Fifth Estate 273, June 1976 Add to the Bookbuilder

Part I of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #272, May, 1976.

“Horse sense and humanitarianism dictate that we phase out most and probably all municipal hospitals before the end of the century.”

—New York Commissioner of Health Lowell Benin, speaking to a group of businessmen, March 5, 1976.

“We’re going to have to operate pretty much like a private hospital; if a patient can’t pay he won’t be admitted. Patients may have to sell their homes for care. We can’t deprive a student of his education to finance a patient who can’t pay.”

—Chancellor Elmer Learn of the University of California at Davis, on the occasion of the university’s takeover of a public hospital in 1972.

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Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Rick Schrader

Pat Kazenko

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Dennis Rosenbloom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

Dora Kaplan

Mark Wenson

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second, Detroit, MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays thru Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.

Dear FE,

I generally enjoy your paper, but have two criticisms: 1) I think it should contain more reporting on working class and community struggles—nation-wide and especially in your own backyard. Of course, most of these are led by reformist or Leninist groups...all the more reason to get in there and tell what’s going on. I think it could also win many more working people to your readership.

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It’s party time again! The Fifth Estate will feature a rock concert, theatrefest, beer guzzling spectacular Friday, June 25, 9:00 pm to 2:00 am at Formerly Alvin’s Deli on Cass just south of the Ford Freeway. The admission is $2.50 and the entertainment will feature the Spikedrivers, Primitive Lust and Acme Theatrical Agency theatre groups, free beer, and maybe a guest reggae band. We hope you will attend, as these affairs are part of our life’s blood and also provide a damn good time. Call us at the office if you want more information or can help distribute promotional leaflets in your area. Although we are not entirely out of the clutches of the money monster, we want to thank people for their response to our last issue’s plea for financial assistance. We keep getting hit with back bills from when the paper was a commercial weekly and still need your support. We have just ordered several hundred dollars in new titles for our book store and hope you will find a few that strike your interest. The most solid support we can receive is from those who become Fifth Estate sustainers and provide us with an anticipated revenue each month. To subscribe or become a sustainer, use the blank on this page or order books further in....

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The power groupies at the Sun have recently changed their focus. After running out of tin horn politicians to do interviews with, the Ann Arbor transplant has taken to promoting the police—something even the Detroit News and Free Press have had problems doing lately. The Sunites would have us believe that the brutal, dope pushing DPD has become “A New Breed of Cop” as their mid-May, littered front page blared.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

— W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

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“A spectre is haunting Europe—the Spectre of Communism.”

— from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

One hundred and eighteen years later Communism is again haunting the combined heads of the world bourgeoisie, but in a way Marx or Engels never could have anticipated.

“Communism” now haunts Europe in the form of electoral activity with the pledge by Communist party leaders to play the game according to the rules set up by the capitalist state.

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Good Communists are not supposed to indulge in the cult of personality. Josef Stalin practiced it for years, and so, too, has Mao Tse-tung.

Compared to Kim Il Sung, 63, dictator of North Korea, however, Stalin and Mao were only kidding.

On the outskirts of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, Sung had a 15-foot bronze statue of himself erected.

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Reality, grown so thick with itself, became a fungus years ago with inbred spores and long reaching strands that have become the vampiric architecture of experience on every street in town. Thriving on dampened spirits in the totally human swamp, the fungus is the protective covering for the swamp, made to keep the animal from moving around in it as it slowly consumes its hosts leaving lifeless automatons where biological entities once thrived.

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This is for all you young Crimestoppers who might be interested in reproducing one of Chester Gould’s best. Tracy can always be relied upon to get to the root of the matter without any minced words, and his is a lesson we could all learn a lot from:

The desire for easy money, tax-free, with a disdain for work and the law, marks a potential criminal.

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In a murder case which has “frame up” written all over it, a 17-year-old black Louisiana man named Gary Tyler sits on Death Row awaiting execution by electric chair for a crime he did not commit--the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old white youth.

The killing took place on October 7, 1974 at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, forty miles north of New Orleans. After a series of busing-related skirmishes between black and white students, the principal decided to dismiss school early to avoid further confrontations.

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Now that the “liberation” of Angola by the MPLA [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola] has been completed, the Luanda government of Agostinho Neto has begun a vicious crackdown on political dissidents to secure its one party rule over Angolan capitalism (See February Fifth Estate).

Agostinho Neto & Marcelino dos Santos prepare the annihilation of their rivals.

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This article is the fifth in a series of counter-Bicentennial pieces dealing with the more sordid and often less-acknowledged incidents in America’s 200-year-old history.

AMERICA—(1950) Only five years removed from the holocaust of World War II, the country stood on the brink of a new reaction: the paranoia of the Cold War, engineered for the most part by the Western powers.

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Although unions have long been identified by left revolutionaries as auxiliary organs of capital whose function is to regulate the sale of their members’ labor power, the myth still persists that they are “defense organs of the working class.” Even those who see no revolutionary potential for unions claim that at least unions have been responsible for a steady rise in workers’ income. John Zerzan attacks this thesis as being untrue and severs the last rationalization for their support. Revolutionary organization of workers will take place outside of the union structure.

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A PRIMER OF LIBERTARIAN EDUCATION by Joel Spring, Free Life Editions, 157 pp. $3.95

Traces the tradition of libertarian opposition to established education from Rousseau and Godwin to Neill and Freire.

“Spring places the radical challenge into its own tradition of libertarian anarchy...” (Ivan Illich)

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Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of the things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost. The wall, which was glass but thrutex, turned out on being approached not to be a wall, it was something else, it was an opening or a doorway—and the doorway (through which he saw himself approaching) turned out to be something else, it was a wall. And what he had eaten not having agreed with him.

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit 48201.

MUSICIAN with an ARP Synthesizer wishes to explore musical possibilities with another musician. Call 831–5454—Richard.

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Since General Motors reported a net profit of $300 million for the first quarter of 1976, our executives have been probable targets for kidnapping by members of the criminal element and left crazies.

The Central Executive Office of GM is composed of fourteen men, most of whom live in the Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham area. Each is a valuable and integral part of the executive team and would command a high ransom if abducted.

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