Full list of texts

The first meeting of the Detroit Chapter of Lemar (Legalize Marijuana) met at the Artist’s Workshop Dec. 19^th, and had a good turn out in spite of a heavy snow.

The purpose of the group is to: 1. Disseminate information concerning marijuana (factual studies as opposed to the bullshit printed in the major daily papers), 2. Gather together people in the Detroit area who are interested in seeing marijuana legalized, 3. Help end or reduce feelings of isolation and paranoia by functioning as an organized group.

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Before becoming Situationists and involving themselves in the business of social war and cultural revolution in 1960s Europe, Guy Debord and his friends were active in the Lettrist International. They read too much Baudelaire and Marx, drank too much cheap Beaujolais, and aimlessly prowled the streets of Cold War Paris seeking liberty, love, the supersession of art, and an escape from post-Marshall Plan consumer culture while staying one step ahead of the cops. From 1954 to 1957, the Lettrists published a free periodical called Potlatch, which later became the Situationist International’s internal newsletter. Debord explained the choice of title for the publication in an essay in 1959: The goods that a free bulletin such as this distributes are non-salable. Only the further elaboration of these new desires and problems by others can constitute the corresponding return gift.” As would be seen later in Debord’s thinking on the spectacle, Potlatch was meant as a way to critically assess the vicious cultural logic of capitalism, the dead world of commodities, and the ways in which the accepted dynamics of the modern exchange economy had neutralized classical working-class Marxism. Instead, the Lettrists were hearkening to an alternative to the capitalist exchange of equivalence. This alternative was practiced by the aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Northwest famously described by late nineteenth century ethnographer Franz Boas and pre-World War II anthropologist Marcel Mauss.

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Just driving by, there is little difference between “The Castle” on the Lodge service down the street from the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam offices, and the same kind of run-down building a few blocks away. Both might be photographed by a person just driving by for an exhibit on poverty in Detroit.

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When Chou En-lai, the first and only Prime Minister of the Peoples Republic of China, died in the beginning of this year, a struggle between the so-called “moderate,” pro-managerial and “radical left,” pro-Maoist factions within the Party burst into the open.

The rift has taken the form of an apparent battle between two personalities within the standing committee of the powerful Politburo of the Communist Party’s Central Committee (China’s ruling body).

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Minnesota has by far the largest acreage of wild grass of any state in the nation, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics figures show.

Last year county weed inspectors reported that they had discovered 1,723 acres of Cannabis in the state. To the inspectors it’s “just another weed”.

This spring an inspector attended a town meeting in a small Minnesota community. “Did you know you have marijuana growing in the town?” he asked.

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Just as obtaining job-related income is being made more precarious every day by automation, our sleeping hours are now increasingly under siege by the forces of techno-capitalism. In order to more fully understand the growing vulnerability of our dreams to corporate manipulation, the recent phenomenon of “dream incubation”, which involves the implantation of marketable dreams in our heads, is worthy of further investigation.

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Kitty Genovese died in Queens while fifty people watched.

Thomas Poindexter lost his seat on the Detroit Common Council when it was reported that he saw a crime being committed and did not even bother to call the police.

Two nameless hippies were arrested on Prentis on Tuesday night August 8, while all the flower folks and their bike-less motorcycle type colleagues just stood around and gaped. Two cops had just walked on their beat down Prentis, gotten lost in the shadows then reappeared from the alley at the end of the block where they had started out. They had two handcuffed prisoners. The prisoners, somewhere between teenyboppers and hippies looked to be about 19 years old. They stooped as they walked down the street hands bound behind their backs.

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The cops and the Feds are sure Dave Valler is behind the Detroit bombings. They’ve told that to The Detroit News and they have constantly tailed Dave (see last issue).

Their only problem is that they have no evidence to directly connect him with the dynamitings. But leave it to the ever ingenious pigs to get their man.

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David Valler, convicted dope user, accused bomber, ex-candidate for President, and of late, Detroit News feature writer, seems to have pretty well squared things away with his former adversaries—the pigs.

Valler is doing 7 to 10 years in Jackson for two counts of violating the Michigan Narcotics Act and is the Principle defendant in a conspiracy case involving the bombings that took place in Detroit and Ann Arbor last year.

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Men seek the truth, Fascists deal in words.

This becomes evident early in our lives if we care to see it for what it is.

Remember the teacher that would ask for apologies in front of the class (and hovering principal)? Remember the parents who would politely beseech our repentant words in front of important guests at the dinner table? They didn’t give a damn whether we meant what we said, they just wanted to hear it.

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October 8^th, Jack Forrest was awakened by the noisy spectacle of nine Federal agents bouncing off the vestibule wall of his mother’s apartment on Pingree.

Streaming through the kicked-in door in wild disarray, they gathered their forces around Jack’s bed and, guns drawn, proceeded to shout some dialogue that they had heard on television.

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MONTEREY, Calif. (LNS)—The Army is taking a Danang-sized shelling as the climactic phase of the Presidio “mutiny” case enters its third week here at Fort Ord.

In a sharp departure from earlier trials, with defendants taking the stand to apologize for the Oct. 14 sit-down, or not testifying at all, Terence Hallinan’s clients have begun testifying that their actions were justified.

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TACOMA, Wash. (LNS)—Good news in the Presidio “Mutiny” case: Linden Blake, the third of the 27 stockade prisoners to escape while awaiting trial, has arrived safely in Canada. And the Department of the Army, feeling the unaccustomed weight of public pressure, has cut Nesrey Sood’s sentence down to two years.

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Military justice, it says in the manuals. But to observers of the trial, the two words form a mutual contradiction, one that emerged more starkly than ever when Pvts. Lawrence Reidel and Louis Osczepinski were sentenced on Feb. 15, to 14 and 16 years of imprisonment for their part in the non-violent Presidio protest last October. (See Fifth Estate, last issue.)

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FLASH—As we go to press we have learned that 12 of the Presidio GI’s have been found guilty of mutiny and two of disobedience. The verdict came after the five-member board deliberated six hours at the end of the 35 day trial. Sentences have not yet been passed.

FORT ORD, Calif. (LNS)—The defense has rested in the climactic phase of the Presidio Mutiny case.

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Subtle and more unsubtle pressure has caused Detroit’s three up front papers to experience difficulties in the last few weeks in getting their papers printed.

The Inner-City Voice, a black revolutionary paper, the Warren-Forest Sun, a freek paper, and this newspaper all have been victims of attempted suppression.

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The Midwest “Underground” Press Conference originally scheduled for Saturday, May 20, at WSU has been called off until further notice due to the machinations of Dean J. Don Marsh of Wayne State University, who refused the WSU Artists’ Society classroom space for the Conference.

Since neither the FIFTH ESTATE or the SUN has adequate facilities for holding such a Conference, it will have to wait until facilities can be arranged. In the meanwhile, people who wish to publish “underground” or independent newspapers, tabloid or mimeograph format, can consult with the staffs of Detroit’s two community newspapers—the FIFTH ESTATE, 923 Plum Street (3^rd floor) and THE SUN, 4863 John Lodge (at Warren).

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In about one month Expo 67 will open in Canada on Montreal’s Ile Sainte-Helene. It will last until October 27, with April 28^th as the opening day. One expects 35 million visitors during this half year of “Happenings” on a grand scale. The Montreal Gazette writes that Expo 67’s network of canals will be filled with water from the River St. Lawrence, which will be tinted blue.

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In response to Tech Examined a letter from Jeffrey Vega, FE #315, Winter 1984.

Jeffrey Vega would like to define primitive cultures “in the terms of class society” so he can assimilate them to the “historical materialist perspective.” In his mind this is a legitimate operation, since unlike “the self-definition of tribal society” (presumably to him a limited form of knowledge), a class analysis enables us to uncover “the dynamics which led to the development of class society.”

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This article is excerpted from “The Search for the Primitive,” an essay written by Stanley Diamond in 1963 and later revised and expanded for inclusion in his book In Search of the Primitive (Transaction Books, 1981). We are reprinting this excerpt because it is relevant to both our ongoing discussions of war and of primitive society, indigenism and modernity.

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“Dr. Alfred Nobel, a man who became rich discovering new ways to kill more people faster than anyone ever before, died yesterday,” declared one French newspaper obituary in 1888.

Nobel, a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, and munitions industrialist, had become obscenely wealthy producing and selling weapons all over the world. In addition to getting rich through his commercial activities as a shameless merchant of death, Nobel also owned hundreds of patents, the most lucrative of which was his 1867 process for weaponizing the dangerously unstable explosive compound nitroglycerine into an easier-to-handle form that he called “dynamite.”

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The Autonomadic Bookmobile is an independent press bookstore and Info-Shop on wheels. It has spent a good part of the last year touring the US, visiting over a hundred cities, covering over 50,000 miles. The Bookmobile supports small, independent and radical publishers of books, zines, newspapers and pamphlets, against the corporate hegemony on printed matter and ideas by chain bookstores and distributors.

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Through the uproar of the sustained near-uprisings of Covid summer 2020 against police violence and systemic racism, one could sometimes hear more radical voices. The assertion from them that everybody behind bars should be recognized as a political prisoner is no longer completely beyond consideration. If so, then it’s worth looking at how radical prisoners have conceptualized their experiences within the state’s institutionalization of punishment.

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During the last score of years there have been numerous prison outbreaks and attempted prison escapes throughout the United States. The media has invariably labeled these as “riots” and acts of “dangerous criminals.” What the media deliberately fails to reveal are the conditions within prisons that lead prisoners to risk their lives in attempting to escape or daring even to protest (as took place at Attica when more than forty prisoners and guards were massacred).

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The State of California has recently stepped up its attacks on Russell (Little and Joseph Remiro (imprisoned for the 1973 SLA assassination of Oakland, Calif. school official Marcus Foster) who are currently serving life terms.

In recognition of his two years of non-violent behavior in the maximum security Adjustment Center at San Quentin prison, promises were made to Russ Little that he would be transferred to a less restricted unit in another prison. These promises were made by counselors at San Quentin as well as various administrators in the California Department of Corrections over a period of five months.

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Prisoners wanting to read anarchist literature: Black Market will send you a general packet of anarchist literature. If you have requests for specific literature, we will try to get it for you (and probably succeed). All free. To all persons who can help, Black Market has been sending anarchist literature free to prisoners for over 6 months. The costs are getting too much for us alone. We need help in the form of used books & pamphlets & leaflets having to do with anarchism (-ists), or a little cash to buy literature specifically requested. Write or send help to: Black Market, box 306, Cambridge, Mass 02139.

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FE staff note: Last issue we sent out 115 sample copies of the Fifth Estate to prisoners, the result of a listing as a free publication in a prison resource handbook. Rather than automatically granting free subscriptions to those who requested them, we asked that prisoners read and evaluate our publication and let us know if they wanted to be put on our list. Gratifyingly, more than a third responded with positive and strong replies, some of which are printed below.

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Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt has been incarcerated in California’s maximum security prisons for almost 20 years. He was recently transferred to Tehachapi, in southern California, far from his growing base of support in the Bay Area.

On July 28, 1972 Pratt—a much-decorated Vietnam veteran and then head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP)—was sentenced to a seven-year-to-life term for the “Tennis Court Murder” of a white school teacher in Santa Monica in 1968. FBI infiltrator Melvin “Cotten” Smith, who was then head of Panther security in Los Angeles, has since come forward with details of the FBI/LA red squad plan to frame Geronimo. Now doing a life stretch of his own in Kentucky, Smith described a meeting in which agents and cops sat around trying to figure out which unsolved murder would be the best to pin on Pratt.

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Sept. 30, 1969

Dear People,

Sorry I haven’t written in so long but I wanted to get settled up here before writing you again. There seems to be a lot more going on out there in the streets than happens here in prison, but then that seems to be the idea of locking people up, so they won’t be able to participate in the activities they enjoy.

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A review of

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Alexander Berkman, Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1970 [available from FE Books, see page 44 for information).

For political organizers, the great worth of Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is the evolution of his political thought during incarceration. He is plunged into the bowels of the beast, stripped of his ultimate sense of worth, yet continuously analyzes his own positions and beliefs.

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A couple of quick prison notes: Revolutionary prisoners at Washington State Prison in Walla Walla have published Vol. I, No. 4 of the Anarchist Black Dragon, a newsletter. Written by the locked-down brothers from the collective of the same name, the publication features articles of both prison news and general anarchist interest. The Dragon is printed on the outside by supporters and is available from Countdown, PO Box 1163, Madison, Wisconsin, 53701; a small donation would be appropriate. However, the Anarchist Black Dragon Collective may be written directly at Box 520, Walla Walla, Washington, 99362.

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NATCHEZ, MISS.--Within the last month, more than 500 people have been arrested in the city of Natchez, Mississippi. Although news of the arrests received wide circulation, the brutality and the indignities which the prisoners were forced to endure during their stay in Parchman State Penitentiary has until now been kept secret. However, with the release of some of the arrested, the story is finally getting out. What follows is the report by two of those recently released:

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Peter Kropotkin, called the “anarchist prince” because of his origins in the Russian nobility, stands out among the many classic anarchist writers for his breadth of subject matter and his concern with the problems of daily life. The following essay was included in a 1924 collection of his writings entitled Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, with an introduction by Roger Baldwin.

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a review of

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Orisanmi Burton. University of California Press, 2023

When Heather Ann Thompson’s account of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, Blood in the Water, was published in 2016, I was one of the readers who was overjoyed to see that historical turning point brought back to life after decades when it seemed to be slipping from popular consciousness.

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Prison is

Hushed and heavy

Like water near the Ocean’s floor,

Then loud and bitter,

Like fractious storms lashing the sky

Everything cement and nerves

And too many years gone by...

The heart requires a place to rest

From all its maddened wanderings

The raft of the Medusa tossed

And trembling in the sea.

...

We received word in mid-October that Minneapolis’ Profane Existence magazine was printing its last issue. The collective also announced cessation of their wholesale and mail order distribution, and record production operations.

Besides noting some financial difficulties, this prolific group, cited being “overwhelmed,” “we have no personal lives,” and “the pay sucks.” In other words, terminal burn-out after a decade of what they define as “a very all-consuming undertaking.”

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The following text first appeared in a special anti-nuclear issue of the Fifth Estate (FE #297, April 18, 1979). It was written earlier in that year just after an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in eastern Pennsylvania. As news of the accident spread, official messages insisted, “There is no need to overreact, the situation is stable, the leaders have everything under control,” but eventually people living near the plant had to be evacuated.

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This special section of the Fifth Estate Newspaper was produced shortly after the April 1979 disastrous events took place at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant at Middletown, Pennsylvania.

The first two articles were composed in response to the accident. “Eight Theses on Nuclearism” discusses what confronts us as a species, while “Progress and Nuclear Power” traces the history of the destruction of this continent by industrial technology. The remaining material was compiled from past issues of this newspaper and aptly describes the threat which nuclear power represents in any form.

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“They’re in there for us; we’re out here for them!”

—IWW slogan

The fight for our imprisoned comrades can take many forms of solidarity. The protest at Carswell prison in Fort Worth on June 5 was a rowdy and exciting example of what support can look like.

Demonstration at Carswell Federal Prison, June 5, part of the Fight Toxic Prisons conference.—photo: Jordan E. Mazurek

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A review of

Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber. Little Brown/Hachette 2019

“Follow Your Leader!” reads the joyous anti-Nazi sticker portraying Adolph Hitler blowing his brains out with a pistol. And in 1945, as the Soviet Army rolled in from the East and Allied forces held the West, thousands upon thousands of “ordinary Germans” did just that in wave of mass suicide. They turned their guns upon themselves, prepared nooses for their entire families, and gobbled up the widely available cyanide ampules distributed by Nazi Party functionaries. Historian Florian Huber finds the suicide wave fascinating, and the widespread allegiance to Hitler and the Reich inexplicable, but the resultant book, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself, falls flat—it’s the German historian equivalent of the 93^rd New York Times feature article about white Midwesterners who like Donald Trump.

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The Dadaists were writers and artists who made it their raison d’etre to destroy culture, or at least literature and art. They carried to its ultimate and absurd conclusion the distinction between form and content in art, rejecting literary conventions, the frame round a canvas, and even the ‘laws’ of normal speech--all these restricted and deformed the authentic complexity of mental reality.

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Reprinted from Up Against The Wall Street Journal

“Watch out, he’s a bad one,” said one of the women in the picket line at Gate 2. The man to whom she referred was trying to drive his white Mustang through the moving pickets. Two pigs assisted him by clearing a path through the line. Three days before the man had run his car into the woman who shouted the warning.

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“Madness cometh sometime of the passions of the soul.”

-- Bartholomew of England

“Zounds! Bethumped by words!”

-- Richard II

The critics are raving about it. Sold out shows and long lines testify to a growing public obsession with it; indeed, everything having to do with the film version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is having mind-boggling repercussions.

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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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Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! They used to be called “Nosems,” the Dutch beatnik. The new word rides out of France. The Provo is the new young style in Holland—the Provocateur—the Hipster. They stopped being Nosems when the big changeover came about a year ago; when the kids started paying more attention to style than to content.

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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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[Web archive note: “Ripes” as it appears in the original print edition]

She stands five feet seven inches in her Courreges boots. Her face is as smooth and unreacting as a billiard ball. She wears miniskirts four inches above her knobby knees, and hip-huggers which hug skinny, unrelenting hips. Her favorite people in the whole wide world are Bobby Dylan, the Beatles, and Mick Jagger. She gets high on anything that’s handy—bennies, methadrine, grass, acid. She is known as a Groupie. Want to ball her?

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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.

...

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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All those charged by police in the January 4^th “Great Reefer Raid” have by now been arraigned and examined and, with one exception, bound over for trial in Detroit Recorder’s Court. The exception is Magdelene Sinclair, charged with possession of marijuana, whose March 14^th examination was continued until March 31^st.

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Robert Buckeye, Wayne State University English instructor, falsely arrested along with his wife, Nancy, during the January 24 “narcotics” raid while visiting the home of one of his ex-students, is filing suit against the City of Detroit, Ray Girardin and six policemen.

The suit, based on personal damages suffered by Buckeye both to his person as well as his academic career, was filed last week by Attorney Albert Best, and asks for $350,000 damages.

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There will be a meeting of the people who were illegally arrested and detained in the January 24^th “great marijuana raids” to discuss the possibilities of bringing suit against the Detroit Police Department for violation of their civil rights.

Attorney Dennis James will address the group and will answer questions about the legal problems involved. All those arrested who wish to look into this matter are urged to attend. The meeting will be held at the Artists’ Workshop, 4857 John Lodge, at 8:00 p.m. Monday, February 20, and will be sponsored by the 24^th of January Movement. People desiring more information can call the chairman of the subcommittee, Rita Cole, at 358–0425.

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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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