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The art of Ricardo Levins Morales is rooted in the soil of the struggles that shape our lives. Inspiring, empowering and validating, his images both document and embody collective visions of unity in the face of power.

As a result of working with the Northland Poster Collective in South Minneapolis for over thirty years, Levins Morales has developed core insights about how art can be a powerful part of strategy in movements.

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

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The nexus linking resistance and protest movements with underground artistic practices is distinct, with significant overlap existing between the participants and qualities of both. It’s no surprise that overt resistance to existing circumstances intersects naturally with activities that are radically discontinuous with production/consumption-based existence.

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To the FE:

Cuban Greens/anti-authoritarians need our aid. Orlando Polo and Mercedes Paez of Cuba’s anti-authoritarian/ecological/ anti-Militarist Green Path group have been touring the U.S. recently.

Arrested many times in Cuba, they are being repressed again as Cuban authorities are refusing to allow them re-admission to the country.

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The Cuban state has usually been able to keep a tight lid on protests. Generally, it only allows demonstrations that have been organized by government ministries. However, during the fall and winter of 2020–21 the dissident San Isidro Movement in Havana began publicly defying the rules by demonstrating for freedom of expression for artists. The government responded with intimidation and even arrests.

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To The Fifth Estate:

There you go again: the $pliterates attacking TV! (See FE #292, June 19, 1978).

1. Literacy produced modern technology, including capitalism and industrialism. 1, 2, 3 = a, b, c; that’s why men invented it.

2. What about the “dehumanized aspects of the centralized $pliteracy source: left brained publishers—depressed, repressed presses?

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Our backyard bonfire crackles, dimly lighting the faces of neighbors and their dogs emerging from the shadows. Secure with our bottled water, red wine and campfire grill, over a dozen of us trade clumsily barbecued chicken, whitefish, and green peppers, along with vignettes of the worst power outage in American history.

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When President Barack Obama announced on October 21 that the nine year U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was ending, it didn’t even make first spot on many news reports. Another imperial slaughter had ground to an end, with many liberal publications, such as The Nation, declaring it an “ignominious end to a shameful debacle.”

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Something’s happening in Detroit and a good part of it ‘happened’ on Friday, February 25.

More than fifty persons gathered at the Fifth Estate to attend a reorganization party for the Detroit Circle. The Circle, recently bogged down with a decreasing attendance record, is a group of forty five students and adults.

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The King described the Poor People’s Campaign as being the last, great nonviolent movement. If tactical nonviolence met with failure in this movement, he felt, then nonviolence as a means to ends” was done for.

The Detroit Police Department seemingly tried their best, for reasons known only to them, to make nonviolence appear a rather poor tactic on Monday, May 13, when more than 6,000 persons marched to Detroit’s Cobo Hall in support of the Poor People’s Campaign The King inspired.

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The transformation of life in its entirety begins when men dare to rule their own lives.

—A narchos

The Detroit revolutionary community needs its own turf.

There are tens of thousands of people in this area who read the Fifth Estate, take part in anti-war demonstrations, go to the Grande, listen to WABX, smoke dope, won’t listen to their parents, to the police, to college administrators or to their bosses.

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The Fifth Estate is a co-operative project, published by a group of friends who are in general, but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 00150800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $6.00 a Year; $8.00 foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit, MI. No copyright. No paid advertisements.

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The Fifth Estate newspaper (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4632 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201 USA. Phone (313) 831–6800. Subscriptions: $5.00 per year; $7.00 per year foreign including Canada. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid ads. Postmaster: Send address changes to Fifth Estate, P.O. Box 02548, Detroit MI 48202.

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

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

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

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Maybe you dug the San Francisco Mime Troupe doing their blackface minstrel show jamming black-white reality back in your face, but the Denver cops certainly didn’t. Charges of indecent acts and indecent language were filed against three members of the Troupe when they played Denver’s Phipps Auditorium last week.

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

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

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

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

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The only task left for thinking men & women in the world today is conscious preparation for the revolution.

Brothers! The social revolution now in progress & vanguarded by black revolutionaries is a weapon of cultural revolution.

The cultural revolution seeks not only to transform the entire political & social status quo but in so much as it seeks to liberate the creative spirit inherent in all men then we can say that it tends to transform the revolutionary socialist’s task of ‘making history’ into the revolutionary Poet’s task of destroying the whole SPECTACLE of history as narrated sequences of events. The cultural revolution, as if she were the beautiful woman who sleeps in the hearts of all men, whispers, & in critical times like these, shouts -THINK OF YOUR DESIRES AS REALITIES. Again & again this great vision of the world transformed, as if this woman were the very organic source of the planet herself, has called her men to arms that they might re-establish themselves in joyous harmony with all things alive & growing, Yet again & again the infamous cities, regardless of what small reforms they have granted & now seek to take back, have managed to contain the struggle. Our vision gnawed into a kind of blue death. OVER THE PAST 150 YEARS MORE DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE TO THE ORGANIC PRODUCTIVE PROCESS OF THE PLANET THAN IN ALL HUMAN HISTORY PRECEDING.

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Dedicated to the Clayoquot people of Meares Island

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

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

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

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Special to the Fifth Estate

ANN ARBOR—A National Guard garage and a business administration building in Kalamazoo, and the state capitol in Lansing were the targets of the latest bombings in Michigan.

The Kalamazoo bombings occurred within 20 minutes of each other in the early morning hours, but police say they have established no connection between them. A gallon jug of gasoline with a wick did $12,000 worth of damage to the National Guard building, destroying a jeep and damaging another, and causing extensive smoke damage.

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Hey! Hey! LBJ—Look What’s happenin’ in America today:

Vietnam Summer, 1967. From coast-to-coast 4,000 people in 48 states have stepped forward to work on Vietnam Summer projects to end the war...and that number is on the rise.

Here in Detroit a hard core of 75 peace activists ranging from Democrats to Socialists have forged a nucleus for a summer of draft counseling, community and political organizing, rallies and demonstrations.

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Daughter of itinerants,

ungrateful refusers of benefits and charity,

in terror of the all-embracing arms

I turned from the tabernacles of turkey

and progeny of toothpaste, I ran and hid

from the love that damns and pardons,

I dodged the draft from the golden doors

and let the wild west wind carry me

with torn newspapers, cigarette butts, condoms,

up against the chainlink fence at the world’s ends

in a red November evening.

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The draft resistance action at the Cadillac Tower Selective Service headquarters on October 16 and the busloads of people from Detroit who joined the assault on the Pentagon in Washington, DC brought the first winds of the new turn taken by the antiwar movement. People in this country are now moving to BLOCK rather than protest the mobilization of this country’s forces for the inhuman war in Vietnam.

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The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (313) 831–6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and the price of each;

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The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (313) 831–6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and the price of each;

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They’ve wrecked the earth, destroyed her treasures, and inflicted misery on the many, all so they can golf or set up their lawn chairs on some clear cut forest. It’s over whether we do anything or not, but if we fail to act, the future will metastasize into the wreckage colonization always leaves in its collapse.

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit 48201.

“BOSSES’ Boy”—a UAW factional flier (leaflet) printed in the ‘40s—will pay $5 for one of them. Phone 823–1485.

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The Trans-Love Energies commune of Detroit, including the MC5 and the Trans-Love Light Company, have left the city of Detroit for good, to settle in Ann Arbor, that green and airy town some 45 miles west of Detroit.

The new address for Trans-Love and affiliates (including the Artists’ Workshop Press, LEMAR, Trans-Love Poster Company, and the Sun) is:

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During my live shows, I often do a song I wrote about the San Patricios, a band of mostly Irishmen who deserted from the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American war and fought on the Mexican side.

I start by doing a call-and-response with the audience. “Give me a ‘T’,” “give me an ‘R.,’” cheerleader-style, until we spell out, “Treason,” to introduce the story of the “Saint Patrick’s Battalion.”

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Confrontations over a contested Berkeley lot “legally” owned by the University of California (U.C.), known as People’s Park, continues. But increasingly, University and City attempts to reassert the rules of private property are succeeding.

Private seizure of common land, a process known as enclosure, was the essential basis for the imposition of the capitalist system. Starting in the 14^th century, peasants found land which had previously belonged to the community as a whole fenced off and claimed as private property. They had to move. Many small farmers also saw their meager holdings seized by larger landlords.

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a review of

The Monster Enters: COVID-19 and the Plagues of Capitalism by Mike Davis. O/R Books 2020

As he has done in the past for California wildfires and famine in India, Mike Davis contextualizes pandemic disease in a matrix of capitalism and deprivation that make a particular kind of disaster inevitable. In The Monster Enters, Davis chronicles the emergence of a new virus; confusion reigns about how it spreads, how deadly it might prove, and how best to stop it. Some governments downplay the danger for political or economic reasons; others are hamstrung in their response by neglected public health infrastructure. People suffer and die—poor people most of all.

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FORT HOOD, TEXAS July 12 (LNS)—The war in Vietnam is now the longest war in America’s violent history. In addition to the genocide being committed against the Vietnamese, thousands upon thousands of American G.I.‘s have been killed or wounded. But “G.I.” is merely a label we use; beneath the uniforms are real people. Sometimes we forget that.

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Open City is the service organization for the free community and has already opened a free medical service, a non profit general store, a food co-op, a free University, a counseling center and switchboard that operates twenty four hours a day.

In order to expand it’s operations Open City is scheduling a week of public meetings at the Unitarian Church (corner of Forest and Cass).

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NEW YORK (LNS)—Thirty thousand joints in the mail? Could be...It’s like you never know what you’re going to find in the mailbox—but free dope?

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” the letter said, “you are one of 30,000 lucky persons being sent free this freshly-rolled marijuana cigarette. We are doing this in order to clear the garbage from the air.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Black Panther Party Chairman, Bobby Seale recently reiterated his call for a United Front against Fascism in America. The United Front is to be inaugurated at a National Conference called by the Panthers in Oakland, Calif., July 18–20.

To this Conference have been invited representatives of groups across the country, not just radicals, but all who consider themselves “progressive” and who “take a firm stand against the development of fascism in America.”

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Before the global pandemic and waves of insurrection, gaps in the empire’s dominion were already widening. The culture wars were escalating, tensions between older and younger generations mounting, the health care system showing its serious inadequacies, psychiatric problems becoming ubiquitous, and environmental devastation rapidly accelerating.

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Pictured at right are Federico Arcos, Fifth Estate comrade, and veteran of the Spanish anarchist militias of the 1930s, with Julie Herrada, April 7, at Hamtramck, Michigan’s 2739 Gallery, during the opening of the exhibit, ‘Unthinkable,’ a display of artifacts from the collection of Fredy and Lorraine Perlman. Featured were posters and publications from Paris 1968, and from ones produced at Detroit’s Print Co-op, as well as a first French edition of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and a floor-to-ceiling display of huge timeline sheets for Perlman’s, The Strait.

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It’s too bad that he had to hear the word from Allah, but still it is heartening to know that at least one Marine refused to be used as cannon fodder in Reagan’s reckless war schemes.

Marine Cpl. Alfred Griffen, a practicing Muslim, told his military superiors in October 1983 that the Koran forbid him to kill fellow religionists in Lebanon or to participate in “a war of egression” in Grenada. Griffin was court-martialed for being AWOL and sentenced to a relatively light four months at hard labor.

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Nikolay Vavilov (1887–1943)

“It seemed that We had finally passed this very difficult trail so that we could mount the horses and continue on. But suddenly from the Cliff above the trail, two gigantic eagles flew out from a nest, circling on enormous wings. My Horse shied and bolted, galloping along the trail and the ovring. The rein was unexpectedly torn out of my hand and I had to hang on to the mane.

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If you are reading these words, it is almost certain that you are ill, sick, and infected. “With what?” you ask. The blight destroying our nation known as Free Enterprise, Supply & Demand, Capitalism, and more commonly Consumerism. It is a worm boring through the minds & souls of all our citizens.

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(UNDERGROUND PRESS SYNDICATE) The three-year-old kid, as the story goes, answered the door, took a cool look at the policeman standing there, raised his full blue eyes and declared: ‘Fuck off, cop.”

“Where’s your folks, son?”

The kid brushed his white cotton-hair out of his eyes. It fell in swirling puffs down his shoulders. “Fuck off,” he repeated, without blinking.

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Nearly 4,000 young people jammed Into the Ford Auditorium on Friday June 30 to hear the Jefferson Airplane.

Three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people enjoyed themselves.

The Detroit News didn’t.

Their reporter came on like a middle aged Brenda Starr equipped only with platinum hair and a super-hostile attitude towards rock and roll, folk-rock and Grace Slick:

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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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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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A book published several years ago purported to define for its readers what anarchism is and what it isn’t. Probably only the writer was satisfied with his definitions since adherents to anarchy come in many varieties.

However, delete the hyphenated suffix (anarchist-communist or anarcho-syndicalist, etc.) and all perspectives agree that the political state and the capitalist economy have since their inception been destructive of human freedom.

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Let us give a brief definition of the way in which Capital or capitalism is used in articles in the Fifth Estate: Capital is based on wage-labor, the production and exchange of commodities, with an agency above the working class extracting surplus value (profits) from the value of goods and services produced, and then re-investing a portion back into the enterprise.

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</strong> Sunday, December 11, 2022

The Joseph Déjacque Bicentennial Conference is being held in recognition of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of this major nineteenth-century communist anarchist political theorist and visionary utopian writer. It is sponsored by La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology and Yes We Cannibal, with the support of the Anarchist Political Ecology Group and the Dialectical Social Ecology Group.

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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 20^th, 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.

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