Scarecrow
Reward of the Tender Flesh

The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that seek death.

—Proverbs XXI, 6

But of this he took little or no notice, continuing his odd smiles and gesticulations.

In the marketplace one convinces by gestures, but real reasons make the populace distrustful.

—Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

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John Zerzan
Rewilding As civilization increasingly fails, radical alternatives are before us

a review of

Human Rewilding in the 21st Century: Why Anthropologists Fail by James M. Van Lanen. Birch Top Hill Press, 2024

Recently, there has been somewhat surprising interest from mainstream media in topics of domestication and rewilding.

On January 1, National Public Radio devoted an hour to a conversation with Woniya Dawn Thibeault, whose book Never Alone recounts her victory in the televised “Alone” arctic competition, with a very sympathetic moderator.

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John Wilcock
RFK or LBJ?

The Vietnam War has exacerbated what is clearly every generation’s occupational hazard: the desperate dissatisfaction with the ruling clique’s policies by people who lack the power, and often the age, to do anything about it. The frustration has been further increased in our time by the presence of what is probably the most unpopular president in American history. A president who can hear hundreds of thousands of his own people shout in the streets that he is a murderer.

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Arthur Parumba
Richard Brautigan’s 3 & 1 & 3-in-1 Books

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O.K. now, I got to tell you about what I am writing about. It is 3 books and another one, and I guess, another one. They are called Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, In Watermelon Sugar and all three of them together (they cost about 2 dollars each in paperback or you can buy (ed. note: steal) all three of them together in hardcover for about 8 dollars. All from Delacorte Press, I guess, and The Confederate General from Big Sur (a buck ninety five from Grove Press) and they were all written by Richard Brautigan who is a crazy man.

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Frank Dedenbach
Richard Farina’s “Been Down So Long” Book review

A few days before recording artist Richard Farina died in a motorcycle accident last May, Random House released his first novel, “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me.” The book, a story of the escapades of one Gnossos Pappadopoulis, shows Farina almost as skilled at prose as he was at folk singing and composing.

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Sherry Hendrick
Mick Vranich

Richard Mock’s Epic Vision

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FE cover, June 2002. Richard’s art was often mysteriously ambiguous. We ran this as emblematic of the ruthless US war machine. However, a Pentagon art buyer thought it accurately portrayed the military mission, and a print hangs in the headquarters of the masters of war.

Richard Mock, political cartoonist, painter, sculptor, educator, anarchist, died in Brooklyn July 28 from complications due to diabetes at 61. Richard had an epic vision that he gave to us piece by piece in his creative linocuts. He freely contributed use of his political cartoons to anarchist and worker publications such as the Fifth Estate, Anarchy and UNITE. Many, such as the one on this page, graced our front covers.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Rich Take Non-Aspirin Over FE Ad Non-Kidnappings Follow Non-Event

“A newspaper printed locally and called the Fifth Estate is running a dangerous advertisement, purportedly placed by General Motors, but actually put on the back page of the Fifth Estate by the staff of the paper.

“It gives the home addresses of fourteen key General Motors executives,” reported TV 2’s golden boy, Joe Glover, as he gave the viewers at home his most solemn on-camera expression, “including GM Board Chairman Tom Murphy. It even shows a picture of his home and a map of escape routes for anyone who wants to kidnap Murphy.

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Durruti
Right for America

Six million Jews did not die in Germany during World War II, anyone should know there was but sixty thousand of them in all of Europe. Franklin Roosevelt was a dirty commie. John Sinclair is a dirty commie. Water fluoridation and LSD are both Communist plots. So is marijuana. All the yellow trash in Asia is not worth the life of one white, American soldier.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Right in the Keast-er

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South End Editor Cheryl McCall speaks at July 14 press conference flanked by Art Johnston (l.) and Attorney James Lafferty (r). Photo—A. Gotkin.

Bill Keast sent Cheryl McCall a telegram at 2:30 am July 11 which read:

I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT I HAVE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO INSTRUCT THE PRINTER OF THE SOUTH END NOT TO PRINT THE ISSUE PLANNED FOR FRIDAY JULY 11. I AM CONVINCED THAT ITS PUBLICATION WOULD DO SERIOUS DAMAGE TO WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY AND TO THE FUTURE OF’ STUDENT JOURNALISM HERE. FURTHER I AM SUSPENDING PUBLICATION OF THE SOUTH END UNTIL THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER PUBLICATION BOARD HAS HAD AN OPPORTUNITY TO DEVELOP POLICIES AND GUIDE LINES CONSISTENT WITH THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE STUDENT FACULTY COUNCIL AS APPROVED BY THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY AND IN THE LIGHT OF THESE DEEMS IT APPROPRIATE FOR PUBLICATION TO BE RESUMED. WM KEAST, PRESIDENT, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Rightist is Obscene

Breakthrough and Donald Lobsinger’s tactics may have backfired in their most recent confrontation with the Establishment—tackled from the right.

Lobsinger could do with some tactical pre-protest advice from some of those who confront from the Left, on how to stay exactly within the law until you are ready to get busted. He was arrested again and faces trial Jan. 15 on disorderly conduct for breaking up a meeting Dec. 3 at St. Lucy’s Catholic Church in St. Clair Shores.

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Ed Rom
Rightist Terror Grows

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Tommye Wiess, Fifth Estate circulation manager, surveys damage left by right-wing vandals at the office of the Detroit Committee to end the War in Vietnam. The office has since been repaired and the anti-war group is continuing its activities. photo: Ollie Anderson

Detroit’s right wing launched a terrorist attack on the offices of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam early in the morning on October 29.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Right Wingers Charged in Seattle Shooting

After a three month investigation, a right wing couple was charged in the January 20 shooting and wounding of an anarchist member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The assault took place during a protest against the appearance of alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. (See “An Anarchist is Shot in Seattle,” FE #398, Summer 2017.)

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Lynne Clive (Marilynn Rashid)
Rigoberta Menchu Native Guatemala Defends the Earth

Discussed in this article

I...Rigoberta Menchu. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, translated by Ann Wright, The Thetford Press, Thetford, Norfolk, England, 1984.

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Indian women and U.S. military attache George Maynes, observing a demonstration (1982).

Although circumstance has forced Rigoberta Menchu, a twenty-three-year-old Quiche Indian woman, to tell her story in Spanish, the language of her oppressors, she speaks it from her Quiche heart with an honesty, a directness, and a simplicity of language characteristic only of one who is close to the earth.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Riot Cops Keep Wall Street Open

On Monday, April 23, almost 2,000 demonstrators converged on New York’s Wall street and attempted to close this bastion of capitalism. Over 200 were arrested in the action which brought together a coalition of 60 or so groups.

At dawn demonstrators blockaded the entrances to Wall Street but were broken up by a massive show of riot police.

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Bob Serling
Riot Eyewitness

It started around 10:30 p.m. Monday, July 24 on Prentis, while there was a small integrated group sitting in front of our apartment building, talking like they do every night, and the police came by and saw them and said “Get in the house, white boy, and you too nigger!”

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Fifth Estate co-editors Ovshinsky & Werbe interview looters as they window-shop at a cleaners at the corner of Trumbull and Forest. Photo by C.T. Walker.

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Peter Werbe
T. Fulano (David Watson)

Riots Revisited Two reprints from 1967 and 1987 FE on the Detroit riots

“July1967” by T. Fulano, from FE 326, Summer 1987

It was a full scale beggar’s banquet, the return of the repressed, a surprise party. The city people, young and old, black and white, went through the pawnshop windows like meteorites. Nervous exorcists, trembling before a mortal turned evil and massive and enigmatic, the politicians asked, “Who are you?” And like demons unleashed from an inferno, they answered, “Many.”

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Ruhe
Riots, Revolt & the Black Bloc Book review

a review of

I Saw Fire: Reflections on Riots, Revolt and the Black Bloc by Doug Gilbert. Institute for Experimental Freedom, 2014, $10. 204 pp. littleblackcart.com

I’ve often found myself frustrated by the lack of worthwhile media projects that accurately capture how anarchists struggle. Doug Gilbert’s I Saw Fire: Reflections on Riots, Revolt and the Black Bloc is the kind of book that you can hand to people encountering anarchist resistance for the first time.

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David Levison
Rip-Off! $&$&&$&$$!$!

Youth capitalism is proving to be as repressive to its people as Nixon’s solution to Black Liberation, black capitalism. The young are being systematically robbed by the capitalists who get rich dealing the products and services of the alternate culture.

The black ghetto feels the bite of the businessman much worse because he robs the black community by selling high-priced, poor quality goods to low-income families. The less you got the more it hurts to get it.

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Fran Shor
Rise and Fall Global Competition, Conflict, and Realignment in an Era of Declining U. S. Hegemony and China’s Rising Power

A defining historical feature of the decline of specific empires in the world capitalist system has been the conflict surrounding the emergence of a successor. The United States and Germany engaged in a protracted struggle in the first half of the twentieth century to determine which country would replace Great Britain as the dominant power.

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Liberation News Service
Rise Dead

WASHINGTON (LNS/CPS) — There may be almost twice as many American deaths in Vietnam as the Defense Department claims.

Former Senator Wayne Morse has charged the Defense Department has two sets of death statistics: the real ones and those released to the public in its weekly “statistical summary.” Morse first made the charge last August, claiming 70,000 rather than 30,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam combat at that time.

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Benjamin Shepard
Ritalin Turns Fifty Confessions of a Teenage Junkie

If there is one enduring memory from my childhood, it is a small porcelain bowl containing three little white pills. The pills were as ubiquitous as morning orange juice and cereal, “Ben, don’t forget your Ritalin,” my mother would remind me as I rushed to meet my carpool on time.

“Don’t forget your Ritalin.” On any given day, some five million children and adolescents in the United States are given a psychostimulant of one form or another. Theory is that these drugs help young people handle their emotions, feelings, and reactions.

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RNC Welcoming Committee
RNC: Shut It Down! Welcoming the Republicans to the Twin Cities

The 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) will descend on Minneapolis-St. Paul, September 1 through 4, as the opening act in the pacifying spectacle of the coming presidential election. The most direct way to oppose a dog-and-pony show is just to stop it.

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This convention of the rich, the white, and the conservative, is a self-congratulatory event intended as the opening shot in the attempt to convince the hapless voter that John McSame represents patriotism, experience, and “our” values, rather than war, empire, economic royalism, and the rest of the miserabilism known as America. Stopping the convention won’t stop the election, but it will disrupt their spectacle and prove that we have the power to shape our own communities and future.

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Fifth Estate Collective
RNC Update Judge rules trumped up charges from 2008 Republican convention can proceed

The RNC 8 are preparing for trial following hearings to dismiss felony charges against them stemming from planned demonstrations at the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC). The eight activists were preemptively arrested before the convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, some in raids by heavily armed SWAT teams. While the State dismissed terrorism counts last year, the defendants still face charges of conspiracy to riot with a dangerous weapon and conspiracy to commit criminal damage to property.

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Fifth Estate Collective
RNC Update Two Charges Dropped in Frame-up of Republican Convention Protest Organizers

In a sign of the power of post-Republican National Convention court solidarity, Ramsey County, Minnesota prosecuting attorney, Susan Gaertner, dropped two of the four unfounded charges against the RNC 8, in April.

The RNC 8 are organizers against the 2008 Twin Cities Republican National Convention who have been falsely charged in response to their political organizing: Luce Guillen-Givins, Max Specktor, Nathanael Secor, Eryn Trimmer, Monica Bicking, Erik Oseland, Robert Czernik and Garrett Fitzgerald.

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Robin Banks
Robbers Was Here

These are bad times and getting depressed about the situation is an easy trap to fall into. But then there’s always that little spark that makes you think there’s still a chance for humanity. New York’s Sentry Armored Car-Courier Co. heist for $5.3 million, brought on such a spark.

On the night of December 14, two people cut their way through the roof of the Sentry garage and office building and made off with the loot (Sentry officials put the amount at around $5.3, while FBI agents are talking of $8 million or more). Everyone I talked to was elated after reading the front page stories of this “victimless crime.” A hold-up where no one was hurt, the guard was handcuffed to a stairway, and where the daring and adventure of such an act brought life to the dreams of millions of people. Where the unpredictable act of these two “criminals” gave meaning to desires in the otherwise pre-arranged and predictable day-to-day lives of the people on the street. Personally, the heart-warming headlines concerning the Sentry robbery, also made me think back to another “take the money and run” situation that happened earlier this year in the Motor City.

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David Rovics
Robb Johnson A Singer/Songwriter You May Never Have Heard Of, But Should

a review of

“A Reasonable History of Impossible Demands: The Damage to Date 1986–2013.” Robb Johnson, 92 songs on 5 CDs with 64-page booklet. PM Press, 2015, pmpress.org

At a time when independent publishers and record labels are going out of business at a rapid rate, PM Press keeps on putting out books, pamphlets, videos, and various other things—including CDs.

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Peter Lamborn Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson Author, The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger, Dies at 74

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Robert Anton Wilson at the National Theatre, London, for the 10-hour stage version of Illuminatus! in 1977

For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive basis--i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness--we decided we were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves connected to the Wilsons who play so murky a role in the “Montauk Mysteries” (Aleister Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel experiments gone awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology (including Colin, S. Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was Wilson) never materialized--although we did collaborate in editing Semiotext(e) SF, together with Rudy Rucker.

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J.R. Kennedy
Robert Williams I will never return

The Detroit black community is moving again. They are mobilizing in support of Robert F. Williams and against the racist judicial machinery that is attempting to extradite him to North Carolina.

Williams, the revolutionary spokesman and former president of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), is accused by the State of North Carolina of kidnapping a “white couple” back in 1961. He returned to Detroit recently to denounce these charges and to renew his political and legal struggles.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

Editors’ Note: Rock and Roll Dope takes the form of a facsimile of the MC5’s Elektra album liner notes for two reasons. First, because Brother Sinclair was stranded in Buffalo after attending a national Lemar (Legalize Marijuana) conference in that city and was unable to get a column to us.

Second, and more important, that this revolutionary rap by John has caused a significant furor in the retail record business. Fully 70% of Detroit area record shops refuse to stock the album because of its use of “fuck” in the liner notes and on one song. One Northland record shop went through each album and crossed out the offending words. Both J.L. Hudson’s and E.J. Korvette stores refuse to handle it as well as many smaller shops.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

For two weeks now I’ve been trying to write a letter to William Leach, the Black Panther who attacked what he calls the “white left” in the Fifth Estate last time as being jive and untogether. [See “The White Left—Serious or Not?” FE #70, January 9–22, 1969.] Brother Leach displayed his unfortunate ignorance when he attacked the White Panther Party as “silly” and “the movement’s biggest headache.” I don’t know that much about the YSA or SDS, since I’m not a Young Socialist or a Student for a Democratic Society, but I do know about the Yippies and I do know about the White’ Panthers, and I do know about the Black Panthers too.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

The Legal Self Defense (LSD) benefit February 4th was the greatest success in my memory: over 1200 people attended and offered their bread for support, and the LSD Fund netted over $2200.00 for the community.

A Board of Directors for LSD was set up to handle the disbursement of the money when people need it, and a bank account was opened in the name of Legal Self Defense. The Board comprises Brother Jack Forest, Detroit Captain White Panthers; Brother John Watson, editor of the South End newspaper; Brother Pun Plamondon, editor of the Sun (Ann Arbor) and Minister of Defense, White Panthers National Office; Brother Alan Gotkin, of the Fifth Estate Editorial Group and Minister of Propaganda, Detroit White Panthers; and Revs. James Markunas and Robert Morrison from St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

I remember two and three years ago and longer writing columns for the Fifth Estate and trying to hip people to a new music and never getting anywhere—people just didn’t seem to be ready for the high-energy jams for one reason or another. Maybe they weren’t eating enough acid like people do now. But I feel very strongly right now that people are ready for a lot more high-energy music than they’re getting from the pop stars, and the music is certainly out there waiting for them—waiting for you right now.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

We arrived in New York City on Dec. 15 and made it to Steve Paul’s Scene to dig the Rationals and Slim Harpo. The Rats were cooking as ever and even managed to get a few people dancing. Slim Harpo had Lightnin’ Slim, one of my childhood heroes, on guitar and vocals and the joint was jumpin’! We stuck around until closing and went in. The next day we hung around the Elektra offices listening to tapes and checking out the artwork for our album, which should be released by the end of this month. On Tuesday the issue of Rolling Stone hit the stands with Rob’s picture on the cover and 5 pages of the MC5 inside. We were overjoyed even though the story was complete bullshit.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

People need music to live. We know that and act on it, all ways. Only straight people—honkies—think music is superfluous, that it doesn’t make any difference what you listen to, and their lives demonstrate their ignorance. Music shapes us and makes us whole, as we would never be without it. We have to have it. There’s no way you can get around it. For our generation music is the most vital force in most of our lives.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

“The duty of the revolutionary is to make revolution.”

The duty of a musician is to make music. But there is an equation that can’t be missed: MUSIC IS REVOLUTION. Rock and roll music is the most vital revolutionary force on earth—it blows people all the way back to their senses and makes them feel good. That’s what the revolution is all about—we have to establish a situation on this planet where all people can feel good all the time. And we will not rest until that situation exists.

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

“If we want to do much more fucking, we’re going to have to start fighting. If we want to be able to live we have to start fighting and not let ourselves be fucked around any longer by this shitpile society. We are the only hope in a crumbling world of lies and deception. Young people look to us—the dropouts, the radicals, the freeks—for information only we can provide. The Black Panthers are our brothers and sisters and point the way for action. We see their situation and realize it is ours too. Our music and our lives are the same. One is not possible without the other. The Music must go on.”

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John Sinclair
Rock & Roll Dope

This is my first column for the Fifth Estate in a long time and I’ll probably be a little rusty, so please bear with me, OK? and I’ll try to do something useful here.

I stopped writing for the Fifth Estate in January mainly for two reasons: I was tired of hassling the editors to get my columns printed intact, and I was even more tired of coming on like some kind of public personality and/or race-track tout in this space, and that was the context that’d been developed over a two-year period of writing a column almost every issue. I’d like to start over again now, if that’s possible, and do something different if I can get away with it.

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Frank Kofsky
Rock and Jazz From Ray Charles to Dylan

Talk to almost any parent with “teen aged” children and you can hear the same litany endlessly chanted: rock is tasteless (American society being so notable for its good taste!), rock is loud, the only thing that counts is the beat, why can’t they listen to good music (meaning Montovani), and more, always more, of that.

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John Sinclair
Rock and Roll Dope

Hi kids, sorry I wasn’t here last time but I got a little depressed by Cella Alderson’s letter and just couldn’t get it together in time for the deadline. The only reason I write this shit is because people seem to dig reading it and if you don’t dig it I’d rather not write it. It takes some effort and a lot of dope to get my head into this linear trip anyway, but it’s worth it if it’s appreciated.

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John Sinclair
Rock and Roll Dope

It’s really good to see that Brother Ear is hearing the Detroit bands and digging them, especially since people around here have to be told how heavy the bands are. The Frost and the Thyme aren’t the only together groups working in this area, either—there are a number of bands whose music is consistently interesting and moving, and these bands are improving every day.

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John Sinclair
Rock and Roll Dope

I want to take up where I left off last time and get into some of the alternatives to the present scene in the local rock and roll industry. There has been some fantastic response to my last column—even Russ Gibb gave me a call on a Saturday afternoon, and I hadn’t heard from him for some time—and I want to detail some of the things that are starting to happen.

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John Sinclair
Rock and Roll Dope

Now that things have cooled down a little for the MC5 and myself after all the excitement of recent weeks maybe I can get into some of the things I promised when I started this column—although the stuff you’ve been reading about the MC5 saga serves as an illustration of the original point: that there’s a lot more to the rock and roll industry than just paying your $3.50 and digging the show stoned on your ass. All those things you read about in the last three or four issues really happened.

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John Sinclair
Rock and Roll Dope

In the past two weeks since the last issue of this paper a bunch of new developments have taken place: Almost every job for the MC5 brings a new and different creep scene into being.

At a Wednesday night job in Tecumseh, Michigan, at the local teen center, guitarist Wayne Kramer ripped a pair of pants early in the second set and went off to change them. Later in the same set he ripped the second pair of pants, this time accidentally exposing his genitals to the tender crowd.

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John Sinclair
Rock and Roll Dope

The following is a press release I wrote for the MC5 this week; we’re running it here because we promised to take you behind the scenes in the rock and roll industry, and these events illustrate what bands have to go thru just to do their thing. If you just paid your money and sat and waited for MC5 at the ballroom last Sunday, you deserve to know that it wasn’t the band that kept you waiting in the heat—it was the people who took your money. Be advised.

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anon.
Rock and Roll Dope

A strange polarization (or maybe it’s a natural one) seems to be happening with rock and roll fans right now, with white teenage audiences turning toward either total freek scenes or greasy reactionary hostility when confronted with the revolutionary guerrilla theatre tactics of the MC5. Three incidents in the last three weeks illustrate the current scene:

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Dennis Frawley
Rock and Roll Revival!

Detroit’s 1st Rock and Roll Revival held Memorial Day weekend at the Fairgrounds significantly began the summer’s slew of pop festivals across the country.

The actual attendance is unknown but it must have drawn at least 25,000 to 30,000 together for the two days of rock and roll.

The set up of the festival was not ideal since there was no place to slip away and get laid but you could lie on a blanket on the sand between the grandstand and the stage and hope that the wind didn’t blow up a sand storm.

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anon.
Rock Ghouls

As groupies of the linear and electric media sniff at Janice Joplin’s empty whiskey bottles for the slightest whiff of a story, WKNR-FM of Detroit has taken rock coverage even farther down the ladder of respectability until it resembles Confidential magazine’s reportage even more than its usual Silver Screen approach.

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Mike Haywood
Rock Island Arsenal Besieged

ROCK ISLAND, IL—For 3 hours beginning at 4 a.m. Monday morning, October 21, 1985, 400 or so activists attempted to shut down the Rock Island Arsenal by blockading workers trying to drive onto the island. The five-month—organizing campaign by Project Disarm culminated in an action with 127 arrests. Many of these people attempting to blockade Arsenal workers, and many others were arbitrarily arrested.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Rock ‘N Roll Revival

The Michigan music scene will rock on over the Memorial Day weekend with the First Annual Detroit Rock and Roll Revival.

Rather than hire performers at random out of the Billboard charts or the record ads in Rolling Stone, producer Russ Gibb, of the Grande Ballroom maintains that rock and roll is the true culture of America’s youth, and must be presented as such.

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Ron Sakolsky
Rocks in my Pillow Book review

a review of

Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, by Allan Antliff, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007

“Do you believe,” she went on, “that the past dies?”

“Yes,” said Margaret. “Yes, if the present cuts its throat.”

--Leonora Carrington

When I first heard about this project, I was excited at the prospect of a book entirely devoted to the history of anarchy and art. Sadly though, the result is a disappointment. Politically-speaking, the book rides the fence between the anarchist milieu and the authoritative voice of academia when what is needed is a sturdy pair of wire cutters, perhaps a catapult, or maybe even a battering ram. For me, the most positive aspect of the book is that its essays stimulated my critical thinking in response to its arguments. To be fair, attempting to write a history of the confluence of anarchy and art from the Paris Commune (1871) to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) is such a monumental project that much of the story will inevitably fall into the cracks of the eight episodic chapters that comprise its less than 200 pages. When I initially skimmed the book, I expected to be writing a basically positive review with my main critique being about the way in which surrealism is handled. However, upon actually reading it with some care, I soon realized that the book is problematic from start to finish.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Rocky’s Rum Trip

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HONDURAS: turmoil unleashed, one student demonstrator killed

COSTA RICA: 2,000 students demonstrated

PANAMA: National Guard on duty

COLOMBIA: 20,000-man special security force tried to control student strikes and heavy street fighting

ECUADOR: ten striking students killed by police...Rocky’s car nearly overturned

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Art Johnston
Roger Calkins Please come home

Editors’ Note: Art Johnston is the former editor of the South End newspaper and disappeared into the West after his term of office ended last June.

SAN FRANCISCO—Journalism as novel. History as novelty. History as fiction. Our lives as fiction. Everybody else’s life as a movie. The Last Great Days of The State of California as tomorrow’s news today. The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization as a two-part Book of the Month Club Introductory Offer. An anecdote:

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anon.
Roger, Michael and Me

a review of “Roger and Me,” a film produced and directed by Michael Moore.

“It was like a prison.” So says Deputy Fred, who evicts families that can no longer pay the rent. He is speaking of the auto assembly line, and this is the only direct reference in the entire film “Roger and Me” to the brutal nature of factory “life.” Michael Moore, founder (and loser?) of the Flint Voice, sacked editor of Mother Jones, has now transferred his lukewarm critique of capitalist relations to the silver screen as director and narrator.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Roger Noel Released

Roger Noel, a Belgian anarchist imprisoned in Warsaw since July 5, was set free on November 26th by the Polish authorities after paying a fine of 900,000 Zlotys ($900 U.S. currency). He was accused of smuggling radio material into Poland and was sentenced to three years in jail or the fine which was paid through the intermediary of the Belgian Embassy in Warsaw, after having been raised in Belgium by the “Free Roger Noel Committee.”

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Fifth Estate Collective
Roger the Grape to Lead Boycott Day

State Senator Roger Craig, along with Hijinio Rangel, a striking worker from Delano, California, will kick off the International Grape Boycott Day activities in Detroit on May 10th.

The day’s activities will start with a bus Caravan for Social Justice at 10:30 a.m., leaving from All Saints Episcopal Church at 3837 W. Seven Mile, two blocks east of Livernois. All interested persons are invited to join the caravan which will visit several A&P stores throughout the Detroit Area.

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anon.
Rogue Statism Ragged Statelessness

“The man without a country is a free man. ‘Country’ is a tenfold chain forged around our necks and feet by our forefathers, a prison and a pit.”

--Herman Bang, Denied a Homeland (1906)

There is a traditional Arabic curse that translates into something like, “May their homes be demolished.” But, as a friend in Beirut said recently, one look at what happened in Israel’s war of destruction against Lebanon this summer is enough to make any decent human refrain from wishing that upon their worst enemy.

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Tom Hamilton
Roll On, Columbia!

New York, May 22, (LNS-NY) Round two of what has now turned into a naked fight for power between the striking students of Columbia and the Administration’s proxy, the New York Police, turned to European tactics in the hours before dawn May 22.

The night before, after a confrontation forced by the second student occupation of Hamilton Hall in four weeks, the University upped the ante to immediate suspension for anyone caught outside the dormitories. The students replied with bricks and flaming barricades.

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Dennis Raymond
Romeo and Juliet—Hagbard and Signe

The biggest mistake in bringing Shakespeare to the screen is to construct some sort of stone effigy to him. But France Zeffirelli’s film production of “Romeo & Juliet,” at the Studio 8, pulsates with a life all its own.

In translating a stage drama to a visual medium, much of the dialogue has been cut in favor of the action. Surprisingly, this works beautifully. “Romeo & Juliet” is a remarkably visual movie that could stand on its own for the imagery alone. The result is a thoroughly “cinematic” film adaptation.

...

Bill Weinberg
Rome Squatters Face Clampdown Immigrant Centers are the Target

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Demonstration in Rome’s Plaza San Silvestro November 23 against a law aimed at immigrants and squatters. Sign held by Kurdish refugees says, “From the mountains of Kurdistan to the heart of Rome, Ararat will not be evicted.” —photo: Bill Weinberg

It was a multicultural crowd that gathered in Rome’s Plaza San Silvestro to oppose the draconian Security Decree then pending in the Italian parliament. Popularly called the Salvini Law after Italy’s far-right Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, the Decree was aimed at two broadly overlapping groups: immigrants and squatters.

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Nat Freeland
Ron Cobb The Fastest Pen in the West

Editor’s note: Ron Cobb is one of the most brilliant contributors to the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) and the Fifth Estate. His cartoons originate from the Los Angeles Free Press as does the following article.

The big, massive shouldered artist with the square-cut beard arrived in the lobby of the hall where Realist editor Paul Krassner was holding forth prior to another Los Angeles one-man show.

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Andy Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Ron Sakolsky’s Swift Winds

A review of:

Swift Winds, Ron Sakolsky, artwork by Anais LaRue, Eberhardt Press, 2009, 128 pp., $8

The prolific anarchist Ron Sakolsky--formerly of Fool’s Paradise, Illinois and now a resident of Inner Island, British Columbia--has published another book.

Billed as a “backpocket compendium,” the volume borrows its shape and size from the legendary City Lights pocket poetry series and professes the insurrectionary properties of poetic desire in such a fashion as to make it a worthy descendant of such legendary and incendiary texts as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Diane DiPrima’s Revolutionary Letters.

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Ray Stock
R.O. Park Fight Looms

Memorial Park in Royal Oak has been a hang-out for suburban youth for a long time. Freaks and even a few straight kids and neighborhood families visit the park frequently and it is seldom seen deserted. For the past two months the scene there has changed from placid, bored and stoned to something far more relevant—the control of the park has become a major issue.

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Thomas Haroldson
Rosemary’s Baby film review

a review of

“Rosemary’s Baby” directed by Roman Polanski

It’s not everyday that one comes across a novel in which Satan rapes a New York housewife and forces her to bear him an heir. In fact, two and a half million readers found the story so intriguing that they turned Rosemary’s Baby into an overnight success.

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Peter Lamborn Wilson
Roses and Nightingales Looking for traditional anarchism in Iran

Introduction

The military dictator Reza’ Shah Pahlavi changed the name of Persia to Iran in 1935. This move was part of a broader effort to craft a nation through the celebration of a largely imaginary Indo-Aryan past at a time the territory was dealing with a century’s worth of British and Russian imperialist interference, as well as the increasing power of foreign oil companies.

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Nutmeg Brown
Ally Greenhead

Ross Winn Digging Up a Tennessee Anarchist

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Ross Winn, circa 1901

A couple of years back, at a conference in Ohio, an acquaintance of ours described to us how he had, in some research, happened upon an anarchist publisher who had lived and died in our neck of the woods: central Tennessee. Did we, he asked, know where Mount Juliet was? This tiny Southern town was only twenty minutes from our front door, and we were surprised when he explained how this man published radical literature from there a century ago. Would we be interested in tracking him down, maybe finding his grave and doing a rubbing? Sure, we thought, it sounded like fun at the time, and genealogical research was something we were new at, but willing to put our heads together on.

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Stew Albert
Gumbo

Rubin Bugged

[Note: authors listed in print original as Stew Albert & Gumbo.]

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—The Justice Department has admitted that during the past year they have been electronically bugging Jerry Rubin’s life.

In official government document 2660, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals 4th Circuit, and signed by C. Vernon Spratley, Jr. U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, they stated that: “the government is tendering.. a sealed exhibit containing transcripts of conversations in which appellant Rubin was a participant or at which he was present which were overheard by means of electronic surveillance.”

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Phil Ochs
Jerry Rubin

Rubin vs. Ochs Perhaps not Untypical

In the aftermath of L.B.J.‘s sudden shocker,* a heated dialogue between Phil Ochs, folksinger, and Jerry Rubin, Yippie organizer, took place on the subject of America, Johnson, Kennedy and the movement. Perhaps it was not untypical...

RUBIN: The six-gun has surrendered; the machine will now move back into control of America’s banks. Rationality will replace the sloppy hand. Kennedy, the mechanical consumer product, will replace Johnson, the existential gambler. And things won’t be as interesting up there.

...

anon.
Rubin, Yippies Infiltrated

A plainclothes policeman who infiltrated the Youth International Party has claimed that Yippies planned in advance to riot and provoke police attacks on them during the Democratic National Convention.

Robert L. Pierson said he was given a leave to serve as an investigator for the state’s attorney’s office, won the Yippies’ confidence and became bodyguard for Jerry Rubin.

...

Liberation News Service
Rudd Faces Army

NEW YORK (LNS)—Mark Rudd has asked his local draft board to give him an occupational deferment on the grounds that he is a “revolutionary” working for SDS and engaged in fighting against “a small number of people who are bleeding and destroying our country.”

Rudd, a former chairman of SDS at Columbia and an active participant in last spring’s rebellion, wrote to his draft board in Irvington, N.J., on Nov, 14: “My occupation, revolutionary, is vital to the national interest of the United States.” Rudd was re-classified 1-A by his draft board in Irvington recently, after the Columbia registrar’s office notified the board that Rudd had been suspended from the college. The chairman of the draft board, Clifford Day, told the Columbia Spectator that the decision was not based on political considerations.

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Tomas MacSheoin
Rudolph Bahro on Industrial Civilization Book review

a review of

Socialism and Survival, Rudolf Bahro, Heretic Books, London, 1983

“We must pull the communications cord on the industrial system.” Who is this speaking? Some post-industrial prophet writing in the Fifth Estate, far from the social movement? Someone lost in theories with no immediate practical consequences or no political base? These are the words of Rudolf Bahro, former East German dissident and now one of the leading theorists and activists in the West German Green movement.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Rules & Regulations...Who needs them?

Nov. 7, 1976

On Sunday, November 7, 3,000 people had descended on the Piazza Vetra, Milan, taking the police, who were prepared for a routine operation, completely by surprise. Bursting into four cinemas, they soon mounted a demonstration some 4,000 strong. Following this, a price reduction was proposed for (movie) matinee performances. The response was a new demonstration, this time involving 52 of Milan’s “youth circles,” with their banners decorated with garish colors and drawings. The Apache emblem (a hatchet) in the forefront, flags, guitars, the pink and flowered flags of the feminist and gay groups.

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Josef Skvorecky
Rules for Nazi Music Taken from the Preface to The Bass Saxophone by Josef Skvorecky

Josef Skvorecky is a renowned Czech author who currently lives and teaches in Toronto. He emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a young man, living under the Nazi administration, he took part in underground jazz groups. Judging from his stories, the band was obliged to play polkas and other “acceptable” music. When the coast was clear, they could indulge in their real love, jazz.

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John Brinker
Running on Emptiness Book review

a review of

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization, By John Zerzan, Feral House, Los Angeles, 2002, 214 pp., $12

John Zerzan hardly needs an introduction here; few modern anarchist writers are as well-known, controversial, and divisive. Zerzan is the founder and leading philosopher of what he calls anarcho-primitivism.

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Marieke Bivar
Running to Find Ourselves New fiction from Cara Hoffman

a review of

Running by Cara Hoffman. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks 2018

Inspired by her own youth spent travelling and working in Greece, Cara Hoffman’s third novel, Running, is a suspenseful punk adventure tale.

It follows Bridey, Jasper and Milo, wild, hungry youths luring unwitting tourists to stay at a shabby Athens hotel in exchange for a place to crash and a commission to spend at the bar.

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Claudia
Russian Women Life In The Former Soviet Union After the Fall

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Behind the male facade of business and politics Russia is a country run by women. Their labor keeps the population from starving. Yet post-1991 economic changes have led some women to reason that if they have to be beasts of burden they are not willing to take men along for the ride.

If this process gathers momentum, it will bring about the most radical transformation ever seen in Russian society. I saw glimmering signs of change when I lived in Russia in 1993. I went to satisfy my curiosity about the reality of Russian life, behind both Eastern and Western propaganda.

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Peter Werbe
Russia Revolution Books – Review From Adulation of Christ to Adulation of the Leader

a review of

Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution eds. Friends of Aron Baron; Luigi Fabbri, Rudolf Rocker, Nestor Makhno, Iain McKay, Alexander Berkman, Maurice Brinton, Ida Mett, Otto Wile, Emma Goldman, et al. AK Press akpress.org, 2017

The Kronstadt Uprising by Ida Mett. Theory and Practice, 2017 theoryandpractice.org.uk

...

anon.
R.W.P. Revolutionary Wall Painting

Reprinted from Fire

I. Necessity

The average Amerikan cannot help but read several hundred thousand words per day of pig shit in the form of advertising, slogans on police cars, etc. Revolutionary wall painting effectively combats this totalitarian bombardment of the mass subconscious.

“A dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”—Mao

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Julie Herrada
Sabotage

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Direct action (legal and illegal) and sabotage had been used by the U.S. and European labor movements as a method of class combat since the rise of industrialism.

These tactics allowed workers to fight back using whatever tools were available to them, and was viewed as a viable method of achieving worker demands outside of political channels. The IWW promoted direct action after the 1908 split with the Socialist Labor Party (which only advocated political action); however, it was not official union policy until 1914, and then only for a short time.

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Jeff Shantz
Sabotage & the Flows of Capital Communities Resist Assaults on Nature

According to all reputable climatologists, an immediate ninety percent reduction in material and energy production is required to meet the goal of limiting the average worldwide temperature increase by a disastrous two degrees Fahrenheit. At the current rate of fossil fuel extraction and use, the earth will experience a catastrophic increase of four to nine degrees by the end of this century.

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Julie Herrada
Sacco and Vanzetti DVD Review

A review of

SACCO AND VANZETTI, Directed by Peter Miller, Willow Pond Films, www.willowpondfilms.com

To many anarchists, there are few more sympathetic characters in our movement’s history than Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

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The Martyrs’ Farewell
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)

...

Apollo
Sacred, Sweet, Wicked Ecstasy Electronic Dance Music & Social Liberation

Editors’ note: Thanks to some typically sleazy last-minute conniving by Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, the “Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy” (R.A.V.E.) Act was signed into Federal law by Bush on April 30, 2003.

The bill’s introduction says in no uncertain terms that raves are “drug dens” where promoters sell illegal drugs and charge exorbitant prices for Ecstasy paraphernalia, such as bottled water, massage oil, and glow sticks. Under the law’s measures, property owners/renters/leasers and event promoters are criminally liable for drug use on their premises and may he fined up to $250,000 and nine years in prison. The effect, of course, is to discourage the electronic music events since the actions of just one dancer could result in a fine or jail time for event organizers.

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Hank Malone
Safe in Heaven Jack Kerouac obituary

I.

That old city-planner, Death, caught up with Jack Kerouac this October. Reportedly, it was an ugly death; drunk and despairing, his guts literally busting and bleeding inside the heavy lonely flesh. Kerouac had ruined his great good looks years before and now he had finally ruined his body, his brain, his life and perhaps his very spirit and karma. As Allen Ginsberg, his old friend, recently said, “he threw up his hands & wrote the universe don’t exist & died to prove it.”

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Blue Jesus
Salamanders for Allah Tales on the Nature of Work

“As long as the oppressive relations of capitalist production prevail, the character of work will continue to assume all of the features of a bad acid trip.”

—Karl Marx, The Communist Dreambook

Work engenders the progressive unemployment of the mind by encouraging the formation of bituminous warts hanging like dead fingernails from the brain. In severe work situations these growths may feel like entire fingers curling inward.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Salesmen fight back

Rolf Dietrich is fighting a one man war with the City of Plymouth—and winning.

Rolf is an old friend of the Fifth Estate and was trying to open up the town to the paper a few months ago. The one head shop he succeeded in placing it in was driven out of business by the local pigs.

Last February, Rolf was stopped on a phony traffic beef and taken to the station for investigation because he had a number of Fifth Estates in the back of the car. The Plymouth police sent the papers to the Wayne County prosecutor’s office to see if they could get an obscenity warrant. Their request was denied, but the pigs refused to give Dietrich back his papers.

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John Clark
Sam Dolgoff A Life at the center of American anarchism for seventy years

a review of

Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff by Anatole Dolgoff; Introduction by Andrew Cornell. AK Press, 2016, 391 pp., $22.

Anatole Dolgoff is a great story-teller. He does the kind of writing that is rare on the left. It never seems to occur to most political writers that entertaining people is not a bad thing. It occurs all the time to Anatole.

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Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
Sam Mbah Dies 1963–2014

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Sam Mbah (1963–2014)

Sam Mbah, Nigerian activist, journalist, lawyer, and co-author of African Anarchism: The History of a Movement, passed away November 6, after suffering unexpected complications from a heart condition for which he had recently undergone surgery.

Mbah was an outspoken advocate of anarchist alternatives to global capitalism, and dedicated his life to providing anarchist models of organizing against government corruption, militarism, climate change, and other social and environmental issues.

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Fifth Estate Collective
San Francisco GIs March

from LNS and the Guardian

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 12 — Over 10,000 marchers turned out on a drizzly, overcast morning to show their solidarity with the largest anti-war march ever organized by active-duty GIs and veterans.

There were at least 500 soldiers and sailors present wearing white caps lettered “GIs for Peace.” Several attended in uniform. The soldiers came despite weeks of intimidation from military officials. Military brass tried to ship Lt. Hugh Smith (USAF), one of the chief organizers, to Taiwan on Sept. 30 in hopes of quashing the demonstration. Two other march organizers, A1-C Michael Locks and A1-C John Bright, got orders to ship out to Utah, but the brass backed down after the two sought a court injunction prohibiting the move.

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Bryan Tucker
Sanity & Identity Repressive Society’s Sleight of Hand

A tentative existence is what society’s current trajectory offers us: alienation from others simultaneous with chronic concern about perception by others. Futile attempts to persist in these conditions takes the form of claiming an identity, espousing sanctioned banalities, and various other nonsense that renders us drained and pained.

...

anon.
Sarah Jane Moore Time Magazine Mother of the Year

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A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

A recent poll has concluded that this year’s “American Mother of the Year” is none other than Sarah Jane Moore, a San Francisco area resident. Moore was however unavailable for comment on this news, as she is presently in a California jail awaiting sentencing for her guilty plea in the attempted assassination of President Ford.

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Bill Meyer
Sasha on an iPhone Abigail Child’s New Emma Goldman Film Merges Anarchist History with Present Struggles

a review of

“Acts and Intermissions: Emma Goldman in America.” 2017. USA. Directed by Abigail Child; 57 min. abigailchild.com

Abigail Child is a prolific and active visual artist whose works have appeared in prestigious international galleries; an author of five poetry books, including a book of critical writings on film; and a professor of video/film production and history.

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T. Fulano (David Watson)
Saturn and Scientism

There she is, looking vaguely pornographic on the glossy covers of the weekly magazines, the planet Saturn. What have we discovered? I don’t know, I haven’t read them, feeling squashed as I do to the Earth by the giddying inertia of this century which plummets like a flaming satellite towards the nothingness. Grey skies, the weather turning cold, sirens in the distance. Some citizens walk by whispering reverently of the wonders of Saturn, disputing the number of rings and moons according to the latest counts, as the corroding universe about them threatens to be annihilated. They drool over photographs of a planet most of them couldn’t spot in a clear night sky—that is, if the night sky hadn’t already been colonized and obliterated by the city light and the lethal dust of the very civilization which made it possible to send gadgets and technicians to the stars. But everything is so groovy on Saturn, so colorful and tempestuous. They know because they watched it all on television.

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The Trumbull Theater Collective
Save Detroit’s Permanent Autonomous Zone (PAZ)

The Trumbull Theater Collective brings together a diverse group of people for the radical project of creating an authentic egalitarian community. We offer low-cost, self-governed, cooperatively-owned, non-profit, communal housing for community activists, students & young families in two, deteriorating, 100-year-old mansions in Detroit’s inner city. Also, there is a theater and meeting space attached to one of the houses. We strive to embody the anarchist principles of voluntary association, mutual aid, & human liberation. We see the Trumbull as an anti-authoritarian center of art & activism based on anti-racist action, feminism, queer liberation, ecology and anarchy.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Save the Great Lakes A Call to Action

The Evergreen Alliance, a Detroit-based federation of individuals devoted to stopping the Detroit trash incinerator, has put out a call for a Regional and International Mobilization to Save the Great Lakes, May 13-May 16. [See schedule in this issue.] This weekend of activities Has been organized to focus attention on the systematic destruction of the Great Lakes bioregion. The weekend will include a large-scale demonstration which will march past the Detroit incinerator now under construction and a rally at the Wayne State University campus. A conference and forum the following day will serve to educate participants with workshops, and several nationally known speakers have been invited to participate. A direct action contingent will utilize civil disobedience to blockade the trash incinerator on Monday, May 16.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Save The Priest

Washington, D.C.—After nine months of pre-trial hearings, a date was set today for the trial of anti-war sailor Roger Priest. Priest, the first serviceman to face court-martial for statements made in an anti-war newsletter, will stand trial in Washington on April 14th, the day before the nation-wide demonstrations against the war.

...

anon.
Save the Seals—Skin the Rich

On March 19, 1979, several of us reached into the dustbin of history to resurrect the old Eat the Rich Gang and the Workers Revenge Group. The occasion was a Greenpeace anti-sealing demonstration in downtown Detroit that, as it turned out had as its demand only a one year moratorium on the Canadian hunt, to determine whether or not these beautiful creatures were an endangered species. The trap of this sort of logic is so bountifully clear that it’s surprising that even these weepy-eyed reformers fell for it—the Canadian government counts the seal heads, says, “Nope, not endangered,” and the slaughter begins anew next year, to provide furs for the rich. The ETR/WRG prepared the following leaflet which was distributed at the rally.

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Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Saying No to Nader

In the year since the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate demonstrations in Seattle, intense actions have occurred in Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London, Prague, and dozens of other cities across this country and the world.

They have functioned as models of resistance to global capitalism’s exploitation of labor, environmental degradation, and state repression Hence, it is disturbing to see some activists now advocating participation in the domesticated arena of electoral politics.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Schools: Kicking the Animal Out of You Education Theme Intro

Fifth Estate staffer, playwright, and madcap prankster, the late Pat Halley, once wrote in these pages, “The purpose of education is to kick the animal out of you.” That is, to make individuals conform to a society based on constraint of one’s desires and autonomy. This is true to one degree or another of every culture although within the modern state and capitalist social order, this is carried out to the extreme by the necessities of their definitions.

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Don LaCoss
Schools of the Americas

In The Underground History of American Education, the renegade educator John Taylor Gatto traces the genealogy of compulsory public-school education in the US back to the system of pedagogy created in the nineteenth-century northern European state of Prussia. Prussia is often seen by historians as the architect of German nationalist unification; after the Napoleonic invasion of 1806, the Prussian military aristocracy decided that it needed to reform education in that kingdom so that new, centralized schools could produce “obedient soldiers to the army; obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; well-subordinated clerks for industry; citizens who thought alike on most issues; and national uniformity in thought, word, and deed.” The Prussian education model became heavily geared toward patriotism and civic virtue after the near-success of the Revolution of 1848; the ruling class in Prussia wanted to insure that the contagion of revolutionary ideas was not being picked up in the schools.

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Ashlyn Mooney
School’s Out For Good

a review of

People’s Republic of Neverland: The Child versus the State by Robb Johnson. PM Press 2020

Raising Free People by Akilah Richards. PM Press 2020

In the grammar of education, children are often passive objects. Children get educated; children get schooled. And what does education do to them? Charles Dickens described schoolchildren as “little parrots and small calculating machines.” A century and an ocean away from Victorian-era England, another artist and resistance worker, the musician Bob Marley, disavowed traditional education entirely: “If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.”

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Antonia Lamb
Score-o-Scope

It was brought to my attention last week, that each of the various astrological signs [vague as any such sun-sign delineation can be] has its own particular sexual proclivities and positions. Indeed, it would be quite possible [if not desirable] to create an astrological Kama Sutra, designed to insure sexual fulfillment and certainty for all possible combinations of signs. Here follows a brief capsule description of astrological intercourse [blow by blow, as it were].

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anon.
SDS Battles Police Which is worse in Detroit? Jay-walking or carrying a red flag?

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Which is worse in Detroit? Jay-walking or carrying a red flag? I suppose it depends on where you are coming from, but put together 60 persons jay-walking after a rally, led by a red-flag-carrying revolutionary, and you can expect what did happen on Saturday, September 27.

Motor City SDS had called a rally on the front steps of the Main Library on Woodward and Kirby to demand an end to Wayne University’s racist urban renewal program and its planned entry into the war research field.

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Fifth Estate Collective
SDS Calls Student Strike

In response to the election fraud being perpetrated on the American people by the U.S. ruling class, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is coordinating a nation wide Student Strike on Election Day, November 5. The slogan is “No class today, no ruling class tomorrow.”

Locally, Wayne State SDS is participating by endorsing the Strike at Wayne and holding a freak-out rally on the Mall at 12:30 pm. This will be followed by a teach-in on the electoral system and the bankruptcy of American liberalism. The proceeding evening, November 4, People Against Racism will sponsor a pre-election rally at Community Arts Auditorium at 8 pm. Rennie Davis, of the National Mobilization Committee will be the featured speaker.


Dec 3, 2019

Fifth Estate Collective
SDS Displays Anti-Draft Exhibit

A news article in the January 21, 1967 MICHIGAN CHRONICLE, a Detroit Negro paper, reported their paper had received several phone calls complaining about the use of the word “nigger” in an anti-draft display at Wayne University.

The display, sponsored by the Wayne chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), outlined different alternatives to the draft including conscientious objection (CO) and going to Canada. Also, the display suggested potential draftees could “cop out” by displaying erratic or disagreeable behavior at the induction center.

...

Clark Kissinger
SDS Founder Attacked

CHICAGO (LNS)—Dick Flacks, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and founding member of SDS, was severely beaten in his university office May 5.

Flacks was beaten over the head, causing multiple skull fractures, and his right hand was almost cut off in an attempt to leave him to bleed to death.

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Barbara Healy
SDS Girls Visit Macomb

Ten women from the Detroit SDS summer project invaded Macomb Community College July 31. They filed into a social science class chanting, “Work, study, get ahead, kill.”

The students were in the middle of a final exam and were perplexed by the interruption.

The SDS women barricaded the door with a desk. They proceeded to talk about how America fucks people over, especially blacks, Third World people and women and how people had to get together and fight this.

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Scott Braley
SDS Guerrillas Strike

Madison Avenue seems determined to co-opt and make a profit on everything, even revolution.

What the movement has to do is politicize every facet of Amerikan life and relate to people everywhere they are—in this case, at the movies.

For the last couple of weeks several people from the SDS summer program have been spending spare time at “CHE!” (“A man who created a nightmare of violence and terror”). We went to theatres all over Detroit passing out the June 12 “Che!” issue of the Fifth Estate [FE #81, June 12–25, 1969], and rapping about what Che and Cuba really are about.

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Fifth Estate Collective
SDS in Chicago

CHICAGO—The toadies of Mayor Daley’s court are working long hours into the night attempting to prepare an official battle plan for the latest onslaught into their domain.

It comes in the form of the SDS National Action set for October 8 thru 11. The scene in Pig City is always chaotic, but this time it may be even more so with two factions of SDS each planning separate programs for the week.

...

anon.
SDS Loves Provo, UPS

One of the resolutions adopted at the recent Students for a Democratic Society national convention in Ann Arbor under the heading of “Cultural Revolution” calls for SDS endorsement of and participation in the Provo Conference Tribal Gathering which is scheduled for the Fall.

New Left Notes, the official SDS newspaper, will also shortly be applying for membership in the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS). SDS is the largest student radical organization in the country and has draft resistance as its main program. Sample copies of New Left Notes or information about the group may be obtained by writing its headquarters at 1608 W. Madison, Chicago, Illinois.


Feb 21, 2017

Students for a Democratic Society
SDS replies

Editors’ Note: The following letter is a reply from the national officers of SDS to criticisms of their upcoming national action in Chicago made by this newspaper in our last edition [“Letter to SDS,” FE #85, August 7–20, 1969].

Dear Comrades,

Your letter about the National Action has become an important item for discussion around here. Because of the way you posed certain problems, and because you have focused in on questions that are being raised around the country at this time, we felt it would be important to answer your open letter with an open response. There are a couple of major misconceptions made about the action. The notion that any part of the action is or could be “adventurist” is crazy. The terms of the fight against imperialism are being set by the colonized people of the world.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
SDS Shakes the Empire

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Scene at GM building. photo: Bob Evans

Students for a Democratic Society declared the days between April 20 and 30 as “Ten Days to Shake the (American) Empire.

Locally, Wayne University SDS led an anti-imperialist march on April 24 of over 250 persons to the General Motors Building which was seen to quiver ever so slightly in the face of the onslaught.

...

Allen Young
SDS Takes New Turn

with additional notes by Fifth Estate staff

CHICAGO (LNS)—SDS expelled the Progressive Labor Party (PL) and its political allies from the ranks of the organization June 21.

The action was the turning point of the 1969 SDS National Convention. SDS leaders saw it as a historic step in the history of the nation’s left, and as a breath of fresh air for the movement.

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Liberation News Service
SDS Weatherman War Council Year of the Fork?

FLINT, Mich. (LNS) — Weathermen, Weatherwomen, some of their friends and some of their critics, met in a “war council” Dec. 27–30. The gathering was a serious political meeting, although it had been widely billed as an outasight international youth culture freak show.

About 400 young people from across the country made it to the bare Giant Ballroom in Flint to practice karate, rap in regional and collective meetings, dig a little music and hear the Weather Bureau lay down its political line for revolution in Amerika.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Seale won’t be silenced

Editor’s Note: The following note was written by Bobby Seale in his Chicago jail cell, smuggled into the courtroom on Thursday, October 30, and given to Jerry Rubin, who released it later that day.

Section 198, title 42 of the United States Government Code says that a black man cannot be discriminated against in any court in any legal defense matter.

...

David Annarelli
Sean Swain says, “Abolish Ohio” Anarchist Political Prisoner

a review of

Ohio by Sean Swain. Ardent Books

Ohio is the story of Sean Swain, a man wrongfully convicted and turned into an anarchist political prisoner in the state that bears the title of the book’s name.

He has been in prison in Ohio since 1991 on a murder charge, the self-defense killing of an abusive ex- of his then-girlfriend who had broken into his house and threatened his life.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Searching for the Culprit Introduction to “The Original Affluent Society”

“Without government life is nasty, brutish and short.”

—Thomas Hobbes

Every person gazing even casually at the sordid history of government realizes that the Hobbesian dictum is nonsense and, in fact, just the opposite is true: with government, humanity has thusly had its life defined.

Viewing the organized political state as the culprit in human affairs for the presence of universal misery is standard fare for the anarchist and libertarian tradition and as a theory is not without merit as far as it goes. Certainly, other attempts historically to locate the culprit in evil spirits, the Devil, human nature or even capitalism, are much more shortsighted as they fail to deliver an explanation of the daily mechanism through which people have been subjugated during the epoch of Civilization.

...

David Solnit
Seattle much more than a few broken windows

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Some demonstrators wanted more than free trade.

On November 30, 1999, a citizen uprising shut down the World Trade Organization and took over downtown Seattle, transforming it into a festival of resistance. Tens of thousands of people joined the nonviolent direct action blockade which encircled the WTO conference site, keeping the most powerful and undemocratic institution on earth shut down from dawn till dusk, despite an army of federal, state and local police, using tear gas, pepper spray, rubber, plastic and wooden bullets, concussion grenades and armored tanks in an attempt to control the crowds. However, people continued to resist throughout the week despite the clampdown which included mass arrests of nearly 600 people and government suspension of any pretense of civil rights.

...

Rui Preti
Seattle Far-Right Shooter’s Trial Ends in Hung Jury How can we get justice in an unjust system?

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Josh Dukes

Following the recent dismissal of charges against a right-wing woman who shot an anarchist anti-fascist activist in 2017, the question of how anarchists should or should not interact with the state’s mis-named justice system has become more relevant than ever. The victim’s own anarchist stance on state-administered justice and possible alternatives to it have added needed complexity to a perennial issue.

...

Sylvie Kashdan
Seattle’s Left Bank Books An anchor for the anarchist community

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Good news! Seattle’s Left Bank Books is republishing Letters of Insurgents, Fredy Perlman’s historical novel about love and revolution in the East bloc and Western states of the mid-20th century.

The book was written in the mid-1970s and first published by Black & Red and printed at the Detroit Printing Co-op, both projects initiated by Fredy and Lorraine Perlman. The B&R Co-op began in 1970, three years before Left Bank Books (LBB) was established.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Second Edition of Ron Sakolsky’s Creating Anarchy Published

Ardent Press in Berkeley, California is publishing a second edition of Ron Sakolsky’s Creating Anarchy. Originally issued in 2005 by the Fifth Estate as a one-off publication, the book is a dynamic collage of ideas, images, and action--ranging widely from May Day to utopia, from refusal to autonomy, and from insurrection to imagination.

...

Gavin Grindon
Second-Wave Situationism

Last year saw, at least here in London, a plethora of commemorative events to mark the 40-year anniversary of the events of 1968, with pundits and talking heads emerging from everywhere to offer their accounts and experiences of that year, in which a multitude of movements remade and reclaimed the terrain of everyday life in a variety of ways from the jaws of capitalism.

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
Secular Antinomian Anabaptist Neo-Luddism What can anarchists and anarcho-primitivists learn from Old Order religious groups about living beyond technology?

“By banning the telephone from the home, Old Order Amish...try to maintain the primacy of communication within the context of community.”

--D.Z. Umble

“Church splits are bad, some things are worse, and one of them is to keep on compromising with something we know is sinful.”

--Anon., Separated Unto Christ (Old Order Mennonite tract, circa 1995)

...

Mycle
Seditious Children

We will meet at the midnight hour

past the tree stump forest.

We will be sneaky slinkies and walky-

talkies. Robin Hood’s woods would be so

proud. Merry boys and girls sing

carnivalesque ballads and awaken

the tree’s breeze--our back beat.

Tonight, we escape to sing songs with the animals

songs that none of us know the words to.

...

Clayton J. Pyke
Seeing is Obeying Authoritarian Aesthetics & the Afterlife of Fascism in Neoliberal Democracy

Faces covered with white masks, carrying a banner reading “Reclaim America,” chanting re-worked Nazi slogans, and waving stylized U.S. flags, 150 members of the white nationalist Patriot Front marched through Washington D.C. in early February.

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Antifascist protesters blocking white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascist sympathizers from entering Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017

...

Cara Hoffman
Seeing Seattle An Interview with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is an author and queer anti-assimilationist activist living in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. She spoke with Fifth Estate on July 2, the day CHOP, the district’s autonomous zone, was demolished by police. Sycamore’s latest novel The Freezer Door is in part about the stranglehold the suburban imagination has on city life; a meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity.

...

Hubert Gendron-Blais
Seeing social struggles through individual characters historical research, well-crafted dramatic intensity and moments of poetry and humour

a review of

3 online plays by Norman Nawrocki, 2020–2022: “EVICTION? Dog’s Blood!!;” “Ukrainians, Pelicans & the Secret of Patterson Lake,” and “Run Nawrocki Run! Escape from Banff Prison”

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Norman Nawrocki in “Run Nawrocki Run! Escape from Banff Prison”

Norman Nawrocki is a veteran artiste and activist in the Montreal anarchist and radical communities. He has produced more than 20 theater plays, 14 books, and over 30 music albums as a solo artist or with many bands and collectives since the 1980s such as Rhythm Activism, Bakunin’s Bum, Anarchist Writers Bloc, and DaZoque.

...

MaxZine Weinstein
Segregation Rising ...and the Strategy to Leave Children Behind

While attending a meeting in Gainesville, Georgia to learn about the horrific effects of environmental racism, the conversation quickly turned to education. For decades African Americans have been fighting pollution and coping with obscene leukemia rates in their community in this city of 25,000 residents. That day, they vented about the local public school system and the intensification of segregation in schools. They know segregation is a device designed to limit their community’s access to the tools and services needed to have a decent life.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Selected books from Factory School

Vision Quest Guidebook

“The New Freedom”: Corporate Capitalism by Fredy Perlman

The Big Melt, President of the United Hearts

We Know You Are Watching by Surveillance Camera Players

The Modern School of Stelton: A Sketch by Joseph J. Cohen and Alexis C. Ferm

Facing Reality, Correspondence Publishing Committee

...

Various Authors
Selecting a Master or Ousting a Tyrant Radical reflections for the selection year

Here in the heart of imperial North America, it’s (s)election year, and whether we like it or not, public discourse over the next several months will be dominated by campaign shenanigans.

Finding the proper revolutionary response to this spectacle spawns the usual frustration and debate. While a few antiauthoritarians have joined the “Anybody but Bush” chorus rampant on the liberal-left, others have dusted off their quadrennial rants against the inherently corrupt capitalist system and its permanent war machine, claim to moral supremacy, and facade of representative democracy.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Select Radical Pedagogy Bibliography

Apple, Michael. 1993. Official Knowledge.

Apple, Michael. 1995. Education and Power.

Apple, Michael. 2001. Educating the “Right” Way.

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Gatto, John Taylor. 1992. Dumbing Us Down.

Goodman, Paul. 1956. Growing Up Absurd.

Goodman, Paul. 1962. Compulsory Mis-education and the Community of Scholars.

...

Pointblank
Self-management and the Spanish Revolution

On the morning of July 18, 1936 General Francisco Franco began the fascist rebellion against the Spanish Republican liberal bourgeois regime in Madrid. This move was immediately met by armed resistance of the urban proletariat who, after defeating the fascists in half of Spain began the revolutionary process of expropriating industry, while their counterparts among the peasantry collectivized agriculture.

...

F.T. Andrews
Selfridge: No more shit

Racism has been heavy at Selfridge Air Force Base, twenty miles north of Detroit, for quite a while. Especially in the last year, there have been numerous incidents, and a great deal of harassment and intimidation of black airmen and air women (WAFs).

Colonel Harold Lund, the commander at Selfridge, is completely ineffectual in dealing with the problem, although one is not sure whether it is through incompetence or design.

...

Liberation News Service
Senators Say No

SEATTLE (LNS)—Ernest Gruening, Former U.S. Senator from Alaska, has called on America’s youth to resist the draft and go to jail, according to a UPI report.

“I want to see thousands of young nen refuse to go—until they have so many of them they’ve filled all the jails,” Gruening told an anti-war rally here.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Senators Uptight

Eighteen State Senators—16 Republicans and two Democrats—are demanding an investigation into “left-wing” student activities at all of Michigan’s State Supported universities.

While Sen. James Fleming (Rep.—Jackson), who is the principle sponsor of the resolution, has stated that SDS activities at the University of Michigan were what he was most concerned about, the investigation would also look into campus “morals.”

...

Friends of Jeffrey Free Luers
Sentence for Jeffrey “Free” Luers is Reversed 22-Year Sentence for Eco-Sabotage Overturned

A rare judicial victory was achieved in February as forest defense activist Jefrey “Free” Luers’ 23-year prison sentence for eco-sabotage was overturned by the Oregon Court of Appeals.

In 2001, then 23 year-old Jeff and his codefendant, Craig “Critter” Marshall, were convicted for torching three SUVs at a Eugene, Oregon car dealership. Their stated purpose was to raise awareness about global warming and the role SUVs play in that process.

...

Len Schafer
Serve the People Coalition News

“We have finally seen that we are brothers and sisters in spite of ideological differences. We finally sense that we hold much in common.”

—STP Coalition

Working together on this basis, 16 community based organizations got together May 19 to define the structure and direction of the SERVE THE PEOPLE Coalition.

...

War Resisters League
Serve Your Country: Don’t Go to Vietnam War Resisters League ad

If your government is waging a criminal war do you serve the country best by cooperating?

Who served Germany best under Hitler? Those who obeyed orders and helped kill the Jews? Or the handful of Germans who chose prison and even death rather than cooperate?

Who upheld Russian honor in 1956? Those who obeyed orders, marched into Hungary, and shot down students and workers—or those troops who refused to fire?

...

Bill Rehahn
Sestina Produced as a free poem by the Great Mohasky Press, Detroit, November 4, 1974

This here’s Detroit,

home of hungering

dreams, home of my empty pockets

and tired worn fingers.

The shadows cast are Babylon’s,

that made scorpion death of my mother.

So many have sacrificed a mother

to become orphans of Detroit

grown cold in the shades of Babylon

that leave us hungering

with no place for our fingers

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Set Our Brother Free Now

FT. LEWIS, Wash., Feb. 28 — 300 people rallied to the defense of Pvt. Bruce McLean, an American Servicemen’s Union (ASU) member who was shanghaied to Vietnam Feb. 19. The rally was held at American Park, just off Ft. Lewis.

Speakers at the rally were Denny Leonard and Stan Hoffman both members of the Ft. Lewis local of the ASU. They called for the military to immediately return Pvt. McLean from Vietnam, where he was taken illegally. The rally was organized by Seattle Liberation Front and ASU Shelter-Half.

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
Seven Subversive instasonnets

Sabotage

Captain Nemo the SciFi Stirnerite

lurks beneath our waves of text like

a semantic barracuda. If God

won’t be dead till we kill grammar

as Nietzsche said then Chomsky must be

at least the Pope (Papa not dada)--

scarcely the “brainless luddism” to which

we all aspire. Scorpions ate our

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Seveso Update Aftermath of deadly Italian chemical release

A year-ago this month (July 10, 1976 to be exact), an explosion at the Icmesa chemical plant in Seveso, Italy garnered worldwide attention as the release of 4.4 pounds of deadly tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, or TCDD, contaminated the town and forced the mass evacuation of its inhabitants. [See these related Fifth Estate articles.]

...

Jamie Heckert
Sex & Anarchy Because real social change includes a sexual revolution

One of the things most appealing about the anarchist tradition is its scope and subtlety. Not only do anarchists have big ideas and great plans for transforming the large-scale cultural, economic, and political structures of our societies, we also address the everyday questions of how we live our lives.

...

Marie Mason
Sex & Revolution

my flesh is rippling music dancing

as I move my hands my lips across your supple

body blending everything becomes bewildered unpretended

in these moments of ecstatic rhythm

reggae sweat your breath so still

lingering upon my lips

your body mine the last of the wine

spilled between us in a kiss

...

Marie Mason
Sex & Revolution Reprinted from FE #332, Summer 1989

my flesh is rippling music dancing

as i move my hands my lips across your supple

body blending everything becomes bewildered unpretended

in these moments of ecstatic rhythm

reggae sweat your breath so sweet still

lingering upon my lips

your body mine the last of the wine

spilled between us in a kiss

...

Ratticus
Sex and Pain

If you are reading this right now, you are not making love. But you are presumably not assembling cars nor doing the dishes either. In this essay about sex you will not learn new techniques, ideas or perspectives. You might even get bored reading it, in which case I insist that you do something else immediately, as that is the whole point of what I am saying.

...

Unruhlee
Sex and Pleasure Activism

a review of

More Out Than In: Notes on Sex, Art, and Community, edited, by Rachel Kaplan and Keith Hennessy, Abundant Fuck Publications, San Francisco, 1995, 100 pp., $5

Get out your scissors for that standard Map of the Possible! There have been some bold scouting parties for a world of liberated desire the last few years, and some of the boldest have just put a book out on their discoveries.

...

anon.
Sex Cakra

Rainbow

Can you float through the universe of

your body and not lose your way?

Can you lie quietly

engulfed

in the slippery union

of male and female?

Warm wet dance of generation?

Endless ecstasies of couples?

Can you offer your stamen trembling in

the meadow for the electric penetration of pollen

...

Bob Stark
Sex, Drugs and other Cheap Hypes

Hello

“The problem with San Francisco groups is, I was expecting wonders and miracles and what I heard was a bunch of white blues bands that didn’t sound as funky as my little band in high school.”

—Frank Zappa

“Big Brother is a joke.”

—Mike Bloomfield

“That’s Jim Gurley. He’s the SADDEST guitar player in the whole world.”

—Hippie

...

Peter Werbe
Sex Economy Toward a Self-governing Character Structure

Coming to grips with the totality of Wilhelm Reich’s anti-authoritarian social psychology is beyond the scope of any short article. [1] Instead, this will be a brief summation of his notion of Sex-economy, which, along with Work-democracy constitute two of his major concepts.

To present Reich in such a manner means by necessity that many apparent inconsistencies in his work must be neglected. [2] To call oneself a Reichian (or a Marxist) means you raise insightful thought to the level of an ideology--a doctrine to be defended in all of its peculiarities.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sex in China

The five cartoon panels printed on this page are taken from “Red Guard Romance” (written and drawn by Jay Kinney) and appeared in Young Lust No. 5. Most of us read the comic and thought it funny, if not somewhat preposterous. However, proving again that being more radical than reality itself is always a difficult proposition, we ran across the accompanying article by Ross H. Munro in the Oct. 12, 1977 Toronto Globe and Mail.

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Citizen Cane
Sex, Lies, & Tourism Is Cuba really prostituting her teenagers, or is this another cynical manipulation by the Bush Administration?

Let me say right off that the subject of Cuba is extremely polarizing. This makes it difficult to have a discussion without the people involved, from the political left or right, simply going deaf and repeating familiar good-vs-evil litanies. After years of visiting and studying the island, I have found it to be anything but simple to figure out. On the contrary, like most places one gets to know well, it’s endlessly complex and nuanced. Hence, my rule of thumb when checking out Cuba analysis is to look for this complexity. The moment I hear tripe peddled by self-deluded leftoids of Cuba-as-socialist-utopia—or the Miami Mafia’s more repugnant portrayal of it as a dirty third-world basket case—I start looking for the exit.

...

A. Smith (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Sex, Sedition and the Fall of the Berlin Wall Book review

a review of

Len Bracken, The East is Black. Sexpol Editions (Third Edition) 2000

Pornography is a literary form fraught with political implications often operating outside the text. The very question of what is pornography has been the pretext of many political trials. But, political and sexual implications aside, pornography is simply what it is: a literary (or artistic) form.

...

Allan Antliff
Mark Antliff

Sexual Anarchy The Monument to Oscar Wilde

The Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris contains many tombs honoring artists and rebels, but the most striking of them all is the monument to the gay English playwright and anarchist Oscar Wilde. [1]

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Oscar Wilde’s Paris tomb became a battleground for sexual liberation.

The story of Wilde’s trial for homosexuality and subsequent imprisonment in England is well-known. After his release from jail in 1897, he fled to the continent and settled in Paris. He died there in exile in 1900 and was quietly buried in Pere Lachaise.

...

Kristian Williams
Sexual Liberation and the Possibilities of Friendship Foucauldian Proposals and Anarchist Elaborations

The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault was not known for offering practical advice. But in a series of interviews from 1981 and 1982 he focused on the major questions then facing the gay liberation movement.

His remarks from that time offer prescient guidance--and pose substantive challenges--for those concerned with sexual liberation today. Though he spoke from his position as a gay man and addressed his comments primarily to a gay audience,

...

Peter Werbe
Sexual Repression and Authoritarianism Control of Bodies equals Control of Minds

The juxtaposing of anti-sexual statements on this page by the Vatican and certain leftist leaders and groups is not meant as an exercise in cynicism, but rather to illustrate in graphic terms the role sexual repression plays within all authoritarian systems.

The Church, for example, is easily identifiable as a repressive institution. Its power to regulate moral conduct grew as did the centrality of its wealth and authority within the feudal system of the Middle Ages.

...

Art Johnston
SF Panthers Attacked!

[two_third padding=“0 30px 0 0”]Special to the Fifth Estate

SAN FRANCISCO—With Thompson submachine-guns blazing, 160 armed cops moved in on the Fillmore District Monday afternoon, April 28, to quiet a Black Panther loudspeaker.

Sixteen persons were arrested in a bust which resulted from a police complaint that a Panther loudspeaker was insulting the pigs. A number of guns were seized (and have not been released), including two double barreled shotguns, a.45 automatic, a .22 caliber rifle, an M-14, and assorted ammo.

...

Dave Hanson
Shamanism, anarchy and the end of the world

After twenty years of teaching shamanic practices to small groups in several circles in Washington and California, I found the results to be mixed. In the groups in which I participated, there were many moving visionary experiences, but the flabby jargon of the human potential movement left important messages missed amid incessant psychobabble.

...

Dennis Raymond
Shame Film review

When the heroine of Ingmar Bergman’s great movie “Persona” turned on a television set and saw the atrocities of the Vietnam war, we in the audience experienced something close to cultural shock—a medievalist had crossed the time barrier. One of the severest and most frequent criticisms of Bergman has been his renowned social indifference.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Share Back page stencil graphic

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Stencil art is a fun and easy way to reclaim and beautify your neighborhood. Above is just one example—experiment with your own.

Directions:

1. photocopy and enlarge (bigger for better visibility)

2. glue to thin non-corrugated cardboard

3. cut out with exacto knife

4. spray paint (don’t hold the can too close)

...

Orin Langelle
Shawnee Timber Sale Stopped

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Demonstrators blockade a logging road in Illinois’ Shawnee Nation Forest while a paid agent of repression looks on. —photo: O. Langelle

Beginning on June 20th, a determined group of Earth First!ers (EF!), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and anarchists, maintained a blockade at the site of the Fairview timber sale area in southern Illinois’ Shawnee National Forest.

...

Jess Flarity
She Exists Only to Please Sexbot Take-over

Love dolls. Robo-whores. Slutbots. Synthetic options. Whatever you call the life-sized Barbies made by California-based Abyss Creations and other companies around the world, these 70-lb, orifice-slotted mannequins have one primary purpose: to be the ever-obedient, surrogate sexual partners of their owners, which are almost always men.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sheriff Harvey Exposed!

Ken Kelley, editor of the Ann Arbor Argus, fresh from a semi-victory over the forces of injustice, has scored another journalistic coup.

Kelley published the contents of the wallet of Washtenaw County’s fascist sheriff Doug Harvey in the latest issue of the Argus.

Kelley told the Fifth Estate that Harvey was drunk on his ass at a University of Michigan basketball game and staggered home leaving his wallet. It was retrieved by an unidentified but heroic citizen who brought it to the Argus office where its contents were photographed and then returned to the Sheriff.

...

Cookie Orlando
Shoplifting and the Politics of Instant Gratification Are individual acts of transgression rebellion?

Lots of anarchists and other radicals shoplift on a regular basis. But the public discussion on the topic seems to oscillate between celebration and denunciation, with almost nothing in between.

On one side you’ve got CrimethInc and Yomango saying shoplifting is authentic resistance. As an anonymous author wrote in CrimethInc’s Days of War, Nights of Love, shoplifting is “the most effective protest” against the worst features of modern capitalism “because it is not merely theoretical--it is practical, it involves action.” Yomango is a European shoplifting community founded in Spain in 2002, whose name in Spanish translates to, “I steal.”

...

Jessamine O’Connor
Shopping List for My Newborn Girl

Botox

Vajazzles

Spray-tan

Collagen

Foundation

Blusher, Shadow

Liner; Stick-on lashes

Anti-perspirant; Perfume

Body spray, Deodorant; Facelift

Tummy tuck, Magic knickers;

Padded bra, Corset

Silicone implants;

Waxed legs

Shaved armpits

Plucked eyebrows

A Brazilian; Detox, Diet

Diet, Diet; Teeth whitening

Anal bleaching, Liposuction;

Colonic irrigation, Pedicure

Manicure; Laser hair removal;

Cosmetic gynecology

...

Various Authors
Short reviews Walking on Water; Joybringer magazine; Baby Bloc; Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls

Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution. Derrick Jensen. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004.

reviewed by Leafy

Already known to us for his indictments of civilization and chilling memoirs, Derrick Jensen takes us inside his real-life anti-classroom and relates his teaching methods in a narrative, story-telling fashion that follows his first rule of writing: Never bore the reader. Throughout, he exposes school systems as training camps teaching us, as Arthur Evans expresses, “depersonalized learning, alienation from nature and sexuality, obedience to hierarchy, fear of authority, self-objectification, and chilling competitiveness.” Jensen challenges his students to start developing past these trainings.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Shorts

A.F. Kooks

The Air Force admitted in a recent hearing that at least three men with dangerous psychiatric problems had been assigned to guard a super-secret nuclear weapons installation at Hamilton Air Force Base, 25 miles south of San Francisco.

The instability of the guards came out it a preliminary hearing for one of them, Sgt. Robert V. Ballou. He is accused of going berserk with a loaded carbine on the base and holding a loaded gun at the head of another officer.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Shorts

Sweet Music-Muzak—that background music featured in supermarkets, office buildings and factories is invading the People’s Republic of China. The Western regional director of the-Muzak Corporation, Bert Mitchell, has told Pacific News Service that a Muzak salesman has just returned from a very successful sales trip to the Chinese mainland. According to Mitchell—in his words—“He spent a whole month there, selling our systems. The Chinese were crazy about them.”

...

Various Authors
Shout Outs ...to and from Fifth Estate on its 40th birthday

Dear FE,

Happy 40th!

Love & Solidarity

Prison Book Program

www.prisonbookprogram.org

Cultivate an eco-communitarian society.

Inhabit ecovillages.

Love Fifth Estate.

Also subscribe to: Green Horizon Quarterly

Visit: http://www.green-horizon.org

Write for information: Ecovillageremsn.com

Greetings & Solidarity!

...

Saint Just
Shutdown Policing the Crisis in Pittsburgh and Boston

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At the 2009 G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, fully militarized police mobilized to protect the world’s financial ministers, rioted and attacked people indiscriminately.

I have had the unfortunate privilege of experiencing two urban shutdowns in the U.S. In 2009, while living in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood adjacent to the University of Pittsburgh as a graduate student, I experienced a preemptive shutdown of a major city during the G-20 summit meeting of the finance ministers of the top world economies.

...

P.P. Dickey
Sign Here

At this time every year, aliens are required to register with the United States Government, who bring you Chevrolets, racism, Herb Alpert and the Tiajuana Brass and other fine products.

In spite of the fact that the government has kindly erected big, prominent buildings called post offices where aliens can register, each year many people who should notify the authorities of their alienation fail to do so.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sincavitch Busted

Tom Sincavitch, who “quit” the army has again refused active duty at Ft. Riley, Kansas on March 27 and was returned to the stockade “pending referral of new charges.”

Tom was convicted of being absent without leave for his first “offense” and given a six month suspended sentence. He had taken sanctuary in St. Joseph’s Church and was arrested by 40 FBI agents on March 13.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sincavitch Gets Army Deal

After messing around with Tom Sincavitch’s “Discharge for the good of the service” and finally turning it down, the Army has offered him a deal.

If Tom agrees to plead guilty to the charges of violating the orders of a sergeant and a captain they will drop the charge of violating an Army regulation, give him nine months confinement at Fort Leavenworth and then give him a Bad Conduct Discharge.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sincavitch Set for Court Martial

Tom Sincavitch, the Detroit GI who took sanctuary in St. Joseph’s Church this Spring is facing another court-martial the last week in July.

Sincavitch is being held in the Ft. Riley, Kansas stockade for refusing to report for duty. He had been put on active duty following his refusal to attend his Army Reserve meetings in Detroit. He called the training he was receiving “racist.”

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sincavitch to be Tried

FLASH! Sincavitch has been convicted of being absent without leave and received a suspended sentence of six months confinement. He was ordered to report for active duty immediately, but Sincavitch has stated that he will refuse to do so.

Tom Sincavitch, who was arrested March 12 by some 40 FBI agents in his “sanctuary” of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, is confined in Fort Riley, Kansas.

...

Mike Tyre
Sinclair

Marijuana—a harmful and dangerous drug.

This is the title of a paper by Joseph E. Maher, Recorders Court Judge, which states the ruling of a three judge panel on the constitutionality of Michigan’s marijuana laws. The decision stems from a case brought to court by John Sinclair, head of Trans-Love Energies, to test the constitutionality of these laws.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sinclair Appeal Brief Filed

The future of John Sinclair, imprisoned chairman of the Youth International Party, hinges on two things at this point. John is currently serving a 9-1/2 to 10 year sentence for possession of marijuana in Marquette Prison.

The first is the expression of support for the freeing of Sinclair, and all political prisoners and the demand to legalize marijuana. This has been manifested in such events as the Free John Sinclair Day held across the country Jan. 24 that raised thousands of dollars in legal fees and educated people about the repressive use of the archaic narcotics laws.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sinclair Court Hassles

The police conspiracy out to put White Panther leader John Sinclair behind bars has suffered several important setbacks in the last few weeks.

First, sentencing of Sinclair was postponed until June 10 on his Oakland County conviction of assaulting a police officer after attorney William Segesta brought in new evidence and asked for a new trial.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sinclair, from Prison

Dear Brothers & Sisters,

It was good to hear from you last week. My transfer to Marquette has been postponed at least a few weeks, but they are determined to send me there as soon as they can. A pig from the Corrections Dept. in Lansing came here to talk to me last Friday and told me how much I would like it up there and that they couldn’t possibly send me into the general prison population in Jackson because I would surely organize the prison men to revolt against the prison authorities, and they couldn’t take a chance on that. So I’ll be shipped up to Marquette Prison in the Upper Peninsula sometime next month. Then I’ll be able to have my typewriter and can get some work done.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sinclair Going to Trial

Web archive note: This article is untitled in the print original.

In a lightning-fast surprise maneuver the Detroit courts have moved to bring John Sinclair to trial on his famous marijuana charge next Tuesday, June 3rd, in Recorder’s Court. This latest in a series of repressive police/court actions against Sinclair is also the most serious: the pigs have sworn to convict him on a charge the minimum sentence for which is 20 years in the state penitentiary, maximum: life.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Sinclair in Court

John Sinclair was arraigned in Federal District Court in Detroit Oct. 23, on charges that he conspired with two other White Panthers to place explosives at an Ann Arbor CIA office last year.

The others accused are Jack Forrest and Pun Plamondon, White Panther Minister of Defense, who still has not been apprehended at this writing. Pun is charged in a separate count of doing the &crust bombing that ripped apart the international pig office.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Sinclair Moved

John Sinclair, Minister of Information for the White Panther Party, remains as political prisoner of the State of Michigan.

John has been moved to Marquette Prison in the Upper Peninsula after Department of Corrections officials began to worry that he might be a uniting force among the prisoners at Jackson to protest conditions there.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Sinclair Talks Marijuana in R.O.

Editor’s note: Detroit poet John Sinclair talked about marijuana at Royal Oak’s Kimball High School, and Royal Oak hasn’t quite gotten over it yet. Below is a story reprinted from that city’s newspaper, the Royal Oak Tribune:

Royal Oak City Commissioners expressed concern Monday night about a speaker last Thursday at Kimball High School who advocated legalization of marijuana sales.

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Julie Herrada
Singing about Revolution & One Big Union

3-s-fe-375-40-songbook.jpg

reviewed in this article

The Big Red Songbook, Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno, editors; 2007; 538 pp.; $24; Charles H. Kerr Co., 1740 West Greenleaf, Chicago, IL 60626. Available from The Barn (see page 55).

In a 100th anniversary commemorative edition of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook, the editors have compiled over 250 IWW songs along with their histories and anecdotes about them. Covering songs that appeared in the notorious and ubiquitous volumes, from the 1909 to the 1973 edition, each entry includes lyrics and a brief description.

...

Dave Hanson
Sing Your Song

Allowed freedom, we are enchanted beings. The enchantment begins with our human, personal song, which discovered, cracks open a window into the cosmos, enabling us to experience reality with fewer boundaries.

The song, first personally and then communally, is the primary tool that unlocks our apprehension of deeper reality, and allows us to act from that vision. This process is deeply connected, integrated and anarchistic.

...

Camy Matthay
S is for Shame F Is for Fury, M is for Mothering

As a well-educated woman who had elected to be a stay-at-home mother, I was an enigma. I wasn’t into Jesus, ironing male garments, or particularly indolent. Yet my choice was perceived to reveal a flaw of character, a weakness. I was supposed to buck up and go back to work. But I just couldn’t do it. That made a lot of people uncomfortable, and most of my critics wore heels. I endured, from liberals and self-identified feminists, endless variations of the question “What is a bright woman like you doing at home?” They were platitudes, ironically, meant to compliment, but shocking insofar as they implied the judgment that mothering and child rearing were occupations reserved for stupid, unambitious women.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Six C.O.s Jailed

The National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam has learned that at least four Negro G.I.s are in jail serving six months to ten years at hard labor for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

They are: Privates Johny L. Jackson, Harold Brown, Percy L. Green and David Clark.

NCCEWV has asked those who wish to write to do so at this address: U.S. Army Stockade, APO San Francisco, California 96243. Navy and Marine C.O.s who also refused to fight in Vietnam are Michael L. Yankess, Jack Gorman and Larry Bobbitt. Write Pearl Harbor Marine Barracks, Honolulu, Hawaii.

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T. Fulano (David Watson)
Six Theses on Empire, Denial & Nuclearism

1.

Nuclearism is inherently totalitarian. The apparent controversy over nuclear power is not really a matter for debate: it mirrors the underlying question of social power. Its history makes this clear.

First developed as a weapon of war under the veil of military secrecy, and then in coordinated efforts with enormous corporate interests, it was never publicly debated before the whole society was heavily committed to it. At its inception, public opposition would have brought charges of treason, and nuclear technology and materials are still considered a matter of strict state security.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Six Ways To Help the Fifth Estate

  1. Subscribe. Subscribers are a publication’s life blood. If you bought this at a news stand, consider subscribing and buying one for a friend or a library.

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Apr 7, 2014

Ian Blumberg-Enge
Skate or Die! Rebels on a Board

The simple and obvious freedoms that first inspire the imagination of young kids, freedom of movement and freedom from the constraints of physical laws, are so simple as to hide a much deeper liberatory kernel.

From the blood sacrifice initiatory trials of learning to skate to the insular lingo, skateboarding is every bit the revolutionary community, in many ways like the revolutionary secret societies of Haiti. In contemplating a subject as broad as and as theoretical as global anarchism, it seems to be much more productive to explore areas of inspiration rather than explain proper applications. To this end, I’d like to explore the radical potential of one of my lifelong passions. Skateboarding.

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Karen Knorp
Skin Flick at the Krim

“The Female,” current attraction at the Trans-Lux Krim in Highland Park, comes as close to being an obscene movie is anything I’ve seen.

The principal action is set in a Mexican whorehouse, and includes graphic scenes of two or more people in bed engaging in various acts of sadism, fellatio, foot fetishism, and plain old sexual intercourse. This is not, in my opinion, what makes “The Female” an obscene movie.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Slave Center to be Closed

OAKLAND—Plans for a four-day siege of the Oakland Induction Center, October 16–21 were announced to day by spokesmen for National Stop the Draft Week Committee. Compulsory conscription was labeled “a criminal conspiracy against American youth that must be stopped.”

“We have picketed, protested, leafleted and argued against the draft and the racist war in Vietnam,” said Terence Cannon, member of the Stop the Draft Week Steering Committee. “There is only one way to keep young men from being shanghaied into the armed forces and that is to stop the draft from operating. We declare that we are opposed to the government’s policy and will do everything we can to bring it to a halt.

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anon57
Slowly They Go

I expected click-click-click

of handcuffs binding wrists,

eyes red with pepper spray,

a haze of tear gas fogging streets,

black ‘copters rotoring the sky,

and cellphone vids of troubled days.

Too late I realized the cunning gist

of protests that shimmer on-screen.

Slowly they disappear from the net-

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Smack: not of us Excerpt from The Fire Next Time

Up to 1949 the most important symbol in the ghetto was the knife, from then on it became the needle.

In 1956 the first wave of smack (heroin) hit the young black people of Harlem, an attack on the poor youth of the ghetto that served to “pacify” the oppressed people of the city. In New York over the last ten years smack has been used to break up gangs of poor whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans.

...

Bob Fleck
Smack: the pig’s drug

It’s my wife

It’s my life

Cause the needle to my vein

Leads to a center in my head

And then I’m better off than dead

Cause when the smack begins to flow

I really don’t care any more

About all the Jim-Jims in this town

And all the politicians makin’ crazy sounds

And thank God that I’m not aware

...

Liam Kliment
Smash the Fascists From Below! Peoples’ Histories of Anti-Racism

a review of

It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History, Editors: Moe Bowstern, Mic Crenshaw, Alec Dunn, Celina Flores, Julie Perini, and Erin Yanke. PM Press, 2023

We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action by Shannon Clay, Kristin Schwartz and Michael Staudenmaier. PM Press, 2023

...

Dennie Van Tassel
Smite Smut

A new law has been passed where you can have any mail stopped which you consider offensive: The law was passed to smite smut—always good for the idiot vote—but—the bill is so worded that you are the sole judge of what is offensive.

If you feel that your congressman’s newsletter, a religious appeal or the normal junk mail is offensive all you have to do is go to the post office and ask for P.O. form 123 and fill out the form giving your name and address and the name and address of the firm which you want to stop sending you advertisements. You do not have to give any reason or justification why you find the mail’ offensive.

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Gary Snyder
Smokey the Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings—even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, were assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

...

Gary Snyder
Smokey the Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a great Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings—even grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed, were assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Gary Snyder

Smokey The Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a

discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying

beings, and the sitting beings-even the grasses, to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a seed,

...

Fifth Estate Collective
SNCC Bombed

The Detroit office of the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) was bombed on May 17. The office is located at 12322 Dexter.

Two SNCC members, Kinley Summers and Roy Swan were slightly injured by the blast and the flying glass. The police said they found the remains of what appeared to be a home-made bomb.

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Fifth Estate Collective
SNCC calls for aid to poor

The Detroit Friends of the Student Non-Veiolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) last week launched a local drive to help raise money to build shelters and to buy land in the deep South. The Poor Peoples Land Fund, headed by Ronald Bennett has already approached Detroit store-owners to ask for their support by serving as sponsors of the project.

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Liberation News Service
SNCC Fires Stokely

NEW YORK, Aug. 22 (LNS)--Phil Hutchings, Executive Secretary of SNCC, announced that Stokely Carmichael, former National Chairman of the organization, had been formally expelled. “Brother Carmichael, both as a member and as chairman of SNCC made tremendous strides in the fight for black liberation in the past eight years, but it has been apparent now for some time that SNCC and Carmichael were moving in different directions,” Hutchings’ statement read.

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Fifth Estate Collective
SNCC Offices Raided in S.F.

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bay Area Regional Office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was raided in the early hours last month by unknown parties. The office at 449 14th Street houses the SNCC office and the national office of THE MOVEMENT, the West Coast monthly newspaper affiliated with SNCC.

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Fifth Estate Collective
SNCC Photo Show

The first major photo exhibit featuring photos depicting the freedom struggle in Mississippi, Alabama and Southwest Georgia. Friday, January 14 is the last day this show will be in Detroit. Admission is free, at the Community Arts Bldg., Wayne State University, 9 a.m. — 10 p.m.


Jul 31, 2015

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
SNCC Says No to Viet War

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is the statement issued by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee concerning U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. Julian Bond was refused his seat in the Georgia House of Representatives when he publically endorsed this statement.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee assumes its right to dissent with U.S. foreign policy on any issue, and states its opposition to U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam on these grounds:

...

John F. Royal
Snitch Gets a Reduced Term Another Prison Sentence in Marie Mason Case

<em>

3-s-fe-387-22-snitch-gets-a-reduced-term.jpg

The Never Alone national tour hit 30 cities in April, speaking to hundreds about long-term anarchist prisoner support. It focused on the cases of Eric McDavid and Marie Mason, using multimedia presentations and included strategizing about how to effectively encourage a culture of resistance and support. Above, from the left, Jason, Jenny, Ian, and released political prisoner, Jeff “Free” Luers at a tour stop at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ore., April 26. Photo from becausewemust.org. The tour raised nearly $7,000 after expenses which will be split between McDavid and Mason support groups. To offer support, donate, or get information about the cases, go to</em> supporteric.org and supportmariemason.org. Info on the tour at http://neveralonetour.wordpress.com.

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Dena Clamage
Socialist Man

“To build communism, a new man must be created simultaneously with the material base.”

— Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba.

In the preceding articles, I have dealt with the quality of life in Cuba, the laying of the base of material production, international relations, and other facets of the Cuban revolution. But the most important aspect of the revolution is yet to be described: the creation of the “new man.” This act of creation is the heart of the Cuban revolution. Although there has been little formally written about it, except for Che’s small but important book, Man and Socialism in Cuba, the task of this creation is reflected in the daily lives and the daily consciousness of every participant in the revolution.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Socialist Runs for Council

Paul Lodico is the Socialist Workers Party candidate for Common Council. But he is not that interested in getting votes. In fact, he is not running to win the election.

Instead, Lodico is interested in “posing programs for struggle.” That is, he wants to organize committees of research teams to study such areas as housing, welfare, medical care, unions and other factors of life in the city. These committees will involve those already interested in each area. In the study of welfare, for example, Lodico hopes to use the aid of welfare workers and ADC mothers.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Socialist Scholars Meet In N.Y.

The second annual Socialist Scholars Conference will be held in New York at the Hotel Commodore, September 9–11, 1966. The noted historian and political analyst Isaac Deutscher and the social philosopher Herbert Marcuse will participate in a discussion “On Socialist Man” to lead off the Conference.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Socialists Prepare Campaign

NEW YORK—The national Committee of the Socialist Workers party has announced here that it has nominated Fred Halstead and Paul Boutelle as the party’s candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States in the 1968 elections.

Halstead, a 40 year old cloth cutter from New York, said that the war in Vietnam would be a central issue of the campaign. His running mate, Boutelle, a 35 year old cab driver, said that black power would be a twin issue.

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A. Esmie Wright
Social Media Virus SMV (play)

CHARACTERS

SEVEN: A young woman, mid-20s. Architect of the virus.

GEORGIA: A young woman, mid-20s. Friend of Seven.

CLEANER: Works for Seven.

CLEANER: Works for Seven.

SETTING: A window-less room with a desk and chair. Located in Washington DC.

TIME: Present. Seven is in a window-less room, monitoring activity on her computer. Her friend, a woman by the name of Georgia enters the room distraught.

...

Mateo Pimentel
Social Technologies & Politics Police Body Cams: How they hurt those who are supposed to be helped

As the importance of social technologies increases, many users fail to pay sufficient critical attention to the political incursions that such technologies invite.

Millions who cannot fathom life without social technologies are, in all likelihood, the same demographic that is most willing to excuse the political transgressions these technologies engender—particularly if the consequent harm affects people other than themselves.

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Jim Stodder
Society Against the State Book review

a review of

Society Against the State, by Pierre Clastres. Mole Editions, Urizen Press, N.Y., 1977, 186 pp. $12.95

A shockingly high price for such a slim volume, but this book from a publishing house “owned by its employees and sharing profits with its authors and translators” is the best general work on anthropology I’ve read. Clastres not only evaluates “primitive communism” from the inside, the viewpoint of the tribe itself, but also manages, almost despite himself, to avoid romanticizing everything for the poor civilized reader, so hungry for rumors of freedom.

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Janis Ian
“Society’s Child” Janis Ian

Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child” was banned in Detroit last year by all the major radio stations. WKNR’s Paul Kannon refused to air it because he felt it was too sensational for a radio audience. “Society’s Child” is currently the number one song in Detroit. Below Janis talks candidly about Janis Ian and her life as a 16 year old sensationalist.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Soldiers Busted

On Saturday, January 4, Victory Fidelman and Ron Halstead, two members of the Resistance, along with two servicemen, Seaman Norman Gelnaw and Ray Greer, a member of U.S. Army Military Intelligence and a Vietnam veteran, distributed copies of The Bond to active duty servicemen at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Solidarity & Mutual Aid Issue intro

Solidarity and Mutual Aid, two anarchist bedrock principles, are being tested in the real world with the rise of the fascist right.

Although small in numbers, they have gained social and political space as the result of the election of Donald Trump.

We, like many others, pledge they will find no home, no safe haven from which to spread their toxic message of racism and authoritarianism. We will also defend ourselves and at-risk populations from the physical and political threat they pose.

...

Onto
Solidarity, Immigration and Border Regimes

“If it’s a war the anarchists want, then damn it, it will start here.”

-- Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen Project, quoted in the Sacramento Bee, 10/30/05, in reference to the anti-minutemen demo at the capitol building.

The Fire

There’s a fire going on. It’s destroying your home, your land. You want to stay and fight it, but you’re suffocating, you need fresh air. You try to leave, but the doors are locked, bolted shut. There’s a long line of other people waiting to get out too. You start waiting, but realize you’ll never get there. Some people are breaking windows, jumping through; some make it, others die on the way out. There are men with guns waiting outside the windows, another obstacle. You make it out, past the gunmen, falling into another house, through another window. You are welcome here, as long as you don’t talk, just cook and clean. Some people want you to leave, to jump back into the fire. Others want to help you, but they don’t know how. They try talking to the landlords. They try fighting the people who want to kick you out. They try building another house within the house. You appreciate the help, but you’re not sure who to trust, not sure what you want. Do you want to stay here, or go back home? The ground is familiar, but the house is different. The fires here are different, much slower then at home. But they are starting up again. In this house? Even here, you start smelling gasoline again. This time you see it coming, joining with others like you to call “FIRE” before it hits. Some people notice. The gasoline covers too much and splashes on some others; they’re angry as well. People are saying that you started the fire, that we need more doors and locks, fewer windows, in order to stop more firebrands like you from entering. You know this is a lie. Now you’re caught between fires, between doors, desiring the one thing that no-one is willing to do: to stop these fucking fires. But you can’t seem to find who started them. Everyone has a different answer.

...

Bruce Trigg
Solidarity in Plague Time Mutual Aid Against the Pandemic

a review of

Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis Edited by Marina Sitrin and the Colectiva Sembrar. Pluto Press, London, 2020

Every nation state has failed miserably in preventing, controlling and managing the still raging COVID 19 pandemic. While military, police, and prison systems continue unabated in their coercive functions, hospitals, public health and social welfare systems in many parts of the world are overwhelmed and in disarray.

...

Charles Hale
Solidarity In Slowmotion

Between sips of Miller High Life I glance down the length of the bar: there is a twenty-six-year-old PhD candidate in mathematics; the assistant to the dean of the graduate school in her early thirties; a girl with more tattoos than fingers; our 53-year-old elder statesmen, and me a window cleaner.

...

Fran Shor
Solidarity in the Time of a Virus Albert Camus’ The Plague

As a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, there is renewed interest in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague. While providing a fictional confrontation with a life-threatening infectious disease, the novel also reflects Camus’ perspectives on solidarity. Those expressions of solidarity convey meanings that have resonance for our present situation in relation to Covid-19.

...

Dr. Zakk Flash
Solidarity Is Our Strength Mutual Aid in Action in Oklahoma Tornado

The 2013 Moore tornado was an EF5 velocity storm that struck Moore, Oklahoma, and adjacent areas on the afternoon of May 20, 2013, with peak winds estimated at 210 miles per hour, killing 23 people and injuring 377 others.

At the beginning of June, when I arrived in Little Axe, Okla. to take a look at post-tornado recovery efforts, the countryside was still in crisis mode. Mountains of rubble and garbage filled gravel roads and red dirt paths leading to the remains of homes. Neighborhoods that had been full of working-class houses were uprooted and dirty, unsafe tent camps were all that remained.

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Peter Lamborn Wilson
Somali Pirates

“The past is not only not dead, it’s not even past.”

-- W. Faulkner

The second ship ever built was probably a pirate ship. When Sumerians and Harappans and Egyptians sailed to “the Land of Punt” 5,000 years ago seeking apes and ivory, gold and copper, no doubt some proto-Blackbeard on a reed raft was already dogging their wake.

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Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Someday the power will die

“Someday the power will die

the lights will fade...

the stars will shine...

WE ALREADY LIVE IN RUINS”

I recently sat down to a dinner of roadkill venison. As an ex-vegetarian who occasionally eats fish or poultry, I did not approach this culinary choice lightly. However, I love an adventure, and I savored each succulent morsel as it emanated wood-smoke and blood.

...

Lewis Hyde
Some Food We Could Not Eat Gift Exchange and the Imagination

First appeared in the Kenyon Review, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH 43022.

Introduction by P. Solis (David Watson)

Poet and translator Lewis Hyde has accomplished several distinct things with this article. First of all, by way of traditional (that is, “pre-” or non-capitalist) folk and fairy tales, as well as anthropological observations, he has revealed the origins of many of the commonplaces associated with capitalist social relations—for example, things have always been as they are today (primitive and traditional peoples are just societies of small-scale capitalists each working in his own self interest), a penny saved is a penny earned, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, the idea of a “noble savage” is only a modern romantic prejudice, etc. By showing how people—including our ancestors—treat property in, a society in which it is not the ruling sign or the axis around which all social relations orbit (indeed, in which present notions of property and wealth do not even apply), he presents a contrast to modern capitalist society which critiques it from a position of affirmation. Whereas many of our discussions of capital have generally implied only a vague sense of the life we envision, his article reveals that many elements are already to be found in our cultural memory. “Folk tales are like the soul’s morality plays,” he writes, but they are also a key to culture. Hence, he has not only undertaken an “economy of the imagination,” but, in a sense, a “political economy” of culture.

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Barbara Ruth
Some Friends of Mine

I’d like you to meet some friends of mine

lesbians

women I write to

women in prison.

Last year I decided corresponding with them was a good way to continue my political work

being too disabled to go to meetings or to demonstrations.

Valerie was the first

a Cherokee-Chicana femme doing long time in Nevada prison.

An artist without art supplies,

she sends me cross-hatch portraits of her sister inmates

rendered with ballpoint on lined paper so thin it tears.

She has cystic fibrosis

at 26 she’s getting old

for someone with CF.

She tries not to think about what that means.

After all, she says,

no one at the jail thinks she’s disabled.

Her job includes scrubbing the bathrooms with bleach

three times a week.

I try to figure a way

to smuggle in a charcoal mask.

...

John Brinker
Some Good Bookchin? Review

a review of

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy by Murray Bookchin. AK Press. 2005. 491 pp. $23.

An influential theorist with a background in anarcho-syndicalism and Marxian theory, Murray Bookchin has spent the past thirty-five years developing and promoting social ecology, one of the few anarchist schools of thought to have its own school, the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. The latter part of his career has been devoted to curmudgeonly crusades to “save” anarchism and ecology from what he sees as its pitfalls: mysticism, biocentrism, and something called “lifestylism.”

...

Ratticus
Some Kind Words about Language

In response to John Zerzan, “Language: Origin & Meaning” FE #315, Winter 1984.

If Shakespeare was right when he said “brevity is the soul of wit” then this piece from Zerzan must be its carcass. The fellow doth protest (language) too much. What?! Quote the Raven nevermore?

One gets the impression from Zerzan that not only is it by breaking from Capitalism and from Civilization will we only be ourselves—authentic and free—but when we once again attain the grandeur of precellular compounds. A timeless pool of protean soup freed from the constraints of definition.

...

Marius Mason
Some Thoughts on Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by an Imprisoned Anarchist

a review of

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by Alexander Berkman. Annotated and Introduction by Jessica Moran & Barry Pateman. AK Press, 2017, (Originally published: 1912), 550 pp. akpress.org

“Thick clouds of smoke over cast the sky, shrouding the morning with somber gray. The air is heavy with soot and cinders; the smell is nauseating. In the distance, giant furnaces vomit pillars of fire, the lurid flashes accentuating a line of frame structures, dilapidated and miserable...The sight fills me with hatred of the perverse social order that turns the needs of mankind into an Inferno of brutalizing toil (that) grinds flesh and blood into iron and steel, transmutes human lives into gold, gold, countless gold.”

...

Lynne Clive (Marilynn Rashid)
Some Winded, Wild Beast Walking a Tender Line

a review of

Some Winded, Wild Beast, by Christina Pacosz. Black & Red (Detroit, 1985), 97 pages, $2.50.

This review is long overdue. Christina Pacosz’s voice has been an important one to many of us in Detroit ever since she and Fredy and Lorraine Perlman discovered each other, and Black and Red published this, her third collection of poetry, Some Winded, Wild Beast, in 1985. I have had the opportunity of hearing Christina read her poems and prose twice in the past five years, and both times I was struck by the strength and expressiveness of her voice and her vision.

...

George Bradford (David Watson)
Some Words on The Word A response

In response to John Zerzan, “Language: Origin & Meaning” FE #315, Winter 1984.

Despite his acute desire to break with all of the fictions of the modern world, John Zerzan makes the unfortunate mistake of taking its ideological justifications at their (false) face value; thus, the radical refusal which he posits tends to be an almost formalistic, inverted image of the society which he analyzes. There are no gray areas, no ambivalence in his critique, only absolutes. But these absolutes come ready-made, provided by modern civilization’s legitimation of its existence.

...

David Rovics
Song for the Earth Liberation Front

Civil disobedience

Has many permutations

You can block the streets in front of

The United Nations

You can lay down on the tracks

Keep the nuke trains out of town

Or you can pour gas on the condo

And you can burn it down

..

Chorus:

So here’s a toast to the night

Three cheers and a grunt

To the Earth Liberation Front

...

Liberation News Service
Songmy The Massacre

TROUNGAN, South Vietnam (LNS)—The inhabitants of this tiny village tell a story that one British Newspaper described as “The Massacre That Chilled The World”. They are the survivors of Songmy.

On March 16, 1968 a company of U.S. soldiers entered Songmy, meeting no opposition. They ordered all inhabitants out of their homes and gathered them together in three groups, about 200 yards apart. When the houses had been cleared the troops dynamited those made of brick and set fire to the wooden ones.

...

Oscar Garcia
Soul On Ice Book review

a review of

Soul On Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. 210 pages. Ramparts (McGraw-Hill).

The Texas Outlaw’s Kerner Commission told the nation that the black and white races are moving rapidly in different directions. Eldridge Cleaver tells it better in his new book.

When one sits down to think about it, he realizes that real communication and understanding between black and white Americans is virtually nil. As Herb Boyd, of the Wayne State Association of Black Students put it, “White students really assimilate what they learn here, but after we dig Freud, we go home and read Le Roi Jones.”

...

Joe Fineman
Sounds

“Garden of Joy” The Jim Kweskin Jug Band (Reprise)—The flowers on the album cover have nothing to do with the inner product except that once again Kweskin has kept up with the times.

“Garden of Joy” is a conglomerate of raucous, jazzy and bluesy folk oriented material that steps on no one’s feet and needs nothing but itself to get you high. New to this album and the band itself are the talents of former country fiddler Richard Greene, turned jazz mechanic.

...

Guan Kosemach
Sounds

Our great affluent society produces excess. Just go down to Hudson’s or walk into E.J. Korvette’s and much of what is on display is either an unimportant frill or junk.

The record industry is not unlike that. Most of what is being released is not worth the time it takes to listen to it.

Almost all record companies are signing and recording anybody who has the slightest possibility of selling. The few exceptions seem to be Elektra, Vanguard, and Verve.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tick—Greatest Hits (Fontana)...this freaky looking and even more strange sounding group has made its first album a landmark. The sounds on this LP were all written by some character called H. Blaikley with the exception of HERE’S A HEART written by Tubbs Segal. Instrumental and vocally it’s a good effort, and the LP is well produced.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

Music From Big Pink—The Band (Capitol)

This band formerly known as the Hawks has the distinction of being Bob Dylan’s backing group. They are polished musicians and this album boasts a lot in the way of imagination in regards to lyrics and clever rhythm changes. The standout cut on the L.P. is a composition entitled ‘Tears of Rage’, penned by Dylan and band pianist Richard Manual: Good.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

Wes Montgomery—“March 6, 1968” (Riverside)

Wes Montgomery is simply one of the two greatest jazz guitarists of all time, the other being Charley Christian. A writer may go on and on and on about the innovations, contributions, and prestige this man gave to jazz but it may suffice to say that he undoubtedly was the best. This album was previously released on the old Riverside label and definitely doesn’t possess the clarity and forcefulness of his later Verve performances. (Due only to dated recording techniques.) But newly converted Wes Montgomery fans may find his old recordings a source of knowledge and a chronicled account of a great artist’s transition and maturation.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

There may come a time when musicians may agree with critics about certain recorded performances, when and if this time comes it will be an absolutely mind shattering synthesis of opinion.

I am not talking about the Leonard Feathers and the Richard Goldsteins who have more than a workingman’s knowledge of music. Technically I am talking about the long haired chick on the staff of a well-to-do teen rag who writes in sexually graphic terms about Jimi Hendrix eating his guitar from the inside out, or the smooth talking cat who works in a record shop who answers your pleas for a good blues record by handing you Fleetwood Mac, a cellophane version of the real thing, when you wanted Billy Hawks or Bobby Bland.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

“A Long Time Comin’”

The Electric Flag (Columbia)

The Electric Flag’s long-awaited LP is in every respect a fine recording and well indicative of this group’s abundant talent and ability to communicate and excite.

It is due to Michael Bloomfield who has reigned in the U.S. as white bluesdom’s most charismatic guitarist and personality. He was perhaps the main attraction of The Butterfield Blues Band for more than two years.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

This column is primarily concerned with contemporary jazz, relevant jazz, music with not only social significance, but sounds derived from environment, relating directly from experience. The very word jazz to many listeners conjures up stereotyped images. Most common is the movie image, the usual pseudo biographical tale of a musician tormented by the everyday series of musician’s “furies” dope, women and/or booze—not necessarily in that order. There is usually a social hangup or two with the hefty bleached blonde that quickly fades into oblivion leaving tons of grief in her wake. The musician, of course, is portrayed by Sammy Davis.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

Children Of The Future: The Steve Miller Band (Capitol)

Capitol Records thought so highly of this West Coast group that they saw fit to shell out a reputed $50,000 in advance to record them. On record Steve Miller’s band is deceivingly extraordinary. Listening to this L.P. for the first time was painfully boring. They are not obviously exciting the first time around. The album is so smooth and uncluttered it may give the illusion of childish simplicity.

...

Wilson Lindsey
Sounds

Dirty Blues Band (Bluesway)

This band’s blues roots were first formed years ago during the British blues invasion started by The Rolling Stones. During this embryonic stage, many teenagers had suspicions that the Stones were copying...yes, copying, but from whom?

Some started research, combing through old Negro blues LP’s until they happened on a song title they recognized, and discovered that the Stones were drawing from many blues sources.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
South Africa Reform or Revolution

South Africa—the rock of colonial racism—has finally begun to crack under the repeated blows of the general and sustained uprising of its black and colored population.

Perhaps the most telling sign that the end of formal apartheid is near is the sudden conversion of South African business leaders to its abolition. Their late September newspaper ad campaign contending “There is a better way,” demanded an end to racial segregation and “peace talks” with black leaders, and breaks significantly with the intransigent Afrikaner commitment to legal and formal white domination. Only a month previously, South African President P.W. Botha pledged no compromise with the black revolt.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
South African Will Speak October 14

Franz J.T. Lee, South African liberation leader, will be the featured speaker on Friday, Oct. 14, 8:00 P.M., at the Hartford Avenue Baptist Church, 6300 Hartford. Mr. Lee will speak on the Freedom Struggle in South Africa and discuss the assassination of Henry Verwoerd. There is a donation of $1; 75 cents for students and the unemployed. The talk is being sponsored by the Alexander Defense Committee.


May 8, 2023

Anthony Rayson
South Chicago ABC Zine distro

Prisons are the essence of the state. But as Tom Big Warrior, historian for the traditional Lenape Nation in Pennsylvania puts it in the title of his essay, we must “Turn the Iron Houses of Oppression into Schools of Liberation.”

With the most conscious and articulate voices being muffled inside the jails, it seemed like the anarchist thing to do to get involved where the need was the greatest.

...

Karen Tintori
South End Freaks Ex-Editor

Charging that Wayne State University’s student newspaper is too leftist and “put out by left-wing radicals,” a group of undergraduate students began publishing a rival daily the week of Nov. 6th.

The South End, WSU’s s official student publication, formerly known as The Daily Collegian, has come under attack by staffers of the competition paper, The Phoenix. The South End has been criticized as leaning heavily toward the left end of the political spectrum, concentrating on protest and anti-war movements.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sovereignty & the State Not Another Editorial!

Meet the New Boss

When US occupation authorities pretended to return sovereignty to Iraq, they erected a pliable government of quisling-proxies. To cover up the devastating failure of the invasion, they created a mirage of Iraqi independence.

During a secret ceremony in a heavily-militarized bunker buried somewhere in the Green Zone, there were no Iraqis present other than the new puppets; only Western news media, US military officers, and armed mercenary bodyguards were allowed to attend.

...

Alexander Cockburn
Jeffery St. Clair

So who did win in Seattle? Liberals Re-write History

Hardly had the tear gas dispersed from the streets of downtown Seattle before an acrid struggle broke out as to who should claim the spoils. It’s still raging.

On one side the lib-lab pundits, flacks for John Sweeney and James Hoffa like the Nation’s Marc Cooper, Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower, middle-of-the road greens, Michael Moore, recycled policy wonks from the Economic Policy Institute and kindred DC think-tanks, Doug Tompkins (the former czar of sweatshop-made sports clothing who funds the International Forum on Globalization), Medea Benjamin (empress of Global Exchange).

...

Jess Flarity
Space is Not the Place ...and Lea’s fictional spaceship society is, essentially, totalitarian

a review of
Hermetica by Alan Lea. Detritus Books 2021

The journey of a generation ship is a classic of the science fiction genre. One that tells the story of what happens when a bunch of humans decide to leave Earth in a sub-lightspeed rocket that will take generations to reach its destination.

The lack of unlimited resources and tight living conditions enables an author to experiment with alternative organizations of society, what critic Brian Attebery refers to as a science fiction parabola. The parabola is intriguing because it is boundless despite having an origin point, as J.D. Bernal’s long essay, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, published in 1929, is the progenitor of the generation ship as a concept. In contrast, Alan Lea’s novella Hermetica is the latest data point along the parabola’s edge.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Space Not The Place

“With the aid of the high-powered rocket modern man is indeed conquering space. But in the very act of making this achievement possible, the megamachine is carrying further its conquest of man...At the bottom of this whole effort lies a purpose that animates the entire megamachine, indeed, figures as its only viable consummation: to reduce the human organism itself, its habitat, and its mode of existence, and its life-purpose to just those minimal dimensions that will bring it under total external control...So the ultimate gift of space technics, it now turns out is to establish in experimental small-scale models the requirements for imprisoning, conditioning, and controlling large populations.”

...

Gus Grissom
Space: Not the Place—2

In the last issue of the FE we noted that people should sigh with relief at the explosion of the space shuttle because of its direct relation to the Star Wars program. As General Lew Allen, Air Force Chief of Staff, said in 1979, “Whatever else the shuttle does and whatever purposes it will have, the priority, the emphasis, the driving momentum now has to be those satellite systems which are important to national security.”

...

David Porter
Spain ’36

Imagine the United States split regionally into conservative-fascist and leftist popular front-anarchist zones. Civil war rages at the shifting boundary lines with half the country under the domination of an insurgent military right-wing junta determined to destroy the elected government and all individuals and organizations of the left. Then imagine that simultaneously, behind the lines in the popular front zone (say, most of the East and West coasts), there are widespread decentralized efforts to transform the society through economic and social collectivization in producers’ cooperatives, free schools, free health centers, neighborhood councils, local popular assemblies-the assumption of community self-responsibility through direct action from the bottom up.

...

David Porter
Spain: model for anarchist organizing

3-s-fe-386-45-spain-milicianas-1936-300x78.jpg
Milicia women at the Madrid front, 1936

a review of

The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, Volume I

by Jose Peirats, Edited and Introduced by Chris Ealham; Translated by Paul Sharkey

PM Press / Christie Books; 432pp, 628; www.pmpress.org

The Spanish anarchist movement and revolution of the late 1930s are undoubtedly the historical force and context most praised by Western anarchists. In absolute numbers, in proportion of the overall population they were part of, and in the radical transformation they accomplished in much of Spanish society, the reputation is well deserved.

...

anon.
Spain: The continuing revolution

For the first time since I got here, people are openly and seriously comparing this to the pre-Civil War situation in 1936.

--Basque Diplomat, October 1975

For 36 years now, Generalisimo Francisco Franco has been ruling Spain through iron-fisted repression and the executions of thousands of Spanish workers and peasants. But last month the senile dictator may have signed his regime’s death warrant with the executions of five revolutionaries.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Spanish Prisoners

A large, well-produced poster titled Libertarians found its way to our office not long ago. It is chiefly a translation of a text written in Spanish by “The International Friends,” denouncing the detention of more than fifty libertarians in Spanish prisons (as of September 1980) for alleged participation in armed activities. It contains a summation of the predicament of these libertarian and autonomous comrades, an analysis of the modern Spanish state (“the tardy reconciliation of all the victors of the counter-revolution”), criticism of the reconstituted CNT which “feels some real discomfiture in this affair. It is not out of indifference or prudence that it was brought to remain silent. The leaders of the CNT want to be an axis of regroupment of libertarians on a trade-unionist basis, in fact moderated and acceptable to the established order. The comrades who have resorted to expropriations represent, by this fact alone, an absolutely opposite axis of regrouping. If some are right, the others are wrong. Each person is the offspring of their works, and one must choose between these or the others by examining the meaning find the finality of their actions....” It then urges practical action to free the imprisoned libertarians, “those [actions] that create the most Scandal [being] the best.”

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Spanish Revolution Bibliography

José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, published by The Meltzer Press (Vol. 1) and Christie Books (Vol. 2). They are essential reading.

Stuart Christie, We, The Anarchists, The Meltzer Press. A telling and thorough look at the FAI.

Much of our knowledge of the anarchist resistance to Franco comes from the work of Antonio Tellez and Miguel Garcia. All of the above publications are available from AK Press akpress.org and deserve close reading.

...

Peter Werbe
Ben Habeebe

Spare the Rod...?

“It is a general policy to expect that teachers will maintain discipline by means other than the use of corporal punishment.”

—Detroit Public Schools TEACHERS’ BULLETIN

“The Detroit Board of Education policy limited the use of corporal punishment is in reality one big fiction.”

This is what one irate Detroit substitute teacher said after witnessing two instances of excessive brutality against elementary school students during one afternoon.

...

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Sparks

“How can one speak of the present, when one feels abandoned by it?”

—Lara Mimosa Montes, Thresholes (Coffee House Press 2020)

“Grief is not always sharp, but grief is always.”

—Mairead Case, Tiny (Featherproof Books 2020)

“How did we get entrenched in this insidious wage labor relationship—where we’re servants to that really repulsive phrase, ‘making a living’? I hate that phrase. We have a living—we have lives. How dare that wage labor relationship—how dare work—overlay itself onto life—and even pretend that it is life?”

...

Fredy Perlman
Speaking to the Beast an excerpt from Against His-story, Against Leviathan

3-s-fe-365-45-beast.png
Richard Mock: Anthropology Gone Bad

Who, then, is the wrecker of the Biosphere? Turner points at the Western Spirit. This is the hero who pits himself against the Wilderness, who calls for a war of extermination by Spirit against Nature, Soul against Body, Technology against the Biosphere, Civilization against Mother Earth, god against all.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Special Women’s Issue Staff & Contributors

STAFF COLLECTIVE: Barbara B., Barbara C., Barbara V., Betty B., Betty M., Carol, Carolyn, Carrie, Cathy, Cinda, Cindy, Colleen, Collette, Debbie B., Debbie S., Elizabeth, Fran, Gronya, Jackie, Janet, Jean, JoAnne, Judy, Julie, Lauren, Lona, Lorraine, Marge, Marie, Marilyn, Mary Jo, Nalda, Pat, Resa, Terry, plus assistance from the regular Fifth Estate Staff.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sperry-Univac

3-s-fe-313-2-sperry.jpg

Technology. We know that it offers no evidence whatsoever of having any sympathy for the nature of the world, and has nothing to do with human desires for an earth on which to dwell.

We’re the people who create it, perfect it and make it part of the American dream. We bring you the computer, which touches all our lives in ways we can hardly begin to imagine. And who can say what lies ahead?

...

Richard Cruse
Spike-Drivers Do Benefit For 5th Estate

Detroit’s own SPIKE-DRIVERS, having just finished a mind-blowing engagement at the Living End Lounge, are now preparing for their first concert appearance in a benefit for the FIFTH ESTATE.

Besides doing their unusual brand of folk-rock (including their new Reprise release, “Baby Let Me Tell You”), they will add two amplified violins and a flute on several tunes to produce strange and mysterious sounds.

...

Richard Cruse
Spike Drivers Return

Detroit’s own Spike-Drivers are back in town and appearing at the Living End on John C. Lodge after being in New York to cut their newly released record and performing at the uptown discotheques. I was eager to hear what changes the group had made, if any, while in New York. There have been changes and unquestionably they are improvements. Fear not! The Spike-Driver sound is intact but has been enhanced by a tighter performance and the addition of more original tunes by the group as well as some very groovie arrangements of rock and folk classics.

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
Spiritual Anarchism Topics for research

“Cowper came to me and said: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all—over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton and Locke.’”

...

Liberation News Service
Spiro Agnew and Kim

WASHINGTON (LNS) Look out, Spiro, there’s an effete snob in your very midst!

Spiro T. Agnew had a very unpleasant surprise come Moratorium day. Agnew’s 14-year-old daughter, Kim (after Kim il Sung, famed leader of the Korean People’s Revolution) decided she wanted to do her part in the struggle.

Attending the National Cathedral School for Girls, young Kim wanted to put on a black armband and march in the anti-war procession held in Washington on Moratorium eve. Papa said no.

...

Kelpie Wilson
Split in Earth First!

Redwood Summer seems to have sent some Earth First!ers over the edge. Many of the old-line EF! activists stayed away from the summer actions, feeling that “outsiders” had invaded their movement and diluted EF!‘s biocentric vision. Two EF! founders, Dave Foreman and Howie Wolkie, resigned in August (if one can resign from a “non-organization”) and the entire paid staff of the Earth First! Journal, which is closely associated with Foreman, announced in their current issue that they were resigning due to constant criticism of their editorial policies.

...

John H. Fenton
Spock gets jail term

BOSTON, July 10—Dr. Benjamin Spock and three other defendants were sentenced today to two years in Federal’ prison for conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft.

The four stood quietly in Federal District Court as the clerk read the sentences imposed by Judge Francis J.W. Ford, who presided over the case. Execution of the sentences was waived pending legal steps for appeal.

...

Don LaCoss
Spooky’s Furious & Funky Audiophonic Collage

REVIEW: Various artists remixed by DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Live Without Dead Time. From Adbusters #47 “Nightmares of Reason,” May/June 2003.

The Live Without Dead Time CD can be found in the anti-consumerist art magazine Adbusters; it highlights DJ Spooky’s uncanny skill in crafting deep sonic climates with up-front agitprop intentions. Paul D. Miller grew up in DC and now works as a conceptual artist, writer, and musician in NYC where he is best known as “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid” collaborating with the likes of ex-Rage Against the Machine vocalist Zach de la Rocha in a blistering anti-war shout called “March of Death.” Rather than cobbling together tracks for the dance floor, DJ Spooky welds together seamless and densely-detailed collective hallucinations better suited for headphones.

...

Marilynn Rashid
Spring Poem to a Bosnian Poet

I imagine you, your voice stopped

by the speed with which the lives around you crumble.

I imagine you wanting, trying to write,

not about the blood stains at your door,

not about the fragments of your family

huddled in basements, nor about the hate

rising in pandemic streams

but about the tree hidden in some

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Sstaff and Contributors

Angela DeSante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Bill Griffith

Pat Halley

Jay Kinney

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Rudy Perkins

Duke Skywatcher

Sonny Tufts

Bratach Dubh

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Brenda Sabbagh

Norm Thomas

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No -copyright, No paid advertising accepted.


Jun 20, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff

EDITOR & PUBLISHER: Harvey Ovshinsky

NEWS EDITOR: Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Cathy West

STAFF: Marlene Tyre, Frank Dedenbach, etc.

MEMBER: U.P.S. [Underground Press Syndicate]


Apr 28, 2023

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff

FIFTH ESTATE #13, August 30, 1966, Vol. 1, No. 13, page 2

The Fifth Estate, 937 Plum Street, Detroit, Michigan 48201, 962–9334

EDITOR & PUBLISHER: Harvey Ovshinsky

NEWS EDITOR: Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Cathy West

STAFF: Ron Halstead, Steven Simons, Debbie Osment, Marlene Tyre, Frank Dedenbach, Paula Stone, John Sinclair, Lena Sinclair, Emil Baccilla, Larry Miller, Frank Joyce, and Jeanie Sheahan

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff

EDITOR & PUBLISHER: Harvey Ovshinsky

NEWS EDITOR: Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Kathy

STAFF: Annie Katzen, Lena Sinclair, Marilyn Werbe, Steve Simons, Deborah Osment

THE FIFTH ESTATE 937 PLUM ST, DETROIT, MICHIGAN

48201 962–9334


Mar 13, 2023

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff

THE FIFTH ESTATE

1107 W. Warren

Detroit 48201

831–6800

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

NEWS EDITOR

Frank Joyce

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION MANAGER

Tommye Wiess

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

John Sinclair

ART

Gary Grimshaw

FILM EDITOR

Joe Fineman

CALENDAR GIRLS

Karen Kovach

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff

THE FIFTH ESTATE

1107 W. Warren

Detroit 48201

831–6800

Member, Underground Press Syndicate

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

NEWS EDITOR

Frank Joyce

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

ART

Gary Grimshaw

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

John Sinclair

CALENDAR GIRLS:

Karen Kovach

Naomi Epel

ADVERTISING

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & contributors

Millard Berry

Guyora Binder

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Pat Kazenko

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Pete Rachleff

Algirdas Ratnikas

Dennis Rosenblum

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising.


Feb 21, 2016

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Mr. Venom

Primitivo Solis

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN-0015-0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second-class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Sep 15, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Richard Rollins

and Boy Wonder

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313)831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second-class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Aug 20, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Fifth Estate

A Newspaper Of Detroit

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

NEWS EDITOR

Alan Gotkin

MUSIC EDITORS

Tony Reay

John Sinclair

OFFICE MANAGER

Debbie Quigg

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

ART DIRECTION

Blallen

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Stuart Perry

Donna Saffioti

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Primitivo Solis

Muswell Hillbilly

Gordon Barry

Carle Groome

Steven Benson

Michael Lucas

W.B. Jeffries

H. Kahn

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class — postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.


Feb 17, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Rick London

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising.


Aug 2, 2016

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Staff and contributors for this issue

Millard Berry

Porter Canfield

A. Shady Character

Dan Dickerhoff

B. Durrutti

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Dan Gordon

Kathy Horak

Algirdas Ratnikas

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Dennis Witkowski

Cover photo: Millard Berry

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit MI; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are 1:00–5:00pm Tuesdays through Fridays and 1:00–4:00pm on Saturdays. Subscriptions are $3.00 (12 issues). Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.


Nov 18, 2013

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

FIFTH ESTATE #272, May, 1976, Vol. 11, No. 8

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Colleen Jenson

Pat Kazenko

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Dennis Rosenblum

Kana Trueblood

S. Tufts

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Mark Wenson

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second, Detroit, MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays thru Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.


Dec 29, 2014

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E. B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Sonny Tufts

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Pat Halley

Edward R. Flynn

Peter Rachleff

Richard Schrader

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Jul 5, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Rick Schrader

Pat Kazenko

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Dennis Rosenbloom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

Dora Kaplan

Mark Wenson

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second, Detroit, MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays thru Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.


Aug 7, 2015

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

FIFTH ESTATE #268, January, 1976, Vol. 11, No. 4

Millard Berry

Murray Bookchin

Jim Casey

Red Evans

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Colleen Jensen

E.B. Maple

J.J. Markin

Nick Medvecky

Monros

Bob Nirkind

Pat O’Bryan

Leo Petrauskas

Algirdas Ratnikas

Carl Smith

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Stuart Perry

Pete Rachleff

Donna Saffioti

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising.


Sep 23, 2016

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

FIFTH ESTATE #269, February, 1976, Vol. 11, No. 5, page 5

Millard Berry

Murray Bookchin

Red Evans

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Colleen Jensen

E.B. Maple

J.J. Markin

Nick Medvecky

Monrós

Bob Nirkind

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Dennis Rosenblum

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Gordon Barry

Millard Berry

Ed Clark

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Terry Hawkins

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Stuart Perry

Pete Rachleff

Donna Saffioti

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising.


Sep 20, 2016

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff & Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Maynard G. Krebs

Angela DiSante

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Bill McGraw

Stuart Perry

Pete Rachleff

Donna Saffiati

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Judith Torres

John Zerzan

Mark Wenson

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising.


Oct 1, 2016

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and contributors

Chairman of the Board, Publisher, Assistant to the Publisher, Senior Editor, Editor, Managing Editor, Executive Editor, Assistant Managing Editor, Chief of Correspondents, Operations, Senior Writers, General Editors, Art Editor, Circulation Manager, Associate Editors, Assistant Editors, Senior Editorial Assistants, Editorial Assistants, Chief of Photography, Editorial Controller, Key Grip, Best Boy, Choreography, and Ms. St. Jacques’ Wardrobe by the Paleolithic Liberation Organization (PLO).

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and contributors

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

Mr. Venom

Primitivo Solis

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Richard Rollins

Larry Talbert

Michael Monster

Bob Brubaker

Stuart Christie

Angela Di Sante

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN-0015-0800) is published bimonthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second-class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright., No paid advertising accepted.


Nov 29, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Tomega Therion

Primitivo Solis

Coquilles St. Jacques

Bob Brubaker

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Suzy Ruby Lips

Don Kirkland

The Unknown

T. Fulano

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bimonthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads accepted.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Tomoga Therion

Primitivo Solis

Angela Di Sante

Larry Talbert

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Coquilles St. Jacques

E.B. Maple

Wanda Lust

Dora Kaplan

David Watson

Bill Watson

T. Fulano

Linda Wiens.

Mr. Venom

Don Kirkland

Ralph Rinaldi

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 8316800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads accepted.


Jan 18, 2019

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

Angela Di Sante

Mr Venom

Primitivo Solis

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Richard Rollins

Larry Talbert

Michael Monster

Stephen Goodfellow

John Zerzen

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

The Entire Nachalo Family

Mr. Venom

Primitivo Solis

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Michael Scrivener

Buster Brown

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN-0015-0800) is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second-class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Sep 25, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Michael Betzold

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Mike Neiswonger

Speedo

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Dennis Rosenblum

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published bi-monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright: No commercial advertising accepted.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Fifth Estate, A Newspaper Of Detroit

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

NEWS EDITOR

Alan Gotkin

MUSIC EDITORS

Tony Reay

John Sinclair

OFFICE MANAGER

Debbie Quigg

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

ART DIRECTION

Blallen

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Tomega Therion

Ruby Lips

Bob Brubaker

T. Fulano

Primitivo Solis

Coquilles St. Jacques

Larry Talbert

David Watson

Don Kirkland

Angela Di Sante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

John Zerzan

Buster Brown

George Bradford

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $4.00 for six issues; $6 for foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads accepted.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors #3, January 1966, Vol. 1, No. 3

The Fifth Estate

Po Box 305

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: Harvey Ovshinsky

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Susan de Gracia, Robin Dibner, Steven Dibner

STAFF: John Sinclair, David Rackett, Deena Clamage, Jeff Feldman, John Hawksley,

Special thanks to the Detroit Friends of SNCC and especially to Miss Dorothy Duberry, who went through hell to get the front page photographs.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Alice Allman, Millard Berry, Alan Franklin, Ralph Franklin, Mike Pinchera, Algirdas Ratnikas, Marilyn Werbe, Peter Werbe

THE FIFTH ESTATE Newspaper, a non-profit corporation is published every month at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201, (313) 831–6800. Office hours are 1:00 til 5:00 P.M. Tuesdays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 per year (12 issues). Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. Copyright protection is taken on all Fifth Estate issues for the sole purpose of protecting our labors from misuse by capitalist publishers only and will not be invoked against revolutionary publications. Distribution: call 842–8888 for store locations.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

FIFTH ESTATE, #299, October 22, 1979, vol. 14, no. 4

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E. B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Mr. Venom

Primitivo Solis

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

Brenda Sabbagh

Larry Talbert

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN-0015-0800) is published bimonthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second-class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Oct 27, 2016

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Doug Larkins

Donna Saffioti

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Govinda Habersplatte

John & Paula Zerzan

Rick Rollins

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Dennis Rosenblum

Bob Nirkind

Pat Halley

Colleen Jensen

E. B. Maple

J.J. Markin

Mr. Venom

Sonny Tufts

Pat O’Bryan

Peter Werbe

Algirdas Ratnikas

Marilyn Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second, Detroit, MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays thru Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.


Jul 20, 2014

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Richard Ades

Michael Betzold

Angela DeSante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Govinda Habersplatt

Amelia Jones

Jay Kinney

Don Kirkland

Jerry Lemenu

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Peter Rachleff

Richard Rollins

Clayton Sheridan

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Hughthir White

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Jun 9, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Arnold Washover

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Stuart Perry

Paula Zerzan

Nana Saffioti

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Jay Kinney

Michael Lucas

John Zerzan

Peter Rachleff

Richard Rollins

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259-1888-for retail sales outlets: Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.


Feb 26, 2017

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Stuart Perry

Joe Jacobs

Donna Saffioti

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

Danylo Tkach

Marcus Graham

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.


Feb 22, 2017

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Rick Schrader

Pat Kazenko

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Dennis Rosenblum

Bill McGraw

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

Paula Zerzan

David Watson

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising.


Jan 23, 2016

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

F. Briest

Angela DeSante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Tina Nachalo

Sabina Nachalo

E.B. Maple

Bob Nirkind

Govinda Haber

Peter Rachleff

Richard Rollins

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Hughtheir White

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.


Mar 22, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

E.B. Maple

Paul Mavrides

Tina Nachalo

Brenda Sabbagh

Jim Stodder

Norm Thomas

Sonny Tufts

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Jun 28, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

FIFTH ESTATE #271, April, 1976, Vol. 11, No. 7

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Dennis Rosenblum

Bob Nirkind

Pat Halley

Colleen Jensen

E. B. Maple

Mr. Venom

Paula Zerzan

Pat O’Bryan

Peter Werbe

Algirdas Ratnikas

Marilyn Werbe

John Zerzan

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second, Detroit, MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays thru Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.


Nov 19, 2014

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff and Contributors

Claudio Albertani

Angela DiSante

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Marcus Graham

John Grant

Maynard G. Krebs

E.B. Maple

Tina Nachalo

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $6 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising accepted.


Jul 10, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Staff Notes As We Go To Press

As we were just finishing this issue, we received word from the anarchists of the Spooner collective in Willimantic, Connecticut that they are sponsoring an Anarchist UNconvention on Sept. 8. They apparently have a beautiful outdoor spot available for a picnic, music festival and campout. Musicians and bands are being sought to perform. Rain date will be Sept. 15. Full details by sending a SASE to Spooner Collective, Box 433, Willimantic CT 06226 or call their bookshop at (203) 423–5836.

...

Andrei Codrescu
Stalin

Nobody dies like Stalin did. He didn’t just die, he took the world with him. My world at any rate. I was 8 years old when it happened. At school all the kids had been crying and I’d been crying the most. For us, Stalin was that saintly fatherly figure that smiled from above surrounded by adoring children. For me, personally, he was father, pure and simple, because I didn’t have one of my own. On my little night stand table I had his portrait and I slept securely under the shadow of his moustache. I was devastated.

...

Duke Skywatcher
Star Wars? The arms race of the future is now

Related: see “Technology and the State: An Introduction” in this issue.

While the attention of the world remains, as it has now for over thirty years, on the proliferation of conventional land, air, and sea-launched nuclear-warheads and delivery systems, recent breakthroughs in the areas of theoretical and applied physics are bringing us radically new and even more frightening weapons of global catastrophe. Most people, unaware of these developments, have assumed that the technology of space warfare is still decades, or perhaps centuries, in the future. A series of seemingly unrelated anomalies, however, suggest that space warfare between the U.S. and the USSR is not only being developed for the immediate future, but that the opening battles may have already occurred.

...

Jason Rodgers
Stashing the Tacky Little Pamphlets As more of our daily geography is occupied by a coercive media ecology, a tool to regain some ground

You might assume that a Tacky Little Pamphlet (TLP) is just another name for a mini-zine. In a way, you are correct. It usually refers to a format of a single sheet folded into eight sections, cut up the middle, and folded up like origami to form a miniature zine. However, the term includes additional meaning that expands far beyond into a form of tactical media or strategic prank.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
State Declares War Legal ...peace illegal

What had been planned as a week-long series of demonstrations and civil disobedience at a suburban Detroit cruise missile engine plant has become the focus of the government’s attempt to crush the growing anti-nuclear movement. In 1983 over 5000 persons were jailed for protests against nuclear facilities and the week of November 27-December 3 saw 51 persons arrested at the Walled Lake, Michigan Williams International Corporation for blockading the entrance to the plant. Instead of expected contempt of court charges and misdemeanor trespassing prosecutions, those arrested are facing felony counts of “conspiring to commit a misdemeanor”—ludicrous sounding on the face of it, but potent enough to send violators to prison for two years.

...

anon.
“State-Fetishism” Some remarks concerning the Red Army Faction

Over the past year, there has been a discussion within the pages of the Fifth Estate as to what constitutes revolutionary violence, and what the uses and relevance of such violence might be.

More and more, the guerrilla actions of such groups as the Red Army Faction and 2nd of June in West Germany and the Red Brigades of Italy seem to be committing at least a tactical error at this time; that is, during a period when there are no mass upsurges against the existing social relationships.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
State Jails Anarchist Webmaster The war at home

In early August 2003, African-American anarchist revolutionary Sherman Austin was sentenced to one year in jail, a $2000 fine, and three years probation. His crime? Being a black man who published a website with links to bomb-making information.

3-f-fe-362-3-sherman-austin.jpg
Sherman Austin

According to experts, the data Austin linked to is widely available—on the Internet and in public libraries. The state attacked Austin because he is black and because he is an anarchist.

...

Paul Jacob
Statement from Draft Outlaw “A free man resisting slavery”

WASHINGTON, DC—The following statement was made by Paul Jacob, a political activist who was indicted by the Arkansas Grand Jury on September 23, 1982 for failure to register for the draft. Although he is the 11th person to be indicted for this offense, Jacob’s case is unique in that he is the only draft resister who has been indicted that the FBI cannot locate for prosecution, despite a nationwide search. Jacob left his home in 1981 (after receiving a threatening letter from the Selective Service System) and has been living underground in an attempt to avoid prosecution. His statement follows:

...

anon.
Statement from the Hole There’s an “A” under the circle, but if it showed, it would be banned from many prisons!

FE Note: The Fifth Estate has a long history of granting free subscriptions to prisoners of the state—inmates and GIs, but often their masters object to our content. No wonder since our ideas challenge the concept of rulers and ruled that the dominant institutions are built on.

Recently, we have had numerous penitentiaries reject our paper, denying our prison subscribers access to ideas. Typical is the rejection notice we received from several inmates in the Oregon “Corrections” system charging our paper “Contains material that threatens or is detrimental to the security, safety, health, good order, or discipline of the facility.” They specifically point out “Front Cover—Anarchist Symbols” as the offending item. To the morons doing the censoring, this symbol of human freedom is a “gang emblem.”

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Statement of Ownership, etc.

Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation (Required by 39 USC 3685)

1. Title of Publication: Fifth Estate

2. Date of Filing: 30 September 1979

3. Frequency of Issue: Bi-Monthly

3A. No. of Issues Published Annually: 6

3B. Annual Subscription Price: $4

4. Location of Known Office of Publication: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201, Wayne County.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Statement of Ownership, Management & Circulation

Title of publication: Fifth Estate. Publication number: 710420. Date of Filing: February 24, 2000. Frequency of Issue: quarterly. Annual subscription price: $10. Complete mailing address 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan 48201. Publisher: The Fifth Estate Newspaper. Editor: None. Managing Editor: None. Owner: The Fifth Estate Newspaper, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Wayne Co., Michigan 48201. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders: None. Extent and nature of circulation (a) average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months; (b) actual number of single issue published nearest to filing date. Total number copies (net press run). (a) 5000; (b) 5000. Paid and or requested circulation: Sales through dealers and vendors: (a) 2424; (b) 2339. Mail subscriptions:

...

Anarchists
Statement on GOP and Democratic Conventions

Centerfold insert

Special Fifth Estate Convention Edition 2000

“We make war upon the State as the chief invader of person and property, as the cause of substantially all the crime and misery that exist, as itself the most gigantic criminal extant. It manufactures criminals faster than it punishes them. It exists to create and sustain the privileges which produce economic and social chaos. It is the sole support of the monopolies which concentrate wealth and learning in the hands of a few and disperse poverty and ignorance among the masses to the increase of which inequality the increase of crime is directly proportional. It protects a minority in plundering the majority by methods too subtle to be understood by the victims, and then punishes such unruly members of the majority as an attempt to plunder others by means too simple and straightforward to be recognized by the State as legitimate, crowning its outrages by deluding scholars and philosophers...into pleading, as an excuse for its infamous existence, the necessity of repressing crime which it steadily creates.”—Benjamin R. Tucker, 1882

...

Open Road
State Plays “Musical Dungeons” With SLA

This article first appeared in Open Road newspaper, Box 6135, Station G, Vancouver, Canada.

The long and complicated saga of the now defunct Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) is still unfolding in the courtrooms and prisons of California. Russ Little, Joe Remiro, Bill and Emily Harris, the group’s four surviving members, are all now serving one or more life sentences each and the Harrises face even more trials growing out of their urban guerrilla activities in 1974.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
State Terrorism in West Germany

As the letter on the preceding page indicates [“Who Are the Real Terrorists?,” FE #289, January 24, 1978], though the more spectacular aspects of the repression in West Germany are now fading from the popular imagination, the “policification” of the Federal Republic proceeds apace.

In recent weeks the criminalization of all who express even the slightest sympathy for the “terrorists” has intensified markedly; though it becomes increasingly difficult to say which is the most astounding of the actions taken by the state to achieve this, a sure candidate can be found in the charges recently brought against the father of murdered RAF member Gudrun Ensslin. For having the temerity to suggest that his daughter had no reason to kill herself but was in fact killed by the state, Ensslin (a minister) is now accused of “defaming the state” and faces three years in prison if convicted.

...

Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
State Violence & Cuba’s Ladies in White

3-s-fe-383-26-cuba-state-violence.jpg
Civilian Cuban women aid state security agents by dragging Ladies in White to an awaiting bus following a Havana anti-government march.

In March, Cuban police broke up a protest by the Ladies in White, women with family members sentenced to prison for opposing the government. The images of the women being dragged to a bus, their white clothes smeared with mud, were broadcast world-wide as proof of the repressive nature of the Castro government.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Statistics About Our ZIP Code

The December North Cass Community Union Newsletter gave some startling statistics about the 48201 ZIP Code the FE office is in.

Its population is a scant 13,010 and falling.

The median income is $10,001, the lowest of the 192 metro ZIP Codes. and the racial composition is 69 percent black.


Jan 16, 2018

Fifth Estate Collective
Stay where you are Don’t do anything

3-j-fe-302-16-stay-where-you-are.jpg

Whatever happens, don’t do anything until you hear from the authorities; your safety cannot be guaranteed if you take it upon yourself to act.

Stay in your homes, cars or shopping centers. If you stay at home, watch television or listen to loud music. During the day, remember that there is no safer place for you than on the job. If you are too young to work, go to school. For your own good, do as you are told.

...

Bill Blank
Steal This Article A Tribute to Abbie

Ten days before Abbie Hoffman was discovered resting eternal, I joined a few hundred spectators in an eerie celebration of ‘60s nostalgia at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. The world premiere of the film Ten For Two featured rare footage of the 1971 concert to free the once radical and once imprisoned (ten years for two joints) White Panther, John Sinclair.

...

Stuart Christie
Stefano Della Chiaie Portrait of a Fascist

A karate blow by a young Venezuelan policewoman to an escaping suspect brought an ignominious end to the career of the world’s most lethal terrorist. Stefano Delle Chiaie is the machiavellian figure behind numerous murderous outrages in Europe, Africa and Latin America over three decades.

Delle Chiaie, taken in a raid on an apartment in a suburb of Caracas in March of this year, had been living there under an alias for three years. After interrogation by Venezuelan security agents, 51-year-old Delle Chiaie was rushed to Caracas airport where he was handed over to waiting Italian agents. Captured with him were two boxes of documents, Delle Chiaie’s archives. He was put on a flight to Italy, where he was being tried in his absence for the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing in which 85 people were killed and over 200 badly injured. Other Delle Chiaie outrages include the December 1969 bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana which left 16 dead, the murder of a magistrate in 1976, and at least three attempted coup d’etats.

...

Christopher Clancy
Step by Step, Ferociously Space is not the place

a review of

Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space by Fred Scharmen. Verso, 2021

The late stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks, used to close his routines with an idea. Take all the money allocated to the U.S. military each year, he would say, and instead use it to feed and clothe and educate the poor of the world, not one person left behind, then take whatever’s left over “to explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

...

Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Still From Detroit: Fifth Estate reflection Cass Corridor to Pumpkin Hollow

Gritty and grimy to the core, inner-city Detroit was a daily regimen of gravel and glass.

Detroit defines the impossibility and the necessity of Fifth Estate. To advocate a complete break from autocratic technotopia yet tolerate the harsh topography required by the automobile; to desire a primitive, communal, eclectic new world while daily enduring the insults of the old world; to publish an intelligent and irreverent response to the inadequacies and inanities of modern life, even as a desperate plea pitched to a small audience--to do all these things despite the distractions of driving and wage work amid the vast exurban expanses of a postmodern megatropolis requires a testy combination of courage, vision, and recklessness.

...

Sandy Feldheim
Still Hungry in America

a review of

Still Hungry in America, text by Robert Coles, photographs by Al Clayton, introduction by Edward Kennedy. $2.95, 115 pages. World Publishing Co.

Still Hungry in America may be considered a sequel to Michael Harrington’s The Other America, published in 1962. Harrington’s book described the America most middle and upper-middle class whites never see.

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Sid Brown
Still Wobbly After All These Years A mini-memoir

I was a Wobbly in the late 1950’s, through a portion of the tumultuous ‘60s and into the always seeking-sometimes finding, ‘Seventies. Learning and honoring the historic traditions of the IWW and sharing tasks and decision-making with “fellow workers” changed my working life and continues to affect my creative endeavors.

...

anon.
Stoke in London Blasts Whitey, Black or White

London (UNS) By Mail — Stokely Carmichael participated in the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London at the Round House.

During his stay here, he also spoke with Black people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

On Sunday, July 23, he addressed a massive, mostly Black, session of the Congress and announced he would be unable to attend further meetings next week because he was leaving unexpectedly.

...

anon.
Stokely: “We got to get some guns”

To the delight of the Black populace of Detroit, Stokely Carmichael, on a mission to raise funds for the incarcerated Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, the convicted H. Rap Brown and other up-tight black freedom fighters, came to town June 8 and with all the ardor and volubility of that other conqueror, he came, he saw and really rapped.

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El Habib Louai
Stoned on Ritualistic Bullshit

They shall all tell you, one by one, when you cross them, collectively

individually, in court lobbies or hotel lounges, in schools or inside

mosques. They shall tell you only what they shall tell you, in their

Abyssinian rhetoric of generational apology. They shall tell you the

same old bullshit they vomited before, and after the great flood of the

...

Liberation News Service
Stone Pig Offed in Chicago

CHICAGO, Oct. 7 (LNS)—A day before the SDS national action was scheduled to begin here, headlines all over the city announced that the “historic” Haymarket Square Police Monument had been blown sky high.

The eight foot high bronze statue of a policeman was built to commemorate seven policemen who died in the famous Haymarket Square riot in 1886.

...

Kathleen Rashid
Stoney Point Reclaims Land and Voice

Background on Stoney Point

In 1942, the Canadian Department of National Defense invoked the War Measures Act to seize the land of the Potawatomi people of Stoney Point Reserve and established an “advanced infantry training center.” Many of the displaced native people were crowded onto the neighboring Kettle Point Reserve. The rest scattered throughout Ontario in search of homes and jobs, often in unfamiliar and hostile urban areas.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Stooges In New York

The Stooges, a Trans-Love band from Ann Arbor, will be in New York City for an end-of-the-month recording session at the Elektra studios.

Produced by John Cale of Velvet Underground fame, the group expects Elektra to release their first single and album in early May.

The band, signed simultaneously with the MC5 will also be doing a number of gigs at Steve Paul’s Scene and some college campuses in the area.

...

MaxZine Weinstein
Stop Assimilating; Start Revolting Book review

a review of

That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Edited by Mattilda, (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore), Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, 2004, 318 pages, $16.95.

With a new collection of essays compiled in That’s Revolting!, radical queer activist Mattilda puts the fun and glamour into radical queer resistance. It starts with a cover featuring a close-up of a mouth covered in lipstick and glitter and encourages the reader to “pick it up and smash something.”

...

anon.
Stop Mountaintop Removal Call to Action--Mountain Justice Summer, Appalachia--Summer 2005

The region known as Appalachia is one of the most beautiful and biologically diverse areas of this gorgeous little green-and-blue planet that we call home. The mountains and forests of Appalachia filter air and water, create soil, provide habitat and spiritual sanctuary, and generally make life possible and desirable. The beauty and diversity have been evolving here for eons.

...

Lynne Clive (Marilynn Rashid)
Stopping the Incinerator, Starting the Movement A Response

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From photography collection ‘Resistance to the Detroit Incinerator, 1986–1990.’ All black and white images: Millard Berry.

There were a number of inaccurate and misleading statements made in E. B. Maple’s both congratulatory and critical article on the Evergreen Alliance and its May Mobilization to Save the Great Lakes in the last issue [FE #329, Summer, 1988].

...

anon.
“Stop the Coral Sea!” Reprint

This article originally appeared as “Berkeley Strikes the Coral Sea” in Fifth Estate #146, November 25 — December 8, 1971 (Vol. 6 No. 18) page 2

ALAMEDA, Calif.—With a Navy band blaring “Anchors Aweigh,” the USS Coral Sea sailed out of the Golden Gate for Vietnam Nov. 12 despite a mass petition drive by anti-war sailors, an offer of sanctuary to deserters from the Berkeley, Calif. City Council and a threat of mass disruption from civilian picketers.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Stop the Dublin Hangings! Anarchists Tortured, Framed-Up

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As Noel and Marie Murray approached their Dublin home after a morning stroll they were confronted by a garda (an Irish cop), wielding a sub-machine gun.

“You’re dead, Murray,” he screamed. A few months later, a justice of the Special Criminal Court concluded a political show trial by confirming the garda’s sentence.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal Pennsylvania Governor expected to set May death date.

If a death warrant for Mumia is signed, demonstrate the next day, 6 p.m. at local federal buildings & city halls.

Death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new trial was denied by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court October 30 in an order upholding every detail of his racist and unfair frame-up. He is now under immediate threat of being executed.

...

Ruby Lips
Stop the incinerator, Stop the megamachine... Women WEAVE a web of resistance

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Left: Women of WEAVE block incinerator gate after slipping behind the police line. photo/Jake Right: Shouting “Shut it down!,” Right: crowd overwhelms surprised cops at the gate. photo/Buster Brown

The continuing movement to stop Detroit’s killer incinerator reached a high point on June 3rd when over 500 people turned out to protest the existence of the $438-million polluter.

...

Various Authors
Stop the War but don’t stop there

Editors’ Note: The following excerpts come from subversive anti-war flyers distributed at mass demonstrations; the first comes from an FE collective member in Tennessee, the second from the Chicago Surrealists, and the third from comrades in the San Francisco Bay Area.

~ ~ ~ ~

The new ultra-right doctrine of global domination that Bush has made his mantra is seen by some liberals as dramatic deviance from American principles. However, while imperial chickenhawk cowboys killing children and reaping the military-industrial profits may seem distasteful to most, it resembles American foreign policy verbatim since the dawn of the last century. Throughout the 1900s, the monsters of money and might wrought misery for millions.

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anon.
Stop Worrying & Learn to Love the Bomb

Editors’ Note: This article was sent to us by an airman stationed at a weather station in Florida. His name has been omitted to protect him from reprisal.

A few months ago it seemed that the military was more up-tight than usual. As it turned out, this is the understatement of the year.

I have a VW mini-bus that is painted with pop art, stars, signs of the zodiac, etc. In the rear window, I had painted an anti-war symbol.

...

Marieke Bivar
Stories and Stories and Stories of Womanhood Pandora is out of the box

a review of

All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body Ed. Dani Burlison. PM Press, 2019

In this collection, women’s bodies are discussed as sites of healing, burnout, grief, joy, transformation, and growth. The essays, interviews, and other writing vary immensely in tone and style, and there is a sense that this is a place where women’s anger is being expressed freely, however the contributors choose to do so.

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Mbeke Waseme
Stories of education in the UK

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Mbeke Waseme in Malacca, Malaysia

I’ve never worked in a school with coloured people.

I looked at her wondering why she felt the need to tell us that. The day I submitted my poem, I found out why.

That moment when you submit a piece of work and you’re standing at the teacher’s desk not quite able to read what their thoughts are.

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Feral Sage
Storm Warnings The personal is political... & historical

a review of

We are the Birds of the Coming Storm by Lola Lafon. Seagull Books, 2014, translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball

Originally published in 2011 as Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempête qui s’annonce

We are the Birds of the Coming Storm is French author Lola Lafond’s third novel, and the first to be translated into English. It is the story of three women whose lives converge and intertwine during a time of personal and political upheaval.

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David Gaynes
STP

TO SERVE THE PEOPLE. Brothers and sisters all over pigamerika are waging war, making revolution. To so serve the people, the STP coalition has been formed.

As brother Fred Hampton said: “...theory’s cool, but theory without practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them—the two go together.” He was talking the truth.

...

Liberation News Service
Straights Seed Love Weed

NEW YORK, N Y. (LNS)—Two groovy suburbanites have been growing grass in the gardens of the local police station, country club, American Legion, and Catholic church. The growers, Bill and Frank, are brothers and hale from Westchester County, where they own their own homes and belong to a country club. “We are only interested in decorating symbols of hypocrisy. We’d never do it to a high school or library,” but they hint that the U.N. may be a target.

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Michael Staudenmaier
Strange Bedfellows?

From a talk given at the Fourth Annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, May 18, 2003

Think back to the Great Depression and World War II and envision the odd alliances that developed around the world in the face of capitalist crisis and rising fascism: the Hitler-Stalin pact, for instance, or syndicalist support for Mussolini. Or, imagine militant anti-fascists in the underground resistance (often dominated by Stalinists) building ties with US and British military forces. Radicals in North America split between those who encouraged enrollment in the fight against fascism and those who did time in prison for refusing the draft. Think of the strange permutations of Peronism in Argentina, the “green” and “left” wings of the Nazi Party, the failure of the European left in the face of Italian occupation in Ethiopia, or the twists and turns of East Asian resistance to Japanese occupation.

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Michael Staudenmaier
Strange Bedfellows? An anti-fascist talk for Bakunin’s birthday

From a talk given at the Fourth Annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, May 18, 2003

Think back to the Great Depression and World War II and envision the odd alliances that developed around the world in the face of capitalist crisis and rising fascism: the Hitler-Stalin pact, for instance, or syndicalist support for Mussolini. Or, imagine militant anti-fascists in the underground resistance (often dominated by Stalinists) building ties with US and British military forces. Radicals in North America split between those who encouraged enrollment in the fight against fascism and those who did time in prison for refusing the draft. Think of the strange permutations of Peronism in Argentina, the “green” and “left” wings of the Nazi Party, the failure of the European left in the face of Italian occupation in Ethiopia, or the twists and turns of East Asian resistance to Japanese occupation.

...

Pat Halley
Street Magic Book review

a review of

Street Magic. Edward Claflin in collaboration with Jeff Sheridan, Doubleday/Dolphin Books, 1977

By far the most dominant feature of American streets is that hardly anything happens. The routines of commerce and work continue like clock-work, dangerous beasts are extinct, and vivid characters have perished as has literature since World War One.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Street people get it together

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Photo / Jeannene Seeger

Representatives from five Ann Arbor revolutionary groups convened at Trans-Love Energies Monday, August 11, to announce to the press the formation of a working coalition of the White Panther Party, the God’s Children motorcycle club, the Black Berets, Sunnygoode Street commune, and the Congolean Maulers.

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Dave &amp; Debby
Street Scene

We were walking down Forest near the freeway after buying some smokes when a carload of Wayne State cops were breaking away from the light and saw us. They cruised up and junior pig sitting shotgun pulls us over.

“Let’s see some I.D.,” the two-year college grad stated.

“Hell, man, that’s bullshit. We’re just walkin’ down the street and you ain’t got no right stopping us from doin’ just that.”

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Alan Gotkin
Strike! GE workers in Detroit

Three ramshackle, trash-can heated huts on York Avenue between Second and Third stand as mute testimony to a strike against the General Electric Corporation which has gone on in Detroit and across the nation since October 26th of last year.

Inside these cramped quarters GE workers from Detroit local 947 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) huddle together drinking hot coffee, between stints on the picket line, in an attempt to fight off the chill of subfreezing Michigan winter.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Strike! In the spirit of Eugene V. Debs

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Eugene V. Debs,

an American Beowulf, who was like both a

sacred covenant rainbow

for all the blue proletariat

and a

powerful electromagnetic storm

and struck fiercely against the

industrial money monsters who

were mute,

blind, stark and cold

to all colors of tears and as

brutal, bloodthirsty and beastly

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Strike against War, Imperialism

On October 15, 25,000 Detroiters added their voice to the millions of others across the country saying “End the War in Vietnam, Bring All the Troops Home Now.” President Nixon, as he had promised, did not listen to that cry. The war continues and so does the Fall Anti-War Offensive.

The dates for the next phase are Nov. 13, 14, and 15. We urge every American who wants the carnage in Vietnam ended to participate as fully as possible in the scheduled events of those days.

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anon.
Strike & Sabotage at Wash. Post

If the publishing of a sympathetic account of a union struggle seems inconsistent with our perspective, which views unions as auxiliary organs of Capital, let us clarify the matter. As people who have spent our adult lives as wage workers and members of several different trade unions, we have always supported the struggles of our fellow workers to improve their lot within Capital. What we are adamant about is that union struggles have absolutely nothing to do with the revolutionary struggle for a communist society.

...

Chris Singer
Strike at S.F. State

“There has had to be an escalation on this campus.”

—S.I. Hayakawa, President, San Francisco State College

We live in a MacLuhanesque age. The world is our village, its inhabitants are all as close as the nearest TV screen.

California, and most especially, switched on San Francisco, are where it’s all at—right?

...

J.R. Kennedy
Strike Back

Last week we went out on strike. We shut down universities and colleges across the country. Over 400 schools learned the power of the political strike. Hundreds of thousands of students moved militantly in rage over the Cambodia invasion and the Kent State murders. We trashed ROTC buildings, occupied administration centers, fought police, and made demands that put our schools against the wall.

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Ron Caplan
Strikers Seek Aid Support needed for farmworkers strike

The word huelga means strike, and it’s fast becoming a word in the American language as the strike that began in the grape fields surrounding Delano slowly radiates out across the country. But to those in the strike area, those who grew up in these fields and are now standing up for a union to protest the long years of suffering and deprivation huelga means a great deal more. It means the small things, it means a decent meal for their families, a chance for a decent home and a choice for them whether or not their children will work in these fields; it means a vacation that is more than a flat tire, or an illness, or rain. And it means the big things; it means that finally, as a body the farm workers are standing up together to present a bill long overdue: a bill to be paid not only with decent wages and human treatment in the fields—but a debt of enormous respect owed to these men and women, and to their parents.

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Don LaCoss
Strip Mining Big Rock Candy Mountain A Tuneful Utopia

“The Big Rock Candy Mountain” has to be one of the greatest anti-work anthems in American popular music. One-time Wobbly busker and radio-show hillbilly Harry McClintock of Knoxville, Tennessee connived to claim authorship of the song in the mid-1920s (as he also did with another one of the IWW’s greatest hits, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum”), but the song has existed in one form or another since the nineteenth-century. Hal Rammel, in his ambitious and imaginative study Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (1990), goes further and traces the song’s genealogy back to old European folk practices like the carnival and mummers’ plays. The song is a scruffy paean to the most potent weapon of the weak: the utopian imagination that can supersede the grim miseries of oppression, exploitation and want.

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Apio Ludd
Stronger Wine! Madder Music!

“Their lives are like their knitting: introspective yet mindless; fussy, exacting, repetitive and pale-tinted by the cheaper dye.”

-- Rikki Ducornet

When I first encountered godless anarchy in the late 1970s, it was its excess, its unconstrained exploration and experimentation with the furthest realms of passion and ideas, and its desire and dreams that attracted me.

...

Rui Preti
Struggles Against Capitalist Rule in Modern China

a review of

China On Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance edited by Hao Ren; English edition edited by Zhongjin Li and Eli Friedman. Haymarket Books, 2016

Striking to Survive: Workers Resistance to Factory Relocations in China by Fan Shigang, translated by Henry Moss. Haymarket Books, 2018

The modern state of China, by capitalist standards, is generally thriving. The nation’s economic growth rate, considered to be a prime indicator of prosperity, is significantly higher than that of the western industrialized countries, even with its recent slowdowns.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Student Leader Hit For Anti-War Group Membership

Chuck Larson, chairman of the WSU Student-Faculty Council (S-FC) was attacked for his participation in the newly formed Detroit Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (DSM) last week. Larson was elected honorary chairman of the anti-war group.

Dr. Richard F. Ward, Vice-Chairman of the SFC felt that “this was a clear conflict of interest and agreement over Larson’s loyalties,” and called for his resignation from either the S-FC or the anti-Vietnam war group.

...

Allen Fisk
Students Battle War Profiteers

Fourteen people were arrested and a number of assault charges are pending after two days of protest by Wayne University students, Oct. 24 and 25, at the site of a Defense and Government Procurement Conference set up to bring more defense business into Michigan.

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John Chiodo (Ieft) of Mello Consultants, after having just struck student to his left. Also pictured is Allen Fisk (with camera), Jim Harrington of WXYZ-TV over his shoulder and James Ford of the Draft Resistance Committee

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Liberation News Service
Students Join Workers

RICHMOND, Calif. (LNS)—Workers and students here fought together Feb. 3 to repel scab attempts to break picket lines during a strike against Standard Oil Refinery.

Some 500 students and 800 workers slashed scab car tires and shattered windows with clubs. Strike breakers on foot were pushed back and beaten when they attempted to cross picket lines. When the company goons arrived to photograph the pickets, they were jumped and their cameras were demolished.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Students Occupy U. of Windsor

WINDSOR, Ont.—For the first time in its history, the University of Windsor has felt the effects of increasing student demands for a voice in those decisions which affect their lives.

On Feb. 11, 55 students took over the Theology and Classics departments in the South Wing of the Administration Building.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Students Plan Anti-War Meet

College and high school antiwar activists and leaders are scheduled to converge on the campus of Cleveland’s Case-Western Reserve University this month to discuss, debate and decide on a future course for the student antiwar movement.

The February 14 and 15 national conference, called by the Student Mobilization Committee to End The War in Vietnam (SMC), is expected to be the largest anti-war student gathering to date. The SMC is encouraging all young people against the war interested in helping to chart the Spring program and strategy for the SMC and the student anti-war movement to come and participate in the conference.

...

Lissa Matross
Students Plan Viet Summer Action

From Michigan Daily—An estimated 600 students from 100 high schools and colleges across the nation overwhelmingly approved a resolution here Sunday calling for a nationwide Vietnam referendum on campuses next fall.

The students took part in a two-day Student Mobilization Committee meeting at the University of Chicago last weekend.

...

Liberation News Service
Students Trash SUNY

BUFFALO, New York (LNS) Students at the State University of New York at Buffalo pulled off a series; of actions for nearly a week in support of black athletes’ demands and to get police off campus in late February. They fought with police, attacked ‘political targets on campus and finally shut the place down on March 2.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Students vs. Draft

Washington, March 29, (UPI)—The Defense Department called today for the drafting of 34,600 men in May. It had asked for 21,700 for April.

The Army still needs 90,000 more men to complete its buildup for the Vietnam war.

The new draft call dimmed hopes previously expressed that the induction of college students might be avoided. Selective Service officials believe that induction of college students would be unnecessary if the draft could be kept below 30,000 a month.

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Simon Galubara
Studies Show LSD Might Damage Human Chromosomes

UPS — If you’re tripping, don’t read this now. Save it for later, and enjoy your trip Otherwise—Evidence, admittedly somewhat inconclusive, has been brought forth seemingly indicating that LSD can do damage to human chromosomes. Studies are being made in Buffalo, Bellevue University Hospital here, and at the University of Oregon. The first work reported on, that of Buffalo scientists, is the least significant.

...

Merrill Lynn
Studio & Court Theatre 2 Reviews

A bizarre chiller which gives Rock Hudson a chance at drama, for a change, provides an evening of unusual entertainment in the John Frankenheimer film, “Seconds,” now appearing at the Studio New Center Theatre.

A fantastic organization, equally amazing in its efficiency and pose, offers Mr. Hudson a second chance at life. Excellent photography and a good performance by Rock brings you to a startling climax which is certainly not meant for weak hearts. Gagged and bound, Mr. Hudson has never looked nor sounded so convincing before.

...

Starla
“Studying History, Making History”

As someone who has spent her entire learning life in public schools, from a public elementary school in Oklahoma to a public University in Colorado, my career has been a multidimensional experience based on dynamic inquiry. Unlike many, I never really thought of my schools as limiting or controlling. Yet the same institutions that gave me so much vigorous opportunity sadly possess a nationalistic underbelly, a contradictory and conformist core.

...

anon.
Study of Cops Shows ‘Pathological Hostility’

“The ghetto atmosphere was illuminated last week in a study prepared for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement. In a survey of three cities—Chicago, Washington and Boston—the study found that four out of every five white policemen working in Negro neighborhoods have prejudiced attitudes towards Negroes.

...

William Boyer (Bill Boyer)
Stumbling Upon Public School Utopias Tales from two front lines

Part One: Utopia Outlined

February 1999: I’m pivoting on my desk, basking in a student-led discussion, momentarily featuring a couple of black-clad teenagers contrasting the ideological differences between Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

The twenty alert faces of the elective “Russian Social Anarchism,” stretch about the carpeted room, where Pilot pens race across lined paper as if there are only seconds left to write before our CD musical segue into Chumbawamba, while a girl with cropped pink hair raises her hand, eager for the previous student to call upon her.

...

Barbara Sincavitch
Suber Locked Out

Tommie Suber arrived at the gates of Fort Wayne on August 5th at 8:00 a.m. to report for induction. He was chained to Father Bob Morrison, Ron Halstead, Kitty Denenfeld, and Victory Friedelman.

Supporting his move were forty people representing Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice, The Resistance and People Against Racism.

...

Jack Bratich
Subjectivity Rosa Undercurrent Affairs

Over the past two years, various actors have ruminated over the perceived loss of the “movement” (specifically referring to the counterglobalization movement, but also referring to a sense of momentum, coordinated actions, targeted purpose, and most importantly a sense of effectivity).

Like a drug, Seattle99 was a vehicle that became confused with its effects. The enthusiasm and infectious power of that moment became a lost object of desire, a model whose failure to reappear seemed to diminish possibilities (for more on this see my previous article “Becoming-Seattle” in Fifth Estate #374, Winter 2007).

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Fifth Estate Collective
Subscribe! Fifth Estate Faces Being Gobbled Up By The Money Monster

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Once again the old Fifth Estate is faced with the nemesis of financial bankruptcy. Our shoestring budget still continues to operate at a rate where production costs inevitably outweigh income generated by the paper, due to our refusal to accept all forms of commercial advertising.

In an effort to maintain the paper and our independence from commercial advertising, we urge our readers to contribute financially to the continuing operations of the paper, to re-subscribe if your sub is running out, to check out Ammunition Bookstore and the catalogue in this issue for reading material, and to pass the word and the paper along to friends everywhere. We at this end will assuredly continue to look for ways to keep the paper going.

...

Art Johnston
Subterranean Homesick News

The Hill was run by lanky Louie, an ex outrider with the Highwaymen. “The Grand Dude,” as they called him now is sort of manager of a couple scraggly rock and roll bands that lived on and around The Hill. There was the Sun, but most notably, perhaps, were the Tate brothers, Terry and Hawg, who form the nucleus of the Tate Blues Band.

...

Penelope Rosemont
Subversions

a review of Subversions: Anarchist Short Stories Ed. Anarchist Writers Bloc, Les Pages Noires 2011, Montreal 115 pages, Softcover, $14.95 U.S.

This collection is the first ever in English or French of new anarchist fiction. These sixteen stories, offer something for everyone: If you like action, there is plenty of action, as well as surprise endings and thought provoking parables. This is a great idea for a collection of stories and it is wonderful that it exists as an accomplished fact. Pulled together with lots of hard work and inspiration--expressing self-organization, self actualization and cooperation at its best--the publication of this book is a do-it-yourself revolutionary action that means to make a difference in this world.

...

Ruth Oppenheim-Rothschild
Subversions of the Body Sex, Sex Work, and Gender in Surrealism

Miserabilist society wants our bodies. It wants docile bodies, controlled by fear, by class, and by silence. As surrealists, we desire absolute control of what we do with our bodies, what we want from our bodies, and how we see and present our bodies.

The institution of marriage must be destroyed. Surrealism has no room for man and wife, missionary-position monogamy, and likewise, no place for mainstream gay culture that wants to be as straight as It can possibly be. We demand the right to fuck who we want to fuck, however we want to fuck them. This means total access to protection against STDs, birth control, and abortion—class should not control sexual possibilities. It means an end to abstinence-only, heterosexist sexual education in schools. It means the destruction of rape culture. It means following our desires. It means being able to verbalize and act on what we want.

...

M.K. Shibek
Brandon Freels

Subversively Surreal Review

a review of

Ron Sakolsky’s Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings, and images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. Autonomedia 2002. Please see page 55 for details on how to order your copy.

“Surrealism can help us break the constraints of social realism and take us to places where Marxism, Anarchism, and other isms in the name of revolution have rarely dared to venture.”

...

Bryan Tucker
Subverting Establishment Suppression ACT UP & Explosions from the Margins: Against gentrification of the mind

The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power—known by its acronym ACT UP—coalesced in the late 1980s with a simple motivation: the desire to live.

This group is a striking example of the influence marginalized people using radical approaches can have. The ambitious and judicious group, founded in New York City on March 12, 1987, set their initial sights on exposing neglect and falsifications about the AIDS epidemic. They demanded attention and significant action from politicians, Wall Street, and the Catholic church.

...

Fifth Estate Collective
Successful Detroit Benefit Concert for Marie Mason Marie’s long sentence compared to that of an anti-apartheid revolutionary

Movement troubadour David Rovics performed a benefit concert in Detroit, October 27, for singer/songwriter/environmental activist, Marie Mason, the Green Scare prisoner serving the longest sentence for eco-sabotage.

Generous attendees at the benefit contributed over $1,000 to support Marie’s prison and legal needs.

...

Don LaCoss
Sucker

Last summer, I was talking to a carnival-ride operator at one of those small, itinerant outfits that was crisscrossing its way across the Midwest. The carny looked to be in his mid-50s and said that he had worked all sorts of jobs with different wandering funfair amusement shows since his first gig as a travelling circus roustabout at age 14.

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John Sinclair
Sun Ra

The ageless Sun Ra and his thirteen-piece Astro-Infinity Arkestra will unite with the MC5 and the people of Detroit at the Grande Ballroom May 16 and 17 for a mass manifestation of revolutionary culture and energy that’s sure to bathe the city in its vibrations for weeks to come.

The Arkestra will also appear at the 1st Annual Rock and Roll Revival, May 30 and 31 at the State Fair Grounds.

...

Anathin
Sunshine Cop

from San Francisco Express Times

San Francisco, April 18 — Easter noon on the steps of the Hall of Justice a cop with a red ribbon in his hat and an iris in his lapel took out a joint and lit up.

“I wasn’t there for grass, I was there for a bigger thing. We’re trying to start a disarmament program with a ten cent piece of ribbon.”

...

Dennis Frawley
Bob Rudnick

Super Duds

The pop world is crashing under the plastic bravado of its self-praise, musical solipsism and commercial orientation which leads toward a strict class separation and a degenerate, bullshit path of “mature sophistication,” alcohol, drugs, elitism, stardom, show business, artiness, campfire music, jiveness, an asinine sense of historical importance, and a superficial future consigned to trends, megalomaniac celebrities, and industry-induced myths. A Neo-Roman decadence has internationally seized the music of Youth—fun, freedom, and change.

...

Hank Malone
Superkid

a review of

The Assault on Childhood, Ron Goulart, Sherbourne Press, Los Angeles, 1969, $6.50

The Assault on Childhood is a book about the newest species of American human/animal: Superkid, and his manufacturers.

Superkid is a real product of mass culture, a person who is not a kid anymore, but who is not really an adolescent nor an adult either. Superkid is the new American person.

...

anon.
Super Woman 6-panel cartoon

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1. So he thinks he’s got my arms pinned, does he! Little does he know I’m.

2. Super Woman! I’ll drop back and thrust my thumbs into his groin...then he’ll move back and I’m ready for my next move...

3. Right in the groin! I’ve got his arm and head too!

4. Now I’ll kick with the knife-edge of my foot--right to the inside of his knee!

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Liberation News Service
Support for Dix 38

NEW YORK (LNS)—Four hundred demonstrators massed in front of Penn Station August 2 to support 38 Fort Dix, N.J. GIs who face court-martials for having participated in a stockade uprising.

The protesters called for the elimination of all Army stockades, dropping charges against the Ft. Dix 38, and the freeing of all political prisoners—including Black Panther Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton.

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Frank H. Joyce
Support Grows for City District System

The Rev. Charles Williams is a conservative, Negro, Republican Baptist.

Robert Tindal is the executive director of the tradition-bound Civil Rights Organization to The Establishment—the NAACP. The Rev. Albert Cleage is a militant black power advocate and chairman of the Inner-City Organizing Committee.

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Nick Medvecky
Supporting Political Prisoners

a review of

Government Repression, Prisoner Support. Sacramento Prisoner Support, 2012, 157pp., P & L Printing, Denver CO $10, order through pandlprinting.com

Unknown to many U.S. citizens, federal and state governments currently imprison more people, 2.4 million+, in their gulag than any nation in history.

...

Nicholas Jon Crane
Supporting the Scene in Association with Others: Do-It-Yourselfers and Difference Does DIY stand inside or outside capital’s economy?

I attended a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) event three years ago that was promoted as a “zine release show.” Ostensibly devoted to the distribution of recently published zines, the event provided zine writers with an audience of people with shared dispositions, but this essay considers a less obvious way it drew people together across difference and precipitated a politics.

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Luci Williams
Support the Forces of Darkness

People have a lot more of the unknown than the known in their minds. The unknown is great; it’s like the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens.

—Sun Ra

According to The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness, human civilization is drowning itself in luminous smog. The Atlas is a joint project of astrophysicists from Italy and Colorado and measures the level of perpetual industrial brightness that is reflecting off the inside rim of the sky.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Support the Troops in Revolutionary Defeat Some of our anarchist, autonomist, and anti-militarist comrades organized a Deserter Festival in Moscow during the last week of February.

Explicitly focusing their energies on undermining Russian military activity in Chechnya, they declared February 23rd as “the International Day of the Deserter” and set up a number of different events, including discussion panels, information exchanges on the draft, hardcore punk shows, antiwar demonstrations, a “Radical Women Against Conscription” rock concert, workshops for international solidarity, a dance party, and a couple of free Food Not Bombs feasts.

...

Marius Mason
Support Those Who Rattle Cages

a review of

Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, Editors: Eric King and Josh Davidson; forward by Angela Davis. AK Press, 2023

“I was told that I would be dead by the time I finished my sentence.”

—Oscar Lopez Rivera, sentenced to 55 years for 130 FALN bomb attacks in 1974–1983

...

Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Support Your Local Utopia Vachel Lindsay’s Golden Book

a review of

The Golden Book of Springfield, Vachel Lindsay, 1920, Re-Introduction by Ron Sakolsky, 1999, Charles H. Kerr Publishers, Chicago

Nearly three decades after moving to central Illinois to share radical ideas with students at Sangamon State college, activist-writer-anarchist-musicologist-deejay-and-dreamer Ron Sakolsky is planting the seeds of his exodus from the job that brought him there, at the now sanitized, corporatized, and renamed University of Illinois at Springfield.

...

anon.
Supreme Court to Hear GIs Fort Hood Three challenged government’s right to send them to Vietnam

The first GIs to publicly refuse to go to Vietnam, known as the Fort Hood Three, asked the Supreme Court to hear their suit against the war, and against the government’s right to send them to Vietnam.

Jimmy Johnson, 21, Dennis Mora, 25, and David Samas, 21, first brought this suit while on leave from the army in June, 1966. At that time, they made public their refusal to go to Vietnam.

...

Don LaCoss
Surrealism & Atheism Review

a review of

Guy Ducornet, Surréalisme et atheisme... “A la niche les glapisseurs de dieu!” Ginkgo editeur, 2007.

Surrealist Guy Ducornet has been active in the Paris and Chicago groups since the late 1960s, as well as a participant in the para-surrealist Phases movement. In 2005, Ducornet began contacting surrealist groups around the world and announced his plans to re-issue the classic surrealist proclamation against religion from 1948, “A la niche les glapisseurs de dieu!” (“Get Back Into Your Kennels, You Yelping Dogs of God!”).

...

Ron Sakolsky
Surrealism is (Still) Elsewhere Like anarchy, surrealism boldly demands the impossible

It seems that the more art school training one receives at the academy, the more one is likely to be confused about surrealism or overtly hostile to it. Much of the malaise around surrealism in art circles stems from the insularity of the art world itself.

While surrealist ideas and practices can be expressed artistically, surrealism cannot be reduced to a style or school of art, even one aimed at inspiring radical political action. Nevertheless, surrealism is typically portrayed by academics as merely one historical moment in the grand cavalcade of failed avant-garde art movements of the 20th century.

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Ron Sakolsky
Surrealism on the Barricades

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excerpt from

Breaking Loose: Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid? LBC Books, 2015, lbcbooks.org

Back in 1995, as the banlieues burned, the Paris Surrealist group put out a tract entitled Warning Lights: A Surrealist Statement on the Recent Riots in France, delineating the unrealized potential of such multi-racial uprisings in the inner suburban immigrant quarters to spread across the country.

...

May Thistle
Surrealism, Poetry, Anarchy An introduction

This issue’s focus on poetry and surrealism evolved in a surrealist fashion as synchronicity and serendipity weaved this theme into being.

Certainly, our friendship with anarchist writer and anthologist Ron Sakolsky played a part as we anticipated the release of his newest book Surrealist Subversions.

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Steven Cline
Surrealist Collectivity A Utopian Rhizome

“Surrealism is the collective experience of individualism”

—André Masson

What is surrealist collectivity? A mutually opened wound, ever seeded by poetry, by revolt. A soft spectral voice in the darkness, urging all nonconformists to come out, and to play. An extradimensional vehicle for thought and action beyond all controls, a device powered by collective vulnerability and individual Becoming.

...

Various Authors
Surrealist, Comrade, Dear Friend, Colleague... A Surrealist Statement on Don (1964–2011)

When our friend Myrna Rochester, an expert on the surrealist Rene Crevel, told us it was necessary for us to meet someone interested in surrealism who was finishing his doctorate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, we were skeptical, even perhaps somewhat hostile. There are, after all, lots of people interested in surrealism, but most only in a superficial way. But when we met Don LaCoss, we were impressed; not only did he know as much about surrealism as we did, but he loved it just as much.

...

David Tighe
Surrealist Manifesto 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the formal announcement of surrealism in the Surrealist Manifesto written by French poet, André Breton. It gathers strength today as it combines with anarchism to shout: ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION!

a review of

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2023

“Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom, and misery.”

...

Max Cafard
Surre(gion)alist Manifesto

Dedication

“Here we cast anchor in rich earth.”

—Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918)

For our Mother the Earth, we set sail on Celestial Ships. Anchored in Erda, we ride the wind. For Gaia, we take flight, spreading terrifying Cafardic wings. No longer trembling at the emasculating, defeminizing sound: the Name of the Father. We re-member Mama. Papa dis-membered Mama. We now re-call the suppressed Names of the Mother. Anamnesis for anonymous Manna. A surre(gion)al celebration, a Mani festival for Mama Earth. This is dedicated to the One we love. For the One Big Mother, in her thousand forms, here it is: the Mama Manifesto (1989)

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Kelly Pflug-Back
Survival of the Fittest? Tribal people took care of their own better than modern society.

The concept of history is far from neutral. Under the monopoly of elites, narratives of the past can be erased, rewritten and taken out of their original context according to their needs.

Dominant concepts of history are often used to justify social inequalities by portraying them as natural rather than constructed. We are led to believe that groups who lack power in today’s cultures have always lacked power, that inferiority is their natural state, and that there is no alternative social structure where freedom and equality could be achieved by all.

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David Watson
Swamp Fever Primitivism and the “Ideological Vortex:” Farewell to All That

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Collage: James Koehnline

A review of the following texts:

Green Apocalypse, Luther Blissett, Stewart Home, and the Neoist Alliance (London: Unpopular Books [Box 15, 138 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2NS UK], 1996), £3.50

Into the 1990’s With Green Anarchist, Steve Booth (London: Green Anarchist Books [PO Box 407, Camberley GU15 3FL, England], 1996), £4

...

David Watson
Swamp Fever (excerpts)

FE note. Excerpts from “Swamp Fever, Primitivism & the ‘Ideological Vortex’: Farewell to All That” first published in the Fall 1997 issue of Fifth Estate (vol. 32 #2 (Whole Number 350)). End note.

Civilizations, most people know, destroy themselves. Radical greens, anarchist or otherwise, need to ... develop a constructive politics of solidarity, justice and renewal that moves beyond one-dimensional opposition to and unintelligible confrontation with mass society.

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George Bradford (David Watson)
Swamp Rats & Urban Rats Unite!

a review of

Legend of the Great Dismal Maroons, Presented as a public service of the Grand Ludic Lodge, Ancient Scald Miserable Order, Great Dismal Maroons, celebrating 400 years of struggle for universal jubilation, 1589–1989, by James Koehnline. Panic Publishing, POB 1696, Skokie IL 60076–8696, USA. No price listed.

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John Sinclair
Sweep-in

The filthy streets of Detroit’s Warren-Forest Area, center of the city’s hippie community, will be the scene of a giant Sweep-In Sunday, August 20.

The Sweep-In, planned by Trans-Love Energies as a last-ditch effort to rid the Warren-Forest Area of such foul elements as discarded beer bottles, garbage and old copies of The News, was decided upon after Trans-Love tried unsuccessfully to convince the DPW that it should exercise its craft in the stricken area.

...

Lenny Rubenstein
‘Swingin London’ Shows Decline and Fall of British Empire

(Special to the FIFTH ESTATE) LONDON—From the suburban sprawls of America where the language of LSD and grass is used to sell cars and discotheque tickets, the appeal of the country that produced Tolkien, “Morgan!,” and George Harrison is strong and readily fulfilled.

Unfortunately after nearly six months in “Swinging London,” I am willing to face General Hershey and his clerks of conscription and the napalm aces of the USAF rather than stay another six.

...

George Bradford (David Watson)
N. Bates

Symbolic Protest & The Nuclear State Two articles

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While pacifists engage in symbolic acts of protest against militarism, the militarists engage in a bit of symbolism of their own. Top: moral witness at Williams International, where cruise missile engines are manufactured. Bottom: U.S. troops practice mass burial techniques during NATO maneuvers in West Germany last autumn. The articles appearing on this page were written by two people who took part in the Williams protests. The first article is signed by N. Bates, the pseudonym of a person who was arrested at Williams for civil disobedience, and who now faces multiple charges stemming from the action.

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George Bradford (David Watson)
Symbolic Protest and the Nuclear State reprint from FE #314, Winter, 1984

Where, then, are the roots of revolt, how can the machine be halted?

A leaflet distributed recently by radicals in California to anti-nuclear protesters argues a point very similar to what we have written in the FE--that fear of being nuked is not enough, and that, “It is not only nukes that menace what is left of life, but the whole structure of modern society, beginning with the obsolescent machinery of work-to-pay-to-work which we call the ‘economy.’ Only a movement which taps into mass rage and desire by challenging this structure can hope to become strong enough to prevent the catastrophe.”

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anon.
Sympathy for the Devil Film review

“Sympathy for the Devil,” Jean-Luc Godard’s first film since his masterly “Weekend,” is full of radical rhetoric, Black Power, white fascism, graffiti, pornographic novels and rock music. Watching it is often difficult and demanding because Godard poses questions while denying us answers. Yet it is an impressive visual and aural orchestration of incredibly diverse parts, and its appearance is a cinematic event of the highest order. “Sympathy for the Devil” is about, among other things, the experience of artistic creation.

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Bill Weinberg
Syria’s Kurdish Revolution The Anarchist Element & the Challenge of Solidarity

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The north Syrian town of Kobani has been under siege since mid-September by forces of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, popularly known as ISIS. Early in the siege, world leaders spoke as if they expected it to fall.

The US took its bombing campaign against ISIS to Syria, but targeted the jihadists’ de facto capital, Raqqa, not the ISIS forces closing the ring on Kobani. But the vastly outgunned and outnumbered Kurdish militia defending Kobani began to turn the tide, while issuing desperate appeals for aid from the outside world.

...

Peter Lamborn Wilson
Take Back the Night ban electricity

Electricity was known to the ancients. Archaeologists found primitive batteries in Crete—probably based on lost Mesopotamian or Egyptian prototypes. Clearly the old mages kept it a deep secret. Franklin didn’t discover it, he appropriated it from Hermeticism and gave it to the very politicians and merchants deemed “profane” and kept in the dark by real alchemists for millennia.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Take This Census & Shove It!

For the last several months I have been inundated with press releases and other propaganda disseminated by the United States government concerning the census which is to begin, appropriately, on April Fool’s Day, 1980. The census presents itself as an innocuous gathering of facts which will make it possible for “us Americans” to know how our society is changing and, as President Carter wrote in a White House release last November, “to make intelligent decisions for the future.”

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Bob Repoley
Take What’s Yours

Editors’ Note: People Concerned About Urban Renewal (PCAUR) is a community based organization that has resisted the expansion of Wayne State University and demanded local control of all renewal projects.

Their main political strategy is to build neighborhood block clubs and to agitate for the rights of the citizens of the Warren Forest area. This article taken from an article in the weekly paper, The Community Reporter, was written by Bob Repoley. PCAUR may be reached at 831–5664.

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Jeff Shantz
Taking it OFF the streets! From Ritual to Resistance — A new world can’t be built in the streets. Making resistance real means creating an alternate social structure.

The Occupy mobilizations of the last year have offered to many some hope for a renewal of popular movements and alternatives to state capitalist arrangements Yet, perhaps few recurring events show the great disparity that exists between activist subcultures and broader working class and poor communities in North America than the privileging of street protests and demonstrations within activist practices.

...

Quincy B. Thorn
Tales from the Cybersphere Fifth Estate on the Web

Since its radical beginnings the Fifth Estate has consistently been more than a magazine, indeed, more than a publication. From the start its staff and contributors--in Detroit and farther afield--have been engaged with anti-authoritarian activities and ideas that are hard to grasp simply by viewing single issues of the FE.

...

Quincy B. Thorn
Tales From the Cybersphere Fifth Estate on the Web: A guide to the Web presence of Fifth Estate staff, writers, and friends

Longtime Fifth Estate friend and supporter Julie Herrada has contributed many articles and photos to the magazine over the last 15 years. These can be found by searching the growing archives on our site at FifthEstate.org. Use the Search box or the FE Authors drop-down list on our home page to find what we currently have online.

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Quincy B. Thorn
Tales from the Cybersphere: FE on the Web A guide to the Web presence of Fifth Estate staff, writers, and friends

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Stephen Goodfellow, Layabouts lead singer, & FE contributor, in his San Miguel de Allende, Mexico studio

Besides contributing to this publication, three longtime Fifth Estate regulars have also had a part in shaping Detroit’s 1980s radical music scene.

Alan Franklin, Ralph Franklin and Stephen Goodfellow, in addition to writing articles and creating graphics for the magazine, played key roles in the Layabouts, a band that, since its founding in the early 1980s, has taken its inspiration from the best in both radical music and anarchist politics. Musically, the group describes itself as “creating a sound that blends rock, ska, reggae, Latin and African rhythms.”

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the planet

Freedom Press Attacked by Fascists

As we were going to press, Albert Meltzer, active in British anarchism for five decades, visited Detroit and told us of a devastating arson attack on Freedom Press in addition to the ones reported below.

We called England and learned that on June 4th, Aldgate Press, which shares space with Freedom in Angel Alley on the first floor below the bookshop, was gutted by flames and its printing press destroyed. Damage was estimated to be $100,000. Although the first floor is a “burnt shell,” the Freedom book shop received only minor smoke damage.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the planet

Erik Larsen, probably the best known military resister to Operation Desert Storm, was released from a Marine brig at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, April 15. He served five months of a six month sentence. Even though many other resisters, especially those of color, remain imprisoned, the Larsen case is a victory, not only for Erik, but for the entire GI support movement.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the planet

SAVE MUMIA

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s battle to keep from being legally lynched by the state of Pennsylvania has reached a critical point. On October 1, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his petition for a review of his conviction and death sentence. In January 1990, Mumia exhausted his last avenue of appeal in the state (in)justice system. All that remains is for Governor Robert Casey to sign the warrant of execution.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the planet

Anarchist Black Cross

At a conference of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) (the first in twenty years) held in April 1989 in Bradford, England, member groups decided to activate one of the ABC’s original functions by establishing the Emergency Response Network (ERN) which will mobilize anarchists internationally to respond to immediate crises. A call to action would have demands such as the immediate release of anarchist prisoners, the dropping of charges, the cessation of torture, meeting the demands of hunger strikers or prisoner hostage-takers, etc. The meeting in Bradford decided that the ERN would only be activated in defense of anarchists.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the planet

Mumia Judge Out

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal that his conviction and death sentence be overturned for the 1981 death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner is still pending before Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. The recent election of an extreme conservative justice to a court that has never granted a new trial, much less dismissed charges for a death-row inmate, does not bode well.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

The Saigon Times reports work will begin next year on a north-south expressway along the route of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. Vietnamese Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet has called for a mass labor program to build the 1,125-mile road This was a retreat from his original plan to build a trunk road down the west side of the Truong Son Mountains, which would have cost $6 billion, half the country’s annual national income.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

Anarchist Gathering in Ottawa

Between May 19 and 21, a regional anarchist gathering sponsored by the Outaouais Anarchist Circle was held in Ottawa (the capital of Canada, located on the border between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec). The gathering was attended by about 150 people from Ontario, Quebec and Vermont, and followed by a now familiar format of workshops, musical events demos and communal meals. A generally upbeat mood was clouded by a number of sexist incidents. Although some of these incidents seemed to be caused by men who were not directly connected with the gathering, women were angry about the lack of response from anarchist men who were present (for example, a man had interrupted a women-only meeting and later made so much noise with a drum that they had to leave the house). Discussion of these incidents dominated a brief evaluation period before the demo, and it was made clear that some women were strongly considering not coming to future gatherings.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

Resistance to Genocide

While some celebrated the 510th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the western hemisphere, thousands of others protested his legacy of genocide and enslavement. In Chiapas, more than 50 peasant and civil organizations organized 12 roadblocks. In Colorado, in opposition to an annual Italian (white) pride pro-Columbus march, AIM mobilized nearly 2500 people to march from the four directions with red, black, yellow and white flags to the state capitol to “Transform Columbus Day”, while hundreds of anarchists confronted the parade in solidarity. In Arizona and Sonora, 250 people marched on the U.S./Mexico border to show their opposition to border policies, the takeover and separation of indigenous lands, and the subjugation of indigenous people. Native Americans and others converged on Washington, DC where someone defaced a statue of Columbus.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

Quick! Call the Anarchist Anti-Defamation League (AADL). It’s bad enough when every corporate media outlet uses anarchism as a synonym for chaos, but now an English company has gone even further.

Superdrug PLC is marketing a commercial bath product line using the brand name “Anarchy,” complete with a circle A over the first letter, which includes a body shower gel they call “Havoc.” “Wreak Havoc,” the plastic container urges; “Get Refreshed.”

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

Kent State Murders Memorialized

Kent State University (KSU) announced that on May 4, 1999, the Ohio college parking lot where Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, and Bill Schroeder were shot to death by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970, will be closed to traffic and a full memorial created. The deaths occurred during a campus demonstration when troops fired armor-piercing ammunition at unarmed student anti-war protesters. The 67-shot barrage also wounded nine youths.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

For over five years, villagers in Portugal have been battling the mass planting of eucalyptus trees, a “quick money,” fast-growing, drought resistant tree which, according to its advocates, provides a good light fuel and prevents soil erosion.

In reality, the eucalyptus planting is truly life-threatening for what remains of Portugal’s small farming communities. The tree, which drives its roots deep into the ground, robs the villages of their already meager water supplies, quickly drying up the wells and small streams.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

1994 saw a new wave of activism in support of imprisoned American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier including the following events: Leonard Peltier Freedom Weekend in Washington D.C. in June, a summer cross-country Walk for Justice, a twelve day “People’s Fast for Justice” and an International Walk for Justice in Washington State and British Columbia in October.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

In our last issue George Bradford reported there are some five thousand pieces of junk floating around in space, including several nuclear reactors that will eventually fall back to earth. (See “Biosphere 2: The Future of the Planet?” FE #343, Fall-Winter, 1993.)

Alas, the situation is even worse. The broken solar panel thrown overboard by space shuttle astronoids working on the Hubble telescope last December actually became another of at least 7,300 pieces of junk out there bigger than a softball.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

On Gogol Boulevard In Exile

“On Gogol Boulevard” is the bulletin of the New York City Neither East Nor West Group which gives support and aids in communication between Eastern European anarchists and dissidents and similar movements in the West. It has functioned since the early 1980s and until recently was published as an autonomous section of Love and Rage newspaper. At an L&R conference held in Atlanta during Thanksgiving 1992 a decision was made to drop the OGB section in favor of an expanded “International Section.”

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

The on-again, off-again first Mexican anarchist gathering is apparently on again with its dates set for Sept. 14–16, 1991. It will be held in Ocotepec, Morelos near Cuernavaca at El Centro de Investigacion Accion Communitaria. The planning was originally beset with disputes over money the Mexican groups received from the 1989 San Francisco anarchist gathering which was to finance the Mexico event. However, much of this seems resolved and planning is proceeding.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

While nonviolent action in China and Central Europe last year grabbed headlines around the globe, North American media seems to have all but forgotten the ongoing nonviolent direct action campaign for a nuclear-free future. Yet in 1989, nearly 5,500 arrests for anti-nuclear protest in the US and Canada—more than any other previous year—were reported in The Nuclear Resister newsletter.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

In an odd twist of democratization, the fires in California’s Oakland Hills this Fall, turned the tables on who usually are the victims of catastrophic house fires. Destruction by fire is an event usually suffered by the poor due to the conditions in slum properties, e.g., faulty wiring, structural faults, blocked escape routes, dangerous heating sources and slow official response.

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Fifth Estate Collective
john johnson

Tales from the Planet

Compiled by john johnson

KKK Does the Job for Us

In November 2003, a bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony near Johnson City, Tennessee came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him. Gregory Allen Freeman, 45, was charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment in the incident that wounded Jeffery S. Murr, 24. About 10 people, including two children, had gathered for the ceremony. The man who was being initiated was blindfolded, tied with a noose to a tree, and shot with paintball guns as Freeman fired a pistol in the air to provide the sound of real gunfire.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

Operation Rescue Founder Pied by Biotic Baking Brigade

Agents of the Biotic Baking Brigade-NYC cell pied Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who was speaking on behalf of his new anti-abortion group, the Society for Truth and Justice.

The anti-choice group was holding a meek protest outside Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan office. Agent Cheesecake served up an organic chocolate cream pie while Terry was ranting to the local media about the evils of homosexuality and abortion.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

The British libel proceeding brought by McDonald’s against two activists with Greenpeace London over their fact sheet, “What’s Wrong With McDonald’s,” continued into the new year with no end in sight. The $26 billion a year junk food giant objects to the leaflet’s characterization of them as abusing animals, destroying the rain forest, conning kids, creating mountains of waste, and being anti-labor.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

Jolt to James Bay

In an era when almost all environmental battles seem doomed to defeat, it was heartening to see Quebec’s energy megaproject at James Bay dealt a crippling blow by the decision of the State of New York to cancel a 20-year power contract.

The giant hydroelectric complex in the Canadian sub-Arctic is devastating the James Bay wilderness and destroying the traditional way of life for thousands of Cree and Inuit who live there. (See FE, Winter 1992.)

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john johnson
Tales from the Planet

Sherman is Out, But not Free

Anarchist organizer Sherman Austin has been released from prison after serving most of a one year sentence after being framed for controversial content on his website RaiseTheFist.com. He faces three years of federal probation under terms which are a continuing attempt to silence him from exercising his right to organize with anarchist groups. Sherman will be intensely monitored to the extent that every phone, computer or other digital device he comes in contact with will be under strict supervision by his probation officers. For updates on Sherman, check freesherman.org.

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john johnson
Tequila Mockingbird

Tales from the Planet

Starbucks Social Response Scale-Back Initiative

In August, Starbucks stores in San Francisco had “for lease” signs and letters saying, the stores were closing pasted on the windows and doors. In all 17 Starbucks were hit with the official-looking signs, mostly in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. At many stores, the windows were soaped up and the locks were jammed, leaving employees waiting outside to start their shifts. One flyer posted outside one store said, “We are moving over and making room for local coffee bars, our last best example of our commitment to fine coffee and local culture that got us into the business in the first place.”

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

“‘Partial’ Victory for McLibel Two”
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54 people from a San Francisco Bay Area cluster of anarchist affinity groups, Homes Not Jails, and several homeless activists were arrested after occupying, barricading, and sitting-in outside of three vacant homes on the Presidio, a former army base. They demanded that the 466 units kept empty by the National Park Service be used for the city’s desperate need for housing. Last year, 154 homeless people died on San Francisco’s streets. Earlier that afternoon, homeless, tenant, anti-poverty, anarchist and environmental groups held a rally, followed by a 300-person march carrying giant puppets and cardboard effigies of homes. To support them, contact the Tenants Union at 415-282-5525. —photo: Anders Corr

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Planet

According to David Brower, the ecology elder “archdruid,” the Clinton administration has done more harm to the environment than either preceding right-wing Republican presidents. For instance, Clinton’s signature on the infamous salvage rider bill allows extensive clear cutting in America’s forests such as Northern California’s Headwaters and Cove/Mallard in Idaho.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales From the Planet Charges Dropped Against FE Collective Member

Last September, the forces of law and order in Davidson County, Tenn. dropped criminal trespass charges against a member of this magazine’s editorial collective.

At a protest outside the White Bridge Road offices of senator Bill Frist, the activist was arrested on March 21, 2003, during the second full day of the US invasion against the people of Iraq. Wearing white medical scrubs emblazoned with the slogan “Harm None,” the FE writer distributed a leaflet denouncing Dr. Frist for using his professional title to help rationalize war in an essay called “When War is the Best Medicine.”

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john johnson
Tales From The Planet

Campesinos Attack the Mexican Congress

Hundreds of well organized campesinos (agricultural workers) stormed and broke into the Mexican Congress on December 10th, forcing many of the congressmen to run for their lives.

The campesinos are extremely desperate because of the worsening conditions in the agricultural sectors of Mexico and the lack of forthcoming solutions by the legislature. Thousands attended a protest at the Congressional building, parking 6 tractors in the front entrance to the building, spreading manure and throwing rotten vegetables against the walls. The group was accompanied by two pigs, named after President Vincente Fox and of Secretary of Foreign Relations Jorge C. Gutman.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales From The Planet

Silvia Baraldini, an Italian national, imprisoned in the U.S. for nearly 17 years for a series of armored car holdups in support of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an urban guerrilla group, was released in August 1999.

She was given a hero’s welcome in Rome, after arriving on a private jet arranged for her by Italy’s leftist government. Several Italian cities offered Baraldini honorary citizenship, calling her a victim of American injustice.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales From The Planet

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A demo in London: photo / Alec Smart

Proving our contentions a few issues ago that, “all money is fake,” a ring of Iranian and Syrian high tech counterfeiters have been printing $100 bills at a clip faster than the government. The quality of these bills is so good that for a while they were honored by the Federal Reserve when submitted for collection.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales from the Police State

In early April, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) fired on non-violent anti-war demonstrators without cause or provocation.

No police were hurt. The protesters conducted themselves in an organized, dignified, and calm manner at all times, even while being fired upon.

Many demonstrators were shot and wounded. Almost all were shot in the back while retreating from advancing police. A concussion grenade exploded inches from protesters. Not only did OPD fire directly on non-violent protesters, they appeared to deliberately turn to fire on longshore workers who were clearly standing to the side and not involved in the protest.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Tales From The Police State

Human Shields Fined

Recently, several American peace activists, who traveled to Iraq to act as “human shields”, have been notified that they are subject to fines and jail time by the US Government. The government is fining the activists $10,000 for traveling to Iraq in violation of US sanctions against Iraq.

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john johnson
Tales of Resistance

Timoney Three Acquitted!

Camilo Vivieros, Darby Landy, and Eric Steinberg, known as the Timoney Three, were acquitted April 6 of all charges against them arising from their arrests at the 2000 Republican National Convention protests.

Former Philly chief pig John Timoney (who later led the assault on demonstrators at the Miami FTAA protests) personally accused the three of property damage and assaulting him and other police officers.

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Bob Fleck
Talkin’ ‘Bout My Demonstration

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Hardly louder than the wet snow that was falling over the assembled marchers, Al Harrison softly said “All right brothers, lock your elbows and let’s march for peace and freedom,” as he and members of the Afro-Americans For Peace led the Mass March held Saturday, November 5, as part of the November Mobilization for Peace, Jobs, and Freedom.

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Agent Automatic
Targeting Who? The DEA’s Vision of Terrorism

“And what could be more natural nowadays than to suspect someone of a fondness for drugs?”

-- Stanislaw Lem

“Target America: Eyes Open to the Damage Drugs Cause” is the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) traveling educational exhibit which attempts to illustrate a connection between the drug war and the war on terror. The operating assumption behind the exhibit is that terrorists need narcotic sales to fund their campaigns, and by extension, buying or selling drugs promotes terrorism.

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Joshua Sperber
Tarot Cards and The Left How prognostications of doom encourage passivity rather than action

There is a near cottage industry of leftists penning engaging, sometimes lurid, always vivid, prognostications of impending social, political, economic, and ecological doom.

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Websites like Counterpunch and Common Dreams, for instance, have been prophesying for several years that a war on Iran is imminent due to the fact that, alternately, a US destroyer moves to the region (2006), oil prices rise (2007), an admiral retires (2008), or, the ubiquitous favorite, the Bush Administration is simply insane. Each one of these omens indicates there will assuredly be war, maybe tomorrow.

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anon.
Tasers Not torture but public safety

Hear what satisfied customers are saying about the x26:

“Don’t tase me, bro! I didn’t do anything”

--Florida

“It was like touching an electric fence they use, to keep cattle in, but instead of just where the initial shock goes in, the electricity goes through your entire body. It feels like every nerve cell is on fire.”

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Ellen Carryout
TAZ, the Album Subversive Act or Active Sell-out?

a review of

TAZ: The Album, Hakim Bey, Axiom Records, 1994

When I first discovered that anarchist author Hakim Bey had released an album of readings on the Axiom label, a subsidiary of the corporate monolith Island Records, I was both eagerly fascinated and smugly repelled. It would be easy to scoff at what, on the surface, seems like a calculated sell-out.

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Fifth Estate Collective
Teacher Sues School Board

Patrick Eady, the Lamphere High School teacher who lost his job last March when a White Panther speaker used the word “fuck” at a student assembly, struck back in three broad-ranging court actions.

Eady has filed suit in Federal District Court for $450,000 damages under the Ku Klux Act of 1871 for deprivation of his civil rights against the Superintendent of Schools, members of the Lamphere Board of Education, a police officer who brought criminal charges against Eady, and Madison Heights Municipal Judge Edward W. Lawrence.

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Jackie Gasson
Teachin’

I load my briefcase (big gold stars, red marking pencils, paper clips, safety pins, string for cheerio necklaces, Conscientious Objector Handbook, Fort Hood Three Newsletter, Substitute Directory, lunch, throat lozenges, cigarettes) and wait for that damn phone call.

Where do I go today? X school—X world—X game to play. Usually I go in my district, referred to as culturally deprived. Deprived only of white middle-class bogusness.

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Edward Rom
Teach-In: Fights & Speeches

Monday, Nov. 7, the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam staged a Teach-In as part of the November Mobilization for Peace, Jobs, and Freedom at Wayne University’s Community Arts Auditorium. Breakthrough, a militant right-wing group, provided a slight pause in the big action at the Teach-In.

Three members of Breakthrough attempted to elbow their way into the auditorium as Joe Mora, brother of Dennis Mora from the Fort Hood Three, was speaking. The Breakthrough group was met by a contingent from the WCEWV who attempted to remove the unruly group from the auditorium. As the two groups scuffled by the entrance, Donald Lob-singer, leader of Breakthrough, was struck solidly on the left cheek by an unidentified man.

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Ron Sakolsky
Teaching Anarchy

There are many anarchist approaches to education from free-schooling to home-schooling to de-schooling and beyond. The experience recounted here occurred in a much less receptive learning environment.

For twenty years I taught a course, entitled “Anarchy and Social Change,” at a university that was at first fairly experimental (student-centered, no grades, interdisciplinary, participatory decision-making and self-designed degrees), but which, over the years, deteriorated (though not without a battle) into the “anywhere USA” franchise of bureaucratic education that is so widespread today.

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Reg Johanson
Teaching Migration, Detention, Camp How students learn about the refugee crisis

In The Figure of the Migrant, Thomas Nail asserts that “the twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant,” and the first years of the new century give ample evidence of this. From September to December 2015, events seemed to daily add themselves to the curriculum of the English course I was teaching on the literature, film, and visual art of migration, detention, and the camp, at Capilano University in North Vancouver BC, Coast Salish territory.

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Tony Reay
Teagarden & Van Winkle Music review

And here we have a new album! Recorded right here in the Motor City before your very eyes and with living audience reaction.

Teagarden and Van Winkle, as many of you may know, consists entirely of two people who play organ and drums and occasionally drawl and sometimes sing. They do all of these things simultaneously and very well, as this album ably demonstrates.

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anon.
Tearing Down The Prisons A Vision of a Prison-less Future

Fifth Estate note: The following text was sent to us anonymously via email. It contained a section following what is here describing an intense prison rebellion at an unnamed institution and without a date of its occurrence.

Although the uprising report was exciting, we had no way to check its authenticity, plus we knew its inclusion would guarantee that our prison subscribers would be denied this edition.

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Henry Peters
Technicians of the sacred

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

Published by Doubleday Anchor, $3.95

A book RE-view

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

—Wm. Burroughs

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

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Dirk Leach
Technik Against Nihilism

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

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Fifth Estate Collective
Technological Biteback Theme intro

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

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David Watson
Technological Invasion “The Snowmobile Revolution”

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

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

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Peter Rachleff
Technology and Capitalism “America by Design”

a review of

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

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

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Fifth Estate Collective
Technology and the State An introduction

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

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

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Various Authors
Technology Debate Continues

FE—A Safe Niche?

To the Fifth Estate:

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

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Icarus Descending
Technology, Kids, and Autonomy The War Against Imagination

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

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

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Alice Detroit
Technology: There’s the Rub Ken Knabb’s Public Secrets

a review of

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

Do radicals get more pleasure from life?

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

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John Zerzan
Techno Madness an overview

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

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Hakim Bey
Tectum Theatrum

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

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Karen Knorp
Ted Lucas Detroit musician

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

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Fifth Estate Collective
Telephone Credit Card Correction

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

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Dan Derby
Temporary Wives (very cheap)

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

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

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H. Read
Ten ELF/ALF Activists Sentenced Eight Given ‘Terrorism Enhancements’

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

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

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anon.
Ten Million

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

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john johnson
Tennescene

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

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

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Fifth Estate Collective
Upside Down Culture Collective

Tennescene: Radical Actions & Summer Tours Deep in the Bible Belt

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

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MaxZine Weinstein
Tennessee Radicals Resist the Permanent Nuclear War Machine at Oak Ridge

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

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David Solnit
Tenth Anniversary of Bolivia’s Water War Report from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia

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

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

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W.B. Jeffries (Fredy Perlman)
Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats

I.

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

II.

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

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Gareth Henry
Ten Years As An Undercover Nazi

a review of

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

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

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Fifth Estate Collective
Ten Years of Montreal’s Mauvaise Herbe

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

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

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Norman Bates
Terrorism & Media

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

--Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

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