Full list of texts
David Watson
On the road to nowhere
Notes on the new nomadism
Looking to change my life, at the age of nineteen I decided to pack my belongings into a knapsack and hitch-hike to California. Two miraculous rides carried me through prairies, deserts and mountains into Los Angeles to a friend’s place at the edge of Hollywood. In those days, at least, California was considered the ultimate destination for every dream of freedom and opportunity, spiritual and economic.
Feb 14, 2016 Read the whole text...
Thaddeus Blanchett
On the sale of sex & bodies
The view from Rio de Janeiro
You don’t have to put on the red light
Those days are over
You don’t have to sell your body to the night
-- “Roxanne” (The Police)
Sting’s lyrics neatly frame how prostitution is often popularly conceived of, no less by anarchist abolitionists than by moralists and those in between.
Living and teaching in Rio de Janeiro for the last 15 years while doing anthropological research about female heterosexual prostitution has demonstrated to me what a deeply flawed description this is of sex work.
Sep 23, 2014 Read the whole text...
George L. Juroy
Stephen M. Raphael
On the Street? Know Your Rights
Pay attention.
Read this article carefully and then commit it to memory. It will save your enormous trouble for the rest of your life. Your authors—two attorneys -are about to advise you on how to deal with THEM: the fuzz. Never again will you run the risk of a knee in your left ball, unless it is your own.
Dec 20, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
“On This Cube Will I Build My Church”
EDITOR’S NOTE; Timothy Leary, high priest of consciousness expansion, spoke in East Lansing Nov. 17th. His talk was covered in our last issue by Michael Kindman, editor of THE PAPER, a sister Underground Press Syndicate publication [see Kill, Leary, Kill, FE # 20, December 15–31, 1966]. The following was written after Kindman and several others interviewed Leary after his speech to a Michigan State University audience.
Oct 7, 2024 Read the whole text...
Olchar E. Lindsann
Ontological anarchy and punk-inspired zine culture
Jason Rodgers’ rich discourse and presentation
a review of
Invisible Generation: Rants, Polemics, and Critical Theory Against the Planetary Work Machine by Jason Rodgers. Autonomedia, 2021
For many years, Jason Rodgers has been a motivating presence in a startlingly large number of anarchist zine projects and communities, including frequently in this magazine. Her work has been published in a great many collective contexts, but always singly and hard to find. In Invisible Generation, her diverse body of critical writing has finally been brought together.
Jun 12, 2022 Read the whole text...
Michael Albert
On Trashing & Movement Building
“Trashing had no positive effects”
This is a response to a post-Seattle debate troubling many folks regarding movement tactics. As a preface, it goes without saying, I hope, that we all understand that as far as violence is concerned, the violent parties in Seattle were first and foremost the President of the U.S., his entourage, the other major heads of state, the leadership of the WTO, etc. Poverty-inducing violence imposed with a pen trumps a brick breaking a window every time—not to mention that the former is to defend and enlarge injustice, while the latter is to fight it.
Nov 24, 2019 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City
Open City, Detroit’s service organization to the free community, has begun operation. So far most activity has centered around people calling in problems to the switchboard.
Although many of the calls regard minor services like telling callers who is at the Grande or where they can read material on LSD, many calls have been of a more serious nature.
Sep 25, 2021 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Free Clinic
Free medical attention for Detroit’s Free Community is now available at the Open City office, 4726 Third, every Monday evening from 6 until 8 pm.
Although this service has been in operation only a month the response has already been very encouraging. At this time plans are being considered to keep the service open three days a week and additional doctors and nurses have expressed an interest in Open City.
Feb 10, 2019 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Keeps Serving Community
A gala fund raising party for Open City’s summer campaign will be held on Friday, July 11 at Alvin’s Finer Deli on Cass at Palmer.
Admission will be $1 and the celebration will begin at 8 pm. Proceeds will go to the Open City Free Clinic and the new Open City General Store soon to open in the Warren Forest area.
Apr 14, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Gaynes
Open City Meeting
On Monday evening, February 20th, Alvin’s Delicatessen hosted the second “official” meeting of the OPEN CITY project.
After smoldering in the cauldrons of the finest minds in Detroit’s underground, OPEN CITY is being realized at a killer pace.
The primary objective of this meeting was to create committees around which people can be organized. This was accomplished in such an organized and (lo and behold) enjoyable manner as to make one wonder whether organizational meetings are worthy of the profound aversion which most people have for them.
Aug 19, 2021 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Opens
Several hundred people attended Open City’s first benefit held February 28 at Alvin’s Delicatessen.
The three hundred dollars collected at the door was used to purchase the community switchboard now in operation at the Open City office.
For the last few weeks Open City members have met in committees, rapped on telephones and have generally been putting their projects together. The most obvious result of all this has been the opening of the Open City office now located at 4726 Third, near Forest, 2nd Floor, office number 5.
Sep 3, 2021 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Progress
Open City’s first financial setback occurred April 1st when the Studio 1 benefit was canceled at the last minute. Bob Scott was supposed to receive enough backing to open his Optek Pharmacy at the old Studio location, but things back-rued and our April Fools benefit hit the dust.
Uncle Russ has come through for an Open City “Rites of Spring” benefit that will be held at the Grande on April 23. The celebration will begin at 7 p.m. and last only until 11 p.m.
May 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Open Letter To Judd Arnett & Lou Gordon
The Fifth Estate Staff Death Penalty for Newspaper Columnists
To: Judd Arnett, The Detroit Free Press
Lou Gordon, The Detroit News
Lift up a rock in Detroit these days—more correctly, in one of its outlying suburbs—and out will crawl a newspaper columnist.
Regarding your respective columns of August 25 in the Free Press and the News on the subject of street gang violence in the city: In general, when we have been forced to think about you at all, we’ve been inclined to think of you as just two more transparent apologists for the status quo. We’ve always felt it symptomatic of your distorted self-perceptions that you should think your banal and witless observations deserving of the least attention, and symptomatic of this sick society that it should pay you to make them public. We have thought of you, in other words, as fit only to be ignored.
Apr 29, 2016 Read the whole text...
Edward D’Angelo
Open Letter to Police Commissioner Spreen
Commissioner Spreen,
In regards to your public clearing of your fellow police officers for their actions at the Wallace rally at Cobo Hall, I would like to say a few words as a victim of police brutality that you say didn’t take place.
First of all, having suffered a broken leg and a sprained arm at the hands of your “law enforcement officers” and now of hearing your words of praise for the “fine work” of your police I can now have a better understanding of the reasons for the ghetto uprisings of two summers ago. When the work of your sadistic men in blue goes unchecked and even praised how do you think people should react? How would you react, Mr. Spreen?
May 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Norman Solomon
Open Letter to the Disarmament Movement
Late 1985
Dear People:
North America’s disarmament movement has gone from momentum to defeat during the first half of the 1980s, but we have not heard much candor about the dimensions of the loss. Arms-race boosters see little reason to taunt floundering adversaries—who tend to be busy cheering for the disarmament team while steering clear of somber assessments. Increasingly, the anti-nuclear movement’s propaganda of the word is being outmatched by the nuclear establishment’s propaganda of the deed; disarmament advocates decry while thermonuclear advocates deploy.
Jul 3, 2020 Read the whole text...
Len Schafer
Open letter to the people
The Detroit community is getting together. Although militant demonstrations and spreading the movements’ rap are important functions, community people have initiated a number of programs needed to deal with the different levels of the People’s oppression.
To strengthen these programs, community organizations have gotten together to form the SERVE THE PEOPLE COALITION. STP was born out of an awareness of these groups that the common denominator of serving the People takes priority over minor political disagreements.
Jul 23, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Opera Company Finks Out
The May 28th performance of “Lysistrata and the War” at Community Arts Auditorium was permanently canceled, due in part to the war which the opera opposes: one of the leading male singers was drafted.
The people in charge of the production postponed the performance until June 14, to be held, with a new singer, in a room with much smaller seating capacity.
Apr 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Valerie Morse
Operation 8: Terror Down Under
New Zealand government repression against Maori people and their supporters
Ka whawhai tonu matou. Ake! Ake! Ake!--“We will fight forever and ever and ever.”
-- Rewi Maniapoto, leader of the armed resistance against colonial settlement in New Zealand, at the Battle of Orakau, 1864
It is hard to imagine the reach of the United States if you have never lived outside of it. In New Zealand, it is pervasive and simultaneously invisible: ideas, culture, and laws are imported and imposed. Following 9/11, New Zealand (NZ) jumped to ratify its own version of the US Patriot Act.
Apr 22, 2013 Read the whole text...
Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Operation Gender Blur
Book review
a review of
Bisexuality: A Reader and Sourcebook edited by Thomas Geller (available for $10.95 from Times Change Press c/o Publishers Services, Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948 or the FE Bookstore)
We are sometimes afraid of the risks which must be taken when we integrate discussions of sexuality and gender into the life of our activist community. It’s rather dangerous to try to define a “politically correct” sexuality for anti-authoritarians. The gay vs. straight or monogamy vs. non-monogamy discussions (and a huge list of other related discussions) should be most familiar to those of us whose lives, identified with communities of resistance, transcend (or defy) a purely political involvement. Discussions of gender and sexuality do have serious implications for our politics (or anti-politics).
Nov 21, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Operation Intercept
MEXICO CITY (DF)—Mounting resentment against “Operation Intercept”—the U.S. effort to halt illegal drug traffic by thorough inspection of cars at border points has been voiced by border officials, business organizations and the Mexican press.
“Whoever dreamed up this witch hunt should have his head examined,” said Mexico City’s News. “By last night a million people had been hurt by it to net a handful of two-bit pushers.”
Jul 16, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Operation Intercept Junked
LOS ANGELES (LNS)—Operation Intercept, billed as the biggest and best-publicized anti-narcotics campaign in history, has come to a close, according to officials in Washington—and with it closes a colorful and exciting chapter in the continuing story of America’s War on Dope.
Late in September, Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst sat down behind a mountain of kilo bricks of pot at a Los Angeles press conference and said, “this is war.” Two explanations were advanced by observers.
Aug 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
J. M. White
O (poem)
“A way that is laid out, is not the way.”
--Tao Te Ching
O
life is a journey
fraught with peril
the way is never clear
naive faith
and sarcastic doubt
circle aimlessly
resolving nothing
pay attention
your time is short
the way long
there are people watching television
while the house is on fire
Jan 25, 2014 Read the whole text...
Rui Preti
Opposing the Rise of the Far-right
Building Solidarity, Protecting Our Communities
These are anarchistic times—times in which increasing numbers of people are resisting the horrors of contemporary society by engaging in direct action without waiting for leaders to tell them what to do. So, it is no surprise that anarchists are once again at the center of fights against the capitalist system and the subjugation of the many to the will of the few.
Nov 7, 2017 Read the whole text...
Citizen Cane
Organic Cuba
Farming & Politics
In May, two former Fifth Estaters (turned farmers) will attend an international organic agriculture conference in Havana. Joining us there will be another farmer from Olympia, Washington, and friends from a Mayan community in the Western Highlands of Guatemala.
The event is co-sponsored by the American organizations Global Exchange and Food First, and the Cuban farming organization Grupo de Agricultura Organica (GAO). These groups co-sponsored a similar gathering there in 1996.
Nov 25, 2019 Read the whole text...
Joe Jacobs
Organization
To think we can establish, even in general terms, a set of objectives/principles which will be a basis for a real “revolutionary organization” is an illusion.
The author of the following article, Joe Jacobs, was an English comrade and one-time member of London Solidarity (one of the two organizations mentioned in the discussion) who, we learned, died shortly after sending us this manuscript. Though we’ve devoted considerable space to this subject in previous issues we think that Joe’s thoughts on the matter after many years of radical activity shed some light on “the organization question” that has too often been ignored.
Feb 24, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Organizing for Anarchism in Ireland
Fifth Estate Interview
The Fifth Estate sat down with Andrew Flood from the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM), an Irish anarchist group, who was on a 43 city speaking tour of North America. Walker Lane conducted the interview April 16 at the Baile Corcaigh Irish Pub in Detroit’s Corktown district.
The talk Andrew gave later in the evening described the group’s involvement in anti-war and abortion rights organizing, opposition to a gas pipeline, and participation in community based movements. Descriptions of these struggles and more information are at their web site, www.wsm.ie
Aug 21, 2014 Read the whole text...
Bursts
Organizing for Solidarity with Locked Down Comrades
Buttons To Show Your Support for Political Prisoners

Apr 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Origins of space
A Neo-Functional Approach
All too often, we tend to ignore what we don’t see in favor of that which we do see. Take space for example. As it hangs unseen we ignore it, but as it becomes fixed under the onslaught of mechanized forces, we suddenly notice huge obstacles debauching our vision and engulfing our lives.
When space first originated it was everywhere, except where it wasn’t--i.e. where objects existed in its place. For space to exist it must be free of objects (for objects utilize space and not vice versa as some would have us believe).
Nov 22, 2014 Read the whole text...
Bob Fleck
Other Ideas
Back in the late ‘50s or so, when Brubeck was just beginning, complacency wasn’t quite dead yet and beatniks were still in bloom, the walls of galleries, stately homes, and civic auditoriums displayed a new art—abstract expressionism.
Style and idealization carried out to cool jazz endsville, chilled out of time and mind. Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day strained to understand it: Time magazine was pedantically vague.
Jul 5, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Who says the New York Times favors the status quo? After a recent story listing “narcotic addicts, drunks, panhandlers, homosexuals and drifters” a staff memo was circulated explaining: “Times have changed and ‘homosexuals’ is no longer universally considered a term of opprobrium”... Meanwhile former Times editor Herman Dinsmore (editor, International Edition, 1951 through 1960) has written a Red-baiting book “documenting what anti-Communists have long known” billed by the Conservative Book Club as “Former Times Editor Exposes Own Paper!”...
Jul 8, 2023 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Writing about the Paul McCartney thing, Robert Somma speculates on how willing some people are to believe that a public figure is dead. Whatever future evidence there might be, he says, McCartney will BE dead in these people’s minds because they want him to be. Very true. And given that most people share this trait—a sort of transference deathwish—to some extent, why don’t we capitalise upon it? Let’s say NIXON IS DEAD and keep saying it over and over again until 200 million people have heard it. Some will take it at face value, others will accept it symbolically until eventually even the wire services and The New York Times are forced to deal with it as a mass phenomenon. Tell your friends...NIXON IS DEAD; don’t -explain it, don’t amplify it, don’t justify it. Just say it.
Jun 18, 2023 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
David Susskind’s office decided to investigate “Bohemia” in a one- or two-hour “Open End” television show. Called Israel Young’s Folklore Center for information. Poets Allan Katzman, an EVO editor and Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs were standing by. Next scene, Susskind’s plushy office in Newsweek building on Mad Ave: Jean Kennedy, nice but playing dumb, interviews Tuli, Ed Sanders, drummer Ken Weaver, guitarist Pete Kearney. Attempts to orient herself: does Ed admire LBJ? (sneers) Bob Dylan? Mailer? the Village Voice? Do many villagers “use drugs?” Sanders remarks: “You know we might blow Susskind right off the air; not because of our foul-mouthedness or anything but because of our philosophical position.” Well asks Kennedy with a brave smile, what are some of your philosophical positions? Oh, says Ed deadpan, Legalize Marijuana, Cunnilingus Now, etc. etc....
Feb 7, 2023 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Skeptics about Happenings—the kind of person who says, “I’ve seen one and I don’t like them”—should visit Al Hansen’s loft at 119 Avenue D. It is like finding yourself In the attic of a childhood you only heard about but never knew. “I had always enjoyed the fact that people visiting me couldn’t tell in many cases whether a thing was a work of art or a useful household object,” writes Hansen in his book, “A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art” (Something Else Press, $4.50). “Friends who knew very well what art is and isn’t would even make jokes such as, ‘May I sit in this chair, or Is it by George Brecht?’ or ‘Can I put my cigarette out in this, or is it part of an assemblage?’”
Dec 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW YORK—Strange and very hypocritical how Dwight D. Eisenhower seems to have been loved and revered by everybody. While he was alive one could scarcely hear a good word for or about him; now he’s dead the air is full of unctuous, oily tributes to his role as a beloved father figure. Wasn’t it he who took over our role in Vietnam from the French? Wasn’t it he who blew the whistle on the military/industry cartel? And yet strange, strange, apparently everybody loved him.
Jun 29, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW YORK—CBS president Frank Stanton (who fired the Smothers Bros.) passed down the word to Columbia Records to stop advertising in the dirty, little underground papers.
At about the same time, Columbia mailed out a general press release boasting about the success of its phony “Revolutionaries” hype. Enormous sums of publicity money were spent not only on advertising but on “display racks, window streamers and posters.”
Jun 16, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW YORK—The tremendous pace at which the so-called sexual revolution is moving leaves us all a little dizzy. It’s only a matter of weeks since Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein broke away from the New York Free Press to found a new unabashedly sexual tabloid called Screw. Now Screw, after seven issues is selling 50,000 copies (at 35 cents each) and is about to go weekly.
Jun 6, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Hippy beggars are a colossal drag. They are all losers, parasites. Their begging is a way of saying that somebody else should take care of you and you don’t much care who it is.
Hippy beggars are worse than most because 1) they hit on their brothers too often; 2) most of them have parents who could and would pay their bills; and 3) lazy, whining kids are an aesthetic bring-down as well as a lousy advertisement for the whole community—any community.
May 7, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Years ago the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was just about the only medium via which lazy, white liberals could salve their consciences when they happened to think about those poor, underprivileged Negroes down south. But the NAACP not only didn’t advance the colored people very far but actively began to resist change when other more militant (such as SNCC & CORE) organizations came along. Maybe that’s why it continued to get so many white “liberal” contributions.
May 1, 2022 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW YORK—Marijuana smokers are “significantly more likely” to report attending happenings, reading underground newspapers and participating in mass protests.
That is one of the unsurprising findings of a study of young people made by a Michigan legislative committee. Chairman Dale Warner, a young hip legislator who hung around with John Sinclair and the MC5 commune people, produced a report that’s basically sympathetic to the benevolent herb. One quote, for example: “It is our impression that adults often know less about the subject than the adolescents do.”
Sep 23, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Current rash of skyjacking is nothing new, merely a new outbreak of the age-‘old custom of piracy in the newest uncontrolled medium: the air. Diverting planes to Cuba is kid stuff. Wait until international pirates see the potential for just taking planes (as long as they can land on territory they control). Then, sooner or later somebody will think of sitting up there in a long-range bomber with a nuclear missile aboard.
Sep 5, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW DELHI—Twenty-one years after his murder this month Mahatma Gandhi is still India’s number one newsmaker. There is hardly an issue of any of India’s scores of English-language magazines that doesn’t carry some word of him—a book review, a reminiscence, an inspirational quotation on its editorial page. And hardly a day goes by without some politician or would-be politician invoking his memory or reaffirming his beliefs—all duly reported in the daily newspapers. Currently, the following running stories pop up with dependable frequency:
Jul 26, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Performer James Brown is one Negro who’s certainly managed to come to terms on his own with Black Power. First he gave a cozy, bear-hugging endorsement of Hubert Humphrey (himself just back from hugging Lester Maddox) and then, when HHH’s balloon deflated, the nimble Brown was right in there socking it to them on behalf of President Tricky Dicky. Uncle Tom Brown may be full of soul but he’s also full of shit.
Aug 22, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
PONDICHERRY, India—The heart and soul of Pondicherry is the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, focal point for pilgrims not only from India but from all parts of the world. It is an unusual ashram in the sense that its buildings are spread all over the town and some of its businesses provide employment and services for other residents of Pondicherry.
Aug 13, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Bombay (pop. 5 million) is India’s second biggest city and the one nearest to Western tastes. It’s Hollywood, New York and Chicago rolled into one, and almost every visitor has a friend or a contact there or can easily find one. The Jehangir Art Gallery specialises in modern contemporary work and so many of the creative types, including writers and young film makers, hang around there or in one or another of the smaller galleries nearby.
May 2, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW DELHI, India—The ascension to the throne of Richard Nixon has not been greeted with enthusiasm in India. Most of the papers think he is a drag—“the winning candidate who took the greatest care not to commit himself—others that he is a menace. A literary and political mag called Shankar’s Weekly calls him “the obedient robot of the American conservative establishment” and says his election has put the American clock back by twenty years. Bombay’s flashy weekly Blitz goes further and attributes Nixon’s election to “the notorious J. Edgar Hoover... the master-brain behind the two Kennedy executions.” This factor, says Blitz, “added to his own unseemly record on which the FBI is bound to have complete files, will make the new President a convenient tool in the hands of the Police Chief and the State-within-a-State he commands.”
Apr 5, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Hostility to the Beatles is building up in the underground press, exacerbated by the release of their recent record “Revolution,” whose lyrics (comments Rolling Stone) “really swing in that brand of political naivete for which the Beatles have long been known and castigated.”
Contrasted with the current Rolling Stones single, “Street Fighting Man,” and the celebrated battle over its album cover, the Beatles’ entry really seems to be an Establishment-oriented message. Rolling Stone’s Catherine Manfredi adds. “Conservatism is a British trend; they have been responsible for bringing back Jazz which they called ‘trad’; jug bands which they called ‘skiffle;’ and rock and roll which they call the Beatles.
Nov 30, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Gradually the Kennedy legend is being demolished and there’s hope that one day both JFK and Bobby will be seen in less idolatrous terms. To the rest of the world, JFK will always be a superhero but Americans are obsessive about the “White Knight” syndrome—the myth of the untarnished pure prince who will ride out of nowhere to save us all from everything. It’s the favorite myth, oddly enough, of what rednecks describe as the pseudo-intellectual: the thinker with intellect but no intelligence, no depth or genuine humanity. The White Knight syndrome is a cop-out theory that somewhere is somebody who will solve all the problems that beset society. He will take power and sweep away inequities, injustice, greed, colonialism etc., etc. And, of course, once he’s in power we won’t have to bother about it any more ourselves will we? We can go on being vicious, greedy, rapacious, unfair to our fellow men, knowing that we already did our bit. Well, Kennedy (neither of them) was a White Knight. He was an ambitious, compromising, timid aristocrat who achieved power first and foremost through money and retained popularity largely through shrewd publicity. He was, admittedly, a cut above most of the disgusting illiterates who masquerade as our “leaders” but just by definition that’s not saying very much.
Dec 11, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
CHANGES: Hundreds of empty cans were dumped on the doorstep of Continental Can company in San Francisco by a group calling itself the Canyon League of Re-Cyclists. If the company makes money out of creating garbage it should do something about disposing of it, spokesmen explained. Continental Can officials disclaimed responsibility and had one of the protesters arrested for “littering”...
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Maryanne Raphael
Other Scenes
Editors’ Note: This week’s Other Scenes is written by Maryanne Raphael and appeared originally in the UPS paper Other Scenes, published by John Wilcock.
WHAT’S A 4-LETTER WORD BEGINNING WITH F? If your answer to the above question was food, you’d probably rather eat greasy fried chicken than low-calorie cock or pussy, and chances are you’re overweight and could profit from the following reducing hints.
Sep 19, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
SEX: Fifteen couples fucking simultaneously under the guidance of a clinical psychologist who told them how to get more out of it was one of the features at a recent encounter weekend at Ed Lange’s Elysium Institute ranch in California’s Topanga Canyon. Elysium (5436 Fernwood, L.A. Calif. 90027 for info) recently won its court fight to operate the first nudist camp within the LA city limits, overturning a law that had made nudity illegal even with your own family in your own backyard...
Sep 13, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Tokyo, Sept. 18
There’s no Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan—which certainly needs one—and so the 1969 Miss International Beauty Pageant went off without a hitch in the Hall of Martial Arts here last week.
The only trouble, in fact, was that things went so smoothly that even the people normally awed by these things must have been affected by the all-pervasive boredom. The nitty gritty of the affair, after all, is to display 50 girls in “national costume”, in evening gowns and in swimsuits and then pare these down to a final quintet of winners.
Jul 28, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
New York’s Film Festival proved once again how utterly impossible it is to satisfy a mixed media audience with the subjective selections of any group of film tasters. Some critics thought there was too much Godard, or too many “foreign” selections in general; others complained about the “amateurism” of the solitary American selection—Norman Mailer’s corny “Beyond the Law” or the thin content of the charming opening selection, “Capricious Summer.” Press tickets were tightly restricted and uniformed guards were alert to combat threatened disruption by militant young filmmakers who see the festival as a classic example of decadent bourgeois culture.
Aug 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Abbie Hoffman explains the reason for the grass shortage in his new book, The Woodstock World (about to be published by Random House). Federal narcs armed with hundreds of thousands of dollars went to Mexico, says Abbie, and outbid the big dope dealers for the new crop. Which they then burned and destroyed.
Jul 9, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
The U.S. Post Office, which god knows has enough to do just trying to keep the mail flowing, has taken it upon itself to prejudge the contents of private letters. I got a postcard the other day inviting me to the main post office to have a letter to me (from a friend in Denmark) opened in my presence. The letter was stamped “presumed to contain obscene matter” or some such nonsense and also bore an insolent warning that if not claimed within five days “storage charges” would be made.
Jul 3, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
THE ENEMY: If Hoover really did have RFK’s authorization to tap Martin Luther King’s phone why doesn’t he produce the signed memo that says so. James Bennett, director of Federal prisons for almost 30 years, has now written a book boasting about his contributions to penal reform (had you noticed how humane prisons are these days?)
Jun 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW YORK: City officials have turned down, sight unseen, a plan to turn NYC’s individual subway stations into fascinating communities, more or less reflective of the areas in which they exist.
The vast space in Greenwich Village’s West 4th Street station, for example, would be tenanted by a sort of miniature Mulberry Street festival with push carts selling vegetables, church-operated gambling wheels, an art show and second-hand bookstalls of the type found along the banks of the River Seine.
May 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
The grass famine’s on in Mexico, too. When I was down there last week many of my friends were also bemoaning the fate of acres of the lush crop supposedly sprayed by poison and napalm. (This may be an evil rumor planted by wishful-thinking Movement purists because nobody seems to have proof of any such destruction).
May 22, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
One of the basic fundamentals of conservatism, presumably, is to conserve what you’ve got (no matter how much somebody else might need it) and to this extent at least, William Buckley, heir to a $100 million fortune, is true to conservative principles. Several hundred or thousand subscribers to Buckley’s magazine, the National Review, received a heart-rending plea in the mail last week: unless somebody gives the slick right-wing magazine $250,000 “it is quite literally true that the nation’s only conservative journal of opinion will have to close down.”
Apr 23, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
LEARY RUNS FOR GOV. Tim Leary says that he’ll conduct a “grass roots campaign for governor of California, beginning with a train tour of the state in September. He already has the support of more than 100 rock bands and “the four leading newspapers” and explains that though he won’t be participating in machine politics “there may be some smoke-filled rooms.”
Apr 11, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
A commune calling itself the Kingdom of Endor tried to plan The Great Aspen Freak Festival in the little Colorado town for this July but carelessly announced that 100,000 hippies-could be expected—and that blew the whole thing.
Suddenly the available land wasn’t available any more and threats of “vigilante” action scared off what few record company commitments that had been made. What finally brought matters to a head was a claim—untrue—that the Beatles would be coming.
Mar 28, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
NEW YORK—Norman Mailer kicked off his mayorality campaign with a rally at the Village Gate attended by George Plimpton’s party crowd and assorted dilettantes and sycophants. Targets of the evening were the NY Times, which hasn’t been giving Mailer the attention he demands; Esquire magazine whose money he’s been taking uncomplainingly for a decade; and his own audience, most of whom he correctly identified as being present “for the fun of it.”
Feb 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
“In a rebellion, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end” (Alexis de Tocqueville)...
In the north of England there’s been an outbreak of bow-and-arrow “sniping”...
If the war in Vietnam was suddenly ended, says a confidential banking letter called Intercom, most of the supposed savings in military expenditures would be grabbed for other “high priority military projects deferred because of the costs of the war”. So projected tax increases, budgetary cuts, etc. would still be needed. And, of course, the military could always start another little war somewhere (Haiti? Guatemala? Bolivia? Thailand?)...
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
By the time the narcotics squad pinpointed him last month, Dick Swafford, 28, had probably stashed two or three hundred thousand dollars away in Swiss banks. Once a week he’d leave his home in L.A. and drive to San Diego to meet the incoming grass supply from Mexico. After a bit of business in California he’d fly across country, sometimes stopping at Chicago long enough to stuff a suitcase full of shit into a parcel locker (leaving the key to the locker for his contact there to pick up later in the day.
Sep 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Wilcock’s London
The London Times reports sadly that Britain isn’t yet equipped to “‘retaliate quickly” against an enemy who attacks with germ warfare. As long as nationalistic feelings prevail over humanitarian ones there’ll always be this chess game with expendable lives by leaders who remain safely above it all....The U.S. Embassy has been replaced by the Hilton Hotel and the Playboy Club as top targets for stone-throwing anti-American demonstrators... A man who received a civil honor, the MBE, for “services to sport” (giving rent-free premises to an Olympic team) has been requested to return the award after being convicted (of perjury) in a court case: Establishing the principle, of course, that you’re judged by your future activities rather than your past...
Aug 14, 2015 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
What a pathetic creature Horseshit Humphreak is; how could anybody with any intelligence take him seriously? Other Scenes wrote (in March 1966): “If vice-stooge HH had the guts to express his own opinions he could be the next president, which—with the polarization over Vietnam—will certainly never be his fate as a yesman.” The fact is undeniable that anybody who’s prepared to rationalize evil for any reason whatsoever is already irrevocably part of it. As of now HH Horseshit looks like a sure loser (his only helper being Asshole Agnew) which, from any revolutionary’s viewpoint, holds hope for the future. President pip-squeak humphreak could keep the wallsitters (including those deserted dreamers who worked for McCarthy) in line for a couple of years before all hell breaks loose; president vixen nixon might last a year; but with george shit-ass in power we might be lucky enough to cause the literal overthrow of the u.s. government within six months. Think on these things. Guerrillas should eschew ideologies (tho not ideals) and concentrate upon tactics.
Jun 14, 2017 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
VENICE—Most of the art freaks who came to Venice for the June Biennale arrived in an ambivalent frame of mind. They were revolutionaries weren’t they? don’t all artists and dealers consider themselves revolutionaries?—and so they understood why the Italian students protested the Biennale as a symbol of the Italian cultural establishment. Well, didn’t they?
Jul 20, 2015 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
What RFK’s election would prove is that America is further ahead in its cheerfully cynical acceptance of corruption and back-room deals than had been feared...
First winner of the Other Scenes Yellow Journalism Award (“the underground Pulitzer”) is the New York Free Press for its outrageously creative publication of the names, addresses and telephone numbers of local draft board members. Citation of the OSYJ award reads: “In a time when newspapers prefer to follow rather than lead, when the apparent aim is to mollify the advertisers rather than rock the boat, and when most newspapers put the maintenance of the status quo ahead of the best interests of the readers’, the New York Free Press reminds us that traditionally the best newspapers have always been troublemakers. May their example be widely copied”...
Nov 30, 2017 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Other Scenesman, John Wilcock, has begun one of his frequent around the world trips. This report is filed from Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. We will publish his impressions of his visits to other European and Asian cities as they are received.
Beethoven concert in the Rector’s Palace, a centuries-old stone castle with inner patio open to the sky. Cheapest ticket 10 dinar (80 cents) with which I race up two impressive stone staircases to recline comfortably on a stone ledge overlooking the middle-aged German tourists sat stolidly in stiff-backed chairs 20 feet below.
May 31, 2018 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
On Saturday, June 22, a demonstration expressing support for French workers and students was held in front of the office of the French consulate in the First National Building in downtown Detroit.
The demonstration, which protested the Gaullist government’s recent ban on public assembly and the suppression of French student organizations and revolutionary political parties, was jointly sponsored by the Young Socialist Alliance (Y.S.A.), the Socialist Worker’s Party (S.W.P.), the Inner City Voice, the Arab Student Association, and Black Conscience magazine.
May 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Millbrook, that renowned dropout shrine in upstate New York, is closed and padlocked, its tribe scattered, its guru Tim Leary now living in Berkeley. And the end of an era was marked last month with a “farewell” party for Uncle Tim at NY’s Village Gate: the Group Image played, Paul Krassner and Allen Ginsberg did their respective things, and the Gate’s management tossed out a tablefull of people for passing a joint around...
Apr 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
Editors’ Note: We neglected last issue to welcome John Wilcock back to the pages of this newspaper. John was one of the founders of the Village Voice and the East Village Other. He publishes his own paper, Other Scenes which is a 20 times a year newspaper produced from wherever the editor happens to be. This could be Greece, Japan, England or anywhere else in the world. Subscriptions are $5 and should be sent to OS, Box 8, Village Post Office, N.Y., N.Y. 10014.
Mar 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Our 50th!
Issue intro
Welcome to our Spring 2015 issue, with the murderous U.S. war against Vietnam as its main theme. The essays and fiction describe the conflict itself, while next issue will feature accounts of the resistance from the anti-war movement, mutinous GIs, and the Vietnamese.
The Fall edition will mark our 50th anniversary of radical publishing and will include essays commemorating the paper’s history. Plans for a celebration, a staff reunion, and museum exhibits in Detroit are on the next and back pages.
Aug 9, 2015 Read the whole text...
Hank Malone
Our Dreams Proved Innocent
Book review
A review of
Jerry Rubin’s “Letter to the Movement,” New York Review of Books, Feb. 13, 1969, 40 cents.
The Young American Poets, edited by Paul Carroll, Follet Publishing Co., 1968, $3.95,
Evergreen Review Reader, edited by Barney Rosset, Grove Press, 1969, $20.00
“From the Bay Area to New York we are suffering the greatest depression in our history...it’s a common problem, not an individual one, and people don’t talk to one another too much anymore. America proved deaf, and our dreams proved innocent. Scores of our brothers have become inactive and cynical,” Jerry Rubin has spoken.
Aug 22, 2021 Read the whole text...
Jaime Huenún Villa
Our Endless Grief
Catrillanca, Wounded Jewel,
your spirit rides through the ravaged
fields of Temucuicui.
Your head destroyed,
your spirit crushed
by the fickle language
of the powerful.
Tear gas whistles, flying
in your funeral procession.
Children, mothers, old people moan
no longer able to harvest
the Mapuzugun of their dreams.
Apr 21, 2020 Read the whole text...
Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Our Enemy the State
The Pyramid Against the Circle
A quick glance at the evening news should be enough to convince even the most disengaged citizen that we live in “grim times.” This recognition, although accurate, is a cliché, since the same could be said about almost every era for the last thousand years in the West.
That’s not to say there’s not joy to he had, moments in which the human spirit erupts with creativity or transcendence, or even years when things seem to work just right, for some people, that is, and usually only for a while. Simultaneously, though, even in the best of periods, often no less than a few miles away, some horror is being perpetrated, or the harmony of an entire era or locale is suddenly exploded by some monstrous event.
Jul 15, 2016 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Our Fallen Anarchist Comrades
Remembering Albert Meltzer, Valerio Isca, Alfredo Monrós, Richard “Tet” Tetenbaum, Earnest Mann, and Jim Gustafson
Born London, Jan. 7, 1920; died, Weston-Super-Mare, N. Somerset, May 7, 1996.
Albert Meltzer was one of the most enduring and respected torchbearers of the international anarchist movement in the second half of the twentieth century. His sixty-year commitment to the vision and practice of anarchism survived both the collapse of the revolution and civil war in Spain and World War II. He helped fuel the libertarian impetus of the 1960s and 1970s and steer it through the reactionary challenges of the Thatcherite 1980s and post-Cold War 1990s.
May 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Federico Arcos
Our Fallen Comrades
Francisco Rebordosa 1918–1998
With the hope of leaving a fruitful seed, the bodies of the Spanish libertarians are sowing the earth in various continents of the planet. In Montreal, it is our dear Cisco Rebordosa. He was preceded by Enrique Castillos, who dedicated many years of his life to militancy, Alfred Munrós (see Fall 1996 FE), whose illustrations are well known to readers of our publications, and Alfred Ruiz, a veteran of the anti-Franco struggle in Spain, where he was imprisoned.
Feb 5, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Our Hearts Never Hibernate, Neither Does The State
An Update on the RNC 8
The RNC 8 are eight activists from Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota charged with four felony counts of conspiracy, two with “Terrorism Enhancements,” in the first known use of the Minnesota Anti Terrorism Act of 2002 (dubbed the MN PATRIOT Act), for their organizing in response to the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC).
May 15, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Our Rave Notices

While pondering over the November 14, 1977 issue of Newsweek magazine, we came across mention of the ole Fifth Estate in their article “Businessmen and Terrorism;” a fine representation of that mystical horseshit that makes us want to bring it all up—“objective journalism.”
How these seeping sacks of parrot droppings dare write such vacuous, pig-ignorant articles and pass them off as truth is beyond us. Why we wouldn’t even spit on the rotting carcasses of these slithering slugs, for fear of offending our saliva!
Mar 23, 2018 Read the whole text...
Peter Dudink
Our Revolution
Religion as impediment
Today we live in a psychopathic civilization. It’s not a pleasant conclusion to arrive at, but perhaps it can spur us to build an alternative a thousand times better than the current planetary disaster. Why not? It’s within our reach. All we need is a concerted effort to revolutionize every aspect of life.
Jun 12, 2014 Read the whole text...
anon.
Outlaw Midwifery
SQUAT: An Anarchist Birth Journal put out its first issue this past June...
And two months later, its first annual birth conference, “SQUAT Camp,” which took place in Washington state from August 10-13th. Usually, midwifery/birthwork conferences are outrageously inaccessible, from their location (high-end hotels) to the cost (upwards of $100 per day). SQUAT organized a conference in the woods, camping style, for $30 for the four-day event (plus meals included). Workshops were a little different than what you’d usually find at a mainstream birth conference, too: “Prison as a Form of Violence Against Women,” “She’s, He’s, and They’s Giving Birth,” “Abortion Doulas and the History of Abortion in Midwifery,” and “Racism and Classism in the Midwifery Movement” were just a few of the fifteen different workshops organized.
Dec 30, 2013 Read the whole text...
Pun Plamondon
Outlaws Forever, Forever Outlaws
Editor’s note: The following message from White Panther Minister of Defense in exile, Pun Plamondon, was read by his wife Geni at the Eastown Theatre, Jan 25 as part of the Free John Sinclair Day benefit.
“The beginnings will not be easy; they will be extremely difficult. All the oligarchies’ powers of repression, all their capacity for brutality and demagogy will be placed at the service of their cause. Our mission, in the first will be to survive....”
Oct 16, 2023 Read the whole text...
Jim Tull
Out of Love
Romantic love so often doesn’t work because it isn’t rooted in human traditions.
In the long course of our culture’s evolution, romantic love has become the primary post-pubescent source of affection in our world. But it has not always occupied this special position. It may be a universal in human experience, but in our globalizing monoculture, romance has intensified over the millennia into a distorted caricature of versions common in tribal and Neolithic village societies.
Aug 9, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
Out of the Fog
On Jan. 1, 2024, the city of San Francisco sent New Year’s greetings to its beleaguered citizens with the cheery news that a suicide net had been installed under the Golden Gate Bridge thanks to funding from the California Mental Health Services Act.
Heralded as a “suicide deterrent system,” the supposedly solid rationale behind this marine grade stainless steel safety net, upon closer examination, turns out to be not so surprisingly full of holes. The erstwhile proponents of this costly $217 million bridge boondoggle have simplistically argued that if access to the material means of suicide are reduced, then deaths can be prevented. Just put up a net under the bridge to catch would-be suicides...presto, problem solved!
May 13, 2025 Read the whole text...
Bob Fleck
Out of the hands of the People
Smokin’ more now and enjoyin’ it less?
The Feds would rather see heads come up to the cool taste of speed and smack than stay down in the valley of harsh reefer fumes (and they’ve been plenty rough lately).
Sound unreal? Hardly.
Courtesy of the R. Miltown Nixon thugs, Operation Intercept is underway, a marijuana eradication program tailored to keep the weed from the minds and lungs of our nation’s youth.
Jul 16, 2019 Read the whole text...
Jess Flarity
Out of View of the Panopticon
Escaping Systems of Control
a review of
Anti-Oculus: A Philosophy of Escape by Acid Horizon. Repeater
The New York City-based podcasting collective Acid Horizon’s book features anarchist-leaning text ranging from informative musings on our present cyberpunk era to densely twisted lexical corridors lined with the thoughts of those like Jung, Deleuze, and Agamben.
Oct 24, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Own a Richard Mock original linocut print and support the Fifth Estate
The late Richard Mock’s linocut art has been featured in the Fifth Estate and other anarchist publications for many years including after his death in 2006 at age 61. His work also appeared on the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times and was the featured art cover for a United Nations magazine with world-wide circulation. Several museums hold his paintings and prints as well. Mock was named the official portrait painter of the 1980 Olympics. Richard left us with the originals of the art that has appeared in these pages since 2002. We’re pleased to offer the 17” by 14.5” original linocut on the previous page for the price of $250 unframed. Richard’s Prints have sold for as much as $2000, but although a signed edition, this is an unnumbered Test Print and marked T.P. as is the custom in such work.
Apr 7, 2014 Read the whole text...
Diane DiPrima
William Blake
Page of poetry
The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the covering clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;
May 11, 2021 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Paint Guerrilla Strike
ITHACA, NY, Sept. 25, (LNS)—Four women toting gallon cans of paint ran up to the Marine officers recruiting at Cornell University’s Barton Hall and doused them with paint.
One recruiter, Captain Donald Frank, was covered from head to foot, front and back, with purple, white and yellow paint. Two other officers, a blanket, and a projector were splattered with paint. Damage was estimated to be over $250.
Jul 26, 2019 Read the whole text...
Le Brise-Glace
Palestine
The Future of a Rebellion
from Le Brise-Glace, No. 1, translated by Lorraine Perlman
However repressive it may have been from its very origins, Zionism represented a movement of emancipation for many oppressed Jews. Once Israel was established, Zionism—whether left or right—has been nothing more than a project to defend a state which, to survive, is condemned to practice a policy of apartheid internally and imperialism externally, where the constant recollection of past adversity serves as a justification for present coercion.
Dec 21, 2020 Read the whole text...
Lynne Clive (Marilynn Rashid)
Palestine: Legacy of Conquest
Having consistently destroyed organized Palestinian political and military resistance to Zionist colonial conquest, Israel must now contend with what is fast becoming a massive and generalized civil revolt.
The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank Strip over the past several months of sustained protest approaches 100. After years of obfuscation and U.S. media silence on the plight of the Palestinian people, we now read daily descriptions of Israeli response to the ongoing protests that rivals and even surpasses state violence in South Africa: gunfire attacks on demonstrating youths, systematic night raids on Palestinian camps and villages, indiscriminate beatings, tear gas and rubber bullet attacks, deportations, censorship, overcrowded and inhumane prisons, mass jailings.
May 8, 2017 Read the whole text...
Ali Moossavi
Palestinian Refugees
Ghosts of Israeli Conquest
Of all the issues raised by Israel’s fifty year anniversary, none holds more pain and longing, nor embodies the Palestinian experience more, than that of the refugees.
Numbering approximately 3.3 million, the Palestinians are the largest such group in the world and have suffered that status longer than any other. Besides being scattered in a diaspora in places as far-flung as Sweden and metropolitan Detroit, many continue to reside in refugee camps close to the land they were forced from a generation ago.
Feb 6, 2021 Read the whole text...
A. Kent MacDougall
Pandemic Immiseration
The Myth of Capitalist Affluence
Fifth Estate Note: Some terminology in this brief but potent essay differs somewhat from the language generally used in the FE.
For example, we normally do not invoke Marx and Engels in economic critiques, but much of their economic analyses remains valid into the modern era.
Also, we feel the commonly used term, employed here by the author, “developing,” is inaccurate to describe the nations of the South—that is the Southern tier, non-industrial countries. The phrase connotes a process that is not occurring, as the article ably points out
Feb 19, 2021 Read the whole text...
anon.
Panther Becomes Christian
Anarchists Pie Cleaver in Canada
VANCOUVER, British Columbia—Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther “revolutionary” turned evangelical Christian, had a pie pushed into his face on May 1, while speaking to an audience attending a christian crusade in the Orpheum Theatre.
As the white, gooey cream streamed down his face, Cleaver met the onslaught and turned his newly-found Christian cheek, saying: “I seem to have changed color.”
Feb 22, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Panther Hunt
Editor’s note: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is an Oakland, California based militant black organization which believes in armed self-defense of the black community from what they call the “pigs” (police).
The group’s Minister of Defense, Huey Newton, is presently in jail awaiting trial on charges of killing one Oakland cop and wounding two others in a shoot-out last year. The Panther’s claim this incident climaxed two years of police harassment and that Huey shot in self-defense.
Jan 4, 2018 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Panther vs. Pig
CHICAGO (LNS)—Bobby Seale was sentenced to jail for four years Nov. 5 for repeatedly asserting his right to defend himself before Judge Julius Hoffman. The judge took an hour and a half to intone sixteen counts of contempt of court, each of them containing Seale’s firm insistence on his constitutional rights.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Michael John
Papersellers Victimized
On Saturday, February 21, three members of the Detroit chapter of the National Committees to Combat Fascism were beaten and arrested while selling the Black Panther Newspaper in front of Kresge’s downtown. The NCCF is a group which is affiliated with the Black Panther Party.
This attack took place at the same time as 200 people were demonstrating against the convictions in the Chicago Conspiracy trial. The protesters massed in Grand Circus Park and then marched to the Federal Building.
Dec 2, 2023 Read the whole text...
John Zerzan
Paradigms
To many, it seems there will be no escape from the dominant reality, no alternative to an irredeemably darkened modernity as civilization’s final, lasting mode. We are indeed currently trapped, and the nature of our imprisonment is not subject to scrutiny. Its very existence is off-limits to discourse.
Jul 30, 2015 Read the whole text...
Joe Hollis
Paradise Gardening
We want to save the world, and we want to save ourselves. It’s the same thing. The problems confronting us are enormous and at every level: personal, social, planetary. I will spare you a list. My aim is to suggest they are all symptoms of one problem, and to propose a solution.
The problem: to find a way to live on earth which promotes our health and happiness, is conducive to the full development of our innate potential and at the same time democratic; that is, available to all—which does not use more than our share, and is harmonious with the biosphere’s evident drive toward increasing diversity, complexity and stability.
Jan 15, 2018 Read the whole text...
Anu Bonobo
Paradise How?
The Living Theatre’s Erotic Revolution of Poetry, Pleasure, Play
“I’m an advocate of free love. What else can I say? I think people should do what they like, enjoy what they enjoy, and we should enjoy their enjoying what they enjoy.”
--Judith Malina
(interviewed by Jim Feast and Steve Dalachinsky)
“The work of liberation from sexual repression must be a parallel of all revolutionary work and must take place during all revolutionary stages. But there comes a point at which no further progress can be made without abolishing standards that cripple the natural man sexually, and this point comes precisely when we confront the fundamental problem of violence.
Jun 26, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
PAR Benefits at Concept
announcement
Benefit performances for People Against Racism will be given by the Concept East Theater on July 7th and 8th. Two plays, Edward Albee’s “A Zoo Story” and Leroi Jones’ “The Dutchman,” will be performed on Friday, July 7th. Laurence Blaine’s “Dark Nights, Angry Faces” will be performed on Saturday, July 8th. “Dark Nights, Angry Faces” consists of two two-act plays: “Prize Fight” and “The Meaning of Time.” Performances begin at 8:00 p.m. at the Concept East Theater, 401 East Adams. Tickets may be obtained by calling the PAR office, 962–3855.
Jan 29, 2017 Read the whole text...
SK
Paris May-June 1968
The Joy of Revolution
a review of
Freedom in Solidarity: My Experiences in the May 1968 Uprising by Kadour Naimi; Translation and foreword by David Porter. AK Press, 2019 akpress.org
During times of social ferment like the present, there tends to be a reawakening of interest in past insurgencies, such as those of the May-June 1968 French uprising. So David Porter’s English translation of Kadour Naimi’s memoir of those transformative events is particularly timely.
Feb 22, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Partial Victory at Ft. Jackson
FT. JACKSON, S.C.—The Army has dropped charges against some GIs affiliated with the group GIs United Against the War in Vietnam at Ft. Jackson, S.C., and will discharge others without ever bringing them to trial.

Of the nine soldiers originally arrested following an anti-war meeting on the base March 20, only three now face charges.
Jun 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Participatory Zoo Dance Rescheduled for Oct. 7, 8
Detroit’s first Participatory Zoo Dance, originally scheduled for September 16 and 17, was postponed, but an October opening is planned. Russ Gibbs, promoter of Detroit’s Grande Ballroom psychedelic dance, said that the original opening date had been cancelled due to technical problems.
The weekly dance, the first of its kind in Detroit, modeled in the San Francisco style, involves a great deal of electrical lighting equipment, and Russ said We ran into some unforeseen difficulties with the electrical wiring code in Detroit, but that has all been taken care of and we will open October 7 and 8 for sure.” Kicking off the grand opening will be the MC5 and the Woolies. Anyone interested in getting more information should call Russ Gibbs at 834–4904.
May 4, 2023 Read the whole text...
Peter Lamborn Wilson
Partly Genius, Partly Quite Mad
a review of
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anonymous materials, by Reza Negarestani. re.press, 2008
This book appears to be (but might not be) a treatise on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Nomadic War Machine, written by someone (said to be an Iranian philosopher) who’s bitten off a bit more French Theory than I can chew. It’s thinly disguised as a SciFi novel as written by or about a brilliant Iranian philosopher named Parsani (“the Persian”) who’s on the verge of paranoid schizophrenic breakdown, in which is embedded a commentary on H.P. Lovecraft and other pulp-horror mashers, in the light of Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian religion and myth (this part is so clever it transcends mere parody), using diagrams of bizarre topology and non-Euclidian geometry, creating fake sources and mixing them with real (but very obscure and erudite) sources--all aimed at an elaborate allegorization of Middle East oil politics and the War on Terror--and analysis that strikes me as partly the work of a genius and partly quite mad, although this is probably the author’s intention, if there is in fact an author.
May 20, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Party Like It’s 1929!
Editorial
Common radical wisdom suggests that capitalism won’t crumble on its own, so imagine the ironically comforting confidence with which we have watched the system convulse over the last few months. But as Don LaCoss reminds us in “The Disasters of Disaster Capitalism,” it’s not a good idea to expect the system to just wither away. The cruel nature of corporations and the state suggests that the forces of domination will continue to profit from the people’s misery and punish anyone who gets in the way.
Jun 16, 2014 Read the whole text...
Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Passionate Mudplay
Piercing the Membrane of the Mundane
Every day for a week I peruse the crumpled quarter-page announcement I’ve been carrying around in my wallet. “MUDPEOPLE: 10th Anniversary...We supply mud. Wear as little as possible. Bring drinks, food, towels, friends, wildness. Finally, the day is here.

Jan 18, 2018 Read the whole text...
Mark Berry
Passion Fruit: A History of (Con)Sensuous Games
The sign read: “Men can wear one article of clothing, and women can wear two articles of clothing.” This was the second annual naked smoothie party that boasted not just fruity blender drinks and creative nudity, but also a steamy hot tub, a banana shaped pool, dancing, body painting, massage, and more.
May 10, 2015 Read the whole text...
Peter Lamborn Wilson
Pastoral Letter
A fragment
Imagine an alternate dimension where
dervishes are roaming around America
sects of Swedenborgian hobos, etc.
You’re there camping in the cemetery
long black hair in tangles ghostwhite face
* * *
Sion County is remote, rural, and poor, and always has been. Around 1870 a breakaway sect of German Amish-type farmers—the Sabbatarian Anabaptists of the “Seventh Day Dunkers,” moved there from Pennsylvania and settled down in the river valleys of the county’s northeast.
Nov 12, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ariel Salleh
Maria Mies
Patriarchy and Progress
A Critique of Technological Domination
The eco-feminism of Maria Mies stands at the crossroads of feminist, ecological and colonial liberation movements. Mies attempts to bring Marxian theory face to face with the newly emerging political crises of the late 20th century. This has involved further investigation of Marx’s texts in the light of modern anthropology and what she calls “object-relations.” But Mies is as much an activist as academic sociologist. Her concerns range from prescriptive essays on methodology in social science and empirical studies of exploitation among Indian women lacemakers, to organized campaigns against pornography and the reproductive-technology industry in West Germany.
Sep 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
T. Fulano (David Watson)
Patriot Songs
‘I hear America singing’
“—so what.”
— D. Campion
I’ve been pissed ever since the President’s announcement—
so let’s get it on, let’s go to war!
I’m tired of the same old betrayals, I want betrayals I can believe in!
.
I’m sick of outsiders ruining my country, we need a Real Leader!
Aug 20, 2017 Read the whole text...
Julie Herrada
Paul Avrich (1931–2006)
A Passionate Chronicler of Anarchism

A beloved comrade and renowned scholar of 19th and 20th century anarchism passed away on February 17 at his home in New York City. Paul Avrich was author and editor of dozens of influential books and articles on the history of anarchism, including The Haymarket Tragedy; The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States; An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre; Anarchist Portraits; Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, and Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America.
Apr 25, 2015 Read the whole text...
Paul J. Comeau
Paul Goodman’s Last Testament
A review of New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative by Paul Goodman, PM Press, 194 pages, trade paperback, $20.00
Although Paul Goodman established himself as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, by the end of his life the anarchist philosopher felt dissatisfied with the direction of the political movements his writings had inspired.
Sep 9, 2013 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Paul Krassner in Detroit
Every Mother’s Day Paul Krassner, editor of the REALIST comes to Detroit and educates us on what’s REALLY happening in the underground.
For instance, if you ever see Tim Leary walking around crouched like a rabbi, it’s because he has a rip in his pants and he doesn’t wear underwear. Krassner also suggested that’s where Leary keeps his stash.
May 1, 2022 Read the whole text...
Ken Mikolowski
Paul Schwarz, 1946–1998
You Are What You Art

FE Note: The area in which the Fifth Estate office is located is known as the Cass Corridor. For years, due to its proximity to an urban university, it has been home to and nurtured endless generations of youthful rebels who cross-fertilized each other in the arts, politics and (Gaia forbid), alternative lifestyles. Each learned from the other, and sometimes there were no divisions as artists were political, and politicos lived alternative lifestyles and were artists, etc. Paul Schwarz was such an individual, who functioned mostly in the arts milieu, but who also was an astute political observer, and took part in many activities. As his friend and co-conspirator, poet Ken Mikolowski, averred in his eulogy to him printed below, Paul’s untimely departure left a hole in this community. In death, as well as life, Paul exemplified the entire community. He was buried wearing an IWW pin on his lapel.
Jan 29, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Paul Watson held for “Crimes” on High Seas
Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, was arrested in the Netherlands April 3 by Dutch police acting on a Norwegian warrant.
The president of Sea Shepherd is being held in Lelystad Penitentiary awaiting an extradition hearing. Norway wants Watson to serve a prison sentence handed down in absentia for the 1992 scuttling of an illegal whaling vessel. They also want to charge him with ramming a Norwegian coast guard vessel in July 1994.
Oct 31, 2021 Read the whole text...
anon.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
Over the last few months we received several responses to the centennial celebrations of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, including the following text, distributed by a group in NYC:
Hi! I’m the AMAZING RON, and have I got a show for you: fireworks, lasers, warships, helicopters, and tens of thousands of cops! Just sit back and watch this blinding show of liberty, but remember, to keep America free, we all have to pitch in and help, so I’m asking you to do a few simple tasks:
Nov 2, 2020 Read the whole text...
Hakim Bey
P.A.Z.
Permanent Autonomous Zones
FE Note: In the following article, Hakim Bey moves beyond his idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)—those moments when normally domesticated space is liberated for a limited time for festive and subversive “moments of happiness.” He discusses what happens when those moments become fixed in time and space.
Jun 28, 2020 Read the whole text...
Sonny Tufts (David Watson)
PBB: Case Study of an Industrial Plague
During the first week of April 1976, Gerald Woltjer, an Ottowa County, Michigan, dairy farmer, shot down his 235-head dairy herd in order to draw attention to the nightmare of PBB--poisoning of Michigan livestock, poultry, and dairy products.
Shortly afterward, the story hit the national news media and within weeks the spectre of a new Minamata-style plague loomed over the heads of Michigan residents. (1) Later in the month, the Michigan House of Representatives approved legislation that will eventually ban the sale of meat from PBB-contained herds for sixty days. A bill is also pending which will result in the liquidation of all tainted animals--virtually every farm animal in the state.
Dec 31, 2014 Read the whole text...
anon.
PBB Found in Mother’s Milk
After being dropped by the media as no longer newsworthy, and being submerged in a myriad of bureaucratic committees on the State Legislature—a process so utterly boring that we have failed to follow its developments (you’ll forgive us, won’t you?)—the issue of PBB (polybrominated biphenyl, a component of a fire-retardant chemical which was introduced by mistake into Michigan livestock feed starting in 1973) has again hit the headlines, this time in a particularly gruesome development. (See “PBB: Case Study of an Industrial Plague,” FE May 1976).
Apr 28, 2016 Read the whole text...
John Zerzan
PBS, Power & Postmodernism
The Public Broadcasting System produces “programming” toward a more manageable society. In fact, it is the network rather expressly for managers, and what it airs can best be understood by keeping in mind this service to the managing class. The exact ration of corporate to government funding of PBS is inconsequential to its basic nature and function.
Apr 9, 2016 Read the whole text...
J.R. Kennedy
PCAUR Drives it Home
The cement never sets on the WSU empire.
A sign is attached to the cement wall of the new Foreign Language Building at Wayne State University. It faces the John C. Lodge Freeway and the Matthaei Physical Education Complex beyond it. The sign, without reservation announces that Wayne is “Building For Our Second Century.”
Oct 1, 2023 Read the whole text...
J.R. Kennedy
PCAUR Puts Heat on Landlord
In a near spontaneous action, People Concerned About Urban Renewal (PCAUR) led a demonstration against a local slumlord last Thursday.
The group, composed of more than twenty local residents, street kids and students converged on an apartment building complex on the near west side to confront the caretaker of the building concerning the heat and water conditions there which had become intolerable. The buildings are located on Hancock near Avery.
Jul 10, 2023 Read the whole text...
sandorkraut
Peace Bikers Use Pedal Power to Shut Down the SOA
Three Tennessee activists bicycled back roads through Tennessee and Georgia for more than a week to join the annual demonstration to shut the School of the Americas (SOA), held in Columbus, Georgia, each November. The SOA is a U.S. government school dedicated to teaching Latin American military forces combat skills; thousands of its graduates have been implicated in horrific forms of state terrorism throughout Latin America. We biked 360 miles to the SOA from the neighboring queer communities where we live, IDA (MaxZine and TomFoolery) and Short Mountain Sanctuary (Sandorkraut) in middle Tennessee.
Jun 17, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Peace Briefs
DETROIT: Six weeks ago the News Editor of the FIFTH ESTATE sent an inquiry to the Defense Department regarding the validity of an article in the VIETNAM COURIER, a paper published in Hanoi, reflecting the political positions of that country. The article in question appears in May 12, 1966 edition and claims that a battalion of the First Infantry Division mutinied and refused to fight on April 24, 1966 at Lai Khe. It further claims that several soldiers were shot by their own officers in an attempt to force them into battle. Also, several suicides by men of the First Battalion were reported. As of July 13 no answer has been received from the Defense Department. In a further attempt to ascertain the truth of the situation copies of all correspondence have been sent to Cong. Charles C. Diggs (D-13th district) asking him to investigate the matter. Nothing has been heard from him to date.
Mar 5, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Peace Briefs

WASHINGTON, May 6. The defense Department yesterday boosted the draft back up to 26,000 men for July compared to 15,000 in June.
Feb 19, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Peace Freaks and Hippies
Cavort at Halloween Happening
Happy hippies and costumed peace freaks assembled behind DeRoy Auditorium on Wayne University’s campus for the 2nd Annual Halloween March the night of Oct. 31. Led by John Schwartz, alias Jacob Odaryan, the march was to bring an absurdist dance of death to the festive evening.
Seventy-five freaks danced around DeRoy and stopped for a WWJ-TV newsman. “Help the poor, stop the war” chanted the marchers. They then danced down Cass Ave. Their chanting visibly disturbed Wayne’s Public Safety fuzz and stopped traffic on both sides of Cass. Black children running alongside the marchers dropped firecrackers in the street and some joined the zany throng.
Jan 14, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Peace Leader Says Clash with China Near
NEW YORK—Rev. James Bevel, national director of the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, assailed President Johnson for turning a deaf ear to the growing anti-war sentiment in the United States.
Rev. Bevel rebuked the President in connection with the latest U.S. bombing raids close to the center of Hanoi. He said that Johnson was “power mad” and “in a futile attempt to cover up his own mistakes, the President is driving this country closer and closer to a nightmarish confrontation with Red China and nuclear catastrophe.”
May 17, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Peace Talks
“Why the Dearborn Referendum?” was the subject of a talk given by Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, January 26.
The lecture was presented by Citizens for Peace in Vietnam as part of their Spring educational series. Other speakers will include William Pepper, who wrote the article in the January Ramparts on U.S. napalm effects on Vietnamese children and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, who recently returned from Hanoi.
Mar 8, 2025 Read the whole text...
anon.
Peace Worker Slain
George Vissard, peace activist in Austin, Texas, was killed last week in an Austin grocery store. Vissard was found at about 11:00 a.m. with a shot through the back and shot through the arm; his body had been placed in the meat freezer of the drive-in market.
Early reports from Texas indicated that his death was probably due to political reasons and that no money was missing from the cash register of the store. Later reports claimed that a “sizable amount” of money had been taken—but not from the cash register. Austin police authorities say that they are moving under the assumption that the motive is robbery and that Vissard tried to resist, which brought about his death.
Jan 26, 2017 Read the whole text...
Primitivo Solis (David Watson)
Peering into the Abyss
discussed in this article:
Encyclopaedia of Nuisances: Dictionary of the irrational in the sciences, trades and industrial arts, April 1989, “Abyss.” Author anonymous, no price listed. Available from Boite postale 188, 75665 Paris Cedex 14 France
“It seems somewhat ridiculous to talk of revolution...But everything else is even more ridiculous, since it implies accepting the existing order in one way or another.”
Nov 21, 2019 Read the whole text...
tomás
Pencils Like Daggers
It starts with a story: My grandma, worried that her 3-year-old son had not spoken a word yet, had him chase down a grasshopper. Diligently, without complaint, the boy did and returned with a smile. Open she said; confused and scared, he did. She shoved it in and closed his mouth. Hablas, mijo, hablas. He spit it out crying. Crying and yelling. He has not stopped either since she says and smiles thinking of her now 50 year old son talking his time away in a New Mexican state penitentiary.
Aug 18, 2017 Read the whole text...
Jessamine O’Connor
Pen Pals
Friends for fifteen years
and never met.
She sends letters across the Atlantic,
then the span of land from east to west
and into the front gates
to be rifled through,
security checked and sometimes rejected,
wheeled along corridors
and doors made of bars,
until reaching
his cell.
It’s always the same time
Jan 24, 2020 Read the whole text...
Jesús Sepúlveda
People of the Earth
The Mapuche Struggle
During his visit to Chile in January 2018, Pope Francis officiated a mass in the Araucania region—the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people.
The night before, unknown individuals burned three forest company helicopters, three churches, and a school. Fliers demanding the liberation of Mapuche political prisoners were found nearby.
Mar 10, 2018 Read the whole text...
Barry Kramer
“People’s Banker”
Bank of China Strives to Give a Solid Image
The following article from the December 1, 1976 Wall Street Journal gives a graphic picture of the integration of China into world capitalism and its money system.
HONG KONG—For an arm of one of the largest Communist powers on earth, the Bank of China is surprisingly adept at making a capitalist feel right at home.
Sep 24, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
People’s Park
The search for a community park in the Warren Forest area continues.
On a balmy Sunday, June 27, about 60 people met in a vacant lot at the corner of Leota and Fourth. The topic of discussion was the proposed site of a park that the community could use without getting in the way of children at play and that was built by the people themselves.
Apr 21, 2019 Read the whole text...
Jack Straw
People’s Park
The battle for land
Confrontations over a contested Berkeley lot “legally” owned by the University of California (U.C.), known as People’s Park, continues. But increasingly, University and City attempts to reassert the rules of private property are succeeding.
Private seizure of common land, a process known as enclosure, was the essential basis for the imposition of the capitalist system. Starting in the 14th century, peasants found land which had previously belonged to the community as a whole fenced off and claimed as private property. They had to move. Many small farmers also saw their meager holdings seized by larger landlords.
Sep 3, 2018 Read the whole text...
Jeff Gerth
Lee Davidson
People’s Park 1969
The First Blood
The battle for People’s Park began 22 years ago. The following is an excerpt from our lead article in FE #80, May 29, 1969, which was entitled, “Police Riot: Murder In Berkeley.” The cover price was 15 cents.
BERKELEY (LNS)—One man was murdered and over 200 people injured by police May 15 in the heaviest street battle in Berkeley yet over who controlled a city park.
Sep 4, 2018 Read the whole text...
C. McCall
People’s Park in Detroit
The spirit of liberation has swept across this freedom stoned land from Berkeley to our sister city, Ann Arbor, and now into Detroit.
Inner city people in the Warren-Forest area are demanding their right to the people’s land to use for the benefit of the people. The nation’s second People’s Park will be made this summer; a call is out for support from the community to everyone who believes in freedom.
Apr 11, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Peoples’ Print Shop
The movement in Detroit has a functioning print shop again.
Located two doors from the Fifth Estate office the shop can do leaflets, pamphlets, booklets, brochures, letterheads and small underground papers.
Originally begun by Joel Landy, who has split the city for Ann Arbor, the Revolutionary Printing Cooperative is a joint project of this newspaper, Black & Red magazine, the Printing Coop of Ann Arbor, and the Radical Education Project. Printers at this time include Mike Davis, Mike Gove, Fred Perlman and Dan Wilder.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Frank H. Joyce
People’s Tribunal Condemns Cops
Defendants found guilty of Murder in the 1st degree
The worst thing one could say about the Algiers Motel Tribunal is that it was Recorder’s Court upside down.
If the tribunal was biased and weighted against the four white defendants, Detroit Patrolman Robert Paille and Ronald August, National Guardsman Theodore Thomas and private guard Melvin Dysmukes, then it was weighted in exactly the same way that Recorder’s Court proceedings are against Negro defendants.
Mar 4, 2017 Read the whole text...
H. Read
Periodical Round-Up
Send your publication for review.
Anchorage Anarchy # 11 December 2007, $1 from BAD Press, PO Box 230332, Anchorage AK 99523 bbrigade (at) world (dot) std (dot) com
Individualist anarchist periodical from Alaska. (12 pp)
Black Flag #226, BM Hurricane London, WC1N 3XX UK black_flag (at) lycos (dot) co (dot) uk
Aug 21, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Periodicals Received
Anarchist Studies vol. 16 #1 (2008)
c/o Lawrence & Wishart,
99a Wallis Rd,
London E9 5LN, UK
www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/anarchiststudies/contents.html
£20.00 subscription
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #66 (Winter/Fall 2008)
PO Box 3488,
Berkeley, CA 94703
anarchymag.org
$20 / 5 issue subscription
May 18, 2014 Read the whole text...
Black Shadow
Peter Fonda Talks about “Easy Rider”
(via Good Times/UPS)
Q: How do you feel about your movie?
A: How do I feel about my movie? Very strong, and a bit funny in the knees. No, I’m putting you on. I feel very good about the movie. I hope I do better next time.
Q: Have you got the next film started?
A: No, I have no...I’m writing a flick now. About the American Revolution.
Jun 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
Wren Awry
Pétroleuses, Witches & Fairy Tales
The Myth of Revolutionary Women as Arsonists
The Paris Commune, which lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871, was an experiment in self-governance that is still inspiring today.
The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 saw the defeat of the French military by the more disciplined and technically better equipped Prussian military.
While the French government worked on negotiating the end to the war, many people living in Paris refused to surrender. Following a brutal four-month siege, they bravely took their fate into their own hands and declared Paris an independent Commune.
Jul 30, 2016 Read the whole text...
Olchar E. Lindsann
Petrus Borel
The 19th Century Anti-Authoritarian Lycanthrope
a review of
Champavert: Immoral Tales by Petrus Borel, trans. Brian Stableford. Borga Press, 2013 WildsidePess.com
The long-forgotten radical novel, Champavert, is the only full-length book available in English by Petrus Borel. The anti-authoritarian poet was known in 19th century French underground circles as “The Lycanthrope” (Wolfman), and was central to the creation of the cultural avant-garde as both an idea and a functioning community in that era.
Dec 31, 2021 Read the whole text...
Thomas Haroldson
Petulia at the Studio
Richard Lester’s new film, “Petulia,” is a contradiction in terms—it is at one and the same time old-fashioned, avant-garde, sophisticated, heavy-handed, and pointless.
Lester, who directed the Beatles films and “How I Won the ‘War,’” is no stranger to cinematic mixed bags, but this time something went wrong.
Aug 21, 2015 Read the whole text...
Don LaCoss
Phantoms of Lost Liberty
Down the street, there’s a park about half the size of a city block. Tucked away in the corner is a four-foot granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments, the core credo of a 3,000-year-old eastern Mediterranean cult started by sun-stroked nomads.
For the last year, that monument has been at the center of controversy because of a lawsuit to get it removed from the park. According to plaintiffs, its presence violates the supposed guarantee of governmental neutrality in matters of mythology. But the loud God-fearing folk of this town have mobilized to “save” the Ten Commandments on the grounds that only good can come from having these writings on permanent display in the public arena, presumably for the same reasons given by those who thought that posting the Ten Commandments in public schools would magically prevent another Columbine High School-style outburst of murderous alienation and rage.
May 11, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Philip Levine
An anarchist is America’s Poet Laureate

Detroit-born and raised, and self-described anarchist, Philip Levine was named the U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress in August. The post, whose task entails raising “the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry,” may take on a different than usual dimension during Levine’s tenure given his politics.
Nov 7, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Philippines comrades skilling up for the long haul

Members of Feral Crust, a small DIY ecologically-minded anarchist collective in the mountains of Marilog Davao (Southern Mindanao), Philippines are developing a rural community based on balance with the surrounding environment and social solidarity. Their community is located in a forest home to wildlife and indigenous people.
Jan 17, 2019 Read the whole text...
Gabriel Rosenstock
Photo-Senryu
A haiku in Irish and English
smachtini
comheiri lag
Sar gceannairi
.
police batons
collective semi-erection
of our rulers
Gabriel Rosenstock is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. He is a poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. He lives in Dublin.
Sep 28, 2024
Fifth Estate Collective
Picket at LBJ Speech
Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the U-nited States of America; the man who sends troops to Vietnam, Santo Domingo, the Congo, and now our own home town is scheduled to speak in Detroit on August 2nd.
Peace activists across the country have promised that Johnson will be met with demonstrations wherever he goes as long as he continues the war in Vietnam. And if Johnson is not frightened away by a little rioting the major peace and civil rights groups plan a large reception for him in the form of a giant picket line.
Jan 16, 2017 Read the whole text...
Edward Rom
Pickets Greet What’s-His-Name at Cobo Hall Dinner
On Thursday, October 6, two people could have gone to Cobo Hall and for one hundred dollars had a dinner and heard Vice-president Humphrey give a speech. If the political viewpoint of the two people was slightly skewed to the right they could have gone down the hall to the “Romney-Griffin Bandwagon Ball” for only one hundred and twenty-five dollars. The difference in price was because the Romney people had to pay the band.
Mar 8, 2024 Read the whole text...
Pun Plamondon
Pictures of Chairman Mao
George Wallace stood up and said all the magic words, “Dope Fiend, Outlaw, Pervert, Cuba, Masses, Red, Mao, Free, Fidel, Workers, Black, White!” These are magic words in America. These arc the words that make white America go to its knees in fear George Wallace got 9 million votes, 9 million honkies are behind George.
Mar 30, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Piece Now
The following article was taken from “A Handbook for Radicals; Revolutionaries and Easy Riders” published by the International Liberation School. It is available for fifty cents and is an invaluable guide to small arms weaponry. Send to: People’s Office, 1925 Grove St., Berkeley CA.
America has a long tradition of vigilante paramilitary violence. Usually it has been directed against blacks and Third World people, poor whites and dissident political groups.
Jun 8, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Piece Pow-Wow at WSU
The Unified Megalopolitan Piece Pow Wow, a choreographed multi-media presentation will debut Thursday, June 8, at 8:00 p.m. in the WSU Community Arts Auditorium, Cass at Putnam.
The magic circus will feature performances by folksingers Phil Marcus Esser, Jan and Lorraine, and Tony Wright; bands including the MC-5, The Passing Clouds, and the Spike-Drivers; lights by The Magic Veil; poetry by John Sinclair and an astrological reading by Billy Reid. Unexpected sympathetic apparitions are also anticipated.
Apr 27, 2022 Read the whole text...
C. McCall
Pig Conspiracy
The forces of political and cultural oppression have opened up a new front. Along with attempts to silence, arrest, and confine the leadership of the black community, the forces of repression inherent in capitalistic societies have begun to strip the young white community of their spokesmen.
The most current manifestation of these repressive forces is the harassment of John Sinclair, MC5 mentor-manager and Minister of Information of the White Panthers.
Jun 16, 2022 Read the whole text...
Pat Halley
Pig Guts for Gutless Pigs
An Offal Situation
Except for the contemptuous throwing of animal entrails, blood, and a decomposed lamb’s head all over Wayne State University President George Gullen’s office, February 19 was a typical day at the school.
Secretaries were processing records while tender-bellied professors busily tried to seem important. The faceless administrators like Gullen would occasionally leave their 12th floor cocktail lounge to flirt with their secretaries or sign some orders that a petty aide had drawn up.
Jul 21, 2014 Read the whole text...
Thorne Dreyer
Pigman Meets the Super Media
NEW YORK (LNS)—The media of the revolution is mushrooming through America.
The growth of the underground and movement press is phenomenal. Equally notable is the outrage and fear which it creates in those whose interests it opposes. As the radical media grows, so do the attempts to repress it.
In recent weeks, the minions of law and order have been beating on the doors of the underground press. The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta has been threatened with grand jury indictments for obscenity. Dallas Notes has seen its office torn apart by the cops and its equipment confiscated. Bloomington, Indiana’s Spectator and Ithaca, New York’s First Issue, have had their editors busted for resisting the draft.
Apr 4, 2021 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Pig Media Joins Police
NEW YORK (LNS) — On January 26, two men identifying themselves as “being from the government” dropped a subpoena off at CBS.
The FBI and the Secret Service wanted to get their hands on all the tapes, memos, notes, letters and telephone calls that CBS has concerning the Black Panther Party from mid-1968 to the present, as well as the unedited tapes—outtakes—of interviews with Panther leaders David Hilliard and Eldridge Cleaver.
Nov 10, 2023 Read the whole text...
Howard Kohn
Pig Riot Manual Exposed!
(via The Ann Arbor Argus) When the insurrection of July, 1967 began, Detroit police were ready with Schutzstaffel rules.
The Argus secured an official copy of the police riot manual issued in 1966 and signed by Ray Girardin, police commissioner, 1961–68. Among the manual policies still in force are the following.
Apr 30, 2019 Read the whole text...
Lazarus
Pigs Attack Panthers
Approximately 150 white off-duty patrolmen and detectives, and civilians attacked and beat a small group of Black Panthers and white sympathizers in the Brooklyn Criminal Court Wednesday, Sept. 4th. The attackers, many shouting “White Power” and wearing George Wallace for President buttons, were responding to a pamphlet distributed by the Law Enforcement Group of New York which urged “all patrolmen and loyal Americans” to “stand up and be counted in court.”
Sep 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
John Sinclair
Pigs Attack Sinclair
Poet John Sinclair and MC5 guitarist Fred Smith were brutally assaulted, beaten, MACEd, and arrested by members of the National Security Police and the Oakland County (Michigan) Sheriffs Dept. while performing at a Michigan teen-club on July 23rd.

The scene took place at the Loft, located on Army Road in Leonard, Michigan (between Pontiac and Lapeer), where the MC5 had been contracted to play a dance job.
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pigs Beat Teens
The Detroit Police are out of control. From the Algiers Motel to Cobo Hall they have left a trail of broken heads, illegal arrests and even murders.
The most recent example of this state of affairs followed right on the heels of the Wallace demonstration [see “Cobo Hall Creep Scene” in this issue] and found drunken off-duty pigs beating and terrorizing black high school students at a church dance.
Dec 11, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pigs Bust Panther Chairman
This time it’s Bobby Seale.
With Eldridge in exile, and Huey in jail, the punk-ass power-structure has turned its racist wrath on the Black Panther Party Chairman. Seale’s troubles are simply the latest government attempt to crush the Panthers by ripping off their leaders and vamping on their headquarters.
Jun 19, 2019 Read the whole text...
Ian Rommel
Pigs Bust Pun and Kelley
Pun Plamondon, White Panther Minister of Defense, has been busted....again!
This time in Chicago on Sept. 21, where he was attending the Conspiracy 8 trials with Ken Kelley, Editor of the Ann Arbor Argus and Al Rosenfeld of the Chicago Seed.
All three were arrested after being stopped by the pigs and ordered to produce some I.D. while walking on Lincoln Ave. The Pigs exercised their right of stop and frisk and found Pun to be in possession of “a dangerous weapon.”
Jul 19, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pigs get blank check
Inhaling deeply on his political hookah, Detroit mayor Jerry Cavanagh, leading contender for the August “Uptight Honkie of the Month” award, attempted to justify his approval of the controversial “stop and frisk” ordinance which moments earlier he had signed into law.
Cavanagh stated that he didn’t think that his action would hurt him politically. “The situation is far different than it was in 1960...” Jerry honked, “ ‘police brutality’ is a thing of the past: The climate has changed completely.”
Nov 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Joe Check
Pigs Riot in Park
On Sunday, August 24, a group of men attending the Ever-Seven (Evergreen-Seven Mile Road) neighborhood association picnic in Stoepel Park harassed and beat up a group of young people who were also in the park.
There were a number of off-duty police officers at the picnic, as well as several kegs of beer and “law and order” Common Council candidate Jack Kelly.
Jul 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pigs Scalp Sinclair
John Sinclair has had his hair cut twice in the last three years. Both times by pigs.
The first time when he left the Detroit House of Correction in July of 1966 after serving a six month sentence for possession of grass.
This time the White Panther Minister of Information had his shoulder-length black hair cut by a guard in the Oakland County jail.
Apr 14, 2019 Read the whole text...
Joe Check
Pig Vigilantes
It has recently come to light that the Detroit Police Department has armed and trained a volunteer force of 1,500 civilians as Emergency Police Reserves.
This force was created after the 1967 Detroit rebellion to aid police in case of another major bid for freedom by the black community or during a natural disaster.
Aug 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
Hank Malone
Pimp—“Black Capitalist”
a review of
Pimp, by Iceberg Slim, Holloway House Publishing Company, 1967, paperback, 95 cents.
This is the strangest bona fide bestseller ever published, appearing on no best-seller list; a kind of God-awful literary masterpiece and fluke, containing some of the lousiest writing ever conceived, and yet a kind of genuine-article taking the reader along on one of the most disgusting American journeys to the end of Night.
Sep 23, 2021 Read the whole text...
Uninvited Guests Radio Cooperative
Pirate Radio Manifesto
In these lackluster months of 1976 in which “our revolutionary heritage” is paraded like a hairless, three-legged dog from the past down main street, the people of America are content to follow mere fads and hobbies in place of the nearly infinite possibilities of creative experiments, and revolutionary “outrages”. The most current and popular fad is the C.B. (Citizens Band) radio craze with its own particular jargon, catch phrases and all of the pseudo-sexual connotations that dominant fads command in this sociocarnival.
Feb 21, 2016 Read the whole text...
Sean Cleary
Pirates
Our stateless heroes
a review of
Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic by David Lester and Marcus Rediker; Illustrated by David Lester; Edited by Paul Buhle. Beacon Press 2023
When you encounter the English-speaking world’s fascination with the golden age of Atlantic pirating, it’s better understood to think of it less about the act of pirating itself, and more about the relationship of pirates to the state. As Marcus Rediker’s 2004 book’s title indicated, they were the Villains of All Nations, separate from state sanctioned pirating like privateering, seemingly dead to the people of other nations.
Jan 17, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pirates!
Issue Introduction
It’s a paradox and an irony that in a nation so filled with timid, quiescent conformists, that pirates hold such romantic appeal for so many.
Perhaps, due to the dominant mass psychology of submission, it’s the repressed fantasy of transgression and rebellion that drives so many web sites, festivals, games, movies, histories, and re-enactments devoted to the buccaneers.
Apr 5, 2014 Read the whole text...
Stewart Albert
Piss in the Voting Booths
Liberation News Service—The American election itself is the candidate, and millions of Americans are going to vote against it. On election day, the streets, parks and voting booths will belong to the people.
Everyone who sees through the fraud will be doing his human thing—showing up the election for the fake it is.
Nov 30, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Pistoleros! 2: 1919
Review
Pistoleros! 2: 1919 is the second volume of the memoirs and notebooks of Farquhar McHarg, a seventy-six-year-old anarchist from Glasgow. Its writing was prompted by the murder of a lifelong friend.
McHarg’s Chronicles record his evolving beliefs and sense of mission, and the remarkable adventures he experienced from the day he sailed into the neutral port of Barcelona in the spring of 1918, a naive but idealistic eighteen-year-old, and 1976. Farquhar’s Chronicles are folk history, bringing the changes that shook the political and social landscape of Spain (and the world) between 1918 and 1976 into the framework of an adult lifetime. They make a vexatious but fascinating story that provides a deep insight into the spirit that moved the selfless, generous, occasionally naive and recklessly idealistic people who were involved in the bitter social struggles that marked the hectic insurrectionary and utopian aftermath of the great imperialist war of 1914 through 1918.
Feb 11, 2014 Read the whole text...
Joe Check
Pistol-happy Pig Re-instated
Sgt. Gerald Biscup is one of the police officers who was involved in the Veteran Memorial incident on November 2. The Detroit Police Officers’ Wives Association (DPOWA) was holding a dance in the Veterans Memorial that night and many police officers and their wives were in attendance.
Sgt. Biscup’s wife is the president of the DPOWA. He was in attendance.
Jun 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pitt People Freed
The Fifth Estate’s Pittsburgh correspondent, Frederick I (Hohenstaufen) reports that the narcotics raid that hit that city 10 February [see “Pitt Pot Bust,” FE #25, March 1–15, 1967] has had a happy conclusion.
All 55 persons arrested have had the charges against them dropped including those against Frank Goldsmith who had been charged with “possession of a dangerous drug.” The “drug” being 5 prescription cold tablets.
May 11, 2025
Frederick I (Hohenstaufen)
Pitt Pot Bust
“There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
There’s a man with a gun over there.
Telling me I’d better beware.
It’s time to Stop! Children,
What’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.”
(Special to the Fifth Estate) The Pittsburgh police’s premature Valentine to the left came in the form of a monster pot (marrywhana) raid on the night of Friday, 10 Feb., that netted a total of 55 arrestees. The bust took place at a reception for the noted anti-war speaker David Dellinger, following a report on his trip to North and South Vietnam delivered earlier at the University of Pittsburgh.
May 2, 2025 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Plafkin Backlashes Ravitz
It was a muggy, uncomfortable night at the 17th District Democratic Headquarters in the all-white Redford section of northwest Detroit. Meeting was the “Democratic Forum,” a conservative faction of the District. The speaker was the noted liberal statesman, Councilman Mel Ravitz.
What was he there to talk about? What else but the recent Detroit insurrection (Part I). And it was amazing how one person, a learned Ph.D. in Sociology, could say so little in such a long speech.
Mar 5, 2017 Read the whole text...
Carrie Laben
Plague for Profit
a review of
The Monster Enters: COVID-19 and the Plagues of Capitalism by Mike Davis. O/R Books 2020
As he has done in the past for California wildfires and famine in India, Mike Davis contextualizes pandemic disease in a matrix of capitalism and deprivation that make a particular kind of disaster inevitable. In The Monster Enters, Davis chronicles the emergence of a new virus; confusion reigns about how it spreads, how deadly it might prove, and how best to stop it. Some governments downplay the danger for political or economic reasons; others are hamstrung in their response by neglected public health infrastructure. People suffer and die—poor people most of all.
Feb 12, 2021 Read the whole text...
Thomas Haroldson
Planet of the Apes
Film review
“Planet of the Apes” may turn out to be the “Bonnie and Clyde” of 1968.
Many film critics, after giving the picture an unfavorable review, are beginning to have second thoughts about it.
Richard Schickel, of Life magazine, said in a recent retraction: “I should have trusted my instincts, stood up and proclaimed my affectionate regard for the thing right off.”
Mar 29, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Planning for Peoples’ Power
A major recruitment and fund raising campaign is currently under way as a part of Open City’s winter offensive.
Open City is the service organization for the free community and has already opened a free medical service, a non profit general store, a food co-op, a free University, a counseling center and switchboard that operates twenty four hours a day.
In order to expand it’s operations Open City is scheduling a week of public meetings at the Unitarian Church (corner of Forest and Cass).
Sep 6, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Plans for Haymarket Centennial
Anarchy to Reign Again in Chicago

A Thanksgiving weekend planning conference in Chicago, which was attended by some 50 anti-authoritarians and anarchists from the US and Canada, announced a centennial celebration to take place during May Day week, to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket Affair.
Haymarket was an example of the state and capital’s brutal suppression of the workers’ movement in Chicago culminating in the state murder of five anarchists (four by hanging).
Oct 9, 2020 Read the whole text...
Benjamin Carson
Planting the Seeds of Anarchy
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
In America, the last vestiges of the liberal social contract and public safety net have been virtually erased. Under George W. Bush, the gap between the rich and poor increases at an alarming rate while privatization pushes forward. While Social Security is being slowly eviscerated and replaced by Individual Retirement Accounts, wealthy people can survive growing old while leaving those who cannot to fend for themselves. At the same time, the “richest 1% of Americans,” who, according to Peter Singer, “hold more than 38 percent of the nation’s wealth,” are forming what David Harvey calls “ghettoes of affluence (their ‘bourgeois utopias’),” which undermine “concepts of citizenship, social belonging, and mutual support,” while the poor, who are being “pushed off welfare into a stagnant labor market,” are left to make their way in what, for so many, looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Mar 28, 2015 Read the whole text...
Anu Bonobo
Plan Wellstone
Conspiracy, Complicity, and the Left
Back in October 2002, driving from the hills to the anti-war rally in the city, we had plenty of time to talk. Conversation immediately turned to a possible conspiracy behind the plane crash the previous day. Did Bush’s people assassinate liberal senator Paul Wellstone just days before his possible re-election?
Jan 6, 2017 Read the whole text...
MaxZine Weinstein
Plan Z builds bridges in Tennessee
Plan Z: A Strategy Conference for Radical Wimmin and Trannies rolled into our radical queer community, IDA, this past June. (“Tranny,” by the way, is a common, chosen term for the transgendered.) The week-long gathering brought together activists from around the country and beyond to the secluded woods of Tennessee. We were happy to open up our home and gardens to enthusiastic agents of social change.
May 11, 2021 Read the whole text...
Sara Loosestrife
Plastic Poem, Plastic Plague
Yellow garbage bag ties
pieces of ziplock bags
whole ziplock bags and baggies
tips of tiparello cigars
orange bread bag ties, green ones
juice bottle top
milk bottle top
camera lens cover
pieces of pampers disposable diapers
toy soldier
toy truck wheel
chapstick
coffee stir
pieces of bic pens
Nov 7, 2020 Read the whole text...
Jeff Shero
Playboy’s Tinseled Seductress
from The Rag (UPS) — One of the brighter aspects of the sexual revolution is that it offers this generation whole new levels of personal manipulation. Instead of the older concept of “nice girls” being virgins upon marriage, the liberated standards offer people the chance to express their deepest feelings to one another in a natural way. Marriage counselors often say that successful marriages are built upon compatible interests, liking one another, and a satisfactory sex life.
Mar 14, 2024 Read the whole text...
anon.
Playgirl Caught
Playboy magazine’s June Playmate of the Month, June Gibson, was convicted August 23 on a charge of prostitution in Hollywood, California.
The platinum-blond Miss Gibson was arrested in an apartment July 12 with another woman and a man. In the June Playboy story she said, “I am my own woman. I lead my life according to no social standards other than my own. A Playboy spokesman said he felt the bust (forgive pun) would not stain the girl-next-door image of the Playmates.
Mar 1, 2017 Read the whole text...
L.M. Bogad
Playing in the Key of Clown
Reflections on the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army

Related: Clown Army Recruiting Poster
At the July 2005 Carnival for Full Enjoyment in Edinburgh, Scotland, riot police mass on the streets with shields and truncheons, fireproof armor; all very imposing. They use their shields to shove protesters, who are dancing in the street without a permit.
But these are no run of the mill protesters. They are the trained cadres of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), which, since its 2003 founding, has been spreading across the world.
Jan 14, 2017 Read the whole text...
anon.
Please...Do Not Kidnap These Men
back cover

Since General Motors reported a net profit of $300 million for the first quarter of 1976, our executives have been probable targets for kidnapping by members of the criminal element and left crazies.
The Central Executive Office of GM is composed of fourteen men, most of whom live in the Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham area. Each is a valuable and integral part of the executive team and would command a high ransom if abducted.
Aug 12, 2015 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Pledges
I pledge obedience
to the flag
of a desecrated America,
and to the multinationals
who let us stand
one nation
of underdogs,
who are exploitable,
with liberty and justice
for sale
—Ron B.
I pledge allegiance
to the bargains of
the United Consumers
at Wal-Mart
and to the stockholders
May 16, 2021 Read the whole text...
Victor Mansfield
Plymouth Hits Smut
In a surprise but not so surprising appearance at a regular City of Plymouth City Commission meeting on Monday, Oct. 21, twelve anointed Veterans of Foreign Wars of one of the local posts registered their objections to the liberation of our brothers and sisters in that city.
The VFW read a statement which said in part, “We strongly object to the fact that certain publications, namely underground newspapers, have been made available to the students of Plymouth schools. Our objections primarily are to the vulgar and sexually provocative language, the disrespect for law and order and the overthrow of government.” Right on!
Aug 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
Victor Mansfield
Plymouth Legal Battle Rages
PLYMOUTH—With the deft hand of a club wielding savage, Garden City District Judge Richard Hammer, sat in Plymouth District Court Sept. 9, and summarily dismissed a suit against the city without allowing the complainant a chance to present his case.
The city’s full-time judge, Dunbar Davis, had previously disqualified himself and had called upon Hammer’s help, in the suit of Rolf Dietrich.
Jul 19, 2019 Read the whole text...
Victor Mansfield
Plymouth Legal Circus
On Oct. 2, Judge Dunbar Davis of the 35th District Court in Plymouth once again reaffirmed his judicial agility by bailing out the primordial Judge Richard Hammer of the 21st district court in Garden City and the ephemeral Charles Lowe, City Attorney for the City of Plymouth, when he granted Brother Rolf Dietrich’s motion for a new hearing on the suit for $2,999.99 Dietrich is pressing against 11 Plymouth officials for confiscating 15 copies of the Fifth Estate last February.
Jul 26, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Watson
Plymouth, Mich.
Police State
Plymouth, Michigan, is a small town. To say that it is conservative would be an understatement.
It is run by a small group of politicians and pigs, among them Carl “Pig” Berry, the chief narc; Chief of Pigs “Daley” Straley; Harold Gunther, the ex-mayor, who is running for the post of city commissioner; and a few others.
May 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Victor Mansfield
Plymouth pigs bust Dietrich
On Halloween eve the Chief of the Plymouth pigs, in what was the culmination of an “extended investigation of the circulation and distribution of the Fifth Estate and the Ann Arbor Argus newspapers,” finally arrested Rolf Dietrich as he “did then and there” show, offer for sale, and sell an indecent or obscene paper(s) to wit: The Fifth Estate and The Ann Arbor Argus; contrary to the provisions of the ordinances of the City of Plymouth...” according to the warrant of the arrest.
Sep 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Craig O’Hara
PM Press
Ten Years of Literary Molotovs
Bay Area-based PM Press celebrated its tenth anniversary of publishing in May with a bang-up party in Oakland, Calif., where staff, authors, and well-wishers howled at political sketch comedy, smashed a captured Amazon delivery drone, and danced the night away to punk rock.
PM was founded at the end of 2007 by a small group of people with decades of publishing, media, and organizing experience. At the outset we strived to create and distribute radical audio, video, and text releases through every available channel in all possible formats. True to one expanded variation of our name, “Print Matters,” however, we’re biased in favor of hardcopy books as the best format in which to communicate ideas for social change.
Sep 13, 2018 Read the whole text...
Joshua Newton
Poem by Joshua Newton
Yesterday we were in your station.
it was not what we had in mind,
that morning—to be pulled over at gunpoint
& shoved upagainstthecar / motherfucker.
surrounded
by five or six cars
with pigs jumping
out of each pigcar
like clowns at the circus do &
their cars too were gaudy with
ads from their sponsors
Jan 19, 2024 Read the whole text...
John Sinclair
Poem for Warner Stringfellow
Detective Lieutenant,
Detroit Narcotics Squad,
who has been single-handedly responsible
for busting me on two separate occasions
for possessing and selling marijuana
.
and who stumbled into my new apartment last night by accident
over a year since the last time he saw me
& two years to the day after he first busted me —
May 17, 2019 Read the whole text...
Robert Knox
Poems for John Coltrane
a review of
Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane by Will Alexander. City Light Books, 2022
Will Alexander’s latest poems, collected in Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane, “remain (in the author’s own prefatory words) parallels to nanograms as dazzling wattage.”
A nanogram, a billionth of a gram, is light on its feet, and the poet is asking the reader to be similarly nimble in responding to his lines, images, and appropriations of vocabulary from the sciences, mathematics, and non-Western dialects.
Jun 5, 2023 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Poems for Our 20th Anniversary
Poetry has been a part of the Fifth Estate since its origins, so it is with great pleasure that we print these sent to us by The Alternative Press on the occasion of our 20th anniversary. The Alternative Press, Grindstone City, MI 48467, does hand-printed broadsides, postcards, bookmarks, etc. from the pressroom of Ann & Ken Mikolowski and comes in three packets a year for $15.
Oct 18, 2020 Read the whole text...
Hank Malone
Poems for people who don’t read poems
a review of
Poems for people who don’t read poems by Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Atheneum Press, NYC. 1968. $2.95. 177 pp.
Hans Magnus Enzenberger, in case you forgot, is Germany’s greatest living poet. This is the first collected translation of his work in English. The English versions, translated by pros like Michael Hamburger and Jerome Rothenberg (and sometimes by Enzenberger himself) are absolutely brilliant.
Aug 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Poetry
from Cultural Democracy, Spring 1989, P.O.B. 7591, Minneapolis, MN 55407
Anchored in the oily swamp
Near the crumbling dockyard
Lurks an old ship
.
Stumbling past
The foggy glass portholes
I glance at the stowaways:
The Black men and women
Are herded and counted
The aisles sway
Oct 5, 2021 Read the whole text...
Guerrilla
Poetry
Centerfold, outer side
[Web Archive note: This centerfold insert is a two-sided 15 x 22 inch poster, of which this page can be considered the back side. The other side of the poster is rendered at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/69-december-26-1968-january-8-1969/poetry-2/ .]
Apr 7, 2021 Read the whole text...
Guerrilla
Poetry
Centerfold, inner side

from Guerrilla, free newspaper of the streets, Volume 2, Number 2 (Surrealists, 1925 — Artists & Writers Militia, 1968)
Guerrilla is edited by Allen Van Newkirk and Susan Hodges and published occasionally as a broadside of poetry and revolution. It is reprinted here as a special supplement. The newspaper is distributed free in the immediate community. Mail subscriptions by donation. All corporations, federal and state agencies by minimum $10.00 donation. Free to any human being held against his will in any army or prison. Guerrilla, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.
Apr 8, 2021 Read the whole text...
Mick Vranich
Willie Williams
Kim Derrick Hunter
Marie Stephens
Christina Pacosz
Ron Allen
Poetry
centerfold feature
by Mick Vranich
America’s totem is the hamburger
don’t look at me look at tv
chains across the trees
generations bread on cheap meat
glass cars with flashy decals
x this z that magnum force
for minute sight
name a town where the demons
don’t lurk lead heads zapped on crack
Dec 28, 2020 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Poetry
by Lisa Last
My cunt is a battleground
of life and death
pain and pleasure
it opens up to swallow
whole beings
then spits them out on command
My cunt is a battleground
of senators and stockbrokers
of you and me
who gets the last draw
My cunt is angry and mean
it is sad and sorry
Mar 19, 2020 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Poetry
walls smeared with
burnt campaign posters
cracks papered over
with yellowed collection
notices
.
we pass smokes
swap zip codes
wait for toxic
clouds to dissipate
.
eyes lay in darkness
and wait
.
wait to take it
all back and start
again.
—Jay Marvin
Sep 7, 2018 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Poetry
One day in the prison yard, the resident grey cat chased heedlessly
A bird, who’d landed on the roof, all enclosed with steely swirls
And slipping through the curling razor wire, stalked
Until it caught her leg and stopping
Shaking as it sliced her paw...open...raw
The sharp barbs cutting fur and muscle, white and wounded to the bone
Mar 9, 2016 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Poetry centerfold
mick vranich
detroit 1989
surrounded and left alone
more marks that don’t connect
movies with the faces as big
as worlds of flesh in bright
light on the thin screen
i don’t have anything to say
about it really you should
talk to someone else like
the wind working up into a
frenzy in the trees bending
Jan 23, 2020 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Poetry for Peltier
For 22 years the doors of justice have been closed to Leonard Peltier. Now, the door may be opening a crack. A few months ago AIM activist Dennis Banks announced that Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, had agreed to hold oversight hearings into the events leading to Peltier’s arrest and conviction. Wounded Knee, the COINTELPRO programs against AIM, Peltier’s illegal extradition from Canada, and the many irregularities in his trial will be among the issues brought to light.
Feb 18, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fritz
Poisoning the Poor
As a survivor of more than a decade of psychiatric abuse, I oppose the pseudo-scientific concept of “Mental Illness” entirely. Unlike physical illnesses that are biologically based and sometimes have chemical cures, Mental Illness is a social construct used to justify abuse for the purpose of social control.
May 8, 2015 Read the whole text...
anon.
Poland: 1970–71
There’s no light quite so bright as the glow from a burning government building
a review of
Poland: 1970–71; Capitalism and Class Struggle, Informations Correspondence Ourvrieres (ICO), 117 pages; illustrated, Black & Red, Detroit, 1977.
“Nothing draws a crowd like a burning cop car!”
—late 1960s political graffiti
Really just one other thing does—a burning government building—and the cover picture of this pamphlet showing the blazing Communist Party headquarters in the Polish city of Szczecin graphically illustrates what this pamphlet is really all about: the hatred of the people for their rulers and the accessibility of the oppressors. The violent class combat that shook Poland over six years ago is recounted here from both Polish and other European sources and details the massive worker counter-offensive to a price hike and wage freeze.
Oct 7, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Poland at the Crossroad
Solidarity and State Pitted Against Polish Workers
With the endorsement of the Polish Communist Party’s Politburo, on November 10, of a plan that would include the Solidarity union in a new coalition government, it appears that the seemingly endless period of crisis and confrontation in Poland will soon have a conclusion of classic dimensions: A militant working class, as it presses ahead with its demands, will face the combined opposition of both the state and union.
Jan 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Poland on the Edge
Revolution or reform?
This article is being written just as the pressure of a Soviet invasion of Poland is being eased and under the assumption that such an attack is not about to occur. Amid an atmosphere of continuing political crisis, growing worker militancy, continuing economic problems, and constant reshuffling of the Polish government personnel, Solidarity, the recently formed “independent” labor organization, looks like it is about to become a permanent part of Polish society.
Jan 10, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Poland: Triumphs and Defeats
On September 1, Lech Walesa, the worker who negotiated the end of the recent Polish strike wave, climbed two flights of wooden stairs to the temporary offices of the new Independent Trade Union which he heads. Walesa carried a two-foot crucifix, a bunch of gladiolas and a pennant from a bicycle club, all to adorn the headquarters of what he and the Western press have hailed as a “triumph” for the strikers—the right to organize a labor organization independent of the government-controlled official union federations.
Dec 16, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Poland under martial law
As we witness the imposition of military rule in Poland it seems clear it was not something to have been unexpected. However, that realization does nothing to limit our anger and sadness as we helplessly watch tanks and faceless armed men crush at least the public manifestations of a movement that threatened to turn the world upside down.
Feb 17, 2019 Read the whole text...
Bill Blank
Poletown: Community Betrayed
a review of
Poletown: Community Betrayed by Jeanie Wylie. 1989, University of Illinois Press
For centuries, capitalism has systematically destroyed or relocated minority and ethnic groups. A particularly repulsive local example occurred during the last decade in Detroit’s “Poletown” neighborhood, where a thriving community was destroyed to build a General Motors Cadillac plant nobody needed and few wanted.
Aug 29, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Police Attack MOVE
As the 1,000 Philadelphia cops assembled outside the home of the anti-government, anti-technology group called MOVE on Aug. 8, they must have thought it was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. The forces of state terror were in full battle gear and were assisted by a large contingent of city firemen preparing to evict the group for what really amounted to housekeeping standards that offended the city’s vicious mayor, Frank Rizzo.
Aug 7, 2018 Read the whole text...
anon.
Police Block Spy File Disclosure
If you are one of the thousands of persons hoping to get a look at the information collected on you by the Detroit and State police anti-subversive (Red) squads, your chances may be dimming.
Lawyers bringing suit against police intelligence unit spying have been trying to force both police agencies to open the 50,000 dossiers to those named in them, but legal counsel for the city and state have resisted this at every turn.
Dec 28, 2014 Read the whole text...
Alec Smart
Police Break London Anti-Road Blockade
LONDON (Special to the Fifth Estate)—The last remaining group of 25 houses in the path of a contested road construction in London were cleared and bulldozed late last year.
The “No M11 Link Campaign” created Operation Roadblock to stop work on Claremont road in Leytonstone, an East London working class district situated on the southern end of a seven kilometer construction project linking the M 11 motorway from Wanstead to the Blackwall Tunnel.
Mar 14, 2016 Read the whole text...
Emil Bacilla
Larry Weiner
Police Burn “Flaming Creatures”
On Wednesday, January 18, the Ann Arbor Police Department confiscated Jack Smith’s film FLAMING CREATURES during a showing to 300 college students, hippies, and film buffs. This was, we suppose, an attempt to protect these people from having to see things that they weren’t supposed to see.
It was a very subtle bust, actually. Everyone was sitting there watching the film when the screen went black and the lights came up. There was confusion for a few minutes, people wondering if the film was over or what.
Mar 30, 2025 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police Lose
A little bit of justice was done in Detroit the other day.
Gene (Reb) Bell, president of the Highwaymen Motorcycle club, and Ronnie Rose, president of the Branded, appeared in Recorder’s Court on charges of running an illegal drinking spot. The charges stemmed from a police raid on the biker’s clubhouse January 11 when Detroit police confiscated property, wrecked the entire premises, beat one person with a pool cue and arrested everyone present.
Nov 9, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police Love-in
More M-1s

Detroit Police Commissioner Johannes (The Lover) Spreen has called for another “love in” to improve police relations with the community.
His last love in was pretty much of a flop with the New Bethel shooting coming right in the middle of it, so Jo is trying again.
Spreen is a wonderful public relations man and seems sincere in wanting to ease community tensions. The only problem is that he is not in effective control of his force (the reactionary Detroit Police Officers Association is the real boss) and most Detroit cops are going about their 24 hour a day, seven day a week hate in.
Apr 14, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Police Power
NEW YORK (LNS)—New York cops are guilty of a regular pattern of arbitrary arrest, physical abuse and courtroom perjury, according to a two-year study recently completed under the auspices of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The study was conducted by lawyer Paul Chevigny and its findings are published in a new book, Police Power.
Aug 22, 2021 Read the whole text...
H. Lawrence Lack
Police Riot
L.A. Police Storm Anti-LBJ Demonstration
The honor of launching the 1968 Presidential election campaign fell to the Los Angeles Police Department as Lyndon B. Johnson, fresh from meetings with his Communist counterpart, dropped in on June 23 at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles to grab a quick meal.
L.A. Police Chief Reddin summed up the day’s events succinctly as he debriefed his heroes in the evening: “A perfect police exercise; I am very satisfied. You can’t imagine how good you looked,” he told them, obviously deeply moved. “We’ve got many movies of this, because it’s some thing that’s never happened in this country before... We proved to them that WE own this city, not the rabble.”
Feb 5, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police Roust Meeting
Detroit’s racist cops apparently unsatisfied at being forced to live in the city they occupy militarily blew their cool at a Detroit Common Council meeting May 17.
Robert Tindal, executive secretary of the Detroit NAACP was speaking strongly against relaxation of the rule requiring officers to live within the city. Several hundred white cops began yelling “racist” and “bigot” at Tindal and then stormed out of the hearing.
Mar 29, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police State America
book review
a review of Police State America: U.S. Military ‘Civil Disturbance’ Planning, edited by Tom Burghardt. April 2002 Arm the Spirit/Solidarity: Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco. Contributions by Frank Morales, Michael Novick, Ron Ridenhour, Arthur Lubow, Mitzi Waltz, Douglas Valentine, and Tom Burghardt.
Jul 16, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police Take Lumps
Is Detroit Police Commissioner Johannes Spreen serious about trying to alter the brutal, racist and corrupt nature of the force he commands?
Some think he is.
He ordered the suspension on Nov. 13 of nine policemen in the unprovoked beating of several black teen-agers after a dance given by the Detroit Pig Officers Association (DPOA) at the Veterans Memorial Building. The youth were attending a church dance.
Mar 28, 2021 Read the whole text...
anon.
Police Terrorize Earth First!er In Ohio
Just before midnight one night in early February Cincinnati Earth First! organizer (and longtime Fifth Estate friend) Marie Mason was terrorized by cops after her 16 year-old daughter discovered a cop fumbling with equipment underneath her automobile. Shortly thereafter, the same plainclothes cop and a uniformed henchman broke into Mason’s home; when confronted, they claimed to be searching for “prowlers” who were stealing “catalytic converters” from cars in the neighborhood and then they hastily left the scene.
Sep 30, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police Testimony
Cops “Worried” About FE
The following are excerpts from the testimony of Sgt. Allen Crouter of the Detroit Police Intelligence (Red) Squad taken from him in connection with the lawsuit asking for disclosure of the contents of some 50,000 police files maintained on Detroit individuals and groups.
Crouter, a longtime foe of the Fifth Estate, was being quizzed in regard to the document appearing on this page by one of the attorneys cooperating in the suit The black lines covering names were required by order of the Court which has forbidden the disclosure of identities until final disposition of the suit. See related article, More on Red Squad in this issue.
Dec 21, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police Vamp on Bikers Clubhouse
Nearly a dozen members of the Blue Flu smashed their way into a private party during a cowardly attack on the Highwaymen Motorcycle Club of Detroit.
The blitzkrieg-like attack was carried out in the early hours of Sunday morning Jan. 11, by police assigned to the Western District Morality Squad. This catchy title is a Spreen-style cover for the old-fashioned Vice Squad. The herd operates out of the 16th (Northwest) Precinct pig pen.
Jun 28, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Police Your Local Support
Police are always complaining about what dangerous jobs they have.
Some of this is justified; some of it is of their own making. When you are part of an occupying army, the people do tend to get a little uptight and unfriendly towards you.
Still, it’s not as dangerous a job as all that. In New York City (noted crime in the streets center) policemen rank third in hazardous city jobs behind sanitation workers and firemen.
Jul 31, 2021 Read the whole text...
anon.
Polish Food Riots
“The whole of Poland is on strike today.”
— A worker from the city of Ursus, Poland, June, 1976
On July 20, six Polish workers from Ursus (a suburb of Warsaw) and seven from the city of Random were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to ten years for their alleged participation in a series of food riots that swept Poland in June.
Feb 22, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Polish Libertarians Under Martial Law
The following was received by the Fifth Estate as a “Declaration to the Libertarian Movement in the West.”
We are a group of anarchists and anti-authoritarian left-wingers in Warsaw who came together in a discussion circle (Sigma) at the beginning of 1980. We all agreed on a general opposition to the existing political system in our country. Most of us came to anarchism via literature. For example, at the beginning of the 1950s some works of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin were published in Poland in small editions. All of them were accessible to everyone in the public libraries. Another important source for us was a series called Library of Socialist Thought in which, during the 1960s, along with texts of Owen, Saint Simon, and Fourier, some works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin were published. In addition, a very badly edited collection of works of the most important Polish anarchist, Edward Abromowski, was published.
Dec 20, 2019 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
Polish Oranges
How the Orange Alternative, a band of surrealist provocateurs, helped bring down Poland’s Communist government in the 1980s
a review of
Lives of the Orange Men by Major Waldemar Fydrych, edited by Gavin Grindon, translated by David French, with an introduction by the Yes Men Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2014, 330 pp.
While many historically-minded radicals are familiar with the imaginative counter-cultural actions undertaken by the Dutch Provos in the 1960s, the Orange Alternative’s subversive cultural resistance tactics emanating from Poland in the 1980s are less well known.
Feb 25, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Polish Workers Face Repression
In the last August 1976 Fifth Estate [#275, Polish Food Riots] we gave a sketchy report (all that was then available) of repression against striking workers centering in the Polish cities of Ursus and Radom. This major strike wave which swept Poland in June was the second in six years that resulted from arbitrary government raises in food prices.
Aug 17, 2016 Read the whole text...
Kristi Phillips
Political Music is Mysterious
I played the guitar once when I was seventeen in front of a crowd of college students. The building had a sign outside that read, Built During World War II. There was a spiked fence that ran a mile around Orange St. and the workers sold cheap beer in the back. I sang a song that was written by yours truly; it was about war and conformity in America.
Nov 16, 2014 Read the whole text...
Robcat
Political Prisoners
Maine shows its solidarity with Jennifer Gann, Eric King, & Herman Bell
It’s a cold Friday night in November in Portland, Maine. Comrades from around the state have gathered at the Aphodian Theater to support our imprisoned friend, Herman Bell. The benefit features bands and speakers, including former political prisoner Ray Luc Lavasseur.
It is organized by our group of friends and family, Maine Anti-Racist Action, in order to raise funds to help pay for Herman’s family visits. We give out organic squash, anarchist papers including the Fifth Estate, and prisoner information.
Apr 4, 2018 Read the whole text...
Political Prisoners in China Free the Li-I-Che 40 Million
Last March in Canton, China, an unnamed Peking official replied to questions by the New York-Times, on the subject of political prisoners in China, by stating, “A few intellectuals deprived of free speech is only a minor question. In the Soviet Union, the workers, the peasants and the intellectuals are all being oppressed.”
Feb 23, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Political Prisoner Update
“They’re in there for us; we’re out here for them.”
—IWW slogan
On May 15th the California State Supreme Court returned Geronimo’s request for a new trial to a lower court. This is good news because at this level his lawyers will be able to present new evidence showing Geronimo’s innocence and the FBI cover-up. A former Black Panther Party member, Geronimo has spent 24 years in prison, making him one of the longest held political prisoners in the world. For more information, contact the Geronimo support committee: PO Box 781328, Los Angeles CA 90016; (213) 294–8320.
May 8, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Political Repression
1969 will undoubtedly be a year which brings increased attacks upon the Movement: the HUAC hearings, the Chicago Grand Jury, and Oakland 7 trial, and repressive actions against GI coffeehouses, are only some of the better publicized incidents of repression and attack on the movement.
The Michigan State Legislature has set up its own little committee (as have several other states) to investigate “breaches of the peace and disorders on university campuses.” Indications are that this committee’s intentions are a broad and general attack upon Movement activity in the state; it is likely that the committee will follow the familiar pattern of using closed hearings, manipulation of the press, subpoenaing of Movement people, threats of legal action, etc., to intimidate and harass Movement activities in the state.
Sep 8, 2021 Read the whole text...
Frank H. Joyce
Political Repression in U.S.A.
“One man of 74 said he opposed the war but declined to write or send a telegram for fear that ‘if they find out, they’ll take my social security away.’ A housewife said, ‘My son’s in college now and I want him to finish. If I send your telegram (opposing the war) to the President, I know he’ll he drafted.’
Sep 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Political Scumbag Kicks Off
FE Note: The leaflet reproduced on this page was issued following the death late last year of Quebecois nationalist politician and ex-premier of the province, Rene Levesque. It was posted in several locations in Montreal, including Cafe Commune/Comun, a libertarian, worker-run restaurant and gathering place for leftists, as well as anti-authoritarians. Apparently nationalism runs high even in places where one would least expect it, and the leaflet was torn down by persons unknown. Two meetings were held at the Cafe during which the author was asked to explain his motives for publishing rather than to ask who had taken it upon themselves to become the official political censor of the Cafe. As of this writing, the question remains unresolved.
Aug 9, 2017 Read the whole text...
anon.
Politics of the “Nuclear State”
Report from W. Germany
The following was sent to us by a friend of the Fifth Estate living in West Germany and lays out the political implications of the “Nuclear State,” and gives a report on several mass anti-nuclear actions. See also “Turn on the Light and Say Goodnight” in this issue.
It is important to point out an aspect of the nuclear energy program which lies—independent from the deathly danger of nuclear energy—in the danger of the loss of personal freedom of each individual. Nuclear power plants do not only imply poisonous radiation, but also inevitably lead to the establishment of a totalitarian “nuclear state” and in the end to a complete control over the individual. Only in this way, argues the state, can the danger of sabotage be prevented. A recent example is the Traube case.
Feb 24, 2017 Read the whole text...
Andrew William Smith
Polyamory and Power
A Confession and Critique
It’s not news that much of modernity is all messed up about sex. Contemporary culture fluctuates between moralistic repression and hypersexual expression. Prudes use religion to promote abstinence for unmarried heterosexuals and celibacy for LGBT folks, and the more extreme libertines turn everything erotic and beautiful into a casual commodity.
Sep 16, 2013 Read the whole text...
Dave Sinclair
Pontiac’s speech to the whiteman
Out of the blue sky, out of
the waters, out of the woods, of the deer,
the beaver, the bush, the bird flies, out
of my people, the blood, out of
so many moons in this place a man
cannot count them, out of
grace with the Great Spirit who
gave us this land, you seek
to push us.
At night, in my dreams,
Mar 16, 2014 Read the whole text...
Thomas Haroldson
“Poor Cow”
Film review
To get some idea of what “Poor Cow” is like, one need only imagine what “Elvira Madigan” would have been like if it had been filmed in the slums of London.
The two pictures are remarkably similar: both deal with impractical young lovers; both use the same impressionistic film techniques; both employ many short, carefully composed scenes; and both follow a visual, rather than a narrative, plot line.
Sep 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
Chris Singer
Poor People in D.C.
Resurrection City
WASHINGTON, D.C. — It is almost like any other American city.
Resurrection City has its problems too. Mayor Ralph Abernathy and City Manager Jesse Jackson face: inadequate city funds; housing shortages; water pollution; and, a generation gap that has led to troubles with the city “police.”
But then it isn’t any other city. Resurrection City exists because the King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided that the survival of one-fifth of American citizens was so In peril, it had to be dramatized by bringing thousands of poor to camp on the doorstep of Congress.
Mar 27, 2018 Read the whole text...
Frank H. Joyce
Poor People Lose Out in West Central Elections
Detroit is a killer city. It is a city in which radicals and reformers of various political stripes have found it nearly impossible to survive.
Internal difficulties of personnel and finance along with external pressure from the police and other elements of the establishment have combined time after time to murder grass roots community organizations, peace groups, civil rights forces and radical religious organizations.
May 9, 2025 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Pope Bans Laxative!

LONDON (LNS)—Millions of Catholics all over the world already staggering under the blow of the Pope’s controversial encyclical on the pill, are in for a new shock.
In a new edict published today by the Vatican press entitled “De Constipatone” the Pope slams down on the use of artificial laxatives to relieve constipation.
Sep 2, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pope Perishes

Like a full moon, like the blazing collapse of a bank in an earthquake, like the comedic sinking of an imperial barge, the death of a pope, and the giddy and liberatory revelation that we are now—if only momentarily—living during a time when there is no pope, is a cause for celebration. Firecrackers, stink-bombs, and rockets should be fired in every aisle and nave, on the steps of every church from Rome to St. Clair Shores! Celebrate! The pope is dead!
Jul 11, 2018 Read the whole text...
Richard Dey
Pop Goes the American Culture
“Like nineteenth century capitalism, Mass Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural distinctions.”
—Dwight Macdonald
The tribal psychedelic rock culture is today the ripest fruit on the tree of the popular arts, and its roots grope deeply into the much-plowed soil of mass culture. In the Beginning (almost), there was folk art, oral, inconographic, mythic. Industrialism and its inevitably mechanistic culture trampled down the past, creating an urban atmosphere in which the folk arts could not survive.
Oct 22, 2022 Read the whole text...
Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Pornography & Pleasure
Beyond capital, beyond patriarchy
After years of reading essays in the seemingly endless debate over pornography in the feminist and anarchist milieu, one of many questions reverberates with the most resonance for me: will pornography exist in utopia?
Ellen Willis, in her essay “Feminism, Morality and Pornography,” states: “I imagine that in utopia, porn would wither away along with the state, heroin, and Coca-Cola.” But even in utopia, won’t some of us still write and make pictures that express our deepest erotic secrets and desires?
Feb 4, 2020 Read the whole text...
Margaret Killjoy
Portrait of a Snitch
Documentary examines the mind of FBI informant, Brandon Darby
a review of
Informant: A documentary directed and written by Jamie Meltzer. Information at informantdoc.com; also Netflix.
In Jamie Meltzer’s 2012 documentary, “Informant,” we’re taken into the home and mind of the FBI informant of the title, Brandon Darby, infamous within U.S. anarchist circles for responsibility for the arrests and conviction of activists during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Jul 17, 2014 Read the whole text...
Bill Weinberg
Positively Quilca Street
Lima anarchist scene survives official clean up
When Lutxo Rodríguez recalls the local punks and social outcasts of the downtown Lima, Peru district he habituates “dressing in black in the ‘80s,” I smile wryly, remembering the Lower East Side of my own youth. But the urban decay that allowed for the florescence of bohemia and an anarcho-punk scene in this small enclave of a South American capital came “in the context of political violence,” he says.
Mar 3, 2018 Read the whole text...
Dennis Fitzgerald
Postal Pot
NEW YORK (LNS)—Thirty thousand joints in the mail? Could be...It’s like you never know what you’re going to find in the mailbox—but free dope?
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” the letter said, “you are one of 30,000 lucky persons being sent free this freshly-rolled marijuana cigarette. We are doing this in order to clear the garbage from the air.”
Sep 15, 2021 Read the whole text...
David Watson
Don LaCoss
Post-election post-mortem
Four more years ... of resistance!
It’s finally over. Now we can get back to work. Over the last seven months a surprising number of our comrades were increasingly distracted by the seductive spectacle of humiliating Bush and Cheney on a grand scale. Anarchists I know, respect, and love voted, ferchrissakes, in their overwhelming desire to publicly rub Bush’s nose in it. But in the back of their minds they all knew that a Kerry victory wouldn’t change anything other than infinitesimally retard the atrocities, plunder, and human rights abuses carried out in the name of the USA.
Oct 21, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Poster Bust

Philadelphia, Penna., April 11—Today, U.S. Postal authorities arrested Steven Kuromiya, a former University of Pennsylvania student, for attempting to mail 1,000 posters to peace organizations throughout the country.
The posters depict a young man burning what might be a draft card, with the words “FUCK THE DRAFT” printed below. The man in the photo is a Detroiter, Bill Greenshields.
Jan 4, 2018 Read the whole text...
Chuck 0
Post-Katrina
Anarchy Works; Government Fails
After the disaster that struck the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, during the total failure of the government response, the first health services available in New Orleans were set up by anarchists and local residents.

The hub of this mutual aid effort was the Common Ground clinic, operated from a mosque in the Algiers neighborhood by former Black Panther, Malik Rahim, local residents, out-of-town anarchists and other radical activists. While local, state and federal governments were in a state of chaos and incompetence, neighbors organized their own spontaneous mutual aid, helping to rescue people from flooded homes and procuring food and supplies. Even some bars in the French Quarter established themselves as DIY relief centers.
May 7, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Post-Revolution Technology
A Compendium
All “modern” technology on the planet today is massive and centralized and demands, by its very nature, centralized political control—authoritarianism is built into those very instruments supposedly designed to free us from the drudgeries of life.
In a revolution that brought about a decentralized, voluntaristic community as the basic mode of human association, technology would become a central question since the operation of it would suddenly depend upon those involved instead of corporations and the state. Unless you want to try to survive in a sub-zero outhouse, technology will have to be re-organized along more human, rational and ecologically sound lines.
Sep 28, 2016 Read the whole text...
John Jordan
Jennifer Whitney
Postscript for the anti-capitalist movement
Argentina may well prove to be the crisis which irrevocably splits the ever-widening crack in the neoliberal armor, especially if things continue to unravel in other parts of Latin America. Recent events in Venezuela, and the possibility of left wing gains in this year’s Brazilian presidential elections, point to a shift away from the “Washington Consensus” across much of the region.
Jun 5, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Post-war Postmortem
How the U.S. Got Away With It
Although death and environmental destruction are continuing in Iraq and Kuwait, the Persian Gulf war is over in America. The remains can be seen in the dirt-streaked, plastic yellow ribbons sagging from trees and lampposts and at half-off sales for Desert Storm commemorative t-shirts and bumperstickers which brag “USA Kicks Ass.”
Jan 19, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pot Group Launches Crusade
The first meeting of the Detroit Chapter of Lemar (Legalize Marijuana) met at the Artist’s Workshop Dec. 19th, and had a good turn out in spite of a heavy snow.
The purpose of the group is to: 1. Disseminate information concerning marijuana (factual studies as opposed to the bullshit printed in the major daily papers), 2. Gather together people in the Detroit area who are interested in seeing marijuana legalized, 3. Help end or reduce feelings of isolation and paranoia by functioning as an organized group.
Sep 29, 2024 Read the whole text...
Don LaCoss
Potlatch
Ritual Resistance to Capitalism

Before becoming Situationists and involving themselves in the business of social war and cultural revolution in 1960s Europe, Guy Debord and his friends were active in the Lettrist International. They read too much Baudelaire and Marx, drank too much cheap Beaujolais, and aimlessly prowled the streets of Cold War Paris seeking liberty, love, the supersession of art, and an escape from post-Marshall Plan consumer culture while staying one step ahead of the cops. From 1954 to 1957, the Lettrists published a free periodical called Potlatch, which later became the Situationist International’s internal newsletter. Debord explained the choice of title for the publication in an essay in 1959: The goods that a free bulletin such as this distributes are non-salable. Only the further elaboration of these new desires and problems by others can constitute the corresponding return gift.” As would be seen later in Debord’s thinking on the spectacle, Potlatch was meant as a way to critically assess the vicious cultural logic of capitalism, the dead world of commodities, and the ways in which the accepted dynamics of the modern exchange economy had neutralized classical working-class Marxism. Instead, the Lettrists were hearkening to an alternative to the capitalist exchange of equivalence. This alternative was practiced by the aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Northwest famously described by late nineteenth century ethnographer Franz Boas and pre-World War II anthropologist Marcel Mauss.
Aug 19, 2017 Read the whole text...
Carol Schmidt
Poverty: Detroit Style
Just driving by, there is little difference between “The Castle” on the Lodge service down the street from the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam offices, and the same kind of run-down building a few blocks away. Both might be photographed by a person just driving by for an exhibit on poverty in Detroit.
Mar 27, 2018 Read the whole text...
R.F.
Power Struggle in China
Who Rules Chinese State Capitalism?
When Chou En-lai, the first and only Prime Minister of the Peoples Republic of China, died in the beginning of this year, a struggle between the so-called “moderate,” pro-managerial and “radical left,” pro-Maoist factions within the Party burst into the open.
The rift has taken the form of an apparent battle between two personalities within the standing committee of the powerful Politburo of the Communist Party’s Central Committee (China’s ruling body).
Jul 20, 2014 Read the whole text...
anon.
Prairie Flowers Growing Wilder Every Hour
Minnesota has by far the largest acreage of wild grass of any state in the nation, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics figures show.
Last year county weed inspectors reported that they had discovered 1,723 acres of Cannabis in the state. To the inspectors it’s “just another weed”.
This spring an inspector attended a town meeting in a small Minnesota community. “Did you know you have marijuana growing in the town?” he asked.
Apr 3, 2017 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
Precarious Dreams
Defending our Imagination from hi-tech Takeover
Just as obtaining job-related income is being made more precarious every day by automation, our sleeping hours are now increasingly under siege by the forces of techno-capitalism. In order to more fully understand the growing vulnerability of our dreams to corporate manipulation, the recent phenomenon of “dream incubation”, which involves the implantation of marketable dreams in our heads, is worthy of further investigation.
Jul 17, 2022 Read the whole text...
Ben Habeebe
Prentis St. Popped
Kitty Genovese died in Queens while fifty people watched.
Thomas Poindexter lost his seat on the Detroit Common Council when it was reported that he saw a crime being committed and did not even bother to call the police.
Two nameless hippies were arrested on Prentis on Tuesday night August 8, while all the flower folks and their bike-less motorcycle type colleagues just stood around and gaped. Two cops had just walked on their beat down Prentis, gotten lost in the shadows then reappeared from the alley at the end of the block where they had started out. They had two handcuffed prisoners. The prisoners, somewhere between teenyboppers and hippies looked to be about 19 years old. They stooped as they walked down the street hands bound behind their backs.
Feb 17, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pres. Dave Busted
The cops and the Feds are sure Dave Valler is behind the Detroit bombings. They’ve told that to The Detroit News and they have constantly tailed Dave (see last issue).
Their only problem is that they have no evidence to directly connect him with the dynamitings. But leave it to the ever ingenious pigs to get their man.
Aug 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
President Dave Doing Well
David Valler, convicted dope user, accused bomber, ex-candidate for President, and of late, Detroit News feature writer, seems to have pretty well squared things away with his former adversaries—the pigs.
Valler is doing 7 to 10 years in Jackson for two counts of violating the Michigan Narcotics Act and is the Principle defendant in a conspiracy case involving the bombings that took place in Detroit and Ann Arbor last year.
Jul 16, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Gaynes
“President Dave” joins News’ staff
Men seek the truth, Fascists deal in words.
This becomes evident early in our lives if we care to see it for what it is.
Remember the teacher that would ask for apologies in front of the class (and hovering principal)? Remember the parents who would politely beseech our repentant words in front of important guests at the dinner table? They didn’t give a damn whether we meant what we said, they just wanted to hear it.
Jun 22, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Gaynes
President Dave Oinks
October 8th, Jack Forrest was awakened by the noisy spectacle of nine Federal agents bouncing off the vestibule wall of his mother’s apartment on Pingree.
Streaming through the kicked-in door in wild disarray, they gathered their forces around Jack’s bed and, guns drawn, proceeded to shout some dialogue that they had heard on television.
Jul 28, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fred Gardner
Presidio Case
“Mutineers” Take the Stand
MONTEREY, Calif. (LNS)—The Army is taking a Danang-sized shelling as the climactic phase of the Presidio “mutiny” case enters its third week here at Fort Ord.
In a sharp departure from earlier trials, with defendants taking the stand to apologize for the Oct. 14 sit-down, or not testifying at all, Terence Hallinan’s clients have begun testifying that their actions were justified.
Jun 19, 2022 Read the whole text...
George Shuba
Presidio Mutiny Case
Update
TACOMA, Wash. (LNS)—Good news in the Presidio “Mutiny” case: Linden Blake, the third of the 27 stockade prisoners to escape while awaiting trial, has arrived safely in Canada. And the Department of the Army, feeling the unaccustomed weight of public pressure, has cut Nesrey Sood’s sentence down to two years.
May 10, 2022 Read the whole text...
Giuseppi Slater
Presidio Mutiny Trial
SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Military justice, it says in the manuals. But to observers of the trial, the two words form a mutual contradiction, one that emerged more starkly than ever when Pvts. Lawrence Reidel and Louis Osczepinski were sentenced on Feb. 15, to 14 and 16 years of imprisonment for their part in the non-violent Presidio protest last October. (See Fifth Estate, last issue.)
Sep 3, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fred Gardner
Presidio Mutiny Trial Ends
FLASH—As we go to press we have learned that 12 of the Presidio GI’s have been found guilty of mutiny and two of disobedience. The verdict came after the five-member board deliberated six hours at the end of the 35 day trial. Sentences have not yet been passed.
FORT ORD, Calif. (LNS)—The defense has rested in the climactic phase of the Presidio Mutiny case.
Apr 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Press Censorship
Subtle and more unsubtle pressure has caused Detroit’s three up front papers to experience difficulties in the last few weeks in getting their papers printed.
The Inner-City Voice, a black revolutionary paper, the Warren-Forest Sun, a freek paper, and this newspaper all have been victims of attempted suppression.
Jan 4, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Press Conference Cancelled
The Midwest “Underground” Press Conference originally scheduled for Saturday, May 20, at WSU has been called off until further notice due to the machinations of Dean J. Don Marsh of Wayne State University, who refused the WSU Artists’ Society classroom space for the Conference.
Since neither the FIFTH ESTATE or the SUN has adequate facilities for holding such a Conference, it will have to wait until facilities can be arranged. In the meanwhile, people who wish to publish “underground” or independent newspapers, tabloid or mimeograph format, can consult with the staffs of Detroit’s two community newspapers—the FIFTH ESTATE, 923 Plum Street (3rd floor) and THE SUN, 4863 John Lodge (at Warren).
May 3, 2022 Read the whole text...
Bob Brubaker
Primitives and Production: a response
In response to Tech Examined a letter from Jeffrey Vega, FE #315, Winter 1984.
Jeffrey Vega would like to define primitive cultures “in the terms of class society” so he can assimilate them to the “historical materialist perspective.” In his mind this is a legitimate operation, since unlike “the self-definition of tribal society” (presumably to him a limited form of knowledge), a class analysis enables us to uncover “the dynamics which led to the development of class society.”
Jul 22, 2017 Read the whole text...
Stanley Diamond
Primitive vs. Civilized War
Some contrasts
This article is excerpted from “The Search for the Primitive,” an essay written by Stanley Diamond in 1963 and later revised and expanded for inclusion in his book In Search of the Primitive (Transaction Books, 1981). We are reprinting this excerpt because it is relevant to both our ongoing discussions of war and of primitive society, indigenism and modernity.
May 15, 2015 Read the whole text...
Don LaCoss
Principle of Hope
“Dr. Alfred Nobel, a man who became rich discovering new ways to kill more people faster than anyone ever before, died yesterday,” declared one French newspaper obituary in 1888.
Nobel, a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, and munitions industrialist, had become obscenely wealthy producing and selling weapons all over the world. In addition to getting rich through his commercial activities as a shameless merchant of death, Nobel also owned hundreds of patents, the most lucrative of which was his 1867 process for weaponizing the dangerously unstable explosive compound nitroglycerine into an easier-to-handle form that he called “dynamite.”
Mar 25, 2014 Read the whole text...
Okra P. Dingle
Printed Oddities & Human Curiosities
Revolt at 65 mph
The Autonomadic Bookmobile is an independent press bookstore and Info-Shop on wheels. It has spent a good part of the last year touring the US, visiting over a hundred cities, covering over 50,000 miles. The Bookmobile supports small, independent and radical publishers of books, zines, newspapers and pamphlets, against the corporate hegemony on printed matter and ideas by chain bookstores and distributors.
Jun 17, 2021 Read the whole text...
Ernest Larsen
Prison Abolition
It’s Time!
Through the uproar of the sustained near-uprisings of Covid summer 2020 against police violence and systemic racism, one could sometimes hear more radical voices. The assertion from them that everybody behind bars should be recognized as a political prisoner is no longer completely beyond consideration. If so, then it’s worth looking at how radical prisoners have conceptualized their experiences within the state’s institutionalization of punishment.
Aug 13, 2021 Read the whole text...
Marcus Graham
Prison and Gary Gilmore
During the last score of years there have been numerous prison outbreaks and attempted prison escapes throughout the United States. The media has invariably labeled these as “riots” and acts of “dangerous criminals.” What the media deliberately fails to reveal are the conditions within prisons that lead prisoners to risk their lives in attempting to escape or daring even to protest (as took place at Attica when more than forty prisoners and guards were massacred).
Feb 23, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Prison Attacks Escalate on Remiro and Little
The State of California has recently stepped up its attacks on Russell (Little and Joseph Remiro (imprisoned for the 1973 SLA assassination of Oakland, Calif. school official Marcus Foster) who are currently serving life terms.
In recognition of his two years of non-violent behavior in the maximum security Adjustment Center at San Quentin prison, promises were made to Russ Little that he would be transferred to a less restricted unit in another prison. These promises were made by counselors at San Quentin as well as various administrators in the California Department of Corrections over a period of five months.
Feb 19, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Prisoners
Prisoners wanting to read anarchist literature: Black Market will send you a general packet of anarchist literature. If you have requests for specific literature, we will try to get it for you (and probably succeed). All free. To all persons who can help, Black Market has been sending anarchist literature free to prisoners for over 6 months. The costs are getting too much for us alone. We need help in the form of used books & pamphlets & leaflets having to do with anarchism (-ists), or a little cash to buy literature specifically requested. Write or send help to: Black Market, box 306, Cambridge, Mass 02139.
Jan 2, 2014 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Prisoners Respond to the Fifth Estate
FE staff note: Last issue we sent out 115 sample copies of the Fifth Estate to prisoners, the result of a listing as a free publication in a prison resource handbook. Rather than automatically granting free subscriptions to those who requested them, we asked that prisoners read and evaluate our publication and let us know if they wanted to be put on our list. Gratifyingly, more than a third responded with positive and strong replies, some of which are printed below.
Aug 23, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Prisoner Updates
The Continuing Cost of COINTELPRO
Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt has been incarcerated in California’s maximum security prisons for almost 20 years. He was recently transferred to Tehachapi, in southern California, far from his growing base of support in the Bay Area.
On July 28, 1972 Pratt—a much-decorated Vietnam veteran and then head of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP)—was sentenced to a seven-year-to-life term for the “Tennis Court Murder” of a white school teacher in Santa Monica in 1968. FBI infiltrator Melvin “Cotten” Smith, who was then head of Panther security in Los Angeles, has since come forward with details of the FBI/LA red squad plan to frame Geronimo. Now doing a life stretch of his own in Kentucky, Smith described a meeting in which agents and cops sat around trying to figure out which unsolved murder would be the best to pin on Pratt.
Aug 17, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Sinclair
Prison Letter from John
Sept. 30, 1969
Dear People,
Sorry I haven’t written in so long but I wanted to get settled up here before writing you again. There seems to be a lot more going on out there in the streets than happens here in prison, but then that seems to be the idea of locking people up, so they won’t be able to participate in the activities they enjoy.
Jul 28, 2019 Read the whole text...
Nick Medvecky
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
Review
A review of
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Alexander Berkman, Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1970 [available from FE Books, see page 44 for information).
For political organizers, the great worth of Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is the evolution of his political thought during incarceration. He is plunged into the bowels of the beast, stripped of his ultimate sense of worth, yet continuously analyzes his own positions and beliefs.
Jan 6, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Prison Notes
A couple of quick prison notes: Revolutionary prisoners at Washington State Prison in Walla Walla have published Vol. I, No. 4 of the Anarchist Black Dragon, a newsletter. Written by the locked-down brothers from the collective of the same name, the publication features articles of both prison news and general anarchist interest. The Dragon is printed on the outside by supporters and is available from Countdown, PO Box 1163, Madison, Wisconsin, 53701; a small donation would be appropriate. However, the Anarchist Black Dragon Collective may be written directly at Box 520, Walla Walla, Washington, 99362.
Sep 23, 2018 Read the whole text...
anon.
Prison Notes
NATCHEZ, MISS.--Within the last month, more than 500 people have been arrested in the city of Natchez, Mississippi. Although news of the arrests received wide circulation, the brutality and the indignities which the prisoners were forced to endure during their stay in Parchman State Penitentiary has until now been kept secret. However, with the release of some of the arrested, the story is finally getting out. What follows is the report by two of those recently released:
Jan 14, 2014 Read the whole text...
Peter Kropotkin
Prisons and Their Moral Influence on Prisoners
Peter Kropotkin, called the “anarchist prince” because of his origins in the Russian nobility, stands out among the many classic anarchist writers for his breadth of subject matter and his concern with the problems of daily life. The following essay was included in a 1924 collection of his writings entitled Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, with an introduction by Roger Baldwin.
Sep 8, 2018 Read the whole text...
Marie Mason
Prison Visit
Prison is
Hushed and heavy
Like water near the Ocean’s floor,
Then loud and bitter,
Like fractious storms lashing the sky
Everything cement and nerves
And too many years gone by...
The heart requires a place to rest
From all its maddened wanderings
The raft of the Medusa tossed
And trembling in the sea.
Jul 1, 2014 Read the whole text...
Peter Werbe
Profane Existence publishes last issue
Crisis in the Anarchist Press?
We received word in mid-October that Minneapolis’ Profane Existence magazine was printing its last issue. The collective also announced cessation of their wholesale and mail order distribution, and record production operations.
Besides noting some financial difficulties, this prolific group, cited being “overwhelmed,” “we have no personal lives,” and “the pay sucks.” In other words, terminal burn-out after a decade of what they define as “a very all-consuming undertaking.”
Feb 13, 2021 Read the whole text...
T. Nachalo (Fredy Perlman)
Progress & Nuclear Power
The Destruction of the Continent and Its Peoples
The following text first appeared in a special anti-nuclear issue of the Fifth Estate (FE #297, April 18, 1979). It was written earlier in that year just after an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in eastern Pennsylvania. As news of the accident spread, official messages insisted, “There is no need to overreact, the situation is stable, the leaders have everything under control,” but eventually people living near the plant had to be evacuated.
Jun 11, 2020 Read the whole text...
T. Nachalo (Fredy Perlman)
Progress & Nuclear Power
The Destruction of the Continent and Its Peoples
This special section of the Fifth Estate Newspaper was produced shortly after the April 1979 disastrous events took place at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant at Middletown, Pennsylvania.
The first two articles were composed in response to the accident. “Eight Theses on Nuclearism” discusses what confronts us as a species, while “Progress and Nuclear Power” traces the history of the destruction of this continent by industrial technology. The remaining material was compiled from past issues of this newspaper and aptly describes the threat which nuclear power represents in any form.
Sep 22, 2018 Read the whole text...
Pepper Kincade
Project FANG Builds Solidarity Through Prison Visits
“They’re in there for us; we’re out here for them!”
—IWW slogan
The fight for our imprisoned comrades can take many forms of solidarity. The protest at Carswell prison in Fort Worth on June 5 was a rowdy and exciting example of what support can look like.

Dec 21, 2017 Read the whole text...
Nick Mamatas
Promises, Promises
A review of
Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber. Little Brown/Hachette 2019
“Follow Your Leader!” reads the joyous anti-Nazi sticker portraying Adolph Hitler blowing his brains out with a pistol. And in 1945, as the Soviet Army rolled in from the East and Allied forces held the West, thousands upon thousands of “ordinary Germans” did just that in wave of mass suicide. They turned their guns upon themselves, prepared nooses for their entire families, and gobbled up the widely available cyanide ampules distributed by Nazi Party functionaries. Historian Florian Huber finds the suicide wave fascinating, and the widespread allegiance to Hitler and the Reich inexplicable, but the resultant book, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself, falls flat—it’s the German historian equivalent of the 93rd New York Times feature article about white Midwesterners who like Donald Trump.
Jan 30, 2021 Read the whole text...
Sonny Tufts (David Watson)
Propagandada discovered in Detroit
The Dadaists were writers and artists who made it their raison d’etre to destroy culture, or at least literature and art. They carried to its ultimate and absurd conclusion the distinction between form and content in art, rejecting literary conventions, the frame round a canvas, and even the ‘laws’ of normal speech--all these restricted and deformed the authentic complexity of mental reality.
Jul 15, 2014 Read the whole text...
Bill Bachmann
Protectors of Fruehauf
Reprinted from Up Against The Wall Street Journal
“Watch out, he’s a bad one,” said one of the women in the picket line at Gate 2. The man to whom she referred was trying to drive his white Mustang through the moving pickets. Two pigs assisted him by clearing a path through the line. Three days before the man had run his car into the woman who shouted the warning.
Nov 10, 2023 Read the whole text...
Pat Halley
Protect our Insane Heritage
Review: “Cuckoo’s Nest”
“Madness cometh sometime of the passions of the soul.”
-- Bartholomew of England
“Zounds! Bethumped by words!”
-- Richard II
The critics are raving about it. Sold out shows and long lines testify to a growing public obsession with it; indeed, everything having to do with the film version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is having mind-boggling repercussions.
Jan 2, 2014 Read the whole text...
Art Johnston
Protest at WSU

At a carnival, when disruption strikes, the call for help goes out: “Hey Rube!” The call went out at Wayne State, last Friday, April 26, as it did across the world, as students on all continents boycotted classes and staged demonstrations in opposition to U.S. imperialism.
In Detroit, the Wayne Administration put out the call—HEY RUBE! and the campus was soon engulfed by carloads of full-decked Tactical Mobile Units, a half dozen members of the cavalry, a platoon of cops, and twenty six miles of metaphoric barb-wire; called out to quell the carnival. Boy, was it a riot.
Jan 3, 2018 Read the whole text...
Rob Broccoli
Protesters Fibrillate Bush
It rarely happens that the king comes in contact with rabble, but he did here in Michigan on May 4, the 21st anniversary of the state murders at Kent State Univ.
Presidente Bush was the honored guest at the University of Michigan graduation ceremonies in nearby Ann Arbor, so we at the Fifth Estate joined with hundreds of others to meet the leader in his limo.
Jan 21, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Protesters Plead Guilty
Eleven members of the Ad Hoc Committee for the August Days of Protest arrested Aug. 6 at a Hiroshima Day rally in downtown Detroit pleaded guilty to charges Aug. 15 in Recorder’s Court. Those arrested were Harold Greenberg, Ron Landberg, Harvey Robb, James Lipson, Rita Leasure, Howard Harrison (of E. Lansing), Eric Chester (of Ann Arbor), Mark Nowakowsi, Farrell Hamen, and Dena Clamage; all were charged with resisting arrest and obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty. Frank Lovell was charged with assault and battery by Donald Lobsinger, head of Breakthrough, a right-wing hate group.
Apr 13, 2023 Read the whole text...
anon.
Protesters Resist the Bush Coronation

The traditional pomp and circumstance of the US January presidential inauguration disappeared amid chants and tear gas, when what was expected to be a grand victory march down Pennsylvania Avenue descended into an embarrassing spectacle for the elite and their “mandate.”
With all eyes on DC, people across the world were treated to televised parade images of wafting smoke and pepper spray, as police battled protesters directly on the inaugural motorcade route. At one point about a mile ahead of the presidential parade, the barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue were brought down by demonstrators. During a prolonged clash, protesters slowed the president’s motorcade and then brought it to a stand-still.
Mar 13, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Protests Planned at 2nd Murray Trial
A weekend of international protest activities has been called to coincide with the opening of the second murder trial of Irish anarchist Marie Murray on April 25 in Dublin, according to the London Black Flag office.
Murray and her husband Noel were convicted last year in a frame-up trial for the slaying of an Irish cop following an unsolved bank robbery in that nation’s capital city.
Oct 2, 2016 Read the whole text...
Hank Malone
Provo!
Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! Provo! They used to be called “Nosems,” the Dutch beatnik. The new word rides out of France. The Provo is the new young style in Holland—the Provocateur—the Hipster. They stopped being Nosems when the big changeover came about a year ago; when the kids started paying more attention to style than to content.
Nov 26, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pro-War Group Tries to Smear Lafferty, Fifth Estate in 17th District
James Lafferty’s campaign for the Congress from the 17th District on Detroit’s far West side took on a new dimension with the appearance in the district of a leaflet branding Lafferty a “traitor” and calling the FIFTH ESTATE an “anti-Christian, anti-American hate sheet.” Although the leaflet, entitled “HOW DARE JAMES LAFFERTY RUN FOR OFFICE IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD!” is signed by a group calling itself the 17th Congressional District Citizens Associated for Support of Our Boys in Vietnam, with headquarters at 17538 Rutherford, Detroit, it appears as though this is a front for Detroit’s anti-Semitic hate group—Breakthrough. Particularly obvious is the re-use of “evidence” reprinted from past Breakthrough smear sheets and the liberal (excuse us) use of capital letters.
Mar 11, 2023 Read the whole text...
Bruce E. Levine
Psychiatry’s Oppression of Young Anarchists
— and the Underground Resistance
Many young people diagnosed with mental disorders are essentially anarchists with the bad luck of being misidentified by mental health professionals who: (1) are ignorant of the social philosophy of anarchism, (2) embrace, often without political consciousness, its opposite ideology of hierarchism, and (3) confuse the signs of anarchism with symptoms of mental illness.
Dec 15, 2013 Read the whole text...
Holly Jean
Psychic Liberation & the Almost Revolution
If you mention France, May 1968 today, you’re probably met with a shrug or a blank look. It’s easy to dismiss the ten million workers and students who went on general strike and the virtual shutdown of the French state as an historic blip. Another failed revolution.
But for the people who took part in those events, much more was going on--something besides a political uprising. Possibility bloomed. First hand accounts speak of a wave of mental liberation and spontaneous joy, with a sense that the old order of business had become obsolete overnight. How did reality shift so quickly into this new, liberated mood?
May 7, 2015 Read the whole text...
Alison Sand
Psychology of the Diaphragm
Reprinted from Off Our Backs (February 27, 1970), a Woman’s News Journal.
“My doctor told me that if using a diaphragm were a test of mental ability I’d be given a moron rating.”
That quote is unique to one woman’s experience with one strange gynecologist but it is, unfortunately, revealing. Most women don’t receive adequate instruction or encouragement from their doctor and leave his office insecure about their ability to use it.
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Dr. Robert M. Patton
Puberty Ripes Among Natives
[Web archive note: “Ripes” as it appears in the original print edition]
She stands five feet seven inches in her Courreges boots. Her face is as smooth and unreacting as a billiard ball. She wears miniskirts four inches above her knobby knees, and hip-huggers which hug skinny, unrelenting hips. Her favorite people in the whole wide world are Bobby Dylan, the Beatles, and Mick Jagger. She gets high on anything that’s handy—bennies, methadrine, grass, acid. She is known as a Groupie. Want to ball her?
Nov 27, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Public Notice
The Artists’ Workshop was formed over two years ago by a group of WORKING artists—mainly poets & musicians—who found that by banding together they could accomplish a great deal in terms of getting themselves together and getting their work to their public. Many of the original members of the Workshop have left town, as is natural, but it seems that no younger people have come up to replace them. If there are people in this city who are interested in keeping the Artists’ Workshop a healthy and growing group—that is; people who are ready to WORK at what needs to be done—they need to step forward now and make themselves known.
May 16, 2024 Read the whole text...
Jesús Sepúlveda
Pulling Back the Veil of the Vile
Social Revolt & the End of Dictatorship
In Memoriam Luis Ortiz Puppo*
Populism is the manifestation of political demagogy that combines financial power and indoctrinated populations. Propaganda is used to indoctrinate the mob.
This social base can amount to a significant percentage of the population—as in Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany—or a small but highly-visible group effusively cheering on their defiant and confrontational leader. Such a leader carries out a plan to revise history and accommodate reality to his own ideology
Apr 29, 2017 Read the whole text...
Total Assault on Culture (IWWC)
Pull Out the Plugs Brothers and Sisters

Web archive note: In the print original “Brothers and Sisters” replaces “Motherfuckers,” which is crossed out.
what politics is for THEM revolution is for US
harmless diversion a publicity stunt Magazines say
are you listening kids? underground newspapers say
Apr 30, 2021 Read the whole text...
Allan Antliff
Punching Holes in Russian Capitalism
Seeds of the 1917 Revolution are Sprouting Again
During the 1917 Russian revolution, anarchists urged workers to take control of their lives by turning the capitalists out and seizing control of the means of production, the better to reconstruct society along anarchistic lines.
In some instances, property was communalized and a post-capitalist social order began to emerge. One such experiment was initiated by Boris Yelensky, an anarchist who returned to Russia in February 1917 after a lengthy exile in Chicago: Yelensky made his way to his home town of Novorossiysk in August where he formed an anarchist propaganda group.
Nov 25, 2019 Read the whole text...
Ruhe
Punk & Anarchy
a review of
Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia by Edward Anthony Avery-Natale. Lexington Books, 2016, 235 pp.
Like many anarchists who came of age in the 1990s, my first exposure to anarchism came through the punk scene. A friend gave me a cassette tape full of classic punk bands as part of an effort to satisfy my ever expanding interest in punk.
Dec 21, 2017 Read the whole text...
A. Punk
Punk Rock
Musical Fad or “Radical Kernel?”
Thinking about punk rock gives one the strange sensation of witnessing a phenomenon and trying to make intellectual sense of it rather than being immersed in it. That of course ages you immediately. No matter what your “sympathies” are toward the music and the social critique it carries with it, if you are writing about it in the manner of this article, you are obviously not of it.
Mar 23, 2018 Read the whole text...
Mary Wildwood
Dogbane Campion (David Watson)
Puppets Against Pollution
Earth Council Condemns Incinerator
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Some 200 local residents turned out to show their opposition to the Detroit incinerator and the ongoing destruction of planetary life systems in early June. Following a dormant phase, this demonstration did much to clear away a pall hanging over our community since the incinerator restarted in 1990 and the Gulf War damaged our spirit.
Feb 8, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pura Arcos, 1919–1995
“She never stopped thinking, questioning, and learning.”

On October 12, 1995, our community lost another elder and member of a generation of anarchist revolutionary veterans now passing into history.
Purificación Pérez Benavent (Pura Arcos), companion of FE staff member Federico Arcos, was born June 26, 1919 in Valencia, Spain. She later moved to Barcelona.
Jul 25, 2016 Read the whole text...
Bryan Tucker
Pushing on What’s Falling
Uprisings in a Crumbling Empire
Before the global pandemic and waves of insurrection, gaps in the empire’s dominion were already widening. The culture wars were escalating, tensions between older and younger generations mounting, the health care system showing its serious inadequacies, psychiatric problems becoming ubiquitous, and environmental devastation rapidly accelerating.
Sep 28, 2020 Read the whole text...
anon.
Pushing The Line
NEW YORK—The 200 garment industry executives listened attentively as the seminar speaker, with evangelical fervor, told them how their industry can be brought “kicking and screaming into the 20th Century.”
The Saturday seminar for New York-area producers, at $30 a head, was designed to show them how to use new assembly line techniques to cut costs. Workers assigned to a single task, such as sewing buttonholes, would work faster as the repetition increases their efficiency, the executives were told.
Sep 20, 2016 Read the whole text...
Allan Katzman
Pyne vs. Krassner
NEW YORK (UPS)—Paul Krassner was supposed to appear on the Joe Pyne show Sunday, July 16, but the tape was never shown. Paul had doubts that Pyne would show the tape even though his guest appearance was announced in the TV section of every paper.
As Paul tells it the producer of the show explained “If Joe don’t like it, Joe won’t show it!”
Mar 1, 2017 Read the whole text...
deLusory
Qube TV
Pushbutton 1984
“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously; any sound that Winston made, above a whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.”
— George Orwell, 1984
Jul 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Queer Anarchy
reprint of cover, FE #342, Summer 1993

“We want non-hierarchical community, the post-nuclear extended family, the circle of erotic and social realization. The ‘Movement,’ defined by an emerging les-bi-garistocracy that embraces the socio-cultural assumptions of the heteropatriarchy is not our movement. Queer anarchy loves and fucks and theorizes and shouts and fucks-shit-up in the face of queer consumerism.”
Mar 10, 2014 Read the whole text...
Sissy Sabotage
Maxeen X
Queer Anarchy Coming Out
Anarcho-faggots Demand to be De-manned: A (de) Manifesto
Once upon a time in the future, perhaps closer than we dare dream, parents do not own children. Children are exposed to a kaleidoscope of possible relationships, and grow up in a world where they witness and freely experiment in consensual, sensual acts of their choosing. Wimmin safely and comfortably fondle and lick each others’ breasts in public, and in full view of passing “families,” men suck each other’s erect fingers.
Mar 17, 2020 Read the whole text...
Jamie Heckert
Queerly Erotic: An Open Love Letter to Ursula Le Guin
Dear Ursula,
This is the first love letter I’ve written to an 80-year-old woman. Most of the people I have fallen in love with, or in lust with, have been men. And so far, all of them have been at least 30 years younger than you. Nor is this love like that I feel for my grandmothers, nearer to you in age and gender. In many ways, I feel closer to you. They have not been so forthcoming with their own stories. I suppose they’ve learned not to be, in a culture that often ignores old women. Nor have they had many chances to speak to me, nor I to listen. Unlike most in human history, my culture is carefully segregated by age. You have reminded me of this oddity in your own fragments of anarchist anthropology.
Mar 29, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Questions & Guidelines for Responses on Sex Work Article
On Page 4, Aaron Lakoff begins a discussion bearing further conversation. Letters limit: 250 words; ideas for essays should be submitted. See our contact info here.
Things to consider which will expand the discussion:
Can sex work be contained within capitalist wage work as solely another job category or does the nature of it deserve special definition and analysis?
Apr 12, 2014 Read the whole text...
Charlie Ebert
Questions we Have to Ask
Planning Living Spaces for a Revolutionary Future
Over the past year, on the streets of Santiago, I witnessed a movement that has transformed my perspective on anarchism coming to Chile shortly after its revolt began.
Officially a response to a minor hike in the metro fare, the popular wave of rebellion was, in reality, the result of fifteen years of revolutionary ferment.
Oct 22, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Race, Class & Crime in the U.S.
The Goetz case
Before the Bernhard Goetz subway shooting recedes completely from social memory, perhaps a few words can be said about what it suggests regarding race, class and crime in this country.
Goetz, as it will be remembered, was acquitted in mid-June of attempting to murder four black youths he shot who had confronted him, asking for money, on a New York City subway. Although never directly threatened by the four, Goetz testified: “My intention was to murder them, hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible.” He saw the four ghetto youths as intent on robbing him, an experience he had traumatically suffered once before. Four of the bullets he fired hit the young men, leaving one permanently paralyzed and brain damaged.
Feb 9, 2018 Read the whole text...
Cara Hoffman
Rachel Pollack is Willing to Change Everything
Rachel Pollack is the author of six novels, two collections of short stories, and 21 works of nonfiction, including the classic 78 Degrees of Wisdom, one of the most important contemporary guides to interpreting the tarot. She is the recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Unquenchable Fire and the World Fantasy Award for Godmother Night.
May 15, 2014 Read the whole text...
Carol Schmidt
Racism at Macomb
Trustees of Macomb County Community College are considering a policy change which would effectively eliminate most of its black enrollment by phasing out non-residents of Macomb County.
Students for a Democratic Society are protesting the proposed change, and have issued a demand “that all students be granted equal opportunity to register and that no limit be placed on the amount of non-residents enrolled at Macomb,” threatening possible student action if the demand is not met.
Sep 3, 2021 Read the whole text...
Violent Illegal Party
Racist Rampage Rips Boston
Race war has become a distinct possibility in Boston. Over thirty people have already been hospitalized from racial confrontations since the so-called “Procession Against Violence” called by Mayor Kevin White took place on April 23.
What is happening is the culmination of a series of events that have escalated with mounting fury over the last few months. White racist mobs are becoming more brazen and aggressive. On April 15 an anti-bussing lynch mob assaulted black attorney Theodore Landsmark outside city hall with an all too appropriate weapon--a flag pole draped with an American flag. The police stood by.
Dec 29, 2014 Read the whole text...
Hugo Hill
Racist Red Cross
SAIGON (LNS)—Have you ever wondered why the North Vietnamese government doesn’t permit the International Red Cross to inspect its prison camps?
The official reason is that there is no declared war in Vietnam and that captured American pilots, therefore, are not prisoners-of-war (POWs), but criminals under the jurisdiction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Jul 16, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Racist Slayings Hit South End
Free Press Distorts Dearborn Attacks
Billowing smoke pours from the stacks that surround the huge water tower on the edge of the Rouge River. A too-familiar blue and white emblem proclaims the domination of the area by Ford Motor Company’s massive Rouge Plant complex, once the largest industrial plant in the world.
East of the railroad tracks that cross Dix Road, UAW Local 600 faces a strip of small stores and coffee houses. On a weekday afternoon, sometime between the changeover of a factory’s day and afternoon shifts, groups of men gather along the street. Dark complexions and painted shop signs are the only indications of the largest Arab Muslim community in the U.S., located in the shadow of the Rouge Plant in the South End of Dearborn.
Jan 24, 2016 Read the whole text...
Lord Willin
Rack of Enchantment
The Not-So-Secret of Mardi Gras
It’s 7 a.m. on Fat Tuesday, the final and peak day of New Orleans carnival. I’m up, or waking up, drinking my first bloody mary of the day, hot glue gun in hand sticking dozens of oversized fake chrysanthemums to my cape in the last calm minutes before the madness resumes.
I’ve had a few hours sleep since last night’s event, the coronation ball of the brilliant Krewe du Poux (yeah, that’s “poo”), where my group appeared wearing tall conical hats made to look like piles of shit with flies buzzing around them. We scavenged the hats from the trash of a major parade, then repainted and adorned them for our purposes at the last minute. The Poux party was a real circus, featuring a midway of homemade carnival games and a raucous shopping cart smash-up derby followed by a parade through the neighborhood. I barely made it there because I’d been in bed all day recovering from my own krewe’s parade and the afterparty where I alternated bartending and dancing until 4 a.m.
Jul 1, 2014 Read the whole text...
Egg Syntax
Radym
Radical books for kids
Learning anarchy
We’re certain that most anarchists can remember at least one book that first introduced them to anti-authoritarianism, political engagement, gender-role-bending, or other topics of lasting importance. But such books are hard to find amid the morass of boring, mainstream kid-lit that reinforces the same capitalist and authoritarian values which are fed to adults (can you say “Disney”?). Here, then, we present a highly subjective and idiosyncratic guide to some of the best work out there. Undoubtedly, we’ve left off your favorite author; we’re sorry, and we meant to check with you before we wrote this, but there are thousands of great children’s books out there, and our guide could easily have taken up the whole of this issue if we’d let it. Our selection is ordered, loosely, by age of target reader.
Jun 7, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Radical Calendar 2003
Please send calendar events to the Fifth Estate keeping in mind our quarterly schedule. We are especially interested in events for the Spring and Summer of ’03 to be published in our next edition.
fifthestatenewspaper@yahoo.com
PO Box 6
Liberty, TN 37095
December 21—(Winter Solstice) Everywhere. You are invited to join a national mobilization of creative, autonomous local acts of resistance to the war at shopping malls around the country on the last Saturday before Xmas. We encourage invasion of shopping malls across the country to disallow business as usual and tell consumers, “Stop the buying! Stop the dying!” For more info: tcap@mutualaid.org
Jun 19, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Radical Calendar for 2005
See page 100 for the Fifth Estate “Revolution Everywhere” schedule.
Throughout 2005--The IWW Centenary (1905–2005)
The IWW will be celebrating its first complete century. There are events happening all year throughout the world. Info: centenary@iww.org, 215--222-1905, PO Box 13476, Philadelphia, PA 19101, www.iww.org/projects/centenary
Mar 17, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fran Shor
Radical Dissent Squashed During War
a review of
Free Speech & the Suppression of Dissent During World War I by Eric T. Chester. Monthly Review Press 2021
The focus of Eric Chester’s incisive study is the clash between the state and its dissenting citizens during the time of war. While based on a fundamental belief in the absolute right of free speech, Chester’s book navigates the ways that the government of President Woodrow Wilson imperiled and suppressed free speech during World War I.
Dec 5, 2021 Read the whole text...
Dena Clamage
Radical Filmmakers in Detroit
On the night of July 3 the staccato of machine-gun fire rang out across the Jeffries Housing Project bordering on the Lodge Freeway. The sound was accompanied by the appearance of flickering letters on the wall of one of the high-rise concentration camps spelling out the name: NEWSREEL.
The sound and the letters are the trademark of Newsreel, a radical filmmaking and distribution organization which had an outdoor film showing at the housing project.
Apr 23, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Radicalize Earth Day
Profits Rise, Nature Dies
As can be seen in this issue’s “Revolution Against the Megamachine” and past Fifth Estate articles, we support the environmental movement becoming a revolutionary movement. Only through such a transformation can it begin to adequately challenge the ecological and social relationships which threaten this planet. To that end, we endorse the idea of radicalizing the 20th anniversary of Earth Week scheduled for April 16 to 22, 1990. The attempt to fashion it as a domesticated spectacle has already begun with every hack politician, mainstream institution and even notorious polluters declaring allegiance to the 1990s as the “Environmental Decade,” all the while planning business as usual. These fakes are preparing to make it a week of festivities celebrating “concern” for the earth and the system’s ability to fix its problems.
Jan 27, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Radio Crazies Plague Police
One of the more astonishing and bizarre developments in the ever-increasing confrontations between revolutionary and establishment elements in our society was leaked to this paper.
A member of the Federal Communications Commission sympathetic to the struggle of today’s youth against their senile oppressors, revealed the incredible and even hilarious details of a hitherto suppressed report circulated in only the highest, innermost governmental circles.
Apr 21, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Radio Libertaire Back on Air After Police Raid

—photo F. Arcos
Shouts of joy greeted the sounds of Radio Libertaire’s return to the airwaves Sept. 3 after having been shut down by a police raid six days previously.
At 5:45 am on Sunday morning, Aug. 28, the Paris premises of the anarchist radio station, Radio Libertaire, were broken into by police, the equipment trashed, the broadcasters arrested and kicked. The forces of “law and order” were experienced at this work, having silenced fourteen other “free” radio stations the previous weekend.
Dec 24, 2019 Read the whole text...
Ron Loeb
Radio Rapper After SDS
“Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) foment disruption on campuses around the country, and contribute nothing to Wayne State University.”
The pontificating prose belongs to J.J. Scott, WTAK (1090-AM) announcer. His apparent vendetta has one main objective: to rid Wayne’s campus of SDS by September.
Mar 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Gloria Larry House
Rafael Viera
An interview
Editors’ Note: The following interview with Rafael Viera took place at a conference of the Republic of New Africa which was held in Washington, D.C. recently. Viera is awaiting trial on second-degree murder charges stemming from the fatal shooting of Patrolman Michael J. Czapski outside the New Bethel Baptist Church, last March 29.
Jul 9, 2019 Read the whole text...
Roland Young
Rafael Viera on the Young Lords
The following article is a reprint of an interview with Rafael Viera, Chief Medical Cadre of the Young Lords Organization (YLO), that first appeared in the Black Panther Newspaper. Viera is one of three men that were indicted following the New Bethel incident here in Detroit last March. At that time Viera was the only non-black member of the Black Legion, a paramilitary arm of the Republic of New Africa. He, along with Clarence Fuller, is to face trial on March 9 here in Detroit. Alfred Hibbitt, the third individual indicted, was acquitted on December 22 (see the Fifth Estate Jan. 22—Feb. 4, Vol. 4, No. 19). Viera is charged with assault with intent to kill and will be defended by Milton Henry, Ken Cockerel, and Chuck Ravitz. He is currently in New York City working in Spanish Harlem to maintain a recently established chapter of the YLO.
Dec 15, 2023 Read the whole text...
John Clark
Raging Against the Machine
...at the Dawn of the Anthropocene
a review of
Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard by Peter Linebaugh. University of California Press, 2019
The title of this fascinating and inspiring work comes from visionary poet William Blake (1757–1827). In one of his most memorable passages, Blake writes that “They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up, / And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,/ And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning/ Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.”
Feb 9, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Raid on L.A. SNCC Office
Everybody knows what the cops and the National Guard are supposed to do during a “civil disturbance,” right?
They are supposed to stop Black people from looting, burning, and killing. The only problem with this formulation is that these guardians of law and order usually involve themselves in the very activities they are supposed to be suppressing.
Jan 4, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Raid Victims Bound Over For Trial
All those charged by police in the January 4th “Great Reefer Raid” have by now been arraigned and examined and, with one exception, bound over for trial in Detroit Recorder’s Court. The exception is Magdelene Sinclair, charged with possession of marijuana, whose March 14th examination was continued until March 31st.
May 18, 2025 Read the whole text...
Joel Kohut
Raid Victims Hit Back at Cops
Robert Buckeye, Wayne State University English instructor, falsely arrested along with his wife, Nancy, during the January 24 “narcotics” raid while visiting the home of one of his ex-students, is filing suit against the City of Detroit, Ray Girardin and six policemen.
The suit, based on personal damages suffered by Buckeye both to his person as well as his academic career, was filed last week by Attorney Albert Best, and asks for $350,000 damages.
May 9, 2025 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
“Raid” Victims to Meet
There will be a meeting of the people who were illegally arrested and detained in the January 24th “great marijuana raids” to discuss the possibilities of bringing suit against the Detroit Police Department for violation of their civil rights.
Attorney Dennis James will address the group and will answer questions about the legal problems involved. All those arrested who wish to look into this matter are urged to attend. The meeting will be held at the Artists’ Workshop, 4857 John Lodge, at 8:00 p.m. Monday, February 20, and will be sponsored by the 24th of January Movement. People desiring more information can call the chairman of the subcommittee, Rita Cole, at 358–0425.
Apr 12, 2025 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Railroaded
FORT DIX, N.J. (LNS)—Pfc. William Brakefield has been found guilty of rioting at the stockade here last June and sentenced to three years at hard labor.
Newsmen and spectators looked at each other with surprise when the verdict came in. Having failed to come up with any substantial evidence that Brakefield had taken part in the rebellion in which 150 GIs tore up their cell blocks, throwing footlockers through the windows and setting mattresses aflame, the prosecutor claimed that given the stockade conditions it was “unbelievable” that Brakefield would not have rebelled.
Jun 15, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Rainforest Action
Not content to sit by while the Central American rainforests are being bulldozed and burned for cattle grazing land to provide beef for fast food greaseburgers, fifty students and faculty from Macomb County College picketed the Burger King at 23 Mile Road and Van Dyke on June 29th in protest.
The group also plans to participate in World Rainforest Week, September 7 through 13, which has targeted the garbage-food chain for international protest demonstrations. The Detroit-based Earth Community, 19731 Forrer, Detroit, MI 48235, (313) 493–0543, has called for a “picket and boycott (of) every Burger King in the country.” Contact Rainforest Action Network, 300 Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, for events in other areas.
Feb 9, 2018
Beth Frage
Ramblings of a Narcissist
Every once in a while you run into one of those books or pieces of music or art, that no matter what its faults, force you to see your life from an entirely different perspective. Lasch wrote a couple of books that did that for me, even though I was left with a distinct distaste for his oversimplified Calvinistic judgments. Not that it wouldn’t be nice at times to stand on the mountain with god and write down the ten, and then hold them like a thunderbolt inside to ride through life’s uncertainties, but even if life may have been easier with Jehovah’s words inside you, that just isn’t where it’s at nowadays, and I don’t think many of us really regret that.
Nov 1, 2016 Read the whole text...
John Sinclair
R&R Crusader
Out of a crop of albums these stand out for one reason or another:
PINK FLOYD: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Tower 5093). The Pink Floyd has enjoyed in London roughly the same position as the MC5 holds here: the Floyd made itself known through working at the weekly UFO dance/ concerts at the Roundhouse, under the sponsorship of the London UPS paper, the International Times.
Jan 17, 2023 Read the whole text...
Dennis Raymond
Raymond dumps on film reviewers
Just how do you go about opening a good movie in this town without getting jumped on? Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf is the best film to appear in Detroit since his earlier Persona, yet by the time you read this, it will probably have already left the Studio North Theatre.
The mechanics of film distribution is often a complicated and unfair process: The survival of a small specialized film—Alain Resnais’ classic La Guerre Est Finie, for instance—depends entirely on the support of local critics. Hard-core Resnais buffs can fill a small theatre for maybe four nights, but after that, the film is on its own, La Guerre Est Finie opened in Detroit during the newspaper strike and, despite the rigorous attempts of the distributor and exhibitor to save it, it barely stayed above water for two weeks. If a Resnais film results in financial loss, will that same exhibitor be willing to risk playing any future films by Resnais? We can only hope and pray.
Apr 2, 2021 Read the whole text...
Kerry Mogg
Reaction to the Calgary Oil Congress Protests
They evacuated the Cows
Environmental activists, anarchists, and other concerned individuals began organizing against the June 2000 meeting of the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, six months in advance of the event.
The Congress, founded in 1933, is composed of such oil producing nations as the U.S., Canada, Croatia, Indonesia Kuwait Nigeria and Libya. Its focus is industry issues, such as down-playing global warming.
Mar 22, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Read All About It!
“Read All About It!” for this issue consists of those papers put out by and for GIs.
It should be obvious from the number of papers existing, especially the ones from army bases, that the opposition within the armed services to the war and to the military has become increasingly visible in the last six months or so.
Aug 22, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Read All About It!
A woman wrote in recently and asked for the addresses of several radical and underground papers. This made us realize that our paper may be the only one of its kind that is known to many of our readers.
Since Liberation News Service just mailed us a complete list of all such papers known to them to be currently operating, we thought we could pass some of the information about them along to you.
Aug 13, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Readers’ Ads
We rarely receive enough readers’ ads to warrant grouping them in a column, but we are always glad to assist our readers in communicating with one another.
The Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest nonsectarian publisher of socialist and labor literature, is putting together a compendium entitled Who’s Who in U.S. Prisons: 1984. The book will gather short sketches of those imprisoned for labor, feminist, environmentalist, anti-racist, peace, anti-imperialist and other such activities. It will also include persons whose offenses are not strictly political but who are victims of racist, sexist and anti-gay prosecutions. The Kerr Co. asks defense committees and civil liberties organizations, as well as prisoners themselves, to write Charles H. Kerr Co., 1740 Greenleaf Ave., Suite 7, Chicago IL 60626 with information on such cases.
Jan 9, 2020 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Readers Comment on Recent Bombings
The following two letters were received prior to the arrest of the Vancouver 5 (see story on next page) and raise again the question of revolutionary violence and terrorism debated so many times previously in these pages. The debate has engaged the anarchist and libertarian movement since its inception and we welcome further comments on the subject.
Jun 30, 2015 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Readers dispute FE on Nuclear Freeze issue
Dear Fifth Estate,
Thank you for your criticisms of the Freeze campaign [FE #309, June 19, 1982]. I agree wholeheartedly that the Freeze is not enough. The Freeze is just a first step, it is a talking point. Whatever its limitations, it has engaged the interest of millions of people in the subject of nuclear terror, and it has helped people start to think about the issue.
Jun 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Peter Lippman
Readers respond (I)
While Yugoslavia Burned, the Left Looked the Other Way
Editors’ note: In the following pages, we feature two essays by readers. The first is Peter Lippman’s “While Yugoslavia Burned the Left Looked the Other Way,” a response to Bob Myers’ “Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia” (published in FE #356, Spring 2002).
Second, we’re printing “Marcos: The Zapatistas’ Unknown Icon” by a subscriber in England. Written last year, this piece may appear dated, but those of us who read it found it inspiring. From time to time, we hope to feature more writing by our readers—when space allows it and the quality of your work demands it.
May 9, 2021 Read the whole text...
Naomi Klein
Readers respond (II)
Marcos: The Zapatistas’ Unknown Icon
“We do not want others, more or less of the right, center or left, to decide for us. We want to participate directly in the decisions which concern us, to control those who govern us, without regard to their political affiliation, and oblige them to “rule by obeying.” We do not struggle to take power, we struggle for democracy, liberty, and justice. Our political proposal is the most radical in Mexico (perhaps in the world, but it is still too soon to say). It is so radical that all the traditional political spectrum (right, center left and those of one or the other extreme) criticize us and walk away from our delirium.
May 9, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Reader Takes LSD, Then His Physical
I had this idea the other day that it would be cool and utilitarian at the same time to ‘drop’ 250 micrograms of acid just before going to take my army physical. I would just take enough to get a mellow and unreachable high so I would be convincing when I copped out as a dope addict-nut, etc.
The physical was due to start at 7:00 o’clock a.m. I stumbled in at 7:45 just after popping the acid. At 8:30 the tests were just beginning and I was pissed because I figures the stuff was not going to work.
Oct 22, 2022 Read the whole text...
Unruhlee
Reading “Letters of Insurgents” 34 Years After its Publication
A Radical Classic is Igniting Discussion Again

As we go to press in late June, we are receiving reports of discussion groups formed around the country, in person and in on-line blogs, that are reading Fredy Perlman’s 1976 historical novel, Letters of Insurgents, published by Detroit’s Black & Red.
Feb 11, 2014 Read the whole text...
Peter Werbe
Reading Marx
Won’t do it!
a review of
How to Read Marx’s Capital: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters by Michael Heinrich. Translated by Alexander Locasio. Monthly Review Press 2022
My interest in reading this tome is so minuscule that I haven’t even opened it. The title is off-putting enough.
The question never asked is why would anyone want to read the arcana of the inner workings of Capital’s political economy? And, perhaps, who would want to?
Feb 5, 2023 Read the whole text...
Geoff Hall
Reading Nikolay Vavilov
A Soviet agronomist travels the world to help end famine and ironically dies of starvation in Stalin’s prison

“It seemed that We had finally passed this very difficult trail so that we could mount the horses and continue on. But suddenly from the Cliff above the trail, two gigantic eagles flew out from a nest, circling on enormous wings. My Horse shied and bolted, galloping along the trail and the ovring. The rein was unexpectedly torn out of my hand and I had to hang on to the mane.
Apr 25, 2014 Read the whole text...
Tamas Panitz
Read to Kill
Based on contraband, based on stealing fire, based on the thrill of nothingness I could consider paying taxes if reading is all you want and maybe a little tidying up. But as it is each night a new piece of shit falls from the hole in the sky. The vast arms that encircle us with their discontinuities remain unable to reach me aside from the occasional caress.
Jul 16, 2023 Read the whole text...
Howard A. Husock
Real Blues in Ann Arbor
Within the past year, America has suddenly found time to experience something called the “rebirth of the blues.” On magazine covers, in underground journals, in popular music—the blues.
Blues has surfaced into the popular culture. It has surfaced not from the so-called underground or “hip” subculture but from an underground far deeper—the black culture. For blues, the only purely native American music, ironically was spawned and nurtured by a man often considered as less than an American, the black man.
Apr 23, 2019 Read the whole text...
Jack Bratich
Reality Wars
Notes on the homicidal state
It is required now to bemoan the fact that the current US President is both a producer and product of Reality TV. Indeed, “reality,” “realty,” and “royalty” are all linked etymologically.
The real-estate tycoon, then, Reality TV boss, now completes the triumvirate by taking on a state executive role by treating it as his own monarchical sovereign seat. Instead of addressing this by seeking to reestablish correspondence-based truth via facts), we would be better off seeing reality as a terrain filled with metamorphosis machines, with subjectivities made and destroyed. We can begin an account of these reality wars by assessing the menagerie of alt-right and neo-fascist street actors emboldened by his victory.
Dec 26, 2017 Read the whole text...
Eric Laursen
Rebel Friendships
What makes a social movement?
Social movements, not establishment reformers, have nurtured and propelled the most important liberatory struggles of the last half-century, from the Civil Rights and Gay Rights struggles to the Feminist Movement to Native American nations recent uprisings against fracking and pipelines.
Social movements create collective engagement, pockets of resistance that “reframe a politics of everyday life,” as activist and academic Ben Shepard writes in his recent book, Rebel Friendships: “Outsider” Networks and Social Movements (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), even as they gather support and ignite overwhelming demands for change.
Jan 19, 2017 Read the whole text...
Hank Malone
Rebellion in Nowhere
Rioting by 250 Black youths, says a UPI dispatch dated March 23, 1969, brought 200 police from 10 communities to the 20,000-student campus at Northern Illinois University at DeKalb.
Windows were smashed in the campus police station, library, university center, and a women’s dormitory. Two trucks and two cars were vandalized. Damage was estimated at several thousand dollars. There were no arrests.
May 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Muriel Lucas
Rebellion in Patagonia
A classic anarchist film still relevant today
“La Patagonia rebelde”
Director: Hector Olivera
110 min. (1974)
The death of Argentine anarchist author and activist Osvaldo Bayer on December 24, 2018 came at a time of renewed interest in his long career. Recent translations of two of his works, The Anarchist Expropriators and Rebellion in Patagonia, were published by AK Press in 2016.
May 17, 2019 Read the whole text...
Paul Walker (Peter Werbe)
Rebellions Rock the World
But, is there still a vision of revolution?

In the latter half of 2019, the streets of Hong Kong, Santiago, Barcelona, Baghdad, London, Paris, and Beirut were flooded with huge demonstrations demanding reforms or the removal of politicians.
All displayed the outward exuberance of mass revolutionary upsurges, but generally raised only demands for fair governance rather than revolutionary alterations of the countries in which they are occurring.
Feb 24, 2020 Read the whole text...
George Bradford (David Watson)
Rebel Violence
Book review
a review of
Rebel Violence v. Hierarchical Violence: A Chronology of Anti-State Violence on the U.K. Mainland, July 1985-May 1986, B. M. Combustion, London WC1N 3XX
“Dangerous times,” reads one of the many fascinating newspaper clippings in this pamphlet produced by the same people who gave us Like A Summer With a Thousand Julys, The End of Music, and Miner Conflicts, Major Contradictions. Dangerous indeed, but heady, exciting times, as well, as the chronology demonstrates. A few examples of rebel violence will suffice to give a glimpse:
Nov 3, 2020 Read the whole text...
Tomas MacSheoin
Recent Books on Genetic Engineering
On 28th September last, a group of unknown people approached a field in County Carlow, Ireland, with malicious intent. They proceeded to tear apart an acre of sugar beets’ then disappeared back into the night from which they came.
The field was the property of Teagasc, a semi-state agricultural research organization. The catchily-branded Roundup Ready Sugar Beet that was destroyed had grown from seed provided by the U.S. multinational, Monsanto (See p. 2). The sabotage was claimed by the Gaelic Earth Liberation Front.
Feb 8, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Recent Deaths
Peter Puccio, Ahrne Thorne, Marcus Graham, Pete Kwant
This issue of the FE is dedicated to our friend and comrade Peter Puccio, who recently succumbed to time and illness. For us, Pete represented not only a direct contact with the anarchist movement at a time in the 1970s when we were arriving independently at similar conclusions, but also a direct link to older radical libertarians and their traditions. We’ll miss him sorely.
Oct 16, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Recently paroled MOVE9 political prisoners

Recently paroled MOVE9 political prisoners Debbie and Michael Africa, and their son Michael Africa Jr., delivering the keynote talk at the 2019 Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) Convergence in Gainesville, Fla, in June.
After surviving a police siege on their Philadelphia home and forty years in prison on frame-up charges, Mike and Debbie were released from prison in 2018. They were imprisoned along with seven other members of MOVE, a revolutionary environmental Black liberation organization, in 1978.
Apr 25, 2020 Read the whole text...
Dogbane Campion (David Watson)
Recent Poetry
“Cue cards off the Devil’s sleeve”: Recent Poetry
We were pleased to see number 1 of Seditious Delicious (PO Box 6981, New York NY 10150), an openly anti-authoritarian (antiauthor-itarian, too?) poetry magazine. As in all poetry journals, be they little self-published magazines or fancy, established publications, you can find the usual mix from poems so bad they make you wince, to spirited and even thrilling songs. Here I even appreciated the stuff I thought bad, since in contrast to the self-serving gunk found in so many small reviews, even the failed attempts in SD often reveal good instincts, if only with a cracked voice. (Anyway, what is “good” and “bad” is ultimately a question for archeologists; if you feel the beat, dance.)
Aug 20, 2020 Read the whole text...
Dave Not Bombs
Recipe for Change
a review of
Hungry for Peace: How you can help end poverty and war with Food Not Bombs by Keith McHenry. See Sharp Press, Tucson, 2012, 180 pp., $18.95
Even after three decades of Food Not Bombs (FNB) volunteers sharing meals, smiles and good times with anyone who happens to pass by, the authorities still don’t seem very inclined to give members of the direct action anti-hunger group their proper respect.
Jun 26, 2013 Read the whole text...
Egg Syntax
John Brinker
Recipes for Disaster
an anarchist cookbook
a review of
Recipes For Disaster, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, Olympia WA 624 pages $12.00. Available from the Barn: see page 98
It seemed that every time we dropped by Bound Together Books in San Francisco, the same situation unfolded. Some teenager getting the punk rock starter kit together (first mohawk, chain wallet, and Doc Marten’s bought with the parents’ credit card) would show up looking for The Anarchist Cookbook. The counterperson, with a weary sigh, would place on the counter a worn copy of the dubious classic and open to a dog-eared page. “See this bomb recipe?” she/he would say. “You’ll blow yourself up if you do what this book says. That’s not what anarchism is about.” The kid would leave clutching a couple of cheap pamphlets on Kropotkin, never to be seen again.
Mar 16, 2014 Read the whole text...
anon.
Reclaiming our Bodies
What Direction Contraception?
Unlike any other living organism on the planet, women are confronted by their bodies. A woman’s biologic reproductive capacity functions inexorably until old age renders it obsolete; until that time they are faced with the possibility of pregnancy. But it is the very cognizance of the relationship between intercourse and childbearing that makes woman’s situation unique: reason presupposes some measure of choice over whether a woman will bear children or not.
Dec 30, 2015 Read the whole text...
Gustavo Esteva
Reclaiming our Freedom to Learn
The Universidad de la Tierra
They came from villages and barrios as naive refuseniks, mostly indigenous, who were fed up with the classroom. They came with curiosity, rather than conviction. They had heard about Universidad de la Tierra from friends or acquaintances and decided to give it a try. The cost of the whole adventure is ridiculously low, almost irrelevant.
Jun 9, 2016 Read the whole text...
Wildroots Collective
Reconsidering Primitivism
Technology and the Wild
This issue’s theme opens up a universe of vigorous discussion and argument. All three concepts invoked by the title can be defined differently, depending on contexts, philosophies, ideologies, and world-views. The subject of technology often raises emotional responses as we grapple with our dependence on complex industrial systems that we don’t understand or control for survival.
Jul 14, 2016 Read the whole text...
Sam Stark
Recorders Court Jury Fraud Exposed
Accused persons in Detroit Recorder’s Court have been tried and, in many cases, found guilty by juries of which Blacks, other minority group members, Southern-born, foreign-born, working-class people, ADC mothers, students, bearded males, and persons convicted of moving traffic violations have been systematically and discriminatorily excluded from serving on.
Oct 18, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Recruitment
Military pushes poverty draft
Prosecution of some fifty-five known resisters of draft registration was to begin in June. However, in an effort to avoid student protests and demonstrations, the government has decided to postpone prosecution until later in the summer. Also, according to an article in the Detroit Free Press (5/20/82), a recent Defense Department document has revealed that the administration, obviously intimidated by the anti-nuclear war movement, fears that litigation against these resisters will further stimulate that movement. When questioned about this document, the White House press secretary responded that the government’s policy is still registration, not prosecution.
Mar 11, 2019 Read the whole text...
Bert Wirkes-Butuar (Peter Werbe)
Recycling & Liberal Reform
Earth Day supplement page 3
It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.
Aug 17, 2019 Read the whole text...
Bert Wirkes-Butuar (Peter Werbe)
Recycling & Liberal Reform
It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.
Jan 29, 2018 Read the whole text...
Bert Wirkes-Butuar (Peter Werbe)
Recycling & Liberal Reform
reprint from FE #334, Summer 1990
On the one hand, fighting solely for reforms has historically had the function of affirming and extending the system’s power; while on the other, waiting only for the final revolutionary conflagration can dictate an isolated existence confined to issuing angry tracts denouncing everything.
When recycling becomes a permanent feature of the economy, it will probably be utilized mainly as a technique to deal with a significant portion of urban garbage, but in itself won’t stop the destruction of the natural world. All the recycling efforts in the country can’t stop the clear-cut logging of the remaining old-growth forests of the US Northwest when a conglomerate which bought out a logging firm with junk bonds needs quick cash to meet its debt service.
Feb 21, 2014 Read the whole text...
D.M. Borts
Recycling & Reforms?
We Want A Revolution!
Unlike the Green backsliding politicians denounced by Saral Sarkar in the adjoining article, no party in the U.S. has ever taken a principled stand on ecological issues. Even groups willing to make an effort to reform capital’s and technology’s worst abuses are few and far between. This absence causes a dilemma for radicals.
Mar 19, 2020 Read the whole text...
Bill Weinberg
Red-Brown Politics
Anarchists Must Not Take the Bait
Fascists are seeking to exploit and co-opt anti-war forces in the US, and build support for war criminals like Assad and Putin. Anarchists have a responsibility to reject such overtures and offer solidarity to those resisting in Syria.
Following the chemical gas attack on the rebel-held Syrian city of Douma in April, Trump staged retaliatory air-strikes, and a protest against the U.S. military actions was held in Los Angeles.
Aug 24, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Red Flag Sale
Last winter at a Draft Conference held in Central Methodist Church in downtown Detroit a Soviet flag was hurled at the speaker’s platform by Don Lobsinger, head of Breakthrough, a local kook group.
Despite the urgings of some draft resisters that the left join the right in stamping on “that dirty revisionist flag” it was rescued and remains intact. The flag is a beautiful revolutionary red with a gold hammer and sickle in the corner. It is a full five feet by three feet in dimension.
Mar 1, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Red Flag Sold
The Draft Resistance sold its Red Flag, but didn’t make one hell of a big profit. $5 to be exact. Maybe people thought it was contaminated by its previous owner.
Incidentally, there was a bad typo in the article offering the flag for sale (FE #37, 1–15, 1967). The story read “the left join the right in stamping that dirty visionist (sic) flag.” The word should have been revisionist. Big deal.
Mar 4, 2017
Franklin Rosemont
Red In More Ways Than One
Carlos Cortez and the Native American/Wobbly Connection
Throughout U.S. history, the lives and struggles of Native Americans have been disregarded and disdained by the white, middle-class, christian, capitalist, Nature-despising national Establishment. Sadly, the disregarders and disdainers also included the great majority of socialists, communists, anarchists, trade-unionists and others who considered themselves critics and opponents of that Establishment.
Jun 8, 2015 Read the whole text...
Paul J. Comeau
Redrawing The Line
The Anarchist Writings of Paul Goodman

a review of
Drawing The Line Once Again: Paul Goodman’s Anarchist Writings, PM Press, 2010, 122 pages, trade paperback, $14.95
While relatively unknown today, Paul Goodman was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. In books like Growing Up Absurd, published in 1960, Goodman captured the zeitgeist of his era, catapulting himself to the forefront of American intellectual life as one of the leading dissident thinkers inspiring the burgeoning New Left.
Oct 15, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Red Squad Files to be Opened
The law suit seeking to stop Detroit and State Police political spy units and open up secret police files may be drawing to its final stages. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge James Montante has appointed liberal Detroit attorney Arthur Tarnow as a monitor for releasing the files after determining the best procedure “at a reasonable cost to the city and state.”
Jan 3, 2016 Read the whole text...
R.W. Scott
Red Star over Northland
Crossword puzzle
Once upon a time there was a large shopping center in a Land to the North, and a plastic store called (1 across). For many weeks long-haired freeks and greasers had hung around with nothing to do but laugh at (1 down) shoppers and hassle pigs.
Kind of a bogue life, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do.
Jun 12, 2023 Read the whole text...
Kelpie Wilson
Redwood Summer
Anatomy of an Action
Redwood Summer was modeled after the “Mississippi Summer” of the civil rights movement. The conditions were similar to those of Mississippi in 1964. African-American victims of the system needed outside intervention to advocate for them in hostile territory. In Northern California in 1990, it was Redwood ecosystems that needed help.
Aug 24, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Re-Enchantment of the World
Theme intro

Our call for the re-enchantment of the world isn’t a collapse into New Age dreaming, but rather a different, or perhaps more accurate description of what this publication has always stood for—revolution against capitalism, the state, patriarchy, and the forms of misery they generate.
Aug 8, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Solnit
Reflections on Copenhagen and the Cycle of Movements
Ten Years After Seattle WTO
David Solnit is the co-author, with his sister Rebecca Solnit and Chris Dixon, of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press), the editor of Globalize Liberation; and the co-author, with Aimee Allison, of Army of None.

On November 30, 2009, the World Trade Organization (WTO) met in Geneva, ten years to the day of the shutdown of the WTO in the streets of Seattle, still reeling from a decade of global organizing and mobilizations against it. On that same day, November 30, 2009, President Obama announced orders to send 30,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan. Two weeks later, from December 7 to 18, the United Nations Copenhagen climate summit took place, paralleled by street mobilizations, mass direct actions, and counter-summits of global social movements.
Mar 25, 2014 Read the whole text...
Ericka Huggins
Reflections on Sunday
sounds that come from the soul are always the same
free
open sounds
giving
the kind that reach out
and touch—
that’s what our sisters did/minimum
touching maximum/sharing oppression
and the wish for its
removal...
feeling those sounds
seeing them felt on others
watching faces smile for the first time in months—
Sep 10, 2015 Read the whole text...
Yusuf Kataev
Refuge
I look at the man sitting before me. He is a very polite man. He is in his mid-thirties. He is meticulously dressed in a plaid shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Lying on the table in front of him are piles of papers, on which he occasionally writes notes. He is cheerful, in a very good mood. Often, he strokes his scratched hand.
Oct 6, 2014 Read the whole text...
Arundhati Roy
“Refuse the Victory Parade”
Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries. It must not acknowledge national boundaries but, if it is to succeed, it has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the US government is American civil society.
Jul 20, 2021 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
Refusing the Marketplace
“Lady
with the very modern illness
agoraphobia
but ancient as fear
in a Greek marketplace
Lady
I have seen your face
crumple and break in ecstasy
of terror of horror of being
alive in the sewer world
feeling alien thoughts beating
at your mind an office desk
protruding from one ear
a subway train from the other
bells clanging gongs shouting
while you’re washing the dishes
terror
of the market place
and falling
falling into that white place
without shadows
where the rivers are milk
and Lethe dreams
and nothingness has no horizon...”
Nov 12, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Rehearse for the Apocalypse
Reprinted from The Seed / UPS
YES FOLKS! NOW YOU CAN BE THE FIRST ON YOUR BLOCK TO EXPERIENCE THE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER.
WHY WAIT TILL 1980? DON’T LET THE FUTURE TAKE YOU BY SURPRISE.
PREPARE NOW FOR THE END OF CIVILIZATION.
REHEARSE FOR THE APOCALYPSE.
HERE ARE A FEW SUGGESTIONS:
Better start preparing your palette and stomach for the fare of the ‘80s:
Jul 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Lowell Boileau
Religion: Aztec Style
“The Destruction of the Fifth Sun” is an allegory of justice based on the apocalyptic Aztec vision of the same name whereby the world and humanity ends in a cataclysm.
The central Mexican empire, dominant from 1300 to 1521, believed the doom could be delayed by daily ritualist human sacrifices in which the victims’ hearts were hacked from their chests by priests and the still pounding organs held aloft to the sun thereby appeasing the gods.
Feb 19, 2020 Read the whole text...
H. Read
Remaining ELF Defendants Plead Guilty
But Refuse to Snitch
A surprise plea bargain was announced at a November pre-trial hearing for four environmental activists charged with a variety of Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF) actions which had been carried out since the late 1990s. The defendants were arrested between December 2005 and February 2006, as part of the FBI’s “Operation Backfire,” which sought to cripple major ELF and ALF cells.
Mar 4, 2015 Read the whole text...
anon.
Remaining RNC 8 Defendants Accept Misdemeanor Plea Agreement
Community service sentence but no jail time
ST. PAUL, MN--The case against eight Twin Cities anarchists known as the RNC 8 came to a conclusion October 19, when the remaining four defendants pled guilty to misdemeanors resolving their legal and political battle stemming from arrests at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Last September, county prosecutors dropped all charges against RNC 8 defendants Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, and Luce Guillen-Givins. In June, RNC 8 defendant Erik Oseland entered a guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, a gross misdemeanor
Dec 25, 2013 Read the whole text...
David Watson
Remembering Federico Arcos

Federico Arcos (July 18, 1920-May 23, 2015), a lifelong anarchist, participated in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War in the 1930s, and later took part in the antifascist underground there. He immigrated to Canada in 1952, where he continued his commitment to anarchist goals. He eventually compiled an extensive archive of anarchist writings and other material.
Dec 1, 2015 Read the whole text...
Anu Bonobo
Remembering Hanon Reznikov (1950–2008)
The Living Theatre loses a mainstay

Because art breathes on in the legacy left with the living, death cannot defeat an artist. In this eternity of the permanent present, poems and plays and songs resist the tyranny of death. While this recognition hardly dulls the sting of mortality in the hearts of the bereaved when we lose a loved one, its message rings clearly today as we celebrate the life of the late Hanon Reznikov.
Aug 21, 2014 Read the whole text...
MaxZine Weinstein
Remembering Harry Hay
Harry Hay, Father of the Gay rights movement, died this October at the age of 90. Harry founded the Mattachine Society in 1950, the first gay rights organization in the United States. He was kicked out a few years later because of his Communist Party affiliation. In 1979 he co-founded the Radical Faeries, a loose-knit, anarchistic, back-to-the-land spiritual/radical/irreverent movement. We came to know him and love him through our Friendships developed at faerie gatherings.
May 23, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Clark
Remembering Helen Hill
A New Orleans community comes together after the murder of a friend and activist
On February 24, I joined a large crowd to march in a jazz funeral celebrating the life of our friend, the filmmaker and community activist, Helen Hill. Helen was murdered at her home on January 4 by an intruder whose motives remain a mystery.

Hundreds of people gathered in the Mid-City neighborhood at the home that she once shared with her husband, Paul Gailiunas, a doctor, musician, and fellow community activist, and their small child, Francis Pop.
Feb 22, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ryan Fletcher
Remembering Jen Angel, 1975–2023
The senseless death of a friend & comrade
Beloved long-time social justice activist, anarchist, and owner of the Oakland, Calif. Angel Cakes bakery, Jen Angel, died on Feb. 9. Jen passed on after three days on life support following critical injuries suffered in a robbery outside of an Oakland bank.

For over 30 years, Jen Angel was a visionary influence and pioneering participant within multiple movements and sub-cultures that significantly informed and shaped our lives.
Jul 16, 2023 Read the whole text...
David Watson
Remembering Jim Campbell
Our longtime friend and comrade Jim Campbell died suddenly last September 17 of heart failure. He was 57 years old. Jim was a mainstay of the Toronto (and larger Canadian and international) anarchist community. Though we had not been in close touch lately, we had a long political and personal relationship going back to the late 1970s, including political collaboration, correspondence, and visits in Detroit and Toronto.
Oct 14, 2014 Read the whole text...
Bill McCormick
Remembering Kent State
“People Aren’t Ready to Let May 4th Die”
When I entered Kent State University in the Fall of 1975 it was by no means a revolutionary situation I was stepping into. It is ironic, because ever since the shooting on May 4, 1970 by Ohio National Guardsmen of thirteen students, resulting in the death of four and the wounding of nine others, Kent had gained an almost worldwide reputation as being a radical campus. But when I was there in 1975 and 1976 the average member of the student body had about as much connection with what happened there just a few years earlier as they did with the man on the moon.
Dec 16, 2017 Read the whole text...
David Tighe
Remembering Peter Lamborn Wilson
Anarchist, author, Poet, scholar, & visual artist 1945- 2022
Peter Lamborn Wilson is best known for the book TAZ.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchism, Poetic Terrorism, and rightfully so. Written as Hakim Bey and first published by Autonomedia in 1991, many of the texts in TAZ had circulated for years in the ‘80s zine underground.

Drawing inspiration from the Situationists, classical anarchism, continental philosophy (Lyotard’s Driftwork, Deleuze & Guattari’s Nomadology), pirate utopias, the American communitarian tradition, and dropouts of every sort, Wilson did not invent the TAZ—he just gave it a name.
Dec 23, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Remembering Ronald Creagh

Longtime French anarchist scholar and activist Ronald Creagh died on September 8 at age 94.
He was in touch with anarchists and anti-authoritarians on several continents. Those who knew him personally appreciated his broad-minded openness and supportive spirit.
Some Fifth Estate staffers were among those who found him engaging and attentive in conversations on many subjects. In recent years he was a regular reader of our online current and past articles and enjoyed discussing them.
Dec 15, 2023 Read the whole text...
Janet
Remembering Vi Landry
1974 — 2008

“What have you done for New Orleans? What separates you from the tourists who come down here, party, maybe absorb a little culture and leave, besides the length of your stay?” Vi Landry asked me these difficult questions with her characteristic unflinching gaze as we sat in my kitchen during the spring of 2007, a year and a half after Hurricane Katrina.
Jul 3, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Remember Sacco & Vanzetti
Immigrant anarchists executed by the state 75 years ago on August 23, 1927

That we lost and have to die, does not diminish our appreciation and gratitude for your great solidarity with us and our families. Friends and Comrades, now that the tragedy of this trial is at an end, be all as of one heart. Only two of us will die. Our ideal, you our comrades, will live by millions. We have won. We are not vanquished. Just treasure our suffering, our sorrow, our mistakes, our defeats, our passion for future battles and for the great emancipation.
Be all as of one heart in this blackest hour of our tragedy. And we have heart. Salute for us all the Friends and Comrades on the earth.
We embrace you all and bid you our extreme good-bye with our hearts filled with love and affection.
Now and ever, long life to you all, long life to liberty.
Yours for life and death.
--Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Death House, August 21, 1927)
May 7, 2021 Read the whole text...
Robert Dudnick
Remember this
the next time you’re reading your Sunday New York Times
(Guardian/UPS) One of the teeth-gritting things about living in Scum City is the opportunity to be insulted by the New York Times. That is why so many more “ordinary” people read the New York Daily News. It insults you on your own terms and in your own language.
What brings this to mind is a recent article about paperback books in the Times Sunday Book Review. This is the part of the paper in which all the college professors and second-division novelists review the books written by all the other college professors and second-division novelists. It smells like the inside of a literary cocktail party.
Sep 22, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Remember: we’re still here
Support anarchist & class war prisoners
Attention prisoners!
Throughout our 25-year history, this newspaper has maintained a policy of offering free subscriptions, through a special fund provided by our readers, to those held captive by the political state—prisoners and GIs. This is not done as an act of charity or social work, but as an expression of solidarity with those suffering in two of class society’s most authoritarian and key institutions—prison and the armed forces.
Aug 16, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Remember when
you were the only one on your block opposed to the war?
There used to be a big debate within the peace movement about whether or not to call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Some thought this was too radical a demand and one that would find no acceptance with the American public.
Even today there is an organization called Negotiations Now! which considers immediate withdrawal to be an untenable position even though they are opposed to the war.
Nov 30, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Remiro Busted on Phony Escape Charge
The State of California has concocted another frame-up charge against imprisoned ex-SLA member Joseph Remiro. Already serving two life terms for murder and jail break, Joe is accused this time of plotting an escape attempt from Folsom Prison with two other prisoners.
The alleged plot came to light last June 4 (although no report was released on it until June 22) after a former associate of Remiro, Bobby Davis, handed a 9-mm pistol and 27 rounds of ammunition over to prison authorities and implicated Remiro in the alleged escape attempt.
Apr 22, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Russ Little
Remiro, Little Appeal Heard
Legal Thicket Continues for Ex-SLAers
Joe Remiro, Russ Little, Bill and Emily Harris remain prisoners of the state as a result of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) urban guerrilla activity in 1973–74. All have been sentenced to long prison terms and have been subjected to continuing harassment and abuse while in custody. (See past FEs.) The following is a report from Russ on the legal and penal status of the four and centers on a recent judicial appeal of his and Joe’s conviction for the 1973 assassination of an Oakland, Calif. school official.
Sep 15, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Renew the Earthly Paradise
reprint from FE #322, Winter/Spring, 1986
The evolution of the FE has been characterized by a willingness to reexamine all the assumptions of radical criticism, which has led it away from its earlier libertarian communist perspective toward a more critical analysis of the technological structure of civilization, and toward a criticism of the trajectory of Western civilization combined with a reappraisal of the indigenous world and the character of primitive or original communities. In this sense we are primitivists.
Feb 25, 2014 Read the whole text...
Mike Wold
“Reparations “ Theatre Review
What can repair the trauma we all suffer?

a review of
“Reparations”
Darren Canady, Playwright,
Jay O’Leary, Director
World Premiere, Sound Theatre Company, Seattle, Jan. 10, 2020
Reparations examines inherited historical trauma, whether that trauma can be healed, and, if so, how.
Apr 27, 2020 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Reply from Defense Dept.
After two months of silence the Defense Department indirectly answered a request for information sent to them by the News Editor of the FIFTH ESTATE. The inquiry, sent June 1, involved a report in the VIETNAM COURIER (published in Hanoi) that a battalion of the 1st Infantry Division had attempted to desert in the midst of battle. (See article, FIFTH ESTATE, p. 6, July 15, 1966).
Apr 10, 2023 Read the whole text...
Kathy Mulherin
Report from Algiers
(via Dock of the Bay/UPS)
-
Eldridge Cleaver is coming home within the year—maybe;
-
Kathleen Cleaver gave birth to a baby boy named after black Cuban revolutionary Antonio Maceo;
-
The Black Panther Party is setting up centers of information and propaganda distribution in Paris and other European and African centers;
-
There may be a “summit meeting” of revolutionary groups in the relatively near future, in which “The Black Panther Party will play a key role;”
-
The Chicago Headquarters of the Panther Party was attacked by police who claim they were shot at by armed Panthers. National Chairman Bobby Seale said at a recent press conference that the Chicago Panthers did not provoke attack, that since the Chicago headquarters were entirely covered with plywood it would have been impossible to shoot from the office anyway.
Jun 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Ben Johnson
Report from Korea
The cars, cabs, trucks, and buses of Seoul constitute the worst traffic I’ve ever seen. I didn’t dare jay-walk during the entire week I was there. Students know how to stop traffic though: just use, or threaten to use, Molotovs.
In late October, about two dozen delegates arrived from almost as many countries in North America, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere to attend the first International Seminar for World Peace sponsored by the Federation of Anarchists in Korea (FAK). Rather than trying to recover from severe jet-lag on our first full day in Seoul, a handful of us said to ourselves: “Hey let’s go to a university and meet some student radicals!” While some might have argued this to be a needlein-a-haystack situation, given Seoul’s population of around nine million, we figured that at least it was a good opportunity to see more of the city and less of the hotel we were collectively booked into.
Dec 19, 2020 Read the whole text...
El Libertario (Venezuela)
Report from Venezuela
Note. El Libertario, the voice of the Comision de relaciones anarquistas of Venezuela, analyzes the how and why of the increasing state repression against the growing social discontent that belies the pseudo-revolutionary discourse of the Chavez regime. See also: “In Chavez’s Venezuela” in this issue.
Feb 13, 2015 Read the whole text...
anon.
Report from W. Germany
Politics of the “Nuclear State”
The following was sent to us by a friend of the Fifth Estate living in West Germany and lays out the political implications of the “Nuclear State,” and gives a report on several mass anti-nuclear actions.

It is important to point out an aspect of the nuclear energy program which lies—independent from the deathly danger of nuclear energy—in the danger of the loss of personal freedom of each individual. Nuclear power plants do not only imply poisonous radiation, but also inevitably lead to the establishment of a totalitarian “nuclear state” and in the end to a complete control over the individual. Only in this way, argues the state, can the danger of sabotage be prevented. A recent example is the Traube case.
Sep 22, 2018 Read the whole text...
Eric Laursen
Repression & Resistance
From RNC 2000 to Trump
a review of
Crashing the Party: Legacies and Lessons from the RNC 2000 by Kris Hermes. PM Press, 2015 pmpress.org
Crashing the Party was published three years ago, but it couldn’t be more timely in the age of Trump and Sessions. Kris Hermes’s book is an in-depth account of the legal saga that began with the repression and mass arrests of activists at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.
Sep 10, 2018 Read the whole text...
F. Briest
Repression and Resistance In W. Germany
The Red Army Faction’s (RAF or Baader-Meinhof Group) initial phase of struggle (1968–72) was guided by the belief that it was possible to crack the imperialist “paper tiger” at any point through militaristic actions (the idea of creating “many Vietnams”). It was based on the perspective that the struggle would on one hand provoke a repressive reaction on the part of the State (already weakened by assassinations, bombings, etc.) thereby provoking the revolt of the “masses.”
Mar 23, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Repression Continues in Toronto
On June 13th the Toronto Metropolitan Police raided a home of several people active in producing the Bulldozer prison support paper and in supporting the Vancouver Five. Ostensibly seeking links to the Litton bombing, a series of charges were brought against the residents. Details of the raid appeared in FE #313, Summer 1983. The following is a report on recent developments.
Dec 24, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Repression Escalates on Panthers
NEW YORK—As part of a nationwide conspiracy to smash the Black Panther Party, 21 New York Panther members were arrested on charges of conspiracy April 2 in a 5 a.m. roundup.
According to New York District Attorney Frank Hogan, the arrests thwarted a Black Panther plot to blow up various parts of the city on the following day, including Macy’s, Alexander’s, Korvette’s, Bloomingdale’s and Abercrombie & Fitch. The indictment also accused the Panthers of having plotted to sabotage a section of New Haven Railroad track.
Jun 19, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Republicans, get out of town
To the left is a reproduction of a one-page broadsheet published as a Convention Extra and distributed to the delegates who it managed to shock and enrage and to Detroit residents who took it a bit better. Reprinted below is the lead story to give a flavor of the paper.
We mean it; pack your bags and leave Detroit! Take your vile political party, your cadaverous candidate, your stinking love for the state, your vicious racism, your blatant sexism, your hatred for the poor, your insane war plans, your nauseating patriotism, your putrid Christianity, your antiquated sexual morality, your contempt for the rest of the world, your millionaire officials, your middle-class sensibilities and your pathetic lack of vision and get out of our city!
Dec 24, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Republicans: Get out of Town
REPUBLICANS! We mean it: pack your bags and leave Detroit! Take your vile political party, your cadaverous candidate, your stinking love for the state, your vicious racism, your blatant sexism, your hatred for the poor, your insane war plans, your nauseating patriotism, your putrid Christianity, your antiquated sexual morality, your contempt for the rest of the world, your millionaire officials, your middle-class sensibilities and your pathetic lack of vision and get out of our city!
May 16, 2023 Read the whole text...
anon.
Resist
David Wheeler, chairman of the Draft Resistance, and Frank Joyce, National Director of People Against Racism, were recently allowed to retain their freedom from the draft for the time being.
Following an early Morning demonstration on August 19th, Wheeler received a 4-F deferment and Joyce received a 1-Y, both on political grounds.
Aug 15, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ron Halstead
Resistance
On June 19 a group of young men declared their intention to confront the draft. The ceremony, originally scheduled for St. Patrick’s Church had to be quickly rescheduled for St. Joseph’s Church when church authorities declared the meeting would not be of a suitable nature for a church setting.
Father Michael J. O’Hara of St. Patrick’s Church began his talk by denouncing the war in Vietnam. He declared that conscientious opposition to the State is part of his religious heritage. He then read the letters from the Archdiocese of Detroit which had closed St. Patrick’s to the meeting.
May 29, 2018 Read the whole text...
MaxZine Weinstein
Resistance Begins at Home
While working as a human rights activist in Guatemala, I learned some of the most profound lessons of resistance. There, I experienced some of the greatest despair imaginable and some of the greatest hope.
In the 1950s, reformers and an indigenous majority—who wanted to end hunger and virtual enslavement on fruit and coffee plantations—challenged generations of neo-colonial rule. Their pleas for freedom were met by a CIA/US corporate directed coup, a series of military dictators and a scorched earth campaign against Mayan villages. Death squads committed a notorious crime against Guatemalans, the torture and murder of desaparecidos thought to be subversives—tens of thousands have been disappeared and never heard from again. The targets: union organizers, students, human rights supporters, and anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. When people spoke out against these horrors they, too, would disappear, ensuring a frightened public would not organize effective resistance.
Jul 21, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Resistance Calendar

Glassner/Phantasm Photography
ONGOING EVENTS
Sept. 6-Nov. 26
“Soapboxers and Saboteurs: 100 Years of Wobbly Solidarity.” An exhibit highlighting materials from the Labadie Collection, one of the world’s best collections of materials documenting early IWW history.. Special Collections Library, 711 Hatcher Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109–1205. Open to the public. See October 19 for accompanying reception.
Jun 11, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Resistance Calendar
To add an event, please email johnjef@bledsoe.net
Sept 20–26—Idapalooza Fruit Jam—A Queer Music Festival in the hills of Tennessee!
www.planetida.com or planetida@planetida.com for info.
Sept 24–26—Katuah Earth First! Regional Rendezvous, Bark Camp Timber Sale, High Knob, Clinch River Watershed and Clinch Ranger District, Jefferson National Forest, south western Virginia. Contact: johnjef@bledsoe.net or call Chris at 423—633–8483 for more info.
Jun 17, 2016 Read the whole text...
Marieke Bivar
Resistance is an Intimate Art
Stories from the Middle of a Sexual Revolution
a review of
Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback Laurie Penny. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022
“This [book] is an exercise in pointing out the obvious. There is a slow-moving sea change happening in gendered power relations. It’s been building for decades now. And it has to do with economics; it has to do with imbalances and rebalances in structural violence and how power is organized and operates. And the reaction to that sexual revolution explains a great deal of modern politics.”
Dec 1, 2022 Read the whole text...
Alexander Trocchi
Resistance is possible
2004 RNC Protests
The Republican National Convention (RNC) was the ultimate slight to New York: those who made careers and a quick buck off the September 11th events returned to feast like vultures on the corpses of the dead, attempting to rally support for a failing war and a disastrous regime by parading around near the site of Ground Zero.
Oct 29, 2015 Read the whole text...
Hal Waldman
Resistance Readies Stop Draft Week
A massive national denouncement of the continuing war in Vietnam and the Selective Service System is being readied for the week of Oct. 16–22, and by all indications it should well be the largest demonstration of its type in American history.
The Resistance does not recognize deferments, for they are part of the system. By accepting a deferment, a person does nothing to change that system.
Apr 3, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Resistance Remains Widespread
Government continues efforts to enforce registration
During October, two non-registrants in contact with the Fifth Estate received warning letters from the Selective Service System (SSS) regarding their failure to report. This broke an almost two year silence on the part of the government during which the two men had heard nothing on their status. Both initially assumed that the government was now on to their “delinquent” status and that, due to the recent prosecution of resisters taking place, a confrontation was in the making. This seemingly purposeful notification is probably due to the expanded efforts of the SSS to identify those who have failed to register by matching up registration forms with social security numbers, Internal Revenue Service computer printouts and some state Motor Vehicle Department lists. Still, other resisters known to the Fifth Estate have yet to receive any notification whatsoever, which indicates that the SSS process for identifying offenders remains haphazard.
Oct 4, 2019 Read the whole text...
Dahr Jamail
Seth Kershner
Resistance to Iraq inside the military
Q&A with Dahr Jamail
The U.S. defeat in the Vietnam war can be attributed to many things including the American military’s inability to vanquish the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army on the battlefield despite killing three million Indochinese and destroying the country’s infrastructure, and the enormous and unprecedented domestic opposition to the war.
Feb 10, 2014 Read the whole text...
Charles Willis
Resistance to the Plan is Heavy
Opposition to trash-to-energy waste-incinerator grows
In March of this year a small article appeared in the Detroit Free Press announcing the last public hearing before the City of Detroit was to begin building the world’s largest trash-to-energy waste-incinerator plant. For those of us who live in the Cass Corridor/Wayne State University area, within a mile of the proposed plant’s location, the city’s plans came as one more horror in a long list of direct assaults on our lives.
Dec 15, 2017 Read the whole text...
Eric Laursen
Resistance to the violence of World War II
Anarchism & Pacifism shaped later struggles
a review of
War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance by Daniel Akst. Melville House, 2022
Violence is not all the same. Context matters.
There’s something much worse about violence when it’s perpetrated by or with the tacit acceptance of the State. It’s not just that governments and their allies in the capitalist class and the patriarchy have more resources, more weapons, and fewer ethical qualms about killing than most. Beyond these obvious assets, they can hide behind the veil of legitimacy that the State (allegedly) offers them. Hitler, George W. Bush, and Derek Chauvin may not have a lot in common personally, but all committed their crimes under the reasonable presumption that the social and political order sanctioned such behavior.
Jul 16, 2023 Read the whole text...
Mitchel Cohen
Resister Update
They Refused to Follow Orders
FE readers may remember the case of Danny Gillis [Fifth Estate #337, Late Summer 1991], a black man from Baltimore, who refused to board the Marine Corps bus to Saudi Arabia last December 17, and was beaten up (with his hands cuffed behind his back) under his Sergeant’s orders by four white Marines. Gillis required an operation on his shoulder due to injuries received during that attack, and is serving out his 18 month sentence.
Sep 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
X. Buyer
Resisting the Consumerist’s Urge
If you are reading these words, it is almost certain that you are ill, sick, and infected. “With what?” you ask. The blight destroying our nation known as Free Enterprise, Supply & Demand, Capitalism, and more commonly Consumerism. It is a worm boring through the minds & souls of all our citizens.
Jul 5, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Resist Poets Read
As part of a series of ten poetry readings across the country, there will be a poetry reading at St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church on April 29th at 8 p.m.
The series is being coordinated by RESIST, a national organization of adults who support draft resistance and other anti-war activities. It is being sponsored locally by Detroit Resistance. The poets reading in Detroit will be Robert Bly, Donald Hall, Clayton Eshlemon, Ted Berrigan, David Henderson, and Ed Sanders of the Fugs.
Jun 6, 2022 Read the whole text...
Karen Elliot Jr.
Resolve to Evolve
Miami and the Future of Resistance
Recently, the rulers of the Western Hemisphere met in Miami to continue negotiations on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) treaty, another blatant power grab by the corporate oligarchy. At the summit, Nov. 17–21, trade ministers signed a watered-down compromise that again blunted US plans for hemispheric domination. This version, dubbed FTAA Lite by critics, allows nations to opt out of provisions they don’t care for, or in the case of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, provisions that the outraged citizenry won’t stand for. With the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancun, the North American elite desperately needed to keep the FTAA alive, even if in a compromised form. As might have been expected, this conciliatory agreement has been spun as a victory by both negotiators and resisters alike.
Aug 13, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Resources for Prisoners & Supporters
National Jericho Movement: PO Box 2164, Chesterfield VA 23832. thejerichomovement.com
New York City Anarchist Black Cross (NYC ABC): PO Box 110034, Brooklyn, New York 11211. nycabc.wordpress.com
Bloomington Anarchist Black Cross: Focuses on solidarity with prison rebels, anarchist prisoners, and prisoners of other liberatory social movements. A books to prisoner project and huge number of links to other prison projects. bloomingtonabc.noblogs.org
Apr 7, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Response to the Poor: Cops
The response of Detroit’s city government to the crisis of the homeless is what the poor can always expect: the cops were set on them! With the cutoff of the General Assistance welfare program (see accompanying article), entire buildings housing state aid recipients were emptied, the residents unceremoniously thrown out in the cold, rendering thousands homeless overnight.
Aug 31, 2018 Read the whole text...
Luis Chávez
(Re)Thinking Music & Revolution
Consider destroying (or purposefully forgetting) your headphones.
Whether you live in a city or rural area, the daily use of headphones physically and aurally blocks your connection to the surrounding sonic environment. Listening as a way of knowing is lost to listening as a way of consuming.
An SFGate news story, “Absorbed Device Users Oblivious to Danger,” recounts a 2013 incident on a San Francisco light rail train that illustrates one of the many dangerous consequences of alienation created by industrial, technological society.
Jun 20, 2017 Read the whole text...
Jim Feast
Reticent Verse
A review of
Digigram by Barbara Henning. United Artists Books 2020
Many poets have used broad strokes to deplore the current reactionary environment (as Eliot Katz does so superbly in President Predator), expressing their outrage, disgust and sadness, but Barbara Henning in Digigram takes a different route, examining how the coarsened political climate has insinuated itself into all the interstices of everyday life.
Feb 27, 2021 Read the whole text...
David Rovics
Return
i can’t help it.
i don’t care how far you think the analogy extends itself.
when i see you making that bus driver climb up and down
on and off the roof of his bus
for your amusement
for hours in the hot sun
i think of how we once had to dance and sing for them
while they shot our parents.
when i see you keep that woman
Aug 19, 2017 Read the whole text...
George Bradford (David Watson)
Return of the Son of Deep Ecology
The Ethics of Permanent Crisis and the Permanent Crisis in Ethics
The letter above [“Deep Ecology as Strategic Knowledge,” FE #331, Spring, 1989] was sent to the Fifth Estate last year in response to the essay I wrote, “How Deep Is Deep Ecology? A Challenge to Radical Environmentalism” (FE #327, Fall 1987). I had a brief correspondence with the author (who, interestingly, admitted to being an EF! man), and had planned to print his letter with several others from EF!ers (we eventually printed a selection of them in the Summer 1988 FE). The more I looked at “Miss Ann’s” (rather, Mr. Ann’s) letter, with its claims to an anti-technological, primitivist, even anarchist perspective, the more I realized its appropriateness as a starting point for my essay. However unkind one may judge me for using a relatively short letter as the focus for a long critical essay, I think the letter so representative of the entire range of problems with the deep ecology movement that I think the temptation is one worth following. If the form is strange, I can only hope that the ideas in the essay are important enough to overcome this problem. The form is in part a result of the shorthand manner in which deep ecologists tend to evade a genuinely critical dialogue. Deep ecology (DE) ideology appears to deflect criticism the way religious dogma does, by raising its voice over all others in defense of its intuitions and simply repeating its assertions (hallelujah and amen), as well as by conveniently misrepresenting the views of its critics.
Apr 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Benjamin Shepard
Return to Liberty Square
Occupy Wall Street, the COOLS, and the Cultural Resistance of Story Telling

Early this year, people involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City started talking about the COOLS, the Cultural Occupation of Liberty Square. The point was to get as many people possible back into Zuccotti Park, dubbed Liberty Square, where the movement began. The police carried out a mass eviction from the lower Manhattan park in November.
Sep 7, 2013 Read the whole text...
Patrick Dunn
Return to Self-Reliance
In “Self-Reliance” Emerson tells us that our alienation consists of living in a world that does not manifest our genius. We trust only in society and do not trust in fate. Society is built on a secondary selfhood that has its limits in the order of calculation. Its founding principles are conformity and consistency. Its relations are governed by envy, property, and debt. In society we are “ashamed before the blade of grass and the blowing rose.” We practice a false morality, as if in apology for our existence. Our original powers are sacrificed at the altar of a ghostly civilization.
Dec 29, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Revelations!
This edition begins our 42nd year of continuous publishing as the longest running, English language anarchist publication in American history. We’ve got a ways to go to catch the Yiddish language Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) which printed for 87 years, but we’re hot on the heels of the Italian Dunata dei Refrattari, which published between 1922 and 1971.
Feb 13, 2015 Read the whole text...
Stevphen Shukaitis
Revelation Vertigo

“Autonomy is both the goal sought after and that whose presence--virtual--let us say, has to be supposed at the outset of an analysis or a political movement. This virtual presence is the will to autonomy, the will to be free.”
-- Cornelius Castoriadis
There exists a tendency, shared across different strains of radical political thought, to see the horrors of our present as comprising a false totality, that when torn asunder, will reveal a more liberatory existence hidden beneath. This is to understand revolution as revelation; as the dispelling of the conditions of false consciousness, and a reclamation of an autonomous existence that continues to live on, albeit deformed, within this world we must leave behind.
Feb 19, 2015 Read the whole text...
Pat Halley
Revenge of the Clowns
Origins of April Fools’ Day
It’s not easy being a fool. All the fools on television and in Hollywood make competition stiff but it has been worse. From the sixth to the tenth century, for nearly four hundred years, the Catholic church and the European nobility declared total war on theatrical activities, and wherever these feudal forces attained power it was at the expense of fools, pagans and local shamans.
Nov 22, 2014 Read the whole text...
E.B. Maple (Peter Werbe)
Revenge of the Nerds
The Republican Victory
“Consider the intelligence of the average man, then realize 50% are even stupider.”
—Mark Twain
“I am nothing, a cloak of skin with a mouth saying, Don’t kill everything so soon.”
—Mick Vranich and Wordban’d
Wouldn’t the headline, “61% of Electorate Avoid Polls; Conservative White Men Elect Right-Wing of Political Racket to Power,” after the Nov. 8 Republican sweep of Congressional seats have been more accurate than those in the media which trumpeted, “Americans Vote for Change?” Admittedly, mine is not exactly snappy, nor would it fit well as a banner headline, but it’s closer to the truth.
Jun 7, 2020 Read the whole text...
Carlotta Henderson
Rev. Gracie Decries Breakthrough
In a sermon on Anti-Semitism on January 22, the Rev. David M. Gracie, St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, called for stronger measures against Breakthrough, a local right-wing group, and its various disguises, better protection of community groups against their “disruption, harassment and embarrassment,” and “prosecution (of them) with at least as much zeal as was shown in the Hobart Street trespass case.”
Mar 30, 2025 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Rev. Gracie to be Honored
Letters were mailed July 12 inviting hundreds ‘of Detroit area activists in the peace, civil rights, civil liberties and religious reform movements to a testimonial dinner honoring the Rev. David M. Gracie.
The Dinner will be held on July 21, 1967, at U.A.W. Local 174 Hall at 6495 W. Warren (at Livernois) at 7:00 p.m.
Feb 2, 2017 Read the whole text...
Marlene Tyre
Review Denied for Fort Hood Three
The Fort Hood Three Defense Committee announced September 30 that the U.S. Court of Military Appeals turned down the request for a review of convictions of the Fort Hood Three.
PFC James Johnson, Private Dennis Mora and Private David Samas, the three who refused orders to ship to Vietnam, were court-martialed in September, 1966. All are now in the Federal Military Prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, serving three years at hard labor.
Dec 1, 2022 Read the whole text...
Ruhe
Review: Breaking Loose
from the walls we create for ourselves
a review of
Breaking Loose: Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid? by Ron Sakolsky. LBC Books, 95 pp., littleblackcart.com
Longtime Fifth Estate contributor Ron Sakolsky offers a short exploration of his concept of “mutual acquiescence.” For Sakolsky, the term seeks to understand how alienation and oppression are connected in everyday life, creating a “wall of domination” that prevents us from seeing another reality beyond the existent.
Jun 4, 2016 Read the whole text...
Muswell Hillbillie
Review of Dolgoff Cuba Book
Cuba Book Avoids Crucial Questions
a review of
Sam Dolgoff, The Cuban Revolution, A Critical Perspective; Copyright 1976, Black Rose Books, Ltd., Montreal; $5.95.
Sam Dolgoff’s book, The Cuban Revolution, presents some interesting and relevant information not previously available in English, although most of it has been available to Spanish-speaking readers for a long time. For those of us who are vitally interested in knowing more than the “communist” myths about the history and progress of revolt wherever it may occur, this book is a starting point. But for those of us who really want to comprehend the past so that we can begin to go beyond it, this book is superficial and inadequate.
Feb 17, 2018 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Reviews
Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement + Rising Sun: A Field Guide to the Eastern Uprisings + Earth First! Journal
Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement by Katya Komisaruk. Illustrated by Tim Maloney. AK Press, 2003
reviewed by MaxZine
I was impressed by attorney Katya Komisaruk at the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair when she came to the podium to speak and said she did not want to give a lecture but preferred to simply answer questions about run-ins with the law. Her conviction to help arm people with an understanding of simple ways to use what rights we have to defend ourselves against the encroaching police state shines through in Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement.
Jul 18, 2016 Read the whole text...
Don LaCoss
Spencer Sunshine
John Brinker
J.L. Dale
Reviews
Oystercatcher #5 Review by J.L. Dale
I’m young, but I still had grade-school fantasies about bathing my neighborhood in a heavy wave of pirate radio--my voice and my songs out into the world.
So, I respect a man that can keep that way of thinking alive. The Oystercatcher #5, edited by Ron Sakolsky, though rather diverse in content and forms, keeps a strong, unified voice. Each piece is well edited and laid out nicely, taking advantage of The Oystercather’s full-size format.
Jul 6, 2014 Read the whole text...
Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Anne R. Key
Reviews
The Wedding and Other Stories and Oystercatcher #3
The Wedding and Other Stories, Cara Hoffman, Factory School Southpaw Culture, 2006, 114 pp., factoryschool.org. Available from the Barn
Cara Hoffman’s seven tautly written, alternately ominous and humorous short stories are driven by her elegant use of language. She’s a writer in the now unfashionable old school where words and the images they create shape story and characters rather than breathless action scenarios waiting to be transferred from page to film. There’s great craft here where one can almost feel the work put into each sinuous sentence; sometimes each word.
Apr 8, 2015 Read the whole text...
Allan Foster
Re-Visioning The Strait
a review of
The Strait by Fredy Perlman, Black & Red, Detroit, 1988
I began to make this a conventional review of Fredy Perlman’s book The Strait and it was a mistake. For if you begin reading it as a conventional book with a linear story and a stairway of characters The Strait will fail you and, what is worse for me, will fail Fredy and the leap of imagination which he put into it.
Aug 17, 2019 Read the whole text...
John Zerzan
Paula Zerzan
“Revolt Against Work” or the End of Leftism?
FE Note. The December 1976 Fifth Estate carried a critique by Charles Reeve (see “The Revolt Against Work or Fight for the Right to Be Lazy,” p. 9) of the contentions of John and Paula Zerzan that the crisis point in capitalism today revolves around worker alienation, job refusal, sabotage, absenteeism, etc. Reeve asserted that on one hand, the significance of this phenomenon is overplayed by the Zerzans and on the other, that to the extent that it does exist, it represents nothing new in workers’ struggles.
Jan 2, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Revolting!
Issue intro
We took on the theme of Revolution, Revolts, Riots, and Rebellions even before the candidates were chosen by the major parties for the US election.
As we say in these pages, social explosions are generated by the oppressive nature of the state itself, and of the economies it has always protected—from early slave society, through feudalism, and into capitalism.
Jul 2, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Revolt Lives!
The following article is reprinted from the 7 June 1977 edition of the Mexican newspaper Excelsior and was translated for us by a comrade in Montreal. Although written in a journalistic style (for instance calling people “anarchists” who might have no interest in the label) it chronicles activity similar to that of the Metropolitan Indians in Italy (see FE #284, July 1977) and the Breakers of Paris. There will undoubtedly be more to come.
Dec 29, 2017 Read the whole text...
George Bradford (David Watson)
Revolution Against the Megamachine
Stopping the Industrial Hydra
Staff note: George Bradford was a pseudonym used by name]
fe_author&taxo[0][opt]
&taxo[0][term]=david-watson][David Watson in these pages.
Remember the Exxon Valdez? The ship was the source of the worst oil spill to date in U.S. history, spilling eleven million gallons of oil in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where it ran aground last March. By the time it had limped into San Diego Harbor in July, it also left at least one other oil slick some eighteen miles long off the California coast.
Feb 27, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Revolution & Counter-revolution in Italy
Introduction to Albertani articles
The following two articles, “The Return of the Social Revolution, Or, Well Dug, Old Mole!” and “Economic Crisis & Revolution. Or, a Propos of Capital and its Contradictions,” were written by a comrade from Milan who took part in revolutionary upsurge which engulfed Italy from the early part of this decade to its peak (so far) in 1977 and the Italian Spring.
Jul 11, 2018 Read the whole text...
anon.
Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Portugal
Workers Councils or the Reorganization of Capital?
Trying to make sense of the situation in Portugal with facts gleaned from reading the daily newspapers and watching the nightly news has become an increasingly impossible task.
Both sources of bourgeois mystification report diligently on which general enjoys the support of what faction of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) today and which political party has trumpeted what particular demand.
Sep 17, 2013 Read the whole text...
David Tighe
Revolution and Other Writings
a review of
Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader by Gustav Landauer, edited and translated by Gabriel Kuhn, PM Press, 2010.
Gustav Landauer is perhaps the most important German speaking anarchist of the late 19th and early 20th century, but he is not well known in the English speaking world. Despite four book length studies of Landauer and a few translations, there has never been a major collection of his work in English. Gabriel Kuhn and PM Press have changed that.
Dec 29, 2013 Read the whole text...
Karen Pickett
Revolutionary Ecology
40 years of the Earth First! Journal
The direct action-oriented Earth First! radical environmental movement and its public-facing arm, the Earth First! Journal, turned 40 years old in 2020. And, 2020 almost killed the venerable Journal.

The scrappy and irreverent publication was plunged into pandemic and quarantine hell, as its volunteers and tiny staff at its office in southern Oregon, used to working collectively in person, passing around articles being edited, was suddenly in chaos, navigating through poor internet in rural Oregon and steering over other considerable bumps in the road.
Jun 12, 2021 Read the whole text...
Lynne Clive (Marilynn Rashid)
Revolutionary Education
The Modern School Movement
a review of
The Modern School Movement: Historical and Personal Notes on the Ferrer Schools in Spain, Contributions by Pura Perez, Mario Jordana, Abel Paz and Martha Ackelsberg, published by Friends of the Modern School, c/o Abe Bluestein, 55 Farmington Rd., Croton-on-Hudson NY 10520, 37 pages, $3. Available from FE Books.
Aug 29, 2019 Read the whole text...
Diane DiPrima
Revolutionary Letters No. 18
let’s talk about splitting, splitting is an art
frequently called upon in revolution
retreat, says the I Ching, must not be confused
with flight, and furthermore, frequently, it furthers
ONE TO HAVE SOMEWHERE TO GO
.
i.e., know in advance
the person/place you can go to,
means to get there
keep money (cash) in house for travelling
Sep 8, 2021 Read the whole text...
Ralph J. Gleason
Revolution as Reaction
The Beatles have finally dealt directly with the American radicals, politicos, and activists of the student movement who have been demanding that they say something.
The Beatles have said something and what they have said is not going to be popular with a great many. The more political you are, the less you will dig the Beatles’ new song, “Revolution.”
Sep 2, 2015 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Revolution as Spectacle
Book Review
A review of
Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle by Rafael Uzcategui, Introduction by Octavio Alberola, Translated by Chaz Bufe, Tucson, See Sharp Press, 2011, 232 pages; seesharppress.com
FE Note: What follows isn’t strictly speaking a review. The one we had intended didn’t materialize, so we are reprinting this from the Venezuelan anarchist publication, El Libertario, where much of Rafael Uzcatequi’s writings appear, and whose themes are echoed in this book.
Sep 10, 2013 Read the whole text...
Steve Diamond
Revolution at Columbia
NEW YORK, April 29 (LNS, NY) A new, more fluid style of revolutionary activity on the American campus has been introduced by Columbia University students, black and white, who held physical control of the campus for a week.
The following is a day-by-day recounting beginning with the original demonstration Tuesday, April 23rd, on Low Library Plaza at noon.
Nov 27, 2017 Read the whole text...
Lisiunia (Lisa) A. Romanienko
Revolution Begins at Home
Developing Subversive Style & Substance. Is body modification personal vanity or does it open pathways to a subversive style that challenges modernity?
There has been an unnecessarily divisive debate distinguishing what the late Murray Bookchin designated as lifestyle anarchy from that of traditional ideological anarchy.
Yet under conditions of modernity, anarchist lifestyle centering upon the body and the intimate private sphere is often a necessary precursor to the development of more public articulation of systemic anarchist revolutionary sentiments.
Oct 13, 2013 Read the whole text...
Martin Comack
Revolution from below
confounds those who desire to lead it from above
a review of
El Socialism Salvaje: Autoorganizacion y democracia directa desde 1789 hasta nuestros dias (Wild Socialism: Self-organization and direct democracy from 1789 to the Present) Charles Reeve. Virus Editorial, 2020
What Paris-based author Charles Reeve calls socialismo salvaje, “wild socialism,” is the demand for direct democracy and popular control of social institutions by workers, peasants, and citizens in periods of social and political upheaval appearing throughout modern history.
Dec 31, 2022 Read the whole text...
Çîrok Ecnebî
Revolution in the Syrian Desert
I went to see the fountain of hope in the desert of death.
Rojava is still in my eyes. A fountain in the middle of desert. By desert, I mean authoritarian regimes, imperialist and colonialist forces, and Islamist warmongers. But it seems now that while at a societal level, Rojava is flourishing with ways to fight patriarchy, the environment is turning into an actual desert.
Jan 7, 2023 Read the whole text...
Greg Calvert
Revolution is an Act of Love
Reprinted from The Guardian
There is a phrase which has often come to mind in the last few months of our movement—“the politics of proving.” Too many people (especially whites, and particularly white males) seem involved in a game in which the intent is to “prove that I am as revolutionary as the blacks, the Cubans, the Vietnamese.” Most recently, “as revolutionary as the Black Panthers.”
Aug 2, 2019 Read the whole text...
Eddan Katz
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword
You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.
You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.
You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,
Or hold your Kazaa download queues,
Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be brought to you on Hi-Def TV
Jul 23, 2021 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Reward
Reward

For information leading to the apprehension of
JESUS CHRIST
WANTED—FOR SEDITION, CRIMINAL ANARCHY, VAGRANCY, AND CONSPIRACY TO OVERTHROW THE ESTABLISHED GOVERNMENT
DRESSES POORLY. SAID TO BE A CARPENTER BY TRADE. ILL-NOURISHED, HAS VISIONARY IDEAS. ASSOCIATES WITH COMMON WORKING PEOPLE, THE UNEMPLOYED AND BUMS. ALIEN. IS BELIEVED TO BE A JEW. ALIAS PRINCE OF PEACE, SON OF MAN, LIGHT OF THE WORLD &c. PROFESSIONAL AGITATOR
Jan 26, 2023 Read the whole text...