizing. Like the empty promise of television’s “global village,” the seductive power of computers is having a destructive effect on human community.

...

The White Panther Bike Run and the people’s party at the U-M Arboretum July 6^th turned out to be a quiet get together of freaks and young people without the usual interference by the pigs.

Things started at 1:00 that Sunday afternoon as 50 bikes split from the Fifth Estate office off to Ann Arbor.

...

In a session on September 9 the Michigan Supreme Court denied John Sinclair’s request for appeal bond saying he had not “persuaded the Court that he has a meritorious basis for appeal.” This upheld the ruling of Court of Appeals.

John was sentenced to 9-1/2 to 10 years in July for possession of two marijuana cigarettes and is currently in Jackson prison.

...

ANN ARBOR, Dec. 5—White Panther Minister of Information John Sinclair announced today that the newly-formed revolutionary organization has named its first Central Committee.

In their first formal meeting the Committee discussed matters of immediate importance to the White Panthers and to the world, including the threatened imprisonment of Brother Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information, Black Panther Party, and the arrest and imprisonment of 13 brothers and sisters in Detroit for alleged “conspiracy to place explosives with intent to do damage.”

...

First I must say that this statement, like all statements is bullshit without an active program to back it up. We have a program which is on-going and total and which must not be confused with anything that is said or written about it.

Our program is cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture, which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on. We take our program with us everywhere we go and use any means necessary to expose people to it.

...

The White Panthers arrested in New Jersey after the Woodstock Music Festival have all been released on bond and are back in Ann Arbor.

Although defense attorneys feel there are good chances of the charges being dismissed, the Panthers see this as an enlarging pattern of attempts by the authorities to eliminate their organization.

...

a review of

Run Home if You Don’t Want to be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 by Rachel Marie-Crane Williams. UNC Press 2021

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams’s new graphic history examines the violence that erupted in Detroit during the summer of 1943 in 230 evocative and beautifully rendered black and white images and text. But erupted might be the wrong word to describe what has been called variously a race riot, a pogrom, or, as Williams says in her title, an uprising.

...

In many respects the November 15^th March on Washington was a monumental success: the issue of the war in Vietnam was once again brought before the American people with the drama that only masses in the streets can achieve. Many new participants were drawn into the anti-war movement and demonstrators left the capital with a sense of accomplishment and commitment rather than the disillusionment of less meaningful days.

...

The rather quiet release of “The Weather Underground,” the new documentary of this late 1960s bomb-toting, clandestine splinter group, presents us with a fascinatingly decisive (and divisive) historical moment, a collision within call-and-response activism still relevant today. This is simply an inspiring film, even if much of the Weathermen’s more repulsive politics remains hidden in the smoke of their detonations.

...

The following is a letter forwarded to us (after translation) by friends in Seattle. Though some of the factual information has already been published previously in the FE (see Oct./Nov. and Dec. ’77 issues) we found its first-hand nature and compelling sense of urgency more than sufficient reason to reprint it intact. Thanks to Wayne Parker and Helene Ellenbogen.

...

Earth Day supplement page 5

In 1977, East German dissident Rudolph Bahro was arrested and accused of publishing “state secrets” in a book entitled The Alternative in Eastern Europe, in which he used a Marxist critique buoyed by the principles of Rosa Luxembourg to scrutinize the socialist system of his time. After more than two years in prison, he was released to West Germany where his profound preoccupation with the ecology crisis led him to become immersed in the green movement, and he eventually became a leading figure in the Green Party. Bahro’s association was, however, marred by conflicts in which his constant insistence on fundamental precepts of freedom, peace and ecological balance made him an irritating thorn in the side of the Party’s more compromising elements. He resigned from the Greens in June 1985, pointing out that through parliamentary and electoral politics, the group had sold out to the system, and that an inherent error had been made in deciding to become a political party in the first place.

...

In 1977, East German dissident Rudolph Bahro was arrested and accused of publishing “state secrets” in a book entitled The Alternative in Eastern Europe in which he used a Marxist critique buoyed by the principles of Rosa Luxembourg to scrutinize the socialist system of his time. After more than two years in prison, he was released to West Germany where his profound preoccupation with the ecology crisis led him to become immersed in the green movement, and he eventually became a leading figure in the Green Party. Bahro’s association was, however, marred by conflicts in which his constant insistence on fundamental precepts of freedom, peace and ecological balance made him an irritating thorn in the side of the Party’s more compromising elements. He resigned from the Greens in June 1985, pointing out that through parliamentary and electoral politics, the group had sold out to the system, and that an inherent error had been made in deciding to become a political party in the first place.

...

Joan Bird is a twenty-year-old New York City Black Panther. Before January of last year Joan’s life revolved around serving the people. At night she studied at Bronx Community College. “My ambition was to become a nurse,” says Joan. “I thought I could sincerely help my people.” By day she worked in the Black Panther programs—free breakfast for the children, free clothing for the people. “I was never tired because doing everything possible to help my people gave me the energy to go on.”

...

Reich being led to federal prison in 1957, where he died two years later.

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian-born physician, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. He worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s before breaking with him. His sex-political activities in Germany led to his denunciation by the Communist Party in the early 1930s and expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association at the insistence of his former mentor.

...

a review of

The Man Who Killed Durruti, Pedro de Paz, Translated from Spanish by Paul Sharkie, Postscript by Stuart Christie, Illustrations by Richard Warren. Christie Books (Read and Noir, PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, U.K.), 2005, 135

In a book that’s both fiction and history, Pedro de Paz and Stuart Christie have combined to look once again at the question of who killed the anarchist militia leader, Buenaventura Durruti.

...

Ronald Powell crouched inside the car. So did the other four men.

Already wounded in firing that had lasted for five minutes, later Mr. Powell said, “I was just waiting for the bullet that would be fatal. It was horrible.”

Charles Dunson, the driver, reached up and shut off the engine, hoping the police and national guard would think they were all dead. Mr. Dunson was also wounded.

...

Liberation News Service, Washington, D.C.—Lyndon Johnson killed Robert Kennedy sure as you and I are alive. (Sure?) Robert Kennedy killed Lyndon Johnson sure as that man in the big white house is dead. (Sure?)

In America, life is power; power is expensive and physical life is cheap. The survival-of-the-fittest thing continues unabated over millions of years here. It is our national religion.

...

The argument that the advent of capitalism brought a rise in the standard of living for workers has been refuted before, but is shown graphically in these two prints. Prior to the dominance of the capitalist economy and the establishment of the first factories in England, manufacturing was done in small shops and cottages overseen by a working master craftsman employing several apprentices and helpers. At left is a typical 18^th Century establishment (1740) using foot and crank powered lathes. Large windows were the only source of light and regulated working time.

...

Last September, I started going to church every Sunday. I go to a different one every time, often of wildly different denominations. I usually go with a friend or two and then write a church review for my blog. I’m not religious, and so extremely far from spiritual, but my goal isn’t to prove that christianity is a load of bullshit. If that’s your trip, ok, but that’s just too easy, and ultimately boring.

...

The costs of religion should be born by those who practice it! Whether you go to church or whether you stay away from it, if you believe in god and religion or if you don’t, you are the one who pays for it in the end.

Section of a cartoon by 19^th century artist, Thomas Nast, who saw the organized forces of religion ready to devour a hapless public--little has changed in 100 years.

...

The poster announced a mass rally at Rev. Cleage’s Central United Church of Christ, where the “friends of Snick” present STOKELY C. CARMICHAEL, Chairman, Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee.

The spelling is different now though—“Snick” (picked up from TIME magazine’s bastardization & turned back on H. Luce) brings to the ear the sound of a knife clicking open, a guillotine swipe at a fat red neck & the head plopping softly into a basket full of identical heads, a nice fitting name indeed. In/deed.

...

“The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are full of students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the republic is in danger.

“Yes, danger from within and from without. We need law and order. Without law and order our nation cannot survive.

...

Sick with the flu, our family had just finished a group medical examination. The doctor paused before leaving and asked, “Does anyone need an excused absence from work? Does the child need one for school?” My first thought was, why does everyone automatically assume that a three-year-old “goes to school”? And my second thought was, since when does a parent have to justify himself to the school authorities, anyway?

...

“The condition today described as that of the precarious worker is perhaps the fundamental reality of the proletariat. And the modes of existence of workers in 1830 are quite close to those of our temporary workers.”

-- Jacques Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth Century France

...

Like so many other historical instances of state persecution, such as the Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenberg cases, the 1886 Haymarket Affair continues to haunt the present with its injustices. It is almost universally accepted in the Haymarket case that the five anarchists condemned to death by the state of Illinois were victims of an incredible miscarriage of justice, a view held even at that time.

...

a review of

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici, Autonomedia 2004, 288pp, $14.95, autonomedia.org/caliban

Silvia Federici’s book is an essential read for those of us seeking to overthrow systems of domination and to build a liberated future. What is most fascinating about Caliban and the Witch is how it challenges the widely-held belief that capitalism, though perhaps flawed in its current form, was at one time a “progressive” or necessary development.

...

In mid October, I met up with radical songwriter David Rovics on the US Out of Colombia roadshow. He and his singing partner Allie Rosenblatt provided a musical backdrop to this powerful traveling presentation, which featured a descriptive slideshow and a talk by Colombian labor organizer William Mendoza.

...

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

This famous quote from Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities probably can be applied to any era, but which it is depends upon where you are situated at a given time.

Most of us, though, might find it difficult to locate the best at this moment as we face a pandemic, an increasing climate crisis, and a rising fascist movement among other contemporary disasters.

...

Demonstrator at the Waterville, Maine Global Climate Strike, Sept. 20. / photo: Peter Werbe

A friend tells me of his first job out of college. He was hired to run a senior center, not attached to a nursing home, in the Bronx.

It was his first exposure to a community of elderly, and he was saddened at what he saw: dozens of women and men, many of whom had once lived fulfilling lives according to the values of American society, now sitting in day rooms, watching television, many of them seldom talking, some nearly catatonic.

...

Download MS Word .doc [29 kb] fe-389-13-Why-Penis

“I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

-- Bernard Picton, Curator of Marine Invertebrates, National Museum of Northern Ireland

Could the surreal imagination of even Karel Capek in his most bitingly satirical novel, War With The Newts, ever have conceived of a game-changer the likes of chromodoris reticulata, a red and white sea slug that can actually shed its own penis after mating and then replenish said appendage the very next day.

...

from WIN Magazine (UPS)

Well, first of all, it wasn’t really my draft-card but my Selective Service Notice of Classification. My Registration Certificate, laminated with a rather untasty variety of acetate plastic, remains intact. Furthermore, I did not commit this act of ingestion by my lonesome, but rather with the aid of a dozen or more accomplices, most of whom I ran across at a DuBois Club concert in New York last November. But why should I devour my classification?

...

a review of

Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfemi Táíwò. Haymarket Books, 2022

Although most readers may not think of ourselves as elites, one of the great gifts of the Black feminists who developed the concept of identity politics was to demonstrate how status and power are relative, and move simultaneously in different directions across multiple aspects of a person’s identity.

...

Crowd at last year’s exhibit of Marie’s art at a Chicago gallery.

Supporters of imprisoned environmental activist Marie Mason, are fearful that the repressive conditions she currently experiences could worsen when a construction project inside of her unit in a Texas high security prison is completed.

...

In Paris, between 1900 and 1903, Alexandre Jacob (1879–1954) and his comrades organized a group of anarchist burglars which carried out 156 break-ins before being caught. Their targets were the wealthy and the gang’s project was to punish them by striking at their most sensitive organ—their wallet. Jacob and his friends were dubbed “Workers of the Night” by the sensationalist Paris press. These unusual robbers believed that theft should not be for personal gain, but an attack against the world of the powerful. Instead of becoming rich himself from the gang’s enterprises, Jacob generously donated to anarchist causes.

...

They’re throwing a peace march April 15. Why come to another demonstration? Because it helps pressure Nixon to bring the troops home. Bringing the troops home will do two things: it will save a lot of American and Vietnamese lives and it will mean the success of the Vietnamese struggle for national self-determination.

...

Introduction

As we explore routes out of today’s stifling, mechanized, crisis-bound world the FE staff opens the magazine’s pages to many forms of subversive research and many flavors of anarchic revolt.

The Chicago Surrealist group Penelope Rosemont discusses below was inspired by the Surrealist movement that began in Europe in the 1920s. Surrealism is a conscious project for utilizing the discoveries of Freudian psychology to subvert the ruling order by images and words, elaborating forms through which people can express and gratify their repressed desires and challenge societal oppression.

...

At 6:46 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on January 16, 1991, George Bush, Commander-in-Chief of the Empire’s armed forces, announced in Washington DC, “The liberation of Kuwait has begun.” And, at that moment half a world away in Iraq, the most furious air assault in history commenced against a nation which fit perfectly into the larger schemes of the United States.

...

NEW YORK (LNS)—A Colorado University Professor thinks he has discovered the real reason millions of Americans hate their job.

Professor Eugene Koprowski, who is also an industrial consultant on employee relations, said these attitudes are the result of permissive parents and television. Both lead children to expect “immediate gratification” he said, and when they don’t get it on the job as adults, they become dissatisfied. The result is that many workers do as little as possible while at work.

...

Why would someone continue to read and publish xeroxed zines two decades into the 21^st century? Didn’t the technocracy announce that this variety of underground publishing was superseded by the hyper-mediated cybernetic dream web?

Yet people still cut up words and images and glue them on paper. They stand in front of xerox machines to copy them, and then staple the pages together.

...

Underneath the center of the international menagerie, whereupon governments totter for power, politicians tumble for fame, generals squawk for security, and clergy rant and rave, skitter the well-fed rodents of the financial world, endlessly greasing the vital parts of all those acrobats center-stage.

...

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of publication of the pamphlet Wildcat: Dodge Truck, June 1974, written and produced by several of the people who became the core of the Fifth Estate collective the next year when it was transformed into an overtly council communist, and then, anarchist publication. A short excerpt is reprinted below.

...

The recent release of director Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild renews the controversial debates generated by Jon Krakauer’s 1997 book of the same name. At the roots, these charged deliberations have less to do with Penn’s ambitious directing or Krakauer’s compelling prose and focus instead on our collective interpretations about the tale’s real-life protagonist Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless.

...

INTRODUCTION (2010)

In 1976, much of what had constituted the New Left of the previous years was in a state of terminal collapse.

As an example, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the quintessential white radical youth organization, whose numbers at its height were in the hundreds of thousands, was reduced to several dozen activists in the Weather Underground.

...

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the Spectre of Communism.”

— from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

One hundred and eighteen years later Communism is again haunting the combined heads of the world bourgeoisie, but in a way Marx or Engels never could have anticipated.

“Communism” now haunts Europe in the form of electoral activity with the pledge by Communist party leaders to play the game according to the rules set up by the capitalist state.

...

On October 31, an Argentine judge, Maria Servini de Cabria, issued international arrest warrants and extradition requests to question and try 20 Spanish Franco-era officials accused of crimes against humanity from 1939 to 1975.

Spanish General Francisco Franco led the Nationalists, a military/fascist rebel group, to eventual victory in a civil war (1936 to 39), overthrowing the democratically elected republican government and quashing revolutionary social change led by anarchists and others.

...

In his early 19^th century book Jerusalem, English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake writes: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” Blake was an anti-authoritarian revolutionary. Although largely unrecognized during his lifetime, his liberatory influence has been felt in the spheres of politics, poetry, religion, economics, art, and sexuality.

...

a review of

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. Hardcover, 259 Pages, $26.95

For over thirty years William Gibson has been the unintended prophet of our digital future. The award-winning author of Neuromancer, Virtual Light, and a string of other best-selling science fiction novels, Gibson’s writings have not only presaged the future in many ways, but also serve as critiques on the present in which they were written.

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a review of

The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of the Cannabis Plant, Marijuana Prohibition, & How Hemp Can Still Save the World, Jack Herer, HEMP/Queen of Clubs Publishing, 200 pp., Van Nuys CA, 1992 edition, $14.95

Hemp: Lifeline to the Future, Chris Conrad, Creative Xpressions Publishing, 312 pp., 1993, price not listed

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I arrived early at Clutch Cargo’s, once an imposing church, but now a trendy rock joint in yuppified downtown Pontiac, a gritty, predominantly black, industrial Detroit suburb. The occasion was a concert by Chumbawamba, the anarchist pop group from Leeds, England, which has achieved international acclaim for their catchy hit, “Tubthumping.”

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There’s been little public notice, but the U.S. is on the verge of its first major national debate about military conscription since the early 1980s.

A bipartisan National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS) appointed in late 2016 by lame-duck President Obama and Congressional leaders has been studying whether the current requirement for all young men to register with the Selective Service System (SSS) for a possible military draft should be ended entirely, extended to young women as well as young men, or replaced with some other system of (possibly compulsory) military and/or civilian national service. (See “A New Right for Women: Eligible for the U.S. War Machine”, Fifth Estate #397, Winter 2017.)

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a review of

Gothick Institutions by Peter Lamborn Wilson. Xexoxial Editions. Dreamtime Village, 2005. 76 pages, $10. http://www.xexoxial.org. Available from the Barn.

A new Peter Wilson book is already a cause for celebration, but this lush collaboration exceeds even my already high expectations. Made beautiful by the production team of Miekal And Zon Wakest team at Dreamtime Village, our wise and playful rebel wields his waking fantasy to distill wild speculation in a dense and delirious brew of brave meditation.

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The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam (1101 West Warren) is not the most popular organization in town. It has had all but two of its nine windows stoned, shot through or broken into.

In early march, late in the evening, at least three bricks were tossed into the office via the glass windows.

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MADISON, Wisc. — (CPS/LNS) While many schools have been abandoning women’s curfew hours (most recently the University of Iowa), the state board of regents of the University of Wisconsin has voted to re-instate women’s hours for freshmen. The ruling takes effect in September, 1970. Hours for coeds were abolished in 1968.

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Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

What follows is a first hand account of a participant in the actions in Philly against the Republican National Convention....

Monday’s event was a march against financial inequality. Marchers were gathered at the base of the city hall building in the center of downtown. There were several helicopters overhead and it was clear that there were more police around than a typical Monday afternoon, but they were not excessively flaunting their numbers (yet).

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Most students will have left for Summer vacation when a special state Senate investigating committee begins its witch-hunt of campus radicals and their morals.

“It probably will be the end of July before we are able to conduct public hearings intelligently,” said Chairman Robert J. Huber, an apparition from the 1950s.

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“With Conviction: Art and Letters from Behind Prison Walls,” was displayed in January at Sacramento’s Exhibit S Gallery featuring prisoner art, letters, and zines. Chicago-based Anthony Rayson and Michael Ploski, amassed hundreds of pieces of original artwork rarely before exhibited beyond prison walls including four acrylics from Marie Mason seen above.

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Maybe the best single word that describes things today is withdrawal.

From less sexual intimacy to NASCAR attendance, there’s just little interest. Clubs are closing as people retreat further into their little screens. When people go out, they are so very likely to be at their tables on their phones. Might as well be at home on the couch. (As obesity rates shoot up in an ever more sedentary culture.)

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As one might expect, paranoia runs high in Earth First! at this moment with much of their boisterous self-confidence muted by the realization of the extent of the government’s attempt to stop their efforts. This is exactly what the intent of the infiltration, arrests and subpoenas are: to rein in a movement that refuses to play by the rules established for “nice” environmental groups. In that regard, it should be seen as an attack on all environmental radicals and defended as such.

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a review of

Without a Glimmer of Remorse by Pino Cacucci, translated by Paul Sharkey, illustrations by Flavio Costantini (2006, Christie Books/Read and Noir; 364 pp.)

Read and Noir is the anarchist crime fiction imprint of anarchist Stuart Christie’s publishing collective; it’s an intriguing idea that deserves to be supported and I look forward to future titles. Back in 2005, Read and Noir put out an English-language translation (also by Paul Sharkey) of Pedro de Paz’s murder mystery/political thriller The Man Who Killed Durruti. This time around, it’s Pino Cacucci’s 1994 fictionalized biography of anarcho-bandit Jules Bonnot (1876–1912), the pre-First World War burglar, counterfeiter, car thief, cop-killer, and bank robber who was the most wanted man in France at the time of his death. (Interested readers may enjoy Bernard Thomas’s La Bande a Bonnot [1967] and Richard Parry’s The Bonnot Gang [1987], two of the best non-fiction histories of that affinity group.)

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Is there ought we have in common with the greedy parasite,

Who would lash us into serfdom and crush us with his might?

Is there anything left for us but to organize and fight?

The Union makes us strong!

—“Solidarity Forever”

Looking back on the first century of the Industrial Workers of the World, the singing labor movement which brought us the Musician-Organizer, one can delve into its wealth of song to understand the urgency of its mission to create One Big Union that would replace wage labor and the state.

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This special section, announcing itself with the above headline, contains more of a critical and theoretical tension than may be immediately obvious at first reading. Imbedded in it is the difference between the clarion call proposed by Marxists to the international proletariat, “Workers of the World, Unite,” and another slogan, introduced in these pages some three decades ago—“Workers of the World, Relax!”

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If there’s any idea promoted by the Wobblies that needs revision, it’s their concept of “One Big Union.” Even if one big union were doable, it may not be desirable. If I had to bet on it, I’d predict it will be One Big Corporation that will demonstrate to us the dystopian nature of “uniting” seven billion people. (Look for a global company like WorldMart in the future.) While the international capitalist system should stimulate global solidarity among non-elites, our struggles and solutions are necessarily local, regional, and decentralized.

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Winter is approaching in wolf country. The last of the sugar maples have surrendered their leaves, and there’s a colder bite in the air that tells you its time to die. It’s nature at its realest, the life cycle of the wild that will never be stopped. Winter is coming and if you are not strong, you will not survive.

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Fifth Estate: Jackie, what were some of the main obstacles that confronted you while growing up’?

Jackie: Well, first of all as a child I really didn’t consider any profession that influences society as being for women. Every profession that influences rather than servicing people is male.

When I was very young, 8 or 9, I had a diary. I was very interested in art, particularly literature because that’s all I was exposed to, but I automatically assumed that it was impossible for me to be an artist. I could appreciate art, but that was it. I got into a very defensive idea about appreciating art because I didn’t think I could actually do it. At a very early age I had already got that idea fixed in my head. There are very few women artists for a young girl to identify with, and in my neighborhood and family, women were wives and mothers, certainly not artists.

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An interview with Lorraine, of the women’s band GOLDFLOWER, which has played for many enthusiastic women, including Erika Huggins and the other inmates at Niantic State Prison in Connecticut.

Lorraine grew up in a Long Island suburb. At 14, she was playing bluegrass guitar and hanging out with Washington Square folk musicians. At 16 she met a guy named Bobby and married him just before her 17^th birthday. They moved to the lower East side where their daughter Magdalena was born. Lorraine left, taking Maggie with her after about a year of marriage. She went through a lot of heavy stuff: unsatisfying relationships, trying to bring her daughter up herself, no money, a brush with hard drugs. A good psychiatrist really helped her a lot. After a while, she felt good enough to start playing guitar again. Singing and playing with Bev and Laura in Goldflower has given her confidence that she lacked even when she was already quite good. But she’s still learning and struggling, doesn’t think of herself as having “made it.” I thought some of the changes she’s gone through in the past couple of years would be meaningful to other women, whether you’re trying to be musicians, or just starting to find out what you’ve always wanted to be.

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a review of

Reproductive Rights and Wrongs by Betsy Hartmann, Harper & Row, New York, 1987; paper $10.95.

This impassioned enquiry is both important and timely. It is important because it synthesizes valuable research to reveal the interlocking connections between world population growth and the related questions of hunger, ecological devastation, political economy, human health and human rights. It is timely because it adds a much-needed dimension to the critique of the Maithusian orthodoxy that overpopulation is the underlying cause of hunger and that population control is the solution. It focuses on the social relations that underlie both the population explosion and the global strategies to confront it, and ties together the discussions of world ecological crisis, the contemporary battle over reproductive rights (including abortion), the question of population control And human rights in the Third World. Much of this is addressed in Lappe and Collins’ book Food First, but by exploring the area of population control, and women’s reproductive and total human rights, Hartmann adds much to the entire discussion.

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Students for a Democratic Society, a radical political organization, held a national convention in Ann Arbor recently during which they adopted a statement demanding equal rights for women, along with statements in opposition to the draft and the war in Vietnam.

The Women’s Liberation Workshop prepared the statement that demanded equal rights, equal positions of authority for competent women, birth control information and devices for all women, and literature on the subject of women’s rights.

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a review of

Taking the Rap: Women Doing Time For Society’s Crimes by Ann Hansen. Between the Lines, 2018

When offered the chance to review Ann Hansen’s memoir about her time in the Canadian prison system, I was enthusiastic but doubtful that I would be permitted to receive such a book.

With my Communications Management status and participation in the Rehabilitation Drug Abuse Program (RDAP) while imprisoned at Carswell Federal Medical Center in Texas, it seemed unlikely that this courageous and intensely honest account of real life in all manner of jails, holding facilities, and prisons would be allowed in.

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Members of the Women’s Liberation Coalition of Michigan staged a protest march in downtown Detroit March 7 to “dramatize the atrocious deaths of our sisters who, in their desperation, have had butcher abortions.”

About fifty women dressed in black with their faces shrouded to symbolize their mourning marched silently through the streets carrying coat hangers, safety pins and other devices often used in illegal abortions. They proceeded to the City Morgue on Brush and Lafayette “where thousands of our murdered sisters have been taken, victims of those who oppose a woman’s right to control her own body and bear the children she wants.”

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Asheville, North Carolina, August 6. Ten Asheville women from Women in Black (WIB) found themselves in court on Aug. 6 faced with charges of trespassing. WIB is an international peace network that was started in Israel in 1988 by women protesting against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. They wear black as a symbol of sorrow for all victims of war, for the destruction of people, nature, and the fabric of life.

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Editor’s note: Dena is a Detroit movement activist who went to Cuba in February of this year. She was part of a group of 20 members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who made the trip at the invitation of the Cuban government. This is the fourth article in a series.

The situation regarding the status of the Cuban woman is similar to the situation of black people there. As with black people, women have been integrated into economic and political life of the country, but it has been impossible to completely erase in ten years the scars of centuries of male chauvinism.

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Many women are going to take part in the anti-war activity being planned for the Spring. A group known as the Mayday Coalition is planning a march to the Chrysler Tank Plant in Warren on April 30. Several groups of women are planning to form a contingent named after Angela Davis to be part of the march.

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“One and a half, two and a half, three and a half, four. You can’t control our bodies anymore!”

“Free our bodies—Free ourselves!” “Hey, Male Chauvinists, you better start shakin’. Today’s Pig is tomorrow’s Bacon!” “Sisterhood is powerful! Sisters Unite!”

Over 2,000 people, mostly women, marched and chanted from Durant Park to the state capitol in Lansing on Saturday, March 13, to demand a change in the state’s abortion laws. Spirits were high and it was clear that for most women there the march was as much a demonstration for women’s liberation as it was for a specific change in the law.

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While Marx developed some important tools for building a critique of capitalism from the perspective of the worker, he did not devote much thought to capital’s exploitation of women.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici critically revisits the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the historical analysis of which plays a significant role in Capital.

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The Women’s Liberation Coalition of Michigan has opened a state office in the Ad Hoc building on Woodward, headquarters for several other movement organizations.

The Coalition’s goal is the abolition of male chauvinism—the domination, exploitation, and oppression of women by men.

The office will serve as a center for information exchange between the affiliated women’s groups and the general public. It will also be a coordinating center for the activities of the Coalition.

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Several Detroit women, members of the “Women’s Liberation Movement,” a group of radicals working on their own thing, joined women from New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Iowa in a twelve hour demonstration against the Establishment’s Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, New Jersey, September 7.

Approximately seventy women protested the “mind-less boob symbol” of Miss America behind two police barricades. About 200 hecklers taunted the women, three of the honkies staying for five hours—the cops turned to face the crowd—they were the more violent.

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a review of

Meat Market: Female Flesh under Capitalism by Laurie Penny. Zero Books, 2011, 68 pp., $12.95

“Contemporary pseudo-feminism is all about the power of yes. Yes, we want shoes, orgasms and menial office work. Yes, we want chocolate, snuggles, and straight hair. Yes, we will do all the dirty little jobs nobody else wants to do, yes, we will mop and sweep and photocopy and do the shopping and plan the meals and organise the parties and wipe up all the shit and the dirt and grin and strip and perform and straighten our backs and smile and say yes, again yes, we will do it all.”

—from Meat Market

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Monday, March 8 was International Women’s Day. Women around the city organized and participated in activities to celebrate that event.

On the previous Saturday women from Youth Against War and Fascism had a literature table at the Lincoln Park Sears industries...

Available from Wayne State Women’s Liberation: the first issue of their magazine Moving Out. Also, a chapbook—a collection of stories, poems, graphics called Free Women: call 577–3409 for info....

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Joyce recently had a baby. She had tried to obtain birth control pills, but couldn’t because of rules which said she had to be married to get a prescription from Planned Parenthood. After discovering that she was pregnant, she attempted to get an abortion, but strict Michigan abortion laws prevented this. Ultimately she married the father of the baby and had a little girl.

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A good cigarette is like a woman—the best ones are thin and rich.

If there ever was a time to be a woman, Woman it’s now!

You’ve come a long way Baby—now you’ve even got your own cigarette!

The capitalist media has copped all the rhetoric and jumped on the Women’s Liberation bandwagon. Woman’s newfound freedom has opened up a vast new market of products and ad campaigns-everything from vaginal deodorant sprays to her very own cigarette.

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In a concerted effort to reform the outdated Michigan abortion laws, Michigan Women for Medical Control of Abortion has launched an all-out action program. The program has been set up to involve as many people as possible in working for the medical control of abortion in Michigan.

“Until there is a concerted effort on the part of hundreds of Michigan women, the legislators will not make changes in our abortion laws,” said Mrs. John H. Tanton of Petosky, President of the state organization. Mrs. Tanton pointed out that in a recent test of the old California abortion law, which was similar to Michigan’s, the Supreme Court of that State recently reversed the abortion conviction of a California physician, ruling that the law was invalid “because it infringed on a woman’s right to privacy without legislative reason.”

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In this column we’d like to share with you some of the work and ideas of women in Detroit. There are many more things to be done, like starting your own rap group, theater group, women’s newspaper, child care center, male baby-sitting service, a women’s union, women’s history classes, auto mechanics and carpentry classes, and women’s legal aid services. How about a women’s center so we can meet each other and coordinate our activities? We need to pool our energies to get some new things started in Detroit. Let us know what you are doing. Maybe we can work together.

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Four Michigan women have filed a suit in U.S. District Court charging that the Automatic Retailers of America, Great Lakes Steel Division, discriminate against women by stabilizing them into job categories; in other words, freezing them into dead-end jobs. They also charge that ARA requires women to undergo burdensome training requirements not required for men and deny women equal opportunity to work overtime.

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Woodstock Music & Art Fair presents</strong>

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Remember Bevo Francis, sports fans? Well, Abbie Hoffman does.

One of the least off-the-wall sections in “Woodstock Nation,” Abbie’s latest bildungsroman and advertisement for himself (the proceeds are pledged to the Motherfuckers who weren’t in on the Movement’s shakedown of hippie capitalist Woodstock Ventures, Inc.), deals with his visit to the one-horse college where fifteen years ago this Bevo Francis dude was the first human to score 100 points in a basketball game.

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To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved so magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

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THISTED, Denmark—Police are looking for a jobless worker who bit off the ear of a labor exchange official and left it wrapped in paper with the handwritten message: “This is your ear.” The victim was Arne Jensen, head of the Koldby labor exchange office near here.

Police identified Jensen’s assailant only as a 34-year-old worker who had been jobless for a long time and repeatedly had refused to take the jobs offered by the labor exchange. Police said he came rushing into the office after Jensen phoned him to say there was a job for him as a farm hand. The man made it clear he did not want that kind of work and then reacted violently at the prospect of losing his unemployment relief.

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a review of

Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work by Abigail Susik. Manchester University Press, 2021

Surrealism emerged from the brutality of the trenches of the first world war that devastated Europe as an attempt to come to terms with the ruins and a rapidly changing world of new technologies and systems.

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The western Massachusetts area was rocked on Monday, October 10, with the news that a 31 year-old drill press operator at the Springfield American Bosch airplane and truck parts plant had returned from lunch with a .22 caliber rifle and killed a general foreman and critically wounded his immediate foreman.

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The anthill signals its submissiion to the leader by holding aloft his religiously imbued sayings.

Since the struggle for power within the Chinese bureaucracy sharpened following the death of Mao Tse-tung in September, events have begun swirling at an ever faster rate.

Coming on the heels of the political turmoil in the capital city, the startling news that several sections of the country are at the point of armed insurrection certainly lays waste to the myth of China as a peaceful, unified nation -struggling to build socialism.”

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The failure of dissidents in the West to come to terms with the Yugoslav debacle & the subsequent slaughters weighs like a nightmare on the mind & spirit of anyone trying to sort through the complex realities of the present period.

We are publishing Bob Myers’ moving testimony to international solidarity on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Bosnian genocide (see “Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia” on following page), most of which occurred between the spring and autumn of 1992.

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147,000 workers at the General Electric Corporation went on strike October 27, 1969. Today, they’re still out of work with little hope of any rapid change in their bleak situation. General Electric’s (non-) negotiators have refused to budge a comma or penny from their pitiful initial offer of a settlement far below the union’s demands.

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“Quack, Quack

I am a duck,

You are probably human

You can wear White Levis

Some people have all the luck”

—The Jefferson Airplane

Some people aren’t so lucky. Strikers against the Levi-Strauss Company in Blue Ridge, Georgia have called for a national boycott of all Levi products.

The strike action was called after 460 of the 570 Strauss workers walked off of the Blue Ridge plant to protest terrible working conditions there. The workers, mostly women, charge that the Strauss plant had located in Blue Ridge in order to exploit the underemployed workers of that region.

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DETROIT (LNS)—Workers in the automobile industry—described by The New York Times as “among the cream of the nation’s industrial workers”—are feeling the squeeze of rising prices and falling real wages.

Although pay raises have been won regularly from the big automobile giants, the increase in the cost of living has kept real wages down.

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The autonomist political theorist and strategist Mario Tronti in his classic book Operai e capital argued that weapons for working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal.

At first glance this easily can come off as a kind of hyperbole or even a contradiction. Has not it often been argued, to use feminist writer Audre Lorde’s phrasing, that it is not possible to take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? Despite the contradictions and tensions contained within his argument, Tronti said this with good reason, for he was writing from a social and historical context where this is just what was taking place. Autonomous politics in Italy emerging at this time greatly benefited from borrowing ideas and methods from bourgeois sociology and social sciences, as well as tools of management theory and industrial relations. And using these tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle that vastly changed the grounds of politics in the country and from which people have drawn much inspiration since then.

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Reprinted from the Guardian.

San Francisco—A major breakthrough in the San Francisco State College strike was achieved Feb. 7 when representatives of striking workers at the Standard Oil refinery in Richmond, across the Bay, joined with striking SF State students and teachers to call for the formation of a mutual-aid agreement in the best traditions of labor solidarity.

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One morning last week I was approached at the plant gate after my shift-by a student passing out your handouts. I spoke to him briefly, and noting the peace symbol painted on my lunchbox, he asked me to pass out your sheets in the plant on my lunch break. How can you expect workers to relate to your programs when your people are so uninformed about conditions in the plants they don’t even know a worker can be automatically fired for “distribution of unauthorized literature?”

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This was the centerfold of the May 1–7, 1975 (we were a weekly then!) Fifth Estate, as part of a special Mayday supplement. The drawing is by Gilbert Shelton, of “Fabulous, Furry, Freak Brothers” fame.

Capitalist work is a slavemaster and a thief; it steals from us our time, our creativity, our health, our humanness. It forces us to work where we don’t want, when we don’t want, to create things we don’t want for people we don’t want. Wage labor is the root of the system that robs us all of our human potential and at the same time it cannot exist without our willful cooperation in it each day we work.

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FE Note: What follows are thoughts on the revolutionary upsurge which shook France 20 years ago. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the message is that revolt is possible in modern society. In ours today, it is not the cops which prevent revolt, but the inertia of what is--the weight of the present.

The introductory section is from the fine new magazine, No Picnic, Spring 1988, Box 69393, Stn. K, Vancouver BC, Canada V5K 4W6; $1.50 per issue. The piece from Fredy Perlman, written from a participant’s viewpoint, appeared in Worker-Student Action Committees, co-authored by R. Gregoire, 1968, $2 from FE Books. The excerpt from Jacques Camatte appeared originally in FE #295, November 3, 1978 and is available at $1. Also recommended is Paris: May 1968, by Solidarity, available from FE Books for $3.

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SAN FRANCISCO — On September 5, 1987, an event occurred which may signal a breakthrough for the North American anti-war movement. Forty yards of railroad track and ties serving the Concord Naval Weapons Station (CNWS) in Port Chicago, were torn up by hundreds of protesters during and after a rally at Clyde Park, adjacent to the CNWS.

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YARGH! STOMP! GIGGLE...WOW!

SLAM! KILK! SIGH...POOT!

RRRRIP! THUD! SPOOOM! AHHHH. BONK! AAAGGHH! MUNCH! CHOFF! HEH, HEH, SPLUT! KLAT! ZZZZZZZZ, HAR, HAR, HEE, HAW, ZNIF! YUMPH!

Gothic Blimp Works is unbelievably good poetry and such (SLAM!)...I mean things is comin’ to life again.

Gothic Blimp Works is the world’s STOMP! STOMP! FLATTEN AND SMASH! And LOVE...ugh...ugh...UGH...UGH. AAAAHHHHHH!

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In preparation for the fourth World Social Forum, held in Mumbai, India, January 16–21, a call went out around the world for people to come to Delhi to work out a program of protection for water and water access to be presented to the larger gathering.

Since 2001, the World Social Forum has met to challenge the rules of investment and governance dictated by the corporate World Economic Forum. It proposes democratic, people-centered alternatives to imperialist globalization. Except for this year, it has met in Porto Allegro, Brazil.

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This issue’s sports roundup shows radical changes in fortune for many players.

Finishing last was Ali Bhutto, former prime minister of the “Islamic Republic” of Pakistan. Despite the pleas of other government leaders around the world, Ali just didn’t make the finals. Calling for leniency in his behalf were such ideological opponents as Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter, which proves once more that birds of a feather flock together. No matter what their line, politicians in general are not enthusiastic about such precedents being set. To All we can only say, you plays the game—you takes your chances.

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“No war but the class war” was the expressed motto of many radicals who refused to enlist or otherwise contribute to any national war effort. At their tenth convention in 1914, the IWW passed a resolution stating, “We as members of the industrial army will refuse to fight for any purpose except the realization of industrial freedom.”

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FE note: A quarterly publication cannot hope to keep up with fast breaking events such as the actions that have taken place against capitalist rule over the last year. However, we think it is urgent to report these stories to encourage more such activity, and also, if even belatedly, to counteract the lies posing in the corporate media as news.

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When an economic system produces 32 million unemployed in the industrialized nations, it would almost seem unnecessary to inveigh against its profound inadequacies. But several factors make it worthwhile to look at the present state of disarray in which world capitalism is currently mired.

Although some wag (either a queen, Marx or the Bible) once said that the poor have always been with us, most people know by now that this is a culture-bound observation and no more than a justification for the privilege of society’s wealthy. However, the saying is nonetheless true for the modern world.

...

You’ve heard it from the pundits, the malcontents, the radicals, even the competition.

Now we’d like to set the record straight.

We’ve made our share of mistakes. We’ve squandered more than our share of corporate dollars that go down the tubes each year. We’ve produced shabby products and covered up information about their poor quality that would hurt us in the market. We’ve overworked our employees in outmoded plants on dangerous, obsolete machinery and broken their walkout strikes when they got fed up with their conditions. And we’re willing to accept responsibility.

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It must have been like watching one of his own underground movies.

There was Ralph Pickett, manager of the Detroit Repertory Theatre and a friend, Bob, running around in the back woods of Ft. Wayne, Indiana harvesting acres of grass with Sheriff’s deputies lurking down the road waiting to make a bust.

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Support The Spring Mobilization To End The War In Vietnam.

As members of the Detroit community we declare our opposition to the illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional war being waged against the people of Vietnam. We declare it particularly to the U.S. leaders who bear ultimate responsibility for the outrages being committed in our names. We indict them thusly:

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Not if you want to succeed in business today. In the modern international marketplace, competition is tough. If the corporations which have brought us the standard of living we have recently come to enjoy are to continue doing so against an increasing foreign challenge, the killing field must be made level. The only way to do that is to do business with the Peoples’ Republic of China.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

Ann Arbor: Elise Boulding of Ann Arbor has begun a write-in campaign for Congress from the Second District of Michigan. The district, which consists of the counties of Washtenaw, Livingston, Lenawee and Monroe, is presently represented in the House of Representatives by Wes Vivian. Vivian has backed the administration’s policy in Vietnam and vacillated on HUAC. His Republican opponent, State Representative Esch, has an equally unimpressive record.

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FE Note: The anarchist novel that J.G. Eccarius wrote is The Last Days of Christ the Vampire, excerpts from which appear in the box below. It was first published in 1988 with a second edition featuring a new front and back cover which includes a quote from the Fifth Estate describing Last Days...as “one of the most wildly blasphemous books we have seen since the classics of sacrilege.”

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Studying in Paris during the intense final year (1961 through 1962) of the Algerian war for independence, I became hooked on Algeria and the potentials of revolutionary politics. In 1965 through 1966, I pursued on-site doctoral research on Algeria’s most radical political innovation after independence--a large-scale realm of worked’ self-management in farms, factories and shops throughout the country.

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a review of

Individualist Anarchism/Revolutionary Sexualism: Writings by Emile Armand. Pallaksch Press 2012 littleblackcart.com/books

This is a nice selected edition of mostly shorter tracts by the French sexpol individualist, Emile Armand (1872–1963). Alejandro De Acosta’s translations are excellent. Most informative are the essays “Life as Experiment,” “The Sexual Fantasists,” and “Revolutionary Sexualism.”

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Diane Di Prima, 1960s

archangel of fire

enwraps now melts glaciers

turf unexposed

angelic aeons trembles

naked

under a vengeful sun

--Diane DiPrima

August 3, 2002

green shack in Richmond

tag on the door sez “Merlin’s”

just that

--Diane DiPrima

March 23, 2003

Train to Sacramento

true poppies:

...

FE Note: The following is taken from the El Libertario web site. See the above article on this page for their URL.

In the last four years Venezuela has undergone a polarization induced by the top players vying for power: the old “punto fijista” bureaucracy (Fedecamaras, CTV, political parties) against the new Chavez bureaucracy that has supplanted the previous one. This antagonism, false as much as real vs. pretended exercise of power, sustained and amplified by the media, has benefited those who have cast themselves as legitimate voices of the sector of Venezuelan society they claim to represent.

...

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers has moved onto the Wayne State University Campus.

In a move to combat racism in employment and bad working conditions, members of the League have organized a group of thirty to forty black secretaries into the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racism, Exploitation and Oppression at Wayne State University.

...

The second annual Detroit Jazz Conference will be held on Saturday, April 8 and Sunday, April 9 at Wayne State University’s McGregor Memorial Conference Center, the Community Arts Auditorium and the Music Wing.

More than 75 musicians and speakers will participate in the week-end program of live performances, discussions and lecture-demonstrations. Headliners include conference artist -in-residence pianist Cecil Taylor and his quartet, guitarist Kenny Burrell, critic-author A.B. Spellman, and Frank Kofsky, FIFTH ESTATE jazz columnist.

...

Wayne State University is a working class college in a working class town. It is located in Detroit, a city which has long since taken the United Auto Workers bureaucracy into its ruling class and blunted union militancy by cooptation.

Many of the students of WSU work in Detroit’s factories and belong to unions. Almost all have come into contact with union experience through their parents.

...

After three weeks of exposes, rallies, demonstrations and meetings the Wayne Student Movement last week (May 17–18) elected three candidates to the Wayne Student-Faculty Council. Three additional candidates were elected on modified student power platforms.

The WSM has also been gaining support from the student boards of the various colleges at Wayne. The Liberal Arts Board, the Monteith Council and the School of Social Work Student Organization have endorsed the WSM six demands with qualifications.

...

Wayne University’s complicity with the war effort as well as the manifestation of student-faculty impotency in university policy making were both clearly revealed Nov. 1, when the administration of Wayne State University decided to lodge a marine recruiter on campus.

Following a rally near the south side of State Hall approximately 100 students headed by members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), Wayne State University Veterans for Peace in Vietnam and the Detroit Draft Resistance Committee protested the presence on campus of Captain Frank Huey, marine recruiting officer for the area south of Marquette, Mich.

...

<em>

Anarchy 101</em>, edited by Dot Matrix, is a crowd-sourced introduction to anarchist ideas. The content comes from the website anarchy101.org, which poses and answers ongoing questions it receives. They represent the best responses from dozens of contributors to hundreds of queries about the “Beautiful Idea: this thing called anarchy,” as Ardent Press, the book’s publisher, puts it. See ardentpress.com.

...

Previous to this era, opponents of capitalism, particularly marxists, but also anarchists, saw the internal contradictions inherent in the political economy as the basis of the system’s overthrow; the working class was to be the agency of revolution. Other marxist theorists postulated that resistance to imperialist domination and colonial oppression, or a revolutionary peasantry, could carry out this task.

...

While Time magazine was announcing the computer as its Man-of-the Year, Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor presently in command of the most sophisticated computerized system of annihilation in history, had something else in mind.

Calling Americans “hungry for a spiritual revival,” the President decided to designate 1983 as the Year of the Bible, and told diplomats and politicians at a National Prayer Breakfast that “America will not go forward” without faith in God.

...

Liberation News Service — Soldiers are shipping out for Vietnam from West Coast embarkation points at a rate that recalls the 1966 build-up—1,700 one day, 3,000 the next. The Oakland Army Terminal is so jammed with GIs on their way to war that hundreds had to sleep out in pup tents during the torrential rains of early January.

...

LONDON The cartoon about the Beatles, “Yellow Submarine” is a watershed movie that could change the pictorial content of all movies and the style of cartoons for all time

Full of puns, (Ringo, rescued by the U.S. Cavalry after being chased by Indians, describes his adventure as “arrowing”), pictorial tricks (clouds patterned like Mexican blankets), thought-provoking jokes (vicious dog with four heads, all pulling different ways) it is a melange of all the commercial and pop art tricks of the past decade.

...

The message relayed by the U.S. Strategic Air Command headquarters’ computer was unmistakable—Soviet missile attack! SAC B-52 bomber engines roared to life, their bomb bays laden with 20-megaton thermonuclear weapons; intercontinental ballistic systems were switched to command function—all that was necessary was the order from the President and the Armageddon of World War Three would commence.

...

Sometimes we have arguments about whether it is appropriate for anarchist-types to be participating in officially sanctioned political events with double-speak names like “public hearing” held before bogus, paid-off boards with Ministry of Truth names like “Michigan Air Pollution Control Commission.” Like the one held April 17^th to validate a backroom deal between the City of Detroit and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) called a “consent order,” made to allow the Detroit trash incinerator to keep burning even though they couldn’t come up with a test result that didn’t grossly violate emissions standards—standards which consider 79 deaths per million residents an acceptable risk.

...

Reprinted from The Berkeley Barb

The death of the ballot, the birth of the bullet—here is the choice—contemptuously thrust in our face by this decadent racist power structure: racist pig Humphrey, racist pig Nixon, racist pig Wallace for President! So where do we go from here?

Into the streets! Into the alleys! Back of town! Onto the rooftops! Behind whatever shelter remains for a black person here in Babylon!

...

The virtual vacuum that has been left in the wake of SDS’s floundering may be filled by the New Youth International Party. With repression growing and the need for a national organization crucial, YIP looks promising as a junction for the vast but disparate political energy the movement is developing.

...

NEW YORK—The Yippies died for a few months this year, partly from under-exposure and partly because, as Abbie Hoffman believes, “the establishment became even more absurd than the idea of YIP.” Hoffman is one of the leaders of the Youth International Party (YIP or Yippies for short).

YIP has renewed its plans for the Chicago Festival of Life conceived last December and forgotten in the mayhem of this year’s politics. The dates of the Festival are August 25–30 and will coincide with Democratic Party Death Convention.

...

What kind

of anarch

am I

on my

best days?

The kind

that eludes

the prisons of

“ists” and “isms”

for the

freedom

of the

“Y”.

Why?

That is

the question.

During

my childhood

daze

my mother

dismissed

my incessant

questioning

of her

authority

(my why-ning

as she called it)

with her favorite

parental

pronouncement,

“Y

is a

crooked letter.”

...

(This column discusses basic “tune in” methods. The next installment suggests harmonious “dropout” methods.)

Psychedelic drugs make it possible to reach a wide range of consciousness. The experienced psychedelic religionist can move consciousness from one level to another, just like focusing a microscope or telescope.

...

It was mid-August, and after singing at various events, mainly ones commemorating the bombing of Hiroshima, I was supposed to be switching planes, en route from Fukuoka to Christchurch, New Zealand, via Tokyo and Auckland. When I got paged over the intercom to the All Nippon Airways desk I was nervous, but figured it was something about a seat assignment on the flight from Narita to Auckland that I was about to board. When the woman from ANA handed me a cell phone and said that someone from New Zealand Immigration in Auckland wanted to talk to me, I was suddenly feeling fatalistic.

...

It doesn’t take an astute observer to point out that an increasingly important product of our society is death and disease. Neutron bombs, cruise missiles, satellite warfare, radioactive wastes, carcinogenic drinking water, mercury poisoning, chemical plagues, industrially-induced cancers, all are prominent parts of our daily lives.

...

A recent addition has been made to the folk scene in the name of John Stewart. He is currently touring key cities to promote his new Capitol album, “California Bloodlines.” The Fifth Estate spoke to him at Baker’s Lounge.

His producer is Nick Venet who has given us such sounds in the past as The Association and The Lovin’ Spoonful.

...

In the garden of 45 Colorado, Highland Park — 1981. Mel Rosas, Stephen Goodfellow, Alan Franklin, Ralph Franklin, Lowell Boileau & Silver

With a name like the Layabouts, it should come as no surprise that Detroit’s Cass Corridor premier anarchist dance band has taken 15 years to produce a follow-up recording to 1985’s blazing combination of infectious beats and insurrectionary lyrics, No Masters.

...

The sphere of politics has gone full-circle with the newly organized Oakland County Chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom.

In the past, YAF has been considered a right-wing, conservative organization. Recently, the Oakland County YAF under the chairmanship of Terry Epton passed resolutions against the draft and against “laws regulating the sale possession and use of marijuana.”

...

When Saturday matinees were only two bits and weekly serials dragged on endlessly, James Bond was barely a flicker on a distant horizon. Broccoli and Saltzman with Panavision, Technicolor, United Artists, Sean Connery and a bottomless shipload of gimmickry have thrown us back to our childhood.

Until now, the most un-cinematic bait drew the fish out of the woodwork; Lesbians, homosexuals, a sadistic grandmother, a unique air corps and a frequently bedridden James Bond. The utter shock of the latest Bond thriller is that it really clears the deck and settles down to telling an exciting story.

...

this courtroom is a public urinal reeking

with the suicidal odor of protocol

the oily horror of boredom illuminates my nausea

on a never ending ride into the hinterlands

of the loneliest chaos I have ever known

does the defendant waive time?

my lawyer winks flirtatiously

yes, your honor

he learned his ABCs

...

Part II of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #273, June 1976.

The American health care system is currently undergoing a barrage of criticism from every corner; particularly, it has become fair game for dissection on the pages of newspapers all over the country. Last month the Detroit Free Press headlined a front page story “Doctors Blamed for Health Costs,” with a subhead running beneath it which read: “Study Cites Monopoly Fees; Hospital Bills Triple in a Decade.”

...

Part I of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #272, May, 1976.

“Horse sense and humanitarianism dictate that we phase out most and probably all municipal hospitals before the end of the century.”

—New York Commissioner of Health Lowell Benin, speaking to a group of businessmen, March 5, 1976.

“We’re going to have to operate pretty much like a private hospital; if a patient can’t pay he won’t be admitted. Patients may have to sell their homes for care. We can’t deprive a student of his education to finance a patient who can’t pay.”

—Chancellor Elmer Learn of the University of California at Davis, on the occasion of the university’s takeover of a public hospital in 1972.

...

The color of the Statue of Liberty

Grows ever more deathly pale

As, loving freedom with bullets

You shoot at yourself, America.

You can kill yourself this way!

It is dangerous to go out

Into this hellish world,

But it is still more dangerous

To hide in the bushes

There is a smell on earth of a universal

...

With the weather warming up, people will be into all kinds of radical activity and crazy shit. If you are into it or see it happening, give us a call at 831–6800 or send it in to us at 4403 Second, Detroit, 48201.

As we go to press, the news just came in that black students at the Orchard Ridge campus of Oakland Community College held a sit-in, trash-in today at the school.

...

The second issue of the Youth News Service was sent out on February 25. The news packet was sent to some 43 high school and youth collectives who are putting out underground newspapers or are thinking of starting them.

The Fifth Estate is turning over a back office to the Youth News Coalition to use as a general Office.

...

NOTE: Costa-Gavras, the director of “Z,” was born in Athens, Greece in 1933. In 1964 he made his first film, “The Sleeping Car Murders” and since has completed “One Man Too Many” and “The Avowal.” While in New York for the opening of “Z,” he was interviewed by Dan Georgakas, a writer who is active in the anti-junta movement, a past contributor to the Fifth Estate who was in Greece in 1963 during the Lambrakis affair, and Gary Crowdus, editor of Cineaste Magazine.

...

The calendar is prepared by Fifth Estate calendar girls Karen Kovac and Naiomi Epil with cooperation from Detroit Adventure. Copy deadline is the 6^th and 22^nd of each month and should be sent to the Fifth Estate, Calendar 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

SUN OCT 15

DANCE/CONCERT. The Cream plus the Rationals, the Apostles, the Thyme in a no — age — limit show at the Grande Ballroom, Grand River at Beverly from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Adm. 10/15.

...

Excerpted from Fifth Estate #367–368, Spring-Summer 2005 40^th anniversary issue. This is an edited version of Don’s essay.

The design shows a pyramid surmounted by an eye being blasted by a bolt of lightning. Bannered beneath the collapsing pyramid is the motto, “NON SERVIAM.”

If English, Spanish, Italian, or French is your native tongue, then you can probably guess the Latin translation: “I will not serve.” The phrase is taken from Paradise Lost (1674) by the radical poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, wherein the archangel Lucifer refuses to obey God and is cast into the frozen lake of Hell for his rebelliousness.

...

The design shows a pyramid surmounted by an eye being blasted by a bolt of lightning. Bannered beneath the collapsing pyramid is the motto, “NON SERVIAM.”

If English, Spanish, Italian, or French is your native tongue, then you can probably guess the Latin translation: “I will not serve.” The phrase is taken from Paradise Lost (1674) by the radical poet of the English Revolution, John Milton, wherein the archangel Lucifer refuses to obey God and is cast into the frozen lake of Hell for his rebelliousness.

...

What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist?

If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves?

Does the flag move? Does the wind move?

Does the revolutionary movement move?

What is your original nature--before May ’68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?

Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638–713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183–1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200–1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685–1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.

...

Smiling and serene Michio Kushi arrived in Detroit Tuesday, the 31^st day of January to talk about his life work, Macrobiotics. To audiences that night at the residence of Bill Reid and Ken Burns and at Jim Semark’s the next, he explained that Macrobiotics is a dietary approach to living based on the principle of yin and yang, two terms for which he has been unable to find an equivalent in our language.

...

Ugly nationalism is surfacing everywhere. It is important for those who oppose the State to reject any and all forms it may take. The following addresses the problem in Canada, but applies to all nationalisms.

from A comrade from Quebec, with FE editing

As the orgy of nationalist stupidity approaches its climax, there has never been a better time to reappropriate the word sovereignty. Never has a need for autonomy been more painfully urgent than it is today. But now that Capital and the State occupy almost all the terrain, our minds become the only space that is usually left. The power of the courts, cops, bosses, and bureaucrats of the present and future States is awesome and undeniable. But for us, these institutions have no legitimacy and will have none in the future State.

...

Zerowork No. 1; Available from P.O. Box 515, Station C, Toronto, Ontario, Canada or through Ammunition Books (see further in this issue).

The last few years have seen the appearance of few new journals, even fewer of which are worth taking seriously. Zerowork, however, is one of the exceptions. Despite a density of text and an absence of graphics and photographs, this journal is well worth reading.

...

Bob Brubaker’s defense of agriculture [this issue, FE #330, Winter, 1988–89] seems to have two main components, one in which agriculture itself recedes in favor of “symbolic exchange.” Here it is argued that “symbolism, not agriculture, was the sun around which primitive life revolved,” and that “where there is symbolic interaction with nature, ecological destruction doesn’t take place.” But while it is more pleasant to hear the voices of ceremonials and rituals than to contemplate the ravages of agriculture, reality must also be encountered.

...

Five-legged beast carved in basalt. Face of a Babylonian warlord and body of a desert flesh eater. His eyes saw for centuries into black sand and dust, into the thickened skin of the earth. Cities and cities, temples and temples, mountains of bone above him as a grave. He is a protective godling, seeing forward and seeing nothing.

...

a review of

War of Dreams: A Field Guide to DIY Psy-Ops by Jason Rodgers. PM Press, 2024

At the height of the zine movement in the 1990s, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands—what could be thought of as armies of people—would march off to their post office boxes every day to engage in an ongoing assault on mainstream culture using low-circulation publications as their weapons of choice.

...

a review of

The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East by David Hirst. Second Edition, 1984, Faber and Faber, 475 pp., £12.50.

In Mein Weltbild (1934) Albert Einstein identified Judaism with a specific “moral attitude” to life: “the essence of that conception seems to me to lie in an affirmative attitude to the life of all creation. The life of the individual only has meaning insofar as it aids in making the life of every living thing nobler and more beautiful. Life is sacred, that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.” Yet in this same work, the great thinker and lover of peace and human brotherhood defended the Zionist realization of “Judaism” in Palestine

...

Today (1973) a new imperialist war breaks out in the Middle East and the vicarious social-patriots who constitute today’s established “left” can hardly contain themselves in their eagerness to rush to the defence of one bourgeoisie against the other.

A few social-democrats and left-wing Zionists declare their solidarity with “plucky little Israel” against “Arab aggression”, ignoring the fact that the state of Israel is fighting a war over conquered territories, over vital raw materials such as the Sinai oil-fields, which now supply almost all of Israel’s oil, over Israel’s “right” to continue her repression and exploitation of thousands of Arab workers and peasants in the “administered areas”.

...

This short account by Liberation News Service of Zionism’s sordid history as a white settler, colonialist movement barely scratches the surface in terms of the magnitude of the injustices committed in the name of the Jewish people, but should not in any way imply support for any of the Palestinian Nationalist groups who claim to speak for the refugees.

...

This article is an excerpt from Our Roots Are Still Alive: The Story of the Palestinian People, by The Peoples Press Palestine Book Project, published by the leftist newspaper The Guardian and is available through the FE Book Service.

[In 1947] The United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP), which had no African or Arab members, recommended by a narrow margin that Palestine be divided into a Jewish and an Arab state. The partition plan granted 55 percent of Palestine to the Jews, who were 30 percent of the population and owned only 6 percent of the land. Some 407,000 Arabs, a number nearly equal to the number of Jews, were to live in the area assigned to the Jewish state. The Arab state was to include ten thousand Jews and 725,000 Arabs in the remaining 45 percent of Palestine.

...