Medieval Revolts against Church and State

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Fifth Estate # 274, July 1976

In a fairly recent booklet, I came across a very standard view of pre-modern class society. It was stated that the life of the individual was completely controlled, and based on something quite external to him. “The central mode of

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“Revolt Against Work” or the End of Leftism?

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Fifth Estate # 281, March, 1977

FE Note. The December 1976 Fifth Estate carried a critique by Charles Reeve (see “The Revolt Against Work or Fight for the Right to Be Lazy,” p. 9) of the contentions of John and Paula Zerzan that the crisis point

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Who Killed Ned Ludd?

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Fifth Estate # 271, April, 1976

The argument that the advent of capitalism brought a rise in the standard of living for workers has been refuted before, but is shown graphically in these two prints. Prior to the dominance of the capitalist economy and the establishment

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Examining Zerzan

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Fifth Estate # 368-369, Spring-Summer, 2005

Much of primitivist theorist John Zerzan’s early work appeared in the Fifth Estate. His Cassandra-like predictions of imminent collapse of modern society began in 1976 with his FE article, “The Decline and Fall of Everything”–a compendium of statistics of social

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The Decline and Fall of Everything

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Fifth Estate # 268, January, 1976

The landscape of capitalism is a global one, existing everywhere with only minor variations. But this universal reign of the paycheck and the price-tag is approaching a state of crisis, becoming noticeable to all but those whose idea of politics

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