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Murfreesboro, Tennessee is hardly known worldwide as a hotbed of radical activism, underground publishing, or anarchist feminism.

Other than a small but surprisingly relevant independent music scene and a handful of college professors and students at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), the overwhelming political mood of the place gravitates to the far right.

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When 17^th century Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region, they discovered Native Americans living in what today we would call an anarchist society. These Lake natives had horizontal social relationships governed by kin obligations and employed consensus decision-making.

A frustrated missionary called them “strangers to civil power and authority:” Another observer noted that “no chief dared to rule over the people, as in that case he would immediately be forsaken, and by the whole tribe, and his counselors would refuse to assist him.”

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Millard Berry--Long time Fifth Estate photographer and staff member. www.millardberry.com

Detroit Artists Workshop--Founded in 1964 in Detroit’s art and cultural community. Personnel and events frequently coincided with the Fifth Estate. www.detroitartistsworkshop.org

Egg Syntax--FE staff member, writes experimental music: http://glossolalia.jukeboxalive.com and metablogs regularly on the intersections of art, technology, and ethics: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/eggsyntax

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Want to learn how to turn off GPS on your phone? Hear the latest from the pipeline blockade? Or, how to support pipeline resisters near you? The Final Straw Radio (TFSR) is a weekly anarchist radio show and podcast based in Asheville, N.C. TFSR has produced programs since 2010, airing on stations across the country, and offering free downloads at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org.

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Anarchy is not Survivor, the X-Files, or the Expos home opener

Anarchy is not Starbucks, the Second Cup, or double lattes at the Croissante Royale

Anarchy is not the Kyota Accords, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund

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Anarchy is not GATT, NAFTA, UNESCO, NATO, or the European Economic Community

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Good Communists are not supposed to indulge in the cult of personality. Josef Stalin practiced it for years, and so, too, has Mao Tse-tung.

Compared to Kim Il Sung, 63, dictator of North Korea, however, Stalin and Mao were only kidding.

On the outskirts of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, Sung had a 15-foot bronze statue of himself erected.

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a review of

A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of Writing from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, edited by Roy San Filipo. AK Press, 2003, San Francisco, 139pp.

Letters to a Young Activist, Todd Gitlin, Basic Books, 2003, 174 pages

I haven’t read either of the books listed above and have no intention of doing so. I’m reviewing them in the manner all of us do each time we peruse a library or bookstore shelf. “Hmm, that looks interesting; no, that probably will be boring,” etc.

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Fredy Perlman with the cover of Letters of Insurgents at Detroit’s Black and Red Print co-op, 1976

referred to in this article:

Having Little, Being Much: A Chronicle of Fredy Perlman’s Fifty Years, by Lorraine Perlman, Black & Red (Detroit, 1989), 155 pages, $3.50

I cannot say with any certainty what kind of response this perceptive, if rather abbreviated memoir would elicit from a person who did not know Fredy Perlman or his writings. It was written, clearly, for those familiar at least with his work, and they without a doubt will enjoy this glimpse of the man whose voice played such a large role in reviving libertarian traditions and articulating the critical primitivism that has profoundly transformed anti-authoritarian ideas during the last decade.

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The Bearer of this document is hereby recognized as a member in good standing of the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Community. As such, this creature is entitled to the following rights as established by the unwritten Constitution of the Universe:

• Right to Purity of Soil, Air and Waters

• Right to Immunity from Artificial Concepts of Time, Space and Location

• Right to All Territory of the Universe

• Right to Self-Defined Identity Regardless of Race, Nationality, Species or Genus

• Right to Unlimited Ecstasy and Its Means of Acquisition

• Right of Unlimited Choice of Behavior

• Right to Independence from All Gods, Laws and Religions

• Right to be Useless and Unproductive

• Right to Disregard Prevailing Concepts of Science, Logic, Politics, History and Mathematics

• Right to Death and Choice of Means

• Right to Unlimited Shape or Personality

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In late March, Takoma, a 22 year-old Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphin trained by the US Navy to detect underwater mines for Marine Corps reconnaissance divers, went absent without leave while on patrol in the Persian Gulf outside of Umm Qasr. In an effort to cover their embarrassment, a public relations official for the Marines claimed that Takoma was recaptured on May 5, but these reports have not been confirmed by independent investigators. Given all the other lies about the Iraqi invasion issued at Pentagon press conferences, we at Fifth Estate consider Takoma to be on the run somewhere in the Indian ocean.

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• Devil’s Music

• The revolution will be a festival

• Sacred, Sweet, Wicked Ecstasy

• Joe Hill

• Dancing for Our Lives

• The Decline of the Choral Dance

• Tectum Theatrum

• The Ray Charles Riots

Jazz. Funk. Folk. Punk. Trance. Hip Hop. Old Time. Blues. Electric. Acoustic. Recorded. Live. When we decided to do an issue on “Music and Dance,” we knew that we could not devote too much time to any one genre or artist.

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Over the years, our special features addressing identity politics—from the 1971 women’s issue to the queer edition of 1993—have both appealed to and tested our readers for the challenging exchanges these topics inevitably generate. This issue on Race and Culture has inspired both an unprecedented quantity of contributions and stimulating controversy within the Fifth Estate (FE) collective.

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Summer came to Ann Arbor last week and brought with it teargas, a tank, about 400 cops and four nights of street confrontation.

Monday night the people gathered in the streets to drink and dance. People fucked in the streets. No cops showed up. Tuesday, the shit came down hard. The people barricaded off South University between E. Forest and E. University. Cops from Washtenaw, Monroe and Oakland Counties showed up along with State Police from the Ypsilanti post. The people were gassed and beaten and finally driven off the streets in the small hours of the morning.

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a review of

Surrealism and Anarchism by Pietro Ferrua, edited by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2022.

Ron Sakolsky has uncovered a previously lost piece of anarchist history, one that explores the fertile crossroads of surrealism and anarchy.

This text originated as a 1982 lecture given by Pietro Ferrua (1930–2021), inaugurating the Anarchos Institute at the University of Montreal. The pamphlet provides a useful biographical sketch of Ferrua that helps situate his scholarship within a lifelong commitment to anarchism.

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Dear comrades,

As you might be aware, the Castroist crackdown on dissent has been stepped up and toughened up over these past few months in Cuba. Even so, transition from dictatorship to bourgeois democracy seems increasingly inevitable, albeit that, as in the Spanish precedent, there is every indication that this Transition will not be fully activated until after the physical demise of the dictator. As you will appreciate, until such time as that happens, the prospects for an opening-up and liberalisation of the regime are virtually nil, so the opposition (excepting that segment relying upon institutional support abroad) will have to grapple with enormous risks and difficulties. Especially Cuban libertarians and any who are open about their opposition to authoritarianism in any guise.

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I want to thank the Fifth Estate for permitting me to purchase this ad in order to put forth a position they oppose. It’s not that I don’t agree with them that politics is the process of rulers and ruled and that the act of voting is an act of self-humiliation (the willing participation in one’s own domination), but I think there is a need for realism at some point. I too was once a revolutionary and had thoughts similar to yours about overthrowing capitalism, and I even dressed like many of you. But I’ve had to make some compromises in my life and I think the least you can do is make some yourselves in return for an ex-radical in city government.

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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.

a review of

The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills. Cornell University Press 1993

No, we don’t. We live under a racial contract. Calling it something else, such as a social contract is part of the racial contract’s system of concealing itself.

The late Charles Mills clarified this matter quite definitively in The Racial Contract, a 133-page book published in 1993.

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That breakup wuz a long time ago.

Wich breakup are you talking about? There bin so many and they keep getting more.

I’m talking about the first wun.

O. that wun. Yes. It wuz a long long time ago.

* * *

Wunce the people saw that Each Thing like Each rock or Each tree or Each bird or Each wind or Each fear or Each love wuz Diferent and hid its Name inside itself. If you looked inside it deep enuf or long enuf the Name wood come threw. If you did it with Each and Every thing and fit all the Names all together they wood make wun Name and that wood be the ansir. Wun Hole Thing. It wuz called Re Member.

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a review of

Passages of Rebellion by Fran Shor. Smart Set, 2021

Passages of Rebellion, with its focus on 1960s activism, feels perfectly curated for 2023 readers.

Just as the country was polarized and divided in the 1960s, today’s activists challenge convention and institutions, albeit with far more sophisticated technological capabilities, but with similar intent to their messaging.

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a review of
The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity by Marshall Sahlins. Princeton University Press, 2022

The late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021) is best known for his claim, first published in 1968, that people living in traditional economies based on hunting and gathering enjoyed lives of relative security, abundance, and leisure.

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Mark Twain, one of America’s most beloved anti-authoritarians, gave young people sound advice: “Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.” Do most schools teach us:

* To be self-directed--or directed by others?

* That relationships should be respectful--or manipulated by rewards and punishments?

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Last June, I was invited by the anarchist publisher, Textos Subterraneos, to speak about the newly-published Portuguese edition of my book, The Garden of Peculiarities, in Lisbon and Oporto. Of interest to FE readers, TS has also put out an anthology of Fredy Perlman’s work, A Reprodugio da Vida Quotidian e Outros Escritos.

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Twin cooling towers at the Fermi Nuclear Facility loom over a Monroe County graveyard. photo/Steven Benson

Eleven years ago an accident at Detroit Edison’s Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in Monroe, Michigan, almost destroyed Detroit. If you accept the utility’s own commissioned study, the death rate could have been as high as 133,000 dead in the metro area and that does not include 181,000 people exposed to such high radiation levels as to develop leukemia or other forms of cancer within ten years. The Atomic Energy Commission’s own study projected an additional 73,000 injured and $17 billion in property damage.

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Nothing exemplifies the sickness and degradation of the present society more than its “criminal justice” system, a cold-blooded infliction of suffering on a scale that far surpasses whatever offenses its victims may have been guilty of.

Think how long an hour can seem if you’re caught in some boring or frustrating situation. Then imagine being locked away not for an hour, or a day, or a week, but for years in a mean, ugly, hopeless environment administered by guards and officials who are in many cases more vicious and mentally sick than most of your fellow prisoners, who themselves may not be the most charming or uplifting of companions. And to add to the torment, knowing that a considerable portion of the people on the outside have been led to believe that you are being “coddled,” and that “light” sentences of “only” a few years amount to “getting off easy”

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FE note: see related article Review, Toxic Psychiatry in this issue.

Breggin’s foundation web site: http://www.icspp.org/

Laing, R.D. & Esterson, A. (1964) Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics. Penguin Books. ISBN 0140211578

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WASHINGTON, D.C. Liberation News Service—On October 21, 1967, the white left got its shit together.

The gala Pentagon confrontation, long billed as a move from “protest to resistance,” was a dramatic and intense political event. Many had been dubious; few can now deny that a new stage is upon us.

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Anti-war forces in Detroit are preparing to respond to a call for a national mobilization called at a meeting last month of anti-war groups.

The meeting, held in Cleveland Nov. 26 to evaluate the recent Nov. 5–8 Mobilization for Peace in Vietnam, for Economic Justice and for Human Rights, mapped plans for continuing and enlarging anti-war activities and established a Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

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Over the weekend of September 8–10, a Detroit Area High School Anti-war Conference was held. Many concrete resolutions came out of it, including “support of the October 21^st demonstration in Washington; support of all activities based around the confrontation; that a call go out to all high school students to participate in the march and organize around it. That they march in it under their own banners.”

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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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During the last two score of years anarchism and its movements have witnessed a sort of re-discovery due to the disillusionment of the intellectual world that has for a long time supported the Marxian Government of Russia and all its allied Marxian Governments in other countries. This, in turn, has led to the appearance of quite a few volumes dealing with anarchism and its movements, along with reprints of most of the works of its theoreticians.

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a review of

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen. Echo Press, 2017.

What is the best way to kill off most life on Earth? Forget those Hollywood asteroids and simply disrupt CO2 equilibrium in the atmosphere. The rest will take care of itself.

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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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Note for web version: regular, bold and italic types are reproduced as in original.

It is appropriate to note at any time that humanity has lived over 99% of its existence in primitive society. Without even the benefit of laws, our ancestors were able to rest their arses on logs and cook over open fires. Without encyclopedias people raised cattle, made, cheese, drank wine. It is even thought by some anthropologists that uncivilized people made love and made music without the religious benefits of stereophonic machines!

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The court-martials for the three GIs who have refused to go to Vietnam began on September 6. All three were convicted—Pvt. David Samas and Pfc. James Johnson to five years at hard labor, forfeiture of pay and dishonorable discharges, and Pvt. Dennis Mora to three years at hard labor—and appeals are now being prepared by lawyer Stanley Faulkner. Each of the three were tried by a different trial panel of 10 officers, all of whom reached verdicts in less than a half hour.

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On April 15, millions of people across the world will take to the streets to demand that the United States end its aggression against Vietnam and immediately withdraw all of its troops. In Detroit, the Coalition to End the War has called for a mass march, rally and local school strikes. The Fifth Estate endorses this call and asks all of our readers to join with the staff in participating to the fullest extent possible.

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FE Note: The police have always done surveillance of revolutionaries. What is new now is the technological capabilities of government snoops. Being noted on paper 3X5 cards didn’t stop our predecessors, and their electronic gadgets won’t deter us.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation defends civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, the San Francisco-based EFF states that it “champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development.”

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The accusation calling primitivists gleeful beckoners of “the collapse,” or misanthropic proto-nazis, reflects a clear misinterpretation of most primitivist writing, and even more primitivist practice. Few who generally agree with the primitivist analysis of the origins of civilization, if any at all, envision “industrial collapse” as some sort of political strategy. In one sense, collapse can definitely be seen as nature’s reaction to the pushing of ecological limits by industrial economies, but this perspective is not a value-based judgment. This possibility is but an observation of the predictable nature of wildness to do whatever it must to maintain ecological equilibrium.

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a review of

Architecture and Anarchism: Building Without Authority by Paul Dobraszczyk. Paul Holberton Publishing 2021

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a state, every human activity looks like it needs to be pounded into the correct, pre-planned shape. State authorities always claim their social engineering schemes will raise living standards and promote the general happiness. No surprise, their plans do not always work.

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The people eagerly awaiting Armageddon, from religious fundamentalists to paranoid Nazis, have no choice but to wish a fiery end. They’ve been such failures in this world, only the end of it can justify their miserable, creepy existence.

The fact is that their world has already ended, a long time ago, despite their protophilosophy’s occasional spurts of life. The apparent strength of fanatics from Iran to Michigan is no more than the jerky motions of a corpse animated by electric shocks. The God buried by Nietzsche in the last century found scores of other gods in that grave: one of humanity’s best tricks is the invention and disposal of gods.

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a review of Dancing at Armageddon by Richard G. Mitchell (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

In sociologist Richard G. Mitchell’s Dancing at Armageddon (University of Chicago Press, 2002) we meet Zillah, dressed in home-patched camouflage, who has come to a weekend retreat with a sheaf of photocopied fliers detailing her vision of localized radical democracy. Sound like a familiar character? Well, you’ll never find Zillah at an infoshop or an anti-WTO action. She’s on a different FBI list: not an “anarchist” but a “survivalist,” and hence a subject for Mitchell, whose book is subtitled Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times.

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a review of

Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, The Insurrection Game 3^rd edition (Out of Order Games)

Bloc by Bloc is a strategy game inspired by contemporary protest movements. Designed and self-published by Greg Loring-Albright and TL. Simons from Out of Order Games, it uses the tabletop board game format to illustrate the impact of gentrification and the power of popular uprisings. As in the two previous editions, the goal is to liberate the city before the military arrives to reestablish order. In accordance with their anarchist ethics, low-cost upgrade kits are available for owners of the second edition, and the source files are free online.

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In the late 1990s in Argentina, a new form of struggle emerged from the unemployed workers (who make up 20% of the people while another 20% are underemployed). This expression of resistance came from the provinces to the capital of the country and consisted of blocking roads to claim a subsidy for unemployment. Blocking roads has its origin with the well-known workers’ tactic called “piquete” (picket). It consisted of people preventing the entrance of scabs who were trying to break the strike. Its goal was to prevent production in support of the workers’ demands. Today, thrown out from production, the unemployed block the transportation of merchandise to support their demands. Not only is this blocking of circulation novel, but so is their organizational practice: direct democracy.

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The neighbors had broken into and occupied the bank building as I arrived in Parque Lezama. Middle aged and scruffy young activists carried out debris, scrubbed windows and floors and hung banners with the name of their assemblia popular and another that said “We are nothing. We want to be everything.”

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The following are three excerpts from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander. The book is an insightful analysis not only of the medium, but the society which produces it. See p. 12

In less than four generations out of an estimated one hundred thousand, we have fundamentally changed the nature of our interaction with the planet.

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a review of

Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War, Build a Better World by Aimee Allison and David Solnit, 2007, Seven Stories Press, 194 pp.

“War is good business, invest your son!”

-- Vietnam-era slogan

Did you enlist...and then change your mind? GI rights advocates can help recruits get out of the DEP — Delayed Enlistment Program. They help service-members apply for discharge or file grievances for harassment or discrimination. The GI rights hotline is answered by a network of non-profit, non-governmental agencies who provide information to members of the military. 1-800-FYI-95GI

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NEW YORK, N.Y., July 1—The national office of the American Servicemen’s Union announced that two revolts had taken place in army stockades recently; on June 14 at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina and on June 22 at Ft. Riley, Kansas.

The uprising at Jackson was touched off by the beating of a prisoner, Julio Rivera, who had refused to pull K.P. Rivera was severely beaten by three sergeants and had to be hospitalized.

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Detroit police arrested 11 neighborhood street brothers and sisters over Nov. 10^th and 11^th and charged them with “conspiracy to place explosives with intent to cause damage,” a bullshit rap that carries a 25-year maximum prison sentence.

Snatched up were David Valler, who was already in the Wayne County Jail in lieu of $10,000 bond on two phony marijuana sales beefs; Joseph Clever; Antoine Daghuyt; Gary. Miltemore; Ronald Pierce; John Schmittroth; William Ladd; James Moscara; Sandra Rousseau; Benjamin Parks; and Diedre Flowers.

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Art Attack

Do You Know the Symptoms?

1. Glazed Eyes

2. Shallow Breathing

3. Clammy Skin

4. Nausea

5. Victim May Smell of Linseed Oil and Formaldehyde

Art Attack victims will usually be found in museums, galleries and Art schools. (Art students have been found to have a propensity for attacks.) The fatal attack may be preceded by the onset of general studio malaise, and an occasional incidence of gallery narcolepsy. When the victim becomes aware of the division between his mundane life and his sanctified Art, he may attempt a self-cure through conceptual Art, punk, or other popular forms of “Anti-Art.” A more effective treatment involves the artist revolutionizing his relationship to the Art World. A simple case may be alleviated with the smashing of a particular work of Art. More advanced cases may require the destruction of entire galleries, museums and Art schools.

When you receive a phone call or a letter from Marie Mason, the Green Scare pri

Kelly Poe’s photo of Marie Mason’s image of sanity and chair, table, and book.

soner serving the longest sentence for eco-sabotage, one is almost startled at how buoyant she is, filled with questions about what you’re doing and wanting to give her opinion on what is happening in the world.

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