Most Recent Additions

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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Ursula K. La Guin, photo by Eileen Gunn

Reprinted from Fifth Estate #382, Spring, 2010. Issues are available as single copies & in bulk.

Related, in this issue: “Le Guin’s Anarchism & Mine” by Andrew William Smith

In a writing career spanning nearly six decades, Ursula K. Le Guin pushed the boundaries of fiction, transcending genre and style conventions to create a unique and distinctive literary voice.

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In 1977, East German dissident Rudolph Bahro was arrested and accused of publishing “state secrets” in a book entitled The Alternative in Eastern Europe in which he used a Marxist critique buoyed by the principles of Rosa Luxembourg to scrutinize the socialist system of his time. After more than two years in prison, he was released to West Germany where his profound preoccupation with the ecology crisis led him to become immersed in the green movement, and he eventually became a leading figure in the Green Party. Bahro’s association was, however, marred by conflicts in which his constant insistence on fundamental precepts of freedom, peace and ecological balance made him an irritating thorn in the side of the Party’s more compromising elements. He resigned from the Greens in June 1985, pointing out that through parliamentary and electoral politics, the group had sold out to the system, and that an inherent error had been made in deciding to become a political party in the first place.

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If there was ever a need for an “Earth Day,” “Earth Week,” or “Earth Year” “to get people thinking creatively about the problems we now confront, and looking for new ways to tackle them,” in the words of Earth Day 1970 organizer (and Earth Day 1990™ CEO) Denis Hayes; now is certainly the time.

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It was perhaps an inappropriate time to ask a question since at that very moment two climbers from Greenpeace were struggling to unfurl a banner describing the pollution which would be emitted from Detroit’s giant trash incinerator. Their problems were compounded by the fact that they were hanging in the girders of the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge some 150 feet from the water below.

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she had quickly cleaned the house

now she waited

perched nervously on the kitchen stool

as if she were a bird ready to take flight

Finally, he arrives

dressed fashionably in grey and white

he cuts an elegant figure

and the interview begins—

he asks:

which do you prefer

the black enamel finish

or these soft, muted rose-tones

shall we discuss the various

textures of carpets

or do you prefer the sensual earthiness

of a fine wood floor

the stark simplicity of the modern

or the eclectic clutter

of the victorian?

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A rising new cause of severe brain dammage: Narcotics officers.

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As can be seen in this issue’s “Revolution Against the Megamachine” and past Fifth Estate articles, we support the environmental movement becoming a revolutionary movement. Only through such a transformation can it begin to adequately challenge the ecological and social relationships which threaten this planet. To that end, we endorse the idea of radicalizing the 20^th anniversary of Earth Week scheduled for April 16 to 22, 1990. The attempt to fashion it as a domesticated spectacle has already begun with every hack politician, mainstream institution and even notorious polluters declaring allegiance to the 1990s as the “Environmental Decade,” all the while planning business as usual. These fakes are preparing to make it a week of festivities celebrating “concern” for the earth and the system’s ability to fix its problems.

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“Without Borders,” this year’s Anarchist Conference and Festival was held in San Francisco from July 20^th to 25^th. Taking place at the Horace Mann Middle School in the city’s Mission District, the gathering drew somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 people from North America and around the world. The exact number will never be known since only the lower number “officially” registered as participants, but thousands more took part in the six-day conference and other events which provided opportunities for learning and discussion, direct action, performance, play and celebration.

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Dear Ann Landers:

Right now I am so mad I could spit tacks.

My husband and I are seniors. We love to watch the soaps. We have come to know the characters so well that they are like members of our own family. Our favorite soaps are “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital.”

Recently, at the most critical moment, Peter Jennings cut in with a news bulletin. He reported that the Chinese government was executing students (which we already knew), causing us to miss out on the crisis involving Scorpio, Sean and Frisco in “General Hospital.”

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“Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”

— Michael Bakunin

When more than a million people- visibly break out of forty years of totalitarianism in a relatively spontaneous manner, their opinions, ideas, and fantasies inevitably vary wildly. However, the statements, interviews, and documents of the Chinese students’ and workers’ movements that have gradually become visible in the months after the June 1989 repression reveal distinct patterns and common attitudes among vast numbers of people. Even if this material doesn’t delineate an explicitly “revolutionary” program, the perspective that emerges still. provides a wonderful breath of fresh air in a country long stagnant with authoritarian ideas and practice. Through this we can see a Chinese democracy movement that contains a molten mixture of many different ideas, many half-baked but all of them subordinate to the exhilarating actions of people refusing to be submissive.

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a review of

Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, Alice Wexler, Beacon Press, Boston, 1989, 301 pp.

The nature and purpose of “doing history” are at stake in Alice Wexler’s new book, Emma Goldman in Exile. America’s best-known anarchist endured numerous personal and political crises from her 1919 deportation to Civil War Russia to her subsequent odyssey throughout Europe and Canada, her immersion in the 1930s Spanish revolution, and her-death in 1940. Based on extensive research, Wexler’s book usefully describes this journey. But the book is more than this. Unfortunately so, since the interpretive voice of the author is usually louder than her subject.

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I pull up to the self service gas pumps,

all the clicking numbers, my windows dirty,

stuck. The gallons flowing, the gas arches

into the tank in a gush.

I look at what comes out of the hose—

diving ducks like black drips. Grebes

and cormorants unravel through the hose.

A warm belly

carries the deaths of Valdez.

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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; 2) add 10% for mailing costs—not less than $.90 U.S. or $1.34 foreign (minimum for 4^th class book rate postage); 3) total; 4)write check or money order to: The Fifth Estate; 5) mail to: The Fifth Estate, P.O. Box 02548, Detroit, MI 48202

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It already seems like a long time ago, but this past June three of us from the Fifth Estate staff headed out by train to New Mexico for our first Earth First! (EF!) Round River Rendezvous (RRR). This was the tenth annual RRR, which EF! describes as its yearly “tribal celebration.”

Needless to say, after the past couple of years of argument, discussion and heated exchange between Fifth Estate writers and people in EF! (see FE’s Fall 1987 through Spring 1989), we undertook the journey with excitement and a bit of trepidation. We were anxious to meet more of the faces behind the words, and though we had received warm invitations from several EF! individuals, we also received a few not so warm challenges to attend, and we weren’t sure we’d be welcomed by all.

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