FE Bookstore

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Fifth Estate # 317, Summer 1984

The FE BOOKSERVICE is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate Newspaper, both of which are at 5928 Second, Detroit, MI 48202. Telephone (313) 831-6800. The hours we are open vary considerably, so it’s always best to give us a call before coming down.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and the price of each;

2) add 10% for mailing—not less than $.63 U.S. or $.83 foreign (which is the minimum charge for 4th Class book rate postage);

3) total;

4) write all checks or money orders to: The Fifth Estate. Mail to: The Fifth Estate, 5928 Second, Detroit, MI 48202.

BILLY! TURN DOWN THAT TV! by M. Kasper

Critique of television utilizing its own mode—fragmented, two-dimensional, partial. Rather than narrating, the volume gives the impression of viewing. Spiral bound and imaginatively illustrated. See M. Kasper’s other work in past issues of the Fifth Estate and on page 3 of this edition.

Diana’s Monthly Press 40 pp. $3.50 (reduced)

THE BOOK OF PLEASURES by Raoul Vaneigem

“The long dark night of trade is all the illumination our human history has known. It will lift as life dawns…Survival, going cheap these days in what is left of the exchange market, is the everyday production of misery,-a totalitarian industry. It too is in what you call crisis, in fact the death spasm of this whole civilization.”

Pending Press 105 pp. $7.50

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE by Ratgeb (Raoul Vaneigem)

“Haven’t you ever, just once, felt like turning up late for work or felt like slipping away from work early? Haven’t you ever, just once, felt the desire never to work again…Haven’t you ever deliberately destroyed products still on the production line or already in storage? Haven’t You ever had the disagreeable ion that, aside from a few odd moments, you do not really belong to yourself and are becoming alienated from your real self?”

Bratach Dubh, 45 pp. $2.50

SIMULATIONS by Jean Baudrillard

“The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, But that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal…which is entirely in simulation.”

Semiotext(e), 159 pp. $3.95

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES by Jean Baudrillard

“The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy referent, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses: A statistical crystal ball, the masses are ‘swirling with currents and flows,’ in the image of matter and the natural elements. So at least they are represented to us.” Contains four essays: “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities,” “…Or, The End of the Social,” “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” and “Our Theatre of Cruelty.”

Semiotext(e), 123 pp. $3.95

THE MIRROR OF PRODUCTION by Jean Baudrillard

Examines the lessons of Marxism which has created a productivist model and a fetishism of labor. Asserts that Marxism reflects “all of Western metaphysics” and that it remains within the restrictive context of political economy whence it was born.

Telos Press, 167 pp. $4.50

FOR A CRITIQUE OF THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SIGN by Jean Baudrillard

Attempts an analysis of the sign form in the same way that Marx’s critique of political economy sought an analysis of the commodity form: as the commodity is at the same time both exchange value and use value, the sign is both signifier and signified.

Telos Press, 214 pp. $5.50

BULLDOZER NUMBER 7/Spring 1984

Despite police attacks, this project continues operating. This issue contains an update on the situation that the BULLDOZER collective faces with police harassment and persecution over the last year, info on the Vancouver 5 (a and interviews with them), poetry and letters and articles from prisoners.

PSC Publishers, 55 pp. $1.00

(Free to prisoners from the FE or directly from PSC Publishers, PO Box 5052 Stn. A, Toronto, Ontario M5W 1W4 Canada. We also have back issues free upon request.)

A 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.”—from the Fifth Estate review of the book. (See Fall 1982 FE)

Harper/Colophon Books, 614 pp. $8.50

FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION by Jerry Mander

“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.” Argues that television is not reformable, that its problems are inherent in technology itself and are so dangerous—to health and sanity, to autonomous and democratic forms of life, that it must be eliminated entirely.

Morrow, 371 pp. $6.95

PREFACE to the Fourth Italian Edition of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

“The society of the spectacle had begun everywhere in coercion, deceit and blood, but it promised a happy path. It believed itself to be loved. Now it no longer promises anything. It no longer says: ‘What appears is good, what is good appears.’ It simply says: ‘It is so.’ ”

Chronos, 24 pp. $1.50

SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE by Guy Debord

Newly reprinted by Black & Red, this major situationist work traces the process in modern societies whereby all that was once lived directly has now moved into a representation.

Black & Red, 221 Theses $2.00

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY Edited and translated by Ken Knabb

Contains over eighty texts—leaflets, articles, internal documents, film scripts, etc. With notes, bibliography and index.

Bureau of Public Secrets, 406 pp. $10.00

AGAINST HIS-STORY, AGAINST LEVIATHAN by Fredy Perlman

In a poetic style which leaves the terrain of history as it excoriates it, Against History traces the origins of the state and the destruction of myth-centered, communitarian free societies by authoritarian machines and economic social relations. Also chronicled are the varied forms of resistance to. Leviathan and flight from it.

Black & Red, 302 pp. $3.00

NO MIDDLE GROUND: Anti-authoritarian Perspectives on Latin America and the Caribbean No. 2, Fall 1983

Section on “Chile Ten Years Later,” a first hand critical account of Nicaragua by a recent visitor, an analysis of Brazil, and more.

Information Network on Latin America, $1.50

JOHN BROWN by Henry David Thoreau

Three classic Thoreau essays in defense of Capt. John Brown and his raid on Harper’s Ferry to arm a slave insurrection. In the introduction to the 1984 Montreal edition the publisher links the scorn Brown reaped even from anti-slavery forces at the time to the contemporary refusal of many peace activists to support the “terrorism” of groups like the Vancouver 5. Poses the question: what acts are permissible to fight evil in the world? Graphically stunning.

Anonymous, 36 pp. $1.00

TELOS: A Quarterly Journal of Radical Thought, Spring 1984

Features a special section on Antonio Gramsci On Language, plus articles on the German Greens, South Africa, purges in Albania and the politics of the religious revival. Also, numerous reviews plus notes and commentary including “The Latent Functions of Rock Music.”

Telos Press, 240 pp. $6.00

REICH: HOW TO USE by Jean-Pierre Voyer

“What is it that Reich clinically detects which he labels ‘character’? We maintain that it is value, as inhuman necessity and otherwise invisible, that is grasped by this approach. It is even, up till now, the only concrete way of approaching value as secret misery of individuality.”

Bureau of Public Secrets, 10 pp. FREE

A DAY MOURNFUL AND OVERCAST by “an uncontrollable” from the Iron Column

This moving and frequently unsettling text by an escaped convict who fought in the anarchist Iron Column during the Spanish Revolution, is an angry protest against the imminent militarization and hierarchicalization of the column in 1937. It was printed in Nosotros, the daily newspaper of the Iron Column in Valencia. This is the first complete English translation, and is a Spanish-English bilingual edition. “History will say that the Iron Column was perhaps the only column in Spain that had a clear vision of what our Revolution ought to be. It will also say that of all columns, ours offered the greatest resistance to militarization, and that there were times when, because of that resistance, it was completely abandoned to its fate…”

Anonymous, 52 pp. $1.00

TO THE HONORABLE MISS S… By B. Traven

Written under the name Ret Marut during the World War I years in Germany when Traven was editor of the anti-war paper Der Ziegelbrenner (The Brickburner). The fifteen stories foreshadow many of the libertarian and moral themes which would appear later in THE TREASURE OF the SIERRA MADRE, THE DEATH SHIP and THE WHITE ROSE.

Lawrence Hill & Co., 149 pp. $5.95

THE WHITE ROSE by B. Traven

In the clash between Mexican rural life and the power of American industrialism, Traven aptly illustrates what we have traded for the modern world. The book describes the discovery and exploitation of Mexico’s oil resources by the rapacious giants of the U.S. oil industry and the destruction of a Mexican Indian hacienda, La Rosa Blanca, which stood in their way.

Lawrence Hill & Co., 209 pp. Hardcover. Published at $8.95; now $5.95

ON TERRORISM & THE STATE: The Theory & Practice of Terrorism divulged for the first time, by Gianfranco Sanquinetti

An anti-terrorist text from a post-Situationist perspective. Concerns mostly Italy with attention to the Red Brigades and the assassination of Aldo Moro.

BM Chronos, 101 pp. $6.50

TELOS NUMBER 58 (Winter 1983-84)

A special issue on religion and politics with several articles and a symposium on religion.

Telos Press, 240 pp. $6.00

List of FE back issues available on request.

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