Fifth Estate 323, Summer, 1986 Add to the Bookbuilder

About 12 of us from Detroit made the trek to Chicago this May Day to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Haymarket riot and subsequent state murder by execution of five anarchists.

Anarchy then and now: Above, Haymarket 1886. Below, Chicago Anarchist Gathering, May 1986. By the way, that’s “Workingmen of all tongues unite.” Photo: S. Izma

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In March of this year a small article appeared in the Detroit Free Press announcing the last public hearing before the City of Detroit was to begin building the world’s largest trash-to-energy waste-incinerator plant. For those of us who live in the Cass Corridor/Wayne State University area, within a mile of the proposed plant’s location, the city’s plans came as one more horror in a long list of direct assaults on our lives.

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Dear Fifth Estate,

Without wanting to get involved in your mag too much, there is one criticism that I feel more important than whatever else I might want to say about it. It’s where you say “South Africa is bound to fall in the next few years.” (See FE #321, Indian Summer, 1985, “South Africa: Reform or Revolution.”)

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FIFTH ESTATE #323, Summer, 1986, Vol. 20 No. 4

The Fifth Estate is a cooperative project, published by a group of friends who are in general, but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

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Our offer of bulk copies of our back issues turned out better than we expected and we were swamped with requests. With a reduced volume, we can now make available issues only on a single copy basis. We have a list of back issues available for those who are interested.

Those of you who were sent subscription renewal notices last issue responded in greater numbers than any time in our memories. Thanks, since we hate doing bulk mailings and it saves greatly on postage when we don’t have to send a second reminder. By the way, some of you who have not responded to a second notice are getting this issue anyway since we wanted you to see our coverage of the Chicago gathering, but if you haven’t renewed, this is the last one you will receive.

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“Plastic settled in river

“SARNIA, Ontario—A cloud of plastic powder that was released into the air and settled in the St. Clair River poses no health threat, says a Canadian spokesman for the Midland-based Dow Chemical Co.

“The estimated 4,000 pounds of the polyethylene powder used to make milk jugs accidentally was released by the company about 10 p.m. Thursday, Dow Chemical Canada Inc. spokesman John Musser said Friday.

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When I entered Kent State University in the Fall of 1975 it was by no means a revolutionary situation I was stepping into. It is ironic, because ever since the shooting on May 4, 1970 by Ohio National Guardsmen of thirteen students, resulting in the death of four and the wounding of nine others, Kent had gained an almost worldwide reputation as being a radical campus. But when I was there in 1975 and 1976 the average member of the student body had about as much connection with what happened there just a few years earlier as they did with the man on the moon.

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From a leaflet by the Angry Workers Group, 2000 Center St., No. 1200, Berkeley CA 94704, which was passed out during Fleet Week in San Francisco, October, 1985.

The past few years have seen a wholesale rewriting of the history of American involvement in Vietnam. From the official government versions of the events to extremely violent television shows and movies like “The Deer Hunter” and “Rambo,” the people who rule us are attempting to glamorize the slaughter of the Indochinese Wars as a prelude to the next war. It might be in the Philippines or Southern Africa, Central America or Korea. It might be fought on five or ten fronts simultaneously with the Soviet Union. Or maybe they’ll send us off to massacre the populations of Spain or Italy or Britain in the suppression of a revolutionary civil war in Western Europe.

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President Reagan came into office with an understanding apparently lacking in the two previous administrations which had been still reeling from the egregious defeat of the U.S. imperial forces in Vietnam: If U.S. capital was to continue to function successfully as a permanent war economy (as it has since 1942), a corresponding war psychosis was going to have to be created to justify programs of economic austerity for the working class and poor while making enormous expenditures of state funds for armaments.

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This article originally appeared as “Berkeley Strikes the Coral Sea” in Fifth Estate #146, November 25 — December 8, 1971 (Vol. 6 No. 18) page 2

ALAMEDA, Calif.—With a Navy band blaring “Anchors Aweigh,” the USS Coral Sea sailed out of the Golden Gate for Vietnam Nov. 12 despite a mass petition drive by anti-war sailors, an offer of sanctuary to deserters from the Berkeley, Calif. City Council and a threat of mass disruption from civilian picketers.

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Imagine the United States split regionally into conservative-fascist and leftist popular front-anarchist zones. Civil war rages at the shifting boundary lines with half the country under the domination of an insurgent military right-wing junta determined to destroy the elected government and all individuals and organizations of the left. Then imagine that simultaneously, behind the lines in the popular front zone (say, most of the East and West coasts), there are widespread decentralized efforts to transform the society through economic and social collectivization in producers’ cooperatives, free schools, free health centers, neighborhood councils, local popular assemblies-the assumption of community self-responsibility through direct action from the bottom up.

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In March Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Hail Mary” came to Detroit’s Wayne State University, drawing sell-out audiences and violent demonstrations from christian-fascist groups. The film is a modern retelling of an already boring (and over-told) tale, the events leading up to the birth of Jesus (the little guy attached to crucifixes). In the film, Joseph is a taxi driver, the angel Gabriel is a foul-mouthed drifter, and Mary is a gas station attendant. Despite a few nude scenes of Mary, the film is rather tame, eliciting such reactions by people who saw it as “actually rather sensitive” and “a snore.” True to form, the pope has condemned the film as sacrilegious.

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In the last issue of the FE we noted that people should sigh with relief at the explosion of the space shuttle because of its direct relation to the Star Wars program. As General Lew Allen, Air Force Chief of Staff, said in 1979, “Whatever else the shuttle does and whatever purposes it will have, the priority, the emphasis, the driving momentum now has to be those satellite systems which are important to national security.”

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“Is any given bombing...the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security? All this is equally true and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons.”

--Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

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As the July 8 deadline nears for forced government relocation of indigenous people—some 10,000 Navajos and 1,000 Hopis—from their homes in the Navajo-Hopi “Joint Use Area,” the people are digging in in preparation for a fight while the federal government is training U.S. Marshals and the Arizona National Guard specifically for the pending removal. (For background on this conflict see “Big Mountain: Native Peoples Resist Forced Relocation” in the FE #317, Summer 1984.)

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The recent clamor by employers for mandatory drug testing of workers threatens to add yet another humiliating dimension to wage labor. Both private and governmental concerns have expressed strong support for the idea, and it was recently given a boost by a report from the President’s Commission on Organized Crime which recommended a national program which would subject most working Americans to urinalysis tests.

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The following is excerpted from a longer critique of the Emma Goldman Papers Project and its director, Candace Falk. For a copy of the complete article, write: c/o the Last Blast, Box 410151, San Francisco, CA 94141. [Authorship in the print edition is attributed to “Marie Berneri & Francois Ravachol.”]

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Josef Skvorecky is a renowned Czech author who currently lives and teaches in Toronto. He emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a young man, living under the Nazi administration, he took part in underground jazz groups. Judging from his stories, the band was obliged to play polkas and other “acceptable” music. When the coast was clear, they could indulge in their real love, jazz.

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a review of

Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat, 1985, Atlantic Monthly, 438 pp. $24.95

In a world where the victor writes the history books, we are grateful for Farley Mowat’s eloquent and dissenting account of the rape of the North American continent.

The ravagers came in search of oil, furs and food. The life they led was adventurous; it was also dangerous and violent. Mowat quotes the eyewitness report of a Professor J.B. Jukes, who in 1840 went as an observer to the main sealing patch in the brigantine Topaz:

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The FE Bookservice may be reached at the same address as the Fifth Estate Newspaper, P.O. Box 02548, Detroit MI 48202 USA, telephone (313) 831–6800. Visitors are welcome, but our hours vary so please call before dropping in.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

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

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A little belatedly we have received The Alternative Press Annual, for 1983 and 1984 published by Temple Univ. Press, Broad & Oxford streets, Philadelphia PA 19122, both of which contain articles by Fifth Estate writers. The 1983 edition has E.B. Maple’s article “The Pain of America and the Tylenol Killings” (FE Winter 1982–3) and the 1984 volume (the most interesting to date) features Lynne Clive’s “Newspeak and the Impoverishment of Language” (FE #315, Winter 1984) as the lead article. Publication price is a whopping $34.95 meaning it was published primarily with library reference sections in mind, where it might be a good place to read it.

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand—A Maori land-rights activist, driving a van with a traditional native people’s insult painted on its side, was arrested in February when he tried to join visiting Queen Elizabeth’s motorcade. The Queen was the repeated target during her visit of Maoris protesting the continuing theft of their homelands by the New Zealand government.

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