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a review of

Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation by Nick Estes, Melanie K. Yazzie, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, and David Correia. PM Press 2021

“I can’t fucking breathe,” Zachary Bearheels (Rosebud Sioux) said before he died in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2017, where cops tased, then mounted him on the pavement, and punched his head 13 times. Murdered. In a bordertown.

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After 691 issues, SchNEWS, “The free weekly direct action newssheet published in Brighton, England since 1994” is no more. A mix of serious reporting and irreverent humor, it was born in a squatted courthouse as part of “Justice?”--Brighton’s campaign against the repressive British Criminal Justice Act.

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a review of

The People’s Republic of Everything by Nick Mamatas. Tachyon Publications 2018, tachyonpublications.com

Nick Mamatas, who first entered the radical literary scene two decades ago as one of the translators of Jae-Eui Lee’s Kwangju Diary, has been a consistent yet consistently surprising voice since.

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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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We might venture to speculate that it was not with deep regret that the Ford Administration finally called an official halt to its embarrassingly disastrous swine flu mass immunization program recently. Most assuredly an unmitigated scam that simply didn’t cut it, -the project was put out of our misery with scarcely a raised eyebrow or a whimper in the waning days of 1976—a fitting Bicentennial finale.

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The Fifth Estate 1107 W. Warren Detroit Michigan 48201

831–2525

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: Harvey Ovshinsky

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Robin Diber, Steve Dibner, Steven Simons

STAFF: John Sinclair, John Hawksley, Magdalene Sinclair, and Janet Klotman

Breakthrough and Donald Lobsinger’s tactics may have backfired in their most recent confrontation with the Establishment—tackled from the right.

Lobsinger could do with some tactical pre-protest advice from some of those who confront from the Left, on how to stay exactly within the law until you are ready to get busted. He was arrested again and faces trial Jan. 15 on disorderly conduct for breaking up a meeting Dec. 3 at St. Lucy’s Catholic Church in St. Clair Shores.

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a review of

No More Mushrooms: Thoughts About Life Without Government by Kirkpatrick Sale. Autonomedia 2021

Kirkpatrick Sale has been an activist, author, and promoter of decentralism and bioregionalism for more than 50 years. No More Mushrooms stitches together material from two of his best-known books, Human Scale (1980) and Human Scale Revisited (2017), to give a quick summary of his thinking about government and the potential for creating new societies based on community, interdependence, and mutual obligation.

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The postal workers’ strike exploded like a time-bomb across the nation. Beginning in New York City, and spreading quickly through every major city in the country.

The massive revolt defied court injunctions, Presidential orders, and the miserable sell-outs in the union bureaucracies. The workers were beyond the control of legal actions and of their union “leadership.” They went out to demonstrate that they intended to win.

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The State’s response to the protests in Miami reveals the stark similarities between war, counter-terrorism, and the suppression of dissent at home. Congress slipped $8.5 million to security in Miami from a recent appropriation earmarked for the “war on terror” in Iraq, ostensibly to rebuild that shattered nation.

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“Your calendar June, 1968—The body has been there a long time...he has been dead a long time...those of you who want to understand, will understand. —Tom Sincavitch

It couldn’t happen in Detroit!

That was the proud proclamation of our city’s leaders all summer long until that fateful morning of July 23. Detroit had supposedly been the nation’s leader among big cities in making civil rights progress.

That is, Detroit was tops in fake tokenism and self-deception. There was bragging that so many Black people here were in positions of prominence and relative wealth. But, obviously, these successful people only represented an infinitesimally small portion of the Black community—and even many of these middle-class oriented people, who still feel the brutal whip of discrimination, were quietly hoping for the summer revolt which finally exploded on one of the first hot Saturday nights in a relatively cool summer.

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One irony of the deep ecology discussion is that almost at the same time that some deep ecologists were taking an explicit position for the abolition of agriculture as the prime cause of the widening spiral of civilization and ecological destruction, John Zerzan wrote an almost identical thesis in the pages of the Fifth Estate. (See “Agriculture: Essence of Civilization,” FE #329, Summer 1988.) For a response to Zerzan, see Bob Brubaker’s “Comments on Zerzan’s Critique of Agriculture” in FE #330, Winter 1988–89.)

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“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

— Eduardo Galeano

The following economy and community section deals at least as much with our visions for different and possibly better realities as it does with our critique of the current and devastating situations within capitalist economic relations. However, we can and should note that the statistics concerning global wealth and poverty are staggering. The elite classes experience unprecedented luxuries while the rest of the world struggles. The working class slips into disastrous debt and the under-class teeters toward catastrophic hunger, disease, and poverty.

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Andrew Pulley, one of the leaders of the Ft. Jackson GIs United Against the War in Vietnam, wound up his speaking tour in the Detroit area Sept. 25, by addressing the first meeting of the Third World Vietnam Solidarity Committee.

GIs United was initiated at Ft. Jackson by Pulley and other black and Puerto Rican GIs who held meetings to discuss the war and the racism rampant inside the armed forces. The GI anti-war movement grew rapidly.

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The Court Theatre has announced the cancellation of its scheduled production of Marat / Sade due to its revival in New York.

As an alternate the Court will present the Detroit premiere of Joan Little-wood’s London hit, “Oh, What A Lovely War.” Subtitled “A Musical Entertainment” the play is often referred to as a music-hall show. Songs and dances of the World War I era are interwoven with actual stories and news events of the War.

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The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which organized the massive April 15 demonstrations in New York City and San Francisco, is now arranging for a mass mobilization to confront the warmakers in Washington, D.C. It will be on October 21, with supporting demonstrations around the world.

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SHOCK! HORROR! It’s the basis for most of the non-events that fill the pages of so many British newspapers. Used the most often to spice up the trivial affairs of a newlyweds’ honeymoon of horror (“Dad made off with my wife” confesses a distraught groom) or a mother’s feeling of hopelessness over her teenager’s actions (“Susan shocked me with staying out late”), this SHOCK! HORROR! syndrome of British journalism was recently unleashed when Cienfuegos Press released their latest publication: Towards A Citizens’ Militia: Anarchist Alternatives to NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

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a review of

Toxic Psychiatry by Peter R. Breggin. St. Martins Press. 1991. 464 pages. $18.

“The only known biochemical imbalances in the brains of nearly all psychiatric patients are those caused by the treatments.”

--Peter Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac

This book is as important and radical as R.D. Laing’s “The Politics Of Experience” or Thomas Szasz’s “The Myth of Mental Illness.” Breggin has been a long time campaigner for reform of the mental health system and in the early seventies he led a successful movement to end the horrific practice of Lobotomy in the US.

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Cultural theorist Raymond Williams has suggested that the technology for television was available years before it was utilized. It was held back because the conditions for it were not ripe yet.

Those conditions were urbanization (which masses an audience in one place), the regularization of employment, the homogenization of culture and the concurrent erosion of communities, the need for communication to customers of large concerns (such as department stores) and the need for insipid entertainment for drones whose jobs leave them physically unimpaired but mentally drained.

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Fifth Estate

Radical Publishing since 1965

Vol. 55, No. 2, #406, Spring 2020 — Follows our Winter 2020 issue.

The Fifth Estate is an anti-profit, anarchist project published by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades.

No ads. No copyright. Kopimi — reprint freely

www.FIFTHESTATE.org

The Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival (MIATF), the only theatre festival in the world dedicated to showcasing anarchist theatre, is currently seeking submissions to be staged during May and June 2014. Application deadline for the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival: January 31, 2014.

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On May 4, 1886, several hundred workers assembled in Chicago’s Haymarket Square to protest the shooting of their comrades on a picket line at the McCormick Reaper Works the day before. The violence happened in the context of a largely successful general strike in support of the eight-hour workday. Anarchist labor organizers and journalists played a key role in the strikes.

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a review of

Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, ed. Cindy Milstein. 37 essays, 412 pp. with 32-page color insert. AK Press, 2017

Rebellious Mourning is an ambitious edited volume by Cindy Milstein with enormous depth and breadth of highly relevant and timely cross-cultural case studies. This work by Milstein (sole author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, AK Press) represents her third edited book project.

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—Pvt. Louis Osczepinski, one of 27 soldiers being tried for mutiny at the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco, attempted to commit suicide on Feb. 14. He slashed his arms four times.

Osczepinski, along with Pvt. Lawrence Reidel, was scheduled to hear the verdict in his case some time during the week of Feb. 17 through 24. On Feb. 13, Pvt. Henry Sood, the first of the Presidio 27 to be tried, was convicted and sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

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During the Cold War period, there was a sector of anarchists/left-libertarians in the West who took special interest in developments and repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries.

Their interest was in part due to the ultra-closed nature of Soviet Bloc societies and the lack of information about activism within them that wasn’t Western oriented.

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The federal government’s continuing campaign to prosecute eco-saboteurs as terrorists has not stopped it from also trying to imprison other radicals on outlandish charges. In particular, it continues to expand its powers to criminalize what has in the past been legal activism.

A recent target is the anarchist New York City household Tortuga, a uniquely long-standing anarchist residence in the city, and definitely the only one in Jackson Heights, Queens, proudly flying a red-and-black flag in front!

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“Come and hear the views of two thinkers who arguably have defined the two polar opposite views on the effects of technology” blared the invitation to a November 15 debate between Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan and Anarcho-Primitivist John Zerzan at California’s Stanford University.

Grimacing at the clash-of-the-titans-esque rhetoric that epitomized the debaters, I nonetheless made my way eagerly to the college, just south of San Francisco, to watch the spectacle unfold.

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An anarchist group and bookstore, Impossible Books (Suite 202, 3435 N. Sheffield Chicago, IL 60657) has been formed by a group of friends in the Chicago area. Although their resources are limited and funds low, they have initiated a newsletter and a small but growing booklist, and have put on several public forums and engaged in activities around the city. They also decided to take part as a group in the Chicago peace march on April 10 (attended by some 20,000 people) and distributed a leaflet entitled “Protest Without Illusions,” which is worth quoting here:

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Both this newspaper in our last issue and Bad Attitude, No. 3 (POB 11589, Detroit Ml 48211) failed to give credit for the poem/ritual, “The Appeal of Anarchy.” It was taken from the compelling pamphlet by John Moore, Anarchy & Ecstasy: Visions of Halcyon Day.

The author states that the text “has been adapted from renderings of ‘The Charge of the Goddess’ by Starhawk and Charles G. Leland...Some maintain that it contains sentiments which have been uninterruptedly passed down the ages from prehistoric times, whilst others aver that it derives wholly from the fertile imagination of Leland, who first published it in 1899.”

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Note: This is a shortened version of an essay that can be found in several locations on the Internet. Some material is likely dated at this point, given the rapidly changing situation in Venezuela. Since the essay primarily has value as a first-hand account, and since we have not returned to Venezuela since it was written, we have not attempted to update this version in any way.

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Plymouth City Attorney Charles Lowe told a Detroit News reporter recently that “the Plymouth City Commission felt that the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office will no longer recommend warrants for violations of the state obscenity law and thus it has become necessary for us to write our own law.”

This comes on the heels of a well financed campaign by the local chapter of the VFW to “rub out smut” in Plymouth. They collected, according to a spokesman, more than 3000 signatures on petitions in support for new anti-obscenity legislation in the City of Plymouth.

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The local gestapo ended their celebration of National Police Week Sunday, May 21, by staging a tiny raid on the offices of the FIFTH ESTATE’S brother newspaper, THE SUN, at 4863 John Lodge, and took SUN editor Gary Grimshaw into temporary custody for “exhibiting an obscene drawing.” Grimshaw is also Art Editor of the FIFTH ESTATE.

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What first greeted me

upon entering that room

were the sad, quiet faces

as we all sat around the table.

.

Thinking of her,

wondering why

and what happened

and some of it came out later.

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But what was also on my thoughts

was finding out how management

had known about it all day long

as they readily pursued their disturbing calculation

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The absolute removal of the blight of organized religion from the face of the planet. This will necessitate the immediate removal from every church, synagogue, mosque, temple, ashram, cathedral, etc. of any and every self-styled “representative of God on earth” including nuns, priests, ministers, rabbis, etc. and their (if necessary) forced dispossession of all the enormous wealth and power they have accumulated in centuries of domination and exploitation. Let the wealth, and the buildings, be used for the creation of playgrounds, abortion clinics, or whatever the people whose labor went to create them see fit.

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NEW DELHI—Twenty-one years after his murder this month Mahatma Gandhi is still India’s number one newsmaker. There is hardly an issue of any of India’s scores of English-language magazines that doesn’t carry some word of him—a book review, a reminiscence, an inspirational quotation on its editorial page. And hardly a day goes by without some politician or would-be politician invoking his memory or reaffirming his beliefs—all duly reported in the daily newspapers. Currently, the following running stories pop up with dependable frequency:

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In a near spontaneous action, People Concerned About Urban Renewal (PCAUR) led a demonstration against a local slumlord last Thursday.

The group, composed of more than twenty local residents, street kids and students converged on an apartment building complex on the near west side to confront the caretaker of the building concerning the heat and water conditions there which had become intolerable. The buildings are located on Hancock near Avery.

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This time it’s Bobby Seale.

With Eldridge in exile, and Huey in jail, the punk-ass power-structure has turned its racist wrath on the Black Panther Party Chairman. Seale’s troubles are simply the latest government attempt to crush the Panthers by ripping off their leaders and vamping on their headquarters.

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a review of

The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories by Lorraine Schein. Autonomedia, 2022

Lorraine Schein, a friend of long-standing, has just published her latest book, The Lady Anarchist Café: Poems and Stories.

This writer has toiled for years within stultifying bureaucratic confines of the workaday world while maintaining sharp anarchist perspectives in her creative endeavors.

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Commemorative march on the tenth anniversary of Bolivia’s Water War, Cochabamba, April, 2010.
--photo Mona Caron

In spring 2000, the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia rose up against the privatization of their water, forcing out the US based corporation, Bechtel, and Bolivia’s neo-liberal government to back down. The rebellion opened up new political space in Bolivia, catalyzing the most powerful, radical, visionary mass movements and mobilizations on the planet. My friend and collaborator, Mona Caron, a public muralist from San Francisco, and I spent six weeks in Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, during March and April co-creating art and visuals with local communities and organizations. We came at the invitation of the organizing committee for the International Feria del Agua (Water Fair) commemorating the ten year anniversary of what has come to be known as the Water War. We also participated with 30,000 others in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, organized by the Bolivian government of President Evo Morales.

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They’re throwing a peace march April 15. Why come to another demonstration? Because it helps pressure Nixon to bring the troops home. Bringing the troops home will do two things: it will save a lot of American and Vietnamese lives and it will mean the success of the Vietnamese struggle for national self-determination.

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Why would someone continue to read and publish xeroxed zines two decades into the 21^st century? Didn’t the technocracy announce that this variety of underground publishing was superseded by the hyper-mediated cybernetic dream web?

Yet people still cut up words and images and glue them on paper. They stand in front of xerox machines to copy them, and then staple the pages together.

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Poetry has been a part of the Fifth Estate since its origins, so it is with great pleasure that we print these sent to us by The Alternative Press on the occasion of our 20^th anniversary. The Alternative Press, Grindstone City, MI 48467, does hand-printed broadsides, postcards, bookmarks, etc. from the pressroom of Ann & Ken Mikolowski and comes in three packets a year for $15.

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You don’t have to put on the red light

Those days are over

You don’t have to sell your body to the night

-- “Roxanne” (The Police)

Sting’s lyrics neatly frame how prostitution is often popularly conceived of, no less by anarchist abolitionists than by moralists and those in between.

Living and teaching in Rio de Janeiro for the last 15 years while doing anthropological research about female heterosexual prostitution has demonstrated to me what a deeply flawed description this is of sex work.

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Pay attention.

Read this article carefully and then commit it to memory. It will save your enormous trouble for the rest of your life. Your authors—two attorneys -are about to advise you on how to deal with THEM: the fuzz. Never again will you run the risk of a knee in your left ball, unless it is your own.

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It has been proposed that the present era of life on earth should be called the Anthropocene to reflect the human domination of our planet.

However, an elegant, scientific-sounding term like anthropocene seems like a cop-out, a handy euphemism to hide exactly what kind of domination this is and what it’s doing to the planet.

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The virtual vacuum that has been left in the wake of SDS’s floundering may be filled by the New Youth International Party. With repression growing and the need for a national organization crucial, YIP looks promising as a junction for the vast but disparate political energy the movement is developing.

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“Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) foment disruption on campuses around the country, and contribute nothing to Wayne State University.”

The pontificating prose belongs to J.J. Scott, WTAK (1090-AM) announcer. His apparent vendetta has one main objective: to rid Wayne’s campus of SDS by September.

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[Web archive note: “Ripes” as it appears in the original print edition]

She stands five feet seven inches in her Courreges boots. Her face is as smooth and unreacting as a billiard ball. She wears miniskirts four inches above her knobby knees, and hip-huggers which hug skinny, unrelenting hips. Her favorite people in the whole wide world are Bobby Dylan, the Beatles, and Mick Jagger. She gets high on anything that’s handy—bennies, methadrine, grass, acid. She is known as a Groupie. Want to ball her?

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a review of

Vietnam Will Win by Wilfred Burchett (New York: Guardian Books, 1968)

Everyone should read Vietnam Will Win—including those who have already read Burchett’s earlier books, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (1965) and Vietnam North (1966).

These two works, especially the first, are important as the first successful attempt to introduce the Vietnamese struggle to Americans in human terms. Burchett’s unpretentious accounts of what he saw in NLF territory in late 1964, and his interviews with the people who live and fight there, continue to be more meaningful than all the abstract legal, political and moral arguments put forth by the U.S. left.

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