Full list of texts

The 2007 Left Forum was held March 9–11 in New York City’s historic Cooper Union, featuring 92 workshops, two plenaries, a film festival, two plays, and attended by 1,500 people. It is the largest annual North American gathering of left intellectuals and organizers (it used to be called the Socialist Scholars Conference until--surprise, surprise--a split occurred). One of the 80 panels was entitled, “Anarchism and the Left: An Uneasy Relationship?”

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In this section:

• Anarchy, food and sustainability

• Against agriculture

• The Hungry Sheep Look Up And Are Not Fed

• Feral Forager #1

• Someday the power will die

• Grange Appeal

• Two Ecological Fancies

• Biophilia

• Wasted, Indeed

Grow Food or Die! exclaims the headline from Live Wild or Die! (an eco-anarchist “breakaway” zine circulating in the Earth First! milieu in the ‘90s). The message rings true today. How will food be dealt with before, during, and after a potential catastrophe or our anarchist revolution? With farmers making up less than two percent of the US’s population and farmland giving way to generic subdivisions, we must wonder what and how we are going to eat after a crisis or in our future Utopia.

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a review of

A Rule is to Break: A Child’s Guide to Anarchy, John Seven and Jana Christy. Manic D Press, 48 pp, $14.95 www.manicdpress.com

Maybe you can’t tell a book by its cover, but a snappy title can gain an author attention where a lesser one might not. In an era where “everyone’s an anarchist,” James C. Scott’s book title, Two Cheers for Anarchism, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, was just the right formulation for even The New York Times to feature it. One suspects if he had given a full three cheers, it may have been ignored.

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A review of Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader

Damian White (Editor), Chris Wilbert (Editor), and Colin Ward, Paperback, 375pages, AK Press (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore), 2011, $21.95

This large collection of essays by Colin Ward, his last publishing effort before he died last year at the age of 84, affords those who know him only as the author of the ever-popular Anarchy in Action (now in print for almost 40 years!) with an in-depth view of his many interests.

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Imagine diasporic anarchy! While not all diasporas are African, I would like to focus upon the affinities between the African diaspora and anarchy using music as a touchstone.

I use the term “diaspora” in Paul Gilroy’s dynamic sense of the “plural richness of black cultures in different parts of the world in counterpoint to their common sensibilities—both those residually inherited from Africa and those generated from the special bitterness of new world racial slavery” (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic).

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The former Soviet republic of Belarus exploded into angry protests last August in the wake of contested presidential elections resulting in a totally implausible landslide victory for long-ruling strongman Alexander Lukashenko. Police, riot squads and army troops unleashed harsh repression, using rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades and water-hoses against demonstrators who objected to the results in the capital of Minsk and other cities.

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Who’s Afraid of The Black Blocs?: Anarchy in Action Around the World, Francis Dupuis-Deri, 2013, PM Press pmpress.org

The Watcher, Nicholas P. Oakley, 2014, See Sharp Press, SeeSharpPress.com (Sci-fi)

The End of the World As We Know it?: Crisis, Resistance, & the Age of Austerity, edited by Deric Shannon, 2014, AK press, akpress.org

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As President Clinton delivered his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) talking about “a bridge to the 21^st century,” a half a mile away Chicago police were raiding a building housing anarchists from the Active Resistance Counter-Convention (ARC).

The Corporate Power tower is dragged by its victims. Later, following a rebellion, it is transformed into utopian scenes of anarchy. — photo/Susan Simensky Bietila

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The “Whiteaker” is Eugene, Oregon’s oldest and poorest neighborhood. Over the past few years some significant anarchy-type situations have developed in Eugene, especially in Whiteaker.

Icky’s Tea House, open from 1994 to 1997, was an anti-institution institution, a haven for the dispossessed and disaffected. Everything at Icky’s was mainly free, including a library, video night, food for the homeless, and bike repair.

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The standard rationalization for the existence of the State is that supposedly without an external restraining element, such as a heavily armed police force, the nature of humans is such-that all of us would prey so wickedly upon one another that life would become intolerable. Forgetting that the State is a somewhat recent development in human affairs and permanent police forces an even newer innovation, many people believe that at least under capitalism the police are a necessary evil as long as this society creates such a potential for disorder.

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During the summer solstice weekend of June 18 through 22, some 250 to 300 people converged on Minneapolis, Minnesota, to attend the Anarchist Gathering. It was the second of such continental gatherings, the last one having been held in Chicago in the Spring of 1986 to commemorate the Haymarket Affair. (See FE #323, Summer 1986 for a report on the Chicago Anarchist Gathering.)

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Murfreesboro, Tennessee is hardly known worldwide as a hotbed of radical activism, underground publishing, or anarchist feminism.

Other than a small but surprisingly relevant independent music scene and a handful of college professors and students at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), the overwhelming political mood of the place gravitates to the far right.

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“Without Borders,” this year’s Anarchist Conference and Festival was held in San Francisco from July 20^th to 25^th. Taking place at the Horace Mann Middle School in the city’s Mission District, the gathering drew somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 people from North America and around the world. The exact number will never be known since only the lower number “officially” registered as participants, but thousands more took part in the six-day conference and other events which provided opportunities for learning and discussion, direct action, performance, play and celebration.

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Join men and women, gays and straights, freaks, faeries, nomads, communitarians, gardeners, artists, deschoolers, pansies, poets, musicians, magicians, herbalists, jugglers, and others in Middle Tennessee, May 28–31, for a magical weekend retreat of revolution and relaxation.

The site for this rebellion and revelry is Ida (Idyll Dandy Arts) a queer community tucked away on 243 acres where many neighboring communities and households focus on sustainable living, from salvaging building materials to picking wild greens to protesting the military-industrial complex.

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• Renew the Earthly Paradise

• Present Day Banalities

The two essays printed here were written in response to a questionnaire sent out by the Italian anarchist magazine, Rivista anarchica, investigating the present situation for North American anarchist and libertarian groups and publications. Rivista anarchica, a monthly publication, is publishing a special issue on “Anarchism in America,” and asked each group to describe its point of view and activities, and to respond to the following two questions: 1) In the “Reagan era,” what do you see as the important areas of social conflict in North America from an anarchist perspective? and 2) In your opinion, what are the most relevant differences between the radical movements of the 60s and the radical movements of the ‘80s? Each question was to take about 20 to 30 lines. We’ve never been famous for brevity, so we did our best to talk about our concerns in the space allotted. The other response is from Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous (P.O. Box 11331, Eugene OR 97440), long-time collaborators of the FE whose articles have frequently appeared in these pages. We thought that the responses to Rivista anarchica would be appropriate for our 20^th Anniversary issue as an indication of where we’re at and what we’re thinking.

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When 17^th century Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region, they discovered Native Americans living in what today we would call an anarchist society. These Lake natives had horizontal social relationships governed by kin obligations and employed consensus decision-making.

A frustrated missionary called them “strangers to civil power and authority:” Another observer noted that “no chief dared to rule over the people, as in that case he would immediately be forsaken, and by the whole tribe, and his counselors would refuse to assist him.”

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On November 6^th, the night of the presidential election, San Francisco’s amorphous and semi-marginal anti-authoritarian “community” called for a funeral march to mourn for freedom, the dead of the next war, and to hope for the death of imperialism and the system that keeps it alive.

At about 6:30 pm 150 people walked between City Hall and the Democratic Party’s San Francisco headquarters; we also went by polling places and imitated sheep, finally ending up at the Republican Party’s victory celebration. At 8:00 we set up a soup kitchen across the street to dramatize the immense gap which separates the ruling class from the rest of us.

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“If you support this motion, you will not assist the government. You will paralyze it and indeed stand in danger of destroying it”

—Jack Jones, veteran trade union leader, pleading with delegates to the convention of the Transport and General Workers’ Union not to refuse the extended wage restraint of England’s celebrated “Social Contract” between the unions and the Labor government. The motion was supported.

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TORONTO—Accompanied by much fanfare and a bit of controversy, this Canadian city was the setting August 17–23 for its second international anarchist/antiauthoritarian gathering in a decade. The organizers titled the event, “Active Resistance,” (AR), after the 1996 Chicago anarchist actions of the same name at the Democratic National Convention. (See FE #348, Fall 1996)

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Top: Sunday in the park spontaneous music and dancing were continuous.
Middle: We were treated to a variety of performances, including poetry, improvisational jazz, acoustic and electric music, and theater.
Bottom: It is interesting to note that although the police were not in control of the demonstrators they did have some finely tuned methods of dealing with them. A protestor grabbed by an officer was quickly isolated as mounted police surrounded them pushing the crowd outward while police on foot reinforced the widening circle.
Photos by Rebecca Cook

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The Italian group Germinal sponsored the first-ever large scale planning meeting of anarchists from the East and West in Trieste, Italy from April 14 through 17. Although they did not intend to have a huge gathering, 332 people registered from 23 countries. Among the groups represented from Eastern Europe were the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (USSR), the Czechoslovakian Anarchist Union, Autonomia (Hungary), Autonomija and A! (Yugoslavia) and Black Aliens and the Polish Anarchist Federation (Poland).

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“The tramps refused to obey; they abandoned time, possessions, labor, slavery. They walked and slept in counter-rhythm to the world.”

—Anais Nin, The Tramps, 1946

Anais Nin’s encounter-with the homeless wanderers of her day—the tramps of Paris, “in counter-rhythm to the world” reminds me of an enduring duality in anarchism. We stand at one remove from capitalism, attempting in our own way to live in a degraded world in spite of it. In the quest to realize our ideals many of us have joined the ranks of such rebels, who subsist on capital’s margins.

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Millard Berry--Long time Fifth Estate photographer and staff member. www.millardberry.com

Detroit Artists Workshop--Founded in 1964 in Detroit’s art and cultural community. Personnel and events frequently coincided with the Fifth Estate. www.detroitartistsworkshop.org

Egg Syntax--FE staff member, writes experimental music: http://glossolalia.jukeboxalive.com and metablogs regularly on the intersections of art, technology, and ethics: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/eggsyntax

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Want to learn how to turn off GPS on your phone? Hear the latest from the pipeline blockade? Or, how to support pipeline resisters near you? The Final Straw Radio (TFSR) is a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast based in Asheville, N.C. TFSR has produced programs since 2010, airing on stations across the country, and offering free downloads at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org.

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Newspapers and magazines have been a part of the anarchist movement since its inception.

They contain daily agitation for ongoing struggles and are excellent sources of the history of a movement that is usually ignored by other left tendencies and historians alike.

They keep the flame of anarchy alive and depend on readers for their solidarity and mutual aid. Take a look at the sampling we have here and consider ordering them to assure their survival.

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Anarchy is not Survivor, the X-Files, or the Expos home opener

Anarchy is not Starbucks, the Second Cup, or double lattes at the Croissante Royale

Anarchy is not the Kyota Accords, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund

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Anarchy is not GATT, NAFTA, UNESCO, NATO, or the European Economic Community

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Reprinted from Fifth Estate, #378, Summer 2008.

In fairy tales, humans can possess exterior souls, things magically containing or embodying individual life force—stone, egg, ring, bird or animal, c. If the thing is destroyed, the human dies. But while the thing persists, the human enjoys a kind of immortality or at least invulnerability. Money could be seen as such an exteriorized soul. Humans created it, in some sense, in order to hide their souls in things that could be locked away (in tower or cave) and hidden so their bodies would acquire magical invulnerability—wealth, health, the victoriousness of enjoyment, power over enemies—even over fate.

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In fairy tales, humans can possess exterior souls, things magically containing or embodying individual life force--stone, egg, ring, bird or animal, etc. If the thing is destroyed, the human dies. But while the thing persists, the human enjoys a kind of immortality or at least invulnerability.

Money could be seen as such an exteriorized soul. Humans created it, in some sense, in order to hide their souls in things that could be locked away (in tower or cave) and hidden so their bodies would acquire magical invulnerability--wealth, health, the victoriousness of enjoyment, power over enemies--even over fate.

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a review of

Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination, edited by Martin Espada. Curbstone Press (Willimantic CT. 1994). 282 pages.

In his forward to this anthology of 37 poets, all of whom have published or are soon to publish collections with Curbstone Press, the poet and editor Martin Espada defines the political imagination as a matter of both vision and language which “goes beyond protest to articulate an artistry of dissent.”

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A green pickup truck with living space for ten or twelve if you squeeze together. Rain-soaked, faded picket signs barely readable: RECOGNIZE OUR UNION, WSU USES STUDENTS FOR CHEAP LABOR, WSU IS ANTI-LABOR.

A leaky makeshift tent made out of clear plastic and freight skids. Finally replaced with a luxurious water-proof boy scout tent.

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Good Communists are not supposed to indulge in the cult of personality. Josef Stalin practiced it for years, and so, too, has Mao Tse-tung.

Compared to Kim Il Sung, 63, dictator of North Korea, however, Stalin and Mao were only kidding.

On the outskirts of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, Sung had a 15-foot bronze statue of himself erected.

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Malachi, born Mark David,

wrote his own obituary. “Reportedly,”

he says, “his last words were

rosebud...oops,”

but what he means

is that he lived his life

like a saucer-faced magnolia flower,

a quick burst of bloom and

perfume early each spring

before the pink things wilt away,

falling to the fiery asphalt

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(Originally published in Mother Earth, July 1909.)

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow these institutions.

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Curious.

The same people who built the old Detroit, which the people burned down because apparently they didn’t like it much, have been selected to build the new Detroit.

Mostly they have already built the new Detroit. It is called Southfield and Oak Park and Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham and Westland and Harper Woods and Grosse Pointe and Livonia and Madison Heights. That is the new Detroit. They built it in the ‘fifties while we weren’t looking.

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Young women may soon face the same choice at age 18 that men have faced since 1980: whether to register with the Selective Service System for possible military conscription.

Edward Hasbrouck, who wrote this article with others, along the march route of the Mobilization Against the Draft (estimated at 30,000 people), Washington, DC, March 22, 1980. (photo by Craig Glassner)

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a review of

Van Morrison “Astral Weeks” (Reprise)

Van Morrison is partially responsible for people leaving the beach early in New York.

There is a song called “Gloria” that is sung by every would-be rock and roll singer on the beach.

G-l-o-r-i-a, it starts, never stops, and seems to have no other lyrics. Van Morrison wrote “Gloria.”

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a review of

A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of Writing from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, edited by Roy San Filipo. AK Press, 2003, San Francisco, 139pp.

Letters to a Young Activist, Todd Gitlin, Basic Books, 2003, 174 pages

I haven’t read either of the books listed above and have no intention of doing so. I’m reviewing them in the manner all of us do each time we peruse a library or bookstore shelf. “Hmm, that looks interesting; no, that probably will be boring,” etc.

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

referred to in this article:

Having Little, Being Much: A Chronicle of Fredy Perlman’s Fifty Years, by Lorraine Perlman, Black & Red (Detroit, 1989), 155 pages, $3.50

I cannot say with any certainty what kind of response this perceptive, if rather abbreviated memoir would elicit from a person who did not know Fredy Perlman or his writings. It was written, clearly, for those familiar at least with his work, and they without a doubt will enjoy this glimpse of the man whose voice played such a large role in reviving libertarian traditions and articulating the critical primitivism that has profoundly transformed anti-authoritarian ideas during the last decade.

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Editor’s Note: The following is a taped rap by a young sister from East Detroit who was able to get a first hand glimpse of the medical care afforded the city’s poor.

I took an overdose of pills and I’d been throwing up and I couldn’t sleep or anything, and I had to be admitted to Detroit General Hospital because I was in the city.

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The Bearer of this document is hereby recognized as a member in good standing of the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Community. As such, this creature is entitled to the following rights as established by the unwritten Constitution of the Universe:

• Right to Purity of Soil, Air and Waters

• Right to Immunity from Artificial Concepts of Time, Space and Location

• Right to All Territory of the Universe

• Right to Self-Defined Identity Regardless of Race, Nationality, Species or Genus

• Right to Unlimited Ecstasy and Its Means of Acquisition

• Right of Unlimited Choice of Behavior

• Right to Independence from All Gods, Laws and Religions

• Right to be Useless and Unproductive

• Right to Disregard Prevailing Concepts of Science, Logic, Politics, History and Mathematics

• Right to Death and Choice of Means

• Right to Unlimited Shape or Personality

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In late March, Takoma, a 22 year-old Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin trained by the US Navy to detect underwater mines for Marine Corps reconnaissance divers, went absent without leave while on patrol in the Persian Gulf outside of Umm Qasr. In an effort to cover their embarrassment, a public relations official for the Marines claimed that Takoma was recaptured on May 5, but these reports have not been confirmed by independent investigators. Given all the other lies about the Iraqi invasion issued at Pentagon press conferences, we at Fifth Estate consider Takoma to be on the run somewhere in the Indian ocean.

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Editor’s Note: The following interview with General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the People’s Army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, first appeared in Europeo Magazine in Milan. The Interviewer was an Italian newspaperwoman, Oriana Fallaci. Liberation News Service is distributing excerpts from the interview as published in the Capitol Times of Madison, Wisc.

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Editor’s Note: Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party and Peace and Freedom Party candidate for Congress is currently standing trial at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California. Newton is charged with the murder, last October 28, of Patrolman John Frey of the Oakland Police Department. During the two weeks spent selecting a jury for the trial, the bias of the court has been apparent. Any possibility of Newton getting a fair trial disappeared with the selection of the jury. Of the 100 potential jurors questioned, working class blacks, and blacks and whites opposed to capital punishment were systematically excluded by District Attorney Lowell Jensen and Judge Monroe Friedman. The Fifth Estate will continue to provide up-to-date coverage of the Newton trial in future issues.

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• Devil’s Music

• The revolution will be a festival

• Sacred, Sweet, Wicked Ecstasy

• Joe Hill

• Dancing for Our Lives

• The Decline of the Choral Dance

• Tectum Theatrum

• The Ray Charles Riots

Jazz. Funk. Folk. Punk. Trance. Hip Hop. Old Time. Blues. Electric. Acoustic. Recorded. Live. When we decided to do an issue on “Music and Dance,” we knew that we could not devote too much time to any one genre or artist.

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Over the years, our special features addressing identity politics—from the 1971 women’s issue to the queer edition of 1993—have both appealed to and tested our readers for the challenging exchanges these topics inevitably generate. This issue on Race and Culture has inspired both an unprecedented quantity of contributions and stimulating controversy within the Fifth Estate (FE) collective.

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Insubordination—literally, the utter refusal to submit to order—is not always revolutionary, but it may be one of the first signs that a revolution is brewing.

The insubordinate can be someone rebelling against an institution to which she formerly conformed or someone who never has been any part of the system of authority. Sometimes ideological and sometimes instinctual, insubordination burns the nerves.

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Summer came to Ann Arbor last week and brought with it teargas, a tank, about 400 cops and four nights of street confrontation.

Monday night the people gathered in the streets to drink and dance. People fucked in the streets. No cops showed up. Tuesday, the shit came down hard. The people barricaded off South University between E. Forest and E. University. Cops from Washtenaw, Monroe and Oakland Counties showed up along with State Police from the Ypsilanti post. The people were gassed and beaten and finally driven off the streets in the small hours of the morning.

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Steve Wildstrom, managing editor of the Michigan Daily in Ann Arbor, Mich., was recently beat to the ground and roughed up by deputy sheriffs attempting to keep him from covering a welfare rights demonstration that the regular press was allowed to cover freely.

On Wednesday, Sept. 4, Steve went to the local Washtenaw County courthouse where welfare mothers were attempting to talk to the county board of supervisors about a needed change in the welfare program after reporters from the Michigan Daily had been harassed for two days. As he placed his hand on the courthouse door to enter, he was ordered away by deputy sheriffs. When he asked rhetorically if it wasn’t a public building and if it wasn’t open, he was told that orders had been given to let no one in.

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Dear Ann Landers: I am a person of simple taste. I don’t need much to make me happy. A can of beer, two good baseball teams, a freeway and a tank of gas. A sunny day in early June. A brisk run at sunrise. A pretty girl who smiles when I look her way. A short story by William Faulkner.

None of these will pay the rent, so I have to work—which I hate, but I realize a person must be practical. What I need to know is why should I kill myself to meet someone else’s definition of success?

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Dear Ann Landers:

Please tell me how certain people can appear to be perfectly OK when they are clearly insane?

Our sweet, innocent daughter was married last week to a Mortician 12 years her senior. He courted her for more than a year. One of the things that Impressed her so favorably was this man’s restraint and good manners. He never embraced her intimately nor did be try to talk her into sex, even after they were engaged.

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People of Detroit, someone needs you!

A girl in the Warren-Forest area will die of a rare blood disease in October if she doesn’t raise close to $1000 and 51 pints of blood.

Through a period of time in the hospital her diseased blood will be drained and healthy blood restored. If you can donate blood or money please contact Susie, 833–7260.

A radical publishing project, “We are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism,” is being put together by a collective of activists, artists and writers. We are looking for more photographs, street art and posters/flyers for the book. The book will celebrate, document, explore and critique the recent rise of the global movement(s) against capitalism and for life, autonomy, land, dignity and justice.

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The Third Space infoshop and lending library is open in Norman, Oklahoma. It features radical, revolutionary, and progressive social theory; philosophy, history, race, class and gender studies; art, literature, DIY manuals, and guides; plus a selection of over eight hundred books. They feature a collection of over one thousand ‘zines, magazines, and periodicals, as well as a small collection of audio and video material, and a public internet terminal.

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Fifth Estate Books publishes the first title of its new imprint.

We are proud to announce the launch of Fifth Estate Books as a publishing imprint. Our first book--Creating Anarchy by Ron Sakolsky--should be released sometime this year.

Gathering at Bolo Bonobo

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drawing by Ruth Irving

Robert C. Elliott died in 1981 in the very noon of is scholarship, just after completing his book The Literary Persona. He was the truest of teachers, the kindest of friends. This paper was prepared to be read as the first in a series of lectures at his college of the University of California, Sari Diego, honoring his memory.

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a review of

Surrealism and Anarchism by Pietro Ferrua, edited by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2022.

Ron Sakolsky has uncovered a previously lost piece of anarchist history, one that explores the fertile crossroads of surrealism and anarchy.

This text originated as a 1982 lecture given by Pietro Ferrua (1930–2021), inaugurating the Anarchos Institute at the University of Montreal. The pamphlet provides a useful biographical sketch of Ferrua that helps situate his scholarship within a lifelong commitment to anarchism.

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Dear comrades,

As you might be aware, the Castroist crackdown on dissent has been stepped up and toughened up over these past few months in Cuba. Even so, transition from dictatorship to bourgeois democracy seems increasingly inevitable, albeit that, as in the Spanish precedent, there is every indication that this Transition will not be fully activated until after the physical demise of the dictator. As you will appreciate, until such time as that happens, the prospects for an opening-up and liberalisation of the regime are virtually nil, so the opposition (excepting that segment relying upon institutional support abroad) will have to grapple with enormous risks and difficulties. Especially Cuban libertarians and any who are open about their opposition to authoritarianism in any guise.

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I want to thank the Fifth Estate for permitting me to purchase this ad in order to put forth a position they oppose. It’s not that I don’t agree with them that politics is the process of rulers and ruled and that the act of voting is an act of self-humiliation (the willing participation in one’s own domination), but I think there is a need for realism at some point. I too was once a revolutionary and had thoughts similar to yours about overthrowing capitalism, and I even dressed like many of you. But I’ve had to make some compromises in my life and I think the least you can do is make some yourselves in return for an ex-radical in city government.

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Dear Julius,

Although our actual contact has been infrequent, I have felt very close to you since we first met, and our shared experiences, including writing for the same papers, added to this. But in recent months your columns have puzzled and confused me. I don’t know you any more; I don’t know where you’re at; I can’t imagine why you are saying (writing) the things you are.

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The chief spokesman for the “independent or underground film-makers” in this country is Jonas Mekas.

He resides in New York where he edits an anti-intellectual (anti-art?) rather ethereal, often pretentious magazine, FILM CULTURE.

“As long as the ‘lucidly minded’ critics will stay out with their ‘form,’ ‘content,’ ‘art,’ ‘structure, ‘ ‘clarity,’ ‘importance,’—everything will be all right, just keep them out.

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Things have a real roll on here at the Fifth Estate and believe it or not we may have the next issue to you in about six weeks. We had several articles left over from this issue and already have an anti-nuke special in mind for the next. Also, look for an announcement of an anti-nuke conference to be held at the Grinning Duck. Final note: Did Canadian subscribers receive our last issue dated July? If not, write us and we’ll send it out.

a review of

The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills. Cornell University Press 1993

No, we don’t. We live under a racial contract. Calling it something else, such as a social contract is part of the racial contract’s system of concealing itself.

The late Charles Mills clarified this matter quite definitively in The Racial Contract, a 133-page book published in 1993.

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a review of

The Unbearables Big Book of Sex. Autonomedia, UnBearable Books, 2011. Editors: Ron Kolm, Carol Wierzbecki, Jim Feast, Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky, Shalom Neuman, 650 pages, $18.95

As a privileged co-editor of this brilliant anthology, I feel a bit abusive of my powers and morally wrong to be, at the same time, reviewing it. But with all due respect to those involved and to you, dear reader, and in the spirit of true anarchism, fuck that.

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That breakup wuz a long time ago.

Wich breakup are you talking about? There bin so many and they keep getting more.

I’m talking about the first wun.

O. that wun. Yes. It wuz a long long time ago.

* * *

Wunce the people saw that Each Thing like Each rock or Each tree or Each bird or Each wind or Each fear or Each love wuz Diferent and hid its Name inside itself. If you looked inside it deep enuf or long enuf the Name wood come threw. If you did it with Each and Every thing and fit all the Names all together they wood make wun Name and that wood be the ansir. Wun Hole Thing. It wuz called Re Member.

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In breaking news from undisclosed, official, and reliable sources, international terra-ist O-Sunny-Been-Lovin’ has claimed full responsibility for hijacking global consciousness and spreading indiscriminate acts of kindness, love, generosity, and joy.

Reports from all over the world have confirmed spontaneous moments of peaceful behavior and unbelievable pleasure. At factories in developed and undeveloped nations, work stoppages were widespread.

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a review of

Passages of Rebellion by Fran Shor. Smart Set, 2021

Passages of Rebellion, with its focus on 1960s activism, feels perfectly curated for 2023 readers.

Just as the country was polarized and divided in the 1960s, today’s activists challenge convention and institutions, albeit with far more sophisticated technological capabilities, but with similar intent to their messaging.

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Answers for Anarcho-Crossword, Fifth Estate 390

Voltairine: Voltairine de Cleyre (1866--1912); prolific anarchist-feminist writer and lecturer who advocated freethinking and “anarchism without adjectives.”

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a review of
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity by Marshall Sahlins. Princeton University Press, 2022

The late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) is best known for his claim, first published in 1968, that people living in traditional economies based on hunting and gathering enjoyed lives of relative security, abundance, and leisure.

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We are all familiar with the ruthless stereotyping and blatant falsification of anarchism in the mass media employing out-dated, long exploded cliches such as that anarchists are solely interested in destruction, fueled by an infantile rage.

It was these stereotypes that were used, for example, in the 1880s to convict the Haymarket martyrs for a bombing they didn’t commit, and have been used repeatedly in U.S. literature to defame the most earnest opponents of capitalism and the state.

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An art historian announced recently that he had uncovered proof that anarchist artists had constructed secret psychological torture chambers in Barcelona for prisoners of war and political enemies during Spain’s civil war.

According to him, a team of anarchists led by Alphonse Laurencic had designed a warren of jail cells that utilized advanced principles of color, abstraction, and perception developed by Bauhaus artists and the surrealists. These rooms were meant to mentally destabilize and emotionally grind down inmates who fought on the side of the clerico-fascists or who were the left-wing rivals of the CNT anarchist labor federation.

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Mark Twain, one of America’s most beloved anti-authoritarians, gave young people sound advice: “Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.” Do most schools teach us:

* To be self-directed--or directed by others?

* That relationships should be respectful--or manipulated by rewards and punishments?

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Last June, I was invited by the anarchist publisher, Textos Subterraneos, to speak about the newly-published Portuguese edition of my book, The Garden of Peculiarities, in Lisbon and Oporto. Of interest to FE readers, TS has also put out an anthology of Fredy Perlman’s work, A Reprodugio da Vida Quotidian e Outros Escritos.

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—Albo Jeavons (www.adanon.org)

This issue on economy marks the Fifth Estate’s last edition of 2004, and as we approach our 40^th anniversary edition, it feels critical to consider the decision we made 30 years ago to become explicitly anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist.

For a brief period in the early 1970s, FE flirted with the kind of alternative journalism that we expect from weeklies like Nashville Scene, Detroit’s Metro Times, and the hundreds of other free papers of that ilk. During this time, FE also attempted to run itself as a business. This phase of the project was a failure. To mark “the last issue of the FE as a capitalist enterprise,” the volunteer editors who had been working together as the Eat The Rich Gang (some still involved in the project), made a series of decisions that we affirm today.

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It is generally a waste of time to argue with individuals about their voting or not voting. Among tens of thousands, one vote either way makes no difference (even when it gets counted).

The question is what large social forces should do in elections. Such forces include the labor unions, the African-American communities, Latino communities, the organized feminist movement, Gay and Lesbian organizations, organized environmentalists, and the network of anti-globalization/anti-corporate activists.

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a review of

Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray. Melville House Books 2017

It’s hard to shake the feeling that we haven’t all wandered into a particularly demented time warp in the last year or so since that Nazi-sympathizer, Donald Trump, bumbled and ranted his way into the White House.

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Faced with economic collapse the bourgeoisie can no longer pretend that there is no crisis. In the face of skyrocketing trade and payments deficits, the bourgeoisie of each country must seek to make its national capital competitive on the world market again.

Everywhere events impose one policy and only one policy on the bourgeoisie: draconian austerity programs. To make the national capital competitive, to take away markets from rivals, and to restore an adequate rate of profit for capital, requires drastic cuts in “social” spending (education, health care, public transportation, housing) and the installation of controls over wages.

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Norman Nawrocki’s “No way! No way! Trees that Talk” was presented at the 2018 Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival, the theme of which was Anti-Fascism. The play is based on the lives of six anarchist, anti-fascist women—four from 20^th century opposition in Italy, Spain, Germany and Poland, and two recent ones from Greece and Syria.

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Coming out of antifa smashups with fascists, in Charlottesville and Berkeley in August, condemnation of those physically fighting the alt-right has given new life to Trump’s charge that “many sides” are responsible for violence at anti-fascist actions.

And, some on the left are contributing to this.

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VOICE, the University of Michigan Chapter of Students for a Democratic Society has called for regional action Aug. 8 at the Dow Chemical Corp. in Midland, Mich., protesting that company’s production of napalm for use on Vietnamese villages.

Members of the participating organizations will travel to Midland on August 7^th to attempt to mobilize community support against napalm production there much in the same way a group of citizens did in Redwood City, California. On Monday, August 8^th, there will be a mass demonstration at the Dow Chemical plant. Participants are expected from all across Michigan and Northern Ohio. The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam voted July 13 to support the action and will coordinate travel arrangements and publicity for the Detroit area. The Committee may be contacted at its office at 1101 W. Warren.

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The massive and still-growing anti-nuclear movement in Europe has become a serious threat to the avatars of destruction who, through the auspices of NATO, are attempting to turn Europe into a nuclear battlefield by deploying Pershing II and cruise missiles on European soil. An American diplomat in Bonn recently warned the readers of the international edition of Newsweek (8/24/81): “If the peace movement isn’t defused soon, we might see the same kind of threat to cruise and Pershing installations after 1983 that you see directed against nuclear energy plants today.” The implications of this shocking development were clearly spelled out by the worried diplomat: “We’re talking about a serious threat to NATO planning as a whole.”

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Twin cooling towers at the Fermi Nuclear Facility loom over a Monroe County graveyard. photo/Steven Benson

Eleven years ago an accident at Detroit Edison’s Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in Monroe, Michigan, almost destroyed Detroit. If you accept the utility’s own commissioned study, the death rate could have been as high as 133,000 dead in the metro area and that does not include 181,000 people exposed to such high radiation levels as to develop leukemia or other forms of cancer within ten years. The Atomic Energy Commission’s own study projected an additional 73,000 injured and $17 billion in property damage.

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Nothing exemplifies the sickness and degradation of the present society more than its “criminal justice” system, a cold-blooded infliction of suffering on a scale that far surpasses whatever offenses its victims may have been guilty of.

Think how long an hour can seem if you’re caught in some boring or frustrating situation. Then imagine being locked away not for an hour, or a day, or a week, but for years in a mean, ugly, hopeless environment administered by guards and officials who are in many cases more vicious and mentally sick than most of your fellow prisoners, who themselves may not be the most charming or uplifting of companions. And to add to the torment, knowing that a considerable portion of the people on the outside have been led to believe that you are being “coddled,” and that “light” sentences of “only” a few years amount to “getting off easy”

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FE note: see related article Review, Toxic Psychiatry in this issue.

Breggin’s foundation web site: http://www.icspp.org/

Laing, R.D. & Esterson, A. (1964) Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics. Penguin Books. ISBN 0140211578

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On Saturday night, May 3, a gathering of about 250 to 400 women and perhaps 100 men held a rally in Palmer Park on Detroit’s North End and then marched through the surrounding neighborhood chanting, “Women, Take Back The Night.” The assembly was one of a series of actions initiated by women which have been held nationwide to protest the pervasive rape culture of this society.

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Escape from death in a gas chamber or a Pogrom, or incarceration in a concentration camp, may give a thoughtful and capable writer, Solzhenitsyn for example, profound insights into many of the central elements of contemporary existence, but such an experience does not, in itself, make Solzhenitsyn a thinker, a writer, or even a critic of concentration camps; it does not, in itself, confer any special powers. In another person the experience might lie dormant as a potentiality, or remain forever meaningless, or it might contribute to making the person an ogre. In short, the experience is an indelible part of the individual’s past but it does not determine his future; the individual is free to choose his future; he is even free to choose to abolish his freedom, in which case he chooses in bad faith and is a Salaud (J.P. Sartre’s precise philosophical term for a person who makes such a choice). [1]

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From June 2 to 5, the second annual Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) hosted its 2017 National Convergence in Denton, Texas, gathering over 200 activists and revolutionaries from across the country to explore the intersections of the environmental movement and the struggle to end mass incarceration.

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In response to the arrest of two antiwar GIs and the steady harassment of military organizers, the Detroit Resistance and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam have launched a law suit against the Board of County Road Commissioners.

The suit, which was announced by Attorney Marc Kadish of the National Lawyers Guild and Victory Fidelman of the Resistance at an April 8 press conference, will attack the regulation which governs the distribution of literature at Metropolitan Airport.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. Liberation News Service—On October 21, 1967, the white left got its shit together.

The gala Pentagon confrontation, long billed as a move from “protest to resistance,” was a dramatic and intense political event. Many had been dubious; few can now deny that a new stage is upon us.

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Fort Ord, Calif., (LNS)—Two GI’s, members of the American Serviceman’s Union, face possible charges of “promoting disloyalty and disaffection among the troops and the civilian populace.” Pvts. Ken Stolte, Jr. and Pfc. Daniel Amick are being investigated because of their leaflet, We Protest.”

The Army maintains “they did publish and distribute leaflets urging the formation of a union to organize their opposition to the war.

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On March 27 a conference—learn-in sponsored by the May Day Coalition will be held to educate people concerning the war in Indochina and its effects on the United States. The conference will also give people a more complete idea of what the April 30 march on the Chrysler Tank Plant in Warren is all about.

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The Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the group that brought over 400,000 persons to New York City and San Francisco on April 15, has called for a national conference to evaluate the Mobilization and to exchange ideas on future programs and actions.

The conference, to be held in Washington, D.C., is scheduled for the weekend of May 20–21, following the confrontation with President Johnson by representatives of the peace movement. All groups and individuals who oppose the war are invited to attend.

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Washington, D. C., April 28 (LNS)—Hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated against the war in Vietnam and in some cities against racism yesterday in parades and rallies in 17 American cities.

Lead contingent in the Fifth Avenue march that brought over 100,000 New Yorkers out to protest the war. A Loyalty Day parade the same day in another part of the city brought out only 2,700 in support of the killing.

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FORT KNOX — Pvt. Thomas Tuck of Cleveland, a black anti-war GI at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, was given a summary court-martial August 4 and sentenced to thirty days in the stockade at hard labor. His offense was that he refused to pick up a gun twice.

Tuck was notified of the court-martial the day before the trial. At the trial he was told that he would not be permitted a civilian lawyer. The Cleveland Draft Resistance Union has hired New York lawyer Conrad Lynn, who has filed notice of an appeal on this basis. The question is: does a soldier have a right to due process of law?

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Can the Army brass deny a GI his constitutional rights to hold and express ideas differing from those held by the administration in Washington—including ideas in direct opposition to the Vietnam war?

These are the key issues of civil liberties in the now celebrated case of Howard Petrick, the twenty one year old Fort Hood based Pfc., recently threatened with court martial solely for expressing his anti-war and socialist — oriented beliefs to his fellow soldiers.

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WASHINGTON—In August 1968 forty-three GIs at Ft. Hood, Texas refused to go to Chicago for riot duty. Their protest was the first in what has been a long series of anti-war and anti-military protests that have led to the growth of a nation-wide GI movement.

On Nov. 15 the most radical of these GIs assembled to form their own contingent in the anti-war demonstrations.

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Anti-war forces in Detroit are preparing to respond to a call for a national mobilization called at a meeting last month of anti-war groups.

The meeting, held in Cleveland Nov. 26 to evaluate the recent Nov. 5–8 Mobilization for Peace in Vietnam, for Economic Justice and for Human Rights, mapped plans for continuing and enlarging anti-war activities and established a Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

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Over the weekend of September 8–10, a Detroit Area High School Anti-war Conference was held. Many concrete resolutions came out of it, including “support of the October 21^st demonstration in Washington; support of all activities based around the confrontation; that a call go out to all high school students to participate in the march and organize around it. That they march in it under their own banners.”

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The mass anti-war march set for April 15 down Woodward Ave. may have wider support than all previous such demonstrations.

Plans call for the march to begin at the Wayne State University campus at 2:00 pm and march to Kennedy Square for a rally from 3:30 to 7:00 pm. Speakers and rock bands will be featured there.

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In the face of a seemingly inevitable campaign driven by the capitalists and their warmongering politicians, anti-war sentiment around the globe continues to grow. As resistance diversifies and broadens in political scope, fresh faces appear in the streets, voicing a firm rejection of the rulers’ policies.

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Socialist Workers party presidential nominee Fred Halstead was in Detroit Friday, October 6 to kick off his campaign at a rally sponsored by the S.W.P. campaign committee.

Halstead spoke about the positions of the Republican and Democratic presidential aspirants on the Vietnam war before an audience mostly made up of young people. Picking up on Governor Romney’s statement that LBJ had “brainwashed” him on Vietnam, Halstead pointed out that even the “dove” candidates and mass media evidenced brainwashing in the unconscious racism of assuming that somehow the U.S. had a mission in Vietnam.

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