FE Note: What follows are thoughts on the revolutionary upsurge which shook France 20 years ago. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the message is that revolt is possible in modern society. In ours today, it is not the cops which prevent revolt, …
FE Author: Fredy Perlman
Worker-Student Action Committees (excerpt)
by Fredy Perlman, Roger Gregoire
Fifth Estate # 329, Summer, 1988
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 319, Winter, 1985
Nationalism was proclaimed dead several times during the present century: —after the first world war, when the last empires of Europe, the Austrian and the Turkish, were broken up into self-determined nations, and no deprived nationalists remained, except the Zionists; …
On the Machine in the Garden
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 321, Indian Summer, 1985
See also: “The Machine against the Garden” (author’s introduction) in this issue, FE #321, Indian Summer, 1985. Your comments as well as the urgings of other friends stimulated me to read Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden. I …
To The New York Review of B
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 321, Indian Summer, 1985
See also: “The Machine against the Garden” (author’s introduction) in this issue, FE #321, Indian Summer, 1985. Web archive note: Numbers in the text are related to references at the end. They are not errors in numbering endnotes. While skimming …
The Machine against the Garden
by Fifth Estate Collective, Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 321, Indian Summer, 1985
Critiques of economic development, material progress, technology and industry are not a discovery of the Fifth Estate. Human beings resisted the incursions from the earliest days, and many of North America’s best-known 19th century writers, among them Melville, Hawthorn and …
Against Leviathan
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 311, Winter, 1983
This article, which began as a review of Frederick Turner’s inspiring work of intuitive history, Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, is now the introductory section of a book in progress treating similar and related questions—the origins of …
Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 310, Fall 1982
Escape from death in a gas chamber or a Pogrom, or incarceration in a concentration camp, may give a thoughtful and capable writer, Solzhenitsyn for example, profound insights into many of the central elements of contemporary existence, but such an …
Speaking to the Beast
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 365, Summer, 2004
Who, then, is the wrecker of the Biosphere? Turner points at the Western Spirit. This is the hero who pits himself against the Wilderness, who calls for a war of extermination by Spirit against Nature, Soul against Body, Technology against …
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 373, Fall 2006
Industrialized nations have procured their preliminary capital by expropriating, deporting, persecuting and segregating, if not always by exterminating, people designated as legitimate prey. Kinships were broken, environments were destroyed, cultural orientations and ways were extirpated.
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism (excerpt)
by Fredy Perlman
Fifth Estate # 368-369, Spring-Summer, 2005
Every oppressed population can become a nation, a photographic negative of the oppressor nation, a place where the former packer is the supermarket’s manager, where the former security guard is the chief of police. By applying the correct strategy, every …