Full list of texts

In my last column [FE #21, January 1–15, 1967] I enumerated some of the more outstanding malfeasances on the part of the leading representatives of the jazz critics’ Establishment. In what follows I intend to go beyond mere individuals, to make clear the pivotal institutional role played by DOWN BEAT magazine in helping to perpetuate the reign of white supremacy in jazz.

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Why the critics?

That is a question I get asked fairly frequently, by friends and correspondents who want to know why I expend so much energy on this particular aspect of the jazz Establishment.

The answer is really quite simple. My point of departure is to analyze what services the jazz critic might be performing for the music (which means for the musicians and their audience). I then compare this with the actual accomplishments of the critics. Since the balance thus struck is so wholly unfavorable to the major critical figures—Leonard Feather, Martin Williams, Dan Morgenstern, Michael Zwerin and the entire editorial staff of DOWN BEAT—I conclude that it is my duty to the jazz community to expose (a good 1930s leftist word) their failings, to prevent them from leading their readers even further astray.

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When Cecil Taylor spoke at a panel discussion at the University of Pittsburgh prior to his concert there, it apparently came as a shock to his collegiate audience that he and his fellow musicians no longer wish to undergo the demoralizing experience of presenting their music in nightclubs. How could the musicians not want to play in nightclubs? the students wanted to know. What was going to happen to jazz then?

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A few weeks ago the New Yorker’s man in jazz, Whitney Balliett, went out to the Coast to catch the Monterey Festival. While he was there he spoke with some of the “workers’ aristocracy” of jazz, the white musicians who make their living primarily from studio gigs.

Like all aristocracies, this one has worked out a complete ideology which “justifies”—in its own collective mind, at least its privileged class position. Thus Balliett:

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The men who play the new styles in jazz frequently tell me that they don’t like to call their music that—they see nothing desirable in having their art identified with the gin mills, criminal activities, hustling, and ruthless entrepreneurship and exploitation that characterize the jazz scene today. (Or for that matter, yesterday. Haven’t black artists always been forced to create in these circumstances?)

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Often when I say “she” or “you” I mean me.

I mean me when I tell you this story but I will say “you.”

I will generalize. I will refer to the broad category that fits my body. The broad category to which my body belongs, in which it has been placed or can be seen from above. The specifics have long been beside the point. I do not agree to be myself.

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At 4:30 am, January 17^th, an earthquake...measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale hit Los Angeles. Everyone was suddenly awakened as the earth tossed the city around for thirty seconds or so.

The damage was enormous. Power was temporarily knocked out, an apartment building collapsed killing 16 people, freeways fell to pieces and a motorcycle cop went flying off one of the collapsed ramps to his death. Because it was early morning the day of the Martin Luther King Day holiday, only 61 people were killed instead of the hundreds which could have been if it had struck in the middle of a normal work day.

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In mid-December, an organization of Lakotah Sioux issued a declaration of independence claiming to unilaterally break treaties with the US government going back to 1868. “We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country [Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming] are free to join us,” activist Russell Means said at a press conference.

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Note: The following article by The Unknown from Seattle was originally written as a contribution to the North American Anarchist newspaper as part of a debate on “the land.” The NAA agreed to print a section of it which has not been done to date; we gladly print it in its entirety. Communications to the Unknown may be sent to Box 81091, Seattle WA 98108.

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The newspaper you are now holding is the last issue of the Fifth Estate--the last issue of a failing capitalist enterprise, the last issue to appear in coin-boxes, and the last issue produced as a commodity dependent on advertising revenue for support, and the hiring of wage workers for its production.

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On a chilly Friday morning, November 6, 1992, a slight drizzle dabbed the sidewalk where the night before a man had been bludgeoned to death by a gang of Detroit policemen.

The story on the street was spreading faster than any newswire—how a black motorist was stopped and dragged from his car by two white cops who took turns brutally beating the unarmed man; how five other officers soon arrived to assist in the merciless discipline of a dying “suspect.”

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The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) undertook a series of urban guerrilla actions in 1973 and 1974 that made world-wide headlines. The assassination of a reactionary school official, the kidnapping of a wealthy heiress and a bank appropriation set off a massive search for the small band. Of the original ten SLA members, six were executed by the Los Angeles Police and the remaining four were captured and sentenced to multiple life imprisonments. The latter—Russ Little, Joe Remiro, Bill Harris and Emily Harris—were interviewed last year by the Bay Area Research Collective (BARC, P.O. Box 4344, Berkeley CA 94704) and related their experiences and assessments of the SLA experience. The Fifth Estate has excerpted sections of that interview and although the full text is not presented, we hope that the major thrust of their feelings and ideas is maintained. The entire interview is available from BARC or Ammunition Books for 75 cents.

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The League of Revolutionary Black Workers Demand:

1. Halt UAW racism. 50% representation for black workers on the international executive board and international staff. Open skilled trades and apprenticeships to black workers. Recognition of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and its affiliates as the official spokesman for black workers.

2. That the grievance procedure be completely revised so that grievances are settled immediately on the job by workers in the plant involved.

3. Elimination of all safety and health hazards in the auto industry. This means cleaning the air in the foundry and redesigning dangerous machinery and production cut backs on hazardous jobs.

4. The union must fight vigorously against speed ups and increases in production standards. The companies should double the size of their work force to meet the present workload.

5. The union must fight for a five-hour work-day and a four-day work-week. The profit level of industry is high enough to allow for more leisure time for workers.

6. The union must fight for an immediate doubling of the wages of all production workers. Since 1960 wages of black workers have risen less than 25%. Yet profits have risen more than 90%.

7. A cut in union dues. The union already collects $10 million a month from its members and can’t defend the rights of the workers.

8. The end of the checkoff of union dues. While the checkoff was progressive in the ‘30s, today it prevents workers from disciplining poor union leadership.

9. That all UAW investment funds be used to finance economic development in the black community under programs of self-determination.

10. That the union end its collusion with the United Foundation. Black workers should contribute only to black controlled charities working for the benefit of the black community.

11. That all monies expended for political campaigns by the UAW be turned over to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black United Front for black controlled and directed political work.

12. That the UAW end its collusion with the CIA, the FBI and all other white racist spy institutions.

13. That the UAW end all interference in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the black community.

14. An end to the harassment of black revolutionaries and their leaders by the auto companies with UAW cooperation.

15. That the UAW use its political and strike powers to call a General Strike to demand:

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The role of religion within authority’s Holy Trinity--the compulsive family, religion, and the State--with its blatant anti-sexual ideology and its historic record of service to totalitarianism, is easily understood as an institution of repression, and most revolutionaries quickly reject overt religious mysticism of all varieties.

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The following are quotations from a variety of “leftist” politicians and organizations:

“Any romantic attachment that goes beyond the distance, outside the marriage bed, is actually a statutory offense, worth six months in jail for the over eager young man...”

-- from Women in China by Helen Snow

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“A revolution is an exceptional event that will alter the history of societies, while changing humanity itself. It is a rupture in time and space, where humans live between two periods: the period of power and the period of revolution. A revolution’s victory, however, is ultimately achieving the independence of its time in order to move into a new era.”

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Although the phrase, “The first casualty in war is truth,” has been aptly realized in the media coverage of the Persian Gulf war, the truth is often the last casualty as well. In the case of America’s military adventure in Vietnam, numerous Big Lies about that conflict continue sixteen years after the U.S. defeat.

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It’s happening again. The tableau that has appeared so many times before resurfaces with bands playing and citizens cheering as the imperial army marches off to war. Now, an additional note is added to the traditional spectacle of men in uniform: departing women, with packs and rifles kiss weeping husbands and children goodbye.

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The liberation of the word & the liberation of the world are codependent. Revolutionary writing should not be grammatically pure, disinterested or unpoetic. It should not be written from the cold vantage point of an absent silent god.

Anarchists we call ourselves—and yet we still gaze out towards Papa/Mama Syntax for permission, still we coo. We control & we deny. We hold back the shy yet flickering wet orifice of imagination’s best trickster—Wildness.

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a review of

The Weight of The Stars: The Life of Anarchist Octavio Alberola. Written and illustrated by Agustin Comotto. Translated from Spanish by Paul Sharkey, AK Press 2022

“These notions of Marxism and anarchism have shown themselves not to be serviceable enough, as circumstances have changed and so they need re-elaborating, amplification, or amendment.”

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reviewed in this article

Guy Debord—Revolutionary by Len Bracken, Feral House, Venice, California, 1997, 267 pp.

This book has much to offer. One of its stated purposes is to make the life and writings of Debord accessible and I am happy to report that in this Bracken has succeeded.

Guy Debord (1932–1994)

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Last July, the so-called United States celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing while another fascination with space was playing out badly. It was with zero irony that the supposed “giant leap for mankind” was recognized while the Kanaka Maoli people of Hawaii’s struggle to prevent a promised miracle of science from desecrating their land was ignored.

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You should have seen Louie’s face. He was beaming like the hero they were trying to make him out to be.

Boy, were they laying it on him. The Detroit News (which pitches: “If You Read The News, You Know” ) had named him Policeman of the Month crediting him with having broken up “a dope ring.’

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Reprinted from The Berkeley Barb (Underground Press Syndicate).

Did you ever have to

make up your mind?

Pick up on one and leave

the other behind.

It’s not often easy and not often kind.

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Did you ever have to finally decide?

And say yes to one and

let the other one ride.

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a review of

Utopian Prospects, Communal Projects: Visionary Experiments in Literature and Everyday Life, Andy Sunfrog Smith, self-published, 2000, 65 pages, $12. Available from the author, post paid, at 1467 Pumpkin Hollow Rd. Liberty, TN 37095

As the late Middle Western novelist, Meridel Le Sueur, once advised her younger anarchist biographer Neala Schleuning in relation to a question about her philosophy, “That’s the problem with you intellectuals. You constantly want to analyze. Life’s not like that. I’m not like that. Writing isn’t like that. Not real writing. You have to be in a wholly different place. Get rid of those dead, lifeless forms! How do they teach you to write? Beginning, middle, end? That’s not life. And that’s not writing.” As the illusions of objective scholarly research fell away at Merida’s prodding, Schleuning’s approach was liberated from the weight of academic posturing, and the insightful nature of her understanding of the subject of her thesis was heightened accordingly.

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Ludlow miners, 1914

This article is the third in a series of counter-bicentennial pieces dealing with the more sordid and less-acknowledged incidents in America’s 200-year-old history.

The era from 1865 to 1919 signaled an important, pivotal development in America’s economy. It was a period in which the dominance of individual, agrarian-based capitalism, often characterized as “rugged individualism,” was overthrown by the organized forces of corporate monopoly capitalism, bringing about irrevocable economic and social transformations in the lives of millions of people.

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a review of

“An Injury to One” (2002). Written and directed by Travis Wilkerson

Tensions in Butte, Montana between the Anaconda Copper Company, unions, and workers had been becoming more serious for about a decade when 164 men perished in the grisly Speculator Mine fire of June 1917.

When it became clear that the disaster was due to Anaconda’s contempt for safety regulations, 14,000 strikers took to the streets. However, the US had just entered the First World War and copper was a vital part of munitions production, so labor disputes in Butte were construed as a threat to national security. Newspapers owned by the bosses denounced the strikers as “pro-German” terrorists, and Federal troops soon arrived to quash unrest by putting Butte under martial law and forcing the miners back to work.

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A minor illustration of the contemporary disappearance of chivalry is the extensive use of a new rifle by United States forces in Vietnam: the M-16. It shoots a tiny, .223 calibre, 55 grain bullet at the very high muzzle velocity of 3,185 feet per second. Its power to inflict wounds is of the magnitude usually associated with the soft-nose and exploding bullets outlawed by the Hague Conventions.

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Critiques of economic development, material progress, technology and industry are not a discovery of the Fifth Estate. Human beings resisted the incursions from the earliest days, and many of North America’s best-known 19^th century writers, among them Melville, Hawthorn and Thoreau, were profound critics of the technological society. Since these writers became “classics of American literature,” and therefore available to all interested readers, defenders of official views have had to carry on a “cold war” against them. The most powerful weapon has been the classroom assignment; most students attacked by this weapon never again cracked a book by a “classic.” Other ways of “conquering and pacifying” the classics have been more subtle: the authors were maligned, the works were misinterpreted, the critiques were diverted and at times inverted.

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“The words that describe what’s happening in the Haight this summer are ‘Free,’ ‘Now,’ and ‘Do It.’”

The most spectacular development of recent months is the acquisition of a 482-room hotel in the area south of Market Street by the San Francisco Diggers. The hotel, located at 256 Sixth Street, was condemned some time ago by the City.

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I saw Maharishi speak here January 21^st and then went up to the Plaza Hotel that evening (I’d phoned for tickets to his organization and on return telephone call they invited me up, saying Maharishi wanted to see me)... so surrounded by his disciples I sat at his feet on the floor and listened while he spoke.

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The postal workers’ strike exploded like a time-bomb across the nation. Beginning in New York City, and spreading quickly through every major city in the country.

The massive revolt defied court injunctions, Presidential orders, and the miserable sell-outs in the union bureaucracies. The workers were beyond the control of legal actions and of their union “leadership.” They went out to demonstrate that they intended to win.

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In 1968, Kiyoshi Kuromiya designed this poster and sent orders by mail. He was arrested by the FBI and charged with sending indecent material through the Post Office. Later that year, after beating the charges, Kuromiya defied the authorities by handing out 2000 of the posters at the Chicago Democratic Convention.

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I would like to invite your participation in an event that will remember Alexander Berkman on the centenary of his attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead Strike of 1892. This will not be an event glorifying the assassination of individuals as a political method, a technique Berkman himself came to question long after his attentat against Frick. Rather, the purpose will be to remember Alexander Berkman—the person, the author, the radical—on the 100^th anniversary of the most important day of his life.

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Reviewed

The Marijuana Papers: A comprehensive reference work of the essential classic and contemporary documents on marijuana. Edited by David Solomon. New York: The Bobs-Merrell Company. 448 pp. $10.00.

If one considers the huge tax loss that would result from a substantial public shift to marijuana from alcoholic beverages and the power of the liquor lobby, it is easier to understand why this mildly stimulating and relaxing herb has been the victim of such repressive laws.

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“There is no individuality without liberty, and liberty is the greatest menace to authority.”

—Emma Goldman, The Individual, Society and the State (1937)

The figure of Emma Goldman still looms large on the anarchist horizon, not least because of her passion for proclaiming the liberty necessary for individuality to flourish as an essential ingredient of any social revolution worthy of the name.

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The dangerous MC-5, Detroit’s heroic “avant-rock” band considered by many the musical electronic equivalent of STP, has been run through the mill lately and may yet come out of it smelling like roses.

Their current trouble started when Uncle Russ Gibb booked the San Francisco rock band the Jefferson Airplane for a Ford Auditorium concert the end of June. The MC-5, who had been promised an appearance with the Airplane when they arrived in Detroit, were informed that they couldn’t play the concert without joining the American Federation of Musicians local in Detroit.

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Movement people should be familiar with the “conspiracy trial,” Its a favorite government tool to stop a radical movement it can no longer absorb or put to good use. It parallels the “Committee Hearing” but doesn’t get the same publicity.

Conspiracy trials are easy for the government to initiate. They usually deal with planning to break a law, a useful device since it is bound to catch the leaders who are the planners. Leaders have to talk to their constituents in court if the plan is to break the law.

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The following is from a translated text of a videotaped message from Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson for Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Front, to a January 1997 Freeing the Media teach-in in New York City.

We’re in the mountains of southeast Mexico, in the Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas, and we want to send a greeting to our brothers and sisters in independent communication media from the U.S. and Canada.

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aborigines anticipate apocalypse...agriculture aggrandizes arable areas and allots acreage, assuming acquisition and alienation...arithmetic adds another abstract axis...authority appreciates art—already accepting abstractions’ ascendancy—as authenticating appearances...by banishing bounty, bureaucracy’s blackmail breeds bitterness between brothers behind benign banality; business believes boundless buying brings back bliss...commodity circulation controls current conditions completely, calculating career compulsions can continue consumption, constantly creating cruel contradictions, colonized consciousness, conveniently corrects...dreams distill dormant desires, darkly divining domestication’s demise...disrupting digital discourse dialectically demonstrates dash, dooming domination’s designer discipline...duplicity defeats double-driveling duplication...equations empower everyday economics, essentially encoding estranged enterprise; elegant ecstasy ebbs...“environment” equals earth?...formula for fusing formally fragments freed from function’s foundation: fully further facsimiles’ fulfilment; feature “forbidden” fantasies fully filmed; finally, fabricate fetishes fascinating feelings for fashion...grammar guards God’s grave...hell, having had heaven’s hallucinatory holiday haunting hearts held history’s hostage has hardly helped humanist hacks humble humanity’s heretical haughtiness...images interpose intermediating influences inside interests; insubordination is interested in insinuating illusion into identifying itself...insolence insists its intelligence is inimitably incendiary, illuminating irony’s impotence...just jeopardize jaded judges’ justice... know krime kan konjure komedy kontaining kommunist kontent...lush laughing lust launches life; lavishly littered likenesses, like, lessen life’s lure ...language licenses lucidity logically; licentious lucidity loosens letters’ lock laughingly, luminously liquidating leaden logic...langorous looting lampoons leisure...modestly managing masso(s)chism(s) mutilates multitudes...matchless money makes mastery meaningless: modern mutiny must make meaning menace mediation: mimickry means mirror’s measure matched...nowadays nihilism’s nothing new...our offense? outwitting our overseers’ overly optimistic overthrow of our original obliquity...private property produces parity—parity portends production’s ponderous planet-punishing progress piss-pure puns parody preyfully...quality’s quintessence quickens...relentlessly replicating reality ripens revolts rigorously resisting representations’ recuperations; rewinding reality readies really radical reversals...school separates subjects, subjecting subjectivity so separations seem sane...scholastic scavengers scrutinize signs showing signification scarcely sustains synthetic scarcity...theory that threatens to transform the totality transgresses tedium; tongue-twisters tend to turn topsy-turvy the tyranny that things talking to themselves typifies...the training that teaches these throngs to trade themselves to time trembles...ultimately, understanding urban upsurges’ unconscious urges uncovers undercurrents undermining uncanily utility’s ugly unwitting velocity vitality, VDT’s vacuous veneer veils vast vulgarities: we wage war with words, withering wage work’s wearying world whenever we wield wit which wickedly widens wild wholeness while working wonders...xamining xiled xistence’ xtraordinary xhaustion xposes xpanding xports xtending xchange, xplicitly xpropriating xtreme xperiences’ xquisite xtasy, xalting xpedience xercised xhaustively; xorcising xtremely xact xpressions xhausts xpedience...your yoke yields yet you yawn...zzzzz...labor of Ludd, po box 11492, eugene, or, 97440, usa

Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote in his autobiography, “The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil...But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong...”

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At the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901 Leon Czolgosz became America’s third presidential assassin when he shot William McKinley with a.32-caliber revolver hidden in his handkerchief-wrapped hand. The president died eight days later. Apprehended at the scene, Czolgosz (pronounced chol-gosh) was tried, found guilty and executed on October 29, less than two months later.

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a review of

Resurgence: Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism and the Resurgence Youth Movement 1964–1967 edited by Abigail Susik. Eberhardt Press, 2023

Who would have suspected that the humble mimeograph duplicator, invented for office work and used by organizations of every imaginable kind, would also have a political-cultural role across generations?

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Dedicated to the Clayoquot people of Meares Island

No one in the small rural village knew exactly how old the fir tree was. To one native old-timer, it was a survivor from the days of his ancestors. The tree had been enormous even in his youth.

It stood, tall and majestic, a solitary tree near the edge of a cliff in a small park. From the foot of the tree, its roots went deep into the earth. Surrounding the tree at its trunk was soft, thick grass where many generations of children had played. Below the cliff, on the sea, people in their small boats sought it as an infallible landmark. To the young, it symbolized romance; to the old, it gave peace.

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a review of

The Bittersweet Science; Racism, Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing by Gerald Horne. International Publishers 2021

Watching two men beat the crap out of each other either in the ring or in the alley has always seemed a little boring. However, not so for followers of the brutal sport, particularly in an era gone by when fans knew the names of every champion and challenger in the different divisions down to welterweights

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In the wake of the punitive No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top legislation of the Bush and Obama years, education reform has turned one hundred and eighty degrees. Today, many schools are implementing much more non-coercive practices, like restorative justice and culturally sensitive teaching.

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1920s Chilean workers scene from El Montaje. ¿Quién conoce a Gómez Rojas?, Teatro Fresa Salvaje (Chile), at 2016 Theatre Festival Photo: Alvaro Pachec

A longer version of this article is available on the Fifth Estate site at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival/the-montreal-international-anarchist-theatre-festival-long-version/

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We stand at a great crossroads in history. If we go right, we are liable to bump into ourselves coming from the left. And vice-versa. But we do agree on one thing: our national interest requires that we wean ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels. Some of us want an alternative to “oil,” others lust for “foreign oil,” and others yet call for an “overhaul” of our entire energy policy, the whole kit-and-caboodle.

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Editors’ Note: At long last, here is the legal column we have been promising for several issues. “The Mouthpiece” will be a regular feature of the Fifth Estate and is in keeping with our motto of Serve The People.

However, no one should have any illusions about the law and its majesty; its function is solely to maintain the property and social relationships of capitalist society. Its so-called system of justice is not blind, but rather sees its way clearly to discriminate against the poor, the minorities and the politically active.

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Five months after its explosive appearance on the French scene, the mass movement of the Yellow Vests (les Gilets jaunes) stands at a crossroads. It faces many choices.

Should it remain outside of the properly political world or should it enter into it and engage in debate: and even electoral campaigns? If it does the latter doesn’t it risk recuperation by the existing parties?

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The Museum of Capitalism (MOC), in Oakland, California, was a provocation not solely for being situated in the Jack London waterfront district, a gentrified marina area, but also for occupying a white elephant of a building erected just as the entire US economy collapsed.

The so-called Great Recession of 2007 could just as appropriately be called the Great Economic Coma, and the capacious future food market that the Museum reclaimed for its quarters, stands as the unintended main exhibit—a cadaver of capitalism.

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This article is the second in a series of counter-Bicentennial pieces dealing with the more sordid and less-acknowledged incidents in America’s 200-year-old history.

March 16, 1968, My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, 7:30 A.M. Under direct orders from Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker Jr., command leader of assault unit Task Force Barker, nine troop-transporting helicopters preceded by two gunships enter the My Lai area.

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Since the 19^th century, anarchists have made opposition to representative democracy and electoral politics central to our critique of the state and all forms of hierarchy. As radicals who envision a world without government, we don’t want to lend legitimacy to the system of politicians and parties. The theme of this Fifth Estate issue is Anything Can Happen. This is not an empty slogan!

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Since the 1960s, Ernesto (Che) Guevara has been celebrated in leftist circles, and even among some anarchists, as the model of a revolutionary. A wide variety of musical and theater productions, political posters, T-shirts, bumperstickers, as well as advertisements for vodka, jeans, laundry soap, and promotions for church attendance bear his iconic image and proclaim: “Che, live like him!”

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The word entrapment conjures images of agent provocateurs, phone taps, and men in suits listening to fuzzy conversations in white vans down the street. But most of all, it feeds into the myth of justice in a system that is hell-bent on pursuing the malicious prosecution of any and all movements that dare to oppose it.

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This is an excerpt of Murray Bookchin’s 1969 pamphlet Listen, Marxist! A longer version appeared in the May 1976 Fifth Estate, which is available in our archives at FifthEstate.org.

“[The essay that follows] is not a series of hypothetical inferences; it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxian parties of the past century--the Social Democrats, the communists, and the Trotskyists.

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Much of the population of Israel, no different from people in the United States, denies its past as an invader/settler nation, is oblivious to the suffering which creates its plentitude, revels in self-generated myths of its goodness and bravery, and cannot fathom why such rage is directed at it.

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A protester raises a black flag during the Pittsburgh G20

A voice says, “Step Forward,” and we do.

We stand one heel touching the other. We are haggard. We have slept coiled next to and on top of one another for weeks, maybe months, it’s impossible to know.

“Remove your clothing.“The voice says.

We do. Our bones jut, poke, and hang from our skins. We are not fed. The woman in front of me, my forward toe touching her back heel, is my wife. We are twenty-eight and will remain twenty-eight for eternity. At this point, I can’t care. I haven’t seen my wife naked in so long I don’t recognize her anymore. There are others behind me, five total.

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For the godless anti-authoritarian, the hope that the current order of reality will come to an end during our lifetimes may be the last possible form of big, world-encompassing faith. For those who are faithful in this sense--whether that faith is based in scholarly readings or is purely intuitive--Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl wants to be the next Bible--or at least a book of psalms.

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July 19 marks the 85^th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution.

This seems an opportune time, then, to reflect on multiple aspects of that revolution. It began as a response to an attempted right-wing military coup against the legally-elected left-wing government, unfolded in the midst of a brutal civil war, and came to an end with the victory of fascist armies in the spring of 1939.

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Anarchism is everywhere in the media recently. Anarchists are blamed and denounced by a wide spectrum of politicians. Trump and his followers denounce anarchists and antifa as being the central figures in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Democrats make a distinction between those they designate as peaceful protesters and bad, violent anarchists who, echoing the Republicans, they charge are responsible for property damage and engage in looting.

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Members of the Black United Front mass on the steps of the Old County Building on April 3 in one of the many demonstrations of support for Judge George W. Crockett. During the day over 3,000 persons took part in pro-Crockett picket lines at Recorder’s Court, Police Headquarters, and the City-County Building. White organizations such as the Ad Hoc Group and People Against Racism gave inter-racial support to the embattled judge. Photo by Gerald Simmons.

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Dear Fifth Estate:

As an Earth First! sympathizer and subscriber to many deep ecology principles, I read David Watson’s How Deep Is Deep Ecology? with great interest. I learned a tremendous amount from it. His criticisms were penetrating and well taken. I also appreciated the tone of sympathy despite profound differences.

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Editor’s Note: The following is an interview conducted by the Fifth Estate with representatives of the Free University of Detroit, a new independent educational institute which will open it’s doors at the end of the month. A full schedule of courses offered at the Free University is printed elsewhere in the paper.

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We are entering another new epoch.

Things will only get far worse/much better from here.

No more trying to find the light or poke holes in the darkness. That time has passed.

Nor do we resolve ourselves to moving slowly through the night.

No, let’s just let our eyes adjust.

Eat carrots.

We’ll move in and out of time and plot quietly under the cover of dusk.

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“The development of capital is delinquency and madness. Now everything is permitted; there are no longer taboos, bans. But, in living out various ‘perversions, men and women can lose themselves, destroy themselves, and no longer be operational’ for capital; out of this there appears-the necessity of a community which can reinsert them into the community of capital (to be more exact, this takes on the dimension of a therapeutic community). An ensemble of specialists-therapists will serve as the mediators for this reinsertion.”

—Jacques Camatte, in Invariance Serie III, No. 1

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Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s recent purge from Yale University—coming hot on the heels of the trial-by-media of Native American radical Ward Churchill—is one of many recent attacks on radical professors that have shaken the supposedly safe zone of the ostensibly liberal academy. Graeber’s contract was recently not renewed under highly suspicious circumstances after many years of teaching at the Ivy League school.

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Very soon now Wayne State University will finally become known across the country--not for its football team (I hope that will never happen), or for its student sit-ins (unfortunately, that will never happen either), but for the fine presentations of contemporary music sponsored by a small group of students known as the WSU Artists’ Society. Formed only 5 months ago, this group has already presented a total of 7 concerts of the new music, plus two readings by young Detroit poets.

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WEST BERLIN—Situated on 3 acres of land in Kreuzberg, West Berlin, between the colorful graffiti art on exhibit at the Berlin Wall and a hundred year old building, there exist some of the last remains of the West Berlin squatter hey-day of the ‘eighties—a small trailer village of squatters and a children’s farm, both founded in the spring of 1981.

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At this moment, everyone on the planet is watching the people of the USA and wondering how they are reacting to the present global crisis. For the most “dangerous” working class on this planet is the US working class. When its compliance with capital ends, US capital will collapse, and thereafter, like dominoes, all the secondary capitals. Some of those lesser proletariats seem ready for such an eventuality, are even preparing for the “day after,” expecting the big holiday.

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Lately, I’ve been immersed in thoughts of surviving “after the crash.” It all started three years ago when our theatre group, unable to find a suitable published play for us to perform, decided to collectively write a play of our own about “the end of the world as we know it.” In The Wobble, as it soon came to be known, five actors on tour get stranded on an island (similar to the one on which we all live in the Georgia Strait between the southwestern coast of British Columbia and Vancouver Island) when they experience ‘a wobble’ that appears to be the cause of the permanent collapse of all power and communication systems.

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a review of

The Nirvana Blues by John Nichols. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981, 527 pp., $14.95 hardcover.

The Nirvana Blues completes the New Mexico trilogy of John Nichols which began with his The Milagro Beanfield War in 1972, includes The Magic Journey in 1978 and which maps the destruction of the indigenous Chicano culture of fictional Chamisa County by development-crazed Anglos.

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The condition of education in America is not an education towards realizing the possibilities of one’s own life, but is in fact an arm of the larger system of the nation with the duty to turn out people who will maintain whatever that system is or has become.

The education is generally aimed toward preserving, and eradicating what is considered worthless (or, it might better be said, what is considered dangerous—considered so by this segment that determines, in that what is kept out of reach is generally this history and traditions of such minorities as Negroes, any respect for the quality of language they’ve developed-the very things that would render them a sense of their own worth; that is, roots of their own strength).

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a review of

“The Northman”

Dir: Robert Eggers, 2022

There was an unavoidable discomfort in my bones upon deciding to view “The Northman.” It felt difficult to ignore how, from advertisements, the film’s early Norse historical setting seemed like unfortunate—if unintentional—catnip for fascists with a tendency for perverting Paganism to justify ideologies of volkisch nationalism. And yet, I was happily surprised.

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The rapidity with which a movement against nuclear weapons and war has blossomed has been as surprising to us as it has been to everyone else. There can be no doubt that the possibility of nuclear holocaust, and the understandable concern if not out-and-out terror which accompanies it, is one of the foremost questions on people’s minds today. The upsurge began in Europe and quickly spread to the United States. Conferences and convocations; demonstrations (20,000 in Chicago, 30,000 in Vancouver, 12,000 in Seattle to name just a few); the repudiation of civil defense plans in towns and cities throughout the U.S.; the growth of peace and disarmament organizations; and the storm of books and articles on the subject have all revealed a pervasive urgency and a growing sense of horror and resistance to the Reagan administration’s recent talk of “limited” and “winnable “ nuclear war, demonstration shots, and “first strike” capability.

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Robert Neuwirth, in his important book, Shadow Cities, says squatters in countries such as Turkey, Brazil, and India, are the poor, usually excluded from the adequate wage work, who do not have the wherewithal to enter the capitalist real estate market either as owners or renters.

They are “simply people who came to the city, needed a place to live that they and their families could afford, and, not being able to find it on the private market, built it for themselves on land that wasn’t theirs.” Of special note here are the numbers. “Estimates are that there are about a billion squatters in the world today [2005]--one of every six humans on the planet.” The best guesses see this group as swelling to about one in four by 2030.

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a review of

The Relevance of Rexroth by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA 94701. 1990. $5. (Available from FE Books)

Ken Knabb, who in recent years has made available in English a large number of French Situationist texts, has written this 80-page essay on author-poet-translator, Kenneth Rexroth.

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As WSU enters her centennial year, the big word is “changes.” The time for a change has been reflected in two areas, the student newspaper, and the Student-Faculty Council. The first editorial in the South End, formerly the Daily Collegian, paralleled the changes with the Beatles. The cover of the most recent Beatles album, shows the group declaring themselves to be ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’—standing over their own casket, with the name ‘Beatles’ arranged in flowers over the casket. They are announcing their conversion from a mechanical fixation trivia (I want to Hold your Hand) to a vital concern with real—even if unpopular or taboo—issues. The Beatles, so to speak, are ‘turned on’ to the issues of our generation. This newspaper, so to speak, is ‘turned on’.”

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a review of

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Danilo Kis, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1978

Few Fifth Estate readers have illusions about the revolutionary nature of the Bolshevik state, but in case any do remain, this book effectively dispels such illusions. Strictly speaking, Kis’s book is not just one more denunciation of the Soviet Union and it does not self-righteously condemn the individuals who were caught up in the revolutionary fervor in the days when the overthrow of the Tsar seemed to promise fulfillment of long-awaited hopes.

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7:58 pm

in this quiet, working class

Montreal residential neighbourhood

the orchestra starts

one person

walks slowly down her stairs

sets a solitary rhythm

taps a pot with an egg beater

looks around hopefully

8 pm

half way down the block

a smiling grandfather

and his shy teen grandson

leave their apartment

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adapted from Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics

The following essay, “The Original Affluent Society,” is written by Marshall Sahlins and was taken from the book Stone Age Economics published by Aldine-Atherton, Inc. We have liberally edited Sahlins’ important investigation into societies prior to the rise of what we generously call “civilization” but hope we have maintained the author’s clarity and purpose. We would suggest a reading of the original piece if at all possible.

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Marshall Sahlins

FE Note: The following is an edited version of the first chapter of Marshall Sahlins classic and groundbreaking work, Stone Age Economics (Aldine, 1972), entitled “The Original Affluent Society.”

In it, Sahlins confronts prevailing academic and popular myths regarding life before the state and technology which is usually conceived of, after Hobbes, as being “nasty, brutish and short.” As with most governing modern mythologies, this one turns out to be another apology for the reigning misery and a projection of our reality onto social forms that have all but been destroyed.

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I concluded last issue by saying that, whereas in previous ages, nonconformists were able to “escape” society by taking refuge in an agrarian life, etc.; nonconformists in the interdependent society cannot escape. They can only rebel. And their rebellion demonstrates the absolute contradiction between the Social System and the Human Id (as a symbol of human freedom and satisfaction).

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A review of

The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Vaselka. Knopf Penguin/Random House (Bertelsmann) 2020

In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, an indecent woman comes gives birth to a set of twins: one cheats poor farmers to make back money for his father, one drops out of college and is eventually killed in World War I. Before all that can happen the sociopathic mother tells the cheating son that they are just alike but he refuses to believe it. He brings his altruistic brother to meet her and the shame he inflicts upon her is the end of her life. These characters are a mix of settlers: early colonial era, as well as recent Irish and Chinese immigrants. Of these settlers, only one set achieves whiteness in America. All benefit from stolen land. All think they have a choice like Cain and Abel. They can choose righteousness or they can choose sin. This is supposed to be freedom; that they can undo generational harm.

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“What have you got in your pockets, Apple Hat?” asked Mr. Anthill pulling at them. “Guts? Electric trains? Horseshoe crabs?”

—W.A. Davison and Sherri Higgins, La Chasse A L’Objet Du Desir

Once, while in my teens, my girlfriend and I were walking along the shores of Plum Beach in Brooklyn on a sultry summer evening to get a breath of fresh air under a full moon. As we walked along the shoreline, we spotted lots of horseshoe crabs that had been overturned on their backs when the tide had gone out.

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1. There is a paradox at the heart of the global capitalist power structure we live in. It is the result of two contradictory truths.

2a. The first truth is that capitalism is destroying our planet. Through global warming, extinction, impoverishment, racism, sexism, homophobia, propaganda, war, the burgeoning security state, computerized isolation, and more, it is literally killing us.

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“Work, now? Never, never. I’m on strike.”

—Rimbaud

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the Paris Commune, an experiment in self-governance that is still inspiring today. It was born in response to the suffering caused by the Franco-Prussian War and the betrayals of the French central government.

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Detroit lost a unique anarchist prankster, mechanical genius, underground musician and reluctant sage, Linus J. O’Leary, after a two month battle with multiple complications from a brain aneurysm on February 25, 2015. He was 58.

Linus grew up during the 1960s in a large working class Catholic family (with proud Irish roots) in Dearborn, Michigan, exposing him to one of metro Detroit’s most infamous examples of bitter segregation, while developing a radical political consciousness against racial injustice and other forms of oppression.

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The movement for social change must be comprehensive and multi-dimensional. There is no simple Solution and no single Best Way to get from here to there.

But there has recently been a shift of sentiment regarding where and how our efforts for social change are most likely to be rewarded. Individuals and families, increasingly atomized within mass society, lack the resources and leverage to have that much of an impact. At the other end of the spectrum, the dominate institutions (corporations, government agencies, large universities, non-profits, etc.) possess institutional inertia to a degree that frustratingly impedes change.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.— (Liberation News Service) The Pentagon still clings to its original statements, attributing the use of tear gas at the Oct. 21 demonstration solely to demonstrators, despite eye-witness accounts to the contrary by the Washington Post’s Paul Valentine, Jed Stout of UPI, and many individuals.

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“Light My Fire” rises through the radio ranks for weeks and, when it hits number one on the stations, the people respond and burn the city down. Or play Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music” album as background music for the Detroit purification: the scope and feeling of the peoples’ mood is there--an elegy for Malcolm X.

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For the past two summers, I accompanied my wife, who speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, to China so we could tour part of the country before she started summer school in a master’s program in Chinese literature in Nanjing, a city famed not only for being pillaged by Japan in World War II, but also as the country’s center of teacher education.

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a review of

The People’s Republic of Everything by Nick Mamatas. Tachyon Publications 2018, tachyonpublications.com

Nick Mamatas, who first entered the radical literary scene two decades ago as one of the translators of Jae-Eui Lee’s Kwangju Diary, has been a consistent yet consistently surprising voice since.

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About 400 men a day take their Pre-Induction Physical at the Fort Wayne Armed Forces Entrance & Examining Station (AFEES) at 6300 W. Jefferson Avenue. The physical is usually the final step in the Selective Service system prior to induction.

For most men this is it. They are 1-A. If they pass the physical, they go into the Army or face prison for draft refusal.

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Leni Sinclair, 1960s

Using the descriptor, ironic, to define almost anything has become an overused cliché. However, Leni Sinclair’s 1966 photo of John Coltrane taken at Detroit’s Drome Lounge deserves that adjective. The image has been displayed in museums and reproduced hundreds of times.

Leni Sinclair’s photos first appeared in the Fifth Estate that same year in the then-tabloid’s second edition. Although the paper’s content was filled with articles about opposition to the Vietnam War and support for civil rights, the cover story was entitled, “The New Sound of Sound,” written under her full name, Magdalene Sinclair, and was accompanied by her photographs of Detroit musicians who were turning the world of jazz upside down [FE #2, December 2–16, 1965].

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“Nationalism offers them something concrete, something that has been tried and tested and is known to work.”

—Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism

On the corner of my block lies an empty lot. One day fifty trees, mainly conifers, each set into a metal container, appeared in the space.

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We might venture to speculate that it was not with deep regret that the Ford Administration finally called an official halt to its embarrassingly disastrous swine flu mass immunization program recently. Most assuredly an unmitigated scam that simply didn’t cut it, -the project was put out of our misery with scarcely a raised eyebrow or a whimper in the waning days of 1976—a fitting Bicentennial finale.

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Throughout his life, David Graeber remained an eternal optimist who refused to accept the world as it is, and saw only what it could be. He envisioned international, directly democratic, and egalitarian politics. To achieve this required practice.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber made an hypothesis: majoritarian democracy was in its origins essentially a military institution, a coercive political process in which the minority was compelled by force to do as the majority wanted. Often the “majority,” as in the case of Ancient Athens, was comprised only of white property-owning men. A real democracy could be found in non-Western examples, where people made decisions based on consent rather than coercion. He wrote, “If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose.” Thus, in communities where the mechanism of coercion, most commonly the state, was absent, there was no reason to engage in a majoritarian process. Instead, he claimed, they operated by not only a formal consensus decision-making process, but a culture of consensus.

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FE Note: In the random manner carnivals can get out of hand, so, too, does this article appear in our pages. A staff member sent it to us months ago, and we found it tucked away in our on-line files. It seemed like a good fit for our theme and we liked the subject matter, but upon reading it, realized that it had been printed elsewhere, particularly since it makes reference to an accompanying CD which obviously isn’t here.

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A dedicated band of idealistic working-class teenagers crash a meeting of techno-fascists at a New York hotel, confronting the group’s dictatorial leaders.

It sounds like an Antifa adventure plucked from today’s headlines—but in fact, this plot unfolded at the first ever World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Despite its reputation for campy story-telling and escapist plots, science fiction (SF) has always been highly political at its core, and this story began when Dave Kyle, a member of a fan club known as The Futurians, attempted to distribute a pamphlet criticizing the convention organizers.

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