The FE Bookstore is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate and can be found at 4403 Second Ave. Detroit—telephone (313) 831-6800. The hours that we’re open vary quite a bit, so it’s always best that you give us a ring before coming down.
How to Order by Mail:
1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and price of each;
2) add 10% for mailing—not less than $.59 (Which is the minimum fee for Book Rate postage;
3) Total;
4) Write all checks and Money Orders to The Fifth Estate and mail to FE Books, 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201
FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION by Jerry Mander
Blasts television as unreformable due to the inherently totalitarian nature of the technology, the dangers to personal health and sanity and the way in which it mediates and trivializes human experience. Television “walls up” awareness, expropriates knowledge, causes insanity, creates false needs’, dims the mind, causes hyperactivity, suppresses the imagination, destroys subtlety, thingifies the human, destroys the sense of place and creates a false sense of time, is addictive and hypnotic. The book’s discussion of television also has obvious implications for modern industrial technology as a whole. “Television freewayizes, suburbanizes, and commoditizes human beings, who are then easier to control. Meanwhile, those who control television consolidate their power…Television aids the creation of societal conditions which produce autocracy; it also creates the appropriate mental patterns for it and simultaneously dulls all awareness that this is happening.” A member of the FE staff said recently, “If somebody walked into the FE office off the street and asked what to read, I’d suggest two books, 1984 and this one.”
Morrow 371 pages $4.95
GUATEMALA! by Green Revolution
The folks at Green Revolution should be applauded for compiling this material. It is a compendium of horror—massacres, torture, kidnappings, a continual bloodbath to maintain a small group of powerful, wealthy interests in command of a country in which 75% of the people are poor subsistence farmers who are forced to work for slave wages on large coffee, cotton and sugar plantations; in which 389 families own 75% of all fertile lands while the per capita income of the Mayan Indian campesinos—more than 60% of the population—is $30 annually. “Even the most conservative pro-government newspaper has printed reports of 3,617 deaths in the first ten months of 1980″—a figure which does not include mass atrocities, which are usually left unreported. “Poverty continues in Guatemala mostly because it serves the interests of those in power—transnational corporations and their allies in Guatemala’s elite.” The fury of the death squads (which operate out of the National Palace Annex), and the enormity of the problem tend to mute what criticisms we have about the nature of generally liberal-humanist forms of opposition which are posed in the booklet. Its problems do not take away from the overall impact of the publication—this information must be disseminated as widely as possible.
Green Revolution 72 pp. $1.50
CHINESE SHADOWS by Simon Leys
The observations of Leys, based on his personal experiences in China as well as his broad understanding of its cultural heritage, are a chilling demystification of the shadow play which obscures the true nature of events in that country. He writes, “We must acknowledge the considerable material improvements in many areas of Chinese life since 1948, but at the same time it is a fantastic imposture to present the regime as socialist and revolutionary when in fact it is essentially totalitarian and feudal-bureaucratic.” This is one of the very best books anywhere on contemporary China.
Viking hardcover, 220 pp. $4.50
ANARCHIST REVIEW 5
Includes Cienfuegos Press News, Some Thoughts on Organization, Anarchists in the Mexican Revolution, Occult Authoritarians, Anarchists in Fiction, and more. More than 120 pages of articles, reviews, photos, cartoons.
Cienfuegos Press $5.50
THE CHRISTIE FILE by Stuart Christie
Against the backdrop of the ’60s and ’70s, Stuart Christie’s autobiography mirrors the turbulent period and includes his account of his imprisonment for his plot to assassinate Franco, his involvement with the Angry Brigade, and a broad sketch of the English anarchist movement. Refused by every major British publisher, it has been called “the most important anarchist memoir since World War II.”
Partisan Press/Cienfuegos Press 370 pp. $9.95
Notice: We will include with all book orders free upon request The Origins of the Anarchist Movement in China by “Internationalist” with a foreword by Stuart Christie.
JUST ARRIVED
ORIGIN AND FUNCTION OF THE PARTY FORM: ESSAYS by Jacques Camatte and Gianni Collu
Contains the following essays: “Origin: and Function of the Party Form,” “The Democratic Mystification,” “Postface:January 1974—From the Party Community to the Human Community,” and “Transition.”
Charlatan Stew 42 pp. $1.25
Also by Camatte and Collu…
THE WANDERING OF HUMANITY by Jacques Camatte
Shatters the old commonplaces: “Capital becomes autonomous by domesticating the human being. After analyzing—dissecting—fragmenting the human being, Capital reconstructs the human being as a function of its process…” “Communism is not a new mode of production; it is the affirmation of a new community. It is a question of being, of life, if only because there is a fundamental displacement: from generated activity to the living being who produced it. Until now men and women have been alienated by this production. They will not gain mastery over production, but will create new relations among themselves which will determine an entirely different activity.
Communism puts an end to castes, classes and the division of labor…It is not domination of nature but reconciliation, and thus regeneration of nature: human beings no longer treat nature simply as an object for their development, as a useful thing, but as a subject (not in the philosophic sense) not separate from them if only because nature is in them…” “Revolution does not emerge from one or another part of our being—from body, space or time. Our revolution as a project to reestablish community was necessary from the moment when ancient communities were destroyed…”
Black & Red 64 pp. $1.00
ON ORGANIZATION by Camatte and Collu
Argues that the establishment of capital within material existence “and therefore within the social community” is accompanied by the disappearance of the traditional personal capitalist, the proletariat, and the theory of the proletariat. “This is only another way of saying that capital has succeeded in establishing its real domination. To accomplish this, capital had to absorb the movement which negates it, the proletariat, and establish a unity in which the proletariat is merely an object of capital. This unity can be destroyed only by a crisis, such as those described by Marx. It follows that all forms of working class political organization have disappeared. In their place, gangs confront one another in an obscene competition, veritable rackets rivaling each other in what they peddle but identical in their essence.”
Anonymous 40 pp. $.50
THE REPRODUCTION OF DAILY LIFE by Fredy Perlman
Discusses the mechanism by which human beings continue to reproduce the conditions of our own immiseration. “Men who were much but had little now have much but are little.”
Black & Red 24 pp. $.25
THE IRRATIONAL IN POLITICS by Maurice Brinton
An excellent introductory treatment of the Reichian critique of authoritarian sexual morality as a central component in the system of domination today. Discusses Reich’s discovery that the “subjective factor” in history was nothing more than “the psychic structure of the masses.” Also contains an article on sexual repression and authoritarian backlash in the years following the Russian Revolution.
Black & Red 95 pp. $1.00
THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM by Wilhelm Reich
An extremely useful work for understanding the so-called “moral majority,” this classic study analyzes the social function of political reaction and fascism and the crucial role played in it by the authoritarian family, repressive sexual puritanism and religion. “Mystical contagion is the most important psychological precondition for the assimilation of fascist ideology by the masses.”
Touchstone 400 pp. $3.95
UNIONS AGAINST REVOLUTION by G. Munis and J. Zerzan
Contains articles on unionism, the title article by the left communist theoretician Grandizio Munis, and John Zerzan’s “Organized Labor Versus ‘The Revolt Against Work.'” “To attribute a useful function to unions in the revolutionary process is as unthinkable as seeing revolutionary potential in the stock market…”—from the text by Munis.
Black & Red 62 pp. $1.00
WORKER-STUDENT ACTION COMMITTEES: FRANCE 1968 by R. Gregoire and F. Perlman
A critique of the French uprisings of 1968 by two participants in the events. “Some of us did have perspectives. But we were unable to define actions which led from where we were to where we wanted to get…There was an expectation (or a hope) that someone else, somewhere else, would bring these things about…”
Black & Red 96 pp. $1.00
INDUSTRIALISM & DOMESTICATION by Paula & John Zerzan
Shows the bitter resistance met by early capitalism and the establishment of the factory system and subsequent degradation of labor inherent to “socialist” as well as capitalist modernization. “The progress of ‘progress’ is left with few partisans, and its enemies with few illusions as to what is worth preserving.”
Black Eye Press 18 pp. $.85
ANARCHIST REVIEW 2
64 pages of articles and reviews, including History of the Anarchist Movement in Poland, B. Traven: Master of the Revolutionary Novel, Whatever Happened to the Universe?, and articles on Argentina, Spain, the U.K., and more.
Cienfuegos Press $2.00
THE KRONSTADT UPRISING OF 1921 by Lynne Thorndycraft
An introduction to the revolt of the Russian sailors and workers of Kronstadt and Petrograd against the Bolshevik government in 1921.
Left Bank Books 21 pp. $.50
TOWARDS A CITIZENS’ MILITIA: ANARCHIST ALTERNATIVES TO NATO & THE WARSAW PACT by IRSM/1st of May Group
In his review of this pamphlet in the last issue of the Fifth Estate, Larry Talbert pointed out the positive informational elements of the book while at the same time noting the innate problems of maintaining a libertarian perspective within the terms of clandestine and military activity. Caused a lot of controversy around these parts, but some of the information may prove of use later in the game.
Cienfuegos Press $3.25
LOVE & RAGE: ENTRIES IN A PRISON DIARY by Carl Harp
The title of the book is appropriate—Carl oscillates throughout it between feelings of inspiration and solidarity on the one hand, and near despair and outrage on the other. Not surprising: you come away from this slim volume wondering how anyone could maintain any spirit at all in the face of such absolute degradation and injustice, let alone reflect upon it and write it down. But a strong-willed, independent sense of self comes through—from the biographical entries you learn that Carl has always been in and out of “trouble”—the good citizen’s way, perhaps, of saying that he was a natural rebel from the start. And like many such individuals he ended up on the prison mill, a revolving door of victimization and brutality which maintains a corrupt and illegitimate legal system and which is reinforced by the “objective” pseudo-scientific sociology which justifies it. Or perhaps it is not really a revolving door, but a steady, unrelenting, spiraling descent into Hell.
There is an understandable tendency in all prisoners, Carl included, to see the prisons of the American Gulag as a revolutionary front line, which assumes in a sense that the most intense forms of oppression represent a decisive center for Capital; but Capital has no center and there is no front line. Capital is a form of Hell, and the prisons lie down below in its very depths. They are a form of “living death,” as Carl writes. We are all somewhere along that spectrum, nevertheless, and if we listen carefully on the first few tiers, we can hear the cries of agony from below. We cannot allow ourselves to forget them, and we must do something to help them, for as he writes, “To do nothing is to allow everything.” They are, after all, our otherness, the image in the mirror. We are, all of us, a physical and spiritual totality, which has been cleft in two, one fragment (for the moment at least) on the Outside, deriving its outrage and its determination from its double on the Inside; and the other, locked away from life on the Inside, deriving its hope and its sense of proportion within that inferno from the support it receives from its double on the Outside. The prisoners are saying this when they tell us, we’re in here for you, you are out there for us.
Carl Harp, whose minimum is 95 years to life is still able to write with hope about the future, still able to stand up to injustice, still able to maintain his personal and political dignity. We, on the outside, who have relative freedom of movement, who can walk outside and look up at the sky if we like, can learn from his spirit. But we must make it a priority to get him out of there. We must never forget that these people are not the material of a political issue, but human beings. Carl wrote in a recent letter, “When I’m killed or seriously hurt they will make me their hero, their martyr, and I don’t want to be a hero, a martyr—I want to win, to live, for myself and others like me, for my friends and loved ones. The lack of support is license to murder in this case, and I request that all of you do whatever you can to the best of your ability to make waves, to save me…” We must make waves. None of us is free as long as some of us are behind bars. We cannot even dream of reestablishing genuine human community without the utter abolition of the prison system. It makes prisoners of us all. MAKE WAVES! RELEASE CARL HARP! DEMOLISH THE PRISONS! —P. Solis
Available from the FE Bookstore. All proceeds from sales on this book will go to the Carl Harp Defense Fund. Readers can also donate directly to the fund by writing to Mrs. Susan Harp, 15827 9th Ave. S.W., Seattle, Washington 98166, or HAPOTOC International, P.O. Box 10638, Amsterdam, Holland. The HAPOTOC collective has just published the January/February 1981 issue of its newsletter. They do excellent work and are continually in need of support and funds. Letters of support can also be sent to Carl Harp at P.O. Box C-7100, Tamal CA 94964.)
Pulp Press, 1981, 73 pp., $3.95.
RONALD RAYGUN POSTER:
See Bonzo Bilhelm in his most convincing role, as a nazi, in America’s Desperate Journey, presented by the GOP, produced by Corporate America, and directed by the Moral Majority. Includes the famous quote from the People’s Park struggles of 1969, “Let’s have a bloodbath and get it over with.” The well-known presidential “zero factor” should make this a collector’s item!
(21 x 16.5 inches) $2.50
BLACK CAT/WOODEN SHOE SABOTAGE BUTTONS FROM LEFT BANK PUBLISHING
Friends in Seattle recently sent us an interesting button which they have produced showing a black cat on a wooden shoe against a background of red, a design revived from an old IWW pamphlet on sabotage. The button sells for $.75 plus $.25 postage. Bulk orders (minimum 15) $.40 each. All proceeds go towards the financing of various publications of the Left Bank Publishing project. All orders and checks to: Left Bank Publishing, Box B, 92 Pike St., Seattle WA 98101.