Most Recent Additions

On Saturday, December 4, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) will hold: a rummage sale in its office at 8906 12^th St. The sale will run from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a great variety of articles up for sale: clothes, kitchen utensils, art objects and some furniture.

Anyone interested in articles to donate can bring them to the CORE office between 2 and 6 p.m. or call 872–8703.

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Bruce Whitten, age 26, held the rank of Staff Sergeant in the Air Force until he received a general discharge on May 23, 1965. Whitten was assigned to the First Air Commando group and spent two years in Vietnam.

Q. How do the people feel about the governments that have been set up?

A. They don’t even discuss them. It just seems to be a taboo subject. You don’t speak to an Englishmen about the Queen in a sexual manner and it’s like that here. You’ll get your throat cut. I never got anywhere discussing that subject.

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To the Editor,

I would like to congratulate you and your staff for being so ambitious as to save our city from the blight which exists at the present time. The blight which I refer to is the lack of communication between the people of Detroit as a result of our inadequate news media. The result has been an uninformed, robotic society.

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The Northwest Folklore Society presented a blues show on Wednesday night, November 24. Included in the show were performances by Washboard Willie, Willie “61” Blackwell, Sippie Wallace, Doctor Isaiah Ross, and climaxed by Little Sonny and the Rhythm Rockers. The show put on by the audience was disgusting.

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It shouldn’t be news to anyone--but it probably is--that the local gestapo is responsible for ending the performance of LeRoi Jones’ “the toilet” and “the Slave” at the now shut-down Concept East Theatre. The plays, directed by Woody King (who is now back in New York) and performed brilliantly by such Detroit actors as Sam Blue (Toilet) and Harrison Avery (Slave), began their run in August, made it through a couple of weeks, and then were brutally closed by the guardians of law & order--and “morals”--in our fair city.

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Very soon now Wayne State University will finally become known across the country--not for its football team (I hope that will never happen), or for its student sit-ins (unfortunately, that will never happen either), but for the fine presentations of contemporary music sponsored by a small group of students known as the WSU Artists’ Society. Formed only 5 months ago, this group has already presented a total of 7 concerts of the new music, plus two readings by young Detroit poets.

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EDITORS NOTE: The following speech was given to a meeting of the Detroit Circle held November 21 in the McGregor Memorial Building. Dr. Pollack is a History professor at Wayne and long active in the movement protesting the war in Vietnam.

Perhaps the biggest mistake many of us make when speaking about Vietnam is that we focus only on Vietnam, and in doing so, engage in a debate with the forces supporting the Administration on their own ground. Not that a case against the war could not be made even there, for it could. But I think the time has come to enlarge the inquiry and to make a case not simply against the war, but against the structure of American society which makes that war possible in the first place. Why are we in Vietnam? Until we dig deeply into that question and explore all the ins and outs, we will be forced to remain on a superficial level and to confront the war as a single issue--and in thinking of the war as a single issue. when and if this war is resolved, then the basis for the criticism is removed. This is not as it should be. I urge you to consider that the Vietnam war, as important as it is, is only a symptom--only a symptom of the larger course American society is pursuing. And one does not accomplish very much by confronting symptoms when the underlying causes remain unhampered.

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The north Syrian town of Kobani has been under siege since mid-September by forces of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, popularly known as ISIS. Early in the siege, world leaders spoke as if they expected it to fall.

The US took its bombing campaign against ISIS to Syria, but targeted the jihadists’ de facto capital, Raqqa, not the ISIS forces closing the ring on Kobani. But the vastly outgunned and outnumbered Kurdish militia defending Kobani began to turn the tide, while issuing desperate appeals for aid from the outside world.

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This article first appeared in FE #320, Spring 1985 under the pen-name George Bradford. It is reprinted on the 20^th anniversary of the defeat of the U.S. empire in Vietnam.

by Richard Drinnon

Another decade has passed and it is Spring 1995, twenty years since the “fall of Saigon to the Vietnamese,” in David Watson’s mordant words, and the man who gave his name to that war has just published In Retrospect, a memoir from which he broadcasts what everyone by now has heard: “we were wrong, terribly wrong.” Now the ur-Whiz Kid tells us that he had become a covert convert to the antiwar movement even by 1967, the year twenty thousand resisters tried to shut down his Department of Defense. If only the erstwhile carpet bomber had then come outside to join the fair number of us who had slipped by the soldiers and the marshals to piss on the Pentagon, what a triumphant relief that would have been, what an epiphany! Yet after twenty-eight years we can still say that Robert S. McNamara’s tardy outing is better late than never, no?

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Thirty years ago, the most powerful military colossus ever assembled, its triumphant legions spread throughout the world, committed an expeditionary force of its best troops to the Asian mainland. “The American Army of 1965,” wrote an admiring historian, “was headstrong with confidence, sharply honed to a lethal fighting edge ... [and] eager to test its newly acquired wings of airmobility.” [1] In other words, it felt invincible. Battalions dispatched to Indochina were told that the local communist guerrilla-bandits were politically isolated and would quickly succumb to their superior might, but instead they found themselves locked in desperate battle with a determined adversary enjoying massive popular support. This expeditionary force gradually became a gigantic field army of over half a million men, and the lightning war turned into a meat-grinder.

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Inside the walled compound of a Buddhist monastery on the outskirts of Kyoto, Japan, the monks who reside there have created a meditation garden consisting of raked sand and about a dozen large stones. The stones are adroitly arranged so that no matter where one stands on the perimeter of the garden, at least one of the rocks is blocked from the sight of the viewer. The Zen wisdom behind this arrangement suggests that the world in all of its aspects is never completely knowable; that something always remains hidden.

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In 1936, groups of women in Madrid and Barcelona founded Mujeres Libres, an organization dedicated to liberation from their “triple enslavement to ignorance, as women, and as producers.” While it lasted for less than three years (its activities in Spain were brought to an abrupt halt by the victory of Franco’s forces in February 1939), Mujeres Libres mobilized over 20,000 women, and developed an extensive network of activities designed to empower individual women while building a sense of community.

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FE Note: The following article, an attempt to come to grips with the implications of Karl Marx’s everyday life by long-time FE contributor John Zerzan, has stirred considerable controversy among those of us presently working on the paper and necessitates, we feel, a few brief introductory observations.

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In mid-April Detroit women were invited to participate in the opening ceremonies for the new Detroit Feminist Women’s City Club, paid for by the recently-formed Feminist Economic Network (FEN). The City Club, located in downtown Detroit on Park Ave. across from the Penthouse A-Go-Go Club, and FEN have been the center of heated discussion and have created factionalism throughout much of the organized women’s movement.

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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

FOR SALE--Cyclone Fencing. 8 x 4 x 4. Slightly damaged but easily fixed. $80.00 or closest best offer. Call Marilyn between 1:00 & 5:00, Mon. thru Fri. at 831–6800.

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Once again the old Fifth Estate is faced with the nemesis of financial bankruptcy. Our shoestring budget still continues to operate at a rate where production costs inevitably outweigh income generated by the paper, due to our refusal to accept all forms of commercial advertising.

In an effort to maintain the paper and our independence from commercial advertising, we urge our readers to contribute financially to the continuing operations of the paper, to re-subscribe if your sub is running out, to check out Ammunition Bookstore and the catalogue in this issue for reading material, and to pass the word and the paper along to friends everywhere. We at this end will assuredly continue to look for ways to keep the paper going.

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At Blue Bird Food Products, a union plant on Chicago’s South side, thirty-five television cameras mounted on moveable tracks keep constant surveillance on 450 workers on the factory floor. In the monitoring room, an “expert” in time-study keeps detailed charts on workers suspected of talking to their neighbors too often or working too slowly, with the bosses having an instant replay of any of the worker’s actions.

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Hungary ’56 by Andy Anderson

Black & Red-Solidarity 138 pp., $1.25

Revolt In Socialist Yugoslavia by Fredy Perlman

Black & Red 23 pp., $.25

Worker Student Action Committees: France May ’68 by R. Gregoire & F. Perlman

Black & Red 45 pp., $.75

The Bolsheviks And Workers Control by Maurice Brinton

Black & Red-Solidarity 86 pp., $.85

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

As discussed in last month’s issue of the Fifth Estate (see Bicentennial Moment No. 3, “The Ludlow Massacre”), the period beginning in 1865 with the conclusion of the Civil War and continuing through 1919 marked the turning point in America’s economy from individual, agrarian-based capitalism to corporate monopoly capitalism.

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Social revolutions are not “made” by parties, groups, or cadres; they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forces and contradictions that activate large sections of the population. They occur not merely (as Trotsky argued) because the “masses” find the existing society intolerable, but also because of the tension between the actual and the possible, between “what is” and “what could be.”

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It was the re-match of the week: Michigan Bell’s high-paid legal staff working in tandem with the full weight of the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office, pitted against the Fifth Estate aided by attorney Ken Mogill. In other words--an even match.

Although a Recorder’s Court jury voted 10 to 2 last August for acquittal on the charge that the Fifth Estate published information on a telephone device that could be used to cheat Ma Bell, the phone company, assisted by their toadies in the prosecutor’s office, threatened to drag us into court a second time. Usually such a lopsided verdict in a misdemeanor case means that it would be dropped, but Bell realized that they could blackmail us through manipulation of the courts to get what was clear they couldn’t achieve in open court.

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During the first week of April 1976, Gerald Woltjer, an Ottowa County, Michigan, dairy farmer, shot down his 235-head dairy herd in order to draw attention to the nightmare of PBB--poisoning of Michigan livestock, poultry, and dairy products.

Shortly afterward, the story hit the national news media and within weeks the spectre of a new Minamata-style plague loomed over the heads of Michigan residents. (1) Later in the month, the Michigan House of Representatives approved legislation that will eventually ban the sale of meat from PBB-contained herds for sixty days. A bill is also pending which will result in the liquidation of all tainted animals--virtually every farm animal in the state.

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The Fifth Estate benefit on April 10 was one of the best ever with Detroit bluesman Bobo Jenkins and his band turning everybody on to their strong rhythms and FE supporters and friends dancing and drinking the night away. Unfortunately, our paper didn’t reach people early enough and many of the usual revelers missed the festivities. We took in about $400, but that was just enough to make expenses.

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Race war has become a distinct possibility in Boston. Over thirty people have already been hospitalized from racial confrontations since the so-called “Procession Against Violence” called by Mayor Kevin White took place on April 23.

What is happening is the culmination of a series of events that have escalated with mounting fury over the last few months. White racist mobs are becoming more brazen and aggressive. On April 15 an anti-bussing lynch mob assaulted black attorney Theodore Landsmark outside city hall with an all too appropriate weapon--a flag pole draped with an American flag. The police stood by.

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FIFTH ESTATE #272, May, 1976, Vol. 11, No. 8

Millard Berry

Alan Franklin

Ralph Franklin

Pat Halley

Kathy Horak

Colleen Jenson

Pat Kazenko

Bob Nirkind

E.B. Maple

Pat O’Bryan

Algirdas Ratnikas

Dennis Rosenblum

Kana Trueblood

S. Tufts

Mr. Venom

Marilyn Werbe

Peter Werbe

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.

To Sonny Tufts, Wonder Woman, the Detroit Auto Dealers Association, and all the imbeciles who revere the article “Propagandada Discovered in Detroit,” (F.E. March 1976):

Besides applauding your own impotence and illusory liveliness, propagandada, etc., a kind of mechanical senility, only demonstrates the seemingly unlimited powers of the spectacle--the continuing vanguard of the banal.

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If you are one of the thousands of persons hoping to get a look at the information collected on you by the Detroit and State police anti-subversive (Red) squads, your chances may be dimming.

Lawyers bringing suit against police intelligence unit spying have been trying to force both police agencies to open the 50,000 dossiers to those named in them, but legal counsel for the city and state have resisted this at every turn.

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Part II of this article appeared in Fifth Estate #273, June 1976.

The American health care system is currently undergoing a barrage of criticism from every corner; particularly, it has become fair game for dissection on the pages of newspapers all over the country. Last month the Detroit Free Press headlined a front page story “Doctors Blamed for Health Costs,” with a subhead running beneath it which read: “Study Cites Monopoly Fees; Hospital Bills Triple in a Decade.”

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Reality is a tunnel constructed between the realm of the possible and all that is deemed impossible. Under the aegis of reality, the conceptual limitations of tunnel vision are normalized. By breaking down the tunnel walls, we fully reveal what is ignored, dismissed, or hidden from view by the fetters of reality. Even though we are born in the tunnel, we can imagine life beyond its walls--we can be tunnel visionaries!

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Note. One sunny day in late August we found ourselves standing on a midwestern highway. Delirious and drenched in sweat, we did our best to keep our consciousness for just one more ride. Fifteen hundred miles later, we arrived in minneapolis/St. Paul for the Pre-NC, a gathering hosted by the RNC welcoming committee with the purpose of developing a large-scale direct action strategy to shut down next year’s Republican national convention. This gathering was the culmination of six months of networking, propagandizing, and strategizing in our own region.

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FIFTH ESTATE #376, Halloween 2007, Vol. 42, #2

Issue Theme: End of the Worldism

Cover, centerfold, & back page art

Tammy Wetzel

http://tammywetzel.zenfolio.com/

End of the Worldism (but not for us), Editorial

“Great Dismal Mercenaries” Blackwater & Iraq

Don LaCoss

“Elves Sentenced” ALF/ELF Activists Sentenced

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To the Fifth Estate:

I disagree with Fifth Estate picking on Hugo Chavez (See Spring 2007 FE, “In Chavez’s Venezuela: Continued Repression of Popular Protest”).

Most of the charges made are correct; his regime is dictatorial. But there’s also the tremendous work done in the barrios (or misiones as they call them), where clinics staffed by Cuban doctors are now almost in all of them, and public housing has been built. I visited one in Caracas on opening day: 218 units rented to poor families at 10 percent of their salary, or free if unemployed.

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a review of

Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters

San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2007.

160 pages, available for $15 from the Barn

Diane Di Prima, 1960s

Diane di Prima, America’s (and probably the world’s) leading anarcho-Hermetic poet, has issued a new edition (the fifth) of her famous Revolutionary Letters, containing all of the poems from the City Lights versions from 1971 through 1980, plus 23 new and more recent pieces. This new edition emanates--rather oddly but not inappropriately-- from Last Gasp, a publisher mostly known for underground comics.

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It was a full scale beggar’s banquet, the return of the repressed, a surprise party. The city people, young and old, black and white, went through the pawnshop windows like meteorites. Nervous exorcists, trembling before a mortal turned evil and massive and enigmatic, the politicians asked, “Who are you?” And like demons unleashed from an inferno, they answered, “Many.”

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As long as we’re on the subject of endings--or rather, the rhetoric of “the end”--I’d like to intervene in the ongoing conversation about what Roger Farr recently referred to in these pages as “the end of an era,” i.e., the era of anarchism as a “communicative” project (“Anarchist Poetics,” Fifth Estate #373, Fall 2006).

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“One never really contests an organization of existence without contesting all of that organization’s forms of language.”

--Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons...

If capital must continually decompose and then restructure standardized communication in order to maintain just enough cooperation as is needed to ensure efficient production, then the defection from this campaign in favor of creating autonomous and “unreadable” modes of communication and dissent emerges as a viable, if limited, tactic. Language and communication become critical sites of anarchist critique and experimentation.

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No discussion of end-of-the-world imaginings would be complete without some reference to wacky conservative Christian dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is a school of Protestant theology that favors a millennial interpretation of history--all roads lead to God cracking open a cataclysmic can of whup-ass on humans.

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What do we find so compelling about the end of the world? While some people are unconvinced or uninterested, others find fictional accounts of nuclear war, plague, or environmental disaster to be mesmerizing. In an unscientific survey recently conducted in a utopia/dystopia class, a majority of the students--who read fiction, watched movies, or thought about the end of the world--also imagined themselves surviving such events.

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For the godless anti-authoritarian, the hope that the current order of reality will come to an end during our lifetimes may be the last possible form of big, world-encompassing faith. For those who are faithful in this sense--whether that faith is based in scholarly readings or is purely intuitive--Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl wants to be the next Bible--or at least a book of psalms.

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I’m not entirely sure when the world ended. I mean, I’ve got some ideas, but I really don’t think that it’s important. That’s why I don’t have much patience for this end-of-the-world baloney.

My anarcho-primitivist comrades rhapsodize about the decline and fall of civilization, but it looks to me like that happened a very, very long time ago. The history of world civilizations has been one astonishing full-scale catastrophe after another for the last six thousand or so years and that makes it hard to choose any single, defining climax of human existence before the degeneration began.

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We catch ourselves reading the Book of Revelation because we cannot face the failure of the revolution. We consult the Mayan calendar and post-modern prophecies about the year 2012 because we can no longer realize mutual aid as an interpersonal policy that suffuses all of daily life.

The prevailing critique of all forms of “collapsism”--the notion that the end is both inevitable and imminent coupled with the subsequent idea that all radical acts for present transformation are thus futile--correctly chides its proponents. The latter half of the formulation finds collapsist rhetoric contributing to the contagion of apathy; this apathy then acts as a mental pesticide, drowning and choking the roots of resistance deep inside the collective consciousness of our culture. But if we are so brash as to suggest we break apart the collapsist formula, decoupling our acceptance of the inevitable from our subsequent sense of defeat, then all things are possible. It really is a go-for-broke moment, then, when we realize that tomorrow is in fact today. But why don’t our actions reflect this?

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Publication date: Early 2008

Issue theme: ESCAPE!

Prisoners. Deserters. Divorcees. Vacationers. Junkies. Exile, exodus, emigration, and escape velocity. Shelters, sanctuaries, and safe-houses. Escaping consequences, escaping responsibility, and escaping attention. Escape to or escape from? Is escapism helpful or harmful? Is it useless to try to escape? We seek original, critical, and analytical assessments of theory and practice of escape, as well as essays, articles, and artwork on general themes.

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What if the lights went out? What if you couldn’t get clean water to drink? What if there were no police, no schools, and no place to go if you were sick or hurt? If the shelves, in the grocery store were never re-stocked, and no one came to pick up the trash?

What if most everything we take for granted about the rhythms of life ceased to be? If the relentless motion--the motion that pushes us on to the next paycheck, the next month’s rent, the next deadline, social event, vacation, the next goal in our imagined future--came to a halt, and these landmarks in our lives were suddenly irrelevant?

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Lately, I’ve been immersed in thoughts of surviving “after the crash.” It all started three years ago when our theatre group, unable to find a suitable published play for us to perform, decided to collectively write a play of our own about “the end of the world as we know it.” In The Wobble, as it soon came to be known, five actors on tour get stranded on an island (similar to the one on which we all live in the Georgia Strait between the southwestern coast of British Columbia and Vancouver Island) when they experience ‘a wobble’ that appears to be the cause of the permanent collapse of all power and communication systems.

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This conversation between writers Anu Bonobo & Daniel Pinchbeck--author of 2012: The Return of Quetzacoatl (2006) and Breaking Open the Head (2002) (and co-founder of RealitySandwich.com)--transpired over email in February 2007. Pinchbeck’s latest book 2012 is just out in paperback: a critical assessment of Pinchbeck’s work by Cookie Orlando follows this interview.

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In late May and early June 2007, sentences were handed down for ten activists who pled guilty to a series of Earth Liberation Front/Animal Liberation Front (ELF/ALF) actions.

In addition to jail time, eight of the activists also received a federal “terrorism enhancement,” which allows for increased penalties of up to 20 additional years. The Civil Liberties Defense Center said this was the “first time in US history that the federal government” had sought “such a sentence enhancement for property crimes that neither intended nor resulted in injury or death to humans.”

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This issue arrives late, but we think you’ll find it worth the wait. We published 1 last in March 2007, but our plans for timely Summer and Fall issues faltered due to a lack in finances and in our issue-editor’s free time. But unlike some publications that have recently ceased operations, we’re as motivated as ever, which should be self-evident from the articles and art in our “End of the Worldism” edition.

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Three years ago, Fifth Estate ran an article on the activities of the two dozen or so privatized armies in Occupied Iraq. The essay claimed that the name of one rent-a-gun company--Blackwater USA--was derived from the term used by the US Navy to describe stealthy, night-time Swift Boat assaults (like the one that former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey went on in 1969 when he single-handedly cut the throats of at least twenty women, children, and old men in the small Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong).

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“Don’t tase me, bro! I didn’t do anything”

--Florida

“It was like touching an electric fence they use, to keep cattle in, but instead of just where the initial shock goes in, the electricity goes through your entire body. It feels like every nerve cell is on fire.”

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The first Burning Man festival in China, with several hundred in attendance

Burning Man began with a wooden effigy and a single match on a beach in San Francisco in the late 1980s. When the police came and closed down the beach burning of the Man it was John Law and Michael Michael, two members of the Cacophony Society, a group of legendary urban pranksters, who told local artist Larry Harvey of a place they knew of in the desert “where you could burn things.”

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