Full list of texts

FT. JACKSON, S.C.—Four GIs are in the stockade as a result of an on-base meeting to discuss the war in Vietnam.

All are leaders of GIs United Against the War in Vietnam and are charged with “inciting to riot,” “disturbing the peace,” and “disrespect to an officer.”

The GI organization has been actively involved in opposing the war and demanding that GIs be allowed the same rights as civilians.

...

a review of

Darlingtonia by Alba Roja. Left Bank Books, 2017 akpress.org; albaroja.noblogs.org

Darlingtonia begins with a juxtaposition characteristic of the times we live in. Anton works in the service industry in San Francisco, commuting each day into the city because he can’t afford to live there and providing concierge services for well-off hotel guests.

...

Once, one approached Truffaut with satiate expectancy, awaiting only to be chewed up and spat upon beneath the marquee. In stark wonderment and in bitter tears one expected to be engulfed by the pleasures of cinema at its best. The mystery about him is depleted and this precious auteur now rates the same scrutiny as his far western brothers with only a slightly higher handicap. His reputation has been defiled through the medium of “Farenheit 451,” Truffaut’s latest endeavor, from the novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury.

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“Every year of her life...the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it. Computers melted other machines, fusing them together. Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk. Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite. Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus of data. There’d been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to make it sound transcendentally incredible.

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Bring the Fifth Estate to Washington as you march to bring the troops home. The Fifth Estate will have an increased press run of our issue scheduled to come out right before the next days of protest against the war. It will be available to vendors about noon on Wednesday, Nov. 13 from our office at 1107 W. Warren. The cost to vendors is 10 cents per copy and can be sold at the actions here for 20 cents and in Washington for a quarter.

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a review of

Night Games

Mai Zetterling strings out her Freudian implications to paper thinness, but then “Night Games,” in plot anyway, is not unlike tissue paper.

It suffices to say that Miss Zetterling’s pen clears a magnificent swath through the intricate Oedipal fantasies of adolesence. Unfortunately this directress is so plagued by Composition and form, her narrative reins up and the two never reach a comparable peak.

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In September 1971, the political landscape of the American Empire was very different from today’s. Detroit, Newark, Watts, and other cities still smoldered with the embers of urban insurgency.

The imperial army in Vietnam was disintegrating from open mutiny in the last days of a failed foreign war. Guardsmen and cops gunned down college students at Kent State and Jackson State, and martial law ruled the streets of Berkeley, California following riots over People’s Park. Functioning as political police, the FBI coordinated a nationwide secret and sometimes murderous campaign against dissidents. But rebellion continued, and in the prisons the spirit of the times reverberated and intensified. The uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York in response to the everyday horrors of prison life became a conscious political insurrection that soon to be murdered inmate spokesman Elliot Barkley described as “but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”

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NEW YORK (LNS)--A little more than three years after the first Attica indictments were handed down at a snow-covered courthouse a few miles from Attica State Prison in upstate New York, the Attica defendants and their supporters have won an almost complete victory.

On February 26 and 27, all but one of the remaining indictments were dismissed by a Buffalo, New York judge. Under the shadow of pre-trial defense revelations of improprieties by state officials, a major indictment charging ten former Attica prisoners with kidnapping guards was dismissed. The next day two indictments charging three inmates with assaulting prison guards was also dismissed.

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Attilio Bortolotti (Toronto, 1993) photo / CIRA-Lausanne

Attilio Bortolotti died of pneumonia on February 10, 1995, in a nursing home near Toronto. He was born on September 19, 1903, in Codroipo, Friuli, Italy, the fifteenth of eighteen children of Luigi Bortolotti, a builder, and Maria Pittana.

Tilio emigrated to Canada in 1920 and became active in the anarchist and antifascist movements in Windsor and Detroit during the agitation for Sacco and Vanzetti. Arrested in Detroit in 1929 for distributing a leaflet announcing a Sacco-Vanzetti meeting, he was held for deportation to Italy, but jumped bail and fled to Toronto. There he worked as a tool-and-die maker and resumed his anarchist activities, editing Il Libertario from 1933 to 1935 and The Libertarian in 1968 and 1969.

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No discussion of end-of-the-world imaginings would be complete without some reference to wacky conservative Christian dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is a school of Protestant theology that favors a millennial interpretation of history--all roads lead to God cracking open a cataclysmic can of whup-ass on humans.

...

Audrey Goodfriend with Federico Arcos. —photo: J. Herrada

Lifelong anarchist Audrey Goodfriend died on January 19 at 92.

Over her lifetime, Audrey engaged with generations of anarchists, and in many ways served as a bridge between them. The fact that as a teenager in the late 1930s, Audrey hitch-hiked to Toronto to meet Emma Goldman, gave younger anarchists who met her a direct connection with anarchist history.

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The New York Times headline trumpeted “[President] Urges Rises in Military Outlay, Cuts in Other Areas,” above an article which stated, “[The President] today proposed to Congress a series of substantial increases in military spending in the 1980s and cuts in many non-defense programs.”

Is this the dreaded Reagan slashing programs for the poor while spending ever more on the already glutted military monolith? No, not at all, but rather the president referred to in the Jan. 15, 1981 article is Jimmy Carter, who several days before leaving office proposed a fiscal 1982 budget which foreshadowed what his successor would announce several weeks later.

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There may be no smoke signals on the horizon or the beat of drums within earshot—but the United States has a candidate for President on the Indian ticket, once he is accepted into the tribe.

The candidate is Austin Burton, who is best known to Fifth Estate readers as the man who sent a brochure for the United Artificial penis to Luci Johnson’s husband and was arrested for mailing obscene matter and held on $200,000 bond. (See Fifth Estate, April 15–30, 1967). Burton is seeking to represent the New York state tribe of Oneida Indians and is being aided by Princess Sunbeam of that tribe.

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In September 2014, the people of Scotland voted on an independence referendum question, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” Following an intense campaign, the “No” side won with 55 percent voting against independence with a turnout of 85 percent.

Alexander writes from Glasgow with an assessment.

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Radical psychologists Wilhelm Reich and Eric Fromm answered the question of why people submit willingly to authority

While most of us were watching the 2016 presidential election with disgust, someone I’m very close to, looked at me with a fiendish grin and announced, “I’m voting for Donald Trump.”

This was perplexing. How could they be captivated by a racist, xenophobic, homophobic narcissist? Having starkly contrasting reactions towards the object of their affinity, I realized a lot of futile and draining arguments were likely to follow. Rifts, drama, and cut-offs between friends and family have become ubiquitous in American society over the past year, with many left bewildered by the resurgent appeal of authoritarianism.

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RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA--Following the second fraudulent US presidential election in a row, many liberals and leftists, and even some anarchists, were in a post-Bush-victory funk. But not the 200 anarchist-led demonstrators who on Nov. 5 defiantly marched to the state Republican headquarters carrying a banner, reading, “fuck Bush; Fuck Kerry; We Need A Revolution.”

...

Since 1995, I’ve helped compile the radical contact list that Berkeley’s Slingshot collective publishes each year in its Organizer calendar date book. The 2014 list runs 21 pages and features autonomous spaces and projects in 45 states and dozens of foreign countries.

The Organizer pocket version classic is a 176 page pocket planner with radical dates for every day of the year, the contact list, a menstrual calendar, information on police repression, plus other features. There is also a large-size version with a spiral wire binding and is twice the size of the smaller classic.

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On the frontiers of what has been termed “moral autonomy,” a long-range anti-ship missile is being developed for the U.S. military by Lockheed Martin Corp. which can pick its own target and destroy it independent of human minders. A team at George Mason University is also developing large groups of small robots that can work together to carry out tasks (which could include killing individuals or groups of people) without the need for humans to undergo the stress of making decisions or intervening in any way. The Pentagon realists, along with their counterparts in other nation-states, welcome the ghastly robotic potential as delivering the much sought after shelter from all responsibility for crimes committed in the service of the preservation of the system they defend.

A Tsunami/Fifth Estate Project

Mountain Center & Detroit

1. Description: machine parts in the foreground, nude man in the background facing away from the viewer; balloon above him says:

Well, everything gets done so quickly and easily, but... Somehow, I never quite feel at home here...

2. Description: a man in a business suit next to a large piece of equipment; balloon above him says:

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Hartford’s Other Voice/UPS — The radio speech was never broadcast—yet old sho-biz Agnew got 14,000 letters of praise the next day. No one will admit who slipped.

What happened was that UPI, a news service, also makes news tapes used by independent radio stations. A month ago they recorded a full hour of the usual hard hitting, always missing, Agnew diatribe. The schedule said it was to be broadcast over dozens of stations on the weekend. But a foul up occurred—not a single station aired the speech.

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a review of

Poll Tax Rebellion by Danny Burns, Photographs by Mark Simmons, AK Press, Stirling, Scotland and Attack International, London, 202 pp.

Imagine the euphoria of making a government back down! Danny Burns’ vivid 200-page account of the popular and widespread rebellion against the British poll tax warms the heart.

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Godfrey Reggio is the director of two visionary films revealing the nature and impact of modern civilization on the natural world. He currently has a third in preparation.

There has been little news of film director Godfrey Reggio in the six years since the release of Powaqqatsi in 1988, the second film in his proposed Hopi-titled Qatsi trilogy. Conceived as a sensorial fresco depicting global lifestyles in the late twentieth century, Reggio’s effort throughout the trilogy is to dynamically provoke meditation on the destructiveness inherent in technology-based mass society. However, unlike the wide acclaim lavished upon his first film, Koyaanisqqatsi, (the most popular college film rental of the 1980s), Powaqqatsi received far less enthusiasm in its limited U.S. theatrical release.

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a review of

The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams (with the original text of “Lesbian Love”) by Jonathan Ned Katz. Chicago Review Press 2021

Eve Adams died in Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, because the U.S. government could not countenance the writer of a lesbian love story (among her other transgressions) to reside in the U.S.

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a review of

Woman at War

Director: Benedikt Erlingsson

104 min. (2018)

You might be surprised to find the protagonist in this action-packed movie about a saboteur, Woman at War, is not a buxom blonde nor a dark-skinned foreign terrorist, but a white, middle-aged woman with a few visible wrinkles that appear around the eyes.

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Civilizations have come and gone over the past 6,000 years or so. Now, there’s just one----various cultures, but a single, global civilization.

Collapse is in the air. We’ve already seen the failure, if not the collapse, of culture in the West. The Holocaust alone, in the most cultured country (philosophy, music, etc.), revealed culture’s impotence.

...

It is impossible to give any credence to the statistics of disaffection and disintegration assembled here by John Zerzan and at the same time take seriously a recent survey in which the vast majority of Americans asserted to pollster George Gallup that they were “satisfied with their lives.” Our tendency, as the reader might imagine, is to accept John’s wide-ranging compilations as closer to the truth than the response to a simplistic question posed by a poll-taker.

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Two records which have reached the top spot in the charts recently are the Beachboys’ GOOD VIBRATIONS and the Monkeys’ I’M A BELIEVER.

GOOD VIBRATIONS is a very interesting single due to an excellent and intricate arrangement of music and vocal parts; and the Monkeys come across with a rather nice, early Beatleish simple, clean sound. Both songs are listenable, but on both 45s, featured performers do not play most of the instruments.

...

It was a Thursday night, December 8, at Wayne State’s Community Arts Auditorium. I was about to hear Lyman Woodward play for the first time...Mustachioed John Sinclair came out of the wings and quietly told us Lyman was going to play and with who and all that. Then Woodward and Charles Miles padded out mumbling to each other. Lyman sat at the piano and Miles stood with his saxophone and they began to play some of the cleanest music I’ve ever heard. Woodward and friends play a kind of free jazz and their concert was hard to describe in ordinary terms at all. The improvisations on the first number lulled one into tranquility and then slid into raucous excitement and then back down again and up and down and when it was all over the audience was too astonished to applaud. Miles stayed, Woodward switched to electric organ, and was later joined by Charles Moore on cornet and Melvin Davis on drums.

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In 1964, when almost everyone in Greenwich Village was playing an acoustic guitar and singing “folk, there was a red-haired ex-Marine named Tim Hardin who was using an electric guitar and sang a sort of jazz flavored blues. Before Hardin had left New York for Los Angeles he had already made a great impression on people who were later to become The Mommas and the Poppas and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Since then Hardin has developed a unique sound which is something like motown rock, jazz, folk, and blues and is different from all those things at the same time. Tim has sung at the Newport Folk Festival; and one of his songs, “If I were a Carpenter,” has been made a hit by Bobby Darin.

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In the last issue of the FIFTH ESTATE John Sinclair put down “acid rock” in favor of new-thing jazz, implying that Coltrane is really where it’s at and that rock is nowhere. His opinion revolves around the term “psychedelic”. Sinclair feels that jazz is truly psychedelic while rock merely exploits the term. I asked Robin Tyner, lead singer of the MC-5, now appearing at the Grande Ballroom, what he considers to be the true psychedelic music.

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I remember that there was a time not too long ago when yours truly sat in one of Detroit’s few coffee houses wanting so badly to have a good time and hear some good music that I actually applauded the second-rate “musicians” folking off onstage. These performers were the product of a very small and very sick music scene in the city. There was very little of anything exciting attracting customers to hear live music. Consequently, there was very little money for the musicians playing in this city. There was, as a result, very little competition, creativity, or excitement going on in the coffee houses. A vicious circle.

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Contrary to the honeyed words of gentlemen, this Age of Empire is a pestilence upon every continent and soul, through colonization manifest or implied. Rich men from stone buildings wade blindly through the penniless on their way to the opera, at leisure after a day spent plotting wars across the seas; and though these gentlemen are excellent at imposing a world order, they are equally adept at colonizing the women who maintain their homes.

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Don’t say you can’t turn back the clock—you do it every year, dupe of daylight savings time—as if you could add or subtract one hour from light by bureaucratic fiat. The really progressive position is reversion.

—Peter Lamborn Wilson “The Alchemy of Luddism”

Graphic: James Koehnline http://www.koehnline.com/

“Underground presses cannot survive within capitalist society. They are created only in order to destroy capitalist relations.”

--Fredy Perlman

FREDY PERLMAN was a radical activist, college professor, writer and publisher whose philosophy has had a significant influence on modern anarchist thought. His most well-known book, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, uses Thomas Hobbes’ metaphor of the Leviathan (a huge, monstrous beast that represented the power of a strong government authority) to criticize the rise of modern statist, capitalist civilization. He also helped found the Detroit Printing Co-Op and the anarchist publishing company Black and Red Books. He died in 1985.

...

From the text of the Puppetista Street Theater pageant at the School of the Americas action, November 16–17, 2002.

the people of Argentina

freed their imagination

and made a situation where change is near

their example makes the alternatives clear

neighborhood assemblies

direct democracy and

worker control of factories

...

Unlimited rewards offered for the elimination of Republicans, Democrats and other politicians.

Known to be engaged in conspiracy to further spread diseased and death-oriented politics.

Aim of this conspiracy: Complete domination of our lives and destruction of all human freedom.

Recent crimes include promotion of global poverty, genocidal war plans, moronic christian morality, debasing of all human life, and rape of the planet.

...

“Just say whatever comes to mind.” The voice, calm, quiet and paternal, rolled across the desk.

“Everything is bullshit,” A.J. said.

There was a quick, nervous giggle, then the voice found itself again.

“I’ll ask you to refrain from using that kind of language,” the voice said. “I’m a family man.”

...

A coordinated black student walkout occurred on Friday, Sept. 19, in support of Ahmed Evans, a black nationalist sentenced to die in connection with a shoot-out in which 3 Cleveland pigs were iced.

Four inner-city schools were shut-down by the walkout—Murray Wright, Malcolm X (Northwestern), Northern, and Mac-Michael. Minor walkouts came off at other schools as well—Cass, Mumford, and Highland Park.

...

I was released from state custody in February after serving seven and a half months in the Vanier Center for Women, a provincial jail in southern Ontario, for charges stemming from the G20 summit protests in Toronto during the summer of 2010. While the judge sentenced me to 15 months, I was given four months credit for the one month of jail time and two years of house arrest I served while awaiting sentencing.

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Letters of Thanks from Gen. Westmoreland to “Breakthrough”

22 November 1965

Mr. Donald J. Lobsinger, Chairman

Breakthrough P.O. Box 3061

Detroit, Michigan 48231

Dear Mr. Lobsinger:

Your letter and the accompanying signatures of over 6,000 citizens of the Detroit area indicating support for the efforts of our armed forces in Vietnam are reassuring and deeply appreciated.

...

The angel that lives so well is brother to the king of hell.

And like the shore of ravaged sea is beaten,

caressed, endlessly.

.

Poisoned feathers of stainless-steel

create the illusion if not the feel

of paradise that always seems

just one more stop

beyond your dreams.

—T.F. Rodinsky

Reprinted from FE #386, Spring 2012.

Reversion to 1911 would constitute a perfect first step for a 21^st century neo-Luddite movement. Living in 1911 means using technology and culture only up to that point and no further, or as little as possible.

For example, you can have a player-piano and phonograph, but no radio or TV; an ice-box, but not a refrigerator; an ocean liner, but not an aeroplane, electric fans, but no air conditioner.

...

Reversion to 1911 would constitute a perfect first step for a 21^st century neo-Luddite movement. Living in 1911 means using technology and culture only up to that point and no further, or as little as possible.

For example, you can have a player-piano and phonograph, but no radio or TV; an ice-box, but not a refrigerator; an ocean liner, but not an aeroplane, electric fans, but no air conditioner.

...

a review of

“The Politics of Ethnopoetics” in The Old Ways, Six Essays, Gary Snyder, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 40077 “(Reckoning roughly from the earliest cave paintings)”, 96 pp.

Ever since the dawn of industrial capitalism 200 years ago, a succession of philosophers, poets, social scientists, and mystics have written on the decline of the species since leaving “the state of nature” and entering the modern epoch. Hence, it could be charged, that there is little that is new in this book and much that has been heard from sources whose nostalgia for the days of yore is of a short lasting duration broken by a return to the middle-class life that spawns such ideas.

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After the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the new governor of California, most people could be forgiven for thinking that something much less than a political cataclysm has occurred in this state. The inhabitants go about their routines of work and leisure; there are no torchlight parades, or even rumors of same, to celebrate the victory of the former admirer of Hitler, Schwarzenegger, over the spectral and aptly named Gray Davis.

...

“What we need is a Revolution!” (wild applause).

A rather flustered Joan Baez held up a hand for quiet...“I wish there was a way you could take back all the clapping you all just did,” she said embarrassedly.

“Now let me tell you what I mean by “revolution.”’

By “revolution” she means change, and the basis of her approach to life and to her revolution (everyone’s got one) is that “the ethical is the practical.”

...

CHICAGO, Feb. 28—The seven defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy trial were released from jail after the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Hoffman’s no bond ruling.

Bond for the five defendants convicted of incitement to riot was set at $25,000 each. Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had been sentenced by Judge Hoffman to terms of five years in prison and $5,000 fines. They were acquitted on charges of conspiracy to cross state lines to incite riots at the Democratic Convention.

...

He’s outfitted for combat.

Ankle boots; black dungarees; Sam Brown belt with cuffs and mace and other tools of the craft; bulletproof vest; sunglasses; implacable stare.

And a gun, holstered at the moment.

The nametag says whatever you want it to say.

He’s standing in the parking lot, guarding the bank, where inside there must be more money than he will earn in his lifetime.

...

“Barbarella” is a gas. No doubt about it. In fact, it is one of the most enjoyable and imaginative movies ever made.

The picture, in a sense, takes Candy to the year 40,000 and drops her off somewhere just this side of surrealism. And all in all it’s a damn fine trip.

Since Barbarella, like other masturbatory heroines, is a product of pure imagination, it is only proper that she is at last free from the mundane restrictions of earthly reality.

...

The Can Vies social centre in Barcelona made headlines around the world when its eviction led to five consecutive nights of rioting in late May 2014. But the social center has a longer history than this.

Can Vies, originally built in 1879 to stock construction materials for the city’s subway, became the headquarters of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT transport union during the 1930s Spanish Revolution. Following Franco’s victory in 1939, the building became the center for a fascist, hierarchal labor union.

...

When I was six, my old man picked up a ’54 Buick, which escalated our family into the burgeoning ranks of two-car amerika and made the local pump-jockeys clean the windshield with those snappy strokes shoe-shine boys used to reserve for gen-u-wine alligators.

We already had a Chevy six cylinder stickshift two-door, but it was just a car. The Buick, on the other hand, was a real creampuff: two toned paint job, elephantine white-wall tires, the whole ball of wax. From its chromed phallic hood ornament to its mellow-toned exhaust pipe, it was a boss short.

...

Errekaleor Bizirik is a large squat occupied by over 150 adults and children in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital city of the Basque Autonomous Community in northern Spain.

Defenders of the Basque Squat are prepared for police assault.

The name, Errekaleor, a contraction of a basque word that means dry river, refers to the plateau on which the neighborhood is situated. Like other large squats in Spain, such as Can Vies (see Fifth Estate, Summer 2017), Errekaleor is resisting police and government efforts to evict the residents.

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a review of

Constructing Ecoterrorism: Capitalism, Speciesism & Animal Rights by John Sorensen. Fernwood Publishing 2016

Anarchist and vegetarian Leo Tolstoy stated in his essay, “What I believe,” that “as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will always be battlefields.”

The quote, though often simply taken as a condemnation of violence against both humans and non-human animals, also ties the state, capitalism, and the rights of animals together in the way many animal rights activists do today.

...

Our reviewer (who was there) thinks it did a pretty good job!

It was with a mixture of anticipation and dread that I began watching actor Stuart Townsend’s directorial debut, Battle in Seattle. I took part in the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization and participated in the spirited marches, the intersection take-overs, and the blockading of WTO delegates depicted so graphically in the film.

...

On Malcolm X Day, February 21, in Detroit, members of two rival leftist sects slugged it out for control of a microphone following an anti-war march organized as part of nationwide protests against the Gulf war.

The demonstration of 125 people was sponsored by a local anti-war coalition, but those calling the shots all seemed to be from the trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The brawl occurred at the protest after-glow on the Wayne State University campus where about half the marchers gathered to discuss what to do next.

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UPS — Shouts of “draft-dodger” and rumors of a FBI arrest have threatened the clean-cut All-American image of the Beach Boys since Carl Wilson, 20, lead guitar, and “cuddliest,” youngest of the three Wilson brothers, refused to submit for induction into the Armed Forces on January 3, 1967.

Claiming Conscientious Objection on the basis of a conflict of values (“My duty to God is far greater than any mortal demand”), Carl’s request was rejected ostensibly on the grounds of late filing. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on April 5 and entered a plea of “not guilty.”

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A POEM FOR JOHN SINCLAIR

we are lonely

we will attack you w/ our smallest uttered parts

we will move w/ the mask of darkness w/ simple weapons

& slit the bellies of yr women

we will replace each foetus w/ a phoneme of our loneliness

a barely uttered beast sound that will take root

and grow until yr women’s bellies explode w/ bizarre totems

...

LONDON (LNS)—The Beatles are considering doing a series of free concerts in the U.S. next spring or early summer, according to a report in the rock tabloid, Rolling Stone. The concerts would be an expression of the Beatles’ thanks for support from their American fans.

The latest issue of Rolling Stone is chock full of other good Beatle data, such as:

...

LONDON (LNS)—Beatle John Lennon and his girlfriend, avant-garde filmmaker Yoko Ono, were busted in London recently for possession of marijuana. The pair were arrested when police raided Lennon’s fashionable apartment at Montague Square in the Marylebone district of the city. Both were charged with illegal possession of drugs and released on bail of 200 pounds each (the equivalent of $480) pending a court appearance November 28. [Editors’ note: Come the revolution there ain’t gonna be no more pot laws. How’s that for a “plan,” John baby?]

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Editors’ Note: The following article by brother Baker, Research Director of People Against Racism, is a rebuttal to the apology for the Beatles’ song “Revolution” done by “critic” Ralph Gleason in the last issue of this paper [FE #62, Sept. 19-Oct. 2, 1968] .

So the Beatles don’t like revolution.

That’s O.K. You wouldn’t either if you had a billion jillion dollars. The old society, you see, has been very good to the Beatles, so what do they have to gain by identifying with those who would change it? Very little indeed. So don’t be surprised.

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As long as people have been ruled, they have expressed their dissent. Throughout the modern era, art has been a powerful tool to voice this political defiance.

With their bold woodcut images of ruling classes and mocking skeletons, art movements like the Taller de Graphica Popular (“the People’s Graphics”) founded in Mexico City in 1937 served not only as satirical commentary but were inclusive enough to inform illiterate people of current events. Further, the Dadaist’s anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities were fueled by their disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. Their disregard for traditional artistic values still resonates today, especially in punk and avant-garde communities.

...

In a recent issue of the Fifth Estate (April 1) it was reported that State Senator Roger Craig of Dearborn had introduced a bill into the Michigan Senate that would exempt marijuana from the application of the general “narcotics” act.

While this was an accurate report and reflective of a new climate regarding public opinion toward the use of “drugs” we hope people are still being careful. In a letter to this paper Sen. Craig stated, “Nothing significant will happen in this area (of legislation) until January.”

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a review of

In Search of the Masterless Men of Newfoundland by Seaweed & Ron Sakolsky. Ardent Press, 2017 ardentpress.com

Seaweed and Ron Sakolsky have put together a book to inspire current and future rebels. Much more than history, it relates a myth with the potential to nurture hope for freer ways of life.

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One characteristic that seems pervasive recently among many political actors (including anarchists) is a fixation with the State’s incessant “failures.” From the vulnerability that the State experienced on 9/11/01 to the breakdown of the State during Hurricane Katrina, there is a palpable sense that we are witnessing a “crisis” that is strategically exploitable. But who finds this account compelling? It is no revelation to say that State “failure” is often a way of developing a more powerful State. This narrative fuels Leninists and other shadow-dwellers waiting to seize opportunities for a revolutionary moment. Failure can happen within capitalist states (e.g. “failure of communication” among intelligence agencies leading to more integration via the Department of Homeland Security) or within a Marxist critique (“your State and its service-providing function has failed you, we will enter and fill the lack with our bigger State provider”).

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a review of

“Beggars Banquet”

The Rolling Stones

(London)

The Rolling Stones are in the same class as many other groups whose albums are beyond comment. There are people who like the Stones and those who don’t and I very much doubt if anyone ever changes sides.

The first cut on “Beggars Banquet” is set to what most glossy mags would call a “driving beat”—you know, the kind of rhythm you can make love to.

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Just as today’s most obsessive notion is that of the material reality of time, self-existent time was the first lie of social life. As with nature, time did not exist before the individual became separate from it. Reification of this magnitude—the beginning of time—constitutes the Fall: the initiation of alienation, of history.

...

This article first appeared in Open Road newspaper.

The Walla Walla Brothers had figured they’d seen just about everything in anti-human treatment during their years of resistance at the Walla Walla State Prison in eastern Washington. But that was before the establishment of the “mental health unit” (MHU) there two years ago to make Walla Walla a laboratory for behavior modification experiments.

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Women in Black is against the whole continuum of violence, from male violence against women, to militarism and war. It is for justice and peace. It is for multi-ethnic democracy. It is for nonviolent, negotiated, means of resolving differences. There is an implicit analysis that a certain kind of masculinity fuels and is fueled by militarism and war, and that this is harmful not only for women, but also for men.

...

I had seen the skinny man with the beard before. The last time was at an anti-war rally in Duluth, I think. He had been collecting signatures for a petition to legalize hemp, or to urge the UN into investigating voter fraud in Florida in 2000, or some such thing. He didn’t have his clipboard this time. He had on a faded-out “Wellstone for Senate” t-shirt which must have been a few years old since Wellstone had been conveniently killed in a strange small plane crash three weeks before the 2002 congressional elections. But this guy didn’t look like he was wearing the t-shirt ironically.

...

If Luis Bunuel had not directed “Belle de Jour,” it probably would have turned out to be nothing more than a case history from the pages of Krafft-Ebbing. On the very surface it merely tells the story of how a wealthy married woman sets out to solve her “abnormal” sexual hang-ups.

Since she is a masochist, who secretly yearns to be dominated, debased and sexually abused, her life of complete comfort leaves her cold. For relief, she frequently resorts to erotic daydreams, but finally the moment comes when she is compelled to act out her sexual fantasies. After a couple of false starts, she becomes a Belle de Jour, an afternoon prostitute, in a small middle-class brothel.

...

Ann Arbor—A nonprofit exhibition and sale for the benefit of EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc.) will take place at the studio of artist Robert Rauschenberg from June 5 to 7.

The exhibition is called GIANT MODEL AIRPLANES and consists of precisely scaled and detailed enlargements of stick-and-tissue-type models of vintage aircraft.

...

The dance/concert, which will be open only to those 17 or over due to local ordinances, will feature the music of the MC-5, the Rationals, the Thyme, the Apostles, Wilson Lindsey’s FDA, the Gang, Our Mother’s Children, and a number of other Detroit bands, with lights by the Pisces Eyes Light Company.

...

Those who believe in a staunch ecological stance that subverts the dominant patterns of objectification, degradation, subordination, and commodification should take time to understand the revolutionary force of poetry.

Among those who can help in this regard are the surrealists. When one scrapes below the surface definitions of surrealism provided by universities, museums, and art dealers, one can begin to sense the insurrectionary thirst for liberty that is the core tenet for which surrealism fights.

...

BERKELEY—“I’d shoot a pig first,” the young man said.

Standing face to face with his olive drab uniform, his gas grenades and his M-1, a street girl—wonderful colors flowing from every curve on her body—had been talking to him for most of the afternoon.

The People’s Park, touching and being touched, lives of love and freedom—she’d covered it all.

...

BERKELEY—This is Wednesday, May 21. A week ago I pulled into the city in the pre-dawn hours on the back of a fifty-two Chevy farm truck laden with contraband oranges, avocadoes, artichokes. We were on our way home from our outlaw camp in the Baja, Mexico.

As we hauled up Highway One, watching the surf pound against the rocks below our -brothers were being routed with clubs and cyclone fence from the People’s Park in Berkeley.

...

BERKELEY (LNS)—The University of California campus here became a battlefield Thursday, Feb. 20, as students fought back against repeated tear gas attacks by club-swinging pigs.

Some 3,000 strikers abandoned the usual tactics of picketing and running, to remobilize when the cops attacked. When the students counterattacked hurling rocks, bricks, bottles and cherry bombs—the police often retreated in terror.

...

Volunteers and trainees in front of the Berkeley Free Clinic.

The Berkeley Free Clinic (BFC) is an all-volunteer, worker-owned collective that provides free medical and dental care, peer counseling, and information in Berkeley, Calif. We were founded in May 1969 on the ideas that healthcare is a human right, that professional licensing is not required to provide good medical care, and that medicine should not alienate people from their bodies. [See “Berkeley USA, 1969,” FE 81, June 12–25, 1969]

...

Editors’ Note: The following events, now described as the Berkeley Rebellion, occurred between June 28 and July 2. Subsequently, the citizens of Berkeley won a complete victory when the city council lifted the curfew and allowed Telegraph Avenue to be closed off and a rally held. This article originally appeared in a slightly longer form in the San Francisco Express Times.

...

Part of the Memorial Day march of 50,000 to demand the return of the People’s Park. The Berkeley City Council has agreed to give half of it back. Photo / Annie Kransdorf

The thunder of the drums is building. By now, under the full Sagitarius moon, they are wailing with sticks, rocks, beer cans, shovels, and bloody fists at trash cans, wash tubs, concrete and steel grates, their bodies writhing—Strip Naked and Faint!—hugging the flesh of every dirty wet pores open brother and hard-nipples sister in the explosive joy that we have finally overcome their separation, kossack-kicking and whooping around the campfires of Insurrection City.

...

Related story: “Tony” Revealed, Fifth Estate #377, March 2008

On July 26, 1900, officials of Western Penitentiary in Woods Run, Pennsylvania, discovered a tunnel which zigzagged some three hundred feet from the basement of the red brick house of 28 Sterling Street, which bordered the southern wall of the prison, to a point just inside the east wall. A superlative feat of engineering, the underground passage was equipped with an ingenious ventilation system as well as an electric warning device.

...

As a result of Valler’s eagerness to switch rather than fight, John Sinclair, Pun Plamondon and Jack Forrest have been indicted on Federal bombing conspiracy charges.

In addition, Pun has been charged with the physical act of dynamiting government property, or, as the pigs so revealingly put it, “...injure property of the United States....”

...

UPS—Superpot! To obtain pure cannabis resin—almost colorless, odorless, tasteless: take hash and reduce to a powder. Dissolve in small quantity of petroleum ether. Ordinary lighter fuel will do for this purpose.

Shake and bring to the boil. Take care it does not explode—lighter fuel boils at about 70 degrees. Unwanted mush will settle at bottom. Pour solution into a saucer, flush muck down bog.

...

The International Brigades came to Spain to fight fascism, but helped crush the anarchist social revolution.

In recent years, many leftists and even anarchists glowingly cite the communist-organized International Brigades (IB) that went to Spain to fight fascism during the late 1930s as an example relevant to many of today’s struggles. Men and women came from around the world to join forces with the army of the liberal Republican Spanish government in its civil war against a military-fascist rebellion that began in July 1936 led by Gen. Francisco Franco, who was aided by Hitler and Mussolini’s governments. The authoritarian right was finally triumphant in 1939.

...

<em>

Fifth Estate</em> contributor Marie Mason was sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison on February 5 in a Lansing, Michigan federal courtroom, after pleading guilty to two acts of eco-sabotage.

(See also Summer and Fall 2008 Fifth Estate.) Mason is now serving the longest sentence of any environmental activist in the US; an appeal is currently underway. Her sentence was one of the latest in a string of recent arrests and convictions of environmental and animal liberation activists, which has been dubbed the Green Scare. Throughout the Green Scare, environmental and animal liberation activists have been charged with inflated sentences (often Life in prison), and have been publicly and legally labeled “terrorists”--though no one has been hurt in their acts of economic sabotage. The term Green Scare is an allusion to the Red Scare of the ’50s, when Communists were persecuted on the basis of new laws targeting them for their beliefs and not their actions, and creating a climate of panic and hysteria in an attempt to intimidate supporters and sympathizers.

...

The effect of automation on employment was first brought to the public’s attention by a 1964 report, The Triple Revolution, issued by a California-based liberal think tank, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

The report asserted that technological developments were leading to almost unlimited productive capacity. But this was also reducing the number of manual jobs needed, increasing the level of skills needed for available jobs, and creating much more unemployment.

...

Introduction by Sunfrog

When I first connected with the radical milieu in the mid-1980s, certain books and writers changed me. Activists passed around dog-eared, marked-up volumes that would transform people forever. A certain work would be read by everyone in a scene, becoming a sort of collective scripture; backpacks brimmed with propaganda, the tastiest tome like a textual talisman.

...

a review of

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex. Judith Levine. University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Before Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002) was even published, many people were out in force condemning the book. Minnesota House Majority Leader and Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Pawlenty called the book “trash.” E-mails and phone calls to the University of Minnesota Press admonished the publishers to “burn in hell.” Neither considerations of free speech nor the fact that Pawlenty and other critics had read only a couple of chapter excerpts restrained them from pressuring U of M Press to stop publication. The Press continued with publication, but the University of Minnesota, which provides less than six percent of the Press’s funding, initiated an external review of the Press to evaluate its publishing criteria.

...

Dear Ann Landers:

Right now I am so mad I could spit tacks.

My husband and I are seniors. We love to watch the soaps. We have come to know the characters so well that they are like members of our own family. Our favorite soaps are “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital.”

Recently, at the most critical moment, Peter Jennings cut in with a news bulletin. He reported that the Chinese government was executing students (which we already knew), causing us to miss out on the crisis involving Scorpio, Sean and Frisco in “General Hospital.”

...

I am a sick man...a spiteful man. I think there is something wrong with my liver. I don’t think it was properly prepared. A crow keeps trying to snatch it from my plate with pearl-inlaid tongs, muttering about vedic wars in the wall, the wall which separates me from the world, the world where cities are demolished by gigantic mechanized pelicans awaiting the mass strike. But I hardly notice, I am listening to your acidic echoes as you read the poems you wrote last night. I am propped up like a corpse against a bombed out wall. Your voice mingles with the drone of a police helicopter which has flattened against the window like a pulverized hummingbird.

...

a review of

Radio Sermonettes, Hakim Bey, The Libertarian Book Club, (339 Lafayette St., Room 202, New York NY 10012), 40 pp., $3.50.

Hakim Bey’s earlier work, along with his more recent Radio Sermonettes, reflects the outlook of one who has centered himself in two often disparate schools of thought—Eastern mysticism and anarchism. And, while the (sometimes) richness of these two fields should promote an interesting cross-fertilization, Bey’s oft inability to pare down to the vital essence of the ideas he works with has seriously hindered his accomplishments.

...

I thought that the article on Bhopal in your Winter 1985 issue [FE #319, Winter, 1985] was quite good and, since nothing on the event appeared in Strike!, I’m glad that you too are “filling some gaps quite nicely.” The only problems I have with the article come in the final section where you tack on your standard anti-technology pro-primitive spiel. In doing so you delineate a problematic that goes straight to the heart of your politics.

...

a review of

Vice Versa: Bisexuality and The Eroticism of Everyday Life, Marjorie Garber, Simon and Schuster, 1995, 606 pp., $30.

Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries and Visions, Edited by Naomi Tucker with Liz Highleyman and Rebecca Kaplan. Haworth Publishers, 1995, 358 pp., $14.95 paper (available from FE Books).

...

Some of the books consulted for Looking back on the Vietnam War:

Richard Drinnon, Facing West The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (1980);

Frances Fitzgerald, The Fire in the Lake (1972);

War Crimes and the American Conscience (testimony from the Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility, 1970, edited by Erwin Knoll and Judith N. McFadden);

...

Bicentennial

A Living History

Two hundred years ago today nothing happened. Literally nothing happened. Philadelphia was sweltering: the garbage men were threatening to strike, and had already enforced a slowdown. They knew that a goodly amount of refuse and filth was going to collect in the city for the July 4^th Continental Congress. Flies swarmed over the heaps of trash bags lying in the streets next to the piles of bodies of plague victims.

...

a review of

Under the Sign of the Bicycle by Alon K. Raab (Portland: Gilgul Press), 31 pages, $3. from the Community Cycling Center, 2407 NE Alberta, Portland OR 97211.

“When I look at childhood,” begins Robert Bly in a poem in his stunning recent collection, Morning Poems,

I see the yellow rosebush

...

SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—The strike at San Francisco State has dragged on for two long months, with virtually every aspect of confrontation sooner or later included. [See “Strike at S.F. State,” FE #71, January 23-February 5, 1969.]

Mass arrest, the one previously missing ingredient, was finally added on Thursday, Jan. 23, when over 400 people were busted while trying to hold an “illegal” on-campus rally.

...

NEW YORK (LNS)—Tuesday night at Ungano’s Discotheque, located just west of Amsterdam Avenue at 70^th St., the atmosphere: dark, the clientele: negligible.

Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, who headed the bill, relaxed in the back room between sets, as the hard throb of records splayed out across the empty dance floor. One of the truly all-time great blues artists, with a powerful emotive and oh-so-sensitive voice that transcends those of both the classical female giants, such as Bessie Smith, and many of the traditionally-styled male bluesmen, Big Mama even now has received scant attention for her dynamic performances here and in Europe.

...

In the Southwest, “U.S. Out of North America” is not just another pretty slogan. In 1680, when Spain presided over the Four Corners Area, Indian ‘runners ran from village to village, launching the Pueblo Revolt, in which Pueblo, Navajo and Hopi Indians united to eliminate every Spaniard they could find, and freed the territory completely from foreign influence. It was twelve years before any of the territory was retaken by Spain and some of it never was, for instance at Hopi.

...

Sometimes no news is good news, and that seems to be the case with the folks at Big Mountain. According to Matt Strasberg (of the Big Mountain Legal Defense/Offense Committee), the July 7, 1986 deadline passed quietly. Indian activists, supporters and the media showed up for the showdown, but U.S. marshals declined to make an appearance. Claiming that the deadline was merely a “target date,” government officials have been close-lipped about their inability to overcome Hopi and Navajo resistance and to complete the relocation project.

...

The word went out through the grapevine. In the parts shops and on the street the word went from mouth to mouth, “There’s gonna be a protest!”

There was no other publicity, but on Sunday, September 7, better than 150 bikers gathered to protest a clearly unconstitutional law recently passed in Michigan requiring motorcyclists to cover their hair with a regulation motorcycle helmet while on a bike. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared a similar case unconstitutional on the basis that it violates the individual’s right to die any way he damn well pleases.

...

Recently the staff of the Fifth Estate, members of the Zulus motorcycle club and people from Detroit Newsreel a movement film making group, went to a press screening of “Easy Rider.”

The film is about two bikers played by Peter Fonda (Captain America) and Dennis Hopper (Billy), who produced and directed the film, riding out to Mardi Gras in Search of America on two beautiful choppers.

...

Bikes have no power until bodily given

and given, give back at higher gear.

Being mounted, being ridden

without armor plating, they’re

light in their taking

and being taken where.

Not that bikes can’t be taken, and take

to war: the U.S. in Havana, the British

against Boers, the Japanese in Shanghai,

...

a review of

Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration Edited by Chris Carlsson. AK Press, 2002, 256 pp. $18.95

Hop on a bike. Head downtown. Reclaim the streets. It is a critical mass of bicyclists boldly pedaling through public space with a festive challenge to car culture.

Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, is a collection of articles, photos and graphics published on the occasion of the ten year anniversary of Critical Mass. CM started as a monthly group bicycle outing in San Francisco and has spread around the world. The breadth of writings show many reasons people participate in Critical Mass rides: adventure, community, to protest pollution, to challenge authority, and to demonstrate against wars for oil.

...

“A little duct-tape, a little cardboard, and it’s a show.”

--Stephanie Monseu aka Philomena Bindlestiff, co-founder of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus

Around the same time I learned that revolution shouldn’t sell selfless sacrifice if it wanted to gain any self-interested revolutionaries, I also discovered dangerous devotees of dissent inside the proliferating avant-garde arts. A fire-breathing follow-up to the performance scene, a traveling anarchist circus was an obvious offshoot from the standard stock of shock that shot us with performance artist Karen Finley and crushed us with the neotribal music of Crash Wosrhip. Founded by Kinko and Philomena Bindlestiff (aka Keith Nelson and Stepahnie Monseu), these veterans of visionary weirdness admit, “Cirkus is hard.” The first decade of Keith and Stephanie’s death-defying adventures are captured in a new DVD documentary.

...

As techno-urbanism extends its dominion, imposing mechanized regimentation on all modes of experience, human nature with-as for want of living sustenance. Deprived of the life-enhancing conditions for expressive self-development, humans in the megamachine become self-alienated rather than self-actualized. The world as mechanized marketplace: calculable “market-values” almost entirely replace experiential values (revering, loving, wondering, feeling). The individual increasingly perceives herself as a commodity to-be trained and sold to the highest bidder.

...

a review of

HOME! A Bioregional Reader edited by Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright. New Society Publishers, Santa Cruz, CA. 1990, 181 pgs. $14.95.

This collection of thirty-one essays is a stimulating introduction to the notion of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism presents a model for a conscious transition from a late industrial society to a society which values community as well as freedom and diversity, a society which emphasizes the limits as well as the regenerative powers of the earth.

...

Related: see the introductory essay “In the Image of Capital: the rise of biotechnology,” FE #320, Spring, 1985

We are entering the newest phase in the technologization of the world. As microelectronics continues to encroach everywhere, capital is preparing the next wave—that of biotechnology or genetic engineering. Just as nuclear power promised to give us electricity too cheap to meter, so biotech’s publicity promises miracles: it will heal the sick, give children to the infertile, cure cancer, deal with chemical pollution and feed the starving millions. The implications of this technology are so vast and far-reaching that its prophets now speak of the coming biosociety, just as publicists of the computer speak of the information society.

...

When most Detroiters think of the organized right-wing in this city they immediately conjure up images of Don Lobsinger and his lunatic organization, Breakthrough, throwing Soviet flags at speakers, disrupting concerts because groups from the Soviet Union are playing there, or trying to break up (or through) peace demonstrations. Certainly, the Breakthroughers are spectacular and through their bizarre actions guarantee headlines. However, less spectacular, but perhaps -much more effective are the activities of the John Birch Society. Although there is an overlap in membership, Breakthrough and the Birch Society express ‘scorn for each other; the former saying the latter is not militant enough in dealing with the ‘communists’ in Detroit.

...

Humankind truly was not meant to fly, and birds keep trying to tell us so. As people and their flying machines continue to overpopulate the skies, not only do plane -to-plane collisions increase, but bird to plane collisions drastically increase as well, especially since new technology has created sleeker and quieter engines which sneak up on birds and scarcely give them any warning of their approach. Needless to say, it is the birds which must attempt to change their natural flight patterns to avoid fatal collisions.

...

The first public meeting of The Birmingham-Bloomfield Committee on Open Occupancy was held at the Birmingham Unitarian Church on Sunday, November 14. An unexpectedly large turnout of 250 people responded to the speakers’ demands for an end to the organized exclusion of Negroes by the realtors in the area.

...

Editors note: The Fifth Estate continued to win readers and supporters throughout the Detroit Metropolitan area.

The following review of the paper recently appeared in the school newspaper of Covington Jr. High School in Birmingham.

Covington student Claudia Marcun II forwarded the story to us.

Dennis Nelson

...

A national movement has been developing in Detroit with accelerated momentum since the summer rebellion, according to an analysis by Grace and James Boggs in the October 7 issue of the independent radical newsweekly NATIONAL GUARDIAN printed in New York City.

The movement, according to the authors, “is conscious of itself as being in the process of creating from all elements of the black community a self-governing nation which will control and determine its own destiny.”

...

The Black Economic Development Council has moved against the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan demanding that it give $200,000 for use in the black community. This is part of BEDC program that white churches pay reparations to the black community for the damage done to it over the last 350 years.

The National Episcopal Diocese has already agreed to give a large sum to the Council and the local group was demanding a similar show of Christian faith on the part of Bishop Richard Emrich and his church.

...

It seems apt now, a few months after Steve Jobs passed away, to turn a skeptical eye to the energetic display of grief that followed the news of his demise on October 5. For a few weeks thereafter, one could hardly turn on the radio, open the newspaper, or cue up the blogs on one’s iPhone without encountering another paean to the creative genius of Apple’s creator, another toast to the brave new world incubated by his products. Quibbles about the advisability of transferring our social and cultural lives to screens were shrugged off as misanthropy, or worse, Luddism.

...

November 11^th was the 120^th anniversary of the hangings of the anarchist Haymarket martyrs in Chicago, Illinois. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer and George Engel were hung (and Louis Lingg committed suicide) after a bomb killed police at a labor rally. There was no evidence against them and all were convicted solely on the basis of their anarchist ideas.

...

The Innu Indians of Labrador, Canada, like all native peoples caught in the tentacles of civilization, are constantly threatened with imminent annihilation. Since 1980, West Germany has been using this flat barren land, a territory about the size of Nevada and the home of the Innu for over 10,000 years, as a training area for their pilots. West German F4 Phantom jets regularly zoom by at altitudes of less than 300 feet, spewing exhaust and totally upsetting the natural balance of things. Ducks have laid eggs a month early, the caribou have changed migration patterns, beavers and other game have vanished, and Innu families have been forced to deal with this latest blatant insult to their traditional way of life, which has already been substantially disrupted and destroyed by encroaching development.

...

The following letter, at the top of which appeared the heading “Direct Action,” recently arrived at the FE office. Its view of the ecological crisis and the essential sameness of the capitalist West and the communist East is one with which we are in substantial agreement. And this anonymous attack on property strikes us as acceptable—unlike attacks on people, which, barring self-defense or extraordinary circumstances, we find repugnant—and often a useful means of struggle. However, we have some doubts about what seems to be their assessment of their own role in the struggle against capital (though the problem might be one of unclear writing). Like many others, they apparently feel compelled to formulate a strategy based on their understanding of historical processes in which they make themselves mere instrumentalities of these processes, rather than proceeding from their own desires and experiences. In this case, the authors of the letter see themselves as making it difficult for capitalists to expand their domestic development of energy and resources in the context of world-wide economic crises and the successes of allegedly destabilizing third world movements, presumably, their intention is to heighten the economic crisis by opposing further encroachments by multinational corporations. This formulation resembles the instrumentalism of ‘60s anti-imperialist students in the U.S. who sought to assist third world struggles by creating resistance in the imperialist centers, a limited and self-sacrificing vision containing the seeds of authoritarianism.

...

The Epilepsy Foundation of America is warning that the simple act of watching television may trigger seizures in nearly a third of all individuals with epilepsy. The Washington-based organization says there is substantial scientific data indicating that the moving images of lights and shadows on TV screens can provoke the seizures.

...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand—A Maori land-rights activist, driving a van with a traditional native people’s insult painted on its side, was arrested in February when he tried to join visiting Queen Elizabeth’s motorcade. The Queen was the repeated target during her visit of Maoris protesting the continuing theft of their homelands by the New Zealand government.

...

Big Mountain News announces the annual spring “Survival Gathering” April 19–22 to be held at Big Mountain Dine (Navajo) Nation. Native peoples and their supporters are invited to participate in the gathering which has been planned to commemorate and honor the resistance of the Navajo and Hopi Elders against the U.S. government. Governmental attempts to remove and relocate some 14,000 Dine peoples from the ancestral lands of the Hopi and Navajo have not been successful. So far only about 200 families have succumbed to relocation programs; 2,800 families still remain. The government intends to clear the land, mine it for coal and uranium, and incorporate it into agribusiness ventures. For information on the continuing struggles of the Navajo and Hopi, and on the upcoming spring gathering write: Big Mountain Support Group, 1412 Cypress Street, Berkeley, CA 94703.

...

It is two hundred years since the European invasion of Australia. The resistance that was begun then by Australian Aborigines continues today. While the presentation of a sanitized version of history takes place on the TV screens of the nation, the original inhabitants of the continent have declared 1988 a Year of Mourning and Commitment to Struggle.

...

Although opposition to draft registration has dropped from prominence in the daily media, an active anti-conscription movement remains committed to opposing one necessary component of the Reagan war drive. Hundreds of thousands of young men remain in violation of the law through their refusal to register and even more through their failure to keep the Selective Service System (SS) informed of address changes and other required data.

...

The Redfern Black Rose Anarchist Bookstore, 36 Botany Rd., Alexandria, Sydney 2015 Australia, sends us the following news from down under:

March 4: A flotilla of 60 odd boats and other watercraft (windsurfers, surfboards, rafts) attempted to hinder the entry of two U.S. destroyers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. 300 people carried out a 96-hour vigil across the Naval yard where they were docked.

...

So-called “national-liberation” struggles (read: establish an indigenous bureaucracy in power with its police rather than that of the colonial power) have pretty much been discredited in recent years except among dismal leftists. High on the list of leftist boosterism has been the Polisario Liberation Front which according to Western intelligence sources appears to be all but defeated in their 8-year war with Morocco for control of the Western Sahara in North Africa.

...

On September 27, 1983, during a demonstration protesting the visit of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Ken Deyarmond, a Toronto activist, was pushed from behind toward Thatcher. He was tackled by a cop, thrown to the sidewalk, handcuffed, and charged with “threatening assault on an internationally protected person.” Charges were also added for assault on police and for possession of marijuana. Ken is the first person in Canada to be charged with the crime of threatening a foreign “dignitary” and scheduled to stand trial for it Sept. 25 in Toronto. He was convicted on the pot charge and sentenced to probation although he states categorically that he does not smoke it and certainly would have brought none to a well policed demonstration. Ken has been active in environmental, women’s issues, anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics for a long while in Toronto. He has been an active supporter and friend of the Vancouver Five and is a member of the anti-prison magazine, Bulldozer. The assault charges (Thatcher and the cops) are based on police statements which range from contradictory to inflammatory to outright lies. Ken had this to say about the situation: “(The charges) stem from my mobilizing opposition to the new security spy agency (in Canada). Furthermore, the charges are an attempt to intimidate people from developing more militant politics against racism, sexism and imperialism.” Support is urgently requested for Ken’s defense. Letters of support and much needed financial donations may be sent to Ken Deyarmond Defense Committee, Box 6326, Station “A”, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

...

Paul Jacob, the libertarian draft resister who went underground to escape prosecution, was convicted at a July 1 trial, sentenced and denied appeal bond. The penalty was six months imprisonment and 4-1/2 years of weekly community service.

The trial proved to be lively with Paul calling 1980 Libertarian Party candidate Ed Clark and former Congressman Ron Paul to testify on his behalf. Both explained the history of the draft and said that registration and the draft are unconstitutional. Paul also called Gen. Thomas Turnage, director of the Selective Service (SS), as a witness for the defense. Turnage testified that compliance with the registration law implied approval of the system which is one of the reasons that Paul refused to sign. Rhonda Allen, Libertarian activist and Paul’s wife, later described Turnage as a nazi.

...

On Sunday, July 17, at around 1:30 am, two masked men carrying machine guns broke into the house in Comiso, Sicily functioning as the coordinating center for the groups against the U.S. cruise missile base. Once inside they lined all the occupants up against the wall and aimed their guns.

About 20 people were subjected to this terror. They included most of the Anarchismo group from Catania and other local anti-militarists. A blast was fired in the direction where Alfredo Bonanno stood and it was later discovered that a bullet had passed through his clothing. The two intruders then ordered everyone in the house to get out of Comiso for good. The two men are assumed to have been mafiosi.

...

GREEK LIBERTARIANS: As of May 14, Greek libertarians, Photis Danatos and Kyriakos Miras were in their 54^th day of a hunger strike. They were arrested on the apparently minor charge of “hooliganism”—a catch-all charge used to imprison protesters (peaceful or otherwise). The arrests took place during a march (to protest at the “suiciding” and torture of, prisoners in Greece under the so-called “socialists”) that took place in Piraeus when a motorist (presumably a provocateur/extremist) drove into the crowd so as to break up the march. In the resulting melee the two—who were in the crowd protesting and are known by the police as “politicals”—were picked up and they have been in prison ever since.

...

HOPE FOR DOPE — High Times magazine reports that the recent Paraquat scare is just that and “not to believe the government.” Paraquat paranoia developed a few months ago when it surfaced that the U.S. had financed the spraying of Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide and that smoking of treated weed would cause “irreversible lung damage.” The Paraquat campaign has cost the taxpayers over $50 million since it began in 1974.

...

How beauteous it would have been to see your lifeless corpse dangling from the iron gate before your majestic estate, as the flames began appearing as ghosts might appear in the windows of the second floor. To hear the sound of breaking glass, and the occasional report of a gun, to see the broken fragments scattered across the lawn, discarded during the looting, the smell of smoke, acrid and oily of your burning limousine, your shiny rich man’s shoes turning like a weathervane, first south, then east, then south, then west, then north, in the direction of all your crimes...
But you died in comfort, perhaps surprised that you were not, after all, immortal. Attica went unavenged. I think of you and I spit, happy at least that you are dead and gone!
—Mr Venom

...

A meeting to plan the 1988 Anarchist Gathering was held Sept. 12 in Toronto which will be the host city. About sixty people from all over North America attended, indicating to the local planning group that there is “interest and support both locally and from across the continent.”

...

Note about cover of print edition: This follows Vol. 21 No. 2

Wisconsin draft resister Gillam Kerley, 26, was sentenced May 29 to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine. This is the harshest sentence received by any convicted nonregistrant since the draft was reinstated by President Carter in 1980. Kerley has been an active and vocal resister whose employment by the Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD) was cited during the sentencing by Judge Shabaz, a Republican Reagan appointee.

...

The people at Back Room Anarchist Books in Minneapolis have announced a continental anarchist gathering to be held June 18–22 in that city. After the success of the May Day/Haymarket events in Chicago last year, most of our appetites have been whetted for closer and more frequent communication within the anti-authoritarian movement. The tentative agenda includes workshops, several actions, a banquet and a party.

...

Bill and Emily Harris, the Symbionese Liberation Army members who pleaded guilty to kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974 and were imprisoned in 1978, will be paroled in June. Their attorney, Stuart Hanlon, said Bill Harris will become an investigative paralegal for Hanlon, and Emily Harris, who took computer training in prison, will look for a job in that field. Both will be placed on parole for three years, although they will probably be discharged after a year. The Harrises pleaded guilty in 1978 to the kidnapping charges and were sentenced to ten years, eight months to life in prison.

...

Despite the change of bureaucracy in China and attempts by the new rulers to make peace with the workers by offering them meager wage increases, it seems that political and social unrest continues. According to a recent French news agency report, there have been a series of executions of political and “criminal” prisoners in China since the beginning of 1978.

...

The Chinese people have a new hero, according to the Peking Peoples Daily. He is Teng Hsiang-erh, a Shantung province coal miner who is being hailed as a model worker. To earn the distinction, Teng did the following: refused to take time off for his honeymoon, never took a vacation in 28 years, worked on his days off, and stayed at work rather than care for his terminally-ill mother. However the acclaim is not unanimous. According to Japanese reporters in Peking, many of Teng’s fellow coal miners think he’s a fruitcake. (IWW)

...

Since the kidnapping of Aldo Moro in Rome last month, newspapers around the world-have been covering the story of the abduction of this “poor man” while attacks by fascist groups in Italy go unreported, and in fact condoned by the Italian high courts (the Feb. 28, 1978 issue of In These Times reported that three judges in Rome have ruled that the self-proclaimed fascist group Ordine Nuovo—New Order—were not at all a fascist organization, which are illegal under Italian law. Upon hearing the ruling of the three judges, the Ordine Nuovo members in the courtroom started singing, ‘All ‘armi siam fascisti’—‘to arms, we are fascists.’).

...

Although Robert Chechlacz and Tomasz Lupanow remain jailed as Polish political prisoners, international support for them has grown (See FE Summer 1985). Though only trying to disarm him, the two were convicted of killing a militiaman just after the crackdown in Poland in 1982. Their support group has a newsletter available as well as posters and postcards from Polish Workers Solidarity Committee, Box 284, Main Street, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada L2R 6T7.

...

A review of

AKIBA: A Gnostic Novel, by p.m. Autonomedia, 2007

AKIBA, the new novel from Swiss writer p.m., belongs to a long tradition of utopian activist novels: it is not so much a work of art as a vehicle to illustrate the author’s political vision. Fans of p.m. will recognize the ideas, but might be surprised by the new sci-fi futurism that drives them.

...

Although many of the influential radical titles from Black & Red Books, printed at the Detroit-based Detroit Printing Co-op between 1970 and 1980 are out of print, their relevance hasn’t lessened with the passing years. It is hoped there is interest in republishing them.

The books contain repressed histories, critiques from ultra-left, council communist, and anarchist sources. Discovering the works of Fredy Perlman, Jacques Camatte, Guy Debord, and others through B&R books contained the ideas that energized this publication to continue printing at a time of political quietism.

...

Fredy Perlman with the cover of Letters of Insurgents at Detroit’s Black and Red Print co-op, 1976

Though little known locally, Black and Red prints some of the most inflammatory and socially relevant material that has ever fanned the flames of discontent.

A variety of concepts mark themes in Black and Red literature: Fetishism, estrangement of power, spectacularization of social relations, all manner of alienating effects that happen when people live under the domination of a ruling class. The books document how people reproduce the institutions that dominate them, and how that domination is done largely because people are unaware of the many forms oppression takes.

...

Editors’ Note: The following statement was delivered Feb. 12 at a Wayne University forum on anti-Semitism sponsored by the South End newspaper. It comes in the midst of growing concern on the part of the Jewish community about alleged anti-Semitism both in our city and in other areas.

Hochman, once a Zionist, is a professor at Eastern Michigan University and ran as the vice-presidential candidate with Eldridge Cleaver in Michigan last year.

...

Jail is an environment that has been engineered to starve the senses. While creativity and culture at times seem to flourish among prisoners, these manifestations of the human drive for self-expression truly exist against all odds, and are often short lived due to institutional suppression.

For racialized communities in particular, this suppression of culture is a heavy reminder of the white supremacist nature of colonial state power. However, while the punitive measures of the prison system aim to demoralize and break the spirit, they can also have the contradictory effect of galvanizing prisoners by giving us no choice but resistance or spiritual death.

...

Who are the long list of names in the oceans

Who are the figures standing in the cabin doors

as the train highballs North

Who are the wailing children,

bodies ripped into bits of flesh?

I catch aspects of their profiles,

am wound around them like a serpent

grasping for life.

whose eyes are these, gouged out

mucus smeared in the red earth,

figure hanging tarred above the lynch fire?

what bodies are these crushed and maimed,

or brains kicked out on the piss pavements

of the cities?

How many aspects of truth do you need Negro leaders?

How many angles are there to any story?

Whose church was that now charred smoldering in time?

Whose mamma getting laid in the cotton patch:

Whose orishas call blood-warnings?

Whose shall die, and die, and die, and die?

Whose soul fucked on the assembly floor?

whose mind picked clean in air-conditioned offices?

whose children shot to pieces in Newark tenements?

whose blood is that efficient lackey-tom motherfuckers?

...

The photographs of Ken Hamblin, photographic director for Detroit Scope Magazine, will be featured in an exhibit combining photography and poetry in the Fine Arts Corridor of the Detroit Main Library from May 12 to June 14.

Hamblin’s photos have appeared several times in the Fifth Estate and the WSU South End.

...

FORT HOOD, Tex.—A court-martial found five black soldiers, including two Detroiters, guilty of refusing to obey an order growing out of a demonstration against possible anti-riot duty at the Democratic National Convention.

The specific charge was failing to report for reveille.

A sixth soldier, Pvt. Ronald McCoy, 23, of Philadelphia was acquitted.

...

Pig-paper reporters don’t wear blue uniforms.

But the pig media has to be considered one of the important repressive forces in this country. As long as “their” media are allowed to define “facts” for people, “their” power structure will be able to control these people. Power is partially the ability to define your world and yourself.

...

Dear Fifth Estate,

In your June, 1985 issue [Letters, FE #320, Spring, 1985] Lev Chernyi joined the Big Mountain discussions and described an uncomfortable experience at the 1980 Black Hills Gathering. Chernyi was also responding to previous letters to the Fifth Estate which complained about some of the messages of the article on Big Mountain which I wrote last year. In that article I had referred to the necessity for “respect for the elders” and other guidelines on how to get along, as a non-Indian, when visiting Indian lands.

...

a review of

Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action by Nadja Millner-Larsen. The University of Chicago Press, 2023

When I met Ben Morea some years ago, I assumed that our correspondence would further my historical research on the interrelation between experimental and ultra-leftist radicalism in the United States in the 1960s and ‘70s.

...

Carrying signs demanding “No Target Practice on Kids,” twenty youths picketed Danny’s Market on Puritan at San Juan, July 13, protesting the wild shooting by a Negro guard at two little black girls aged eight and ten.

The white owner, Danny Knopper, was told to “keep his goons under control” to “protect black kids” and to “provide good will and not bad guards”.

...

Convening in Chicago’s Palmer House, one of America’s plushest (and whitest) hotels, the National Conference on New Politics brought black militants and much of the white left into occasional dialogue and frequent chaos.

The New Politics convention assembled an unprecedented array of strange bedfellows under one roof. Before the convention ended, white Mississippians called for Black Power, Jews condemned “Zionist imperialism,” a couple of nuns endorsed the Newark conference resolutions (which characterized Christianity as a slave religion) and as usual the minuscule Ad-Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Vanguard in America denounced almost everyone.

...

a review of

Black Panther; Director: Ryan Coogler 134 min.

On the list of watershed films of 2018 will be Black Panther, Marvel Studios’ astronomically budgeted blockbuster, which raked in critical plaudits as well as ticket sales on an unprecedented scale. The film has struck a chord with both black and white audiences.

...

OAKLAND, CALIF., July 16 (LNS) A tense crowd of several thousand chanted outside the Alameda County Courthouse here as the trial of Huey Newton entered its second day.

Newton, Black Panther Party Minister for Defense, and Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. Congress, has been imprisoned since October 28 of last year, when he was arrested in a hospital and charged with the murder of an Oakland cop. Newton and a second Oakland cop were wounded in the confrontation, the first in a series of attempted assassinations of the Panther leadership by Oakland police.

...

“Art just pushed the shit through.”

It was with that calmly uttered statement that John Watson summed up how it was that he came to be elected the editor-in chief of the Wayne State University student newspaper, The South End.

He was referring to Art Johnston, the out-going editor, who maneuvered Watson’s election to the post. The two of them talked of their plans for the paper in a conversation with the Fifth Estate.

...

reprinted from the L.A. Free Press

“Given a city government that is unconcerned about the problems of the people of South Central Los Angeles, a Mayor who considers these citizens to be hoodlums and a Chief of Police who considers them to be monkeys, the only alternative to violence on both sides is for a separation from that city government and the institution of another one with powers assigned by the people it serves.”

...

High school students throughout the country have been historically forced to assume second and third class status in Amerikan citizenship. Special kinds of oppression are reserved for them because the state views them as being at the crucial brainwashing stage.

But, like all other institutions in our society, high schools are breaking out of the narrow constricted limitations that are provided for them. To be black in Amerika is bad enough, but to be black and a student is totally intolerable. Throughout Detroit white, and especially black, high schools have been rebelling and scoring important victories.

...

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, founded in Detroit, is a militant union movement. It is fighting against the giant automotive corporations and against the United Auto Workers. It is fighting for black liberation and self-determination. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers is an historic phenomenon that is not only a response to the failures of capitalist-worker relationships, but more importantly it is a response to the failures of American unionism.

...

“A single star weds the space between two branches.”

-- George Elliott Clarke in Québécité

Lately, I have chosen to do my living, loving, writing, and resisting in British Columbia (BC) Canada. Though I can’t say that I’m an ex-patriot, since I have always despised patriotism; I am currently an expatriate. Canada has long been a destination of choice for American political dissidents like myself, and for such refugees from US oppression as the enslaved Africans who followed the North Star to the last stop on the Underground Railroad (though slavery was by no means illegal in Canada). In 2000, the now deceased African American surrealist poet, Ted Joans, put a new wrinkle on that maroon tradition by swearing that he would move to Canada if George W. Bush became President. Immediately after the election, he moved to Vancouver. For a variety of reasons, in 2002, I followed his ambulatory example by moving to one of the Northern Gulf Islands (which are located in the Strait of Georgia between the West Coast of the Canadian mainland Vancouver Island). Finally fed up, I had escaped the belly of the beast to seek sanctuary on Denman Island.

...

Black high school students escalated their Spring Offensive March 26 in a city-wide demonstration at the School Center Building, headquarters of the Detroit Board of Education.

The demonstration was sponsored by the Black Student Voice, a black junior and senior high school newsletter dedicated to the complete liberation of black people.

...

April 3^rd began a new evening of theatre from black experience entitled “Soul of Darkness.”

Evenings of two one-act plays by Detroit playwright Laurence Blaine will be held at the Detroit Repertory Theatre.

“Little Old Ladies” will be performed by Jessie Newton, Irene McGlone, Frenchy Hodges, and Harrison Avery.

...

Another letter has been engraved on the tombstone of the dying United Auto Workers bureaucracy as 300 members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers gathered outside Cobo Hall Sunday morning, Nov. 9, to protest the racist practices of the UAW leadership.

The demonstration was to coincide with the UAW special convention to be concluded on Nov. 9. UAW president Walter Reuther, however, in an attempt to avert a confrontation with the militant rank-and-file movement arranged for the convention to be terminated on the previous evening.

...

The week of Oct. 5 through 12, the Ad Hoc Construction Coalition presented demands to 8 agencies that 50% of all workers in construction and construction-related projects in the Detroit area be black.

Spokesman Hank Rogers said that the Coalition represents an affiliation of approximately 50 community groups, including the West Central Organization, Urban League, Metropolitan Contractors Association, and black construction Local 124.

...

The following is an excerpt from an article commenting on the 1993 Palestine Liberation Organization/Israel peace agreement, “The PLO/Israeli Treaty: Another Defeat for the Palestinians,” from Fifth Estate #343, Fall/Winter 1993.

Few realize that in the 45 years of Israeli existence, fewer than 700 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian guerrillas. In the same period, Israel has slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians (including scores of children whose “crime” was throwing stones), wiped out 400 villages, imprisoned thousands without trial, dynamited houses, cut down thousands of trees in orchards, and engaged in collective punishment in an attempt to terrorize the “natives” into submission.

...

In our effort to bring readers important reprints from the FE archive, we offer the following excerpt from an article by George Bradford and E.B. Maple regarding the 1993 Palestine Liberation Organization/Israel peace agreement, “The PLO/Israeli Treaty: Another Defeat for the Palestinians.” This is the last section of the article.

...

a review of

Blood Lake: A Filomena Buscarsela Mystery by Kenneth Wishnia. PM Press edition 2014; Spanish translation 2018. Originally published HB 2002

Anarchist fans of detective novels and murder mysteries who don’t like cops have to suspend a little of their social critique since it is the police, ex-cops, and private eyes who are solving the crimes. Anarchists as a rule don’t do much sleuthing.

...

In the last few months blues has become very popular with the white coffee house crowds. This blues is a kind of washed out version of what was popular during the forties and early fifties when now familiar names like Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Sunnyland Slim, Little Walter and Jimmy Reed were popular to a different type of audience. Most of the artists mentioned are still turning out albums in the blues city, Chicago, but the music has changed, maybe for the better, maybe not. The old gut-bucket style of delivery, the slurred speech, and the startlingly honest lyrics have been toned down slightly.

...

It was with shock and sadness that we learned of the sudden death of our friend and collaborator Bob Brubaker, of a severe asthma attack at his home in Numazu, Japan. Bob died in the night of April 23–24. Memorials for him were organized by friends, coworkers and his students in Japan; by his family in Pittsburgh; and by friends in Detroit.

...

Dylan, eyebrows up and lids down, spoke in intense staccato. He’d throw words out in rhythmic phrases, testing the articulation of his thought by speaking it. He would smoke distractedly, bob his knee as if dandling a kid, and diddle with his fingers...continually nervous. We’d been introduced by mutual friends and the talk had been straight and communicative for an hour or so. His nervousness wasn’t irritation, it was restlessness. Dylan is a quester, a grower, a doer; and growth is a nonsleep engagement.

...

This Interview Is something of a rarity in that it is one of the very few—if any—in which Dylan volunteered to talk to and with his interviewer in a manner honest and meaningful. However, I do not claim to have caught Dylan in it—I have only caught a segment of his shadow on that day...

Robbins: I don’t know whether to do a serious interview or carryon in that Absurdist way we talked last night.

...

In Dylan’s sixth album he sings a major poem called “Desolation Road.” One stanza has to do with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot sitting in the captain’s tower arguing for power while calypso dancers leap on the deck and fishermen hold flowers. The image is relevant to any interview with Dylan, for it illustrates his basic attitude towards showplace words. It has to do with experiencing life, partaking of its unending facets and hangups and wonders instead of dryly discussing it. A typical Dylan interview is more an Absurdist Happening than a fact-finding dialog. He presents himself in shatterproof totality—usually a somewhat bugged and bored mode of it—and lets components fall out as the interview pokes at it. He’s not taciturn, he’s simply aware of his absurd situation and the desperate clamor of folks who want to know how many times he rubs his eyes upon awakening and why.

...

Detroit took its first glimpse at the “new” Bob Dylan in his concert at the Masonic Temple on Oct. 24. The first half of the spectacle was the traditional Dylan. Following the intermission, the audience was confronted by Dylan wielding an electric guitar, surrounded by his rock & roll combo.

His first song, “Tombstone Blues”, resulted in cries of “We want Dylan!”

...

Bob McGlynn, a longtime fighter, organizer and visionary in New York City’s anarchist scene, who became known internationally for his solidarity work with activists in the East Bloc, died of a heart attack Aug. 23 at his home in Yonkers. He was 60 years old.

With his long hair, army boots, sleeveless denim jacket and prize-fighter’s build, McGlynn could be taken for a biker. But he was motivated by an intense idealism.

...

A review of

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle: Beyond the Periphery of the Skin by Silvia Federici PM Press 2020

Before history appears on any page, it is written on the bodies of those who live it—as muscle, callous, stretch mark, wound. “The history of the body is the history of human beings,” writes Marxist and feminist scholar Silvia Federici, “for there is no cultural practice that is not first applied to the body.” The history of capitalism, then, is a history of bodies and their subjugation: of bodies exploited, enslaved, colonized and mechanized, bodies made work-machines in service of productive labor—or, for those bodies called “woman,” reproductive labor.

...

“La protesta es una fiera mujer sin partido ni caudillo” “The protest is a fierce woman without party or leaders.”

Teeming with tens of thousands of angry protesters and shaking from the resounding blasts of dynamite, the streets of La Paz on October 18^th were the scene of a dramatic climax to six weeks of mounting protests. The universal demand was nothing less than the resignation of Bolivia’s president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Later that afternoon, President Sanchez, his family, and remaining ministers fled to the United States.

...

Recorder’s Court Judge Thomas Poindexter has bound over for trial seven of the nine persons accused of conspiring to bomb police stations, draft boards, and the Ann Arbor CIA office last Fall.

Poindexter has apparently already decided that the accused are guilty even before the trial begins.

“A conspiracy is like a circle,” he said on Feb. 7 after an 11 day preliminary examination. “After I make that comparison the defendant David Valler is the center of the circle.”

...

A scene from “The Good War”: American marines boil the flesh off of a Japanese soldier’s skull, Guadalcanal, South Pacific, 1942.

After reading your articles in FE #345, Winter 1995 on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of historical and moral context was needed to balance the distortion contained therein.

...

(Ieft) Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, victims of an assassin’s bomb, playing earlier at a Redwood Summer benefit. (right) The car they were driving when the bomb exploded.

In a doubly bizarre set of circumstances, two California environmentalists experienced an assassination attempt followed by their arrest for “possessing” the device that almost killed them.

...

“The pump won’t work ‘cause the vandals took the handles.”

—Bob Dylan

When three bombs, planted by revolutionaries, exploded at dawn Thursday, March 12, inside the New York offices of three major U.S. industrial corporations, they were not acts of mindless destruction.

The explosions at IBM, Socony Mobil, and Sylvania Electric were attacks by serious [word missing in original] who understand that it is these corporations that are marketing death, destruction, and social perversion in mass quantities.

...

The following report on the arrest and deportation of Bommi Baumann comes to us from the Islington Gutter Press by way of Black Flag newspaper.

On the 14^th of February, Michael “Bommi” Baumann, for years on the list of West Germany’s 40 most wanted left-wing terrorists, was arrested by the British Special Branch at his home in London. 36 hours later he was on the plane to Frankfurt. Now in prison in Berlin, he awaits trial on a list of charges including membership in the outlawed 2^nd June Movement, taking part in three bank robberies, the attempted murder of a policeman and an explosion in which a worker was killed.

...

a review of

The Menu. Dir: Mark Mylod (2022)

Judging from The Menu’s trailer and promotional images, it seemed as though it was going to literally be an Eat the Rich story. While a movie with a cannibal revenge plot would have been entertaining, there was some welcomed nuance and style within the film that made up for some of its disappointments.

...

As a charter member of the “Bonnie and Clyde” cult, Thomas Haroldson’s hostile review of the movie in the last issue of the FIFTH ESTATE [“Bonnie & Clyde Shot Down,” FE #40, October 15–31, 1967] was slightly disconcerting. Enough so that I went to see the movie. For the third time.

My faith was restored. “Bonnie and Clyde” is one of a small number of great American movies. Haroldson’s review is wrong about nearly everything except the fact that some scenes would have been more effectively shot in black and white. Some wouldn’t.

...

It is usually unwise and often physically dangerous to laugh at another man’s religion. When a person believes fervently in something, no matter how absurd the object of his faith appears, there is no safe way to tell him that he is wrong.

Therefore, when one attacks the movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” there is no way to avoid infuriating the worshipping instant cult that the movie has produced.

...

a review of

Murray Bookchin, Re-enchanting Humanity: A defense of the human spirit against anti-humanism, misanthropy, mysticism and Primitivism (London: Cassell, 1995) 284 pp

In this book Murray Bookchin is out to clobber the competition. He’s been in training for this one for decades. In his previous works, he explained the crucial importance of developing a “muscularity of thought,” and revealed that his “ecological project” is a “social gymnasium for shedding the sense of powerlessness.” After much working out in that gym, he’s developed some enormous intellectual muscles, and is a powerful guy indeed. He’s often told us of his contempt for those sissified Eastern philosophers and their weak, “passive receptive” outlooks. This philosophical Marlboro Man is firmly in the Western tradition, which is, he explains, “sturdier in its thrust than the Eastern.” There will be no questions about the “sturdiness” of Murray Bookchin’s “thrust”! He has passed through the steeling school of politics, which, he tells us, is concerned with “forging a self.” Once out of the forge, the safely armored self will always be on its guard. For “the guarded mind,” he says, is the only Guarantee that we will be “guided by the thin line of truth.” This “guarded mind,” rigidly following the correct “line” is, he concludes, nothing less than “a fortress,” Eine fest Burg is unser Geist. When Murray Bookchin writes a book defending “the spirit,” it’s the spirit that comes out swinging.

...

A review of

Powerline: The First Battle of America’s Energy War, Barry M. Casper and Paul David Wellstone, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1981, 314 pp.

In many ways this is a hard book to get a handle on. It would be easy to dismiss the protagonists as middle-income, conservative, small-landholding farmers pitted against a giant power company and only squawking when their ox is suddenly gored. But it’s more than that. The farmers who tried to stop a 430 mile long direct powerline from trespassing across their property in the middle ‘70s were propelled along by the deceit of politicians and corporations until most of them had experienced a profound transformation in how they viewed their isolated rural world of western Minnesota.

...

a review of

Wartime Strikes: The Struggle Against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW During World War II by Martin Glaberman, 1980, Bewick Editions, Detroit, 158 pp., $6 (Available from Fifth Estate Books).

Marty Glaberman’s account of auto worker militancy during the war years from the perspective of both an observer and a participant is essentially a tale of resistance to the orders of bosses—both union and government—to participate in the war mobilization under terms unfavorable to the workers.

...

a review of

Richard Wright, a biography by Constance Webb. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NYC, 442 pages $8.95.

William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Henrik Clarke. Beacon Press, Boston, hardbound $4.95, paperback: $1.95

Whenever a better-than-third-rate book enters the midst of all the recent jet-propelled “publishing about Black” it must seemingly SCREAM! to be heard above all the confusing Noise of Publicity. Constance Webb’s gigantic biography of Richard Wright (author of Native Son, Black Boy, [1] and originator of the phrase, Black Power) does not, unfortunately, scream, and so it will probably drown in libraries (at $8.95 a copy) before it has had a chance to swim in public dialogue.

...

B. Traven, The White Rose, Lawrence Hill & Co., Westport, CT, 1979, 209 pages, ($5.95, available from Fifth Estate Bookstore)

reviewed by L.S.D.

The White Rose by B. Traven is the story of the destruction of the pearl that was the most beautiful of all, the Rosa-Blanca, The White Rose, and its transformation into an industrial wasteland. This Mexican hacienda was almost entirely surrounded by land rich in oil owned by the Condor Oil Co., where rich wells poured forth thick streams of black gold. The richest of these wells bordered Rosa Blanca where Jacinto Yanez, owner of the hacienda, and sixty Totonac Indian families lived and had lived in almost the same manner for generations past, for Rosa Blanca was their ancestral home.

...

a review of

Vietnam! Vietnam! by Felix Greene, Fulton Publishing Co Hardcover $5.50, Softcover $2.95.

“Whatever the military outcome of the war in Vietnam, its moral outcome has already been decided...America has the ignominious role, whether she wins or loses.”

—Arnold Toynbee

In war-time, it is easy to forget about human beings. In the case of the war in Vietnam, this seems to be especially true. For those who sympathize with the war, pictures of torture and cruelty become commonplace (after all, war is hell). For those involved in opposing the war, heated arguments about slogans and feverish planning for mechanical demonstrations too often take precedence. We have all forgotten the Vietnamese and their humanity.

...

a review of

Abortion by Lawrence Lader. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 211 pp. 1966. $5.95.

Illegal abortion is the leading health problem in the United States.

There is one abortion for every 3.6 births and half of all childbearing deaths are attributed to illegal abortions. A hospital abortion is one of the simplest and safest of all operations, less dangerous than a tonsillectomy.

...

INFORMED SOURCES, a novel by Willard Bain: Doubleday, 1969, 144 pp., $2.95.

“Power is the ability to define phenomena and make them act in a desired manner.”

—Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense, Black Panther Party

Willard Bain’s book was originally printed by the Communications Company in San Francisco the summer of 1967 and given away free in the streets. Informed Sources is the first post-Burroughsian novel I’d say, post-McLuhan also, and in its intentions and design strictly contemporary. Bain (who has the same initials as Burroughs—WSB—strangely enough) has gotten down to the simple major questions of control and power and what language has to do with it.

...

a review of

Man’s Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State by Peter Farb, E.P. Dutton, 332 pp. 1968, $8.95.

Man’s Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State is quite an eyefull title. Don’t be fooled.

...

discussed in this article:

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. 397 pages, Hardbound, $5.95. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Paperback, $1.25, Bantam Books

Editors’ Note: Detroit News reporter Joseph Strickland was the first newsman to break concrete news about the Algiers Motel slayings during last July’s rebellion. The editors of the Fifth Estate quizzed Strickland about John Hersey’s new book, The Algiers Motel Incident.

...

a review of

• The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report by Richard Warren Lewis based on an investigation by Lawrence Schiller. Dell Original 95 cents

• The Truth About the Assassination by Charles Roberts. Grosset & Dunlap, Original Paperback $1

“If I learned anything in Dallas that day, besides what it’s like to be numbed by shock and grief,” says Charles Roberts in his book (p. 13), “it was that eye-witness testimony is the worst kind.”

...

a review of

The Impoverished Students’ Book Of Cookery, Drinkery, & Housekeepery by Jay F. Rosenberg. New York: Doubleday. $1.25.

Not so different from Chaucer’s scholar, students today are usually poor and this book is meant to ease the pains and help the limited budget. An impoverished student is defined as an individual who loves to eat, bates to cook, and cannot really afford to do either.

...

a review of

Pot: A Handbook Of Marijuana, by John Rosevear (University) Books, $4.95).

I first met John Rosevear when I was dealing grass in 1964. He came to my apartment with two notorious Ann Arbor dealers who had a bag of imported Panama Red, the finest grass to hit Detroit since I’ve been here. It seems they were in the habit of flying to Panama to pick up the grass themselves, to make sure nothing went wrong in the shipping. At that time Rosevear had just recently been turned on to the joys of marijuana smoking and he told me of the plot of pot he was growing in a vacant lot across from his house in Ann Arbor. He was already working on his book of grass, which he claimed ecstatically would turn on a lot of straight people to marijuana.

...

a review of

Where Is Vietnam? a Collection of Poems—an Anthology of new work by 87 Poets, edited by Walter Lowenfels, NYC., Doubleday and Co., 160 pages, $1.25.

A friend of mine once said that the only good reasons for reviewing a book were (1) to sell the book, or (2) to publicly kick the author in the ass. In this case I hardly know where to begin.

...

Our friends at Black and Red Books--another radical publishing project from Detroit--have finally put their catalog online at http://blackandred.org. It’s now easier than ever to find titles like Society of the Spectacle; Against His-story, Against Leviathan; The Strait; The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism; Love and Politics; The Wandering of Humanity, and more.

...

Cazzaarola!: Anarchy, Romani, Love, Italy by Norman Nawrocki, PM Press, 2013, 300 pp, $18, pmpress.org. Anarchy and the anti-fascist struggle in 20^th century Italy and the oppression of the Roma and other immigrants in contemporary Italy are intertwined in this excellent novel.

Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, edited with commentary by Peter Glassgold, Counterpoint Press, 2012, 458 pp, $22.95, counterpointpress.com, is a new and expanded edition of this collection of work drawn from the pages of Goldman’s wildly anarchic magazine, which she and others published between 1906 and 1917, until it was suppressed by the government. These century old articles remain relevant and exciting today.

...

BOOKS

Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, by Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Harvard University Press, 2012, 528 pp., 36 photos, $35.

The story of “the most dangerous woman in America” and her long-time companion, begun by the late historian Paul Avrich and completed by his daughter. Goldman’s words, whose quotes adorn everything from coffee mugs to Occupy placards, still resonate with the passion and vision of anarchy.

...

Momentos, Compendio Poetico by Federico Arcos

The Story of Tatiana by Jacques Baynac

The Wandering of Humanity by Jacques Camatte

Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship by N. Chomsky

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

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

Love & Politics by Judith Malina

...

Gothick Institutions by Peter Lamborn Wilson (Xexoxial 2005) $10 (see the review on page 38)

Garden Planet by William Kotke (AuthorHouse 2005) $11 (see the reprint on page 33)

Passion Fruit (Passion Fruit 2005) $5 (see the reprint on page 30–31)

Hymns for Brueghel: Brambles of Berries, Rants, and Poetic Orgies by (un)leash. (Primal Revival Press 2005) $20 (see the review on page 32)

...

Bush League Spectacles: Empire, Politics, and Culture in Bushwhacked America by Fran Shor (Factory School 2005) $13

“In the aftermath of 9/11, many of us looked to the Internet for the desperately needed analysis that was pushed out of the corporate media, and it’s there that we found writers such as Fran Shor. Combining an academic’s careful research and a political activist’s quest for justice, Shor speaks plainly and speaks with passion in these essays that analyze the political and cultural crisis of the contemporary United States.”

...

Complete catalog available from pumpkinhollow.net/thebarn

Creating Anarchy by Ron Sakolsky

(Fifth Estate Books 2005) $15

Twenty chapters in a dynamic collage of ideas and action. This vibrant collection glows with flames of discontent and defiance and flows with waves of laughter and possibility. Ranging widely from Mayday to Utopia, from Refusal to Autonomy, and from Insurrection to Imagination, this compilation is in turn defiant, reflective, and playful--a brick for hurling through the windows of despair and a doorway to creating an anarchy that is not afraid to dream.

...

When we put out the calls for this issue, we sought lists and commentaries on books that changed people’s lives. Apparently, many were too busy with summer reading to respond. Others may be too busy with life to read--or to write about what they might be reading if they’re reading. For me, I’ve decided to name writers more than books, and the shortlist is rather long, heavily populated by poets. Allen Ginsberg’s influence on me might always overshadow other writers, and to learn more about that, please see my article on him in a few pages. My world view has been so widely shaped by all of these visionaries that I would feel remiss not giving them their due in this issue.

...

Most publications receive more books for review than they can possibly do. What’s needed is an Anarchist Review of Books [now, there’s a project waiting to happen]. We are often disappointed, to say nothing of the authors, when we cannot find reviewers for excellent titles that are sent to us. Here are a selection of books we’ve gotten recently, and this isn’t a complete list.

...

an hour east of Nashville

(615) 536–5999

FifthEstate@pumpkinhollow.net

To order, send check, money order, or well-concealed cash to:

Fifth Estate Books

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Please add $2 shipping/handling for first item ($1 for the 2^nd, $.50 for the third, & so on)

NEW

Franklin Rosemont

...

Send check, money order, or well-concealed cash to:

Fifth Estate Books

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Please add $2 shipping/handling for first item ($1 for the 2^nd, .50 for the third, & so on).

All book orders include a sampling of free ‘zines & assorted propaganda! We carry current issues of the Earth First! Journal, Slingshot; Clamor, & Crimethinc’s latest Fighting for Our Lives!

...

FROM PARTISAN PRESS:

Partisan Press is pleased to announce the long-awaited release of Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie’s autobiography The Christie File.

British orders can be placed with Cienfuegos Press; all non-U.K. orders can be sent to us ($9.95). Coming Spring 1981: Festival and Revolt Italy anthology), Heretic (a new left libertarian journal), and more. Donations needed urgently! Join the Partisan Sustainer fund: $30/year (all publications for that year), or $100+ (lifetime). For orders and inquiries, write Partisan Press, P.O. Box 2193, Seattle WA 98111.

...

As I wandered through Albania a few months ago, as unlikely a place as any during a six-month journey around the planet, a friend emailed a link to “Anarchist Traveling vs. Tourism.” *

The comments mostly reminded me that I’m not attempting an anarchist tour, whatever that might mean. I’m not looking constantly for political insurrection or utopian experimentation even though, inevitably, my anarchist lens focuses on signs of inequality and resistance, cops and soldiers, graffiti and posters (the circle-A, everywhere in Athens, is absent here in Oman).

...

FE Note: A spin-off from our letters section, “Both Sides Now” presents two distinct views on a controversial topic, side by side. On the left [in print edition], FE reader Seaweed elaborates points first raised in his “Land And Liberty” (FE #367, p. 22–23). His views might be shared by many Fifth Estate readers and writers, but by no means all, as clearly evidenced by EB Maple’s response (see “Guns again?” in Letters, FE #370, p. 52). Hence, on the right [in print edition], we present Maples’s elaboration of an “opposing” view.

...

In my life I’ve met only two bonobos face to face. I stared at them and they at me through the glass of their cage in the Berlin Zoo. The experience gave me the same creepy feeling I get whenever I see gorillas or chimps in cages. Their sadness at being confined is obvious, as is their slightly accusatory attitude, which seems to say, “Why me? and why are you free?”

...

I found out that Brad Will had been shot to death from a message that went out over New York City email lists on October 27. It simply said, “Fuck, ya’ll, fuck,” followed by a link to an Indymedia story describing the events of that day. Soon, it was confirmed that Will, an IMC journalist and ever-present figure in the New York anarchist scene, had been gunned down in Oaxaca in southern Mexico where he had been chronicling the revolutionary upsurge building there since April 2006.

...

The brass at Fort Wayne have taken their revenge for Spec. 4 Jerry Brown’s criticism of induction center medical examinations. Brown was given 36 hours to leave the post after an article appeared in the last issue of this paper detailing Fort Wayne’s improper procedures used to examine potential draftees. He was transferred to Fort Benjamin Harrison Indiana to await duty “overseas.”

...

from Special and AP Dispatches

WASHINGTON—Gen. David M. Shoup, former commandant of the Marine corps, charges that an ambitious elite of high ranking officers, preferring war to peace, is turning the United States into “a militaristic and aggressive nation.”

Writing in the April issue of the magazine Atlantic, Shoup says that the search for promotion, interservice rivalry and an eagerness to test military doctrines lies behind the deep American involvement in Vietnam and the heavy invasion of the Dominican Republic.

...

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Army brass at Ft. Jackson is still trying to screw GIs for exercising their Constitutional rights. (See last issue, p.15 [“Free Speech for GIs: Analysis of a victory” by Michael Smith, FE #82, June 26-July 9, 1969] for background story.)

Pvt. Tommy Woodfin, one of the founders of GIs United Against the War in Vietnam, has just come through a second court martial. He was acquitted on two counts, but plead guilty to a third count of being Absent Without Official Leave. Woodfin went AWOL on Memorial Day to visit his sick girlfriend in a New York hospital. He was sentenced to one month at hard labor and busted in rank.

...

Reprint from Fifth Estate #128, April 1–14, 1971

KHESANH, South Vietnam—53 men of Bravo Troop, 1^st Squadron, 1^st Cavalry, Americal Division refused orders to move into a battle zone near the Laotian border March 20 to retrieve abandoned equipment.

One of the men in the two platoons, which refused to obey the command, said he did not follow orders because “the reason given wasn’t a very good one... I didn’t see any sense in risking any more lives.”

...

As Bill Weinberg points out (see page 14, this issue), much of the left media shamefully supports odious forces simply because they oppose the U.S. A contemporary example of a significant skewing the facts can be seen in its overwhelmingly biased coverage of the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s president, Dilma Rouseff.

...

This project is seeking personal accounts of surveillance, violence, and repression upon temporary and permanent autonomous zones (convergence centers, info shops, community centers, squats, collectives, etc...). Titled Breaking and Entering: State Repression of Autonomous Zones, this book will be comprised of individual perspectives of raids, supplemented with theory-based analysis of repression. The effectiveness of this documentation relies on the participation of those who have been subjected to police repression.

...

Trauma is a subtle dominator of experience. Totalizing yet imperceptible, the massive mental shock re-contextualizes life so fully, one forgets what life was like before it.

Indeed, one forgets that there ever was a before. War, mass shootings, rape, famine, can all cause trauma. In fact, sometimes just hearing about these things (living with a loved one or being raised by a parent who once experienced them), creates its own trauma in the listener, causing a cycle that can intensify over generations.

...

a review of

Fighting for A Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada by Samir Shaheen-Hussain, Foreword by Cindy Blackstock, Afterword by Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel. Mcgill-Queen’s University Press 2020

On May 30, 2021, the land surrounding a former residential school in Canada was found to contain the unidentified remains of over 200 children. Since then, nearly a thousand other children’s graves have been uncovered. A horrified hush fell over those of us willing to accept this reality. Then rage.

...

“He who lives by the sword dies by the sword,” but the men who are now dying have no such simple entrance into their own lives—the swords they bear (whatever “side”) are not what they live by, not the terms of their living, but alien & unnecessary tools forced into their hands by men who have taken themselves so far from such actual simple tools.

...

On 19 May this year Brenda Earl Christie, a co-founder of the anarchist publishing house Cienfuegos Press, and her two-year-old daughter Branwen, were arrested at Hanover Airport in West Germany as they were boarding a Gatwick (England) bound flight following a three week holiday with her sister-in-law. Both Brenda and her daughter were held by GS-9 antiterrorist police when the Central Police Computer in Wiesbaden indicated that Brenda was wanted on a warrant issued against her eleven years ago in Frankfurt.

...

a review of

Let’s Get Free: a zine about Jeff “Free” Luers: Earth Defender, Anarchist, and Political Prisoner 11x17, 28 pages. Order for $5 (postage paid) from Break the Chains (checks made out to “Howl For Freedom”, and well concealed cash only) POB 11331 Eugene, OR 97440

Let’s Get Free is a new zine created by the Defense Network for ELF prisoner Jeff “Free” Luers. Serving a 22 year sentence for burning 2 SUVs in the summer of ’00, Free continues to fight for his freedom through the legal system, and to speak out for the liberation of all life. This zine is a major forum for Free’s writings, and a useful introduction to his case and his motivations for those who are just learning about radical eco-defense. The zine features reprints of mainstream media reports, letters and op-eds (some by Free himself), Free’s poetry, personal letters of support from Lorenzo Ervin and Grand Jury resistor Josh Harper, and an interview between Free and another Oregon anarchist prisoner, Rob “Los Ricos” Thaxton.

...

Behind the surface appearance of every beauty contest, from Home Coming Queen to “Miss World,” exists an entire framework that represses and objectifies women. That framework had produced the idea that exposing one’s flesh, with proper techniques of body exhibition, is a desirable skill, to be rewarded with prizes and tribute.

...

OTTAWA, Ont. (LNS)—Canadian Health Minister John Munro has indicated that the Canadian government is considering action within months to liberalize, and possibly abolish, laws which ban possession and use of marijuana.

Munro told a Canadian newspaper that increasingly widespread use of pot showed that harsh penalties were not working as a deterrent. He did not give any indication, however, that the government would change its stiff laws against the sale of grass.

...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—The Supreme Court has upheld (7 to 2) the right of three Des Moines high school students to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War.

The majority opinion stated that students and teachers don’t shed “their Constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

...

ATHENS, Greece (LNS) — Greece’s military dictatorship has imposed a rigid code of conduct on university students. Greece is already under martial law, but the new code could be used if martial law is relaxed later this year, as promised by the dictatorship.

The code imposes stringent penalties on students who show “disrespect” or participate in strikes or demonstrations. The code also permits action against students “not imbued with the spirit compatible with the established system.”

...

Global books, a long-time Detroit Marxist bookstore, has moved its headquarters to 4415 Second at Canfield.

The bookstore, which has been in operation since 1958, carries radical literature, both current and classic, periodicals from Socialist countries and books on black liberation, labor and economics.

...

Radical cheerleaders give a playful, yet militant, feminist flavor to anti-authoritarian protest. After reading through the third edition of the Radical Cheerleader Handbook, I want to grab a pair of pompoms and take to the streets.

The inspiring cheers and rants throughout this radical handbook prepare wimmin for the front lines and can transform a sober action into a party. Cheers for every occasion from a “Take back the night” rally to the anti-WTO/IMF/World Bank protests are represented in full voice.

...

by the Roach Editor

The Red Roach coffee house is open!

It’s hard to find, but look around the corner at Plum and Fifth, the barnwood door between two red and purple gaslights, go upstairs, you’re there,

The place is improvisional, a room for artists to meet, play their music, read they poems, just do their thing. There are two stages, one for the performer, one for the audience, a groove stage with bath tub and a large screen for light shows.

...

LONDON (PWS)—Traffic, one of Britain’s most highly rated groups, officially disbanded last week. The announcement was made here last week just as the group’s new single, “Medicated Goo,” was released and as their current album, “Traffic,” continued up the charts.

Originally formed in early 1967 when singer Stevie Winwood parted company with the Spencer Davis Group, to join forces with Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood, and Dave Mason, the group scored heavily through live performances and several hit singles.

...

The Winter Offensive against the war in Vietnam is beginning. The Fall Offensive culminated in 800,000 persons in Washington and people came back to Detroit with even a greater sense of the need to bring all the troops home now.

The December Moratorium will focus on organizing and support of anti-war GIs.

...

SOMERSET, Ky — A 14-year old boy jailed for auto theft led three other prisoners in a break from the Pulaski County Jail Thursday.

Authorities said the boy obtained what appeared to be a.32-calibre pistol from an unknown source.

Deputy jailer Gary Johnson said a prisoner, Donald Ray Lynn, 24, of Somerset, received a telephone call and was let out of the cell block to take the call.

...

Greet The Man!

Be the first in your commune, home, block, etc., to wear the latest in fashion—“All Power to the People” and fist on finest quality T-shirt; sizes S, M, L and X-Large. Send $2.50 to: T-Shirts, Box 1711, Ann Arbor, Mi. 48106. Also custom T-shirting for your group or club.

...

A Federal indictment was returned May 3 charging three suspended Detroit cops and a private guard with violating the civil rights of ten persons during last summer’s uprising.

Included among those whose civil rights were violated were two of three black youths shot to death by the cops at the Algiers motel.

...

The 3^rd Annual Twin Cities Anarchist Book Fair (TCABF) is the weekend of Sept. 15–16 at the Powderhorn Park building in Minneapolis.

The organizers say while the primary purpose of the Book Fair is to promote and debate the ideas of anarchism, it is also open to organizations and individuals who seek a radical restructuring of our current society to be more democratic, less oppressive, and just for all people.

...

In Southern Germany in a town by the name of Bayreuth, the German police are in a quandary. The town’s dog poo is under attack. Police are hunting pranksters who have been sticking miniature US flags into piles of dog shit in public parks. Josef Oettl, parks administrator for Bayreuth, said: “This has been going on for about a year now, and there must be 2,000 to 3,000 piles of excrement that have been claimed during that time.”

...

Editors’ Note: Larry Miller, known to his longtime listeners in the Detroit area as the man who invented “underground radio,” has returned to Detroit after two years as “Midnight Miller” on KMPX-FM in San Francisco and is presently partying on at WABX on Saturdays and Sundays.

His radio programming is probably the most tasteful in the country, and his influence has spread to stations and disk jockeys all over the U.S.A. Miller’s Saturday afternoon shows on WDTM in Detroit in 1965 and 1966 introduced contemporary rock and roll music (Beatles, Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds at that time) into the FM radio scene, and his midnight-to-6 am show on KMPX in San Francisco set the scene for the current FM-rock revolution.

...

The latest escalation of the fighting in Iraq is a clear sign that the people of Iraq reject their “liberation.” The United States, led by the Bush regime, can’t decide why it invaded Iraq and refuses to pull out of Iraq. The Bush regime is dedicated to the continuation of the American program of empire building. A withdrawal from Iraq would be seen as a setback of this ongoing effort to build a Thousand Year Reich in which the world would be run by America. The quagmire in Iraq has not deterred the United States as it continues to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries (Haiti) and actively threatens other countries (Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and on and on).

...

The trial lasted 61 days, but in December a hand-picked jury pulled off a major surprise by finding four anarchist defendants in the British “Persons Unknown” trial not guilty!

The case started in 1978 when the British government’s elite Special Branch and Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) arrested Iris Mills, Dafydd Ladd, Ronan Bennet, Stewart Carr Vincent Stevenson and Trevor Dawton charged with being “terrorists” planning to take “positive steps” to overthrow society.

...

We recently received the good news from England that some of the six comrades who were arrested last spring on charges of “Conspiracy to Cause Explosions” (see “Anarchists Arrested in Britain,” FE #293–294, August 21, 1978), have been released on bail and the “Conspiracy” charges have been dropped.

...

PHILADELPHIA—The police state atmosphere legitimized at the Democratic Convention continues to grow. The arrest of four people here September 9 dramatizes the fact that the “authorities” will no longer tolerate any form of dissent.

The four arrested were among those seeking to make a peaceful protest at the opening of Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign in Philadelphia. Three of the four were members of the Philadelphia Resistance. The fourth, Ronald Whitehorse, is a member of People for Human Rights (PHR), the Philadelphia affiliate of National People Against Racism (PAR).

...

Buddhism holds that the universe and all creatures in it are intrinsically in a state of complete wisdom, love and compassion; acting in natural response and mutual interdependence. The personal realization of this from-the-beginning state cannot be had for and by one-“self’ because it is not fully realized unless one has given the self up; and away.

...

Honoring the Haymarket Martyrs

The U.S. National Park Service has declared Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs’ monument a National Historic Landmark and the Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS) is sponsoring a celebration, Sunday afternoon, May 3. The ceremony will take place at the former Waldheim cemetery, now called Forest Home, at 863 Desplaines Ave. in Forest Park, Ill., outside of Chicago.

...

The body is the locus of authoritarian control in Meg Elison’s Big Girl (number twenty-five in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series.) Gorgeously surreal, the collection includes speculative short stories, essays and an interview with Elison by Terri Bisson.

Elison, whose debut novel Book of the Unnamed Midwife won a Phillip K Dick Award in 2014, has a stunning emotional range. Her work can be prosaic, comic, rageful, grotesque and full of sorrow, all within the same piece, sometimes within the same sentence. The title story recounts, through news reports, the journey of a sixteen-year old girl who grows to enormous proportions. She wakes one morning with birds roosting on her eyelashes, she slogs through the San Francisco bay, she flicks away men who climb her, and she comes to occupy her own island like a B-movie monster.

...

The resistance to the Draft Resistance Committee office at 12820 Hamilton in Highland Park has been stepped up into a Mississippi-style harassment campaign.

At 11:20 p.m. the night of August 28 someone shot three slugs from a large-caliber rifle through the front window of the office. Two more shots were fired through the front windows of the office in the dark hours of the morning of September 1.

...

On March 21, four people demonstrated at the Federal Bldg. in downtown Detroit for the right to be anti-patriotic. In so doing, they burned a small American flag, much to the outrage of passersby and security guards.

The date of the protest coincided with a US Supreme Court hearing of a criminal conviction of a demonstrator who also burned a flag as a political statement at the 1984 Dallas Republican convention. We give full support to all acts of flag desecration and encourage others to commit similar provocations.

...

2023 has officially been designated as the worst fire season on record in so-called Canada, with almost 20 million acres burned by summer’s end. While these wildfires deeply ravaged many communities, they have most severely impacted Indigenous communities, many of whose territories are northern, rural, or wilderness.

...

I have just left Black Rock City, the site of Burning Man, a yearly arts festival and temporary autonomous zone based on radical self-expression, and find myself in the paradoxical situation of being inspired to give written form to things that are utterly inexpressible.

In the desert of Nevada, Black Rock City is constructed entirely of art. It exists in material form for only one week in August every year, and then it disappears, as though into the ethers, its citizens dispersed to various faraway places.

...

The first Burning Man festival in China, with several hundred in attendance

Burning Man began with a wooden effigy and a single match on a beach in San Francisco in the late 1980s. When the police came and closed down the beach burning of the Man it was John Law and Michael Michael, two members of the Cacophony Society, a group of legendary urban pranksters, who told local artist Larry Harvey of a place they knew of in the desert “where you could burn things.”

...

Freeing ourselves from the state, capital, and civilization requires radical action. Radical means going for the jugular. The blood pumping through the jugular is money.

Without money, labor power can no longer be commanded. Nor can wealth be hoarded, which means labor power cannot be commanded further down the line. Without taxes, the state’s war machine can not reinforce capital, nor police our bodies.

...

Anarchists sweat in Florida. Dumpstered foods spoil quicker, black bloc protests require balaclavas made with moisture-wicking, breathable materials, and mosquitoes relentlessly target the sugary-sweet blood of anti-capitalists.

Out of this sultry subtropical environment has sprouted Burnpile Press. Founded in 2012, Burnpile is an informal, community supported project dedicated to producing, printing, and distributing radical literature free-of-charge. They often distro as many as 200 Fifth Estates each issue as well as Berkeley’s Slingshot periodical, and many other radical used books, zines, and accessories at no cost to the reader. With no current info-shop location, all material is literally hand distributed through face to face interactions with those living in the region.

...

Your voice always whacked me right on the funny bone

of the great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy

that ruled me like a huge copper moon with its phases

until I could partially break free.

How could I help but cherish you for my bad dreams?

Your voice would grate right on the marrow filled bone

...

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school; it’s a wonder I can think at all.”

--Paul Simon; “Kodachrome”

Trying to make sense of the busing issue is like the classic story of the blind men and the elephant--every piece you touch feels different and suggests a different definition. The trick is to make sense of the whole animal.

...

Bush is clearly gearing up for another “short” war before next year’s elections. Although many people have mentioned Cuba, Libya, and Korea as possible targets, it is likely he’ll go back into Iraq to “finish the job.”

Regardless of the location of the next “zap” war, however, anti-war activists in the U.S. have yet to seriously grapple with the inability of our movement to stop the last war. From the start of the “crisis” we were lied to by the government and corporate media, who carefully planned their deceptions to rouse the breast-beaters and militarize the public mind.

...

NEW YORK—Despite the lingering bitterness over the hostage crisis and the horrible events surrounding the inaugural crash, as many as 50 inquiries a day have been pouring into the Commerce Department from companies interested in resuming business ties with Iran.

“Even as the remains of the dead were being removed from Pennsylvania Avenue, businesses were calling up asking for information. In fact the number of inquiries reached a high point in the hours after the crash,” a department official said.

...

a review of

A Busker’s Adventure by David Rovics. Various e-book formats at davidrovics.com/

David Rovics hails from a long lineage of gifted topical American folk guitar singers originally birthed by Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and Pete Seeger, with blazing torches passed on through its most notable stepchildren, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton and, of course, Bob Dylan, at least before he “went electric” (as alarmingly noted in that 1965 first issue of the Fifth Estate).

...

a review of

Seizure of State Power, Part 3 of Manual for Revolutionary Leaders by Michael Velli. Sources of Velli’s thought annotated by Fredy Perlman. Black & Red (2019) BlackandRed.org

Spoiler alert: This text is not well-intentioned advice for those seeking to lead the working class and seize the power of the state. Quite the opposite. It is a polemic against those who seek such a role.

...

a review of

And Yet It Moves: The Realization and Suppression of Science & Technology, by Boy Igor, 1986, 120 pp., $5, Zamisdat Press, GPO Box 1255, Gracie Station, NY NY 10028.

Boy Igor’s provocatively titled text gets off to a start that suggests a real depth. It challenges modern science as inseparable from the development of capitalism and pronounces “proletarian” science as bourgeois as proletarian art or the proletarian state.

...

“I want my plastic.” All bright colors and boppy hairstyles, it looks more like a music video than a television commercial. She’s a free young woman of the late ‘eighties, she wants it all, and she wants it NOW. These days, a little square of plastic can get it for her—instant cash or commodities, instant gratification, instant recognition. No wonder she wants her plastic. And you, the viewer, are hypnotized by desire, yet redeemed by the message. You too can be as cool and confident as the new-wave chick with her polyvinyl petroleum product. On the TV, the clean and sexy mannequin flashes her smile along with her new status symbol...after decades of manufacturing cardboard applicators for their “feminine hygiene” products, in order to compete with the other companies. Tampax has finally switched to plastic. And the cool chick, knowing this will get her everything and everyone she ever wanted out of life, sparkles and exclaims, “I want my plastic!”

...

ANN ARBOR—This city witnessed the first public expression of dissent by Women’s Liberation groups of Michigan Saturday night, March 22, at the Miss Ann Arbor Pageant.

Outside the Auditorium doors of the Ann Arbor High School where the Pageant was being held about 100 women picketed in protest of the local meat auction which will eventually culminate in the Atlantic City Miss America prostitution rites.

...

from The Great Speckled Bird

Radical women across the country are demanding an end to the male supremacist attitudes and policies of the underground press. It is essential that these demands be recognized and met as a political priority; not only for the women who are struggling against male supremacy in this country but for the Movement as a whole.

...

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

WED. NOV. 15

...

MUSIC

CONCERT. Spikedrivers, Upper DeRoy Aud., Wayne Campus, 8:00, adm. benefit for 5^th Estate, 1/20

CONCERT. Scandinavian Symphony, Scottish Rite Cathedral, Masonic Temple, 8:20 adm. 1/21

JAZZ CONCERT: THE ANDREW HILL QUARTET, Saturday, January 21, 8:00 p.m., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

DANCE/CONCERT to benefit GUERILLA, presented by the 1967 Steering Committee. Sunday, January 29, 4–12 p.m. Grande Ballroom. Music by the MC-5, SpikeDrivers, Detroit Edison (formerly the Down-Home Tyrannosauraus of Despair), Livonia Tool & Die, the Lyman Woodard Ensemble, Joseph Jarman, the Ron English — Bud Spangler Unit, and others. Lights by the High Society and the Bulging Eyevalls of Gautama. Poetry readings by Bill Hutton, Allen Van Newkirk, John Sinclair, Jim Semark, Bradley Jones, Art Rosch, Don Moye, Jerry Younkins, Gary Grimshaw, and others. For a new civilization. Donation $2.50.

...

The calendar is a regular feature of the FIFTH ESTATE. It carries news of what is happening in the Detroit to Ann Arbor area. You can help make the calendar more complete by sending us information about activities you know about or that you are involved in. Deadlines for the calendar are the 8^th and 23^rd of each month.

...

The calendar will be a regular FIFTH ESTATE feature. We know that there is more happening in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas than what we have listed, so we need your help. Send us information about what your group is doing or just anything you hear about. We think the items listed below disprove the contention that “nothing ever happens in Detroit.” The deadlines for the calendar are the 8^th and 23^rd of each month.

...

The calendar will be a regular FIFTH ESTATE feature. We know that there is more happening in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas than what we have listed, so we need your help. Send us information about what your group is doing or just anything you hear about. We think the items listed below disprove the contention that “nothing ever happens in Detroit.” The deadlines for the calendar are the 8^th and 23^rd of each month.

...

Saturday October 15

FILM. Famous Films of Famous Directors: Part. II. Akira Kurosawa’ s “Yojimbo”. Rackhman Aud. 80 Farnsworth, 8 p.m. Adm. 10/15

Sunday October 16

FILM, Famous Early Movie Series. Henry Ford Museum Theatre. 2 and 4 p.m. Adm. 10/16

PROGRAM. Student Sunday Program, movies and dancing. International Inst. 4–6 p.m. 10/16

...

The calendar will be a regular FIFTH ESTATE feature. We know that there is more happening in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas than what we have listed, so we need your help. Send us information about what your group is doing or just anything you hear about. We think the items listed below disprove the contention that “nothing ever happens in Detroit.” The deadlines for the calendar are the 8^th and 23^rd of each month.

...

Wed. Nov. 1

PLAY “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” WSU Hillberry Classic Theater, 2:30 p.m. Adm. 11/1.

LECTURE Sander Vanocur speaks, Mercy College, 12:30 p.m. 11/1.

CONFERENCE Communism in China: Democracy in India, Oakland U. Center, 10:00 a.m., 11/1.

FILM “Old and New” (1929), Sergei Eisen-stein, Architectural Aud., Ann Arbor. 7 p.m. and 9:05 p.m. Adm. 11/1.

...

The calendar is prepared by Fifth Estate calendar girls Karen Kovac and Naiomi Epil with cooperation from Detroit Adventure. Copy deadline is the 6^th and 22^nd of each month and should be sent to the Fifth Estate Calendar, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 98201.

Thurs the 15^th

Muhamed Ali-Lewis Fight. Exhibition. Cobo Hall at 8:00 p.m. Adm. 6/15

...

Thursday June 1

JUSTICE! Judge Gillis’ Courtroom 1326 St. Antoine. Trial Preliminaries concerning the “great reefer raid” of January 24^th. John Sinclair and others will be up before the bench. Friends and sympathisers are urged to attend. 6/1

FILM: “Ipcress File,” 7:30, WSU Community Arts. Free. 6/1.

...

Fri. Sept. 6

DIALOGUE ’68. A festival of radical rock music for three nights. The UP, Billy C. and his Killer Blues Band, and the Psychedelic Stooges will play Prior to the performances

A SHOWING OF UNDERGROUND FILMS will be presented by the Detroit Repertory Theatre, at the first Unitarian Church, Forest and Cass. $2.50 per night or $6.00 for all three nights. Tickets may be purchased at Hudson’s, Grinnell’s, or at the church.

...

SAT., SEPT. 30

PLAY: Pantageize, APA repertory company, Michel de Gheldero’s “farce to make you sad” Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, Ann Arbor, 8:00 p.m. 9/30

SUN., OCT. 1

PLAY: Same as 9/30 2:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. adm. 10/1

CONCERT: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Premiere of a new work by Roger Sessions commissioned for the U. of M. Sesquicentennial Celebration. Hill Aud., 2:30 p.m. adm. 10/1

...

PLAY — Court Theatre presents George Buchner’s “Leonce and Lena” opening May 10–20. 8:30 p.m. at Court Theatre 2555 Burns Ave. Phone 822–6655 Adm.

PLAY Sheridan’s “The Rivals” WSU Hillberry Classic Theatre, Cass & Hancock 2:30 p.m. Adm. May 27.

PLAY, Children’s Holiday Theatre. Talking Drums, Percival Borde Dance Co. Det. Inst. Arts Aud., John R St. entrance. 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Adm. May 20.

...

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

SUN the 16^th

HEAL along with Oral Roverts at Cobo Hall. Sponsored by North American Baptist Convention. Call Cobo for ticket info. 8/16

...

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

Sat the 1^st

CONCERT—Meadow Brook Music Festival. Detroit Symphony with Sixten Ehrling. Oakland Univ. 8:30 Adm. 338–7211, ext. 2301. 7/1

...

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

wed. the 2^nd

DEMONSTRATION: LBJ in Detroit August 2^nd. All opposed to the war, demonstrate on August 2^nd at Cobo Hall, 7:30 p.m. For information call 832–5700 or 963–7711. 8/2.

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June 28-July 5 — Earth First! Round River Rendezvous

Annual gathering of the Earth First! Movement. Contact: www.maineef.org, maineEF@yahoo.com, 1-800-MY-YAHOO mailbox # 922-487-3887, 224 West Side Drive, Verona Island, ME 04416

June 30-July 4 — We Are Resisting! Conference Anti-Imperialist/Anti-Capitalist gathering in Lawrence, KS, followed by a day of action on July 4, in Leavenworth, KS. For more information, please visit the website http://www.kansasanarchist.net/WAR/

...

April 5: Trial of Camilo Viveiros scheduled to begin in Philadelphia. Defend Camilo! Defend Dissent!

www.friendsofcamilo.org

April 9–11 — Positive Action’s Fourth Annual DIY/T (Do It Yourself/Do It Together) Fest and gathering in Athens, Ohio. If you’re interested please email pos_act@yahoo.com for more info.

...

ATLANTA (LNS)—Super-patriots have been trying to turn Lt. William Calley, accused of playing a major role in the Song My massacre, into some sort of a military hero.

Last month, members of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars planned a rally in support of Calley. They expected 3,000 people, but only 34 showed up.

...

In July, 2008 heads of the states that monopolize two-thirds of Earth’s wealth will gather at Toya Lake in Hokaido, Japan. Although the so-called “Group of Eight” (G8) does not have any legitimate right for deciding planetary affairs, they have self-appointed themselves world ruler. Thus the G8 has driven neo-liberal globalization at the same time as spreading poverty, violence, hatred, segregation, and environmental destruction.

...

Unless we build a sustained practice of free relationships and liberated lives, we risk lengthening the long list of those who have created partial revolutions. The revolution is inside as well as outside ourselves. Misery and alienation reproduce themselves--not just in authoritarian institutions--but in our own character structure, imprisoned by the catastrophe of repressive consciousness.

...

The long-denied files of Wayne University students’ political and personal activities were discovered last week amid a protest about the lack of student involvement in the decision-making processes of the University.

While 30 student leaders staged an all-night vigil Wednesday, outside the University president’s office, James McCormick, vice-president for Student Affairs, and a delegation of five students found the “non-existent” files in the University’s department of Safety and Security office.

...

The ultimate representation; the symbol of all that is alienated in the modern world; the driving force of pathological greed; the whip that coerces wage labor; the basis of wars. Ten million millionaires world-wide control $37.2 trillion dollars in financial assets, assuring a planet of immiseration for billions of people.

...

We seek analytical articles, news reports, essays, poetry, and fiction on ways of re-envisioning, re-creating and re-enchanting the world either individually or collectively. Also, art, graphic illustrations, and photographs.

Before submitting articles, read our writer’s guidelines at FifthEstate.org.

...

We are seeking analytical articles, news reports, essays, poetry, and fiction on acts of refusal and resistance, either individually or collectively; also graphic illustrations and photographs. Before submitting essays or articles, please read our writer’s guidelines at www.FifthEstate.org.

...

Revelations

The word apocalypse, counter to centuries of disinformation, does not refer to the end of the world. The word’s actual meaning is “uncovering” — a revelation of truths that are concealed from the majority of the human population. This spring we suggest a rebirth of understanding about the world around us-through revelation.

...

Deadline: September 15

Publication date: October 15

Themes

* FE — Celebrating fifty years of promoting revolution everywhere

* Resistance to the U.S. Vietnam War

Before contacting us, please read our Writers’ Guidelines.

<strong>Submit manuscripts for short pieces and proposals for longer essays, along with graphics and photographs, to:

...

Deadline: May 1

Publication date: June 1

The war in Vietnam, the first great defeat of American imperialism, came to an ignominious conclusion 40 years ago, at the end of April 1975.

The United States Congress has authorized the Secretary of Defense “to conduct a program to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Vietnam War.” This obscene commemoration of a shameful war should not go unanswered. We need to remind the world of its true heroes and victims--the Vietnamese people, the anti-war movement, and the draft resisters--and say No! to the celebration of the imperial war machine.

...

Deadline: July 1

Publication date: August 1

Issue Theme: Art & Anarchy. The creative spirit of anarchy often acts as muse in all aspects of the arts, historically and today. We welcome your help in celebrating this in essays and graphics. Also, general articles in keeping with the ideas of this publication are sought.

...

The Fifth Estate has always proudly displayed the FBI’s description of this publication as “supporting revolution everywhere,” but the world has greatly changed since the U.S. secret police prowled around our offices and kept tabs on staff members in the 1960s.

Those evil gumshoes knew little about what constitutes an authentic overthrow of the current misery and the restructuring of its causes along revolutionary principles. But, perhaps the armored toadies of the state intuited something important: that society perpetuates itself through people’s habit of submission to authority, and that even the smallest act of rebellion contains the seeds of total revolt.

...

As we go to print, the US Ministry of Fatherland Security has just raised its color-coded freakout level to ORANGE, citing “credible and specific” terrorist threats against “financial institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington DC.” Sure, we all hate capitalism, but what is it, exactly, that inspires people to load a truck with dynamite and drive it into the lobby of a stock exchange? Would desperate terrorists plot for four years to blow up a community-supported agricultural farm, a free store, a mutual-aid labor exchange center, or a file-sharing website?

...

Never SUBMIT! Contribute to the Fifth Estate!

Next issue: CULTURE, RACE, & RITUAL

deadline: November 1^st

Q: When radicals adopt, appropriate, or adapt the cultures and rituals of marginalized minority groups, they

(a) disrespect the integrity of the original forms through cultural tourism and neo-racism;

...

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW is the oldest anti-capitalist trade union federation in history. Their mission, the abolition of the wage system, still holds today; their practice of justice and fairness and their commitment to worker empowerment serves as a model for all trade unions.

...

“Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind. In other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion.”

--Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man

Deadline: November 1, 2012 Publication date: December, 2012

Sex. It is perhaps the most loaded word in the English language, with numerous connotations and denotations. In this issue of Fifth Estate, we want to explore sex and sexuality in all its forms, exposing the naked truths, and teasing out the possibilities. No topic is too risqué.

...

SUBTEXT, SUBVERSION and SABOTAGE

This winter, Fifth Estate seeks to put out good reading for hibernation. Work that focuses on underground political, cultural and social activity as well as subtextual analysis. We seek discussion on how radicals and everyday folks subvert the dominant culture in a meaningful way. We seek analysis on the unspoken meanings of current social, economic, semiotic and political phenomena such as the environmental crisis and the Green Scare, bio-ethical decisions, entertainment, gender, institutionalized violence. We seek to examine the parts we play in subjection and subjugation This winter we seek to exhume the churchyard and provide readers with an invisible choir that will sing audibly and precisely about the hidden meanings of things.

...

For: Fifth Estate, Fall 2012

Deadline: August 1

Publication date: September 5

Fall is the traditional time when students resume their studies. At present, there are tuition strikes, austerity strikes, student loan debt crises, and other dilemmas regarding education playing out in the public arena. For much of mainstream society, even the very value and meaning of education is now in question.

...

Deadline: August 15 Publication date: September 15

Issue Theme: Mad! A word whose meaning ranges from rage to enthusiasm to mental illness and more, even as an acronym for the truly insane Cold War nuclear policy of the U.S. and the Soviet Union [Mutually Assured Destruction].

Your ideas for news articles, essays, and art are welcome. Submit manuscripts for short pieces and proposals for longer essays, along with graphics and photographs to:

...

Deadline: April 15

Issue Theme: Sex

Your ideas for news articles, essays, and art are welcome. Submit manuscripts for short pieces and proposals for longer essays, along with graphics and photographs to: fe--AT--fifthestate.org or Fifth Estate, PO Box 201016, Ferndale, MI 48220, USA. Please put “Submission 389” on the subject line of email.

Next issue will be our 400^th since we began publishing 52 years ago. If you’d like to be part of this historic edition, please send proposals for essays, articles, and fiction to our email address or post office box.

Photographs, art, and poetry are also welcome. Please view our submission and manuscript guidelines on our web site. All submissions should be consistent with our political views.

...

Deadline: April 1,

Publication date: May 5

For the past several years, each edition of the Fifth Estate has had a specific theme. Maybe it’s the excitement of the era which has just opened up, but we have decided not to have a particular theme for our Summer edition, and simply let the imagination of writers get as wild as the times demand.

...

Play as a concept has always animated the anarchist/underground milieu with an infectious spirit of playful experimentation and exuberance. Riding wild and playful energy, we created seeds of an insurrectionary alternative reality that could one day replace or overthrow the dominant system. Physical, political, ideological, and imaginal spaces seemed open to us.

...

Theme: “DIY: Culture, Ethics, Aesthetics”

Next issue: FIFTH ESTATE #384 Winter 2011

Maybe the most persistent of all forms of external authority in our lives are the day-to-day tyrannies of specialists and experts. The Fifth Estate’s next issue investigates strategies of resistance to and liberation from this insidious system of technocratic mystification and domination with a look at the culture, ethics, and aesthetics of do-it-yourselfism.

...

Belief systems--cognitive constructions--determine our perception of reality which can chain us to old ideas or free us with visions that go beyond dominant paradigms. The entire modern era has been one of contestation as to which belief systems will rule in societies--ones that link us to submission and acquiescence to hierarchal authority or those which rebel against them.

...

This winter, the Fifth Estate seeks to publish good reading for winter hibernation. Work that focuses on underground political, cultural, and social activity, as well as subtextual analysis. We seek discussion on how radicals and everyday people subvert the dominant culture in a meaningful way.

We seek analysis on the unspoken meanings of current social, economic, semiotic, and political phenomena such as entertainment, gender, institutionalized violence, the environmental crisis, the Green Scare, bio-ethical decisions or anything you can fit into the theme. We seek to examine the parts we play in subjection and subjugation. This winter we seek to exhume the churchyard and provide readers with an invisible choir that will sing audibly and precisely about the true meanings of things.

...

Deadline: January 15

Publication date: February 15

Issue Theme: Anarchy, Anarchism & Anarchists.

We welcome your ideas for news articles, essays, and art. Submit manuscripts for short pieces and proposals for longer essays, along with graphics and photographs to:

fe--AT--fifthestate--DOT--org

...

The winter issue of FE will critically reflect upon contemporary anarchist and radical anti-authoritarian political movements. What directions should radicals--who wish to both create a revolution in our everyday lives, as well as to destroy the various and overlapping systems of oppression--take in our current political situation? We welcome theoretical, historical and practical pieces on political and cultural issues.

...

When the voice on the phone announced himself as Alexander Graham Bell calling from the Yipster Times newspaper in New York, we knew the Yippies had done it again—snatched the new long distance credit card codes almost as soon as Ma Bell put them out.

The publication of the secret codes has been an annual event in the Fifth Estate as a small way the captive customers of profit-swollen Bell can even the score a bit. Since last February when we published the 1976 codes, the Michigan Public Service Commission has caved into Bell requests for a multi-million dollar rate hike and the upping of pay-phone calls to 20 cents—both unnecessary other than to fatten the company’s profit margins.

...

The Yippies have done it again—snatched the new long distance credit card codes almost as soon as Ma Bell put them out.

The publication of the secret codes has been an annual event in the Fifth Estate as a small way the captive customers of profit-swollen Bell can even the score a bit. Since 1976 the Michigan Public Service Commission has caved into several Bell requests for multi-million dollar rate hikes and the upping of pay-phone calls to 20 cents—both unnecessary other than to fatten the company’s profit margins.

...

“One hates to see Los Angeles go up in flames unless one’s got a camera running,” joked the British anarchist comedian Peter Cook after the 1992 LA riots. A variation on this idea applies to Western state-corporate media, which seldom covers the non-Western world unless it is gripped by disaster.

This is true of the Philippines today and its vicious president, Rodrigo Duterte, whose rule is characterized by a frenzied cocktail of leftish-style populism, state authoritarianism, cynical nationalism, toxic masculinity and, most appalling of all, the government-orchestrated mass-murder of drug abusers and traffickers.

...

Publication date: Early 2008

Issue theme: ESCAPE!

Prisoners. Deserters. Divorcees. Vacationers. Junkies. Exile, exodus, emigration, and escape velocity. Shelters, sanctuaries, and safe-houses. Escaping consequences, escaping responsibility, and escaping attention. Escape to or escape from? Is escapism helpful or harmful? Is it useless to try to escape? We seek original, critical, and analytical assessments of theory and practice of escape, as well as essays, articles, and artwork on general themes.

...

Realizing that he who jumps into the middle of a fight gets shot at from both sides, I must say that both sides in the debate over “On Organization” are wrong: Ed Clark with his impersonal formal organization, and Camatte/Collu, and their defender Maple, with their unorganized formal persons. [See “On Organization: Two Reviews of The Camatte/Collu Pamphlet,” FE# 279, December, 1976.] Here are two positions badly in need of dialectic. (I’m more sympathetic to Clark, mostly because I worked with him for a number of years, but also because he’s less pretentious and dogmatic than Camatte/Collu.)

...

LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE—As the unexpectedly early monsoon rains fell on War Zone “C” by the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border, a U.S. divisional planning officer said, “The people who advised President Nixon to start something like this at this time of year must be the same ones who advised him on candidates for the Supreme Court.”

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“The free election of masters eliminates neither the masters nor the slaves.”

—Herbert Marcuse

American politics, as has been noted here before, is the politics of non-alternatives and pseudo-choices. If we needed any evidence, the present election provides it. Search and fantasize as we might there simply are not any radical possibilities. Consider the following:

...

The August second primary was almost enough to send one to the political physicists with their slide rules and computers to find out what happened. Why was it such a disaster?

But then we don’t really need political physicists to tell us what happened. We know. Racism, confusion, manipulation, “apathy” and one-dimensional politics happened. What happened is the logical consequence of a political system which for too long has never provided any alternatives for people beyond bright shining faces and good family men. The result is that people did not know that in a few isolated cases there were alternatives or didn’t believe them when they saw them or for other, more complicated reasons, rejected them.

...

The following are some random comments and recommendations on the upcoming August 2 primary election races.

It is entirely possible that Recorders Court is the worst criminal court in the United States. Its brand of “justice” has been discussed, exposed and documented in a number of reports, studies and editorials by the daily press.

...

The Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons held its third annual conference in Pittsburgh, June 8–10. It included lectures, workshops, and discussions about the Prison/Industrial Complex’s mass incarceration and its links to erosion of environmental health both inside and out.

Workshops ranged from toxic conditions in prisons (such as unsafe drinking water and air), to political repression and resistance inside and solidarity outside, to fighting white supremacy in prisons, support for those with disabilities, queer and trans prisoners, as well as support for undocumented detainees.

...

“You could say that cyberpunk is intrinsically anarchistic. It’s endlessly anti-authoritarian, and it can be employed like a weapon, like a computer virus, injecting new information by means of the existing mechanisms. The pop image of anarchism has always been a bomb—yeah, well, this is an ideological bomb that has been planted in the culture.”

...

On the front page of the latest issue of Black Flag (organ of the Anarchist Black Cross) is the picture of Spanish anarchist Laureano Cerrada Santos with the word MURDERED printed under it in large type.

According to Black Flag, Cerrada, who fought in the Spanish revolution and later became a skilled forger in passports and Spanish food rationing coupons, was shot to death in the streets of a Paris suburb by a Spanish secret agent last October.

...

The positioning of this article in the back pages in no way reflects our assessment of the gravity of the situation described herein. We extend our full solidarity to these comrades, victimized for committing no “crime” other than to cross a point of land arbitrarily designated as a “border” by those who we hold in utter contempt. It is small acts like this, carried out by cretinous functionaries of the State, that further steels our resolve to work actively for its total elimination.

...

The recent arrest of Andrew Mikolasch, editor of Toronto’s Underground Press Syndicate paper, Satyrday, has completed the cycle of busts on all of Canada’s U.P.S. papers. Earlier this year the Canadian Free Press from Ottowa and Georgia Straight from Vancouver were busted.

The police based the Satyrday arrest on an irate parent’s complaint about an article entitled “The way the platform is.” Mikolasch did not write the article himself but said: “It was a sort of satire on the music business and dealt with various sex practices, using honest words to describe them. You can pick up any book downtown using the same words, but they busted me.” He was released on personal bail.

...

Jon R., a semi-retired North Dakotan farmer in his late 60s, eased his big, beat-up pickup truck off to the side of the dirt road and turned off the ignition. He turned in his seat and pointed to low wire fence running through the heavily-wooded field to the right.

“Usually, I would try to get here right before midnight. That fence is a good guide in the dark. You stay on the other side and follow that all the way to the corner of the field; straight ahead is an old fieldstone wall that you need to follow west until you find a small stream. You go upstream there for about two hours. Then you bed down for the night. I tell them ‘No fires at night. Dress warm, eat some food, fill your canteen at the stream, but no fires. Stay there until sunrise.’ Then I need to give them the compass readings...”

...

Reprinted from the Guardian (NYC)

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG, a color film in Super-Panavision (sic), produced by Albert R. Broccoli (sic), directed by Ken Hughes, based on a story by Ian Fleming; United Artists (sick).

At this moment long lines of anxious parents are dutifully forming lines at box-offices to buy their expensive reserved-seat tickets to this melange of candy-coated garbage, assuaging their doubts about themselves and their empty lives with the force-fed illusion that they are providing a delicious treat for their offspring.

...

“Candy” must be the world’s first avant-garde Gallop poll movie; there’s something for everybody... dirty old men, freaks, sadists, mom and dad, the kiddies, and homosexuals.

The director, Christian Marquand, started out with a fool-proof formula guaranteed to appeal to the “with-it” film audience. Consider this: the screenplay, by Buck Henry, was loosely based on Terry Southern’s notorious best seller; the casting department had lined up no less than Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Ringo Starr, Walter Mathau, James Coburn, Charles Aznavour, John Astin, Elsa Martinelli, and a much-publicized little Swedish dish, Ewa Aulin, to play the title role; and then toss in all sorts of movie madness...bits and pieces of “Persona,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Graduate,” “Barbarella,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a whole segment from “8-1/2,” nods to Lester and Godard, and finally, a little “2001” mysticism thrown in for box-office measure.

...

a review of

Karl Marx, Private Eye by Jim Feast. PM Press, 2023

Karl Marx Private Eye is a fascinating chimera: it is simultaneously a cozy mystery, a Conan Doyle parody, and a philosophical meditation on Karl Marx’s reaction to the failed 1871 Paris Commune.

Author Jim Feast weaves a compelling narrative that can capture the imagination of anyone who slept through most of their European Civilization 101 course. The plot rivals the twisty whodunits of Agatha Christie, while the prose feels authentically Victorian, in the line of Charles Dickens or even Charlotte Bronte, but with the pacing on fast-forward.

...

The Canned Heat came to Detroit to do a gig at the Masonic Temple and got busted by the real heat.

Canned Heat’s drummer Adolph De Laparra was charged with being a disorderly person and the group’s equipment manager Ron Stender was charged with possession of grass. They and 25 other persons were arrested Feb. 20 in a Southfield home. The charges range from disorderly persons to sale of LSD and possession of marijuana.

...

The results of the Italian parliamentary elections held June 20 and 21 toppled the predictions of political forecasters (including us; see FE last issue, June 1976) that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) would emerge as the greatest vote getter. As it turned out, the Christian Democrats (DC) maintained their place as Italy’s largest party although the Communists increased their vote totals more than 10% from the elections held in 1972 for Senate and House of Deputies seats.

...

From childhood, most of us are taught what is supposedly an essential skill for living within industrial capitalist society: how to be nice. To be nice is to act in a way that gives others pleasure, comfort, and satisfaction in order to receive social rewards or prevent social penalties. To succeed in capitalism, it is important to be liked and likable. Nice people can get and keep jobs, make business deals, have social lives, and more.

...

This article is the first in a two-part series on the effects that the indiscriminate handling and usage of radioactive waste materials and dangerous chemicals are having, and will have in the future, on human beings and their environment. Part One focuses on the results of chemical accidents and nuclear leakages in the United States and around the world. Part Two, Is Michigan Slated For Nuclear Landfill?, Fifth Estate #277, October 1976, will concern itself specifically with Michigan, and the Federal Government’s intention to test land here for the possible construction of a nuclear waste disposal system.

...

The “socialist” government of unified Vietnam, after telling the Vietnamese people for the past twenty years that they must expel the imperialist nations of France and the United States, is proposing to invite private corporations of those same countries, along with those of Japan, Canada, Australia and Norway, to exploit Vietnam’s wealth of cheap labor and natural resources—all in the name of “industrial development” and production.

...

Reprinted from Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20^th Century by Harry Braverman, Monthly Review, July-August 1974 edition; pages 55–58.

The function of the capitalist is to represent capital and to enlarge it. This is done either by controlling the production of surplus value [profit] in the productive industries and activities, or by appropriating it from outside those industries and activities. The industrial capitalist, the manufacturer, is an example of the first; the banker of the second. These management functions of control and appropriation have in themselves become labor processes. Here the productive processes of society disappear into a stream of paper—a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow like that of the cannery, the meat-packing line, the car assembly conveyor, by workers organized in much the same way.

...

Cara Hoffman published her first major novel, So Much Pretty, in 2011. It is a tale of family, community, and storytelling, but also about the ongoing acceptance of violence against women. Cara’s writing has appeared frequently in these pages. The Spring 2012 Fifth Estate featured a review of her book which was nominated for the National Book Award.

...

Carla Glidden (1964–1994)

It is very difficult for me to write about Carla in the past tense. When she died of a blood clot in June, I lost my best friend and the Detroit alternative community and the Fifth Estate lost an untiring participant and supporter. Carla embodied the philosophy of community and mutual aid more than anyone I’ve known. Carla spurned no task as too humble or dangerous.

...

“If they didn’t physically slash him and tie the cord around his neck, the years of sensory deprivation, beatings, setups, transfers, hole time, mind and law games, and the psycho-torture which this place is famous for had the same effect. I know that anyone can be gotten to, regardless of how strong they are.”

— A Walla Walla Prisoner

...

Poet, revolutionary, artist--an inspiration to three generations of radicals in the struggle for a better world--Carlos Cortez died in his sleep at his home in Chicago on January 18, after an illness that had long confined him to a wheelchair; he was 81. A member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for nearly sixty years, with red card number X321826, he remained to the end a fervent supporter of working class self-emancipation and an irreconcilable enemy of capitalism and the state. Fellow Worker Cortez died like a good Wobbly, with his union dues paid up.

...

a review of

“Carmen” (2022) Dir: Benjamin Millepied

Benjamin Millepied’s retelling of the classic opera “Carmen” feels like the kind of movie that you need some time to process...and then some more after that...and then even more later on. It’s hard for someone to make up their mind about a film and safely tuck it away, never to be examined again, when the density of the film in question insists on coming back to haunt the viewer.

...

“I don’t want to startle you, but they mean to kill us all.”

—e.e. cummings

War—the word on everyone’s lips—the deadly end of the capitalist cycle of prosperity and economic collapse, appears close at hand as the major world empires and their vassals play out the world-wide “Great Game” of inter-capitalist rivalries. In this country, President Carter has posed the situation in the Persian Gulf region as a new period of confrontation with the Soviet Union and a return to the Cold War, complete with renewed fears of nuclear conflict.

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This cartoon strip consists of seven interchanges between two people.

Person 1: Tell me the reason for The Bay of Pigs.

Person 2: Kennedy believed that after an invasion there’d be a popular uprising.

Person 1: And who else believed that? Anybody you know?

Person 2: Nobody...

Person 1: Now tell me the reason for Santo Domingo.

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“Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective.”

—Kerner Report, p. 389

The headline of the Free Press editorial of April 1 reads, “Keep Isolated Incidents Within Narrow Limits.” This is a typical example of the racist distortion of reality practiced by Detroit’s major newspapers. There is nothing isolated about assaults on the black community by the white police. There is nothing isolated about attacks on Judge George Crockett for dispensing true justice to black people.

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The weekend of September 6^th, 7^th and 8^th will provide for diggers of radical-rock an unusual and revolutionary concept at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church, in the heart of the Warren-Forest Community (corner of Forest and Cass).

Long active in social and cultural activities, the church, through the sponsorship of its “Social Singles” group, will host a weekend of hard rock music, psychedelic and stroboscopic light shows, underground films, love-ins and similar activities related to the theme of the festival—DIALOGUE 68

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Protesting the threat of the removal of their school performing arts curriculum, about five hundred students from Cass Technical High School demonstrated at the Schools Center Building on Woodward November 26.

Mrs. Betty Gittlen, a parent, asked simply for the board to “state clearly that it will maintain Cass Tech as an undistributed, city-wide, specialized high school with its present curricula intact.”

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The Grande Ballroom, Grande River and Joy will be host to Detroit’s first psychedelic prom at 8:00 p. m. on Tuesday, June 20.

The dance will be Cass Tech’s underground Prom and is being produced by Bob Serling, Cass senior and editor of the school’s underground newspaper, YELLOW.

The SPIKEDRIVERS will lead the entertainment and graduating seniors from all of Detroit’s schools are invited.

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Now that a significant number of both patricians and plebes of the American metropole, from wealthy futures traders to dishwashers, have become collateral damage in the crossfire between Jihad and McWorld, it bears asking ourselves what forces are really clashing and what is at stake.

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a review of

Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene by David Sepkoski. University of Chicago Press 2020

Catastrophic Thinking is not an optimistic book. However, it is relentlessly realistic.

Sepkoski is a professor at the University of Illinois specializing in transnational history of biological, environmental, and information sciences in cultural context.

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In these excerpts from their book, Catastrophisme, administration du desastre et soumission durable, René Riesel and Jaime Semprun warn against State-administered management of the global ecological and social crisis.

Riesel is an activist who destroyed GMO seeds at Monsanto’s facility as well as author of Du progres dans la domestication. Semprun, a major contributor to the influential French journal Encyclopedie des Nuisances, first pointed out many of the sinister aspects of planet-saving when it is carried out under the joint venture of Capital and the State.

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The following text is a speech given by Fifth Estate staff member David Watson at a conference on July 9, 1994 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, hosted by the New Jersey Greens. Entitled “A Radical Ecology Forum: Ecological and Communitarian Visions,” the gathering drew approximately one hundred people. For a report of the conference, and the introductory remarks made by Steve Welzer, see the latest edition of the Jersey Greens Journal, c/o Green World, P.O. Box 2029, Princeton NJ 08543. Please send $2 to cover costs.

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“When we first began speaking to the guerrilla forces, we were afraid of being used. We re-examined our reasoning and said to ourselves: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if for once we were used by the people at the bottom instead of being used by the people at the top.’”

Marge and Tom Melville, former Catholic missionaries in Guatemala, spoke these words during their recent visit to Detroit (July 31-August 1). They made three speaking engagements, sponsored by Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice, in Ann Arbor, Southfield, and Detroit.

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No one really consciously planned the thorough integration of the middle-class worker with capitalism. Capitalists were forced to develop a more productive worker, a more extravagant consumer, simply because their own fixation on accumulation (profit) is continuously frustrated by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as automation grows.

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Part I

These are the last days of the Weimar Republic.

In Berkeley, police ‘opened fire with buckshot on unarmed people by the Peoples’ Park, wounding over a hundred and killing one, James Rector. Across the country—in Madison, in Ann Arbor—police repeated the same repression with only slightly less savagery. Meanwhile, the government is quietly extending its stop-and-frisk, no-knock police state over almost everybody under 30.

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The danger facing freeks—even many so-called “cultural revolutionaries”—is that hip culture is close to a revolutionary cultural movement, but more of a lumpen middle-class culture, deformed by capitalist society, to the extent that it even preserved class-lines between the upper and lower middle-class (plastic hippie and freek).

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a review of

Cazzarola!: Anarchy, Romani, Love, Italy (A Novel) by Norman Nawrocki. PM Press, 2013, 300pp pmpress.org

Italian and Spanish anarchism have long inspired anti-authoritarian movements in the Americas.

Anarchists fleeing fascist governments in Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain during the 1920s and 30s sped up a process already underway through normal emigration to not just Spanish speaking countries in the West, but to Canada and the United States as well.

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the cosco busan

a shipping ship

hit the bridge in the san francisco bay some weeks ago

and — perhaps you’ve heard

hundreds of birds--were oiled

poisoned corroded

bunker fuel’d

well

Monte ran the wash room

and i became a rinser

(convergent volunteers:

flock weep work keep

awake)

hot jet under into each feather

of each bird

dawn cuts grease

later then earlier each day

close up right here

waking dream life

remedies

lack of sleep

steam

bites

feather condition

waterproofing

feet

eyes

lines

death

leakage

slip

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Mick Kubiak: Here Comes Spring

cdbaby.com

reviewed by Sean Flynn

Mick Kubiak is the girl you were in love with in school. Who read novels and wrote in a notebook during class, despised convention and carried her otherworldly beauty and sexuality as simple givens. A part of no clique, Kubiak began to form her eviscerating and hilarious social critique of a culture obsessed with possessing women when she was barely seventeen.

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From time to time over the past 25 years, a motley collection of cops, principals, prosecutors, factory foremen, army sergeants, prison wardens, mall owners, shop keepers and vigilantes have tried to interfere with the circulation of this newspaper. Almost always because, as the FBI once put it, the Fifth Estate “supports the cause of revolution everywhere.” The bastions of authority hate our message of indiscipline and freedom and have gone to great lengths in attempts to suppress it.

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The 1980 census has come and gone without much ado. On the face of it, it appears as though most Americans dutifully mailed back their forms and provided the government with its constitutionally mandated information needed to apportion each state’s Congressional representation. Although there was a massive propaganda effort on the part of the Census Bureau to count every resident of the U.S., it is still believed that millions of illegal aliens, poor and minority group members went uncounted.

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Syria’s current borders were drawn up by imperial map makers a hundred years ago in the midst of World War I as part of a secret accord between France and Britain to divide the Mideast spoils of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. As the colonial state gave way to the post-independence state, power was transferred from Western masters to local elites.

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Imagine if more people believed in the power and the magic of collective creativity, what a crazy wonderful new anarchist world we could build. Under capitalism, any form of creativity is usually seen as an individual pursuit, the domain of the rich, the elite and artistes. It’s something to be commodified, re-packaged, and sold back to others as pop culture to be consumed. People accept that they must subscribe to watch movies or hear music to get their cultural fix. For the average person, the high costs of attending live theatre or dance performances are usually prohibitive.

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On September 16 charges of Inciting to Riot against Moses Wedlow and James Roberts were dismissed in Recorder’s Court by visiting Judge John Seiler. The charges grew out of the August 9–12 “Policeman’s Field Days” on Kercheval on Detroit’s East Side. Three additional charges of rioting, conspiracy to disturb the peace and possession of a bomb against the two men had previously been dropped for lack of evidence.

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Issue #12 of Internationale Situationniste reported that, during a general strike in Paris on March 10, 1969, a group identified only as the “Guy-Lassac Street Barricaders” erected a handmade bronze-coated plaster statue of Charles Fourier. The new monument was placed on the empty pedestal where his statue had stood before being torn down during the Nazi Occupation of the 1940s. Within a day, however, French security forces had restored control to the street and the technical service of the Paris prefecture tore the Fourier statue down; like the Nazis, the French government obviously regarded the presence of this early nineteenth-century utopian writer to be a distinct threat to public order.

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Cesar Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers union, and perennial darling of the liberal-Catholic-Stalinist milieu, has recently been making his followers uncomfortable by behaving like a George Meany-style labor hack. At the end of July, Chavez, touring the Philippines at the request of the Philippine farmworkers in California to see how their families were faring under martial law imposed by dictator Ferdinand Marcos, ended up being given the royal treatment by the regime and presented an award by Marcos himself! Chavez, who admitted having no knowledge of Marcos’ ban on strikes or the arrests of thousands of striking workers, defended the Marcos regime, claiming that life under martial law was “a hell of a lot better” for the Philippine workers than before. Chavez had never been in the Philippines previous to his July trip.

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“In culture, capitalism has given all that it had to give and all that remains of it is the foretaste of a bad-smelling corpse.”

—Che Guevara, Man & Socialism in Cuba

Liberation News Service — Twentieth Century-Fox’s sense of the box office hasn’t diminished. Last year they produced such money-makers as “Valley of the Dolls,” “Boston Strangler,” and “Planet of the Apes.”

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In his letter, “Miss” Ann Thropy [this issue, FE #331, Spring, 1989] writes that it was his article celebrating AIDS that generated the criticisms of Earth First! and deep ecology. Even though his claim drastically simplifies the reasons for our critiques, it is undeniable that cheerleading epidemics is what earned him his notoriety. If his original AIDS article (“Population and AIDS,” Beltane 1987 EF! Journal) could have been dismissed as a sick joke, the same cannot be said about articles that have since appeared in the EF! Journal with a more developed, ostensibly scientific, argument. One in particular, “Is AIDS the Answer to an Environmentalist’s Prayer?” by Daniel Conner (Yule 1987 EF! Journal) describes the virus as a kind of Gaia’s revenge (Gaia being the name given the concept of a superorganism which is the entire Earth). Since population pressure “lies at the root of every environmental problem we face,” he argues, starting predictably from a Malthusian position, AIDS may be the answer to any “thoughtful” environmentalist’s prayer. If prayer is the key word in this argument, there is a reason; it borders on being pure religion.

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a review of

Secolo Nuovo or The Times of Promise by Fulvia Ferrari. Detritus Books 2021

“There are people in this world committed to spreading rebellion as far as possible. They appear amid the disaster and guide people away from the [wreckage]. They carry a secret flame that can infect entire cities with its brightness. Fulvia carried this flame along with many others, living and dead, and they passed the sacred flame to us. It’s possible Fulvia never had children. Maybe those children are us.”

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A lone figure stood before a door. Townsfolk had ridiculed her for years because she walked daily to this same spot.

No one else saw any reason to do so. And when they asked her what drew her, she could only shake her head. An answer reverberated deep in her brain but she could never quite grasp what it was.

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CHICAGO, LNS—City Hall sources were buzzing this morning as the mayor’s office shamefacedly admitted to what may be one of the greatest blunders in the history of law enforcement. A mud-splattered blue Chevrolet van carrying 14 dangerous political criminals had passed through the clutches of the city’s police and was allowed to escape through what Mayor Daley called “criminal negligence” on the part of his force early Sunday morning.

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When revolution is in the air and extremist groups take to the streets, the Establishment smells a conspiracy to commit violence, usually led by outside agitators.

So it was in August, 1968, when 10,000 of us took to the streets of Chicago for six days of protest and eight of us were selected and are being tried for conspiracy to incite riot and crossing interstate lines with the intention to incite riot.

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Chicago (UNS)—A meeting called to rename a southside Chicago park in honor of slain leader Malcolm X Shabazz was turned into a scene of police violence, complete with billy clubs and riot guns, Sunday, May 21.

The occasion started out on a joyous note, with speeches, Afro-American music and dance, but friction developed when two young women attempted to join the crowd of between 250 and 300 black people. When the women were asked to leave and refused to do so, they were set upon by two young women from the group, who pushed and shoved them away.

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Last issue we promised to print more reactions to the May Day centenary celebration of the Haymarket Affair (see FE #323, Summer 1986), but much of what we had intended for publication failed to come together. This is unfortunate since many of the criticisms—of responsibility for the arrests at the Friday march (see report further on), the structure of the workshops, meat at the banquet, and even anarchism itself—made for important reflections on an experience that was significant to many of us.

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(LNS) Some 100,000 people including hippy-Yippies, McCarthy kids and SDS organizers, are expected to converge upon Chicago sometime before the Democratic National Convention, August 25–30.

Some will be there to do their thing, others to attempt serious political organizing, others to disrupt and demonstrate, others to do all three.

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