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translated & edited by FE collective members

This article was written by a participant in the VAAAG, the Village Alternatif Anticapitaliste et Anti-guerre (the Alternative Anti-capitalist and Anti-war Village) that was created during the Group of Eight summit meeting (G8) in Evian, Switzerland during June 2003. The anonymous author wants to make it clear that s/he was not a member of the coalition protesting the summit, the Convergence des Luttes Anti-Autoritaires et Anticapitalistes Contre le G8 (CLAAAC G 8). This text, the author says, is “addressed to comrades and companions on the other side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.”

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Insubordination—literally, the utter refusal to submit to order—is not always revolutionary, but it may be one of the first signs that a revolution is brewing.

The insubordinate can be someone rebelling against an institution to which she formerly conformed or someone who never has been any part of the system of authority. Sometimes ideological and sometimes instinctual, insubordination burns the nerves.

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Analyzing the contemporary struggle against the increasingly concentrated power of mega-corporations (and of those politicians who serve them) is actually a struggle against the pathologies of an international ruling class. In the most general terms, it is a fight for non-alienated self-realization, decentralization, and voluntary social relations, against individuals, institutions, and structures that are fixated on expanding the capacities for domination.

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As long as people have been ruled, they have expressed their dissent. Throughout the modern era, art has been a powerful tool to voice this political defiance.

With their bold woodcut images of ruling classes and mocking skeletons, art movements like the Taller de Graphica Popular (“the People’s Graphics”) founded in Mexico City in 1937 served not only as satirical commentary but were inclusive enough to inform illiterate people of current events. Further, the Dadaist’s anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities were fueled by their disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. Their disregard for traditional artistic values still resonates today, especially in punk and avant-garde communities.

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Never SUBMIT! Contribute to the Fifth Estate!

Next issue: CULTURE, RACE, & RITUAL

deadline: November 1^st

Q: When radicals adopt, appropriate, or adapt the cultures and rituals of marginalized minority groups, they

(a) disrespect the integrity of the original forms through cultural tourism and neo-racism;

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It’s Friday night, and a hundred sweaty freaks are dancing their asses off to the sounds of a Cyndi Lauper cover band. Courtney is standing on a stool by the front collecting money, but no one’s ever turned away for lack of funds around here. The cash she collects will go to benefit the local women & transgendered health collective. Paintings from the last art opening are still hanging on the walls, and out front dozens of beautiful, grungy people are smoking cigarettes and networking like mad.

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In two years, this newspaper will celebrate its 40^th anniversary and carries the distinction of being the longest running, English language, anti-authoritarian publication in American history. Yet, the substantial upsurge in computer use in recent years as a major source for ideas and information may be putting our existence in jeopardy.

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a review of

Direct Action: An Historical Novel by Luke Hauser

In Direct Action, Luke Hauser writes fiction so steeped in reality that he reproduces an era for us, with all of its excitement and frustrations.

Although the 1980s are generally thought of as a kind of dead zone for progressive activism, in the San Francisco Bay Area the early part of the decade was a time of fervent activism around nuclear issues.

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These excerpts come from the English section of the El Libertario website. El Libertario is a collective in Venezuela that has been active for eight years now.

Everything with the people, nothing with the power!

Against a broken State and an inefficient market economy, self-management!

Against the maneuvering of the few, the autonomy of the many!

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Perhaps the most important thing we learned in Chicago is that we are right. We suspected it all along, but it took clubs and gas and Humphrey’s grinning face to cinch it. We know now for sure that the values of this society are fraudulent and used only to support the unjust system that benefits only the few in positions of economic and political power. The values that we have begun to devise through living and struggling together are superior to the ones of this society. They are revolutionary values and all of us that are serious must begin to live the revolution now as well as struggling to make it a reality.

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FIFTH ESTATE #362, Fall, 2003, Vol. 38, No. 3, page 4

The Fifth Estate (FE) is an unincorporated, cooperative magazine publishing since 1965. As opposed to professionals who publish to secure wages or invest in the media information industry, our collective consists of volunteer writers, artists, and editors--friends who produce the paper as an expression of resistance to an unjust and destructive society.

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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)

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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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Since the Fifth Estate refuses to publish the voice of capital, advertisements—the normal source of financing ‘newspapers—we depend on you through your subscriptions, newsstand purchases, and donations to insure our survival.

This issue was made possible through a combination of the above sources as well as a series of regional benefits held on our behalf. The most recent ones occurred in Chattanooga, Asheville, “Punk-n-holler,” and Detroit and combined raised over $1000, with $850 coming from the latter event alone. This provided us with almost half of what we needed to print, mail, and ship this issue. So, thanks to the many performers, organizers, and attendees who made them so successful.

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The burden of war always falls heaviest on the toilers. They are taught that their masters can do no wrong and go out in vast numbers to be killed on the battlefield. And what is their reward? If they escape death they come back to face heavy taxation and have their burden of poverty doubled. Through all the ages they have been robbed of the just rewards of their patriotism as they have been of the just rewards of their labors.

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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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I’ve been giving the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) to my 3^rd graders this week. I could be fired, possibly arrested, for telling you this, but do you want to know what’s on the test? Here’s one of the questions:

Why do cities have laws?

a. to take people’s money

b. to make leaders powerful

c. to give police officers jobs

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Tie 30^th annual G8 summit meeting of the major industrial nations was held this June on Sea Island, Georgia within a day’s drive of the Fifth Estate’s southern headquarters, so some FE collective members traveled to participate in the planned protests and counter-summit.

Approximately 300 resisters assembled in Brunswick, Georgia—the closest the demonstrators were allowed to the royal elite—to greet some of the 30,000 military and police personnel stationed throughout the region.

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Students and teachers live, sleep, eat, and travel together. A hand-made bumper sticker hangs on the ceiling of one bus, “If the students lead, the faculty will follow.” Audubon Expedition Institute (AEI) is a radical and accredited college program where I taught as field faculty for the last four and a half years.

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Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of artists and academics who illustrate problems with science and technology through writing, performance, and installations. Their objective is to demystify high-tech tools so that the public can make informed decisions about the new technologies that are already impacting our lives in many ways.

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—The strike at San Francisco State has dragged on for two long months, with virtually every aspect of confrontation sooner or later included. [See “Strike at S.F. State,” FE #71, January 23-February 5, 1969.]

Mass arrest, the one previously missing ingredient, was finally added on Thursday, Jan. 23, when over 400 people were busted while trying to hold an “illegal” on-campus rally.

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The election is already over and we have lost. The name of the president for the next four years won’t be announced until November 3, but I know right now that the guy who won is a white male millionaire from Yale who is drunk on arrogant feelings of self entitlement and privilege.

The asshole who has already won this election is a statist insider who has conspired with his colleagues to kill and rob more people around the world in the name of American exceptionalism. He’s pro-war (even worse, pro-“War on Terrorism” & pro-Iraqi invasion), pro-PATRIOT act, pro-No Child Left Behind, and pro-Israeli free-for-all militarism.

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Anarchist practice in education is emerging throughout the world, but it tends to describe itself as “democratic” to avoid the negative reaction which the word “anarchist” so often arouses. The name of the annual International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC) was chosen by the two fourteen-year-old girls who ran the fifth conference which was held at Sands School in England in 1997. They didn’t like the name, but they couldn’t think of a better one, and it has stuck.

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Today, the concept of a free school has many connotations. It can mean the freedom to choose what to learn or whether to learn at all. But whatever we mean by free, we can’t really discuss the free schools of today without some background in the Modern School movement that began more than a century ago.

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I’m sitting with my developmental writing class towards the beginning of the semester. There are two white students, eighteen students of color, six international students. It’s the exact opposite in my critical thinking class. But we aren’t talking race yet; we’re talking about language, about writing, about swearing in your papers, about slang. They point out that it’s because I’m the teacher that I can encourage them to write in any way they want to. Because they know when they are done with me, they gonna have problems in the next class. It don’t matter what we say, but how we say it, they point out. And since you a teacher and Mexican, you can use some spanglish like it’s cool and all. When you a professional it’s ok, not for us though.

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• Gettin Schooled

• Teaching Anarchy

• Adamant refusal will not go unnoticed

• Anarchist Accidentally Asked to Lecture at Army Base

• “Studying History, Making History”

• On (anarchist) Education

• Stumbling Upon Public School Utopias

• Schools of the Americas

• Francisco Ferrer & the Free Education Movement

• Learning Webs

• Radical books for kids

• Segregation Rising

• Forget about theories

• Reclaiming our Freedom to Learn

• Learning, Unlearning, Defining, Redefining

• Adventures with the Audubon Expedition Institute

• Short reviews

• Letter from a Teacher

• Select Radical Pedagogy Bibliography

• S is for Shame

• De-schooling the de-schoolers

• Whose kids? OUR Kids!

• History Quiz

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Modernity is an age of gadgets, where things are created and destroyed, not in years but in seconds, where stances change, but where social change itself is an unthinkable phenomenon. The world is divided into developed and underdeveloped, and people are valued not for what they produce but as commodities, where learning is merely schooling and where dissent is sophistically controlled. The weapons of subjugation are clever, and information overload is persistent. The destinies of people are determined behind closed doors. The global development is need of the market and the market drives the lives of the people.

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Read and considered, perused and recommended, liked and disliked, discussed and commented on in the following section:

Green Anarchy (current issue available from FE books for $4 or free with any book order, while supplies last) Issues #16 and 17, Spring and Summer 2004 PO Box 11331, Eugene, OR 97440 collective@greenanarchy.org

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Teaching at Durfee Middle School in Detroit’s inner-city, I found that most students had not been exposed to books of any kind before entering school in first grade or Kindergarten. No one read at home, not to themselves, and parents did not read to their children.

At staff meetings and informal discussions with teachers at both schools, I tried getting a teacher book discussion club going. One reason was to model enjoyment of reading to our students. I was appalled to find out that most of the teachers didn’t read anything outside of school either. One year, I discovered that only one teacher out of 33 read out-side of school and that for a weekly bible study class at her church.

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“Education passes on more than knowledge—it transmits the lore, beliefs, customs, values, rites, and ceremonies that shape a society and govern its functioning. In short, education transmits culture.”

—Randy Bass

We know what culture modern schools reproduce: Empire. Schools are prison-factories, churning out producer-consumers from alpha to epsilon, bastions of patriarchy. The institutionalized authority (as truth and discipline) of “teacher says”: the violent stewing chauvinism of clique and posse, the age-stratified, passive aggressive coercion to conformity. And of course, they are boot camps for capitalism, for learning to repress unmediated human desires (for love and play and learning) to work mindlessly (“for your own good”) under the pallid urging of those damned abstractions through which capital rationalizes life so that grades, with time, become money.

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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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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.

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A new and exciting group of directors has appeared in the Italian cinema over the past four or five years. Its two most promising members are Marco Bellocchio and Bernardo Bertolucci.

So far Bellocchio seems to be the most outstanding, and with only two feature films to his credit he is already one of the more important talents in the young European cinema.

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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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Welcome to the second issue in the fortieth anniversary year of this publication. The first was published in February and was our official commemorative edition. It was the largest and most colorful issue ever printed since we began in 1965. The anniversary issue was a double one constituting our publishing efforts for both Spring and Summer 2005. Hence, you have not missed an issue and you are reading the next in our series.

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Sick with the flu, our family had just finished a group medical examination. The doctor paused before leaving and asked, “Does anyone need an excused absence from work? Does the child need one for school?” My first thought was, why does everyone automatically assume that a three-year-old “goes to school”? And my second thought was, since when does a parent have to justify himself to the school authorities, anyway?

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Antonio Tellez Sola died at his home in France at 84. He was one of the last survivors of the Spanish anarchist resistance which fought to overthrow the Franco dictatorship in Spain following the fascist triumph in 1939. He was also one of the first historians of the post-civil war urban and rural guerrilla resistance to the regime. In his actions and his writings, Tellez personified refusal to surrender to tyranny.

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Complete catalog available from pumpkinhollow.net/thebarn

Creating Anarchy by Ron Sakolsky

(Fifth Estate Books 2005) $15

Twenty chapters in a dynamic collage of ideas and action. This vibrant collection glows with flames of discontent and defiance and flows with waves of laughter and possibility. Ranging widely from Mayday to Utopia, from Refusal to Autonomy, and from Insurrection to Imagination, this compilation is in turn defiant, reflective, and playful--a brick for hurling through the windows of despair and a doorway to creating an anarchy that is not afraid to dream.

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a review of

the Rolling Stones, “The Beggars’ Banquet” (London)

the Beatles, “The Beatles” (Apple)

The Beatles and Rolling Stones albums have been out for a couple of months now and we have a clearer perspective on what these, the super-est of the groups are up to.

When the Beatles’ album first appeared my immediate reaction was that it would be pretentious for anyone to attempt to “review” it. The Beatles had released a new album, of course it was great, and what else could us “lowly types” say about it.

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“We should war with relentless efficiency not only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with anarchists.”

—President Theodore Roosevelt, annual address to Congress, December 3, 1901

“It is time to take a look at the culture and climate of support for criminally-based activism like ELF and ALF and do something about it. Just like al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization, ELF and ALF cannot accomplish their goals without money, membership and the media.”

—Senator James Inhofe, US Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, May 18, 2005

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Throughout U.S. history, the lives and struggles of Native Americans have been disregarded and disdained by the white, middle-class, christian, capitalist, Nature-despising national Establishment. Sadly, the disregarders and disdainers also included the great majority of socialists, communists, anarchists, trade-unionists and others who considered themselves critics and opponents of that Establishment.

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From the Fifth Estate files: Washington DC anti-draft, anti-war demonstration, March 22, 1980, organized by anarchists --photo: Craig
Glassner/Phantasm Photography

Sept. 6-Nov. 26

“Soapboxers and Saboteurs: 100 Years of Wobbly Solidarity.” An exhibit highlighting materials from the Labadie Collection, one of the world’s best collections of materials documenting early IWW history.. Special Collections Library, 711 Hatcher Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109–1205. Open to the public. See October 19 for accompanying reception.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—A river of young Americans flowed up into downtown Washington from 14^th St. and Pennsylvania Avenue, away from the Death Parade marking Richard Nixon’s Inauguration January 20.

We were taking the streets for an affirmative celebration of our own. And when the cops came to break it up, the new fighting movement used fists, rocks and sticks to repel the attackers.

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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.”

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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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Marshall Sahlins

FE Note: The following is an edited version of the first chapter of Marshall Sahlins classic and groundbreaking work, Stone Age Economics (Aldine, 1972), entitled “The Original Affluent Society.”

In it, Sahlins confronts prevailing academic and popular myths regarding life before the state and technology which is usually conceived of, after Hobbes, as being “nasty, brutish and short.” As with most governing modern mythologies, this one turns out to be another apology for the reigning misery and a projection of our reality onto social forms that have all but been destroyed.

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a review of

The Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, Verso, New York, 256pp., $25

In the book, Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, acclaimed New Left historian Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman of World War 3 Illustrated have put together a unique, lively, accessible and entertaining history of the most important union in American history. They use the style of a graphic novel and the contributions of many artists to show this complex history from the point of view of the participants.

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In Paris, between 1900 and 1903, Alexandre Jacob (1879–1954) and his comrades organized a group of anarchist burglars which carried out 156 break-ins before being caught. Their targets were the wealthy and the gang’s project was to punish them by striking at their most sensitive organ—their wallet. Jacob and his friends were dubbed “Workers of the Night” by the sensationalist Paris press. These unusual robbers believed that theft should not be for personal gain, but an attack against the world of the powerful. Instead of becoming rich himself from the gang’s enterprises, Jacob generously donated to anarchist causes.

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This special section, announcing itself with the above headline, contains more of a critical and theoretical tension than may be immediately obvious at first reading. Imbedded in it is the difference between the clarion call proposed by Marxists to the international proletariat, “Workers of the World, Unite,” and another slogan, introduced in these pages some three decades ago—“Workers of the World, Relax!”

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An experimental rant titled “Radical Poetry, Heretical Religion, and the Psychedelic Revolution” provided the germ and genesis for this rambling, review-essay.

I delivered that sermon in my over-the-top Reverend Bonobo mode for a gathering in western North Carolina called “Croatan.” Held in late April 2006, the event featured lectures by the likes of scientist and scholar of mind-altering substances Dennis McKenna (brother of the late Terence McKenna), late nights of electronic dance music, and thunderous spring rains that sprayed us all with epic torrents.

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