Most Recent Additions
Events Calendar August 1 to 14
Come watch the league leading Tigers sock it to the Washington Senators in a night game. It’s fun if you don’t get hasseled by some obnoxious popcorn vender. 8 p.m. Tiger Stadium.
ENJOY good FOLK MUSIC by Danny Cox. Now at the Raven Gallery until Aug. 11. Greenfield Rd. just north of 12 Mile Rd. Open every night but Mondays. For any information call 353–1778.
Nov 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
In the July 18 edition of the Detroit American, Anthony J. Wierzbicki, the paper’s president and publisher, wrote an editorial in response to the barrage of criticism directed at the paper’s use of uncomplimentary terminology when referring to law-breakers, precisely black law-breakers.
Nov 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Publisher Anthony Wierzbicki of the Detroit American is constantly explaining his extensive “crime” coverage. In a recent front-page editorial he stated: “We firmly believe that it is the duty of a newspaper to advise its readers of the truth—the entire truth. Then, and then only can the public make proper decisions and demand proper civic action.”
Nov 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Pigs get blank check
Inhaling deeply on his political hookah, Detroit mayor Jerry Cavanagh, leading contender for the August “Uptight Honkie of the Month” award, attempted to justify his approval of the controversial “stop and frisk” ordinance which moments earlier he had signed into law.
Cavanagh stated that he didn’t think that his action would hurt him politically. “The situation is far different than it was in 1960...” Jerry honked, “ ‘police brutality’ is a thing of the past: The climate has changed completely.”
Nov 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Unclassifieds
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.
Good looking bachelor likes to make love during the day. Works,4 to 12 shift. Call before 10 am 883–0068.
Nov 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
anon.
Dope study-junk!
Reprinted from the San Francisco Express-Times
San Francisco—The American Medical Association’s report on the dangers of marijuana poses the issue in the lingo of narcotics police, not in scientific or humanitarian language, according to Dr. Joel Fort.
Moreover, the media made a bad report worse by paying so little attention to its constructive recommendations the lifting of criminal penalties against occasional users, and the loosening of federal controls restricting research on marijuana.
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Dope victims benefit
Local folk singers David and Roselyn are the focal point of a campaign to raise $6,000 by August 15. David and Roselyn, who provided the music for Tom and Kate’s wedding and played at their reception (see last issue, FE #58, July 18–31, 1968) were from Houston, Texas. The trial for the inter-racial couple will be in Houston on August 16, and they are without money for a lawyer.
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Thorne Dreyer
Hate In The Haight
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF., JULY 19 (Libeeration News Service)—The scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury was tense Friday evening. Street confrontations between cops and free men had occurred the two previous nights and more street activity was expected into the weekend. On Wednesday and Thursday night, according to one witness, “People were throwing molotov cocktails as freely as rocks and bottles.” Barricades were erected and set aflame in the streets of Hashbury and the pigs were greeted with flying objects.
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Eugene Schoenfeld M.D.
HipPocrates

QUESTION: I have used the pill for five years but have become concerned and frightened by what I’ve recently heard about the dangerous side effects. What are they? And if I should give them up, what is the comparative efficiency of (1) a diaphragm with contraceptive cream, (2) a ‘loop”, (3) vaginal foam?
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Emil Bacilla
Medium
Every so often I wake up in the middle of the night with the insane desire to write another film column. Usually, I manage to put it out of my head and go back to sleep. Sometimes I find that impossible, so here we go again.
First some background: Detroit is probably the only place in the world where independent film theaters have come into existence with no filmmaking scene to back them up. Usually there’s filmmakers first and theaters second. Now that underground films have been around regularly for about six months, a filmmaking scene seems to be materializing.
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
anon.
Mixed Mead-Ear
In this fortnight past of sparse record releases we were given new albums by the Doors, Ten Years After, Buffalo Springfield, Pink Floyd and Jeff Beck, along with Phil Ochs’ tape from California and Paul Butterfield’s latest massacre.
Each of these albums I heard several times with the exception of Buffalo Springfield and Phil Ochs, as these two albums arrived too late for me to hear to -any great extent.
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Wilson Lindsey
Sounds
This band formerly known as the Hawks has the distinction of being Bob Dylan’s backing group. They are polished musicians and this album boasts a lot in the way of imagination in regards to lyrics and clever rhythm changes. The standout cut on the L.P. is a composition entitled ‘Tears of Rage’, penned by Dylan and band pianist Richard Manual: Good.
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Russ Gibb
Uncle Russ in England
The English musical scene is really a bummer. English audiences are mostly composed of teenyboppers that still dig “The Midnight Hour.” Yet there is a growing group that is really beginning to get into the music thing and love to hear a band kick out the jams.
Probably the most interesting musical group on the English horizon is “The Family.” It is composed of some older college type cats who are not only saying something in their music about the conditions of the society that we live in, but also happen to be very expert musicians.
Nov 5, 2018 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Black Panther Trial
OAKLAND, CALIF., July 16 (LNS) A tense crowd of several thousand chanted outside the Alameda County Courthouse here as the trial of Huey Newton entered its second day.
Newton, Black Panther Party Minister for Defense, and Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. Congress, has been imprisoned since October 28 of last year, when he was arrested in a hospital and charged with the murder of an Oakland cop. Newton and a second Oakland cop were wounded in the confrontation, the first in a series of attempted assassinations of the Panther leadership by Oakland police.
Nov 2, 2018 Read the whole text...
Harvey Stone
G.I. Coffee Houses for Peace
FORT HOOD, TEXAS July 12 (LNS)—The war in Vietnam is now the longest war in America’s violent history. In addition to the genocide being committed against the Vietnamese, thousands upon thousands of American G.I.‘s have been killed or wounded. But “G.I.” is merely a label we use; beneath the uniforms are real people. Sometimes we forget that.
Nov 2, 2018 Read the whole text...
Thomas Haroldson
The Swimmer
Film review
Eleanor and Frank Perry, who made “David and Lisa,” have come out with a new film called “The Swimmer.” Although it does not resemble, or live up to, their previous effort, it’s a better movie than most critics would have you believe.
I feel, despite what you might have heard to the contrary, that “The Swimmer” is a motion picture worth seeing. I should point out, however, that I’m probably the only reviewer in the country who feels this way.
Nov 2, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Underground Incorporated
New York, July 23 (LNS)—Former Supreme Court Justice and UN lackey Arthur Goldberg will defend Rev. William Sloane Coffin in the upcoming appeal of his two-year draft conspiracy conviction. Radio Station WBAI said that Goldberg left them with the impression that he would soon issue a statement on why he left the UN and why he decided to take up Coffin’s defense.
Nov 2, 2018 Read the whole text...
David Horowitz
Todd Gitlin
Where Rocky’s At
Reprinted from San Francisco Express Times
Surely it isn’t brazen self-confidence that drives Nelson Rockefeller, scion of the most powerful network of vested interests in the Free World, to appear as the Galahad of the forces of Change in the pre-convention scramble. After all, empires are not administered by headstrong individuals but by hereditary networks, families, tribes—Nelson does not go off on his own to contest control of the Republican Party. Then what could he have in mind?
Nov 2, 2018 Read the whole text...
Chris Singer
Black Day in July—one Year later
Who are the long list of names in the oceans
Who are the figures standing in the cabin doors
as the train highballs North
Who are the wailing children,
bodies ripped into bits of flesh?
I catch aspects of their profiles,
am wound around them like a serpent
grasping for life.
whose eyes are these, gouged out
mucus smeared in the red earth,
figure hanging tarred above the lynch fire?
what bodies are these crushed and maimed,
or brains kicked out on the piss pavements
of the cities?
How many aspects of truth do you need Negro leaders?
How many angles are there to any story?
Whose church was that now charred smoldering in time?
Whose mamma getting laid in the cotton patch:
Whose orishas call blood-warnings?
Whose shall die, and die, and die, and die?
Whose soul fucked on the assembly floor?
whose mind picked clean in air-conditioned offices?
whose children shot to pieces in Newark tenements?
whose blood is that efficient lackey-tom motherfuckers?
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Black Mercenary Bullies Children
Carrying signs demanding “No Target Practice on Kids,” twenty youths picketed Danny’s Market on Puritan at San Juan, July 13, protesting the wild shooting by a Negro guard at two little black girls aged eight and ten.
The white owner, Danny Knopper, was told to “keep his goons under control” to “protect black kids” and to “provide good will and not bad guards”.
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Books
discussed in this article:
The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. 397 pages, Hardbound, $5.95. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; Paperback, $1.25, Bantam Books
Editors’ Note: Detroit News reporter Joseph Strickland was the first newsman to break concrete news about the Algiers Motel slayings during last July’s rebellion. The editors of the Fifth Estate quizzed Strickland about John Hersey’s new book, The Algiers Motel Incident.
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead
Fifth Estate
A Newspaper of Detroit
EDITORS
Harvey Ovshinsky
Peter Werbe
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Cathy West
CIRCULATION
Tommye Wiese
NEWS EDITOR
Alan Gotkin
MUSIC EDITORS
Tony Reay
John Sinclair
OFFICE MANAGER
Debbie Quigg
PHOTO EDITOR
Mike Tyre
ADVERTISING
Gunnar Lewis
CALENDAR
Resa Jannett
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
MC5 busted for noise
After finally freeing John Sinclair and Fred Smith from the iron grip of the Oakland County pigs July 25, the MC5 was awakened the next morning by representatives of the Ann Arbor Police Dept. and charged with “disturbing the peace” and being “disorderly persons” as a result of their free West Park concert the Sunday before.
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
“New cries of battle and victory”
“Shortly after the riot in Detroit last summer, I talked to a Negro in his late thirties, and I asked him what he thought about the 12-year old boy lying in the street after being shot by a white policeman in Newark. A newsmagazine had the picture on its cover in living color. The man said he thought it was a joke. ‘A joke?’ I inquired. He said, ‘Yeah, the whole goddam thing is a joke. Every year, they pass some new damn civil rights bill; and every year, Emmett Till gets younger.”
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
John Wilcock
Other Scenes
“In a rebellion, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end” (Alexis de Tocqueville)...
In the north of England there’s been an outbreak of bow-and-arrow “sniping”...
If the war in Vietnam was suddenly ended, says a confidential banking letter called Intercom, most of the supposed savings in military expenditures would be grabbed for other “high priority military projects deferred because of the costs of the war”. So projected tax increases, budgetary cuts, etc. would still be needed. And, of course, the military could always start another little war somewhere (Haiti? Guatemala? Bolivia? Thailand?)...
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
John Sinclair
Pigs Attack Sinclair
Poet John Sinclair and MC5 guitarist Fred Smith were brutally assaulted, beaten, MACEd, and arrested by members of the National Security Police and the Oakland County (Michigan) Sheriffs Dept. while performing at a Michigan teen-club on July 23rd.

The scene took place at the Loft, located on Army Road in Leonard, Michigan (between Pontiac and Lapeer), where the MC5 had been contracted to play a dance job.
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
John Sinclair
The Coat Puller
Editor’s note: Brother Sinclair’s Coatpuller column is re-printed here exactly as it appeared in this paper one year ago. It was written at the height of the July Rebellion and contains one of the best impressionistic sketches of that week.
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
The Honkie American
Detroit’s racist newspaper
The Detroit American is a racist newspaper.
It is written by racists and for racists. Its pseudo-populist rhetoric about defending the little man from “crime in the streets” and fighting against “THE BIG PRESS ESTABLISHMENT” is nothing but subterfuge for its racism.
The American defends itself against attack by saying that the bleeding-hearts can’t bear to have accused criminals referred to as “curs”, “punks”, “whelps”, etc. This, of course, is not the central issue.
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Yippies Ready for Chicago Assault
NEW YORK—The Yippies died for a few months this year, partly from under-exposure and partly because, as Abbie Hoffman believes, “the establishment became even more absurd than the idea of YIP.” Hoffman is one of the leaders of the Youth International Party (YIP or Yippies for short).
YIP has renewed its plans for the Chicago Festival of Life conceived last December and forgotten in the mayhem of this year’s politics. The dates of the Festival are August 25–30 and will coincide with Democratic Party Death Convention.
Oct 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Crisis in Iran—none for me, thanks
The confrontation between Iran and the United States over the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran Nov. 4 and taking of 63 hostages (later reduced to 50) by Islamic student militants has brought to the fore the worst features of this epoch. The grotesque spectacle of a million Iranians marching in lockstep, chanting praises of a decrepit mullah and a reactionary religion is matched in this country by a sudden upsurge of patriotism one would have thought impossible just a few weeks ago.
Oct 1, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead
FIFTH ESTATE, #300, December 4, 1979, vol. 14, no. 5, page 1
Fifth Estate
Published by the Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN 0015–0800) bimonthly at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201; phone (313) 831–6800. Subscriptions are $4.00 for 6 issues; $6.00 for foreign. Second class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No paid advertising.
Oct 1, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
No War (poster)
Oct 1, 2018 Read the whole text...
Daily Barbarian
Daily Barbarian Number 1
Barbarian: 1. A fierce, brutal or cruel person. 2. A brute, uncivilized, rude, savage, cruel, barbarous.
Example: “he is merely a barbarian on the loose in a museum” (Yvor Winters).
Civilization: 1. The process of civilizing or becoming civilized. 2. To civilize; to bring out of a condition of savagery or barbarism; to better the habits or manners of; refine.
Sep 29, 2018 Read the whole text...
Various Authors
Letters
Send letters to fe@fifthestate.org or Fifth Estate, POB 201016, Ferndale MI 48220.
All formats accepted including typescript & handwritten. Letters may be edited for length.
Thank you for finally calling out your fellow privileged white lefties for their, “I choose not to vote,” bullshit. (See “In Defense of Tactical Voting,” by Bill Weinberg, FE #400, Spring 2018.)
Sep 29, 2018 Read the whole text...
E.B. Maple (Peter Werbe)
George Bradford (David Watson)
Blood and Soil Ideologies
Excerpt-Reprint
The following is an excerpt from an article commenting on the 1993 Palestine Liberation Organization/Israel peace agreement, “The PLO/Israeli Treaty: Another Defeat for the Palestinians,” from Fifth Estate #343, Fall/Winter 1993.
Few realize that in the 45 years of Israeli existence, fewer than 700 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian guerrillas. In the same period, Israel has slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians (including scores of children whose “crime” was throwing stones), wiped out 400 villages, imprisoned thousands without trial, dynamited houses, cut down thousands of trees in orchards, and engaged in collective punishment in an attempt to terrorize the “natives” into submission.
Sep 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Intro to May ’68
We’ll Always Have Paris

It’s been fifty years since the exciting events of May 1968 in France that shook the country to its foundations. It is still inspiring to remember the widespread revolt of high school and university students, and then workers, that erupted throughout the country, leading to the largest general strike in French history. These events brought society to a stop, temporarily transforming daily life, and posing the possibility of a complete social revolution. The 1968 turmoil in France was part of a worldwide upsurge.
Sep 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Tom Schulte
Life Among the Piutes
Review
a review of
Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883; Kindle edition, 2017. Also, free online
This is an amazing autobiography and first-hand account from Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (born Thocmentony, meaning “Shell Flower;” c. 1844—1891) the grand-daughter of Chief Truckee (d. 1860), medicine chief of the Northern Paiute.
Sep 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Montreal Anarchist Theatre Festival Seeks Plays
The 14th annual Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival, the world’s only event dedicated to anarchist theatre, seeks plays, monologues, dance-theatre, puppet shows, mime, in English and French, on the theme of anarchism or related themes such as opposition to all forms of oppression including the State, capitalism, war, and patriarchy. Also, pieces exploring ecological, social and economic justice, racism, feminism, poverty, class and gender oppression from an anarchist perspective. We welcome work from anarchist and non-anarchist writers.
Sep 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
S. Laplage
Novels of Michael Ondaatje
Review
a review of
In the Skin of a Lion (1987); The English Patient (1993) by Michael Ondaatje
Some people read novels solely for a good story. Others also want quality writing that flows well and doesn’t distract from the story line. For me, if the novel reflects my values, all the better, but this is not a criterion.
Sep 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Bill Weinberg
True Stories
Review
a review of
True Stories: Tales from the Generation of a New World Culture by Garrick Beck. iUniverse, 2017
Garrick Beck spans a personal journey through radical bohemia in the 1950s, hippie utopianism in the 1960s, back-to-the-land communalism in the 1970s, to applying those ethics today through community work and urban Land-reclamation back in the New York City of his youth.
Sep 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
About this issue
An Anarchist Review of Books

It’s been said that a revolutionary’s first weapon is a book.
When the Fifth Estate occupied a physical office in its first thirty years of existence, it always had a bookstore space where texts supporting ideas we published and stimulated us lined the shelves. The last one, in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, carried the name of Ammunition Books and in one listing of our titles used a photo of a .357 magnum pistol as an illustration.
Sep 27, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Masthead, Call for Submissions
Fifth Estate #401, Summer 2018, Vol. 53 No. 2
Fifth Estate: Radical Publishing since 1965
The Fifth Estate is an anti-profit, anarchist project published by a volunteer collective of friends and comrades.
No ads. No copyright. Kopimi — reprint freely.
www.FIFTHESTATE.org
Fall 2018 Fifth Estate
Sep 27, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Bits of the world in brief
The Epilepsy Foundation of America is warning that the simple act of watching television may trigger seizures in nearly a third of all individuals with epilepsy. The Washington-based organization says there is substantial scientific data indicating that the moving images of lights and shadows on TV screens can provoke the seizures.
Sep 26, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Canadian Anarchists Seized at U.S. Border
The positioning of this article in the back pages in no way reflects our assessment of the gravity of the situation described herein. We extend our full solidarity to these comrades, victimized for committing no “crime” other than to cross a point of land arbitrarily designated as a “border” by those who we hold in utter contempt. It is small acts like this, carried out by cretinous functionaries of the State, that further steels our resolve to work actively for its total elimination.
Sep 26, 2018 Read the whole text...
Michael Scrivener
Discipline and Punish
Book review
a review of
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977)
The book is now a Vintage paperback; the original French version was Surveiller et punir, Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975)
Foucault insists that “delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups” (p.279). Delinquency is a uniquely modern development, which first materialized in the nineteenth century. As Foucault delineates the process, tine Enlightenment reforms of the penal code and prison conditions were adapted to the new conditions of early industrial capitalism. Delinquency, then, is depoliticized crime, distinct from popular illegalities such as peasant uprisings, sans-culotte direct democracy, Luddism, strikes, insurrections and so on. The reformed penal code and the new criminal justice bureaucracy (police, courts, lawyers, prisons) created, in the nineteenth century, a circumscribed zone of illegality that was easily controlled and which posed no threat to the ruling class. On the contrary, delinquency became one of the principal modes by which the bourgeois regime maintained its legitimacy as a ruling class.
Sep 26, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
FE Bookstore
The FE Bookstore is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate and can be found at 4403 Second Ave., Detroit—telephone (313) 831–6800. The hours that we’re open vary quite a bit, so it’s always best that you give us a ring before coming down.
HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL:
1) List the title(s) of the book, amount wanted and price of each;
Sep 26, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Free Readers’ Ads
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, Michigan 48201.
PARTISAN PRESS is a new libertarian publishing project in Seattle. We are currently preparing several works for publication, including THE CHRISTIE FILE, the autobiography of British anarchist Stuart Christie; THE PRACTICE OF UTOPIA, the English translation of Louis Mercier Vega’s last book; and an as-yet untitled anthology on Italian insurgency, 1976–78. If you have a manuscript relating to libertarian themes (fiction is also welcome), we’d like to see it; and of course, donations toward the publication of our first titles will be gratefully accepted. Hoping to hear from you: Partisan Press, Box 2193 Seattle WA 98111.
Sep 26, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Mega-Death, the film
Mega-Death

Coming soon... (crossed out)
Already here
Rarely does a horror movie of such magnitude reach the public, but when it does, it seems to obtain an unshakable grip on the public imagination, if not on its very being. Such a movie is the latest product from 20th Century Tech.—MEGA-DEATH’
Sep 26, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Walla Prisoners Revolt
On May 9, 1973, three prisoners of Washington State Penitentiary, Carl Harp, Shane Green and Clyde Washburn seized the Classification and Parole Building with ten hostages, and held it nonviolently for 12 hours. During that time they were in constant communication by phone and bullhorn with media, prisoners and people outside to whom they talked about maltreatment and cruel conditions inside the prison.
Sep 26, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Ex-SLAers Hear Mixed Legal News
In a victory for Russ Little, the California Supreme Court has let stand a lower court order reversing his conviction for the 1973 SLA assassination of an Oakland, California school official.
Little should be back in court for re-trial by this Fall setting the stage for his eventual release if found innocent at that proceeding. However, at the same time, the Court refused to hear the appeal in the same case of Joe Remiro whose conviction was left standing by the lower court.
Sep 25, 2018 Read the whole text...