Throughout 2005, we will celebrate our anniversary by spreading the ideas of revolution that made us notorious to authority and noted by readers everywhere as a consistent, intelligent, and even humorous tool for change.
From the suburban Detroit home of a 17-year-old high school student in 1965, to a gritty, inner-city Cass Corridor basement with an ever-changing revolutionary collective to a remote Tennessee barn of the current communal and editorial core group, the Fifth Estate has remained what the FBI called a voice “supporting the cause of revolution everywhere.”
The ’60s Underground Press milieu that birthed the FE also boasted hundreds of publications collaborating in organizations like the Liberation News Service and Underground Press Syndicate. This amazing radical network managed weekly newspapers and a diverse distribution system decades before the Internet.
With the task of publishing an explicitly non-commercial and anti-authoritarian magazine comes the commitment of the writers, editors, and artists who contribute not for wages but as an expression of rebellion. We are part of the alternative media movement, countering dominant ideologies and the myth of objectivity, but we strive to do more through critical self-reflection and analysis.
When the anarchist movement revived itself for the Haymarket anniversary in 1986, FE was a primary forum for discussion and debate. A bridge between the ’60s cultural revolution and today’s global justice movement, the FE has both provoked and transcended the debates between warring activist factions. The distinctions between hippies and politicos then—or lifestylists and militants today—crumble when we insist on merging the social and personal or the political and cultural in a vision of total liberation.
Fifth Estate seeks to distinguish itself through our commitment to visionary, nondogmatic, and activist-oriented content.
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Our planned 40th anniversary double issue will only be possible with your support. After we pay for the issue you’re holding, we will begin our fundraising for 2005. Please do what you can to help by purchasing a subscription, making a donation, or ordering books from the Barn. Let us know if you would like to become a Fifth Estate sustainer.
Finally, you can make the next issue possible by joining our one-time-only advertising drive:
Fifth Estate Declassified Ads!
Help make the special edition possible; send us an announcement or greeting on the occasion of our 40th anniversary. $1 per word. Please send copy and checks to: Fifth Estate, P.O. Box 6, Liberty, TN 37095