Full list of texts

A review of Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia & Oceania, Collected & Edited by Jerome Rothenberg

Published by Doubleday Anchor, $3.95

A book RE-view

“There’s nothing an anthropologist hates worse than a native”

—Wm. Burroughs

Poetry, rite, shamanistic rituals, criminal dope fiend seers of amazing vision colored w/ the blue stars of tongue hanging prophesy? Color of fire moving at night, thru this field in the kingdom of death. Aztec sacrifice? Cortez loves Motecuzoma. Poly wanna cracker?

...

Dirk Leach began working on an assembly line at a Mercedes-Benz factory in 1977 to finance his studies at a German university. His work, and his reflections on the nature of modern technology intersected with his reading of existentialist texts by Martin Heidegger and Ernst Junger’s Der Arbeiter (“The Worker”).

...

While many of us dream of green forests and a restored natural world, there are others who embrace the machine to the extent of desiring to become one. Echoing the horrors of dystopian sci-fi novels, transhumanism and singularity advocates celebrate the merging of the human brain with computers. But, this grotesque movement comes at a time when there is growing apprehension of what technological Frankensteins have created.

...

Note to Web version: In the print edition this article is erroneously attributed to Coquilles St. Jacques.

The invasion by technological civilization of indigenous societies, be it through massive industrialization or through seemingly innocuous “microtechnologies” in the form of commodities, undoes a society overnight.

...

a review of

David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (N.Y.: Knopf, 1977). 384 pages, $12.95.

David Noble has written a genuinely path-breaking book, one which addresses critical issues in an analytically creative and historically concrete fashion. America by Design is distinguished not only by its scope, by the picture it offers of capitalist development in the first three decades of this century, but above all by the questions it poses. In this sense, the book itself represents a leap in historical perspectives, and it is to be hoped that future studies will begin with the concrete approach offered here, not those which it has surpassed.

...

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of modern, centralized technology, even more than its pervasiveness, is its complete acceptance in almost all quarters as an integral part of the human experience (and among so-called “revolutionaries” as a prerequisite for a change to a humane society).

Humanoids and humans have spent the vast portion of our time on the planet with little or no technology and only in the last 10,000 years or so (an infinitesimal portion of our existence) has the rise of mechanical and technological improvements begun to affect us and the other species with which we share the planet. The capacity for innovation and invention seemed almost innate in humans once the first rudimentary developments of prehistoric times became wide-spread. The first inventions were employed as a means to improve what was often a harsh and dangerous existence, but they immediately put us on the road on which we currently find ourselves.

...

To the Fifth Estate:

Over the past couple of years that I have been reading your paper, I have been alternately intrigued, provoked, or irritated by some of the things you folks have written. And that’s as it should be. What has continued to hold my interest has been your refreshing tendency to re-examine issues that too many people in the so-called libertarian left have taken for granted. You have never hesitated to ask disturbing but necessary questions—without wishing to “resolve” them all at once.

...

In a classroom of five and six-year olds, I witness moments each day that vividly illuminate the tension and conflict within young minds struggling to understand their exposure to culture through mass media.

If survey data published in mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post are believed accurate, let’s consider the following: a television is on an average of nearly eight hours every day in US households, of which the average child watches 28 hours per week, viewing an average of 20,000 commercials per year. The imagery these numbers conjure is terrifying; any anti-authoritarian educational praxis (the combined process of action and reflection) must grapple with this fabricated reality or it is simply irrelevant. We’ll get to that later.

...

a review of

Public Secrets, Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, California 94701, 408 pp., $15 (available from FE Books)

Do radicals get more pleasure from life?

For most of us around the Fifth Estate, the answer is yes. We might not all agree on why, but our detachment from many of this society’s ideological bonds lets us laugh at, ridicule, and debunk antics of popes and politicians. We distinguish ourselves from obedient zeks and this gives us satisfaction.

...

We live in a technological life-world, more so by the hour. Our ecology is now all too largely technology, which has been irreversible, directional, and cumulative. The process that now characterizes civilization is a generalized technicization. Its success is measurable by how totally it has insinuated itself into society and into our consciousness––with grave consequences.

...

It’s easy to understand how images have come to replace the realities at the heart of our lives. When reality appears to have nothing to offer us half so seductive as images, why not? On the subconscious level, we “know” that the world has little to give in the way of bliss, ecstasy, love, adventure, luxury, joy, etc.—little but work, disappointment, rejection, failure, sickness, isolation, boredom, and death. We “know” this because we learn it at school—it’s the unspoken subtext of nearly all “education” and other forms of therapy.

...

Ted Lucas knows exactly where he wants to be in relation to his art: “You can’t b.s. on an instrument—it’s impossible! Everything that’s there just comes out. What I got to do is just get my head together enough so that when I play I can just be what I am—Hey! What a groovy title for a song! ‘I Wanna Be What I Am!’ Where’s a pencil?”

...

Bad news! Two of the numeral codes given in the last issue of the FE [#289, January 24, 1978] for the 1978 Long Distance Credit Card Code were incorrectly reported to us by the Yippies and will not get your call through. The corrected numbers and corresponding letters are: 2-Z and 9-L. Send us a quarter for last month’s paper if you want the entire code. Below are several Revenue Accounting Office codes which allow you to construct your own codes. Remember: never believe anything you read.

...

SAIGON (LNS)—To stem the gold flow and inflation caused by six-hundred thousand Americans spending large monthly salaries in Vietnam, the PX and the military clubs have gone to great lengths to provide for the needs of the Americans in Saigon.

One commodity in great demand, however, cannot be found in the PX shelves or at the bar of the Officers’ Clubwomen.

...

In late May and early June 2007, sentences were handed down for ten activists who pled guilty to a series of Earth Liberation Front/Animal Liberation Front (ELF/ALF) actions.

In addition to jail time, eight of the activists also received a federal “terrorism enhancement,” which allows for increased penalties of up to 20 additional years. The Civil Liberties Defense Center said this was the “first time in US history that the federal government” had sought “such a sentence enhancement for property crimes that neither intended nor resulted in injury or death to humans.”

...

Returning members of the Venceremos Cane Cutting Brigade encountered their comrades who will take up the work of the first contingent of the brigade in the sugar cane fields of Cuba. The Venceremos Brigade is a group of young Americans who have been and will continue to be participating in the Cuban sugar harvest of 1970, now known internationally as the Battle for the Ten Million Tons.

...

Long time readers of the Fifth Estate will remember the section called “Detroit Seen” which brought news from the radical scene in Detroit. We hope to continue “scene” reports in the new incarnation of the Fifth Estate.

Howdy y’all! (The Eco-Anarcho-Communalist Faction of the Society for the Preservation of the Good Parts of Southern Culture officially declares “y’all” a new, non-sexist alternative for addressing groups. People who still say “you guys” are obviously not concerned with preservation of our fine language, or worse, they are yankees.)

...

This summer, the Rule of Thirds recently dubbed by the Nashville Scene as a “subversive art space”—played host to numerous politically proactive collectives. June saw the educational and entertaining Upside Down Culture Collective hailing from our other outpost: Detroit. They shared a mix of radical art history, puppetry, music, and readings, in promotion for their newly released book All the Days After, a collection of art and poetry ranging from creatively pissed off to outright heart wrenching, in response to the events on and after September 11^th. These guys are warm, funny, and intelligent: turning a culture upside down in a city near you or at

...

A few months ago, George W. Bush proclaimed that 2002 would be a “war year.” Indeed, the so-called “War Against Terrorism” promises war without end. Still, the President has not hesitated in making superficial gestures towards “peace.” The latest of these is the recent nuclear arms reduction treaty signed with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The treaty will not dismantle a single weapon, simply move some into storage.

...

Commemorative march on the tenth anniversary of Bolivia’s Water War, Cochabamba, April, 2010.
--photo Mona Caron

In spring 2000, the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia rose up against the privatization of their water, forcing out the US based corporation, Bechtel, and Bolivia’s neo-liberal government to back down. The rebellion opened up new political space in Bolivia, catalyzing the most powerful, radical, visionary mass movements and mobilizations on the planet. My friend and collaborator, Mona Caron, a public muralist from San Francisco, and I spent six weeks in Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, during March and April co-creating art and visuals with local communities and organizations. We came at the invitation of the organizing committee for the International Feria del Agua (Water Fair) commemorating the ten year anniversary of what has come to be known as the Water War. We also participated with 30,000 others in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, organized by the Bolivian government of President Evo Morales.

...

The Egocrat—Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Kim Il Sung—is not an accident or an aberration or an irruption of irrationality; he is a personification of the relations of the existing social order.

The Egocrat is initially an individual, like everyone else: mute and powerless in this society without community or communication, victimized by the spectacle, “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue, the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.” (Debord) Repelled by the spectacle, he longs for “the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen.” (Camatte) If his longing were expressed in practice: at his workplace, in the street, wherever the spectacle robs him of his humanity, he would become a rebel.

...

a review of

Codename Arthur: The true story of the anti-fascist spy who identified the London nailbomber by Nick Lowles. Partisan Books 2021

Codename Arthur is both a tribute to “Arthur,” an anti-fascist spy who spent a staggering 10 years undercover in the nascent far-right British National Party (BNP) during the 1990s and 2000s, facing the constant threat of exposure.

...

The Montreal zine and distro, Mauvaise Herbe (MH; The Weed), celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2011. The journal, with its green and anarchist insurrectionist influences, prints articles in French and English, was first to publish this perspective in French in Quebec.

Since 2002, Mauvaise regularly presents workshops at the annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair and at other events including the city’s Eco-radical festival. The topics include anarchism and the anti-civ critique, the question of organization, the concept of autonomy, and on the challenges to Quebec’s eco-radical movement.

...

“Is any given bombing...the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security? All this is equally true and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons.”

--Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

...

LNS/Peoples News Service, London — As part of its ongoing hysteria campaign against both “terrorists” and their “sympathizers” (that is, literally, anybody who refuses to condemn the “terrorists”), West Germany’s notorious Bild Zeitung (a Springer newspaper) has now offered its readers a chance to predict whether their children will wind up on the most wanted list some day.

...

From South Africa comes the news that what even conservative observers took to be a very bad joke on the part of “Justice” Minister Jimmy Kruger turns out, on closer analysis, to be the certified honest-to-god truth.

Kruger had expressed complete ignorance of the source of the ‘train damage which had brought about the death of imprisoned black resister Steven Bike, suggesting that if as Kruger suspected, Biko’s head injuries were self-inflicted, he could nonetheless sympathize with the unfortunate man because he often felt the strains of his job to be akin to “banging my head against the wall.”

...

NEW YORK (Liberation News Service/Guardian) “Love starts at Chase Manhattan,” said the psychedelic lettering on the plastic shopping bags given to the girls attending New York’s first Bridal Fair at Madison Square Garden on Valentine’s Day weekend.

In a back stairwell, house dicks, rent-a-cops, some of the city red squad and independent heavies had isolated 10 radical women who were disrupting the day’s slave trade and were busy throwing them down the steps, slamming them up against concrete walls, twisting their arms, and screaming, “You’re sick, you’re sick, you’re sick.”

...

While waiting at a traffic light in the city of Karlsruhe, West Germany, Chief Prosecutor Siegfried Buback was assassinated just as the light turned green.

Along with his chauffer and a bodyguard, Buback was killed by two people riding a stolen motorcycle, when they drove up to the right side of his limousine and emptied more than thirteen shots into the car with a submachine-gun.

...

a review of

Test-Tube Women, What Future for Motherhood? Rita Arditti et. al., Pandora Press, 482 pages.

“Human beings will end their second millennium since Christ perfecting the means to tamper, for the first time, with their own nature and existence,” The Economist of London editorialized recently. And it is hard to imagine an area more important for political debate and action than this one which will determine the fate of our children and their children.

...

The ambush-style shooting death of an anti-nuclear activist in Houston, in April, has sent waves of alarm through the Texas anti-nuclear community. The victim of the assault was 28-year-old Michael Eakin, who was formerly the editor of the University of Texas newspaper and founder of the Austin Sun, a weekly alternative paper.

...

A second Convergence Against Toxic Prisons will take place June 2–5, 2017 in Fort Worth, Tex., the city where the Carswell Federal Medical Center is located. The gathering will feature speakers, panels, workshops, protests and cultural activities, including an art show and hip-hop performances, and demonstrations.

...

Since the Fifth Estate refuses to publish the voice of capital, advertisements—the normal source of financing ‘newspapers—we depend on you through your subscriptions, newsstand purchases, and donations to insure our survival.

This issue was made possible through a combination of the above sources as well as a series of regional benefits held on our behalf. The most recent ones occurred in Chattanooga, Asheville, “Punk-n-holler,” and Detroit and combined raised over $1000, with $850 coming from the latter event alone. This provided us with almost half of what we needed to print, mail, and ship this issue. So, thanks to the many performers, organizers, and attendees who made them so successful.

...

The 1988 Presidential electoral farce was all over by midnight on Tuesday, Nov. 8. Vice-President George Bush victoriously declared, “The people have spoken.”

Bush was right in one regard: the people had spoken but in a manner reported virtually nowhere. Those eligible to vote avoided the polls in record numbers to the point where Nobody won an absolute majority among the potential electorate for the first time in 64 years.

...

The 2020 Michigan presidential primary on March 10 marked the end of the progressive fantasy that the American political landscape could be altered by supporting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Party nominee.

Instead, it was bye-bye, Bernie, as Joe Biden swept every county in the state as voters overwhelmingly went for a candidate they thought had the best chance of defeating the execrable Trump in November.

...

National days of protest March 25–26 constituted the largest concerted world-wide action for peace in history. Demonstrations to protest the war in Vietnam took place in 30 countries, according to the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam—initiator of the campaign.

In the United States, the protests surpassed those called by the NCV last October, indicating that the anti-war movement has grown significantly in response to the Johnson Administration’s escalation of U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

...

In THE 400 BLOWS, recent feature at the Varsity Theater, Francois Truffaut telescopes in on one small but very human subject, picking up the story almost at the height of its conflict, rather than methodically building up to it, which might very well have been the “soundest” way to attack the story. Free of the conventional straight jacket of getting in the proper exposition at the proper time, and also acting this exposition out, he is able to give us a greater human close-up. It is as if he were applying a zoom lens to the entire script. And at the final scene, which is the height of the close up, he frames on the face of the boy. Nothing is really resolved--as in life things seldom are.

...

Forty years ago, like today, the country found itself in an unpopular war of imperial domination to vanquish, not “Islamo-Fascism,” but Communism. And, like then, the political system was thoroughly corrupt and in the hands of a cabal of stooges with nightmarish plans.

Like so many others, when an election year rolls around and party politics rules the “news” with its loathsome trivia and journalistic manipulations, I long for refuge in an idyllic retreat deep in a forest far away from all media. But that isn’t an option for me, nor, I suspect for most people.

...

The following is an excerpt from Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs by the Curious George Brigade (see facing page for a review). For more information, see www.ageofdinosaurs.net or contact yellowjack@ageofdinosaurs.net

Race is an issue that has long scared and perplexed radicals in the US. White anarchists today are especially dismayed by a lack of racial diversity, especially of blacks, among the folks who join them in the streets and collective work.

...

The voter is a man who comes where he is summoned one day like a flunkey, to one who whistles for him as for a dog trained to obey, who comes on the said day only and not on any other day. He is a man who comes when authority says: “The moment is here to sanction one more time a system established by others and for others than yourself.

...

This is the greatest honor of my life. It is with sincere humility that I accept this federal indictment. It is the fulfillment of childhood dreams, climaxing years of hard work and fun.

I wish to thank all those who made it possible: my mother, my father, brother, wife Nancy, Stew and Gumbo, Spartacus, Tom Paine, the Boston Tea Party, Ho, Che, Fidel, Huey, Eldridge, Lenny Bruce. Walter Cronkite, and last but not least—Richard J. Daley.

...

My experiences on a recent trip to The Gambia on Africa’s west-central coast, brought to mind the historic leftist dream that the state will wither away once workers have overturned capitalism.

Here’s an irony of history. In the last 15 years, in the industrially undeveloped world, the state has withered away, not because of its supersession, but due to the extension of global capitalism. Talk of state collapse on capital’s periphery doesn’t mean governments have completely vanished, but that many states have diminished from being the totalized agencies of control we experience in Northern tier countries.

...

Militarized police attack unarmed demonstrators at a protest against the G20 meeting in Toronto, June 2010

In a packed Toronto courtroom, November 23, the prosecution dropped all conspiracy charges against the so-called “Main G20 Conspiracy Group,” 17 organizers from Southern Ontario and Quebec.

The G20 Summit, a meeting of international finance ministers held in Toronto in June 2010, was met with huge protests, followed by unprecedented mass arrests: 1105 people detained, and over 300 charged. Countless others were targets of police brutality and violations of fundamental human rights. Of those charged, almost 200 had charges dropped.

...

for Diane di Prima

St. John’s Eve (Midsummer) 2006

It’s the idea

of code that’s cool not the actual

bother of decipherment: the utopia

of not having been in a state of

anticipation or regret. The Dowager Empress

took fresh honeysuckle petals in her green tea — yes even Civilization had its finer moments

...

a review of

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. 397 pages, Hardbound, $5.95 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Paperback, $1.25, Bantam Books

Language is loaded with euphemisms, and the title of John Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident is a prime example. “Algiers” suggests an Afro-orientation, but “Incident” is the stinger. Albert Cleage writes of “the Algiers motel massacre”, and in mid-August of 1967 Doc Greene began a Detroit News column with a sentence which contained a likely title: “The thing that gets me about the Algiers Motel slayings of Aubrey Pollard, Fred Temple, and Carl Cooper is the superb manner in which the police set about solving these homicides.” The irony builds in that article.

...

“Plastic settled in river

“SARNIA, Ontario—A cloud of plastic powder that was released into the air and settled in the St. Clair River poses no health threat, says a Canadian spokesman for the Midland-based Dow Chemical Co.

“The estimated 4,000 pounds of the polyethylene powder used to make milk jugs accidentally was released by the company about 10 p.m. Thursday, Dow Chemical Canada Inc. spokesman John Musser said Friday.

...

In response to “Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism,” FE #372, Spring, 2006]

Dear Fifth Estate,

When I saw the cover of FE which promised an article on the Amish and Anarchists, it piqued my interest. I live in Amish country, Pennsylvania. An Old Order Amish family are my next door neighbors.

...

A former community center that hosted a youth rock scene is now being occupied by activists, seemingly ignored by the authorities. A few blocks away, urban farms are bright patches of green in the landscape, producing vegetables and fruits for the community.

Oakland? Detroit? Manhattan’s Lower East Side?

...

a review of

Now Let’s See What You’re Gonna Do: Poems 1978–2002 by Katerina Gogou; translation by A.S., forward by Jack Hirschman. fmsbw press 2021

A biographer of Katerina Gogou terms her “the anarchist poetess of Exarcheia,” the so-called “edgy alternative” Athenian neighborhood with its political murals and anarchist bookshops. I have been to Athens, once, but the tour guides never pointed us that way. So, I will take on faith a biographer’s description of Gogou, who died in 1993 by her own hand, as “Greece’s greatest anarchist poetess.”

...

Murray Bookchin is the editor of Anarchos magazine, a periodically appearing journal of anarchist thought published in New York City. Copies of his magazine and other writings are available from Anarchos, P.O. Box 466, Peter Stuyvesant Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10009 or may be picked up in person only at the Fifth Estate office.

...

Rarely is an entire region of the world so caught up in the collapse of hierarchical politics as Eastern Europe of a year ago. The infamous “spectre of anarchy” astonished and horrified Communist, dissident and Western politicians alike as millions suddenly demanded control of their own lives. [1]

Tragically, but predictably, politicians of all sides—Party members and bureaucrats of the old regime, oppositional leaders and Western “advisors”—moved rapidly to protect their interests. Thus, Polish General Czeslaw Kiszczak, Interior Minister of the Jaruzelski regime, began talks in February 1989 to restore Solidarity’s legality in order to prevent the “anarchy and destruction” of its original phase (1980–81). [2]

...

“There’s a kind of desire that, whenever it arises, is censored scientifically, morally, politically. The ruling reality tries to stamp it out. This desire is the dream of a second reality.”

-- P.M., bolo’bolo

In the introduction to his anarchist utopian book, bolo’bolo, author P.M. describes why we need visions of positive futures. Second realities, as he calls them, are necessary, else we find that “the only choice [is] that between the Machine’s own dream and the refusal of any activity.”

...

The animal hungers

for light and strength

He hungers

.

Killing himself while hunting

Groaning

fatally and the last

.

Hunger springs

Sleepless

.

There are beasts without burden

that dance / grow fiery

They warily drink water

.

Famine distorts

Tea or sugar or bread

or fuel

or a tender hand?

.

The animal hungers

for goodness

.

The famished grow fat

leaving scraps for neither him

nor her

who remained with her cubs

.

The animal hungers

Tramps through trenches

.

up slopes

Sets out

.

He rears up on both paws and ransacks a beehive

Spreads his wings and throws himself from a cliff

.

The animal hungers

when he moves with the flock

or sells his lungs, his eyes

his goodness, his fury

hangs from meat hooks

.

There is no slaughterer without slaughterhouses

there is a journal. a story. a bus

.

and the barrio where he who writes grew up

.

There are massacres

.

Slaughterers dressed as generals in plastic aprons

or doctors in white coats

the chemists the priests enrobed

.

Or gold buttons / stripes

or suits

Bare-chested

or sweaty

.

When the animal hungers

Everything trembles

Books crumble

The earth quakes

.

Autumn flowers bloom in the garden

In the gazebo unreal and necessary

the breeze rushes

people stroll by

.

Home is one

who smokes sitting in the patio of his house

or in a hotel

or silently waits in the corner of his

infancy

or lingers outside

until they open the door

.

Hunger squeezes through crevices

Cuts grooves

Breathes

Climbs fences

Feeds

.

But the animal doesn’t wait

grows weak or devours

He is hungry

and cold

.

He doesn’t know how to live

with pain and anguish

but tries

.

He prepares tea / bathes

or doesn’t

.

He has had enough

.

Slurps

Dips his bread

.

Sits still a moment

...

A 1990 Earth First! Redwood Summer blockade. Judi Bari’s key role led to the attempt on her life. The annual EF! Round River Rendezvous will be June 27-July 6 in Wisconsin’s Nicolet National Forest. Contact the RRR committee at 731 State St., Madison WI 53711; (608) 250–8378 or see the next EF! Journal for information.

...

Collage by Freddie Baer

All the city mourns, and the crumpled masses languish at the gates, and the cry of all the freeways has gone up.

The politicians have sent their runners to the waters, but they have come with all their vessels empty.

The limousines fester in long lines like links of meat waiting to be roasted in the devil’s barbecue.

...

Amidst ecstatic visions, Anarchy appears. She says:

Whenever you need anything, once a month at the full moon, assemble in the wilderness—in the forest, on the heath, by the seashore—for the state of nature is a community of freedoms. Recognize the imminence of total liberation and as a sign of your freedom, be naked in your rites.

...

Amidst ecstatic visions, Anarchy appears. She says:

Whenever you need anything, once a month at the full moon, assemble in the wilderness--in the forest, on the heath, by the seashore--for the state of nature is a community of freedoms. Recognize the imminence of total liberation, and as a sign of your freedom, be naked in your rites.

...

Newsreel-ARM — Hollywood began to appreciate some years ago that the vision of life it was projecting for the people was increasingly irrelevant to their lives and uninteresting. It was a basic marketing problem—how to catch up with a broad social process that has some of the aspects of pre-revolutionary alienation from the system, without giving into it and confirming its concrete revolutionary potential?

...

a review of

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press, 2009, cloth, 442 pp., $35

How could any black-and-red-blooded anarchist resist a book with this title?

Admittedly, it’s an expensive treat, but I’m very glad at last to discover a writer I should already have known: James C. Scott, who (like David Graeber) is an anthropologist at Yale and a self-confessed anarchist.

...

The art of Ricardo Levins Morales is rooted in the soil of the struggles that shape our lives. Inspiring, empowering and validating, his images both document and embody collective visions of unity in the face of power.

As a result of working with the Northland Poster Collective in South Minneapolis for over thirty years, Levins Morales has developed core insights about how art can be a powerful part of strategy in movements.

...

October 21, 1992 marked 25 years ago that a huge anti-war demonstration swept past the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. and over the bridges into Virginia, wave after wave of young anti-warriors crashing against the walls of the Pentagon.

GIs blocking entrance to the Pentagon, Oct. 21, 1967. Some demonstrators tried to levitate the structure while others put flowers in the soldier’s gun barrels. FE photo/Frank H. Joyce

...

On September 2, 3 and 4 the Lafayette Park Players presented their production of “A Thurber Carnival” at the Chrysler School Auditorium. The cast has worked together only once before last fall in “Monique”; and, although the program notes show that many members have extensive background in other plays, the amateur character of this attempt was painfully obvious.

...

The events of the week of anti-war resistance which began October 16, and which have continued to this writing—including the assault on the war profiteers at the Rackham Building on Wayne State’s campus on October 24 and 25—are of profound significance for the nation and the Movement.

Thousands of whites have in fact moved from protest and dissent to resistance. As many black people were forced to do some years ago, increasing numbers of whites have been forced to conclude that the government is illegitimate. The “legal” structures for change which are presumed to exist in this country are in fact meaningless. White people, in short, do not have any power either—or at least they do not have the power to change anything, only the power to acquiesce. Congress has been petitioned. The Executive has been implored. And still babies die. “Napalm is Johnson’s Baby Powder,” said one sign.

...

In fall 1997, in Sechelt, a small coastal town in southwest British Columbia, Canada, Jamie Elder, owner of the Unity Skateboard Shop and drop-in point for local youth, approached me about painting a mural on the side of the trailer that housed his store which faced the highway directly opposite from a McDonald’s.

...

In the hills of Tennessee, about an hour east of Nashville, on the outskirts of Dismal (population zero), there exists a barn. It’s an ordinary old barn from all outward appearances—except for a few anti war banners and the buzzing, whirring hum of electricity. Inside, the scene is anything but what Ma and Pa Kettle would have intended.

...

Bill Ayers

Fugitive Days (2001) $10

James Bell

The Last Wizards (2002) $5.00

Alexander Berkman

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist $15.00

— What Is Anarchism? $14.00

Hakim Bey

Millennium (1996) $8.00

— Immediatism (1992) $10.00

— T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991) $8.00

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...

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Most book and CD purchases come with a surprise sampling of current zines and radical propaganda.

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When you order books from the Barn, you support a collective and help keep the Fifth Estate physical space solvent. With your help, we’re trying to sustain an alternative to the commercialism of retail or web-based booksellers.

NEW Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. Edited by David Solnit. Almost 500 pages! City Lights. 2004. $18. See the review on page 50.

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The barn is bursting with new titles & more to come. If you’d like us to review and/or distro your independent publication, bring it on

Midnight Notes, Auroras Of the Zapatistas (2001) $14.00

James Bell, The Last Wizard (2002) $12.00

Paul Garon, The Devil’s Son-in-Law: Petiie Wheatstraw (2003) $15.00 (w/CD)

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Book distribution has been a mainstay of our collective for many years. We believe that reading can be a revolutionary activity, and in that spirit, we continue this service.

We feature books by Fifth Estate editors, contributors, collaborators, friends, and other books that have either been read or recommended by members of the collective. If you have a book you’d like to see offered here, send it along. Like the magazine, this project is volunteer-run and all proceeds go back into the collective.

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<em>

Staff Note:</em> The following is a first-hand account of the demonstration and events leading up to it. See also in this issue: West German Protest.

BROCKDORF, Germany (LNS)—Up to now we have used only legal ways—filing lawsuits and so on—but have always made it clear that if legal means didn’t work, we would occupy the site, as was done in Whyl.

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FE Note: What follows are thoughts on the revolutionary upsurge which shook France 20 years ago. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the message is that revolt is possible in modern society. In ours today, it is not the cops which prevent revolt, but the inertia of what is--the weight of the present.

The introductory section is from the fine new magazine, No Picnic, Spring 1988, Box 69393, Stn. K, Vancouver BC, Canada V5K 4W6; $1.50 per issue. The piece from Fredy Perlman, written from a participant’s viewpoint, appeared in Worker-Student Action Committees, co-authored by R. Gregoire, 1968, $2 from FE Books. The excerpt from Jacques Camatte appeared originally in FE #295, November 3, 1978 and is available at $1. Also recommended is Paris: May 1968, by Solidarity, available from FE Books for $3.

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a review of

“The Battle of Algiers”

How surprised we were three years ago by the success of “To Die in Madrid,” Francisco Rosi’s remarkable compilation of old news films from the Spanish Civil War. The distinction of that film was the poetic way in which it shaped and explained the ironic progress and outcome of the struggle. And now we have a new film, though in much the same vein, which is historically more immediate.

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Editors’ Note: The Fifth Estate contains virtually no news coverage of the Battle of Chicago. For once the overground media did its job and to repeat the horror stories here would only be redundant. Rather, we feel that it is important to put the Chicago events within a perspective and provide an analysis of the events that occurred.

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During the months of May and June 1968, the mass strikes and uprisings that occurred in France shook the foundations of an unsuspecting world. This crisis for capital appeared at a time when newspapers like The New York Times and le Monde were describing the French people as bored and lethargic and they weren’t completely inaccurate—the French were bored with their lives under capitalism and their boredom exploded onto the streets of Paris on May 18^th creating a new reality for several weeks.

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A review of

The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit, AK Press, 2009, $12, www.akpress.org

Having been in Seattle for the “insurrection” against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, I looked forward to reading David Solnit’s account of the days leading up to November 26 and his interpretation of the aftermath of those events. I took part enthusiastically in many of the demonstrations and blockades of which he writes, and ran in the Black Bloc.

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a review of

A Desert Pilgrim’s Bestiary by Anthony Walent, author; Maurice Spira, Illustrator. Eberhardt Press, 2019

A Desert Pilgrim’s Bestiary is both archaic and modern. Anthony Walent has been employing this very tension in his zine, Communicating Vessels, for many years, that is assembled and designed using functioning, but antique typesetting equipment.

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LONDON (PWS) Beatle John Lennon is scheduled to head the list of guest stars set for the Rolling Stones’ first American television special, “The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus.” Lennon, along with Eric Clapton, Keith Richard, and Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, will form a supergroup especially for the show.

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There I was, right in the exact middle of it... most of that which had gone before merely served to strain my patience... had to go out several times for a cigarette, drink of water...when they finally came on, it was several seconds before I realized that this was it...every single one of these hideous creatures standing on top of the seats, screaming... the light from the thousands of popping flashbulbs was like some strange acid-inspired lightning, accompanied by this strange high pitched squealing thunder...retreated to the balcony, shaken by the intensity of the pure energy unleashed there in that weird electriarena... Migod, it was Romans and Christians and Lions all over again...once safe up above, away from the insane mass orgasm, I could see just what was really happening...the music was probably the worst pap they could have done... the reason obvious...these savages just would not LISTEN to the good stuff, the real art...they don’t have the vaguest idea of what these Beatles can do With sounds and words...so they get just exactly what they deserve, the crap, the screamers, the noise and shouting...and according to the ritual, the girlies faint and charge the stage, actually throw dangerous weapons at them...an attempt at communication with the fantasy come to life. So the Beatles concert turns out to be a big slap in the face, a musical screw-you aimed at the pre-pubic non-minds who sleep with their John Lennon dolls, trying to work off the forbidden orgasms. Money or no money, I do not want to be a rock-and-roll star. These cats were lucky to escape with their lives. And this was a lot quieter than the last time around.

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A few days before the commencement in Pittsburgh of the July 23^rd conference, “A Remembrance of Alexander Berkman, The Man Who Shot Frick,” Sunfrog and I headed for a little town on the Pennsylvania/West Virginia border called Confluence where several rivers come together. We figured if rafting was good enough for Earth First! founder, Dave Foreman, maybe we should give it a try as well.

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it’s also the worst

when used in circumstances calling for a closeup

or in circumstances that call for detachment

it is only a gift when it employs the appropriate distance

that minimizes pain

between the observer and the observed

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we have a school for teaching appropriate distance

it’s called a slum a favella

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On Saturday, March 26, demonstrations protesting the war in Vietnam were held in Detroit as this city’s effort in the Second International Days of Protest. In preparation for this event, sponsored by the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Women for Peace, Detroit Citizens for Peace and Trade Unionists for Peace, more than 20,000 leaflets were distributed and advertisements appeared In the Detroit News and various campus and community newspapers.

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Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s original monkey dinner was held at 19 Gramercy Park in New York in 1908, wherein Mrs. Fish invited the “haute monde” of her day, according to writer Tom Wolfe, to a dinner in honor of the Prince del Drago.

Of course, nobody bothered to ask who the prince was, but they all came, and there was the Prince, a full-grown Chambezi baboon in evening clothes, fitted in a wing collar and tails. This grand gesture was Mrs. Fish’s way of showing how strange “society” had become in her day, willing to go anywhere for whatever purpose, if it seemed grand and gay enough.

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...millions are plagued throughout their lives by a gnawing emptiness or meaninglessness expressed not as a fear of what may happen to them, but rather as a fear that nothing will happen to them...

Under the dull security and passive spectacle characterizing the total routine of everyday life in modern society lies the unmistakable framework of a withered and decayed social structure evading the grave in frantic pursuit of an eternal market of subservient: human beings. No such market exists anymore. Capital’s-own child, technology, has seen to that.

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The theme of this issue is Sex. The very word can elicit emotions from delight to anxiety. However, those reactions aside, the central function of sex, from mega fauna to microbes, is the reproduction of the species. It is only human sexuality which is over laden with social scripts that translate into pleasure or pain, often on a large cultural scale.

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August 2, 2007 was the 175^th anniversary of the Bad Axe massacre, when US soldiers, settler militias, and army gunboats slaughtered Sauk (Osakiwug), Fox, and Kickapoo Indians following the Battle of Wisconsin Heights. This mass killing effectively put an end to the Black Hawk Wars.

The wars, named for what the British had given the indomitable war chief Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, began with conflict over long-simmering objections to the 1804 treaties. Black Hawk was captured, imprisoned, and put on public display all over the US. He later fell ill and died in Iowa.

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1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black community.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an and to the robbery by the white man of our black community.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day Society.

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There is a monster outside of our window.

The monster roars and shudders; threatens, blusters; blows off steam and rusts. It is a beast of the sea; it is a massive machine; it is dangerous; it is explosive; it has no jaws, but a smaller subtler and more secret weapon... It is crawling with maggots.

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New York City. March 2020, the first days of the crisis that would define the year. The words “mutual aid” began to appear where they’d not been seen before, from lamp post flyers to Reddit neighborhood forums.

Everyone from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to Britney Spears was using the expression. Loosely organized groups ran errands and made deliveries. Friends sewed masks for friends, then for friends of friends. And well before the summer’s boiling-over of righteous rage at police brutality, sustained protests attempted to hold Cuomo and the prison system accountable for leaving incarcerated at-risk people in facilities like Rikers Island, which became a hotspot for COVID.

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Here are four records you might want to have:

1. Otis Spann: Sweet Giant of the Blues, Bluestime BTS-9006.

2. Harmonica Slim: The Return of Harmonica Slim, Bluestime BTS9005.

3. T-Bone Walker/Joe Turner/Otis Spann: Super Black Blues, Bluestime BTS-9003.

4. Earl Hooker: Don’t Have to Worry, Bluesway BLS 6032.

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a film review of

“The Bride Wore Black”

Francois Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black” is terrific. Infused with his patented brand of gentle humor, the film is a modern horror story in which lovely Jeanne Moreau goes about methodically murdering five gentlemen with an iron calm and comic sunniness. Essentially an entertainment movie, a minor effort for Truffaut, other films of similar genre pale beside it.

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Most of us don’t like dealing with conflict in movement politics. There are times when our projects are rolling along smoothly and then we hit a point of contention and suddenly the room is full of tension and discord.

For many people, the reaction is to try and restore order by quelling the discontent and moving onto other matters.

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The burden of war always falls heaviest on the toilers. They are taught that their masters can do no wrong and go out in vast numbers to be killed on the battlefield. And what is their reward? If they escape death they come back to face heavy taxation and have their burden of poverty doubled. Through all the ages they have been robbed of the just rewards of their patriotism as they have been of the just rewards of their labors.

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reviewed in this article

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, by Mike Davis, 2007, Verso, 228 pp., $22.95

Mike Davis argues forcibly that the “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device” (in Pentagon parlance) is a weapon of mass destruction. Keying in on the terrible effectiveness of this weapon (“an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target”), Davis underscores the inevitability of its proliferation as globalized capitalism industrially overdevelops every corner of the world, “like a kudzu vine of destruction taking root in the thousand fissures of ethnic and religious enmity that globalization has paradoxically revealed.”

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Art is always about “something hidden.” But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it.

During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that “unfallen social reality” because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliché about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid.

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As we travel north on Oregon’s Highway Five, from Portland towards Seattle, places and names go by: Castle Rock, Cougar, Mt. St. Helens, Onalaska. A November rain is falling, light rain, blessed rain. We cross the Chehalis river and then approach Centralia, Washington.

There are places whose names remain connected with the past, with a specific event that will forever remind strangers of their existence. Bhopal, Selma, Auschwitz, Soweto and Chernobyl are such places. People begin lives anew on those sites, building houses, giving birth, loving, but the associations persist. Centralia also has its beast of memory.

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In response to “A Challenge to the Prison Movement,” FE #307, November 19, 1981.

Sylvie Kashdan, Seattle

In its mirror image negation of some positions of the prisoner support movement, the anonymous article highlights weaknesses of such single-issue politics. In focusing so completely on this one institution (the prisons), it becomes impossible for people to imagine its elimination.

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CHICAGO—The repression that many have forecast may have come.

On September 9, 1968, Judge William J. Campbell charged a 23-man grand jury with the job of investigating the violence in the streets of Chicago that occurred during the week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Last week the grand jury, in a remarkable political balancing act, returned indictments against 17 persons: eight Chicago police; eight persons allied with the movement; and, one member of the fourth estate, a suspended NBC News executive.

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“We’ll save it in the editing.”

Though true of James Cruze, Griffith, Stroheim, this maxim was hardly any longer true of Murnau, Chaplin, and becomes irretrievable untrue with sound film. Why? Because in a film such as Eisenstein’s “October” (and still more so with “Que Viva Mexico”) editing is above all the supreme touch of direction. Elena, just as Mr. Arkadin, is a model of editing because each in its class is a model of directing.

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In adapting a bulky, densely detailed novel of seven volumes, Mai Zetterling has extricated the following schema in her movie, “Loving Couples:” her three women have in common a place and a time of arrival, the hospital, set immediately at the beginning of the film; a starting time, childhood; a central time and place, the chateau and the longest night, Midsummer. This schema orders and disorders brilliantly the destiny of the three lives in which childhoods, love affairs, childbearings correspond to one another.

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Note: The following article was translated from the readers’ soapbox page of the June 1, 1978 issue of Solidaridad Obrera (C/. Princesa, 56, entlo, 1a, Barcelona, Spain), organ of the C.N.T. of Catalonia.

Since last May, Solidaridad Obrera seems to have gone through quite a change in its content and has found itself in conflict with the C.N.T. nationally. In a recent issue of the bulletin Echanges (no. 16, July 1978), they state: “...this is an official paper of the C.N.T. it appears that the editorial staff of this paper has undergone changes incorporating elements who do not support any union including the C.N.T. It remains to be seen how long they will keep the editorship of the paper, for it is clear now that the C.N.T. nationally (headquarters Madrid) is pursuing a more and more strictly syndicalist line, expelling or criticising sections or groups considered to be ‘assemblyist” i.e. for the power of the mass meeting.”

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