Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit, in the same space as the Fifth Estate Newspaper. Hours vary, so please call before coming by.
HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL
1) List the title of the book, quantity, and the price of each;
2) add 10% for mailing costs—not less than $1.05 U.S. or $1.60 foreign (minimum for 4th class book rate postage);
3) total;
4) write check or money order to: Fifth Estate;
5) mail to: Fifth Estate, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201 USA.
Phone 313/831-6800 for hours and more information.
FUTURE PRIMITIVE by John Zerzan
Even (or especially) for those who disagree with him, Zerzan’s essays are well worth reading as much for the questions they raise as for the (hyper) critical perspective of civilization he promotes. Included are his recent positions on primitivism, alienation and postmodernism, many of which first appeared in Anarchy magazine. Since many of these ideas are ones we have debated heatedly with him over the years, his swats at the Fifth Estate are a tolerable diversion.
Autonomedia/Anarchy 185 pp., $7
DRUNKEN BOAT: ART, REBELLION, ANARCHY editor Max Blechman
From the sagging dock of modernity, Drunken Boat sets out to sea. Leaving the shores of liberalism and Marxism, it aims to reveal and revitalize unexpected regions of anarchist culture: Kandinsky’s art of the future, John Cage’s zen-soundscape, B. Traven’s pseudonymous itineraries, and, beatitudes of Kali-ma.
—from introduction Autonomedia/Left Bank Books 288 pp., $12
THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE by Raoul Vaneigem
This is a revised version of the 1983 translation, reviewed and approved by the author. and includes Vaneigem’s 1991 preface to the first French paperback edition. Written in 1963-65 and first published in France in 1967, Vaneigem’s book complements Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle which appeared in the same year. As the main programmatic statements of the Situationist International, these two works played a large part in the gestation of the French May events of 1968.
Left Bank Books 216 pp., $16
LIVE WILD OR DIE! #5
An anti-authoritarian journal of industrial collapse, technological demise, and truly wild alternatives. A frenzy of desire for the wild, with articles like “Why we want you to smash your computer (and your television)” and announces “No computers used in the production of this zine.” Embarrassingly, it quotes from FE anti-computer articles, though we have now succumbed. Evidence that Jerry GarCIA of the Grateful Dead is a government agent along with general enviro-craziness. Highly recommended.
LWOD 28 pp., $2
SPINOZA: PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY By Gilles Deleuze
Recent attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this new reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. The book, which presents Spinoza’s main ideas, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical propositions and ontological propositions.
City Lights Books 130 pp., $11
THE STORY OF TATIANA by Jacques Baynac
In 1906, at a Swiss luxury hotel, Tatiana Leontiev, a young aristocratic intellectual and revolutionary, assassinated a French businessman in the mistaken belief he was the Tsar’s Interior Minister. While tracing Tatiana’s life, the book evokes the repression, tragedy, intrigue, and commitment leading up to the overthrow of Tsarism.
Black & Red 225 pp., $6
GONE TO CROATAN: ORIGINS OF NORTH AMERICAN DROP-OUT CULTURE edited by Ron Sakolsky & James Koehnline
America was founded as a land of dropouts, and produced a crop of dissidents, visionaries, utopians, escaped slaves, white and black “Indians,” sailors and buccaneers, tax rebels, angry women, “tri-racial isolate” communities—all on the lam from Babylon. 25 essays tell a hidden history of this continent.
Autonomedia-USA 382 pp., $12
FIGHTING THE REVOLUTION #1: N. Makhno, B. Durruti and E. Zapata
The introduction to this pamphlet calls these three the “unsung heroes” of history and tells about their lives and battles. Men and women such as these have argued that the vast majority of the people of all nations, have no material interest in the wars and conflicts of their masters. They urged the people of Ukraine, Spain and Mexico respectively to unite against their respective rulers and property owners, strip them of their power and wealth, and make the means of life the common heritage of all, regardless of race, nationality or sex.
Freedom Pamphlets 40 pp., $3.00
FIGHTING THE REVOLUTION #2: P. Kropotkin, Louise Michel and the Paris Commune
Contains “The Defense of Louise Michel” which she presented at her trial following the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. Michel was a brave member of this famous uprising who surrendered to the police to secure the release of her mother who had been taken hostage. Also included are essays and articles by Peter Kropotkin on the Paris Commune and other aspects of anarchism and revolution.
Freedom Press 48 pp., $3.00
T.A.Z: THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE, ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM, POETIC TERRORISM, by Hakim Bey
This collection of beatific verse, post-situationist pronouncements, anarchist animadversions, and postmodern speculations register various figures of Utopia (the hermetic margins of the East, romantic experimental communities of Europe and early America, and the drop-out cultures of the recent past and present) that have, as we approach the millennium, become rootless and worldly.
Autonomedia 141 pp., $7
PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn
“Engaging, informative, passionate and extremely well-written; the best critical survey of American history available.”—FE Review Highly recommended as a basic radical history text.
Harper and Row 614 pp., $13
MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST by Peter Kropotkin
Kropotkin’s best known book and one of the great works of revolutionary literature. In it he brings alive the ferment of ideas and movements in late 19th century Europe. If one wishes to know what it was like to be a revolutionary when it meant being hounded, exiled, Siberia, imprisonment or death, here is the book that tells it first-hand.
Dover Publication 557 pp., $12
FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION by Jerry Mander
Television doesn’t just have “bad” content, but changes how we perceive the world. Experience is no longer direct, but mediated by T.V. through centralized and unified images. The result is a loss of the sensuous world and a passive, easily manipulated population.
Quill 371 pp., $9
SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE by Guy Debord
The late author’s 221 paragraph book expands and revolutionizes critical theory. It has influenced radicals since the 1968 French uprisings. Its critique of modern society as functioning through the medium of the spectacle, and its criticism of leftism and militantism are as powerful and uncompromising as when it was written in 1967.
Black & Red 221 paragraphs $3
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY edited by Ken Knabb
Drawn from the journal Internationale Situationniste and other shorter publications and documents, this anthology is a useful selection of situationist writings while at the same time illustrating the SI’s origins and development.
Left Bank Books 406 pp., $15
LIVING MY LIFE by Emma Goldman
The turbulent autobiography of a woman at the center of the century’s major events. Although her life intersected with the famous figures of the era, it is the day-to-day struggles for anarchy which make this account come alive. This is the original two-volume edition first published in 1931.
Dover 993 pp. (2 volumes) $18
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN by Fredy Perlman
This is a compendium of the most important of Fredy Perlman’s shorter writings which chart an intellectual exploration from the student (and other) revolutions of 1968 in France and Italy, to the ecological concerns of today. His insights into industrialism, the nation-state and imperialism, racism and genocide, the psychology of power and dependency, are some of the most important in recent libertarian thought.
Phoenix Press 127 pp. $9
ECO-DEFENSE: A FIELD GUIDE TO MONKEY WRENCHING edited by Dave Foremen and Bill Haywood
This new, revised and enlarged third edition contains everything the wilderness defender needs to know about how to disable, dismantle, and destroy the machinery, buildings and vehicles, etc. of those who are raping the earth for profit. Sabotage techniques are richly detailed with diagrams, first hand accounts and “field notes” with an enlarged section on security.
Ned Ludd Books 311 pp., $20
SABOTAGE IN THE AMERICAN WORKPLACE: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief & Revenge edited by Martin Sprouse
Safe-guarded by anonymity, contributors talk candidly about using sabotage as a means of surviving work. Bank tellers, machinists, paramedics, flight attendants and others describe how they creatively strike back at monotony, low pay, company policies, poor working conditions and harassment.
Pressure Drop Press 175 pp., $12
FREE WOMEN OF SPAIN: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women by Martha Ackelsberg
Ackelsberg traces the efforts by Mujeres Libres (Free Women) to create an independent organization of and for working class women that would empower them to take their places in the revolution and new society which was being created in the Spanish Revolution of the late 1930s. Anarchist analysis of domination and subordination and the centrality of notions of community developed in that era can be important resources for contemporary radicals.
Indiana U. Press 256 pp., $15
HOW DEEP IS DEEP ECOLOGY? with “Women’s Freedom: Key to the Population Problem” by George Bradford
“How Deep…” is the now out-of-print 1987 FE essay that began the long exchange on what constitutes radical environmentalism. Its criticism of Earth First! and the fundamentals of deep ecology centers on the failure of nerve to understand the role of capital and the state in creating the ecological crisis. “Women’s Freedom” discusses the role of reproductive freedom as being a key to both the liberation of women and our reconciliation with nature.
Times Change Press 86 PP., $5.50
THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION: 1789-1793 VOL. 1 & 2 by Peter Kropotkin
Kropotkin ties his interpretation of the revolution to the continuous stream of popular action which began long before the revolution itself. He also focuses on the clash between the Jacobins and their opponents, the Hebertists, Enrages, and Anarchists. In this struggle between the authoritarian Jacobins and their anti-authoritarian opponents, Kropotkin draws out the origins of Marxism and Leninism within the Jacobins. Although the French Revolution was a popular mass event, it was directed and disciplined by a minority of professional revolutionaries. Those who continue to exalt the organization of a post-revolutionary State fail to see the interests followed in France, and elsewhere following a so-called “revolutionary seizure of power,” are those of the bourgeoisie.
Elephant Editions 2 vol. 602 pp., $15
BAYBYFISH…Lost Its Momma #6
The last (?) in a wild series of a uniquely Detroit total assault on the culture and the senses.
Babyfish Pub. 48 pp., $3