Full list of texts

Students and teachers live, sleep, eat, and travel together. A hand-made bumper sticker hangs on the ceiling of one bus, “If the students lead, the faculty will follow.” Audubon Expedition Institute (AEI) is a radical and accredited college program where I taught as field faculty for the last four and a half years.

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There’s no end to discussion about the “crisis of the family.” From Reader’s Digest to obscure academic journals, in the halls of Congress and in countless homes, the crisis of the family is portrayed, analyzed, debated, or lived out. This discussion has become the litany of a society in crisis. This is so, as Jean Bethke Elshtain tells us, because the crisis of the family “is a crisis of meaning and it goes to the heart of our self-understandings and our social existence.” [1]

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In order to convey some indication of the unique technical challenge represented by “Fantastic Voyage,” including the never-before-encountered photographic problems which it posed, it becomes necessary to present a brief synopsis of the extremely off-beat story:

Grant, a special American agent, delivers Czech scientist Jan Benes to an airport in the USA after helping him escape from behind the Iron Curtain. The entire Secret Service is involved in getting Benes safely from airport to city. But still the enemy manages to make one last desperate attempt to destroy Benes and the precious secret he carries in his brain. Benes suffers a severe head injury. A normal brain operation is impossible.

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In the streets of Washington DC on Inauguration Day, Black Bloc protesters notoriously smashed windows and set a limousine on fire. Fortunately, I wound up on the other side of the police lines when the cops sealed off the area and herded some 200 into pens of metal barricades, where they were kept waiting in the cold for hours before being hauled off to jail.

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Everybody should make films.

Film-making is a beautiful thing and it’s something that anyone can do. Really.

Sure there’s a lot of strange professional things to get hung up on, but it’s like the cat hustling Wurlitzer organs on television: “you can be playing your favorite songs in minutes.” You’re not going to be ready to take over for Boot if he doesn’t make it to a gig with Billy C., and it’s the same thing with film.

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Once again the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund scaled back big annual meetings in DC in the face of popular opposition. Folks from the DC Anti-Capitalist Convergence organized a People’s Strike for Friday, September 27^th. The call was out for affinity groups to engage in- autonomous actions to disrupt business as usual for the ruling elites in DC. Many DC commuters stayed home, so traffic was light. There were probably 1000 radicals in the streets, and a large critical mass clogged up some traffic. However, the 3700 pigs were very well organized, and any time they caught up with a large group, they corralled protesters with bikes, motorcycles and armor clad storm troopers.

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The Safe Energy Coalition (SECO) is a broadly-based, loose coalition which meets in private homes and encourages the formation of local groups, some of which have been established in places such as Allen Park, Romulus, Westland and other areas. There is no real leadership and little organization. SECO supporters advocate every possible strategy for an anti-nuclear struggle from direct action and occupations to inviting sleazy politicians like Coleman Young to speak at their public forums. Political hacks, such as the Socialist Workers Party, have (in their own jargon) “intervened” in the movement undoubtedly in hopes of transforming such a movement into an SWP-led “peaceful, legal” pressure group and a recruiting ground for their party along the lines of its activities within the U.S. anti-Vietnam war movement. So far its results have been minimal and unimpressive.

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Sam Mbah (1963–2014)

Although anarchism emerged in the 19^th century as a European political philosophy opposed to capitalism and the state, its ideals are manifest throughout the world.

A representative of Nigeria’s Awareness League, Sam Mbah, spoke at Detroit’s Trumbull Theatre in November on the application of libertarian ideals within an African context. He noted how the principles of anarchism were mirrored by traditional African village democracy, and how existing nation state boundaries on that continent are based on those of former colonies, ignoring tribal pre-state territories.

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In the early hours of July 13, Will Van Spronsen was shot to death by police outside of an ICE-contracted private detention facility holding migrants in Tacoma, Wash. He was confronted by police in a parking lot full of buses; buses that were to be used to deport large numbers of migrants in a coordinated, nationwide action launched by the Trump administration. Will was trying to destroy as many buses as possible.

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a review of

After the Deluge: A Novel of Post-Economic San Francisco by Chris Carlsson. Full Enjoyment Books, 2004, $14 from the Barn or available for free download at fullenjoymentbooks.com

Processed World, 2005 edition, $7 from the Barn, or processedworld.com

Even alienated office nerds and overachieving, working class intellectuals need an anti-authoritarian forum. That’s how I remember Processed World (PW) from my immersion in the anarchist zine scene of the 1980s. Unmistakably Bay Area in its bad attitude and aesthetic orientation, it was as much a staple of the Reagan-era underground and its left coast, printed propaganda as Homocore and Maximum Rock n Roll.

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I’m not entirely sure when the world ended. I mean, I’ve got some ideas, but I really don’t think that it’s important. That’s why I don’t have much patience for this end-of-the-world baloney.

My anarcho-primitivist comrades rhapsodize about the decline and fall of civilization, but it looks to me like that happened a very, very long time ago. The history of world civilizations has been one astonishing full-scale catastrophe after another for the last six thousand or so years and that makes it hard to choose any single, defining climax of human existence before the degeneration began.

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a review of

Present Continuous by David Grundy. Pamenar, 2022

As David Grundy notes in “Catalogue,” the first of fifteen essays that comprise his new book, the ongoing Covid pandemic has served as yet another mode of “normalization” under the grindstone of late capital: “We’ll face the constant injunction to adjust to the ‘new normal’: normality in abnormality, an extension of the fucked-up methods that already exist; the retreat to the virtual for those waiting for Deliveroo, Uber, and Amazon drop-offs, while the deaths pile up in the warehouses, or the skyscraper shadows below.”

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Related: see “Anarchy, food and sustainability” (theme intro) in this issue.

It doesn’t take a health food nut to see that modern society has a dysfunctional relationship with food. As in almost every other arena of life, our priorities are elsewhere--if not in wage slavery and staying out of debt, then in escapist entertainment or self-numbing addictions. Even among radicals and anarchists, healthy and mindful dietary practices are often considered a luxury reserved for that mythical post-revolutionary era that we are supposedly laying the groundwork for, when our children’s children, or their children, can enjoy safe, pure, nutritious food. Sounds like a plan. Except for a few things...

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The following text, “On The Future of the Earth,” is a talk given by Russell Means at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering held last July at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The gathering was attended by groups which spanned the spectrum from local Indians and farmers, to Marxist-Leninists politicos, Sierra Club activists, Greenpeace, anti-power-line activists, to “alternative technology” entrepeneurs.

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We were struck immediately by the similarities in the conclusions that Russell Means has reached and our own, in particular, in relation to the question of technology and a critique of Marxism.

We have been speaking as orphans and fragments, searching for roots and a tradition of resistance to civilization anywhere we can find them. We have embarked upon an adventure which began first of all with the criticism of all of our former presuppositions, that is, of Marxism and anarchism, technological progress, modern society, the functions of art and culture, workers’ organizations and self-organization, the existence and function of classes and other questions. We don’t claim to have resolved these fundamental problems, but we have headed in a general direction of rejection of the presuppositions of society in all its forms.

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The iconic scene of a Navy sailor kissing a nurse following the Japanese surrender in 1945 is depicted in this statue, tellingly entitled, “Unconditional Surrender.” The three-ton sculpture is on loan to New York City from the Santa Monica Midway Museum since 2007, and sits in Times Square. It will soon be replaced by a permanent bronze version in December. Donations will cover the $1 million price tag. Rather than a surrender, the act today would be considered a sexual assault.

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This article, which began as a review of Frederick Turner’s inspiring work of intuitive history, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, is now the introductory section of a book in progress treating similar and related questions—the origins of the state, the destruction of myth-centered, communitarian, free societies by authoritarian machines and economic social relations, the varied forms of resistance to and flight from the state, and other seminal and provocative problems.

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By its own lights, the history of modernity has been a history of resentment, despair, and annihilation. God is dead, and nothing is permitted. The echo, in every cell of our dark prison, is a resounding “No!” Hegel, an early and influential theorist of modernity, found a starting point for modern philosophy in the spirit of absolute negation. This negative path, he averred, was necessitated by the very form of modern subjectivity. Through a series of dialectical movements, thought could bring itself into reconciliation with the positive order of the day. But the task of relentlessly overcoming its alienation by seeking to fill the void inherent in self-consciousness could not be ignored by the modern subject.

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It is estimated by reputable quacks in the American Medical Association that at least one out of five people in the U.S. has some problem with mental illness. (Are the rest pretending?) It appears, surely, that there is no shortage of fools. Surely, should a swelling quantity of grads high-hurdle over the artificially maintained barriers of the psycho-therapeutic industry, thereby driving down rates through an overabundance of shrinks, the AMA will announce peculiarly that there is an alarming amount of oddballs, neurotic, and misanthropes.

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If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him with absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar.

—Mikhail Bakunin

Modern fiction is replete with stories of revolt and failure. The setting might be a brutal dictatorship, maybe it is a medieval fantasy or a cyberpunk dystopia, but the ending is similar. The usual tropes are presented: violence of policing, spy agencies and brutal military forces, all of whom perpetrate torture, disappearances and murders.

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The deportations, detentions, and disappearances have begun. Matched only by mass denial among Babylon’s denizens, the brave new empire has struck back. The many-headed capitalist dragon is licking its lips for an Easter dinner of Iraqi children. No, it shouldn’t be news that someone’s stolen the century. Clearly, the global Godzilla of geopolitical, techno-industrial trauma has treated us all to a gory preview of hell.

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“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot’ stamping on the human face—forever.”

—O’Brien, in Orwell’s 1984

How do we begin to discuss something as immense as technology? To investigate it means to investigate the totality of this modern civilization, not only its massive industrial vistas which represent the structural apparatus, the stage scenery; not only the hierarchy of command and specialization which reveals the skeletal structure of this apparatus in human relations; not only “the humble objects,” which “in their aggregate ... have shaken our mode of living to its very roots,” as Siegfried Giedion has written; but also in that internalized country of our dreams and desires, in the way we unconsciously see ourselves and our world.

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1. Cell phones are an overpowering, ever present factor in society. A factor which has multiplied at a staggering rate.

2. They help to deal with the fear of the unknown. It is imagined that they provide for the protection of children, assuring that the child will never be stranded or outside of the watchful parental gaze. If a car breaks down, one no longer needs to risk getting a ride from a stranger--a risk which is primarily having to confront the overwhelming alienation of our community.

3. The cell phone allows the user to avoid the risk of missing the updates they are constantly bombarded with. It is simpler and more convenient than having to risk making mundane choices yourself. The user is never difficult to contact about anything, no matter how banal.

4. The cell phone fulfills the need to be hip and current. Those without mobile communications devices are constructed as being outdated, in the cultural lag, backwards. By owning a cell phone one can feel progressive and up to date.

5. The underlying motivations for cell phone ownership are fear and convenience. Ultimately fear avoidance and convenience are the same thing- the avoidance of ambiguous situations.

6. It is no extreme statement to say that capitalism creates false needs. Fifteen years ago cell phones were a rarity, certainly no necessity. How did we live before? They are now a need. We need it like a fix of cellular smack.

7. The cell sell is the easiest imaginable; the consumer does it themselves. After the initial convincing, the consumer signs a contract, which they suffer monetary penalties for breaking. Once trapped, the job of persuasion is internalized by the consumer, so as to not face their contractual trap.

8. It is now standard at many jobs, even low paying ones, to expect ownership of a mobile phone. Employers can constantly contact employees. Labor engulfs everyday life.

9. Due to the addition of text messaging the cellular communication is trapped between orality and literacy. It has neither the improvisation and open ended nature of spoken language, nor the complexity and depth of written language.

10. This contributes to a poverty of language. The exchange is constant, yet nearly meaningless. This poverty of language contributes to a poverty of thought.

11. The 911 system, required by law to be included on all cell phones, allows the location of any cell phone to be triangulated, via GPS, within a few yards. The communication device becomes a tracking device. The cell is a cell.

12. Paranoid? Maybe. After all, they can’t be tracking everybody all the time; there are just too many people. Precisely the point. The 911 system fulfills the concept of the Panopticon analyzed by Michel Foucault. We know they can’t be paying attention to everyone at every given moment. At the same time we know that they have the capability for surveillance on anyone at any given time.

13. This position causes the internalization of the control of surveillance. The oppressor is no longer a clear external force, it is now a formless totality which impersonally constrain us. This formlessness makes it difficult to remain autonomous against it; it can not be pinned down. Furthermore, the user knows that they consented.

14. Cellular technology is transforming man into a cyborg. The technology grows more ever present. The user becomes more and more integrated into the totality. McLuhan argued that the integrated circuit and the television were extensions of the nervous system. He seems to have been premature. The cell phone is closer to the realization of this extension of the neurological system. Remember, McLuhan’s often forgotten companion point, every extension is also an amputation.

15. The cell phone is becoming a permanent extension. It is responded to nearly automatically. This interaction forms a feedback system; a cybernetic system. What thoughts are ours, in this cybernetic system? This cybernetic transformation is particularly noticeable in the case of ear pieces and other hands free devices.

16. The question this brings up is not one of right and wrong. It is a matter of admitting that these devices cause major shifts and determining if these shifts are what we actually want. It has been pointed out to me that the picture I present may even be too optimistic.

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a review of

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott. Yale University Press, 2017 yalebooks.yale.edu

In his latest book, James Scott continues his exploration of the relationship between domestication and the development of hierarchies of power in pre-modern and modern societies. He is particularly interested in examining the situations of people who resisted being incorporated into states. Against the Grain rejects the view that human history is a story of linear progression leading to the conveniences of contemporary civilization.

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a review of

Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections, edited by John Zerzan. Uncivilized Books, Eugene, Ore., 1999, 214 pp., $10 (available from FE Books)

Against Civilization is an essay collection taking the radical perspective that the society we toil ceaselessly to maintain and reform may not be worth sustaining.

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from Liberation News Service-Liberation magazine

Tim Leary’s invitation, in the Beatles’ words, to “turn off your mind, relax and float down the stream” did not, at one time, send shock waves through the New Left. The vision of multitudes seduced by psychedelia into a blissful, passive, apolitical euphoria sent shivers throughout the alphabet soup of the straight-laced Left establishment.

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Making a bid for the Wallace vote, Spiro Agnew (sic), allegedly the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, has been sounding like Rip Van Winkle just waking up from the ‘40s. Particularly astute analysis of what’s happening on campuses, was offered at a New York press conference Saturday, September 7.

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a review of

Ishmael, Daniel Quinn, 1993, Bantam/Turner, New York, 262 pp., $6.00.

Ishmael is a gorilla who places classified ads in search of those who would learn “how to save the world.” The narrator of Daniel Quinn’s critique of civilization is the (human) applicant to Ishmael’s one-gorilla school on what went wrong with humanity. In Socratic dialogue-type style, the nameless student learns the story of how Homo lived as a “Leaver” for two or three million years, only to become a planet-destroying “Taker” in the last 10,000 years.

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Almost all John Zerzan essays feature accompanying introductions in which the word most frequently used to describe his method and conclusions is “provocative,” (see, for instance, Anarchy, Summer 1987). Some may think this only an ugly little term meant to distance a publication from the wild assertions that John so often makes in his writings (“wild,” by the way, is a word which I know he will not take as a pejorative). Realistically though, provocative accurately describes what is the common reaction to reading a Zerzan article—you are provoked, to anger or to thought.

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a review of

A History of Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis by Marcel Mazoyer & Laurence Roudart. Monthly Review Press, 2006, 528 pp., $50 paperback

Monthly Review was established in 1949 as a Marxist, Soviet-oriented Stalinist journal. In recent years it has changed its stripes somewhat, now pushing, for example, a green/eco Marx (!) and a reformist outlook. The latter outlook typifies Mazoyer and Roudart’s History of Agriculture which bills itself as “a path breaking and panoramic work.”

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a review of

The Politics of the Joy of Printing: The Detroit Printing Co-op by Danielle Aubert. Artbook/D.A.P.

The text of this history of the Detroit Printing Co-op is engaging enough by itself, even without its colorful, graphic-filled pages of the work produced in the decade beginning in 1970 at an all-volunteer project amidst the city’s industrial ruins.

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“A Humble Call to Subvert the Human Empire” by longtime Fifth Estate collaborator David Watson is from a recent collection of his writing, Against the Megamachine: Essays on empire & its enemies (Autonomedia, 1999); it’s one of a few in this highly recommended volume that has not previously appeared in this newspaper. See Bookstore page for ordering information.

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a review of

Spoor (Pokot). Dir. Agnieszka Holland 2017

Deemed by some to be an eco-terrorist story, Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is adapted by director Agnieszka Holland into Spoor, an exceptionally accurate rendering of a Polish language anarchist thriller.

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“Safe sex” has put sex in the safe. The three number combination lock reads: heterosexuality (two turns to the right) ultra-monogamy (two more turns to the right)—and condoms (one reluctant turn to the left), unlocking the Final Solution for the far right. Even if AIDS isn’t the result of covert germ warfare testing (see “Did U.S. Cause AIDS?” FE #326, Summer, 1987) the CIA couldn’t have created a better weapon against the subculture of drug use and “deviant” sex. Is it time to raise the white flag of celibacy and wait for science to invent a new pill, or do we have some real choices beyond the modern black plague hysteria?

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“Safe sex” has put sex in the safe. The three number combination lock reads: heterosexuality (two turns to the right), ultra-monogamy (two more turns to the right), and condoms (one reluctant turn to the left), unlocking the Final Solution for the far right. Even if AIDS isn’t the result of covert germ warfare testing, the CIA couldn’t have created a better weapon against the subculture of drug use and “deviant” sex.

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Earlier this year, I created a fifteen-minute presentation on the ethical implications of the program Midjourney and other A.I. art generators for the Northeast Modern Language Conference, then released it online through the University of New Hampshire.

A week later, a computer science PhD student emailed me asking to meet up. As a literature PhD, I wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted. Perhaps it was to gossip about the plethora of A.I. software spreading like a digital kudzu, or maybe he would pitch me a business idea.

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Selfridge Air Force Base is an idyllic installation on the beautiful shores of Lake St. Clair about twenty miles north of Detroit. It houses a SAC installation, a fighter-wing, and miscellaneous other units.

Victory celebration by Airman Theodore Goldflies, and his lawyers, Marc Stickgold and Marc Kadish. Photo/Alan Gotkin

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NEW YORK—The Jefferson Airplane’s filming of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s “One American Movie,” on location here, resulted in a minor riot, a skin show, a visit from New York’s finest, and an impromptu performance for midtown Manhattan office workers.

Out of the welter of confusion come these facts, according to eye witnesses. The group along with the cast and crew of the film were filming on the rooftop of the Schuyler Hotel, directly across from the filming headquarters. The filming started with lead singer Marty Balin delivering an impromptu and richly amplified “Wake Up New York, Wake Up. Free Music. Free Love.”

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AK Press is a worker-run anarchist collective that publishes and distributes radical books as well as visual and audio media. The collective was established in 1990 and is now run by seven people in five cities and two countries. They currently publish around twenty books each year.

Four collective members, who have been involved from 12 to 28 years, posed questions to themselves about anarchist publishing to take a look at their project.

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“The songs they sing come from their own experiences. They are not entertainers but are leaders who want everyone in the audience to join in singing songs that serve to inspire us to go on further to hold on ‘til we’re all free...”

The description above belongs to the Albany Freedom Singers who will be coming to Detroit on Sunday, November 21, 1965 at 7:00 pm at the Mayflower Baptist Church, 5858 Fourth at Holden. The program, called Gospel Sing For Freedom will also feature the New Cosmopolitan Baptist Church Choir, the East Side Community Choir, and the Mayflower Baptist Church Choir.

Anarchist Albert Cossery’s books are the most irreverent that I’ve ever read, ridiculing those in power, the police, the wealthy, and the stupidities of our industrial society. Everything our puritanical society deems important--material wealth, ambition, proper conduct, hard work, university degrees, progress--is ridiculed in his novels, most of which are set in Arab countries (especially Egypt). He mocks bourgeois materialism, consumerism, and productivity while reserving his sympathies for the lowlife: street-corner layabouts, hashish dealers, petty thieves, beggars, confidence tricksters (“shuttar” in Arabic), and bandits.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—Al Capp rapped pretty heavily to the 78^th Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

He came down, in his cornpone style, on SDS, Joan Baez, (“phonie Joanie,” he calls her), and welfare, and treated the Daughters to a taste of his own brand of foreign policy: “It’s very simple—anyone who kills Americans is no damn good.”

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The bullet-ridden body of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, which was discovered a short distance from the Italian Communist Party (CP) headquarters on May 9, brought the expected cries of protest from the expected quarters. From the crowned heads of Europe to political parties of all stripes came expressions of horror and demands that Red Brigade-style terrorism be eradicated.

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Staff Note: The following is a letter that was recently sent to the Fifth Estate by Lorenzo Komboa Ervin. For more information about Komboa, see “Komboa: Anti-Vietnam Warrior,” FE #292, June 19, 1978.

Dear Comrades:

I am an Anarchist political prisoner confined in the infamous Control Unit Behavior Modification Program at the Marion Federal Penitentiary. Ten prisoners have died in the Control Unit In the past few years (3 deaths in 1977 alone!) and hundreds of others have been-driven to self-mutilation or insanity.

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a review of

Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader, by Gene Fellner, Four Walls Eight Windows, P.O. Box 548, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, 354 pp.

Historians don’t often agree on much, but for as long as I’ve been reading and learning about the life of Alexander Berkman, authors of books on anarchism and related subjects who make some mention of Berkman have decried in the same breath the lack of scholarship devoted to him.

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a review of

Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of ‘The Joy Of Sex’ by Eric Laursen. AK Press 2023

“We are the enemies of society and we must learn disobedience. Then we shall probably inherit the earth by default when the maniacs have burnt each other to a cinder. We shall be alive; they won’t.”

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Imprisoned Italian insurrectionist anarchist Alfredo Cospito’s six-month hunger strike ended in April with a partial victory of a reduced sentence.

Over the past year, Cospito has waged a struggle against the brutality and dehumanization of prison life in Italy. (See “Alfredo Cospito’s Struggle,” FE #413, Spring 2023). He and his comrade Anna Beniamino were convicted of kneecapping the CEO of Italy’s main nuclear power company, and later of planting bombs at a school for Carabinieri, the national police.

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Alfredo Cospito is a 55-year-old incarcerated Italian anarchist who has been on hunger strike since October 2022, protesting the brutality of his imprisonment. As we publish in March 2023, his condition is uncertain. His comrades fear he is near death.

In 2012, Cospito and a comrade kneecapped Roberto Adinolfi, the CEO of Italy’s main nuclear power company, shooting him in the leg three times. Cospito was apprehended and sentenced to 10 years in prison. While imprisoned, he was convicted for planting bombs at a school for Carabinieri, the Italian elite police force. Although no one was injured in the explosions, he was given a life sentence without parole. The government decided that Cospito should be permanently removed from society as a dangerous anarchist terrorist.

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Karen Malloy is out of jail and home in Columbus, Ohio.

Enough fuss was raised by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to force the Beast to “release” her on $5000 cash bond.

You see, Miss Malloy is one of the “key prosecution witnesses” in the bogus trial of suspended Detroit Pig Ronald August. This racist pig is due to stand trial in May for the vicious torture-slaying of Auburey Pollard, a 17-year old black who was among three blacks brutally murdered by the mad-dog agents of the Beast in the former Algiers Motel on Wednesday, July 26, 1967, during the height of the Rebellion.

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While the rest of the “Motor city was Burning,” to paraphrase the MC5, ironically to the tune of “Light My Fire,” the annex of the former Algiers Motel was quiet. Guests were sleeping, “eating hot dogs” and “listening to music.”

It was quiet until the authorities arrived.

When the authorities left, there remained behind the bodies of three black youths—all of them shot to death. All of the other guests had been beaten—two white girls, “caught” in the company of black men, had been stripped naked and severely beaten.

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a review of

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener. Macmillan/Farrar Straus Giroux/MCD Books (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) 2020

To escape her stagnant work as an assistant in publishing, Anna Wiener sold out and took a job in tech. Now she’s written about her experience, and published it. The result, Uncanny Valley, is a portrait of Silicon Valley from the perspective of a literary impostor, promising to reveal the scandalous truth.

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New information sheds light on the recent “accidental” disaster that destroyed the space shuttle Columbia. In a secret communiqué from the Intergalactic Liberation Front (ILF), spokesperson Ivan Von Kropotkin from the planet Berkman warned NASA and all the governments of the globe: “Earthlings stay home! Your space program is a massive waste of resources for capitalist profit and military domination. Don’t even think of doing to outer space what you’ve already done to your own planet.”

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In this country, I am called a “permanent resident alien” or, more to the point, a “non-citizen.” What that means in the patriotic war frenzy that has taken hold of the minds of the American populace following the tragedy of 9/11, is that the few legal rights I was entitled to as an immigrant prior to that day of reckoning have now been effectively eliminated, and my human rights are increasingly under assault.

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The following essay is from Alien-Nation, an interesting first issue of a newsletter produced by several people in Olympia, Washington, who until recently were associated with Earth First! No one wants to have their worst fears confirmed, but in many ways that is exactly the effect this account had on us here in Detroit. Being isolated geographically from both the activities and organizational life of Earth First!, we have been concerned that perhaps there was more truth than we realized to the contentions of some that the only problem with Earth First! lay with the “Tucson group” and that it is “only Dave Foreman and Ed Abbey who have crazy views.”

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Al Kooper, one of this country’s leading rock artists, was in town a couple of weeks ago. He has been performing, writing, and now producing rock musts for ten years and is best known for his work as an organist for Dylan, a member of tire Blues Project, and organizer of Blood, Sweat and Tears.

His latest album is “Super Session” with Mike Bloomfield and Steve Stills. In the next few months he will be releasing a double album that he recorded with Bloomfield at the Fillmore, a solo album, and an album he produced for the Don Ellis Orchestra.

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Copyright 1966 by the Los Angeles Free Press. Reprinted with permission.

“All a man wants is a home like a castle, all a man wants is peace at his door, all a man wants is a tree by his window...”

(A poem fragment tape-recorded by Ginsberg on the Los Angeles freeways)

Last Friday I had a three hour conversation at the Free Press office with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, who are presently touring the country writing poetry, giving readings and meeting people.

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Face the Nation

Thru Hickman’s rolling earth hills

icy winter

gray sky bare trees lining the road

South to Wichita

you’re in the Pepsi Generation Signum enroute

Aiken Republican on the radio 60,000

Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 250,000

South Vietnamese armed men

our Enemy—

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FREE FOOD! Today and every day at Farmer Jacks!!

NO COUPONS! NO LINES! NO MONEY! NO LIMITS! FREE FOR THE TAKING!!!

The problem of hunger is a very serious one, and we, the managers of the food distribution industry are well aware of it. After all, it is hunger—in relative stages of course—which keeps us in business.

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Almost all contemporary radical thought is marked by dialectics. Classical anarchism, Marxism (in all its variants), and the Situationists owe a huge debt to the thought of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, and hence, to dialectics. For example, the political thought of anarchist and anti-authoritarian theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin, Guy Debord, Murray Bookchin and Fredy Perlman all rely on dialectical thinking. Poststructuralist social theorist Michel Foucault even characterized Hegel’s theories as the ghost that prowls through the 20^th century. In fact, dialectics are so hegemonic in radical circles that a common objection to a perspective is that it is “insufficiently dialectical.”

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Introduction by Sunfrog

As one of the more outspoken non-atheists in the FE collective, it’s fitting that one of my early memories of the project was an argument about religion. I was hanging out in the office under the auspices of helping the collective members in their battle to stop the Detroit trash incinerator. While I could usually hold my rhetorical own, I was outnumbered and intellectually outgunned that afternoon in early 1988. Before I left the office that day, one of the collective members pulled me aside, sensing that I was feeling emotionally bruised after taking such a verbal beating. He encouraged me not to take the discussion personally, told me that he valued my participation, and gave me a book by Frederick Turner called Beyond Geography. If it weren’t for that gesture by David Watson, I wonder if I might not be here as a co-editor, writing this intro to his most recent article.

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In July, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington DC finally gave up on its eighteen-month effort to prosecute people protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump as President.

The 217 people indicted on felony charges of conspiracy to riot, engaging in a riot and property destruction, related to the events of January 20, 2017, came to be known as the J20 defendants.

...

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this fine bit of gangster rap in 1883:

Fifteen men of the whole ship’s list

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

Dead and bedamned and the rest gone whist!

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

The skipper lay with his nob in gore

Where the scullion’s axe his cheek had shore

And the scullion he was stabbed four times four

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adrienne maree brown speaks with the Fifth Estate about Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Co-edited with Walidah Imarisha, AK Press, 2015, $18.00, akPress.org.

How do we strategize to create a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism? For author and activist, adrienne maree brown, the answer is science fiction. She’s a strong believer that sci-fi and other literature can be a force for transformative social change.

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“We have been fooled, conned into letting governments and armies get into space on our behalf. Occasionally they will dangle little tidbits in front of us like “life on Mars” or “ice on the Moon,” but nothing really changes. It must be apparent that their interests are not ours. Now is the time for everyone, for all of us here to do it for ourselves--and for each other.”

-- from a 1995 manifesto by the Association of Autonomous Astronauts

...

Part of American Revolutionary Media / Detroit insert

When 300,000 people marched in Washington for civil rights in 1963, a lot of people felt as good as they did in November when 750,000 people marched in Washington for peace. But the civil rights movement has not liberated Black people. And the peace movement has yet to end the war in Vietnam, let alone “bring the boys home” from the 53 countries’ in which they are stationed around the world.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

Ed. Note: Jeffrey Shero is a former national vice-president of Students for a Democratic Society. He recently returned from an extended journey to the Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe.

They used to whisper, “Pssst, soldier! Dirty pictures?”

But times have changed. Just as likely now that long-haired kid hanging around the European train station or soldier’s bar is offering abettor deal—Freedom. “Hey, man, FTA, (Fuck the Army), take one of these.” That’s the new hustle.

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War! Uh!

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing!

--Edwin Starr, “War”

The Motown great Edwin Starr asked and answered this question in his 1970 song that became a best-selling record and the anthem of another in a series of long, hot summers.

By then, tens of millions of people around the world had come to a similar conclusion about the U.S. empire’s brutal war in Vietnam that already had taken the lives of at least two million Indochinese and tens of thousands of those of the invaders. There was wide-spread realization that not only did America’s Asian war have nothing to do with “freedom,” but was about imperial domination of a region far from its shores.

...

Dear Ursula,

I’ve been intending to write to you for ages, to thank you for the innumerable ways that your words have inspired, informed, supported, and challenged me over the past thirty-six years. Now that you’re turning eighty, I think it’s a good time to write that letter.

I first met you in 1973, in a room behind a little macrobiotic restaurant, called Peace Food, in West Berlin. I was twenty-one and in training to become a full-time worker for an Eastern spiritual organization. Our trainer would read to us from The Wizard of Earthsea, thinking, I suppose, that it was relevant to us as spiritual workers in training. It reminded me that I’d always known I was a wizard, as a faerie child talking to faeries in the woods of Britain and making sticks into magic wands. Of the many ideas in that book that resonated with my being, what stayed with me was the importance of the healing power of embracing and integrating one’s own shadow--one’s whole self--which became and remains central to my way of understanding myself and the world.

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translated & edited by FE collective members

This article was written by a participant in the VAAAG, the Village Alternatif Anticapitaliste et Anti-guerre (the Alternative Anti-capitalist and Anti-war Village) that was created during the Group of Eight summit meeting (G8) in Evian, Switzerland during June 2003. The anonymous author wants to make it clear that s/he was not a member of the coalition protesting the summit, the Convergence des Luttes Anti-Autoritaires et Anticapitalistes Contre le G8 (CLAAAC G 8). This text, the author says, is “addressed to comrades and companions on the other side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.”

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Has an unintended alliance of Silicon Valley censorship, alternative news rebuttals, mainstream journalistic scrutiny, and especially antifa street-fighters, discouraged what passes as the intellectual wing of the most reviled political movement of the last half-century?

Although fascist street attacks continue, the alt-right has been undergoing something of a brain drain in North America recently.

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Fighting got serious as antifa stopped white power in East Lansing, Mich. in March.
Above, neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach of the Traditional Workers Party (rt) looks worried.

For those curious whether Antifa tactics can actually deliver the goods when it comes to disrupting fascist organizing efforts, the activity surrounding white supremacist Richard Spencer’s early March visit to Michigan should serve as a resounding, “Yes!” The alt-right leader, who heads the racist National Policy Institute and wants to turn the U.S. into an exclusively white ethno-state, canceled the remaining dates of a college campus speaking tour after being confronted by a militant antifascist presence during a stop at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

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Editors’ note: This article is being printed so that we can stop brothers and sisters from being needlessly busted. It was written by a Detroit lawyer who wants to remain anonymous. Don’t be careless! Learn from the way the man is dealing with John Sinclair.

The drug laws are enforced very selectively in this country. Everybody smokes pot, but it is the blacks, the long-hairs, the political movement people, the students, the underground press and the army organizers who get busted for it.

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MADISON, WIS. (LNS) Students and police fought with fists, rocks, sticks, and tear gas for two and a half hours Oct. 19 on the campus of the University of Wisconsin.

The rioting between some three to four thousand students and city police followed what began as a peaceful demonstration against the presence of the Dow Chemical Company on campus. (Dow Chemical is best known for its role in the production of napalm).

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Recently, I was talking politics and revolution with a friend and she said to me the last thing we need is 19-year-old boys fighting a revolution. I think she was referring to me at 19. Sure enough, I don’t feel as invincible now as I did then.

Still, that’s not the point she was making. Our society is not ready for a revolution. Women still get raped everyday, communities are still divided along racial lines, people still don’t care about one another. If revolution came right now and we actually won, ultimately, we would replace what we have now with capitalism, racism and patriarchy because we still haven’t overcome those ailments or come up with alternatives

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We live in a time and culture that does not understand, value, or manifest personal responsibility. The general doctrine is that even if you betray the rules of your religious practice you’ll be forgiven your digressions when you die, if you ask nice.

So, what happens when you combine a deeply entrenched culture of anarchy and individual responsibility with a political system, bureaucracy, cultural climate that is currently breaking records for its utter lack of introspection or capacity to admit mistakes? New Orleans meet America.

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[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]with E.B. Maple (Peter Werbe)

Q: How do you know when there’s a major social problem in America?

A: It’s on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

Now it’s the “problem” of guns which shouts from the magazine racks, and liberals have an easy and seemingly obvious answer: gun confiscation by the state. Though voluminous human slaughter by musketry goes back to the European arrival here, the American obsession with firearms appears to have entered another dimension.

...

a review of

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. Norton, 2017

Nomadland—Film 2021; Director: Chloe Zhao

In case you weren’t paying attention, the Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best actress this year all went to Nomadland, a drama centered around Fern (Frances McDormand), a woman near retirement age, after losing her husband and her home, starts living in a van.

...

Walking along the river’s edge,

The water level low this year

The receded river reveals

.

A lifetime’s worth of accumulated

Garbage. A bicycle straddles

A burned out, gutted blue

.

Sofa, spilling its soggy innards

To a sun close and ragged.

I step through tall grasses

.

And reeds and feel the ground

...

The following interview with American Servicemen’s Union (ASU) chairman Pvt. Andrew Stapp (Ret.) was conducted by Fifth Estate staffer Dena Clamage.

Fifth Estate: What is the American Serviceman’s Union? When was it formed and for what purpose?

Andy Stapp: The ASU is a union organization of rank and file GIs. The ASU has eight demands, which mostly center around the war and racism within the Army. It is essentially a resistance movement which was formed to encourage GIs to fight against the war, which we believe to be an imperialist war.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—What was to have been one of the most triumphant days in U.S. history was brought to a tragic, fiery close today when the jetliner bringing the fifty-two former hostages back from captivity in Iran crashed into the Presidential inauguration ceremonies here, killing all aboard and taking with it numerous leaders of the United States government, armed forces and industry; including President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, evangelist Billy Graham, former President and Vice President Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, all nine members of the United States Supreme Court, General William Westmoreland, Henry Ford II, Frank Sinatra, Donnie and Marie Osmond and hundreds of other senators and congressmen, governors, mayors, Republican and Democratic Party officials, industrialists, bankers, religious leaders, military and police officials, and television and movie personalities.

...

Taboo, smelly, hidden, shameful, unsightly. Women’s sex has been described historically in these terms without explaining precisely why it qualifies as such. At the beginning of the 1960s, mores became less rigid and what was then labeled the Sexual Revolution commenced. But as many women authors have noted, this progress didn’t reduce the gap between the pleasure that men and women experience sexually.

...

Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper(?) [question mark in original] and can be found at 4403 Second Ave, (telephone (313) 831–6800. Our hours vary quite a bit, so it’s always best to give us a telephone call before coming down.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

1) List the title of the book(s), amount wanted and price of each;

...

Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper (?) [sic] and can be found at 4403 Second Ave, (telephone (313) 831–6800. Our hours vary quite a bit, so it’s always best to give us a telephone call before coming down.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

1) List the title of the book(s), amount wanted and price of each;

...

Ammunition Books, 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201—Telephone No. (313) 831–8600

Bookstore hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons and at scattered other times. Please call before coming down to be sure we are here.

HOW TO ORDER:

(1) List the title of the book(s), amount and price of each;

...

Ammunition Books

4403 Second Ave.

Detroit, Michigan, 48201

Bookstore hours:

Mon. thru Fri. 1 pm — 5 pm

A SPECIAL NOTE!

For those of you who have been waiting for your copies of Chris Gray’s book, Leaving the 20^th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, we have just received a letter from a comrade in England saying that he has recently sent us 50 copies by surface mail. They should arrive here in about a month, at which time we shall mail it out to those who have ordered it. Sorry about the delay, and thanks for bearing with us.

...

AMMUNITION BOOKS shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1 pm to 5 pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

...

Ammunition Books, 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201

ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY

by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson

Part I The Eye in the Pyramid 304 pp.

Part II The Golden Apple 272 pp.

Part III Leviathan 253 pp.

Incredible political fantasy tale of a world-wide, eons-old conspiracy to impose an authoritarian rule on the planet. Scenes range from SDS conventions to underwater battles at Atlantis to giant rock festivals in Germany. Sex, LSD, revolution, right and left wing anarchism all compete in one of the most bizarre pieces of fiction (or is it?).

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Ammunition Books, 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201

Bookstore Hours: Mon. thru Fri. 1 pm-5 p.m.

LUCY PARSONS, AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY written by Carolyn Ashbaugh

Lucy Parsons is a central figure in the Haymarket Affair—“Dark Lucy” was a woman so feared by the Chicago Police that they broke up her meetings for 30 years. Historian Carolyn Ashbaugh interprets the radical response to industrialization, the robber barons, and monopoly in the post civil war era through Lucy Parsons’ career—adding a new dimension to the historiography of the period by showing us an important role played by this woman.

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Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

...

THE RUSSIAN TRAGEDY Alexander Berkman

The Russian Tragedy first appeared in 1922 as three separate pamphlets (The Russian Tragedy, The Russian Revolution and the Communist Party & The Kronstadt Rebellion), and is compiled here under one cover for the first time. In it, Berkman lays bare the true facts of the Leninist ‘workers state.’

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Hungary ’56 by Andy Anderson

Black & Red-Solidarity 138 pp., $1.25

Revolt In Socialist Yugoslavia by Fredy Perlman

Black & Red 23 pp., $.25

Worker Student Action Committees: France May ’68 by R. Gregoire & F. Perlman

Black & Red 45 pp., $.75

The Bolsheviks And Workers Control by Maurice Brinton

Black & Red-Solidarity 86 pp., $.85

...

Ammunition Books

4403 Second

Detroit, Michigan 48201

Telephone: (313) 831–6800

Office Hours: Tuesday thru Friday, 1pm--5pm

AUTHORITARIAN CONDITIONING, SEXUAL REPRESSION & THE IRRATIONAL IN POLITICS

Maurice Brinton

An analysis of Reichian psychology in its relation to politics and the Russian revolution. Its title pretty much says it all.

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Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

...

Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

...

4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 Telephone No. (313) 831–8600

Bookstore hours vary, but we are generally open on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and at scattered other times. Please call before coming down to be sure we are here.

HOW TO ORDER:

(1) List the title of the book(s), amount and price of each; (2) Add 5% for mailing (not less than 25 cents); (3) Total (Michigan residents please add 4% sales tax), and mail to us. Please write all checks and money orders to: DROP-OUT PRODUCTIONS, but mail to: AMMUNITION BOOKS, 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48201

...

Ammunition Books

4403 Second Avenue Detroit, Michigan 48201, Tele. No. (313) 831–6800

Bookstore hours vary, but we are generally open on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and at scattered other times. Please call before coming down to be sure we are here.

HOW TO ORDER:

(1) List the title of the book(s), amount and price of each;

(2) Add 5% for mailing (not less than 25 cents);

(3) Total (Michigan residents please add 4% sales tax), and mail to us.

Please write all checks and money orders to: DROP-OUT PRODUCTIONS, but mail to: AMMUNITION BOOKS, 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48201

...

A PRIMER OF LIBERTARIAN EDUCATION by Joel Spring, Free Life Editions, 157 pp. $3.95

Traces the tradition of libertarian opposition to established education from Rousseau and Godwin to Neill and Freire.

“Spring places the radical challenge into its own tradition of libertarian anarchy...” (Ivan Illich)

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BOOKSTORE HOURS: Monday and Tuesday-1pm to 5pm—Wednesday 7pm to 10pm. LOCATION: 4403 Second (on the corner of Second & Canfield), Detroit, Michigan 48201

LIP AND THE SELF-MANAGED COUNTER REVOLUTION Negation

Using the illustration of the famous French watch factory, the authors show that the self-management of Capital is but another stage in the development of the capitalist economy.

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Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral. But defiance and resistance are illegal. Therein lies the salvation of man.

-- Emma Goldman, Anarchism, 1910

Ammunition Books, 4403 Second, Detroit, Michigan 48201 — Telephone: (313) 831–6800

...

Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

...