Most Recent Additions

You don’t have to watch the nightly TV news to realize that money is tight these days. It is an international problem that has put many anti-authoritarian printing projects in jeopardy including this one. For that reason we are planning a benefit party to raise money for the international anti-authoritarian press.

...

As we witness the imposition of military rule in Poland it seems clear it was not something to have been unexpected. However, that realization does nothing to limit our anger and sadness as we helplessly watch tanks and faceless armed men crush at least the public manifestations of a movement that threatened to turn the world upside down.

...

A large, well-produced poster titled Libertarians found its way to our office not long ago. It is chiefly a translation of a text written in Spanish by “The International Friends,” denouncing the detention of more than fifty libertarians in Spanish prisons (as of September 1980) for alleged participation in armed activities. It contains a summation of the predicament of these libertarian and autonomous comrades, an analysis of the modern Spanish state (“the tardy reconciliation of all the victors of the counter-revolution”), criticism of the reconstituted CNT which “feels some real discomfiture in this affair. It is not out of indifference or prudence that it was brought to remain silent. The leaders of the CNT want to be an axis of regroupment of libertarians on a trade-unionist basis, in fact moderated and acceptable to the established order. The comrades who have resorted to expropriations represent, by this fact alone, an absolutely opposite axis of regrouping. If some are right, the others are wrong. Each person is the offspring of their works, and one must choose between these or the others by examining the meaning find the finality of their actions....” It then urges practical action to free the imprisoned libertarians, “those [actions] that create the most Scandal [being] the best.”

...

a review of

Facing West, The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building, Richard Drinnon, New York, New American Library, 1980.

Richard Drinnon offers documentation of the attitudes and history of people with whom we are sickeningly familiar. He eloquently debunks the heroic myths of frontier life in the U.S. and also exposes the arrogance with which Europeans devastated this continent and beyond, once they reached the Pacific Ocean. Enlightenment ideology furnished the prop for the racism, greed and self-repression which have been part of U.S. history over the centuries, In the twentieth century, imperialist rhetoric has been polished by public relations experts who often obfuscate the real motives of the contemporary politician. This book makes clear the unbroken link with their predecessors who moreover shock us by their open expression of frenzied hatred and moral self-righteousness.

...

Citizen G of Citizens for a Non-Linear Future (see letter in this issue) has published an educational comic as well as an article and questionnaire on despair. Send a self-addressed stamped envelope to Citizen G at Wallingford Station, PO Box 31638, Seattle, WA 98103...

Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, is an irregular publication of the Columbia (Missouri) Anarchist League looking for readers and correspondents. Subscriptions are $3.00 for six issues, foreign subs are $6.00, and prisoners can receive subs for free. A recent issue (Vol. 1 No. 4) contains articles such as “Anarchy Under Fire,” “Marriage, Screwing, and Free Love,” “Ordinance to Limit Bicycle Right of Way” (?) and more. Write C.A.L., PO Box 380, Columbia MO 65205...

...

Come and join us in an anti-nuclear war conference at Detroit’s Grinning Duck Club the weekend of March 5, 6 & 7 and add your voice to the growing resistance to nuclear madness. No admirals, no policy experts, no political candidates hopping on the latest bandwagon—just a lot of ordinary people tired of living in a world where our lives and the lives of our loved ones can be snuffed out in a moment by people we’ll never even see—and who will never see us. For further information and details on how you can participate, write NUKE FEAR, P.O. Box 02455, Detroit, MI 48202, or call (313) 831–6800. Better yet, come to a planning meeting, every Sunday at 1:00 pm at the Grinning Duck Club, southeast corner of Willis and Third, just south of the Wayne State University campus. We’ve all grown up under the threat of nuclear annihilation and we’d like to be the last generation that does—and we refuse to be the last generation.

The FE Bookstore is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate Newspaper, both of which are located at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201—telephone (313) 831–6800. The hours we are open vary considerably, so it’s always best to give us a call before coming down.

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:

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

...

a review of

The Year of the French, Thomas Flanagan, Pocket Books, New York, 1980, 642 pp., $4.50 (Canadian)

At first glance at the dust jacket of Thomas Flanagan’s book, one expects either the usual fluff which passes for “historical” novels these days or an exposition on England’s bloody-handed colonial rule as setting the stage for sympathy to the modern day IRA, much in the way accounts of the Nazi holocaust wind up to be sales pitches for Israel. Fortunately, this is not to be the case.

...

Dear T. Fulano (and the FE)

I read your response to the defenders of technology with great trepidation [“Uncovering a Corpse: A Reply to the Defenders of Technology,” FE #307, November 19, 1981]. At every turn I expected you to say: “This is what we need to do: let’s dismantle everything and turn the clocks back to 700 A.D. or 500 B.C.” I thought you might announce a program that would alienate the people who oppose only parts of technology and oppose it for a variety of reasons; e.g., because they love old, vanishing crafts, because they are Christians, because they are nostalgists, or simply because they are technological incompetents.

...

First appeared in the Kenyon Review, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH 43022.

Poet and translator Lewis Hyde has accomplished several distinct things with this article. First of all, by way of traditional (that is, “pre-” or non-capitalist) folk and fairy tales, as well as anthropological observations, he has revealed the origins of many of the commonplaces associated with capitalist social relations—for example, things have always been as they are today (primitive and traditional peoples are just societies of small-scale capitalists each working in his own self interest), a penny saved is a penny earned, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, the idea of a “noble savage” is only a modern romantic prejudice, etc. By showing how people—including our ancestors—treat property in, a society in which it is not the ruling sign or the axis around which all social relations orbit (indeed, in which present notions of property and wealth do not even apply), he presents a contrast to modern capitalist society which critiques it from a position of affirmation. Whereas many of our discussions of capital have generally implied only a vague sense of the life we envision, his article reveals that many elements are already to be found in our cultural memory. “Folk tales are like the soul’s morality plays,” he writes, but they are also a key to culture. Hence, he has not only undertaken an “economy of the imagination,” but, in a sense, a “political economy” of culture.

...

HAVANA, Cuba—Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther leader is living and writing in Havana according to the British news agency, Reuters.

Cleaver, who disappeared in the United States late last year after a warrant was issued for his arrest on a phony charge of parole violation, was rumored to have been living in Cuba, but his whereabouts on the island had been a mystery.

...

WAR!

The weapons are in place. The language of war is accepted everywhere. The rulers of the opposing empires confront each other menacingly.

Their fingers are poised on the button. The warheads ache to be launched. Will we wait passively for annihilation?

The words above are what should have shown through a light image of a mushroom cloud on our Nov. 19 [FE #307] cover, but were obscured due to a communication error with our printer. Our disappointment with the results was lightened somewhat when several people told us they thought it was a contest to see if the words could be discerned. Others said that the bomb obliterating our words was appropriate for the matter under discussion.

...

Those events marked with an asterisk (*) need Fifth Estate salesmen. If you want to earn some extra money, come down to our office and pick up some papers.

THURS. MAY 29

* THE BONZO DOG from England and the Wilson Mower Pursuit at the Grande Ballroom. Adm. $2.50.

EAST TOWN THEATRE. Grand opening of Detroit’s newest rock joint. The SRC. Teegarden & VanWinkle, Savage Grace, and Catfish all entertain at 8041 Harper near Van Dyke. 8 pm. Adm. $2.50.

...

FIFTH ESTATE, Number 308, Volume 17, No. 1, January 19, 1982

The Fifth Estate is a co-operative 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.

...

Faced with upwards of a million men who have refused to register for the draft, President Reagan announced on December 10, a halt to prosecutions scheduled in the cases of 161 resisters, This means that currently there are no legal sanctions for failing to comply with the Selective Service Act provisions and hopefully it will impel hundreds of thousands of additional young men to refuse to have any part of the U.S. war machine.

...

The Fifth Estate has joined with a group of people from Detroit’s Grinning Duck Club to organize an anti-nuclear war conference at the club in March. Following is the text of the conference’s first call for participants. If you would like more information on the conference, please write NUKE FEAR, c/o P.O. Box 02455, Detroit MI 48202 or call (313) 831–6800, 3–5 pm. Preparations for the conference are still in the planning stage and weekly meetings are held each Sunday at the Grinning Duck Club, located on the southeast corner of W. Willis and Third Ave., just south of the Wayne State University campus. All individuals are invited, but no political parties need apply. Meetings are at 1:00 a.m.

...

UPI—The dream of “containment” of a limited nuclear exchange to the European theater collapsed utterly today when the Reagan administration’s demonstration air-burst over the Baltic Sea touched off a rapidly-escalating series of events which culminated in all-out nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West.

...

Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

We dig the Fifth Estate, L.A. Free Press, and other undergrounds here in ‘Nam. Keep the truth coming.

...

Selfridge Air Force Base is an idyllic installation on the beautiful shores of Lake St. Clair about twenty miles north of Detroit. It houses a SAC installation, a fighter-wing, and miscellaneous other units.

Victory celebration by Airman Theodore Goldflies, and his lawyers, Marc Stickgold and Marc Kadish. Photo/Alan Gotkin

...

A few years ago, pre-moog synthesizer, and long before the dawning of the “age of aquarius,” Detroiters were known to cluster at the various points of departure in order to cheerfully bon voyage their young ambassadors of jazz, whose responsibility it was to saturate the land with sounds ( pan-euphoniously?). Anyway, the story goes, they were supremely successful and with their talents garnered for their city a most enviable reputation...

...

Two High School Student Unions, in the northeast suburbs and at Cooley have been agitating for change inside their schools.

The Cooley High School Student Union recently printed and distributed its Five point program with the following demands:

1) The elimination of ROTC;

...

“We are bringing our legitimate grievances to the legal establishment of the white man’s government to give the racist monopoly capitalist system the opportunity to begin to redeem itself for the crimes which have been perpetuated against Black workers and Black people for centuries.”

With this statement on Friday, May 16, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the United Auto Workers International Union (UAW), Locals No. 3 and No. 961, and against the Chrysler Corporation.

...

The strike of the Third World peoples and white supporters at San Francisco State College was a part of expanding the movement in this country toward liberation. It was a strike, an action with a direction toward a revolutionary level because it was based upon principles drawn from the foundation of oppressed Third World people’s needs.

...

“The solution to the race problem is separation. White and black should be separate. Their natures are opposite. This is the source of all our problems today. White and black are trying to force something (integration) that even God himself didn’t intend.”

Speaking before well over 300 people on the mall of Wayne State University, Muhammed Ali, former Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World, ran down his views on racism, the black struggle, and women on May 14.

...

Paul Bindrim is a clinical psychologist who believes that the most agonizing feelings through which human beings must suffer result from the conflict between the need to say “Love me, and let me love,” and the need to retain a personal identity.

Nineteen strangers, Bindrim among them, gathered in a small paneled room at the Center for the Whole Person and enacted the kind of human drama upon which Paul Bindrim bases that conclusion.

...

Free medical attention for Detroit’s Free Community is now available at the Open City office, 4726 Third, every Monday evening from 6 until 8 pm.

Although this service has been in operation only a month the response has already been very encouraging. At this time plans are being considered to keep the service open three days a week and additional doctors and nurses have expressed an interest in Open City.

...

When the heroine of Ingmar Bergman’s great movie “Persona” turned on a television set and saw the atrocities of the Vietnam war, we in the audience experienced something close to cultural shock—a medievalist had crossed the time barrier. One of the severest and most frequent criticisms of Bergman has been his renowned social indifference.

...

Web archive note: This article is untitled in the print original.

In a lightning-fast surprise maneuver the Detroit courts have moved to bring John Sinclair to trial on his famous marijuana charge next Tuesday, June 3^rd, in Recorder’s Court. This latest in a series of repressive police/court actions against Sinclair is also the most serious: the pigs have sworn to convict him on a charge the minimum sentence for which is 20 years in the state penitentiary, maximum: life.

...

Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s original monkey dinner was held at 19 Gramercy Park in New York in 1908, wherein Mrs. Fish invited the “haute monde” of her day, according to writer Tom Wolfe, to a dinner in honor of the Prince del Drago.

Of course, nobody bothered to ask who the prince was, but they all came, and there was the Prince, a full-grown Chambezi baboon in evening clothes, fitted in a wing collar and tails. This grand gesture was Mrs. Fish’s way of showing how strange “society” had become in her day, willing to go anywhere for whatever purpose, if it seemed grand and gay enough.

...

The Incredible String Band came to town one night, a few weeks ago, to share themselves and their music.

They came courtesy of CREEM magazine, and found that Detroit’s people, like those of most cities, were not ready for the peaceful message and music of the ISB.

Although most of the vast Ford Auditorium on May 16 was empty, the stage was filled before Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, Rose, and Licorice came on.

...

JACKSON, N.C.—The Army announced May 20 its “final disposition of the cases of the three anti-war soldiers who had been in the Fort Jackson stockade for two months.

There will be no courts-martial for Joseph Cole, Eugene Jose Rudder and Andrew Pulley; they were released from the stockade today and the Army says that they will be discharged from the service in short order.

...

While the rest of the “Motor city was Burning,” to paraphrase the MC5, ironically to the tune of “Light My Fire,” the annex of the former Algiers Motel was quiet. Guests were sleeping, “eating hot dogs” and “listening to music.”

It was quiet until the authorities arrived.

When the authorities left, there remained behind the bodies of three black youths—all of them shot to death. All of the other guests had been beaten—two white girls, “caught” in the company of black men, had been stripped naked and severely beaten.

...

BERKELEY—This is Wednesday, May 21. A week ago I pulled into the city in the pre-dawn hours on the back of a fifty-two Chevy farm truck laden with contraband oranges, avocadoes, artichokes. We were on our way home from our outlaw camp in the Baja, Mexico.

As we hauled up Highway One, watching the surf pound against the rocks below our -brothers were being routed with clubs and cyclone fence from the People’s Park in Berkeley.

...

BERKELEY—“I’d shoot a pig first,” the young man said.

Standing face to face with his olive drab uniform, his gas grenades and his M-1, a street girl—wonderful colors flowing from every curve on her body—had been talking to him for most of the afternoon.

The People’s Park, touching and being touched, lives of love and freedom—she’d covered it all.

...

The Establishment press and the Detroit Police Department have been blasted in a report on the New Bethel Incident done by the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (CCR).

The eight-page staff report is sharply critical of the manner in which the news media reported on the actions of Recorder’s Court Judge George W. Crockett Jr. The CCR also blasted the response of police both during and after the March 29 shootings of two policemen outside the New Bethel Baptist Church.

...

The shit is coming down all over America from Greensboro, N.C. to Berkeley, Calif. Blood is flowing in the streets as people battle for their rights.

The question of whether or not fascism will come to this country has been answered by the pigs with a hail of bullets aimed at our brothers and sisters. The long talked about and debated repression has come with indictments, jailings, police beatings and murders.

...

Dan Seigal, president-elect of Cal’s student body, never finished his talk to the thousands gathered to rally behind the Berkeley People’s Park. When he suggested they take the park, avoiding bloodshed and arrest, the crowd immediately left Sproul Plaza. Chanting “We want the park,” and whooping like Indians, they spilled out onto Telegraph Avenue and walked to the Haste Street intersection where a line of helmeted, brown-uniformed police waited behind barricades.

...

THE FIFTH ESTATE

A NEWSPAPER OF DETROIT

FIFTH ESTATE #80, May 29-June 11, 1969, Vol. 4 No. 2, page 2

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

Tommye Wiese

DISTRIBUTION

Bruce Montrose

Fred Frank

BUSINESS & ADVERTISING

Bill Rowe

CITY EDITOR

Chris Singer

MUSIC EDITOR

John Sinclair

...

Author’s note: I tried to write a journalistic reportorial article about the “Miss Student Body” rape held on the WSU campus in honor of Fraternity Week, where mutilated people voted on the headless pictures of women in bikinis guided by criteria of the best “Bod.” This article was going to include an objective description of the protest demonstration of Friday, May 16, and other assorted responses of quasi-liberated men and women—but my anger got in the way. Sorry.

...

In an unprecedented move Russ Gibb, Detroit rock and roll magnate and creator and owner of the Grande Ballroom, has announced that he is imposing a 1% community tax on the gate proceeds of the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival, held at the State Fairgrounds over the Memorial day weekend.

The 1% will come off the top of the gross proceeds, Gibb said, and will go into a new Community Fund which will then make disbursements through its Board of Directors to groups and/or individuals in the community who need money.

...

NEW YORK—Norman Mailer kicked off his mayorality campaign with a rally at the Village Gate attended by George Plimpton’s party crowd and assorted dilettantes and sycophants. Targets of the evening were the NY Times, which hasn’t been giving Mailer the attention he demands; Esquire magazine whose money he’s been taking uncomplainingly for a decade; and his own audience, most of whom he correctly identified as being present “for the fun of it.”

...

The theme for this issue, Anything Can Happen, originated as the title of a 1968 Fredy Perlman essay at a time when everything did, indeed, seem possible. The ebullience of that era, in which many believed revolution was on the horizon has faded, but the engagement of activist projects in confronting the worst abuses of the system continue apace.

...

This first issue of Fire Ant, an anarchist prison solidarity zine, is published by Robcat and the incredibly energetic comrades in rural Maine.

It is a long term project for and with anarchist prisoners specifically, not a general prisoner support publication.

The goals are to raise material aid for imprisoned anarchists, spread information about imprisoned anarchists and anarchy, and foster communication between imprisoned and free roaming anarchists.

...

“Every time I think about us women, I think about the trees, the subversive trees laden in blood but not bleeding the rebellious trees encrusted but not cracking.”

—Jayne Cortez

“Unless rooted in poetry the experience of ‘outside’ from within—even the deepest ‘deep ecology’ barely scratches the surface.”

—Franklin Rosemont

...

In the 1990s, environmentalists and animal rights activists engaged in campaigns to put a stop to climate change, animal exploitation, and the destruction of biodiversity. They shut down board meetings, interrupted construction projects, organized demonstrations and sit-ins, held public outreach events at punk shows and vegan potlucks, liberated animals from captivity, and occasionally utilized vandalism, sabotage, and arson against corporations involved in particularly egregious behavior.

...

Send letters to fe AT fifthestate DOT org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220.

All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten. Letters may be edited for length.

Enjoyed your review of John Zerzan’s A People’s History of Civilization, “The Way of the Passenger Pigeon,” by Peter Werbe in FE #401, Summer 2018. In your reviewer’s analogy of civilization being a train heading towards a bridge that is out without the realization of those supping in the dining car, if I enjoy that last supper as it crosses that trestle, is that decadence?

...

BERKELEY (LNS)—One man was murdered and over 200 people injured by police May 15 in the heaviest street battle in Berkeley yet over who controlled a city park.

Above, Berkeley Police shoot at the backs of free people. Below, a police car is burned in retaliation. Photos—LNS.

For the first time, cops used shotguns and rifles against the people. Over a hundred people were hit with birdshot, rock salt and with carbine bullets.

...

a review of

The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen. Echo Press, 2017.

What is the best way to kill off most life on Earth? Forget those Hollywood asteroids and simply disrupt CO2 equilibrium in the atmosphere. The rest will take care of itself.

...

In June and July, during a visit to Spain, my partner Marilynn Rashid and I spread some of the ashes of Federico Arcos, a companero, friend, and mentor to many of us in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, including those on the Fifth Estate. Fede, as he was called, died in 2015 at the age of 94.

(For Federico’s memorial in Detroit in 2015, see FE issue 394, Summer 2015 and 395, Winter 2016.)

...

a review of

Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian—Strategies, Tools, and Models by Bruce E. Levine. AK Press, 2018

What makes someone anti-authoritarian? Bruce Levine, in his sometimes engaging book, Resisting Illegitimate Authority, starts by talking about his own childhood experiences testing adult authority, in this case, his teacher, and how he decided whether her authority was legitimate:

...