Most Recent Additions

A PRIMER OF LIBERTARIAN EDUCATION by Joel Spring, Free Life Editions, 157 pp. $3.95

Traces the tradition of libertarian opposition to established education from Rousseau and Godwin to Neill and Freire.

“Spring places the radical challenge into its own tradition of libertarian anarchy...” (Ivan Illich)

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Although unions have long been identified by left revolutionaries as auxiliary organs of capital whose function is to regulate the sale of their members’ labor power, the myth still persists that they are “defense organs of the working class.” Even those who see no revolutionary potential for unions claim that at least unions have been responsible for a steady rise in workers’ income. John Zerzan attacks this thesis as being untrue and severs the last rationalization for their support. Revolutionary organization of workers will take place outside of the union structure.

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Though we do not accept commercial advertising, this Unclassified ad space is free for our readers’ use. We do not accept ads over the telephone, so please send your ads in writing to our office at: 4403 Second Ave., Detroit 48201.

MUSICIAN with an ARP Synthesizer wishes to explore musical possibilities with another musician. Call 831–5454—Richard.

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Now that the “liberation” of Angola by the MPLA [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola] has been completed, the Luanda government of Agostinho Neto has begun a vicious crackdown on political dissidents to secure its one party rule over Angolan capitalism (See February Fifth Estate).

Agostinho Neto & Marcelino dos Santos prepare the annihilation of their rivals.

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Since General Motors reported a net profit of $300 million for the first quarter of 1976, our executives have been probable targets for kidnapping by members of the criminal element and left crazies.

The Central Executive Office of GM is composed of fourteen men, most of whom live in the Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham area. Each is a valuable and integral part of the executive team and would command a high ransom if abducted.

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Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of the things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost. The wall, which was glass but thrutex, turned out on being approached not to be a wall, it was something else, it was an opening or a doorway—and the doorway (through which he saw himself approaching) turned out to be something else, it was a wall. And what he had eaten not having agreed with him.

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This article is the fifth in a series of counter-Bicentennial pieces dealing with the more sordid and often less-acknowledged incidents in America’s 200-year-old history.

AMERICA—(1950) Only five years removed from the holocaust of World War II, the country stood on the brink of a new reaction: the paranoia of the Cold War, engineered for the most part by the Western powers.

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This is for all you young Crimestoppers who might be interested in reproducing one of Chester Gould’s best. Tracy can always be relied upon to get to the root of the matter without any minced words, and his is a lesson we could all learn a lot from:

The desire for easy money, tax-free, with a disdain for work and the law, marks a potential criminal.

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In a murder case which has “frame up” written all over it, a 17-year-old black Louisiana man named Gary Tyler sits on Death Row awaiting execution by electric chair for a crime he did not commit--the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old white youth.

The killing took place on October 7, 1974 at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, forty miles north of New Orleans. After a series of busing-related skirmishes between black and white students, the principal decided to dismiss school early to avoid further confrontations.

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Welcome to our Spring 2015 issue, with the murderous U.S. war against Vietnam as its main theme. The essays and fiction describe the conflict itself, while next issue will feature accounts of the resistance from the anti-war movement, mutinous GIs, and the Vietnamese.

The Fall edition will mark our 50^th anniversary of radical publishing and will include essays commemorating the paper’s history. Plans for a celebration, a staff reunion, and museum exhibits in Detroit are on the next and back pages.

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Romantic love so often doesn’t work because it isn’t rooted in human traditions.

In the long course of our culture’s evolution, romantic love has become the primary post-pubescent source of affection in our world. But it has not always occupied this special position. It may be a universal in human experience, but in our globalizing monoculture, romance has intensified over the millennia into a distorted caricature of versions common in tribal and Neolithic village societies.

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Detroit lost a unique anarchist prankster, mechanical genius, underground musician and reluctant sage, Linus J. O’Leary, after a two month battle with multiple complications from a brain aneurysm on February 25, 2015. He was 58.

Linus grew up during the 1960s in a large working class Catholic family (with proud Irish roots) in Dearborn, Michigan, exposing him to one of metro Detroit’s most infamous examples of bitter segregation, while developing a radical political consciousness against racial injustice and other forms of oppression.

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

— W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

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Good Communists are not supposed to indulge in the cult of personality. Josef Stalin practiced it for years, and so, too, has Mao Tse-tung.

Compared to Kim Il Sung, 63, dictator of North Korea, however, Stalin and Mao were only kidding.

On the outskirts of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, Sung had a 15-foot bronze statue of himself erected.

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It’s party time again! The Fifth Estate will feature a rock concert, theatrefest, beer guzzling spectacular Friday, June 25, 9:00 pm to 2:00 am at Formerly Alvin’s Deli on Cass just south of the Ford Freeway. The admission is $2.50 and the entertainment will feature the Spikedrivers, Primitive Lust and Acme Theatrical Agency theatre groups, free beer, and maybe a guest reggae band. We hope you will attend, as these affairs are part of our life’s blood and also provide a damn good time. Call us at the office if you want more information or can help distribute promotional leaflets in your area. Although we are not entirely out of the clutches of the money monster, we want to thank people for their response to our last issue’s plea for financial assistance. We keep getting hit with back bills from when the paper was a commercial weekly and still need your support. We have just ordered several hundred dollars in new titles for our book store and hope you will find a few that strike your interest. The most solid support we can receive is from those who become Fifth Estate sustainers and provide us with an anticipated revenue each month. To subscribe or become a sustainer, use the blank on this page or order books further in....

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The power groupies at the Sun have recently changed their focus. After running out of tin horn politicians to do interviews with, the Ann Arbor transplant has taken to promoting the police—something even the Detroit News and Free Press have had problems doing lately. The Sunites would have us believe that the brutal, dope pushing DPD has become “A New Breed of Cop” as their mid-May, littered front page blared.

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Reality, grown so thick with itself, became a fungus years ago with inbred spores and long reaching strands that have become the vampiric architecture of experience on every street in town. Thriving on dampened spirits in the totally human swamp, the fungus is the protective covering for the swamp, made to keep the animal from moving around in it as it slowly consumes its hosts leaving lifeless automatons where biological entities once thrived.

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“A spectre is haunting Europe—the Spectre of Communism.”

— from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

One hundred and eighteen years later Communism is again haunting the combined heads of the world bourgeoisie, but in a way Marx or Engels never could have anticipated.

“Communism” now haunts Europe in the form of electoral activity with the pledge by Communist party leaders to play the game according to the rules set up by the capitalist state.

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Dear FE,

I generally enjoy your paper, but have two criticisms: 1) I think it should contain more reporting on working class and community struggles—nation-wide and especially in your own backyard. Of course, most of these are led by reformist or Leninist groups...all the more reason to get in there and tell what’s going on. I think it could also win many more working people to your readership.

...

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Rick Schrader

Pat Kazenko

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Dennis Rosenbloom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

John Zerzan

Dora Kaplan

Mark Wenson

The Fifth Estate Newspaper, a non-profit Michigan corporation is published monthly at 4403 Second, Detroit, MI 48201; phone: (313) 831–6800. Office hours are: 1:00–5:00 P.M., Mondays thru Fridays. Subscriptions are $3.00 for 12 issues. Call 842–8888 for retail sales outlets. Second Class postage paid at Detroit, Michigan. No copyright. No commercial advertising accepted.

“Come and hear the views of two thinkers who arguably have defined the two polar opposite views on the effects of technology” blared the invitation to a November 15 debate between Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan and Anarcho-Primitivist John Zerzan at California’s Stanford University.

Grimacing at the clash-of-the-titans-esque rhetoric that epitomized the debaters, I nonetheless made my way eagerly to the college, just south of San Francisco, to watch the spectacle unfold.

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Part I of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #272, May, 1976.

“Horse sense and humanitarianism dictate that we phase out most and probably all municipal hospitals before the end of the century.”

—New York Commissioner of Health Lowell Benin, speaking to a group of businessmen, March 5, 1976.

“We’re going to have to operate pretty much like a private hospital; if a patient can’t pay he won’t be admitted. Patients may have to sell their homes for care. We can’t deprive a student of his education to finance a patient who can’t pay.”

—Chancellor Elmer Learn of the University of California at Davis, on the occasion of the university’s takeover of a public hospital in 1972.

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Over 4,500 farm workers in Delano, California have been on strike against Delano grape growers since September 8, 1965.

These California farm workers are seeking the rights you take for granted: UNION RECOGNITION and COLLECTIVE BARGAINING. Delano grape growers refuse to recognize and respect these rights.

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WORK, a journal of new writing, edited by John Sinclair

$1.00/copy, 4-issue subscriptions $3.00

CHANGE, a new jazz magazine, edited by John Sinclair & Charles Moore, $1.00/copy, 4-issue subscription: $3.00

WORKSHOP BOOKS, new writing from Detroit under the general editorship of Robin Eichele

WB/1 Book of Humors, Jim Senark, 25¢

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Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh last month ordered the renewal of a concert hall license for Concept East Theatre.

His action was taken on an appeal submitted by the theatre group after its application for a license renewal had been summarily denied without charges on a hearing some weeks ago.

The Theatre has been subjected to harassment based upon its production of the Leroi Jones plays “The Toilet” and “The Slave.” Initially, an ordinance violation ticket had been issued to the theatre manager for permitting the use of “profane or indecent language”. This charge was dismissed in traffic court by Judge Andrew C. Wood because of defective service. The following day the theatre received notice that its pending application for renewal of license had been denied.

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Poetry Seminar

John Sinclair & Robin Eichele

Tuesdays 7–9 p.m.

Contemporary American Prose & Drama

John Sinclair

Thursdays 9 p.m.

The Surrealist Stance

Allen Van Newkirk

Arranged

Seminar in Pre-Homeric Greek Civilization

Sinclair, Eichele, Van Newkirk

Arranged

Theatre Techniques/Acting

Hurst Rinehart

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George Garnett Jr. was found dead on the inner lane northbound of the John Lodge expressway, under the Warren Avenue bridge, at 1:45 a.m. Tuesday, December 28, 1965. He apparently fell from the bridge, struck the pavement and was hit by several cars which didn’t stop after running over the body. A passing motorist saw the body in mid-air and pulled over to the curb; other motorists who did stop called the police. George was pronounced dead on arrival at Detroit Receiving Hospital at 1:55 a.m.

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Recently, I had a discussion with Dr. Abram Hoffer and Dr. Humphrey Osmond on drugs that tend to mimic psychoses. These two doctors are among the leading researchers on the mind and how chemicals effect it. Dr. Hoffer is Director of the Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Osmond, by the way, coined the currently popular word ‘psychedelic”, meaning mind-effecting.

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The first major photo exhibit featuring photos depicting the freedom struggle in Mississippi, Alabama and Southwest Georgia. Friday, January 14 is the last day this show will be in Detroit. Admission is free, at the Community Arts Bldg., Wayne State University, 9 a.m. — 10 p.m.

The Fifth Estate

Po Box 305

Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: Harvey Ovshinsky

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: Susan de Gracia, Robin Dibner, Steven Dibner

STAFF: John Sinclair, David Rackett, Deena Clamage, Jeff Feldman, John Hawksley,

Special thanks to the Detroit Friends of SNCC and especially to Miss Dorothy Duberry, who went through hell to get the front page photographs.

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Live (i.e. alive) musical activity continues to grow here in Detroit, and on its own terms, which makes it all the more valuable. Pianist Andrew Hill made his first concert appearance in this part of the country here last month, under the sponsorship of the WSU Artists’ Society and his Detroit-based agent, Lutz Bacher. In doing so Andrew also became the first major artist of international stature to be sponsored by the young student organization (only six months old), and the first such musician to undertake a totally cooperative musical venture outside the New York Area. The most significant extra-musical fact about Andrew’s concert is that he (& Bacher) worked directly with the society, on a person-to-person (rather than businessman-to businessman) basis, with music rather than money as the determining factor in the arrangement. This is the only way the rotten music-as-business situation is going to be overturned, and it must be revolutionized—and fast—if the music is going to be as an art form otherwise all anyone but the most privileged listeners will be able to hear in public performance will be the tired “entertainment” music that clutters the “jazz clubs” now.

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In another age, in a different lifetime, David Watson (under the name, George Bradford) wrote in the Spring 1984 Fifth Estate:

“While there may be reason for concern about computer threats to privacy, it is generally overlooked that deepening privatization, with a computerized television in every room as its apotheosis, is itself at least as great a threat—a threat which makes the police almost superfluous.”

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Editor’s Note: The following is an interview conducted by the Fifth Estate with representatives of the Free University of Detroit, a new independent educational institute which will open it’s doors at the end of the month. A full schedule of courses offered at the Free University is printed elsewhere in the paper.

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At the September 1965 National Council meeting, members of Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS), decided that the time had come for a thorough re-examination of the organization, its ideology, its programs and strategies, its coalitions, and its goals. In order to insure a broad number of participants in this reexamination, the organization decided to hold a conference in late December, a conference free from the normal pressures of decision-making, which could at least begin to define the questions which arise from a serious commitment to social change.

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It doesn’t take long before you fall in love with a helicopter.

The ponderous, heavy, and wholly improbable flight of a cargo plane, or the enclosed cocoon of a commercial airliner are too similar to driving in a delivery truck rather than tearing down the highway in a four-seat convertible.

The chopper has its own rhythm, and moves impossibly in all directions—or none at all; still as a kite, if not quite as silent.

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To many, it seems there will be no escape from the dominant reality, no alternative to an irredeemably darkened modernity as civilization’s final, lasting mode. We are indeed currently trapped, and the nature of our imprisonment is not subject to scrutiny. Its very existence is off-limits to discourse.

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The wind in a room. Often, though the club would be a hive of activity, with waiters, sunners, diners by the food counter, and children bounding through the wading area, the main indoor pool would be empty. A current of air would undulate along its placid surface, raising a single wavelet that glittered outstandingly like one flounce on a plain dress.

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adrienne maree brown speaks with the Fifth Estate about Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Co-edited with Walidah Imarisha, AK Press, 2015, $18.00, akPress.org.

How do we strategize to create a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism? For author and activist, adrienne maree brown, the answer is science fiction. She’s a strong believer that sci-fi and other literature can be a force for transformative social change.

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a review of

We are the Birds of the Coming Storm by Lola Lafon. Seagull Books, 2014, translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball

Originally published in 2011 as Nous sommes les oiseaux de la tempête qui s’annonce

We are the Birds of the Coming Storm is French author Lola Lafond’s third novel, and the first to be translated into English. It is the story of three women whose lives converge and intertwine during a time of personal and political upheaval.

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from Liberation News Service-Liberation magazine

Tim Leary’s invitation, in the Beatles’ words, to “turn off your mind, relax and float down the stream” did not, at one time, send shock waves through the New Left. The vision of multitudes seduced by psychedelia into a blissful, passive, apolitical euphoria sent shivers throughout the alphabet soup of the straight-laced Left establishment.

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Editor’s Note: Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party and Peace and Freedom Party candidate for Congress is currently standing trial at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California. Newton is charged with the murder, last October 28, of Patrolman John Frey of the Oakland Police Department. During the two weeks spent selecting a jury for the trial, the bias of the court has been apparent. Any possibility of Newton getting a fair trial disappeared with the selection of the jury. Of the 100 potential jurors questioned, working class blacks, and blacks and whites opposed to capital punishment were systematically excluded by District Attorney Lowell Jensen and Judge Monroe Friedman. The Fifth Estate will continue to provide up-to-date coverage of the Newton trial in future issues.

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The weekend of September 6^th, 7^th and 8^th will provide for diggers of radical-rock an unusual and revolutionary concept at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church, in the heart of the Warren-Forest Community (corner of Forest and Cass).

Long active in social and cultural activities, the church, through the sponsorship of its “Social Singles” group, will host a weekend of hard rock music, psychedelic and stroboscopic light shows, underground films, love-ins and similar activities related to the theme of the festival—DIALOGUE 68

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“When we first began speaking to the guerrilla forces, we were afraid of being used. We re-examined our reasoning and said to ourselves: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if for once we were used by the people at the bottom instead of being used by the people at the top.’”

Marge and Tom Melville, former Catholic missionaries in Guatemala, spoke these words during their recent visit to Detroit (July 31-August 1). They made three speaking engagements, sponsored by Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice, in Ann Arbor, Southfield, and Detroit.

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Detroit is not a great city for bookstores like the large publishing centers of New York and Chicago. but there are interesting stores here with a wide variety of material. As the ads say, find their names in the Yellow Pages under “Book Dealers-Retail.

After you get bored with looking for reading material at Hudson’s and Doubleday’s, where the choices are limited to new books and classics, take some time to explore the many specialty and used book stores. If you want old comics, Afro-American books, Marxist literature, underground publications, or good old smut...they are available in Detroit, and a trip (many trips!) to some of the following stores will reward you with stimulating hours of browsing and gassing with bookmen who have personalities. Patience will produce the book for which you are looking.

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CLEVELAND, July 26 (LNS)—The new penalty for filming the arrest of blacks on Cleveland’s East Side is possible broken ribs, multiple cuts and bruises and maybe a broken tooth, two NBC cameramen learned recently.

Cameraman Julius Boros was told by cops he was creating a “traffic hazard” by filming the arrest, which took place on East 105^th and Euclid Avenue. The cops smashed his camera and beat him with nightsticks; later at the station they threw lighted matches at him while he was being fingerprinted. He was charged with assault and battery.

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1. Poetry readings, mass meditation, flycasting exhibitions, demagogic yippie political arousal speeches, rock music, and song concerts will be held on a precise timetable throughout the week of August 25–30.

2. A dawn ass-washing ceremony with 10’s of 1000’s participating will occur each morning at 5:00 am as yippie revelers and protesters prepare for the 7:00 a.m. volley ball tournaments.

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THE AMERICAN DRAMA FESTIVAL continues at Greenfield Village. Under-the Gaslight will be presented in the Henry Ford Museum Theatre. 8:30pm.

FUN AT MEADOWBROOK. It’s the last weekend of the series. Bring your friends and food and have a (stoned soul) picnic while Edith Peinemann, violinist, does her thing. 8:30pm. Take I-75 to Rochester University Dr. Exit.

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At this writing it is completely unclear what to expect in Chicago. It looks like the YIP and the National Mobilization Committee, the group coordinating the political activity, is going to let everybody “do their own thing.” So YOU be ready to do it because it doesn’t look like anyone is going to assist you.

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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: My lover and I heard a record on KMPX-FM one evening while in bed, about beating and biting one another as a way to come to sexual satisfaction.

We practiced along with the record and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I would beat on his back and he bit me all over. particularly around my armpits and breasts. It was very reciprocal and so pleasing we felt we should tell our friends. But since then we have been rejected as weirdoes.

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Editor’s Note: The following letter was written by an American serviceman in Vietnam. It was sent to one of our readers, who in turn forwarded it to us with permission to print it in our letters column. The writer’s name has been omitted for his own protection.

Dear Bob,

This is a place of horror, and I am frankly unequipped for it. I can perform my duty; cleaning the jungle mud from gaping wounds, folding a man’s near-severed lower leg up against the intact part and binding them together, or swathing a head in bandages to keep the brain from falling out, as much as any other purpose. I can carry a shapeless bundle from a helicopter and assist in opening it to find inside little more than a jumble of severed limbs, intestines, and chunks of charred muscle. I can even fish a blood-soaked envelope from the bundle and fill out a tag for the body from its address, noticing that the same name, plus, “mrs.” is repeated in the return address.

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