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NEW YORK—The Jefferson Airplane’s filming of a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s “One American Movie,” on location here, resulted in a minor riot, a skin show, a visit from New York’s finest, and an impromptu performance for midtown Manhattan office workers.

Out of the welter of confusion come these facts, according to eye witnesses. The group along with the cast and crew of the film were filming on the rooftop of the Schuyler Hotel, directly across from the filming headquarters. The filming started with lead singer Marty Balin delivering an impromptu and richly amplified “Wake Up New York, Wake Up. Free Music. Free Love.”

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AK Press is a worker-run anarchist collective that publishes and distributes radical books as well as visual and audio media. The collective was established in 1990 and is now run by seven people in five cities and two countries. They currently publish around twenty books each year.

Four collective members, who have been involved from 12 to 28 years, posed questions to themselves about anarchist publishing to take a look at their project.

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“The songs they sing come from their own experiences. They are not entertainers but are leaders who want everyone in the audience to join in singing songs that serve to inspire us to go on further to hold on ‘til we’re all free...”

The description above belongs to the Albany Freedom Singers who will be coming to Detroit on Sunday, November 21, 1965 at 7:00 pm at the Mayflower Baptist Church, 5858 Fourth at Holden. The program, called Gospel Sing For Freedom will also feature the New Cosmopolitan Baptist Church Choir, the East Side Community Choir, and the Mayflower Baptist Church Choir.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—Al Capp rapped pretty heavily to the 78^th Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

He came down, in his cornpone style, on SDS, Joan Baez, (“phonie Joanie,” he calls her), and welfare, and treated the Daughters to a taste of his own brand of foreign policy: “It’s very simple—anyone who kills Americans is no damn good.”

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The American Civil Liberties Union will challenge the court-martial conviction of an Army lieutenant for participating in a demonstration against US policy in Vietnam, arguing that the articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice under which he was convicted violate freedom and are unconstitutionally vague.

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Anarchist theorist and activist Alfredo Bonanno, a proponent of insurrectionary anarchism, died in December at his home in Trieste, Italy at age 86. Together with early 20^th century anarchists, Errico Malatesta and Luigi Galleani, Bonanno was a comrade who greatly influenced Italian and international anarchism.

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Al Kooper, one of this country’s leading rock artists, was in town a couple of weeks ago. He has been performing, writing, and now producing rock musts for ten years and is best known for his work as an organist for Dylan, a member of tire Blues Project, and organizer of Blood, Sweat and Tears.

His latest album is “Super Session” with Mike Bloomfield and Steve Stills. In the next few months he will be releasing a double album that he recorded with Bloomfield at the Fillmore, a solo album, and an album he produced for the Don Ellis Orchestra.

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A friend and I, one recent evening, stroll into the Oak Park Community Center. Sundry activities are taking place, bridge-playing, music groups, etc. We’re not there 60 seconds when this guy—janitor, custodian or whoever he was—barges up with the cop-like “CAN I HELP YOU FELLAS?” At first, but eyeing the man, my friend tells him that, since it’s a public place, we’re simply looking around. The worker takes on an increasing anxiety, as though wondering who we are, what we’re up to. Like maybe we’ll steal the building! Or rape the females! (even though most, that evening, were there taking karate lessons).

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Almost all contemporary radical thought is marked by dialectics. Classical anarchism, Marxism (in all its variants), and the Situationists owe a huge debt to the thought of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, and hence, to dialectics. For example, the political thought of anarchist and anti-authoritarian theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin, Guy Debord, Murray Bookchin and Fredy Perlman all rely on dialectical thinking. Poststructuralist social theorist Michel Foucault even characterized Hegel’s theories as the ghost that prowls through the 20^th century. In fact, dialectics are so hegemonic in radical circles that a common objection to a perspective is that it is “insufficiently dialectical.”

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In July, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington DC finally gave up on its eighteen-month effort to prosecute people protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump as President.

The 217 people indicted on felony charges of conspiracy to riot, engaging in a riot and property destruction, related to the events of January 20, 2017, came to be known as the J20 defendants.

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adrienne maree brown speaks with the Fifth Estate about Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Co-edited with Walidah Imarisha, AK Press, 2015, $18.00, akPress.org.

How do we strategize to create a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism? For author and activist, adrienne maree brown, the answer is science fiction. She’s a strong believer that sci-fi and other literature can be a force for transformative social change.

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Part of American Revolutionary Media / Detroit insert

When 300,000 people marched in Washington for civil rights in 1963, a lot of people felt as good as they did in November when 750,000 people marched in Washington for peace. But the civil rights movement has not liberated Black people. And the peace movement has yet to end the war in Vietnam, let alone “bring the boys home” from the 53 countries’ in which they are stationed around the world.

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Dear Ursula,

I’ve been intending to write to you for ages, to thank you for the innumerable ways that your words have inspired, informed, supported, and challenged me over the past thirty-six years. Now that you’re turning eighty, I think it’s a good time to write that letter.

I first met you in 1973, in a room behind a little macrobiotic restaurant, called Peace Food, in West Berlin. I was twenty-one and in training to become a full-time worker for an Eastern spiritual organization. Our trainer would read to us from The Wizard of Earthsea, thinking, I suppose, that it was relevant to us as spiritual workers in training. It reminded me that I’d always known I was a wizard, as a faerie child talking to faeries in the woods of Britain and making sticks into magic wands. Of the many ideas in that book that resonated with my being, what stayed with me was the importance of the healing power of embracing and integrating one’s own shadow--one’s whole self--which became and remains central to my way of understanding myself and the world.

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a review of

The Blast by Joseph Matthews. PM Press, 2022

The Blast, a new novel by Joseph Matthews, takes place in San Francisco in 1916, just as the United States edges its way into the general European slaughter known as World War I.

We learn that three years before the current moment, labor radicals and anarchists of various denominations agitated mightily for workers’ rights and union recognition in that thriving waterfront shipping town, but failed to make lasting progress.

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While the rest of the “Motor city was Burning,” to paraphrase the MC5, ironically to the tune of “Light My Fire,” the annex of the former Algiers Motel was quiet. Guests were sleeping, “eating hot dogs” and “listening to music.”

It was quiet until the authorities arrived.

When the authorities left, there remained behind the bodies of three black youths—all of them shot to death. All of the other guests had been beaten—two white girls, “caught” in the company of black men, had been stripped naked and severely beaten.

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Fighting got serious as antifa stopped white power in East Lansing, Mich. in March.
Above, neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach of the Traditional Workers Party (rt) looks worried.

For those curious whether Antifa tactics can actually deliver the goods when it comes to disrupting fascist organizing efforts, the activity surrounding white supremacist Richard Spencer’s early March visit to Michigan should serve as a resounding, “Yes!” The alt-right leader, who heads the racist National Policy Institute and wants to turn the U.S. into an exclusively white ethno-state, canceled the remaining dates of a college campus speaking tour after being confronted by a militant antifascist presence during a stop at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

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Recently, I was talking politics and revolution with a friend and she said to me the last thing we need is 19-year-old boys fighting a revolution. I think she was referring to me at 19. Sure enough, I don’t feel as invincible now as I did then.

Still, that’s not the point she was making. Our society is not ready for a revolution. Women still get raped everyday, communities are still divided along racial lines, people still don’t care about one another. If revolution came right now and we actually won, ultimately, we would replace what we have now with capitalism, racism and patriarchy because we still haven’t overcome those ailments or come up with alternatives

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The following interview with American Servicemen’s Union (ASU) chairman Pvt. Andrew Stapp (Ret.) was conducted by Fifth Estate staffer Dena Clamage.

Fifth Estate: What is the American Serviceman’s Union? When was it formed and for what purpose?

Andy Stapp: The ASU is a union organization of rank and file GIs. The ASU has eight demands, which mostly center around the war and racism within the Army. It is essentially a resistance movement which was formed to encourage GIs to fight against the war, which we believe to be an imperialist war.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—What was to have been one of the most triumphant days in U.S. history was brought to a tragic, fiery close today when the jetliner bringing the fifty-two former hostages back from captivity in Iran crashed into the Presidential inauguration ceremonies here, killing all aboard and taking with it numerous leaders of the United States government, armed forces and industry; including President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George Bush, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, evangelist Billy Graham, former President and Vice President Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, all nine members of the United States Supreme Court, General William Westmoreland, Henry Ford II, Frank Sinatra, Donnie and Marie Osmond and hundreds of other senators and congressmen, governors, mayors, Republican and Democratic Party officials, industrialists, bankers, religious leaders, military and police officials, and television and movie personalities.

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AMMUNITION BOOKS shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1 pm to 5 pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

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Ammunition Books, 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201

ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY

by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson

Part I The Eye in the Pyramid 304 pp.

Part II The Golden Apple 272 pp.

Part III Leviathan 253 pp.

Incredible political fantasy tale of a world-wide, eons-old conspiracy to impose an authoritarian rule on the planet. Scenes range from SDS conventions to underwater battles at Atlantis to giant rock festivals in Germany. Sex, LSD, revolution, right and left wing anarchism all compete in one of the most bizarre pieces of fiction (or is it?).

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Ammunition Books, 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, MI 48201

Bookstore Hours: Mon. thru Fri. 1 pm-5 p.m.

LUCY PARSONS, AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY written by Carolyn Ashbaugh

Lucy Parsons is a central figure in the Haymarket Affair—“Dark Lucy” was a woman so feared by the Chicago Police that they broke up her meetings for 30 years. Historian Carolyn Ashbaugh interprets the radical response to industrialization, the robber barons, and monopoly in the post civil war era through Lucy Parsons’ career—adding a new dimension to the historiography of the period by showing us an important role played by this woman.

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Ammunition Books

4403 Second

Detroit, Michigan 48201

Telephone: (313) 831–6800

Office Hours: Tuesday thru Friday, 1pm--5pm

AUTHORITARIAN CONDITIONING, SEXUAL REPRESSION & THE IRRATIONAL IN POLITICS

Maurice Brinton

An analysis of Reichian psychology in its relation to politics and the Russian revolution. Its title pretty much says it all.

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Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

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4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 Telephone No. (313) 831–8600

Bookstore hours vary, but we are generally open on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and at scattered other times. Please call before coming down to be sure we are here.

HOW TO ORDER:

(1) List the title of the book(s), amount and price of each; (2) Add 5% for mailing (not less than 25 cents); (3) Total (Michigan residents please add 4% sales tax), and mail to us. Please write all checks and money orders to: DROP-OUT PRODUCTIONS, but mail to: AMMUNITION BOOKS, 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48201

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Ammunition Books

4403 Second Avenue Detroit, Michigan 48201, Tele. No. (313) 831–6800

Bookstore hours vary, but we are generally open on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and at scattered other times. Please call before coming down to be sure we are here.

HOW TO ORDER:

(1) List the title of the book(s), amount and price of each;

(2) Add 5% for mailing (not less than 25 cents);

(3) Total (Michigan residents please add 4% sales tax), and mail to us.

Please write all checks and money orders to: DROP-OUT PRODUCTIONS, but mail to: AMMUNITION BOOKS, 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48201

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Ammunition Books shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1pm to 5pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

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a review of

The Anarchist Cookbook

Keith McHenry, with Chaz Bufe Introduction by Chris Hedges, 2015

See Sharp Press, 154 pp.

It’s unfortunate that the best selling book with the word anarchist in the title is a terribly flawed bomb- and drug-making manual.

The original Anarchist Cookbook was first published in 1971, compiled by William Powell, then a 19-year-old living in New York City.

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On February 2, I stepped off a plane that had left a frigid Toronto three and a half hours earlier and landed in the balmy sunshine of Holguin, Cuba. It was impossible to know then that I had arrived two weeks before the end of the island’s Revolution as we know it.

Santiago de Cuba, the southern city hailed as the home of the Revolution, the Moncada Barracks, where Castro and 125 men attacked on July 26, 1953. A guide explained the battle, Castro’s strategy, and showed where the fighting occurred, some of it in the foreground. Castro was captured, as were many of his men, some of whom were tortured and summarily executed. The building is now a school.

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The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK)--North Korea. The very mention of the country’s name and a blizzard of buzzwords are released: Cult of Personality, Mass starvation, Nuclear-armed, Thought Control, Defectors and Reverse-defectors.

A land completely closed to the outside world? Since the 1960s, a small but steady stream of foreign delegations, diplomats, NGO representatives, and regular tourists have been permitted to visit North Korea, albeit under tightly controlled conditions with official minders watching every move and word.

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An unarmed protester is shot by a right-winger and the wounded anarchist does not want to rely on the punitive power of the state. What are the alternatives?

On the night of Donald Trump’s inauguration, January 20, Hex, an IWW organizer, street medic and anarchist, was shot and severely wounded at a protest against Milo Yiannopoulos’s speaking engagement at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle.

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• Renew the Earthly Paradise

• Present Day Banalities

The two essays printed here were written in response to a questionnaire sent out by the Italian anarchist magazine, Rivista anarchica, investigating the present situation for North American anarchist and libertarian groups and publications. Rivista anarchica, a monthly publication, is publishing a special issue on “Anarchism in America,” and asked each group to describe its point of view and activities, and to respond to the following two questions: 1) In the “Reagan era,” what do you see as the important areas of social conflict in North America from an anarchist perspective? and 2) In your opinion, what are the most relevant differences between the radical movements of the 60s and the radical movements of the ‘80s? Each question was to take about 20 to 30 lines. We’ve never been famous for brevity, so we did our best to talk about our concerns in the space allotted. The other response is from Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous (P.O. Box 11331, Eugene OR 97440), long-time collaborators of the FE whose articles have frequently appeared in these pages. We thought that the responses to Rivista anarchica would be appropriate for our 20^th Anniversary issue as an indication of where we’re at and what we’re thinking.

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a review of

Long Day, Counting Tomorrow by Jim Feast. Autonomedia, 2017

“Outside across a swath of bay was the Statue of Liberty its torch, like a match head in night’s gutter.”

—from Long Day, Counting Tomorrow

Set in the late 1990s, Jim Feast’s Long Day, Counting Tomorrow is a sequel to an earlier novel, phobe, written by him and Ron Kohn. Both are mysteries involving the same group of anarchist writers. Long Day’s main character is Rask Harp, an ex-drug addict, son, brother, poet, friend, occasional prostitute, a young man who is dying from AIDS.

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a review of

Peter & Emma’s Bookcafe (operetta) by Lenny Kwok, 2021

During the worldwide youth revolt in 1968, Lenny Kwok was a 13-year old Hong Kong high school student handing out radical pamphlets with his friends. He got busted, but it didn’t stop him from continuing to agitate for anarchism.

Flash forward 53 years, and Lenny is still at it. He has spent a life-time as a Hong Kong anarchist/artist/musician/singer/author, but now lives in Taiwan following repression from the Chinese government.

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For anarchists, marriage is defined not by the sexuality or gender of spouses, but by the presence of the Church and State. However, marriage, the legal and religious sanctioning of interpersonal relationships, rarely receives much attention in anarchist feminist circles. Major collections of anarchist writings cover many areas of social life but usually have no essays dealing with marriage. Those chapters in which important institutions and social relations are dealt with do not even include marriage as part of the discussion.

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

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It has been said that self-preservation is the first law of nature, and that the basis of justice lies in protecting ourselves from one another. This is a perennial lie of the system of domination.

In reality, the flourishing of the community is the primary aim of nature, and mutual aid and solidarity in pursuit of this aim is the primal, originating law of nature. Nurture is the first law of nature. All justice flows from this source.

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Most anarchists are familiar with Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian science fiction novel, The Dispossessed. But its fame has somewhat served to overshadow other works of science fiction that are also of great interest. Here are a few of those.

* Eric Frank Russell’s 1948 story, “And Then There Were None,” was the nearest sci fi work to an anarchist utopia prior to Le Guin’s 1974 novel, and was praised as such in the pages of Freedom and Anarchy at the time, starting with a full-length review in 1954, under the headline “An Anarchist Utopia,” saying it “makes an anarchist society not only attractive, but also eminently practical.” John Pilgrim, writing in 1963, speculated on “just how much influence this much anthologised tale has had in forming the political opinions of the fallout generation.”

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In 1917, unable to break the unity of the miners, armed vigilante gangs organized by the copper corporations, rounded up 2,000 strikers at gun point in Bisbee, Az. They were forced onto crammed cattle cars and dumped in the desert.

A hundred years ago, in September 1918, more than a hundred leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were convicted of conspiracy to obstruct World War I. The trial marked a critical turning point for the union and the Left. In marking this centenary, we remember the Industrial Workers of the World as the most successful organization holding to a radical vision in U.S. history.

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Has an unintended alliance of Silicon Valley censorship, alternative news rebuttals, mainstream journalistic scrutiny, and especially antifa street-fighters, discouraged what passes as the intellectual wing of the most reviled political movement of the last half-century?

Although fascist street attacks continue, the alt-right has been undergoing something of a brain drain in North America recently.

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Much of contemporary anarchist thought is completely reconciled with industrial society and technological social organization. This common anarchist viewpoint is summed up by Daniel Guerin thusly: “[Anarchism] rests upon large-scale modern industry, up-to-date techniques, the modern proletariat, and internationalism on a world scale. In this regard it is of our times and belongs to the twentieth century.” (Daniel Guerin, Anarchism, p. 154) The optimism of many anarchists regarding the liberatory potential of modern technology was echoed by a student-worker action committee formed during the May, 1968 French uprising. The committee urged the formation of workers’ councils, federated with the councils of other companies on a regional, national, and international level. In the committee’s view, “worker management of business is the power to do better for everybody what the capitalists were scandalously doing for a few.” (George Katsiaficas, “The Meaning of May 1968,” Monthly Review, May 1978)

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Emma Goldman is reputed to have said, “If voting could change things, they’d make it illegal.” Contempt for the franchise permeates anarchism, so that anarchists who favor participating in state elections are both in the minority and on the defensive.

This essay places the struggle for Votes for Women in the context of anarchist aspirations for radical social transformation, and also reconsiders the anarchist rejection of voting in contemporary times. A century after “The Great Reform,” I suggest we reformulate Goldman’s logic: perhaps authorities try so hard to make voting illegal because it could actually change things.

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Rafael Uzcategui is a member of the editorial collective of the anarchist magazine El Libertario, published in Caracas, Venezuela. The below has been excerpted from an entry which originally appeared on his June 2016 blog in Spanish & has been translated by FE staff.

As anarchists struggling against current forms of domination in Latin America, it is important for us to understand the socio-political conditions that have developed in recent years. We also need to reflect on how anarchists have responded to them.

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The Anarchist Social Center and Library (Abra: Centro Social y Biblioteca Libertaria) was inaugurated in Havana on May 5. The first word in the Spanish name, Abra, means a place or action through which possibilities can be opened up, which is what the center hopes to be.

Anarchists have been present in Cuba since the 1870s, suffering periodic repression under several different authoritarian regimes. From 1959 on, the Castro government persecuted, imprisoned, and killed anarchists, forcing large numbers into exile or silence-something neither the Spanish colonialists nor the earlier Cuban dictators could accomplish.

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Annares Infoshop

422 NW 13^th Ave #147

Portland OR 97209

Blackbird Bookstore/Infoshop

1431 Park Avenue

Chico CA 95928

blackbirdchico.com

Bluestockings

172 Allen Street

New York NY 10002

bluestockings.com

Bound Together Bookstore

1369 Haight St.

San Francisco CA 94117

boundtogetherbookssf.github.io

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In a previous issue of the Fifth Estate critic Thomas Haroldson airily dismissed Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” as a “crashing bore.” One wishes critics like Mr. Haroldson could be just as easily dismissed, critics who confuse art forms. If one is to criticize art, it is necessary one has a theory of art on which to base his criticisms.

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The CIRA (Centre International de Recherches sur Anarchisme) in Lausanne, Switzerland is a large archive and small research facility. It has existed for over 50 years, but today, its existence is threatened. The CIRA works to retain the memory of the anarchist movement.

For 50 years they have collected texts written by anarchists from all over the world which are available for militants, researchers, and the curious. The collection includes nearly 20,000 books and brochures, hundreds of titles of magazines (the oldest of which is from 1848), films, and a personal archive of militants’ correspondence, etc., in over 20 languages.

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There is a common notion of the art world, a shared idea of what it is and what it is about. However, that also comes with a popular misconception: the perception of the art world as one, univocal concept when in fact there is a multitude of art worlds. Some intersect and overlap while others function isolated from the others, often informed by a number of opposing principles.

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The Anarchist Communitarian Network (ACN) is in its second year of existence. In that time, some changes within the network have greatly transformed the goals of the project. At this point, we wish to reintroduce the ACN and make a call for participation in our newsletter and in the network in general. Our hope is that a renewed level of communication of ideas and experience will help generate new connections and facilitate more projects consistent with the aims of anarchist communitarians.

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One of the most remarkable men in Michigan runs the only Vegetarian Cafeteria in this area: Stanley Filipzcak has operated the Health Food Center at 5255 Schaefer Road, Dearborn, for the last six years.

Filipczak is now eighty years old. When he reached the age of forty, he was suffering from arthritis, lumbago, headaches and other diseases, which three Ann Arbor doctors could not cure. A friend turned him on to vegetarianism and by the age of forty-five he was cured and a confirmed vegetarian.

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