Most Recent Additions

Sunday night a bunch of us were over at a friend’s house. We didn’t have room to stay there so we thought we’d try to make it back to another guy’s apartment. We were almost home when five cop cars pulled up with guns sticking out of all the windows and stopped us.

We were in two cars. The cops that came over to our car stuck shot guns in our faces and made us get out. They handcuffed our hands behind our backs. The handcuffs were fastened very tightly just at the wrist joint so that today, Thursday, our hands are still numb.

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“It is time now to meet the escalation of the War in Vietnam with an escalation of opposition to that War. I think the time has come for all people of good will to engage in a massive program of organization, of mobilization. This is the purpose of Vietnam Summer. And I’m happy to join as one of the sponsors of what I consider a most necessary program, a program that may well determine the destiny of our nation.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at press conference announcing VIETNAM SUMMER, Cambridge, Mass., April 23, 1967

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from WIN Magazine (UPS)

Well, first of all, it wasn’t really my draft-card but my Selective Service Notice of Classification. My Registration Certificate, laminated with a rather untasty variety of acetate plastic, remains intact. Furthermore, I did not commit this act of ingestion by my lonesome, but rather with the aid of a dozen or more accomplices, most of whom I ran across at a DuBois Club concert in New York last November. But why should I devour my classification?

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Ah rode all night, and all day long,

‘Cause ah’m in love with you.”

—old ballad

They wouldn’t let us into the bar. It was 2:30 a.m. and we wanted to get one last six pack of beer. We climbed on our scooters, pulled our “safety helmets” (as the state law now required), kicked over our hogs, and rolled out onto 14 Mile road. The light at Gratiot turned green, and with a healthy jerk of the right wrist, smoke and noise began to vomit forth from our high-rise pipes, as our rubber ground into the asphalt and the combined thirty-six hundred cubic centimeters of our three vintage Harley-Davidsons growled across Gratiot.

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ALBUQUERQUE (UNS) — The mountains of Northern New Mexico’s Rio Arribba County, like Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion Oregon, expect that they are drier, are scarce of touring campers, as two members of the Confederation of Free City States, wanted on felony charges stemming from the June 5^th raid on Tierra Amarilla Courthouse, remain fugitives.

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“A lot of us have been smokin’ reefers and layin’ broads in the bushes at Belle Isle for the last twenty years...and nobody ever called that a Love-In.”

—anonymous

Greaser and Frat Rocker and Mod Lower-middle class versus upper-middle-class America.

The struggle for the supremacy of class values among the recent Young. Both begin more or less together, as Screamies. It is the Mod who characteristically veers off to become the Teeny-Bopper and eventually the Hippie.

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Dr. David Herreshoff, assistant professor of English at Wayne State University, is the author of a new book published by the WSU Press.

Dr. Herreshoff’s book, American Disciples of Marx, From the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (216 pages, $7.95) traces the activities of the first Marxists in America, including Orestes Brownson, Joseph Weydemeyer, Friedrich Sorge, and Daniel De Leon. The book traces the pressures faced by the first American Marxists in their efforts to organize a socialist working class movement.

George Vissard, peace activist in Austin, Texas, was killed last week in an Austin grocery store. Vissard was found at about 11:00 a.m. with a shot through the back and shot through the arm; his body had been placed in the meat freezer of the drive-in market.

Early reports from Texas indicated that his death was probably due to political reasons and that no money was missing from the cash register of the store. Later reports claimed that a “sizable amount” of money had been taken—but not from the cash register. Austin police authorities say that they are moving under the assumption that the motive is robbery and that Vissard tried to resist, which brought about his death.

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“The ghetto atmosphere was illuminated last week in a study prepared for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement. In a survey of three cities—Chicago, Washington and Boston—the study found that four out of every five white policemen working in Negro neighborhoods have prejudiced attitudes towards Negroes.

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Send to: The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Mich. 48201, phone 831–6800

Unclassified costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. A word is a word, including I and 2 letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

(No limit on number of lines)

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a review of

City Lights Journal Number Three. San Francisco, City Lights Books. $2.50.

City Lights Bookstore is a bookstore, a publisher, and an institution. The Journal is a good indication of what can be found in the bookstore, from the publisher and the make up of the people the institution represents.

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The first GIs to publicly refuse to go to Vietnam, known as the Fort Hood Three, asked the Supreme Court to hear their suit against the war, and against the government’s right to send them to Vietnam.

Jimmy Johnson, 21, Dennis Mora, 25, and David Samas, 21, first brought this suit while on leave from the army in June, 1966. At that time, they made public their refusal to go to Vietnam.

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A new United States postage stamp commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau has been designed by painter Leonard Baskin.

The stamp was first placed on sale July 12 at the writer-anarchist’s home town of Concord, Massachusetts.

The stamp came under fire recently from Thoreau devotees on the grounds that it makes bearded, long-haired Henry look like a “hippie.” Indeed, Thoreau’s appearance and his life style may qualify him as one of America’s first “hippies.”

More than 200 peace, civil rights and church activists honored David M. Gracie at a testimonial dinner Friday, July 21, as the Rev. Gracie prepared to leave Detroit for a new job with the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.

The gathering represented a wide cross section of Detroit’s “Left” community, ranging in age from late teens to late sixties, and in ideology from pacifism to revolution. They came to listen to perhaps the one man in the city who could speak to, and listen to, all of them.

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Law is the framework that props up the state, the matrix that nourishes authority. Law is a web of prohibition and mandate. It is one of the mechanisms that ensure that each individual fills an assigned role. It is a particularly complex and abstract system of power.

While there are attempts to use law in constructive ways, such as discourses on rights and liberties, the law is not something that can be used for liberation. It must be rejected and overcome.

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His sunglasses blended with his cropped, black hair, his burnished, obsidian skin toasted from hours toiling under salt-sprayed sun when he’d proudly commandeered, he said, not the rusty white cab cutting through Manila’s Gordian traffic knot, but a sleek, hand-hewn wooden banca,

its bow a knife slicing through the silvery-teal waters off of Masbate Island, taking his place in his age-old clan vocation gathering Neptune’s gifts. But no, not anymore, he said—all these, rejoinders to my polite reply to his innocuous question, how are you, ma’am, as I slid into

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a review of

Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915–1940 by Travis Tomchuk. University of Manitoba Press, 2015, 260 pp.

An illustration early in Travis Tomchuk’s Transnational Radicals demonstrates the popular press’s view of anarchists immediately following the 1886 Haymarket Square Police Riot in Chicago: Johann Most, a radical anarchist, is presented by Harper’s Weekly as a maniacal figure waving a sword and a flag, threatening the reader with “Socialistic War,” while several other well-armed anarchists dive under beds in fear.

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Organized political opposition to the Johnson Administration will be mapped in Chicago Labor Day weekend at a nationwide convention of grassroots activist organizations in the peace, civil rights and student movements. The convention, “New Politics—’68 and Beyond,” is expected to draw more than 2,000 delegates representing more than 200 local and national groups, said William Pepper at a recent news conference. Pepper is Executive Director of the National Conference for New Politics, sponsor of the convention.

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I’d like you to meet some friends of mine

lesbians

women I write to

women in prison.

Last year I decided corresponding with them was a good way to continue my political work

being too disabled to go to meetings or to demonstrations.

Valerie was the first

a Cherokee-Chicana femme doing long time in Nevada prison.

An artist without art supplies,

she sends me cross-hatch portraits of her sister inmates

rendered with ballpoint on lined paper so thin it tears.

She has cystic fibrosis

at 26 she’s getting old

for someone with CF.

She tries not to think about what that means.

After all, she says,

no one at the jail thinks she’s disabled.

Her job includes scrubbing the bathrooms with bleach

three times a week.

I try to figure a way

to smuggle in a charcoal mask.

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THE FIFTH ESTATE

1107 W. Warren

Detroit 48201

831–6800

Member, Underground Press Syndicate

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

NEWS EDITOR

Frank Joyce

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

ART

Gary Grimshaw

MUSIC & LITERARY EDITOR

John Sinclair

CALENDAR GIRLS:

Karen Kovach

Naomi Epel

ADVERTISING

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You know that it would be untrue / You know that I would be a liar / If I was to say to you / “Girl, we can’t get much higher”—/ Come on baby light my fire / Come on baby light my fire / Gonna set the night on/FI-YUR

—“Light My Fire,” The Doors

“Light My Fire” rises through the radio ranks for weeks and, when it hits number one on the stations, the people respond and burn the city down. Or play Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music” album as background music for the Detroit purification: the scope and feeling of the people’s mood is there; an elegy for Malcolm X.

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Introduction

As we explore routes out of today’s stifling, mechanized, crisis-bound world the FE staff opens the magazine’s pages to many forms of subversive research and many flavors of anarchic revolt.

The Chicago Surrealist group Penelope Rosemont discusses below was inspired by the Surrealist movement that began in Europe in the 1920s. Surrealism is a conscious project for utilizing the discoveries of Freudian psychology to subvert the ruling order by images and words, elaborating forms through which people can express and gratify their repressed desires and challenge societal oppression.

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The draft resistance movement in Detroit, which until now has operated underground, has surfaced with the opening of the Draft Resistance Center at 12820 Hamilton at Glendale.

The storefront office, rented by the Draft Resistance Committee and the Draft Committee of the Vietnam Summer Project, will serve primarily as the headquarters for their joint organizing project among draft age young men in Highland Park.

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The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam will take initial steps to place a referendum on the war in Vietnam on the ballot in Detroit.

Dean Jabara, attorney for the Detroit Referendum Committee, submitted to the Corporation Council a proposed amendment to the Detroit City Charter, the amendment would create the office of the “Director of Peace Priorities,” who would work to bring about an “immediate withdrawal of all U. S. military forces from Vietnam.”

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Students for a Democratic Society, a radical political organization, held a national convention in Ann Arbor recently during which they adopted a statement demanding equal rights for women, along with statements in opposition to the draft and the war in Vietnam.

The Women’s Liberation Workshop prepared the statement that demanded equal rights, equal positions of authority for competent women, birth control information and devices for all women, and literature on the subject of women’s rights.

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a review of

Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff by Anatole Dolgoff; Introduction by Andrew Cornell. AK Press, 2016, 391 pp., $22.

Anatole Dolgoff is a great story-teller. He does the kind of writing that is rare on the left. It never seems to occur to most political writers that entertaining people is not a bad thing. It occurs all the time to Anatole.

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Over the past year, ruling elites in Russia and Ukraine—often in collaboration with fascist gangs—intensified active repression of those who dare to express dissident points of view on a wide range of topics, from workers’ demands for back pay, to the rights of ethnic minorities, to antifascist activities.

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Rafael Uzcategui is a member of the editorial collective of the anarchist magazine El Libertario, published in Caracas, Venezuela. The below has been excerpted from an entry which originally appeared on his June 2016 blog in Spanish & has been translated by FE staff.

As anarchists struggling against current forms of domination in Latin America, it is important for us to understand the socio-political conditions that have developed in recent years. We also need to reflect on how anarchists have responded to them.

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Marius Mason has begun hormone treatment for medical gender transition in a Fort Worth, Texas federal prison after a long awaited decision by officials to allow it.

Mason, assigned female at birth, is an anarchist, environmental activist, and former Fifth Estate writer.

He was sentenced in 2009 to 22 years imprisonment for the 1999 sabotage of a Monsanto laboratory on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing, and is currently held in a highly restrictive unit at Carswell Federal Medical Center.

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Social movements, not establishment reformers, have nurtured and propelled the most important liberatory struggles of the last half-century, from the Civil Rights and Gay Rights struggles to the Feminist Movement to Native American nations recent uprisings against fracking and pipelines.

Social movements create collective engagement, pockets of resistance that “reframe a politics of everyday life,” as activist and academic Ben Shepard writes in his recent book, Rebel Friendships: “Outsider” Networks and Social Movements (2015, Palgrave Macmillan), even as they gather support and ignite overwhelming demands for change.

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On Sunday, July 23, at 3 o’clock in the morning, The Doors’ “Baby Light My Fire” was the number one song in Detroit.

It couldn’t have been more appropriate.

At 3:30 a.m. a large crowd of black people watched as their brothers and sisters were arrested for drinking in a blind pig.

At 4:00 a.m. they stopped watching and began throwing things. The rest is history.

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“The chickens are coming home to roost”

—Malcolm X, Nov. 22, 1963

Malcolm was right, of course, and the chickens have come home so many ways since that grim day four years ago. Vietnam, Malcolm’s own death, riots across the country and now the biggest chicken of them all—the Detroit riot.

Detroit always does things up in a big way.

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The movement to re-legalize marijuana was dealt a severe blow several weeks ago according to an article in the Village Voice of June 22, 1967.

On May 25 President Johnson, a reputed speed freak, signed a treaty known as the Single Convention after it was ratified by the Senate. There was virtually no opposition to the treaty during hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and no publicity was given to the treaty’ s progress.

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To the Editor:

The U.S. Congress is a disreputable club. It’s easy to find fault with anybody who’s a member. But if you are going to pan a congressman, why pick on the best one in sight?

The question occurred to me as I read Plafkin’s silly, self-important, time-serving attack on John Conyers. Let me explain my adjectives. It’s silly to yell “Opportunist!” at one of the handful of congressmen with guts enough to oppose Johnson’s requests for money for the dirty war, to oppose the jingo flag-burning bill, and to oppose using government money on projects in lily-white towns like Weston, Illinois.

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Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36^th President of the U-nited States of America; the man who sends troops to Vietnam, Santo Domingo, the Congo, and now our own home town is scheduled to speak in Detroit on August 2^nd.

Peace activists across the country have promised that Johnson will be met with demonstrations wherever he goes as long as he continues the war in Vietnam. And if Johnson is not frightened away by a little rioting the major peace and civil rights groups plan a large reception for him in the form of a giant picket line.

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<strong>Related: Playing in the Key of Clown

</strong>

when you can join the Rebel Clown Army instead?!</strong>

The U.S. army is no picnic and actually is far worse. Tons of money is poured into the recruiting campaign offering false promises. Our soldiers are being manipulated, fooled, and thrown into horrific situations. For the benefit of corporations and war-profiteers far away from the battlefield.

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Related: Clown Army Recruiting Poster

At the July 2005 Carnival for Full Enjoyment in Edinburgh, Scotland, riot police mass on the streets with shields and truncheons, fireproof armor; all very imposing. They use their shields to shove protesters, who are dancing in the street without a permit.

But these are no run of the mill protesters. They are the trained cadres of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA), which, since its 2003 founding, has been spreading across the world.

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April 5: Trial of Camilo Viveiros scheduled to begin in Philadelphia. Defend Camilo! Defend Dissent!

www.friendsofcamilo.org

April 9–11 — Positive Action’s Fourth Annual DIY/T (Do It Yourself/Do It Together) Fest and gathering in Athens, Ohio. If you’re interested please email pos_act@yahoo.com for more info.

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Burning draft cards in NYC 1967

Bruce Dancis’ book Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison (Cornell Press, 2014) chronicles his efforts during the Vietnam War to defy the draft and cripple the U.S. war effort.

Fifth Estate: You tore up your draft card and then led a mass burning of them in 1967.

Bruce Dancis: Very few people wanted to fight in the Vietnam War, even those who supported it. There were 27 million draft age men and 25 million didn’t go into the army.

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Want a ‘zine or book reviewed? Want to trade bulk ‘zines between your distro and ours? Contact us!

Down at the Barn, we have a few ‘zines we can always recommend. Many of these are our sister publications in the Allied Press Syndicate (a radical newswire & publishing coalition). These include the Asheville Global Report and Clamor. We also trade copies on a regular basis with revolutionary mags like the Earth First! Journal, Slingshot, Anarchy, and Green Anarchy (an impressive, intelligent, insurrectionary ‘zine that has matured amazingly well since I prematurely dismissed it as macho rubbish in late 2002).

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Send check, money order, or well concealed cash to:

Fifth Estate Books

PO Box 6

Liberty, TN 37095

Please add $2 shipping/handling for first item, $1 for the second and subsequent one, etc...

Thanks for your recent order!

Most book and CD purchases come with a surprise sampling of current zines and radical propaganda.

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Fifth Estate letters policy

We welcome letters commenting on our articles, ones stating opinions, or reports from your area. We can’t print every letter we receive, but each is read by the collective and considered for publication. Letters via email or on disk are appreciated, but type- or hand-written ones are acceptable. Length should not exceed two double spaced pages. We reserve the right to edit for length or style. If you are interested in writing a longer response, please contact us.

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Prisons are the essence of the state. But as Tom Big Warrior, historian for the traditional Lenape Nation in Pennsylvania puts it in the title of his essay, we must “Turn the Iron Houses of Oppression into Schools of Liberation.”

With the most conscious and articulate voices being muffled inside the jails, it seemed like the anarchist thing to do to get involved where the need was the greatest.

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Recently, I was talking politics and revolution with a friend and she said to me the last thing we need is 19-year-old boys fighting a revolution. I think she was referring to me at 19. Sure enough, I don’t feel as invincible now as I did then.

Still, that’s not the point she was making. Our society is not ready for a revolution. Women still get raped everyday, communities are still divided along racial lines, people still don’t care about one another. If revolution came right now and we actually won, ultimately, we would replace what we have now with capitalism, racism and patriarchy because we still haven’t overcome those ailments or come up with alternatives

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Ironically, Iraqi Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is currently disrupting US plans to democratize Iraq by demanding that the upcoming election process be more democratic. The Coalition Provisional Authority has balked at al-Sistani’s proposals, as it prefers the process for creating a new government to be a “selectocracy,” a series of easily stage-managed regional representative caucuses that can produce the most manageable batch of Iraqi collaborators. Al-Sistani and his followers, however, are calling for a more immediate and more direct process’ that would curtail external manipulation and the policing of election results by the US.

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Back in October 2002, driving from the hills to the anti-war rally in the city, we had plenty of time to talk. Conversation immediately turned to a possible conspiracy behind the plane crash the previous day. Did Bush’s people assassinate liberal senator Paul Wellstone just days before his possible re-election?

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A review of

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, Alexander Berkman, Pittsburgh: Frontier Press, 1970 [available from FE Books, see page 44 for information).

For political organizers, the great worth of Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is the evolution of his political thought during incarceration. He is plunged into the bowels of the beast, stripped of his ultimate sense of worth, yet continuously analyzes his own positions and beliefs.

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In November, 2001, I was arrested protesting at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. I received a six month sentence the next July, eventually seeing the insides of three Georgia county jails, a federal maximum security transit center, and a minimum security federal prison camp. At my politicized trial, the prosecutor knew I was an anarchist, and it was because of this, and because I openly criticized the judicial system, that I got the maximum sentence despite being a first-time offender.

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He’s outfitted for combat.

Ankle boots; black dungarees; Sam Brown belt with cuffs and mace and other tools of the craft; bulletproof vest; sunglasses; implacable stare.

And a gun, holstered at the moment.

The nametag says whatever you want it to say.

He’s standing in the parking lot, guarding the bank, where inside there must be more money than he will earn in his lifetime.

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After the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the new governor of California, most people could be forgiven for thinking that something much less than a political cataclysm has occurred in this state. The inhabitants go about their routines of work and leisure; there are no torchlight parades, or even rumors of same, to celebrate the victory of the former admirer of Hitler, Schwarzenegger, over the spectral and aptly named Gray Davis.

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