Fifth Estate 286, September, 1977 Add to the Bookbuilder

To Whomever Is Interested:

Well, it seems it was a pretty tame bunch of tabbies up at Wildcat Mountain late in July. Once again, nothing was accomplished at a Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF) conference, but the determination of a time and place for next year’s rerun. Some people were disappointed that nothing of substance was produced, while others, such as myself, wondered why the temporary assemblage of such a heterogeneous group had to “accomplish” something anyway.

...

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Stuart Perry

Donna Saffioti

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Primitivo Solis

Muswell Hillbilly

Gordon Barry

Carle Groome

Steven Benson

Michael Lucas

W.B. Jeffries

H. Kahn

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation, is published monthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are sporadic, so call before coming down. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 12 issues; $5.00 for foreign. Call 259–1888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class — postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No advertising.

a review of

“The Politics of Ethnopoetics” in The Old Ways, Six Essays, Gary Snyder, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 40077 “(Reckoning roughly from the earliest cave paintings)”, 96 pp.

Ever since the dawn of industrial capitalism 200 years ago, a succession of philosophers, poets, social scientists, and mystics have written on the decline of the species since leaving “the state of nature” and entering the modern epoch. Hence, it could be charged, that there is little that is new in this book and much that has been heard from sources whose nostalgia for the days of yore is of a short lasting duration broken by a return to the middle-class life that spawns such ideas.

...

The Egocrat—Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Kim Il Sung—is not an accident or an aberration or an irruption of irrationality; he is a personification of the relations of the existing social order.

The Egocrat is initially an individual, like everyone else: mute and powerless in this society without community or communication, victimized by the spectacle, “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue, the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.” (Debord) Repelled by the spectacle, he longs for “the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen.” (Camatte) If his longing were expressed in practice: at his workplace, in the street, wherever the spectacle robs him of his humanity, he would become a rebel.

...

Twin cooling towers at the Fermi Nuclear Facility loom over a Monroe County graveyard. photo/Steven Benson

Eleven years ago an accident at Detroit Edison’s Fermi 1 nuclear power plant in Monroe, Michigan, almost destroyed Detroit. If you accept the utility’s own commissioned study, the death rate could have been as high as 133,000 dead in the metro area and that does not include 181,000 people exposed to such high radiation levels as to develop leukemia or other forms of cancer within ten years. The Atomic Energy Commission’s own study projected an additional 73,000 injured and $17 billion in property damage.

...

From May to October of 1976 the workers of the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant in France struck following what was euphemistically described as a radical “deterioration of working conditions” as a result of a shift from the reprocessing of conventional nuclear power plant fuel (graphite gas) to the reprocessing of spent fuel from light water reactors.

...

a review of

Sam Dolgoff, The Cuban Revolution, A Critical Perspective; Copyright 1976, Black Rose Books, Ltd., Montreal; $5.95.

Sam Dolgoff’s book, The Cuban Revolution, presents some interesting and relevant information not previously available in English, although most of it has been available to Spanish-speaking readers for a long time. For those of us who are vitally interested in knowing more than the “communist” myths about the history and progress of revolt wherever it may occur, this book is a starting point. But for those of us who really want to comprehend the past so that we can begin to go beyond it, this book is superficial and inadequate.

...

Ammunition Books, 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201—Telephone No. (313) 831–8600

Bookstore hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons and at scattered other times. Please call before coming down to be sure we are here.

HOW TO ORDER:

(1) List the title of the book(s), amount and price of each;

...

Cesar Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers union, and perennial darling of the liberal-Catholic-Stalinist milieu, has recently been making his followers uncomfortable by behaving like a George Meany-style labor hack. At the end of July, Chavez, touring the Philippines at the request of the Philippine farmworkers in California to see how their families were faring under martial law imposed by dictator Ferdinand Marcos, ended up being given the royal treatment by the regime and presented an award by Marcos himself! Chavez, who admitted having no knowledge of Marcos’ ban on strikes or the arrests of thousands of striking workers, defended the Marcos regime, claiming that life under martial law was “a hell of a lot better” for the Philippine workers than before. Chavez had never been in the Philippines previous to his July trip.

...

This issue of the Fifth Estate is only twelve pages due to both staff and financial problems. Several members of our collective are traveling and all others but one are working full-time. This leaves the paper to just a few of us working mainly at night after our jobs. Not being very good businesspeople, we have never been able to figure out why we are in flush times at one period and at the brink of going under at another, but we have reached a point not real far from the latter. In that we have a fairly low budget, this means we are only talking about $350 a month, but still it is enough to get our creditors knocking at the door. Finances haven’t quite reached the point they did a year ago when we had to send out an emergency mailing asking for funds, but that is a real possibility if the picture does not improve soon. We have just sent out 150 renewal forms to those people whose subscriptions are about to expire. We urge those of you receiving them to return them as soon as possible as the money from those renewals would put us back in shape. Book orders, new subscriptions, donations and our ever-faithful sustainers’ fund will keep periods like this from re-occurring. Also, look for an FE benefit in the near future....

...

Culture shock: back in Detroit, my life of freedom lies neglected as I de-mothball the artifacts of this daily life. One always returns to Detroit; everyone told me, “You’ll be back,” just as they snicker along the line when you take your vacation. You’ll be back. You can’t kick, you are strung out.

...