Full list of texts

Ross Winn, circa 1901

A couple of years back, at a conference in Ohio, an acquaintance of ours described to us how he had, in some research, happened upon an anarchist publisher who had lived and died in our neck of the woods: central Tennessee. Did we, he asked, know where Mount Juliet was? This tiny Southern town was only twenty minutes from our front door, and we were surprised when he explained how this man published radical literature from there a century ago. Would we be interested in tracking him down, maybe finding his grave and doing a rubbing? Sure, we thought, it sounded like fun at the time, and genealogical research was something we were new at, but willing to put our heads together on.

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[Note: authors listed in print original as Stew Albert & Gumbo.]

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—The Justice Department has admitted that during the past year they have been electronically bugging Jerry Rubin’s life.

In official government document 2660, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals 4^th Circuit, and signed by C. Vernon Spratley, Jr. U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, they stated that: “the government is tendering.. a sealed exhibit containing transcripts of conversations in which appellant Rubin was a participant or at which he was present which were overheard by means of electronic surveillance.”

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In the aftermath of L.B.J.‘s sudden shocker,* a heated dialogue between Phil Ochs, folksinger, and Jerry Rubin, Yippie organizer, took place on the subject of America, Johnson, Kennedy and the movement. Perhaps it was not untypical...

RUBIN: The six-gun has surrendered; the machine will now move back into control of America’s banks. Rationality will replace the sloppy hand. Kennedy, the mechanical consumer product, will replace Johnson, the existential gambler. And things won’t be as interesting up there.

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A plainclothes policeman who infiltrated the Youth International Party has claimed that Yippies planned in advance to riot and provoke police attacks on them during the Democratic National Convention.

Robert L. Pierson said he was given a leave to serve as an investigator for the state’s attorney’s office, won the Yippies’ confidence and became bodyguard for Jerry Rubin.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Mark Rudd has asked his local draft board to give him an occupational deferment on the grounds that he is a “revolutionary” working for SDS and engaged in fighting against “a small number of people who are bleeding and destroying our country.”

Rudd, a former chairman of SDS at Columbia and an active participant in last spring’s rebellion, wrote to his draft board in Irvington, N.J., on Nov, 14: “My occupation, revolutionary, is vital to the national interest of the United States.” Rudd was re-classified 1-A by his draft board in Irvington recently, after the Columbia registrar’s office notified the board that Rudd had been suspended from the college. The chairman of the draft board, Clifford Day, told the Columbia Spectator that the decision was not based on political considerations.

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a review of

Socialism and Survival, Rudolf Bahro, Heretic Books, London, 1983

“We must pull the communications cord on the industrial system.” Who is this speaking? Some post-industrial prophet writing in the Fifth Estate, far from the social movement? Someone lost in theories with no immediate practical consequences or no political base? These are the words of Rudolf Bahro, former East German dissident and now one of the leading theorists and activists in the West German Green movement.

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On Sunday, November 7, 3,000 people had descended on the Piazza Vetra, Milan, taking the police, who were prepared for a routine operation, completely by surprise. Bursting into four cinemas, they soon mounted a demonstration some 4,000 strong. Following this, a price reduction was proposed for (movie) matinee performances. The response was a new demonstration, this time involving 52 of Milan’s “youth circles,” with their banners decorated with garish colors and drawings. The Apache emblem (a hatchet) in the forefront, flags, guitars, the pink and flowered flags of the feminist and gay groups.

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Josef Skvorecky is a renowned Czech author who currently lives and teaches in Toronto. He emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a young man, living under the Nazi administration, he took part in underground jazz groups. Judging from his stories, the band was obliged to play polkas and other “acceptable” music. When the coast was clear, they could indulge in their real love, jazz.

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a review of

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, By John Zerzan, Feral House, Los Angeles, 2002, 214 pp., $12

John Zerzan hardly needs an introduction here; few modern anarchist writers are as well-known, controversial, and divisive. Zerzan is the founder and leading philosopher of what he calls anarcho-primitivism.

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a review of

Running by Cara Hoffman. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks 2018

Inspired by her own youth spent travelling and working in Greece, Cara Hoffman’s third novel, Running, is a suspenseful punk adventure tale.

It follows Bridey, Jasper and Milo, wild, hungry youths luring unwitting tourists to stay at a shabby Athens hotel in exchange for a place to crash and a commission to spend at the bar.

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Behind the male facade of business and politics Russia is a country run by women. Their labor keeps the population from starving. Yet post-1991 economic changes have led some women to reason that if they have to be beasts of burden they are not willing to take men along for the ride.

If this process gathers momentum, it will bring about the most radical transformation ever seen in Russian society. I saw glimmering signs of change when I lived in Russia in 1993. I went to satisfy my curiosity about the reality of Russian life, behind both Eastern and Western propaganda.

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a review of

Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution eds. Friends of Aron Baron; Luigi Fabbri, Rudolf Rocker, Nestor Makhno, Iain McKay, Alexander Berkman, Maurice Brinton, Ida Mett, Otto Wile, Emma Goldman, et al. AK Press akpress.org, 2017

The Kronstadt Uprising by Ida Mett. Theory and Practice, 2017 theoryandpractice.org.uk

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Reprinted from Fire

I. Necessity

The average Amerikan cannot help but read several hundred thousand words per day of pig shit in the form of advertising, slogans on police cars, etc. Revolutionary wall painting effectively combats this totalitarian bombardment of the mass subconscious.

“A dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”—Mao

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Direct action (legal and illegal) and sabotage had been used by the U.S. and European labor movements as a method of class combat since the rise of industrialism.

These tactics allowed workers to fight back using whatever tools were available to them, and was viewed as a viable method of achieving worker demands outside of political channels. The IWW promoted direct action after the 1908 split with the Socialist Labor Party (which only advocated political action); however, it was not official union policy until 1914, and then only for a short time.

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According to all reputable climatologists, an immediate ninety percent reduction in material and energy production is required to meet the goal of limiting the average worldwide temperature increase by a disastrous two degrees Fahrenheit. At the current rate of fossil fuel extraction and use, the earth will experience a catastrophic increase of four to nine degrees by the end of this century.

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A review of

SACCO AND VANZETTI, Directed by Peter Miller, Willow Pond Films, www.willowpondfilms.com

To many anarchists, there are few more sympathetic characters in our movement’s history than Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

The Martyrs’ Farewell
That we lost and have to die, does not diminish our appreciation and gratitude for your great solidarity with us and our families. Friends and Comrades, now that the tragedy of this trial is at an end, be all as of one heart. Only two of us will die. Our ideal, you our comrades, will live by millions. We have won. We are not vanquished. Just treasure our suffering, our sorrow, our mistakes, our defeats, our passion for future battles and for the great emancipation.
Be all as of one heart in this blackest hour of our tragedy. And we have heart. Salute for us all the Friends and Comrades on the earth.
We embrace you all and bid you our extreme good-bye with our hearts filled with love and affection.
Now and ever, long life to you all, long life to liberty.
Yours for life and death.
--Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Death House, August 21, 1927)

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Editors’ note: Thanks to some typically sleazy last-minute conniving by Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, the “Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy” (R.A.V.E.) Act was signed into Federal law by Bush on April 30, 2003.

The bill’s introduction says in no uncertain terms that raves are “drug dens” where promoters sell illegal drugs and charge exorbitant prices for Ecstasy paraphernalia, such as bottled water, massage oil, and glow sticks. Under the law’s measures, property owners/renters/leasers and event promoters are criminally liable for drug use on their premises and may he fined up to $250,000 and nine years in prison. The effect, of course, is to discourage the electronic music events since the actions of just one dancer could result in a fine or jail time for event organizers.

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That old city-planner, Death, caught up with Jack Kerouac this October. Reportedly, it was an ugly death; drunk and despairing, his guts literally busting and bleeding inside the heavy lonely flesh. Kerouac had ruined his great good looks years before and now he had finally ruined his body, his brain, his life and perhaps his very spirit and karma. As Allen Ginsberg, his old friend, recently said, “he threw up his hands & wrote the universe don’t exist & died to prove it.”

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“As long as the oppressive relations of capitalist production prevail, the character of work will continue to assume all of the features of a bad acid trip.”

—Karl Marx, The Communist Dreambook

Work engenders the progressive unemployment of the mind by encouraging the formation of bituminous warts hanging like dead fingernails from the brain. In severe work situations these growths may feel like entire fingers curling inward.

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Rolf Dietrich is fighting a one man war with the City of Plymouth—and winning.

Rolf is an old friend of the Fifth Estate and was trying to open up the town to the paper a few months ago. The one head shop he succeeded in placing it in was driven out of business by the local pigs.

Last February, Rolf was stopped on a phony traffic beef and taken to the station for investigation because he had a number of Fifth Estates in the back of the car. The Plymouth police sent the papers to the Wayne County prosecutor’s office to see if they could get an obscenity warrant. Their request was denied, but the pigs refused to give Dietrich back his papers.

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a review of

Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff by Anatole Dolgoff; Introduction by Andrew Cornell. AK Press, 2016, 391 pp., $22.

Anatole Dolgoff is a great story-teller. He does the kind of writing that is rare on the left. It never seems to occur to most political writers that entertaining people is not a bad thing. It occurs all the time to Anatole.

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Sam Mbah (1963–2014)

Sam Mbah, Nigerian activist, journalist, lawyer, and co-author of African Anarchism: The History of a Movement, passed away November 6, after suffering unexpected complications from a heart condition for which he had recently undergone surgery.

Mbah was an outspoken advocate of anarchist alternatives to global capitalism, and dedicated his life to providing anarchist models of organizing against government corruption, militarism, climate change, and other social and environmental issues.

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from LNS and the Guardian

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 12 — Over 10,000 marchers turned out on a drizzly, overcast morning to show their solidarity with the largest anti-war march ever organized by active-duty GIs and veterans.

There were at least 500 soldiers and sailors present wearing white caps lettered “GIs for Peace.” Several attended in uniform. The soldiers came despite weeks of intimidation from military officials. Military brass tried to ship Lt. Hugh Smith (USAF), one of the chief organizers, to Taiwan on Sept. 30 in hopes of quashing the demonstration. Two other march organizers, A1-C Michael Locks and A1-C John Bright, got orders to ship out to Utah, but the brass backed down after the two sought a court injunction prohibiting the move.

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A tentative existence is what society’s current trajectory offers us: alienation from others simultaneous with chronic concern about perception by others. Futile attempts to persist in these conditions takes the form of claiming an identity, espousing sanctioned banalities, and various other nonsense that renders us drained and pained.

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A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

A recent poll has concluded that this year’s “American Mother of the Year” is none other than Sarah Jane Moore, a San Francisco area resident. Moore was however unavailable for comment on this news, as she is presently in a California jail awaiting sentencing for her guilty plea in the attempted assassination of President Ford.

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a review of

“Acts and Intermissions: Emma Goldman in America.” 2017. USA. Directed by Abigail Child; 57 min. abigailchild.com

Abigail Child is a prolific and active visual artist whose works have appeared in prestigious international galleries; an author of five poetry books, including a book of critical writings on film; and a professor of video/film production and history.

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There she is, looking vaguely pornographic on the glossy covers of the weekly magazines, the planet Saturn. What have we discovered? I don’t know, I haven’t read them, feeling squashed as I do to the Earth by the giddying inertia of this century which plummets like a flaming satellite towards the nothingness. Grey skies, the weather turning cold, sirens in the distance. Some citizens walk by whispering reverently of the wonders of Saturn, disputing the number of rings and moons according to the latest counts, as the corroding universe about them threatens to be annihilated. They drool over photographs of a planet most of them couldn’t spot in a clear night sky—that is, if the night sky hadn’t already been colonized and obliterated by the city light and the lethal dust of the very civilization which made it possible to send gadgets and technicians to the stars. But everything is so groovy on Saturn, so colorful and tempestuous. They know because they watched it all on television.

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The Trumbull Theater Collective brings together a diverse group of people for the radical project of creating an authentic egalitarian community. We offer low-cost, self-governed, cooperatively-owned, non-profit, communal housing for community activists, students & young families in two, deteriorating, 100-year-old mansions in Detroit’s inner city. Also, there is a theater and meeting space attached to one of the houses. We strive to embody the anarchist principles of voluntary association, mutual aid, & human liberation. We see the Trumbull as an anti-authoritarian center of art & activism based on anti-racist action, feminism, queer liberation, ecology and anarchy.

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The Evergreen Alliance, a Detroit-based federation of individuals devoted to stopping the Detroit trash incinerator, has put out a call for a Regional and International Mobilization to Save the Great Lakes, May 13-May 16. [See schedule in this issue.] This weekend of activities Has been organized to focus attention on the systematic destruction of the Great Lakes bioregion. The weekend will include a large-scale demonstration which will march past the Detroit incinerator now under construction and a rally at the Wayne State University campus. A conference and forum the following day will serve to educate participants with workshops, and several nationally known speakers have been invited to participate. A direct action contingent will utilize civil disobedience to blockade the trash incinerator on Monday, May 16.

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On March 19, 1979, several of us reached into the dustbin of history to resurrect the old Eat the Rich Gang and the Workers Revenge Group. The occasion was a Greenpeace anti-sealing demonstration in downtown Detroit that, as it turned out had as its demand only a one year moratorium on the Canadian hunt, to determine whether or not these beautiful creatures were an endangered species. The trap of this sort of logic is so bountifully clear that it’s surprising that even these weepy-eyed reformers fell for it—the Canadian government counts the seal heads, says, “Nope, not endangered,” and the slaughter begins anew next year, to provide furs for the rich. The ETR/WRG prepared the following leaflet which was distributed at the rally.

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In the year since the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate demonstrations in Seattle, intense actions have occurred in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London, Prague, and dozens of other cities across this country and the world.

They have functioned as models of resistance to global capitalism’s exploitation of labor, environmental degradation, and state repression Hence, it is disturbing to see some activists now advocating participation in the domesticated arena of electoral politics.

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Fifth Estate staffer, playwright, and madcap prankster, the late Pat Halley, once wrote in these pages, “The purpose of education is to kick the animal out of you.” That is, to make individuals conform to a society based on constraint of one’s desires and autonomy. This is true to one degree or another of every culture although within the modern state and capitalist social order, this is carried out to the extreme by the necessities of their definitions.

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In The Underground History of American Education, the renegade educator John Taylor Gatto traces the genealogy of compulsory public-school education in the US back to the system of pedagogy created in the nineteenth-century northern European state of Prussia. Prussia is often seen by historians as the architect of German nationalist unification; after the Napoleonic invasion of 1806, the Prussian military aristocracy decided that it needed to reform education in that kingdom so that new, centralized schools could produce “obedient soldiers to the army; obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; well-subordinated clerks for industry; citizens who thought alike on most issues; and national uniformity in thought, word, and deed.” The Prussian education model became heavily geared toward patriotism and civic virtue after the near-success of the Revolution of 1848; the ruling class in Prussia wanted to insure that the contagion of revolutionary ideas was not being picked up in the schools.

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a review of

People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State by Robb Johnson. PM Press 2020

Raising Free People by Akilah Richards. PM Press 2020

In the grammar of education, children are often passive objects. Children get educated; children get schooled. And what does education do to them? Charles Dickens described schoolchildren as “little parrots and small calculating machines.” A century and an ocean away from Victorian-era England, another artist and resistance worker, the musician Bob Marley, disavowed traditional education entirely: “If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.”

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It was brought to my attention last week, that each of the various astrological signs [vague as any such sun-sign delineation can be] has its own particular sexual proclivities and positions. Indeed, it would be quite possible [if not desirable] to create an astrological Kama Sutra, designed to insure sexual fulfillment and certainty for all possible combinations of signs. Here follows a brief capsule description of astrological intercourse [blow by blow, as it were].

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Which is worse in Detroit? Jay-walking or carrying a red flag? I suppose it depends on where you are coming from, but put together 60 persons jay-walking after a rally, led by a red-flag-carrying revolutionary, and you can expect what did happen on Saturday, September 27.

Motor City SDS had called a rally on the front steps of the Main Library on Woodward and Kirby to demand an end to Wayne University’s racist urban renewal program and its planned entry into the war research field.

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In response to the election fraud being perpetrated on the American people by the U.S. ruling class, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is coordinating a nation wide Student Strike on Election Day, November 5. The slogan is “No class today, no ruling class tomorrow.”

Locally, Wayne State SDS is participating by endorsing the Strike at Wayne and holding a freak-out rally on the Mall at 12:30 pm. This will be followed by a teach-in on the electoral system and the bankruptcy of American liberalism. The proceeding evening, November 4, People Against Racism will sponsor a pre-election rally at Community Arts Auditorium at 8 pm. Rennie Davis, of the National Mobilization Committee will be the featured speaker.

CHICAGO (LNS)—Dick Flacks, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and founding member of SDS, was severely beaten in his university office May 5.

Flacks was beaten over the head, causing multiple skull fractures, and his right hand was almost cut off in an attempt to leave him to bleed to death.

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Ten women from the Detroit SDS summer project invaded Macomb Community College July 31. They filed into a social science class chanting, “Work, study, get ahead, kill.”

The students were in the middle of a final exam and were perplexed by the interruption.

The SDS women barricaded the door with a desk. They proceeded to talk about how America fucks people over, especially blacks, Third World people and women and how people had to get together and fight this.

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Madison Avenue seems determined to co-opt and make a profit on everything, even revolution.

What the movement has to do is politicize every facet of Amerikan life and relate to people everywhere they are—in this case, at the movies.

For the last couple of weeks several people from the SDS summer program have been spending spare time at “CHE!” (“A man who created a nightmare of violence and terror”). We went to theatres all over Detroit passing out the June 12 “Che!” issue of the Fifth Estate [FE #81, June 12–25, 1969], and rapping about what Che and Cuba really are about.

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CHICAGO—The toadies of Mayor Daley’s court are working long hours into the night attempting to prepare an official battle plan for the latest onslaught into their domain.

It comes in the form of the SDS National Action set for October 8 thru 11. The scene in Pig City is always chaotic, but this time it may be even more so with two factions of SDS each planning separate programs for the week.

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One of the resolutions adopted at the recent Students for a Democratic Society national convention in Ann Arbor under the heading of “Cultural Revolution” calls for SDS endorsement of and participation in the Provo Conference Tribal Gathering which is scheduled for the Fall.

New Left Notes, the official SDS newspaper, will also shortly be applying for membership in the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). SDS is the largest student radical organization in the country and has draft resistance as its main program. Sample copies of New Left Notes or information about the group may be obtained by writing its headquarters at 1608 W. Madison, Chicago, Illinois.

Editors’ Note: The following letter is a reply from the national officers of SDS to criticisms of their upcoming national action in Chicago made by this newspaper in our last edition [“Letter to SDS,” FE #85, August 7–20, 1969].

Dear Comrades,

Your letter about the National Action has become an important item for discussion around here. Because of the way you posed certain problems, and because you have focused in on questions that are being raised around the country at this time, we felt it would be important to answer your open letter with an open response. There are a couple of major misconceptions made about the action. The notion that any part of the action is or could be “adventurist” is crazy. The terms of the fight against imperialism are being set by the colonized people of the world.

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Scene at GM building. photo: Bob Evans

Students for a Democratic Society declared the days between April 20 and 30 as “Ten Days to Shake the (American) Empire.

Locally, Wayne University SDS led an anti-imperialist march on April 24 of over 250 persons to the General Motors Building which was seen to quiver ever so slightly in the face of the onslaught.

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with additional notes by Fifth Estate staff

CHICAGO (LNS)—SDS expelled the Progressive Labor Party (PL) and its political allies from the ranks of the organization June 21.

The action was the turning point of the 1969 SDS National Convention. SDS leaders saw it as a historic step in the history of the nation’s left, and as a breath of fresh air for the movement.

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FLINT, Mich. (LNS) — Weathermen, Weatherwomen, some of their friends and some of their critics, met in a “war council” Dec. 27–30. The gathering was a serious political meeting, although it had been widely billed as an outasight international youth culture freak show.

About 400 young people from across the country made it to the bare Giant Ballroom in Flint to practice karate, rap in regional and collective meetings, dig a little music and hear the Weather Bureau lay down its political line for revolution in Amerika.

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Editor’s Note: The following note was written by Bobby Seale in his Chicago jail cell, smuggled into the courtroom on Thursday, October 30, and given to Jerry Rubin, who released it later that day.

Section 198, title 42 of the United States Government Code says that a black man cannot be discriminated against in any court in any legal defense matter.

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a review of

Ohio by Sean Swain. Ardent Books

Ohio is the story of Sean Swain, a man wrongfully convicted and turned into an anarchist political prisoner in the state that bears the title of the book’s name.

He has been in prison in Ohio since 1991 on a murder charge, the self-defense killing of an abusive ex- of his then-girlfriend who had broken into his house and threatened his life.

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“Without government life is nasty, brutish and short.”

—Thomas Hobbes

Every person gazing even casually at the sordid history of government realizes that the Hobbesian dictum is nonsense and, in fact, just the opposite is true: with government, humanity has thusly had its life defined.

Viewing the organized political state as the culprit in human affairs for the presence of universal misery is standard fare for the anarchist and libertarian tradition and as a theory is not without merit as far as it goes. Certainly, other attempts historically to locate the culprit in evil spirits, the Devil, human nature or even capitalism, are much more shortsighted as they fail to deliver an explanation of the daily mechanism through which people have been subjugated during the epoch of Civilization.

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Some demonstrators wanted more than free trade.

On November 30, 1999, a citizen uprising shut down the World Trade Organization and took over downtown Seattle, transforming it into a festival of resistance. Tens of thousands of people joined the nonviolent direct action blockade which encircled the WTO conference site, keeping the most powerful and undemocratic institution on earth shut down from dawn till dusk, despite an army of federal, state and local police, using tear gas, pepper spray, rubber, plastic and wooden bullets, concussion grenades and armored tanks in an attempt to control the crowds. However, people continued to resist throughout the week despite the clampdown which included mass arrests of nearly 600 people and government suspension of any pretense of civil rights.

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Josh Dukes

Following the recent dismissal of charges against a right-wing woman who shot an anarchist anti-fascist activist in 2017, the question of how anarchists should or should not interact with the state’s mis-named justice system has become more relevant than ever. The victim’s own anarchist stance on state-administered justice and possible alternatives to it have added needed complexity to a perennial issue.

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Good news! Seattle’s Left Bank Books is republishing Letters of Insurgents, Fredy Perlman’s historical novel about love and revolution in the East bloc and Western states of the mid-20^th century.

The book was written in the mid-1970s and first published by Black & Red and printed at the Detroit Printing Co-op, both projects initiated by Fredy and Lorraine Perlman. The B&R Co-op began in 1970, three years before Left Bank Books (LBB) was established.

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Ardent Press in Berkeley, California is publishing a second edition of Ron Sakolsky’s Creating Anarchy. Originally issued in 2005 by the Fifth Estate as a one-off publication, the book is a dynamic collage of ideas, images, and action--ranging widely from May Day to utopia, from refusal to autonomy, and from insurrection to imagination.

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Last year saw, at least here in London, a plethora of commemorative events to mark the 40-year anniversary of the events of 1968, with pundits and talking heads emerging from everywhere to offer their accounts and experiences of that year, in which a multitude of movements remade and reclaimed the terrain of everyday life in a variety of ways from the jaws of capitalism.

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“By banning the telephone from the home, Old Order Amish...try to maintain the primacy of communication within the context of community.”

--D.Z. Umble

“Church splits are bad, some things are worse, and one of them is to keep on compromising with something we know is sinful.”

--Anon., Separated Unto Christ (Old Order Mennonite tract, circa 1995)

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We will meet at the midnight hour

past the tree stump forest.

We will be sneaky slinkies and walky-

talkies. Robin Hood’s woods would be so

proud. Merry boys and girls sing

carnivalesque ballads and awaken

the tree’s breeze--our back beat.

Tonight, we escape to sing songs with the animals

songs that none of us know the words to.

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Faces covered with white masks, carrying a banner reading “Reclaim America,” chanting re-worked Nazi slogans, and waving stylized U.S. flags, 150 members of the white nationalist Patriot Front marched through Washington D.C. in early February.

Antifascist protesters blocking white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascist sympathizers from entering Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017

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Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is an author and queer anti-assimilationist activist living in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. She spoke with Fifth Estate on July 2, the day CHOP, the district’s autonomous zone, was demolished by police. Sycamore’s latest novel The Freezer Door is in part about the stranglehold the suburban imagination has on city life; a meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity.

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a review of

3 online plays by Norman Nawrocki, 2020–2022: “EVICTION? Dog’s Blood!!;” “Ukrainians, Pelicans & the Secret of Patterson Lake,” and “Run Nawrocki Run! Escape from Banff Prison”

Norman Nawrocki in “Run Nawrocki Run! Escape from Banff Prison”

Norman Nawrocki is a veteran artiste and activist in the Montreal anarchist and radical communities. He has produced more than 20 theater plays, 14 books, and over 30 music albums as a solo artist or with many bands and collectives since the 1980s such as Rhythm Activism, Bakunin’s Bum, Anarchist Writers Bloc, and DaZoque.

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While attending a meeting in Gainesville, Georgia to learn about the horrific effects of environmental racism, the conversation quickly turned to education. For decades African Americans have been fighting pollution and coping with obscene leukemia rates in their community in this city of 25,000 residents. That day, they vented about the local public school system and the intensification of segregation in schools. They know segregation is a device designed to limit their community’s access to the tools and services needed to have a decent life.

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Vision Quest Guidebook

“The New Freedom”: Corporate Capitalism by Fredy Perlman

The Big Melt, President of the United Hearts

We Know You Are Watching by Surveillance Camera Players

The Modern School of Stelton: A Sketch by Joseph J. Cohen and Alexis C. Ferm

Facing Reality, Correspondence Publishing Committee

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Here in the heart of imperial North America, it’s (s)election year, and whether we like it or not, public discourse over the next several months will be dominated by campaign shenanigans.

Finding the proper revolutionary response to this spectacle spawns the usual frustration and debate. While a few antiauthoritarians have joined the “Anybody but Bush” chorus rampant on the liberal-left, others have dusted off their quadrennial rants against the inherently corrupt capitalist system and its permanent war machine, claim to moral supremacy, and facade of representative democracy.

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Apple, Michael. 1993. Official Knowledge.

Apple, Michael. 1995. Education and Power.

Apple, Michael. 2001. Educating the “Right” Way.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Gatto, John Taylor. 1992. Dumbing Us Down.

Goodman, Paul. 1956. Growing Up Absurd.

Goodman, Paul. 1962. Compulsory Mis-education and the Community of Scholars.

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On the morning of July 18, 1936 General Francisco Franco began the fascist rebellion against the Spanish Republican liberal bourgeois regime in Madrid. This move was immediately met by armed resistance of the urban proletariat who, after defeating the fascists in half of Spain began the revolutionary process of expropriating industry, while their counterparts among the peasantry collectivized agriculture.

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Racism has been heavy at Selfridge Air Force Base, twenty miles north of Detroit, for quite a while. Especially in the last year, there have been numerous incidents, and a great deal of harassment and intimidation of black airmen and air women (WAFs).

Colonel Harold Lund, the commander at Selfridge, is completely ineffectual in dealing with the problem, although one is not sure whether it is through incompetence or design.

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SEATTLE (LNS)—Ernest Gruening, Former U.S. Senator from Alaska, has called on America’s youth to resist the draft and go to jail, according to a UPI report.

“I want to see thousands of young nen refuse to go—until they have so many of them they’ve filled all the jails,” Gruening told an anti-war rally here.

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Eighteen State Senators—16 Republicans and two Democrats—are demanding an investigation into “left-wing” student activities at all of Michigan’s State Supported universities.

While Sen. James Fleming (Rep.—Jackson), who is the principle sponsor of the resolution, has stated that SDS activities at the University of Michigan were what he was most concerned about, the investigation would also look into campus “morals.”

...

A rare judicial victory was achieved in February as forest defense activist Jefrey “Free” Luers’ 23-year prison sentence for eco-sabotage was overturned by the Oregon Court of Appeals.

In 2001, then 23 year-old Jeff and his codefendant, Craig “Critter” Marshall, were convicted for torching three SUVs at a Eugene, Oregon car dealership. Their stated purpose was to raise awareness about global warming and the role SUVs play in that process.

...

“We have finally seen that we are brothers and sisters in spite of ideological differences. We finally sense that we hold much in common.”

—STP Coalition

Working together on this basis, 16 community based organizations got together May 19 to define the structure and direction of the SERVE THE PEOPLE Coalition.

...

If your government is waging a criminal war do you serve the country best by cooperating?

Who served Germany best under Hitler? Those who obeyed orders and helped kill the Jews? Or the handful of Germans who chose prison and even death rather than cooperate?

Who upheld Russian honor in 1956? Those who obeyed orders, marched into Hungary, and shot down students and workers—or those troops who refused to fire?

...

This here’s Detroit,

home of hungering

dreams, home of my empty pockets

and tired worn fingers.

The shadows cast are Babylon’s,

that made scorpion death of my mother.

So many have sacrificed a mother

to become orphans of Detroit

grown cold in the shades of Babylon

that leave us hungering

with no place for our fingers

...

FT. LEWIS, Wash., Feb. 28 — 300 people rallied to the defense of Pvt. Bruce McLean, an American Servicemen’s Union (ASU) member who was shanghaied to Vietnam Feb. 19. The rally was held at American Park, just off Ft. Lewis.

Speakers at the rally were Denny Leonard and Stan Hoffman both members of the Ft. Lewis local of the ASU. They called for the military to immediately return Pvt. McLean from Vietnam, where he was taken illegally. The rally was organized by Seattle Liberation Front and ASU Shelter-Half.

...

Captain Nemo the SciFi Stirnerite

lurks beneath our waves of text like

a semantic barracuda. If God

won’t be dead till we kill grammar

as Nietzsche said then Chomsky must be

at least the Pope (Papa not dada)--

scarcely the “brainless luddism” to which

we all aspire. Scorpions ate our

...

A year-ago this month (July 10, 1976 to be exact), an explosion at the Icmesa chemical plant in Seveso, Italy garnered worldwide attention as the release of 4.4 pounds of deadly tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, or TCDD, contaminated the town and forced the mass evacuation of its inhabitants. [See these related Fifth Estate articles.]

...

One of the things most appealing about the anarchist tradition is its scope and subtlety. Not only do anarchists have big ideas and great plans for transforming the large-scale cultural, economic, and political structures of our societies, we also address the everyday questions of how we live our lives.

...

my flesh is rippling music dancing

as I move my hands my lips across your supple

body blending everything becomes bewildered unpretended

in these moments of ecstatic rhythm

reggae sweat your breath so still

lingering upon my lips

your body mine the last of the wine

spilled between us in a kiss

...

my flesh is rippling music dancing

as i move my hands my lips across your supple

body blending everything becomes bewildered unpretended

in these moments of ecstatic rhythm

reggae sweat your breath so sweet still

lingering upon my lips

your body mine the last of the wine

spilled between us in a kiss

...

If you are reading this right now, you are not making love. But you are presumably not assembling cars nor doing the dishes either. In this essay about sex you will not learn new techniques, ideas or perspectives. You might even get bored reading it, in which case I insist that you do something else immediately, as that is the whole point of what I am saying.

...

a review of

More Out Than In: Notes on Sex, Art, and Community, edited, by Rachel Kaplan and Keith Hennessy, Abundant Fuck Publications, San Francisco, 1995, 100 pp., $5

Get out your scissors for that standard Map of the Possible! There have been some bold scouting parties for a world of liberated desire the last few years, and some of the boldest have just put a book out on their discoveries.

...

Rainbow

Can you float through the universe of

your body and not lose your way?

Can you lie quietly

engulfed

in the slippery union

of male and female?

Warm wet dance of generation?

Endless ecstasies of couples?

Can you offer your stamen trembling in

the meadow for the electric penetration of pollen

...

“The problem with San Francisco groups is, I was expecting wonders and miracles and what I heard was a bunch of white blues bands that didn’t sound as funky as my little band in high school.”

—Frank Zappa

“Big Brother is a joke.”

—Mike Bloomfield

“That’s Jim Gurley. He’s the SADDEST guitar player in the whole world.”

—Hippie

...

Coming to grips with the totality of Wilhelm Reich’s anti-authoritarian social psychology is beyond the scope of any short article. [1] Instead, this will be a brief summation of his notion of Sex-economy, which, along with Work-democracy constitute two of his major concepts.

To present Reich in such a manner means by necessity that many apparent inconsistencies in his work must be neglected. [2] To call oneself a Reichian (or a Marxist) means you raise insightful thought to the level of an ideology--a doctrine to be defended in all of its peculiarities.

...

The five cartoon panels printed on this page are taken from “Red Guard Romance” (written and drawn by Jay Kinney) and appeared in Young Lust No. 5. Most of us read the comic and thought it funny, if not somewhat preposterous. However, proving again that being more radical than reality itself is always a difficult proposition, we ran across the accompanying article by Ross H. Munro in the Oct. 12, 1977 Toronto Globe and Mail.

...

Let me say right off that the subject of Cuba is extremely polarizing. This makes it difficult to have a discussion without the people involved, from the political left or right, simply going deaf and repeating familiar good-vs-evil litanies. After years of visiting and studying the island, I have found it to be anything but simple to figure out. On the contrary, like most places one gets to know well, it’s endlessly complex and nuanced. Hence, my rule of thumb when checking out Cuba analysis is to look for this complexity. The moment I hear tripe peddled by self-deluded leftoids of Cuba-as-socialist-utopia—or the Miami Mafia’s more repugnant portrayal of it as a dirty third-world basket case—I start looking for the exit.

...

a review of

Len Bracken, The East is Black. Sexpol Editions (Third Edition) 2000

Pornography is a literary form fraught with political implications often operating outside the text. The very question of what is pornography has been the pretext of many political trials. But, political and sexual implications aside, pornography is simply what it is: a literary (or artistic) form.

...

The Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris contains many tombs honoring artists and rebels, but the most striking of them all is the monument to the gay English playwright and anarchist Oscar Wilde. [1]

Oscar Wilde’s Paris tomb became a battleground for sexual liberation.

The story of Wilde’s trial for homosexuality and subsequent imprisonment in England is well-known. After his release from jail in 1897, he fled to the continent and settled in Paris. He died there in exile in 1900 and was quietly buried in Pere Lachaise.

...

The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault was not known for offering practical advice. But in a series of interviews from 1981 and 1982 he focused on the major questions then facing the gay liberation movement.

His remarks from that time offer prescient guidance--and pose substantive challenges--for those concerned with sexual liberation today. Though he spoke from his position as a gay man and addressed his comments primarily to a gay audience,

...

The juxtaposing of anti-sexual statements on this page by the Vatican and certain leftist leaders and groups is not meant as an exercise in cynicism, but rather to illustrate in graphic terms the role sexual repression plays within all authoritarian systems.

The Church, for example, is easily identifiable as a repressive institution. Its power to regulate moral conduct grew as did the centrality of its wealth and authority within the feudal system of the Middle Ages.

...

[two_third padding=“0 30px 0 0”]Special to the Fifth Estate

SAN FRANCISCO—With Thompson submachine-guns blazing, 160 armed cops moved in on the Fillmore District Monday afternoon, April 28, to quiet a Black Panther loudspeaker.

Sixteen persons were arrested in a bust which resulted from a police complaint that a Panther loudspeaker was insulting the pigs. A number of guns were seized (and have not been released), including two double barreled shotguns, a.45 automatic, a .22 caliber rifle, an M-14, and assorted ammo.

...

After twenty years of teaching shamanic practices to small groups in several circles in Washington and California, I found the results to be mixed. In the groups in which I participated, there were many moving visionary experiences, but the flabby jargon of the human potential movement left important messages missed amid incessant psychobabble.

...

When the heroine of Ingmar Bergman’s great movie “Persona” turned on a television set and saw the atrocities of the Vietnam war, we in the audience experienced something close to cultural shock—a medievalist had crossed the time barrier. One of the severest and most frequent criticisms of Bergman has been his renowned social indifference.

...

Stencil art is a fun and easy way to reclaim and beautify your neighborhood. Above is just one example—experiment with your own.

Directions:

1. photocopy and enlarge (bigger for better visibility)

2. glue to thin non-corrugated cardboard

3. cut out with exacto knife

4. spray paint (don’t hold the can too close)

...

Demonstrators blockade a logging road in Illinois’ Shawnee Nation Forest while a paid agent of repression looks on. —photo: O. Langelle

Beginning on June 20^th, a determined group of Earth First!ers (EF!), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and anarchists, maintained a blockade at the site of the Fairview timber sale area in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest.

...

Love dolls. Robo-whores. Slutbots. Synthetic options. Whatever you call the life-sized Barbies made by California-based Abyss Creations and other companies around the world, these 70-lb, orifice-slotted mannequins have one primary purpose: to be the ever-obedient, surrogate sexual partners of their owners, which are almost always men.

...

Ken Kelley, editor of the Ann Arbor Argus, fresh from a semi-victory over the forces of injustice, has scored another journalistic coup.

Kelley published the contents of the wallet of Washtenaw County’s fascist sheriff Doug Harvey in the latest issue of the Argus.

Kelley told the Fifth Estate that Harvey was drunk on his ass at a University of Michigan basketball game and staggered home leaving his wallet. It was retrieved by an unidentified but heroic citizen who brought it to the Argus office where its contents were photographed and then returned to the Sheriff.

...

Lots of anarchists and other radicals shoplift on a regular basis. But the public discussion on the topic seems to oscillate between celebration and denunciation, with almost nothing in between.

On one side you’ve got CrimethInc and Yomango saying shoplifting is authentic resistance. As an anonymous author wrote in CrimethInc’s Days of War, Nights of Love, shoplifting is “the most effective protest” against the worst features of modern capitalism “because it is not merely theoretical--it is practical, it involves action.” Yomango is a European shoplifting community founded in Spain in 2002, whose name in Spanish translates to, “I steal.”

...

Botox

Vajazzles

Spray-tan

Collagen

Foundation

Blusher, Shadow

Liner; Stick-on lashes

Anti-perspirant; Perfume

Body spray, Deodorant; Facelift

Tummy tuck, Magic knickers;

Padded bra, Corset

Silicone implants;

Waxed legs

Shaved armpits

Plucked eyebrows

A Brazilian; Detox, Diet

Diet, Diet; Teeth whitening

Anal bleaching, Liposuction;

Colonic irrigation, Pedicure

Manicure; Laser hair removal;

Cosmetic gynecology

...

Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution. Derrick Jensen. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004.

reviewed by Leafy

Already known to us for his indictments of civilization and chilling memoirs, Derrick Jensen takes us inside his real-life anti-classroom and relates his teaching methods in a narrative, story-telling fashion that follows his first rule of writing: Never bore the reader. Throughout, he exposes school systems as training camps teaching us, as Arthur Evans expresses, “depersonalized learning, alienation from nature and sexuality, obedience to hierarchy, fear of authority, self-objectification, and chilling competitiveness.” Jensen challenges his students to start developing past these trainings.

...

The Air Force admitted in a recent hearing that at least three men with dangerous psychiatric problems had been assigned to guard a super-secret nuclear weapons installation at Hamilton Air Force Base, 25 miles south of San Francisco.

The instability of the guards came out it a preliminary hearing for one of them, Sgt. Robert V. Ballou. He is accused of going berserk with a loaded carbine on the base and holding a loaded gun at the head of another officer.

...

Sweet Music-Muzak—that background music featured in supermarkets, office buildings and factories is invading the People’s Republic of China. The Western regional director of the-Muzak Corporation, Bert Mitchell, has told Pacific News Service that a Muzak salesman has just returned from a very successful sales trip to the Chinese mainland. According to Mitchell—in his words—“He spent a whole month there, selling our systems. The Chinese were crazy about them.”

...