Most Recent Additions

The Clamshell Alliance and more than 20 anti-nuclear organizations around the country plan a major shift in tactics in their opposition to nuclear power plants. Angered by the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of the cooling system of the nuclear plant at Seabrook, New Hampshire, the Clamshell Alliance says the era of fighting nuclear power in the courts is over. Direct action, civil disobedience and site occupation will take its place.

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In the aftermath of the highly successful April 30^th occupation of the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear plant site has come documented information from the Clamshell Alliance that members of the scurrilous leftoid U.S. Labor Party (a.k.a. the NCLC or National Carcass of Labor Committees) actively operated as police informants in an effort to sabotage the demonstration.

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A year-ago this month (July 10, 1976 to be exact), an explosion at the Icmesa chemical plant in Seveso, Italy garnered worldwide attention as the release of 4.4 pounds of deadly tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, or TCDD, contaminated the town and forced the mass evacuation of its inhabitants. [See these related Fifth Estate articles.]

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A few years ago on my last job I kept waking up in the morning with big bubbles in my head, eat a bowl of corn chips and go to work, checking out the storm sewers for leaks and patching them with quick- ‘ dry when I found one. I was very good and could hold my breath under sludge for seven minutes with my eyes open, but I had these bubbles in my head and that bothered me.

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In considering the anti-nuclear movement in Germany—the growing opposition, agitation and the emergence of hundreds of local citizen’s initiatives that are directly organizing to stop the nuclear designs of the government and the electric utility companies—we must keep in mind that Germany, as Europe’s most highly industrialized national economy, is a much more densely populated territory than, for example, the United States. Nuclear plants here are unavoidably in closer proximity to small and large population centers and adjacent or directly on top of farming areas. There are no large, empty flatlands and unpopulated regions in which nuclear plants can be tucked away out of sight and out of the relatively close environmental range of the urban and rural communities.

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Apparently there is honor among thieves and the anti-nuclear power struggle has exposed the totally reactionary tendencies of several marxist groups as they line up behind the governments of totalitarian regimes and mouth the same pro-nuclear statements as its most strident capitalist proponents.

One of the more authoritarian of the small Trotskyist sects plaguing the terrain, the Sparticist League has unleashed a torrent of pro-nuclear, anti-demonstrator rhetoric (“eco-freaks” their paper calls them) that rivals New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thompson.

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In Memoriam Luis Ortiz Puppo*

Populism is the manifestation of political demagogy that combines financial power and indoctrinated populations. Propaganda is used to indoctrinate the mob.

This social base can amount to a significant percentage of the population—as in Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany—or a small but highly-visible group effusively cheering on their defiant and confrontational leader. Such a leader carries out a plan to revise history and accommodate reality to his own ideology

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On July 16, 1877, railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, walked off their jobs in response to a 10% wage cut instituted by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Wage cuts had become common practice on the railroads, in fact throughout American industry, since the onset of a severe depression in the fall of 1873.

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The long-denied files of Wayne University students’ political and personal activities were discovered last week amid a protest about the lack of student involvement in the decision-making processes of the University.

While 30 student leaders staged an all-night vigil Wednesday, outside the University president’s office, James McCormick, vice-president for Student Affairs, and a delegation of five students found the “non-existent” files in the University’s department of Safety and Security office.

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In the last issue of the Fifth Estate [#283, June 1977], a letter appeared signed by a Joe Doaks criticizing Black Rose Books of Montreal. Doaks charged that a recent BRB publication, Durruti: The People Armed, by Abel Paz and translated by Nancy MacDonald, omitted a key section without informing the reader, failed to give the book’s printing history (thus making it appear as though it were a BRB original), that it was overpriced, poorly produced (typesetting and proofreading) and that BRB had a history of appropriating titles from other publishers and putting BRB covers on them. Doaks further said that he and others planned to put out another edition at a third the BRB cost and ended by stating that “Durruti would have shot those (BRB) fuckers.”

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FE note: See also the letter exchange “L’affaire Black Rose Books” in this issue.

Dear Editor,

With reference to the slanderous letter from a Mr. Joe Doaks in your June 1977 issue, we would like you to publish the following reply in full.

(1) Why did the English-language edition of Durruti by Abel Paz not include Part 4? The history of this question is as follows. A member of our book-publishing cooperative read the French-language version some two and a half years ago. We thought about publishing an English-language version, but naturally we were overwhelmed by the complexity of the project. The one French-language edition we had was returned to the person from whom it was borrowed. Some time later we received the translation by Nancy Macdonald. We then negotiated a contractual agreement with both the author and translator. Part of the agreement included that the contents and approval of translation was a matter between the author and translator. We frankly proceeded to the publication of the book without anyone of us being aware that there was a Part 4. Last month to our embarrassment a member of our cooperative while visiting Paris was told by Paz that we had not included Part 4. This was news to us as we had insisted that the translation be cleared by the author. We have written to Nancy about this and received the following reply which we quote in part: “About the 4^th part of the Durruti it was (Paz) who suggested to me that it be cut out of the English edition as the book would be too long. And I agreed. There was never any question again of my translating it. I sent my translation to (Paz) a long time ago for him to OK it and he never mentioned the 4^th section. I have already written him to this effect a few days ago since he raised the question with me by letter...” As far as BRB was concerned it was certainly not an act of censorship in any way. If there is another edition of the book we intend to include Part 4, unless Paz thinks to the contrary.

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The State of California has concocted another frame-up charge against imprisoned ex-SLA member Joseph Remiro. Already serving two life terms for murder and jail break, Joe is accused this time of plotting an escape attempt from Folsom Prison with two other prisoners.

The alleged plot came to light last June 4 (although no report was released on it until June 22) after a former associate of Remiro, Bobby Davis, handed a 9-mm pistol and 27 rounds of ammunition over to prison authorities and implicated Remiro in the alleged escape attempt.

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Is a speeding automobile more beautiful than the Winged Victory? Is Dionne Warwick’s “Are You There?” greater than the Ninth Symphony? The Grate Society, a small group of Ann Arbor composers and performers think so. They will be in Detroit on Friday, May 19 presenting a program of musical works and “total theater events” for Wayne State’s Friday Night Coordinating Committee.

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A Human Be-In in the Flint area will happen on Sunday, May 21, from 10 a.m. until dusk at the Byram Lake park outside of Linden, Michigan. Organized by Trans-Love Energies of Flint, the Be-In will take place in a 60-acre park area 20 miles from Flint and will last all day, with music, fun, food, bells, and banners.

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“Whether one chooses to examine the opening phases of the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the French general strike of 1968, the opening stages are generally the same: a period of ferment that explodes spontaneously into a mass upsurge.”

—Murray Bookchin, “Myth of the Party: Bolshevik Mystification and Counter-Revolution,” Fifth Estate #272, May 1976 and in our anti-Marx issue, #393, Spring 2015.

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A lot has happened since the last time I wrote this column, and I still don’t know what’ll come of it, but all we can do is ride it out and see what we can do with it. My own situation has changed a great deal even though I certainly don’t feel any different as a human being, but it sure is weird to walk or drive down the street and have strangers smile and wave because they saw me on TV and were given to believe that “John Sinclair is the high priest of the hippies in Detroit” or whatever.

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There have been long standing political and theoretical debates about whether a particular political movement or leader is fascist. In the article before this one, as Bill Weinberg attests in the previous pages, it can come down to hairsplitting. Is Trump a fascist? Was the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco? Or, Argentina’s Juan Peron? Or, is the term fascist applied indiscriminately to any oppressive government and politician?

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“When you have $50 billion invested in defense what you need most isn’t allies but an enemy.”

— Nelson Algren said in Ramparts, May, 1967.

When you have policemen on horses and Tactical Mobile Units with little baseball bats and “riot-trained” commandos, what you need most is not a Love-In but a riot.

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Photos by Richard Stoker, Norm Koren, C.T. Walker. Collage by Harvey Ovshinsky

Two thousand people had a love-in on Belle Isle.

Unfortunately 8,000 people were present. Whatever happened on the island that night, it shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow the 6 or 7 hours of dancing, singing and sharing that preceded it.

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In the streets of Washington DC on Inauguration Day, Black Bloc protesters notoriously smashed windows and set a limousine on fire. Fortunately, I wound up on the other side of the police lines when the cops sealed off the area and herded some 200 into pens of metal barricades, where they were kept waiting in the cold for hours before being hauled off to jail.

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a review of

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist by Alexander Berkman. Annotated and Introduction by Jessica Moran & Barry Pateman. AK Press, 2017, (Originally published: 1912), 550 pp. akpress.org

“Thick clouds of smoke over cast the sky, shrouding the morning with somber gray. The air is heavy with soot and cinders; the smell is nauseating. In the distance, giant furnaces vomit pillars of fire, the lurid flashes accentuating a line of frame structures, dilapidated and miserable...The sight fills me with hatred of the perverse social order that turns the needs of mankind into an Inferno of brutalizing toil (that) grinds flesh and blood into iron and steel, transmutes human lives into gold, gold, countless gold.”

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SAT., SEPT. 30

PLAY: Pantageize, APA repertory company, Michel de Gheldero’s “farce to make you sad” Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, Ann Arbor, 8:00 p.m. 9/30

SUN., OCT. 1

PLAY: Same as 9/30 2:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. adm. 10/1

CONCERT: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Premiere of a new work by Roger Sessions commissioned for the U. of M. Sesquicentennial Celebration. Hill Aud., 2:30 p.m. adm. 10/1

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To the Editor,

As the yearly retreat to the diploma mills nears I thought your readers would like to know of the continued existence of some essentially less repressive alternatives.

Especially since 1960, there have existed an increasing number of very small, essentially student run, institutions that would now most aptly be considered “counter-community” colleges. The first was Mark Golden’s experimental personalist college, Emerson, in Pacific Groves, California, which is mentioned in Saul Landeau’s anthology on the New Left.

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Admiral Arnold E. True will address a forum entitled Vietnam—The Wrong War to be held at Cobo Hall at 8 p.m. Wednesday, October 11.

Admiral True has been an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and has clearly stated his reasons for supporting a withdrawal of U.S. troops. The admiral served as a general line officer in the U.S. Navy for 26 years. He was Staff Commander-In-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet during World War II and has been awarded a variety of decorations, including the Purple Heart.

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A local demonstration is set for October 31, Halloween Night in protest against the war and LBJ, It will be a “grotesque, flashlight parade” by costumed marchers. The march will be in the form of a “provo demonstration’ according to Jon Schwartz, organizer of the protest.

“A provo demonstration,” Schwartz said, “takes advantage of local circumstances and traditions and in this case, combines the holiday spirit of Halloween with the tragic effects of the war in Vietnam.”

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The Draft Resistance Committee has pulled off a minor victory in an attempt to stop some of the harassment directed at it by landlords, vigilantes, and the City of Highland Park. (See Fifth Estate, Sept. 15–30).

On Sept. 22, the Committee brought their landlord, Tom Jewell into the Circuit Court room of Judge Carl Weideman in an attempt to keep Jewell out of the groups storefront headquarters at 12820 Hamilton. Jewell had entered the building several times and had torn down signs and done other damage.

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An unarmed protester is shot by a right-winger and the wounded anarchist does not want to rely on the punitive power of the state. What are the alternatives?

On the night of Donald Trump’s inauguration, January 20, Hex, an IWW organizer, street medic and anarchist, was shot and severely wounded at a protest against Milo Yiannopoulos’s speaking engagement at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle.

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To be a teenager in western Europe today is to enjoy a freedom of movement only dreamed about by American young people. During the summer, while most American kids are sitting home watching reruns on T.V., their European counterparts are out on the road.

Of course, the geographical makeup of the Continent makes travel not only possible, but irresistible.

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Jim Garrison is looking for the man whose photo appears on this page. Garrison thinks he may be one of the conspirators in the assassination of President Kennedy. [Web archive note: the photo does not appear in the original FE print edition.]

The photo, first published almost four years after the event in the September 15 Berkeley Barb, is a blow-up of part of a frame from a film which shows him seized by police and released.

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A middle-aged friend of mine helps keep his sanity by giving, on occasion, an extra 25 cents to the man in the toll booth on the bridge. Then he says, “This is to pay for my friend who is in the car behind me.” As he drives away he can look in his rear view mirror and laugh to see the policeman and driver of the following car gesturing and scratching their heads.

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Probably one of the most unusual groups ever to meet in Detroit is the Aetherius Society headquartered at 20771 West 8 Mile Rd. The Aetherius Society is a worldwide non-profit organization which was organized says Miss Edna Spencer, head of the Detroit Branch “at the command of the Cosmic Masters who inhabit Mars and Venus and other highly-cultured planets in this solar system.”

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Sept. 25, 1967

Dear Fifth Estaters,

The Spike-Drivers almost became America’s first folk martyrs while doing an innocent gig in Burlington, Vt. The club manager freaked out and demanded we stop playing this “Psydillik” music, because it irritated a few of his beer-swilling regulars. He craved our last year’s soft pap rock sound. When we told him it was impossible to go backwards, he plied the local gorilla movement with free beer to get them to harass us and goad us into quitting the gig so he wouldn’t have to pay us.

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After two years on the corner of John Lodge and Warren Avenue the Artist’s Workshop (now known equally as Trans-Love Energies) has moved to the campus side of the expressway and will set up shop in a long-vacant former doctor’s office on the corner of Second and Forest.

The workshop, which had its original home in a house at 1252 West Forest, was founded three years ago this month by John Sinclair, Robin Eichele, George Tysh, Charles Moore, Jim Semark, Larry Weiner, Ellen Phelan, Magdalene Sinclair (then Arndt Martine Aligire, and a group of other neighborhood people). At the Forest Avenue headquarters the Workshop established itself through an eight month series of free Sunday afternoon concerts and poetry readings before the house was abandoned after being struck by fire on Memorial Day 1965.

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Over the weekend of September 8–10, a Detroit Area High School Anti-war Conference was held. Many concrete resolutions came out of it, including “support of the October 21^st demonstration in Washington; support of all activities based around the confrontation; that a call go out to all high school students to participate in the march and organize around it. That they march in it under their own banners.”

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There may be no smoke signals on the horizon or the beat of drums within earshot—but the United States has a candidate for President on the Indian ticket, once he is accepted into the tribe.

The candidate is Austin Burton, who is best known to Fifth Estate readers as the man who sent a brochure for the United Artificial penis to Luci Johnson’s husband and was arrested for mailing obscene matter and held on $200,000 bond. (See Fifth Estate, April 15–30, 1967). Burton is seeking to represent the New York state tribe of Oneida Indians and is being aided by Princess Sunbeam of that tribe.

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a review of

Pot: A Handbook Of Marijuana, by John Rosevear (University) Books, $4.95).

I first met John Rosevear when I was dealing grass in 1964. He came to my apartment with two notorious Ann Arbor dealers who had a bag of imported Panama Red, the finest grass to hit Detroit since I’ve been here. It seems they were in the habit of flying to Panama to pick up the grass themselves, to make sure nothing went wrong in the shipping. At that time Rosevear had just recently been turned on to the joys of marijuana smoking and he told me of the plot of pot he was growing in a vacant lot across from his house in Ann Arbor. He was already working on his book of grass, which he claimed ecstatically would turn on a lot of straight people to marijuana.

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“The American war machine reaps a whirlwind that engulfs our country and threatens the world. Three billion dollars a month, which could be spent to attack the intolerable conditions of our disinherited cities is spent instead to kill and destroy in Vietnam. The insulted’ and injured at home have no choice but to act out their despair by rebelling.”

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FE note: The following is excerpted from an interview with Mike Bloomfield, lead guitarist of the Electric Flag. In deleted portions of the interview, which will appear in its entirety in the next issue of Scene magazine, Bloomfield traces his musical development and his split with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to form the Flag. He discusses some of his favorite musicians, tells why he canceled his recent Bowl appearance with the Mamas and Papas, and some of the joys and hangups of his art.

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Minnesota has by far the largest acreage of wild grass of any state in the nation, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics figures show.

Last year county weed inspectors reported that they had discovered 1,723 acres of Cannabis in the state. To the inspectors it’s “just another weed”.

This spring an inspector attended a town meeting in a small Minnesota community. “Did you know you have marijuana growing in the town?” he asked.

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A massive national denouncement of the continuing war in Vietnam and the Selective Service System is being readied for the week of Oct. 16–22, and by all indications it should well be the largest demonstration of its type in American history.

The Resistance does not recognize deferments, for they are part of the system. By accepting a deferment, a person does nothing to change that system.

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If your government is waging a criminal war do you serve the country best by cooperating?

Who served Germany best under Hitler? Those who obeyed orders and helped kill the Jews? Or the handful of Germans who chose prison and even death rather than cooperate?

Who upheld Russian honor in 1956? Those who obeyed orders, marched into Hungary, and shot down students and workers—or those troops who refused to fire?

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London (UNS) By Mail — Stokely Carmichael participated in the International Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London at the Round House.

During his stay here, he also spoke with Black people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies.

On Sunday, July 23, he addressed a massive, mostly Black, session of the Congress and announced he would be unable to attend further meetings next week because he was leaving unexpectedly.

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It is hard to reach you guys. Once you go through the doors of that induction center it is almost impossible to get to you. Well, you are inside now. Maybe you are at some base in the U.S. getting your basic training. Maybe you are stationed in Germany. Maybe you’ve gotten your orders for Vietnam. Maybe you are already there.

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(UPS) One of the most feared (and most frequently fantasied) of sexual activities is the orgy.

Right now you are probably fantasizing one of your own, right?

The word “orgy” is ambiguous. In its broadest sense it connotes a sensual activity which is pursued without restraint of appetite, or an “unbridled exercise of passions,” as my dictionary would have it.

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d.a. levy, 1960s

(UPS) The following is an interview with D.A. Levy, the nationally prominent young Cleveland poet who was twice arrested early this year because of his outspoken poetic opinions of the good mayor and his mucked-up administration of that city.

L.B.: When were you arrested on obscenity charges?

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

QUESTION: Can long continued use of spray deodorants cause cancer of the armpits?

ANSWER: At first, I thought your letter was a put-on. In fact, that might have been your intention but, nevertheless, you raise an interesting question. Certainly there has been no epidemic of cancer of the axilla or armpit. But spray deodorants have not been in use for very long. Cigarette smoking causes cancer of the lungs but it takes about 20 years for it to develop. We don’t yet have 20 years experience with spray deodorants.

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(UPS) FE note: If you read last issue’s column, (“Better Living—Thru Chemistry,” FE #38, September 15–30, 1967) please read this one also. Our advice would be that anything that can explode should be forgotten unless you are really into [sentence not finished in the print edition]

Further information on Superpot. If you heat lighter fluid near an open flame you’ll blow yourself up. In a pot of boiling water put the solution.

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Well, the Detroit Teachers’ strike is over—and guess who got the royal screwing? About 175,000 black kids whose basic conditions of instruction were not improved more than a piddle.

The matriarchy of Union President Mare Ellen Riordan triumphed again. She and her Marygrove Mafia have succeeded in developing such tight control of that organization that it’s almost impossible to move without an approving glance from her.

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Editor’s Note — The San Francisco Mime Troupe will perform Saturday, October 28 at 8:15 in The Detroit Institute of Arts Auditorium in a benefit performance for the Fifth Estate. The Mime Troupe was in Detroit last Fall and received rave reviews (from us) for their “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.”

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The sphere of politics has gone full-circle with the newly organized Oakland County Chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom.

In the past, YAF has been considered a right-wing, conservative organization. Recently, the Oakland County YAF under the chairmanship of Terry Epton passed resolutions against the draft and against “laws regulating the sale possession and use of marijuana.”

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