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AMMUNITION BOOKS shares space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and can be found at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit, Mich. 48201 (telephone-313-831-6800). Our hours vary, but we are generally open on Monday and Thursday afternoons (from 1 pm to 5 pm) and at scattered hours other times. It’s always a good idea to telephone us before you start the trek down, just to be safe.

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Dear F.E.:

It would be very interesting to know more about the character of the N.Y. looting but it is not clear to me that we can tell anything from the figures which the Zerzans passed on to us from the San Francisco Chronicle in your August issue [see “New York, New York: The blackout of 1977” by John Zerzan, Paula Zerzan, Fifth Estate # 285, August, 1977].

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In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, the rise of capitalism was met by bitter and intense resistance. Its establishment was only effectuated by the imposition of the factory system as a method of social control. The result was a tamed working class and a degradation of labor which lives today at the core of the marxist conception of socialism.

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“If you support this motion, you will not assist the government. You will paralyze it and indeed stand in danger of destroying it”

—Jack Jones, veteran trade union leader, pleading with delegates to the convention of the Transport and General Workers’ Union not to refuse the extended wage restraint of England’s celebrated “Social Contract” between the unions and the Labor government. The motion was supported.

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Note for web version: regular, bold and italic types are reproduced as in original.

It is appropriate to note at any time that humanity has lived over 99% of its existence in primitive society. Without even the benefit of laws, our ancestors were able to rest their arses on logs and cook over open fires. Without encyclopedias people raised cattle, made, cheese, drank wine. It is even thought by some anthropologists that uncivilized people made love and made music without the religious benefits of stereophonic machines!

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Last March in Canton, China, an unnamed Peking official replied to questions by the New York-Times, on the subject of political prisoners in China, by stating, “A few intellectuals deprived of free speech is only a minor question. In the Soviet Union, the workers, the peasants and the intellectuals are all being oppressed.”

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The Detroit primary elections, as usual, contained no surprises with a majority of both registered and eligible voters not bothering to venture out of their house to participate in selecting who shall rule them. Officials have even given up bemoaning the low turnouts and called this primary a success because 46% of the voters cast ballots...

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MULHOUSE, FRANCE — UPI-AP Leading German industrialist Hans-Martin Schleyer committed suicide Oct. 18 in the trunk of the car in which he had been held since his seizure Sep. 5^th by members of the German Red Army Faction.

The one-time Nazi reportedly shot himself after learning that negotiations between his captors and the Bonn government had completely broken down.

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NEW YORK (LNS)—In the more than six weeks following the kidnapping and execution of Hans-Martin Schleyer by guerrillas of the Red Army Faction (RAF), the West German Government took few visible steps to win the release of one of the country’s leading industrialists and ex-Nazi. But the government wasted little time in enacting laws that will take the country back a long ways toward the golden years of Schleyer’s youth, when he was in charge of stamping out anti-Nazi sentiment on university campuses, first in Heidelberg, then Innsbruck, Austria, and finally in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

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Press accounts have generally referred to the kidnapped Hans-Martin Schleyer as “a major West German industrialist.” He was certainly that—head of the West German Employers Association and top board member of Daimler-Benz, the multinational giant which produces Mercedes-Benz cars and trucks and invests throughout Europe, Africa and the United States.

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Unbelievably, it has become fashionable among some observers of the American political scene to associate the alt-right with punk rock, lauding Donald Trump for his “punk” presidency.

The liberal magazine, The Atlantic, noted in 2016, that Trump and his supporters “created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” Similarly, the New York Post gushed that Trump “is a guy with a safety pin through his nose and a purple mohawk.”

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To The Fifth Estate:

I have been delegated by the Anarchist Fund Raising Picnic held Sept. 11 at Santa Teresa Park, San Jose, California, to disburse the following funds to support the anarchist propaganda projects in the English language including Black Flag, Black Star, Freedom and Open Road.

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The State of California has recently stepped up its attacks on Russell (Little and Joseph Remiro (imprisoned for the 1973 SLA assassination of Oakland, Calif. school official Marcus Foster) who are currently serving life terms.

In recognition of his two years of non-violent behavior in the maximum security Adjustment Center at San Quentin prison, promises were made to Russ Little that he would be transferred to a less restricted unit in another prison. These promises were made by counselors at San Quentin as well as various administrators in the California Department of Corrections over a period of five months.

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Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Pat O’Bryan

Kathy Horak

Tina Nachalo

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Doug Larkins

Donna Saffioti

Peter Werbe

Marilyn Werbe

Govinda Habersplatte

John & Paula Zerzan

Rick Rollins

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.

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If you think the story to the right concerning the death of Hans-Martin Schleyer sounds absurd, then you know exactly how we feel every time we read the equally ridiculous stories of the “suicide” deaths of the three Red Army Faction (RAF) members now filling television screens and the pages of the print media everywhere. In fact, all the statements contained in our Schleyer article are either lifted verbatim from newspaper and magazine accounts of the RAF “suicides” or paraphrased from similar statements in those same accounts. Everywhere the most ludicrous contentions of the state are being taken at face value by the “media” and reproduced as “objective” fact, even when they fly full in the face of any normal human being’s perceptions.

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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;

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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.

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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.

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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....

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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The FE Bookstore is located at 4632 Second Ave., just south of W. Forest, in Detroit. We share space with the Fifth Estate Newspaper and may be reached at the same phone number: (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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The rhetoric is anti-State. “They picture me as a threat to the nation,” Robert Miles told Metropolitan Detroit magazine (June 1987), referring to the FBI. “But let me tell you the kind of threat I am: I publish a newsletter. I don’t harm or threaten anyone. Granted, I don’t like the government—I’m an anarchist, in fact. But these Ollie Norths see sedition in the five cows I have out in my pasture.”

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FE note: Due to space considerations, some of the letters on these pages may have been excerpted. We ask that letter writers make their remarks as concise as possible. We will print the addresses of letter writers who request it.

Dear FE:

In general, I agree with E.B. Maple’s warnings about cozying up to the Left; (See FE #325, Spring 1987); anarchism’s blood-feud has always been with the Bolsheviks, even if its war has been fought against the Right. However, I get the sense of a subtext here, an attempt to “purify” anarchist ideology of all syndicalist, socialist & Left Revolutionary tendencies, to once again define who is & who is not a “real” anarchist.

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FE Note: This letter was not written specifically for the FE, but was shared with us by William Koethke, whose article, “Earth Diet, Earth Culture,” appeared in FE #325, Spring, 1987. Our next issue will include a review and discussion of ecology and social critique, in particular the deep ecology perspective and movement.

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The Poet’s Coven is a relatively new photocopied publication distributed free in the Vancouver, B.C. area. It consciously defies categorization and is open to a wide variety of expression—poetry, collage, fiction, articles. The Coven describes its vision as coming from an “eclectic assortment of inspirations,” and considers itself to be “a propaganda or counter-information project that would like to encourage creativity as well as debate and analysis within the anarchist/ social-ecologist/ ‘primitivist’ milieu.” The Coven seeks contributions from “anti-authoritarians, misfits, earth worshippers, optimistic and social nihilists, and underground rebels,” with a promise that all correspondence will be answered. Contributions in the form of money are also welcome.

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A karate blow by a young Venezuelan policewoman to an escaping suspect brought an ignominious end to the career of the world’s most lethal terrorist. Stefano Delle Chiaie is the machiavellian figure behind numerous murderous outrages in Europe, Africa and Latin America over three decades.

Delle Chiaie, taken in a raid on an apartment in a suburb of Caracas in March of this year, had been living there under an alias for three years. After interrogation by Venezuelan security agents, 51-year-old Delle Chiaie was rushed to Caracas airport where he was handed over to waiting Italian agents. Captured with him were two boxes of documents, Delle Chiaie’s archives. He was put on a flight to Italy, where he was being tried in his absence for the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing in which 85 people were killed and over 200 badly injured. Other Delle Chiaie outrages include the December 1969 bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana which left 16 dead, the murder of a magistrate in 1976, and at least three attempted coup d’etats.

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Dirk Leach began working on an assembly line at a Mercedes-Benz factory in 1977 to finance his studies at a German university. His work, and his reflections on the nature of modern technology intersected with his reading of existentialist texts by Martin Heidegger and Ernst Junger’s Der Arbeiter (“The Worker”).

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Sometimes no news is good news, and that seems to be the case with the folks at Big Mountain. According to Matt Strasberg (of the Big Mountain Legal Defense/Offense Committee), the July 7, 1986 deadline passed quietly. Indian activists, supporters and the media showed up for the showdown, but U.S. marshals declined to make an appearance. Claiming that the deadline was merely a “target date,” government officials have been close-lipped about their inability to overcome Hopi and Navajo resistance and to complete the relocation project.

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U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a hero?

A patriot?

Shit! This guy is a fascist and a war criminal!

Less people than it appears are willing to stand up and salute this creep who bears great responsibility for the slaughter of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants at the hands of the U.S. financed, North directed, contras.

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Since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, much information has come out about its terrible effects. The irradiation of (particularly European) people, animals and vegetation has been devastating. Dr. John Gofman, a Widely respected expert on radiation effects, estimated that more than a million people will develop cancers, half of them fatal, as a result of the accident.

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Collage by Freddie Baer

All the city mourns, and the crumpled masses languish at the gates, and the cry of all the freeways has gone up.

The politicians have sent their runners to the waters, but they have come with all their vessels empty.

The limousines fester in long lines like links of meat waiting to be roasted in the devil’s barbecue.

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Chief Luther Standing Bear wrote in his autobiography, “The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil...But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong...”

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Political speculation concerning rapidly changing political events in a journal such as this which appears so infrequently puts the writer at a distinct disadvantage, Even by the time this paper is published, a new crisis may have been created and the current ones described herein discarded or resolved.

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During the summer solstice weekend of June 18 through 22, some 250 to 300 people converged on Minneapolis, Minnesota, to attend the Anarchist Gathering. It was the second of such continental gatherings, the last one having been held in Chicago in the Spring of 1986 to commemorate the Haymarket Affair. (See FE #323, Summer 1986 for a report on the Chicago Anarchist Gathering.)

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Note about cover of print edition: This follows Vol. 21 No. 2

Wisconsin draft resister Gillam Kerley, 26, was sentenced May 29 to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine. This is the harshest sentence received by any convicted nonregistrant since the draft was reinstated by President Carter in 1980. Kerley has been an active and vocal resister whose employment by the Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD) was cited during the sentencing by Judge Shabaz, a Republican Reagan appointee.

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Good news! The Fifth Estate has a new office and bookstore quarters with public access, plus it provides a better atmosphere for working and receiving visitors. The move has provided the spark for increased activity around the bookshop, with one of us taking responsibility for expanding its book selection and starting regular hours.

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Last year when Detroit residents began their protest against the proposed municipal trash incinerator (by demonstrating, attending meetings, putting out informational flyers, hanging banners over the freeway near the incinerator site) there was some local media coverage. But the focus of the coverage was the Detroit City Council meetings where the building permit was being challenged by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). After the permit was approved and since construction has begun, there has been little mention of the issue, even though there have been numerous protest activities organized by residents and local environmental groups.

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As predictions for the eventual toll of the deadly AIDS disease grow higher, speculation as to the origin of the virus remain unanswered. Reports continue to surface that rather than a natural occurring new strain, the disease was a result of U.S. Army germ warfare research conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland in the mid 1970s.

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July ’87 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Detroit riots: the largest American rebellion of the century. Reactions to an early morning police raid on a ghetto after-hours drinking spot began with stones and bricks aimed at cop cars and quickly grew into excited looting within hours. The retreating police were eventually reinforced by 8,000 national guardsmen and 4,700 federal troops (82^nd and 101^st Airborne). The official body count after one wild week of looting, smashing, and burning was 43 killed, 657 wounded—at least 30 were slain by police or government forces. Rumors of snipers provoked troops to fire wildly at people, windows, buildings, and each other. Of the 682 fires, 412 buildings were destroyed. Over 1,700 stores were looted as whites quickly joined blacks in a true communal uprising. The number one song in the country that week was The Doors’ “Light My Fire.”

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Note about cover of print edition: This follows Vol. 21 No. 2

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.

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Before the Bernhard Goetz subway shooting recedes completely from social memory, perhaps a few words can be said about what it suggests regarding race, class and crime in this country.

Goetz, as it will be remembered, was acquitted in mid-June of attempting to murder four black youths he shot who had confronted him, asking for money, on a New York City subway. Although never directly threatened by the four, Goetz testified: “My intention was to murder them, hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible.” He saw the four ghetto youths as intent on robbing him, an experience he had traumatically suffered once before. Four of the bullets he fired hit the young men, leaving one permanently paralyzed and brain damaged.

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Not content to sit by while the Central American rainforests are being bulldozed and burned for cattle grazing land to provide beef for fast food greaseburgers, fifty students and faculty from Macomb County College picketed the Burger King at 23 Mile Road and Van Dyke on June 29^th in protest.

The group also plans to participate in World Rainforest Week, September 7 through 13, which has targeted the garbage-food chain for international protest demonstrations. The Detroit-based Earth Community, 19731 Forrer, Detroit, MI 48235, (313) 493–0543, has called for a “picket and boycott (of) every Burger King in the country.” Contact Rainforest Action Network, 300 Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, for events in other areas.

a review of

Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, ed. Cindy Milstein. 37 essays, 412 pp. with 32-page color insert. AK Press, 2017

Rebellious Mourning is an ambitious edited volume by Cindy Milstein with enormous depth and breadth of highly relevant and timely cross-cultural case studies. This work by Milstein (sole author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, AK Press) represents her third edited book project.

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The idea of an “anarchist saint” might seem kind of silly at first, but that did not stop Autonomedia publishers from starting its annual jubilee calendars of radical saints, now in its 26^th year. If anyone who has recently died qualifies for the status of anti-authoritarian saint, I would nominate the author, Ursula K. Le Guin, who is featured on the calendar with prominent and lesser known anarchists.

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