Full list of texts

Happy 40^th!

Love & Solidarity

Prison Book Program

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Inhabit ecovillages.

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...

At the 2009 G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, fully militarized police mobilized to protect the world’s financial ministers, rioted and attacked people indiscriminately.

I have had the unfortunate privilege of experiencing two urban shutdowns in the U.S. In 2009, while living in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood adjacent to the University of Pittsburgh as a graduate student, I experienced a preemptive shutdown of a major city during the G-20 summit meeting of the finance ministers of the top world economies.

...

At this time every year, aliens are required to register with the United States Government, who bring you Chevrolets, racism, Herb Alpert and the Tiajuana Brass and other fine products.

In spite of the fact that the government has kindly erected big, prominent buildings called post offices where aliens can register, each year many people who should notify the authorities of their alienation fail to do so.

...

Tom Sincavitch, who “quit” the army has again refused active duty at Ft. Riley, Kansas on March 27 and was returned to the stockade “pending referral of new charges.”

Tom was convicted of being absent without leave for his first “offense” and given a six month suspended sentence. He had taken sanctuary in St. Joseph’s Church and was arrested by 40 FBI agents on March 13.

...

After messing around with Tom Sincavitch’s “Discharge for the good of the service” and finally turning it down, the Army has offered him a deal.

If Tom agrees to plead guilty to the charges of violating the orders of a sergeant and a captain they will drop the charge of violating an Army regulation, give him nine months confinement at Fort Leavenworth and then give him a Bad Conduct Discharge.

...

Tom Sincavitch, the Detroit GI who took sanctuary in St. Joseph’s Church this Spring is facing another court-martial the last week in July.

Sincavitch is being held in the Ft. Riley, Kansas stockade for refusing to report for duty. He had been put on active duty following his refusal to attend his Army Reserve meetings in Detroit. He called the training he was receiving “racist.”

...

FLASH! Sincavitch has been convicted of being absent without leave and received a suspended sentence of six months confinement. He was ordered to report for active duty immediately, but Sincavitch has stated that he will refuse to do so.

Tom Sincavitch, who was arrested March 12 by some 40 FBI agents in his “sanctuary” of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, is confined in Fort Riley, Kansas.

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Marijuana—a harmful and dangerous drug.

This is the title of a paper by Joseph E. Maher, Recorders Court Judge, which states the ruling of a three judge panel on the constitutionality of Michigan’s marijuana laws. The decision stems from a case brought to court by John Sinclair, head of Trans-Love Energies, to test the constitutionality of these laws.

...

The future of John Sinclair, imprisoned chairman of the Youth International Party, hinges on two things at this point. John is currently serving a 9-1/2 to 10 year sentence for possession of marijuana in Marquette Prison.

The first is the expression of support for the freeing of Sinclair, and all political prisoners and the demand to legalize marijuana. This has been manifested in such events as the Free John Sinclair Day held across the country Jan. 24 that raised thousands of dollars in legal fees and educated people about the repressive use of the archaic narcotics laws.

...

The police conspiracy out to put White Panther leader John Sinclair behind bars has suffered several important setbacks in the last few weeks.

First, sentencing of Sinclair was postponed until June 10 on his Oakland County conviction of assaulting a police officer after attorney William Segesta brought in new evidence and asked for a new trial.

...

Dear Brothers & Sisters,

It was good to hear from you last week. My transfer to Marquette has been postponed at least a few weeks, but they are determined to send me there as soon as they can. A pig from the Corrections Dept. in Lansing came here to talk to me last Friday and told me how much I would like it up there and that they couldn’t possibly send me into the general prison population in Jackson because I would surely organize the prison men to revolt against the prison authorities, and they couldn’t take a chance on that. So I’ll be shipped up to Marquette Prison in the Upper Peninsula sometime next month. Then I’ll be able to have my typewriter and can get some work done.

...

Web archive note: This article is untitled in the print original.

In a lightning-fast surprise maneuver the Detroit courts have moved to bring John Sinclair to trial on his famous marijuana charge next Tuesday, June 3^rd, in Recorder’s Court. This latest in a series of repressive police/court actions against Sinclair is also the most serious: the pigs have sworn to convict him on a charge the minimum sentence for which is 20 years in the state penitentiary, maximum: life.

...

John Sinclair was arraigned in Federal District Court in Detroit Oct. 23, on charges that he conspired with two other White Panthers to place explosives at an Ann Arbor CIA office last year.

The others accused are Jack Forrest and Pun Plamondon, White Panther Minister of Defense, who still has not been apprehended at this writing. Pun is charged in a separate count of doing the &crust bombing that ripped apart the international pig office.

...

John Sinclair, Minister of Information for the White Panther Party, remains as political prisoner of the State of Michigan.

John has been moved to Marquette Prison in the Upper Peninsula after Department of Corrections officials began to worry that he might be a uniting force among the prisoners at Jackson to protest conditions there.

...

reviewed in this article

The Big Red Songbook, Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno, editors; 2007; 538 pp.; $24; Charles H. Kerr Co., 1740 West Greenleaf, Chicago, IL 60626. Available from The Barn (see page 55).

In a 100^th anniversary commemorative edition of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook, the editors have compiled over 250 IWW songs along with their histories and anecdotes about them. Covering songs that appeared in the notorious and ubiquitous volumes, from the 1909 to the 1973 edition, each entry includes lyrics and a brief description.

...

Allowed freedom, we are enchanted beings. The enchantment begins with our human, personal song, which discovered, cracks open a window into the cosmos, enabling us to experience reality with fewer boundaries.

The song, first personally and then communally, is the primary tool that unlocks our apprehension of deeper reality, and allows us to act from that vision. This process is deeply connected, integrated and anarchistic.

...

As a well-educated woman who had elected to be a stay-at-home mother, I was an enigma. I wasn’t into Jesus, ironing male garments, or particularly indolent. Yet my choice was perceived to reveal a flaw of character, a weakness. I was supposed to buck up and go back to work. But I just couldn’t do it. That made a lot of people uncomfortable, and most of my critics wore heels. I endured, from liberals and self-identified feminists, endless variations of the question “What is a bright woman like you doing at home?” They were platitudes, ironically, meant to compliment, but shocking insofar as they implied the judgment that mothering and child rearing were occupations reserved for stupid, unambitious women.

...

The National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam has learned that at least four Negro G.I.s are in jail serving six months to ten years at hard labor for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

They are: Privates Johny L. Jackson, Harold Brown, Percy L. Green and David Clark.

NCCEWV has asked those who wish to write to do so at this address: U.S. Army Stockade, APO San Francisco, California 96243. Navy and Marine C.O.s who also refused to fight in Vietnam are Michael L. Yankess, Jack Gorman and Larry Bobbitt. Write Pearl Harbor Marine Barracks, Honolulu, Hawaii.

...

Nuclearism is inherently totalitarian. The apparent controversy over nuclear power is not really a matter for debate: it mirrors the underlying question of social power. Its history makes this clear.

First developed as a weapon of war under the veil of military secrecy, and then in coordinated efforts with enormous corporate interests, it was never publicly debated before the whole society was heavily committed to it. At its inception, public opposition would have brought charges of treason, and nuclear technology and materials are still considered a matter of strict state security.

...

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The simple and obvious freedoms that first inspire the imagination of young kids, freedom of movement and freedom from the constraints of physical laws, are so simple as to hide a much deeper liberatory kernel.

From the blood sacrifice initiatory trials of learning to skate to the insular lingo, skateboarding is every bit the revolutionary community, in many ways like the revolutionary secret societies of Haiti. In contemplating a subject as broad as and as theoretical as global anarchism, it seems to be much more productive to explore areas of inspiration rather than explain proper applications. To this end, I’d like to explore the radical potential of one of my lifelong passions. Skateboarding.

...

“The Female,” current attraction at the Trans-Lux Krim in Highland Park, comes as close to being an obscene movie is anything I’ve seen.

The principal action is set in a Mexican whorehouse, and includes graphic scenes of two or more people in bed engaging in various acts of sadism, fellatio, foot fetishism, and plain old sexual intercourse. This is not, in my opinion, what makes “The Female” an obscene movie.

...

OAKLAND—Plans for a four-day siege of the Oakland Induction Center, October 16–21 were announced to day by spokesmen for National Stop the Draft Week Committee. Compulsory conscription was labeled “a criminal conspiracy against American youth that must be stopped.”

“We have picketed, protested, leafleted and argued against the draft and the racist war in Vietnam,” said Terence Cannon, member of the Stop the Draft Week Steering Committee. “There is only one way to keep young men from being shanghaied into the armed forces and that is to stop the draft from operating. We declare that we are opposed to the government’s policy and will do everything we can to bring it to a halt.

...

I expected click-click-click

of handcuffs binding wrists,

eyes red with pepper spray,

a haze of tear gas fogging streets,

black ‘copters rotoring the sky,

and cellphone vids of troubled days.

Too late I realized the cunning gist

of protests that shimmer on-screen.

Slowly they disappear from the net-

...

Up to 1949 the most important symbol in the ghetto was the knife, from then on it became the needle.

In 1956 the first wave of smack (heroin) hit the young black people of Harlem, an attack on the poor youth of the ghetto that served to “pacify” the oppressed people of the city. In New York over the last ten years smack has been used to break up gangs of poor whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans.

...

It’s my wife

It’s my life

Cause the needle to my vein

Leads to a center in my head

And then I’m better off than dead

Cause when the smack begins to flow

I really don’t care any more

About all the Jim-Jims in this town

And all the politicians makin’ crazy sounds

And thank God that I’m not aware

...

A new law has been passed where you can have any mail stopped which you consider offensive: The law was passed to smite smut—always good for the idiot vote—but—the bill is so worded that you are the sole judge of what is offensive.

If you feel that your congressman’s newsletter, a religious appeal or the normal junk mail is offensive all you have to do is go to the post office and ask for P.O. form 123 and fill out the form giving your name and address and the name and address of the firm which you want to stop sending you advertisements. You do not have to give any reason or justification why you find the mail’ offensive.

...

Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings—even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, were assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

...

Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings—even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, were assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

...

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a

discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying

beings, and the sitting beings-even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed,

...

The Detroit office of the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) was bombed on May 17. The office is located at 12322 Dexter.

Two SNCC members, Kinley Summers and Roy Swan were slightly injured by the blast and the flying glass. The police said they found the remains of what appeared to be a home-made bomb.

...

The Detroit Friends of the Student Non-Veiolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) last week launched a local drive to help raise money to build shelters and to buy land in the deep South. The Poor Peoples Land Fund, headed by Ronald Bennett has already approached Detroit store-owners to ask for their support by serving as sponsors of the project.

...

NEW YORK, Aug. 22 (LNS)--Phil Hutchings, Executive Secretary of SNCC, announced that Stokely Carmichael, former National Chairman of the organization, had been formally expelled. “Brother Carmichael, both as a member and as chairman of SNCC made tremendous strides in the fight for black liberation in the past eight years, but it has been apparent now for some time that SNCC and Carmichael were moving in different directions,” Hutchings’ statement read.

...

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bay Area Regional Office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was raided in the early hours last month by unknown parties. The office at 449 14^th Street houses the SNCC office and the national office of THE MOVEMENT, the West Coast monthly newspaper affiliated with SNCC.

...

The first major photo exhibit featuring photos depicting the freedom struggle in Mississippi, Alabama and Southwest Georgia. Friday, January 14 is the last day this show will be in Detroit. Admission is free, at the Community Arts Bldg., Wayne State University, 9 a.m. — 10 p.m.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is the statement issued by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee concerning U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. Julian Bond was refused his seat in the Georgia House of Representatives when he publically endorsed this statement.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee assumes its right to dissent with U.S. foreign policy on any issue, and states its opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam on these grounds:

...

<em>

The Never Alone national tour hit 30 cities in April, speaking to hundreds about long-term anarchist prisoner support. It focused on the cases of Eric McDavid and Marie Mason, using multimedia presentations and included strategizing about how to effectively encourage a culture of resistance and support. Above, from the left, Jason, Jenny, Ian, and released political prisoner, Jeff “Free” Luers at a tour stop at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ore., April 26. Photo from becausewemust.org. The tour raised nearly $7,000 after expenses which will be split between McDavid and Mason support groups. To offer support, donate, or get information about the cases, go to</em> supporteric.org and supportmariemason.org. Info on the tour at http://neveralonetour.wordpress.com.

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“To build communism, a new man must be created simultaneously with the material base.”

— Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba.

In the preceding articles, I have dealt with the quality of life in Cuba, the laying of the base of material production, international relations, and other facets of the Cuban revolution. But the most important aspect of the revolution is yet to be described: the creation of the “new man.” This act of creation is the heart of the Cuban revolution. Although there has been little formally written about it, except for Che’s small but important book, Man and Socialism in Cuba, the task of this creation is reflected in the daily lives and the daily consciousness of every participant in the revolution.

...

Paul Lodico is the Socialist Workers Party candidate for Common Council. But he is not that interested in getting votes. In fact, he is not running to win the election.

Instead, Lodico is interested in “posing programs for struggle.” That is, he wants to organize committees of research teams to study such areas as housing, welfare, medical care, unions and other factors of life in the city. These committees will involve those already interested in each area. In the study of welfare, for example, Lodico hopes to use the aid of welfare workers and ADC mothers.

...

The second annual Socialist Scholars Conference will be held in New York at the Hotel Commodore, September 9–11, 1966. The noted historian and political analyst Isaac Deutscher and the social philosopher Herbert Marcuse will participate in a discussion “On Socialist Man” to lead off the Conference.

...

NEW YORK—The national Committee of the Socialist Workers party has announced here that it has nominated Fred Halstead and Paul Boutelle as the party’s candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States in the 1968 elections.

Halstead, a 40 year old cloth cutter from New York, said that the war in Vietnam would be a central issue of the campaign. His running mate, Boutelle, a 35 year old cab driver, said that black power would be a twin issue.

...

CHARACTERS

SEVEN: A young woman, mid-20s. Architect of the virus.

GEORGIA: A young woman, mid-20s. Friend of Seven.

CLEANER: Works for Seven.

CLEANER: Works for Seven.

SETTING: A window-less room with a desk and chair. Located in Washington DC.

TIME: Present. Seven is in a window-less room, monitoring activity on her computer. Her friend, a woman by the name of Georgia enters the room distraught.

...

As the importance of social technologies increases, many users fail to pay sufficient critical attention to the political incursions that such technologies invite.

Millions who cannot fathom life without social technologies are, in all likelihood, the same demographic that is most willing to excuse the political transgressions these technologies engender—particularly if the consequent harm affects people other than themselves.

...

a review of

Society Against the State, by Pierre Clastres. Mole Editions, Urizen Press, N.Y., 1977, 186 pp. $12.95

A shockingly high price for such a slim volume, but this book from a publishing house “owned by its employees and sharing profits with its authors and translators” is the best general work on anthropology I’ve read. Clastres not only evaluates “primitive communism” from the inside, the viewpoint of the tribe itself, but also manages, almost despite himself, to avoid romanticizing everything for the poor civilized reader, so hungry for rumors of freedom.

...

Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” was banned in Detroit last year by all the major radio stations. WKNR’s Paul Kannon refused to air it because he felt it was too sensational for a radio audience. “Society’s Child” is currently the number one song in Detroit. Below Janis talks candidly about Janis Ian and her life as a 16 year old sensationalist.

...

On Saturday, January 4, Victory Fidelman and Ron Halstead, two members of the Resistance, along with two servicemen, Seaman Norman Gelnaw and Ray Greer, a member of U.S. Army Military Intelligence and a Vietnam veteran, distributed copies of The Bond to active duty servicemen at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

...

Solidarity and Mutual Aid, two anarchist bedrock principles, are being tested in the real world with the rise of the fascist right.

Although small in numbers, they have gained social and political space as the result of the election of Donald Trump.

We, like many others, pledge they will find no home, no safe haven from which to spread their toxic message of racism and authoritarianism. We will also defend ourselves and at-risk populations from the physical and political threat they pose.

...

“If it’s a war the anarchists want, then damn it, it will start here.”

-- Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen Project, quoted in the Sacramento Bee, 10/30/05, in reference to the anti-minutemen demo at the capitol building.

There’s a fire going on. It’s destroying your home, your land. You want to stay and fight it, but you’re suffocating, you need fresh air. You try to leave, but the doors are locked, bolted shut. There’s a long line of other people waiting to get out too. You start waiting, but realize you’ll never get there. Some people are breaking windows, jumping through; some make it, others die on the way out. There are men with guns waiting outside the windows, another obstacle. You make it out, past the gunmen, falling into another house, through another window. You are welcome here, as long as you don’t talk, just cook and clean. Some people want you to leave, to jump back into the fire. Others want to help you, but they don’t know how. They try talking to the landlords. They try fighting the people who want to kick you out. They try building another house within the house. You appreciate the help, but you’re not sure who to trust, not sure what you want. Do you want to stay here, or go back home? The ground is familiar, but the house is different. The fires here are different, much slower then at home. But they are starting up again. In this house? Even here, you start smelling gasoline again. This time you see it coming, joining with others like you to call “FIRE” before it hits. Some people notice. The gasoline covers too much and splashes on some others; they’re angry as well. People are saying that you started the fire, that we need more doors and locks, fewer windows, in order to stop more firebrands like you from entering. You know this is a lie. Now you’re caught between fires, between doors, desiring the one thing that no-one is willing to do: to stop these fucking fires. But you can’t seem to find who started them. Everyone has a different answer.

...

a review of

Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis Edited by Marina Sitrin and the Colectiva Sembrar. Pluto Press, London, 2020

Every nation state has failed miserably in preventing, controlling and managing the still raging COVID 19 pandemic. While military, police, and prison systems continue unabated in their coercive functions, hospitals, public health and social welfare systems in many parts of the world are overwhelmed and in disarray.

...

Between sips of Miller High Life I glance down the length of the bar: there is a twenty-six-year-old PhD candidate in mathematics; the assistant to the dean of the graduate school in her early thirties; a girl with more tattoos than fingers; our 53-year-old elder statesmen, and me a window cleaner.

...

As a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, there is renewed interest in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague. While providing a fictional confrontation with a life-threatening infectious disease, the novel also reflects Camus’ perspectives on solidarity. Those expressions of solidarity convey meanings that have resonance for our present situation in relation to Covid-19.

...

The 2013 Moore tornado was an EF5 velocity storm that struck Moore, Oklahoma, and adjacent areas on the afternoon of May 20, 2013, with peak winds estimated at 210 miles per hour, killing 23 people and injuring 377 others.

At the beginning of June, when I arrived in Little Axe, Okla. to take a look at post-tornado recovery efforts, the countryside was still in crisis mode. Mountains of rubble and garbage filled gravel roads and red dirt paths leading to the remains of homes. Neighborhoods that had been full of working-class houses were uprooted and dirty, unsafe tent camps were all that remained.

...

“The past is not only not dead, it’s not even past.”

-- W. Faulkner

The second ship ever built was probably a pirate ship. When Sumerians and Harappans and Egyptians sailed to “the Land of Punt” 5,000 years ago seeking apes and ivory, gold and copper, no doubt some proto-Blackbeard on a reed raft was already dogging their wake.

...

“Someday the power will die

the lights will fade...

the stars will shine...

WE ALREADY LIVE IN RUINS”

I recently sat down to a dinner of roadkill venison. As an ex-vegetarian who occasionally eats fish or poultry, I did not approach this culinary choice lightly. However, I love an adventure, and I savored each succulent morsel as it emanated wood-smoke and blood.

...

First appeared in the Kenyon Review, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH 43022.

Poet and translator Lewis Hyde has accomplished several distinct things with this article. First of all, by way of traditional (that is, “pre-” or non-capitalist) folk and fairy tales, as well as anthropological observations, he has revealed the origins of many of the commonplaces associated with capitalist social relations—for example, things have always been as they are today (primitive and traditional peoples are just societies of small-scale capitalists each working in his own self interest), a penny saved is a penny earned, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, the idea of a “noble savage” is only a modern romantic prejudice, etc. By showing how people—including our ancestors—treat property in, a society in which it is not the ruling sign or the axis around which all social relations orbit (indeed, in which present notions of property and wealth do not even apply), he presents a contrast to modern capitalist society which critiques it from a position of affirmation. Whereas many of our discussions of capital have generally implied only a vague sense of the life we envision, his article reveals that many elements are already to be found in our cultural memory. “Folk tales are like the soul’s morality plays,” he writes, but they are also a key to culture. Hence, he has not only undertaken an “economy of the imagination,” but, in a sense, a “political economy” of culture.

...

I’d like you to meet some friends of mine

lesbians

women I write to

women in prison.

Last year I decided corresponding with them was a good way to continue my political work

being too disabled to go to meetings or to demonstrations.

Valerie was the first

a Cherokee-Chicana femme doing long time in Nevada prison.

An artist without art supplies,

she sends me cross-hatch portraits of her sister inmates

rendered with ballpoint on lined paper so thin it tears.

She has cystic fibrosis

at 26 she’s getting old

for someone with CF.

She tries not to think about what that means.

After all, she says,

no one at the jail thinks she’s disabled.

Her job includes scrubbing the bathrooms with bleach

three times a week.

I try to figure a way

to smuggle in a charcoal mask.

...

a review of

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. 2005. 491 pp. $23.

An influential theorist with a background in anarcho-syndicalism and Marxian theory, Murray Bookchin has spent the past thirty-five years developing and promoting social ecology, one of the few anarchist schools of thought to have its own school, the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. The latter part of his career has been devoted to curmudgeonly crusades to “save” anarchism and ecology from what he sees as its pitfalls: mysticism, biocentrism, and something called “lifestylism.”

...

In response to John Zerzan, “Language: Origin & Meaning” FE #315, Winter 1984.

If Shakespeare was right when he said “brevity is the soul of wit” then this piece from Zerzan must be its carcass. The fellow doth protest (language) too much. What?! Quote the Raven nevermore?

One gets the impression from Zerzan that not only is it by breaking from Capitalism and from Civilization will we only be ourselves—authentic and free—but when we once again attain the grandeur of precellular compounds. A timeless pool of protean soup freed from the constraints of definition.

...

a review of

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by Alexander Berkman. Annotated and Introduction by Jessica Moran & Barry Pateman. AK Press, 2017, (Originally published: 1912), 550 pp. akpress.org

“Thick clouds of smoke over cast the sky, shrouding the morning with somber gray. The air is heavy with soot and cinders; the smell is nauseating. In the distance, giant furnaces vomit pillars of fire, the lurid flashes accentuating a line of frame structures, dilapidated and miserable...The sight fills me with hatred of the perverse social order that turns the needs of mankind into an Inferno of brutalizing toil (that) grinds flesh and blood into iron and steel, transmutes human lives into gold, gold, countless gold.”

...

a review of

Some Winded, Wild Beast, by Christina Pacosz. Black & Red (Detroit, 1985), 97 pages, $2.50.

This review is long overdue. Christina Pacosz’s voice has been an important one to many of us in Detroit ever since she and Fredy and Lorraine Perlman discovered each other, and Black and Red published this, her third collection of poetry, Some Winded, Wild Beast, in 1985. I have had the opportunity of hearing Christina read her poems and prose twice in the past five years, and both times I was struck by the strength and expressiveness of her voice and her vision.

...

In response to John Zerzan, “Language: Origin & Meaning” FE #315, Winter 1984.

Despite his acute desire to break with all of the fictions of the modern world, John Zerzan makes the unfortunate mistake of taking its ideological justifications at their (false) face value; thus, the radical refusal which he posits tends to be an almost formalistic, inverted image of the society which he analyzes. There are no gray areas, no ambivalence in his critique, only absolutes. But these absolutes come ready-made, provided by modern civilization’s legitimation of its existence.

...

Civil disobedience

Has many permutations

You can block the streets in front of

The United Nations

You can lay down on the tracks

Keep the nuke trains out of town

Or you can pour gas on the condo

And you can burn it down

..

Chorus:

So here’s a toast to the night

Three cheers and a grunt

To the Earth Liberation Front

...

TROUNGAN, South Vietnam (LNS)—The inhabitants of this tiny village tell a story that one British Newspaper described as “The Massacre That Chilled The World”. They are the survivors of Songmy.

On March 16, 1968 a company of U.S. soldiers entered Songmy, meeting no opposition. They ordered all inhabitants out of their homes and gathered them together in three groups, about 200 yards apart. When the houses had been cleared the troops dynamited those made of brick and set fire to the wooden ones.

...

a review of

Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. 210 pages. Ramparts (McGraw-Hill).

The Texas Outlaw’s Kerner Commission told the nation that the black and white races are moving rapidly in different directions. Eldridge Cleaver tells it better in his new book.

When one sits down to think about it, he realizes that real communication and understanding between black and white Americans is virtually nil. As Herb Boyd, of the Wayne State Association of Black Students put it, “White students really assimilate what they learn here, but after we dig Freud, we go home and read Le Roi Jones.”

...

“Garden of Joy” The Jim Kweskin Jug Band (Reprise)—The flowers on the album cover have nothing to do with the inner product except that once again Kweskin has kept up with the times.

“Garden of Joy” is a conglomerate of raucous, jazzy and bluesy folk oriented material that steps on no one’s feet and needs nothing but itself to get you high. New to this album and the band itself are the talents of former country fiddler Richard Greene, turned jazz mechanic.

...

Our great affluent society produces excess. Just go down to Hudson’s or walk into E.J. Korvette’s and much of what is on display is either an unimportant frill or junk.

The record industry is not unlike that. Most of what is being released is not worth the time it takes to listen to it.

Almost all record companies are signing and recording anybody who has the slightest possibility of selling. The few exceptions seem to be Elektra, Vanguard, and Verve.

...

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tick—Greatest Hits (Fontana)...this freaky looking and even more strange sounding group has made its first album a landmark. The sounds on this LP were all written by some character called H. Blaikley with the exception of HERE’S A HEART written by Tubbs Segal. Instrumental and vocally it’s a good effort, and the LP is well produced.

...

This band formerly known as the Hawks has the distinction of being Bob Dylan’s backing group. They are polished musicians and this album boasts a lot in the way of imagination in regards to lyrics and clever rhythm changes. The standout cut on the L.P. is a composition entitled ‘Tears of Rage’, penned by Dylan and band pianist Richard Manual: Good.

...

Wes Montgomery—“March 6, 1968” (Riverside)

Wes Montgomery is simply one of the two greatest jazz guitarists of all time, the other being Charley Christian. A writer may go on and on and on about the innovations, contributions, and prestige this man gave to jazz but it may suffice to say that he undoubtedly was the best. This album was previously released on the old Riverside label and definitely doesn’t possess the clarity and forcefulness of his later Verve performances. (Due only to dated recording techniques.) But newly converted Wes Montgomery fans may find his old recordings a source of knowledge and a chronicled account of a great artist’s transition and maturation.

...

There may come a time when musicians may agree with critics about certain recorded performances, when and if this time comes it will be an absolutely mind shattering synthesis of opinion.

I am not talking about the Leonard Feathers and the Richard Goldsteins who have more than a workingman’s knowledge of music. Technically I am talking about the long haired chick on the staff of a well-to-do teen rag who writes in sexually graphic terms about Jimi Hendrix eating his guitar from the inside out, or the smooth talking cat who works in a record shop who answers your pleas for a good blues record by handing you Fleetwood Mac, a cellophane version of the real thing, when you wanted Billy Hawks or Bobby Bland.

...

“A Long Time Comin’”

The Electric Flag (Columbia)

The Electric Flag’s long-awaited LP is in every respect a fine recording and well indicative of this group’s abundant talent and ability to communicate and excite.

It is due to Michael Bloomfield who has reigned in the U.S. as white bluesdom’s most charismatic guitarist and personality. He was perhaps the main attraction of The Butterfield Blues Band for more than two years.

...

This column is primarily concerned with contemporary jazz, relevant jazz, music with not only social significance, but sounds derived from environment, relating directly from experience. The very word jazz to many listeners conjures up stereotyped images. Most common is the movie image, the usual pseudo biographical tale of a musician tormented by the everyday series of musician’s “furies” dope, women and/or booze—not necessarily in that order. There is usually a social hangup or two with the hefty bleached blonde that quickly fades into oblivion leaving tons of grief in her wake. The musician, of course, is portrayed by Sammy Davis.

...

Capitol Records thought so highly of this West Coast group that they saw fit to shell out a reputed $50,000 in advance to record them. On record Steve Miller’s band is deceivingly extraordinary. Listening to this L.P. for the first time was painfully boring. They are not obviously exciting the first time around. The album is so smooth and uncluttered it may give the illusion of childish simplicity.

...

This band’s blues roots were first formed years ago during the British blues invasion started by The Rolling Stones. During this embryonic stage, many teenagers had suspicions that the Stones were copying...yes, copying, but from whom?

Some started research, combing through old Negro blues LP’s until they happened on a song title they recognized, and discovered that the Stones were drawing from many blues sources.

...

South Africa—the rock of colonial racism—has finally begun to crack under the repeated blows of the general and sustained uprising of its black and colored population.

Perhaps the most telling sign that the end of formal apartheid is near is the sudden conversion of South African business leaders to its abolition. Their late September newspaper ad campaign contending “There is a better way,” demanded an end to racial segregation and “peace talks” with black leaders, and breaks significantly with the intransigent Afrikaner commitment to legal and formal white domination. Only a month previously, South African President P.W. Botha pledged no compromise with the black revolt.

...

Franz J.T. Lee, South African liberation leader, will be the featured speaker on Friday, Oct. 14, 8:00 P.M., at the Hartford Avenue Baptist Church, 6300 Hartford. Mr. Lee will speak on the Freedom Struggle in South Africa and discuss the assassination of Henry Verwoerd. There is a donation of $1; 75 cents for students and the unemployed. The talk is being sponsored by the Alexander Defense Committee.

Prisons are the essence of the state. But as Tom Big Warrior, historian for the traditional Lenape Nation in Pennsylvania puts it in the title of his essay, we must “Turn the Iron Houses of Oppression into Schools of Liberation.”

With the most conscious and articulate voices being muffled inside the jails, it seemed like the anarchist thing to do to get involved where the need was the greatest.

...

Charging that Wayne State University’s student newspaper is too leftist and “put out by left-wing radicals,” a group of undergraduate students began publishing a rival daily the week of Nov. 6^th.

The South End, WSU’s s official student publication, formerly known as The Daily Collegian, has come under attack by staffers of the competition paper, The Phoenix. The South End has been criticized as leaning heavily toward the left end of the political spectrum, concentrating on protest and anti-war movements.

...

When US occupation authorities pretended to return sovereignty to Iraq, they erected a pliable government of quisling-proxies. To cover up the devastating failure of the invasion, they created a mirage of Iraqi independence.

During a secret ceremony in a heavily-militarized bunker buried somewhere in the Green Zone, there were no Iraqis present other than the new puppets; only Western news media, US military officers, and armed mercenary bodyguards were allowed to attend.

...

Hardly had the tear gas dispersed from the streets of downtown Seattle before an acrid struggle broke out as to who should claim the spoils. It’s still raging.

On one side the lib-lab pundits, flacks for John Sweeney and James Hoffa like the Nation’s Marc Cooper, Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower, middle-of-the road greens, Michael Moore, recycled policy wonks from the Economic Policy Institute and kindred DC think-tanks, Doug Tompkins (the former czar of sweatshop-made sports clothing who funds the International Forum on Globalization), Medea Benjamin (empress of Global Exchange).

...

a review of
Hermetica by Alan Lea. Detritus Books 2021

The journey of a generation ship is a classic of the science fiction genre. One that tells the story of what happens when a bunch of humans decide to leave Earth in a sub-lightspeed rocket that will take generations to reach its destination.

The lack of unlimited resources and tight living conditions enables an author to experiment with alternative organizations of society, what critic Brian Attebery refers to as a science fiction parabola. The parabola is intriguing because it is boundless despite having an origin point, as J.D. Bernal’s long essay, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, published in 1929, is the progenitor of the generation ship as a concept. In contrast, Alan Lea’s novella Hermetica is the latest data point along the parabola’s edge.

...

“With the aid of the high-powered rocket modern man is indeed conquering space. But in the very act of making this achievement possible, the megamachine is carrying further its conquest of man...At the bottom of this whole effort lies a purpose that animates the entire megamachine, indeed, figures as its only viable consummation: to reduce the human organism itself, its habitat, and its mode of existence, and its life-purpose to just those minimal dimensions that will bring it under total external control...So the ultimate gift of space technics, it now turns out is to establish in experimental small-scale models the requirements for imprisoning, conditioning, and controlling large populations.”

...

In the last issue of the FE we noted that people should sigh with relief at the explosion of the space shuttle because of its direct relation to the Star Wars program. As General Lew Allen, Air Force Chief of Staff, said in 1979, “Whatever else the shuttle does and whatever purposes it will have, the priority, the emphasis, the driving momentum now has to be those satellite systems which are important to national security.”

...

Imagine the United States split regionally into conservative-fascist and leftist popular front-anarchist zones. Civil war rages at the shifting boundary lines with half the country under the domination of an insurgent military right-wing junta determined to destroy the elected government and all individuals and organizations of the left. Then imagine that simultaneously, behind the lines in the popular front zone (say, most of the East and West coasts), there are widespread decentralized efforts to transform the society through economic and social collectivization in producers’ cooperatives, free schools, free health centers, neighborhood councils, local popular assemblies-the assumption of community self-responsibility through direct action from the bottom up.

...

Milicia women at the Madrid front, 1936

a review of

The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, Volume I

by Jose Peirats, Edited and Introduced by Chris Ealham; Translated by Paul Sharkey

PM Press / Christie Books; 432pp, 628; www.pmpress.org

The Spanish anarchist movement and revolution of the late 1930s are undoubtedly the historical force and context most praised by Western anarchists. In absolute numbers, in proportion of the overall population they were part of, and in the radical transformation they accomplished in much of Spanish society, the reputation is well deserved.

...

For the first time since I got here, people are openly and seriously comparing this to the pre-Civil War situation in 1936.

--Basque Diplomat, October 1975

For 36 years now, Generalisimo Francisco Franco has been ruling Spain through iron-fisted repression and the executions of thousands of Spanish workers and peasants. But last month the senile dictator may have signed his regime’s death warrant with the executions of five revolutionaries.

...

A large, well-produced poster titled Libertarians found its way to our office not long ago. It is chiefly a translation of a text written in Spanish by “The International Friends,” denouncing the detention of more than fifty libertarians in Spanish prisons (as of September 1980) for alleged participation in armed activities. It contains a summation of the predicament of these libertarian and autonomous comrades, an analysis of the modern Spanish state (“the tardy reconciliation of all the victors of the counter-revolution”), criticism of the reconstituted CNT which “feels some real discomfiture in this affair. It is not out of indifference or prudence that it was brought to remain silent. The leaders of the CNT want to be an axis of regroupment of libertarians on a trade-unionist basis, in fact moderated and acceptable to the established order. The comrades who have resorted to expropriations represent, by this fact alone, an absolutely opposite axis of regrouping. If some are right, the others are wrong. Each person is the offspring of their works, and one must choose between these or the others by examining the meaning find the finality of their actions....” It then urges practical action to free the imprisoned libertarians, “those [actions] that create the most Scandal [being] the best.”

...

José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, published by The Meltzer Press (Vol. 1) and Christie Books (Vol. 2). They are essential reading.

Stuart Christie, We, The Anarchists, The Meltzer Press. A telling and thorough look at the FAI.

Much of our knowledge of the anarchist resistance to Franco comes from the work of Antonio Tellez and Miguel Garcia. All of the above publications are available from AK Press akpress.org and deserve close reading.

...

“How can one speak of the present, when one feels abandoned by it?”

—Lara Mimosa Montes, Thresholes (Coffee House Press 2020)

“Grief is not always sharp, but grief is always.”

—Mairead Case, Tiny (Featherproof Books 2020)

“How did we get entrenched in this insidious wage labor relationship—where we’re servants to that really repulsive phrase, ‘making a living’? I hate that phrase. We have a living—we have lives. How dare that wage labor relationship—how dare work—overlay itself onto life—and even pretend that it is life?”

...

Richard Mock: Anthropology Gone Bad

Who, then, is the wrecker of the Biosphere? Turner points at the Western Spirit. This is the hero who pits himself against the Wilderness, who calls for a war of extermination by Spirit against Nature, Soul against Body, Technology against the Biosphere, Civilization against Mother Earth, god against all.

...

STAFF COLLECTIVE: Barbara B., Barbara C., Barbara V., Betty B., Betty M., Carol, Carolyn, Carrie, Cathy, Cinda, Cindy, Colleen, Collette, Debbie B., Debbie S., Elizabeth, Fran, Gronya, Jackie, Janet, Jean, JoAnne, Judy, Julie, Lauren, Lona, Lorraine, Marge, Marie, Marilyn, Mary Jo, Nalda, Pat, Resa, Terry, plus assistance from the regular Fifth Estate Staff.

...

Technology. We know that it offers no evidence whatsoever of having any sympathy for the nature of the world, and has nothing to do with human desires for an earth on which to dwell.

We’re the people who create it, perfect it and make it part of the American dream. We bring you the computer, which touches all our lives in ways we can hardly begin to imagine. And who can say what lies ahead?

...

“Cowper came to me and said: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton and Locke.’”

...

WASHINGTON (LNS) Look out, Spiro, there’s an effete snob in your very midst!

Spiro T. Agnew had a very unpleasant surprise come Moratorium day. Agnew’s 14-year-old daughter, Kim (after Kim il Sung, famed leader of the Korean People’s Revolution) decided she wanted to do her part in the struggle.

Attending the National Cathedral School for Girls, young Kim wanted to put on a black armband and march in the anti-war procession held in Washington on Moratorium eve. Papa said no.

...

Redwood Summer seems to have sent some Earth First!ers over the edge. Many of the old-line EF! activists stayed away from the summer actions, feeling that “outsiders” had invaded their movement and diluted EF!‘s biocentric vision. Two EF! founders, Dave Foreman and Howie Wolkie, resigned in August (if one can resign from a “non-organization”) and the entire paid staff of the Earth First! Journal, which is closely associated with Foreman, announced in their current issue that they were resigning due to constant criticism of their editorial policies.

...

BOSTON, July 10—Dr. Benjamin Spock and three other defendants were sentenced today to two years in Federal’ prison for conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft.

The four stood quietly in Federal District Court as the clerk read the sentences imposed by Judge Francis J.W. Ford, who presided over the case. Execution of the sentences was waived pending legal steps for appeal.

...

REVIEW: Various artists remixed by DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Live Without Dead Time. From Adbusters #47 “Nightmares of Reason,” May/June 2003.

The Live Without Dead Time CD can be found in the anti-consumerist art magazine Adbusters; it highlights DJ Spooky’s uncanny skill in crafting deep sonic climates with up-front agitprop intentions. Paul D. Miller grew up in DC and now works as a conceptual artist, writer, and musician in NYC where he is best known as “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid” collaborating with the likes of ex-Rage Against the Machine vocalist Zach de la Rocha in a blistering anti-war shout called “March of Death.” Rather than cobbling together tracks for the dance floor, DJ Spooky welds together seamless and densely-detailed collective hallucinations better suited for headphones.

...

I imagine you, your voice stopped

by the speed with which the lives around you crumble.

I imagine you wanting, trying to write,

not about the blood stains at your door,

not about the fragments of your family

huddled in basements, nor about the hate

rising in pandemic streams

but about the tree hidden in some

...

Angela DeSante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Bill Griffith

Pat Halley

Jay Kinney

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Rudy Perkins

Duke Skywatcher

Sonny Tufts

Bratach Dubh

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Brenda Sabbagh

Norm Thomas

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No -copyright, No paid advertising accepted.

EDITOR & PUBLISHER: Harvey Ovshinsky

NEWS EDITOR: Peter Werbe

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MEMBER: U.P.S. [Underground Press Syndicate]