Full list of texts

BI ANY OTHER NAME: BISEXUAL PEOPLE SPEAK OUT edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu

Rejected by both Gay and Straight worlds, bisexuals have been a community in exile. With this rich and varied collection, however, bisexual women and men step forward into their own historical spotlight. The writing here can only deepen our discussion about passion and politics.

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Bolo Bolo, Anarchy Comix & other FE Favorites

SOCIETY AGAINST THE STATE by Pierre Clastres

Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing, he refuses the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a critique of Western society.

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Forget those L.L. Bean and Harry & David catalogs! When you’re picking out presents for the holidays, send revolutionary literature as gifts and help support independent publishers and booksellers. If you want a wider selection of anti-authoritarian titles, contact Left Bank Books, 92 Pike St., Seattle WA 98101; tel and fax: 206-622-0195; or AK Press, P.O. Box 40682, San Francisco CA 94140; tel: 415-864-0892.

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ANARCHY OR CHAOS by George Woodcock

Written as World War II raged around him, Woodcock’s brief history of anarchism is filled with youthful enthusiasm.

Lysander Spooner, 124 pp. $9.50

THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE, by Raoul Vaneigem

First published in France in 1967, this book complements Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle which appeared the same year. The main programmatic statements of the Situationist International, these works played a large part in the gestation of the French 1968 May events.

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It already seems like a long time ago, but this past June three of us from the Fifth Estate staff headed out by train to New Mexico for our first Earth First! (EF!) Round River Rendezvous (RRR). This was the tenth annual RRR, which EF! describes as its yearly “tribal celebration.”

Needless to say, after the past couple of years of argument, discussion and heated exchange between Fifth Estate writers and people in EF! (see FE’s Fall 1987 through Spring 1989), we undertook the journey with excitement and a bit of trepidation. We were anxious to meet more of the faces behind the words, and though we had received warm invitations from several EF! individuals, we also received a few not so warm challenges to attend, and we weren’t sure we’d be welcomed by all.

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As a public service, the Fifth Estate will present eight times daily, newscasts on WABX, Detroit’s contemporary radical FM station.

With a little help from our friends, the broadcasts will be a success. We are asking for high school and college students in all areas served by WABX (Detroit, Ann Arbor, Jackson, East Lansing, Flint, Port Huron and Toledo) to phone all newsworthy items to the Fifth Estate office (831–6800).

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“It’s getting better all the time. I admit it’s getting better.”

—The Beatles

Things are getting better at the Fifth Estate, although you’d never know it by looking at our office windows. Last week we lost them to a fire bomb at 3:00 in the morning. The front part of the reception area was gutted and bundles of old issues were destroyed.

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The FIFTH ESTATE is growing like wild marijuana.

Our current press run is 8,000 newspapers and our newsstands have been empty a week because we didn’t have the papers to fill them. If this keeps up, our circulation before the summer will be 10,000 paid. Figuring at least three readers per copy that makes thirty thousand readers every issue.

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The coming of summer has meant a great increase in activity in the Warren Forest area near Wayne State University.

Trans-Love Energies Unlimited, the Detroit hippie cooperative with offices located in the center of The Forest, at John Lodge and Warren, has reorganized its facilities in order to better serve the community and the Fifth Estate has moved its offices to 1107 W. Warren in Warren Forest. A cooperative store and trading post recently opened in the Artists’ Workshop under the direction of Dennis and Janet Smith and Pun the sandal-maker, and, in the biggest move, Trans-Love agents will open a huge concert-house, THE SEE, on the outskirts of The Forest, at 3929 Woodward just south of Alexandrine.

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Seventeen years after a lawsuit begun by social activists, including this newspaper, against the Detroit Police Red Squad, the sordid episode of cop spying has almost come to its climax. During its 50-year history of dogging radicals, peeping over transoms, paying informers and keeping the most excruciatingly detailed list of license plate numbers taken from cars at radical gatherings, the gumshoes managed to amass over one million names in their files.

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To be a teenager in western Europe today is to enjoy a freedom of movement only dreamed about by American young people. During the summer, while most American kids are sitting home watching reruns on T.V., their European counterparts are out on the road.

Of course, the geographical makeup of the Continent makes travel not only possible, but irresistible.

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EDITOR & PUBLISHER

Harvey Ovshinsky

MANAGING EDITOR

Peter Werbe

NEWS & POLITICAL EDITORS

R. Fleck & F. Joyce

ART & LAYOUT

Gary Grimshaw

EDITORIAL Assistant

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Wilson Lindsey

PHOTOGRAPHY

E. Bacilla, Wilson Lindsey, Magdaline Sinclair

TRAVEL EDITOR

Sheil Salashnek

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

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Editor & publisher

Harvey Ovshinsky

Managing Editor

Peter Werbe

News and Political Editors

R. Fleck & F. Joyce

Art & Layout

Gary Grimshaw

Editorial assistant:

Cathy West

Circulation

Wilson Lindsey

Photography

E. Bacilla, Willson Lindsey, Magdaline Sinclair

Travel editor

Sheil Salasnek

...

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

NEWS EDITOR

Frank Joyce

ART

Gary Grimshaw

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

John Sinclair

CALENDAR

Rhona Whipple

FILM EDITORS

Joe Fineman

Shirley Hamburg

ADVERTISING

Leon Brenner

CIRCULATION

Wilson Lindsey

TRAVEL EDITOR

Sheil Salasnek

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It had to happen eventually, and it did. That repository of pre-masticated mediocrity, that script for dullards, Time magazine, declared its “Man-of-the-Year” a machine-of-the-year, the computer. The magazine gave a lavish spread to this loathsome invasion, joining in the corporate chorus with its declaration, “A new world beckons.”

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Working on what was called, People’s Park Annex, 1969.

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), in the late 1960s, demolished 200 Berkeley homes to trench and submerge their rail system. BART then filled in tons of dirt on top of the tube it built and in this way “reclaimed” the land that it bulldozed.

It strip-mined Berkeley to submerge the trains and above left four blocks along Hearst Avenue a barren, ugly field of dust in summer and mud in winter. An eyesore. BART officials said that they didn’t have funds (or mental bandwidth?) to develop it, that is, monetize it.

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A preliminary statewide planning meeting of a group formed to combat the special state Senate Investigating Committee looking into campus problems will be held March 15.

The Michigan Coalition for Political Freedom will meet at St. Joseph’s Church that Saturday at 10:30 am. The coalition represents student, faculty and citizen groups from across the state.

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“One day at noon in a busy street of Athens, a refrigerator crate was unloaded to the pavement and soon the thing began talking. ‘Patriots,’ it boomed, ‘listen and do not interrupt me. Anybody who touches me will be blown up.’

“A long speech from the Greek Patriotic Front followed, interrupted at intervals by the warning: Do not touch! Danger of explosion!’ When, in spite of this, a policeman touched the crate, sparks flashed out from it. He jumped back and the speech continued.

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a review of

Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly by Peter Cole. PM Press, 2021

One of the hardest tasks for an historian of the working class is telling the story of the organizer whose greatest talent is organizing their fellow workers while remaining anonymous. If not for historian Peter Cole’s book, Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, Fletcher might still be unknown to us today.

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a review of

Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

“I began to identify as an anarchist nearly 20 years ago, after a demonstration where I realized that the people cooking the food, doing the dishes, and administering first-aid were mostly anarchists. Rather than a rigid political doctrine, I understand anarchism as an ethical stance focused on making justice and caring for each other without hierarchy, without asking permission from power-brokers, and with whatever tools we have available. I call on these ethics daily.”

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In September 2004, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) declared January 2, 2005 to be “Doomsday.” Unless the transportation department received $87 million from the state legislature, city bureaucrats threatened that Chicago’s public transit system would be slashed by 20 percent, eliminating numerous bus routes, overnight elevated train service (the “El”), and 1250 jobs.

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As we go to press, the Empire is preparing for war against Iraq, and as you read this, the war may have already commenced. Or perhaps the saber rattling will continue until the mighty technological imperial blade falls as an October surprise to enhance the electoral fortunes of the ruling party. Or, maybe the bloody, high altitude rampage against that already-destroyed land will come the day after the election, as some have suggested, or, by January of next year, or, at some other date convenient to the needs of oil and politics.

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A review of

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade. Verso 2020

With Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), the trans activist and law professor Dean Spade challenges the reader, and the radical left as a whole, to realize the power of Mutual Aid in collective struggles toward liberation. Spade helps to define the long and often untold history of Mutual Aid as an act of “building subversive networks of care which are of utmost importance to engage, radicalize, and directly provide for our communities.” Citing revolutionary history and contemporary struggle from the Black Panther Party, the efforts of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, to Hong Kong’s anti-government protest movement, Spade has dropped in our collective laps an easy-to-read road map toward seeding, cultivating, and strengthening our movements, exactly when we needed it most.

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It’s rumored that the Wayne State University Artists Society is planning a film festival. They’ve gotten some money from the University and feel that a festival would be a good way to use it, and, perhaps make some more money. Due to the time thing I’m going to have to beg off on giving more information, since the plan has only been in existence for a few days.

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The other night the ACLU presented the premiere of Paul Stookey’s film THE CULVERT, along with RELAX YOUR MIND by Tom Berman and Chris Frayne, and FIVE SHORT FILMS and L’HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT by George Manupelli. The program was very enjoyable, in fact it was an intriguing way to spend an hour plus.

The first film shown was FIVE SHORT FILMS, which was a collection of experiments with abstract flashes with a soundtrack comprised of various sounds synchronized to the images. The five films were titled: FILM FOR HOODED PROJECTOR: I LOVE YOU, DO NOT BE AFRAID; SAY NOTHING ABOUT THIS TO ANYONE; I MUST SEE YOU CONCERNING A MATTER OF THE UTMOST URGENCY: and IF YOU LEAVE ME I WILL KILL MYSELF. The audience as usually happens with films of this type, tended to become uneasy, but I found that if you just kind of sit there and let the thing overpower you, it can be kind of a strange trip. Although, I’ll have to admit that I too got tired of it after a while. But then maybe I missed the point.

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Maybe film was only playing possum. It sure looked dead, though... Nothing was happening. The few people I had managed to find that were interested in film were leaving town. Most of the good theaters were closing. There was obviously no hope. Then I wrote a couple columns for The Fifth Estate and BHANG, the floodgates opened. Things started happening. So many things that I can’t really cover them in depth, because of a lack of space and information; I just haven’t had time to learn all that I want to learn about them. All I can do is mention them and promise to elaborate sometime in the future.

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Well you see it was something like this. Larry Weiner (formerly mentioned in this column), Detroit film-maker, has finally gotten everything together for his long planned sequence for his long in the making film. The sequence involves some junior executive types walking through the Fisher Building, through the tunnel, in and out of the General Motors Building, dressed in turtle shells.

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In the last issue of the Fifth Estate [FE #14, September 15, 1966] I said that film was dead in Detroit. I wrote that shortly after arriving in San Francisco, and have since managed to see what film makers here are doing to promote films and film making in the Bay area.

The film makers in this area have banded together and are forming the Canyon Cinema Co-op, patterned after the Filmmakers Co-op in New York, the arrangement being that anyone who has a film that they would like to see distributed arranges to have it listed in the co-op’s catalogue, and every time the film is rented the film-maker receives 75% of the rental fee and the co-op gets 25% to help cover operating expenses.

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When you see “Goodbye, Columbus,” you think how amazing-that this crew of film makers could take such familiar material and make it so fresh.

Throughout the whole movie, right from the opening shots of a swimming pool, I was plagued by the notion that director Larry Peerce was somehow capitalizing on “The Graduate,” but by the end -I had relaxed and decided “So what?” if Peerce could make a better movie than Nichols’, or even one of equal quality, the more power to him.

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A little over a year ago I was a bit disturbed by the slight attention given the 12 victims of “Bonnie and Clyde’s” career. When I suggested that the movie should have given equal time to the victim’s point of view, a fan shot back, “What the hell kind of a picture would that be?”

Well, now, thanks to Francois Truffaut (who directed “400 Blows,” “Jules and Jim,” etc.) the question has been answered. “The Bride Wore Black” is a detailed account of how a woman kills five men to avenge her husband’s death, but the main focus of the film (interestingly enough) Is on the victims, rather than on the murderess.

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“Alice’s Restaurant” is a good film and makes for a reasonably enjoyable evening’s entertainment. Several passages are even outstanding. But a revolutionary anthem it ain’t. Which, granted it never promised to be, but Arlo Guthrie’s laughing, sardonic musical manslaughter could have been turned into a fantastic, frantically fruitful film, not just a good one. And it’s too bad.

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When you see “The First Time” you begin to think that this “Graduate” bit is becoming a pretty poor excuse for a movie.

This time the striking Jacqueline Bisset has the Mrs. Robinson role, and Wes Stern, Rick Kelman, and Wink Roberts all comprise the Benjamin Braddock figure, working under the assumption that three Dustin Hoffmanns are more fun than one.

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You can’t turn on the news these days without hearing about unemployment. The national unemployment rate hovers at about 8.3 percent, although experts agree that the number of people outof-work far exceeds that figure.

The 8.3 percent figure only reflects the number of people actually looking for work. It does not count the growing number of people who have stopped looking for work.

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Dear Contestants,

As most of you know, things were getting pretty hot here at Teamsters Headquarters what with the “little guy” about to run for the presidency of our union and threatening to spill the beans about the Pension Fund and our links with the Mafia. Well me and some of the guys thought it best if Jimmy sort of disappeared; you know, take a sort of ‘extended vacation.’ Since then, everybody from his family to the FBI has been trying to find him.

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This first issue of Fire Ant, an anarchist prison solidarity zine, is published by Robcat and the incredibly energetic comrades in rural Maine.

It is a long term project for and with anarchist prisoners specifically, not a general prisoner support publication.

The goals are to raise material aid for imprisoned anarchists, spread information about imprisoned anarchists and anarchy, and foster communication between imprisoned and free roaming anarchists.

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Middle Tennessee anarchists and community organizers gathered at Nashville’s Belmont United Methodist Church on May Day, traditionally a worker’s holiday, to celebrate their vision of social justice, and are working to create a vision for the Firebrand, a proposed community center in East Nashville.

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While the idea for Nashville’s Firebrand Community Center and Infoshop was born in 2003, the collective finally found its current home in 2008 as part of the shared Little Hamilton Collective space on Little Hamilton Road near the city’s downtown.

A member of the original organizing group, Ryan Kaldari explains the roots of the project: “The idea for the Firebrand was conceived immediately after the 2003 Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) protests in Miami. The idea that emerged was to set up an infoshop so that political radicals in Nashville could have a public space to use for events, education, and organizing.”

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“Unlike the French uprising of May-June 1968, the youth rebellion of November 2005 had no demands and no critique; just the fires.”

--Le Monde Libertaire

Early in November 2005, three young men were trying to escape from being questioned by police and took refuge inside an electric transformer in Clichy-sous-Bois, a poor working class suburb outside Paris. Two of them were electrocuted and the third was severely burned.

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Over the past year, 58 GI antiwar newspapers published by and for GIs have sprung up on bases around the country and overseas—substantially augmenting the quality of news and analysis for GIs who previously had access only to such military publications as Stars and Stripes—the official mouthpiece of the brass and lifers.

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“Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a point higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?”

—Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

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Mutiny. This word, fearsome to the brass of any army (but joyful to anti-war activists), was left out of October 2004 media accounts about a US Army Reserve unit whose soldiers refused to deliver fuel along a route in Iraq they considered too dangerous to travel.

Eighteen soldiers, including the commander of the 343^rd Quarter-master Company, refused to under-take a fuel delivery north of Baghdad in what they characterized as a “suicide mission,” given the frequency of attacks and the lack of armor for their unit. The commander was relieved of duty with the hope that the entire incident could be swept under a rug already showing great bulges from previous sweepings.

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Mutiny. This word, fearsome to the brass of any army (but joyful to anti-war activists), was left out of October media accounts about a US Army Reserve unit whose soldiers refused to deliver fuel along a route in Iraq they considered too dangerous to travel.

Eighteen soldiers, including the commander of the 343^rd Quarter-master Company, refused to under-take a fuel delivery north of Baghdad in what they characterized as a “suicide mission,” given the frequency of attacks and the lack of armor for their unit. The commander was relieved of duty with the hope that the entire incident could be swept under a rug already showing great bulges from previous sweepings.

...

In “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill invoked Malcolm X’s comments immediately following the assassination of president John F. Kennedy as he maintained that American foreign policy provoked the attacks on New York. At root in the controversy was Churchill’s comparison of Americans to the “good Germans” of Nazi Germany and his now famous phrase about “the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers.”

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His sunglasses blended with his cropped, black hair, his burnished, obsidian skin toasted from hours toiling under salt-sprayed sun when he’d proudly commandeered, he said, not the rusty white cab cutting through Manila’s Gordian traffic knot, but a sleek, hand-hewn wooden banca,

its bow a knife slicing through the silvery-teal waters off of Masbate Island, taking his place in his age-old clan vocation gathering Neptune’s gifts. But no, not anymore, he said—all these, rejoinders to my polite reply to his innocuous question, how are you, ma’am, as I slid into

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“The MC5 always lose the first time,” according to Wayne Kramer, lead guitar with the group.

Wayne was speaking about the band’s bad scene with Elektra records.

The 5, now based on a ten-acre hideout near Hamburg, Michigan goes through more externally imposed changes than any band in history.

The cancellation of their contract by Elektra was unprecedented in recording business history. The record company released a super hot band with a record in the top 30 albums nationally because Elektra President Jac Holzman couldn’t relate to the band’s high-energy assault tactics.

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(Reprin

ted from the Toronto Star) The Cartoon panels show a middle aged chubby woman gesturing with her hands and body as she speaks, clasping hands, putting them in front of her, away from her body, close to her body. She says:

1. “His father talked to him. He said ‘Let the GOVERNMENT worry about RESPONSIBILITY! All YOU have to do is drop the bombs!’ But it was no use. He’d just start yelling about WARSAW.

2. “I talked to him. I said ‘Let the GOVERNMENT worry about MORALITY! All YOU have to do is burn the villages!’ But he wouldn’t listen. He’d just start yelling about HITLER.

3. “His teacher talked to him. He said ‘Let the GOVERNMENT worry about NATIONAL GUILT! All YOU have to do is gun down the silly peasants!’ But he paid no attention. He’d just start yelling about BELSEN.

4. “Our minister talked to him. He said ‘Let the GOVERNMENT worry about HUMAN DIGNITY! All YOU have to do is NAPALM the women and children!’ But it had no effect. He’d just start yelling about NUREMBERG.

5. “So the day his draft card arrived he left for CANADA! He’s living there now in some place called YORTVILLE or something! I didn’t raise my boy to be a Canadian!”

1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

2. Donate. Postal and printing costs continue to rise making financial stability an increasing challenge to publications which refuse commercial advertising. Donations also allow us to continue sending free subscriptions to prisoners and GIs.

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1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

2. Donate. Postal and printing costs continue to rise, making financial stability an increasing challenge to publications which refuse commercial advertising. Donations also allow us to continue sending free subscriptions to prisoners and GIs.

3. Distribute the FE. Sell or give away current or back issues. Get stores in your area to sell the magazine. Use them for tabling. Take them to events and demos. Bulk back issues are available for the cost of postage. Write us at fe@fifthestate.org for info.

4. Hold a fundraiser for the FE. A house party or an event not only provides revenue for the magazine, but gets people together that share similar ideas.

5. Become an FE Sustainer. Sustainers pledge a certain amount each issue or yearly above the subscription fee to assure our continuing publishing, and receive each issue by First Class mail.

1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

2. Donate. Postal and printing costs continue to rise making financial stability an increasing challenge to publications which refuse commercial advertising. Donations also allow us to continue sending free subscriptions to prisoners & GIs.

...

1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

2. Donate. Postal and printing costs continue to rise, making financial stability an increasing challenge to publications which refuse commercial advertising. Donations also allow us to continue sending free subscriptions to prisoners and GIs.

3. Distribute the FE. Sell or give away current or back issues. Get stores in your area to sell the magazine. Use them for tabling. Take them to events and demos. Bulk back issues are available for the cost of postage. Write us at fe@fifthestate.org for info.

4. Hold a fundraiser for the FE. A house party or an event not only provides revenue for the magazine, but gets people together that share similar ideas.

5. Become an FE Sustainer. Sustainers pledge a certain amount each issue or yearly above the subscription fee to assure our continuing publishing, and receive each issue by First Class mail.

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.”

—Tom Stoppard

Electoral fraud is as old as elections. Societies that brag about traditions of electoral democracy can also claim a continuous history of electoral crime and chicanery. It’s a safe bet that large-scale electoral racketeering will not end with the Florida flimflam of 2000 and the judicial coup d’etat that installed the Bush-Cheney regime.

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WABX strikes again. The Phantoms of Underground Radio deliver yet another coup d’etat with their broadcasting of nine cuts from the new Beatles album.

I really don’t believe anybody would name an album “Sexy Sadie.” Now there’s several old ladies in Bloomfield Hills who are gonna have to buy this for somebody. And are they going to say the word “s-e-x-y” in a public record shop? No way!

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Pun Plamondon is still in jail in Traverse City in lieu of $20,000 bond. We haven’t been able to get an attorney to work for him for free, and we can’t possibly get the bond up. If there are any attorneys out there who are interested in working on this or similar cases out of the goodness of their stoned little hearts, please contact us at Trans-Love, 769–2017 in Ann Arbor or through the Fifth Estate office in Detroit. Also, any donations to the Trans-Love Defense Fund can be sent to 1510 Hill Street, Ann Arbor 48104.

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As the Fifth Estate goes to press we received word that the Michigan Secretary of State has certified the Michigan New Politics Party to appear on the November Ballot.

In a telephone interview with state party chairman, Bert Garskoff, he stated that the party will quickly hold a state convention where many feel Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver’s name will be put in nomination as the party’s presidential nominee.

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For anyone who wanted a late Christmas present, the Fleetwood Mac at the Grande Ballroom provided a good one. Score one against all the Blue Cheer fans who said the Mac were “another British blues group.”

But, for those of you who didn’t see them, go the next time. I always find it amazing when so many people in the hierarchy of the group world treat music as something which means something to them and nothing to others.

...

In this cafeteria flies swarm the recruiter’s cropped hair.

“One thing I hate—” he spits out—“flies!”

His dominant hand swipes the air. Pure reflex.

.

In this same room girls carry plastic babies, lifeless until

internal mechanisms inspire crying when

they haven’t been fed, haven’t slept, are jarred in some way.

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Firestorm Books, a fifteen-year-old collectively-run anarchist bookstore and community event space in Asheville, N.C., is sending back thousands of children’s books banned from the Duval County Public School system in Florida.

The queer- and trans-owned bookstore has given away thousands of copies each of over fifty different titles exploring topics from racism and colonialism to social movement history and visionary organizing.

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Newport, Rhode Island is an old, almost dingy New England town whose saving graces are a beautiful Atlantic beach and the music festivals held every year there. The weather is hot in the day and cold in the night, but the inhabitants are cold almost all of the time. However, when a few thousand folk fans decide to bask in the afternoon sun for some musical workshops and to warm up the night and the town with some evening concerts and quite a few sleeping bodies in the park, folkies usually do it right.

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“To meet, to talk, and to sing with people on a human basis, this is the unique offering at Mariposa,” Mike Seeger mused while listening at the open-air concert Saturday night amongst a crowd of some 6,000 young people. “You can say something about the physical setting; it had good balance, good musical balance, but the main thing is the spirit—which is hard to generate at a large festival.”

...

a review of

Starlight on the Rails: Songbook, U. Utah Phillips, 4 CDs, AK Press, 2005, $39

Memory Against Forgetting, Casey Neill, CD, AK Press, 2005, $15. Available from http://akpress.org

Anarchist ideals have been expressed in a myriad of musical genres from rock to funk to jazz to world to trance. But the forms thoroughly connected to agit-prop are the most exemplary to me as they are extreme: folk, rap, and punk. This is not to say there’s never any revolutionary aspect to a saxophone riff or violin solo--or even an intoxicating sample tweaked to perfection on a laptop.

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Since the anti-wizard who disenchanted the world was Capitalism, we must assume that Capitalism will have to vanish by evolutionary necessity in order for re-enchantment to triumph.

Is it really possible to embrace such optimism? Let’s try.

An April 1, 2019 article in The Nation, “Warning: The Plastics Crisis is About to Get Worse,” begins with a “midrange” estimate of the amount of plastic garbage that is dumped in the ocean every year—eight million tons.

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“Every time I think about us women, I think about the trees, the subversive trees laden in blood but not bleeding the rebellious trees encrusted but not cracking.”

—Jayne Cortez

“Unless rooted in poetry the experience of ‘outside’ from within—even the deepest ‘deep ecology’ barely scratches the surface.”

—Franklin Rosemont

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This year the Ford motor company celebrates its 100^th anniversary. To proponents and critics alike, Ford is the perfect illustration of the corporate world-view. Henry Ford’s rationalization of the assembly-line process was a great advance for industrial technology, and the mass production of the automobile led inevitably to the creation of a world—through auto-centric urban design and the creation of America’s highway system—in which the automobile became an expensive necessity rather than a luxury.

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a review of

Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915–1940 by Travis Tomchuk. University of Manitoba Press, 2015, 260 pp.

An illustration early in Travis Tomchuk’s Transnational Radicals demonstrates the popular press’s view of anarchists immediately following the 1886 Haymarket Square Police Riot in Chicago: Johann Most, a radical anarchist, is presented by Harper’s Weekly as a maniacal figure waving a sword and a flag, threatening the reader with “Socialistic War,” while several other well-armed anarchists dive under beds in fear.

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Ursula Le Guin was already 45 when her well-known anarchist text The Dispossessed was published in 1974. Today, she’s almost a decade older than the unlikely shero of Laia Odo, the feisty matron who wrote the core theoretical texts that shape the anarchist society described in the “ambiguous utopia” of the novel. The short story as prequel called “The Day Before the Revolution” discusses Odo in her later years, preparing to die before her dream gets realized.

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American heoroes, the Fort Hood Three: (l. to rt.) Mora, Samas, Johnson

The shocking prison treatment of the Fort Hood Three, the three GIs who refused to go to Vietnam, has improved slightly as a result of the publicity of their situation and a flood of letters to government and Army authorities.

The restrictions against the three men speaking have been removed, and at present David Samas and James Johnson are celled with four other prisoners and are permitted to eat meals in the mess hall. Dennis Mora is with three others; however, he is still unable to leave his cell for meals. They still have no library privileges. They must still remain standing from 5 a.m. til 6 p.m. each day. The often promised, and supposedly “regular” exercise periods, are still unavailable.

...

Anarchist practice in education is emerging throughout the world, but it tends to describe itself as “democratic” to avoid the negative reaction which the word “anarchist” so often arouses. The name of the annual International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) was chosen by the two fourteen-year-old girls who ran the fifth conference which was held at Sands School in England in 1997. They didn’t like the name, but they couldn’t think of a better one, and it has stuck.

...

It’s been an open secret for months that Nathan Block (better known as “Exile”), a former Green Scare prisoner who served a number of years in prison for several Earth Liberation Front actions, has become a fascist. This has been known not just through numerous personal accounts from Olympia, Wash., but from copious postings on Block’s tumblr blog, Loyalty Is Mightier Than Fire.

...

“The layman Ho asked Basho: ‘What is it that transcends everything in the universe?’ (another version: ‘If all things return to the one, to what does the one return?’)

“Basho answered: ‘I will tell you after you have drunk up all the waters of the West River in one gulp.’

“Ho said: ‘I have already drunk up all the waters of the West River in one gulp.’

...

But in two days of court martial proceedings (Nov. 4 and 5), the Army has been able to get only two scared young GIs—both of whom admit having been threatened with charges of their own if they refused to help the prosecution—to testify against Jeffrey Russell, first of the four to come to trial.

The Army’s other two eyewitnesses, Pvt. Alan Farrell and Airman. John Lisk, brought shocked and angry flushes to the faces of the Army’s two ambitious young prosecutors when they refused to testify against Russell.

...

Editors’ Note: The following article was written last April by LNS staffer Sheila Ryan. The deplorable conditions she describes led to a massive stockade revolt at the base in June which was put down with severe brutality. Many of the prisoners involved face serious charges of rioting and destruction of Army property and several have already been convicted.

...

FORT DIX, N.J. (LNS)—The Army has decided to take three years of Jeffrey Russell’s life.

“It’s a total fraud,” says one establishment reporter.

The New York Post reporter refuses to stand for the court. One of the MP guards can’t quite keep his eyes dry as Cathy Russell screams “Why are you doing this to us!” and starts to climb up to the Judge’s rostrum, probably to kill him, if only she could. “You jive mother fuckers,” mutters a black GI, and another one, white, runs out of the courtroom screaming “Stinking pigs!” He’s arrested.

...

Every radical movement in U.S. history has paid lip service to “Women’s Rights” while continuing to operate out of the same old male supremacist bag. This goes for the founding fathers, the abolitionists and the 20^th Century left.

But something new is happening now. A Women’s Liberation Movement is developing as part of the proliferation of the new left, and unlike previous efforts which either settled for limited gains or sacrificed themselves to “more important” struggles, this movement will not be denied.

...

The Fort Hood Three—the three GI’s who refused to serve in Vietnam—were tried last week by a court martial board and found guilty. Pvt. Dennis Moras received a three year sentence at hard labor and Pvt. David Samas and PFC James Johnson received five years of the same.

The Fifth Estate spoke with Marlene Sam as, wife of one of the convicted men. She said the trio would face at least two review boards, both of which have civilian members on them. Mrs. Samas asked that any donations or requests for information be sent to the Defense Committee at 5 Beekman St. NYC.

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KILLEEN, TEXAS—More than 160 black soldiers from Fort Hood refused to take part in riot control operations in Chicago.

The rebellion—the largest in recent U.S. military history—began the night of August 23 at the Texas base. Approximately 100 black GIs from the 1^st Battalion, 41^st Infantry Brigade, First Armored Division, staged a sit-down demonstration to protest their orders to fly to Chicago the next day.

...

As the result of an appeal brought on June 23 of the court-martial of the Fort Hood Three, Pvt. First Class Jimmy Johnson, Pvt. David Samas and Pvt. Dennis Mora, the sentences of Jimmy Johnson and Pvt. David Samas were reduced from five years to three. Dennis’ original sentence was three years.

They were the first GIs to publicly refuse orders to go to Vietnam, and challenged the right of the government to send them to an “illegal, immoral and unjust war.” They were court-martialed and are serving their sentences at Ft. Leavenworth.

...

a review of

This Rancid Mill: An Alex Damage Novel by Kyle Decker. PM Press 2023

Foul deeds will rise

Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.

—Hamlet

When C. Auguste Dupin solves the case in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders on the Rue Morgue, the chilling elements comprising the grizzly killings and the shocking conclusion contain the model for much of subsequent murder mystery and detective fiction. The genre’s popularity, almost 200 years later, remains undiminished in literature and film. Ones with depth, raise not only the question of who-dunnit, but along the way, pose larger, wide-ranging considerations of greed, revenge, power, politics, trust, friendship, sex, family, or combinations.

...

SAN FRANCISCO—Four more GIs have been found guilty of mutiny and sentenced to prison terms. The March 27 verdict at Ft. Lewis, Wash., where the court-martials are being held to avoid large-scale protest demonstrations, came after nearly two weeks of testimony.

Convicted were Privates Edward Yost, William Hayes, Ricky Dodd and Harold Swanson. Yost was sentenced to nine months in prison; Hayes got two years, Dodd six years and Swanson three years. They also received dishonorable discharges. Appeals are pending.

...

PARIS (LNS)—At first glance the only visible change resulting from the May revolution in France are some repaved streets and felled trees.

DeGaulle’s use of the two-sided club of repression and reform seems to have succeeded in placating the dissatisfied majority and in silencing militants. But the lull in political activity is deceiving; the movement is now perhaps at its most crucial stage, preparing the educational and organizational groundwork for a successful revolution.

...

a review of

Worker-Student Action Committees: France ’68, R. Gregoire & F. Perlman, Black & Red, PO Box 02374, Detroit MI 48202, 1969 (reprinted 1991). Available from B & R or FE Books, $3 plus postage.

This is a pamphlet written almost a generation ago when revolution not only seemed possible, but imminent. The enthusiasm generated from the authors’ direct participation in the 1968 events almost leaps from the pages as they pen lively critiques of the successes and failures of the movement which almost toppled French society.

...

Today, the concept of a free school has many connotations. It can mean the freedom to choose what to learn or whether to learn at all. But whatever we mean by free, we can’t really discuss the free schools of today without some background in the Modern School movement that began more than a century ago.

...

Federico Arcos, Franklin Rosemont, Paul Avrich, Waldheim Cemetary, May 3, 1998 at the dedication of the Haymarket Monument as a National Historic Landmark. — photo Julie Herrada

Writer, painter, and publisher Franklin Rosemont died on April 12 in Chicago. He was buried in a private ceremony some forty feet from the Haymarket Monument in Waldheim Cemetery amid the graves and scattered ashes of Fred W. Thompson, Emma Goldman, Ben Reitman, Lucy Parsons, Nina Van Zandt Spies, Slim Brundage, Voltairine de Cleyre, and a number of other subversives and Wobblies.

...

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Open City Health Clinic for the first time to see a gynecologist. I was a little nervous, but glad that Open City was there for people like me who have no money. I was excited about getting medical care in a comfortable place, rather than some: doctor’s sterile waiting room, and with people who are part of a new culture. People who are trying to create alternative institutions like the clinic, places that are free, that are staffed by people who are concerned for others, and who give concrete aid—places where all kinds of people can come together to talk, and not be as separated from each other as we usually are.

...

The author of the following helpful hints is an attorney employed by the federal government of the United States of America in Washington, D.C. Obviously, he prefers to remain underground in our interest and his own. —eds

One. Take photographs of undercover narks„ as it destroys their psychological stability. These pictures may then be either published in the underground press (preferably nationally, as narks in federal service get transferred). Additionally or alternatively, posters could be made up in “Wanted” style. These could be simply satirical: (“Wanted by the Free Community”) or made up as federal wanted posters, but if the latter, don’t get caught with them, since that is a violation of some federal statutes as well as libel laws.

...

Fredy Perlman was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1934. He emigrated with his parents to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover. The Perlman family came to the United States in 1945 and lived variously in Mobile, Alabama, Brooklyn, Queens before settling in Lakeside Park, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio where Fredy graduated high school.

...

It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of our friend and comrade, Fredy Perlman, who died while undergoing heart surgery in Detroit on July 26, 1985.

Fredy Perlman escaped Czechoslovakia as a very young child just before the nazi takeover, thus barely avoiding, in his words, that “rationally planned extermination of human beings, the central experience of so many people in an age of highly developed science and productive forces...” His life experiences and his ideas were framed within that context—the life-crushing machinery and the varieties of human response.

...

It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of our friend and comrade, Fredy Perlman, who died while undergoing heart surgery in Detroit on July 26, 1985.

...

The Machine and Its Discontents, a collection of writings by Fredy Perlman (1934–1985) has recently been jointly published in the U.K. by Theory and Practice and Active Distribution (theoryandpractice.org.uk and activedistribution.org). Perlman, a prolific writer of radical texts, was a ten-year participant in the Fifth Estate.

...

a review of

Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, by Robin D.G. Kelley, Beacon Press, Boston, 2002.

The word “dreams” in the title of this book is both a plural noun and a present-tense verb. In his compelling, daring book from last year (now available in paperback), historian and cultural critic, Robin D.G. Kelley, refuses to be forced to choose between the dreams of last night and the constant process of the awakened imagination now. This makes for an unruly read—the book is equal parts historical narrative, utopian conjecture, and prescriptive plan for rethinking what it means to be Black and what revolutionary transformation would look like from new perspectives.

...

Artistic anarchism has a long and complex history. Certainly one of its most interesting chapters in France is the development of two competing anarchist discourses about art’s libertarian possibilities during the years leading up to the ill-fated Paris Commune of 1871. Then the paintings of the anarchist artist Gustave Courbet served as a foil for a debate in which Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s praise for Courbet’s “Realist” aesthetic was pitted against the young novelist Emile Zola’s enthusiasm for the stylistic qualities of Courbet’s art. Proudhon encapsulated his views in his last book, Du principe de l’art et de sa destination social (The principle of art and its social goal), published in 1865. [1] Here he situated art production socially so as to affirm the artist’s freedom to transform history. Proudhon argued art was inescapably social, and that the artist was free only to the degree to which he or she sought to transform society. He admired Courbet’s Realism because it pushed history forward through critique, extending the dialectical interplay between anarchist criticism and social transformation into the artistic realm.

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A review of

The Beast and Other Tales by Jóusè d’Arbaud, translated by Joyce Zonana. Northwestern University Press 2020

“I was happy on this barren land that barely provides what I need to sustain this ancient body, but which grants me the wild wind I cannot live without…”

These are the words of The Beast of Vacares, the title character of the title story in Jóusè d’Arbaud’s powerful collection. First published in Provençal in 1926 and long treasured in its native land, the book has only now been translated into English. For many American readers it will be their first glimpse of a landscape, way of life, and language that were under threat even at the time this book was written, founded on the freedom of open spaces and solitude.

...

“To be free you have to have bread to do free things. The more bread you got, the freer you become.”

—Mike Quatro (Hippie band booking agent, explaining how he equates making money off “the movement”) Detroit News, Nov. 16, 1969

FREEDOM IS MONEY, MONEY IS FREEDOM, FREEDOM IS MONEY. MONEY IS FREEDOM—just ask Henry Ford II. How do you get freedom? Sell people a piece of shit car for twice what it is worth and pay the workers in wages half of the value they produce. Or dress in hip clothes, put on rock concerts and charge the people $8 a head. Two sure-fire ways to get freedom. But how do the rest of us get free—“You gotta get the hog out of the stream if you want to drink clean, clear water.”—Chairman Bobby Seale, Black Panther Party.

...

a review of

Freedom Summer by Sally Belfrage (Viking, 1965)

The many aspects of the movement are presented in the often chaotic way they presented themselves to Sally Belfrage in the summer of 1964. Facts which could be dry and even boring if given in abstract take on life and meaning in the particular. They are sometimes present in connection with the personality of the person who spoke of them. Sometimes they are part of the history of a friend who survived them. Sometimes, facts come in to give meaning to the efforts of an Establishment man—a Greenwood deputy, an FBI agent, a representative of the justice department, a television reporter—to deny them. And sometimes, they are summed up in what was, for Sally Belfrage, one more step in the long walk of understanding.

...

Unruh Lee: In 1994, we started the Gardeners Against the Work Ethic Association (or GAWE) together. I later wrote in a ‘zine with this name, that this project was an “anti-work experiment in self-sufficiency, creating a new way of life based on play. And much playful subversion of all that gets in the way.” Really, it was a joke of a formal organization, that was part of an upsurge of Surrealist-oriented experimentation towards expanding the quality and quantity of our realm of play, no? The core of it was trying to seduce people to rip up their lawns with us and plant gardens for free feasts. But as I remember it, a lot of zany and erotic stuff, in private and public, was going on under the GAWE umbrella.

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In a murder case which has “frame up” written all over it, a 17-year-old black Louisiana man named Gary Tyler sits on Death Row awaiting execution by electric chair for a crime he did not commit--the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old white youth.

The killing took place on October 7, 1974 at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, forty miles north of New Orleans. After a series of busing-related skirmishes between black and white students, the principal decided to dismiss school early to avoid further confrontations.

...

“Freejazz reaches back to what jazz was originally, rebelling against the ultra-sophisticated art form it has become.”

--Archie Shepp

Freejazz, according to the great tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, is a rebellion against the bourgeois world of “high art.” It is a music that self-consciously identifies as a kind of sonic insurrection, both within and against music itself. It makes good sense to begin this article with a quote from Shepp.

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“There is no LAW in Amerika today—only the honkie power structure and its victims. We are down to the nitty-gritty now, with our backs to the wall, and the population is quickly polarizing: oppressors and oppressed. The revolutionary youth of the weirdo country are an oppressed people—the victims of a calculated cultural repression movement instigated and carried out by the honkie power structure under Richard M. Nixon, Henry Ford II, Nelson Rockefeller, and other monied interests who are committed to maintaining the decadent status quo. They will kill us if they can, they will incarcerate their own children and have them beaten if they can get away with it, they would jail all of us if they could—all in the name of, freedom, democracy, and the unspeakable obscenity they call the American Way.”

— John Sinclair

...

Jan. 24 an

d 25

Saturday January 24 2 p.m.-1 a.m. $3.00 Grande Ballroom

Sunday, January 25 3 p.m.-11 p.m. $3.00 Grande Ballroom

FREE JOHN SINCLAIR

AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

HELP END MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

Mitch Ryder, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Cockrel, Skip Taube,

SRC, MC5, Stooges, Bob Seger, Up,

...

“THERE IS NO LAW IN AMERIKA TODAY—only the racist power structure and its victims. The revolutionary youth of this weirdo country are an oppressed people—the victims of a calculated cultural repression movement instigated and carried out by the Government and certain monied interests who are committed to maintaining a decadent status quo. They will kill us if they can; they will incarcerate their own children and have them beaten if they can get away with it. They would jail us all if they could—all in the name of freedom, democracy and the unspeakable obscenity they call the Amerikan Way!”

...

The first Detroit Pop Festival on April 7 at Olympia Stadium came off beautifully. All the stalwarts of the Detroit music scene were in attendance to create a ten hour musical trip for over 16,000 people that came to listen.

The Amboy Dukes, the MC5, the Frost, Ted Lucas, The Wilson Mower Pursuit, The Train and so many other good bands blasted through the incredibly bad Olympia acoustics to show the audience that Michigan Music is what’s happening.

...