Full list of texts

Over the past year, there has been a discussion within the pages of the Fifth Estate as to what constitutes revolutionary violence, and what the uses and relevance of such violence might be.

More and more, the guerrilla actions of such groups as the Red Army Faction and 2^nd of June in West Germany and the Red Brigades of Italy seem to be committing at least a tactical error at this time; that is, during a period when there are no mass upsurges against the existing social relationships.

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In early August 2003, African-American anarchist revolutionary Sherman Austin was sentenced to one year in jail, a $2000 fine, and three years probation. His crime? Being a black man who published a website with links to bomb-making information.

Sherman Austin

According to experts, the data Austin linked to is widely available—on the Internet and in public libraries. The state attacked Austin because he is black and because he is an anarchist.

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WASHINGTON, DC—The following statement was made by Paul Jacob, a political activist who was indicted by the Arkansas Grand Jury on September 23, 1982 for failure to register for the draft. Although he is the 11^th person to be indicted for this offense, Jacob’s case is unique in that he is the only draft resister who has been indicted that the FBI cannot locate for prosecution, despite a nationwide search. Jacob left his home in 1981 (after receiving a threatening letter from the Selective Service System) and has been living underground in an attempt to avoid prosecution. His statement follows:

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FE Note: The Fifth Estate has a long history of granting free subscriptions to prisoners of the state—inmates and GIs, but often their masters object to our content. No wonder since our ideas challenge the concept of rulers and ruled that the dominant institutions are built on.

Recently, we have had numerous penitentiaries reject our paper, denying our prison subscribers access to ideas. Typical is the rejection notice we received from several inmates in the Oregon “Corrections” system charging our paper “Contains material that threatens or is detrimental to the security, safety, health, good order, or discipline of the facility.” They specifically point out “Front Cover—Anarchist Symbols” as the offending item. To the morons doing the censoring, this symbol of human freedom is a “gang emblem.”

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1. Title of Publication: Fifth Estate

2. Date of Filing: 30 September 1979

3. Frequency of Issue: Bi-Monthly

3A. No. of Issues Published Annually: 6

3B. Annual Subscription Price: $4

4. Location of Known Office of Publication: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201, Wayne County.

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Title of publication: Fifth Estate. Publication number: 710420. Date of Filing: February 24, 2000. Frequency of Issue: quarterly. Annual subscription price: $10. Complete mailing address 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan 48201. Publisher: The Fifth Estate Newspaper. Editor: None. Managing Editor: None. Owner: The Fifth Estate Newspaper, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan 48201. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders: None. Extent and nature of circulation (a) average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months; (b) actual number of single issue published nearest to filing date. Total number copies (net press run). (a) 5000; (b) 5000. Paid and or requested circulation: Sales through dealers and vendors: (a) 2424; (b) 2339. Mail subscriptions:

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Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

“We make war upon the State as the chief invader of person and property, as the cause of substantially all the crime and misery that exist, as itself the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals faster than it punishes them. It exists to create and sustain the privileges which produce economic and social chaos. It is the sole support of the monopolies which concentrate wealth and learning in the hands of a few and disperse poverty and ignorance among the masses to the increase of which inequality the increase of crime is directly proportional. It protects a minority in plundering the majority by methods too subtle to be understood by the victims, and then punishes such unruly members of the majority as an attempt to plunder others by means too simple and straightforward to be recognized by the State as legitimate, crowning its outrages by deluding scholars and philosophers...into pleading, as an excuse for its infamous existence, the necessity of repressing crime which it steadily creates.”—Benjamin R. Tucker, 1882

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This article first appeared in Open Road newspaper, Box 6135, Station G, Vancouver, Canada.

The long and complicated saga of the now defunct Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) is still unfolding in the courtrooms and prisons of California. Russ Little, Joe Remiro, Bill and Emily Harris, the group’s four surviving members, are all now serving one or more life sentences each and the Harrises face even more trials growing out of their urban guerrilla activities in 1974.

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As the letter on the preceding page indicates [“Who Are the Real Terrorists?,” FE #289, January 24, 1978], though the more spectacular aspects of the repression in West Germany are now fading from the popular imagination, the “policification” of the Federal Republic proceeds apace.

In recent weeks the criminalization of all who express even the slightest sympathy for the “terrorists” has intensified markedly; though it becomes increasingly difficult to say which is the most astounding of the actions taken by the state to achieve this, a sure candidate can be found in the charges recently brought against the father of murdered RAF member Gudrun Ensslin. For having the temerity to suggest that his daughter had no reason to kill herself but was in fact killed by the state, Ensslin (a minister) is now accused of “defaming the state” and faces three years in prison if convicted.

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Civilian Cuban women aid state security agents by dragging Ladies in White to an awaiting bus following a Havana anti-government march.

In March, Cuban police broke up a protest by the Ladies in White, women with family members sentenced to prison for opposing the government. The images of the women being dragged to a bus, their white clothes smeared with mud, were broadcast world-wide as proof of the repressive nature of the Castro government.

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The December North Cass Community Union Newsletter gave some startling statistics about the 48201 ZIP Code the FE office is in.

Its population is a scant 13,010 and falling.

The median income is $10,001, the lowest of the 192 metro ZIP Codes. and the racial composition is 69 percent black.

Whatever happens, don’t do anything until you hear from the authorities; your safety cannot be guaranteed if you take it upon yourself to act.

Stay in your homes, cars or shopping centers. If you stay at home, watch television or listen to loud music. During the day, remember that there is no safer place for you than on the job. If you are too young to work, go to school. For your own good, do as you are told.

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Ten days before Abbie Hoffman was discovered resting eternal, I joined a few hundred spectators in an eerie celebration of ‘60s nostalgia at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. The world premiere of the film Ten For Two featured rare footage of the 1971 concert to free the once radical and once imprisoned (ten years for two joints) White Panther, John Sinclair.

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A karate blow by a young Venezuelan policewoman to an escaping suspect brought an ignominious end to the career of the world’s most lethal terrorist. Stefano Delle Chiaie is the machiavellian figure behind numerous murderous outrages in Europe, Africa and Latin America over three decades.

Delle Chiaie, taken in a raid on an apartment in a suburb of Caracas in March of this year, had been living there under an alias for three years. After interrogation by Venezuelan security agents, 51-year-old Delle Chiaie was rushed to Caracas airport where he was handed over to waiting Italian agents. Captured with him were two boxes of documents, Delle Chiaie’s archives. He was put on a flight to Italy, where he was being tried in his absence for the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing in which 85 people were killed and over 200 badly injured. Other Delle Chiaie outrages include the December 1969 bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana which left 16 dead, the murder of a magistrate in 1976, and at least three attempted coup d’etats.

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a review of

Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen. Verso, 2021

The late stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks, used to close his routines with an idea. Take all the money allocated to the U.S. military each year, he would say, and instead use it to feed and clothe and educate the poor of the world, not one person left behind, then take whatever’s left over “to explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

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Gritty and grimy to the core, inner-city Detroit was a daily regimen of gravel and glass.

Detroit defines the impossibility and the necessity of Fifth Estate. To advocate a complete break from autocratic technotopia yet tolerate the harsh topography required by the automobile; to desire a primitive, communal, eclectic new world while daily enduring the insults of the old world; to publish an intelligent and irreverent response to the inadequacies and inanities of modern life, even as a desperate plea pitched to a small audience--to do all these things despite the distractions of driving and wage work amid the vast exurban expanses of a postmodern megatropolis requires a testy combination of courage, vision, and recklessness.

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a review of

Still Hungry in America, text by Robert Coles, photographs by Al Clayton, introduction by Edward Kennedy. $2.95, 115 pages. World Publishing Co.

Still Hungry in America may be considered a sequel to Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962. Harrington’s book described the America most middle and upper-middle class whites never see.

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I was a Wobbly in the late 1950’s, through a portion of the tumultuous ‘60s and into the always seeking-sometimes finding, ‘Seventies. Learning and honoring the historic traditions of the IWW and sharing tasks and decision-making with “fellow workers” changed my working life and continues to affect my creative endeavors.

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London (UNS) By Mail — Stokely Carmichael participated in the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London at the Round House.

During his stay here, he also spoke with Black people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

On Sunday, July 23, he addressed a massive, mostly Black, session of the Congress and announced he would be unable to attend further meetings next week because he was leaving unexpectedly.

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To the delight of the Black populace of Detroit, Stokely Carmichael, on a mission to raise funds for the incarcerated Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, the convicted H. Rap Brown and other up-tight black freedom fighters, came to town June 8 and with all the ardor and volubility of that other conqueror, he came, he saw and really rapped.

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They shall all tell you, one by one, when you cross them, collectively

individually, in court lobbies or hotel lounges, in schools or inside

mosques. They shall tell you only what they shall tell you, in their

Abyssinian rhetoric of generational apology. They shall tell you the

same old bullshit they vomited before, and after the great flood of the

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CHICAGO, Oct. 7 (LNS)—A day before the SDS national action was scheduled to begin here, headlines all over the city announced that the “historic” Haymarket Square Police Monument had been blown sky high.

The eight foot high bronze statue of a policeman was built to commemorate seven policemen who died in the famous Haymarket Square riot in 1886.

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In 1942, the Canadian Department of National Defense invoked the War Measures Act to seize the land of the Potawatomi people of Stoney Point Reserve and established an “advanced infantry training center.” Many of the displaced native people were crowded onto the neighboring Kettle Point Reserve. The rest scattered throughout Ontario in search of homes and jobs, often in unfamiliar and hostile urban areas.

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The Stooges, a Trans-Love band from Ann Arbor, will be in New York City for an end-of-the-month recording session at the Elektra studios.

Produced by John Cale of Velvet Underground fame, the group expects Elektra to release their first single and album in early May.

The band, signed simultaneously with the MC5 will also be doing a number of gigs at Steve Paul’s Scene and some college campuses in the area.

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a review of

That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Edited by Mattilda, (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore), Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, 2004, 318 pages, $16.95.

With a new collection of essays compiled in That’s Revolting!, radical queer activist Mattilda puts the fun and glamour into radical queer resistance. It starts with a cover featuring a close-up of a mouth covered in lipstick and glitter and encourages the reader to “pick it up and smash something.”

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The region known as Appalachia is one of the most beautiful and biologically diverse areas of this gorgeous little green-and-blue planet that we call home. The mountains and forests of Appalachia filter air and water, create soil, provide habitat and spiritual sanctuary, and generally make life possible and desirable. The beauty and diversity have been evolving here for eons.

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From photography collection ‘Resistance to the Detroit Incinerator, 1986–1990.’ All black and white images: Millard Berry.

There were a number of inaccurate and misleading statements made in E. B. Maple’s both congratulatory and critical article on the Evergreen Alliance and its May Mobilization to Save the Great Lakes in the last issue [FE #329, Summer, 1988].

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This article originally appeared as “Berkeley Strikes the Coral Sea” in Fifth Estate #146, November 25 — December 8, 1971 (Vol. 6 No. 18) page 2

ALAMEDA, Calif.—With a Navy band blaring “Anchors Aweigh,” the USS Coral Sea sailed out of the Golden Gate for Vietnam Nov. 12 despite a mass petition drive by anti-war sailors, an offer of sanctuary to deserters from the Berkeley, Calif. City Council and a threat of mass disruption from civilian picketers.

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As Noel and Marie Murray approached their Dublin home after a morning stroll they were confronted by a garda (an Irish cop), wielding a sub-machine gun.

“You’re dead, Murray,” he screamed. A few months later, a justice of the Special Criminal Court concluded a political show trial by confirming the garda’s sentence.

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If a death warrant for Mumia is signed, demonstrate the next day, 6 p.m. at local federal buildings & city halls.

Death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new trial was denied by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court October 30 in an order upholding every detail of his racist and unfair frame-up. He is now under immediate threat of being executed.

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Left: Women of WEAVE block incinerator gate after slipping behind the police line. photo/Jake Right: Shouting “Shut it down!,” Right: crowd overwhelms surprised cops at the gate. photo/Buster Brown

The continuing movement to stop Detroit’s killer incinerator reached a high point on June 3^rd when over 500 people turned out to protest the existence of the $438-million polluter.

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Editors’ Note: The following excerpts come from subversive anti-war flyers distributed at mass demonstrations; the first comes from an FE collective member in Tennessee, the second from the Chicago Surrealists, and the third from comrades in the San Francisco Bay Area.

~ ~ ~ ~

The new ultra-right doctrine of global domination that Bush has made his mantra is seen by some liberals as dramatic deviance from American principles. However, while imperial chickenhawk cowboys killing children and reaping the military-industrial profits may seem distasteful to most, it resembles American foreign policy verbatim since the dawn of the last century. Throughout the 1900s, the monsters of money and might wrought misery for millions.

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Editors’ Note: This article was sent to us by an airman stationed at a weather station in Florida. His name has been omitted to protect him from reprisal.

A few months ago it seemed that the military was more up-tight than usual. As it turned out, this is the understatement of the year.

I have a VW mini-bus that is painted with pop art, stars, signs of the zodiac, etc. In the rear window, I had painted an anti-war symbol.

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a review of

All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body Ed. Dani Burlison. PM Press, 2019

In this collection, women’s bodies are discussed as sites of healing, burnout, grief, joy, transformation, and growth. The essays, interviews, and other writing vary immensely in tone and style, and there is a sense that this is a place where women’s anger is being expressed freely, however the contributors choose to do so.

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Mbeke Waseme in Malacca, Malaysia

I’ve never worked in a school with coloured people.

I looked at her wondering why she felt the need to tell us that. The day I submitted my poem, I found out why.

That moment when you submit a piece of work and you’re standing at the teacher’s desk not quite able to read what their thoughts are.

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a review of

We are the Birds of the Coming Storm by Lola Lafon. Seagull Books, 2014, translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball

Originally published in 2011 as Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempête qui s’annonce

We are the Birds of the Coming Storm is French author Lola Lafond’s third novel, and the first to be translated into English. It is the story of three women whose lives converge and intertwine during a time of personal and political upheaval.

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TO SERVE THE PEOPLE. Brothers and sisters all over pigamerika are waging war, making revolution. To so serve the people, the STP coalition has been formed.

As brother Fred Hampton said: “...theory’s cool, but theory without practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them—the two go together.” He was talking the truth.

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NEW YORK, N Y. (LNS)—Two groovy suburbanites have been growing grass in the gardens of the local police station, country club, American Legion, and Catholic church. The growers, Bill and Frank, are brothers and hale from Westchester County, where they own their own homes and belong to a country club. “We are only interested in decorating symbols of hypocrisy. We’d never do it to a high school or library,” but they hint that the U.N. may be a target.

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From a talk given at the Fourth Annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, May 18, 2003

Think back to the Great Depression and World War II and envision the odd alliances that developed around the world in the face of capitalist crisis and rising fascism: the Hitler-Stalin pact, for instance, or syndicalist support for Mussolini. Or, imagine militant anti-fascists in the underground resistance (often dominated by Stalinists) building ties with US and British military forces. Radicals in North America split between those who encouraged enrollment in the fight against fascism and those who did time in prison for refusing the draft. Think of the strange permutations of Peronism in Argentina, the “green” and “left” wings of the Nazi Party, the failure of the European left in the face of Italian occupation in Ethiopia, or the twists and turns of East Asian resistance to Japanese occupation.

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From a talk given at the Fourth Annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, May 18, 2003

Think back to the Great Depression and World War II and envision the odd alliances that developed around the world in the face of capitalist crisis and rising fascism: the Hitler-Stalin pact, for instance, or syndicalist support for Mussolini. Or, imagine militant anti-fascists in the underground resistance (often dominated by Stalinists) building ties with US and British military forces. Radicals in North America split between those who encouraged enrollment in the fight against fascism and those who did time in prison for refusing the draft. Think of the strange permutations of Peronism in Argentina, the “green” and “left” wings of the Nazi Party, the failure of the European left in the face of Italian occupation in Ethiopia, or the twists and turns of East Asian resistance to Japanese occupation.

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a review of

Street Magic. Edward Claflin in collaboration with Jeff Sheridan, Doubleday/Dolphin Books, 1977

By far the most dominant feature of American streets is that hardly anything happens. The routines of commerce and work continue like clock-work, dangerous beasts are extinct, and vivid characters have perished as has literature since World War One.

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Photo / Jeannene Seeger

Representatives from five Ann Arbor revolutionary groups convened at Trans-Love Energies Monday, August 11, to announce to the press the formation of a working coalition of the White Panther Party, the God’s Children motorcycle club, the Black Berets, Sunnygoode Street commune, and the Congolean Maulers.

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We were walking down Forest near the freeway after buying some smokes when a carload of Wayne State cops were breaking away from the light and saw us. They cruised up and junior pig sitting shotgun pulls us over.

“Let’s see some I.D.,” the two-year college grad stated.

“Hell, man, that’s bullshit. We’re just walkin’ down the street and you ain’t got no right stopping us from doin’ just that.”

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Three ramshackle, trash-can heated huts on York Avenue between Second and Third stand as mute testimony to a strike against the General Electric Corporation which has gone on in Detroit and across the nation since October 26^th of last year.

Inside these cramped quarters GE workers from Detroit local 947 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) huddle together drinking hot coffee, between stints on the picket line, in an attempt to fight off the chill of subfreezing Michigan winter.

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On October 15, 25,000 Detroiters added their voice to the millions of others across the country saying “End the War in Vietnam, Bring All the Troops Home Now.” President Nixon, as he had promised, did not listen to that cry. The war continues and so does the Fall Anti-War Offensive.

The dates for the next phase are Nov. 13, 14, and 15. We urge every American who wants the carnage in Vietnam ended to participate as fully as possible in the scheduled events of those days.

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If the publishing of a sympathetic account of a union struggle seems inconsistent with our perspective, which views unions as auxiliary organs of Capital, let us clarify the matter. As people who have spent our adult lives as wage workers and members of several different trade unions, we have always supported the struggles of our fellow workers to improve their lot within Capital. What we are adamant about is that union struggles have absolutely nothing to do with the revolutionary struggle for a communist society.

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“There has had to be an escalation on this campus.”

—S.I. Hayakawa, President, San Francisco State College

We live in a MacLuhanesque age. The world is our village, its inhabitants are all as close as the nearest TV screen.

California, and most especially, switched on San Francisco, are where it’s all at—right?

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Last week we went out on strike. We shut down universities and colleges across the country. Over 400 schools learned the power of the political strike. Hundreds of thousands of students moved militantly in rage over the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State murders. We trashed ROTC buildings, occupied administration centers, fought police, and made demands that put our schools against the wall.

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The word huelga means strike, and it’s fast becoming a word in the American language as the strike that began in the grape fields surrounding Delano slowly radiates out across the country. But to those in the strike area, those who grew up in these fields and are now standing up for a union to protest the long years of suffering and deprivation huelga means a great deal more. It means the small things, it means a decent meal for their families, a chance for a decent home and a choice for them whether or not their children will work in these fields; it means a vacation that is more than a flat tire, or an illness, or rain. And it means the big things; it means that finally, as a body the farm workers are standing up together to present a bill long overdue: a bill to be paid not only with decent wages and human treatment in the fields—but a debt of enormous respect owed to these men and women, and to their parents.

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“The Big Rock Candy Mountain” has to be one of the greatest anti-work anthems in American popular music. One-time Wobbly busker and radio-show hillbilly Harry McClintock of Knoxville, Tennessee connived to claim authorship of the song in the mid-1920s (as he also did with another one of the IWW’s greatest hits, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum”), but the song has existed in one form or another since the nineteenth-century. Hal Rammel, in his ambitious and imaginative study Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (1990), goes further and traces the song’s genealogy back to old European folk practices like the carnival and mummers’ plays. The song is a scruffy paean to the most potent weapon of the weak: the utopian imagination that can supersede the grim miseries of oppression, exploitation and want.

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“Their lives are like their knitting: introspective yet mindless; fussy, exacting, repetitive and pale-tinted by the cheaper dye.”

-- Rikki Ducornet

When I first encountered godless anarchy in the late 1970s, it was its excess, its unconstrained exploration and experimentation with the furthest realms of passion and ideas, and its desire and dreams that attracted me.

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a review of

China On Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance edited by Hao Ren; English edition edited by Zhongjin Li and Eli Friedman. Haymarket Books, 2016

Striking to Survive: Workers Resistance to Factory Relocations in China by Fan Shigang, translated by Henry Moss. Haymarket Books, 2018

The modern state of China, by capitalist standards, is generally thriving. The nation’s economic growth rate, considered to be a prime indicator of prosperity, is significantly higher than that of the western industrialized countries, even with its recent slowdowns.

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Fourteen people were arrested and a number of assault charges are pending after two days of protest by Wayne University students, Oct. 24 and 25, at the site of a Defense and Government Procurement Conference set up to bring more defense business into Michigan.

John Chiodo (Ieft) of Mello Consultants, after having just struck student to his left. Also pictured is Allen Fisk (with camera), Jim Harrington of WXYZ-TV over his shoulder and James Ford of the Draft Resistance Committee

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RICHMOND, Calif. (LNS)—Workers and students here fought together Feb. 3 to repel scab attempts to break picket lines during a strike against Standard Oil Refinery.

Some 500 students and 800 workers slashed scab car tires and shattered windows with clubs. Strike breakers on foot were pushed back and beaten when they attempted to cross picket lines. When the company goons arrived to photograph the pickets, they were jumped and their cameras were demolished.

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WINDSOR, Ont.—For the first time in its history, the University of Windsor has felt the effects of increasing student demands for a voice in those decisions which affect their lives.

On Feb. 11, 55 students took over the Theology and Classics departments in the South Wing of the Administration Building.

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College and high school antiwar activists and leaders are scheduled to converge on the campus of Cleveland’s Case-Western Reserve University this month to discuss, debate and decide on a future course for the student antiwar movement.

The February 14 and 15 national conference, called by the Student Mobilization Committee to End The War in Vietnam (SMC), is expected to be the largest anti-war student gathering to date. The SMC is encouraging all young people against the war interested in helping to chart the Spring program and strategy for the SMC and the student anti-war movement to come and participate in the conference.

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From Michigan Daily—An estimated 600 students from 100 high schools and colleges across the nation overwhelmingly approved a resolution here Sunday calling for a nationwide Vietnam referendum on campuses next fall.

The students took part in a two-day Student Mobilization Committee meeting at the University of Chicago last weekend.

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BUFFALO, New York (LNS) Students at the State University of New York at Buffalo pulled off a series; of actions for nearly a week in support of black athletes’ demands and to get police off campus in late February. They fought with police, attacked ‘political targets on campus and finally shut the place down on March 2.

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Washington, March 29, (UPI)—The Defense Department called today for the drafting of 34,600 men in May. It had asked for 21,700 for April.

The Army still needs 90,000 more men to complete its buildup for the Vietnam war.

The new draft call dimmed hopes previously expressed that the induction of college students might be avoided. Selective Service officials believe that induction of college students would be unnecessary if the draft could be kept below 30,000 a month.

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UPS — If you’re tripping, don’t read this now. Save it for later, and enjoy your trip Otherwise—Evidence, admittedly somewhat inconclusive, has been brought forth seemingly indicating that LSD can do damage to human chromosomes. Studies are being made in Buffalo, Bellevue University Hospital here, and at the University of Oregon. The first work reported on, that of Buffalo scientists, is the least significant.

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A bizarre chiller which gives Rock Hudson a chance at drama, for a change, provides an evening of unusual entertainment in the John Frankenheimer film, “Seconds,” now appearing at the Studio New Center Theatre.

A fantastic organization, equally amazing in its efficiency and pose, offers Mr. Hudson a second chance at life. Excellent photography and a good performance by Rock brings you to a startling climax which is certainly not meant for weak hearts. Gagged and bound, Mr. Hudson has never looked nor sounded so convincing before.

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As someone who has spent her entire learning life in public schools, from a public elementary school in Oklahoma to a public University in Colorado, my career has been a multidimensional experience based on dynamic inquiry. Unlike many, I never really thought of my schools as limiting or controlling. Yet the same institutions that gave me so much vigorous opportunity sadly possess a nationalistic underbelly, a contradictory and conformist core.

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“The ghetto atmosphere was illuminated last week in a study prepared for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement. In a survey of three cities—Chicago, Washington and Boston—the study found that four out of every five white policemen working in Negro neighborhoods have prejudiced attitudes towards Negroes.

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February 1999: I’m pivoting on my desk, basking in a student-led discussion, momentarily featuring a couple of black-clad teenagers contrasting the ideological differences between Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

The twenty alert faces of the elective “Russian Social Anarchism,” stretch about the carpeted room, where Pilot pens race across lined paper as if there are only seconds left to write before our CD musical segue into Chumbawamba, while a girl with cropped pink hair raises her hand, eager for the previous student to call upon her.

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Tommie Suber arrived at the gates of Fort Wayne on August 5^th at 8:00 a.m. to report for induction. He was chained to Father Bob Morrison, Ron Halstead, Kitty Denenfeld, and Victory Friedelman.

Supporting his move were forty people representing Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice, The Resistance and People Against Racism.

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Over the past two years, various actors have ruminated over the perceived loss of the “movement” (specifically referring to the counterglobalization movement, but also referring to a sense of momentum, coordinated actions, targeted purpose, and most importantly a sense of effectivity).

Like a drug, Seattle99 was a vehicle that became confused with its effects. The enthusiasm and infectious power of that moment became a lost object of desire, a model whose failure to reappear seemed to diminish possibilities (for more on this see my previous article “Becoming-Seattle” in Fifth Estate #374, Winter 2007).

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Once again the old Fifth Estate is faced with the nemesis of financial bankruptcy. Our shoestring budget still continues to operate at a rate where production costs inevitably outweigh income generated by the paper, due to our refusal to accept all forms of commercial advertising.

In an effort to maintain the paper and our independence from commercial advertising, we urge our readers to contribute financially to the continuing operations of the paper, to re-subscribe if your sub is running out, to check out Ammunition Bookstore and the catalogue in this issue for reading material, and to pass the word and the paper along to friends everywhere. We at this end will assuredly continue to look for ways to keep the paper going.

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The Hill was run by lanky Louie, an ex outrider with the Highwaymen. “The Grand Dude,” as they called him now is sort of manager of a couple scraggly rock and roll bands that lived on and around The Hill. There was the Sun, but most notably, perhaps, were the Tate brothers, Terry and Hawg, who form the nucleus of the Tate Blues Band.

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a review of Subversions: Anarchist Short Stories Ed. Anarchist Writers Bloc, Les Pages Noires 2011, Montreal 115 pages, Softcover, $14.95 U.S.

This collection is the first ever in English or French of new anarchist fiction. These sixteen stories, offer something for everyone: If you like action, there is plenty of action, as well as surprise endings and thought provoking parables. This is a great idea for a collection of stories and it is wonderful that it exists as an accomplished fact. Pulled together with lots of hard work and inspiration--expressing self-organization, self actualization and cooperation at its best--the publication of this book is a do-it-yourself revolutionary action that means to make a difference in this world.

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Miserabilist society wants our bodies. It wants docile bodies, controlled by fear, by class, and by silence. As surrealists, we desire absolute control of what we do with our bodies, what we want from our bodies, and how we see and present our bodies.

The institution of marriage must be destroyed. Surrealism has no room for man and wife, missionary-position monogamy, and likewise, no place for mainstream gay culture that wants to be as straight as It can possibly be. We demand the right to fuck who we want to fuck, however we want to fuck them. This means total access to protection against STDs, birth control, and abortion—class should not control sexual possibilities. It means an end to abstinence-only, heterosexist sexual education in schools. It means the destruction of rape culture. It means following our desires. It means being able to verbalize and act on what we want.

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a review of

Ron Sakolsky’s Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings, and images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Autonomedia 2002. Please see page 55 for details on how to order your copy.

“Surrealism can help us break the constraints of social realism and take us to places where Marxism, Anarchism, and other isms in the name of revolution have rarely dared to venture.”

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The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power—known by its acronym ACT UP—coalesced in the late 1980s with a simple motivation: the desire to live.

This group is a striking example of the influence marginalized people using radical approaches can have. The ambitious and judicious group, founded in New York City on March 12, 1987, set their initial sights on exposing neglect and falsifications about the AIDS epidemic. They demanded attention and significant action from politicians, Wall Street, and the Catholic church.

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Movement troubadour David Rovics performed a benefit concert in Detroit, October 27, for singer/songwriter/environmental activist, Marie Mason, the Green Scare prisoner serving the longest sentence for eco-sabotage.

Generous attendees at the benefit contributed over $1,000 to support Marie’s prison and legal needs.

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Last summer, I was talking to a carnival-ride operator at one of those small, itinerant outfits that was crisscrossing its way across the Midwest. The carny looked to be in his mid-50s and said that he had worked all sorts of jobs with different wandering funfair amusement shows since his first gig as a travelling circus roustabout at age 14.

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The ageless Sun Ra and his thirteen-piece Astro-Infinity Arkestra will unite with the MC5 and the people of Detroit at the Grande Ballroom May 16 and 17 for a mass manifestation of revolutionary culture and energy that’s sure to bathe the city in its vibrations for weeks to come.

The Arkestra will also appear at the 1^st Annual Rock and Roll Revival, May 30 and 31 at the State Fair Grounds.

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from San Francisco Express Times

San Francisco, April 18 — Easter noon on the steps of the Hall of Justice a cop with a red ribbon in his hat and an iris in his lapel took out a joint and lit up.

“I wasn’t there for grass, I was there for a bigger thing. We’re trying to start a disarmament program with a ten cent piece of ribbon.”

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The pop world is crashing under the plastic bravado of its self-praise, musical solipsism and commercial orientation which leads toward a strict class separation and a degenerate, bullshit path of “mature sophistication,” alcohol, drugs, elitism, stardom, show business, artiness, campfire music, jiveness, an asinine sense of historical importance, and a superficial future consigned to trends, megalomaniac celebrities, and industry-induced myths. A Neo-Roman decadence has internationally seized the music of Youth—fun, freedom, and change.

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a review of

The Assault on Childhood, Ron Goulart, Sherbourne Press, Los Angeles, 1969, $6.50

The Assault on Childhood is a book about the newest species of American human/animal: Superkid, and his manufacturers.

Superkid is a real product of mass culture, a person who is not a kid anymore, but who is not really an adolescent nor an adult either. Superkid is the new American person.

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1. So he thinks he’s got my arms pinned, does he! Little does he know I’m.

2. Super Woman! I’ll drop back and thrust my thumbs into his groin...then he’ll move back and I’m ready for my next move...

3. Right in the groin! I’ve got his arm and head too!

4. Now I’ll kick with the knife-edge of my foot--right to the inside of his knee!

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Four hundred demonstrators massed in front of Penn Station August 2 to support 38 Fort Dix, N.J. GIs who face court-martials for having participated in a stockade uprising.

The protesters called for the elimination of all Army stockades, dropping charges against the Ft. Dix 38, and the freeing of all political prisoners—including Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton.

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The Rev. Charles Williams is a conservative, Negro, Republican Baptist.

Robert Tindal is the executive director of the tradition-bound Civil Rights Organization to The Establishment—the NAACP. The Rev. Albert Cleage is a militant black power advocate and chairman of the Inner-City Organizing Committee.

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a review of

Government Repression, Prisoner Support. Sacramento Prisoner Support, 2012, 157pp., P & L Printing, Denver CO $10, order through pandlprinting.com

Unknown to many U.S. citizens, federal and state governments currently imprison more people, 2.4 million+, in their gulag than any nation in history.

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I attended a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) event three years ago that was promoted as a “zine release show.” Ostensibly devoted to the distribution of recently published zines, the event provided zine writers with an audience of people with shared dispositions, but this essay considers a less obvious way it drew people together across difference and precipitated a politics.

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People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it’s like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens.

—Sun Ra

According to The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness, human civilization is drowning itself in luminous smog. The Atlas is a joint project of astrophysicists from Italy and Colorado and measures the level of perpetual industrial brightness that is reflecting off the inside rim of the sky.

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Explicitly focusing their energies on undermining Russian military activity in Chechnya, they declared February 23^rd as “the International Day of the Deserter” and set up a number of different events, including discussion panels, information exchanges on the draft, hardcore punk shows, antiwar demonstrations, a “Radical Women Against Conscription” rock concert, workshops for international solidarity, a dance party, and a couple of free Food Not Bombs feasts.

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a review of

The Golden Book of Springfield, Vachel Lindsay, 1920, Re-Introduction by Ron Sakolsky, 1999, Charles H. Kerr Publishers, Chicago

Nearly three decades after moving to central Illinois to share radical ideas with students at Sangamon State college, activist-writer-anarchist-musicologist-deejay-and-dreamer Ron Sakolsky is planting the seeds of his exodus from the job that brought him there, at the now sanitized, corporatized, and renamed University of Illinois at Springfield.

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The first GIs to publicly refuse to go to Vietnam, known as the Fort Hood Three, asked the Supreme Court to hear their suit against the war, and against the government’s right to send them to Vietnam.

Jimmy Johnson, 21, Dennis Mora, 25, and David Samas, 21, first brought this suit while on leave from the army in June, 1966. At that time, they made public their refusal to go to Vietnam.

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a review of

Guy Ducornet, Surréalisme et atheisme... “A la niche les glapisseurs de dieu!” Ginkgo editeur, 2007.

Surrealist Guy Ducornet has been active in the Paris and Chicago groups since the late 1960s, as well as a participant in the para-surrealist Phases movement. In 2005, Ducornet began contacting surrealist groups around the world and announced his plans to re-issue the classic surrealist proclamation against religion from 1948, “A la niche les glapisseurs de dieu!” (“Get Back Into Your Kennels, You Yelping Dogs of God!”).

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It seems that the more art school training one receives at the academy, the more one is likely to be confused about surrealism or overtly hostile to it. Much of the malaise around surrealism in art circles stems from the insularity of the art world itself.

While surrealist ideas and practices can be expressed artistically, surrealism cannot be reduced to a style or school of art, even one aimed at inspiring radical political action. Nevertheless, surrealism is typically portrayed by academics as merely one historical moment in the grand cavalcade of failed avant-garde art movements of the 20^th century.

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excerpt from

Breaking Loose: Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid? LBC Books, 2015, lbcbooks.org

Back in 1995, as the banlieues burned, the Paris Surrealist group put out a tract entitled Warning Lights: A Surrealist Statement on the Recent Riots in France, delineating the unrealized potential of such multi-racial uprisings in the inner suburban immigrant quarters to spread across the country.

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This issue’s focus on poetry and surrealism evolved in a surrealist fashion as synchronicity and serendipity weaved this theme into being.

Certainly, our friendship with anarchist writer and anthologist Ron Sakolsky played a part as we anticipated the release of his newest book Surrealist Subversions.

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“Surrealism is the collective experience of individualism”

—André Masson

What is surrealist collectivity? A mutually opened wound, ever seeded by poetry, by revolt. A soft spectral voice in the darkness, urging all nonconformists to come out, and to play. An extradimensional vehicle for thought and action beyond all controls, a device powered by collective vulnerability and individual Becoming.

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When our friend Myrna Rochester, an expert on the surrealist Rene Crevel, told us it was necessary for us to meet someone interested in surrealism who was finishing his doctorate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we were skeptical, even perhaps somewhat hostile. There are, after all, lots of people interested in surrealism, but most only in a superficial way. But when we met Don LaCoss, we were impressed; not only did he know as much about surrealism as we did, but he loved it just as much.

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a review of

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2023

“Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom, and misery.”

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“Here we cast anchor in rich earth.”

—Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918)

For our Mother the Earth, we set sail on Celestial Ships. Anchored in Erda, we ride the wind. For Gaia, we take flight, spreading terrifying Cafardic wings. No longer trembling at the emasculating, defeminizing sound: the Name of the Father. We re-member Mama. Papa dis-membered Mama. We now re-call the suppressed Names of the Mother. Anamnesis for anonymous Manna. A surre(gion)al celebration, a Mani festival for Mama Earth. This is dedicated to the One we love. For the One Big Mother, in her thousand forms, here it is: the Mama Manifesto (1989)

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The concept of history is far from neutral. Under the monopoly of elites, narratives of the past can be erased, rewritten and taken out of their original context according to their needs.

Dominant concepts of history are often used to justify social inequalities by portraying them as natural rather than constructed. We are led to believe that groups who lack power in today’s cultures have always lacked power, that inferiority is their natural state, and that there is no alternative social structure where freedom and equality could be achieved by all.

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Collage: James Koehnline

A review of the following texts:

Green Apocalypse, Luther Blissett, Stewart Home, and the Neoist Alliance (London: Unpopular Books [Box 15, 138 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2NS UK], 1996), £3.50

Into the 1990’s With Green Anarchist, Steve Booth (London: Green Anarchist Books [PO Box 407, Camberley GU15 3FL, England], 1996), £4

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FE note. Excerpts from “Swamp Fever, Primitivism & the ‘Ideological Vortex’: Farewell to All That” first published in the Fall 1997 issue of Fifth Estate (vol. 32 #2 (Whole Number 350)). End note.

Civilizations, most people know, destroy themselves. Radical greens, anarchist or otherwise, need to ... develop a constructive politics of solidarity, justice and renewal that moves beyond one-dimensional opposition to and unintelligible confrontation with mass society.

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a review of

Legend of the Great Dismal Maroons, Presented as a public service of the Grand Ludic Lodge, Ancient Scald Miserable Order, Great Dismal Maroons, celebrating 400 years of struggle for universal jubilation, 1589–1989, by James Koehnline. Panic Publishing, POB 1696, Skokie IL 60076–8696, USA. No price listed.

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