back cover

From Fifth Estate # 416, Spring 2025
by Len Bracken

a review of War of Dreams: A Field Guide to DIY Psy-Ops by Jason Rodgers. PM Press[sic, actually Autonomedia, thanks anon], 2024

At the height of the zine movement in the 1990s, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands—what could be thought of as armies of people—would march off to their post office boxes every day to engage in an ongoing assault on mainstream culture using low-circulation publications as their weapons of choice.

For many of those who took part in this do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon, often creating their zines on photocopy machines, it was a life-changing experience. For those who came later, the zine movement should be seen as a precursor for the proliferation of views now expressed on the internet.

In War of Dreams, Jason Rodgers documents a nearly life-long dedication to grappling, mostly via zines, with radical and conspiracy subcultures. This wrangling has been in the form of the author’s reviews, letters and leaflets, as well as in surrealist collage art. These works are collected in this 336-page book, along with new essays by the self-described “conspiracy realist” specializing in “elite-power analysis” and “occult reasoning.”

The book includes numerous chapters related to zines: “Samizdat and Xerography: Why Zines Refuse to Die;” “Fighting Words: Zines and Conflictual Media; Zines Against Precarious Capitalism.” Rodgers continues to have high hopes for the impact of zines to “make change based on resonance, invisibly,” and to “make change at some future point, when least expected.”

Rodgers is a longstanding contributor to the zine movement who moved to Albany in 2009 to collaborate with Suzy “Crowbar” Poe, publisher of the zine, Popular Reality. He stopped publishing his zine, Psionic Plastic Joy, in 2015 while “suffering from a sense of hopelessness about the world,” but continues to create and distribute his exceptional xerox collages in the mail art network. At some point, he started to publish flyers that included “mean jokes” and “heavy polemics,” mostly targeting radicals in Albany, as well as critical theory and surrealist stream of consciousness literature.

These texts reflect Rodgers, an avowed anomaly, yet also the anomalies of an era stretching back to the 1990s—that is, the individuals, groups, books and music found in the margins of American culture during this period.

Some readers may recall Ivan Stang and the Church of the SubGenius, Factsheet Five, the mega-review zine that ran from 1982 to 1998, and Loompanics Unlimited, the now defunct publisher of controversial books, such as Ragnar Redbeard’s 1896 revolting Might Is Right, subject of a long review by Rodgers. Few will be aware of all the wild ideas and eccentric individuals under discussion in War of Dreams.

“I am interested in ideas that don’t fit…,” Rodgers states on the back cover. “It isn’t important to reach the masses, instead we want a growing lunatic fringe, schizoid anarchs who are uncontrollable and irresistible.”

It’s impossible to say to what degree, over the past three decades, the social space occupied by people in the margins has grown, encroaching on the mainstream.

One could certainly argue there is seemingly more acceptance and inclusion of the “lunatic fringe” in mainstream discourse. One should anticipate, as Rodgers does in an essay on X-Files and The Lone Gunmen spinoff, the objection that the fringe has been co-opted by the mainstream. This begs the question as to which side is actually growing, the fringe or the mainstream.

Unfortunately, these trends seem to have been accompanied by an increase in what is more conventionally thought of as people on the margins of society—those who are impoverished, ill, addicted or otherwise destitute. One can understand how those suffering from deprivation amid plenty might lapse into a capitalism-induced schizoid personality. But is that really desirable for an anarchist? It’s hard to see how a schizoid’s emotional detachment and social disinterest would be favorable for a long-term social transformation along anarchist lines.

There are instances when Rodgers does seem detached and lacking empathy. A leaflet in the author’s Campaign to Play for Keeps, for example, blasts the meal-providing group Food Not Bombs as “Diarrhea for the People.” It satirizes the mishandling of half-rotten produce by “junky traveler kids” in the context of internalizing guilt and checking privilege. “People are too full of shit. Food Not Bombs can help! One meal and the system is clear!”

As one would expect in a collection like this, where the author is taking critical stands and aiming for humor, there are hits and misses. The do-it-yourself approach allows Rodgers to take risks and target well-intentioned people whose practices the author questions, such as Food Not Bombs, which will likely offend some readers.

“This is what I love about zines and anti-media: they have the capability to actually change reality,” Rodgers writes in the context of another polemic, one in which a zine detailing sexual abuse was used as a “weapon to wage war.” Rodgers added, in a tone reminiscent of Robespierre: “It was a thrill to destroy the life of someone who really deserved it.” The individual in question was thus prevented from creating an activist cult of personality around himself, moved away, and kept his head down lest Rodgers attack again.

While Rodgers draws on many lines of radical thought in launching attacks—the individualist anarchist and egoist Max Stirner, the utopian socialist Charles Fourier and the Frankfurt School’s Walter Benjamin, to mention only a few—it is from a fundamental base of anti-work anarchism, referencing classic writers in this realm: Bob Black, Paul Lafargue and Raoul Vaneigem, among others.

“To create DIY creations should be a focusing of will, a direction of intent,” Rodgers writes. “It might be part of a preparation for beginning to disentangle ourselves from the planetary work machine.”

Rodgers’ dispute with the Albany branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), in which the author highlighted the contradiction between the group’s opposition to work and its idealization of workers, is indicative of this fundamental anti-work outlook. One of the Wobblies who engaged in the clash later died of an overdose, Rodgers reports without qualms, reflecting his hard-hearted, Campaign to Play for Keeps approach.

Rodgers previously covered similar subterranean themes in his 2021 book, Invisible Generation: Rants, Polemics, and Critical Theory Against the Planetary Work Machine, also published by Autonomedia. Anarchists might want these books as references to people and events that took place in the fairly recent past that could have a bearing on their current practices.

Not many will have the discipline to continue printed zine creation and promote the outmoded zine trading system, as Rodgers does, given the allure of the internet.

This may not be the book for those looking for a more classical approach to anarchist practice, one based, for example, on workers’ councils and cooperatives, pressing for radical reforms favoring the cooperative sector—reforms that could actually stick.

They will likely be put off by one of the last chapters in which Rodgers explores disparate means of escaping the current system, ranging from space to pirate fantasies. Others will enjoy the way the author synthesizes Hakim Bey, Henry David Thoreau, Josiah Warren, Samuel R. Delany, James C. Scott, Pierre Clastres, Ralph Borsodi, John Zerzan, Laurance Labadie, and Jacques Camatte in an essay that is both for and against escapism.

Len Bracken was an activist during the anti-globalization campaigns of the 1990s. He is the author of several books, including a biography of Guy Debord, an exposé on 9/11, and an erotic novel set in fall-of-the-wall Berlin. lenbracken.com

Comments

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/05/2025 - 15:24

WAR OF DREAMS is a great book, BUT it is ACTUALLY published by Autonomedia (https://autonomedia.org/product/war-of-dreams-a-field-guide-to-diy-psyo…)

NOT PM Press (who are a bunch of opportunistic wankers, especially head-wankster Ramsey Kanaan).

The only other reasonable source to buy the book (besides from Jason) is from Underworld Amusements (https://underworldamusements.com/products/war-of-dreams-a-field-guide-t…)

Leave it to an anti-globalization activist who writes for Fifth Estate to get it through PM PRESS and write a milquetoast and mealy-mouthed review.

boo hiss.

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/05/2025 - 17:19

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Definitely recommend ordering from Underworld Amusements instead of Autonomedia. Jim at Autonomedia is notorious for taking months to send incomplete orders, and he doesn't respond to email unless you follow up several times.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 07:59

By referring to Ragnar Redbeard as merely "controversial" (isn't he a nazi?) & naming hostility to workerism as among the spiciest bits of the compilation the reviewer is revealing their acceptance of the Mr. Kracker status quo in this marginal but hardly hostile-to-the-existent social space. Layla AbdelRahim's comment on the white supremacy around Autonomedia also points to this.

https://puntickovanichrobaci.noblogs.org/post/2013/11/17/interview-with…

“at the 2007 Anarchist Bookfair in Montreal, I approached Autonomedia press based in New York. When I explained to the co-partner of the press my work and offered that should their publishing press be interested in taking a look at my manuscript, I would be happy to send it to her, she told me condescendingly that I should first inform myself about their literature. ‘We publish anarchist books. You should first get acquainted with what we do. We do not publish Mexican cookbooks’ she informed me.”

lumpy (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 08:18

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

yikes!

also, the robespierre comment is quite strange too, no? publishing about an abusive aspiring cult leader and enjoying a win at blackballing, is compared to the terror in revolutionary france?! supposed to be a joke maybe?

personally i think it's funnier when cult leaders are afraid to show their faces

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/07/2025 - 08:57

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

i do it for free. and there is absolutely no denying the diluted and deluded anarchist space at this point in time. but ok, maybe we should just start "doing anarchy" on tiktok too.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 08:25

first off, Ragnar Redbeard was not a nazi. that is just stupid and probably based on internet garbage. do you know what a nazi is? or do you just use it for everyone you think are bad. he was a character used to push transgressive concepts of freedom. were their very problematic parts of his extended rant, for sure, but nazi? as a jewish person i find this offensive, as an anarchist, just plain stupid.

secondly, critiquing workerism is a very minor part of Jason's book, yet, important. how does a hostility towards a tired, played out, and absorbed perspective trouble you?

thirdly, nevermind, its probably a waste of time...your perspective seems to be more status quo than anything you try to critique. you would get absolutely nothing out of this book except high blood pressure which might result in a hemorrhage in your tiny little brain.

lumpy (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 08:33

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

why would you even say "probably based on internet garbage"? that's just a self report that you can't be bothered to look in to it so here ya go dumbass!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_Is_Right

i'll skip the part where you run the goal posts around, trying to gatekeep how the word gets used. if you don't see how these ideas CLEARLY relate to fascism, you're either dishonest or a dimwit

EmmaAintDead Wed, 05/07/2025 - 08:58

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

It isn't "gatekeeping how the word gets used" to say it isn't a proper use of the word. While the text "Might is Right" certainly espoused sentiments the Nazis also espoused, they did so 50 or so years after publication and a good two decades ish after the author's death. It is inaccurate - or, rather, dishonest and dimwitted - to call him a Nazi when he predates them so significantly. In much the same sense as it would be dishonest to call Klansmen "Nazis." It doesn't make them any less disagreeable bastards to recognize they aren't Nazis. It does them no disservice to call them Nazis. The only people coming up short in this exchange are anarchists who are now bogged down by the weight of enemies they cannot identify in a meaningful way.

lumpy (not verified) Wed, 05/07/2025 - 09:23

In reply to by EmmaAintDead

you can punch that nuance button all you like and you'll still be having THIS semantic debate in 2025 ... perhaps the most ridiculous time in roughly 100 years, to be going around, WELL ACH-TUALLYing people about what the word nazi means...

truly embarrassing, full-body cringe inducing, terminally online behaviour! bravo!

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/07/2025 - 09:44

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

"truly embarrassing" "full-body cringe inducing", "terminally online behaviour!"

can we string together anymore online place-holding nothing phrases?
the irony here is so thick.

lumpy (not verified) Wed, 05/07/2025 - 09:58

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

certainly! i could be much worse but the mods will just have to clean up the mess and resent me for spraying the walls, you know how it is. i've cleaned public washrooms for minimum wage too!

EmmaAintDead Wed, 05/07/2025 - 10:09

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

The practical real-world impacts of precision are pretty overwhelming. If you try to attack the Klan - a semi-secret confederate organization with hidden membership and a centuries old esoteric organizational structure that undeniably works for their goals - as though they were Nazis - an open and public amalgamation of organizations with few formal ties and visible and legible younger/more active membership and rudimentary structures - you are going to have an awful time. You will not be able to tell how badly you are failing at addressing their threat until it is too late and it will be because you thought making a distinction was a thing that only matters online or whatever. 

Similarly with this text, to call it a Nazi text is to miss what's truly incendiary within it. Its a more important and relevant text than Siege precisely because Siege is a Nazi text and this is not, even though they speak in very related languages. Siege is therefore limited in its scope, bound by self-definition. No suchbluck with Might. The target audiences of Might and Siege are wholly different. The goal of the authors are wholly different. The means and the ends proposed in each are irreconcilable with each other. To regard the two as equal on any footing is an exercise in dumbassery. 

This is also a common failing of Nazis. When they expect to fight communists and come up against anarchists, they have a bad time. When they expect to fight drag queens and find Redneck Revolt they are humbled by their ignorance. So will you be if you cannot distinguish your enemies. 

"They are both racist bad things and therefore must be identical" is, pardon my french, silly sausage shenanigans. 

Just because you are fundamentally limited by your inability to see the shades of gray between your blacks and whites doesn't mean everyone around you is blind. Your constant insistence on LESS functional analysis makes you a weaker enemy to them than they will ever be to you.  

lumpy (not verified) Wed, 05/07/2025 - 10:33

In reply to by EmmaAintDead

at any time, you could pause in your pedantry to read the rest of the thread, where it might become clear to you that people understand how time works, aren't using the word in a literal way, don't need this clarification, etc

it's funny because i want to agree with you, largely agree with your more salient points here but you're such an insufferable asshole about it, completely missing the point, which is about which ideas serve as springboards to these very dark places.

precise labels isn't a game i play because i'm not an academic, i use rhetoric as a blunt weapon because words aren't that important to me. i'm more of an action focused type of anarchist

but it's the contentious category of "proto-fascist" if you wanted to get in to it, much discussed by anyone familiar with the topic, which i am, i assure you. but as i said, your giant ego is offputting and people like you tend to create a lot of cover for the enemy, in my experience

lumpy (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 07:41

In reply to by EmmaAintDead

heh! ^here we have an excellent example of why words aren't that important most of the time.

also a pretty good case of that sarte quote!

"They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 11:34

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

"as a jewish person i find this offensive, as an anarchist, just plain stupid." No one knows, or cares, who you are while online, genius.

Redbeard was not a Nazi? No shit. He lived before the Nazis became a thing. But he was one of these several 19th century Darwinian proto-Nazis.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 08:40

i don't need a wiki on it to get my opinion. i have read the book twice. it is a complicated book, no doubt. gate keep "nazi"??? no, there is a real world application to the word and it does not apply to Redbeard, nor most of the time it is used. i never said there were not parts that could be related to "fascism", or interpreted that way, or used by them...i would say you are the dimwit here.

lumpy (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 09:07

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

i'll bet you would say that but you can't even thread your replies ... plus it's creepy as shit how you're refusing to use reference material while making the same assertion over and over like a robot

your argument looks like this

he's not a nazi because i say so. i refuse to explain why. i don't want or need any info to the contrary. some of the ideas are "fascism" which i will scare quote for some reason. anyway, you're stupid.

^ that's you. you suck at this. thanks for some mild amusement tho!

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 17:37

In reply to by lumpy (not verified)

This conversation is pointless in relationship to the subject. The essay about Redbeard was literally about the contradictions in his work, between say egoism and racial collectivist positions. Or how his position was unclear as he wrote poems for despots and was involved with the IWW. Point being, you aren’t talking about the post, you are just letting yourself get wound up and sent spinning.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 19:36

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

The contradictions are more with big-tent unions like the IWW than Redbeard.... I get he went from being an anti-colonial Leftie activist in NZ and getting flamed for it, to being a proto-fascist; but what were the rules and values for including people in the IWW and allowing them to become prominent? Don't we know how Mussolini used to also be a workerist and was very active in the Second International?

lumpy (not verified) Wed, 05/07/2025 - 08:45

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

exactly, you get it.

it's not that horseshoe theory is real but there's maybe a weird vortex of certain terrible ideas that can pull people in, downstream from the beautiful idea. you might have to pass through the proto-fascist shadow lands... full of angry ghosts who are always hungry

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 12:22

Am I the only one who loses track of what Bracken is attempting to say here? Does anyone else think that this short piece could do with a bit of copy editing?

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 14:28

"Not many will have the discipline to continue printed zine creation and promote the outmoded zine trading system, as Rodgers does, given the allure of the internet."

err what? i'm thinkin zines made a huge comeback in recent years: on the front lines, at encampments, and prison cells. keep it physical, keep it offline. maybe what's outmoded is relying on internet for "organizing"

zinefucker (not verified) Tue, 05/06/2025 - 17:49

No mention of artisanally-made recycled-paper textures, nor algae-based ink blots. What a joke.

David T (not verified) Sat, 05/17/2025 - 20:40

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

One of the reasons that Jason discusses Redbeard and might makes right is because the book was a huge influence on Covington Hall (a prominent IWW organizer in the 1910s) and the IWW in general. By familiarizing yourself with Redbeard's work do you mean you read that wiki or you read Might Makes Right? Because reading a wiki isn't familiarizing yourself with anything. If you read Jae's book you might learn something.

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/07/2025 - 19:44

"was an activist during the anti-globalization campaigns of the 1990s...". Translation: went to some protests a long time ago. The End.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 10:50

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

So many '90s summit-hoppers being shitty Lefties of Marxoid or social democrat tendency that indeed it's nowhere a solid point in a militant resume... Even having been involved in Occupy is more significant. But the most salient question they never dare talk about is "what have they been doing ever since?".

So many cases of those edgy hyper-assertive Millenial liberals doing social-political entryism and small capital crap the past 20 years or so...

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 12:01

Nobody is solely redeemed by calling themselves an anarchist here. In Chile or elsewhere this might still mean among some people a real-world opposition to the existing state of things. In the United States it means a subculture of disengagement and passivity.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 12:17

In reply to by Nick Stavrogin (not verified)

There are anarchists in the US who aren't liberal, passive, or disengaged but they don't post communiques because they figured out how stupid that is two decades ago, and they're not interested in having a presence on/in the Net. They're doing their own things trying to play the cards in their hands to their best advantage. I firmly believe anarchists will be the few that emerge and prosper in the coming chaos of the 21st century.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 14:27

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Nothing wrong with "doing things for/by yourself", but in order to develop a culture of autonomy there's always a need for a level of propagation and visibility, otherwise you're just some dude doing freestyle BMX in the middle of a large parking lot of an abandoned mall in some suburb.

Getting over and beyond yourself to take a stand is literally how you emerge from chaos. But there's always a time for this. Living in a context where the local anarchist milieu is a bunch of spooks collaborating with Maoists, I'd rather do things in the shadows so to let the idiots and their cops get roasted under the Sun.

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 14:29

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

"They're doing their own thing(s)"

This is unintentionally telling. It is a scene walled-off from the larger world outside. You can't get more U-S-of-A than that.

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 17:31

In reply to by EmmaAintDead

The United States of 'Murika owns you. Your trite little personal rebellion trip used to be available off the rack at Forever 21.

The sign of a really superior individual is that of one who can fight for a cause that is bigger and better than the atomized she or he is. You extract yourself from your consumer society engendered cognitive cocoon, view the world from outside, and band together with others, tangling with objective reality on the merciless terms that objectve reality demands.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 17:41

In reply to by Nick Stavrogin (not verified)

“Your trite little personal rebellion trip used to be available off the rack at Forever 21.”
Wow, this is such a peculiar statement. The rebellion was at Forever 21? Have you ever even been to that store? They aren’t in the recuperation biz. Almost like you are talking about something you don’t really know about. Perhaps the intelligence briefing at your Russian troll farm was a little off? Stuff like this makes anews feel spooky.

Nick Stavrogin (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 22:52

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Here we see the stock, juvenile as hell, pissed off that his Mom won't give him the car keys mode of discussion found in a juvenile fringe phenom. You don't have to put up a persuasive argument for what you claim to believe in because it isn't worth believing in.

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 23:06

In reply to by Nick Stavrogin (not verified)

You arrogant fool. The unique becomings that frequent these comments have long ago moved far beyond the trappings of mass society and reified concepts like "world".

anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/08/2025 - 18:04

Ivan Stang!?! You do realize the church of the subgenius is based on anti-normal, anti-pink biase, right?

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