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A friend and I, one recent evening, stroll into the Oak Park Community Center. Sundry activities are taking place, bridge-playing, music groups, etc. We’re not there 60 seconds when this guy—janitor, custodian or whoever he was—barges up with the cop-like “CAN I HELP YOU FELLAS?” At first, but eyeing the man, my friend tells him that, since it’s a public place, we’re simply looking around. The worker takes on an increasing anxiety, as though wondering who we are, what we’re up to. Like maybe we’ll steal the building! Or rape the females! (even though most, that evening, were there taking karate lessons).

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Hello:

I would like to subscribe to the Fifth Estate. I’m impressed with the content or the majority of it enough to want to see more.

However, the format and layout will assure you that only the true believers will ever read it regularly. You don’t break up the columns, it’s endlessssssssss. Visually it’s dull; reminds me of The Weekly People, only with possibilities.

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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.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $5.00 a year; $7.00 foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit MI

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1. Not felt except by a very few under especially favorable circumstances.

Marginal and long-period effects.

2. Felt only by a few persons at rest, or favorably placed.

Delicately suspended objects may swing.

3. Felt quite noticeably especially on upper levels.

Many people do not recognize it.

Hanging objects swing.

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Norman Mayer tried to stop the Missile X and failed. On the morning of December 8 the 66-year-old Miami man drove his van up to the Washington Monument, threatening to blow up the structure with 1,000 pounds of dynamite. Not interested in taking human lives, he insisted that nine people inside be evacuated. Perhaps he could have toppled that ugly stone spire resembling a hooded Ku Klux Klansman, or even broken a few windows in the White House. (In fact, a White House luncheon attended by President Reagan was moved to a room facing away from the monument grounds.) But no bombs were exploded and no White House windows broken.

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Mass murder, random killings and the like are nothing new in this country; Bruce Springsteen, in his ballad about a killing spree in the late 1950s by Charlie Starkweather, sings, “It’s just a meanness in this land, sir.”

It seems someone blows their top, flips their lid almost daily. So, reports of a homophobic minister’s son in New York City shooting into a crowd of gays, or a driver ramming her car into pedestrians packed onto a Las Vegas sidewalk, or a disgruntled client tossing gasoline bombs before him as he shoots his way through a crowded Detroit law office, or a bored Southern California school girl who calmly fires round after round into her school yard, become almost mundane, ordinary, such is their frequency. They are the small percentage of flip-outs, those whose rage has gotten out of control.

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a review of

Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia by Kevin A. Young, 2017, University of Texas Press

Kevin Young’s Blood of the Earth examines the period of Bolivian history after the country’s 1952 revolution, in which the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) was able to overthrow the ruling military government with the help of popular militias led by factory workers and miners.

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How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

To an admiring bog!

—Emily Dickinson

Dogwoods swathed in delicate white, gently clear their winter throats as cable news updates crawl and grovel for her attention. But she doesn’t blog, pin, Snapchat, Instagram or—God No!—tweet, and her dumb phone shortcomings are just fine. She the freak in the waiting room without an umbilical glow in her palm, just a paperback copy of something she fills with marginalia.

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From its Eat the Rich Gang incarnation in the 1970s, Fifth Estate has been an unparalleled source of new ideas. Thinkers like Fredy Perlman, Jacques Ellul, and Jacques Camatte were introduced and moved anti-authoritarian perspectives forward very significantly.

I was happy to be a part of an exciting opening, as many of us pondered the limitations and defeat of the 1960s. Foundational critiques of technology and civilization emerged.

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The inflated effigy of a head of state, dressed in nothing but a diaper, floats over a joyous crowd of protesters on a sunny day. Beneath the surface description, two spirits can be perceived, the vile spirit of a deranged despot and the angry but hopeful and playful spirit of collective refusal.

Images such as this appear in current protests against the rule of racketeers like Trump. They are artistic weapons wielded against repressive reality, a part of radical history we are privileged to experience directly. In opposing authority, it is important to explore many cultural expressions of revolt, their past as well as present incarnations.

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a review of

Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici, Foreword by Peter Linebaugh. PM Press, 2019

Silvia Federici was born in Italy, taught for years in Nigeria, made many visits to South America, and now lives and teaches in the U.S. This broad experience, along with extensive scholarship, provides the wide angle lens which enables the perspective on view in her new book, Re-Enchanting the World.

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Decentralization of the Detroit Public School System has emerged as a major issue confronting this city. Within this conflict there exists a strong potential for radical change. Recognizing this, many activist groups have joined in the struggle for effective decentralization.

This becomes a radical issue when the part that is played by education in the Amerikan system is considered.

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(in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure)

THURS. DEC. 25

Many places closed, better call ahead. Happy birthday; baby Jesus!!

FRI. DEC. 26

FLOCK YOU with Chicago’s Flock & Detroit’s own Stooges and Savage Grace, plus Magic Veil trippy lights at the Easttown-Grande. Harper at Van Dyke. Adm. $3.50.

TED LUCAS invades one of the sacrosanct shelters of the ruling class, at the Absolute Zero Coffeehouse in Birmingham. 388 N. Woodward. $1.50.

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Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

For several years we’ve been looking for physicians to help freeze people. With several exceptions, we haven’t had much luck. Most doctors are too frightened and conservative to even study our approach.

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Arthur Parumba’s review of Richard Brautigan’s three books [FE #94, December 11–24, 1969] was the best thing to appear in the Fifth Estate in ages. His Shell Station sounds like the greatest spot this side of Alice’s Restaurant. By the way, is “Parumba” for real?

Thomas Haroldson

Editors’ Note: Sure he’s real. The Parumba Bros. Shell Station is right on the corner of Prentis and Woodward. Drop in and see them.

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Editor’s note: Mike Quatro is a Detroit booking agent and promo man for some of Michigan’s leading rock groups. Quatro has been hit hard in the last few months by the underground media for being a parasite on the community. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s office even went so far as to investigate him for fraud for his ill-fated October 31 Black Arts Festival.

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Editors’ Note: This week’s Other Scenes is written by Maryanne Raphael and appeared originally in the UPS paper Other Scenes, published by John Wilcock.

WHAT’S A 4-LETTER WORD BEGINNING WITH F? If your answer to the above question was food, you’d probably rather eat greasy fried chicken than low-calorie cock or pussy, and chances are you’re overweight and could profit from the following reducing hints.

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Editors’ Note: People Concerned About Urban Renewal (PCAUR) is a community based organization that has resisted the expansion of Wayne State University and demanded local control of all renewal projects.

Their main political strategy is to build neighborhood block clubs and to agitate for the rights of the citizens of the Warren Forest area. This article taken from an article in the weekly paper, The Community Reporter, was written by Bob Repoley. PCAUR may be reached at 831–5664.

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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, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50)

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PRENSA LATINA—When asked “why did you come to Cuba” one black youth from Detroit answered earnestly: “To meet the beautiful Cuban people and help them with their harvest.” His friend, also from Detroit said: “To mix with the people and to get the truth of what’s happening here.”

“De pieeee...” followed by its English equivalent, “On your feeeet...” comes through the loudspeaker and echoes across the cane fields.

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Breakfield, Russell, Klug and Catlow, four of the Ft. Dix 38 (Shakedown/LNS)

FORT DIX, N.J.—The court-martial of Pvt. Terry Klug is over. He is the GI who the Ft. Dix brass had singled out as the “ringleader” in the now famous stockade rebellion on that base last June.

The surprise verdict: Not Guilty on all counts.

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DEC. 26–31, WEATHERMAN SDS IS PROCLAIMING A GATHERING OF THE TRIBES—A NATIONAL WAR COUNCIL! WEATHERMAN, MAD DOGS, THE CONSPIRACY, YAWF, YIPPIES, MEDIA FREEKS, JUVENILE DELINQUENTS, AND DOPE CRAZED HIPPIES FROM THE GUTS OF AMERIKA WILL BE THERE! PARTIES, FILMS, BANDS, DANCING AND POLITICAL DISCUSSIONS ON BRINGING THIS MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! PLACE SECRET UNTIL DEC. 24TH, THEN CALL DETROIT: 833–4323, CHICAGO (312) 666–3874.

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The virtual vacuum that has been left in the wake of SDS’s floundering may be filled by the New Youth International Party. With repression growing and the need for a national organization crucial, YIP looks promising as a junction for the vast but disparate political energy the movement is developing.

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Plymouth pigs went down in defeat in a frontal legal attack by Rolf Dietrich on December 18^th.

As reported earlier on these pages, the pigs of suburban Plymouth have hassled Dietrich from the beginning of the year when they first arrested him on a phony traffic charge and confiscated 15 copies of the Fifth Estate which he had on the back seat of his car. [See articles in FE Archive.]

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The following speech was delivered by David Hilliard, Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party at the November 15^th anti-war rally at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

He was charged with threatening the life of the President as a result of it.

There’s too many American flags out here, and our Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, says that the American flag and the American eagle are the true symbols of fascism. ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE. Black power to Black people, Brown power to Brown people, Red power to Red people, and Yellow power to Ho Chi Minh, and Comrade Kim II Sung the courageous leader of the 40,000,000 Korean people.

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Brothers & Sisters:

After a long literary silence, I write again to the people of the planet. Joshua Newton, the phantom bomber, is still alive and carrying on the struggle. Are you?

The sooner we unite to off the oppressor, the sooner we will be able to live free lives by our own principles and our own values.

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Fifth Estate

“To Serve the People”

EDITORIAL GROUP

Alan Gotkin

Peter Werbe

Cathy West

MANAGING EDITOR

Bill Rowe

DISTRIBUTION

Keep On Truckin’ Co-op

ADVERTISING

Steve Dunn

STAFF

Jane Capellaro

David Gaynes

Jim Kennedy

Rick London

Nick Medvecky

Bruce Montrose

Claudia Montrose

Marilyn Werbe

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SAN FRANCISCO (LNS)—People are determined not to allow the murderous police raids which have been carried out in Chicago, Los Angeles, Kansas and other areas to occur in Berkeley and San Francisco.

A constant vigil has been established at Panther headquarters in both cities. The offices are filled at all times with thirty to forty people—black and white, very old to very young (some mothers with infants.)

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LOS ANGELES (LNS)—Over 5,000 people massed at Los Angeles City Hall on Thursday, Dec. 11 to protest the Dec. 8 attack on the Black Panther Party headquarters here in which 13 Panthers held off 300 police for close to five hours.

Speakers at the City Hall rally included representatives of NAACP and the Urban League as well as the Panthers.

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Plymouth City Attorney Charles Lowe told a Detroit News reporter recently that “the Plymouth City Commission felt that the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office will no longer recommend warrants for violations of the state obscenity law and thus it has become necessary for us to write our own law.”

This comes on the heels of a well financed campaign by the local chapter of the VFW to “rub out smut” in Plymouth. They collected, according to a spokesman, more than 3000 signatures on petitions in support for new anti-obscenity legislation in the City of Plymouth.

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“We are all outlaws in the eyes of America.”

—Jefferson Airplane

“The chickens are going to come home to roost.”

—Malcolm X

Years of police harassment of young people at Northland Shopping Center finally came home on Saturday, December 20, as hundreds of Detroit and suburban youths clashed with police for several hours in the center.

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A tentative existence is what society’s current trajectory offers us: alienation from others simultaneous with chronic concern about perception by others. Futile attempts to persist in these conditions takes the form of claiming an identity, espousing sanctioned banalities, and various other nonsense that renders us drained and pained.

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One afternoon a thousand years ago a Chinese administrator named Cao Bien was sitting by the River Lo in Vietnam. He had been sent by the Emperor of China to conquer Vietnam and make it part of China.

As he sat there on that afternoon, 500 years before the first white man ever set foot in America, scheming of ways to get the riches of Vietnam back to China, he saw something huge and terrifying.

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This May was a very exciting time for anarchists in Cuba, full of both inspiration and anxiety. On the positive side, the Anarchist Social Center and Library (ABRA: Centro Social y Biblioteca Libertaria) hosted the Fourth Libertarian Spring Conference in Havana, from May 4 to 11.

Cuba Pride March, May 11, despite being banned by authorities.

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Part of American Revolutionary Media / Detroit insert

When 300,000 people marched in Washington for civil rights in 1963, a lot of people felt as good as they did in November when 750,000 people marched in Washington for peace. But the civil rights movement has not liberated Black people. And the peace movement has yet to end the war in Vietnam, let alone “bring the boys home” from the 53 countries’ in which they are stationed around the world.

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(in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure)

THURS. DEC. 11

HEAR COME THE REVOLUTION (too bad its about the American one) a gallery talk with Glenn Still, Curator of Fort Wayne Military Museum. At the Det. Hist. Museum. 3:30 p.m. Free.

DETROIT SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA in concert with Alexander Gibson guest conductor. Soloist: Wanda Wilkomirski, violinist. Ford Aud. 8:30 p.m.

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Part of American Revolutionary Media / Detroit insert

Ken Cockrell is a Black revolutionary, “so-called attorney,” and a member of the central staff of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. His rap was taped, transcribed and edited by Newsreel for this ARM issue on the day of the Los Angeles police attack on the Panther office, before that news was made public.

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Consensus is boiling that humans have become hyper-exploiters, impacting and taking so much from nature that remaining ecosystems are entering death spirals. Is it possible for human’s bred-in exploiter culture to shift from a taking lifeway from the wild to a way of giving?

Just as humans can turn civilization’s wrenches against logging machines to halt destruction, they can turn their civilized brains and bodies to recovering earth’s wild.

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Dear Dr. Hip Pocrates,

I seldom read your column, it usually actually makes me sick to my stomach to know there are such vulgar, uncivilized, people.

Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld speaking at Community Arts Auditorium, May 28, 1969 at a benefit for Open City. Photo: Alan Gotkin.

Today my husband showed me your column about the man who liked to wake up his wife by making love to her in the morning. He’s an early riser and I’m not (he relaxes in the evenings while I take care of dinner, children, and chores). He remarked that he might try that sometime. I told him and I’ll tell you, if he ever does, in that manner, I’ll probably kill him and blame you for contributing to the cause.

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Ever since I’ve been reading Hank Malone’s articles, I acquired the irresistible urge to blast his ideas out of our midst into oblivion, where they belong. Malone’s reflections on art are a classical example of revolutionary cretinism.

Malone’s views have been attacked (rather irrationally) by another reader before me, and his response is curiously analogous to vice-president Agnew’s: “I’m not for censorship” said Agnew, after subtly advocating censorship in a previous speech.

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Part of American Revolutionary Media / Detroit insert

Last summer, after beating a 13-month strike by its employees, the Booth family’s Detroit News returned to its standard racist and reactionary distorted news practices. The response of the white and Black movements was the total boycott declared below. But as, we all know, it is not just the News which distorts information to the people at the source, nor just the Booth newspapers, TV and radio stations which hold the people down by denying them full and accurate information about their place in the world, and what people are doing to change the world—it is the entire spectrum of the power structure media. Until the movement stops cooperating with the power structure media in the naive confidence that it is WE who will be using THEM, and until the people act on their knowledge that “you can’t believe what you read in the newspapers,” or hear on radio or see on television, our image of the world and ourselves will depend on the power-structure’s definitions, and we will never be free.

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Blacks at Harvard University seized the Administration Building December 5 demanding more black workers in administrative and service areas. Six hours later, the blacks gave up the building after an Administration promise to discuss the demands on the following Monday.

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SEX: Fifteen couples fucking simultaneously under the guidance of a clinical psychologist who told them how to get more out of it was one of the features at a recent encounter weekend at Ed Lange’s Elysium Institute ranch in California’s Topanga Canyon. Elysium (5436 Fernwood, L.A. Calif. 90027 for info) recently won its court fight to operate the first nudist camp within the LA city limits, overturning a law that had made nudity illegal even with your own family in your own backyard...

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The Detroit black community is moving again. They are mobilizing in support of Robert F. Williams and against the racist judicial machinery that is attempting to extradite him to North Carolina.

Williams, the revolutionary spokesman and former president of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), is accused by the State of North Carolina of kidnapping a “white couple” back in 1961. He returned to Detroit recently to denounce these charges and to renew his political and legal struggles.

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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, per issue. (i.e. 2 lines in 5 issues cost $3.50)

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When the Rolling Stones came to Detroit, 14,000 kids gave Mike Quatro over $100,000. The Stones were great and the whole crowd was really into it.

Around 100 SDS Weathermen were digging the Stones too. Only they didn’t pay anything; neither did about 200 other kids.

They didn’t pay because they were fed up with the entire bullshit line about paying money to establishment pigs just so you can dig your own culture. So all the Weathermen got together and crashed the gates at Olympia.

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Position: Man is but a part of the fabric of life—dependent on the whole fabric for his very existence. As the most highly developed tool-using animal, he must recognize that the unknown evolutionary destinies of other life forms are to be respected, and act as gentle steward of the earth’s community of being.

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LOS ANGELES, Dec. 8—25 Black Panthers were arrested, three wounded, during police raids on two apartments and a four-and-a-half hour gun battle at the main Panther office in Watts.

The office was surrounded at 5:30 a.m. by a force of between 300 and 400 police. They were refused entrance to the office. They began to break down the front door, but were driven away by shotgun fire; two cops were wounded.

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Movies, radio and television, newspapers and magazines consistently distort news, information and images of the Black and white liberation movements, here and around the world.

With Black Nationalist groups like the Panther Party, the effort is to present them as aggressively, violently militant organizations of anti-white Black racists. In the case of the Panthers, this slander has been accomplished entirely by slant and innuendo. The Panther Party has never been reported in an incident of violence that was not a case of self-defense. Spokesmen have continually emphasized that the Panther Party is not anti-white, but anti-racist, not concerned with the destruction of white people, but concerned properly and necessarily with serving, defending and liberating its own Black people.

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Reprinted from Fire

I. Necessity

The average Amerikan cannot help but read several hundred thousand words per day of pig shit in the form of advertising, slogans on police cars, etc. Revolutionary wall painting effectively combats this totalitarian bombardment of the mass subconscious.

“A dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”—Mao

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