Most Recent Additions

Identify the three weird dudes pictured here and win two free tickets to see the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The winner will be drawn from correct entries received at the Fifth Estate office by October 10^th. Send entries to 1107 W. Warren, Detroit 48201. Be sure to include your name and address.

Fifth Estate staff members and former staff members not eligible.

PORT HURON—Two unidentified teenagers hurled broken concrete through two large plate glass windows of the Wallace Campaign Committee headquarters in Port Huron, according to state vice-chairman, James Hall.

Dean Cunningham, who is the chairman of the American Independent Party in St. Clair County, reported that police called him September 12 just after the vandalism had occurred.

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Liberation News Service — That a hard rain (of some kind) is agonna fall on America soon is a fact apparent to mystics and rationalists, to leftwing political scientists and to rightwing economists, to European money speculators and to your local police, who’ve probably already ordered their tanks. The Hopi Indians can tell you all about it and so can the Black Power cats and the Brown Berets, not to mention Yippies, Provos, Zenarchists, and the rock group of your choice.

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Several Detroit women, members of the “Women’s Liberation Movement,” a group of radicals working on their own thing, joined women from New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Iowa in a twelve hour demonstration against the Establishment’s Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, New Jersey, September 7.

Approximately seventy women protested the “mind-less boob symbol” of Miss America behind two police barricades. About 200 hecklers taunted the women, three of the honkies staying for five hours—the cops turned to face the crowd—they were the more violent.

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Fri. Sept. 6

DIALOGUE ’68. A festival of radical rock music for three nights. The UP, Billy C. and his Killer Blues Band, and the Psychedelic Stooges will play Prior to the performances

A SHOWING OF UNDERGROUND FILMS will be presented by the Detroit Repertory Theatre, at the first Unitarian Church, Forest and Cass. $2.50 per night or $6.00 for all three nights. Tickets may be purchased at Hudson’s, Grinnell’s, or at the church.

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Richard Lester’s new film, “Petulia,” is a contradiction in terms—it is at one and the same time old-fashioned, avant-garde, sophisticated, heavy-handed, and pointless.

Lester, who directed the Beatles films and “How I Won the ‘War,’” is no stranger to cinematic mixed bags, but this time something went wrong.

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NEW YORK, Aug. 22 (LNS)--Phil Hutchings, Executive Secretary of SNCC, announced that Stokely Carmichael, former National Chairman of the organization, had been formally expelled. “Brother Carmichael, both as a member and as chairman of SNCC made tremendous strides in the fight for black liberation in the past eight years, but it has been apparent now for some time that SNCC and Carmichael were moving in different directions,” Hutchings’ statement read.

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Unclassifieds cost 50 cents per line per issue. Figure four words per line. (A word is a word including one and two letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible. DISCOUNT RATES: Five runs cost 35 cents per line.

All unclassifieds must be paid for in advance.

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LONDON The cartoon about the Beatles, “Yellow Submarine” is a watershed movie that could change the pictorial content of all movies and the style of cartoons for all time

Full of puns, (Ringo, rescued by the U.S. Cavalry after being chased by Indians, describes his adventure as “arrowing”), pictorial tricks (clouds patterned like Mexican blankets), thought-provoking jokes (vicious dog with four heads, all pulling different ways) it is a melange of all the commercial and pop art tricks of the past decade.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—The U.S. Justice Department has released results of a study conducted for it by the University of Michigan which states that twenty-seven per cent of all policemen “were either observed in misconduct situations or admitted to observers that they were engaged in misconduct.” Two-thirds of this group were seen “in some form of conduct that could be classified as a felony or misdemeanor,” while the rest admitted such naughty acts.

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Merchants continue to use guns on young people in the Fitzgerald community on Detroit’s Northwest side and are being supported by your local police.

The latest reported incident on August 9^th involved the Bollinger Party Store on Fenkell near Greenlawn. The proprietor, Mr. Fedah, on being asked about dispensing stale and shoddy merchandise, pulled a gun, fired a shot, and ordered a delegation of young black people, led by John Hunt, coordinator of a local community supported Teen Drop-In Center, to get out at gun point.

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I want to take up where I left off last time and get into some of the alternatives to the present scene in the local rock and roll industry. There has been some fantastic response to my last column—even Russ Gibb gave me a call on a Saturday afternoon, and I hadn’t heard from him for some time—and I want to detail some of the things that are starting to happen.

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A new law has been passed where you can have any mail stopped which you consider offensive: The law was passed to smite smut—always good for the idiot vote—but—the bill is so worded that you are the sole judge of what is offensive.

If you feel that your congressman’s newsletter, a religious appeal or the normal junk mail is offensive all you have to do is go to the post office and ask for P.O. form 123 and fill out the form giving your name and address and the name and address of the firm which you want to stop sending you advertisements. You do not have to give any reason or justification why you find the mail’ offensive.

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a review of

Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture 1848–2011 by Jesse Cohn. AK Press, 2014, 421 pp., akpress.org, $22.95

In Underground Passages, Jesse Cohn begins with the apt metaphor of anarchist resistance culture as a tunnel: it is “a way of living in transit through” this world. Resistance culture is “not mainly defined by its end; it is a middle, a means.” Anarchist cultural production is a way of making sense of the world, a figurative place inhabited temporarily in the time between the present and the future of anarchy.

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a review of

Richard Wright, a biography by Constance Webb. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NYC, 442 pages $8.95.

William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, edited by John Henrik Clarke. Beacon Press, Boston, hardbound $4.95, paperback: $1.95

Whenever a better-than-third-rate book enters the midst of all the recent jet-propelled “publishing about Black” it must seemingly SCREAM! to be heard above all the confusing Noise of Publicity. Constance Webb’s gigantic biography of Richard Wright (author of Native Son, Black Boy, [1] and originator of the phrase, Black Power) does not, unfortunately, scream, and so it will probably drown in libraries (at $8.95 a copy) before it has had a chance to swim in public dialogue.

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

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld:

Your discussion of the sneeze-orgasm question in a recent column gave me the unaccustomed and satisfying experience of becoming aware of a mysterious part of my own behavior.

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Dear Sirs,

I have been a subscriber to your paper for a long time and hope to be a subscriber for a long time to come, but that’s not why I wrote.

I wish to congratulate you on your last issue (vol. 3, no. 7), it was great!

I also wish to criticize you on your letting John Sinclair ruin your fine newspaper by printing all of his bullshit on the MC5.

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This particular piece is written to serve two purposes:

(1) For those who know and like British Blues so that they may learn something of its history and composition.

(2) For those lemmings of this society who treat blues as a science text book; in that what counts is sticking to the rules laid down by the innovators of that form; so that they MAY (and pigs may fly) treat the next piece of blues they hear as a musical section of someone’s soul, being contained therein exactly the emotions that said person is/was feeling at that time.—

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ANN ARBOR—The Peace and Freedom Party nominated Eldridge Cleaver as its Presidential candidate August 18^th at the Party’s national convention.

The selection of a Vice-presidential candidate will be up to each state or combination of states, because the Convention as a whole could not unite behind a national Vice-presidential candidate despite Cleaver’s proposal that Jerry Rubin fill that spot on the ticket.

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Detroiters made out fairly well in “The Battle of Chicago” with a minimum of casualties and arrests. At this writing the only known arrests were Sue Wender, of People Against Racism, Dan Hodak and an unidentified member of Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice. All were released on bond.

Hard hit, though, was people’s property. Frank Joyce, National Director of PAR, returned to his car to find it had been completely demolished by flames. It was parked half a block from a pig station and had visible quantities of peace literature in the back seat.

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July 23, 1968 will have to go down in the history of the black revolutionary struggle as a day of even more importance than July 25, 1967 (Detroit) and August 11, 1965 (Watts). It was on Tuesday night, July 23, that a small group of black men set up an ambush for the police in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio. They set it well and carefully: “... there were telephone complaints about an abandoned, stripped white Cadillac left on Beulah St.,” wrote the New York Post’s Jimmy Breslin. “The police tow truck came up to the Cadillac, shots came from three directions. The driver was a civilian employee. He was not hit. He was doing what they wanted him to do, radio for help. They would use their aim later.”

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To those of you tenderly under 20: imagine, if you dare, that tomorrow you could no longer obtain records anywhere. Imagine that all the record stores were suddenly boarded up. Imagine that all of your records and tapes have mysteriously disappeared, your stereo is missing, and that it is now impossible to gain access to music anywhere in the world. Pretend, for a moment, that all the musicians everywhere have suddenly left without notice!

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The rabid anti-Communist vultures are now having a field day. They are suddenly showing a concern for the people of Czechoslovakia which they never exhibited for the Blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa or the Orientals in Vietnam.

In the history of the world, words like “freedom” and “democracy” are usually only valuable as items of a propaganda machine. They are cute “means” necessary to unite or propel a people behind a national cause that is really much more dedicated to political and economic power.

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David Wheeler, chairman of the Draft Resistance, and Frank Joyce, National Director of People Against Racism, were recently allowed to retain their freedom from the draft for the time being.

Following an early Morning demonstration on August 19^th, Wheeler received a 4-F deferment and Joyce received a 1-Y, both on political grounds.

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Chicago and the Democratic Convention were the end of a fantasy trip. The last illusion that social change could be brought about through popular pressure on the Democratic Party was shattered beneath the clubs of Daley’s pigs and the manipulations of the Humphrey political machine.

The Party has shown itself for what it is—a cynical, corrupt political tool of a power elite working behind a military shield to prevent any popular interference with its operation.

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photo by the real Dr. Squat

Indignation over the “Battle of Chicago” created one of the largest demonstrations held in Detroit in quite a while.

Called by the Detroit Coalition, a rally was held in Kennedy Square on August 29. Over 400 people attended even though only several hours’ notice had been given. Many stopped on their way from work to picket.

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Quite a time these last few weeks. Most of our full-time staff went to Pig City and returned without injury or arrest. Still, just being there and seeing what happened to our brothers and sisters gave us a real shot in the arm in terms of our commitment to change this society. We want people in control of their own lives instead of pigs.

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KILLEEN, TEXAS—More than 160 black soldiers from Fort Hood refused to take part in riot control operations in Chicago.

The rebellion—the largest in recent U.S. military history—began the night of August 23 at the Texas base. Approximately 100 black GIs from the 1^st Battalion, 41^st Infantry Brigade, First Armored Division, staged a sit-down demonstration to protest their orders to fly to Chicago the next day.

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The London Times reports sadly that Britain isn’t yet equipped to “‘retaliate quickly” against an enemy who attacks with germ warfare. As long as nationalistic feelings prevail over humanitarian ones there’ll always be this chess game with expendable lives by leaders who remain safely above it all....The U.S. Embassy has been replaced by the Hilton Hotel and the Playboy Club as top targets for stone-throwing anti-American demonstrators... A man who received a civil honor, the MBE, for “services to sport” (giving rent-free premises to an Olympic team) has been requested to return the award after being convicted (of perjury) in a court case: Establishing the principle, of course, that you’re judged by your future activities rather than your past...

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Fifth Estate

A Newspaper Of Detroit

EDITORS

Harvey Ovshinsky

Peter Werbe

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Cathy West

CIRCULATION

Tommye Wiese

NEWS EDITOR

Alan Gotkin

MUSIC EDITORS

Tony Reay

John Sinclair

OFFICE MANAGER

Debbie Quigg

PHOTO EDITOR

Mike Tyre

ART DIRECTION

Blallen

ADVERTISING

Gunnar Lewis

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Editors’ Note: The Fifth Estate contains virtually no news coverage of the Battle of Chicago. For once the overground media did its job and to repeat the horror stories here would only be redundant. Rather, we feel that it is important to put the Chicago events within a perspective and provide an analysis of the events that occurred.

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Each step in a revolutionary’s development is a result of a definite experience. The role of a revolutionary is forced on the man, the man who knows the truth and can do nothing but live it. Gaining this truth is the hardest part of the development, the continual struggle for truth; the truth may come early or late in life or it may never come at all, but until it comes the man struggles, he struggles with his fellow man, but most of all he struggles with himself, and he never seems to know why he always loses.

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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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