Most Recent Additions

a review of

“Rosemary’s Baby” directed by Roman Polanski

It’s not everyday that one comes across a novel in which Satan rapes a New York housewife and forces her to bear him an heir. In fact, two and a half million readers found the story so intriguing that they turned Rosemary’s Baby into an overnight success.

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There may come a time when musicians may agree with critics about certain recorded performances, when and if this time comes it will be an absolutely mind shattering synthesis of opinion.

I am not talking about the Leonard Feathers and the Richard Goldsteins who have more than a workingman’s knowledge of music. Technically I am talking about the long haired chick on the staff of a well-to-do teen rag who writes in sexually graphic terms about Jimi Hendrix eating his guitar from the inside out, or the smooth talking cat who works in a record shop who answers your pleas for a good blues record by handing you Fleetwood Mac, a cellophane version of the real thing, when you wanted Billy Hawks or Bobby Bland.

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Tommie Suber arrived at the gates of Fort Wayne on August 5^th at 8:00 a.m. to report for induction. He was chained to Father Bob Morrison, Ron Halstead, Kitty Denenfeld, and Victory Friedelman.

Supporting his move were forty people representing Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice, The Resistance and People Against Racism.

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a review of

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. 397 pages, Hardbound, $5.95 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Paperback, $1.25, Bantam Books

Language is loaded with euphemisms, and the title of John Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident is a prime example. “Algiers” suggests an Afro-orientation, but “Incident” is the stinger. Albert Cleage writes of “the Algiers motel massacre”, and in mid-August of 1967 Doc Greene began a Detroit News column with a sentence which contained a likely title: “The thing that gets me about the Algiers Motel slayings of Aubrey Pollard, Fred Temple, and Carl Cooper is the superb manner in which the police set about solving these homicides.” The irony builds in that article.

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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

CALENDAR

Resa Jannett

DISTRIBUTION

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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 per line.

Send to: THE FIFTH ESTATE, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit 48201

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(LNS) Some 100,000 people including hippy-Yippies, McCarthy kids and SDS organizers, are expected to converge upon Chicago sometime before the Democratic National Convention, August 25–30.

Some will be there to do their thing, others to attempt serious political organizing, others to disrupt and demonstrate, others to do all three.

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We are initiating this column as a means of communicating with the Fifth Estate readership. We hope to be able to give you periodic progress reports, answer your questions about the paper, and hopefully give you the feeling that there are real live people behind the newsprint and ink.

Although our Detroit circulation is increasing, distribution still remains our major problem. We feel our circulation could double if a method could be devised to get our paper close to the potential buyers. Any suggestions?

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Times used to be when everybody loved a liberal. They had something for everybody. Times have changed and Hubert Humphrey, America’s number two war criminal can tell you that.

News Editor Gotkin at the HHH picket line gets it on with both hands. Photo by Mike Tyre.

Hubie made it into the Motor City on August 2 and went straight out to St. Clair Shores thinking he ought to do pretty well out in Honkie land. Bad planning. There were a lot of honkies thought Hubie wasn’t honkie enough and began heckling him with cries that he was soft on rioters and that the poverty program had “subversives” in it.

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a review of

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile by Eden Medina. MIT Press, 2014, 344 pp., $20

Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries provides an account which is sympathetic to Chile’s Project Cybersyn. She uncovers and details the largely forgotten and extraordinarily fascinating history of how information and communication technology was seized upon as a way to realize President Salvador Allende’s socialist aspirations.

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a review of

Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, paper edition 2015, 289 pp. $26

What sacred thing could pass through her lips now? What choir could shield her from the sound of her own voice?

“I did terrible things,” she said.

“Of course you did, Troy said calmly. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

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When this essay first appeared in the Fifth Estate in Spring 1985, the Vietnam War already seemed to be receding into ancient history. Central America was at that time being battered with money and proxies, rather than with “American boys,” who tend to get themselves unceremoniously killed while smashing up other people’s neighborhoods. A few hundred thousand deaths and mutilations later, we still await the tearful retrospectives with their admixture of regret and denial.

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The war’s legacy of lies continues in an official commemoration that stands history on its head. 2015 marks the third year of a fifteen year, congressionally designated commemoration of the U.S. empire’s monstrous war in Vietnam.

It is also the fortieth anniversary of the final defeat and withdrawal of U.S. military forces.

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FREE FOOD! Today and every day at Farmer Jacks!!

NO COUPONS! NO LINES! NO MONEY! NO LIMITS! FREE FOR THE TAKING!!!

The problem of hunger is a very serious one, and we, the managers of the food distribution industry are well aware of it. After all, it is hunger—in relative stages of course—which keeps us in business.

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The FE BOOK SERVICE is located in the same place as the Fifth Estate newspaper, both of which are located at 4403 Second Avenue, Detroit MI 48201—telephone (313) 831–6800. The hours we are open vary considerably, so it’s always best to give us a call before coming down.

1) List the title of the book, quantity wanted, and the price of each;

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After years of wasted time and copy space, the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF) has decided to exclude anarcho-anti-semite Joffre Stewart from the pages of its free-wheeling Bulletin (P.O. Box 21071, Washington DC 20009). Since the pages of the Bulletin are submitted pre-typed and hence, non-edited, SRAF hoped, and often achieved, a magazine created by its readers, in a truly libertarian fashion. The decision to finally censor Stewart after years of discussion must have indeed been a weighty one, but of the 13 SRAF groups who responded to the production group’s question about the matter, seven abstained, five clearly wanted the Bulletin “to immediately stop printing Stewart and one wanted the open policy to continue.” You could almost feel the reluctance of the abstainers to not be the one to initiate censorship, hoping other affiliates would bring the long standing policy to a close, but enough of the groups apparently had had it with Stewart’s embarrassing connection with their publication and he is hopefully gone from further consideration. The current SRAF Bulletin contains a discussion of the matter...

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The High Priest of Technology: “Dominate, dominate, dominate” (drawing by Stephen Goodfellow)

The High Priest of Technology still holds the high cards of death, but throughout the world mass opposition to his plans are taking place. Easter week-end in Europe saw at least half a million people in Scotland, England, the Netherlands and W. Germany carry off demonstrations, die-ins and blockades. Hundreds of other small actions like trespassing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan by churchpeople on an Air Force base go largely unreported, but are examples of a wave of resistance to the annihilation which waits in the wings.

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reviewed in this article

Juliette Minces, The House of Obedience: Women in Arab Society, 1980, translated from the French by Michael Pallis, Zed Press, 1982.

French sociologist Juliette Minces has written an informative introduction to the extremely complex subject of the subjugation of Arab women. One cannot read this study without feeling great remorse, frustration and empathy for the plight of these women who remain physically, psychologically and emotionally enslaved by a deeply ingrained tradition of hierarchical power which depends on their very enslavement for its continued existence.

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Conversations with Judith Malina rarely ended without her advocating “the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution.” Strategy to realize it always followed. Her efforts to achieve this ideal resulted in her arrest for civil disobedience in twelve different countries.

She and her husband Julian Beck established The Living Theatre in New York City in 1947 when they were in their 20s. Cultural foundations offering support were non-existent. Despite the constant shortage of physical space to rehearse and perform, they produced plays by radical playwrights like William Carlos Williams, Antonin Artaud, Paul Goodman and Tennessee Williams.

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There’s no end to discussion about the “crisis of the family.” From Reader’s Digest to obscure academic journals, in the halls of Congress and in countless homes, the crisis of the family is portrayed, analyzed, debated, or lived out. This discussion has become the litany of a society in crisis. This is so, as Jean Bethke Elshtain tells us, because the crisis of the family “is a crisis of meaning and it goes to the heart of our self-understandings and our social existence.” [1]

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Bill and Emily Harris, the Symbionese Liberation Army members who pleaded guilty to kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974 and were imprisoned in 1978, will be paroled in June. Their attorney, Stuart Hanlon, said Bill Harris will become an investigative paralegal for Hanlon, and Emily Harris, who took computer training in prison, will look for a job in that field. Both will be placed on parole for three years, although they will probably be discharged after a year. The Harrises pleaded guilty in 1978 to the kidnapping charges and were sentenced to ten years, eight months to life in prison.

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For those who may argue an “appropriate,” “soft” technology characterized by solar, wind and water power against the massive nuclear and coal-burning forms taken by “hard” technology, the photograph below should raise some problems. Pictured is a machine designed and built by Sharp-ECD Solar, Inc., a joint venture of Japan’s Sharp Corporation and the Troy, Michigan based Energy Conversion Devices. The machine mass-produces rolls of one-foot-wide solar cells, which will be used in Sharp solar-powered calculators. ECD describes the machine as a breakthrough in reducing the price of solar Cells, which could lead to wider use of solar power.

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While Time magazine was announcing the computer as its Man-of-the Year, Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor presently in command of the most sophisticated computerized system of annihilation in history, had something else in mind.

Calling Americans “hungry for a spiritual revival,” the President decided to designate 1983 as the Year of the Bible, and told diplomats and politicians at a National Prayer Breakfast that “America will not go forward” without faith in God.

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When you get to be our age, it seems easy to forget your birthdays, but it probably should be noted that last November marked the 17^th anniversary of our first issue. The paper has gone through a number of marked changes since those first days (we became an explicitly anti-authoritarian paper in July 1975), but we continue on, our commitment intact and looking forward to the next 17...

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A wave of anti-anarchist hysteria, stage-managed by the government, is sweeping Canada as a result of the arrest of five Vancouver political activists accused of a “wide-spread campaign of sabotage.”

On January 20^th, the five—two women and three men—were ambushed on the Squamish highway north of Vancouver by the combined forces of every law enforcement agency in the province. SWAT squads in full camouflage with riot gear, gas masks, and bullet-proof vests, came storming out of the hills and ditches to smash and tear-gas their way into the vehicle the five were driving in. The police dragged them through the broken glass and then to the ground to be handcuffed.

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FE NOTE: The following article arrived in the mail just as our last issue was going to the printer. Since that time, the government has closed the case on the shooting of Norman Mayer on Dec. 8, 1982 and his name has disappeared from the media. But his actions, and his message, continue to deserve attention. The postscript was submitted later, after two films on nuclearism were aired on national television.

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Within the space of one week in March, two films dealing with different aspects of nuclear madness appeared on Network television. In “The China Syndrome,” a film which had been released right at the time of the Three Mile Island blow-up, the viewer is confronted with an attempt to cover-up a dangerous accident at a nuclear reactor in California.

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As some of us were walking to our car from the February 4^th rally to support draft resister Dan Rutt (see above), we spied another demonstration in front of the Federal Reserve Bank downtown. There were picket signs, an American flag, and some chants, although we couldn’t hear them from down the street. As we came up, we were approached by one of the all male, all white group, who explained to us that they were demanding a return to the gold standard and protesting the use of paper money. “Paper money is unconstitutional,” he said. “It isn’t even real money.”

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Words embody, embrace, define an era. Make Love, Not War, a slogan 1960s rebels created fifty years ago in March 1965 is still around today, often echoed, modified, mocked, transformed. (A wonderful Berkeley Bakery, for instance, boasts, “Make Bread, Not War,” on its banner.)

The original saying was created at Chicago’s Solidarity Bookshop, a “do-it-yourself-revolution project” of Roosevelt University anarchists and IWW members who decided to make an anti-war button. What came to mind was the old Fellowship of Reconciliation slogan “Make Peace, Not War,” but this didn’t reflect our thinking; it was too tame.

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September 19, <strong>MOCAD

3-5pm, The Fifth Estate’s 50 Years of Radical Journalism, Commentary & Critique: A Panel & Conversation

5-7pm, FE staff reunion

8:30–10:00pm at HopCat (Canfield at Woodward), dance/party/concert celebration featuring Detroit’s Layabouts. Full menu for dinner before is available.

</strong>

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“The roots of politics are older than humanity,” writes Desmond Morris in his new book Chimpanzee Politics. He contends that chimpanzees have well-developed political systems, demonstrating that humans are not so much “fallen angels as they are risen apes.”

Basing his argument on a study of chimpanzee behavior by Dutch biologist Frans de Waal, Morris writes: “There is hardly anything that occurs in the corridors of power of the human world that cannot be found in embryo in the social life of a chimpanzee colony.”

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Fifth Estate:

People can call themselves anything they like but I would think the differences between Christianity and anarchism are so massive as to preclude anyone calling themselves Christian anarchists (see FE June19, 1982 Letters column). There are similarities between the two doctrines which would lead someone to adopt such a label; they both speak of a love for humanity.

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The following two letters were received prior to the arrest of the Vancouver 5 (see story on next page) and raise again the question of revolutionary violence and terrorism debated so many times previously in these pages. The debate has engaged the anarchist and libertarian movement since its inception and we welcome further comments on the subject.

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It had to happen eventually, and it did. That repository of pre-masticated mediocrity, that script for dullards, Time magazine, declared its “Man-of-the-Year” a machine-of-the-year, the computer. The magazine gave a lavish spread to this loathsome invasion, joining in the corporate chorus with its declaration, “A new world beckons.”

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Recently, an anti-nuclear protester in Washington state, after seeing the nuclear freeze banners which he and his friends had spread across the tracks shredded by the oncoming train carrying nuclear warheads, was asked by a radio reporter what his feelings were.

As the train barreled along nearby blowing its whistle, he answered, “Fear, I guess, first; we could be shot by sentries for getting too close to the train. Also it’s a humbling experience being so close to so much destruction.”

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The recent loosening of restrictions on economic transactions between citizens and companies in the U.S. and those in Cuba has been greeted by many liberals and leftists as a promise of what they designate as “prosperity” for the island.

They are hopeful that Congress will eliminate remaining trade restrictions, thereby helping to promote economic growth. However, given past examples of such liberalization, we can only realistically expect it to promote further integration of the Cuban economy into global capitalism.

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As we go to print, it is with great sadness that we report the passing of our compañero, amigo, padre, and abuelo, Federico Arcos, in Windsor, Ontario, at the age of 94. The last several months were very difficult for him, but all in all he lived long, fully, and admirably. He stood for lasting and noble human values. He cared about human beings and the Earth. He believed in justice and freedom and human solidarity and compassion. He had a powerful and permanent effect on us.

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Stories of spat-on veterans began proliferating in the U.S. media in 1990 as the country ramped up for the first Persian Gulf War. Anti-war activists had spat on troops returning from Vietnam, or so the stories went, and to make sure that did not happen again, Americans were urged to rally around the men and women dispatched to the Gulf. Within weeks, the nation was awash with yellow ribbons, symbols of support for troops, and by inference, the mission on which they had been sent.

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On May 17, military forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) captured Ramadi, Iraq, and with it another huge stock of US-supplied modern weaponry. Six thousand US-trained Iraqi soldiers fled the city without putting up much of a fight. The ISIS force was considerably smaller and reliant on waves of suicide car bombs for its final attack. It’s not hard to see why ISIS has been successful in establishing the idea that it is an unstoppable force carrying out their god’s will.

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Complete catalog available from pumpkinhollow.net/thebarn

Creating Anarchy by Ron Sakolsky

(Fifth Estate Books 2005) $15

Twenty chapters in a dynamic collage of ideas and action. This vibrant collection glows with flames of discontent and defiance and flows with waves of laughter and possibility. Ranging widely from Mayday to Utopia, from Refusal to Autonomy, and from Insurrection to Imagination, this compilation is in turn defiant, reflective, and playful--a brick for hurling through the windows of despair and a doorway to creating an anarchy that is not afraid to dream.

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From the Fifth Estate files: Washington DC anti-draft, anti-war demonstration, March 22, 1980, organized by anarchists --photo: Craig
Glassner/Phantasm Photography

Sept. 6-Nov. 26

“Soapboxers and Saboteurs: 100 Years of Wobbly Solidarity.” An exhibit highlighting materials from the Labadie Collection, one of the world’s best collections of materials documenting early IWW history.. Special Collections Library, 711 Hatcher Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109–1205. Open to the public. See October 19 for accompanying reception.

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a review of

That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Edited by Mattilda, (AKA Matt Bernstein Sycamore), Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, 2004, 318 pages, $16.95.

With a new collection of essays compiled in That’s Revolting!, radical queer activist Mattilda puts the fun and glamour into radical queer resistance. It starts with a cover featuring a close-up of a mouth covered in lipstick and glitter and encourages the reader to “pick it up and smash something.”

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a review of

“An Injury to One” (2002). Written and directed by Travis Wilkerson

Tensions in Butte, Montana between the Anaconda Copper Company, unions, and workers had been becoming more serious for about a decade when 164 men perished in the grisly Speculator Mine fire of June 1917.

When it became clear that the disaster was due to Anaconda’s contempt for safety regulations, 14,000 strikers took to the streets. However, the US had just entered the First World War and copper was a vital part of munitions production, so labor disputes in Butte were construed as a threat to national security. Newspapers owned by the bosses denounced the strikers as “pro-German” terrorists, and Federal troops soon arrived to quash unrest by putting Butte under martial law and forcing the miners back to work.

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a review of

After the Deluge: A Novel of Post-Economic San Francisco by Chris Carlsson. Full Enjoyment Books, 2004, $14 from the Barn or available for free download at fullenjoymentbooks.com

Processed World, 2005 edition, $7 from the Barn, or processedworld.com

Even alienated office nerds and overachieving, working class intellectuals need an anti-authoritarian forum. That’s how I remember Processed World (PW) from my immersion in the anarchist zine scene of the 1980s. Unmistakably Bay Area in its bad attitude and aesthetic orientation, it was as much a staple of the Reagan-era underground and its left coast, printed propaganda as Homocore and Maximum Rock n Roll.

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Antonio Tellez Sola died at his home in France at 84. He was one of the last survivors of the Spanish anarchist resistance which fought to overthrow the Franco dictatorship in Spain following the fascist triumph in 1939. He was also one of the first historians of the post-civil war urban and rural guerrilla resistance to the regime. In his actions and his writings, Tellez personified refusal to surrender to tyranny.

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a review of

The Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, Verso, New York, 256pp., $25

In the book, Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, acclaimed New Left historian Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman of World War 3 Illustrated have put together a unique, lively, accessible and entertaining history of the most important union in American history. They use the style of a graphic novel and the contributions of many artists to show this complex history from the point of view of the participants.

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Note: FE staffer Walker Lane interviewed Billy Bragg, the English singer/songwriter, when he played a 1998 Labor Day benefit for striking Detroit newspaper workers.

Lane: Rumor has it you once drank a glass of beer containing the ashes of the famous Wobbly songwriter, Joe Hill.

Bragg: It’s true, actually. Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah in 1915 after a frame-up trial. When he died, he was cremated, and they had asked him where he wanted to be buried. He answered, “Anywhere but in Utah,” where he had been executed by a firing squad. So, what the Wobblies decided to do was to send his ashes to every union branch in the United States. They put them in little packets and mailed them out.

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“We should war with relentless efficiency not only against anarchists, but against all active and passive sympathizers with anarchists.”

—President Theodore Roosevelt, annual address to Congress, December 3, 1901

“It is time to take a look at the culture and climate of support for criminally-based activism like ELF and ALF and do something about it. Just like al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization, ELF and ALF cannot accomplish their goals without money, membership and the media.”

—Senator James Inhofe, US Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, May 18, 2005

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by Alan Franklin

He called me a peculiar, bungling misfit, and right away I knew things weren’t going to work out quite as well as I’d hoped. Oh, sure, I’d filled out the form all right, even signed my name at the bottom as best I could remember it, but I could see from the disposition of his ears that expressing an appreciation of my efforts was not at the top of his to-do list.

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Throughout U.S. history, the lives and struggles of Native Americans have been disregarded and disdained by the white, middle-class, christian, capitalist, Nature-despising national Establishment. Sadly, the disregarders and disdainers also included the great majority of socialists, communists, anarchists, trade-unionists and others who considered themselves critics and opponents of that Establishment.

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