Full list of texts

Since the arrest last May of four Earth First! (EF!) activists on charges of attempting to sabotage a nuke plant (see Summer 1989 FE), the federal government has widened its campaign against the radical environmental movement.

Throughout the summer and fall, the FBI fanned out across the Western states interviewing numerous people associated with EF!, and in several areas, grand jury subpoenas were issued, suggesting that more indictments and arrests could follow. On October 4, seven people associated with Wild Rockies EF! were called before a grand jury in Missoula, Montana investigating a tree spiking incident.

...

In the 1990s, environmentalists and animal rights activists engaged in campaigns to put a stop to climate change, animal exploitation, and the destruction of biodiversity. They shut down board meetings, interrupted construction projects, organized demonstrations and sit-ins, held public outreach events at punk shows and vegan potlucks, liberated animals from captivity, and occasionally utilized vandalism, sabotage, and arson against corporations involved in particularly egregious behavior.

...

Signs are that the government has begun an assault on radical environmental groups with the arrest of four people associated with the Earth First! movement and the order that 12 others appear before a federal grand jury. As we go to press, all we have are sketchy reports from the daily media and a quick call to the EF! Tucson headquarters, but it appears as though a class set-up is at work.

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NEW YORK—The American Civil Liberties Union has warned that a new round of anti-Communist investigation by congressional committees could turn into a “congressional inquisition” and jeopardize freedom of speech and association.

In a statement issued by John de J. Pemberton, Jr., the Union’s executive director, the ACLU sharply attacked the sweeping investigation by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of New Left organizations and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the House Un-American Activities Committee’s inquiry into the alleged role of Communist influence in last summer’s rioting.

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The Grande Ballroom, through the goodness of Uncle Russ, will again be the scene of a huge benefit dance/concert for Trans-Love Energies Unlimited, the Detroit hippie / artists coop.

Titled “Homage to John Coltrane,” the concert will celebrate the birth of the late musical giant (Trane was born September 23^rd, 1926, on the first day of Libra) and commemorate his passage from this planet July 17^th, 1967. Music will be donated by the MC-5, the Up, and the Charles Moore Ensemble, Detroit’s first and most forward avant-garde jazz unit. Moore’s original group, the Detroit Contemporary 5, performed in a “Homage to John Coltrane” concert at the old Artists’ Workshop on Forest Avenue in November of 1964.

...

There’s so much to say, man, that I don’t know where to start...maybe with the Five...the MC5 are a really classic example of environment and music coming together. There’s a Simple declaratory sentence for you...

The music affects the environment and...the environment affects the music. Dig? The machine, man. Detroit is a machine, The Machine even, and in the music of the Five...the frenzy, the anger...is the music of the Machine. Did you ever work in a factory? Jesus, I hope not. There’s music in the factory, but it’s the music of...metal crunching metal...a melody of violence...the Five are Man against Machine, baby, that’s all.

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Unaccustomed though I may be to giving advice which will earn money for someone other than myself I feel duty bound to give you some information concerning two forthcoming attractions at the Grande Ballroom.

Foremost, by date of appearance only, is the Jeff Beck group. Some of you will probably remember Jeff as being the guitarist in whose shadow stands, and always will stand, Jimmy Page, present “Lead Player” with the Yardbirds, who having now disbanded leaves him as the lead player to Chris Dreja, bassist.

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On January 28, a guard woke anarchist grand jury resister Jerry Koch in his cell and told him to get ready for court. They handed him some thin prison sweats and cotton slippers, then kicked him out in downtown New York City without even a phone call. He had to run six blocks in fifteen-degree weather to his lawyers’ office.

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“The work we are going about is this, to dig up Georges Hill and the waste grounds thereabouts, and to sow corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows.

“And the first reason is this, that we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, that everyone That is born in the Land may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation.”

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(reprinted from the LA Free Press)

Somewhere in Los Angeles this week, a small group of men and women are preparing the tenth in a series of weekly radio programs of news and critical commentary on America’s foreign policy which they tape and send to Hanoi for broadcast to American troops.

Since it is very possible that the activities of Radio Stateside, as the group calls itself, are illegal (they are urging American soldiers to oppose America’s role in Vietnam), everything is done in clandestine fashion.

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The graphics/collages on pages 9–13 are taken from “Manual for Revolutionary Leaders” by M. Velli, and appear in the book in full color. It is available through our book service and is listed on page 18.

Each construction contains a variety of images representing the rise to power of the leader and his party, and the process of modernization and industrialization.

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a review of

The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below by Peter Gelderloos. Pluto Press 2022

The climate crisis is here. While climate change coverage in mainstream media remains paltry, it is impossible to miss the ways the climate crisis is unfolding. Year after year of record wildfire seasons, of the warmest years on record, of devastating heat waves in Europe and Asia. And, this is only the beginning.

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The work that’s being done by the new Italian cinema continues to amaze me, and the latest entry proves no exception.

“Grazie, Zia” (Thank you, Aunt) was written and directed by Salvatore Samperi at the preposterous age of twenty-four. Yet it is a film of uncommon depth and shapeliness, so clearly the work of a mature, sophisticated artist.

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Three years ago, Fifth Estate ran an article on the activities of the two dozen or so privatized armies in Occupied Iraq. The essay claimed that the name of one rent-a-gun company--Blackwater USA--was derived from the term used by the US Navy to describe stealthy, night-time Swift Boat assaults (like the one that former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey went on in 1969 when he single-handedly cut the throats of at least twenty women, children, and old men in the small Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong).

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The march of human social organization is essentially the story of how people have found ways of harvesting ever more energy from their environments in order to sustain ever more humans. The story began with the harnessing of fire and the domestication of plants and animals, but it took a fateful turn at the commencement of the industrial revolution when we discovered fossil fuels.

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John Wayne BIFF! has made a new movie POW! called “The Green Berets” AAP! It’s currently appearing at the Adams Theatre, and I want all you weak-kneed, yellow-bellied draft dodgers out there to double time down to see it.

The real-life John Waynes display their handiwork in Vietnam. The photo was sent to Vietnam GI, an anti-war paper edited by Vietnam Vets in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Vietnam GI/LNS.

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Developments in what is being called the “Green Scare” continue at a fast pace as the government increases its attack on forest, animal, and earth defenders.

Four environmental campaigners from Detroit including a Fifth Estate writer were arrested in March for eco-sabotage. Other activists around the country were subjected to the heavy hand of justice with harsh sentences and arbitrary acts. The possibilities of more arrests and indictments are on the horizon.

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SACRAMENTO, CALIF.--On January 8, Green Scare prisoner Eric McDavid was ordered released from prison after nine years because the government admitted to withholding documents from the defense at his 2007 trial.

Eric McDavid leaves prison with his lawyers after serving nine years after a rigged trial in which the government withheld evidence.

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An international campaign demanding that imprisoned environmental activist, Marie Mason, be transferred from the repressive, high-security Carswell federal prison at Fort Worth, Texas, to a minimum security unit close to her family and friends, is in high gear.

Actions include a world-wide letter writing effort addressed to the U.S. federal Bureau of Prisons, legal action, and increased distribution of information about her case.

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Marie Mason, who is serving the longest prison term of any Green Scare prisoner, lost her appeal as the U.S. 6^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati on December 16 upheld her almost 22-year sentence for two acts of eco-sabotage. Following oral arguments in front of the court in October, Mason’s attorney, Anastatse Markou, said he was encouraged by the questions the judges asked about the harshness of the sentence which is the basis of the appeal, but it came to naught. As usual, American justice, not impartially blindfolded to her supplicants, but with one eye open, winked obscenely at the power she serves so dutifully. Green Scare is the name given to recent prosecutions of radical environmental and animal liberation activists who are labeled terrorists by the government and given exceptionally long sentences. No one has been killed or injured as a result of their actions. Mason accepted a plea agreement that called for a sentence of 15–20 years, although the judge tacked on even more time to the maximum agreed upon with the prosecution. It’s not clear whether any further avenues within the legal system are worth pursuing. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, given its right-wing composition, and the cost involved, makes it probably prohibitive. In early July, Mason was remanded to solitary confinement for a month before being transferred to a facility in Fort Worth, Texas. She was told by prison officials at Federal Correction Institution (FCI) Waseca (Minnesota) that her confinement and transfer, during which she was not allowed to retain many of her personal belongings including books and photos, was “administrative” and not punitive. Mason had been a model prisoner and was teaching guitar to other prisoners. She was known for her peacekeeping efforts inside the prison. Mason’s plea agreement included the crime of arson at the Michigan State University Biotechnology Support Project in East Lansing, Michigan, a genetically modified organism (GMO) research site. In 1999, she and her husband at the time, Frank Ambrose, set fire to research records at the lab causing considerable damage to the building. Ambrose became a snitch for the federal government almost ten years later, taping incriminating conversations with Mason, and later with dozens of other activists around the country at the behest of the FBI. Ambrose is serving a nine-year term in spite of all his work as a government informant. He was sentenced by US District Judge Paul Maloney who also presided in Mason’s case. Ambrose and Mason had been divorced prior to their arrests. There were initial fears that Mason had been transferred to a newly established Communications Management Unit (CMU) at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell in Fort Worth. In CMUs, prisoners are subjected to a heavily repressive regimen that allows only severely reduced contact with friends and family. Lawyers with the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights say the feds have consistently denied that Carswell is a CMU. However, the wing Mason is in is clearly a special control unit, and has restrictive conditions. Carswell’s web site states that it “provides specialized medical and mental health services to female offenders,” but the facility is notorious for its bad services for ill or disturbed prisoners and has been the subject of past law suits. Although Mason says she preferred the prison in Minnesota with its larger population, she is reconstructing her life at Carswell and reports that she has improved access to fresh foods to accommodate her vegan diet. Mason receives support from environmentalists and animal rights activists world-wide, many who do not approve of her tactics, but are appalled at her harsh sentence. She says she wants to assure them that, contrary to rumors, she steadfastly maintains her vegan diet even though so doing was beginning to erode her health given the lack of proper food at the Minnesota facility. Supporters help provide Mason with money for food of her choice from the prison commissary, stamps, clothing, supplies, phone calls and internet communication. Mason’s son and daughter receive stipends from the Rosenberg Fund for Children that makes grants to the offspring of persecuted activists. The fund is administered in part by Robert Meerpol, one of the two children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed as atomic spies in 1953 following a frame-up trial. In other developments, Mason urgently asks that her supporters not send money directly to her commissary account, since when it reaches a certain level the government confiscates the overage to pay toward her $4 million restitution she has been ordered to repay. All donations should be sent to her mother, Karin Mason, at PO Box 352, Stanwood MI 49346. Money sent to her is put into Mason’s commissary account as needed. Please circulate this information. Benefits continue to support Mason including recent ones in Cincinnati, and another in October in Detroit’s Trumbullplex featuring singer/songwriter David Rovics which raised over $700. Mason welcomes mail, but please contact her before sending her anything other than a letter to insure she can receive a particular item. Her address is: Marie Mason #04672–061 FMC Carswell P.O. Box 27137 Fort Worth, TX 76127

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The ludicrous charges against the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act Four (AETA4) show the absolute depths to which the Green Scare has plummeted. According to the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), the four animal liberation activists are charged with “terrorism” under the AETA for (and, we kid you not, because I could not make up something so ridiculous if I wanted to) “protesting, chalking the sidewalk, chanting and leafleting--and the alleged use of ‘the Internet to find information on bio-medical researchers.’”

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WASHINGTON, Oct. 29—The U.S. Treasury Department ordered the confiscation of perhaps the most unusual piece of campaign literature in use as the electoral farce drew near its completion.

Treasury agents broke into the New York Dick Gregory for President headquarters and seized all the Gregory campaign “dollar bills” they could find. Agents were reported scouring Chicago for the contraband material.

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The solar array’s passive tracking system wakes to the first rays of the Pennsylvania summer sun. The solar panels don’t care that today is the solstice, or that the sun will rise on its arc to an angle of 72.5° at noon.

Its rusting actuators will strain to follow the sun all the way to its apex. As freon warms in the black copper tubes that run along the edges of the frame, the liquid vaporizes and moves from one side to the other. The tracker begins its daily task of following the thermal energy of the sun, keeping the photovoltaic panels facing into the sunlight as it moves along a course from east to west.

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a review of

Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, ed. Cindy Milstein. 37 essays, 412 pp. with 32-page color insert. AK Press, 2017

Rebellious Mourning is an ambitious edited volume by Cindy Milstein with enormous depth and breadth of highly relevant and timely cross-cultural case studies. This work by Milstein (sole author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, AK Press) represents her third edited book project.

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The infamous Grimshaw kite case has reached its first conclusion, with an astounding miscarriage of justice.

The case, as you may recall, concerned a kite, made out of an American flag, with the inscription: “Fuck America—Go Fly a Kite” and an Egyptian peace eye symbol. The kite was hanging from a light fixture in The Sun office, 4863 John Lodge.

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LANSING—Justice moves slowly.

Two years ago Gary Grimshaw, who at that time was art director for the Fifth Estate, was arrested in the Artists’ Workshop office on John Lodge for displaying an obscene kite.

The kite had on it an Egyptian peace eye symbol and the words “Fuck America Go Fly a Kite.”

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GRINNELL, Iowa (LNS) Brice Draper is a PR man for Playboy Magazine. He travels around to college campuses, selling the Playboy line and “promoting products for our advertisers.”

When Hefner’s boy Draper came to Grinnell, the local folk engaged him in naked confrontation. Ten students, six of them girls, took off their clothes to protest Playboy’s exploitation of the female body.

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FILM. “King of Hearts” at the Studio North. Student rates Mon. & Tues. ce

FILM “A Man For All Seasons” at the Studio New Center. Student rates Mon. & Tues. ce

CANTERBURY HOUSE. 330 Maynard, Ann Arbor. Skip James performs Nov. 4–6. Adm. ce

RAVEN GALLERY. 29101 Greenfield. The Gun Folk perform thru Nov. 5 Then Charley Latimer and Paul Bowles, Nov. 6–19, Adm. ce

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“Grooving,” which we’ve been doing since birth, has recently taken on some formal definition as the Kulchur Kritiks attempt to sympathetically dig the spirit of the multimedia art forms. Grooving, they say means to yield yourself to the flow of activity around you. Grooving requires a lot of personal freedom, and a lot of self assurance. It is the opposite of uptight perception, the opposite of categorizing experience, the opposite of traditional logical “understanding”. Grooving is the ability to receive several clashing stimuli simultaneously, a form of perception dictated by the new urban environments.

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not since I was seventeen

have I been in a similar state of lockdown

.

back then it was

beaming home with the early light

with complete disregard for any promises

of minding a curfew or sobriety

jeep a degenerate comet

reeking of beer and weed

and I an alien approaching a staircase

where I cross paths with my captors

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A review of

The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance (Ed., M. Annette Jaimes, South End Press, 1992)

“Native Americans as a group experience the most extreme poverty...far and away the greatest rates of malnutrition, plague disease, death by exposure, infant mortality, and teen suicide of any group on the continent.”

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Fifth Estate Note: Since his 1991 review/essay “Operation Gender Blur” [FE #336, Spring, 1991] Sunfrog has written about radical sexuality for the Fifth Estate. Both 1992’s “Pornography and Pleasure: Beyond Capital, Beyond Patriarchy” [FE #340, Autumn 1992] and 1993’s “Queer Anarchy: Anarcha-Faggots Demand to be De-Manned, a (de)Manifesto” [FE #342, Summer 1993] garnered extensive reactions from our readers, from thankful praise to condemnatory criticism. With “Group Sex,” we welcome the return of Sunfrog’s thoughtful, passionate, and uncompromising erotic politics to our pages.

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CHICAGO (LNS)—Across America, the GI movement and draft resistance are growing. Stockade rebellions, GI coffee houses, draft board demonstrations and induction refusals have been the most visible forms of resistance to the U.S. Army.

The Chicago Area Draft Resisters (CADRE) report an important increase in another less known form of resistance—simply not reporting for induction. In Chicago alone, there were 1,090 cases of men not reporting for induction in 1968–69. This is up from 659 in 1966–67, and means that on the average, more than 10 men a week are not reporting for induction. These figures were compiled from information publicly posted at Chicago draft boards.

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Since 1954, when a U.S.-backed coup toppled the democratically elected reformist government of Jacobo Árbenz, there has been a succession of military regimes aided by the U.S. The Guatemalan people, 60% of whom are Mayan Indians, have fought through both peaceful and violent means for social change; the Guatemalan state’s response has been the brutal suppression of any and all movements of opposition or reform.

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On Thursday, February 23 at 8 p.m. the editorial board of GUERRILLA will present a program of new Latin American poetry in Lower Helen DeRoy Aud. at Wayne State University. The program will include a film on the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle and a lecture on Hugo Blanco, the imprisoned Peruvian peasant leader. The evening will be presented in cooperation with the Committee To Defend Latin American Political Prisoners.

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The Guerrilla Roofreadings started May 28 at Guerrilla: Sector North, on Allen Van Newkirk’s roof, above the Artist’s Workshop with Andrei Codrescu reading from his forthcoming book: Insane People With Beautiful Sidewalks.

Andrei Codrescue was born in Romania and has lived throughout Europe. His book (in English) is a reflection of this multi-language trip. His convulsive fights with language make the structure of this poetry.

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The San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has earned an international reputation for slaughtering sacred cows, will be performing its anti-war commedia dell ‘arte “l’Amante Militaire” in a benefit performance for the Fifth Estate on Saturday, October 28.

R.G. Davis, the articulate and energetic director of what he has called the ‘guerrilla theatre,’ had this to say about charges of obscene, suggestive gestures, disloyal treatment of the Vietnam War and presidential policies, and shock for shock’s sake in his show:

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(Page 1 of The South End insert)

President George Gullen took a late-night meeting of the WSU Board of Governors by surprise Tuesday with the announcement of his resignation from the University’s highest post effective immediately.

Citing what he called the “massive dehumanization” which distinguishes “this and every other university,” the 57-year-old administrator said he could no longer justify “a single day more” at the helm of the State’s third largest university.

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Guy Debord, the French author of Society of the Spectacle and a founder of the Situationist Internationale, took his own life on November 30, 1994. He was 62. His insights are valued and utilized by rebels and social critics.

Guy Debord (1932–1994)

In the past 20 years he lived largely in rural areas and this is where he died (at his home in Auvergne, a mountainous region in south-central France). He was born in Paris, however, and credits this city as well as other urban centers with furnishing him the elements to analyze contemporary society.

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is áille ná bratacha an domhain é ...

an níochán

ar an líne

.

more beautiful

than the flags of all nations ...

washing on the line

A haiku in Irish and English by Gabriel Rosenstock (Ireland) with artwork by Masood Hussain (Kashmir) whose first book together, Walk with Gandhi, commemorates the 150^th anniversary of the Mahatma’s birth. More bilingual haiku posters from them are available at

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In March Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Hail Mary” came to Detroit’s Wayne State University, drawing sell-out audiences and violent demonstrations from christian-fascist groups. The film is a modern retelling of an already boring (and over-told) tale, the events leading up to the birth of Jesus (the little guy attached to crucifixes). In the film, Joseph is a taxi driver, the angel Gabriel is a foul-mouthed drifter, and Mary is a gas station attendant. Despite a few nude scenes of Mary, the film is rather tame, eliciting such reactions by people who saw it as “actually rather sensitive” and “a snore.” True to form, the pope has condemned the film as sacrilegious.

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In politics nothing can be taken at face value; many times what passes for an elaborately drawn political point of view is little more than a posture which conceals psychopathology. Trotskyism, a stillborn variety of marxism notable for the bizarre historical ironies embodied in it, is a particularly appropriate example.

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Press accounts have generally referred to the kidnapped Hans-Martin Schleyer as “a major West German industrialist.” He was certainly that—head of the West German Employers Association and top board member of Daimler-Benz, the multinational giant which produces Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks and invests throughout Europe, Africa and the United States.

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In the waning moonlight, three bands of sullen men with ash-blackened faces stealthed through the woods and dales of central Yorkshire, one of the first counties in England to industrialize.

Quietly, the three groups, each traveling from different villages, picked themselves through paths they traversed since childhood and assembled in a clearing near their target. Though they passed outlying cottages, no dogs betrayed them.

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It is a mystery to us why a small number of anarchists and primitivists are attracted to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who carried out a murderous bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995 against targets representing technology. The homemade bombs he planted or mailed killed three people and injured 23. Although imprisoned for life since 1996, he continues to be cited as an influence by writers, and one group recently called for birthday cards to be sent to him.

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This year marks five-hundred years since the appearance of English social philosopher, author, statesman, and Renaissance humanist Thomas More’s famous Utopia. We might also consider that it is just over five-hundred years since the definitive anti-utopia, Machiavelli’s The Prince was published.

We might say that the entire modern age has been a struggle between utopia and anti-utopia. Even more, it is a struggle between utopia and the dystopia that is at the heart of the dominant utopia.

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Marius Mason was struck by the story of these early civil rights activists and their assassination by the Ku Klux Klan. He painted this portrait (“Harriet and Harry T Moore”, 2022) using prison coffee as the main medium.

The Moores incurred the wrath of the Klan for their advocacy of voting rights in segregated Florida in the 1940s. They were both killed on Christmas night 1951 by a bomb set at their home in Mims, Florida. This followed their both being fired from teaching because of their activism.

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The Court Theatre will begin its third season with revivals of two successful productions—HARRY THE RAT WITH WOMEN and OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR.

“Harry the Rat with Women” is an adaptation of the Jules Feiffer novel of the same name. It is the biography of Harry, the beautiful and narcissistic youth who is corrupted and eventually de oyed by the society which forces him to accept love and involvement on its terms.

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In a decision that outraged the Toronto anarchist community, Ken Deyarmond was sentenced to six months in jail for assaulting two cops during a demonstration in September 1983 against British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Deyarmond was grabbed by pig Dusko Markovic during the demonstration for “lunging” at Thatcher and during the resulting fracas, as Ken tried to squirm free, he was manhandled by three cops.

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One of the major topics debated in this newspaper and others like it is the reason(s) for the dramatic change in social organization during the transition from “primitive” societies to the “modern” one. Most contemporary anthropological accounts agree that the vast majority of human life has been lived in non-hierarchical, cooperative communities. Then why did the last ten thousand years or so result in a hierarchical, competitive society which has expanded its bounds to encompass virtually the entire globe?

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Perhaps the only positive result of the reign of the murderous moron in the White House as chieftain of the American empire is to what depths he has sunk the popular perception of Christianity.

The Bush mob’s initial political approval following the 9/11 catastrophe he allowed to occur, utilized both the flag and bible as its key iconography to fool the rubes. Although this is standard fare for craven politicians, the Republicans raised this cultural imaging to levels not seen in a hundred years. But, the unraveling of the reigning racket’s lies, the exposure of their greed, corruption, and their hypocrisy and that of their most pious spokesmen, both in the Congress and the pulpit, have created an opening for atheism that would have seemed impossible even a short time ago.

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The failure of civilization: it has been given some eight thousand years to prove itself a superior mode of life to the ninety-nine percent of previous human existence, primarily in tribal, communal, mostly egalitarian societies. Has the transformation to complex civilizations made the species more peaceable, more communal, more egalitarian, or has it had the opposite effect? Let us consider not civilization’s ideal, but rather what might be termed “real-existing” civilization.

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from The Eighth Night of Creation: Life on the Edge of Human History by Jerome Deshusses

Today there is no city that the automobile has not turned into a vast parking lot, no avenue that is not a rectilinear traffic artery bordered by concrete sidewalks and strips of sickly, dying dusty, grayish grass. It will soon be impossible for people to talk to each other in the street except by walkie-talkie, impossible to breathe except high up in the mountains (where the air is only a little less toxic than elsewhere, and cars will soon be as numerous as tourists, anyway), impossible to cross a lane without thinking of the danger of being run down and killed, impossible to regard other human beings as other than so many Sunday mechanics mucking about underneath the artificial armor of their coachwork....

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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF., JULY 19 (Libeeration News Service)—The scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury was tense Friday evening. Street confrontations between cops and free men had occurred the two previous nights and more street activity was expected into the weekend. On Wednesday and Thursday night, according to one witness, “People were throwing molotov cocktails as freely as rocks and bottles.” Barricades were erected and set aflame in the streets of Hashbury and the pigs were greeted with flying objects.

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A Chinese journalist was freed in February after spending nearly 17 years in prison for splattering paint on a portrait of Mao during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Yu Dongyue, now 38, and two friends, hurled eggs filled with red paint at the famous painting of Mao, which still stares at the Square from across the street. Yu and his family are expected to reunite in Hunan Province, but his younger brother said the family was deeply concerned about Yu’s mental health.

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What follows is an edited entry from “Hauling Secrets” an anonymous job-blog written by a handful of waste haulers in the Upper Mid-west. (haulingsecrets.com). The site offers interesting entries on bizarre on-the-job findings, as well as reflections on the cosmology of the waste stream in our over-developed civilization.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

One in every 40 deaths in the United States is caused by lung cancer, and this ratio is expected to increase in the next ten years. according to the October 7^th issue of the Journal of the A.M.A. But this year sales of cigarettes declined for the first time: hopefully a snowballing trend. What has been the response of cigarette manufacturers?

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Through September 2

A traveling RV-gypsy gathering that will join with local people in 14 cities across North America to create temporary autonomous zones, make art, cook food, establish squats, play music, celebrate, & protest. For a complete list of cities, call Arrow at 212/ 614–0393 or write: 209 E. 7^th St., NY, NY:

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a review of

Hayduke Lives! by Edward Abbey, Little, Brown, Co., Boston, 1990

Hayduke lives? Well, after reading the late Edward Abbey’s sequel to his 1976 novel, The Monkeywrench Gang, one almost wishes the “wilderness avenger, industrial saboteur, night-time trouble-maker, barroom brawler, free-time lover...” had not made it safely off the cliff where we had assumed he plunged to his death at the end of the first book.

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About 12 of us from Detroit made the trek to Chicago this May Day to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Haymarket riot and subsequent state murder by execution of five anarchists.

Anarchy then and now: Above, Haymarket 1886. Below, Chicago Anarchist Gathering, May 1986. By the way, that’s “Workingmen of all tongues unite.” Photo: S. Izma

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

As discussed in last month’s issue of the Fifth Estate (see Bicentennial Moment No. 3, “The Ludlow Massacre”), the period beginning in 1865 with the conclusion of the Civil War and continuing through 1919 marked the turning point in America’s economy from individual, agrarian-based capitalism to corporate monopoly capitalism.

...

Response to:

A Bicentennial moment: Haymarket Square Riot by Bob Nirkind, Fifth Estate #272, May, 1976, Vol. 11, No. 8, page 10

To the Fifth Estate:

A brief note concerning Bob Nirkind’s treatment of the Knights of Labor in the May issue of the Fifth Estate.

Most historians have seen the Knights of Labor as a backward-looking organization grounded in the craftsman’s rejection of the development of wage-slavery and the destruction of his skills—and privileges. There is a certain grain of truth in this, especially as far as the early years of the organization are concerned (1879 through 1884), and the leadership itself. However, in my own work (which meant looking at the Knights in great detail on both the local and national level) I found a more useful framework.

...

Special to the Fifth Estate from Satyrday Publications, Toronto

Toronto—as well as most large Canadian cities—is becoming a haven for youthful Americans who, for reasons of their own, don’t want any part of U.S. President Johnson’s war on the Vietnamese people.

“It’s not that I’m scared to fight... I just don’t believe in killing people for the phony cause that our leaders tell us we’re fighting for,” one U.S. draft-dodger told Satyrday magazine recently. He preferred to remain anonymous because Federal Bureau of Investigation officers, hand-in-hand with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada’s FBI), are trying to keep tabs on draft-dodgers.

...

a review of

1) The Matrix, Poems: 1960–1970, by N.H. Pritchard, Doubleday paperback, 1970, $2.45.

2) Arts in Society, volume 6, number 3, edited by Edward L. Karmack, University of Wisconsin, 1969, single issue $2.00, 1 year subscription (3 issues) $5.50.

Contemporary poetry covers a pretty wide range, far wider than these two examples would have us believe. Good modern poetry is as hard to find as good modern jazz and though these two volumes are approaching it, neither come close enough.

...

CHICAGO—Hundreds of SDS members, responding to two separate calls, moved in the streets of Chicago and braved police gunfire on several occasions in the opening days of the Oct. 8–11 action against U. S. imperialism.

Workers at Harvester Plant in Chicago say “Right On” to demonstrators. photo / LNS

On the first night four hundred young people, mostly members of SDS’s prominent Weatherman faction—wearing helmets and carrying sticks—charged through Chicago’s fashionable Gold Coast district, smashing left and right the windows of stores, banks, cars, apartments and hotels.

...

Game (1) “Shelf Life”

How to Play: You take a series of books off your shelf in the order they sit there. Working through them in sequence, you open them at random, selecting the phrase or clause that strikes you, and create a text in this way. (It’s also possible to make a title in this way). As a variant, this can also be played with more than one player, by taking it in turns to add a sentence, phrase, clause or half-sentence.

...

DETROIT Nov. 14—In a joyous celebration at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, eight men returned their draft cards to the Selective Slavery System, including the pastor of the church.

In breaking their ties with the draft the men stated, “Young men are being forced to choose between being free to celebrate their existence and being forced to engage in acts of destruction. We choose freedom, life, and the joy involved in being true to ourselves.”

...

On October 16, young men in Detroit and in cities across the United States will have turned in their draft cards to federal officials.

In Detroit, at least 20 men are expected to take part in the actual resistance at Cadillac Tower in Downtown Detroit, site of the Selective Service System while a support demonstration will take place outside beginning at 3:00 p.m.

...

October 16 was the first day of massive draft resistance in Detroit and throughout the United States. From coast to coast thousands of Americans demonstrated against the Vietnam war and against draft slavery.

The rain didn’t stop draft resisters from demonstrating on Oct. 16.

In total, over 2,000 young men returned their draft cards to the Federal Government. In San Francisco over 200 cards were returned; in New York over 300; in Chicago, 250. Similar actions were held in Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines, and Philadelphia. In Washington D.C. prior to the giant Mobilization almost 1,000 young men said no to the draft by depositing their cards at the office of the Attorney General.

...

Over the course of a decade, almost ten million Americans served the US military in the Vietnam War, and one quarter of those were draftees. Almost 60,000 Americans died, and almost 60% of those were under the age of 21. In terms of sheer numbers, today’s all-volunteer army is much leaner. And many young people who signed up out of economic necessity aren’t that stoked about Bush’s War Without End.

...

The international press is constantly writing about the economic crisis in Greece. Economic pundits speculate less about whether or not Greece will default but in what manner and when. Absent from these considerations is the massive popular revolt in Greece against the Draconian measures already in place. Totally absent from mainstream commentary is the effect on European stability the mass resistance developing in Greece might have if replicated in other EU nations. The massive marches in Greece have gotten considerable coverage, but far more significant are the unreported successes of the I Won’t Pay movement and the communal revolt in Keratea, a small seaside town 25 miles southeast of Athens.

...

Age 90 is very different. A dusty journey has been traveled, a time-tunnel has been penetrated. Her 20^th Century is a vast prismatic blur, a fantasy in which some parts hold up for the Truth.

In 1900, this beautiful woman was 21 years old. So many years ago that what you’re saying, what I’m saying today is a drop of curious mist in the great and sheer storm of human survival. Little more than a grunt, glint, tiny fart, etc., of the 90 year old cosmic voyage of this lady.

...

When Fidel Castro liberated the Cuban people from exploitation by United Fruit and other capitalist pilferage 10 years ago, an old folks home in Washington enforced an economic blockade on that small island country.

Their reasoning can only be explained as anger at not being allowed to continue pulling in a profit from the labor and resources of that nation. It is part of the same greedy anger being displayed by Pig Amerika in its genocidal mania against the peoples of Vietnam and the black colony here.

...

The Fifth Estate needs a minimum of forty persons willing to pledge $5.00 a month to insure this paper’s survival and increase our ability to do such things as enlarge page size or do special issue supplements. A long rap probably won’t convince you one way or the other about whether or not the paper is worthwhile to maintain—either you like it and that makes it worth five bucks a month or you don’t. (By the way, this isn’t meant to be a guilt trip—we know some people just cannot afford a monthly sum like that.) Fifth Estate sustainers will receive a free publication each month as well as free admission to all FE events such as benefits and film showings. If you can help us, mail this coupon and we’ll contact you next month.

...

The Detroit Black Panther Party has just opened up a new office and asked the community to aid them in securing needed supplies.

If you have desks, typewriters or other office machines available they can be put to immediate use in aiding the work of the Panthers.

If you can help or wish to make a donation to the Panthers contact the Fifth Estate office, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, 48201 or call 831–6800.

The Fifth Estate is not reaching everyone that it should. Conservative distributors and frightened merchants will not handle or sell the paper because it is too controversial. Hence, there are many people who are not able to read what we have to say simply because there is nowhere they can buy the paper.

...

The FE HQ in rural Tennessee seeks volunteers and interns for extended visits of one to three months.

Help maintain our Bistro. Participate in every aspect of magazine production. Learn new skills and meet interesting people. Live in a rural intentional community.

Applicants must be willing to live rustically, pay for own expenses, and share basic chores. Please submit letter of introduction with writing samples and activist references.

...

(for Federico Arcos)

In 1937, at the opening of the London exhibition, “Surrealist Objects and Poems,” anarchist art critic Herbert Read delivered a short talk proclaiming the movement’s artists as “angels of anarchy.” The show’s catalogue cover also featured a sculpture by the Argentinean-English surrealist Eileen Agar entitled, “The Angel of Anarchy.” Who was this “Angel?” The mystery was cleared up in the December 1938-January 1939 issue of the English surrealists’ London Bulletin, where a photo of Read, author of Poetry and Anarchism, appeared alongside a reproduction of the work.

...

Just before 1998, he started taking advice from the talking crow.

It started like you might have imagined. The crow was perched on a spindly branch near the hospital parking lot. It quietly assessed him.

He was getting his car keys out of his pocket, and the crow was drawn in by his smooth knuckles as they slid into the denim of his jeans and then slid out barely concealing something shiny.

...

The interview originated with a long-distance telephone call from Los Angeles to the office of the Fifth Estate the day of the Oct. 15 Moratorium. The operator wanted “whoever writes about movies.” There wasn’t anybody else in the office, so I took the call.

“This is Casey Kasem.” A good professional voice and manner. “I’m from Detroit and I’m starring in my first movie, ‘Free Grass,’ which is premiering there next week. I’d like to talk to you about it, if you’re interested.” Poised, easy. Right on. Free passes.

...

Yas, free music. Free livin’. Free heads. Free Old Tarter Field for awhile at the WABX free Sunday afternoon concert.

After three solid days of rain, the sun shone on Old Tarter Field July 20. Deep in the crotch between the John C. Lodge and Edsel Ford Expressways five bands jammed for the whole afternoon.

...

I have called this a “Hidden Chapter in the Fight Against War” because the vast majority of our generation is totally unaware of the fact that the end of 1945 and the beginning of 1946 saw the greatest troop revolt that has ever occurred in a victorious army. The central issue was whether the troops would be demobilized, or whether they would be kept in the Pacific to protect Western interests from the growing colonial revolution.

...

The Draft Resistance Committee has pulled off a minor victory in an attempt to stop some of the harassment directed at it by landlords, vigilantes, and the City of Highland Park. (See Fifth Estate, Sept. 15–30).

On Sept. 22, the Committee brought their landlord, Tom Jewell into the Circuit Court room of Judge Carl Weideman in an attempt to keep Jewell out of the groups storefront headquarters at 12820 Hamilton. Jewell had entered the building several times and had torn down signs and done other damage.

...

In contrast to the Dearborn decision on a Vietnam referendum, Highland Park’s City Council voted, 4 to 1, on Oct. 17, not to place the issue on the November ballot. The vote was surprising in a community which is more urban, more sophisticated than Dearborn, with a high percentage of Negroes, active in civic affairs.

...

“What the fuck are we going to do about those crazy White Panthers?” “I don’t know, man....I’m too wasted to even think about it.”

“Me too, man, shit, how are we gonna have a legislative session this afternoon?”

“Look, go wash your face with cold water and drink some coffee,” the fat one said, “I’ll call Schweigert and tell him what’s happening. If we can’t get it together, we’ll call the State Police and have everyone thrown out. It’ll be rough for those junior high kids from Petoskey, but we sure can’t let them see us like this.”

...

I. STUDENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO EXERCISE ALL RIGHTS ENUMERATED IN THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND ALL OTHER AMENDMENTS AND THOSE ESTABLISHED BY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT.

II. STUDENTS HAVE THE FULL FREEDOM OF POLITICAL ACTIVITY IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS.

...

NEW YORK (LNS) — A new press service especially for the growing network of high school underground papers has been established in New York City.

The High School Independent Press Service (HIPS) sends out news packets weekly to several hundred high school publications. HIPS works out of the LNS office at 160 Claremont Ave., New York, N.Y. 10027, phone: (212) 749–2200.

Detroit area high school students will protest the war in Vietnam and commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King in a student strike on April 3^rd.

April 4^th marks one year since the assassination of Dr. King, who was an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam and an active participant in the antiwar movement.

...

As part of the April 26 Student Strike against the Vietnam War, hundreds of high school students from the metropolitan area walked out of school or protested by other means.

At Cass Technical High School, which draws students from the entire city and beyond, 300 walked out at 9:30 under the direction of the Cass Afro-American Club and the Detroit High School Student Mobilization Committee. An undeterminable number of other students stayed in school wearing black armbands, which were distributed by DHSSMC.

...

The revolutionary spirit among young people has begun to rage in the secondary schools and one may be seeing a multitude of mini-Columbias as high school students begin to demand their rights.

A recent example occurred at Mumford High on the Northwest side the week of Oct. 1. Because of student grievances, a protest walk-out was being planned, but relatively few students knew about it.

...

A conference for high school underground publications has been set up. All high school students working on publications or interested in starting underground papers are invited.

The purpose of the meeting is to discuss all aspects of establishing a paper, and compare experiences for the benefit of other papers. It would be beneficial if those people who are already printing a paper would bring copies with them.

...

Editors’ Note: Roman Gribbs is Sheriff of Wayne County and candidate for mayor of Detroit. Part of his attempt to sell himself to the people of our city has been on the basis of his role in reforming the Wayne County Jail, which is his responsibility.

Long a chamber of horrors, the Sheriff has been able to enlist the cooperation of Detroit’s two daily papers to create an illusion that his dungeon has become a fit place for humans to inhabit due to his work.

...

Five new productions, including three classics and two contemporary plays, will be featured at the Hilberry Classic Theatre during its Wayne State University Centennial season of repertory.

A revival of last year’s record-breaking success, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be performed in the fall.

...

On June 16, 1962 a group of students stimulated by the burgeoning protest movement of black young people in the south, met at Port Huron, Michigan.

After much debate they approved a long statement analyzing “the state of the society which they were inheriting.” Known as the Port Huron Statement, the document served as the organizational base for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Port Huron meeting is generally considered to be the beginning of the “New-Left.”

...

“A lot of us have been smokin’ reefers and layin’ broads in the bushes at Belle Isle for the last twenty years...and nobody ever called that a Love-In.”

—anonymous

Greaser and Frat Rocker and Mod Lower-middle class versus upper-middle-class America.

The struggle for the supremacy of class values among the recent Young. Both begin more or less together, as Screamies. It is the Mod who characteristically veers off to become the Teeny-Bopper and eventually the Hippie.

...

WASHINGTON, October 3 (Liberation News Service ) — Something’s happening, and you won’t know what it is, General Jones, because you think that only Angry Mothers and bearded students march and that hippies stay in Haight — Ashbury and the East Village. Look out your window on October 21 and freak out at what will be marching towards the Pentagon:

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

Your discussion of the sneeze-orgasm question in a recent column gave me the unaccustomed and satisfying experience of becoming aware of a mysterious part of my own behavior.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I have an unusual “problem” concerning my penis when I have an erection. When not aroused, it is small and appears to be very normal. When I have an erection, it grows very large and has a pronounced curve downwards. In other words, it is bent toward the ground.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

About restaurants that prohibit nude feet. Am assuming hygienic rationale: Are shoes more hygienic per foot?”

ANSWER: Shoes are more likely to track in disease from the street than bare feet. Some restaurant owners cite health codes but the truth is they just don’t like barefooted customers.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Antoinette Dishman was a 17 year old Barnard College freshman who died January 31^st of a heroin overdose. She had sniffed heroin at a party and was found dead the next morning. Hers wasn’t an exceptional case. Heroin overdoses killed more than 200 teenagers in New York City alone last year. The drug is made even more dangerous when used in combination with alcohol or barbiturates.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

Recently my 14 month old daughter got ahold of some LSD tabs. The trip was apparently too much for her because she kept crying out in what seemed to be terror.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

The audience stared incredulously at Old Glory.

Their eyes moved down the little wooden staff and remained fixed on its base, a candle in the shape of an erect penis. The candle was red, white and blue and larger than life. Silver stars covered its blue testicles.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

I’m strung out on heroin. This doesn’t seem to have any long term advantages.

There are a good many places which offer help to addicts who wish to kick. But to the best of my knowledge, all of them ask the name of the patients and take photographs, etc. The confidential file always eventually becomes available to the law enforcers.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Brother:

I have a rather peculiar problem. When my girlfriend was younger, she had a rather bad dream concerning her breasts. The gist of the dream was that her breasts were kissed, sucked, etc., by a man who she thought loved her, but who, in reality, wanted only her body.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

The other day a girlfriend of mine asked me to see a movie called “Daughters of Lesbo.” Something about this girl disturbs me.

First of all, the boys call her “Big Daddy Linda” and have said some very bad things about her. Although she is a bit domineering and aggressive she always seemed quite friendly with us all. My boyfriend says she’s a “Butch and a Dyke.” Could you please give me a definition for these names?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Can anything be done to increase penis size at the age of about twenty? I feel I am underdeveloped and have always felt a little inadequate because of it.

ANSWER: When I was a high school student, a friend felt he had the same problem. Each day he would tie a weight to his penis, swinging it like a pendulum and gradually increasing the weight. He worked his way up to ten or fifteen pounds, setting some sort of record in masochism but his member remained unchanged except for some rope burns.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Is it possible to get high on morning glory seeds? If so, is it dangerous?

ANSWER: Morning glory seeds contain ololiuqui which is basically lysergic acid monethlamide. Ingesting the seeds gives an LSD-like experience but there is also almost invariably a prolonged period of severe nausea and vomiting. A real bummer.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: A surgeon has recently informed me that he has been able to cure his sexual impotency through kite-flying. This idea came to him after reading a brief article by Sandor Ferenczi entitled THE KITE AS SYMBOL OF ERECTION (found in the SELECTED PAPERS of S. Ferenczi Vol. 2).

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I am writing to you in regard to my weight problem. I am 22, five feet six inches tall and I weigh 134 pounds. I would like to weigh 125 pounds. I have been as heavy as 145 pounds and really have had no trouble losing the first ten pounds but the second are a problem.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

To be blunt, I’m scared. I was smoking some grass about 3 weeks ago and I started to feel dizzy. Next thing I remember is waking up on the floor and being told I’d been unconscious about 7 minutes.

...

WARNING: Word is out that some tripsters are using the anesthetic cyclopropane (Trimethylene) for their highs. I hope this message reaches you in time.

Cyclopropane is far more dangerous than laughing, gas (nitrous oxide). Arrhythmias of the heart and respiratory failure are not uncommon effects of this gas. In other words, the heart may stop beating or beat so quickly and weakly that blood is not circulated through the body. Or the brain centers which control breathing may be so heavily anesthetized that breathing stops.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Where can I get myself CASTRATED? I’m tired of sex, I hate sex, I don’t want to be controlled by women any longer! I hate the two-facedness, double-think, hypocrisy. I can’t stand living in the Sexual Contradiction any longer: sex is condemned, sex is admired; sex is dirty, sex is fun; if I ask her or imply that I want sex, she hates me (“What? You think I’m a WHORE?”), but if I don’t ask her and in fact act like ‘I don’t want sex’ (and I have done this) she says, “What? I’m NOT GOOD ENOUGH for you?”

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I am a serviceman in Vietnam and my wife thinks I am having sexual relations here. Not so. But after arriving I noticed some pimple-like protrusions in my pubic area. I went to my sick bay where the corpsmen laughed them off as venereal warts.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: An old lover of mine was fond of a certain trick taught to her by an old lover of hers—which involved the placement of an ice cube in her vagina and then copulation.

Certainly an exciting experience, but I have two questions: 1) Could this harm her? 2) Could this be used as an effective means of contraception as well as groovy orgasms?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Would you please explain what tachycardia is? I am undergoing treatment by an analyst for anxiety which is causing tachycardia in my heart. However, neither he nor my M.D. will explain tachycardia to me.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Is there such a thing as sexual allergy? I have been dating a recently divorced woman, but we have had intercourse only once. Here’s why: Shortly after we shared one of the most explosive, mutually exciting and uninhibited amorous encounters a man and woman could experience she developed an irritating vaginal infection.

...

The following letter was received from Shreveport, Louisiana:

QUESTION: How can a male determine whether or not he is circumcised? I am not sure about myself.

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

ANSWER: Buy the John Lennon-Yoko Ono album. Neither John nor Yoko is circumcised.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld,

Here’s a reply to the reader of your column in OZ (the English underground monthly) who wanted information about circumcision.

I was circumcised as an adult, at the age of 24, some 14 years ago. I’ve never regretted it for a moment—nor, so she tells me, does my wife.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld,

Regarding your column warning about literal blow jobs.

A few years ago, one of the psychiatric journals carried a paper on an unusual accidental death of a woman following coital foreplay.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

A reader recently asked if I knew of any slang terms for “clitoris,” which she found too technical for bedroom talk. I didn’t know of any so I asked readers for their suggestions. Here are some of them:

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

“My first year at Stephens College all the girls were getting weird diseases. They were just starting to make it with boys and went to the college dispensary with a whole lot of vaginal complaints—trichomonas, fungus infections and strange discharges that didn’t seem to have a name.”

...

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

In a recent column you printed the letter of a girl whose “problem” was a boyfriend who had an almost continuous erection and made her sore with continuous and lengthy intercourse. I think you missed the obvious solution. Let her share her good fortune with a girl friend. God knows there are many sexually frustrated girls who would be happy to get half of such a good thing.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I am a very early riser, strictly a morning man and my mate is a late sleeper. Therein lies my dilemma.

There is nothing I like better than having intercourse with her as she awakes or, more precisely, waking her up with the actual coital act. When first awakened, she is sometimes a bit irritable but quickly gets over this.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

For several years we’ve been looking for physicians to help freeze people. With several exceptions, we haven’t had much luck. Most doctors are too frightened and conservative to even study our approach.

...

Dear Dr. Hip Pocrates,

I seldom read your column, it usually actually makes me sick to my stomach to know there are such vulgar, uncivilized, people.

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Today my husband showed me your column about the man who liked to wake up his wife by making love to her in the morning. He’s an early riser and I’m not (he relaxes in the evenings while I take care of dinner, children, and chores). He remarked that he might try that sometime. I told him and I’ll tell you, if he ever does, in that manner, I’ll probably kill him and blame you for contributing to the cause.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld.

This may be a bit out of your line but I have a dog who is gay.

Not that he will pass up a chance with a female dog, but he really goes out of his way to do it with a male dog.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Dear Dr. Schoenfeld: “I am replying to a recent column of yours and to the girl that complained about her boyfriend’s balls. It seemed that during intercourse, his balls banged against her body and she didn’t care for this. That girl is absolutely NUTS!

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Sometimes you hear that very tight clothing around the scrotum of the male can cause sterility. I just can’t believe that. Athletes, particularly professionals, wear jock straps several hours daily, ballet dancers live day in and day out with tight leotards, and male fashions today may often call for very tight slim underwear. What is the truth about tight clothing and male sexuality? What does medical research show?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: What are the potential dangers of the new “3-way” tablets (mostly mescaline plus a little LSD and a wee bit of cocaine?) One of my friends got stoned wild for 9 hours on this but spent the last 3 hours on the john. What’s coming off?

...

QUESTION: My old lady is a light sleeper and she can’t sleep because my snoring keeps her awake. I’ve never heard myself snore, but those who have say I’m really loud.

What causes snoring? Is there anything I can do about this problem—other than separate bedrooms?

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I have a problem which is embarrassing and troublesome to me. A few weeks ago, I balled for the first time (incidentally, I’m a girl) and bled an awful lot.

I would like to know: Is the bleeding just because it was the first time? Or is there something wrong with me?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Marijuana is often heavily weighted down with sugar, as I’m sure many smokers know. The obvious purpose seems to be to give as little grass as possible for the weight of the kilo or lid.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I have six children and would like to find a way to present my soul-mate with a more shrunken area to play in. Dig?

My physician told me that I had an unusually good pelvic floor for having had so many children (whatever that means). I have exercised my vaginal muscles but I think I have accomplished all that can be done that way. My husband is sweet and says it doesn’t make that much difference, but...

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Some time ago a doctor injected silicone into my nose just above the left nostril. Then the silicone started to come out.

I went back to the doctor and he removed an inch of hard white substance hanging out of a pore in my right nostril. But he couldn’t remove the rest of it.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: While watching the action attendant the occupation of People’s Park, I received several mild doses of tear gas. The result seems to be a considerable lessening of congestion in my sinuses, though I suffer from chronic sinusitis. Do you recommend this treatment?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I have used the pill for five years but have become concerned and frightened by what I’ve recently heard about the dangerous side effects. What are they? And if I should give them up, what is the comparative efficiency of (1) a diaphragm with contraceptive cream, (2) a ‘loop”, (3) vaginal foam?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Could you please tell me how and where I can get a convenient contraceptive?

Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to get any by prescription as I am 17, single and living with my parents.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Our last kilo contained hundreds of chips of crushed moth balls. We have heard tell of grass cured in moth balls, but had never seen any before. The grass had a peculiar medicinal odor and a metallic taste, but it did stone us better than average. Could there be any possible harm in smoking or swallowing chips too small to see?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: In a recent column you referred to a medical underground weekly called the A.M.A. News. I would like to place a subscription for my doctor to this paper. He is a real good doc and all but seems to have blinders on. Could you give me the address?

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: Last weekend my boyfriend and I were picking mushrooms in the woods and found some funny yellow ones with long stems. Could these have been hallucinigenic mushrooms?

ANSWER: Before you go tripping off in the woods again, you should realize that only experts should try to distinguish between edible mushrooms and poisonous toadstools. Toadstools (Amanita muscaria, A. verna, A. Phalloides, A. Brunnescens) may give a kind of trip but collapse and even death may follow. Amanita muscaria has a sudden (1 to 2 hours) onset of action and causes confusion, excitement, thirst, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, wheezing, salivation, slow pulse, tremors, weakness, collapse and perhaps death. Amanita phalloides, brunnescens and verna have a delayed onset of action (12 to 24 hours) and cause confusion, depression, headache, convulsions, coma, nausea, vomiting, bloody vomitus and stools, jaundice, reduced flow of urine and fluid in the lungs.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I recently, at the advice of my friends, drank a bottle of Romilar C.F. cough syrup. This was supposed to get me stoned. It did just that. After about 20 minutes my arms and legs got limp. I could hardly think and slurred when I talked. I laid down and found myself hallucinating.

...

QUESTION: I think my girlfriend and I have been screwing too much. The reason I believe this is lately I’ve been almost continuously tired.

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Could it be that too much sex is wearing me out? We only screw once a day, six or so times a week. As far as I know, I’m getting a balanced diet and plenty of sleep.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: My husband drives me nuts every night. His right leg sort of jumps every 30 seconds on the dot (trying to put myself to sleep I timed it). He used to chew and grind his teeth but since he got a pin between his two front teeth and it hurt him, he stopped, but replaced that with scratching his head and rubbing his arms.

...

Dan Seigal, president-elect of Cal’s student body, never finished his talk to the thousands gathered to rally behind the Berkeley People’s Park. When he suggested they take the park, avoiding bloodshed and arrest, the crowd immediately left Sproul Plaza. Chanting “We want the park,” and whooping like Indians, they spilled out onto Telegraph Avenue and walked to the Haste Street intersection where a line of helmeted, brown-uniformed police waited behind barricades.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: My lover and I heard a record on KMPX-FM one evening while in bed, about beating and biting one another as a way to come to sexual satisfaction.

We practiced along with the record and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would beat on his back and he bit me all over. particularly around my armpits and breasts. It was very reciprocal and so pleasing we felt we should tell our friends. But since then we have been rejected as weirdoes.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: My wife had her first baby about a month ago and a couple of days after they returned from the hospital the baby began crying every night at about nine and usually continued until my wife finally fed him again around midnight.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

QUESTION: I had enjoyed a close personal and sexual relationship with a girl to whom I was engaged. But then I began to vomit whenever I saw or thought of her. The frightening part of the story is that the same thing happened to me again during a casual sexual relationship with another girl.

...

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, known and loved “Hippocrates,” will be at WSU’s Community Arts Auditorium on Wednesday May 28 at 8 pm in a benefit for Open City, Detroit’s service organization for the free community.

...

The following interview with Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld (HIPpocrates) is reprinted from the Summer 1969 edition of Sexual Freedom, the quarterly publication of the Sexual Freedom League. Subscriptions cost $4.00 a year and are available by writing to: Sexual Freedom Quarterly, Box 14034, San Francisco, California 94114.

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An important notice for your safety and survival

Reprinted from Berkley Barb (UPS)

(Time is short. If you haven’t already seen the following prophetic notice by the communication company, issued this weekend, take heed. And take heart.)

Sorry to bring you down, but this is about the riots our black brothers have planned for the city. There isn’t much hope that they won’t occur.

...

As E.B. Maple points out in the following article (which first appeared in FE #285, August 1977), the atomic bombings of civilians by the American Army Air Corps at the end of World War II was not the knockout punch that convinced an intransigent Japan to suddenly change its strategy and surrender.

...

The barbarity of the nation-state since its emergence 8,000 years ago has only been limited in its intensity by a lack of the technological means needed to perpetrate horrors upon humanity. By the advent of World War II, science and industry, joined together in wedlock by Capital, achieved the breakthrough in destructive methodology and allowed a carnage of a staggering 30,000,000 dead.

...

Reprinted from FE #285, August 1977.

The barbarity of the nation-state since its emergence 8,000 years ago has only been limited in its intensity by a lack of the technological means needed to perpetrate horrors upon humanity. By the advent of World War II, science and industry, joined together in wedlock by Capital, achieved the breakthrough in destructive methodology and allowed a carnage of a staggering 30,000,000 dead.

...

Maurice Spira, “His-story Lesson,” 1983, acrylic on paper

I conceived of “His-story Lesson” as being like a little lecture, demonstrating the development that can be observed as a central tendency, throughout all of human history. Our lecturer is holding his spray can, which is a symbol of hostile technology: it could be destroying the ozone layer or it could be for graffiti, or it could be poison, some toxic substance, it could be mace, whatever comes in a can, it could be hairspray or some hideous perfume out of the drugstore. He’s wrapped in a map of the world to emphasize the essential underpinning of human development and progress on this planet which has always been conquest and domination...in effect colonialism, colonial expansion. Up on the wall to the right you have the factory system, you have the pyramids which represent the ancient bureaucratic state, you have some other little motifs which have to do with the pillars of society—the judiciary, the church and so on. To the left of the lecturer is Roman time, symbolized by a clock with no hands, and below it is our lethal contemporary obsession with cybernetic time and the so-called information revolution which is nothing but an insane and obnoxious plot to fill up all us empty vessels—apparently we’re all empty vessels to be filled up with all this worthless bullshit that technocratic civilization deems purposeful, which I reject out of hand.

...

The black flag is a symbol of anarchism. Unfortunately, the exact origin of this association is very elusive. This may be frustrating to those fascinated by historical trivia but it is by no means surprising.

Anarchism has always deliberately stood for a broad, and at times, vague political platform. The reasoning is sound; blueprints create rigid dogma and stifle the creative spirit of revolt. Along the same lines and resulting in the same problems, anarchists have rejected the “disciplined” leadership found in many political groupings. The reasoning for this is also sound; leadership based on authority is inherently hierarchical. It seems to follow logically that since anarchists have shied away from anything static, they would also shy away from the importance of symbols and icons.

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“The Fifth Estate supports the cause of revolution everywhere.”

—FBI Report

In my estimation, the above twelve-word summary by the nation’s secret police serves adequately as an abbreviated history of this paper on the occasion of its 30^th anniversary.

However, it will definitely not satisfy my friends and comrades on the FE staff who urged me on our 20^th and 25^th anniversaries to write a comprehensive account of the newspaper’s long existence as a radical publication.

...

This article was originally written for our 30^th anniversary edition which appeared in 1996. It has been updated and expanded for this issue.

“The Fifth Estate supports the cause of revolution everywhere.”

-- FBI Report

This nine-word summary by the nation’s secret police, I suspect, serves adequately as an abbreviated history of this paper on the occasion of its 40^th anniversary. It is not due to an inflated sense of self-importance or radical nostalgia that people in the current Fifth Estate collective feel the story of our four decades of print should be recounted. Rather, it is because the history of this paper mirrored a period of large-scale rebellion throughout those years and continues today to give expression to a body of ideas which often finds little expression elsewhere.

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“Mother, what is a feminist?”
“A feminist, my daughter,
Is any woman now who cares
To think about her own affairs
As men don’t think she oughter.”
—Alice Duer Miller, 1915

On March 8 in 1857 hundreds of women textile workers marched from a poor, working-class district on the Lower East Side of New York City to a wealthy area nearby. They were demonstrating against poor working conditions, low wages, and a 60-hour work week, and demanding equality for all women. They were dispersed by the police who “were just protecting property.” Many women were trampled and arrested.

...

Name:

Please choose the best answer for the following questions.

a. was a stool pigeon for the FBI and the anti-communist witch-hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating the film industry.

b. told a major California newspaper: “It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.”

...

Santiniketan, India

Special to the Fifth Estate

It’s weird.

Future historians, in analyzing the causes of the Laotian War (or World War II as the case may be) will be stumped by a curious footnote which will cause them to take off (or put on) their spectacles, shake their heads slowly, and say, “it’s weird.” They will be amazed, of course, at the presence of “hippies” in Laps and the part they play politically in the games of intrigue that are so characteristic of Laotian government.

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a review of

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman. Princeton University Press 2017 press.princeton.eduititles/10925.html

The United States and Germany shared an important characteristic in the 1930s. Both were determined to cement white supremacy into Law. Racist statutes in the US were then state of the art. The Nazis sought to catch up after taking power in 1933.

...

The rhetoric is anti-State. “They picture me as a threat to the nation,” Robert Miles told Metropolitan Detroit magazine (June 1987), referring to the FBI. “But let me tell you the kind of threat I am: I publish a newsletter. I don’t harm or threaten anyone. Granted, I don’t like the government—I’m an anarchist, in fact. But these Ollie Norths see sedition in the five cows I have out in my pasture.”

...

There is a staple of the Yiddish theater written in 1921 entitled, The Golem (sort of a Jewish Frankenstein).

It still remains quite popular in translation including a 2002 Off-Broadway run. I saw it performed in 1984 at a free outdoor staging starring Randy Quaid as the monster.

However, the play has two striking peculiarities. First, no one seems to remember the author’s name. Second, it was written as a “dramatic poem in eight scenes,” and originally thought to be unstageable because of technical demands. Although adapted into its current form, many theatergoers still find parts of the play dreadfully obscure.

...

The series of brief poems which make up the Prison Diary—his one and only, his precious book of poetry—were written by Ho Chi Minh between August 29, 1942, and September 10, 1943, during a journey which he describes in one of his poems in these words: “I have travelled the thirteen districts of Kwangsi Province, and tasted the pleasures of eighteen different prisons.”

...

LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE — Ho Chi Minh died, after fifty years of struggle, still undefeated fighter for Vietnamese independence. Why is it that his death now seems so disturbing?

There has been no lack of pre-packaged homage for the man whose stature as a revolutionary leader is matched only by a handful of men in this century. Moreover, as one whose personal history embraced the broad sweep of international communism from the October Revolution to the present, as well as the entire twentieth century struggle in Vietnam, Ho has appeared to many of us more as an institution than an individual; and his own death, like his personal life, has not received much attention from the Movement.

...

It was with interest that I read an article on Dr. Abram Hoffer in the last issue of The Fifth Estate [FE #13, August 30, 1966]. As a medical researcher on LSD I have had the occasion to refer to Dr. Hoffer’s work many times and hold the greatest respect for him as a competent scientific investigator.

...

“Stop the madness and expand Tweed. Two neighborhoods can’t hold up economic progress,” pronounced a local newspaper columnist, directing his ire at residents on the edge of New Haven and East Haven, Connecticut.There, the grassroots Stop Tweed campaign has so far halted the expansion of Tweed Airport.

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B.K. Brings You the All New SELF-BURGER!!!

A new feature at our inner-city Burger King allows you, the customer, to come through our doors in search of a hamburger and take a chance on becoming hamburger yourself! Continuing our policy of giving random surprises to our customers, Burger King regional supervisor Dan Dilldy hired an armed guard equipped with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun.

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Our banner in the marches, which is usually found at the front of our drum squad. It reads “There are no ‘good citizens’, only potential criminals.” This banner was made in response to propaganda circulated by pro-Beijing establishmentarian political groups in Hong Kong, assuring “good citizens” everywhere that extradition measures do not threaten those with a sound conscience who are quietly minding their own business. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.
Source: Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill (CrimethInc, June 22, 2019)
https://crimethinc.com/2019/06/22/hong-kong-anarchists-in-the-resistance-to-the-extradition-bill-an-interview

...

Hong Kong, a steamy, enchanting, green pearl of an island with an amazingly efficient public transit system is also the ultimate temple to last gasp, fast buck, crass consumerism.

Mega-towering, teetering, multi-national corporate headquarters ablaze with over-sized neon logos that are sometimes lost in the clouds, dominate the skyline, but can’t quite obliterate the dreamy and defiant mountains behind them.

...

Hong Kong’s Black Book Fair took place November 17–19, 2017 in the lecture theatre of the Visual Arts Centre, close to the Admiralty area where the Umbrella Movement was ignited by a police attack on demonstrators three years earlier.

Collective members from a vegan restaurant in a working class community with a “pay what you feel is ight” free/autonomoous pricing operation presenting at the Hong Kong book fair.

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FE note: The following is excerpted from an interview with Mike Bloomfield, lead guitarist of the Electric Flag. In deleted portions of the interview, which will appear in its entirety in the next issue of Scene magazine, Bloomfield traces his musical development and his split with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to form the Flag. He discusses some of his favorite musicians, tells why he canceled his recent Bowl appearance with the Mamas and Papas, and some of the joys and hangups of his art.

...

a review of

Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization by John Zerzan; introduction by Lang Gore. Feral House, 2015, 136 pp.

John Zerzan’s latest book, Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization, continues his ongoing critique of civilization and its consequences. The collection of essays--many of which originally appeared in Fifth Estate and other anarchist publications during the past few years--explore familiar topics: the origins of civilization, the techno-culture, industrialism, the Left, and collapse.

...

The Camp Fire was also a health and environmental disaster. Smoke from the deadly fire resulted in widespread air pollution throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Central Valley.

On November 8, 2018, a deadly wildfire—called the Camp Fire because it began on Camp Creek Road—swept the western Sierra Nevada foothills in northern California. The fire’s spark originated with Pacific Gas & Electric power transmission lines that ignited dry vegetation on a particularly windy day.

...

The first night after leaving their hide-out in the Vancouver Island woods, Jerry and Max climbed the drawbridge off the last ferry of the day onto what they hoped would be the safety of Inner Island and headed down the beach to avoid meeting anyone.

Inner Island bobbed comfortably in the calm waters between the mountainous spine of Vancouver Island and the mainland Coast. After the indigenous Pentlatch had been decimated by lethal doses of smallpox and colonialism, it had- been settled for the past half century by an assortment of old-time pioneer families, hippie dropouts, draft dodgers, and a scattering of retired criminals.

...

It’s over. Nobody really came out ahead. Washtenaw Sheriff Douglas Harvey became Pig of the Year and liberal Ann Arbor Mayor Robert Harris and U-M President Robben Fleming both lost many points with their respective constituencies. Sixty-nine people were busted in three days of street fighting and more than 100 were hurt.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—Hearings on SDS will be held this month by the House Internal Securities Committee, the College Press Service reported.

Committee Chairman Richard Ichord said that the investigation has been going on for nearly three months. The Committee is looking over its large library of SDS literature and other leftist material.

...

By August 2020, nearly one third of all Americans had outstanding rent or mortgage payments. As eviction moratoriums expire, communities should look to successful actions against the American housing system for inspiration. Moms 4 Housing of Oakland, California is a notable example. The organization formed when Carroll Fife, the director of Oakland Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) was approached by several mothers who had recently become homeless. The moms formed a collective, and together, they occupied a spectator property that had remained vacant for years. The occupation continued for two months while a legal battle to evict them ensued. As the case dragged on, Moms 4 Housing became a media sensation, gaining support from liberal journalists and politicians. Moms 4 Housing lost their court case on January 10^th 2020, and the mothers were evicted during a nighttime raid four days later. But the community stood by them, attempting to block the eviction and demanding justice. In response to the outcry, the landlord agreed to sell the property to a community land trust. Moms 4 Housing has drawn substantial attention to the severe failures of market housing.

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a review of

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021

I was hanging out in the dayroom of the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Conn. late last year. It was noisy with the sound of the guys playing cards and Scrabble, when a friend brought a book with an intriguing cover to the table. It was Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, and it jolted me back to another place and time in my life, when so much of my world was about saving the trees from destruction. Her book is full of the wisdom gleaned from decades of careful and loving observation.

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a review of

Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture 1848–2011 by Jesse Cohn. AK Press, 2014, 421 pp., akpress.org, $22.95

In Underground Passages, Jesse Cohn begins with the apt metaphor of anarchist resistance culture as a tunnel: it is “a way of living in transit through” this world. Resistance culture is “not mainly defined by its end; it is a middle, a means.” Anarchist cultural production is a way of making sense of the world, a figurative place inhabited temporarily in the time between the present and the future of anarchy.

...

As an anarchist writer, I’m no different from other scribes who try to be socially engaged in their work and lives. I drink beer, write, and do my best to live according to my anarchist principles. And I try to incorporate anarchist thought, experiences and visions in all my creative work.

It’s a daily, lifelong challenge.

...

a review of

How Art and Music Can Change the World: Mecca Normal

Mecca Normal is Jean Smith and David Lester--making music and art together since 1984.

Over the last 25 years, Mecca Normal has consistently turned up the heat on the theoretical relationship between music and social change by furiously stirring them together in the fiery cauldron of artistic practice. In the process, they have boldly created a unique body of work that has challenged the downpressing gravity of the authoritarian life with a yeasty combination of outrage and subversive laughter. In essence, they have defied gravity, and, in doing so, have urged us all to refuse to be held down when we could be soaring to the outer reaches of possibility, or, better yet, demanding the impossible. Their music is not designed to present us with a dry polemic on the “one-best-way” to be politically active or offer a pat answer on how to live our lives according to anybody’s party line. Instead, it is a direct call to see through the bullshit and make our own choices.

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a review of

Red Squared Montreal: A Fictional Chronicle by Norman Nawrocki. Black Rose Books, 2023

One thing we know about capitalism: it can’t have a past (or at least acknowledge one), for the past is filled with resistance.

That’s why it’s so important to keep this history alive, as Norman Nawrocki does so well in his novel Red Squared Montreal. It tells the story of the Quebec 2012 seven month long massive student strike involving 300,000 participants throughout the province. The revolt, ignited by a proposed hike in tuition, didn’t consist of just a few protests, but first, daily marches and then daily and nightly demonstrations with actions involving tens of thousands.

...

For a number of years, the Fifth Estate has been writing about the crisis of Western civilization and its industrial/technological plague. At the same time we have been profoundly interested in primitivism and the cultures of earth-based peoples, realizing that their demise came with the subjugation of nature by the advances of the civilized world. The view that our planet faces a grave, man-made ecological threat is certainly not unique to us, and the last few years have seen the emergence of an international green or ecology phenomenon which demands an end to environmental abuse and seeks a reconciliation between humanity and nature.

...

There is a Saying: “Good writing is counter-revolutionary. According to Ellen Willis (who did a piece on the Chicago Pig Riot in New American Review No. 6) good writing “is a reminder that literature is basically an activity of mandarins, that it is all too easy for a writer to start thinking like a mandarin, that literary mandarins will be eager to recruit us, since there are too few good writers around. It is an exhortation not to glory in literacy as an end in itself, but to use it responsibly. And by responsibly I don’t mean judiciousness, intellectual respectability, or the balanced view. I mean responsibility to our fellows and our struggle.”

...

Mass murder, random killings and the like are nothing new in this country; Bruce Springsteen, in his ballad about a killing spree in the late 1950s by Charlie Starkweather, sings, “It’s just a meanness in this land, sir.”

It seems someone blows their top, flips their lid almost daily. So, reports of a homophobic minister’s son in New York City shooting into a crowd of gays, or a driver ramming her car into pedestrians packed onto a Las Vegas sidewalk, or a disgruntled client tossing gasoline bombs before him as he shoots his way through a crowded Detroit law office, or a bored Southern California school girl who calmly fires round after round into her school yard, become almost mundane, ordinary, such is their frequency. They are the small percentage of flip-outs, those whose rage has gotten out of control.

...

Both the Spring & Summer 2002 editions of Green Anarchy were read and studied for this review. GA is available for $2.00 contact P.O. Box 11331, Eugene, OR 97440.

To join the green of ecology with the black of anarchy is to make transparent something intuitively apparent. To genuinely critique the state and authority is to critique civilization and industrial devastation. The first anarchists-the indigenous gatherers who lived in what Marshall Sahlins dubbed “the original leisure society”-were certainly green anarchists. The theses that create projects like Green Anarchy (GA) are important ones.

...

a review of

Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish & Italian Anarchism in America by Kenyon Zimmer. University of Illinois Press, 2015, 300 pp.

The campaign in the 1920s to save Sacco and Vanzetti from execution brought anarchists to national attention, but not the fact that they were part of a large community of comrades in Boston.

...

Recycling is a classic case of co-optation.

The title of this article is somewhat misleading since I continue to recycle a portion of the waste produced daily by my household. What has changed is my previous diligence in making certain every scrap of what is recyclable winds up in my yellow curbside container.

...

In mid-August, a three year-old lawsuit charging that environmentalist groups were religious extremists comparable to some of the more violent, intolerant ultra-orthodox Islamic sects collapsed when the attorney failed to meet a re-filing deadline with the U.S. Supreme Court.

The suit had been brought against Forest Guardians, the Superior Wilderness Action Network, and the U.S. Forest Service by the 125 companies that make up the Associated Contract Loggers (A.C.L.) of northern Minnesota. The loggers were asking for $600,000 in damages and permission to plunder timber from the Superior National Forest.

...

FE NOTE: The following article arrived in the mail just as our last issue was going to the printer. Since that time, the government has closed the case on the shooting of Norman Mayer on Dec. 8, 1982 and his name has disappeared from the media. But his actions, and his message, continue to deserve attention. The postscript was submitted later, after two films on nuclearism were aired on national television.

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a review of

How Nonviolence Protects the State by Peter Gelderloos. Signal Fire Press. 2005. 180 pages. $8. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state

Being a person deeply committed to nonviolence, to spiritual anarchy, and to actively not going along with the status quo in any way, I have to admit I started reviewing this book with the intention of trashing it. Initially, my reaction was, “Oh, this is ridiculous; this is absurd; this is twisted.” But the more I read it, and the more I talked with people about it, the more I came to agree with Peter Gelderloos. To a point.

...

a review of

Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation by adrienne maree brown. AK Press 2021

Holding Change is the kind of wise resource book I wish so very badly that I had when I was free and organizing. Way too often, I witnessed the depressing cycle of a hopeful and energetic coming together of a grassroots group break down into sad, burned-out individual activists.

...

The dominant culture’s appropriation and enfeeblement of language that was once angrily thrust against it is nothing new.

Even the word “revolution,” which once sent shivers down the spines of a fragile bourgeoisie until their rule was assured, has been recuperated. After its brief resurrection in the 1960s, the phrase was quickly adopted by the advertising industry to mean anything new and exciting, as in “Breck’s revolutionary new hair coloring.”

...

Burning Books opened in Buffalo, New York on September 9, 2011, the 40^th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising. The store, located on the city’s west side is a family-run, friendly, neighborhood radical bookstore, owned by me, Theresa Baker-Pickering, and Nate Buckley. It has quickly become an activist hub for the local community.

...

a review of

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, adrienne maree brown, Editor. AK Press, 2019 AKpress.org

This book is about creation, the act of re-creating the world; about a new world, a new language, a new flesh. Politics based around healing and happiness. adrienne maree brown and her fellow contributors offer a gift of unspeakable value by way of this sturdy, hilarious, tragic book. By helping to reinvigorate the world with magick and remembrance of the ancestors, it is more revolutionary than any text I can recall reading in years.

...

From Norway, My Norway (1968) Translated by Esther Greenleaf Murer

Jens Bjorneboe (1920–1976) is one of Norway’s most noted post-WW authors; a poet, playwright, essayist and novelist. He was a complex personality embodying a variety of influences from anthroposophy to anarchism, who was both banned and honored in his home country. He is best known for his fiction, particularly the trilogy, The History Of Bestiality: Moment Of Freedom (1966), Powderhouse (1969), and The Silence (1973) and his novel The Sharks (1974). Philosopher Arne Ness is the founder of Deep Ecology.

...

There is something faulty with the concept of humans as rational animals. It defines humanity by a limited criterion and tries to separate humans from our animal being. This sets up a hierarchy in which the true human is defined by the portion of the brain that is rational. Perhaps, even worse than the idea of the rational animal is the idea of the “rationalizing animal.” Pratkanis and Aronson in their 2001 Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, place this as a central factor in how we are manipulated.

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a review of

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire by Eric Berkowitz. Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, Calif., 2012

Hebrew law changed everything. Prior to this, homosexuality had generally gone without notice, but in Hebrew law it became (along with many other sex acts) punishable by death. Although many of their laws drew from past practices, for the Hebrews, private sex acts, and everything associated with them, became God’s business.

...

1. More and more bombing, including population centers. More and more napalm. More and more poisoning chemicals. More and more U.S. troops.

2. Forced hat-in-hand negotiations. Ignore the Geneva accords. Permanent U.S. control of South Vietnam. Terms which the Vietnamese can never accept.

...

Nature played a big part in the 1960s Revolution, more than just flower-power and communes. Many of us left the city for natural living, for our physical and mental well-being. We sought freedom from a mercantile world of wage-slavery. We read Mother Earth News. Gardens were planted; fields were cultivated. New ideas of untainted healthy food flourished together with a new-born environmentalism and deep ecology. The chauvinism of the 1950s was confronted by movements of peace, civil rights, women’s rights, environmental rights, consumer rights and so on.

...

Today, many American leftists are accepting and even promoting the propaganda of the dictatorial regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. They overwhelmingly stand on the side of fascism and genocide in that ravaged country.

Democracy Now! features guests who constantly declare that the Assad regime is the only hope for stability in Syria. It took an online petition to get program host, Amy Goodman, to invite a Syrian activist to appear on the show. Pictured is Yasser Munif of Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution.

...

a review of

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004

This early short book by the late David Graeber provides us with several edifying topics. Its 105 pages contain a concise summary of anarchist principles, an overview of anarchist ideas that have already shown up in conventional anthropology, a critique of both academic leftism and academia itself, and the idea that anarchist imagination and activism can benefit from anthropological work.

...

Reprinted here are the instructions as they originally appeared in the FE for both the use of bogus credit card numbers (for free long-distance calls) and the subversion of computer-card billing (for reduced telephone bills). Also included is a description of the method whereby long-distance phone calls can be made by tapping into Bell’s own nation-wide test loop circuits, the bill for which goes directly to old Ma herself.

...

As the profit-swollen Michigan Bell Telephone monopoly tries to gouge its captive customers more each year with unnecessary rate hikes, requests for charges for information services and 20-cent pay-phone calls, the Fifth Estate presents a small way to even the score: free long-distance calls.

The 1976 telephone credit card codes are presented here as both a public service, as we have done for the past several years, and as our way of saying “Fuck Michigan Bell” for its recent (and unsuccessful) attempt to prosecute this paper for printing telephone company information.

...

The 40 year history of Fifth Estate is not the easiest thing to access for research purposes. The best source is the massive Underground Press Collection, a 500+ reel microfilm archive of periodicals from 1963 to 1985. Almost 100 libraries, mostly university-based, in the US have part or all of this series, and the FEs from these dates are contained within, although the image quality can be poor. Pro-Quest, an online journal service which some libraries subscribe to, contains electronic full-text FE articles from 1996 On. But if you don’t have a university affiliation, it may be difficult to use these resources, although some public libraries may have access to them. Talk to your local public library’s reference desk about what options you have; sometimes articles can be accessed by Interlibrary Loan (ILL), and occasionally special passes can be arranged to university collections. Of course, persuading local students to lend you an ID may be the easiest route!

...

a review of

Cheap Copies! Cheap Copies! The OBSOLETE! Press Guide to DIY Hectography, Mimeography, & Spirit Duplication by Rich Dana. Obsolete Press, 2022

The first question many people have when looking at a how-to manual like this one is, why bother? What’s the motivation for doing something the hard way with antiquated techniques and materials? Scouring junk shops and the Internet for the equipment and supplies, that, in printing, have been made obsolete by the machines that produce what you’re holding in your hands—computers.

...

As Bush’s Iraq quagmire begins to take on the same qualities as the war in Vietnam—fighting an insurgent population, mounting US casualties, increased slaughter of civilians, destruction of the country to “save it,” no exit strategy—so, too, does military opposition.

Ex-Sgt. Camilo Mejia holding an anti-war sign in Iraq. After refusing to report for duty, he was sentenced to a year in jail.

...

a review of

Between Earth and Empire: From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community by John P. Clark. PM Press 2019 pmpress.org

John P. Clark is a major thinker, on a par with Wendell Berry, Thoreau, or Rebecca Solnit. He is an anarchist and an eco-socialist but label not required.

The book under review, Between Earth and Empire, expresses the hope and the fear. From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community is his subtitle. Necrocene is geological portending death as a result of statist, technocratic, patriarchal society. The beloved community is spiritual. The terms bestride the natural and the social.

...

It’s been two weeks now since the morning when I awoke before dawn to join the blockade that shut down the opening meeting of the WTO.

Since getting out of jail, I’ve been reading the media coverage and trying to make sense out of the divergence between what I know happened and what has been reported.

...

The almost all white Michigan National Guard charges down Detroit’s 12^th Street where the 1967 Rebellion began.

Frank Joyce, was the Fifth Estate News Editor 50 years ago, and rejoins us with reflections on the 1967 events.

“I calmed the tremor in my gut. I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creatures in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”

...

Special to Liberation News Service

How does one describe a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing? From a legal viewpoint? Confrontation of opposing forces? Show biz? From any point of view, the hearings held in Washington October 1, 3, and 4, to investigate what took place in Chicago were a flop, a farce.

...

SEE...

HUAC AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT!

Students for a Democratic Society present a...

RIGHT-WING FILM PHANTASMAGORIA

Featuring

“While Brave Men Die...”

Brand new film depicting control of anti-war movement by criminal conspiracy.

SEE Army troop trains blocked... Marches on Washington... unlimited civil disobedience, and more...

...

NEW YORK, Sept. 24 (Liberation News Service)—The HUAC circus is coming to town once more. And the fireworks should fly in Washington.

Thus far, six people have received subpoenas to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Oct. 1. Those now set to appear before Amerika’s anti-commie tribunal are Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger and Robert Greenblatt.

...

Congress is still striving to preserve the American Way. The inventiveness of the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) has gone beyond the dangerous into the realm of ridiculous and petty harassment. The McCarran act of 1950, provided the President with powers to proclaim a state of Internal Security Emergency and have persons whom it felt would conspire with others to engage in sabotage put into places of detention.

...

“A serious error is being made in Latin America: Where the inhabitants depend almost exclusively on the products of the soil for their livelihood, the educational stress, contradictorily, is on urban rather than farm life; and the happiest people are the ones whose children are well-educated and instructed in philosophy; whose sentiments are directed into noble channels.”

...

The Black Panthers have begun a campaign for the immediate admission to bail of their Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton, who was convicted Sept. 8^th of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death, Oct. 28^th of last year, of an Oakland, California policeman.

Eldridge Cleaver, Panther Minister of Information and Peace and Freedom Party candidate for President, said in San Francisco, that the verdict in the eight week trial was “totally unacceptable...a compromise verdict,” and stated that petitions were being prepared for circulation demanding that Newton be allowed to post bond.

...

OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 27—Huey P. Newton, Black Panther leader, was sentenced today to a prison term of 2 to 15 years for the voluntary manslaughter of John Frey, an Oakland cop.

Newton’s lawyer, who was turned down on his plea for probation said he hoped to gain freedom for Newton on bail through an appeal to the California District Court of Appeals.

...

Charles Garry, attorney for Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, will speak in Detroit at 8 p.m., Friday, October 18, at McGregor Hall on Wayne’s campus.

The occasion is a conference sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild on political defense.

The Newton trial, in significant contrast to the Spock Trial, was an important example of the use of a trial as a political forum, means of exposure, and organizing focus for movement politics. While exploiting all opportunities for legal and factual defenses, Garry relentlessly exposed the racist practices of the Oakland Police in particular, and racist nature of the judicial system and American society in general.

...

A Human Be-In in the Flint area will happen on Sunday, May 21, from 10 a.m. until dusk at the Byram Lake park outside of Linden, Michigan. Organized by Trans-Love Energies of Flint, the Be-In will take place in a 60-acre park area 20 miles from Flint and will last all day, with music, fun, food, bells, and banners.

...

Special to the Fifth Estate

San Francisco — Hippies, Hippies, Hippies, and when you turn around, more of them were sitting on the grass, perched on fences, standing on benches, straining for a look, or entwined on the ground.

People carrying odd pennants, flags and signs, seeing colored smoke bombs going off. People dropping into the crowd by parachute, souls filing through the crowd handing out L.S.D., others handing out sticks of incense.

...

Äkta Människor (Real Humans)

SVT 1 Sweden, 2012. Syndicated in 50 countries including U.S.

After watching twenty episodes from two seasons of the Swedish TV series, “Real Humans,” I am left with several questions. It’s terrifying to know that there are scientists, particularly in Japan, who are working on creating robots to be both intelligent and human-like.

...

A middle-aged friend of mine helps keep his sanity by giving, on occasion, an extra 25 cents to the man in the toll booth on the bridge. Then he says, “This is to pay for my friend who is in the car behind me.” As he drives away he can look in his rear view mirror and laugh to see the policeman and driver of the following car gesturing and scratching their heads.

...

Times used to be when everybody loved a liberal. They had something for everybody. Times have changed and Hubert Humphrey, America’s number two war criminal can tell you that.

News Editor Gotkin at the HHH picket line gets it on with both hands. Photo by Mike Tyre.

Hubie made it into the Motor City on August 2 and went straight out to St. Clair Shores thinking he ought to do pretty well out in Honkie land. Bad planning. There were a lot of honkies thought Hubie wasn’t honkie enough and began heckling him with cries that he was soft on rioters and that the poverty program had “subversives” in it.

...

Thirteen years ago the Hungarian people, led by the Budapest working class, launched an attack on the ruling police state. In the process, the despotism of the state was briefly eliminated and councils of workers emerged, signaling a dramatic break with the old life and posed a genuine alternative for the future. This spark of revolution was crushed only by the intervention of Russian tanks and after weeks of heroic resistance. Those moments in 1956 exist not as memories of defeat, but as a beacon for what is possible.

...

Recently, I had a discussion with Dr. Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphrey Osmond on drugs that tend to mimic psychoses. These two doctors are among the leading researchers on the mind and how chemicals effect it. Dr. Hoffer is Director of the Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Osmond, by the way, coined the currently popular word ‘psychedelic”, meaning mind-effecting.

...

a review of

Hymns for Brueghel: Brambles of Berries, Rants, and Poetic Orgies by (un)leash. Published by Ink and Scribe in coordination with Cafe Press, 2005. Contact: Primal Revival Press at wyrdwizard < a t >hotmail < d o t >com. Available from the Barn for $20.

“The Full Moon strips civilization from the landscape, and it becomes fully 1,000 years ancient. The sun and moon know how to make eternal. But once an area is colonized, it stays colonized for so very long. How long before these delusions evaporate for good? Will I live to see it? Will I live my whole life under the occupation? [...] Yet I would Los Angeles become a Homeland again, for beneath my feet, by sunset or moonlight, crickets chirp by the tule villages where campfires are cooking acorn stew.”

...

The hypocrisies of hierarchical political organizations know no bounds. Of this we can be certain. However, we shouldn’t be cajoled into thinking that the political right have a monopoly on contradiction and duplicity.

As far as it plays the game of modern power politics, the inconsistencies and follies of The Left (comprised of communists and socialists) rival those of any rightist grouping. The modern-day disciples of the dead men with beards are by no means immune to the worst effects of dogmatism and myopia.

...

My childhood prepared me for prison

I knew that in every day

There was a possibility

That I might be ashamed,

Denied something I

Needed,

Would be contained and prevented

From escaping

And yes, there would be pain,

There might be violence

Marius Mason paints and writes while serving 22 years in prison. supportmariusmason.org

Editor’s note: Dave Dellinger, editor of Liberation magazine, arranged in Hanoi last spring for a group of Americans to meet with the North Vietnamese and members of the NLF in a midway meeting point—which developed to be Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. The Americans were drawn from the peace movement, the black liberation movement, university professors, community organizers, clergy, artists and film-makers. Raymond Mungo, former editor of the Boston University News, participated and spoke on behalf of the Liberation News Service.

...

The scene is a church located in the heart of Detroit’s Inner City.

A small army of some 40 agents of the State roar up to the church, force their way in, and demand a man named Tom Sincavitch.

About 43 young men, all wearing nametags reading: “I am Tom Sincavitch,” identify themselves as the wanted man.

...

There is a rumor going around, a rumor of great tremors. Last week Chief Reddin called in the National Guard, set up an emergency morgue in the Pan Pacific, and declared L.A. a disaster area. You may already have heard: earthquakes are expected this summer, perhaps even this month.

California is going to break away from the continent and drop off into the Pacific Ocean.

...

In late August, a sizable crowd gathered in a downtown Detroit park well past its glory days to eat chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream...and learn about Sacco and Vanzetti.

The event, known as the Sacco and Vanzetti Ice Cream Social, honored the memory of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-born anarchists framed for allegedly robbing and killing a paymaster and security guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts in April 1920.

...

1976—A national identification card, as well as 53 other “proposed solutions” to the problems of false identification, drug smuggling, fugitives, welfare abuse and check fraud are currently under debate by the Federal Advisory Committee on False Identification (FACFI), according to a recent issue of Counterspy magazine (Spring ’76).

...

“When you’re taking on a bulldozer, you don’t worry about the flies buzzing around your head.”

—Dave Foreman, editor, Earth First!, Yule 1987 edition

Words have consequences and, knowing their power, Dave Foreman uses them skillfully and manipulatively.

The Fifth Estate is one of the flies, along with Murray Bookchin and the social ecologists, Ynestra King and the eco-feminists, Alien-Nation—anyone who has criticized the deep ecology philosophy and its most militant exponent, the Earth First! (EF!) group. They’re “warriors” on a sacred mission to defend the Wilderness, with barely time to “squabble” with “anarchists-leftists-marxists,” who are “academics,” “anthropocentric” and “wimps” given to “whining.”

...

“History,” Stephen said, “is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”

To resist, that is to create, is this waking--in the sense of waking up from the nightmare of history: of the accumulation of capital, state power, the vast concentration of hierarchies and fields of power embodied through society--extended through colonization.

...

Clown school, summer 2007. I’m doing an improv exercise, still soaked from the spit takes and bucket sloshes we practiced in the last class. The teacher catches me struggling for a witty response and hollers “Stop!”

“You’re thinking too hard.” He looks straight into my eyes: this guy’s been a clown for so long that he needs just a facial twitch to remind me of the only imperative. Play. A noun and a verb--just like “clown.”

...

Hi! My name is CBU-871B, but let’s not be formal. A lot of my friends call me Cluster Bomb. I’ve been busy lately, doing what I’m supposed to. And, I sure appreciate the careful treatment that I receive from the American news media.

...

Special to the Fifth Estate

GREAT FALLS, Montana—A local boy has made good out in the wooly West.

Mickey Gordon, formerly of Detroit, was charged in Montana Federal District Court with threatening the life of President Nixon. Gordon is a student at Rocky Mountain College in that state.

The complaint is based on information furnished by Roger Lee Clement, a fellow student who claims Gordon said, “If I had a gun, I’d shoot the President.”

...

a review of

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant. Little, Brown & Company, 2023

A February arson attack by a mob of Lunar New Year revelers in San Francisco on a Google driverless taxi, to the cheers of onlookers, brings to mind the early 19^th century assaults on factories and industrial machines by newly-marginalized workers who came to be known as Luddites. The attempt of these workers to hold on to social solidarity and community is the subject of Brian Merchant’s timely offering.

...

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</strong>

To vote is to recognize the legitimacy of the state, its laws and its right to control your life.

To vote is to sanctify the government’s right to make war in your “defense” and in your name. To kill, maim, terrorize and torture people, yourself included, in both secret and conventional wars.

...

If you are stopped by the police, or arrested, whether you are guilty or not, you have the same rights. You can protect these rights best if you use this information.

1. You may remain silent; you do not have to answer any questions other than your name and address.

2. The police may search you for weapons by patting the outside of your clothing.

3. Whatever happens, you must not resist arrest even if you are innocent.

...

The following speech was delivered by David Hilliard, Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party at the November 15^th anti-war rally at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

He was charged with threatening the life of the President as a result of it.

There’s too many American flags out here, and our Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, says that the American flag and the American eagle are the true symbols of fascism. ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE. Black power to Black people, Brown power to Brown people, Red power to Red people, and Yellow power to Ho Chi Minh, and Comrade Kim II Sung the courageous leader of the 40,000,000 Korean people.

...

Throughout history, atrocities other than sexual assault have been described as rape. One example of this is the World War II Japanese massacre known as the Rape of Nanking. This serves the rhetorical purpose of bringing home the horrible nature of a crime, since rape itself is so horrifying.

Recently, however, there has been a trend towards trivializing it in common slang, assisted by its use as a descriptive for incidences completely unrelated to sexual assault. This obscures the meaning and nature of rape.

...

The following article is a first person account of the author’s involvement in the FBI’s program of using students to spy on students. Although occurring at Purdue University, the author feels that such activities are far from rare, and that the implications contained in it are fairly universal.

In the fall of 1968, a friend (who will not be named and who is no longer a danger) and I called the FBI office in Lafayette, Indiana, in pursuit of money and excitement, to inform on what we thought, when we witnessed it, to be a criminal act. Speaking for myself, at this time I had no political convictions or prejudices.

...

Different cultures view the world in different ways, especially if we take into consideration the large number and diversity of the means to engage in conversation beyond speech.

Just like language, each communication medium creates a unique way to converse, providing a new field of thought, expression and sensitivity In our culture, each image type, whether as a photograph or in its television version, is a historically specific paradigm of creating a certain instance of what we call a worldview. What is not so easy, though, is to decode what it is the image proposes, that is what kind of worldview it creates.

...

What I love about

the occupy movement

is that it makes

no demands.

Is

a space

in which possibility

expands.

An opening

for imaginations

to upset

the applecart

of acquiescent

relations.

Imagine

clearing the slate

opening the gate

rejecting

the horrors

of industrial civ

un-Occupying

...

The Image was there, the sacrifices and the paid assassin, the screaming mobs of idiot droolers, the expressionless expressions passing for cool, the magic gimmicks and trickery, the grey recorders and their cynicism who will later let everyone know what “really” happened via the tube; all there in a building that once flourished better when it was full of cows. The midwest may never learn.

...

FE Note: Because we are so late in coming out, this article may seem to be rather belated. In fact, the population-immigration debate continues.

Dave Foreman (former proprietor and editor of the Earth First! Journal) plays a key role in pushing an ugly, reactionary anti-immigration politics that does not remotely address the issues of empire and capitalism that are necessary to understand and to respond humanely and sanely to the population explosion.

...

a review of

Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950–1985 Edited by Andrew Nette and Ian McIntyre. PM Press, 2021

In the last several years, Science Fiction, or SF as it is known among fans of the literary genre, has been the subject of several excellent critiques.

In 2018, Alec Nevalla-Lee’s Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction presented an in-depth analysis of the cultural impact of pulp magazines and the purveyors of the genre’s myth of “the competent man.”

...

Discussed in this article

The Poetry of Postwar Japan, edited by Kijima Hajime. University of Iowa Press, 1975.

Modern Japanese Poetry, translated by James Kirkup and edited by A.R. Davis. University of Queensland Press, 1978.

War poetry is significantly characteristic of this century. Because the poet’s voice is inherently a human voice, poets throughout the world have felt a weighted responsibility to react to that which threatens to destroy humankind and to protest against the inhuman force of modern warfare—from the ruthless use of asphyxiating gas during World War I to the massive unleashing of bombs during World War II.

...

Clinton’s US/UN imposed sanctions have already killed 10 percent of the Iraq population. 1.5 million people are dead which includes 6000 children who die monthly. The economic sanctions are weapons of mass destruction. They are a crime against humanity that have served to strengthen Hussein, weakened his opposition, and failed to force him to comply with UN resolutions.

...

“I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own.”

—General David M. Shoupe, Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps. Retired

It’s hard to believe that the war in Vietnam is still dragging on. The generals have already lost the war in the Vietnamese countryside and are now fighting a losing battle to hold on to the few cities and enclaves left to them.

...

a review of

Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy by Yassin al-Haj Saleh. Haymarket Books 2017

This book is a necessary corrective to the dominant perception—left, right and center—that the opposition in Syria are all jihadists and dictator Bashar Assad the best bet for stability.

...

“Hey! What are you guys doing here? You hate unions!”

—A strike supporter

The labor militant who aimed this question at us was surprised, almost shocked, to see a group whom she considers anarchists critical of unions, shoulder-to-shoulder with striking Teamsters and newspaper reporters, squaring off against the cops at a suburban Detroit printing plant late one night last summer.

...

“Hey! What are you guys doing here? You hate unions!”

--A strike supporter

The labor militant who aimed this question at us was surprised, almost shocked, to see a group whom she considers anarchists critical of unions, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with striking Teamsters and newspaper reporters, squaring off against the cops at a suburban Detroit printing plant late one night last summer.

...

Discussed in this article:

The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, Vol. 1, by José Peirats, translated by Paul Sharkey, edited by Chris Ealham, 348 pp., (24 pp. photographs). The Meltzer Press, P.O. Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex TN34 2UX, England, 2001 WIB ph. Also available through AK Press and Left Bank Books in North America.

...

a review of

Never Work: Essays Against the Sale of Life. Detritus Books, 2022

“Workplaces are fascist. They’re cults designed to eat your life; bosses hoard your minutes jealously, like dragons hoard gold.”

—Nouri, solar punk

This collection of essays argues that we are sacrificing our lives in the service of the Machine. The concluding essay sums it up. Written in 2022, “Anti-work: from ‘I quit’ to ‘We revolt’ by Crimethlnc Ex-Workers Collective, starts by addressing the revolt against work that coincided with the two years of the pandemic. In 2021, a quarter of the workforce quit their jobs. The pandemic made it clear that the function of the market is to force people to sacrifice their lives for others’ benefit.

...

On Jan. 20, 620 bombing missions will rain death on South Vietnam.

On Jan. 20, Richard Nixon will be inaugurated amid cries of consensus, unity, and law and order.

Liberals admonish us to “give Nixon a chance,” but we should remember that this new “man” has the same sick obsession with war policies as Johnson and is quite likely to bomb us to death in the name of international law and order if our local police, which he supports, don’t club us to death first.

...

Last March 23 to 25, the Italian police made a nation-wide raid on the homes and offices of anarchists and arrested 19 people and charged them with armed rebellion, subversive association with the clandestine group Azione Rivoluzionaria (Revolutionary Action) and the robberies of six banks in Bologna. Since that time, seven of the people have been released, but the other twelve remain behind bars—they are: Alfredo Bonnano, Carmelina Di Marco, Salvo Marietta, Paolo Ruberto, Patrizia Casamenti, Masstmo Gaspari, France Lombardi, Roccard Fabbricat, Sandre Vandini and two Scots, Jean Weir and Kenneth Burgone (both associated with the publishing group Bratach Dubh).

...

American Civil Liberties Union: 961–4462

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee, Police Brutality Complaints: 872–2828

Creem Magazine: 831–0816

Draft Resistance, info on counseling 874–4334

Detroit Anti-war Coalition: 873–4322

Fifth Estate Office: 831–6800

Fire Department: 962–0400

Grape Boycott Office: 825–4811

...

American Civil Liberties Union, 961–4662

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee, 923–0610

Centerhouse Switchboard, 399–9090

Community Reporter, 833–5085

Detroit Anti-War Coalition, 874–4410

Fifth Estate Offices, 831–6800

(Distribution Centers, KOTC, 831–1574)

Fire Department, 962–0400

Gay Liberation, 923–7749

...

American Civil Liberties Union 961–4662

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee (Police Brutality Complaints) 872–2828

Creem Magazine 831–0816

Detroit Anti-war Coalition 873–4322

Fifth Estate Office 831–6800

Fire Department 962–0400

Grape Boycott Office 825–4811

Metro 832–5126

Newsreel 833–7885

Open City 831–2770

...

American Civil Liberties Union, 961–4662

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee (Police Brutality Complaints), 872–2828

Creem Magazine, 831–0816

Detroit Anti-war Coalition, 873–4322

Fifth Estate Office, 831–6800

Fire Department, 962–0400

Grape Boycott Office, 825–4811

Metro, 832–5126

National Lawyers Guild, 871–1251

...

American Civil Liberties Union: 961–4662

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee (Police Brutality Complaints): 872–2828

Creem Magazine: 831–0816

Draft Resistance (info on counseling): 874–4334

Detroit Anti-war Coalition: 873–4322

Fifth Estate Office: 831–6800

Fire Department: 962–0400

Grape Boycott Office: 825–4811

...

American Civil Liberties Union 961–4662

Ad Hoc Citizens Committee (Police Brutality Complaints) 872–2828

Creem Magazine 831–0816

Draft Resistance (info on counseling) 874–4334

Detroit Anti-war Coalition 873–4322

Fifth Estate Office 831–6800

Fire Department 962–0400

Grape Boycott Office 825–4811

...

Just the headline above alone probably condemns us to the gulag by uncritical leftist supporters of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian socialist revolution. But like most issues that vex the left, a look beneath the surface always provides more than what initially presents itself, and almost always, something worse.

...

On August 9–12 a fantasy now known as the “East Side Riot” was staged by the Detroit Police with the assistance of the prosecutor’s office, city government and the press. The major villain of the drama was Alvin Harrison, Director of the Afro-American Unity Movement and spokesman for Black Power. Below is The Fifth Estate’s interview with Mr. Harrison.

...

Kanellos, the ubiquitous Greek Riot Dog present at numerous actions (or is it PhotoShop?)

As a publication appearing only three times a year, it’s difficult to report on the outrages of capital and the empire in a timely fashion. Usually, we cover only issues not available elsewhere. However, the Greek events of this Spring seem worthy of reporting and analysis as Capital’s crisis becomes generalized and rulers’ call for austerity enforced on workers becomes more shrill.

...

THWACK! My fighting stick landed exactly where I aimed it—diagonally across the face of a fascist who was trying to rip down a banner a friend and I were holding, to which the stick was attached.

The blow struck him with such velocity that it snapped his head back while a rosette of blood gushed forth from his broken nose and split lips intermingled with a piece of a tooth and broken lenses from his glasses.

...

My attitude about voting has been like the old Jewish joke about chicken soup when you’ve got a cold—it may not help very much, but it can’t hurt. The more ideological argue that voting legitimizes the system, and they’ve got a point. The more pragmatic counter that such a purist position is an irresponsible luxury in the face of emergency—such as we in the United States are clearly now facing.

...

As most movie goers know, “skin is in.” Some of the current biggies in Detroit are: “Naughty Shutter”; “Naked and the Wicked”; “Nudes on Credit”; “The Erotic Mr. Rose”; “Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill”; and last, but not least, “Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley.”

The above pictures, and many more like them, have become so popular in Detroit that we now rank number three in the nation in skin houses.

...

Buried in a back section of an October issue of the Detroit Free Press:

“Manaus, Brazil (AP) Mayurunas Indians on the remote western edge of the Brazilian Amazon jungle have begun killing newborn females in an attempt to wipe out their tribe rather than confront civilization, according to a Brazilian anthropologist. Paulo Lucena said the Indians, whose numbers have been severely diminished in the last four years since coming into contact with white oil explorers, intend to exterminate themselves rather than continue suffering the impact of civilization.

...

On September 26; 1990 a 78-day siege of two Mohawk territories near Montreal, Quebec, ended when the last group of holdouts walked out of a rehabilitation centre where they had been surrounded by Canadian army troops since September 1^st. Rather than the unconditional surrender that the state wanted, the Mohawks were able to turn apparent defeat into symbolic victory.

...

In North Orissa, on the coast of India’s Bay of Bengal, a three-year conflict between the Central Government and local farmers and fisherfolk continues, virtually ignored by the international media.

In the village areas of Baliapal and Bhograi—a region known as the granary of Orissa because of its great fertility and high-yielding cash crops—approximately 100,000 people face eviction from their homes and lands. The cause of their imminent displacement is the government’s National Testing Range, a military base costing an estimated $840 million (U.S.), designed to test and launch satellites, rockets and missiles.

...

indigenous, adj. 1. Occurring or living naturally in an area; not introduced; native. 2. Intrinsic; innate. [From Latin indigena, native. See indigene.

Indigenism, which begins as a defense of the Indian within western political and literary discourse, ends as a form of conquest, the final assault of civilization on prehistory.

...

A review of

Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde by Kristian Williams. AK Press 2020

At first blush, Kristian Williams’ literary and political biography Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde, could have been an interesting blog post about the famed playwright. After all, the details of Wilde’s politics are well-known enough, articulated as they are in the essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” He was an enemy of the state as well, and was arrested and imprisoned for gross indecency and sodomy. All that needs doing is to rifle through the man’s creative works and surviving correspondence to find some political bons mot, and behold—clickbait!

...

“If science was put to the service of capital, the recalcitrant worker’s docility would be assured.”

—Andrew Ure, Philosophie des manufactures, 1835

“In the past, if anyone called a tradesman a worker, he risked a brawl. Today, when they are told that workers are what is best in the state, they all insist on being workers.”

...

In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, the rise of capitalism was met by bitter and intense resistance. Its establishment was only effectuated by the imposition of the factory system as a method of social control. The result was a tamed working class and a degradation of labor which lives today at the core of the marxist conception of socialism.

...

Download PDF [174 KB] fe-389-19-industrialism-and-its-discontents

Nearly two hundred years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley gave us a classic warning about the hubris of technology’s combat against nature. Her late Gothic novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), depicts the revenge nature takes upon the presumption of engineering life from the dead. Victor Frankenstein and his creation perish, of course; his “Adam” is as doomed as he is. If this monster cannot be saved by his father/creator, however, today’s cyborg/robot/Artificial Intelligence products do expect to be saved. For those at the forefront of technological innovation today, there will be no return to a previous, monster-free state.

...

Madness & the Surrealist Imagination

The common denominator of the sorcerer, the poet and the madman cannot be anything but magic...the flesh and blood of poetry.

--Benjamin Peret

Surrealists have celebrated madness as a means of exploring the possibilities of the human mind. Madness provides that window into how people put together reality; how thoughts are often assembled in an unusual and creative way.

...

“News is the dialogue of fragmented power with itself. Notice how scientists, politicians or businessmen now complain that even they only learn about the events they manage from the news.

—“Some Fragmented Views from a Fragmented World” (Against Sleep and Nightmares)

Information bombardment from multiple media sources makes contemplation difficult. Everything is broken down into fragmented data having no relation to anything else presenting. It is superficially processed constantly. No rest, but neither exertion nor effort. Just continuous banality and superficiality.

...

BOOKSTORE IN A BARN

(615) 536–5999

an hour east of Nashville; call, write, or email for directions

FifthEstate@pumpkinhollow.net

Read more

WORDS

Dr. Ben Reitman, Sister of the Road: the Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha (2002) $15.00

Dark Star

Beneath the Paving Stones (2001) $15.00

Hakim Bey

Immediatism (1992) $10.00

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It seems improbable that a conference was held in Havana last May to examine the life and ideas of the Russian Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky. One would think the Cuban Stalinist bureaucracy would be averse to allowing a gathering sympathetic to the Soviet dictator’s arch rival within the Russian ruling clique power struggle that occurred almost 100 years ago.

...

Last month the Fort Hood Three were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of three years for Mora; and five years for Samas and Johnson. The Fort Hood Three, to perhaps refresh a few memories, are Pvt. Dennis Mora, Pvt. David Samas and PFC James Johnson—the three U. S. soldiers who refused to serve in Viet4 nam believing that the war is “immoral, unjust and illegal.”

...

February 21^st marked the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Black America’s hero, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (known to many as Malcolm X).

Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19, 1925, Malcolm quickly learned the bitter taste of white racism. His mother was born as the result of her mother’s rape by a white planter (thus giving Malcolm his light complexion and red hair).

...

Canada is illegally renting out the territory of the Innu people to the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries so that their bombers can practice bombing and surprise attacks. The establishment of a permanent NATO base could be announced soon. [see FE note at end of article]

The Innu people (sometimes called the Montagnais or the Naskapi) refer to their ancestral territories as the Nitassinan, literally our land, in their native language. The area was never ceded by treaty or otherwise by the original inhabitants. The presence of the Innu in this remote part of the world goes back at least 9,000 years. This area extends from Sept-Iles, to Lac St. Jean, Quebec, to the west; to Fort Cains, Quebec, to the north; and down to St. Augustine, Quebec, and Goose Bay, Labradore, to the east.

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As of early November, three people were detained in the SeaTac Federal Detention Facility near Seattle because of their refusal to provide a federal grand jury with information about anarchist beliefs and associations.

Federal government prosecutors claim they are investigating violent actions at demonstrations, but the Portland-based Committee Against Political Repression says the extensive surveillance, SWAT raids, and grand jury subpoenas are not simply a response to a few broken windows, but an effort to criminalize the political philosophy of anarchism.

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a review of

Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain by Frank Mintz. AK Press, 2013, 326pp., $19, akpress.org

Following his brief synopsis about the Spanish anarchist movement before 1936, the central concern of French anarchist Frank Mintz is the very core of the 1930s Spanish revolution--the grassroots movement of urban and rural collectivization throughout republican Spain.

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To those of you tenderly under 20: imagine, if you dare, that tomorrow you could no longer obtain records anywhere. Imagine that all the record stores were suddenly boarded up. Imagine that all of your records and tapes have mysteriously disappeared, your stereo is missing, and that it is now impossible to gain access to music anywhere in the world. Pretend, for a moment, that all the musicians everywhere have suddenly left without notice!

...

The new album by COUNTRY JOE and the FISH on Vanguard is the greatest piece of music that was ever vaguely labeled under the title of rock ‘n roll.

They do every kind of musical change in the album better than I’ve ever heard it before. They do heavy blues things, soft regular singing, guitar and organ solos that just fly, the free sounds of tinking wind chimes and hands rubbing a balloon.

...

The Spikedrivers were the first psychedelic rock group that existed in Detroit.

Their sound wasn’t super hard, yet it was able to take you off into the freedom of your sub-consciousness. That was a year ago and they weren’t hip to the new obvious fact that music doesn’t happen on 45 records. All they knew was, if you wanted to make music you needed the big money of a record company to pay for the studio time to put something out in order to reach a large enough audience.

...

FIFTH ESTATE #366, Fall, 2004, Vol. 39, No. 3

News, etc. pages 2 — 11

Features on “unschooling the world” pages 12 — 45

Letters to the FE pages 46 — 49

Reviews, etc. pages 50 — 53

Bookstore & Calendar pages 54 — 55

What is anarchism? This question continues to crop up as anarchists debate amongst themselves as how to accurately express their perspectives to non-anarchist activists in the antiwar and global justice movements.

Subsequently, a new wave of anarchist primers has appeared in the Summer editions of North American anti-authoritarian periodicals such as Green Anarchy and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. Also, anarchist web sites often include glossaries, FAQs, mission statements, constitutions, manifestos, and talking points to explain anarchist principles to the uninitiated. Thus, we are challenged to recognize and celebrate anarchist diversity while seeking the meaningful collaborations needed to influence lasting change on the other.

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REVOLUTION

REVOLUTION

ELDRIDGE

CLEAVER

Get your shit together be

ready

Tell your friends be

the first on

your block

My God Man be

serious

What would Che say

?

Kill a pig a day fuck in the streets wear

berets

Quote Mao

If you like this poem

it isnt for you

friend

five sticks/electric cap

...

“The political status quo in Mexico died on January 1. Every Mexican institution is now in a state of crisis.”

—El Financiero (Mexican business newspaper)

“If 53 people died in the riots in the Dominican Republic, 53,000 people could die if the Mexicans remember that they are a people with a history of rebellion. If that happens, capitalism in Latin America will go to the devil!”

...

a review of

The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore. Translated by Wolfi Landstreicher. Ardent Press, 2012, $13, 300 pp., ardentpress.org

The Italian insurrectionary and individualist anarchist, Renzo Novatore (the pen name of Abele Rizieri Ferrar, 1890–1922), died at the brink of a great confrontation with Fascism. His comrade Enzo Martucci claimed that at his death, Novatore “was preparing to strike at society and tear from it that which it denies the individual.” Unfortunately, he died in a gun battle with carabinieri in 1922 who had ambushed him.

...

a review of

This Is Not a Photo Opportunity: The Street Art of Banksy

Artist: Banksy, Photographs by Martin Bull. PM Press, 2014 pmpress.org

Anonymous England-based vandal Banksy, most known for graffiti-like works across the planet recently made news with his latest prank, by destroying it, or rather by it destroying itself. Upon selling at Sotheby’s, an art auction in London, Girl with Red Balloon, autonomously shredded itself before bidders. This was a departure from previous works, which are displayed in Martin Bull’s 2014 book, This Is Not a Photo Opportunity. There is a problem with Bull’s book. You discover the issue when you approach the text more critically than you would a coffee table book, which might be all that this is.

...

she had quickly cleaned the house

now she waited

perched nervously on the kitchen stool

as if she were a bird ready to take flight

Finally, he arrives

dressed fashionably in grey and white

he cuts an elegant figure

and the interview begins—

he asks:

which do you prefer

the black enamel finish

or these soft, muted rose-tones

shall we discuss the various

textures of carpets

or do you prefer the sensual earthiness

of a fine wood floor

the stark simplicity of the modern

or the eclectic clutter

of the victorian?

...

In August 2011, thousands of people rioted in several London boroughs and cities and towns across England after a protest in Tottenham following the death of an area youth who was shot to death by police. The resulting looting, arson, and mass deployment of police were called “BlackBerry riots” because people used mobile devices and social media to organize.

...

Activists in Brattleboro, Vt. are calling for an International Day of Chalking Against State Violence, on Saturday, June 3. Autonomous actions with no central coordination; just get your chalks, go out by yourself or with others, and chalk about war, racism, police killings, prisons, sexual assaults or other issues.

...

On Friday, March 25, the first of three INTERNATIONAL DAYS OF PROTEST, there will be activities on the Wayne Campus highlighted by a rally against the war in Vietnam. This will take place on the mall.

Such Universities as Oakland and University of Michigan will also be the site of anti-war demonstrations. The Citizens for Peace in Vietnam will carry on neighborhood activities.

...

Schedule

Friday, March 25: At 6:30 P.M. the Wayne State University

Young Democrats are sponsoring a forum on the war in Vietnam in the community Arts Auditorium, Cass and Kirby.

Saturday, March 26: At 4:00 P.M. a mass march will start down Woodward from Central -Methodist Church at Adams and Woodward. We will march to Campus Martius carrying signs, banners, and giant grotesque puppets to the beat of death drums.

...

Bruce Whitten, age 26, held the rank of Staff Sergeant in the Air Force until he received a general discharge on May 23, 1965. Whitten was assigned to the First Air Commando group and spent two years in Vietnam.

Q. How do the people feel about the governments that have been set up?

A. They don’t even discuss them. It just seems to be a taboo subject. You don’t speak to an Englishmen about the Queen in a sexual manner and it’s like that here. You’ll get your throat cut. I never got anywhere discussing that subject.

...

Fifth Estate: First of all, let me congratulate you on your victory.

Roman Gribbs: Thank you.

Fifth Estate: I understand that Mr. Austin issued a statement calling for brotherhood and unity between his supporters and yours.

Roman Gribbs: Yes, Mr. Austin did that. He ran a fine dignified campaign. He has earned the respect, admiration, and adulation of many people in this city. We plan to work together. We must work together to make Detroit the city where we can live together and prosper together.

...

Abbie Hoffman, fugitive Yippie, has been on the lam for over three years following a New York City cocaine deal set-up by the police. Abbie has had plastic surgery to alter his appearance and has managed to elude the authorities even while popping up at protest demonstrations, rallies held in his behalf and he once even appeared as the guest chef on a Toronto TV cooking program.

...

[two_third padding=“0 30px 0 0”]The following interview with Mu Xidi, a former sailor, Chinese rebel, and since 1990, a refugee in Barcelona was taken from the French book Bureaucratie, Bagnes et Business (Bureaucracy, Prisons and Profits), published in Paris by L’insomniaque last year.

The editors, Hsi Hsuan-wou and Charles Reeve conducted 22 such interviews in China, Hong Kong, and Macao with Chinese individuals from different occupations and political perspectives. The views expressed below by Mu come closest to those enunciated by our publication on the subject of reform and revolution.

...

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Angela Davis done by the Guardian.

How do you see the women’s movement? Also, do you consider it to have a special role for black women?

Let me begin by saying this: no revolutionary should fail to understand the underlying significance of the dictum that the success or failure of a revolution can almost always be gauged by the degree to which the status of women is altered in a radical, progressive direction. After all, Marx and Engels contended that there are two basic facts around which the history of mankind revolves: production and reproduction. The way in which people obtain their means of subsistence on one hand, and in which the family is organized on the other hand.

...

Reprinted from the LA Free Press

Dame Sybil Leek is in this area to apply finishing touches to a soon-to-be-published book, and for one speaking engagement Tuesday night, Dec. 14, at the Ionic Building, 1122 S. La Cienega.

As I drove out to North Hollywood (where ELSE would a witch stay?), I recalled my dictionary’s definition:

...

Reprinted from The Free Student

FS: What is your reaction to the New York Times quote that “SNCC officials insist that they would prefer segregationist officials because their presence would keep Negroes aroused and militant?”

Courtland Cox: I think the facade—that if you vote for Wilson Baker as opposed to Jim Clark you have improved something—is really something people have to look at as not being true. I would feel much better if Negroes would stop thinking in terms of which is the lesser of two evils and start thinking of how I can get somebody that benefits me. The Democratic Party in the South is still racist

...

Editor’s Note: Ed Sanders, founder and lead singer of the fuck-rock group The Fugs, is a legendary figure on the avant-garde poetry-peace-dope-fucking in the streets scene in the Lower East Side of New York City. A native of Kansas, Sanders made his first splash on the national scene as one of the peacefreaks who boarded the atomic submarine Polaris in 1962. He served 90 days in jail when he was apprehended and later had his account of the scene, “Poem from Jail,” published as a pamphlet by City Lights Books (1963). In New York City in 1962 Sanders founded the mind-shattering magazine Fuck You / a magazine of the arts, which published such American poetry giants as Charles Olson, Michael McClure, LeRoi Jones, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, et al.

...

Color image of album cover for Phil Ochs’ 1966 LP “I ain’t Marchin’ Any More.”

It has been a good season recently at Ed Pearl’s Ash Grove: last week it was Doc Watson and now it is Phil Ochs, songwriter, poet, revolutionary, and all-around good egg. Phil Ochs, who has been held over this weekend to co-star with Guy Carawan, writes his own songs, thinks up his own comedy lines on the spot, and plays his old-style Gibson Jumbo guitar in a most entertaining fashion. I talked with Phil Ochs between sets and he told me:

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a review of

Poetic Reason in the Age of Digital Control by Jesús Sepúlveda. Bad Idea Publishing, 2023

Jesús Sepúlveda’s Poetic Reason in the Age of Digital Control addresses some of today’s most pressing threats and sketches out some promising ideas of a strategy in response, which will hopefully be elaborated in future works.

...

Free Speech Fight in Plymouth—Students around Detroit may have been misled by the so-called “news reports” on what recently went down in Plymouth. I cleared up the story after talking to Jim Kalliel, editor of Free Verse, an underground paper which the Plymouth officials tried to silence.

The fascists in Plymouth were beaten out of a victory when Jim faced the Court, the pigs, and the “powers that be” in the tradition of all those who have dared to print what they believe in the face of much opposition and a repressive ruling group.

...

Progressive High School students throughout the Detroit area were shocked April 22 to read in the Detroit “News”: “Ferndale H.S. Drops 138 Negro Protesters.”

This blatantly racist act by the administration at Ferndale came down when black students walked out in protest of the treatment of their demands to the Ferndale Board of Racist Education. The students, according to spokesman Anthony Collins, had demanded a meeting on April 21, but the Board stalled, and finally postponed the meeting. So black students walked out.

...

Cass students march to Wayne State University mall for student strike rally. Dave Watson is in the center. Photo by A. Gotkin.

On April 3, Detroit area high school students walked out of school in protest against the war in Vietnam, in commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and around issues of student rights, racism, and other issues pertaining to each school.

...

To high school students who are going to be free and happy this Summer, remember the future; the Man will come in the Fall and lead you back to the zoo where he can watch you and work on you for another year.

With this in mind, high school students should leave school this year with a Fall perspective, so we can get our shit together and let it all hit the fan at the same time.

...

Two High School Student Unions, in the northeast suburbs and at Cooley have been agitating for change inside their schools.

The Cooley High School Student Union recently printed and distributed its Five point program with the following demands:

1) The elimination of ROTC;

...

In this terrifying explication of biotechnology, Tomas Mac Sheoin notes that to reduce the natural world to a single monolithic “logic”—in this case, it is capital’s logic of accumulation and control to which he refers—is to imperil life itself. This totalitarian logic is perceived by Jean Baudrillard as well, in his book Simulations, as “that delirious illusion of uniting the world under the aegis of a single principle;” Baudrillard points out the connection between this totalitarian social program and the “fascination of the biological “: “From a capitalist-productivist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic order that aims now at total control. This is: the mutation for which the biological theorization of the Code prepares the ground.” (110–111)

...

The authoritarian, proto-fascist religious cults such as the Moonies, Krishna Consciousness and the People’s Temple have always thrived at the fringes of what was once called the “counter-culture” and which is today euphemistically referred to as “New Age” consciousness—a catch-all of Asian mysticism, macrobiotics, herbalist faddism, palmistry, “holistic” products-mongering, meditation, pop psychology and other obscurantist effluvia.

...

a review of

Urgent Publishing after the Artist’s Book: Making Public Movements Toward Liberation by Paul Soulellis (Book Design: Be Oakley). GenderFail 2021

Urgent Publishing After the Artist’s Book operates as a document, a record, an archival object and a piece of art, while the book’s commentary on the arts, publishing, and social justice is expressed both through text and graphic design. It challenges the reader’s role as viewer and consumer, potential ally and an unwitting antagonist.

...

TORONTO—Although the Vancouver 5 trials are over except for that of Brent Taylor on charges of bombing Litton Industries (see accompanying article), the support group here is still dealing with the aftermath of extensive police harassment.

Ken Deyarmond, one of the more active supporters, was to go on trial Nov. 13 for “attempted assault against an internationally protected person” who, in this case, was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Deyarmond was participating in a demonstration against Thatcher’s visit to Toronto organized by IRA supporters and anti-Cruise groups when he was pushed from behind towards the prime minister and then grabbed and punched by three cops. (See FE #317, Summer 1984.)

...

On January 22 the usually quiet and staid University of Detroit joined the ‘70s as police arrested 17 students who were protesting the presence of a Navy recruiter on campus.

photo / A. Gotkin

The students, who began a non-violent, non-disruptive sit-in at the University’s Placement Center, refused to leave when ordered to by Dean for Student Affairs, Fred Shadrick. Then, as the headline of the U-D Varsity News put it, “Fred Calls Cops” and the Tactical Mobile Unit, a police riot bus and a paddy wagon took the students away.

...

Welcome to the first FE of 2003!

One year ago, when the Tennessee Collective stepped up to take over primary editorial responsibilities for the Fifth Estate, many of us were discouraged and disillusioned by the dreadful lack of public opposition to empire in the weeks and months following 9/11. One year ago, when we wrote about “the emergence of a mass-based movement...contesting the state and capital,” it was speculation. Today, the mass-based anti-war movement that boldly connects the dots between corporate tyranny and its bloodbaths is here.

...

With the defeat of the White Christian Nationalist Party in the U.S. presidential election, liberals and progressives are understandably relieved that the politics of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and the rest of the right-wing panoply were rejected by American voters, even if only by a fairly small percentage. We share that sense, but hold no illusions about the second term of Barack Obama containing any possibility for authentic hope or change, or even mild reform.

...

“When I pronounce the word civilization, I spit.”

—Gauguin

We are all trapped within the technological labyrinth, and at its center awaits our annihilation. We have already lost more than we can imagine to civilization’s insatiable hunger for power and uniformity. We live in the shadow of an enormous edifice, a monstrosity which teeters and threatens to collapse upon us in a moment. We sing, make love, struggle and despair amid its decomposing limbs. But the smell of decomposition is general. We are in eclipse; the human spirit is moribund.

...

It is said that the automobile created and brought life to the cities, but once again official history dangerously misrepresents and distorts the facts. In reality, it is responsible for the destruction of viable human communities and emblematic of death culture all over the world. The auto industry’s monopolistic power kept Detroit and the rest of the world from creating alternative urban environments and consciously built car cities and a car world--chopped up and destroyed by incredible expressway systems. Cities and a world for cars, not for people.

...

Ursula Le Guin’s works typically recount the story of a voyage. Whether or not this voyage traverses vast distances of space, it is always an epic journey of the spirit. It is a kind of vision quest in which we who allow ourselves to be taken along confront the strange, the alien, the other, only to return with a deeper understanding of ourselves. We gain a better sense of who we are, but as is perhaps more crucial, we gain insight into where we are. In the end, the voyage is a journey home.

...

Inside the walled compound of a Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Kyoto, Japan, the monks who reside there have created a meditation garden consisting of raked sand and about a dozen large stones. The stones are adroitly arranged so that no matter where one stands on the perimeter of the garden, at least one of the rocks is blocked from sight of the viewer. The Zen wisdom behind this arrangement suggests that the world in all of its aspects is never completely knowable; that something always remains hidden.

...

Welcome to the New York City issue of Fifth Estate. The editorship of the magazine now rotates, and two of us in NYC have stepped in to give the peops in Detroit and Tennessee a rest (making this the first issue in 41 years that has been produced in the northeast!). The people that put out this publication have a variety of views and backgrounds (we range in age from our 20s to 70s, and live across North America); this issue reflects our reality and issues here in NYC.

...

• Gettin Schooled

• Teaching Anarchy

• Adamant refusal will not go unnoticed

• Anarchist Accidentally Asked to Lecture at Army Base

• “Studying History, Making History”

• On (anarchist) Education

• Stumbling Upon Public School Utopias

• Schools of the Americas

• Francisco Ferrer & the Free Education Movement

• Learning Webs

• Radical books for kids

• Segregation Rising

• Forget about theories

• Reclaiming our Freedom to Learn

• Learning, Unlearning, Defining, Redefining

• Adventures with the Audubon Expedition Institute

• Short reviews

• Letter from a Teacher

• Select Radical Pedagogy Bibliography

• S is for Shame

• De-schooling the de-schoolers

• Whose kids? OUR Kids!

• History Quiz

...

The article appearing on the following two pages, “The Myth of the Party,” by Murray Bookchin (from his essay “Listen Marxist”) was first excerpted in FE #272, May 1976. We reprint it hoping it will be of interest to a new generation of anti-war and social activists who find themselves beset by the return of the living dead—marxist-leninist parties.

...

This is the story about how I got a C- grade in my high school economics class. Mr. Burns told the class on the first day that we were going to spend all of our time playing the “Stock Market Game.”

We were given an imaginary lump sum of $10,000 at the beginning of September and our assignment was to invest it in stocks. We read the financial page of the local newspaper at the beginning of every class and compared notes from cable television financial news programs to track our make-believe investments. Mr. Burns said that the highest grade would go to the three people who made the most money in the class. Extra points would be given to those whose stock value had the greatest increase.

...

It’s been fifty years since the exciting events of May 1968 in France that shook the country to its foundations. It is still inspiring to remember the widespread revolt of high school and university students, and then workers, that erupted throughout the country, leading to the largest general strike in French history. These events brought society to a stop, temporarily transforming daily life, and posing the possibility of a complete social revolution. The 1968 turmoil in France was part of a worldwide upsurge.

...

We perhaps owe John Zerzan a debt of gratitude for the research that has gone into his essay The Promise of the ‘80s, for it graphically demonstrates to us what we have suspected all along—that all is not well with the rule of capital. In fact, the litany of decomposition presented both among the institutions of rule and its subjects is shown to be so widespread and systemic that one can conclude little else than that the rulers will no longer be able to govern as they have, due to the massive erosion of loyalty to the reigning mode of domination.

...

a review of

Isabelle Walks With Angels: A Montreal Urban legend by Norman Nawrocki, Illustrated by Ivan R. Les Pages Noires, 2023

Norman Nawrocki’s novella is a beautifully illustrated story, allegory, or fable about a woman who had a home, but lost it. All her adult life there have been abusive men: lovers, landlords bosses, restaurant clients. She loses what little she has and is now living on the street, defending herself from predators the best she can. All the avenues have been closed, there’s only one left...jumping into the freezing waters of the Saint-Laurence Seaway from a high bridge.

...

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin

ChatGPT has lit up the West in the last three months evincing delight among enthusiasts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), but great fear and loathing among critics who see its entry into a world already diminished by machines as a further ratcheting downward of what it means to be human.

...

The National Coordinating Committee against the war has revealed that some major American universities have entered into another phase of noneducation.

The committee says that university involvement in chemical and biological warfare (CBWL) has recently become a major issue on some important campuses.

...

On November 30, several groups of individuals in black bloc attacked various corporate targets in downtown Seattle. Among them were (to name just a few):

Fidelity Investment (major investor in Occidental Petroleum, the bane of the U’wa tribe in Colombia), Bank of America, US Bancorp, Key Bank and Washington Mutual Bank (financial institutions key in the expansion of corporate repression), Old Navy, Banana Republic and the GAP (as Fisher family businesses, rapers of Northwest forest lands and sweatshop laborers).

...

a review of

Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada by Andrea Langlois, Ron Sakolsky and Marian van der Zon. New Star Books, 2010

After reading Islands of Resistance: Pirate Radio in Canada, all I wanted to do was become a pirate. Not the kind that steals in a capitalist bent to become rich at the expense of others. I want to appropriate what is already mine: the public airways and broadcast what corporate media despise most--defiant free-form radio that encourages audio creativity and promotes social justice.

...

This article is the second of a two-part series on the effects that the indiscriminate care and usage of radioactive waste materials and dangerous chemicals are having, and will continue to have in the future, on man and his environment.

Part One of the series, Capitalism’s Industrial Plagues, #276, September 1976, dealt with the devastating results of nuclear and chemical dumps, leakages and accidents in the United States and around the world. Part Two now looks into the Federal Government’s intention of testing land here in Michigan for the possible construction of a nuclear waste disposal system.

...

a review of

Counterfeit Currency: How To Really Make Money, M. Thomas Collins, Loompanics Unlimited, P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend WA 98368, $15; $3 shipping.

Money is a fairly curious substance. Its official function is to represent value, but once said, you can immediately challenge all the assumptions inherent in such a formulation: Value?; its representation? Since value itself is a representation of abstract worth, money operates within economies as a representation of a representation! No wonder its properties seem so inscrutable.

...

a review of

Counterfeit Currency: How To Really Make Money, M. Thomas Collins. Loompanics Unlimited, 1990 (out-of-print). Reprint from Fifth Estate, Fall, 1991.

Money is a fairly curious substance. Its official function is to represent value, but once said, you can immediately challenge all the assumptions inherent in such a formulation: Value; its representation? Since value itself is a representation of abstract worth, money operates within economies as a representation of a representation. No wonder its properties seem so inscrutable.

...

FE Note: We are publishing this essay to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. It is a substantially revised version of two articles written in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (“The Israeli Massacre—Peace in Galilee?” FE #310, Fall, 1982 and “Latin American Terror: The Israeli Connection”) that also appeared in FE #310, Fall 1982.

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In the Negev Desert Israeli “Green Patrols” employed military intimidation and violence to force the Bedouins off their ancestral lands into closed areas similar to Indian reservations. In fact, all Palestinian areas have more and more come to resemble reservations or South African bantustans, a situation which has only been exacerbated by the Oslo Accords. Israel’s resemblance to the English colonial expansion in the Americas is notable, thus it should come as no surprise that Israel has also been one of the largest suppliers of arms to Latin American death squad regimes, often functioning as a proxy for the U.S. when political pressure made direct arms aid impossible. Israel’s customers have included El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Haiti, and have generated billions of dollars in profit.

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Resistance to two years of aggressive war and occupation in Lebanon is growing in the Israeli armed forces. 2,500 reserve officers have formed a group called Yesh Gvul (“There is a Limit/Border”), and have requested not to be sent to Lebanon. Already 130 of their organization have served prison terms for their refusal to serve there.

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Today, after twenty years of Israel’s existence and three wars between Arab and Israeli, the Arab-Israeli conflict remains one of total deadlock. Arab acceptance of Israel’s existence after the June, 1967 blitzkrieg must remain the wishful thinking of the Sunday NEW YORK TIMES.

So many millions of words have been written about the Palestine problem and yet the basic issues remain uncomprehended by so many people. Recent statements by Black Power advocates in the U.S. condemning the “Zionist imperialist war of Israel” show that some radicals in the country are, however, very much aware of why Arab opposition to Israel has not abated.

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Yes, it does often feel like we’re beating our heads against a brick wall. What do we do?

The now-cliched definition of insanity, although it originated with Albert Einstein, is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Do we meet that description? Anarchists fight against racism and there is an upsurge in violence against people of color. We fight the pipelines, and governments roll out more of them. We oppose the patriarchy, but in many ways it is as entrenched as ever. The climate crisis worsens each season and a dynamic fascist movement is on the rise.

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The photo above of a traffic jam on a Brazilian highway could be a metaphor for life today. A scarred landscape littered with trucks filled with the everyday stuff of commerce going nowhere.

The trucks carrying what are now the necessities of modern society are stalled at a local level but reflect the entire global economy and culture. As the planetary integrated system becomes increasingly complex, so does its capacity for collapse.

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This issue’s theme, “What’s Next? Demand the Impossible,” is a challenge to all our imaginations.

We live in a world faced with the scourge of a plague, and in a country that is an armed madhouse with a good portion of its population seemingly gone off the rails with fascist rage and white fear.

What appears in these pages is nothing like a blueprint for where or how to focus our energies. We know well what we don’t want and what doesn’t work. In general, we know that creating alternative communities of resistance is what brings results and can provide a model of the world we desire.

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Welcome to the fourth Fifth Estate of 2002!!

We have not published four issues in one year since the late 1980s. As much as any of our magazines this year, this edition represents the contribution of many heads, hearts, and hands in our ever-evolving collective.

Although we love the front cover art of May Thistle, its symbology may threaten the penology of the department of corrections in the state of Oregon. According to notices we’ve received from prison officials, anarchism’s classic circle-A is a dangerous gang symbol!

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The magazine you hold in your hands represents the ongoing project of a dedicated group of individuals and the enduring vision of many more. Just a few months ago, it looked as though this anti-authoritarian publishing cooperative might retire after 37 years of, in the FBI’s assessment, “supporting the cause of revolution everywhere.” However, while the writers and activists in the Detroit collective have been unable to put out the paper on a regular schedule, their wish to see it continue led to passing the torch to a new editorial enclave based on the radical communes of rural Tennessee.

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Welcome to our Winter 2020 edition. Although there is no specific theme this issue, the totality of our articles affirms a longstanding commitment to the philosophy of anarchism that is now an existential necessity given the political and environmental crises the world faces.

Can a body of ideas, considered impractical by many, and ignored by most, rise to the point where it is powerful enough to challenge centuries old modes of hierarchal rule and ecological destruction?

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As we send this issue to the printer, the ghastly Shit Show known as the 2016 American presidential election has not yet concluded, although it will be over when you read this.

While one of the candidates expressed definitively more openly bigoted and authoritarian ideas, neither challenged the basic equation of life within the state and capitalism. The horrors of war, racism, environmental collapse, and oppression will continue regardless of the electoral outcome.

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Just so readers don’t think all of the celebration around the 50^th anniversary of publishing has brought forth a bout of hubris in us, let us be clear. Those of us working on the Fifth Estate today know this publication couldn’t have lasted this long without connection to a vibrant tradition and social solidarity from contemporary comrades.

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Throughout 2005, we will celebrate our anniversary by spreading the ideas of revolution that made us notorious to authority and noted by readers everywhere as a consistent, intelligent, and even humorous tool for change.

From the suburban Detroit home of a 17-year-old high school student in 1965, to a gritty, inner-city Cass Corridor basement with an ever-changing revolutionary collective to a remote Tennessee barn of the current communal and editorial core group, the Fifth Estate has remained what the FBI called a voice “supporting the cause of revolution everywhere.”

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When the wind blows against us, there are two distinct choices: either push back and push on against it with ever more resolve, or surrender to the direction in which it’s going.

Undoubtedly, if you are reading this publication, like us, you have decided that resistance must continue regardless of the forces we face. It’s easy to take for granted democratic rights supposedly guaranteed to us, but at critical junctures in U.S. history, those evaporated leaving critics of government at great risk.

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Welcome to another issue of the Fifth Estate Anarchist Review of Books. We haven’t changed our title permanently; just letting readers know what to expect inside this edition. We also haven’t changed our belief that it is direct action in the streets and in the woods, and creating communities of resistance and rebellion that are needed so critically as conditions worsen on almost every level. We read and learn to increase our commitment in our struggles.

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At a time when everyone is declaring the death of print media, our magazine, now in its 47^th year, is not only alive, but prospering. We have many new subscribers, new staff, more renewals, increased newsstand sales, and an exciting new look. We ran out of our last issue on Revolution and are increasing our press run for this edition.

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a review of

Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present Edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2011, 417pp, $19

Syndicalism, the love child of socialism (or Marxism) and anarchism, seems to be badly outdated, or is it?

The idea that the working class could overthrow capitalism and the state through a general strike, and administer a new society through workers councils reached a peak popularity shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, but sunk rapidly thereafter. It was sometimes criticized as the propensity of highly skilled workers, but actually it was the faith of the lower levels (especially in the Industrial Workers of the World, if rarely called syndicalism by them).

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Don’t stop me. I’m dreaming.

We’ve been through centuries of injustice.

Centuries of loneliness.

Not now—don’t stop me.

Now here forever and everywhere.

I’m dreaming of freedom.

Gorgeous unique anyone,

let’s restore harmony to the universe.

Let’s play. Knowledge is joy.

It’s not mandatory schoolwork—

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Since its origin 55 years ago, the Fifth Estate has always supported draft refusal and mutinies among the troops as the best tactics along with anti-war mass demonstrations for stopping the empire’s endless wars.

However, a bipartisan bill is currently before the U.S. Congress that would abolish the requirement for draft registration and related penalties. This is welcome, but the impetus for it isn’t a sudden commitment to peace or a realization that conscription is slavery.

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Unbelievably, it has become fashionable among some observers of the American political scene to associate the alt-right with punk rock, lauding Donald Trump for his “punk” presidency.

The liberal magazine, The Atlantic, noted in 2016, that Trump and his supporters “created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” Similarly, the New York Post gushed that Trump “is a guy with a safety pin through his nose and a purple mohawk.”

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Is your nature revolting? You certainly look the type. Yes? Then you will be interested in a very special inscription found scrawled on the wall of a public toilette by some good fairy to offer us salvation in transformation: “you must get smaller.” No simple task you might say. Maybe Alice left us a crumb, you might quip. Or perhaps we can reverse time, you add incredulously. No, my cynical friend, there is another way. And I found it on a sunny Sunday walk in the park. It is simple. Just walk out on the path with a stone in one hand and a leaf in the other and think of a vine sprouting through asphalt. When that pale green light inside your aorta expands around you and the or olfactories are filled with the scent of rich earth, you are ready, and your feet will guide you to the deeply trodden path of the deer. Crouch low to pass under boughs and thick bramble till you can feel your hooves firmly beneath you. Sniff out the rabbit trails among the moss and dry leaves, straining to follow them until you can hear clearly with your long, soft ears. Search out the long line of ants and walk with them until you can taste with your antennae down in the detritus. Crawl down into the earth, ever smaller and deeper. Until you are so small you can fit inside the smallest unit of life. And there, of course, you will find and become that which...well, I can’t tell you what. Perhaps you’ll know soon enough. In any case, I must be going. I have some graffiti to write.

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Since the July 10^th explosion at an Italian Chemical plant outside of the northern Italian city of Seveso, information has come to light to indicate that Michigan could be the setting for a similar disaster.

The explosion at the Icmesa plant, which sickened 500 persons and caused a mass evacuation of the area released approximately 4 1/2 pounds of the chemical dioxin (TCDD) into the atmosphere. TCDD is considered to be “the most toxic small molecule known to science—so dangerous that it is toxic at concentrations as low as one part per trillion.

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This text was taken from a leaflet by Isaac Cronin (Box 14221, San Francisco, Ca. 94114). Thanks to No Limits (Box 2605, Madison, WI 53701) for the information. It appeared in their June/July issue.

The ‘movement’ declares itself ‘autonomous’: it doesn’t accept any ‘mediation’ and asserts that it is independent of all organized forces, even those of the ultra-left. It is not a student movement. It’s a movement of struggle uniting workers, feminists and the unemployed.” In 1977, unlike the ‘Italian May,’ no powerful leader has emerged. ‘We refuse all delegation of authority,’ insists one rebel.

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Growing numbers of people compelled to flee their homes because of ongoing devastations of wars, cataclysmic climate change, and intractable environmental crises! It’s not a Hollywood sci-fi horror movie—it’s the world of industrialization and capitalism. As the system grinds on, it continues to multiply threats to all living creatures on the planet.

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I begin with two insights. Global systems theorist, Immanuel Wallerstein, argues that throughout capitalist history the working class has been divided into a proletariat, which makes a living solely through waged labor, and a semi-proletariat which in its contemporary incarnation, juggles such pursuits as temp work, freelance projects, state subsidies (food stamps, artists in residence grants, or student loans), and maxing out on credit cards.

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Military life is no sweet deal for anyone. We are aware of the oppression and harassment meted out to our GIs, but what about our sisters, the WAFS in the service?

The WAFS I talked to are not gung-ho! So why do they join? One WAF I talked to put it this way: “We are tricked. They promise us a career, choices, job training and they tell us rosey stories about traveling the world. Once we are in it’s a whole different scene. They keep you busy with paper work or some shit job and the attitude of the guys is so bad. They treat us like scum.”

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On the day it rained stockbrokers, meteorologists debated the causes of this strange, nearly unprecedented weather. One claimed that stockbrokers represented a dense, heavy element which would continue to fall, down through the Earth and out the other side, eventually creating monstrous, irrepressible explosions in the center of the planet as they returned along their trajectory with the force of gravity and met themselves coming back from the other direction. Another said that there was nothing unusual and nothing to be concerned about. Stockbrokers rained every fifty years in regular, predictable cycles. Still, another denied that it was raining stockbrokers at all, and attributed the sightings of plummeting stockbrokers to a form of mass hysteria.

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