Full list of texts

Attendance at the 2^nd Detroit Triple Fan Fair the weekend of June 17 and 18 peaked at approximately 150 and audience enthusiasm burned with a hard, gem-like flame, despite program changes and setbacks.

Buck Rogers comics were among many at convention

The purpose of the Fair was succinctly set forth: “To preserve rare material and to further the appreciation of Comic Strips, Films, and Fantasy Literature as genuine Art Forms.” Many fans at the Park Shelton Convention were therefore rather testy about the illustration from former EC artist Wally Wood’s Witzend, which accompanied my earlier pre-Fair article in a recent Fifth Estate. The panel depicted Wood’s Animan defrocking a stacked lovely. When I mentioned that he had drawn the pornographic centerfold (Orgy at Disneyland) in the current Realist, Wood’s stock sank even lower at the dealer tables.

...

On Tuesday night the 24^th of January 56 Detroit citizens were arrested and held at least overnight in the City Jail. Most of these arrests—43—were entirely illegal and unconstitutional, and there is considerable doubt as to the legality of the arrests of the 13 people who were subsequently charged with selling and / or dispensing (giving away), and/or possessing, varying quantities of marijuana.

...

Sept. 11^th the Green Berets came to town.

They got together for a little show at the foot of Woodward, about two dozen of them in the bright sunshine. Maybe 150 Detroiters turned out to see the military elite, vaunted in press and song.

The first thing that struck the viewer was their youth. They looked for the most part barely two and three years out of their teens. Young faces for the most part, smooth, unwrinkled and without real worries.

...

The Green Scare continues with the plea-bargain and imprisonment of Fifth Estate writer Marie Mason, three new arrests in Wisconsin, grand jury appearances by activists Kevin Tucker and already-imprisoned Daniel McGowan, and the sentencing of Briana Waters.

The “Green Scare” refers to a series of recent arrests of earth and animal liberation activists (and the ongoing investigation and intimidation of the same) who have engaged in acts of property damage in which no one was hurt. The arrests have been marked by outrageous charges (activists often face life in prison), as well as the public and legal labeling of these acts as “terrorism.”

...

Besides the sentencing of Marie Mason, there have been developments in a number of other Green Scare cases in the Midwest and beyond.

The Rhinelander case has affected a number of activists. Five hundred genetically-modified research trees were destroyed at a federal research facility in Rhinelander, WI in 2000. Activist-turned-government-collaborater Ian Wallace pled guilty in October 2008 to this action, as well as an attempt to damage two buildings at Michigan Technological University. In March 2009 he received three years.

...

The intricate web of lies fielded by the U.S. to hide the real reasons for its 1991 attack on Iraq has been further exposed (see Spring and Summer 1991 FEs for earlier disclosures). Realizing that the American people would not support a war to protect Persian Gulf oil profits, President Bush contrived a hobgoblin, depicting Saddam Hussein with a nuclear bomb. He presented this as an imminent threat and the reason why the war had to be prosecuted immediately rather than waiting for slower-acting sanctions. Now we find hidden away in the pages of the May 20, 1992 New York Times was the information that an international gathering of nuclear weapons designers had concluded, after looking at all the available evidence, that Iraq was 3 to 5 years away from developing a bomb and may even have faced insurmountable obstacles.

...

Note: Hangovers are cantilevered buildings in New York City. Italics are quotes from Wislawa Szymborska’s poem.

Arise! Time to leave squalor, filth behind

the wars, carts of corpses, sludge and ashes

instead, let’s build heavens in New York’s blue skies

ignore the shards of glass, the bloody rags below

...

Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and other entertainers performing in FTA, a satire on the army & Vietnam war. From the documentary “F.T.A.: (F**k the Army)” available from StoneyRoadsFilms.com

“Jane Fonda, Traitor Bitch”

—Bumper Sticker at Old Miami, a Detroit Bar

In 1968, Jane Fonda was best known for the role she played as the scantily-clad Barbarella in the film by the same title. Shortly thereafter, she emerged as an influential voice in the movement against the war in Vietnam, leaving as her most lasting contribution the support she gave the resistance efforts of GIs and veterans.

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In Chicago’s Haymarket Square on the night of May 4, 1886, a dynamite bomb was thrown at a squadron of police during a rally of striking workers. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of police officers and workers. Eight anarchists were tried for murder and found guilty although the prosecution conceded none of the defendants had thrown the bomb. Four of the men were executed.

...

A series of free entertainment on Friday nights has been organized at Wayne State University by a group of students known as the Friday Night Coordinating Committee (FNCC)

On February 3 there will be a classical music concert at Community Arts Aud., at 8:00, presenting Dr. & Mrs. Hockberg of the Wayne State University School of Music.

...

highThere is virtually no aspect of life in America today that is not concerned in one way or another with the drug scene. Hippies and politicians, students, parents, teachers. police and revolutionaries all contribute their harsh or thoughtful or inconsistent opinions. Their voices range from the educated, flat and clinical sermons of the AMA, to the educated, maniacal sermons of Timothy Leary.

...

The High Priest of Technology: “Dominate, dominate, dominate” (drawing by Stephen Goodfellow)

The High Priest of Technology still holds the high cards of death, but throughout the world mass opposition to his plans are taking place. Easter week-end in Europe saw at least half a million people in Scotland, England, the Netherlands and W. Germany carry off demonstrations, die-ins and blockades. Hundreds of other small actions like trespassing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan by churchpeople on an Air Force base go largely unreported, but are examples of a wave of resistance to the annihilation which waits in the wings.

...

In Southern California, the wild summers of 1960 and 1961 were a prelude to a series of famous youth insurrections: the watts riot of 1965, the so-called “Hippie riots” on Sunset Strip between 1966 and 1970, and the Eastside high school “blowouts” of 1968–69. [In the early sixties], Black youth in Los Angeles and elsewhere began to fight spontaneously for substantive control over community space—a thrust that would later become enshrined in the Black Panther Party’s program for “self-determination.”

...

Remember what happened when you came home from the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968? Things started blowing up around here—things like police stations, draft-boards and recruiting stations—even the war-crimes building at U-M and the Ann Arbor CIA office.

A dude named David Valler was coming on the set in a big way around that time. Called himself “President Dave” and meant it. He was so far out on his ego trip he was appointing his future “cabinet” from off the street. One street brother was tapped for “Postmaster-General” because he delivered mail.

...

The Detroit American is a racist newspaper.

It is written by racists and for racists. Its pseudo-populist rhetoric about defending the little man from “crime in the streets” and fighting against “THE BIG PRESS ESTABLISHMENT” is nothing but subterfuge for its racism.

The American defends itself against attack by saying that the bleeding-hearts can’t bear to have accused criminals referred to as “curs”, “punks”, “whelps”, etc. This, of course, is not the central issue.

...

The Agnes Marsh ditch was hardly twelve feet wide and two feet deep but in it you could sink over your head in mud so foul it could make you puke. Nobody seemed to know when it was dug or why, or if it was natural, or if not, why not. It slid and hissed under the industrial yellow and pewter toned sky, its banks jewelec with the rusted-out hulks of old cars, some which crashed there years ago and some which were simply abandoned. Originally a drainage canal for adjacent farms, with the coming of throwaway culture, the Agnes Marsh took on the function of a neighborhood dump. And it had always been a sewer. The water carried every imagineable disease the locals could conjure. Everyone thought so. If you accidentally swallowed some you retched for weeks simply because you wanted to.

reviewed in this article

Juliette Minces, The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society, 1980, translated from the French by Michael Pallis, Zed Press, 1982.

French sociologist Juliette Minces has written an informative introduction to the extremely complex subject of the subjugation of Arab women. One cannot read this study without feeling great remorse, frustration and empathy for the plight of these women who remain physically, psychologically and emotionally enslaved by a deeply ingrained tradition of hierarchical power which depends on their very enslavement for its continued existence.

...

In our neoliberal societies, elites like to quantify the worth of human lives in various ways. A telling example is per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product) that determines the economic contribution each citizen makes to a nation.

Such a view gives succor to Social Darwinists and free-market right-wingers. If some lives are more valuable than others in this formulation then why should those of lower value be aided by the wider community? While few elite figures today would say things like this out loud, similar calculi tacitly inform many political decisions.

...

a review of

Wild Fermentation by Sandor E. Katz, 2003, 180 pp, $25. vvww.chelseagreen.com

The “hundredth monkey” suggests that if enough animals (including people) begin doing something, the rest will follow. “Chaos theory” suggests that a very small change can set a process in motion which causes an enormous effect. As a single yeast cell will divide and change barley to beer, we can feel empowered to change our lives.

...

Related: see “Anarchy, food and sustainability” (theme intro) in this issue.

“But what can they hope to gain by attacking the only company that devotes itself exclusively to pure foods?

“My guess...Maybe collect data on as many slip-ups as possible—in an operation that size, some stuff must leak through now and then which isn’t as good as the advertising claims—and use these as a pistol to hold to the company’s head.”

...

As we face the storms (both literal and figurative) of 2017, we offer a poem by Voltairine De Cleyre, dedicated to the memory of the May 1886 Haymarket strikes and demonstrations in Chicago, and especially to the anarchists murdered for their beliefs by the state.

De Cleyre was born in 1866 into a poor family in Leslie, Michigan. Schooling at a Catholic convent convinced her to reject all religion, and she became a free thinker, dedicated not to God, but to humanity.

...

Detroit just sits there

like the head of a large dog on a serving platter.

It lurks in the middle of a continent,

or passes itself off as a civilization dangling at the end of a rope.

The lumpiness of the skyline

is the lumpiness of a sheet stretched over

what’s left of a tender young body.

Detroit groans and aches and oppresses.

...

Born in 2004 out of the industrial ruins of Shelton, Conn., 75 miles north of New York City, a shifting cast of individuals led by soft-spoken, anti-leader, Pepe Chapowski, released records, threw shows, bootlegged albums, sent merchandise and artwork to randomly chosen addresses, wrote letters to prisoners and friends, destroyed property, published articles and zines, built sculptures from garbage, held neighborhood meetings, booked tours, and scammed real estate owners, under the name DIY Bandits.

...

There is a tendency to casually dismiss works of science fiction and the supernatural in the arts, as if this type of thinking were just too cheap, too trivial to be bothered with. “2001” was virtually boycotted by the New York dailies and periodicals.

“The Illustrated Man” is a thoughtful, stimulating, and absorbing movie—one that I will return to see again and again and yet, if its early critical reception is any sign, I fear that this film will be largely underrated and thereby lose the very audience it seeks to contact.

...

The Incredible String Band came to town one night, a few weeks ago, to share themselves and their music.

They came courtesy of CREEM magazine, and found that Detroit’s people, like those of most cities, were not ready for the peaceful message and music of the ISB.

Although most of the vast Ford Auditorium on May 16 was empty, the stage was filled before Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, Rose, and Licorice came on.

...

There is an obvious need for revolutionary media in the black community, states editor John Watson in explaining the creation of a new newspaper for the black community.

Titled the Inner-City Voice, the new paper which has already printed two issues expects to become a weekly with a circulation of more than 30,000 within a few months.

...

“One never really contests an organization of existence without contesting all of that organization’s forms of language.”

--Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons...

If capital must continually decompose and then restructure standardized communication in order to maintain just enough cooperation as is needed to ensure efficient production, then the defection from this campaign in favor of creating autonomous and “unreadable” modes of communication and dissent emerges as a viable, if limited, tactic. Language and communication become critical sites of anarchist critique and experimentation.

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JERUSALEM—The greatest thing that strikes you when you leave the Arab countries and enter Israel are the differences in the culture and the level of material wealth.

A Westerner feels completely at home in Israel. Miniskirted girls, wide avenues, traffic signs and lights, supermarkets and the complete freedom of the English language allow one to freely mix and mingle here. The abundance of discotheques, theatres, transportation facilities and lush parks provide good and easy-to-get recreation.

...

Various technical and resource problems delayed publication of this issue of the FE (see article elsewhere). Hence, the sweep of events in the Middle East has already rendered some of the focus and information in this article a bit out of date. Atrocity has followed atrocity, and the situation has become even more dangerous and volatile. With the introduction of Reagan’s “peace initiative,” a scheme which would essentially leave the Palestinians at the mercy of their old nemesis King Hussein of Jordan, Begin and his supporters have proved themselves utterly intransigent by launching plans for further settlement of the West Bank by Zionist settlers. Begin, his face red with excitement, declared before Israeli parliament in a Hitler-like tirade, “The world will witness whose dedication will win...If someone tried to take Judea and Samaria [the West Bank) from us, we will tell him: Judea and Samaria for the Jewish people for all generations.”

...

By the last half of the nineteenth century, working conditions in American factories, mines, and mills were deplorable. Industrialists were ruthless about making money at the expense of the health and safety of the workers. They looked upon their employees as less than human.

No labor laws existed to protect the men, women and children who poured into northern industrial centers. The cheapest of laborers were the freed slaves from the South and poor immigrants from all over Europe, escaping famines, devastating wars, and repressive regimes. Slavery was officially outlawed in the United States, but the treatment of black people was little different than before the Emancipation Proclamation.

...

Every revolution in jazz is fundamentally a revolution in the mode of sensing jazz rhythms and that is of course as true of the jazz revolution of today as it was of the bebop revolution of some two decades past.

The first thing that one does in striving to grasp the essence of a revolution—social or aesthetic—is to compare the new synthesis with the one it replaced. With respect to jazz rhythm, the transition is from the unvarying 4/4 pulse of bebop to a fragmented and polyrhythmic fabric which juxtaposes patterns of three beats, four beats, and beats of other bases against one another.

...

Probably no sector of American capitalism displays more cutthroat competitiveness than the recording industry. Entry into the field is, unlike the case in basic industries such as auto and steel, still relatively unrestricted. Any adventurer with a couple of thousand dollars can get an LP produced (even less for a 45 rpm single) and—who knows?—if he is lucky can make it supremely big. Such is the story of Barry Gordy of Motown Records and, on a much reduced scale, of Bernard Stollman of ESP, for whose label the surprisingly red-hot Fugs record.

...

JOHN COLTRANE LIVE AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD AGAIN! (Impulse 9124) just might be the greatest work of art ever produced in this country -not to mention the greatest selection of jazz music ever to get set down on wax.

Regardless of what you have read, regardless of what anyone has told you, you must give this new music a chance to speak for itself; only you will be the loser if you fail to do so. The place to begin is with this album. Not a day has gone by since I first heard it that I don’t play it at least once, and sometimes twice or even three times. If I were in charge at Impulse, I would sell the record on a money-back-if-not-satisfied basis—it’s simply that good, and that policy would insure that it was heard as widely as it deserves to be.

...

In his recently published book FOUR LIVES IN THE BEBOP BUSINESS, A.B. Spellman relates that Buell Neidlinger, former bassist with Cecil Taylor, told him: “I think Cecil Taylor is potentially the most important musician in the Western World ... And I’m basing this,” the “legitimately” trained Neidlinger went on, “on my experience with some of the very best of the new composers and the new orchestras ... Cecil has it, to my mind, clearly above all of them.”

...

Nothing demonstrates more clearly the intertwined nature of politics and the new music than a concert that I had the good fortune to be able to attend over the recent holidays. The concert was in New York’s Village Theatre, and it featured, besides the artistry of Jackie McLean, Marion Brown, Archie Shepp, and their respective groups, a short speech by none other than Stokely Carmichael.

...

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

...

Why the critics?

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers Demand:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

-- from Women in China by Helen Snow

...

Fifth Estate Extra

This is a supplement to THE FIFTH ESTATE, an independent socialist newspaper of Detroit now in its eighth year of publication. It deals with the current uproar in Detroit’s Left caused by a violent conflict between the Communist Party and the National Caucus of Labor Committees. The conflict has spread to include virtually every Left group, several welfare rights organizations and some unions. A few lessons can be learned from it. One article presents the criticism and analysis of The Fifth Estate production staff. A second article presents the criticism and analysis of The Fifth Estate distribution staff, Big Rapids Distribution Company.

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

a review of

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

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

...

reviewed in this article

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

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

Guy Debord (1932–1994)

...

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

...

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

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

...

Reprinted from The Berkeley Barb (Underground Press Syndicate).

Did you ever have to

make up your mind?

Pick up on one and leave

the other behind.

It’s not often easy and not often kind.

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Did you ever have to finally decide?

And say yes to one and

let the other one ride.

...

a review of

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

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

...

Ludlow miners, 1914

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

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

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a review of

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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Reviewed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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a review of

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

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

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Dedicated to the Clayoquot people of Meares Island

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

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

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a review of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A protester raises a black flag during the Pittsburgh G20

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

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

“Remove your clothing.“The voice says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dear Fifth Estate:

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

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

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