Full list of texts

A Washington, DC, research group contends that, despite industry claims to the contrary, the. U.S. nuclear industry has been plagued by worker deaths, plant accidents, acts of terrorism and other serious mishaps during the last three decades.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest alleges that a careful study of government atomic energy records reveals there have been more than 300 worker deaths, no less than two dozen “meltdowns” or other serious accidents, dozens of threatened and actual terrorist acts, and numerous cases of lost nuclear material and human error.

...

Zodiac News Service—A Washington, DC research group contends that, despite industry claims to the contrary, the U.S. nuclear industry has been plagued by worker deaths, plant accidents, acts of terrorism and other serious mishaps during the last three decades.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest alleges that a careful study of government atomic energy records reveals there have been more than 300 worker deaths, no less than two dozen “meltdowns” or other serious accidents, dozens of threatened and actual terrorist acts, and numerous cases of lost nuclear material and human error.

...

The following text was originally published as a leaflet and distributed at this year’s Hiroshima Day observance sponsored by the Detroit Area Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.

“What the powerful call utopia is now in fact the condition for human survival.”

—C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three, 1958

...

Reprinted from FE #278, November 1976.

When the Fifth Estate first undertook this series, we had in mind the discussion and analysis of a few isolated, yet significantly noteworthy, incidents of nuclear and chemical mishaps. Over the past two-to-three months, however, more and more of these “isolated incidents” have come to light, especially those involving the release of radioactive elements.

...

This article is the third in an originally-planned two-part series on the perils of radioactive waste materials and highly toxic chemicals.

Part One of the series (Capitalism’s Industrial Plagues, # 276, September 1976) dealt with the devastating results of nuclear and chemical dumps, leakages and accidents in the United States and around the world. Part Two (Is Michigan Slated For Nuclear Landfill? #277, October 1976) then followed with a look at the Federal Government’s intention to test land in Michigan as a possible construction site for a nuclear waste disposal system.

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UPI—The dream of “containment” of a limited nuclear exchange to the European theater collapsed utterly today when the Reagan administration’s demonstration air-burst over the Baltic Sea touched off a rapidly-escalating series of events which culminated in all-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West.

...

What they do...

“It was in Hiroshima, that morning of August 6. I had joined a team of women who, like me, worked as volunteers in cutting firepaths against incendiary raids by demolishing whole rows of houses. My husband, because of a raid alert the previous night, had stayed at the Chunichi (Central Japan Journal), where he worked.

...

Paul Bindrim is a clinical psychologist who believes that the most agonizing feelings through which human beings must suffer result from the conflict between the need to say “Love me, and let me love,” and the need to retain a personal identity.

Nineteen strangers, Bindrim among them, gathered in a small paneled room at the Center for the Whole Person and enacted the kind of human drama upon which Paul Bindrim bases that conclusion.

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MONTEZUMA, Iowa (LNS)—Eight Grinnell College students have been convicted on charges of “open and indecent exposure.”

The eight, five women and three men, took off their clothes during a talk given by a representative of Playbody magazine at Grinnell College, on Feb. 5. (See Fifth Estate, Feb. 20, 1969).

...

Reprinted from FE #285, August 1977.

The spectre of a nuclear police state has frequently been raised by atomic energy critics as one of the threats posed by the evolution of a nuclear energy based economy.

Those critics have theorized that such basic liberties as free speech and freedom from unreasonable search would be lost as the nation found it increasingly necessary to protect itself against theft of nuclear materials or acts of terrorism directed at nuclear facilities or using nuclear fuels.

...

This article originally appeared in the People & Energy Newsletter (1757 S. St., N.W, Washington, D.C.) and was based on research by Bruce Edwards.

The spectre of a nuclear police state has frequently been raised by atomic energy critics as one of the threats posed by the evolution of a nuclear energy based economy.

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Number surpasses all other ideas for its combination of impact and implication. Counting means imposing a definition and a control, assigning a number value. It is the foundation for a world in which whatever can be domesticated and controlled can also be commodified. Number is the key to mastery: everything must be measured, quantified. It is not what we can do with number, but what it does to us. Like technology, its intimate ally, number is anything but neutral. It tries to make us forget that there is so much that shouldn’t or can’t be measured.

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In his article on the idea of number, John Zerzan completes what appears to have become a trilogy on the origins and development of abstraction, and the accompanying alienation of humanity from nature and from the sources of its own being. Despite the difficult and inaccessible character of any anthropological-philosophical investigation of such cultural abstractions as time, language and number, his underlying motive is immediate and urgent—to discern in order to break out of “the wrenching and demoralizing character of the crisis we find ourselves in, above all, the growing emptiness of spirit and artificiality of matter.” He argues, “Who could deny that, in practice, quantity has been mastering us,” adding, “From knowledge, to information, to data, the mathematizing trajectory moves away from meaning...”

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Up to 100 people attending a private benefit for APOC attendees in Brooklyn were shocked early on the morning of November 16 [2003] by an unprovoked and violent assault at the hands of the NYPD. Attendees were indiscriminately sprayed with chemical agents, beaten with nightsticks, and harassed by a throng of police officers.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

NEW YORK, N.Y., July 1—Five beautiful women, including Kathy Czarnik of Detroit, entered Manhattan’s 44^th Street draft board and destroyed 2,000 1-A files. They also broke office equipment and scattered other records across the office.

They were able to leave the office without detection and appeared July 3 at a noon rally in Rockefeller Center of 2,000 persons to explain their actions to the public.

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Graphic: photo of US Army installation with overhead sign reading Obedience to the law is freedom.

Text superimposed on photo reads:

Rather than inanely repeating the old formula ‘Respect the law’ we say, ‘Despise law and all its attributes!’ In place of the cowardly phrase ‘Obey the law,’ our cry is, ‘Revolt against all laws!’ — Kropotkin

In December 1997 two writers died who influenced our perspective: Rudolf Bahro and Cornelius Castoriadis, both former marxists capable of valuable insights as well as highly questionable positions. Bahro and Castoriadis were original thinkers, nevertheless, and deserve recognition as important voices in the breakup of traditional leftism and the emergence of new forms of radicalism.

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When I was first asked to write an obituary in the Fifth Estate for Dr. Albert Hofmann, who passed away on April 29, I felt conflicted. I was not wrestling with how to reconcile his contributions to neurochemistry and the politics of liberation; these seemed self-evident.

Rather, the question was how to write objectively about the father of LSD without talking about my personal relationship to the worlds he opened for me and millions of others.

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FE Note: This is a response to “More Minneapolis Anarchy,” the letters beginning on page 15 of this issue.

The desire to maintain the technology developed under Capital’s reign after a libertarian revolution demands that it continue to be administered. The very scope of the productive process means that a similarly large deliberative and decision-making apparatus would exist to coordinate its functions. Those within the anti-authoritarian milieu, usually anarcho-syndicalists or councilists, advocate worker self-management through a system of councils as the best way to democratically and non-bureaucratically administer the capitalist means of production in a manner consistent with a revolutionary vision.

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The local gestapo ended their celebration of National Police Week Sunday, May 21, by staging a tiny raid on the offices of the FIFTH ESTATE’S brother newspaper, THE SUN, at 4863 John Lodge, and took SUN editor Gary Grimshaw into temporary custody for “exhibiting an obscene drawing.” Grimshaw is also Art Editor of the FIFTH ESTATE.

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Raoul Vaneigem, along with Guy Debord, was one of the principal theorists of the Situationist International. Active with the SI from 1961–1970, Vaneigem’s most well known book, The Revolution of Everyday Life, contains the slogans that frequently made it onto the walls of Paris during the May 1968 uprising.

...

“What are kingdoms but great robberies? Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled an emperor.’”

--Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (410 CE)

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A specter is haunting [the world]--the specter of [the Occupy movement]. All the powers of [the world] have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.

-- The Communist Manifesto--1848, Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels [altered to reflect current reality]

One hundred and sixty-three years after the original words were written, the specter the rulers of Europe so feared (communism, the word altered in the above quote) appeared to have been successfully vanquished. But suddenly the Occupy movement went from 0 to a 100 mph in a few weeks placing the question of the rule of money on the political agenda across the world, and, in the U.S. for the first time in a hundred years. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the Greek, Spanish, and English opposition to shifting the cost of repairing capitalism from bankers to the people, almost overnight, Occupy sites sprouted up in over a thousand U.S. cities.

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On June 17, Father’s Day, a march and vigil was planned outside of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters in Southwest Portland, Ore., to protest the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. It quickly developed into something that the organizers hadn’t planned for: a six week occupation of the building that effectively shut it down for an extended period of time and brought ICE activities into sharp public attention.

...

a review of

After the Fall: Communiques from Occupied California by Aragorn! Edited by Little Black Cart Books, Berkeley, 2010. This free newsprint publication is presently out of print, but can be downloaded at afterthefallcommuniques.info.

One of the key essays, “We Are The Crisis,” appears in Occupy Everything: Anarchists in the Occupy Movement, 2009 2011 by Aragorn!, Little Black Cart Books, Berkeley, 2012, 258pp, $15

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Anarchists lead the way in a May Day march. Authoritarian leftists tried to intervene in Occupy New Orleans but were rebuffed. --photo: N. Krebill

It was encouraging to see large numbers of anarchists and anti-authoritarians at a late March Occupy New Orleans General Assembly (OccupyNOLA). As one of the participants mentioned, Occupy is in many ways the most significant grassroots uprising since the Vietnam Era.

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They’ve wrecked the earth, destroyed her treasures, and inflicted misery on the many, all so they can golf or set up their lawn chairs on some clear cut forest. It’s over whether we do anything or not, but if we fail to act, the future will metastasize into the wreckage colonization always leaves in its collapse.

...

When I learned of Octavia Butler’s death in late February 2006, I fought the feelings of loss. A longtime fan and student of her science fiction and fantasy, I never stopped sensing synchronicity and strangeness when I found that other radicals were reading her work. On the occasion of her passing, London’s Independent described her as “the central figure in the relatively close-knit community of black writers of the fantastic in America.”

...

To break off from the homeworld,

Separate and start anew,

Takes courage nigh unknowable.

Make a new language, speak it;

Choose a harsher planet, keep it;

Dispossess yourself of things

And your only home alike;

Leave the old lush rainforests

For frigid deserts, dry, starving,

Where through hardship you are free.

...

“Zebra mussels came from fresh-water seas of Eastern Europe and have no major natural predators in the Great Lakes, which accounts for their spread at a rate of 160 miles per year.

“They showed up in Lake St. Clair in 1987 and rapidly infested Lake Erie to the south...The creatures have already appeared as far apart as Green Bay, Wis., and Lake Ontario...

...

Liberal Detroiters were recently mildly surprised and, perhaps, even a little bit shocked, by a recent picket line thrown by the West Central Organization (WCO) before a union hall where a victory” fund-raising dinner was being held for recently re-elected Councilman Mel Ravitz.

One prominent local progressive, George Crockett, Jr. refused to cross the line, even though he was a close personal friend of Ravitz.

...

The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) had its long-awaited dinner at the Rackham Bldg. recently, only a few days after anti-war demonstrators had clashed with the warmakers and local gendarmes in the same locals.

I tend to think that the spontaneous outbreaks which resulted in 14 arrests probably had more effect (if anyone can have effect) in dramatizing opposition to the War in Vietnam than the ADA gathering of 500 $10.00 dinner-goers passively listening to ADA National Chairman John Kenneth Galbraith—in a setting which was essentially a reunion of the Democratic Party.

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Probably one of the dirtiest jobs in the world is being a police commissioner in a large American city.

Even the most enlightened and liberal person in the world would have a bad time presiding as a civilian director over what is essentially a military operation designed to physically, socially, and psychologically suppress urban Blacks and poor whites.

...

Let’s have a few more words about Mel Ravitz (then, I hope to close this subject for a while).

Councilman Ravitz personifies, on a local level, the true “devil” to the Black community and to striving and alienated whites.

There is no question that Ravitz, a professor of sociology at Wayne State University, has made a substantial contribution to the community. In 1961, a lot of good people worked very hard to put him on the Common Council and his close election, with the simultaneous elevation of Jerry Cavanaugh to the Mayors’ chair, gave many hope for a “new day” in Detroit.

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Rep. John Conyers, Jr. cast, as he promised, the only dissenting vote in a House judiciary subcommittee against that idiotic, probably unconstitutional, law which would make it a Federal crime to burn, deface, etc. the American flag. (The “offense” is now only covered by individual state laws.)

He predicts that only about 23 congressmen will have the guts to vote against the bill when it hits the floor of the House.

...

Let me predict this: Jerry Cavanagh is definitely on the way out! It may not come as a result of the current recall movement, but it will happen soon.

I don’t think that there’s a single reader of the FIFTH ESTATE who gives a damn about the Mayor’s sex life, but there are a hell of a lot of people in town who do care about his political, ethical, intellectual, and possible, financial corruption.

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Publisher Anthony Wierzbicki of the Detroit American is constantly explaining his extensive “crime” coverage. In a recent front-page editorial he stated: “We firmly believe that it is the duty of a newspaper to advise its readers of the truth—the entire truth. Then, and then only can the public make proper decisions and demand proper civic action.”

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Drums are rolling early and heavy in the Michigan Democratic Party’s forthcoming internal civil war with Detroit’s 37-year-old Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh pitted against just-retired Asst. Sec. of State for African Affairs and former governor, 55-year-old G. Mennen villiams.

Unfortunately, the campaign promises to avoid discussion of pressing current issues (e.g. the war in Vietnam) and seems likely to center on a silly and meaningless battle of the “young” vs. the “old.”

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The rabid anti-Communist vultures are now having a field day. They are suddenly showing a concern for the people of Czechoslovakia which they never exhibited for the Blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa or the Orientals in Vietnam.

In the history of the world, words like “freedom” and “democracy” are usually only valuable as items of a propaganda machine. They are cute “means” necessary to unite or propel a people behind a national cause that is really much more dedicated to political and economic power.

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One of the most noticeable things about the primary election this month was the unusually low turnout especially for a Presidential year. The excitement of a forthcoming national election contest generally creates among the electorate a greater interest in the traditional process and usually stimulates people to exercise their franchise more enthusiastically.

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“Some people believe that all Negroes carry switchblade knives. Well, it’s not true.”

Thus Detroit’s local TV commentator Lou Gordon ‘continues his technique of cute rumour managing. He’s pretty smooth. He states the rumour first making sure that everyone hears it clearly then, after it has sunk in deeply among his gun-toting white viewers, he makes a mild renunciation of the rumour.

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The Detroit Public Schools will receive $6,000,000 to squander in the next three years from the Federal government for a special project to “enrich” five inner-city-schools.

Among other things, they will increase the staffs in these five schools—but at a heavy price they won’t publicly admit: the reduction of personnel available to the rest of the city’s schools. That’s the tragedy of most “crash” programs; with only a limited amount of teachers to utilize, school boards are more interested in “showcases” for their national public relations image than they are in genuine overall improvement of their antiquated systems.

...

An interesting entry to the TV “talk show” circuit locally is “Haney’s People,” at 11:15 p.m., on Channel 7 (WXYZ-TV).

Host for the new show is Don Haney who is dark black in color, but not very black in philosophy. For instance, in discussion July 7 on bias in the mass media, Haney kept on insisting that TV had played an important role in magnifying the image (with a clear implication that this was detrimental to “good race relations”) of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown.

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Much attention in the community from now on will be focused on the primary election to be held Tuesday, August 6. Perhaps the largest effort will be that of the McCarthy for President Committee, together with the Michigan Conference for Concerned Democrats, to get their 2,000 candidates for precinct delegates in the Democratic party elected throughout the state. A substantial success in this campaign could effect some changes in the internal structure of the Democratic party, since there are only a total of 5,000 precincts in Michigan.

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Of the many comments made following the shooting of Sen. Kennedy, perhaps the most incisive was given by Sen. McCarthy:

“It is not enough in my judgment to say that this was the act of one deranged man, if that is the case. The nation, I think, bears too great a burden of guilt, really, for the kind of neglect which has allowed the disposition to grow here in one’s own land, in part a reflection of violence which we have visited upon the rest of the world, or at least one part of the world.” Sen. McCarthy was talking about the violence that America has been and is still inflicting in Vietnam.

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Are we in the midst of a revolution now? Or, are we on the verge of one? Can the revolution be comparatively bloodless, basically non-violent?

These are interesting questions we ask ourselves as summer approaches and its oppressive heat threatens to ignite this nation in the greatest internal turmoil since the Civil War.

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If the once highly-touted, but now quite tarnished “War Against Poverty” has done nothing else, it has provided a new battleground for political bickering-among the poor themselves and among the middle-class citizens who think they’re trying to help the poor.

Probably the greatest boondoggle around here nowadays is the Wayne County Office of Economic Opportunity (WCOEO) program. Designed to serve the “poor” areas in Wayne County outside Detroit, it makes the Detroit poverty program look like a smashing success in contrast.

...

One of the biggest problems of “rebuilding Detroit” after the July 23 rebellion will be the attitudes and actions of the very powerful “white liberal” leadership in our community.

These paternalistic gentlemen have not, I can assure you, learned any significant lessons from the events of the past few weeks and are still insisting on keeping up with their meddling with their dirty paws in the growing determination of Black people to truly emancipate and govern themselves.

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Well, the Detroit Teachers’ strike is over—and guess who got the royal screwing? About 175,000 black kids whose basic conditions of instruction were not improved more than a piddle.

The matriarchy of Union President Mare Ellen Riordan triumphed again. She and her Marygrove Mafia have succeeded in developing such tight control of that organization that it’s almost impossible to move without an approving glance from her.

...

One nice thing about public feuds between politicians is that it gives everybody a rare chance to see part of what’s going on inside governmental circles. We learn, that at least to some extent, many decisions are made on the basis of personal vanity, pride, and ego conflict—and not solely as the result of some impersonal “power structure” beyond the reach of our full comprehension or influence.

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If there’s anything more disgusting than a person who has no guts, its a person who has half-guts.

For example, Rep. John Conyers, Jr. For the past several weeks I’ve been writing about the wonderful job he was doing in fighting passage of that horrible “flag-burning” bill.

I suggested to producers of the Lou Gordon TV show on Channel 50 that this would be an excellent topic for a debate. They agreed. Rep. Conyers agreed to appear at first, but when his opposition was going to be Richard Durant, the highly articulate ex-Birchite and present chairman of the 14^th District GOP, Conyers welched.

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The ridiculous bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to penalize flag-burners passed by a whopping majority (385 to 16) last week—but in their haste, the patriotic legislators forgot to include the specific term “burning” in their prohibition. They did ban mutilating, defacing, defiling or trampling the flag.

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It couldn’t happen in Detroit!

That was the proud proclamation of our city’s leaders all summer long until that fateful morning of July 23. Detroit had supposedly been the nation’s leader among big cities in making civil rights progress.

That is, Detroit was tops in fake tokenism and self-deception. There was bragging that so many Black people here were in positions of prominence and relative wealth. But, obviously, these successful people only represented an infinitesimally small portion of the Black community—and even many of these middle-class oriented people, who still feel the brutal whip of discrimination, were quietly hoping for the summer revolt which finally exploded on one of the first hot Saturday nights in a relatively cool summer.

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In recent months Israel has been dismaying even its closest imperialist allies with its policy of retaliation against southern Lebanon for a single act by a small group of Palestinian guerrillas. The Israeli assault on Palestinian and Lebanese civilian villages has left the world press filled with horror shots of dead women and children at the hands of U.S.-made Israeli planes in what has become the modern equivalent of the Nazi’s ten-for-one policy of retribution.

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Editors’ Note: The so-called “riot manual” described on the opposite page [FE #84, July 24-August 6, 1969] should be seen for what it is—a battle plan for the subjugation of the black community, demonstrators, and anyone who challenges the way this system is run. Its ruthlessness and cynicism should be ample evidence that the police are not an agency to protect the people, but rather to terrorize them.

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a review of

Pets DC: Rise of the Pets by Ramon Dines and Kit Brixton. A.B.O. Comix, 2022

A.B.O. Comix describes themselves as “a collective of creators and activists who work to amplify the voices of LGBTQ prisoners through art. By working closely with prison abolitionist and queer advocacy organizations, we aim to keep queer prisoners connected to outside community and help them fight towards liberation.”

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a review of

The Little Communist Who Never Smiled by Lola Lafon. Seven Stories Press, 2016, 320 pp. English translation from French by Nick Caistor

“Today, it is an older, wearier Nadia who raises her arms. She leans into a back walkover, but she falters and falls. “I am not a perfect 10 anymore,” Nadia says. “I can only try my best.”

—People Magazine, 1990 (she was 28)

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Stuart Christie, Scottish anarchist, who practiced both the propaganda of the deed and the book, died at age 74 on August 15, 2020. Farewell and thank you good comrade.

Stuart came of age and political awareness in Glasgow in the early 1960s. The arc of his early politics went from a prospective Protestant Orange Lodge member to the anti-nuclear war movement of the Committee of 100 to the Glasgow Federation of Anarchists by the time he was 16. He was drawn to anarchism because it “was a way of life rather than an abstract view of a remote future. It was not a theory, a philosophy, a ‘programme for life,’ nor yet a description of how individuals and society should one day be, but a whole new way of looking at the world we were in.... [It was] something I could measure myself in my actions right now.”

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The Detroit area is getting desperately short of places for rock bands to play. Three months ago things looked really good with the Grande, the Hideouts, and the Crow’s Nests all doing well; the Eastown getting ready to open, and at least eight smaller clubs rumored to be opening by early summer.

But in the last month the prevailing winds seem to have shifted in the other direction. The Clawson Hideout was forced to close down because the city fathers and the Knights of Columbus (who own the hall) limited the capacity to 350, hardly enough to break even. The Crow’s Nest West has closed to remodel right at the start of the Summer.

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LA Free Press — First of all, please forget everything you’ve heard about the Diggers, because it’s mostly a bunch of crap.

To begin with, the Diggers are what happened when the Hell’s Angels met LSD and got turned off violence to psychedelic love.

The central cadre running the hippie hostels day by day is made up of guys with names like Motorcycle Richie, Tobacco, Little Wolf, Apache and Tiny.

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On October 19 to 21, Wayne State University will sponsor a conference titled “New Perspectives on Race and the City.” Featured speakers include G. Mennen Williams, Jerome P. Cavanagh, Hubert Locke, Roger Wilkins of the U.S. Justice Department, Community Relations Service and John Spiegal, head of the Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University.

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Editor’s Note: On Thursday, June 6, the House gave final approval and sent to the President for his signature or veto, the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968, the effects of which may be on us for years.

Liberation News Service — Now a person can sit on his chair in his home and say, “I sure am enjoying this grass!” and be sent to federal prison for five years based on that statement—when and if the President signs the 109-page Omnibus Crime Bill. A local cop might have bugged the pot smoker’s house, on the tip of a member of a new style police private vigilante group which the new bill also provides for and would finance.

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What first greeted me

upon entering that room

were the sad, quiet faces

as we all sat around the table.

.

Thinking of her,

wondering why

and what happened

and some of it came out later.

.

But what was also on my thoughts

was finding out how management

had known about it all day long

as they readily pursued their disturbing calculation

...

“MOVE’s work is to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water, the soil. And, to put an end to the enslavement of life—people, animals, any form of Life.”

—MOVE Statement

I am driving south on Interstate-295 in a freezing April rain toward Portland, Maine. In the car with me are Ramona Africa and Fred Riley of the black liberation organization, MOVE. We pass an SUV that has slid off the highway into the ditch.

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“Education passes on more than knowledge—it transmits the lore, beliefs, customs, values, rites, and ceremonies that shape a society and govern its functioning. In short, education transmits culture.”

—Randy Bass

We know what culture modern schools reproduce: Empire. Schools are prison-factories, churning out producer-consumers from alpha to epsilon, bastions of patriarchy. The institutionalized authority (as truth and discipline) of “teacher says”: the violent stewing chauvinism of clique and posse, the age-stratified, passive aggressive coercion to conformity. And of course, they are boot camps for capitalism, for learning to repress unmediated human desires (for love and play and learning) to work mindlessly (“for your own good”) under the pallid urging of those damned abstractions through which capital rationalizes life so that grades, with time, become money.

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“God can do anything except suicide”
--Malcolm de Chazal

In 1973, a small network of Arab students living in Paris, London, and Vienna founded the Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile. At the group’s core was Abdul Kader el-Janabi, Farid Lariby, Mohammed Awadh, and Maroine Dib; they re-oriented surrealist elements against the intense misery they saw rampant in the Middle East: despotic police-state politics, nationalism (particularly Ba’athism in Syria and Iraq), militarism, patriarchal oppression, neo-colonial European interference, grueling poverty, and suppressed imaginations.

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“It seems all too frivolous to try listing the litany of atrocities visited upon the powerless by the powerful.”

—Editorial, the Fifth Estate, August 1, 1968

Tensions were running high in Inkster, an integrated suburb, on August 8 because of the closing of a teen center run by militant black youths.

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“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

— Eduardo Galeano

The following economy and community section deals at least as much with our visions for different and possibly better realities as it does with our critique of the current and devastating situations within capitalist economic relations. However, we can and should note that the statistics concerning global wealth and poverty are staggering. The elite classes experience unprecedented luxuries while the rest of the world struggles. The working class slips into disastrous debt and the under-class teeters toward catastrophic hunger, disease, and poverty.

...

One of Don’s last research projects was on the history of Egyptian surrealism, so it is fitting that his death was poetically heralded by a popular insurrection in the streets of Cairo.

As the founding manifesto of the 1973 Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile exclaimed as if in anticipation of the possibilities opened up by recent events in Tunisia and Egypt: “We call upon individuals and the masses to unleash their instincts against all forms of repression, including the repressive ‘reason’ of the bourgeois order. We poison the intellectual atmosphere with the elixir of the imagination, so that the poet will realize himself in realizing the historical transformation of poetry. We liberate language from the prisons and stock markets of capitalist confusion.”

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FE Note: There continues to be a sometimes rancorous debate within the anarchist movement about how best to combat the system. What follows is meant to be critical but comradely. We in no way doubt the spirit of those we criticize in this article, only their judgment.

Unfortunately, even for a small number of those who espouse the ideas of anarchy, the modern form of organization (which both the left and the right employ) holds an allure as a seemingly efficient manner in which to confront the state and capitalism. However, when adopted by anarchists, the formal organizational mode has been no more successful than it has for leninists.

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WASHINGTON, DC. (LNS)—An Army officer who sent out Christmas cards last year decorated with photos of stacks of Viet Cong killed by his regiment has been promoted, according to columnist Jack Anderson.

George Patton 3d has received a Brigadier General’s star. Last Christmas he sent his greetings out with a picture of him waving another war trophy—a polished Viet Cong skull, with a bullet hole above the left eye. The skull was a present from men in Patton’s 11^th Armored Cavalry.

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Anarchy as a journey in the human story has a long and crazy road. In fact, it is where the Human Story begins. It is the story of human life before the advent, the institutionalization of the Muthafuckas. (Eldridge Cleaverian definition, ha).

Increasingly, anthropologists, archeologists, etc., have been finding pieces to a fantastic set of puzzles. And notice that I used the plural! As they begin to lay these pieces down, pictures are forming of our social beginnings that will shock, surprise and amaze many. Most of us may even find them revolting because these pictures go so extremely contrary to all that we’ve been raised to believe about the stories of the human species on this planet.

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a review of

On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death by Jack Z. Bratich. Common Notions, 2022

97-year-old Irmgard Furchner does not fit the stereotype of a murderous fascist. The diminutive German woman was slumped over in a wheelchair, cane in hand, when she was sentenced in court last December for her part in the murder of over 10,000 people during World War II.

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Do you have trouble getting the FIFTH ESTATE? You can find it at the Merit Book Center, 14365 Harper; Bookworld, Woodward at Warren; the news stand at Campus Martius and Woodward; Debs Hall, 3737 Woodward; Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 1101 W. Warren; Facing Reality Publishing Co., 14131 Woodward; Global Books, 4829 Woodward, upstairs; Mixed Media, 5704 Cass at Palmer; Mona’s Restaurant, John Lodge at Forest; Monroe Music, 18981 Livernois at 7 Mile Rd.; Paperbacks Unlimited; 14145 Woodward; Paramount News in E. Lansing; and Bob Marshall’s Books in Ann Arbor. We need more distributors. Know of any stores that would carry the paper?

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Due to the incompetence of the Post Office bureaucracy the subscribers did not receive their FIFTH ESTATES until a week after they were mailed. This is a double drag since our office staff really busted their asses trying to see that the mailing got to the subscribers before the papers hit the streets. Well, have faith, God and the old P.O. willing you should have this in your paid subscriber’s hands the day after we get it back from the printers.

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Numerous problems prevented a full version of our feature, On Gogol Boulevard, from appearing in this issue. Look for its return. In the meantime, important events continue to be played out in Ex-Eastern Bloc countries and the Third World. Contact OGB at 528 Fifth St., Brooklyn NY 11215 or on the web at flag.blackened.net/agony for updates. Items prepared by the Fifth Estate staff.

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On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. A similar section also appears in Black Fist.

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On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. Similar sections also appear in Anarchy and Amor y Rabia.

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This section is produced for the Fifth Estate by Neither East Nor West; a New York City group linking alternative oppositions in the East and West, and printing news and documents unavailable in the corporate and “left” media. Our title refers to Moscow’s Gogol Boulevard, a favorite hangout of Soviet-era counterculture youth dissidents, artists, and peace and human rights activists.

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On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts.

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On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. A similar section also appears in Black Fist.

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For several issues of the Fifth Estate, On Gogol Boulevard (OGB) produced a two-page spread on former Eastern Bloc and Third World anti-authoritarian struggles. However, due to numerous glitches, we’re missing from the FE again except for these short items. But, by next issue we should be back. In the meantime, OGB is available on our website shared with other New York City anarchist groups: http://Flag.Blackened.net/agony.

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The long delay between this issue and the last one published at the end of January resulted from our being confronted by a bout of cerebral paralysis which left us feeling empty of words and ideas. We mostly articulated this feeling to one another by stating rather aimlessly that perhaps “we no longer had anything to say,” which carried with it the vague suggestion that maybe we should even close up shop.

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The long delay between this issue and the last resulted from a bout of cerebral paralysis which left us feeling empty of words and ideas. We mostly articulated this feeling to one another by stating rather aimlessly that perhaps “we no longer had anything to say,” which carried with it the vague suggestion that maybe we should even close up shop.

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We tried dropping out, and we tried working in the factory. We tried teaching, and we tried going back to school. We tried organizing the workers, and we tried permitted protest marches. We tried passing leaflets to every passerby, and we tried wheatpasting every wall with provocative posters. We even tried nighttime guerrilla graffiti squads.

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I wonder if anyone else feels the same nausea and despair I experience when reading missives like R. Tate’s [see in this issue “More Debate on the Balkans,” FE #360, Spring, 2003]. Apparently, such jumbled, simple-minded invective, with its breathless disregard for the requirement to present serious evidence to support an argument, is what now passes for debate, for reasoning, in the so-called anti-authoritarian milieu. Was it always like this? Do any of these people even bother to learn anything about a subject anymore before applying their one-size-fits-all template?

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Recently, the Anarchist Political Ecology Group (the APE Group) read and discussed Ursula Le Guin’s book Always Coming Home. Though it’s a work I often go back to, this was the first time I had read it cover to cover in about thirty-five years.

I first discovered Le Guin’s work when I read The Dispossessed in the mid-1970s. The book had a huge effect on the members of the anarchist group I was in at the time, the Black Pearl Mutual Aid and Pleasure Club in New Orleans.

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a review of

Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. Edited by Allan Antliff. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2004. 352 pages. $25. Available from The Barn.

Left liberals in the United States laud Canada as a sort of parallel universe: a North American welfare state paradise where everyone has health care; foreign policy is about international peacekeeping; and a national propensity for politeness is translated into public discourse as civility. It’s a mythic place where anger doesn’t exist (except perhaps on the hockey ice), and anarchism is as genteel as a George Woodcock poem.

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Critical theory is a bit like pornography, as a Supreme Court justice once said when asked to define the latter: “I know it when I see it.”

Critical theory can be defined pretty loosely as well. It’s the multitude of intellectual spin-offs from Marx that began to take flight roughly a hundred years ago, at about the time that Lenin and his acolytes thought they have codified what Orthodox Marxism was, forever.

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Mutiny is such a potent threat to military organizations—and the States who use them avoid even mentioning the word. Instead, military commanders and civil authorities fall back on euphemism in order to avoid announcing the news that they most fear—during the First World War, for example, a major mutiny by French troops was mentioned in murmurs as “collective indiscipline”; while the war dragged on in Vietnam, the US Army reported increasing numbers of “battlefield refusals.”

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NEW YORK (LNS) — The Boy Scout movement has long been regarded as a paramilitary indoctrination course for Western Civilization’s children.

Now a Massachusetts autograph dealer is offering for sale a letter which confirms that view of the Scout movement. The letter, dated Oct. 16, 1928, was written by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. It is addressed to a friend and financial supporter of the organization.

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The question of whether to combine in organizations, associations, federations, etc., has become a subject of some debate and much interest. Many feel that the only obstacle to organization is the relative weakness of the small numbers of persons who identify with a libertarian perspective, while still others feel organizations in and of themselves are bureaucratic and are incapable of producing the desired goal.

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Within the small circles that constitute the libertarian movement in the United States, the question of whether to combine in organizations, associations, federations, etc., has become a subject of some debate and much interest Many feel that the only obstacle to organization is the relative weakness of the small numbers of persons who identify with a libertarian perspective, while still others (probably a smaller number) feel organizations in and of themselves are bureaucratic and are incapable of producing the desired goal.

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The stage is set, houselights go out, curtain opens and a poignant silence reigns as actors hit the stage. Always the audience looks at the skin; arms and legs, usually attractive faces. The audience licks its lips. Honest observation must concede that beyond the facade of cultural awareness the real reason mass audiences attend the theatre or cinema lurks the haunting spectacle of cannibalism.

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Thanks again for running my article on Poland, and for E.B. Maple’s reply. (See FE #309, June 19, 1982, “The Collapse in Poland”) Maple seems a little over-anxious for a dispute on the questions raised, in some cases going out of his way to misinterpret what I say, and to ignore parts of the article in which I clearly distinguish the revolutionary movement from the organizations which speak for it, and from the capitalist state which cannot be reformed or seized. Still, there are several points on which we genuinely disagree.

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“He who humbles himself wills to be exalted.”

—Nietzsche

I would like to present some thoughts and comments on terrorist organizations and activities in general and on the SLA and “The Last SLA Statement” in this context. My main intention is not to criticize the SLA as such, but to contribute to the discussion concerning what is to be done by those of us who fervently desire the transformation of the present “social order” into a free world.

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U.S. Getting Radiation From China A-Blast

WASHINGTON — (AP) — Light radiation from a Chinese atomic test is sprinkling parts of the eastern United States, leading health officials in one state to warn residents to wash garden vegetables carefully before eating them.

Pennsylvania officials were first to report detection of the fallout from a Sept. 26 blast at Lop Nor in western China. Other areas reporting some radiation include New Jersey, southern Connecticut, Long Island, Delaware and South Carolina.

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I contribute my social commentary linocut images to the FE to add weight to the humanist argument against fear and power mongers taking over the world. The activities of large collective organizations like corporations and governments create a constant barrage of false information and phantoms to justify their controlling structures and systematic programmed removal of the earth’s natural resources that in truth are the outer body of all of us who are on this planet.

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Related: see FE Staff introduction, “Against Civilization,” in this issue.

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

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See also: “The Machine against the Garden” (author’s introduction) in this issue, FE #321, Indian Summer, 1985.

Your comments as well as the urgings of other friends stimulated me to read Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden. I quickly recognized the reviewer of Hawthorne’s Secret and also the author of the Foreword to my Signet Classic edition of Hawthorne’s superb novel. But I do not regret reading the book. The central themes of Leo Marx’s book have for several years been among my main concerns, and the book’s range as well as the profundity of many of its observations impressed, provoked and disturbed me.

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