Full list of texts

Photo by Richard Stocker

At a carnival, when disruption strikes, the call for help goes out: “Hey Rube!” The call went out at Wayne State, last Friday, April 26, as it did across the world, as students on all continents boycotted classes and staged demonstrations in opposition to U.S. imperialism.

In Detroit, the Wayne Administration put out the call—HEY RUBE! and the campus was soon engulfed by carloads of full-decked Tactical Mobile Units, a half dozen members of the cavalry, a platoon of cops, and twenty six miles of metaphoric barb-wire; called out to quell the carnival. Boy, was it a riot.

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It rarely happens that the king comes in contact with rabble, but he did here in Michigan on May 4, the 21^st anniversary of the state murders at Kent State Univ.

Presidente Bush was the honored guest at the University of Michigan graduation ceremonies in nearby Ann Arbor, so we at the Fifth Estate joined with hundreds of others to meet the leader in his limo.

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Eleven members of the Ad Hoc Committee for the August Days of Protest arrested Aug. 6 at a Hiroshima Day rally in downtown Detroit pleaded guilty to charges Aug. 15 in Recorder’s Court. Those arrested were Harold Greenberg, Ron Landberg, Harvey Robb, James Lipson, Rita Leasure, Howard Harrison (of E. Lansing), Eric Chester (of Ann Arbor), Mark Nowakowsi, Farrell Hamen, and Dena Clamage; all were charged with resisting arrest and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty. Frank Lovell was charged with assault and battery by Donald Lobsinger, head of Breakthrough, a right-wing hate group.

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The traditional pomp and circumstance of the US January presidential inauguration disappeared amid chants and tear gas, when what was expected to be a grand victory march down Pennsylvania Avenue descended into an embarrassing spectacle for the elite and their “mandate.”

With all eyes on DC, people across the world were treated to televised parade images of wafting smoke and pepper spray, as police battled protesters directly on the inaugural motorcade route. At one point about a mile ahead of the presidential parade, the barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue were brought down by demonstrators. During a prolonged clash, protesters slowed the president’s motorcade and then brought it to a stand-still.

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A weekend of international protest activities has been called to coincide with the opening of the second murder trial of Irish anarchist Marie Murray on April 25 in Dublin, according to the London Black Flag office.

Murray and her husband Noel were convicted last year in a frame-up trial for the slaying of an Irish cop following an unsolved bank robbery in that nation’s capital city.

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James Lafferty’s campaign for the Congress from the 17^th District on Detroit’s far West side took on a new dimension with the appearance in the district of a leaflet branding Lafferty a “traitor” and calling the FIFTH ESTATE an “anti-Christian, anti-American hate sheet.” Although the leaflet, entitled “HOW DARE JAMES LAFFERTY RUN FOR OFFICE IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD!” is signed by a group calling itself the 17^th Congressional District Citizens Associated for Support of Our Boys in Vietnam, with headquarters at 17538 Rutherford, Detroit, it appears as though this is a front for Detroit’s anti-Semitic hate group—Breakthrough. Particularly obvious is the re-use of “evidence” reprinted from past Breakthrough smear sheets and the liberal (excuse us) use of capital letters.

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Many young people diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anarchists with the bad luck of being misidentified by mental health professionals who: (1) are ignorant of the social philosophy of anarchism, (2) embrace, often without political consciousness, its opposite ideology of hierarchism, and (3) confuse the signs of anarchism with symptoms of mental illness.

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If you mention France, May 1968 today, you’re probably met with a shrug or a blank look. It’s easy to dismiss the ten million workers and students who went on general strike and the virtual shutdown of the French state as an historic blip. Another failed revolution.

But for the people who took part in those events, much more was going on--something besides a political uprising. Possibility bloomed. First hand accounts speak of a wave of mental liberation and spontaneous joy, with a sense that the old order of business had become obsolete overnight. How did reality shift so quickly into this new, liberated mood?

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Reprinted from Off Our Backs (February 27, 1970), a Woman’s News Journal.

“My doctor told me that if using a diaphragm were a test of mental ability I’d be given a moron rating.”

That quote is unique to one woman’s experience with one strange gynecologist but it is, unfortunately, revealing. Most women don’t receive adequate instruction or encouragement from their doctor and leave his office insecure about their ability to use it.

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The Artists’ Workshop was formed over two years ago by a group of WORKING artists—mainly poets & musicians—who found that by banding together they could accomplish a great deal in terms of getting themselves together and getting their work to their public. Many of the original members of the Workshop have left town, as is natural, but it seems that no younger people have come up to replace them. If there are people in this city who are interested in keeping the Artists’ Workshop a healthy and growing group—that is; people who are ready to WORK at what needs to be done—they need to step forward now and make themselves known.

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In Memoriam Luis Ortiz Puppo*

Populism is the manifestation of political demagogy that combines financial power and indoctrinated populations. Propaganda is used to indoctrinate the mob.

This social base can amount to a significant percentage of the population—as in Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany—or a small but highly-visible group effusively cheering on their defiant and confrontational leader. Such a leader carries out a plan to revise history and accommodate reality to his own ideology

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Web archive note: In the print original “Brothers and Sisters” replaces “Motherfuckers,” which is crossed out.

what politics is for THEM revolution is for US

harmless diversion a publicity stunt Magazines say

are you listening kids? underground newspapers say

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During the 1917 Russian revolution, anarchists urged workers to take control of their lives by turning the capitalists out and seizing control of the means of production, the better to reconstruct society along anarchistic lines.

In some instances, property was communalized and a post-capitalist social order began to emerge. One such experiment was initiated by Boris Yelensky, an anarchist who returned to Russia in February 1917 after a lengthy exile in Chicago: Yelensky made his way to his home town of Novorossiysk in August where he formed an anarchist propaganda group.

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a review of

Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia by Edward Anthony Avery-Natale. Lexington Books, 2016, 235 pp.

Like many anarchists who came of age in the 1990s, my first exposure to anarchism came through the punk scene. A friend gave me a cassette tape full of classic punk bands as part of an effort to satisfy my ever expanding interest in punk.

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Thinking about punk rock gives one the strange sensation of witnessing a phenomenon and trying to make intellectual sense of it rather than being immersed in it. That of course ages you immediately. No matter what your “sympathies” are toward the music and the social critique it carries with it, if you are writing about it in the manner of this article, you are obviously not of it.

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Some 200 local residents turned out to show their opposition to the Detroit incinerator and the ongoing destruction of planetary life systems in early June. Following a dormant phase, this demonstration did much to clear away a pall hanging over our community since the incinerator restarted in 1990 and the Gulf War damaged our spirit.

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Pura Arcos (1919–1995)

On October 12, 1995, our community lost another elder and member of a generation of anarchist revolutionary veterans now passing into history.

Purificación Pérez Benavent (Pura Arcos), companion of FE staff member Federico Arcos, was born June 26, 1919 in Valencia, Spain. She later moved to Barcelona.

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Before the global pandemic and waves of insurrection, gaps in the empire’s dominion were already widening. The culture wars were escalating, tensions between older and younger generations mounting, the health care system showing its serious inadequacies, psychiatric problems becoming ubiquitous, and environmental devastation rapidly accelerating.

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NEW YORK—The 200 garment industry executives listened attentively as the seminar speaker, with evangelical fervor, told them how their industry can be brought “kicking and screaming into the 20^th Century.”

The Saturday seminar for New York-area producers, at $30 a head, was designed to show them how to use new assembly line techniques to cut costs. Workers assigned to a single task, such as sewing buttonholes, would work faster as the repetition increases their efficiency, the executives were told.

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NEW YORK (UPS)—Paul Krassner was supposed to appear on the Joe Pyne show Sunday, July 16, but the tape was never shown. Paul had doubts that Pyne would show the tape even though his guest appearance was announced in the TV section of every paper.

As Paul tells it the producer of the show explained “If Joe don’t like it, Joe won’t show it!”

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“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously; any sound that Winston made, above a whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.”

— George Orwell, 1984

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“We want non-hierarchical community, the post-nuclear extended family, the circle of erotic and social realization. The ‘Movement,’ defined by an emerging les-bi-garistocracy that embraces the socio-cultural assumptions of the heteropatriarchy is not our movement. Queer anarchy loves and fucks and theorizes and shouts and fucks-shit-up in the face of queer consumerism.”

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Once upon a time in the future, perhaps closer than we dare dream, parents do not own children. Children are exposed to a kaleidoscope of possible relationships, and grow up in a world where they witness and freely experiment in consensual, sensual acts of their choosing. Wimmin safely and comfortably fondle and lick each others’ breasts in public, and in full view of passing “families,” men suck each other’s erect fingers.

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Dear Ursula,

This is the first love letter I’ve written to an 80-year-old woman. Most of the people I have fallen in love with, or in lust with, have been men. And so far, all of them have been at least 30 years younger than you. Nor is this love like that I feel for my grandmothers, nearer to you in age and gender. In many ways, I feel closer to you. They have not been so forthcoming with their own stories. I suppose they’ve learned not to be, in a culture that often ignores old women. Nor have they had many chances to speak to me, nor I to listen. Unlike most in human history, my culture is carefully segregated by age. You have reminded me of this oddity in your own fragments of anarchist anthropology.

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On Page 4, Aaron Lakoff begins a discussion bearing further conversation. Letters limit: 250 words; ideas for essays should be submitted. See our contact info here.

Things to consider which will expand the discussion:

Can sex work be contained within capitalist wage work as solely another job category or does the nature of it deserve special definition and analysis?

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Over the past year, on the streets of Santiago, I witnessed a movement that has transformed my perspective on anarchism coming to Chile shortly after its revolt began.

Officially a response to a minor hike in the metro fare, the popular wave of rebellion was, in reality, the result of fifteen years of revolutionary ferment.

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Before the Bernhard Goetz subway shooting recedes completely from social memory, perhaps a few words can be said about what it suggests regarding race, class and crime in this country.

Goetz, as it will be remembered, was acquitted in mid-June of attempting to murder four black youths he shot who had confronted him, asking for money, on a New York City subway. Although never directly threatened by the four, Goetz testified: “My intention was to murder them, hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible.” He saw the four ghetto youths as intent on robbing him, an experience he had traumatically suffered once before. Four of the bullets he fired hit the young men, leaving one permanently paralyzed and brain damaged.

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Rachel Pollack is the author of six novels, two collections of short stories, and 21 works of nonfiction, including the classic 78 Degrees of Wisdom, one of the most important contemporary guides to interpreting the tarot. She is the recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Unquenchable Fire and the World Fantasy Award for Godmother Night.

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Trustees of Macomb County Community College are considering a policy change which would effectively eliminate most of its black enrollment by phasing out non-residents of Macomb County.

Students for a Democratic Society are protesting the proposed change, and have issued a demand “that all students be granted equal opportunity to register and that no limit be placed on the amount of non-residents enrolled at Macomb,” threatening possible student action if the demand is not met.

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Race war has become a distinct possibility in Boston. Over thirty people have already been hospitalized from racial confrontations since the so-called “Procession Against Violence” called by Mayor Kevin White took place on April 23.

What is happening is the culmination of a series of events that have escalated with mounting fury over the last few months. White racist mobs are becoming more brazen and aggressive. On April 15 an anti-bussing lynch mob assaulted black attorney Theodore Landsmark outside city hall with an all too appropriate weapon--a flag pole draped with an American flag. The police stood by.

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SAIGON (LNS)—Have you ever wondered why the North Vietnamese government doesn’t permit the International Red Cross to inspect its prison camps?

The official reason is that there is no declared war in Vietnam and that captured American pilots, therefore, are not prisoners-of-war (POWs), but criminals under the jurisdiction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

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Billowing smoke pours from the stacks that surround the huge water tower on the edge of the Rouge River. A too-familiar blue and white emblem proclaims the domination of the area by Ford Motor Company’s massive Rouge Plant complex, once the largest industrial plant in the world.

East of the railroad tracks that cross Dix Road, UAW Local 600 faces a strip of small stores and coffee houses. On a weekday afternoon, sometime between the changeover of a factory’s day and afternoon shifts, groups of men gather along the street. Dark complexions and painted shop signs are the only indications of the largest Arab Muslim community in the U.S., located in the shadow of the Rouge Plant in the South End of Dearborn.

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It’s 7 a.m. on Fat Tuesday, the final and peak day of New Orleans carnival. I’m up, or waking up, drinking my first bloody mary of the day, hot glue gun in hand sticking dozens of oversized fake chrysanthemums to my cape in the last calm minutes before the madness resumes.

I’ve had a few hours sleep since last night’s event, the coronation ball of the brilliant Krewe du Poux (yeah, that’s “poo”), where my group appeared wearing tall conical hats made to look like piles of shit with flies buzzing around them. We scavenged the hats from the trash of a major parade, then repainted and adorned them for our purposes at the last minute. The Poux party was a real circus, featuring a midway of homemade carnival games and a raucous shopping cart smash-up derby followed by a parade through the neighborhood. I barely made it there because I’d been in bed all day recovering from my own krewe’s parade and the afterparty where I alternated bartending and dancing until 4 a.m.

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We’re certain that most anarchists can remember at least one book that first introduced them to anti-authoritarianism, political engagement, gender-role-bending, or other topics of lasting importance. But such books are hard to find amid the morass of boring, mainstream kid-lit that reinforces the same capitalist and authoritarian values which are fed to adults (can you say “Disney”?). Here, then, we present a highly subjective and idiosyncratic guide to some of the best work out there. Undoubtedly, we’ve left off your favorite author; we’re sorry, and we meant to check with you before we wrote this, but there are thousands of great children’s books out there, and our guide could easily have taken up the whole of this issue if we’d let it. Our selection is ordered, loosely, by age of target reader.

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Please send calendar events to the Fifth Estate keeping in mind our quarterly schedule. We are especially interested in events for the Spring and Summer of ’03 to be published in our next edition.

fifthestatenewspaper@yahoo.com

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

December 21—(Winter Solstice) Everywhere. You are invited to join a national mobilization of creative, autonomous local acts of resistance to the war at shopping malls around the country on the last Saturday before Xmas. We encourage invasion of shopping malls across the country to disallow business as usual and tell consumers, “Stop the buying! Stop the dying!” For more info: tcap@mutualaid.org

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See page 100 for the Fifth Estate “Revolution Everywhere” schedule.

Throughout 2005--The IWW Centenary (1905–2005)

The IWW will be celebrating its first complete century. There are events happening all year throughout the world. Info: centenary@iww.org, 215--222-1905, PO Box 13476, Philadelphia, PA 19101, www.iww.org/projects/centenary

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a review of

Free Speech & the Suppression of Dissent During World War I by Eric T. Chester. Monthly Review Press 2021

The focus of Eric Chester’s incisive study is the clash between the state and its dissenting citizens during the time of war. While based on a fundamental belief in the absolute right of free speech, Chester’s book navigates the ways that the government of President Woodrow Wilson imperiled and suppressed free speech during World War I.

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On the night of July 3 the staccato of machine-gun fire rang out across the Jeffries Housing Project bordering on the Lodge Freeway. The sound was accompanied by the appearance of flickering letters on the wall of one of the high-rise concentration camps spelling out the name: NEWSREEL.

The sound and the letters are the trademark of Newsreel, a radical filmmaking and distribution organization which had an outdoor film showing at the housing project.

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As can be seen in this issue’s “Revolution Against the Megamachine” and past Fifth Estate articles, we support the environmental movement becoming a revolutionary movement. Only through such a transformation can it begin to adequately challenge the ecological and social relationships which threaten this planet. To that end, we endorse the idea of radicalizing the 20^th anniversary of Earth Week scheduled for April 16 to 22, 1990. The attempt to fashion it as a domesticated spectacle has already begun with every hack politician, mainstream institution and even notorious polluters declaring allegiance to the 1990s as the “Environmental Decade,” all the while planning business as usual. These fakes are preparing to make it a week of festivities celebrating “concern” for the earth and the system’s ability to fix its problems.

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One of the more astonishing and bizarre developments in the ever-increasing confrontations between revolutionary and establishment elements in our society was leaked to this paper.

A member of the Federal Communications Commission sympathetic to the struggle of today’s youth against their senile oppressors, revealed the incredible and even hilarious details of a hitherto suppressed report circulated in only the highest, innermost governmental circles.

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Some of the 5,000 who marched in Paris Sept. 3 to protest the police suppression of Radio Libertaire.
—photo F. Arcos

Shouts of joy greeted the sounds of Radio Libertaire’s return to the airwaves Sept. 3 after having been shut down by a police raid six days previously.

At 5:45 am on Sunday morning, Aug. 28, the Paris premises of the anarchist radio station, Radio Libertaire, were broken into by police, the equipment trashed, the broadcasters arrested and kicked. The forces of “law and order” were experienced at this work, having silenced fourteen other “free” radio stations the previous weekend.

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“Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) foment disruption on campuses around the country, and contribute nothing to Wayne State University.”

The pontificating prose belongs to J.J. Scott, WTAK (1090-AM) announcer. His apparent vendetta has one main objective: to rid Wayne’s campus of SDS by September.

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Editors’ Note: The following interview with Rafael Viera took place at a conference of the Republic of New Africa which was held in Washington, D.C. recently. Viera is awaiting trial on second-degree murder charges stemming from the fatal shooting of Patrolman Michael J. Czapski outside the New Bethel Baptist Church, last March 29.

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The following article is a reprint of an interview with Rafael Viera, Chief Medical Cadre of the Young Lords Organization (YLO), that first appeared in the Black Panther Newspaper. Viera is one of three men that were indicted following the New Bethel incident here in Detroit last March. At that time Viera was the only non-black member of the Black Legion, a paramilitary arm of the Republic of New Africa. He, along with Clarence Fuller, is to face trial on March 9 here in Detroit. Alfred Hibbitt, the third individual indicted, was acquitted on December 22 (see the Fifth Estate Jan. 22—Feb. 4, Vol. 4, No. 19). Viera is charged with assault with intent to kill and will be defended by Milton Henry, Ken Cockerel, and Chuck Ravitz. He is currently in New York City working in Spanish Harlem to maintain a recently established chapter of the YLO.

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a review of

Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard by Peter Linebaugh. University of California Press, 2019

The title of this fascinating and inspiring work comes from visionary poet William Blake (1757–1827). In one of his most memorable passages, Blake writes that “They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up, / And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,/ And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning/ Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.”

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Everybody knows what the cops and the National Guard are supposed to do during a “civil disturbance,” right?

They are supposed to stop Black people from looting, burning, and killing. The only problem with this formulation is that these guardians of law and order usually involve themselves in the very activities they are supposed to be suppressing.

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FORT DIX, N.J. (LNS)—Pfc. William Brakefield has been found guilty of rioting at the stockade here last June and sentenced to three years at hard labor.

Newsmen and spectators looked at each other with surprise when the verdict came in. Having failed to come up with any substantial evidence that Brakefield had taken part in the rebellion in which 150 GIs tore up their cell blocks, throwing footlockers through the windows and setting mattresses aflame, the prosecutor claimed that given the stockade conditions it was “unbelievable” that Brakefield would not have rebelled.

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Not content to sit by while the Central American rainforests are being bulldozed and burned for cattle grazing land to provide beef for fast food greaseburgers, fifty students and faculty from Macomb County College picketed the Burger King at 23 Mile Road and Van Dyke on June 29^th in protest.

The group also plans to participate in World Rainforest Week, September 7 through 13, which has targeted the garbage-food chain for international protest demonstrations. The Detroit-based Earth Community, 19731 Forrer, Detroit, MI 48235, (313) 493–0543, has called for a “picket and boycott (of) every Burger King in the country.” Contact Rainforest Action Network, 300 Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, for events in other areas.

Every once in a while you run into one of those books or pieces of music or art, that no matter what its faults, force you to see your life from an entirely different perspective. Lasch wrote a couple of books that did that for me, even though I was left with a distinct distaste for his oversimplified Calvinistic judgments. Not that it wouldn’t be nice at times to stand on the mountain with god and write down the ten, and then hold them like a thunderbolt inside to ride through life’s uncertainties, but even if life may have been easier with Jehovah’s words inside you, that just isn’t where it’s at nowadays, and I don’t think many of us really regret that.

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Out of a crop of albums these stand out for one reason or another:

PINK FLOYD: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Tower 5093). The Pink Floyd has enjoyed in London roughly the same position as the MC5 holds here: the Floyd made itself known through working at the weekly UFO dance/ concerts at the Roundhouse, under the sponsorship of the London UPS paper, the International Times.

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Just how do you go about opening a good movie in this town without getting jumped on? Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf is the best film to appear in Detroit since his earlier Persona, yet by the time you read this, it will probably have already left the Studio North Theatre.

The mechanics of film distribution is often a complicated and unfair process: The survival of a small specialized film—Alain Resnais’ classic La Guerre Est Finie, for instance—depends entirely on the support of local critics. Hard-core Resnais buffs can fill a small theatre for maybe four nights, but after that, the film is on its own, La Guerre Est Finie opened in Detroit during the newspaper strike and, despite the rigorous attempts of the distributor and exhibitor to save it, it barely stayed above water for two weeks. If a Resnais film results in financial loss, will that same exhibitor be willing to risk playing any future films by Resnais? We can only hope and pray.

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Environmental activists, anarchists, and other concerned individuals began organizing against the June 2000 meeting of the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, six months in advance of the event.

The Congress, founded in 1933, is composed of such oil producing nations as the U.S., Canada, Croatia, Indonesia Kuwait Nigeria and Libya. Its focus is industry issues, such as down-playing global warming.

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“Read All About It!” for this issue consists of those papers put out by and for GIs.

It should be obvious from the number of papers existing, especially the ones from army bases, that the opposition within the armed services to the war and to the military has become increasingly visible in the last six months or so.

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A woman wrote in recently and asked for the addresses of several radical and underground papers. This made us realize that our paper may be the only one of its kind that is known to many of our readers.

Since Liberation News Service just mailed us a complete list of all such papers known to them to be currently operating, we thought we could pass some of the information about them along to you.

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We rarely receive enough readers’ ads to warrant grouping them in a column, but we are always glad to assist our readers in communicating with one another.

The Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest nonsectarian publisher of socialist and labor literature, is putting together a compendium entitled Who’s Who in U.S. Prisons: 1984. The book will gather short sketches of those imprisoned for labor, feminist, environmentalist, anti-racist, peace, anti-imperialist and other such activities. It will also include persons whose offenses are not strictly political but who are victims of racist, sexist and anti-gay prosecutions. The Kerr Co. asks defense committees and civil liberties organizations, as well as prisoners themselves, to write Charles H. Kerr Co., 1740 Greenleaf Ave., Suite 7, Chicago IL 60626 with information on such cases.

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The following two letters were received prior to the arrest of the Vancouver 5 (see story on next page) and raise again the question of revolutionary violence and terrorism debated so many times previously in these pages. The debate has engaged the anarchist and libertarian movement since its inception and we welcome further comments on the subject.

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Dear Fifth Estate,

Thank you for your criticisms of the Freeze campaign [FE #309, June 19, 1982]. I agree wholeheartedly that the Freeze is not enough. The Freeze is just a first step, it is a talking point. Whatever its limitations, it has engaged the interest of millions of people in the subject of nuclear terror, and it has helped people start to think about the issue.

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Editors’ note: In the following pages, we feature two essays by readers. The first is Peter Lippman’s “While Yugoslavia Burned the Left Looked the Other Way,” a response to Bob Myers’ “Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia” (published in FE #356, Spring 2002).

Second, we’re printing “Marcos: The Zapatistas’ Unknown Icon” by a subscriber in England. Written last year, this piece may appear dated, but those of us who read it found it inspiring. From time to time, we hope to feature more writing by our readers—when space allows it and the quality of your work demands it.

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“We do not want others, more or less of the right, center or left, to decide for us. We want to participate directly in the decisions which concern us, to control those who govern us, without regard to their political affiliation, and oblige them to “rule by obeying.” We do not struggle to take power, we struggle for democracy, liberty, and justice. Our political proposal is the most radical in Mexico (perhaps in the world, but it is still too soon to say). It is so radical that all the traditional political spectrum (right, center left and those of one or the other extreme) criticize us and walk away from our delirium.

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I had this idea the other day that it would be cool and utilitarian at the same time to ‘drop’ 250 micrograms of acid just before going to take my army physical. I would just take enough to get a mellow and unreachable high so I would be convincing when I copped out as a dope addict-nut, etc.

The physical was due to start at 7:00 o’clock a.m. I stumbled in at 7:45 just after popping the acid. At 8:30 the tests were just beginning and I was pissed because I figures the stuff was not going to work.

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

As we go to press in late June, we are receiving reports of discussion groups formed around the country, in person and in on-line blogs, that are reading Fredy Perlman’s 1976 historical novel, Letters of Insurgents, published by Detroit’s Black & Red.

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a review of

How to Read Marx’s Capital: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters by Michael Heinrich. Translated by Alexander Locasio. Monthly Review Press 2022

My interest in reading this tome is so minuscule that I haven’t even opened it. The title is off-putting enough.

The question never asked is why would anyone want to read the arcana of the inner workings of Capital’s political economy? And, perhaps, who would want to?

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Nikolay Vavilov (1887–1943)

“It seemed that We had finally passed this very difficult trail so that we could mount the horses and continue on. But suddenly from the Cliff above the trail, two gigantic eagles flew out from a nest, circling on enormous wings. My Horse shied and bolted, galloping along the trail and the ovring. The rein was unexpectedly torn out of my hand and I had to hang on to the mane.

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Based on contraband, based on stealing fire, based on the thrill of nothingness I could consider paying taxes if reading is all you want and maybe a little tidying up. But as it is each night a new piece of shit falls from the hole in the sky. The vast arms that encircle us with their discontinuities remain unable to reach me aside from the occasional caress.

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Within the past year, America has suddenly found time to experience something called the “rebirth of the blues.” On magazine covers, in underground journals, in popular music—the blues.

Blues has surfaced into the popular culture. It has surfaced not from the so-called underground or “hip” subculture but from an underground far deeper—the black culture. For blues, the only purely native American music, ironically was spawned and nurtured by a man often considered as less than an American, the black man.

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It is required now to bemoan the fact that the current US President is both a producer and product of Reality TV. Indeed, “reality,” “realty,” and “royalty” are all linked etymologically.

The real-estate tycoon, then, Reality TV boss, now completes the triumvirate by taking on a state executive role by treating it as his own monarchical sovereign seat. Instead of addressing this by seeking to reestablish correspondence-based truth via facts), we would be better off seeing reality as a terrain filled with metamorphosis machines, with subjectivities made and destroyed. We can begin an account of these reality wars by assessing the menagerie of alt-right and neo-fascist street actors emboldened by his victory.

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Social movements, not establishment reformers, have nurtured and propelled the most important liberatory struggles of the last half-century, from the Civil Rights and Gay Rights struggles to the Feminist Movement to Native American nations recent uprisings against fracking and pipelines.

Social movements create collective engagement, pockets of resistance that “reframe a politics of everyday life,” as activist and academic Ben Shepard writes in his recent book, Rebel Friendships: “Outsider” Networks and Social Movements (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), even as they gather support and ignite overwhelming demands for change.

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Rioting by 250 Black youths, says a UPI dispatch dated March 23, 1969, brought 200 police from 10 communities to the 20,000-student campus at Northern Illinois University at DeKalb.

Windows were smashed in the campus police station, library, university center, and a women’s dormitory. Two trucks and two cars were vandalized. Damage was estimated at several thousand dollars. There were no arrests.

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“La Patagonia rebelde”

Director: Hector Olivera

110 min. (1974)

The death of Argentine anarchist author and activist Osvaldo Bayer on December 24, 2018 came at a time of renewed interest in his long career. Recent translations of two of his works, The Anarchist Expropriators and Rebellion in Patagonia, were published by AK Press in 2016.

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Hong Kong, 2019

In the latter half of 2019, the streets of Hong Kong, Santiago, Barcelona, Baghdad, London, Paris, and Beirut were flooded with huge demonstrations demanding reforms or the removal of politicians.

All displayed the outward exuberance of mass revolutionary upsurges, but generally raised only demands for fair governance rather than revolutionary alterations of the countries in which they are occurring.

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a review of

Rebel Violence v. Hierarchical Violence: A Chronology of Anti-State Violence on the U.K. Mainland, July 1985-May 1986, B. M. Combustion, London WC1N 3XX

“Dangerous times,” reads one of the many fascinating newspaper clippings in this pamphlet produced by the same people who gave us Like A Summer With a Thousand Julys, The End of Music, and Miner Conflicts, Major Contradictions. Dangerous indeed, but heady, exciting times, as well, as the chronology demonstrates. A few examples of rebel violence will suffice to give a glimpse:

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On 28^th September last, a group of unknown people approached a field in County Carlow, Ireland, with malicious intent. They proceeded to tear apart an acre of sugar beets’ then disappeared back into the night from which they came.

The field was the property of Teagasc, a semi-state agricultural research organization. The catchily-branded Roundup Ready Sugar Beet that was destroyed had grown from seed provided by the U.S. multinational, Monsanto (See p. 2). The sabotage was claimed by the Gaelic Earth Liberation Front.

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This issue of the FE is dedicated to our friend and comrade Peter Puccio, who recently succumbed to time and illness. For us, Pete represented not only a direct contact with the anarchist movement at a time in the 1970s when we were arriving independently at similar conclusions, but also a direct link to older radical libertarians and their traditions. We’ll miss him sorely.

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Recently paroled MOVE9 political prisoners Debbie and Michael Africa, and their son Michael Africa Jr., delivering the keynote talk at the 2019 Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) Convergence in Gainesville, Fla, in June.

After surviving a police siege on their Philadelphia home and forty years in prison on frame-up charges, Mike and Debbie were released from prison in 2018. They were imprisoned along with seven other members of MOVE, a revolutionary environmental Black liberation organization, in 1978.

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We were pleased to see number 1 of Seditious Delicious (PO Box 6981, New York NY 10150), an openly anti-authoritarian (antiauthor-itarian, too?) poetry magazine. As in all poetry journals, be they little self-published magazines or fancy, established publications, you can find the usual mix from poems so bad they make you wince, to spirited and even thrilling songs. Here I even appreciated the stuff I thought bad, since in contrast to the self-serving gunk found in so many small reviews, even the failed attempts in SD often reveal good instincts, if only with a cracked voice. (Anyway, what is “good” and “bad” is ultimately a question for archeologists; if you feel the beat, dance.)

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a review of

Hungry for Peace: How you can help end poverty and war with Food Not Bombs by Keith McHenry. See Sharp Press, Tucson, 2012, 180 pp., $18.95

Even after three decades of Food Not Bombs (FNB) volunteers sharing meals, smiles and good times with anyone who happens to pass by, the authorities still don’t seem very inclined to give members of the direct action anti-hunger group their proper respect.

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a review of

Recipes For Disaster, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, Olympia WA 624 pages $12.00. Available from the Barn: see page 98

It seemed that every time we dropped by Bound Together Books in San Francisco, the same situation unfolded. Some teenager getting the punk rock starter kit together (first mohawk, chain wallet, and Doc Marten’s bought with the parents’ credit card) would show up looking for The Anarchist Cookbook. The counterperson, with a weary sigh, would place on the counter a worn copy of the dubious classic and open to a dog-eared page. “See this bomb recipe?” she/he would say. “You’ll blow yourself up if you do what this book says. That’s not what anarchism is about.” The kid would leave clutching a couple of cheap pamphlets on Kropotkin, never to be seen again.

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Unlike any other living organism on the planet, women are confronted by their bodies. A woman’s biologic reproductive capacity functions inexorably until old age renders it obsolete; until that time they are faced with the possibility of pregnancy. But it is the very cognizance of the relationship between intercourse and childbearing that makes woman’s situation unique: reason presupposes some measure of choice over whether a woman will bear children or not.

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They came from villages and barrios as naive refuseniks, mostly indigenous, who were fed up with the classroom. They came with curiosity, rather than conviction. They had heard about Universidad de la Tierra from friends or acquaintances and decided to give it a try. The cost of the whole adventure is ridiculously low, almost irrelevant.

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This issue’s theme opens up a universe of vigorous discussion and argument. All three concepts invoked by the title can be defined differently, depending on contexts, philosophies, ideologies, and world-views. The subject of technology often raises emotional responses as we grapple with our dependence on complex industrial systems that we don’t understand or control for survival.

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Accused persons in Detroit Recorder’s Court have been tried and, in many cases, found guilty by juries of which Blacks, other minority group members, Southern-born, foreign-born, working-class people, ADC mothers, students, bearded males, and persons convicted of moving traffic violations have been systematically and discriminatorily excluded from serving on.

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Prosecution of some fifty-five known resisters of draft registration was to begin in June. However, in an effort to avoid student protests and demonstrations, the government has decided to postpone prosecution until later in the summer. Also, according to an article in the Detroit Free Press (5/20/82), a recent Defense Department document has revealed that the administration, obviously intimidated by the anti-nuclear war movement, fears that litigation against these resisters will further stimulate that movement. When questioned about this document, the White House press secretary responded that the government’s policy is still registration, not prosecution.

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Earth Day supplement page 3

It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.

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It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.

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On the one hand, fighting solely for reforms has historically had the function of affirming and extending the system’s power; while on the other, waiting only for the final revolutionary conflagration can dictate an isolated existence confined to issuing angry tracts denouncing everything.

When recycling becomes a permanent feature of the economy, it will probably be utilized mainly as a technique to deal with a significant portion of urban garbage, but in itself won’t stop the destruction of the natural world. All the recycling efforts in the country can’t stop the clear-cut logging of the remaining old-growth forests of the US Northwest when a conglomerate which bought out a logging firm with junk bonds needs quick cash to meet its debt service.

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Unlike the Green backsliding politicians denounced by Saral Sarkar in the adjoining article, no party in the U.S. has ever taken a principled stand on ecological issues. Even groups willing to make an effort to reform capital’s and technology’s worst abuses are few and far between. This absence causes a dilemma for radicals.

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Fascists are seeking to exploit and co-opt anti-war forces in the US, and build support for war criminals like Assad and Putin. Anarchists have a responsibility to reject such overtures and offer solidarity to those resisting in Syria.

Following the chemical gas attack on the rebel-held Syrian city of Douma in April, Trump staged retaliatory air-strikes, and a protest against the U.S. military actions was held in Los Angeles.

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Last winter at a Draft Conference held in Central Methodist Church in downtown Detroit a Soviet flag was hurled at the speaker’s platform by Don Lobsinger, head of Breakthrough, a local kook group.

Despite the urgings of some draft resisters that the left join the right in stamping on “that dirty revisionist flag” it was rescued and remains intact. The flag is a beautiful revolutionary red with a gold hammer and sickle in the corner. It is a full five feet by three feet in dimension.

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The Draft Resistance sold its Red Flag, but didn’t make one hell of a big profit. $5 to be exact. Maybe people thought it was contaminated by its previous owner.

Incidentally, there was a bad typo in the article offering the flag for sale (FE #37, 1–15, 1967). The story read “the left join the right in stamping that dirty visionist (sic) flag.” The word should have been revisionist. Big deal.

Throughout U.S. history, the lives and struggles of Native Americans have been disregarded and disdained by the white, middle-class, christian, capitalist, Nature-despising national Establishment. Sadly, the disregarders and disdainers also included the great majority of socialists, communists, anarchists, trade-unionists and others who considered themselves critics and opponents of that Establishment.

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a review of

Drawing The Line Once Again: Paul Goodman’s Anarchist Writings, PM Press, 2010, 122 pages, trade paperback, $14.95

While relatively unknown today, Paul Goodman was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20^th century. In books like Growing Up Absurd, published in 1960, Goodman captured the zeitgeist of his era, catapulting himself to the forefront of American intellectual life as one of the leading dissident thinkers inspiring the burgeoning New Left.

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The law suit seeking to stop Detroit and State Police political spy units and open up secret police files may be drawing to its final stages. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge James Montante has appointed liberal Detroit attorney Arthur Tarnow as a monitor for releasing the files after determining the best procedure “at a reasonable cost to the city and state.”

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Once upon a time there was a large shopping center in a Land to the North, and a plastic store called (1 across). For many weeks long-haired freeks and greasers had hung around with nothing to do but laugh at (1 down) shoppers and hassle pigs.

Kind of a bogue life, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do.

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Redwood Summer was modeled after the “Mississippi Summer” of the civil rights movement. The conditions were similar to those of Mississippi in 1964. African-American victims of the system needed outside intervention to advocate for them in hostile territory. In Northern California in 1990, it was Redwood ecosystems that needed help.

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“La Jeunesse de Bacchus” William Bouguereau 1884

Our call for the re-enchantment of the world isn’t a collapse into New Age dreaming, but rather a different, or perhaps more accurate description of what this publication has always stood for—revolution against capitalism, the state, patriarchy, and the forms of misery they generate.

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David Solnit is the co-author, with his sister Rebecca Solnit and Chris Dixon, of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press), the editor of Globalize Liberation; and the co-author, with Aimee Allison, of Army of None.

On November 30, 2009, the World Trade Organization (WTO) met in Geneva, ten years to the day of the shutdown of the WTO in the streets of Seattle, still reeling from a decade of global organizing and mobilizations against it. On that same day, November 30, 2009, President Obama announced orders to send 30,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan. Two weeks later, from December 7 to 18, the United Nations Copenhagen climate summit took place, paralleled by street mobilizations, mass direct actions, and counter-summits of global social movements.

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sounds that come from the soul are always the same

free

open sounds

giving

the kind that reach out

and touch—

that’s what our sisters did/minimum

touching maximum/sharing oppression

and the wish for its

removal...

feeling those sounds

seeing them felt on others

watching faces smile for the first time in months—

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I look at the man sitting before me. He is a very polite man. He is in his mid-thirties. He is meticulously dressed in a plaid shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Lying on the table in front of him are piles of papers, on which he occasionally writes notes. He is cheerful, in a very good mood. Often, he strokes his scratched hand.

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Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the US government is American civil society.

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“Lady

with the very modern illness

agoraphobia

but ancient as fear

in a Greek marketplace

Lady

I have seen your face

crumple and break in ecstasy

of terror of horror of being

alive in the sewer world

feeling alien thoughts beating

at your mind an office desk

protruding from one ear

a subway train from the other

bells clanging gongs shouting

while you’re washing the dishes

terror

of the market place

and falling

falling into that white place

without shadows

where the rivers are milk

and Lethe dreams

and nothingness has no horizon...”

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