Full list of texts

Gang fever is sweeping Detroit. Everywhere the gangs are the main topic of conversation—the Black Killers, the Errol Flynns, the Coney Oneys, the Chene Gang. The cops are puffed with importance—they’re the thin blue line between the hordes and the populace; the media are ecstatic—they have found a story that can be milked every day to break the monotony regularly presented; and for the average citizen: a concrete discernible reason for why Detroit is falling apart—1,000 teenage gang members.

...

Justice—Detroit style. Danny Royster was convicted last week of manslaughter in the slaying of the only pig killed during the July 1967 uprising. One problem—Danny didn’t off the pig and everyone including the State admits to that fact.

What happened was that Danny and a buddy were liberating some goods from a store on the near Eastside when they were discovered by the 13^th Precinct Big 4. One particularly vicious pig, Roy (Butterfingers) St. Onge who works the Warren-Forest area entered the smashed out storefront and whopped Royster upside the head with his shotgun.

...

The Detroit Police has begun a reign of terror in the Warren-Forest area near Wayne University.

Almost all of it has been aimed at the local freaks. “It’s getting to be too much,” said Skip Cooper, who lives in the Castle on John Lodge. “All the cops do is hassle with anyone with long hair.”

Other people in the area have reported a marked increase in illegal searches and entries by the cops. Mostly, the cops involved are from the Tactical Mobile Units and the “Big Four.” The latter is the precinct cruiser that travels in a Dodge sedan with three plainclothes (and they are) patrolmen and one uniformed driver.

...

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.

...

a review of

“BlacKkKlansman”

Director: Spike Lee

135 min.

“The cops and Klan go hand in hand!”

—frequent chant at anti-cop demonstrations

Spike Lee’s latest film “BlackKkKlansman,” the story of an African American police officer’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s, has received generally excellent reviews in mainstream publications and from anti-racist activists.

...

Police representatives from twelve suburban communities have been training in methods of riot control on the Cranbrook School campus once a month throughout the year.

The newly-formed Cranbrook SDS concentrated on their removal as a primary goal. A victory was scored May 8, when the pigs failed to appear, apparently aware of the increasing militancy of certain students at Cranbrook School. This eliminated the necessity of an open confrontation between SDS and the cops, as this was the date when such a confrontation was supposed to have occurred.

...

The Stoepel Park Incident of Sunday, August 24 was not an isolated instance of police harassment [see “Pigs Riot in Park,” FE #87, September 4–17, 1969]. On-duty and off-duty, legally and illegally, police harassment of the young people who gather in Stoepel Park continues. But the latest round has been won by the kids.

...

For once it appears that it pays to be black.

At least the sons of prominent black ministers and politicians.

The Detroit Police Department actually disciplined several of it’s men for their drunken and cowardly beatings of several black youths after a church dance Nov. 2 of last year.

Commissioner Johannes Spreen called the attack “unprofessional, uncalled for and unexcusable.”

...

Fernando Gonzalez was 16 years old.

He won’t be getting any older.

As his name implies, Gonzalez was a Chicano youth from southwest Detroit. And in a wanton display of insane racism, four crazed pigs from the Fort-Green Station of the Detroit Police Department, savagely clubbed the man to death on a Detroit street.

...

“Both police and armed forces follow orders. Orders. Orders flow from the top down. Up there, behind closed doors, in antechambers, in conference rooms, gavels bang on tables, the tinkling of silver decanters can be heard as ice water is poured by well-fed, conservatively dressed men in horn-rimmed glasses, fashionably dressed American widows with rejuvenated faces and tinted hair, the air permeated with the square humor of Bob Hope jokes. Here all the talking is done, all the thinking, all the deciding.”

...

2000 may be the decisive year in the legal and political battle for the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal. As the campaign to save the falsely imprisoned journalist and ex-Black Panther gathers momentum, the police, politicians and media are stepping up their efforts to have him strapped to the execution gurney.

...

“When you have $50 billion invested in defense what you need most isn’t allies but an enemy.”

— Nelson Algren said in Ramparts, May, 1967.

When you have policemen on horses and Tactical Mobile Units with little baseball bats and “riot-trained” commandos, what you need most is not a Love-In but a riot.

...

HOUSTON, Texas—The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has requested the U.S. Attorney General to launch a “vigorous investigation” of Houston police who “engaged in a vengeful and destructive rampage” against students and property at Texas Southern University during a five-hour riot on May 17.

...

OAKLAND, CALIF. (UPS) What began as an anti-draft teach in grew into issues of both anti-war and free speech and ended as 400 helmeted police, sheriff and California Highway Patrol officers using eye-stinging mace and swinging billy clubs broke up an anti draft demonstration along with some two dozen skulls in front of the Oakland Induction Center in the early dawn of Oct. 17. When the first of four groups of demonstrators arrived at the Oakland Induction Center early that Tuesday morning it was greeted by some 150 persons who had already gathered across the street.

...

Most everyone knows that the small encircled, lower case letter “c” indicates that a piece of work is copyrighted, and that it designates legal protection of creative work and intellectual property. Perhaps the key word for this discussion is the last one in the sentence--property.

How copyrights are applied and the protection they provide for work that is intended as property within the commercial marketplace, on the face of it, wouldn’t seem to need much elaboration. However, its definitions and applications are quite complex, but fortunately aren’t what will be under discussion here. This article will center on how anti-statists can or should relate to state protection.

...

Floyd McKissick, National Director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), will be speaking in Detroit on Monday, November 7. The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam and the Wayne Committee to End the War in Vietnam have announced that McKissick will be one of the main speakers at a teach-in which is scheduled for that day on the Wayne State University campus.

...

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.

...

Prostitution may indeed be the world’s oldest profession mercenary soldiering is probably a close second place. Like so many other late-contemporary capitalist service commercial enterprises, soldiering-for-hire has undergone particularly ugly mutations in the last fifteen years as the bosses and clients have become more internationalized and more committed to the successful business strategy of plausible deniability. The latest globalized incarnation of the mercenary trade is the burgeoning $100 billion-per-year corporate military service industry.

...

Although we’ve gotten an excellent response from last issue’s article, “Industrial Domestication” [FE #329, Summer, 1988] which originally appeared in the French magazine Os Cangaceiros, we were informed by the translators that we had inadvertently typeset it from a working, rather than final, version.

...

Is this a class? It is at Corvid College.

Forty-two years ago, philosopher Ivan Illich wrote, “I also believe that the end of the ‘age of schooling’ could usher in the epoch of a global schoolhouse that would be distinguishable only in name from a global madhouse or a global prison in which education, correction, and adjustment became synonymous.”

...

Intelligence finally reigned supreme recently when Detroit’s Common Council tore apart Ray Girardin’s stupid proposal to ban motorcycles from city parks without a special permit.

The proposal was immediately condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union as unconstitutional and in violation of the civil liberties of individuals because of its vagueness.

...

The nexus linking resistance and protest movements with underground artistic practices is distinct, with significant overlap existing between the participants and qualities of both. It’s no surprise that overt resistance to existing circumstances intersects naturally with activities that are radically discontinuous with production/consumption-based existence.

...

“Counterfeit coin is said to prove the existence of genuine--the terms being purely relative. But because there can be no counterfeit where there is no original, does it in any manner follow that any undemonstrated original exists? In seeing a spurious coin, we know it to be such by comparison with coins admitted to be genuine; but were no coin admitted to be genuine, how should we establish the counterfeit, and what right should we have to talk of counterfeits at all?

...

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848, asserts that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” that social transformations grow out of the contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production when the latter become too constricting for the development of the former. In every epoch a revolutionary class incarnates these productive forces. [For Marxists, the classic historic example of a class struggle which is followed by a radical social transformation is the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In this example the bourgeoisie incarnated the new productive forces: the feudal relations of production (the way society was organized), were too inflexible to accommodate the increasing commodity production.

...

a tree shivers shade

to protect the thief, the wolf

from the prying sun

.

it is no coincidence that

the gods of the forest

are the patrons

.

are the patrons of

witches, slaves, outcasts,

are the patrons of outlaws

.

for the earth was a sanctuary

before a mortar-mediated sky

imposed survival on the living

...

Outside the Detroit Recorder’s Court in July 1969, supporters gather at the trial of White Panther leader and former FE columnist John Sinclair. Comrades, who did not want their photos in any pig paper, flip the bird to Detroit Free Press photographer Tom Venaleck. Sinclair was sentenced to ten years for the possession of two joints of marijuana. Before he was released from prison in late 1971, he garnered international attention and support as a political prisoner. Three days before his release, 15,000 friends gathered for a benefit concert including Abbie Hoffman, Bobbie Seale, Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Phil Ochs, and Stevie Wonder.

I was seven years old when my mother fell in love with our landlord. The apartment we lived in, in retrospect, was a slum.

It was a three story red paneled building with eight units, two on each floor, all occupied by cartoonish caricatures of poverty, myself and my mother included. My father was battling alcoholism, and my mother, yearning for stability, filed for divorce and moved us into the red apartment. She got a job down the street waiting tables at a restaurant, and we lived in that apartment for the next five years.

...

Cracker Barrel, a Southern restaurant chain known for its racist hiring policies and Confederate flag decor, instituted a company-wide policy in 1991 to not employ persons “whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values.” Twelve people were promptly fired from the chain because they were lesbian or gay.

...

a review of

Breaking the Alphabet by Sascha Engel. Ardent Press 2022

Critiques of language and its objectifying, alienating effects are older than history itself (history defined as the linear, language-based story of civilization). Those early incarnations still exist today in mystical and spiritual practices like no-mind meditation, ecstatic dance, and mantra.

...

NEW YORK, N.Y. June 25 (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)—A group of about 40 hippie types, bearded, beaded and foul-mouthed, invaded the studio of WNDT-TV, Channel 13, last night and, within sight and sound of thousands of viewers, tried to take over the station.

Reality was performed on Channel 13, WNDT-TV, Tuesday night, June 25^th, at 10:30 p.m. A live reenactment of chaos sent shock waves through the New York metropolitan area as thousands of viewers witnessed the first physical confrontation between the underground and the establishment media. What was happening in Paris, in Vietnam, in Berlin, in Tokyo, in practically every major city in the world was happening at that exact moment on the third eye of living room consciousness: REBELLION.

...

When the Rolling Stones came to Detroit, 14,000 kids gave Mike Quatro over $100,000. The Stones were great and the whole crowd was really into it.

Around 100 SDS Weathermen were digging the Stones too. Only they didn’t pay anything; neither did about 200 other kids.

They didn’t pay because they were fed up with the entire bullshit line about paying money to establishment pigs just so you can dig your own culture. So all the Weathermen got together and crashed the gates at Olympia.

...

a review of

On Community: Field Notes #8 by Casey Plett. Biblioasis, 2023

Casey Plett’s new book, On Community, weaves a nexus of themes and concepts, including compassion, needs, the pleasure of sharing coffee, the mutual support queers and transsexuals provide, the power of the group, and an ongoing space of encounter.

...

A review of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, Edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai DuLani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Preface by Andrea Smith. South End Press, 2011, 325 pp, $16

The Revolution Starts at Home is a series of articles, accounts, and discussions aimed at not only dealing with the aftermath of abuse, but also challenging the underlying institutions and values that perpetuate abuse and violence. The aim of the anti-violence movement, as Rebecca Farr of Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) writes, is to “create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support one another that there is no longer the need for anonymous hotlines.”

...

Editors’ Note: The following is from Abbie’s book Revolution For the Hell of It, to be published by Dial Press later this month, by the author “Free.”

LIBERATION News Service — Perhaps the best way to begin to relate to Chicago is to clear your throat of the tear gas fumes, flex those muscles stiff from cop punches, write lying down, collapsing from fifteen solid days on no more than three hours sleep each night, mouth AUM, smile and then roll on the floor laughing hysterically. I can only relate to Chicago as a personal anarchist, a revolutionary artist. If it sounds egotistical, tough shit. My concept of reality comes from what I see, touch and feel. The rest, as far as I’m concerned, didn’t happen. If it did, so what, then it happened. Great!

...

San Francisco (LNS) — The people of People’s Park received token retribution recently. Twelve sheriffs deputies involved in the struggle last May were indicted by a San Francisco Grand Jury on charges of conspiring to mistreat prisoners (many of the 423 arrested were brutally beaten), shooting persons with shotguns, and beating persons who were arrested.

...

Power authority creeps have reared their puffy bourgeois heads once again in the Detroit area, this time at Clarenceville High School in Livonia.

Any Clarenceville student caught displaying the Fifth Estate inside the school will have his copy of the paper confiscated and his parents will be informed.

...

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

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

...

Somewhere in Washington D.C. there resides a President’s Crime Commission, and on this Commission there is a man called Dr. Richard H. Blum. Dr. Blum is one of six doctors reporting on narcotics and drug abuse in the United States.

In his report, Blum stated that he thought alcohol the most dangerous drug Americans use, that smoking “Marijuana may be less harmful than drinking,” and “there is no strong evidence that marijuana (or any other drug) is a cause of crime.”

...

reviewed in this article:

Expect Resistance: a field manual, CrimethInc., $8, CrimethInc.com

Rolling Thunder: an anarchist journal of dangerous living; P.O. Box 494, Chapel Hill NC 27514; rollingthunder — at — CrimethInc — dot — com

Why is the CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective (CWC ) the crew that the workerists love to hate? The rigidly anti-lifestyle critique leveled at-these so-called “arrogant middle-class kids” has become so commonplace that it’s as much a caricature of itself as it is an unsophisticated slag at these prolific publishers of beautifully-crafted anarchist propaganda.

...

During Autumn NATO maneuvers in West Germany, thousands of people demonstrated at U.S. military bases, and hundreds were arrested. U.S. military commanders protested, calling on the West German government to crack down on “anarchists and criminals” who have damaged military vehicles, cut fences, sprayed paint and thrown stones at soldiers.

...

The confrontation between Iran and the United States over the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran Nov. 4 and taking of 63 hostages (later reduced to 50) by Islamic student militants has brought to the fore the worst features of this epoch. The grotesque spectacle of a million Iranians marching in lockstep, chanting praises of a decrepit mullah and a reactionary religion is matched in this country by a sudden upsurge of patriotism one would have thought impossible just a few weeks ago.

...

George Orwell’s 1984, in which he potently describes a totalitarian society of the future, has been used by both capitalists and communists in describing each other’s society. The saddest thing of all is that they’re both right.

The photos on this page show the military forces of Germany (1936) and China (1977) practicing the art of criticism/self-criticism in attempts to clear the nation state of unwanted elements.

...

cited in this article:

The Decline of (Anti-)Western Civilization: A Critique of Fifth Estate, by Dan Todd, 27 pages, $1.00 from New Rage, PO Box 11492, Eugene OR 97440

This rather cunningly written essay/dialogue expands on comments made by its author in a letter to the FE (see “Critical Flab” in Letters, FE #322, Winter/Spring 1986) in which he identified what he thought to be a generalized decline in the quality and critical coherence of the paper. And though I was intrigued by the title and welcomed such a discussion, the product of this critique was disappointing. Todd had simply taken two rambling, hastily-written letters I’d sent him and retyped them with a blow-by-blow, paragraph-by-paragraph response, thus creating a straw FE and knocking it down. But an exchange of letters does not add up to a critique of our ten-year effort.

...

The following is a statement issued from Stammheim Prison by jailed RAF lawyer Klaus Croissant, dated Nov. 20, 1977. Thanks to LNS.

“At Stammheim I have been subjected to the same conditions of isolation against which I have struggled for years as defense attorney for the RAF prisoners. I am systematically and completely deprived of all contact with other prisoners...Food is passed to me by a prison employee through a hole in the door of the cell...

...

“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep.”

—Frank Zappa, December 1965

Some very strange action has been coming down at Southfield-Lathrup High School. Rick Cricow, a student there, has been selling Fifth Estates in the area and distributing them at his school. Last month the Assistant Principal of the school, Richard Leland, confiscated the papers and instructed Cricow to discontinue selling them on school property.

...

a review of

Welcome Home by Clarrie and Blanche Pope. Minor Compositions 2022

When I picked up Clarrie and Blanch Pope’s Welcome Home and saw the tower block on its cover, it shook out of me a memory of watching the BBC documentary series The Tower: A Tale of Two Cities about the privatization of the Aragon Tower at the Pepys Estate (housing estate is the British euphemism for public housing, or projects for Americans unfamiliar).

...

Staff Note: For nine years, the tenants of San Francisco’s International Hotel have been battling to save their residence from the attempts by the Four Seas Investment Corporation, a Hong Kong based firm, to turn the area into a multi-story shopping center. The cause of the elderly Chinese and Philippino residents has been taken up by a variety of leftist groups, even supported for a while by the local sheriff, and criticized by others as a defense of squalor. Our writer, a Fifth Estate staff member emeritus, has been wandering the hemisphere and arrived at the I-Hotel as the final confrontation with the bodyguards of property began.

...

Cuba secured the World Amateur Baseball Championship by scoring a 2-to-1 victory over the United States at a playoff match in Santo Domingo Aug. 26.

More than 18,000 fans watched the Cuban team win their tenth straight game to take the championship series unbeaten.

According to the Cuban press, Western news agencies “had been emphasizing for some time the political nature of this game.” But the Dominican fans enthusiastically rooted for the Cubans and continually greeted the U.S. team (composed of outstanding college players) with shouts of “Go home” and prolonged booing.

...

(Reprinted from the Guardian, New York City)

New Year’s day marks the tenth anniversary of the victory of the rebellion (Fidel’s terminology) and the beginning of the Cuban revolution.

This tenth year, just completed, will be remembered as the Year of the Revolutionary Offensive. It is not that the other nine years lacked the elements of a revolutionary offensive: this revolution has always been revolutionary and has always been on the offensive. But in 1968 a new height was scaled, made possible by the great transformations of character and ideology which millions of Cubans have undergone.

...

1976, being America’s 200^th anniversary--with all the commercial pomp and whitewashed historical hoopla that’s riding along with it--would be the ideal year to miss entirely and go abroad.

Between television’s “‘Buy-Centennial’ Minutes” and the countless newspaper and magazine articles extolling our so-called grand and glorious history, it’s going to be kind of hard to keep our food down and our spirits up.

...

HAVANA — We entered the elevator on the ground floor of Havana’s renowned FOCSA building in the city’s Vedado district and were quickly whisked, non-stop, to the 33^rd floor. When the doors opened, tuxedoed waiters welcomed us to La Torre, an elegant, candle-lit restaurant with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city and harbor twinkling in the night below us.

...

This May was a very exciting time for anarchists in Cuba, full of both inspiration and anxiety. On the positive side, the Anarchist Social Center and Library (ABRA: Centro Social y Biblioteca Libertaria) hosted the Fourth Libertarian Spring Conference in Havana, from May 4 to 11.

Cuba Pride March, May 11, despite being banned by authorities.

...

When a reader sent us this page from the December ’76 issue of Granma (the official organ of the Cuban Communist party) pictured at the right, we thought the goose-stepping troops must have been from the army of Argentina or Chile. The pictured style of marching has always been identified with fascist armies and represents the extreme to which the male body at the service of the state can be distorted. Any leader knows that once troops have been submitted to the sort of discipline necessary to create a well-oiled military machine, the individual components lose any uniqueness and become a faceless, headless mass willing to follow any order that comes from above.

...

Cuban women are beginning to see solid results of the many years of struggle that they have been through. Before the revolution, there was little or no work for any women. The only way a single woman could get money for her children or herself was to beg or else sell herself. Most women were totally dependent upon their husbands or fathers. A divorced woman was considered to be nothing but a prostitute, because that was the only way she could support herself. Virginity became even more of a prize for a marriage dowry. Young women were “protected” to the point where they couldn’t leave the house without a chaperone.

...

Groups like this performing at El Tanque at Havana’s Proyecto Cultural Muraleando will soon be subjected to official censorship.—photo: Peter Werbe

Pity the poor Marxist-Leninist militants now bereft of the police states for which they so earnestly apologized. But, not real pity as their dishonesty has caused as much damage to revolutionary possibilities as have the objects of their political ardor.

...

On Wednesday, February 5^th, the Rev. Peter Pillsbury will talk on his recent tour of Cuba at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Paul Lowinger, 2170 Iroquois (Indian Village) at 8:00 p.m.

The lecture is sponsored by the Lafayette Park Vietnam Committee.

The Rev. Pillsbury was invited, as one of a small group of American churchmen, by the Cuban Government to visit the country. While in Cuba, Rev. Pillsbury traveled through four provinces, and visited social, political and economic institutions, in all of them.

...

LIBERATION News Service

(Editor’s note: On New Year’s Day in 1959, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and their victorious guerrilla army strode into Havana. The day before, Fulgencio Batista, the ruthless dictator who had been the prime object of the political and military movement led by Fidel, fled in an airplane to the Dominican Republic, en route to Spain.

...

The Cuban state has usually been able to keep a tight lid on protests. Generally, it only allows demonstrations that have been organized by government ministries. However, during the fall and winter of 2020–21 the dissident San Isidro Movement in Havana began publicly defying the rules by demonstrating for freedom of expression for artists. The government responded with intimidation and even arrests.

...

On March 15, our last day in Cuba, my wife and I boarded the Hershey Electric Railway in Casablanca, across the harbor from Old Havana, for a 57-mile trip to the town of Matanzas. We were flying back to Toronto from the airport near that city the next morning after eight days on the island. The line was built a century ago by the U.S. candy manufacturer to bring sugar from the fields to Havana harbor, and is the only remaining train of what was once the most developed rail system in Latin America.

...

a review of

33 Revolutions by Canek Sánchez Guevara, Translated by Howard Curtis. Europa Editions 2015

Les Héritiers du Che (The Heirs Of Che) by Canek Sánchez Guevara and Jorge Masetti. Presses de la Cite 2007

“The persecution of homosexuals, hippies, free thinkers, syndicalists, poets (dissidents of a sort) certainly seems in excess of what was being combated. The criminalization of being different has nothing to do with freedom. Neither does the concentration of power in the hands of a few form part of anarchist ideas, and even less so the perpetual surveillance of individuals or the prohibition of any associations that may be formed on the margins of the State.”

...

Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, a fugitive animal-rights activist, was intercepted by Cuban authorities in early August and turned over to the FBI.

Popped by Cuban cops on an INTERPOL Red Notice, Dibee was flown to Portland, Ore., where he pleaded not guilty to taking part in a 1997 arson attack on a meatpacking plant—the first of several charges he faces.

...

Acceding to the exigencies of global capital, the U.S. and Cuban governments finally admitted their mutual interests after some 16 years of mutual denunciation.

The first trade agreements are being hashed out in the Congressional carnival while fishing accords are already operative, confirming a 200-mile coastal limit which will put Cuban and American trawlers in equal competition off the Florida coast.

...

FE Note: Usually, Fifth Estate essays are filled with the vision that alternatives exist to our current predicament. This article explores the possibility that humanity has already been extinguished and that there may be no hope of fashioning a different world. If that’s the case, do we just cease our resistance? Comments welcome.

...

On college campuses, in urban squats, at hip city venues, and at anarchist events, one often sees young white people sporting dreadlocks or Mohawk haircuts. However, there has been an increasingly aggressive push-back by those who designate this as cultural appropriation and are confronting and shaming those they deem guilty of the practice.

...

Culture shock: back in Detroit, my life of freedom lies neglected as I de-mothball the artifacts of this daily life. One always returns to Detroit; everyone told me, “You’ll be back,” just as they snicker along the line when you take your vacation. You’ll be back. You can’t kick, you are strung out.

...

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

To an admiring bog!

—Emily Dickinson

Dogwoods swathed in delicate white, gently clear their winter throats as cable news updates crawl and grovel for her attention. But she doesn’t blog, pin, Snapchat, Instagram or—God No!—tweet, and her dumb phone shortcomings are just fine. She the freak in the waiting room without an umbilical glow in her palm, just a paperback copy of something she fills with marginalia.

...

[by R. Fleck, Little Nancy Goodvibes & Alfie]

What’s worse than watching Walt Disney’s version of Winnie the Pooh? Sitting through “I Am Curious Yellow.” At least Disney is a goof for the kids.

Drawn by the press’s public publicity, the over and under-40s righteously attended their first opportunity to legally dig a skin-flick and feel “real arty” at the same time. Poor fools. Shucked again.

...

Author’s Note: This article is not intended to define or thoroughly explain the muddled swamp which is today’s world of art/life/experience. In fact, its only a visceral (gut) reaction to looking at cars, looking at Lennon-Ono prints. In the next issue a more detailed exploration of art and people will be presented. But for the time being....

...

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.

...

The week of April 12 was a very bad one for pirates. It began that Sunday when Navy SEALs executed three pirates off the coast of Somalia who had captured an American ship’s captain. For days, the “daring” rescue dominated headlines in the U.S., without any mention of the socio-economic circumstances that have led to a resurgence of piracy in the region--or of the role the West has played in contributing to those circumstances. Rather, countless stories focused on the Hollywood-style operation: how three snipers parachuted under cover of darkness into the sea, swam to a nearby ship and took out the pirates with three bullets fired nearly simultaneously.

...

When the President appointed a Commission to study violence after Chicago’s freak-out Convention activity last August, not even the most turned on prophet in the movement could have suspected the bombshell report which would become, after a single day on the stands, a runaway best seller.

Maybe hippies, Yippies, Panthers, college students, politicos, and assorted freeks have been saying it all along, but now the Establishment has come out and said it.

...

Barbarian: 1. A fierce, brutal or cruel person. 2. A brute, uncivilized, rude, savage, cruel, barbarous.

Example: “he is merely a barbarian on the loose in a museum” (Yvor Winters).

Civilization: 1. The process of civilizing or becoming civilized. 2. To civilize; to bring out of a condition of savagery or barbarism; to better the habits or manners of; refine.

...

<em>

</em>

FE Home > Issue 316, Spring, 1984 >

• Nature Imprisoned at the Zoo

• Why, What, Who Barbarian

• Poetry Page

• Absolute Divergence

• Fuck Governments

This issue of the Daily Barbarian is not only being distributed throughout the Detroit area for free, but thanks to the members of the Fifth Estate collective, it is also appearing as the center four pages of their paper. This means that along with the 3,000 copies we’re printing, an additional 3,000 will be sent all over the U.S. and different parts of the world through the subscription and bookstore sales of the FE.

...

Fifth Estate Home > Issue 319, Winter, 1985 >

Back so soon?

Well, we didn’t make it as a monthly publication, but we did make it back. This issue—#3—marks a turning point for the Daily Barbarian...this broadsheet can no longer be considered a bi-decadal. In fact, we’re pushing for quarterly status, if we can get the next issue—#4—out by 1989?!

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Daily Barbarian > Thoughts on the Disappearance of History

“so that when there is no more story that will be our story when there is no forest that will be our forest”

—W.S. Merwin, “One Story”

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“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution,” said Emma Goldman (1869–1940), feminist heroine, anarchist activist, editor, writer, teacher, jailbird, and general troublemaker. Or did she?

Perhaps she said, “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” as my purple T-shirt claims under a picture of Emma looking demure in a wide-brimmed hat. Or was it rather, “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution,” as the quote appears in a 1983 “non-sexist yet traditional” Passover Haggadah?

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The following essay [“The Decline of the Choral Dance,” FE #361, Summer 2003] couldn’t have entered my consciousness at a better time. It was 1962, and I had spent my late teens and early twenties reading intensely in an attempt to discover the fundamental qualities of existence.

Reality seemed pretty bleak. Rigid conformity, compulsory patriotism, fear of atomic annihilation, and a cultural wasteland of had movies and boring music predominated in 1950s mainstream society.

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A few hundred people carrying a coffin and accompanied by a brass band marched through Oakland, Calif. on Leap Day, Feb. 29, at a funeral for capitalism. It was a welcome break from protesting-as-usual as well as a demonstration of how the Occupy scene is moving beyond single issue politics and rejecting the whole rotten system. The procession was short on mourning and long on celebration.

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We gather today not to praise capitalism, but to bury it. Rejoice, the great god greed is dead! It lived far too long, laying waste to all it touched. Its chains have been broken, its tentacles severed. The world is free to breathe again; to grow, to flourish, no longer weighed down by this voracious monster.

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Black Indian identity charts a course that, by its own hybrid nature, sails beyond the simplistic binaries commonly associated with racial nationalism, while at the same time carving out its own cross-cultural position in the struggle against white supremacy.

In relation to the anarchist/Black Indian connection, as Wilson Harris has noted, “The very ground beneath us has been stolen. I think that’s why Proudhon wrote his book, Property IS Theft.” Harris then goes on to trace his own struggle as a Black Guyanan to the anti-colonial revolt of 1687 fomented by the combined forces of African maroons and Arawak Indians.

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A review of Scratching the Tiger’s Belly by Ron Sakolsky, 2012, Eberhardt Press, Portland, Oregon, 160pp., price listed as, “Until we achieve a world free of currency, this book is $9.95,” eberhardtpress.org.

Even the mailing envelope containing Ron Sakolsky’s latest collection of essays and poems announces a subversion of the expected. The publisher’s return address label has a traditional red “DANGER” oval above the words “INFLAMMATORY LITERATURE.”

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We attended the preview of DANTON’S DEATH, the first play by the Repertory Theatre of the Lincoln Center in their new, attractive Vivian Beaumont Theatre.

The directors, Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, were previously co-producers of the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop where they had earned acclaim for the imaginative and excellence of their productions.

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Darcee began to realize she was in serious trouble, that notions of rebellion were growing beyond her control, during the President’s speech. She and her co-workers were crowded together in the workplace auditorium for mandatory daily socialization, all eyes on the huge teevee screen, watching the image of Our Benevolent Leader, the President of GovCentral. He was flinging words to his public like great faux pearls that promised nothing beneath their shiny surfaces; yet the people were scooping them up through their ears and stringing them in memory to recall when they needed something to believe in.

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Which local all night disc jockey wards off the most obscene phone calls, brings down the most listeners who get sick on STP, and plays stud to all the lonely night people who listen to his show with one hand on their Buddhist prayer candles and the other in their pants?

Dave Dixon does it all.

He is ABX’s “Night Tripper” and his thing is done every day (except Tuesday) from 2:00 to 7:00 in the morning.

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On the evening of January 19^th, 2018, while over 200,000 people gathered in New York City for the Women’s March, a thousand alt-right supporters converged for a “Night of Freedom” at Hell’s Kitchen FREQ NYC nightclub. Outside, a brawl broke out between one of the gala’s drunken attendees and David Alex Campbell, a 30-year-old anti-fascist activist. An NYPD officer threw Campbell to the ground, breaking his leg in two places. Later the cop alleged that Campbell had stalked, punched, and strangled a party goer. These allegations, later shown to be false by surveillance footage, were heavily circulated by the event’s organizer Mike Cernovich.

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The Monteith Student Board will present a concert featuring David & Roselyn Wednesday and Thursday evenings, March 12 and 13 in WSU’s Upper DeRoy Auditorium at 8 p.m.

David and Roselyn bring an unusual blend of voices to the folk and blues medium. They are a self-contained unit using guitars and Kalimba, an African Thumb piano.

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For the first time a presidential candidate has been busted for dealing grass.

On April 10, David Valler, the candidate who is known to his followers as simply “David” was arrested in his apartment at Third and Hancock by members of the Detroit Narcotics Bureau.

Leading the raid was none other than Det. Vaghan Kapegian, best known to readers as “Louie,” the undercover agent who infiltrated the Trans-Love commune and was responsible for the busting of 56 young dope smokers in January 1967. Included in these arrests was John Sinclair, head of Trans-Love, who now faces a 20 year minimum jail sentence because Kapegian claims Sinclair gave him two joints.

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a review of

Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia by David Graeber. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023

David Graeber left us one last book before he died, sadly, at the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Pirate Enlightenment, or the New Libertalia, originally published in French in 2019, brings together the related projects that bookended his career: the anthropology of Madagascar, including how its highland communities avoid (one of David’s favorite words) the state, and the many ways that humans have organized themselves into complex, nonhierarchical societies throughout history.

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Longtime Fifth Estate friend and contributor, David Porter, died December 29; he was 79. A dedicated teacher, anarchist researcher, and grassroots community activist, Porter applied his anti-authoritarian principles to many projects.

David Porter in his office, 1975

Growing up near Chicago, Porter graduated from Oberlin College near Cleveland in 1961. He then attended the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. His doctoral studies in politics at Columbia University included a year in Algeria learning directly about the workers’ self-management movement there.

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(paid advertisement)

As Veterans’ Day, November 11^th, draws near, it is significant to mention the “Day of Peace festival to be held at Olympia Stadium on that day.

“A Day of Peace” is intended by its producers to be just that—a do-your-own-thing day, for thousands of this area’s young people to gather together and enjoy one another as well as to see and hear fifteen of the groups which have made the Michigan area an exciting but peaceful place to live.

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In November 2003, Miami, Florida, is hosting both the eighth round of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) trade negotiations and the eighth Americas Business Forum. Trade Ministers from 34 nations in the Western hemisphere, and hundreds of their closest commerce-inclined friends, will descend on this city for a week of business and pleasure: the business of advancing capitalism’s parasitic agenda, and the pleasure of getting away with it. This is to be our region’s principal contribution to the much-heralded age of globalization.

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Today the Vietnamese people are fighting for the right to choose their own society. Their demands are human; food, a decent place to live and work, political and private self determination, and a life of dignity and self respect. They are engaged in a struggle for human rights, a struggle which affects us all. Their demands reach into Chicago, Mississippi, Selma, Detroit, Los Angeles, South Africa, the Congo. America is waging an actual military war which prevents them from achieving these aims.

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To no one’s great surprise, the United States has resumed the bombing of a sovereign nation with which it is not at war. This was clearly done to stem the rising tide of criticism of the war, which was beginning to be heard even within the president’s own party.

The decision to take the issue to the U.N. is a token concession to the critics. Although the outcome of the Security Council debate seems uncertain, it is clear that the U.S. would never have agreed to initiate debate if it envisioned any adverse decisions resulting from this.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—A river of young Americans flowed up into downtown Washington from 14^th St. and Pennsylvania Avenue, away from the Death Parade marking Richard Nixon’s Inauguration January 20.

We were taking the streets for an affirmative celebration of our own. And when the cops came to break it up, the new fighting movement used fists, rocks and sticks to repel the attackers.

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

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As the July 8 deadline nears for forced government relocation of indigenous people—some 10,000 Navajos and 1,000 Hopis—from their homes in the Navajo-Hopi “Joint Use Area,” the people are digging in in preparation for a fight while the federal government is training U.S. Marshals and the Arizona National Guard specifically for the pending removal. (For background on this conflict see “Big Mountain: Native Peoples Resist Forced Relocation” in the FE #317, Summer 1984.)

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a review of

Dead Meat, drawings by Sue Coe, with an essay by Alexander Cockburn, Four Walls Eight Windows Press, New York-London, 1996, $22.

“As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right...for the animals, life is always Treblinka.”

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Modern modes of handling concerns in the death and dying spheres seem emblematic of disturbing trends found throughout mass culture.

Due to regrettable circumstances, I have had recent exposures to a body kept fresh on a mechanical ventilation machine in an intensive care unit; some aspects of the evaluation of the worth of a life lost in an accident; and services offered to the terminally ill and their families.

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We are in mass society’s Age of Pandemics. At this stage of civilization nothing is stable or secure. The Age of Pandemics is also the Age of Extinction, as in no longer existing.

Death as an existential, ontological matter.

Nursing homes, prisons, meat packing factories—where humans and other animals are warehoused under the sign of Death. Meanwhile, life continues at the extremes of representation, the time of the virtual spectacle. Digital validation is the norm in hypermodernity. What exists is what is on the screen, displayed on the display screen and not elsewhere.

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In two years, this newspaper will celebrate its 40^th anniversary and carries the distinction of being the longest running, English language, anti-authoritarian publication in American history. Yet, the substantial upsurge in computer use in recent years as a major source for ideas and information may be putting our existence in jeopardy.

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The flash has passed and the pan is cold. All the late editions have been put to bed; the suicides lie snugly decomposing in their graves. Only the sense of queasy anticipation remains: what next?

More ghastly homicides, more spectacular mutilations, oddities, outlandish flukes, freakish massacres—extraordinary episodes performed by the lunatic fringe itself, all to take our minds off another, more pervasive decomposition, the wretched day-to-day.

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SALINA, Kan.--UPI--A 1,400 pound cow rampaged for an hour through downtown business districts before being gunned down by an armed pig of the Salina Police Force.

Officer John Soukup said that he was forced to shoot the cow after it knocked him down twice and began ramming the rear door of a building where he had sought refuge. The cow, valued at $365, had escaped from a nearby livestock pen.

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Time Magazine wrote in its eulogy of Chou En-lai that he never forgave John Foster Dulles for refusing to shake hands with him at the 1954 Geneva Conference. That was where he engineered the famous “compromise” in which he convinced the Vietnamese Stalinists to accept a divided Vietnam and thus paved the way for the genocidal U.S. intervention to come.

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In a rite of spring, a festive gathering of zeks celebrated the biosphere—that fine layer of rust that covers the earth which gives and supports life. This rite was bizarre because it wasn’t happening around the wild fruit trees or among the paw and hoof prints of the wolf, brown bear and white-tailed deer, but in the land which did once support these sisters but now is transformed into the great Babylonian city of Detroit. It was also bizarre for it was a rite of de-structuring of this city’s greatest idol, its golden calf of black hooves which travels at incredible speeds. It was the rite called “Death of the Car.”

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After years of overwhelming public and political support in this country for the death penalty, the tide may be turning.

Following a string of exonerations for Illinois death row inmates, Governor George Ryan declared a halt to all executions in that state. Since 1977, when Illinois reinstated the death penalty, the state has executed 12 men, but has freed 13, several in the last two years, when they were found to have been convicted in error. One can only wonder, given that the dead-to-freed ratio is less than 50 percent, how many of those killed by the state were also innocent.

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FRANKFURT, Sept. 28, 1984—Like so many times before, groups from left, Green, and autonomous circles had called out their crews to protest a meeting of the neo-fascist NPD, taking place in a marginal neighborhood of Frankfurt, where Turkish and other immigrant workers predominate.

Like so many times before, German police were at hand to protect the right of the fascists to have their meeting. This time, the German police were very “efficient.” They forcefully beat away the protesters who were blockading the entrance. And then, one of their new water cannons chased and crushed a protester, Gunter Sare, to death.

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a review of

Judas and the Black Messiah

Director: Shaka King 2hr 6m (2021)

“You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.”

—Fred Hampton, 1969

But what if killing a revolutionary does kill a revolution?

—Curious Film Critic

Until recently, few high school social studies classes, let alone the general adult population, ever stumbled upon COINTELPRO, state terrorism, or Fred Hampton, the last of four prominent African American leaders assassinated during the 1960s, after Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. As the mainstream seems even less aware of our essential protest past, perhaps Hollywood has oddly begun to fill a disturbing void.

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Dear Cave-dwellers:

Nice try, but you really make yourselves look a bit ignorant, not to mention self-righteous, in “El Salvador and Its Politicians” (FE #316, Spring 1984). Guillermo Ungo and his “reformist and Stalinist” FDR/FMLN might well become counterrevolutionary if they came to power, but they ‘re a long way from doing so.

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FE Note: As we write, the U.S. is in the final stages of preparation for its imperial invasion and occupation of Iraq, so the question posed in the upper right headline may be in the first stages of being answered.

A look into a past period of powerful resistance and radical agitation against imperialist war is instructive. Already, far-right-wing talk show hosts are advocating that the 1917 Sedition Act be used to silence anti-war demonstrators.

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a review of

The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual, Strike Debt, PM Press, 2014, 256pp. Available online from strikedebt.org or PMpress.org

The good people of Strike Debt have revised and expanded their very popular “Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual,” (DROM) into a full-length book. It is half political and historical analysis of how indebtedness has come to define so many aspects of our lives and half a practical how-to guide for people struggling with various forms of debt to seek individual relief and collective action.

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Decentralization of the Detroit Public School System has emerged as a major issue confronting this city. Within this conflict there exists a strong potential for radical change. Recognizing this, many activist groups have joined in the struggle for effective decentralization.

This becomes a radical issue when the part that is played by education in the Amerikan system is considered.

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EG speaking in New York City’s Union Square, 1914

I had come to believe capitalism is just the tip of the iceberg of human stupidity. Altogether there is no injustice without complicity. And truly the sight of a brooding wage slave beguiled by some vapid ideologue of privilege is pitiful. So certainly I knew if you drift into complicity with the world in its ever rude war against you, you lose the world within, but by then I was dying and in need of quiet so was tempted to simply tell them all what they wanted to hear, by then it already seemed idiotic to have much conversation at all, we so readily scoff at any workable proposal for our common survival. And our fetishes abound, as if it were more comforting to obsess about some conspiracy than to face up to the elemental stupidity of our breed.

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“Is life too dear or peace too sweet as to be purchased at the price of...slavery?...I know not what course others may take, but for me, give me liberty, or give me death.”

—Patrick Henry

Eddie Steamshovel, Tod Damone, Bob Bob Bob and Soap Xhead spent Tuesday mornings scrubbing tobacco stains off their knees. They wrote the Declaration of Independence. Once when Eddie Steamshovel was by himself in a tavern beer cooler in Michigan he took out his Raisin Bran Detecto-Code Flasher. These men were weird and had grown up with the usual pre-revolutionary superstitions like doing the Monkey and Frug would give you Anthrax.

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We dedicate this Issue to the World-Wide Peace Movement & to Rachel Corrie: Martyr for Justice.

Following the Empire’s triumphal march to Baghdad, it seems appropriate to express our deep regret at being unable to stop Bush’s long-planned war to control Middle East oil, while simultaneously celebrating our participation in history’s largest mass movement for peace.

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WABX DJs Larry Miller and Dave Dixon both emphatically deny the report of last issue that they came to blows over station policy. “The real miracle of the station is how well we work together,” Miller said. Sorry fellas, we had thought that the info came from a “reliable source...

The ad for the Chicago Conspiracy trial that appeared on the back page of our last issue was refused by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. Several other major dailies did accept the ad...

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It may take two or three years, but beware: Mayor Gribbs has let it be known that he is not adverse to a $1.00 admission fee to the Detroit Zoo, along with plans to raise the Sunday parking fee to $2.00...Detroit Patrolman Richard Worobec, who was shot in the New Bethel Incident nearly a year ago, is back on the job. Worobec, who is presently working at a desk job in the Police Department personnel office is “looking forward to outside duty”....

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Dear Fifth Estate:

As the author of “Population and AIDS”—the article that seems to have galvanized so much “anarchist” opposition to Earth First!—I can’t help but attempt a brief response to George Bradford’s wide-ranging critique of deep ecology in FE. Although it would be easy enough to get polemical about the rancor in Bradford’s article, polemics are always a side show to the question at hand, which for deep ecology, at least, is the environmental crisis. What I’d like to do, then, is discuss the philosophic project of deep ecology, particularly as it pertains to population. For by misconstruing the former, Bradford misrepresents the latter.

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On April 27, eight of us from Detroit, including people from the Fifth Estate staff, traveled 200 miles north to Cadillac, Michigan to participate in the Earth First! initiated “Days of Outrage Against the U.S. Forest Service.” The Forest Service has been selling off large chunks of wilderness areas and national forests to rapacious logging concerns which have destroyed millions of acres of trees. The USFS has opened areas to logging by an extensive road building program which destroys habitat and wildlife and plans an additional 50,000 miles if they are not stopped. The EF! action brought out people in 40 locations around the country including ours at the headquarters of the Manistee/Huron National Forests. EF! has an important brochure detailing the danger posed by the Forest Service; contact Earth First!, P.O. Box 5871, Tucson AZ 85703. A dollar for postage would be appreciated.

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Rolf Dietrich, the scourge of Plymouth, let loose a barrage of legal fireworks in pursuit of his damage suit against Plymouth officials for confiscating 15 Fifth Estates from him earlier in the year.

Dietrich says that he has won his suit by default when the defendants failed to appear on Nov. 6. A postponement had been ordered by Judge Richard Hammer, but Dietrich insists this was improper and that the defendants were required to appear.

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America—the world—lives in a period of transition of its entire way of life. On the one hand we live in utter confusion and yet on the other we are beginning to see the immense possibilities that are now available to us to construct a HUMAN society, a society in which man will be released from thousands of years of struggle and toil he has put himself to. Moreover, we live in a period of great spiritual discovery. We find ourselves at the beginning of a human epoch that will see each of us—all men—MAN flower into the beautiful creative animal he is.

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Activist with the Unist’ot’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in northwestern British Columbia protecting indigenous lands from oil and gas development. August 2015. (RedPowerMedia.WordPress.com)

Broken leather latch

time’s dispatch

an oil-stained suitcase

containing

tar sands underwear

surrounded by

industrial overwear.

Over where?

Not over here

you bastards

not anywhere!

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The rising tide of fascism and organized political violence of the Right, particularly the mobilization of street-level right-wing forces, such as the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, have returned the question of self-defense to the center of anarchist and antifascist concerns. This has become more burning following the brutal fascist mobilization and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. The murder there of Heather Heyer by a neo-Nazi gives the issue of self-defense life or death importance.

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Monument to the anarchist Haymarket martyrs, Waldheim Cenetary, Chicago

Comrades from Chicago’s Louis Lingg Society and Autonomous Zone are continuing their campaign to keep the truth about the Haymarket martyrs alive and to combat the lies and half-truths of the ILHS. As they so aptly ask, “is it not complete hypocrisy to love the martyrs and hate their anarchism?”

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Support for the Fort Hood Three, the three GI’s who refused to be transferred to Vietnam, is growing rapidly (see Fifth Estate August 15). A Defense Committee, set up to assist the men, has leaflets, pamphlets and buttons available on request from their office at 5 Beekman Street, NYC.

Pfc. James Johnson, Pvt. Dennis Mora, and Pvt. David Samas are still confined to the stockade at Fort Dix in New Jersey. Their conditions have improved slightly, after protests by members of their families. Nevertheless, their situation is still far from comfortable. They are treated as if they are convicted criminals, the Committee asserted.

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FE note: Although we generally dislike back and forths in our letters column, we thought the issues raised by our two comrades below are worthy of continuing the discussion raised about combating fascism begun in our Summer 2003 edition (see “Strange Bedfellows?”) and then commented upon in the letters section of the subsequent issue. We welcome readers’ thoughts as well.

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Mrs. Draper, active trade unionist and secretary of California Citizens for Farm Labor, spent several days on the Delano-Sacramento pilgrimage march of the grape strikers.

A giant march and rally of some 10,000 farm workers and supporters on Easter Sunday in Sacramento, California demonstrated the enormous support which the seven-month strike of the Delano grape strikers has aroused. On Easter morning the original 67 pilgrims who had left Delano 25 days earlier were joined by thousands coming from all parts of the state and nation for the last five miles from West Sacramento to the gold-domed State Capitol.

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The letter exchanges and articles on the next few pages represent the second installment of what we see as an ongoing process of investigation and discussion of the ecology perspective and movement, nature and society. The response to FE #327, our special Fall 1987 issue on deep ecology has been overwhelming and gratifying—one of the greatest responses to any single issue since we published a special women’s issue sixteen years ago.

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“Mistuh Chairman,” the fleshy faced delegate droned, “the Great State of Mississippi, last bastion of slavery, casts all of its redneck ballots for...CLICK!

“CLICK!” The sound was unmistakable—all over America, in cities and small towns, high-rise apartments and wooden shacks, people were busy flipping their television sets to another channel as the Republican party exposed itself on all three major networks for nearly a week of unending boredom.

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

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There is a book about the founder of Dow chemical called “Herbert Dow and Creative Chemistry.” Dow Chemicals is the primary manufacturer of napalm. Midland, Michigan is the seat of this bed of creativity.

Last week the Clergy and Layman Concerned about Vietnam sponsored a protest rally of 400 persons at the Dow Corporation stockholders meeting.

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(above) A Greek Independence Day celebration at the Masonic Temple March 22 was the signal for the Michigan Freedom for Greece Committee to hold a protest demonstration. “How can they hold an ‘independence’ day celebration when Greece is in chains ruled by a fascist dictatorship?” asked Nikos Boyias, chairman of the group. About 35 persons participated in the picketing.

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Chavez’s original movement...becomes the face of the people’s malcontent, achieving legitimacy at the polls in 1999 by capitalizing on the prevailing wish for change that ran through the country, but also revitalizing the populist, statist and caudillista ethos so much a part of Venezuela’s historical make-up.

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Schooling in an authoritarian society is often demeaning and determined to inculcate ignorance and obedience. When schooling fails, we deem it a social disaster. But without a viable alternative, the subversion that sneaks inside the doors and out from under the rugs—thanks largely to autonomous students, radical parents, and anti-authoritarian teachers—might partially redeem public schooling for now.

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“Oil is industrial capitalism’s ‘crack.’”

—anti-war placard

In the late 1980s, it became increasingly and undeniably obvious that modern civilization was undermining the complex ecological web sustaining life on the planet. The earth’s “vital signs” were becoming seriously stressed by industrial activity, and global responses would be necessary to reverse some of the dangerous trends. Yet there was an inertia among the world powers capable of responding. As French President Francois Mitterand said at a summit on the environment in 1989, there seemed to be “no political authority capable of making decisions on a global scale.”

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a review of

Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields by Penelope Rosemont. City Lights Books 2020

I used to know an amazing old working-class philosopher (an electrician) and practical utopian who had a wonderful phrase to sum up his inspired anarchism: “We deserve the best.”

“The best” means, as Penelope Rosemont shows in this book, what the surrealists call “the marvelous,” a world of beauty, joy, and goodness. “We,” means everybody, of course.

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THE FIFTH ESTATE ANNOUNCES:

A DESIGN COMPETITION FOR THE U.S.-SAUDI WAR MEMORIAL

Entries should be based on some of the following design elements:

* A war for oil.

* The slaughter of youth and innocents on both sides.

* Industrialism’s demand to sustain oil as the dominant energy source despite its ecological destructiveness.

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In order to deterritorialize the state it is imperative to oppose militarism and its ideological base, the idea of the nation state. If it were possible to suppress the imaginary of the imagined community, those which exist in the diverse nation-building projects, community would become a real group of people with faces and identifiable names.

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a review of

Detroit (2017)

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

143 min.

The misnamed film “Detroit” is more about a triple slaying by police than the city’s 1967 Rebellion. It first opened in the Motor City in July, and then nationwide 50 years to the day of the final riot fatality, a firefighter electrocuted trying to put out one of the last of the smoldering fires.

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The July, 1967 Detroit rebellion left 42 dead, hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and scars still unhealed today. The Fifth Estate office was in a hard-hit area: the August 1, 1967 issue featured first-hand accounts from staff members who went directly into the fray while half the city was still in flames.

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After closing the office on Plum Street and selling my last “Sterilize LBJ” button, I walked downtown where the old Vanguard Theatre used to be. It provided a few minutes of indecision because two skin-flicks were playing and I had already seen one.

The last time I was in the Vanguard was two years ago. I remember seeing THE FIREBUGS there. THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH was good too, and e. e. Cummings’ HE did a pretty neat job of stoning (all twenty members of) the audience.

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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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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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Something’s happening in Detroit and a good part of it ‘happened’ on Friday, February 25.

More than fifty persons gathered at the Fifth Estate to attend a reorganization party for the Detroit Circle. The Circle, recently bogged down with a decreasing attendance record, is a group of forty five students and adults.

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An Interfaith group of clergymen who oppose the war in Vietnam will hold a conference for draft age men on Dec. 28 at the Central Methodist Church on Woodward at Adams.

The clergy committee on the draft has called the conference because it believes that churches that have expressed opposition to the war have an obligation to those men who face the possibility of serving in a war they think unjust.

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In America’s big cities in the 1960s, white police forces patrolled black ghettos like an occupying army. Detroit took the lead in integrating its cops, and now also has the highest percentage of female officers in any big U.S. city. Yet this “modern” department has proven to be one of the most lethal in the country for its people. (See Detroit Seen in this issue).

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The King described the Poor People’s Campaign as being the last, great nonviolent movement. If tactical nonviolence met with failure in this movement, he felt, then nonviolence as a means to ends” was done for.

The Detroit Police Department seemingly tried their best, for reasons known only to them, to make nonviolence appear a rather poor tactic on Monday, May 13, when more than 6,000 persons marched to Detroit’s Cobo Hall in support of the Poor People’s Campaign The King inspired.

...

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m jogging my two or three miles on the track at the downtown Detroit YMCA overlooking the gym where a group of about sixteen mostly black men are playing basketball. The man and woman who were running when I started have finished, so I’m alone and keeping an eye on the game to fight the boredom of running on an indoor track.

...

The tales of violence go on-and-on.

There is a bold arrogance that comes with class privilege and economic security and comfort. Certainly there are exceptions, but for the most part there is little or no sympathy in affluent communities for the plight of the poor, the homeless, the unemployed.

¿“Te compadeces de los destechados?” I asked one of my students, after explaining the Spanish verbal phrase “to sympathize with” and the noun for the homeless, “los destechados.” No, he answered, in slow, perfect Spanish, I don’t sympathize with the homeless. And when asked why not, he confidently explained that there were plenty of jobs for people if they really wanted to work, and then went on to complain about welfare fraud. A middle-class black student, whose family recently moved to the suburbs from the city, denounced AIDS victims, telling me they got what they deserved, they made their choices, opted to take drugs, chose to be gay or not to use condoms.

...

A Detroit Diggers Society has materialized in the Warren-Forest area and is in the process of being “organized” by two neighborhood hippies, Dan Vincent and Cindy Lee. Organization to the Diggers means getting a place to operate out of, scrounging up rent money and donations of money, food, clothing, and housing, all to be distributed freely among the people of the community.

...

Editor’s note: Henry Waldorf is the pseudonym of a physician practicing in the eastern United States. Dr. “Waldorf” agreed to write the following article out of a sincere belief in his work and asked only that his real name be kept from appearing in print.

As the circle of people who have had psychedelic experiences continues to expand at an ever increasing rate it becomes more and more common to encounter young people with many questions about the drugs. These are the people who are vaguely aware of the message behind the allusional terminology of expanded consciousness. They are so curious about themselves and the world around them that their gravitation toward psychedelic chemicals is inevitable.

...

The S.F. Oracle recently sent a missive to the Fifth Estate office asking us to warn those who are traveling west to bring: (besides their flowers and bananas) money for food and rent, sleeping bags and rucksacks, extra food (brown rice and soysauce—100 lbs. bags at rice mills for $12), camping equipment, warm clothing for the cold times, and proper I.D.

...

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.

...

The second Detroit Triple Fan Fair of fantasy literature, films, and comic art convenes the weekend of June 17 and 18 at the Park Shelton Hotel, Woodward at East Kirby.

The convention attracts not only Camp followers, but of Fandom, i.e. dedicated enthusiasts of the imaginative popular arts.

Fandom itself is comprised of individuals and loosely — knit tribal groups who collect, preserve, and discuss the artifacts, artists, and history of each genre. Fans also keep abreast of the current scene critically and, creatively, and engage in two major activities to promote the Cause: the production and consumption of an underground torrent of Fanzines, and Conventions.

...

The psychedelic dance concert, long an institution among San Francisco hippies, came to Detroit Friday and Saturday nights. Oct. 7^th and 8^th, at the Grande Ballroom, Grand River one block south of Joy Road. Judging from the enthusiasm of the crowd who made it, the venture was a success. It looks like this new form of entertainment is here to stay.

...

April of 1978 marks the closing of a publication that has had a definite impact on the gay movement of Detroit, even though most straight leftists (and probably many gays) were never aware of its existence—The Metro Gay News.

Its story begins a few months after the radical Gay Liberator closed its operations in March 1976. The Metro Gay News (MGN) commenced publication and its first meetings were well-balanced between men and women (one of its few points over the Liberator), but even in this early stage it was very obvious where the power of the paper was truly centered: in David Krumroy, a former steel lot salesman. Though MGN always had some articles by a few women, gradually they seemed to shift to the bottom of the staff box, or drop out entirely.

...

Big news, you say, it happens every day. Ask any serviceman.

The difference in Bell’s case is that the Army is trying to do a job on him because he refused to go to Chicago during the Democratic Convention last August.

He is one of the black soldiers at Ft. Hood, Texas who were court-martialed for disobeying an order. 300 GIs had gathered on the base to protest being sent to Chicago to do riot duty. 43 were arrested in the protest.

...

What with all the hoopla going on around the Republican Convention—free parties, banners and balloons every where, a city-wide clean-up and the media trying to make us forget the depression—it’s easy to ignore the mammoth police state apparatus the politicians have also brought to town.

Seizing an opportunity to cash in on the convention, the cops have used the “security” needs of the political parlay to extend even further their technology and ever growing presence. Detroit, State and Wayne County police have secured over $3.6 million in federal grants from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) which will provide funds for the convention, but much of the “special” projects will remain as a permanent part of the police machine.

...

The Hate-In was staged by the Nightriders Motorcycle Club June 3 & 4 in Detroit’s Rouge Park, to protest a proposed city ordinance which would ban motorcycles from the city parks without a special permit.

A secondary purpose of the Hate-In was to demonstrate to straight people and the police that the different clubs could get together and not cause trouble. In this aspect they were quite successful as there was only one scuffle, and you can get more than that at an average family get together or wedding.

...

For us, here in inner-city Detroit, the crumbling of a “progress” oriented society is very real and present. Its tangible effects are concentrated here. Its evidence—ragged empty shells of concrete, lining streets leading to their untimely ends, amputated by expressways or isolated corporate megaliths, the occasional pathetic charades of well-being, the razed and desolate spaces—pervades everything we do, even attempts to distract ourselves from the ruin. Everyone living here is profoundly aware of the failure. It is bred in our bones, as during our lives we’ve witnessed, not just this city’s demise, but the cumulative result of misdeeds performed through history by an increasingly urban society impelled by a limitless want of power brought to self-destruction.

...

The Detroit trash incinerator, focus of years of opposition in the community, continues to operate in spite of numerous technical, legal and financial problems. Since last Winter, the City of Detroit has been involved in negotiations to sell the facility to Phillip Morris Capital Co., part of the cigarette manufacturer’s commercial empire, in exchange for a complicated series of tax breaks. The $600 million complex would go to Phillip Morris for $51 million, but it would be leased by the incinerator authority and Combustion Engineering, which constructed and operates it. In exchange for the lease, Phillip Morris could claim tax write-offs for depreciation and credits for investment—a fancy shell game which would ultimately make the city taxpayers responsible for any failure.

...

A few years ago, pre-moog synthesizer, and long before the dawning of the “age of aquarius,” Detroiters were known to cluster at the various points of departure in order to cheerfully bon voyage their young ambassadors of jazz, whose responsibility it was to saturate the land with sounds ( pan-euphoniously?). Anyway, the story goes, they were supremely successful and with their talents garnered for their city a most enviable reputation...

...

Photos by Richard Stoker, Norm Koren, C.T. Walker. Collage by Harvey Ovshinsky

Two thousand people had a love-in on Belle Isle.

Unfortunately 8,000 people were present. Whatever happened on the island that night, it shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow the 6 or 7 hours of dancing, singing and sharing that preceded it.

...

Carl Campbell is 23 years old and a veteran of the Vietnam war, where he served in the United States Marine Corps. He is presently a student at Wayne State University. His interview with the Fifth Estate follows below.

FE: Carl, why did you join the Marines?

Carl Campbell: I was 19 years of age, a high school graduate, I didn’t have enough money to go to college, I felt somewhat patriotic and soldiering is the logical action of anyone who is patriotic. I had also decided if you were going to be a soldier, you might as well be a good one. At that time I had no doubt that the Marines were good soldiers.

...

“The American war machine reaps a whirlwind that engulfs our country and threatens the world. Three billion dollars a month, which could be spent to attack the intolerable conditions of our disinherited cities is spent instead to kill and destroy in Vietnam. The insulted’ and injured at home have no choice but to act out their despair by rebelling.”

...

Militant Negro leaders in Detroit have called for a nation-wide strike and boycott by black communities in support of Adam Clayton Powell. Over 600 people attended the rally at Central United Church of Christ on January 24 calling for the boycott.

Comedian Dick Gregory, feature speaker at the rally, called for a “new attitude by Negroes.” He pointed out that while white southern senators were elected illegally and still remain seated, Congressman Powell was ousted because he was black. Gregory also said he would not mind if treatment were equal, but “please, Mr. President, don’t let Bobby Baker take the rap alone.”

...

I’m writing this on Labor Day 1997, the third such holiday since five newspaper unions began their strike against the Detroit News and Free Press in July 1995. The spirits of many of the strikers remain high, their weekly paper continues to publish, and a national AFL-CIO-sponsored march brought out tens of thousands of supporters, yet victory or even a return to work appears more and more distant.

...

Conformist Logic & The Political Question

(An open letter to the Artists’ Workshop and the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam.)

“But for art to transform as well as reflect, there must be a great distance between the artist and life, just as there is between the revolutionist and political reality.”

...

Editor’s note: The following is printed exactly as it was released by the City of Detroit, Department Report and Information Committee.

Movie goers who once marveled at the disguises of Lon Chaney would be amazed at the many “faces” of Detroit police department detectives.

Dope smokers June Mumford and Vahan Kapegian

...

Work on the second International Days of Protest scheduled for March 25 and 26 has begun. For Detroit, a whole weekend of activities is projected. The plans are as follows:

FRIDAY, March 25—In the afternoon, all activities will be centered around Wayne State University. Citizens for Peace in Vietnam will also do something on this day. A fundraising event is being planned for the evening.

...

A local demonstration is set for October 31, Halloween Night in protest against the war and LBJ, It will be a “grotesque, flashlight parade” by costumed marchers. The march will be in the form of a “provo demonstration’ according to Jon Schwartz, organizer of the protest.

“A provo demonstration,” Schwartz said, “takes advantage of local circumstances and traditions and in this case, combines the holiday spirit of Halloween with the tragic effects of the war in Vietnam.”

...

The Detroit Provos are ready to march in their second annual Halloween Night parade.

Led by the strange and mysterious figure, Jacob Odaryan, the festive group will meet at the Mall on the Wayne University campus October 31 at 7:30 p.m. and walk to the New Centre area up Cass Avenue.

Led by musicians and dancers the parade will stop by several Detroit landmarks: the GM building headquarters of international imperialism; Hotel St. Regis, owned by notorious slumlord Al Goodman; WJBK — TV, sponsors of the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. fictionalized accounts of the news and then passing to the Algiers Motel scene of the police executions and ending at Northern High School.

...

The transformation of life in its entirety begins when men dare to rule their own lives.

—A narchos

The Detroit revolutionary community needs its own turf.

There are tens of thousands of people in this area who read the Fifth Estate, take part in anti-war demonstrations, go to the Grande, listen to WABX, smoke dope, won’t listen to their parents, to the police, to college administrators or to their bosses.

...

Seventy-five persons picketed the Federal Building in downtown Detroit May 20 to protest the trial in Boston of Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others for conspiracy to violate the draft laws. The demonstration was sponsored by Detroit Area Resist.

A delegation from the group made up of the Rev. Robert Morrison, Fr. Carter Partee, Catherine Zimmerman, Ronald Halstead, and Mary Ravitz entered the building on Fort St. and visited Federal District Attorney Lawrence Gubow.

...

Participants in the 400-person anarchist contingent carry banners from the New York-based Autonomous Anarchist Action group at the Jan. 26 Washington DC march. —photo/Mitch

The following is a brief summary of the many anti-war actions which occurred in the Detroit area since just before the January 16 U.S. air assault on Iraq. The numbers involved here were considerably lower than anti-war actions in other large metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, where tens, and even hundreds, of thousands participated. Reasons for the small numbers in Detroit are linked to racial, geographical and political patterns of our city (a story best told another time), but we did what we could with the people we had to impede the war machine and express the depth of our rage against the government.

...

During the American Civil War, Detroit’s population scarcely exceeded that of a modern day university. But, with 1,400 blacks and 43,000 whites, it wasn’t too small to have a race riot.

On March 6, 1863, rampaging whites left one dead, dozens injured, and scores of homes burned.

About 500 troops had to be called in from Ypsilanti to restore order.

...

Compiled by Cathy, Peter and the Crotchpuller with a little help from their friends. Send your scandal to Seen c/o The Fifth Estate.

Turning over the 7^th Floor of the Student Union to WSU strikers cost Wayne State over $53,000 according to “U” officials. The total included stolen furniture, repairs, overtime to pay employees, and $13,000 for sandblasting slogans off of walls. David Baldwin, WSU vice-president said it “was a small cost t& pay for peace at the school”...

...

Answer to last issue’s quiz: The designer of the nationally known Willow Run bomber plant was Charles Lindberg, former Warren-Forest resident and grandson of John C. Lodge, of X-way fame...

Rumors of the week: The J.L. Hudson Co. will announce after this Xmas that it will abandon its downtown Detroit store due to lagging sales. The last day of business will be after Xmas of 1971 (of course)...

...

Welcome to our Summer 1997 edition; the last one published was Fall 1996. This issue has been the result of numerous fruitful collaborations. Our visually stunning cover is the work of renowned artist Richard Mock. We used his work for the first time last issue and hope to have more in the future.

Pages 10–13, containing Allan Antliff’s fascinating study of Russian anarchist artists of the revolution, was designed by Alexis Buss, a member of the Wooden Shoe collective in Philadelphia. See page 5 for details On the fire that destroyed their bookstore.

...

Amazing! This issue follows the last faster than any one since we became a quarterly ten years ago. In good part it is motivated by the quickening pace of political events throughout the world and the sense that revolution is once again afoot in the land (even in the United States and even in Detroit!).

...

For submission of articles and art, contact Sunfrog, PO Box 6, Liberty TN 37095.

For new subscriptions, renewals, donation, or other business matters, please continue to use our old address at Fifth Estate, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201.

A 1972 Fifth Estate office meeting. photo/Millard Berry

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Welcome to the Fall/Winter 2000 Fifth Estate which follows our Spring 2000 edition. This issue marks the 35^th anniversary of this paper, now the longest running English language anarchist publication in U.S. history.

It’s quite a legacy, one we continue to build on, but only with your ongoing support. Thanks to everyone who subscribed, renewed, sent donations (especially our Sustainers), bought books, came by, wrote articles and letters, sent graphics and photos, and a hundred other things that make issues happen.

...

It’s a pleasure to launch our Summer 1999 edition with a rare splash of color on our front page and center section. The other art and photos also provide an excellent setting for a diverse set of articles.

There are probably more people contributing to this issue than we’ve had in a long while. We haven’t had a color front page in six years, but Stephen Good-fellow’s terrific art and the page one photos made it almost a necessity.

...

Welcome to the Winter 1999 issue of the Fifth Estate, #352. This edition follows our Summer issue by about six months. Maybe, like Anarchy has in its recently published issue, we should stop any pretense of quarterly publication, and openly state that we are publishing twice yearly for the time being. One problem with that is the Post Office demands a four time yearly schedule for us to remain eligible for our special mailing status. This issue was delayed even longer than normal due to the great Blizzard of ’99 which hit Detroit.

...

We can tell when it’s been a long time between issues when we start getting letters from subscribers asking if they’ve missed an issue or it we’ve stopped publishing. This issue is the third we’ve published this year, which doesn’t meet our official status as a quarterly, but this should not be taken as a measure of our enthusiasm for our project. While this past year has seen both personal and other commitments interrupt our plans for publishing more issues, 1989 could be an improvement. We are simultaneously preparing a special issue along with this one which will feature a further investigation by George Bradford into the philosophy of deep ecology, the grounding of environmental ethics and concepts of wilderness. This will come out hopefully early in February.

...

Hi, remember us? We put out a paper called the Fifth Estate every once in a while. Seriously though, we hope the reports of events in this issue such as the protests against the Detroit incinerator and the Toronto Anarchist Gathering give the idea that we’ve been doing more than just lazing about since our last issue. In fact, the last seven months have probably been the most active ones we’ve experienced in recent memory.

...

You may note the repetitious opening to each of these columns: a plea to subscribers to respond to their renewal notices and a thanks to those who have made special contributions when re-subscribing or ordering books. These donations are the life blood of this newspaper, and although their mention may appear, at times, automatic, please know that they are nothing we take for granted. We have no special funding and other than the support of our readers, no means to finance this project. When we offer our thanks for your continuing support we recognize that distinct quality of mutual aid which enhances the libertarian vision present in each donation.

...

As usual, let us begin this column with an apology for the lateness of this issue, as well as an appeal to readers who have been notified of their subscription expiration to send us their renewals. Also, a heartfelt expression of gratitude to those who have made a special contribution to help sustain our project.

...

All of us at the Fifth Estate want to extend our warmest greetings and wishes for a happy, healthy and revolutionary New Year to those of you who have supported our project through your subscriptions, donations and participation. We made it through the long-dreaded 1984 and although the megamachine of the state seemed all but undeterred in its vicious reproduction of itself, our capacity to maintain our ideals, our dreams and our resistance seems heightened. It may be too early to declare the resurgence of a mass anti-authoritarian/anarchist movement, but from much of what we receive at the FE office, there is a definite upsurge in libertarian activity. 1985—the year to go for the master’s throat.

...

Thank you for your patience in waiting for our Spring (almost Summer) issue. Our normal problems (or excuses) were compounded in the last few weeks by a broken typesetter which remained unfixed for a week due to IBM’s reluctance to dispatch a repairman to work on our almost two decades old machine. We are faced now with the decision to forge on into the computer age (choke!) or see if we can nurse along the mechanical nightmare that has served us for so long. A part of the problem is that the new technology of photocomposition is unsuited to our sporadic typesetting needs and is damn expensive to boot.

...

Well, we hope that those of you who have complained for the last two years about our full-sheet size are happy about a return to a tabloid. However, after doing the layout for this edition in the smaller size, it confirms our contention that it is more time-consuming to put together, more difficult to find graphics and actually results in a loss of copy space. No decision yet on the size of the next issue; maybe we’ll even go further in the other direction and put it out in magazine size.

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Yes, you’ve noticed; we’re damn late with our Fall edition. The reason is that we were forced into a hurried move to new quarters due to a total lack of heat at our old place. The move was an unfortunate one beyond just the disruption of our production schedule since it has also effectively ended what had turned into a very nice cooperative situation with the Layabouts and Private Angst bands.

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[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]We have finally firmed up plans for the Fifth Estate 20^th Anniversary celebration. It will be held at Alvin’s, 5756 Cass Ave., Detroit, on Dec. 7. Hopefully, the event will bring together many of those who have worked on the paper over the last two decades, as well as all those who want to help us celebrate. Music will be by the Layabouts who will have just released their album by that time. Also, there will be a dinner the same night for present and former staff members, so if you were part of the paper at any time, please write so we can plan a grand reunion.

...

Welcome to the Winter 1995 Fifth Estate. This is only the second edition we’ve published this year, so you probably have not missed any issues. This issue also marks the 29^th anniversary of continuous publication of the Fifth Estate. We probably should have a giant, wild celebration for our 30^th next year, but if the 25^th was any indication, the date may just slip by. However, if there is anyone in the Detroit area willing to organize a gathering/celebration event, let us know; we’re up for it.

...

Welcome to the Summer 1994 Fifth Estate. Our center eight pages feature the return of the once-a-decade Daily Barbarian, which last appeared as an FE supplement in 1984. Just wait until 2004! Also, this 40-page issue is the largest in our 28-year history.

We are late again with this edition. Our last was marked Fall/Winter 1993, Vol. 28, #3, and this is Summer 1994, Vol. 29, #1; no other issues appeared in between. Best way of keeping track of issues is by their whole numbers. This is issue #344; the previous, #343.

...

Welcome to the Spring 1993 edition of the Fifth Estate. You probably noticed, it is different in two striking respects. First, the elaborate use of color by two of our favorite illustrators, Tony Doyle, on the cover, and Sean Bieri in the centerfold.

Color is normally an expense we think inappropriate to incur (particularly full-color), but the cost for this issue was picked up generously by the people responsible for the back-page Mao poster, which meant it could be used in the other sections as well. Contributions to further printing of the poster and to offset the cost of the color work in the FE, can be sent to their address listed elsewhere in the issue.

...

Welcome to the Spring 1993 edition of the Fifth Estate. Our promise of a third issue for 1992 never materialized, so you are reading the edition which follows our Fall 1992 publication. Subscribers receive four issues even if the period extends beyond a calendar year, so fear not if we don’t produce the expected annual number. You can check whether you are receiving sequential issues by looking at the total number of issues printed since our founding in 1965. This issue is #341 and Fall’s was #340.

...

Welcome to the Fall 1992 Fifth Estate. No, you didn’t miss an issue. Summer just sort of went by and we never got an issue out. As usual, you can probably expect only one more edition this year. Even though we print only three times a year (officially we are a quarterly), it is heartening to continue to receive the support we do from readers. Our usual thanks to all of you—sustainers, subscribers and book store buyers—for making this project continue.

...

Hello, and welcome to another issue of the Fifth Estate, our Summer edition 1991, Vol. 26, No. 2, total number, 337. Fortunately, our basement office provided us with a cool respite from the blistering heat we’ve experienced in this part of the country, so we have no tales of martyrdom to relate.

As usual, our gratitude to all of you who constitute the community of support for our project through your subscriptions, donations and book purchases. It is your generosity and consistency which allows us to keep publishing and to maintain a public office which functions as one of the centers of libertarian activity in Detroit (see below for the other).

...

The chaos of a hundred packing boxes has finally been cleared away, lost correspondence found and misplaced book orders filled, and our new office space is beginning to take on the feeling of home. It’s quite a change since the paper was in its last office for 12 years, but the fact that we are sharing quarters with three other groups has made the transition one of positive expectations. The large building we are occupying is just a few blocks uptown from the old address (in the shadow of the General Motors world headquarters) and features office space in front with a large performance area in the rear. The latter will be utilized by the Layabouts, a new wave band (three of whose members also contribute to the FE), the Dramatic Research Company (the old Freezer Theatre Players), and the Duck Club Players (from the infamous club of the same name), so music, satire and plays will abound. We had a big, bang-up, Detroit style grand opening and May Day celebration (Workers of the World Relax!) and a small Fifth Estate open house to show off our new quarters and bookstore. A full schedule of events is not yet set, but with the above crew situated, events in the manner of the old Grinning Duck and Freezer Theatre can be expected.

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The birthdays seem to be coming around faster and faster. This November marks the 18^th anniversary of the Fifth Estate’s appearance as an “underground” paper in 1965. Several of us were recently looking at some back issues and smiling at the lavish language they contained-“ALL POWER TO THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS WHO UNDERSTAND THE REVOLUTION AND WHO ARE WORKING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN.” But we were also marveling at how well much of it has stood the test of time. Is it to early to prepare for our twentieth anniversary celebration?

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Welcome to our Spring 2000 issue. The last one we published was dated Summer 1999, so subscribers and libraries, please take note; you haven’t missed any intervening papers. This edition is numbered 354, the previous one, 353, so we are trudging along, even if not very quickly.

We’re grateful to have Maurice Spira’s inspiring and hilarious graphic grace our front page, and are pleased to be able to give extensive space to the discussion regarding tactics and strategies following the Seattle WTO demos. As David Solnit suggests in our page one article, we could very well be on the cusp of a new period of contestation.

...

Victor D. Schumacher
January 27, 1922 — January 28, 1991

This issue of the FE is dedicated to Victor Schumacher, a mainstay of the Detroit antiwar movement and activist community, who was killed by a car late in January during his morning jog. Vic was a pacifist and a member of the War Resisters League whose resistance to militarism dated back to the time he spent in prison for refusing to serve in the U.S. armed forces during World War II. Vic refused to do alternative service as well. While working in a New York hospital tending many war victims, he saw wards cleared of war wounded for security reasons so that Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the wife of the Chinese Nationalist dictator, could have cosmetic surgery. Seeing the soldiers lying in gurneys in the hallways to make room for the privileged, he vowed to resist the system of injustice in every way he could.

...

That’s as good a reason as any for why the observance of our 25 years of publishing is reduced to a short mention in this column. We had intended more, both self-congratulation and perhaps a deeper discussion about our origins and political evolution. But the idea of a retrospective special issue began to slip as this issue became overwhelmed with articles.

...

According to our staff box, this newspaper is officially a quarterly, but in reality, we have become an “episodic,” corning out between or in conjunction with our political, cultural and environmental projects. It has been common practice in this space to offer explanations for our long printing delays and infrequent publishing schedule which is now about three issues a year. That is contrasted to twenty years ago when the Fifth Estate appeared weekly. It is perhaps time to formally declare that three-four times a year will be it for a while and devote this column to matters other than apologia.

...

It might seem self-indulgent, in the face of mounting worldwide horror, to call what has occurred around the FE the past several months a “crisis,” but a more precise word fails to come to mind. In August we were told by our landlord that we had one month in which to vacate the FE office, in order to allow construction workers to tear out the ceiling and undertake renovation of the building.

...

Thanks to those of you who so promptly answered your subscription renewal letters we sent out after the last issue. Thanks, also, for sending along your comments on the paper; it’s always good to get your feelings about our effort, even if it’s sometimes critical. And a special appreciation to those who contributed money beyond the price of their subscription. If you haven’t mailed your renewal letter back yet and intend to, please don’t make us have to spend more money on postage; it could much better be spent elsewhere. Also, this is your last opportunity to subscribe at the old rate of $4.

...

A shortage of staff, and not money problems, kept us from putting out this issue sooner. For the first time in a long time we are in good financial shape, thanks to your numerous and extremely generous contributions. The contributions have helped tremendously, but they haven’t solved our logistical problems. Most of us work, and those that don’t, scrape, and we find that our commitments to Capital—jobs, survival, cars that break down on an increasingly regular basis, all the vicissitudes of what is commonly referred to as “normal” existence—keep us from our true commitments and our projects. So be it; we’d be the last ones to deny the gulf that separates our desires and the pleasure we derive from this project and others like it on the one hand, and the struggling and daily despair on the other. Thanks again for your support. Hopefully we’ll have another issue in your hands within two months at most. We know you’ve heard that one before, folks, but this time we really mean it...

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October marks the 16^th anniversary of the Fifth Estate and a little over five years since we’ve been publishing this paper as an explicitly libertarian project (see the Oct. 1979 FE for a brief history), and we are pleased to report that the ship of anti-state remains healthy. We say this even though the Post Office has reduced our status to that of a quarterly. This has served as a reminder of how we’ve let our publishing frequency precipitously slip from that of a monthly to, in this case, once every four months. Readers write to us all too often complaining that they have missed an issue, when it’s just been our sloth. Please be assured, all of you will get the six issues you subscribed to no matter if they don’t fall into a given calendar year. Financially we’re holding our own (contrary to a year ago when we were dead broke), but please, don’t let this declaration act to forestall the generous donations that many of you have been sending to the paper, because it is exactly those extra dollars or two or $20! with a book order or subscription renewal that have carried us in the direction of solvency. We can rarely do so individually, so let us thank all of you collectively who continue to have faith, not so much in this paper, but in the ideas it embodies, Who have helped us so much over the last year. And as usual, a special debt of gratitude must go out to our Italian comrades on both coasts and in Florida who continue their lifelong commitment to anarchist ideals by support of the world libertarian press including this one.

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This issue is in your hands for two reasons: 1) your generous and numerous response to our plea for financial assistance and 2) the feeling of support we got from the accompanying letters you sent in. Our problem was really two-fold, but we only told you about the money side of the difficulties we faced. The other, a feeling of demoralization and a questioning of the purpose of our project, was really a more serious matter, but your desire for the Fifth Estate to continue infused a similar determination in us as well. We did discriminate, though, in a manner we should apologize for; we sent direct letters of thanks to large contributors and left our small donors to receive our appreciation in this space. We know that often it is as hard for some of you (and us) to find a spare five dollars where others are fortunate enough to have larger sums to contribute. We meant no slight but just couldn’t possibly thank everyone personally. We were exceptionally fortunate to have gotten the money we did as we had several large expenses relating to our office plus sent off several hundred dollars to book publishers such as Partisan Press, Cienfuegos, Black & Red, and Bratach Dubh. These important projects are experiencing much of the same difficulties as we are and we thought the least we could do was to pass along your donations to us for the debts we owed them. We don’t know what the future looks like financially, but we feel that if we can publish fairly regularly and offer an interesting selection of books, we can continue our projects. Still, we were just informed by our printer that his price is going to rise by 50%, our postage costs are already up, and we may have to switch mailing companies, all of which will entail a goodly sum. Ugh! So, any of you who feel the spirit to pledge a certain sum per month to the maintainance of the paper, you can join the small group of sustainers who receive the paper first class mail each issue and are a vital part of keeping us afloat...

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When we start receiving letters asking if we are still publishing, we know it’s time to get an issue out. One reason that the gap between our last issue and this one must appear so large to those who receive the FE by mail is that the edition published at the time of the Republican Convention was not mailed to subscribers. Because of a shortage of staff and funds at the time, we distributed it in Detroit only. Unfortunately, none remain available for distribution but a reproduction of it is on the opposite page as well as a selection from the text.

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Last issue we reported that the local Freezer Theater had been torched and that the people who performed there were looking for a new place. Well, all you ardent Freezer fans will be glad to know that they’ve opened up shop in a storefront on Cass, between Selden & Alexandrine in the Cass Corridor. They’re back to performing the “beyond the fridge” plays that only they can do, and have started poetry readings on Sundays. It’s well worth checking out...

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Just when everything starts to look gloomy on a cold Detroit winter’s day, along comes one of those rays of hope that helps keep up everyone’s morale—a bank closing! This time it’s those sleazes at the Feminist Federal Credit Union.

Writing in their newsletter, Financing Feminism, these bankers expressed a sense of loss over having to withdraw their Detroit offices from the balance sheet because of waning interest. They’ve decided to throw all their capital behind an Ann Arbor office. Too bad, bankers, but as they say in the world of high finance: “your loss is our gain.” We only hope that your brothers in the money business will soon cash in their chips...

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Welcome to our Winter 1992 edition. This was our final issue for the 1991 year. continuing our recent pattern of three papers per year. As we’ve said in the past, the fact that we publish so infrequently comes neither from a lack of will nor is it a measure of the growing anti-authoritarian movement.

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Although we got a lot of positive response to our last issue (as well as our fair share of abuse), no one noted a major error in our Hungary poster which attributes the date of the events to being “13 years ago” (making it 1966) rather than 23 years ago. Every one of us must have looked at the layout twenty times and never noticed the obvious blunder. Oh, well, we can tell people it’s a reprint of a ten-year-old poster...

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As you may have noticed in our staff box this issue, the Fifth Estate is now officially designated as a bimonthly. A reduced staff and the availability of those remaining has dictated this change and will also allow us to conform more closely to postal regulations governing the second class mail rate which demands specific publication schedules. Ah, another of the great FE contradictions. The Fifth Estate has mailed at this controlled rate for a decade, long before the paper too was explicitly anti-State. The decision to be immersed in the postal bureaucracy is based on our ability to mail an entire issue including bulk orders to bookstores for under $20. Fred Woodworth, editor of the now defunct Match, steadfastly refused to involve his paper with any government agency and would spend over six times our figure to mail each of his issues. Of course, if we took that course we would still be using U.S. postage stamps....

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Emily’s, the downtown shop where all the nicey-nice smile faces go to get their over-priced touchy-feely thingys is apparently plagued with the same problem as any other Motor City store—shoplifting. The proprietor has displayed a sign reading, “Free double-dip ice cream cone to anyone fingering a shoplifter!” and another cutesy plea, “We don’t steal from you! Don’t steal from us.” Nothing more could drive us to a life of crime...

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We dedicate this issue to the memory of the 14 women slaughtered in Montreal December 6 at the hand of a patriarchal maniac. As he lined up his victims and methodically shot them, he expressed a hatred for all women and said he wanted “to kill feminists.”

In the memory of these dead sisters, we pledge, “We’re all feminists here!”

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A happy new year thank-you to all of you who responded so quickly to our request in the last issue to please renew your subscriptions promptly. Thank you also for all the very generous donations and requests for papers to distribute to friends—we love to see those piles of papers disappear. Remember that we always need people and places to distribute the FE; we’ll send you papers on a consignment basis and you pay only for those you sell and keep half of the proceeds for yourself. If you wish to give the papers away free, send us the postage and we’ll send you a corresponding amount of FE’s.

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Welcome to our Summer 1998 edition. Thanks to everyone who had a hand in creating our 351^st issue. This issue follows our Fall 1997 edition, so please note that there was not an issue designated Winter or Spring.

As always, you can keep track of issues by noting the number in parentheses. Subscriptions expire after you have received four issues, not a calendar year. Special thanks to our Sustainers and to those who made generous donations with their subscription renewals. Also, to our writers and artists whose works grace our pages.

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Welcome to our 30^th anniversary issue—although you are reading this as we are already into our 31^st year. 1965 seems like ancient history or just a heartbeat away, depending on your current age. The cover logo on page one over our chronicle comes from our 1968–71 period.

As always we would like to express our gratitude to each reader, each Sustainer, each contributor. On the occasion of this anniversary, we feel this sense of gratitude even more deeply. Without your support, none of this would happen. We appreciate the patience with which all of you tolerate our sporadic publishing schedule although we have given up promising to appear more frequently.

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Welcome to the long time coming Summer edition of the Fifth Estate. It is our first since the Winter 1995 issue which was published Dec. 31, 1994. Subscribers (and particularly libraries) frequently think they have missed issues when six months go by between our papers. For instance, they’ll understandably inquire, “Where’s the Spring 1995 edition?” although there wasn’t one.

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Welcome to the Spring 1992 issue of the Fifth Estate (Vol. 27, No. 1, our 339^th paper)! As usual, we are later than we had planned, due in part to our worst nightmare: the breakdown, in the heat of production, of our IBM Composer. Most of this issue has been typeset on Macintosh computers by a host of busy friends stealing time at work, home and in school computer labs.

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Greetings to all and as usual, a special thanks to those who have added a contribution to their subscription renewal or book order. Also, to that small group who have elected to become Fifth Estate Sustainers—those who donate a fixed sum each issue. One of the reasons why Sustainers are limited is that we rarely promote the category or indicate how important it is to us. Sustainers are sent the issue first class, receive publications from time to time and free admission to local FE events. This issue we sent Sustainers a tabloid we produced in conjunction with the Evergreen Alliance as part of the opposition to the Detroit Incinerator, and the next issue will be accompanied (hopefully) by the soon-to-be published last book by Fredy Perlman, The Strait. So, if we have enticed you, please drop us a line and let us know how much you can pledge each issue.

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Good news! The Fifth Estate has a new office and bookstore quarters with public access, plus it provides a better atmosphere for working and receiving visitors. The move has provided the spark for increased activity around the bookshop, with one of us taking responsibility for expanding its book selection and starting regular hours.

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Where are the Bulgarians now that we need them department: Get ready Detroit! As the archbishop and the mayor slap each other on the back for bringing the pope himself into town in September, local entrepreneurs are geared up to produce all the exciting papal potpourri to be hawked in the wake of the holy parade as it cruises up Woodward Avenue and out to Pontiac’s Silverdome to pray that the roof doesn’t cave in. What will it be—tee shirts, buttons, pinwheel beanies, and, undoubtedly the classic style commemorative Popa Cola for a taste that refreshes. Rumor has it that the Pope plans to personally bless the site of the City’s world’s [as in print original] largest trash-to-dioxin municipal incinerator. Local fundamentalist christians are understandably horrified to see the antichrist and Whore of Babylon himself in these Yewnited States, and plan mass baptisms of born-again christians down at the Rouge River. Rumor also has it that there will be a huge pagan festival (more to our liking, though we’d enjoy seeing the born-agains fending off the bloated rats down at the Rouge as they go down for the third time) to coincide with the papal visit, to call up all the old Indian spirits of these lands to drive the blackrobes and their ilk away. Of course millions will be spent (and made) and security is going to be hard-core. Since, as Stalin once cynically but aptly pointed out, the pope has no military divisions, he’ll be relying on Detroit’s finest and lots of plainclothes pigs from every imaginable agency (and some we’ve never heard of, probably) to make sure the holy daddy-o doesn’t trip over his gown. Detroiters! Here’s your chance—a once-in-history opportunity: MOON THE POPE:

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Our offer of bulk copies of our back issues turned out better than we expected and we were swamped with requests. With a reduced volume, we can now make available issues only on a single copy basis. We have a list of back issues available for those who are interested.

Those of you who were sent subscription renewal notices last issue responded in greater numbers than any time in our memories. Thanks, since we hate doing bulk mailings and it saves greatly on postage when we don’t have to send a second reminder. By the way, some of you who have not responded to a second notice are getting this issue anyway since we wanted you to see our coverage of the Chicago gathering, but if you haven’t renewed, this is the last one you will receive.

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The space which the Fifth Estate shares with three other groups has been the scene of a number of events recently, mostly rock performances, but also a smattering of theatre and comedy. They have been generally well-received with an exceptionally gratifying turnout for our benefit held March 2. We raised $261 to help defray the expenses of maintaining the space shared by the Layabouts band, the Freezer Theatre Players and the Duck Club Players as well as the paper.

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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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Welcome to our Fall 1997 edition, #350. We think we’ve assembled numerous informative and challenging articles for you and are particularly pleased with the issue’s art work. Thanks to Stephen Goodfellow for the cover’s ominous drawing and no less to the creative talents of Richard Mock, Maurice Spira, Bill Koehnline, and Marilynn Rashid whose drawings grace our pages; also, to Alexis Buss for her tasty layout of Alan Antliff’s art and anarchy article. Thanks to all of you whose contributions keep our project going. Prisoners and GIs: if this is your first issue, please notify us if you want to be on our subscription list.

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The FE staff and friends celebrated our 30^th anniversary at the Cass Café in April, not only bringing in people from as far away as California, Maryland and Philadelphia, but even a picket by two very entertaining old-fashioned stillborn-again Jesus freaks who drew even more irreverent Cass Corridor types into our vortex of sin. Favorite FE covers and FE memorabilia were displayed, including a judge’s gavel that some enterprising ‘60s staff member stole from a courtroom and turned into a hash pipe. People danced to the music of Detroit’s Ghost Band, and enough money was raised to keep this ship afloat. Thanks to Chuck Roy and the Cass Café staff, to the Ghost Band, to David Furer for the music mix, to Julie Herrada, and to unnamed others for their help in making it a success.

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This issue of the Fifth Estate is only twelve pages due to both staff and financial problems. Several members of our collective are traveling and all others but one are working full-time. This leaves the paper to just a few of us working mainly at night after our jobs. Not being very good businesspeople, we have never been able to figure out why we are in flush times at one period and at the brink of going under at another, but we have reached a point not real far from the latter. In that we have a fairly low budget, this means we are only talking about $350 a month, but still it is enough to get our creditors knocking at the door. Finances haven’t quite reached the point they did a year ago when we had to send out an emergency mailing asking for funds, but that is a real possibility if the picture does not improve soon. We have just sent out 150 renewal forms to those people whose subscriptions are about to expire. We urge those of you receiving them to return them as soon as possible as the money from those renewals would put us back in shape. Book orders, new subscriptions, donations and our ever-faithful sustainers’ fund will keep periods like this from re-occurring. Also, look for an FE benefit in the near future....

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Once again we have to extend gratitude to our subscribers for their generous contributions to insure this paper’s continued existence. Every time we thought the flow of letters containing checks or cash had ceased, we would receive yet another with an explanation that the delay was due to a wait for an unemployment check or paycheck to arrive. It’s this sort of support that provides not only the money for us to continue, but also the motivation. Some of us felt that a notice of thanks this small is insufficient to thank those that provided the funds, but really the whole paper is our response...

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Sorry to be so late with this issue, but the FE staff had a lot of its time and energy sapped by Michigan Bell’s efforts to prosecute us out of existence. (See story elsewhere in this issue.) We just couldn’t pull the paper together after sitting in Recorder’s Court all day. However, our tardiness fueled more speculation (some of it gleeful) that we had finally gone under, but, after a rocky three months, the project has stabilized itself financially and has a functioning staff which is prepared to go ahead with long-range plans for the FE’s continued existence....We particularly want to extend our thanks to the many people who have shown their appreciation and support of our “new” direction by sending in subscriptions and donations--the money has helped cut into the still-large backlog of debts...Another reason we certainly don’t want to go under is that we want to be here to celebrate with you the 10^th anniversary of the Fifth Estate. We are tentatively planning a dinner/music celebration for Halloween evening, October 31^st at the Earth Center in Hamtramck. The first FE appeared in October of 1965--whew!

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Usually when a publication such as ours disappears for several months it is due to money problems, political differences among the staff or a combination of the two. However, we can happily report that neither of these maladies caused our hiatus, but rather a combination of sloth and self-indulgence. The days and then the months just slipped away as we traveled, tended our gardens, took leisurely bike-rides, worked our dumb jobs and generally laid about as much as we could. Now that our mail has slacked off to almost zero, and the rumors of our demise have begun to reach us once again, we figure it is time for another assault against contemporary reality. Perhaps, though, it understates our intellectual activity to suggest we were only doing the above mentioned pastimes, because every article in the paper has been the subject of discussion and debate; some of it extending back several months. This newspaper is much like letter-writing: you get back in accordance with what you send out. In that we value greatly the input we receive from readers, you probably can expect to see more of this paper during the winter months ahead...

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The Detroit primary elections, as usual, contained no surprises with a majority of both registered and eligible voters not bothering to venture out of their house to participate in selecting who shall rule them. Officials have even given up bemoaning the low turnouts and called this primary a success because 46% of the voters cast ballots...

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Wowie zowie!—this issue marks the beginning of the 12^th year of continuous publication for the Fifth Estate. In 1965, 17-year-old Harvey Ovshinsky came back from the West Coast after a summer of working on the Los Angeles Free Press with the idea of starting a similar “underground” newspaper in Detroit. After varying fits and starts the FE rapidly became part of the dope, rock and roll and marching in the streets phenomena of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. With the demise of the “Movement” and an accompanying reduction in circulation from a high of 14,000 in 1969 to a low of about 5,000 in 1974, the paper made one last stab at survival as a commercial, youth-oriented weekly. That effort collapsed in July 1975 when the present staff revamped the works into a monthly publication of libertarian communism having a circulation of 3,000. None of us feel an “awesome responsibility” or anything like that, to continue what has turned out to be an institution in Detroit, but we do plan to keep on rolling for the time being—at least as long as we can maintain a degree of relevancy and have a touch of fun...

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“We understand you tore the little tag off your mattress.” (Louisiana Worker/cpf)

To paraphrase an ex-president; we won’t have The Detroit Sun to kick around anymore—the city’s “hottest paper” collapsed financially after its Oct. 22 issue, ending several months of weekly publication. In a desperate attempt to raise needed cash (the staff hadn’t been paid in several weeks), Editor John Sinclair began a campaign of favorable publicity for the mayor and the police that even outdid The Sun’s previous performances. But even though grinning cops and politicians dominated the front pages of the last two issues, no one in the city administration was willing to secure the financial commitment the paper needed to continue publishing. The Sun was never like the other “alternative” liberal weeklies which appear in other major U.S. cities such as the Boston Real Paper or the Los Angeles Free Press with their combination of left-liberal politics and “hip” culture which meant that city hall is always fair game for investigative reporting.

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What with all the straight media from TV-2 to the Ann Arbor Sun declaring us dead, we thought it was about time to bring out some proof to the contrary. On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t be so cocky about it since this is only our third paper in four months, pretty well giving the lie to our proposed monthly schedule. But a fatal combination of laziness and a desire not to be bound by externally imposed deadlines has probably allowed us to become self-indulgent (like this column). Also, this is an explanation, not a promise for more frequent issue.

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Several people have asked us if the back page of last issue’s FE [#289, January 24, 1978] depicting the “thoughts” of Kim Il Sung was real or just another put-on. Well, we wish that it was something we had thought up, but unfortunately those tragic State comedians in North Korea beat us to the punch. Everything on the back page was taken from official North Korean propaganda publications—everything except, of course, the segment by the Italian fascist Mario Palmieri—or was it the other way around; it’s hard to tell. Also, we’d like to thank the members of the IWW group in Hawaii for sending us the info for the North Korean movie “The Engineers” which also appeared on the back page...

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Our finances present a decidedly brighter picture this month, although a few creditors like IBM are demanding large sums from us for back debts. The sole reason we are able to peek a little above the waterline is due to the generosity and support from our readers—from one-time donors, and especially from our growing list of sustainers. We will probably still need to hold a benefit in April, but we can get completely out of the entertainment business and concentrate on the newspaper if a score more people would become sustainers. If you are so motivated, please use the coupon farther back in the paper...

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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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The Fifth Estate’s benefit party on February 20^th was a rousing success which saw the paper raise $400 over expenses and provided a party-down good time for about 450 revelers. Although the 5 kegs of beer went out faster than we expected, brilliant performances by the Shadowfax Band, creative theater by The Acme Theatrical Agency and Primitive Lust, and mystifying magic by Art DeAwful combined with the resources of the people in attendance made for a fun night for all.

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Special thanks to all those readers who sent in contributions and became sustainers in response to last issue’s plea for funds. Financially we are at somewhat of an equilibrium, but still remain on the edge, so although we don’t want to keep calling “emergency” before the situation warrants it, we still urge readers to become sustainers and to renew their subscriptions when the time comes....

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Rather than try to reconcile the obvious disparity between a newspaper that indicts the entire edifice of civilization and the technology it has developed with the fact that the FE mail subscriptions have just been converted to a computer list, we’ll just take another sip of beer. We think the transition (required of us by our mailing house) went fairly smoothly, but if there are any serious errors, please bring them to our attention....

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The August mayoral and Common Council elections in Detroit are worth no more than a casual brickbat if for no other reason then their irrelevance. Unlike many other cities, where political machines were powers to be reckoned with, in the Motor City the politicians occupy a position not even a distant second to the city’s real rulers—the auto companies. Barely rating even a few copy inches in the mass media, the usual collection of opportunists, careerists, and thieves are waiting to feed at the public trough. Perhaps even more despicable is the same gaggle of socialists, ex-militants, and other leftoids vying for a shot at a small piece of power in the state apparatus. In elections like these, participation is even more of a humiliation than normally—don’t vote or if you do have a voter’s card—piss in the voting booth...

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Things can only get worse for auto workers with the election of Doug Fraser as president of the UAW. Beyond just being a run-of-the-mill hack, Fraser has a record of strike-breaking that old Henry Ford’s security department would have admired. Fraser engineered the suppression of four major wildcat strikes in Detroit during 1973 through 1974 at Chrysler Corporation’s Jefferson Ave., Detroit Forge, Mack Ave., and Dodge Truck plants. The worst case was at the Mack Stamping Plant where a mini-occupation had taken place and Fraser put together a goon squad comprised of over 1,000 union officials armed with clubs to force the strikers back to work and to “deal with radicals”. When Detroit Police Inspector Joseph Areeda saw the gang of union officials at the plant he said to Fraser, “I’m glad we’re on the same side.” And so it is...

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Our Fifth Estate benefit and party at Alvin’s Back-room on June 25 worked out pretty well for us, both in terms of money (we made about $215 after expenses) and everyone seemed to have a good time. The entertainment was provided by the Acme Theatrical Agency and Primitive Lust satire groups, both who left folks rolling in the aisles. After them, Ted Lucas and the Spikedrivers provided the rock and roll for a night of dancing. Unfortunately, the pressure gauge on the beer tapper broke while we were into our fourth keg and left us with a lot of undrunk suds at the end of the evening. You can hear more of the Spikedrivers every Friday and Saturday nights at Alvin’s after hours from 11 pm to 4 am. Our usual thanks to everyone who helped put the benefit together including Mark for printing and Mike McCoy and Judy Adams of WDET for publicity.

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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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Thanks to everyone (musicians, performers and party-goers) who made the Fifth Estate 10^th anniversary party on December 6 one of the most entertaining and fun sets Detroit has seen in a long while. (See details and photos farther in.) Besides all of the joyous dancing and partying, the benefit managed to bring in enough money to print this issue, order some more books for our store and catch up on some nagging bills. Also, reaction to the affair was so overwhelming that numerous people have suggested that we sponsor events featuring Detroit talent on a regular basis, perhaps every two months. Sounds good to us and we are planning a meeting in a few weeks to discuss such possibilities.

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The Fifth Estate Benefit Party held Jan. 14 turned out to be one of the most enjoyable to date, with folks guzzling down six kegs of beer and dancing their asses off to the Shadowfax band. Special thanks are due to all the people who helped out including Mark Wenson for printing our leaflets; Carman Harlan of WWWW, Jack Broderick of WJZZ, Mike McCoy, Phil Marcus Esser and Judy Adams of WDET, and other stations and newspapers which helped publicize the event. A last minute bureaucratic hassle with the state liquor commission which threatened to stop the party was averted thanks to staff members of the Lansing Star (Box 24, Lansing, Mi. 48824) who made a special trip which saved the day—thanks folks. Still in all, this could possibly be the last benefit due to our staggering overhead—this time $455—for beer, band, rent and five smaller items—against door receipts of $608, which produced only a total income of $153. This is almost enough to print one issue but we were hoping for at least twice that. Any suggestions? And if we do have another benefit, will any readers give us a hand on setting it up?...

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Bad news for the Ann Arbor Sun. “Detroit’s Hottest Paper” (as they call it) was hit in January with a coordinated wave of vandalism which left 40 of their newspaper coinboxes disabled after a liquid solder was poured in the coinslots. Since the gang from Ann Arbor has offered a $100 reward to bring in the culprits to justice, we thought we could narrow down the list of suspects for them. (1) Any of the 650,000 members of Detroit’s black community who have been insulted by the blatantly racist attempt of a group of white college-town liberals to publish a paper for blacks without the slightest understanding of the dynamics of the situation; (2) Any of the 250,000 members of the UAW who have seen chief union bureaucrat Leonard Woodcock portrayed on the Sun pages as a friend of labor, rather than as the stooge of the auto companies which he is; and (3) Any of the thousands of radicals in Detroit who have seen the Sun try to divert criticism of the political system by uncritically praising every elected hack in the state. Hope that helps you out, fellas...

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With this issue of the Fifth Estate, the paper begins its thirteenth year of continuous publications with the first edition appearing November 19, 1965. Since that date 288 issues have been published, hundreds of people have come and gone from the staff, publishing schedules have varied from weekly to monthly and the politics contained within have flipped and flopped from liberal to New Left to Maoist to anarchist to its current perspectives. We keep on truckin’ through, sometimes with less of a sense of purpose than at others, but always with a desire for revolution and the demand for the sweetness of life. Hope you can dig a little of what we are doing, and are doing something we dig on as well. Through all of it, we always try to remember the immortal words of Sammy Smoot, “When you smash the State, keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart”...

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Many thanks to those who continue to send donations both through our Sustainer’s fund (which is growing) and one-time donations. It’s been financially difficult trying to make it through three months without holding a benefit, and it’s the individual responses of so many subscribers that keeps us in the game. We’re going to have another rip-roarer in January (see details later on in the paper) so you can get ready to boogie...

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Last month the Detroit City Water Board was boasting to the news media that Detroit’s water was some of the cleanest in the country. By clean, City officials mean that the chances of there being any harmful (or non-harmful for that matter) bacteria in our drinking water is almost zero. But considering all of the chemicals added to the already polluted waters that surround Detroit, it’s not surprising. What is surprising though, is that we’re still alive! An example of the amount of chemicals the water board uses to clean up our drinking water can be found in the fact that people at the Detroit Print Co-op have found that the needed content p h for the fountain solution in their presses (the fountain solution is a mixture of water and chemicals that keeps ink off of the non-print areas of a printing plate), can be found in plain old Detroit tap water. Drink up...

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Good news on the financial front: the Fifth Estate is still cruising on the generosity of our growing list of sustainers and those making one-time contributions. Also, a thank you to all of those subscribers who have been renewing over the past few months. One note though: if you received a letter last month stating that your subscription has expired, this will be the last issue you receive unless we hear from you. (Hate to lose anyone, but...)

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If you are reading this newspaper and are not a subscriber, please be advised that you are able to do so only through the support and generosity of those who are. On about July 18 we realized that we had no money for our August print bill, the July rent and a multitude of other smaller obligations. We sent out a special mailing to our subscribers asking for $1.00 donations per person and the response was overwhelming, with some contributions as high as $25.00! The total was $500 and is enough to allow us to hang on another month. We were all really pleased with the tremendous response from our readers; we thank you all greatly for your support, and hope for your continued interest in our future...

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As promised in our March issue, the FE will be throwing another rip-roaring benefit, to raise money for the paper’s maintenance and provide a great time for all. To be held on Saturday, April 10 (9 until ?) at Formerly Alvin’s Delicatessen (on Cass between Antoinette and Palmer near the WSU campus), the $2.50 admission charge will include dancing to a great blues band headed by Detroit’s own BoBo Jenkins and lots of free beer. As before, all money goes toward the continued appearance of this paper and we are looking forward to your support and participation.

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Well this issue of the FE is a little late in coming out because three-quarters of the staff is off taking a much awaited summer break. This is the last FE you’ll see until September (this issue is a double issue—July/Aug.), when we hope to be back in the swing of things...

As usual, we’re operating the paper by the skin of our teeth and would like to thank all of those people who resubscribed and sent in those much needed donations—it saved us this month. If you received a “renewal” notice in the mail and haven’t re-subscribed yet, we hope that you do so soon since it’s your subscriptions that help us cover costs each month...

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In 1969 [when Fredy and Lorraine moved to Detroit], the “underground” newspaper the Fifth Estate addressed itself to the Detroit radical and counter-culture community. Fredy sought out the staff, and except for a brief period (when there was an attempt to make the paper a commercial success), was an ardent but critical supporter of the paper, extending his friendship to the numerous remarkable collaborators. In addition to his criticisms, Fredy’s typing skills were welcomed. Over the years, Fredy took part in the paper’s production. At his death in 1985, only one staff person, Marilyn Werbe, had more typesetting seniority than Fredy.

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May Day was celebrated in Detroit with a Smoke-In in Grand Circus Park, to call for the re-legalization of marijuana.

Hippies stood around and smoked joints made of Bull Durham, legal herbs, and bananas.

The demonstration started out with lots of rain, and a big hassle with the local constables about a permit they were supposed to have. As a result, the demonstration was temporarily moved to the lobby of the City-County building. Later everyone slowly wandered back to the park and nothing else was said.

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For all those world-weary visionaries fed up with ever doleful tones and anxious to hear something concrete and uplifting—didja hear the one about the Detroit People Mover?

It’s this big snakey rail on cement poles that winds around downtown Detroit and looks sort of like MGM’s yellow brick road except it’s not yellow (except in rusty streaks down the sides) and it won’t take you to Kansas. It only trails in a series of question marks back to the Renaissance Center (a maze-like fortress of glass and poured concrete, barricading the river) to which you may have come from Kansas, or to the new “Millender Center Luxury Hotel and Apartments” across the street (which, and this is the truth, prides itself on being “the Tallest Prefab Building in the World” and during construction had signs hanging off each floor, boasting for instance, “13^th floor—completed in 1-1/2 days!”). As things stand now, however, the People Mover won’t take you or anybody else anywhere and possibly, hopefully for everybody’s sake, never will.

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Imagine this scene: a bright cloudless warm May Sunday in Detroit. On days like this, rare as the purple wallaby, half the local population has suddenly taken cover indoors in a shroud of bubbling beercans, listening to Tiger announcer, Ernie Harwell, broadcasting his play-by-play commentary from New York.

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At their National Gathering last August, the U.S. Greens decided to embark upon a project they called “Detroit Summer” as one of their three major campaigns for 1992.

The idea was to express an urban consciousness for ecological issues through the establishment of a “Green alternative” for an economically and socially disintegrating urban environment. Part of this ambitious project involved the recruitment of Youth Greens, many of whom constitute the most radical and even anarchist wing of the Greens, to come to this city for the summer.

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Last year when Detroit residents began their protest against the proposed municipal trash incinerator (by demonstrating, attending meetings, putting out informational flyers, hanging banners over the freeway near the incinerator site) there was some local media coverage. But the focus of the coverage was the Detroit City Council meetings where the building permit was being challenged by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). After the permit was approved and since construction has begun, there has been little mention of the issue, even though there have been numerous protest activities organized by residents and local environmental groups.

...

The news in March 2019 that, due to “financial and community concerns,” the Detroit trash incinerator was to be closed was weirdly reminiscent of news back in the spring of 1986 that it was going to be built: It came as a surprise to almost everyone in the city. This time, obviously, it came as good news; people who had been working to shut it for decades naturally celebrated the closing as “a glorious day for the city and its residents,” as Sandra Turner-Handy, a long-term environmental justice activist, member of the Michigan Environmental Council, co-supervisor of Zero Waste Detroit, put it. [1]

...

Their bust of General MacArthur which caused so much trouble in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade was there.

The gentlemen of Grand Circus Park were not impressed. But then there wasn’t much to be impressed by.

Less than 500 people marched down Woodward Avenue in the great Flag Day parade on June 14. The March was called by a resolution of the Michigan Senate to honor the flag and “Support Our Boys in Vietnam.”

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Interview by Don LaCoss, April 2003, Chicago

Poet, storyteller, and cultural critic Paul Garon co-founded Living Blues, a periodical that, from its origins in the early 1970s, documented and supported blues music as an innovative and revolutionary African-American response to discrimination, abuse, and injustice by whites.

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a review of

Isle of Dogs by Jon Frankel. Whiskey Tit 2020

Every time Jon Frankel releases a novel it feels as if he’s managed to twist the English language into a new, illusory shape: a mobius strip made of words. Specimen Tank, his debut in 1994, is a lurid nightmarescape with one foot in the grimiest alley of 1980’s New York City and the other in the bizarro universe it took David Wong and all those Eraserhead Press writers another twenty years to finally tap into. If you strip down his latest book from Whiskey Tit, Isle of Dogs, it appears to resemble a political thriller—but it takes place in the year 2500 and all the politicians are multi-generational clones who ride flesh-eating horses around a war-torn, biopunk, feudalist-dystopian version of crumbling America. It’s like sitting down to watch a familiar courtroom drama and discovering your couch is releasing hallucinogenic spores while Netflix beams into your tv from two dimensions away. A word of warning: if you don’t first read Gaha: Babes of the Abyss (the sequel), you may ricochet off this book’s first chapter like a bullet shot into a centrifuge. Frankel must have snorted some Gene Wolfe recently, because he throws his reader directly into the center of the Sargon 4’s political web without wasting a single page on backstory, making it feel like a contemporary novel about life on Capitol Hill except now all the congress members have been replaced by techno-Spartans with delicate, epicurean palates. In a single scene, a couple of two-hundred year old clones might casually discuss mass genocide while drinking jasmine tea and referencing the latest issue of The New York Times, and Frankel continually mixes the familiarity of our modern day with his surreal vision of the future to keep the prose highly readable, yet somehow...askew. His style is a fusion of literary realism and highly imaginative science fiction that harkens back to works such as Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, Samuel Delaney’s Trouble on Triton, and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. But compared to his other novels, such as The Man Who Can’t Die, Frankel has pumped the brakes on his graphic depictions of sexuality and violence, to the relief of some his readers and to the disappointment of others. This is possibly because Isle of Dogs is told from the perspective of the tyrannical Rulers rather than from their “genetically inferior” victims, and so the story has a familial warmth as the plot passes from character to character, almost as if the reader is peeking behind the curtains of the powerful kings or queens more typical of a high fantasy setting. Again, it’s difficult to pin a single genre on this or any of Frankel’s other works, but for the kind of reader who longs for a story that doesn’t have the slapped-together feel of too much of today’s popular fiction or the overwrought stylism of the literary novels hemorrhaging from Brooklyn’s coffee shops, this book will activate a part of your mind that you didn’t know was there before.

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Diane di Prima has died. Now we have no choice but to introduce her to each other, since she is no longer here to introduce herself.

Diane Di Prima, 1960s

On paper, you could say, “she was a poet, she was a feminist, beatnik, anarchist, Buddhist.” You could list her famous friends and lovers. Promote her books, her poems, her art. But she was so many things.

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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.

...

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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This article is the third in a series on Birth Control, compiled and presented with the aid of the Women’s News Co-op.

Because of the media’s big push for the “pill” over the last few years, little information has been readily available on other birth control methods. There are, in fact, many of us who are not even aware of the number of different medically approved methods which are both safe and inexpensive. There is presently no one method of birth control that is perfect for everyone. Since this choice must be made on an individual basis, correct and current information is necessary to aid in that decision.

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WASHINGTON — (Liberation News Service) At least two, and perhaps three, American military men in the line of troops at the Pentagon took off their helmets, laid down their guns, and joined the demonstrators sitting in on the Pentagon steps, Saturday, October 21.

The fate of the demonstrators is unknown, since the Pentagon denies their existence. “There were no defectors. We have no AWOL’s; no one is missing,” stated a Defense Department press spokesman.

...

.

Caption for photos:

Contrasted with the U.S., European anti-nuclear demonstrations often result in violent clashes with police. Scene above (l.) shows a Clamshell demonstrator practicing nonviolence being dragged away by a New Hampshire State Trooper, May 1 at Seabrook, At right, part of a contingent of 30,000 who tried to march on a plant site at Creys-Malville, France, July 31. One demonstrator was left dead and a hundred others injured after police attacked, trying to block access to the plant. French Interior Minister Christian Bonnet issued a statement saying, “About a fifth of the demonstrators were foreigners. Among them were about a thousand troublemakers, indisputably anarchist in action and inspiration who ignore frontiers and who already have made trouble elsewhere, especially in West Germany.”

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As predictions for the eventual toll of the deadly AIDS disease grow higher, speculation as to the origin of the virus remain unanswered. Reports continue to surface that rather than a natural occurring new strain, the disease was a result of U.S. Army germ warfare research conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland in the mid 1970s.

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Original poster by: SOCIAL WARFARE / WILDCAT, Room 37, 200 West 72^nd Street, New York, New York 10025 / USA

Panel 1: Drawing of an angry man.

Angry man: Work stinks!

Response, off: Well, you’re not the only one.

Panel 2: Two men in conversation

Man 1: When we fuck up on the job and steal from our boss, we begin to realize our own power.

...

Plymouth pigs went down in defeat in a frontal legal attack by Rolf Dietrich on December 18^th.

As reported earlier on these pages, the pigs of suburban Plymouth have hassled Dietrich from the beginning of the year when they first arrested him on a phony traffic charge and confiscated 15 copies of the Fifth Estate which he had on the back seat of his car. [See articles in FE Archive.]

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Digger O’Dell, world famous stunt man, will be buried in Detroit October 26^th, at 1 pm at 13505 Grand River east of Schaefer. Mr. O’Dell will be buried alive.

He will arrive on October 21 to begin construction of his concrete casket six feet beneath an abandoned gas station.

Digger estimates he has spent 6-1/2 of his 54 years buried in a self made grave and has been buried 93 times before. O’Dell, who earns his living either sitting on flagpoles or going to the other extreme of being buried alive, holds the present World Record of 78 days 20 minutes and 10 seconds for staying under six feet of dirt.

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The Crusader keeps wondering how long people are going to go on eating up images instead of music.

When a group comes to town all the hip people are here waiting to eat them up—which is as it should be—but even when the band isn’t making it musically or is just good, these people keep coming up and screaming about how out of sight they are or how the band is just blowing their minds.

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ANN ARBOR, Jan. 26—Euripides was so pissed after the Ann Arbor pigs busted the Performance Group’s performance of “Dionysus in ’69”—an updated and realistic version of his “Bacchae”—that the city was covered with a slick icy glaze for three days afterwards.

It all started when word leaked out that a nude performance was going to take place on the chaste floor of the Michigan Union Ballroom, as a part of the University of Michigan’s annual Creative Arts Festival.

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a review of

Direct Action: An Historical Novel by Luke Hauser

In Direct Action, Luke Hauser writes fiction so steeped in reality that he reproduces an era for us, with all of its excitement and frustrations.

Although the 1980s are generally thought of as a kind of dead zone for progressive activism, in the San Francisco Bay Area the early part of the decade was a time of fervent activism around nuclear issues.

...

On October 14 a bomb blast ripped apart a production building at the Litton Systems Canada Ltd. plant in Rexdale, Ontario, causing an estimated $5 million in damage. The group Direct Action claimed responsibility for the bombing, which also injured seven people.

Direct Action is apparently the same group that claimed responsibility for the bombing of power transformers on Vancouver Island in British Columbia (see FE #309, June 19, 1982, for Direct Action’s communique and our comments on it). This time, seven people were injured, due to the bomber’s mistakes and the apparent incompetence of Litton’s security personnel.

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Anarchist utopias are alive and well, not only in Chiapas or Rojava but also in the heart of capitalist Europe. In Germany, police repression and gentrification have dealt a decisive blow to traditional anarchist strongholds like Berlin, with numerous free spaces closed down since the pandemic started.

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Editor’s note: Last issue, we printed a review of Starhawk’s new book Webs of Power in the context of our spirituality feature. [See “The Spirit of Global Justice,” FE #359, Winter, 2002–2003.] The following piece comes from a post Starhawk made to an e-mail list devoted to discussing issues raised by that book. It offers a compelling critique of those elements in the peace and justice movement that seek to censor anger and conflict.

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a review of

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Milkweed Editions, 2020 (original: 2013)

Don’t mistake the long lifespan on bestseller lists of Braiding Sweetgrass as something superficial. Certainly, Kimmerer’s excellent prose style attracts a broad range of readers. Yet the complexity of her ideas surely challenges those for whom nature equates to the landscape videos they capture on their smartphones.

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Neither the fire marshal nor the police have ever paid a visit to the Dirty Yeti. It’s a small house in Spokane, Wash. which has hosted shows for local bands and a variety of musicians and artists on tour, travelers from around the world, has been a kitchen and pantry for the local Food Not Bombs, and a zine publishing and workshop space alongside its rotating cast of permanent residents.

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a review of

There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2021

More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art by Georgina Kleege. Oxford University Press 2018

“I want freedom, the right to self expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

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a review of

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977)

The book is now a Vintage paperback; the original French version was Surveiller et punir, Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975)

Foucault insists that “delinquency, controlled illegality, is an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups” (p.279). Delinquency is a uniquely modern development, which first materialized in the nineteenth century. As Foucault delineates the process, tine Enlightenment reforms of the penal code and prison conditions were adapted to the new conditions of early industrial capitalism. Delinquency, then, is depoliticized crime, distinct from popular illegalities such as peasant uprisings, sans-culotte direct democracy, Luddism, strikes, insurrections and so on. The reformed penal code and the new criminal justice bureaucracy (police, courts, lawyers, prisons) created, in the nineteenth century, a circumscribed zone of illegality that was easily controlled and which posed no threat to the ruling class. On the contrary, delinquency became one of the principal modes by which the bourgeois regime maintained its legitimacy as a ruling class.

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Daily life has a new rhythm: routine disruptions. DPacing an accelerated news cycle and affective bursts from smart phone notifications, our subjective autonomous systems are increasingly synced up with crisis-state and techno security tempos.

We don’t know what the next surprise is going to be, but we know it’s coming.

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WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 (AP) — Senator Stephen M. Young, Democrat from Ohio, said Thursday that he had learned that the Central Intelligence Agency hired persons to disguise as Vietcong and discredit Communists in Vietnam by committing atrocities.

The C.I.A. and Representative Cornelius E, Gallagher, Democrat of New Jersey, said it was not so.

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“Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control” in this issue [FE #309, June 19, 1982] continues John Zerzan’s work demonstrating the massive erosion of traditional American values, in this case centering on popular allegiance to the work ethic. Below is a rebuttal from Tim Luke, which appeared in Telos magazine No. 50 (Box 3111, St. Louis MO 63130, $5); this is followed by a reply from Zerzan and a comment by Bob Brubaker of the FE staff.

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In Raoul Vaneigem’s 1967 Situationist treatise, The Revolution of Everyday Life, he recounts what resulted from the flooding of the basement of Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory where the Russian physiologist kept his famous salivating dogs as experiments in classical conditioning.

It was a traumatic event for the dogs that had to struggle to live in the rising water. The ones who survived completely shed the conditioning Pavlov had worked so diligently to place in them.

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For too long we have gone on like sleepwalkers as the weapons of total extermination were manufactured and readied. Now it is becoming clear to even the most myopic that nuclear war threatens not only the present configurations of social and political relations, but all of life.

Such a war (which cannot even be described as a “war” if we are to maintain a sense of human proportion) would be an act of total, absolute destruction: destruction of human beings, destruction of human culture, destruction of the ecosphere. For all practical purposes nothing would survive the blast, the heat, the radiation and the destruction of the ozone layer, and all the intermingled secondary and tertiary effects of all-out nuclear confrontation.

...

Everyday sexual predation on women by men of power and prestige in the entertainment world, politics, business, and the university has been an open secret that has suddenly gained massive public attention. Women’s words have been listened to and prominent men have experienced almost immediate banishment from their fields after exposure of their abusive actions.

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According to Time Magazine, prostitution has always been part of the American soldier’s life. It is a continuation of a grand tradition going back to the Crusades and extending through the vivandieres of World War I to the B-Girls called tea girls in Saigon today. After dysentery and other intestinal diseases had multiplied fourfold in four months and venereal disease had afflicted one-third of the 21,000 troopers of the U.S. first cavalry (Airmobile) in the small town of An Khe in the central highlands, the local commander acted. He made the town off limits. Prices, which the soldiers had forced up, and disease rates soon fell but, as Time puts it, “In March the first cases of ‘battle fatigue’ showed up.”

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Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue.

-- Oscar Wilde

...and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen. The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

-- From Adbusters (September/October 2011 issue)

We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commoded, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy, real estate portfolios and police ‘protection.’ Hold on to these spaces, nurture them and let the boundaries of your occupations grow.

-- Egyptian (Tahrir Square) Comrades

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A new book of oral histories edited by political prisoner Eric King and abolitionist Josh Davidson is now available for preorder through AK Press and Burning Books. Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners with a foreword by Angela Davis and an introduction by Sara Falconer is a fundraiser for, and a way to raise awareness of those imprisoned for politically motivated actions.

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On July 9, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s ruling New Democracy party pushed through an opportunistic law restricting public protest.

This is part of a larger assault on Exarchia, the Athens neighborhood that is home to autonomous anarchist projects, migrant communities, and self-managed squats.

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Athens Neighborhood is Home to Anarchy

ATHENS — In February, The National Herald, a right-wing Greek newspaper based in the U.S., boasted, “Exarchia Anarchists will be Wiped Out.” For nearly fifty years, Exarchia, a neighborhood in central Athens, Greece has been an example of autonomous living.

The neighborhood, which is the site of a number of uprisings has achieved what anarchists long believed possible; a self-organized city within a city. For decades, police who entered would be immediately attacked and pushed out.

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In June 2001, 23-year-old forest defense activist Jeffrey “Free” Luers was sentenced to 22 years and 8 months in prison for a Eugene, Oregon arson. Free and his co-defendant Critter set fire to three Sport Utility Vehicles (SUV’s) at a local car dealership to raise awareness about global warming and the role that the gas-guzzlers play in the process. No one was hurt in this action nor was that their intent.

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The only time it’s legal to mask in town these days is Mardi Gras. In fact, an old law on the books predating this regime says it’s illegal to be in a parade and not mask. Meanwhile, the Icemen arrest anybody on a non-parade day who dares even to wear a head scarf like those Yemeni women I saw in my neighborhood until they fell under the ban and got shipped offshore.

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The Fifth Estate recently received a copy of “Divine Toad Sweat,” Church bulletin of the NeoAmerican Church, headquartered in Mt. Eden, California.

The Neo-American Church, although it does not employ set rituals, subscribes to three basic Principles. As stated in “Divine Toad Sweat” they are

“1) Everyone has the right to expand his consciousness and stimulate visionary experience by whatever means he considers desirable and proper without interference from anyone;

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NEW YORK (LNS)—The Army is planning a heavy vengeance for the June 5 rebellion of over 150 GIs imprisoned in the Ft. Dix stockade. [See “Army Stockades Blow,” FE #84, July 24-August 6, 1969.]

Apparently, 38 prisoners have already been hit with some kind of charge, or to declare the nature of the charges.

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WRIGHTSTOWN (LNS)—The GI movement at Ft. Dix is the largest and most advanced in the country, and this is due partly to the Coffeehouse for GIs in Wrightstown.

The organizing efforts of the Coffeehouse bring hundreds of GIs every week to relax, listen to music and talk about fighting imperialism, and they pulled off the first demonstration here when thousands of civilians invaded an Army base last Oct. 12.

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FIFTH ESTATE #384 Spring, 2011, Vol. 46, #1

Maybe the most persistent of all forms of external authority in our lives are the day-to-day tyrannies of specialists and experts. The Fifth Estate’s next issue investigates strategies of resistance to and liberation from this insidious system of technocratic mystification and domination with a look at the culture, ethics, and aesthetics of do-it-yourselfism.

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The New Physician, a national medical journal with a monthly circulation of over 60,000 physicians and medical students, has become the first major national medical journal to speak out in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

An editorial in the March 1969 issue entitled: “Pot: Hobby not Habit,” it was suggested that unless new medical evidence is unearthed to prove any ill effects from marijuana, then “marijuana should enjoy the same status as alcohol.”

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As a result of a pre-Christmas anti-war march the brass at Selfridge Air Force Base are trying to bring down a cloak of repression on GI activists.

The Detroit Coalition to End the War Now sponsored a candle light march on the evening of Dec. 23 in support of anti-war GIs and for an end to the war. Approximately 1,200 persons joined the parade in a driving snow storm that soon left almost all the participants with extinguished candles.

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MADISON, Wisc. (LNS)—Students and non-students in the University of Wisconsin community, responding to publicity which asked “Why don’t you do it in the road?”, found out why when they turned up for a block party on Saturday, May 3.

They were driven off the streets by police with clubs and gas in what led to three nights of fighting between cops and at least 1,000 young people on the tree-lined Madison streets.

...

a review of

Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America by Virginia Delohn Anderson. Oxford University Press, 2006, 336 pp., $19.95

Civilization is a lie. Its images mask violence and its logic is that of genocide. Even the most banal scene of grazing cattle, while seemingly serene, portrays a weapon of war.

...

The hunter/gatherer school of anarcho-anthropology and the anarchist critique of Civilization (e.g., Perlman’s Leviathan) proposed the domestication of plants and animals as the first step toward separation and ultimately the State.

Sahlins posed the question: why would any sane free hunter/gatherers voluntarily take up the shit-work of the “primitive agriculturist” (or, by extension, pastoralist)?—the erosion of leisure, the impoverished diet, etc.? Given his premises, this unsolved puzzle hints at coercion and deprivation. With hindsight we see that domestication leads to misery. We assume it began that way.

...

a review of

Shadow Work, Ivan Illich. Marion Boyers, Boston and London, 1981

“As progress and technology transform our way of life and our physical surroundings,” Lynne Clive writes [“Newspeak and the Impoverishment of Language,” FE #315, Winter, 1984], “they eat away at our language, enfeeble our spirit...” I would like to expand on this idea by making use of Ivan Illich’s insights discussed in his book Shadow Work, on language as one of the earliest areas of previous human competence—a cultural commons and focal point of shared meaning—to come under attack from church and state, and later from advancing technology and bureaucratic institutionalization. Illich argues that by undermining the “vernacular” domain in language, technics, and other areas of human activity, these forces of authority destroy self-sufficiency and freedom, making us all wards of the state and the disabling professional institutions.

...

All donations for Marie Mason should be sent to

Support Marie Mason,

c/o Fifth Estate,

POB 201016,

Ferndale MI 48220.

Checks should be made out to Support Marie Mason.

Funds are used for her prison expenditures, plus support material such as t-shirts, leaflets and brochures to publicize the injustice of Marie’s sentence, provide travel stipends, and expenses for her pro bono lawyers.

...

This issue is dated Spring 2011 and follows our Summer 2010 number. It was intended for publication on November 1, but the tragic death of our friend and comrade, Don LaCoss, who was editing the issue, is the reason for our interruption in publishing.

Death’s scythe slices always cruelly, often unexpectedly, sweeping away those we cherish and need without regard for those left in grief. So it was with Don LaCoss, who succumbed on January 31 to complications from a respiratory illness he had been fighting for months.

...

By working in secretarial jobs, at Ys, day care centers, and in other experimental ways, SDS hopes to do practical work in organizing women.

Besides these organizing collectives, the project will engage in intensive political study and research into Detroit. By the end of the summer the project will have trained a large number of people who can become sophisticated political cadre for -the organizing of a youth movement throughout Michigan as well as Detroit.

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a review of

Don’t Look Up, Dir: Adam McKay, 2021

Planet of the Humans Dir: Jeff Gibbs 2019

“You guys. The truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.”

—Kate Dibiasky (fictional astronomer in Don’t Look Up)

So, what to make of an unusual film about a streaking, earth-bound comet colliding with present-day distractions? Does it shake up the entertainment cycle only to disappear like a fairly close asteroid missing our orbital self-importance?

...

(from www.zmag.org)

Note: As we go to press, the jury in the “Judi Bari vs. the FBI” case is still deliberating. During the rally discussed below, the lawyers for the defendants filed a motion to dismiss the case because the protest might unfairly influence jurors against the FBI. The judge, however, rejected this motion. By the time you read this, the case has probably been decided. Visit judibari.org for the latest. Photo by unruLEE.

...

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.

...

Don’t Vote—Piss in the Voting Booth

(back cover)

Another election, another opportunity to let someone else determine our lives. In modern capitalist society, the election of representatives has become an integral part of the general process of self-denial and self-repression standing at the center of modern life. It has become a prohibition to the real possibilities for self-realization. At root in bourgeois society—occurring fundamentally in creative human activity, in labor—is the phenomenon of alienation, an active process whereby human life and energy become crystallized in objects and institutions divorced from their creators and the creators become mere objects alien to themselves and available to be manipulated, dominated, controlled. This process is reproduced in the general life of bourgeois society and finds its political expression in electoral politics, in so-called “representative democracy”. Through the practice of voting we alienate the possibility for defining and administering our own lives by delivering this function to someone else. Electoral politics is an obstacle to both. And so we conclude that voting will get us nowhere. Don’t vote for reactionaries, don’t vote for liberals. They are all committed to the present state of affairs. Don’t vote for members of so-called Socialist or Communist Parties. They are charlatans incapable of a liberated vision of life. Don’t vote for fools, don’t vote for wisemen. Don’t vote for anyone. We can do it ourselves.

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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Reprinted from the San Francisco Express-Times

San Francisco—The American Medical Association’s report on the dangers of marijuana poses the issue in the lingo of narcotics police, not in scientific or humanitarian language, according to Dr. Joel Fort.

Moreover, the media made a bad report worse by paying so little attention to its constructive recommendations the lifting of criminal penalties against occasional users, and the loosening of federal controls restricting research on marijuana.

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Local folk singers David and Roselyn are the focal point of a campaign to raise $6,000 by August 15. David and Roselyn, who provided the music for Tom and Kate’s wedding and played at their reception (see last issue, FE #58, July 18–31, 1968) were from Houston, Texas. The trial for the inter-racial couple will be in Houston on August 16, and they are without money for a lawyer.

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The misanthropic and dystopian speculative-fiction writer J.G. Ballard once mused that the two most important inventions of the Twentieth Century were the aircraft ejection seat and the birth-control pill.

He never explained what he meant by this, but I suspect that he was pointing out how technologies of escape have profoundly shaped the direction of this civilization’s history. Both devices are used to limit the extent of the physical repercussions inherent in certain kinds of risky behavior--they’re safety nets developed in the last century that let people get away with taking big, stupid chances, whether it is piloting a fighter plane deep into enemy territory or falling into bed with someone of the opposite sex who you never want to see again.

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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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The anti-napalm protest scheduled in Midland, Mich., national headquarters of Dow Chemical Corp., for Aug. 7 and 8 will include participants from all across Michigan and northern Ohio and parts of Canada. The region wide action has been called by VOICE, the University of Michigan chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. The demonstration planned in New York on Hiroshima Day, Aug. 6, by the 5^th Avenue Peace Parade Committee, will culminate in a rally in front of the Dow Chemical offices at Rockefeller Plaza. Dow is a major supplier of napalm to the government and has been responsible for developing napalm-B, a deadlier variety. (“Napalm has been used to bomb Vietnamese villages during the war. The jelly-like substance sticks to whatever it touches and burns with such heat that all oxygen in the immediate area is quickly exhausted” (N.Y. Times, May 29, 1966). Protests have been held at napalm plants in Torrance, California, and Redwood City, California. A nationwide boycott of Dow’s domestic products is also being organized. The new kind of napalm which Dow has developed contains 50% polystyrene, which Dow makes. CHEM. & ENG. NEWS recently reported that, “Predictions of future use of polystyrene in napalm-B now are running as high as 25 million pounds a month.” This is a 50% increase in the production of polystyrene, a fact which has led to the building of new plants. Dow has also raised the price of its product. So that it is no surprise when it is reported that sales and profits for Dow Chemical “were higher than in any quarter of any prior year. (Det. News, July 21, 1966).

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A mass demonstration is being staged to confront those who reap rich rewards from burned villages, crops and people, namely the stockholders of Dow Chemical.

They are meeting May 8^th in the home of napalm, Midland, Michigan. (Isn’t it delightful that Michigan is blessed with such a proliferation of peace-keeping outfits such as Cadillac Gauge, General Motors and Dow. Perhaps next year’s plates should read “Munitions Wonderland”).

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Set in the red light district of Athens, Greece in the late 1980s, Cara Hoffman’s cult classic novel, Nike, is about getting by at the periphery. It chronicles the lives of a group of young expatriates from a global culture of war.

In this scene Maya Brennan, who has been raised on military bases throughout the US, and has sold her passport to finance her travels, uses the cultural capital of her upbringing to get the document re-issued. NIKE reveals a world where freelance military contractors, small-time traffickers, and refugees from the superficial materialism of the Reagan/Bush era surf undetected on the crest of a wave that was about to break in an era of perpetual military engagement.

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Eldridge Cleaver has a rap about how immigration screwed up the unity of the American working class. How the English immigrants came and kicked the Indians off the land and then had to import black people to do the work, so that the Indians and blacks were always at the bottom of the heap. And then how later the Germans, French, Polish, Italians and Irish made the scene, each group starting at the bottom of the white job market and clawing its way up, only when the next immigrant group arrived and was forced into the shittiest jobs.

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Atlanta—On Saturday, August 12, a crowd of 175 supporters and newsmen gathered at Atlanta’s Piedmont Park to watch 25 Atlanta students and workers take off and burn their Levi pants.

The “burn-in,” sponsored by the Southern Labor Action Movement (SLAM), marked the kickoff of a nation-wide boycott of all Levi Straus products. The boycott is being organized in support of the 400 workers now on strike at Levi Straus’ Blue Ridge, Georgia plant.

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The Fifth Estate talked recently with Dr. Abram Hoffer, Director of Psychiatric Research at University Hospital, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Dr. Hoffer was one of the first legitimate scientists to become involved in research with the controversial drug LSD. In hopes of cutting through the hysteria currently clouding the use of the drug, The Fifth Estate discussed the problem, its origins and the prospects for the future with Dr. Hoffer.

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Burning draft cards in NYC 1967

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

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

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

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Demonstrators on the steps of the “Defense” Dept. during the March 22, 1980 Washington DC rally against the draft and war.

When bullet-headed Selective Service Director Bernard D. Rostker looked sternly into the TV cameras last July and predicted that all but 2% of the nation’s 19- and 20-year-old men would comply with the scheduled draft registration his self-confidence was chilling. It was easy to believe that a generation of youth untouched by the protests of the ’60’s and ’70’s and raised on the Fonz and skateboards would march dutifully off to their local Post Office to become willing parts of the state military machine.

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The draft law (Universal Military Service and Training Act) will expire in July of this year. Because this country is supposedly run democratically, there will be debate on the renewal of the bill in Congress. Because there is a war being waged in Viet Nam, the flow of men to Southeast Asia will not be hampered.

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More than a thousand people opposed to the draft met here in Detroit the weekend of February 12 to 15 at a conference called as a planning and organizing session by the National Committee Against Registration and the Draft (NCARD). The entire conference, from the Friday night pep rally at which a bevy of socialist and liberal politicians and labor bureaucrats spoke, to the workshops, and plenary sessions characterized by leftist block voting, caucuses and maneuvering, produced an eerie sensation of traveling back into the 1960s to one of the Student Mobilization conferences of that era. Every little political group, from the “support Albania” political bizarros to the laissez faire “student libertarians,” maintained a literature table in one salon which appeared to be a sort of political shopping mall, and one had to shoo away the newspaper salesmen like flies,

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

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

...

Each in its own way, the Draft Resistance Committee and the Highland Park Police Department both celebrated Anti-Draft Week, a week of intensive protest against the Vietnam war and the Selective Service System.

The new Detroit draft resistance movement attempted to communicate to the public through any means possible the discontent and resentment of young men being drafted to die in somebody else’s war in Vietnam.

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Thirty-five people from the DCEWV picketed at the Detroit Stock Exchange, Thursday, May 19, protesting the fact that the war in Vietnam, although in the interest of certain American corporations making skyrocket profits from war production, benefits neither the Vietnamese people nor the GIs who are sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed.

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[two_third padding=“0 20px 0 0”]The reinstitution of the military draft is practically a foregone conclusion according to many observers. All that is needed is the official go-ahead from Congress to set the wheels in motion.

The October 1982 government exercise dubbed “Operation Proud Saber” proved that all is in a state of readiness. Draft boards have been trained and are ready to open; rules and regulations are up to date; and military reservists are ready to serve as temporary staff at induction centers across the country. The Selective Service System (SS) awaits only Congressional approval to begin calling up young men.

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An ad in the July 15–30 Fifth Estate calling for unknown playwrights and aspiring actors to help rejuvenate the American stage has blossomed into the Detroit Drama Workshop. First performance... two original one-act plays—Joan Feret’s “The Nightmare” and Sam Cohen’s “The Library Room.” Dates are September 14, 15, 16 and 21, 22, 23 at 616 West Hancock.

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a review of

The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition by William C. Anderson, Saidiya Hartman (Foreword), Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (Afterword). AK Press 2021

As a Black diasporic female academic and activist, it isn’t so easy to encounter the intersectionality of the struggles I encounter reflected in many academic or anarchist discussions.

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Dear Dr. Hypocrisy,

My boyfriend just got over a “dose” of Trotskyism. He says he is “safe” to begin relations again, but I’m worried. What do you think?

Livonia Libertarian

I get lots of letters like this and it never ceases to amaze me how ignorant many people are of the dangers of social diseases.

...

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

Dear Dr. Schoenfeld,

A couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I got loaded and were making love. She told me that she wanted to show me something new that would be a real thrill to me. She said that one of her old boy friends liked to have her do it to him often, so without knowing what it was, I agreed to let her try it.

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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: Can long continued use of spray deodorants cause cancer of the armpits?

ANSWER: At first, I thought your letter was a put-on. In fact, that might have been your intention but, nevertheless, you raise an interesting question. Certainly there has been no epidemic of cancer of the axilla or armpit. But spray deodorants have not been in use for very long. Cigarette smoking causes cancer of the lungs but it takes about 20 years for it to develop. We don’t yet have 20 years experience with spray deodorants.

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

arf! arf!

QUESTION: My wife and I think it might be interesting for her to have intercourse, perhaps regularly, with a German Shepherd dog. We have not experimented, however, because we are afraid of weird diseases that we might get. What’s the deal?

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

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following column will be a regular Fifth Estate feature. It is published regularly in our sister Underground Press Syndicate paper, The Berkeley Barb. Dr. Schoenfeld is a legitimate medical doctor and all of the questions he answers are authentic ones sent to him by readers of the UPS papers that syndicate his column. Your questions are welcome and may be sent to Dr. Schoenfeld at the Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan.

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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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A July 13, 2012 New York Times article, “That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker,” by Peter Maass, suggests that we should consider smartphones, computers, and other connected devices as tracking machines rather than appliances of personal convenience.

The manufacturers of these now ubiquitous gadgets claim that aggregating data about individuals favors the consumer, so when you visit a web page, it might display ads relevant to your tastes and needs. But it’s widely speculated that far more sinister use is made of this information--that the government enjoys a cozy relationship with the private data gatherers, that information can and will be used against us, and/ or to the advantage of the military-industrial complex.

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The recent clamor by employers for mandatory drug testing of workers threatens to add yet another humiliating dimension to wage labor. Both private and governmental concerns have expressed strong support for the idea, and it was recently given a boost by a report from the President’s Commission on Organized Crime which recommended a national program which would subject most working Americans to urinalysis tests.

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Ron March, DRUM leader, addresses workers outside of Dodge Main. Photo: G. Simmons.

A group of militant black workers have begun to organize at a Detroit auto plant and have thrown both the union and the company into a near panic. It is called the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and is located at the Hamtramck Assembly plant, also known as Dodge Main.

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NEW YORK — Melvin L. Wulf, an ACLU Legal Director has announced that a brief was filed on August 18 challenging the right of US Attorney General Katzenbach to force the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs to register with the Subversive Activities Control Board as a “Communist-front organization” under the 1950 Subversive Activities Control Act.

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On Thursday, January 23, 1969, the Metropolitan Detroit Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union will present a film, “The Seasons Change,” and a panel discussion on the events which occurred in Chicago during the Democratic Party Convention.

“The Seasons Change” is a one-hour film in response to the City of Chicago and Mayor Daley’s “What Trees Do They Plant?”, which was carried on many TV stations some months ago.

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reviewed in this article

The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet by Lutz Dammbeck

Other Cinema, San Francisco, 2003

www.othercinemadvd.com/net.html

“Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

--Werner Herzog, filmmaker.

“Truth is the invention of a liar.”

--Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician.

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Earth Day supplement page 1

If there was ever a need for an “Earth Day,” “Earth Week,” or “Earth Year” “to get people thinking creatively about the problems we now confront, and looking for new ways to tackle them,” in the words of Earth Day 1970 organizer (and Earth Day 1990 CEO) Denis Hayes, now is certainly the time.

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If there was ever a need for an “Earth Day,” “Earth Week,” or “Earth Year” “to get people thinking creatively about the problems we now confront, and looking for new ways to tackle them,” in the words of Earth Day 1970 organizer (and Earth Day 1990™ CEO) Denis Hayes; now is certainly the time.

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Fifth Estate Note: In “Earth Culture-Earth Diet” author William H. Koethke chronicles the life and culture of the inhabitants along New Mexico’s San Francisco River watershed over a millennium up to the present time. At the time he wrote the article William lived in the area described, but has since become a member of the consensus community of Breitenbush Hot Springs in Detroit, Oregon. He recently was arrested for blockading logging crews trying to cut the last remnant of undamaged old growth forest near his community.

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Fifth Estate note: The 12^th annual Earth First! Round River Rendezvous (RRR) was held in Colorado’s San Juan National Forest, June 28-July 5, with a direct action against an Amoco Corp. facility immediately after it.

Lone Wolf Circles, a long-time EF! activist, contributes the following report of the RRR and his impressions of it.

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Wow! I thought, look at all that color! Can it really be the Earth First! Journal? They pulled out all the stops creating this collage of Earth First! art, poetry, history and personal reminiscences of radical eco-warriors over the past 40 years!

It’s been a long while since there’s been an issue of the Journal chronicling the actions and campaigns of what the powers-that-be love to label eco-terrorism, but so many others see simply as a fight to save life on Earth!

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Earth First! is dead! Long live Earth First!

The irreconcilable differences within the dispute-plagued, radical environmental group finally led to what one of its founders, Dave Foreman, who is often at the center of the controversies, has long called for—a “no-fault divorce.” Although there is much behind-the-scenes acrimony among the leading figures on all sides, the public stance has been that each should go in peace and continue defending the environment in their own way.

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a review of

Earth House Hold by Gary Snyder, New Directions Paperback, 143 pp., $1.95

Liberation News Service — Gary Snyder spoke at a Berkeley teach-in on ecology and politics recently. It was the end of a long afternoon, at the end of two very long weeks, and most of the students had gone on about their business, but those who stayed found their poet.

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Note: The Hog Farm is an apolitical commune which has set up shop in New Mexico. A few innovators who had been involved in People’s Park and Woodstock got together with the Hog Farm and kindred spirits and have recently come up with a groovy idea—why not stake out an “Earth People’s Park” in some vast wilderness territory, move in about 20,000 of the beautiful people, and live together in love and harmony, taking good care of each other and the natural environment. The Earth People’s Park developers are trying to collect $1 million to buy about 100,000 acres in New Mexico on which to settle their 20,000 people. Twenty thousand who are not Mexican, not Spanish-speaking, not Indian. Ecology-minded people really dig the idea. Those who can’t stand the rat-race of city life, those who feel they’ve struggled long enough and want to drop out, those who feel they could somehow build a better life away from the repression of the cities, groove on the idea. The Governor of New Mexico, reassured that the Earth People plan to “obey all the laws of the state,” grooves on the idea. The Chicano and Latino and Indian people of New Mexico don’t groove on the idea at all. The following article is from El Grito del Norte, the Chicano paper that comes out of Espanola, N.M. It explains the position of the people who already live on the land that the Earth People want to buy. Earth People’s Park has a mailing address at 1230 Grant Ave., Box 313, San Francisco, Calif 94113, where they expect to receive donations. People might want to write to them to tell them what they think of the idea of setting up their “liberated zone” in an area already brutally “liberated” from its original inhabitants. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ The basic message is: PLEASE DON’T COME! At least not now. Stop and think about a few things that you may not have heard about or thought about. Think about the fact that, much as you reject your middle class Anglo society and its values, you are still seen here as gringos. Anglos. Think about the 120-year old struggle by Chicanos and the even older struggle by Indians to get back millions of acres of land stolen from them by Anglo ranchers with their Anglo lawyer buddies. Think about what it means for a new influx of Anglos—no matter how different their purpose from those others—to come in and buy up land that the local people feel to be theirs and cannot afford to buy themselves. Think about the fact that a real estate agent in Taos reports having sold almost $500,000 worth of land to longhairs. Think, on the other hand, about how people have sometimes reacted to hippies who get welfare payments and food stamps. Even though this takes nothing away from poor Raza people, they have felt resentment. It seems like a false identification, when the hippies involved can get money from home or a decent job if necessary. Think about the water problem. Longhairs usually come from the big city, not knowing that water is precious and often hard to get. They see a stream and wash their feet or dishes in it. Hey! That’s our drinking water. We are used to being abused, ignored, scorned—but that’s too much. Think about not only the land and water, but also the culture. Longhairs come, often deliberately unwashed and ungroomed in their rebellion against a sterile, hypocritical middle-class society. They don’t see that, for the Spanish-speaking people, cleanliness is a weapon of cultural self-defense against the oppressor. It is not a symbol of hypocrisy but part of the little pride and self-respect left to them, preciously guarded. So is conventional morality: the tight-knit family is everywhere a source of strength and unity against a hostile environment. Longhair values might sometimes be better—but they cannot be imposed. Especially when you are not joining the struggle of the people against the oppression which is the source of many Raza values. Think about the educational advantages that you often have—whether you wanted to have them or not. You can come here and start a little business, and you will often succeed where Raza people fail (or would not even try). “Son muy vivo.” Raza people say—the hippies are very bright. It is often true, it is not your “fault,” but it is important to remember how many millions of times the Anglo’s education and technology helped to make him a successful oppressor. If you say, “I’ve come to learn from the people,” excuse us if we sometimes remember: that’s what the Anglos said when they came to Sierra Nevada, learned from us how to mine—and then drove us out, even murdered us. Think about yourself, and just how clear you are about rejecting your own society’s values. Recent events here have shown that, when things get heavy, the longhairs sometimes act very much like the society they have fled. When a hippie woman in Taos was raped by a Chicano youth (because the Chicanos don’t understand free women and because they have been taught not to see hippies as human beings) the longhaired men called the cops—THE COPS! In another case, the longhair went out and shot the Chicano dead for supposedly raping “his” woman. And he got off, with a hung jury. Think about this: the longhair has opted out. Most of the Chicanos and Indians have no option—except revolution. People here cannot flee to islands of peace in their nation of horrors, this is their nation. It cannot be said too often that there is a long, hard political and economic struggle in these beautiful mountains, a struggle for land and justice. That struggle calls for fighters and supporters, not refugees with their own set of problems. You may see the scenery as relief from an oppressive America. We see a battleground against oppression. You (rightly) condemn your own society, your own culture strongly, but why not go where it is, and change it? And if your answer to that is “I can’t” or “I won’t” then think about what this answer implies—and whether you are then a person needed by people here, who can be useful here. Now, finally, please think about this: if you must come, wait a while. Wait until things cool off for longhairs, wait until the speed freaks have hopefully left, wait until the longhairs who are already here can develop a better climate—if they can. While you wait, READ and LEARN about this part of the country. Read what has been done to the people here by the white man; find out why they see Kit Carson and those other frontier types as murderers—not heroes; find out what the U.S. Forest Service and Smokey the Bear represent here. Don’t just put on long skirts and beads, and think you understand “the Indians;” too many rich tourist ladies do that too: Learn Spanish, learn about the every day culture, hang around some poor Spanish-speaking families. Learn about the tradition of courtesy, and why you must not presume on it. Learn some humility; look in yourself for unconscious arrogance and selfishness. Ask yourself, what do I know? Do you know how many Mexican-Americans there are in this country? Do you know that, in terms of education and jobs, they are worse off even than the blacks? Can you imagine what it is to speak one language as a child and then suddenly be dumped into a classroom where another is enforced on you—and fall behind in class, then be told you are stupid? Can you see the difference between being poor and being without money? Can you go to a demonstration by poor people and let them run it their way, and not impose your style as did some longhairs in Santa Fe recently? Can you show respect for another people’s culture and not be disrespectful simply because that’s the way you feel toward your own culture. Can you in other words, do some hard thinking? If you think, you won’t come. Not now. And when you come, come as a revolutionary.

Continuation of a review: The Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich, Ballantine, 223 pp., 95 cents paper.

[For Part I see “Earth Read-Out,” FE #86, August 21-September 3, 1969].

Ehrlich says: “A general answer to the question, ‘What needs to be done?’ is simple. We must rapidly bring the world population under control, reducing the growth rate to zero or making it go negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved. Simultaneously we must, at least temporarily, greatly increase our food production.

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a review of

The Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich, Ballantine, 223 pp., $.95, paper.

Ehrlich tries to reach a broad public in this book—but he’s not coy or campy.

He knows there’s no longer time for that.

His first words are: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs -embarked upon now...

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BERKELEY—About 2,000 persons attended—off and on—a six hour teach-in on “Ecology and Politics in America” May 28 at the U-C Berkeley campus.

The idea was to relate the People’s Park issue to broader questions of planetary survival.

A lot of language under a hot sun—but hopefully the thing will get made into a book to help people past the old politics and into a root politics of ecology.

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The idea of getting a lot of great musicians together to work as a back-up band for a featured artist on rock recordings is almost as old as rock itself.

On most of these, the back-up people were lucky to get mentioned conspicuously on the album jacket. But somewhere along the line people began to really care about who played what.

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It was probably something I had coming for a long time, but it really caught me by surprise when it happened. After all I don’t write these pieces because I get paid for them. I do it because it gets me some free records, gets me into the clubs for free, and a few other fringe benefits. Or so I thought.

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The on again-off again break up of the Red, White and Blues Band is On-again-off again. After the original guitarist-harpist quit, he was replaced by two people, a singer-harpist and a lead player who never really worked out.

It was announced that the group was breaking up for good, then that they would just replace the singer and the guitarist with two new people. But bigger things were in the air, and now, it seems, piano player Skip has left the group to join the Wilson Mower Pursuit.

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While local music business people continue to hype the Detroit scene as a major center of the pop world the scene itself continues to deteriorate and no one seems to care enough about it to do anything constructive.

Quite the contrary, the trend seems to be toward copying all the mistakes that have been made in every other “major music center” in order to exploit every last nickel to be had from the people.

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The thought of hearing any music played in Olympia Stadium is distressing. There is no acoustical ceiling on the arena and the bare rafters not only echo much of the sound, but also distort it or often trap it. Also, setting up the stage at one end of the narrow stadium makes it difficult, if not impossible to clearly see what’s going on.

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East Detroit High School was the scene Jan. 10 of a student sit-in protesting school policies there.

The action involved some 450 students and had demands ranging from dress and hair regulations and money wasted on “hall mothers” who patrol the school’s halls to a general demand for a student veto on school policies.

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(The Sunday News supplement)

Caption: The feet that once walked the Sea of Galilee here protrude from the mud, still showing the nail scars from the crucifixion.

JERUSALEM--UPI-- The Christian Faith lies in ruins today as the central myth of the world-wide religion--the Resurrection of Christ-- was shattered by the discovery of a 2,000 year-old corpse and its positive identification as that of Jesus of Nazareth.

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YPSILANTI, Feb. 20 — On this cold Thursday morning over 100 black students seized the administration building of Eastern Michigan University and chained themselves inside.

Students massing on Eastern Michigan campus to support demands of black students.

After a one hour occupation approximately 100 riot-equipped Washtenaw County sheriff’s deputies sawed their way into the occupied building and busted the “leaders” of the demonstration. A list of people to be arrested had been drawn up by the university president the night before.

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On Tuesday, May 3, 1966. Thomas L. Baker, a 16 year old black youth was shot and wounded while entering the office of the Afro-American Youth Movement (A.A.Y.M.), formerly known as the Adult Community Movement for Equality, at 9211 Kercheval on Detroit’s East Side.

This incident is only one of a long series of violent acts directed at the A.A.Y.M., as well as A.C.M.E. The A.A.Y.M. has been in existence for approximately three months. In that time, burning rags have been thrown through the rear office window, a bomb has been tossed through the front window, and a shotgun blast at the office in the middle of the night.

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a review of

Ukraine & the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict by Yuliya Yurchenko. Pluto Press, 2018

This book was written four years before Russia massively invaded Ukraine, but is in some ways even more relevant now.

Yurchenko is a democratic socialist, yet takes a more rigorous neither/nor position regarding Russia and the West than some figures associated with the Western anarchist left, such as Noam Chomsky.

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In 1943, Eastwood Amusement Park was literally the end of the line. Streetcars, packed with servicemen and factory workers, would cut sharply across Gratiot at Eight Mile, screech around a tight loop at the park’s entrance, and head back downtown.

Located in the then semi-rural town of East Detroit, Eastwood seemed removed from the bleak realities of the early Forties—if not from reality itself. In fact, even today, a list of the park’s attractions produces a mild sensory overload.

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“Tan me ‘ide when I’m dead, Fred,

“Tan me ‘ide when I’m dead.

“So we tanned ‘is ‘ide when ‘e died, Clyde,

“An’ that’s it ‘angin’ on the shed.”

—Bela Kun

They’re dropping like flies! A devil of a run of luck! First Paul, then “Smiley” Albino, Pope John Paul. Now another gets ready to float belly up: full name, Pope John Paul George and Ringo...And he’ll undoubtedly croak within a few weeks. And no warranty!

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If you read the South End, The Metro, The Detroit News or Free Press, you already know the story of “Easy Rider.” But that’s all you know.

Despite the number of reviews which claim to analyze or criticize “Easy Rider” as a movie, none have considered what its effect as a film is. It may be a good story, but from the reviews, it’s hard to tell whether “Easy Rider” is a good movie.

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After talking about it for a long time, there finally is someplace to go on Sunday Mornings, someplace to pick up the Times and read it over coffee and danish.

Your own Eat It girl is opening Alvin’s Finer Delicatessen (Cass at the expressway) on Sundays. We started a few weeks ago with danishes and donuts, my mother’s homemade apple pan dowdy, and a special for the day, Sandy Feldheim’s cheese blintzes. We had a nice crowd and everyone seemed to encourage us.

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As a belated Mother’s Day present—a tribute to my mother (who said I was no lady for using the word “bullshit” in my last column).

Like other little girls, I learned to cook by getting in my mother’s way. You know how mothers are, giving menial tasks like watching the egg whites become meringue when what I really wanted to do was make a wedding cake.

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Having been publicly admonished by the editors for a lack of responsibility, I dutifully return to these pages, hanging my head and offering bagels, begging forgiveness (up the wall, Peter!).

Finals time usually finds me typing papers with little interest in cooking or column writing which is my excuse for a lack of responsibility.

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Open City has started to happen and I’m excited about it and glad to be involved in it. I’m working on the job co-op, hoping to influence the business world to hire freaks who really want to work but are more left of center in their commitments.

Why do we all have to lie so much when we apply for a job? Why do we have to promise to never miss a day and stay with the job forever when both sides know it’s so much bullshit? Part of the job of our committee is to try to get work that is meaningful, a job at which we can be ourselves: long hair, freaky clothes and whatever else we are. We hope to eventually extend beyond the menial, baby-sitting, window washing job set up that other freak communities have established.

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A big thanks to the Tennessee Ghost writer for socking it to you last issue.

And thank you to everyone concerned about my hand. It wasn’t a bad burn and I was fine the next day.

Sundays at Alvin’s continue to be a lot of fun for me and hopefully for everyone who comes there. My soc. class with Dr. Stein has taken to meeting informally at Alvin’s on Sundays as a few Monteith classes have done. It’s a fine place to study later in the afternoon (our hours are 11 to 5).

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As I write this time I’m recovering from a tonsillectomy and therefore haven’t done much cooking or eating.

Vernors ginger ale seems to have healing powers that only Detroiters are aware of. Vernors and milk is also my number one remedy for a morning-after thirst.

I’ve also had this yen for Chinese food for the past three days and can’t wait to swallow a big bite of chow mein or egg roll or sweet and sour pork.

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Talking-pre-holiday-pre-final-two-papers-due-blues. No feel for cooking; no money for eating out and Peter says get your column in.

Heat oil, brown pork on both sides, salt and pepper. Peel 5–6 onions, cut in slices and smother the pork. Pour in a little water, reduce the heat and simmer 20 minutes.

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By the time you read this I will have gotten through Christmas, but as I write I haven’t yet.

I sort of have a tradition which I sometimes wish I could stop. Anyway, I have this tree trimming party every year where everyone who comes for the first time must bring an ornament which somehow expresses the “real” them.

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I had a groovy Thanksgiving that I’d like to tell you about: Some of my friends asked me if I’d like to cook for about 30 people.

What I took on as a challenge turned out to be a great night of eating for over a hundred people. Charlie Auringer, Myron Green, Steve Swainson, Eric Morrice, and Barry Kramer all live and work out of a huge studio loft on Cass which easily accommodated our friends and guests.

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I made a delicious beef stew the other day, a real one pot delight, filled with all kinds of vegetables and served over noodles. Pick up on it.

The meat to use in a beef stew is usually packaged as “stewing beef.” Actually it is sirloin tip or top round steak. Buy it when it’s called stew beef because it usually costs less and is easier to cut into cubes.

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butter

medium onion

few pieces garlic

2 oz. salt pork (few pieces cut up bacon will do)

2 to 3 lbs. frying chicken

1 sm. can tomato sauce

seasoning: pinches of parsley, rosemary, oregano and basil (or a couple teaspoons Italian seasoning which is all of the above in a more expensive bottle).

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