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Firestorm Books, a fifteen-year-old collectively-run anarchist bookstore and community event space in Asheville, N.C., is sending back thousands of children’s books banned from the Duval County Public School system in Florida.

The queer- and trans-owned bookstore has given away thousands of copies each of over fifty different titles exploring topics from racism and colonialism to social movement history and visionary organizing.

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a review of

Van Morrison “Astral Weeks” (Reprise)

Van Morrison is partially responsible for people leaving the beach early in New York.

There is a song called “Gloria” that is sung by every would-be rock and roll singer on the beach.

G-l-o-r-i-a, it starts, never stops, and seems to have no other lyrics. Van Morrison wrote “Gloria.”

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Early this year, George Meany’s AFL—CIO pulled out of the International Confederation of “Free” Trade Unions because ICFTU, originally set up as an anti-Communist rival to a pro-Soviet World Federation of Trade Unions in 1949, is getting closer to dealing with WFTU bodies.

“In the future,” said the Wall Street Journal, “AFL-CIO will spend the money on its own international programs,” that is, the ICFTU will no longer be directly on the CIA payroll. Unfortunately, nationally-isolated trade unions run into other kinds of problems.

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The Establishment press has been full of three things lately: encounter groups, pollution-ecology-environmental control (which has got to be the most cooptable issue since sideburns) and wasteful spending by the Defense Department.

Two interesting mainstream views on the latter were in Look (Aug. 25, the second of a series) and Fortune (Aug. 1^st issue). Fortune lists the top 25 contractors, breaks down defense contracts by state and into dollars per head of the population per state (meaning: just how dependent a particular state is on the military), and shows how the 25 largest contractors account for nearly half the value of all contracts.

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This year the Ford motor company celebrates its 100^th anniversary. To proponents and critics alike, Ford is the perfect illustration of the corporate world-view. Henry Ford’s rationalization of the assembly-line process was a great advance for industrial technology, and the mass production of the automobile led inevitably to the creation of a world—through auto-centric urban design and the creation of America’s highway system—in which the automobile became an expensive necessity rather than a luxury.

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Ursula Le Guin was already 45 when her well-known anarchist text The Dispossessed was published in 1974. Today, she’s almost a decade older than the unlikely shero of Laia Odo, the feisty matron who wrote the core theoretical texts that shape the anarchist society described in the “ambiguous utopia” of the novel. The short story as prequel called “The Day Before the Revolution” discusses Odo in her later years, preparing to die before her dream gets realized.

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a review of

Life of an Anarchist: The Alexander Berkman Reader, by Gene Fellner, Four Walls Eight Windows, P.O. Box 548, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, 354 pp.

Historians don’t often agree on much, but for as long as I’ve been reading and learning about the life of Alexander Berkman, authors of books on anarchism and related subjects who make some mention of Berkman have decried in the same breath the lack of scholarship devoted to him.

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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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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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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

WE CAN STOP THE NUKES bumpersticker of the Clamshell Alliance (who occupied the Seabrook, NH nuclear plant site). Copies available for a donation (all $$ to Clamshell). Send for sticker and info on nuclear technofascism to COLT, Box 271, New Vernon, N.J. 07976. Please enclose 13 cent stamp.

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Coming out of antifa smashups with fascists, in Charlottesville and Berkeley in August, condemnation of those physically fighting the alt-right has given new life to Trump’s charge that “many sides” are responsible for violence at anti-fascist actions.

And, some on the left are contributing to this.

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This column will be devoted to an exploration of Establishment thinking, as revealed primarily in power structure publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, etc. The assumptions of the writer are Marxian, Marcusian, and C.W. Millsian: in brief, that there is a power structure largely centered in the economy; that the Establishment, in particular its economic wing, is still remarkably flexible; that we, as radicals, had better know a lot more about how this Establishment functions; and, on a strategy for change must try to understand the divisions within the Establishment so as to make use of them for revolutionary purposes.

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Chants of “Shave my teeth!” and “Blood! Guts! Terror!” were the theme of a militantly irresponsible demonstration called by the recently founded Violent-Illegal Party (V.I.P.) on December 12 at Wayne State University.

The occasion was that tedious but finally terminated attempt to “save Monteith College,” a small college within Wayne which faced elimination due to cutbacks. Through the duration of the pseudo-struggle to keep their little academic turf, the Monteith administration and faculty, and their idealistic dupes among the student body, kissed the asses of innumerable bureaucrats and politicians.

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The work/sleep, shop/discard, lose/win, simulated existence that is thrust upon us is fundamentally forced participation in an electro-sociopathic process.

With computer mediation steadily consuming discourse life is increasingly lived behind, and for, a screen. As contemporary civilization continues this conversion into omnipresent, digitized drudgery, antisocial propensities mushroom, a listless insatiability abounds, while feelings and insight are left behind.

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It was an unheard-of event. For the first time a performer picketing the place he was supposed to play because he wanted to perform there.

Ted Lucas mans the picket line at the Ichth Coffeehouse –photo by Evan Soldinger

On Saturday evening Dec. 28, Ted Lucas put up a one-man picket line outside of the Church of Christ (located next to the Playboy Club); within the Church was the Ichthus Coffee House. Lucas was booked to play a concert there but was canceled out with less than 24 hours notice because of an alleged lack of funds. The booking agent for the Ichthus claimed that because the coffee house had been asked to leave their former home, the Old Mariners Church, they couldn’t afford a higher priced act because their new home held one third the capacity.

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A review of Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 2 edited by Ken Wachsberger, Michigan State University Press, 2012, 442 pp, $40

As you can see by the type on our cover, the Fifth Estate is approaching its 50^th anniversary of radical publishing. This makes us either the longest or one of the longest running English language anarchist publications in U.S. history. The “either or” is due to from what date you count our appearance as an explicitly anarchist paper.

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As interest in the history of anarchism increases with each passing year, we stumble across more lost gold mines of sources. I recently discovered one in Philadelphia which connects Voltairine de Cleyre, the celebrated anarchist speaker, poet, essayist and activist, with an anonymously published feminist article “The Political Equality of Woman.” Publishing it here for the first time in 105 years is cause for a small celebration.

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Voodoo is a colloquial corruption of Vodo, the name of an African godhead, the Holy Serpent.

The practice of Voodoo has been, until recent years, the most consistently revolutionary and anti-establishment force among poor blacks in the United States. For this reason, Voodoos have always been, and-still are, secretive, especially where white people are concerned. Yet, as “the Power” of Voodoo is slowly assimilated into many secular forms, including some of the recent black nationalist movements, candid information becomes more and more generally available, and it is finally clear how profoundly important Voodoo has been in so many quarters of American life.

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As Tony Reay says [FE #65, October 31-November 13] “WABX strikes again.” And they did, with ripples from the blow coming all the way back to Detroit from England. The WABX audience was the first, anywhere in the world, to hear the new Beatles” double record album, “Sexy Sadie,” on tapes of the new release that came “from a source close to the Beatles,” according to station manager John Detz.

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a review of

Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria, by David Porter; foreword by Sylvain Boulouque. AK Press, 2011, 550 pp, $25

David Porter’s hefty new book is a remarkable resource for scholars and activists seeking to understand the relationship among French anarchists, French colonization of Algeria, and Algerian anti-colonial movements.

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Dear Julius,

Although our actual contact has been infrequent, I have felt very close to you since we first met, and our shared experiences, including writing for the same papers, added to this. But in recent months your columns have puzzled and confused me. I don’t know you any more; I don’t know where you’re at; I can’t imagine why you are saying (writing) the things you are.

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Things have a real roll on here at the Fifth Estate and believe it or not we may have the next issue to you in about six weeks. We had several articles left over from this issue and already have an anti-nuke special in mind for the next. Also, look for an announcement of an anti-nuke conference to be held at the Grinning Duck. Final note: Did Canadian subscribers receive our last issue dated July? If not, write us and we’ll send it out.

On May 9, 1973, three prisoners of Washington State Penitentiary, Carl Harp, Shane Green and Clyde Washburn seized the Classification and Parole Building with ten hostages, and held it nonviolently for 12 hours. During that time they were in constant communication by phone and bullhorn with media, prisoners and people outside to whom they talked about maltreatment and cruel conditions inside the prison.

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On November 13, 1979 I was snatched out of San Quentin in California and flown back to the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, for the Court case around the May 9^th take-over of this prison (Wash. State) behind human rights and justice. So far all is well and I’m doing fine. I won’t be here long they say, and will be taken back to San Quentin, but I’ve got no idea when. Logical to assume I will be here for a while for we are making moves to hold me here up to and through our trial.

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If you have information concerning this person, please contact your local FBI office. Telephone numbers and addresses of all FBI offices listed on back.

Identification Order 4343, December 30, 1969

Lawrence Robert Plamondon, as he is known to the pigs, or Pun as he is called by the people, is White Panther Party Minister of Defense. He is accused of conspiring with Jack Forrest, Detroit White Panther captain, and John Sinclair to dynamite the Ann Arbor CIA office in October of 1968. They were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury late last year on the testimony of imprisoned stoolie Dave Valler. Valler was head of a dynamite ring that carried out a series of bombings in 1968 and is now trying to get out of prison by finking on anyone the government mentions to him.

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Montreal’s fourth annual International Anarchist Theatre Festival is seeking submissions of anarchist theatre pieces to be staged May 11 — 14^th, 2009.

We are looking for theatre pieces in English or French, from 5 to 60 minutes long, about anarchists, anarchist ideas and history, or any subject related to anarchism including anti-state, against capitalism, racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. We will consider plays or monologues that are original work, ones that have already been performed, or that have been written by anarchists (historical or contemporary).

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1) Subscribe. Send $2.50 for a one year subscription and 26 issues of the paper. Send a gift subscription to a friend.

2) Sell the Fifth Estate at school, on the streets or at public places. Our sales people earn 5 cents on each paper they sell. Call 831–6801 or write to: 1107 West Warren, Detroit Michigan, 48201.

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The success of the ecological movement in the First World is of vital importance to the movement in the Third. The industrialized societies have always provided the dominant global development model, and unless the paradigm of industrialism is rejected in the First World, there is little chance of the Third World turning back from the ecologically disastrous path of industrial development. If the ecological movement of the North is serious about the “solidarity” it expresses with the South, it is vital that it succeeds, not only in halting the juggernaut of industrial growth, but in actually forcing it back.

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From July 29 to August 1, “The Frenzy” anarchist gathering is scheduled for Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Music, workshops and a good time are planned.

For more information, contact Frenzy / P.O. Box 119 / 1895 Commercial Drive / Vancouver, BC V5N 486 / Canada.

On the same weekend, there are plans for a Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Gathering to be held in Philadelphia, PA. Donations to cover anticipated expenses or inquiries for more information can be sent to 1993 Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Gathering / P.O. Box 31889 / Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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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.

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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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Although there have been no recent developments in the nation-wide campaign to free Gary Tyler, the 17-year-old Black Louisiana man framed and sentenced to death for the shooting of a 13-year-old white racist youth, there have been new disclosures concerning Tyler and his family, friends and supporters.

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You, M. Pope, are a scoundrel and a cur. The more “personable,” the more popular and accessible you become, the more you inspire our absolute loathing for all that you represent: the self-alienation of the human subject and the invasion of the human spirit by the forces of domination. Let it be clear: we are your implacable enemies. Perhaps it is true that it is not you who pushes the button which sends screaming rocket bombs to annihilate whole populations, or who orders the dumping of murderous chemicals into the water supplies, or who dispatches the police to assassinate poets and rebels. And obviously it is true that the hullabaloo that you have stirred up with your visit to the United States should raise no more interest than the arrival of some anonymous charlatan astrologer. But you haven’t been ignored; you have been recognized, feted, adored, praised, gazed upon, cheered, and taken seriously. And you do represent the internalization of the forces which make it possible for the aforementioned crimes to continue unavenged. You are the living incarnation of the plague which legitimizes oppression, promotes passivity, and defuses rebellion. We are warning you: stay out of Detroit if you wish to avoid a sound, well-deserved thrashing.

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In response to the arrest of two antiwar GIs and the steady harassment of military organizers, the Detroit Resistance and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam have launched a law suit against the Board of County Road Commissioners.

The suit, which was announced by Attorney Marc Kadish of the National Lawyers Guild and Victory Fidelman of the Resistance at an April 8 press conference, will attack the regulation which governs the distribution of literature at Metropolitan Airport.

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In response to “Readers dispute FE on Nuclear Freeze issue,” FE #310, Fall, 1982 (this issue).

On one point we all seem to be in agreement: the campaign for a nuclear freeze is not enough. So, I find it perplexing that rather than considering its inadequacies as a basis for investigating ways of moving rapidly beyond it (since we also apparently agree that time is very limited), our critics reiterate all of its conventional arguments. None of the specifics of our analysis are discussed. Instead, the Freeze is presented as the embodiment of the movement against nuclear weapons and war, rather than a single tactical approach among many possible ways to create an opposition.

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The Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the group that brought over 400,000 persons to New York City and San Francisco on April 15, has called for a national conference to evaluate the Mobilization and to exchange ideas on future programs and actions.

The conference, to be held in Washington, D.C., is scheduled for the weekend of May 20–21, following the confrontation with President Johnson by representatives of the peace movement. All groups and individuals who oppose the war are invited to attend.

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WASHINGTON (LNS)--Karl Marx once said that a revolution is the festival of the oppressed and exploited. Washington wasn’t that. But it was some kind of festival. It was Woodstock without the rain or the mud. It: was the great silent majority of American youth come together and digging it. Quiet kids, kids who didn’t get really excited about any of the speeches they had come to hear, come to hear nothing more than what they already knew--that the war was bad, that the killing had to be stopped.

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“‘You just have to turn on a television to see that those people need help, and no one else is going to help them but us,’ said Todd Schuppert, a truck driver from Pekin, Ind.”

—New York Times, Dec. 1992

“Who tries to hold what flashes in the worldly storm will drown.”

—Taoist poem

“They want bases and the oil in Somalia,” I told Ed, looking into his intense, sad eyes. I was responding to the same question he posed to me during the Persian Gulf war. A former leftist, Ed wanted to know whether I believed “the U.S. could ever do anything good.”

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Thank you for bringing to my attention your Fifth Estate essay, “How Deep Is Deep Ecology? A Challenge to Radical Environmentalism” [FE #327, Fall, 1987]. I appreciate its extensive treatment of my book, Overshoot. Here are some thoughts stimulated by having read the essay twice.

I have no objection to being characterized in your essay as “a leading modernizer of Malthus” for I believe that our future would be much less endangered were Malthus more widely and more accurately understood. He never claimed human populations always and everywhere increase exponentially (“geometrically”) nor did he say nothing could prevent a population from outstripping increases in its food supply.

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The Detroit Black Panther Party has just opened up a new office and asked the community to aid them in securing needed supplies.

If you have desks, typewriters or other office machines available they can be put to immediate use in aiding the work of the Panthers.

If you can help or wish to make a donation to the Panthers contact the Fifth Estate office, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, 48201 or call 831–6800.

1,500 persons marched from Cass Park to Kennedy Square in downtown Detroit on October 26 as the city’s part in the international “Week of Solidarity with the Vietnamese People.” The marchers rested in the drained fountain of the square and listened while a variety of speakers denounced the presidential candidates, the war, and the system that produced it.

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“I know one or 2 who have this year, for the first time, read a president’s message, but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves rather than a rise in the president. Blessed are the young for they do not read the president’s message.”

—Thoreau to Parker Pillsbury, April 1861

The Empire now has New Clothiers, and opportunely for the rulers. As the political management languished and the economy buckled, change became the only way to keep the Empire on its track. The apparatus of organized illusion called the slaves to the Lever: which figurehead could best keep the Empire slouching along? Which party would put them back to work mining the Mystery, with picks and shovels and a small particle of eternity for all, while soothing them with homilies of health and happiness and an economy that would grow and grow forever, amen? Who could provide bread and circuses, feed the unruly to the Coliseum, torch the rebel colonies?

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Their Statement:

On Friday, March 4, 1966, Attorney General Nicholas D. Katzenbach presented the subversive Activities Control board with a petition asking them to list the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs of America as a “Communist front group” as provided under the McCarran Act.” This act would require the Du Bois Clubs to register as a “Communist Front Group.” For every day that we fail to register, we are subject to a $10,000 fine and five years in jail. We will not register.

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Energies of the West Central Organization, since its formal emergence on the Detroit scene in June,1965, have exploded the myth of “apathy” inherent in the behavior of “poor folks.” Human beings—Negro, white, Mexican, Maltes, and Puerto Rican—who have never fully recognized and used their latent power are doing so now. “poor folk’s” organizations which thrive in one area of Detroit’s poor folk ghetto are merging into a poor folk liberation front popularly known as WCO. Presently, WCO is confronting the common enemy—those persons who by design or inability operate the existing educational, welfare, housing, law enforcement, and urban renewal machines, etc., in a way which conspires against poor people.

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a review of

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper & Row, New York, 1980, 600 pages plus index.

Howard Zinn is a “radical revolutionary,” whose People’s History is aptly named given its kinship with the various “Peoples Republics.” In fact, this “wild” book was conceived as a means of slaking Zinn’s “thirst for notoriety in the pecking order of the radical left,” as well as for the enrichment of himself and Harper & Row. So saith the reviewer for Barron’s [1] the financiers’ weekly.

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This fragment is from Jacques Camatte’s pamphlet translated in 1975 in Detroit by Fredy Perlman. It was a key text in developing Fifth Estate concepts during the 1970s and 80s, ones which remain today. It speaks of capital and technology that has “run away” from its initiators and domesticated humans. It is available at blackandred.org

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FT. JACKSON, S.C.—Pvt. Henry Mills has refused orders to Vietnam.

According to the American Serviceman’s Union, Mills came to New York to consult with them and then turned himself in at Ft. Dix, the nearest base.

Mills, who is black, has stated that he will not participate in a war that is immoral and racist.

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The Fifth Estate is the longest publishing, anti-authoritarian, English language publication in US history. Next year, we will celebrate our 40^th birthday...maybe!

Due to rising printing and postage costs, our future is in jeopardy if we don’t come up with several thousand dollars within the next two months. We are planning a special 100 page bound edition and a national tour to celebrate our fortieth anniversary, but you may be holding our last issue if we don’t solve our financial difficulties immediately.

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After 3 years of action, an anarchist center closes its doors, but a more ambitious project opens down the street.

“The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can “occupy” these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace.”

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