Full list of texts
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Bulldozers for all of Michigan? This was the fear of liberal delegates to the recent Democratic state convention in Grand Rapids as Patti Knox, wife of “Bulldozin’ Bob” Knox—Detroit Housing Director, was elected vice-chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party.
The Cavanagh “Irish Mafia” was in full evidence on behalf of the candidacy of Mrs. Knox as the “old guard” Democratic leadership of Staebler, Williams, and Scholle left open a big vacuum into which the well-oiled “Jerry-boys” could easily move.
May 1, 2025 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Here’s the political line-up for 1967, so far: There will definitely be a special election in the City of Detroit, and probably the rest of Wayne County, in November. The primary will be held either in August or September.
One of the most interesting races will be for two Detroit Common Council vacancies. Possible candidates are: Walter Shamie, Mary Ball, Rev. James Chambers, State Rep. James Del Rio, Asst. Police Commissioner Hubert Locke, and State Sen. Coleman Young.
May 17, 2025 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Councilman Nicholas Hood’s recent “anti-crime” breakfast of Negro “leaders” may have been a lot more clever than one would think at first glance.
This writer’s first reaction was: What kind of crap is this—that, according to Hood, “Negroes should utilize the same energies devoted to the civil rights movement to the fight against crime.”
Mar 9, 2025 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Surprise “hero” of the recent narcotics bust—Recorder’s Court Judge Frank Schemanske. Lena Sinclair (John’s wife) and three others were going to be held a second night without being formally charged, pending a chemical analysis of the stuff seized in the raids. When Lena’s pregnant condition was pointed out to the judge, he called the Narcotics Bureau and ordered the prisoners’ immediate release without bond of any kind.
Apr 12, 2025 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
A “dark-horse,” William Cahalan, has been named new Wayne County Prosecutor to replace the evasive Sam Olsen, who captured a Recorder’s Court post last fall, and hopes are up that there will be a more liberal spirit in law enforcement.
Cahalan, another alumnus of the University of Detroit, appears to be another crony of Mayor Cavanagh—and that’s neither good nor bad in itself, except that it adds a little more fuel to the potent “Irish Mafia” political machine in Wayne County.
Nov 28, 2024 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Liberal Detroiters were recently mildly surprised and, perhaps, even a little bit shocked, by a recent picket line thrown by the West Central Organization (WCO) before a union hall where a victory” fund-raising dinner was being held for recently re-elected Councilman Mel Ravitz.
One prominent local progressive, George Crockett, Jr. refused to cross the line, even though he was a close personal friend of Ravitz.
Dec 26, 2022 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) had its long-awaited dinner at the Rackham Bldg. recently, only a few days after anti-war demonstrators had clashed with the warmakers and local gendarmes in the same locals.
I tend to think that the spontaneous outbreaks which resulted in 14 arrests probably had more effect (if anyone can have effect) in dramatizing opposition to the War in Vietnam than the ADA gathering of 500 $10.00 dinner-goers passively listening to ADA National Chairman John Kenneth Galbraith—in a setting which was essentially a reunion of the Democratic Party.
Jan 18, 2023 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Probably one of the dirtiest jobs in the world is being a police commissioner in a large American city.
Even the most enlightened and liberal person in the world would have a bad time presiding as a civilian director over what is essentially a military operation designed to physically, socially, and psychologically suppress urban Blacks and poor whites.
Dec 1, 2022 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Let’s have a few more words about Mel Ravitz (then, I hope to close this subject for a while).
Councilman Ravitz personifies, on a local level, the true “devil” to the Black community and to striving and alienated whites.
There is no question that Ravitz, a professor of sociology at Wayne State University, has made a substantial contribution to the community. In 1961, a lot of good people worked very hard to put him on the Common Council and his close election, with the simultaneous elevation of Jerry Cavanaugh to the Mayors’ chair, gave many hope for a “new day” in Detroit.
Dec 17, 2022 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Rep. John Conyers, Jr. cast, as he promised, the only dissenting vote in a House judiciary subcommittee against that idiotic, probably unconstitutional, law which would make it a Federal crime to burn, deface, etc. the American flag. (The “offense” is now only covered by individual state laws.)
He predicts that only about 23 congressmen will have the guts to vote against the bill when it hits the floor of the House.
Oct 22, 2022 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Let me predict this: Jerry Cavanagh is definitely on the way out! It may not come as a result of the current recall movement, but it will happen soon.
I don’t think that there’s a single reader of the FIFTH ESTATE who gives a damn about the Mayor’s sex life, but there are a hell of a lot of people in town who do care about his political, ethical, intellectual, and possible, financial corruption.
May 1, 2022 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Publisher Anthony Wierzbicki of the Detroit American is constantly explaining his extensive “crime” coverage. In a recent front-page editorial he stated: “We firmly believe that it is the duty of a newspaper to advise its readers of the truth—the entire truth. Then, and then only can the public make proper decisions and demand proper civic action.”
Nov 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Drums are rolling early and heavy in the Michigan Democratic Party’s forthcoming internal civil war with Detroit’s 37-year-old Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh pitted against just-retired Asst. Sec. of State for African Affairs and former governor, 55-year-old G. Mennen villiams.
Unfortunately, the campaign promises to avoid discussion of pressing current issues (e.g. the war in Vietnam) and seems likely to center on a silly and meaningless battle of the “young” vs. the “old.”
Sep 2, 2015 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
The rabid anti-Communist vultures are now having a field day. They are suddenly showing a concern for the people of Czechoslovakia which they never exhibited for the Blacks in Rhodesia and South Africa or the Orientals in Vietnam.
In the history of the world, words like “freedom” and “democracy” are usually only valuable as items of a propaganda machine. They are cute “means” necessary to unite or propel a people behind a national cause that is really much more dedicated to political and economic power.
Aug 15, 2015 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
One of the most noticeable things about the primary election this month was the unusually low turnout especially for a Presidential year. The excitement of a forthcoming national election contest generally creates among the electorate a greater interest in the traditional process and usually stimulates people to exercise their franchise more enthusiastically.
Jul 20, 2015 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
“Some people believe that all Negroes carry switchblade knives. Well, it’s not true.”
Thus Detroit’s local TV commentator Lou Gordon ‘continues his technique of cute rumour managing. He’s pretty smooth. He states the rumour first making sure that everyone hears it clearly then, after it has sunk in deeply among his gun-toting white viewers, he makes a mild renunciation of the rumour.
Nov 30, 2017 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
The Detroit Public Schools will receive $6,000,000 to squander in the next three years from the Federal government for a special project to “enrich” five inner-city-schools.
Among other things, they will increase the staffs in these five schools—but at a heavy price they won’t publicly admit: the reduction of personnel available to the rest of the city’s schools. That’s the tragedy of most “crash” programs; with only a limited amount of teachers to utilize, school boards are more interested in “showcases” for their national public relations image than they are in genuine overall improvement of their antiquated systems.
Jan 4, 2018 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
An interesting entry to the TV “talk show” circuit locally is “Haney’s People,” at 11:15 p.m., on Channel 7 (WXYZ-TV).
Host for the new show is Don Haney who is dark black in color, but not very black in philosophy. For instance, in discussion July 7 on bias in the mass media, Haney kept on insisting that TV had played an important role in magnifying the image (with a clear implication that this was detrimental to “good race relations”) of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown.
Jun 1, 2018 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Much attention in the community from now on will be focused on the primary election to be held Tuesday, August 6. Perhaps the largest effort will be that of the McCarthy for President Committee, together with the Michigan Conference for Concerned Democrats, to get their 2,000 candidates for precinct delegates in the Democratic party elected throughout the state. A substantial success in this campaign could effect some changes in the internal structure of the Democratic party, since there are only a total of 5,000 precincts in Michigan.
May 30, 2018 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Of the many comments made following the shooting of Sen. Kennedy, perhaps the most incisive was given by Sen. McCarthy:
“It is not enough in my judgment to say that this was the act of one deranged man, if that is the case. The nation, I think, bears too great a burden of guilt, really, for the kind of neglect which has allowed the disposition to grow here in one’s own land, in part a reflection of violence which we have visited upon the rest of the world, or at least one part of the world.” Sen. McCarthy was talking about the violence that America has been and is still inflicting in Vietnam.
Apr 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Are we in the midst of a revolution now? Or, are we on the verge of one? Can the revolution be comparatively bloodless, basically non-violent?
These are interesting questions we ask ourselves as summer approaches and its oppressive heat threatens to ignite this nation in the greatest internal turmoil since the Civil War.
Mar 29, 2018 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
If the once highly-touted, but now quite tarnished “War Against Poverty” has done nothing else, it has provided a new battleground for political bickering-among the poor themselves and among the middle-class citizens who think they’re trying to help the poor.
Probably the greatest boondoggle around here nowadays is the Wayne County Office of Economic Opportunity (WCOEO) program. Designed to serve the “poor” areas in Wayne County outside Detroit, it makes the Detroit poverty program look like a smashing success in contrast.
Mar 9, 2017 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
One of the biggest problems of “rebuilding Detroit” after the July 23 rebellion will be the attitudes and actions of the very powerful “white liberal” leadership in our community.
These paternalistic gentlemen have not, I can assure you, learned any significant lessons from the events of the past few weeks and are still insisting on keeping up with their meddling with their dirty paws in the growing determination of Black people to truly emancipate and govern themselves.
Mar 1, 2017 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
Well, the Detroit Teachers’ strike is over—and guess who got the royal screwing? About 175,000 black kids whose basic conditions of instruction were not improved more than a piddle.
The matriarchy of Union President Mare Ellen Riordan triumphed again. She and her Marygrove Mafia have succeeded in developing such tight control of that organization that it’s almost impossible to move without an approving glance from her.
Mar 31, 2017 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
One nice thing about public feuds between politicians is that it gives everybody a rare chance to see part of what’s going on inside governmental circles. We learn, that at least to some extent, many decisions are made on the basis of personal vanity, pride, and ego conflict—and not solely as the result of some impersonal “power structure” beyond the reach of our full comprehension or influence.
May 18, 2017 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
If there’s anything more disgusting than a person who has no guts, its a person who has half-guts.
For example, Rep. John Conyers, Jr. For the past several weeks I’ve been writing about the wonderful job he was doing in fighting passage of that horrible “flag-burning” bill.
I suggested to producers of the Lou Gordon TV show on Channel 50 that this would be an excellent topic for a debate. They agreed. Rep. Conyers agreed to appear at first, but when his opposition was going to be Richard Durant, the highly articulate ex-Birchite and present chairman of the 14th District GOP, Conyers welched.
Feb 12, 2017 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
The ridiculous bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to penalize flag-burners passed by a whopping majority (385 to 16) last week—but in their haste, the patriotic legislators forgot to include the specific term “burning” in their prohibition. They did ban mutilating, defacing, defiling or trampling the flag.
Jan 30, 2017 Read the whole text...
Sol Plafkin
Off Center
It couldn’t happen in Detroit!
That was the proud proclamation of our city’s leaders all summer long until that fateful morning of July 23. Detroit had supposedly been the nation’s leader among big cities in making civil rights progress.
That is, Detroit was tops in fake tokenism and self-deception. There was bragging that so many Black people here were in positions of prominence and relative wealth. But, obviously, these successful people only represented an infinitesimally small portion of the Black community—and even many of these middle-class oriented people, who still feel the brutal whip of discrimination, were quietly hoping for the summer revolt which finally exploded on one of the first hot Saturday nights in a relatively cool summer.
Feb 17, 2017 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Official Israeli Terrorism Continues
In recent months Israel has been dismaying even its closest imperialist allies with its policy of retaliation against southern Lebanon for a single act by a small group of Palestinian guerrillas. The Israeli assault on Palestinian and Lebanese civilian villages has left the world press filled with horror shots of dead women and children at the hands of U.S.-made Israeli planes in what has become the modern equivalent of the Nazi’s ten-for-one policy of retribution.
Jul 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Off the Pigs
Editors’ Note: The so-called “riot manual” described on the opposite page [FE #84, July 24-August 6, 1969] should be seen for what it is—a battle plan for the subjugation of the black community, demonstrators, and anyone who challenges the way this system is run. Its ruthlessness and cynicism should be ample evidence that the police are not an agency to protect the people, but rather to terrorize them.
May 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Tighe
Of Pet Shops & Prison Revolts
Captives Plot a Jail Break
a review of
Pets DC: Rise of the Pets by Ramon Dines and Kit Brixton. A.B.O. Comix, 2022
A.B.O. Comix describes themselves as “a collective of creators and activists who work to amplify the voices of LGBTQ prisoners through art. By working closely with prison abolitionist and queer advocacy organizations, we aim to keep queer prisoners connected to outside community and help them fight towards liberation.”
Dec 14, 2023 Read the whole text...
Marieke Bivar
Of Sports & Women’s Bodies
Book review
a review of
The Little Communist Who Never Smiled by Lola Lafon. Seven Stories Press, 2016, 320 pp. English translation from French by Nick Caistor
“Today, it is an older, wearier Nadia who raises her arms. She leans into a back walkover, but she falters and falls. “I am not a perfect 10 anymore,” Nadia says. “I can only try my best.”
—People Magazine, 1990 (she was 28)
Jan 11, 2018 Read the whole text...
Nathaniel Hong
Of the Book and the Deed
A Tribute to Stuart Christie
Stuart Christie, Scottish anarchist, who practiced both the propaganda of the deed and the book, died at age 74 on August 15, 2020. Farewell and thank you good comrade.
Stuart came of age and political awareness in Glasgow in the early 1960s. The arc of his early politics went from a prospective Protestant Orange Lodge member to the anti-nuclear war movement of the Committee of 100 to the Glasgow Federation of Anarchists by the time he was 16. He was drawn to anarchism because it “was a way of life rather than an abstract view of a remote future. It was not a theory, a philosophy, a ‘programme for life,’ nor yet a description of how individuals and society should one day be, but a whole new way of looking at the world we were in.... [It was] something I could measure myself in my actions right now.”
Jan 20, 2021 Read the whole text...
Bob Stark
Oh My
Rock and Roll
The Detroit area is getting desperately short of places for rock bands to play. Three months ago things looked really good with the Grande, the Hideouts, and the Crow’s Nests all doing well; the Eastown getting ready to open, and at least eight smaller clubs rumored to be opening by early summer.
But in the last month the prevailing winds seem to have shifted in the other direction. The Clawson Hideout was forced to close down because the city fathers and the Knights of Columbus (who own the hall) limited the capacity to 350, hardly enough to break even. The Crow’s Nest West has closed to remodel right at the start of the Summer.
Apr 23, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
‘Oh! What A Lovely War’
At Court Theatre
Detroit is going through a lot of changes. Plum Street has made the inner city a nice place to visit and the Grande Ballroom has made tripping out a routine. But the most important change is at 2555 Burns Avenue, home of the Court Players.
The Court Theatre is headed by Clyde Vinson, speech instructor at Wayne. His resident acting company consists of thirteen University students, most of whom are Detroiters. Their current production is Joan Littlewood’s OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR.
Nov 27, 2024 Read the whole text...
Nat Freeland
Old Angels Never Die
They Turn Digger
LA Free Press — First of all, please forget everything you’ve heard about the Diggers, because it’s mostly a bunch of crap.
To begin with, the Diggers are what happened when the Hell’s Angels met LSD and got turned off violence to psychedelic love.
The central cadre running the hippie hostels day by day is made up of guys with names like Motorcycle Richie, Tobacco, Little Wolf, Apache and Tiny.
Feb 11, 2017 Read the whole text...
Frank H. Joyce
Old Perspectives on Race at WSU
On October 19 to 21, Wayne State University will sponsor a conference titled “New Perspectives on Race and the City.” Featured speakers include G. Mennen Williams, Jerome P. Cavanagh, Hubert Locke, Roger Wilkins of the U.S. Justice Department, Community Relations Service and John Spiegal, head of the Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University.
Nov 24, 2022 Read the whole text...
Bill Higgs
Omnibus Crime Bill
Editor’s Note: On Thursday, June 6, the House gave final approval and sent to the President for his signature or veto, the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968, the effects of which may be on us for years.
Liberation News Service — Now a person can sit on his chair in his home and say, “I sure am enjoying this grass!” and be sent to federal prison for five years based on that statement—when and if the President signs the 109-page Omnibus Crime Bill. A local cop might have bugged the pot smoker’s house, on the tip of a member of a new style police private vigilante group which the new bill also provides for and would finance.
Apr 8, 2018 Read the whole text...
Brad Evans
On 5 pm
and being told
that a colleague
had committed suicide
earlier that day
What first greeted me
upon entering that room
were the sad, quiet faces
as we all sat around the table.
.
Thinking of her,
wondering why
and what happened
and some of it came out later.
.
But what was also on my thoughts
was finding out how management
had known about it all day long
as they readily pursued their disturbing calculation
Dec 28, 2018 Read the whole text...
Robcat
On a MOVE In Maine
Ramona Africa speaks in rural, small towns
“MOVE’s work is to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water, the soil. And, to put an end to the enslavement of life—people, animals, any form of Life.”
—MOVE Statement
I am driving south on Interstate-295 in a freezing April rain toward Portland, Maine. In the car with me are Ramona Africa and Fred Riley of the black liberation organization, MOVE. We pass an SUV that has slid off the highway into the ditch.
Sep 3, 2018 Read the whole text...
brush
On (anarchist) Education
(in a world of many worlds)
“Education passes on more than knowledge—it transmits the lore, beliefs, customs, values, rites, and ceremonies that shape a society and govern its functioning. In short, education transmits culture.”
—Randy Bass
We know what culture modern schools reproduce: Empire. Schools are prison-factories, churning out producer-consumers from alpha to epsilon, bastions of patriarchy. The institutionalized authority (as truth and discipline) of “teacher says”: the violent stewing chauvinism of clique and posse, the age-stratified, passive aggressive coercion to conformity. And of course, they are boot camps for capitalism, for learning to repress unmediated human desires (for love and play and learning) to work mindlessly (“for your own good”) under the pallid urging of those damned abstractions through which capital rationalizes life so that grades, with time, become money.
Jun 1, 2016 Read the whole text...
Don LaCoss
On Blasphemy and Imagination
Arab Surrealism Against Islam

--Malcolm de Chazal
In 1973, a small network of Arab students living in Paris, London, and Vienna founded the Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile. At the group’s core was Abdul Kader el-Janabi, Farid Lariby, Mohammed Awadh, and Maroine Dib; they re-oriented surrealist elements against the intense misery they saw rampant in the Middle East: despotic police-state politics, nationalism (particularly Ba’athism in Syria and Iraq), militarism, patriarchal oppression, neo-colonial European interference, grueling poverty, and suppressed imaginations.
Feb 13, 2014 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Once again
Editorial
“It seems all too frivolous to try listing the litany of atrocities visited upon the powerless by the powerful.”
—Editorial, the Fifth Estate, August 1, 1968
Tensions were running high in Inkster, an integrated suburb, on August 8 because of the closing of a teen center run by militant black youths.
Jul 20, 2015 Read the whole text...
Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
On Class & Solidarity
An introduction to economy & community
“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person and learns from the other. I have a lot to learn from other people.”
— Eduardo Galeano
The following economy and community section deals at least as much with our visions for different and possibly better realities as it does with our critique of the current and devastating situations within capitalist economic relations. However, we can and should note that the statistics concerning global wealth and poverty are staggering. The elite classes experience unprecedented luxuries while the rest of the world struggles. The working class slips into disastrous debt and the under-class teeters toward catastrophic hunger, disease, and poverty.
Oct 22, 2015 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
On Don LaCoss’s Passing
a tribute

One of Don’s last research projects was on the history of Egyptian surrealism, so it is fitting that his death was poetically heralded by a popular insurrection in the streets of Cairo.
As the founding manifesto of the 1973 Arab Surrealist Movement in Exile exclaimed as if in anticipation of the possibilities opened up by recent events in Tunisia and Egypt: “We call upon individuals and the masses to unleash their instincts against all forms of repression, including the repressive ‘reason’ of the bourgeois order. We poison the intellectual atmosphere with the elixir of the imagination, so that the poet will realize himself in realizing the historical transformation of poetry. We liberate language from the prisons and stock markets of capitalist confusion.”
Dec 24, 2013 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On (don’t spell it backwards) Anarchist Organization
FE Note: There continues to be a sometimes rancorous debate within the anarchist movement about how best to combat the system. What follows is meant to be critical but comradely. We in no way doubt the spirit of those we criticize in this article, only their judgment.
Unfortunately, even for a small number of those who espouse the ideas of anarchy, the modern form of organization (which both the left and the right employ) holds an allure as a seemingly efficient manner in which to confront the state and capitalism. However, when adopted by anarchists, the formal organizational mode has been no more successful than it has for leninists.
Nov 15, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
One Easy Way to Get Ahead
WASHINGTON, DC. (LNS)—An Army officer who sent out Christmas cards last year decorated with photos of stacks of Viet Cong killed by his regiment has been promoted, according to columnist Jack Anderson.
George Patton 3d has received a Brigadier General’s star. Last Christmas he sent his greetings out with a picture of him waving another war trophy—a polished Viet Cong skull, with a bullet hole above the left eye. The skull was a present from men in Patton’s 11th Armored Cavalry.
Jun 8, 2023 Read the whole text...
Ashanti Alston
One Journey into and out of the Anarchist...Black!
Anarchy as a journey in the human story has a long and crazy road. In fact, it is where the Human Story begins. It is the story of human life before the advent, the institutionalization of the Muthafuckas. (Eldridge Cleaverian definition, ha).
Increasingly, anthropologists, archeologists, etc., have been finding pieces to a fantastic set of puzzles. And notice that I used the plural! As they begin to lay these pieces down, pictures are forming of our social beginnings that will shock, surprise and amaze many. Most of us may even find them revolting because these pictures go so extremely contrary to all that we’ve been raised to believe about the stories of the human species on this planet.
Aug 18, 2017 Read the whole text...
William D. Buckingham
On Fascists & Microfascists
a review of
On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death by Jack Z. Bratich. Common Notions, 2022
97-year-old Irmgard Furchner does not fit the stereotype of a murderous fascist. The diminutive German woman was slumped over in a wheelchair, cane in hand, when she was sentenced in court last December for her part in the murder of over 10,000 people during World War II.
Jun 18, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On Getting the Fifth Estate
Do you have trouble getting the FIFTH ESTATE? You can find it at the Merit Book Center, 14365 Harper; Bookworld, Woodward at Warren; the news stand at Campus Martius and Woodward; Debs Hall, 3737 Woodward; Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 1101 W. Warren; Facing Reality Publishing Co., 14131 Woodward; Global Books, 4829 Woodward, upstairs; Mixed Media, 5704 Cass at Palmer; Mona’s Restaurant, John Lodge at Forest; Monroe Music, 18981 Livernois at 7 Mile Rd.; Paperbacks Unlimited; 14145 Woodward; Paramount News in E. Lansing; and Bob Marshall’s Books in Ann Arbor. We need more distributors. Know of any stores that would carry the paper?
Aug 30, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On Getting The Fifth Estate
Due to the incompetence of the Post Office bureaucracy the subscribers did not receive their FIFTH ESTATES until a week after they were mailed. This is a double drag since our office staff really busted their asses trying to see that the mailing got to the subscribers before the papers hit the streets. Well, have faith, God and the old P.O. willing you should have this in your paid subscriber’s hands the day after we get it back from the printers.
Mar 4, 2024 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On Gogol Boulevard
Short version
Numerous problems prevented a full version of our feature, On Gogol Boulevard, from appearing in this issue. Look for its return. In the meantime, important events continue to be played out in Ex-Eastern Bloc countries and the Third World. Contact OGB at 528 Fifth St., Brooklyn NY 11215 or on the web at flag.blackened.net/agony for updates. Items prepared by the Fifth Estate staff.
Feb 19, 2021 Read the whole text...
Neither East Nor West/NYC
On Gogol Boulevard
On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. A similar section also appears in Black Fist.
Jun 17, 2020 Read the whole text...
Neither East Nor West/NYC
On Gogol Boulevard
On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. Similar sections also appear in Anarchy and Amor y Rabia.
May 10, 2020 Read the whole text...
Neither East Nor West/NYC
On Gogol Boulevard
This section is produced for the Fifth Estate by Neither East Nor West; a New York City group linking alternative oppositions in the East and West, and printing news and documents unavailable in the corporate and “left” media. Our title refers to Moscow’s Gogol Boulevard, a favorite hangout of Soviet-era counterculture youth dissidents, artists, and peace and human rights activists.
Feb 6, 2016 Read the whole text...
Neither East Nor West/NYC
On Gogol Boulevard
On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts.
Jan 18, 2018 Read the whole text...
Neither East Nor West/NYC
On Gogol Boulevard
On Gogol Boulevard is produced for the Fifth Estate by New York City/Neither East Nor West, which links alternative oppositions in the East and West, and prints news and documents unavailable in the corporate or left media. OGB sometimes involves Third and Fourth World activists in these efforts. A similar section also appears in Black Fist.
Apr 9, 2016 Read the whole text...
Neither East Nor West/NYC
On Gogol Boulevard
For several issues of the Fifth Estate, On Gogol Boulevard (OGB) produced a two-page spread on former Eastern Bloc and Third World anti-authoritarian struggles. However, due to numerous glitches, we’re missing from the FE again except for these short items. But, by next issue we should be back. In the meantime, OGB is available on our website shared with other New York City anarchist groups: http://Flag.Blackened.net/agony.
Feb 18, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On Having Nothing to Say
The long delay between this issue and the last one published at the end of January resulted from our being confronted by a bout of cerebral paralysis which left us feeling empty of words and ideas. We mostly articulated this feeling to one another by stating rather aimlessly that perhaps “we no longer had anything to say,” which carried with it the vague suggestion that maybe we should even close up shop.
Sep 15, 2018 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On Having Nothing to Say
reprinted from FE #297, April 18, 1979
The long delay between this issue and the last resulted from a bout of cerebral paralysis which left us feeling empty of words and ideas. We mostly articulated this feeling to one another by stating rather aimlessly that perhaps “we no longer had anything to say,” which carried with it the vague suggestion that maybe we should even close up shop.
Feb 21, 2014 Read the whole text...
Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
On Having Something to Do
We tried dropping out, and we tried working in the factory. We tried teaching, and we tried going back to school. We tried organizing the workers, and we tried permitted protest marches. We tried passing leaflets to every passerby, and we tried wheatpasting every wall with provocative posters. We even tried nighttime guerrilla graffiti squads.
Mar 15, 2014 Read the whole text...
David Watson
On Keeping Our Critical Faculties
a response to an ultra-left critic
I wonder if anyone else feels the same nausea and despair I experience when reading missives like R. Tate’s [see in this issue “More Debate on the Balkans,” FE #360, Spring, 2003]. Apparently, such jumbled, simple-minded invective, with its breathless disregard for the requirement to present serious evidence to support an argument, is what now passes for debate, for reasoning, in the so-called anti-authoritarian milieu. Was it always like this? Do any of these people even bother to learn anything about a subject anymore before applying their one-size-fits-all template?
Jul 13, 2021 Read the whole text...
John Clark
On Living in the World
Revisiting Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home
Recently, the Anarchist Political Ecology Group (the APE Group) read and discussed Ursula Le Guin’s book Always Coming Home. Though it’s a work I often go back to, this was the first time I had read it cover to cover in about thirty-five years.
I first discovered Le Guin’s work when I read The Dispossessed in the mid-1970s. The book had a huge effect on the members of the anarchist group I was in at the time, the Black Pearl Mutual Aid and Pleasure Club in New Orleans.
Nov 10, 2021 Read the whole text...
Ron Sakolsky
Only a Beginning
Review
a review of
Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology. Edited by Allan Antliff. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2004. 352 pages. $25. Available from The Barn.
Left liberals in the United States laud Canada as a sort of parallel universe: a North American welfare state paradise where everyone has health care; foreign policy is about international peacekeeping; and a national propensity for politeness is translated into public discourse as civility. It’s a mythic place where anger doesn’t exist (except perhaps on the hockey ice), and anarchism is as genteel as a George Woodcock poem.
May 8, 2015 Read the whole text...
Eric Laursen
Only Change is Permanent
Critical theory is a bit like pornography, as a Supreme Court justice once said when asked to define the latter: “I know it when I see it.”
Critical theory can be defined pretty loosely as well. It’s the multitude of intellectual spin-offs from Marx that began to take flight roughly a hundred years ago, at about the time that Lenin and his acolytes thought they have codified what Orthodox Marxism was, forever.
May 21, 2021 Read the whole text...
Cap’n John Yossarian
On Mutiny Considered as One of the Fine Arts
Mutiny is such a potent threat to military organizations—and the States who use them avoid even mentioning the word. Instead, military commanders and civil authorities fall back on euphemism in order to avoid announcing the news that they most fear—during the First World War, for example, a major mutiny by French troops was mentioned in murmurs as “collective indiscipline”; while the war dragged on in Vietnam, the US Army reported increasing numbers of “battlefield refusals.”
Nov 19, 2017 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
On My Honor...
NEW YORK (LNS) — The Boy Scout movement has long been regarded as a paramilitary indoctrination course for Western Civilization’s children.
Now a Massachusetts autograph dealer is offering for sale a letter which confirms that view of the Scout movement. The letter, dated Oct. 16, 1928, was written by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. It is addressed to a friend and financial supporter of the organization.
Oct 21, 2023 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On Organization
Fifth Estate history
The question of whether to combine in organizations, associations, federations, etc., has become a subject of some debate and much interest. Many feel that the only obstacle to organization is the relative weakness of the small numbers of persons who identify with a libertarian perspective, while still others feel organizations in and of themselves are bureaucratic and are incapable of producing the desired goal.
Mar 7, 2016 Read the whole text...
E.B. Maple (Peter Werbe)
Ed Clark
On Organization
Two Reviews of The Camatte/Collu Pamphlet
Within the small circles that constitute the libertarian movement in the United States, the question of whether to combine in organizations, associations, federations, etc., has become a subject of some debate and much interest Many feel that the only obstacle to organization is the relative weakness of the small numbers of persons who identify with a libertarian perspective, while still others (probably a smaller number) feel organizations in and of themselves are bureaucratic and are incapable of producing the desired goal.
Sep 21, 2016 Read the whole text...
Ratticus
On “People’s Theatre”
Culture as Cannibalism
The stage is set, houselights go out, curtain opens and a poignant silence reigns as actors hit the stage. Always the audience looks at the skin; arms and legs, usually attractive faces. The audience licks its lips. Honest observation must concede that beyond the facade of cultural awareness the real reason mass audiences attend the theatre or cinema lurks the haunting spectacle of cannibalism.
Jan 7, 2020 Read the whole text...
E.B. Maple (Peter Werbe)
Rudy Perkins
On Poland and Power
Coordination & Electricity
Thanks again for running my article on Poland, and for E.B. Maple’s reply. (See FE #309, June 19, 1982, “The Collapse in Poland”) Maple seems a little over-anxious for a dispute on the questions raised, in some cases going out of his way to misinterpret what I say, and to ignore parts of the article in which I clearly distinguish the revolutionary movement from the organizations which speak for it, and from the capitalist state which cannot be reformed or seized. Still, there are several points on which we genuinely disagree.
Jun 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
Muswell Hillbillie
On Terrorism and Authoritarianism
“He who humbles himself wills to be exalted.”
—Nietzsche
I would like to present some thoughts and comments on terrorist organizations and activities in general and on the SLA and “The Last SLA Statement” in this context. My main intention is not to criticize the SLA as such, but to contribute to the discussion concerning what is to be done by those of us who fervently desire the transformation of the present “social order” into a free world.
Dec 26, 2017 Read the whole text...
anon.
On the Correct Handling of Nuclear Fallout upon the People
A message from the national steering committee of the U.S. China Peoples Friendship Association
U.S. Getting Radiation From China A-Blast
WASHINGTON — (AP) — Light radiation from a Chinese atomic test is sprinkling parts of the eastern United States, leading health officials in one state to warn residents to wash garden vegetables carefully before eating them.
Pennsylvania officials were first to report detection of the fallout from a Sept. 26 blast at Lop Nor in western China. Other areas reporting some radiation include New Jersey, southern Connecticut, Long Island, Delaware and South Carolina.
Aug 4, 2016 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
On the covers

I contribute my social commentary linocut images to the FE to add weight to the humanist argument against fear and power mongers taking over the world. The activities of large collective organizations like corporations and governments create a constant barrage of false information and phantoms to justify their controlling structures and systematic programmed removal of the earth’s natural resources that in truth are the outer body of all of us who are on this planet.
May 6, 2021 Read the whole text...
Russell Means
On The Future of the Earth
Related: see FE Staff introduction, “Against Civilization,” in this issue.
The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.
Jan 23, 2019 Read the whole text...
Fredy Perlman
On the Machine in the Garden
See also: “The Machine against the Garden” (author’s introduction) in this issue, FE #321, Indian Summer, 1985.
Your comments as well as the urgings of other friends stimulated me to read Leo Marx’s book The Machine in the Garden. I quickly recognized the reviewer of Hawthorne’s Secret and also the author of the Foreword to my Signet Classic edition of Hawthorne’s superb novel. But I do not regret reading the book. The central themes of Leo Marx’s book have for several years been among my main concerns, and the book’s range as well as the profundity of many of its observations impressed, provoked and disturbed me.
Jul 13, 2020 Read the whole text...
Bill Brown
On the Poverty of Student Life
The Little Pamphlet that Started a Revolution
a review of
On the Poverty of Student Life, Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, And a Modest Proposal for its Remedy: Members of the Situationist International and Students from Strasbourg. Edited by Mehdi El Hajoui and Anna O’Meara. Common Notions, 2022
Dec 10, 2022 Read the whole text...
David Watson
On the road to nowhere
Notes on the new nomadism
Looking to change my life, at the age of nineteen I decided to pack my belongings into a knapsack and hitch-hike to California. Two miraculous rides carried me through prairies, deserts and mountains into Los Angeles to a friend’s place at the edge of Hollywood. In those days, at least, California was considered the ultimate destination for every dream of freedom and opportunity, spiritual and economic.
Feb 14, 2016 Read the whole text...
Thaddeus Blanchett
On the sale of sex & bodies
The view from Rio de Janeiro
You don’t have to put on the red light
Those days are over
You don’t have to sell your body to the night
-- “Roxanne” (The Police)
Sting’s lyrics neatly frame how prostitution is often popularly conceived of, no less by anarchist abolitionists than by moralists and those in between.
Living and teaching in Rio de Janeiro for the last 15 years while doing anthropological research about female heterosexual prostitution has demonstrated to me what a deeply flawed description this is of sex work.
Sep 23, 2014 Read the whole text...
George L. Juroy
Stephen M. Raphael
On the Street? Know Your Rights
Pay attention.
Read this article carefully and then commit it to memory. It will save your enormous trouble for the rest of your life. Your authors—two attorneys -are about to advise you on how to deal with THEM: the fuzz. Never again will you run the risk of a knee in your left ball, unless it is your own.
Dec 20, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
“On This Cube Will I Build My Church”
EDITOR’S NOTE; Timothy Leary, high priest of consciousness expansion, spoke in East Lansing Nov. 17th. His talk was covered in our last issue by Michael Kindman, editor of THE PAPER, a sister Underground Press Syndicate publication [see Kill, Leary, Kill, FE # 20, December 15–31, 1966]. The following was written after Kindman and several others interviewed Leary after his speech to a Michigan State University audience.
Oct 7, 2024 Read the whole text...
Olchar E. Lindsann
Ontological anarchy and punk-inspired zine culture
Jason Rodgers’ rich discourse and presentation
a review of
Invisible Generation: Rants, Polemics, and Critical Theory Against the Planetary Work Machine by Jason Rodgers. Autonomedia, 2021
For many years, Jason Rodgers has been a motivating presence in a startlingly large number of anarchist zine projects and communities, including frequently in this magazine. Her work has been published in a great many collective contexts, but always singly and hard to find. In Invisible Generation, her diverse body of critical writing has finally been brought together.
Jun 12, 2022 Read the whole text...
Michael Albert
On Trashing & Movement Building
“Trashing had no positive effects”
This is a response to a post-Seattle debate troubling many folks regarding movement tactics. As a preface, it goes without saying, I hope, that we all understand that as far as violence is concerned, the violent parties in Seattle were first and foremost the President of the U.S., his entourage, the other major heads of state, the leadership of the WTO, etc. Poverty-inducing violence imposed with a pen trumps a brick breaking a window every time—not to mention that the former is to defend and enlarge injustice, while the latter is to fight it.
Nov 24, 2019 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City
Open City, Detroit’s service organization to the free community, has begun operation. So far most activity has centered around people calling in problems to the switchboard.
Although many of the calls regard minor services like telling callers who is at the Grande or where they can read material on LSD, many calls have been of a more serious nature.
Sep 25, 2021 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Free Clinic
Free medical attention for Detroit’s Free Community is now available at the Open City office, 4726 Third, every Monday evening from 6 until 8 pm.
Although this service has been in operation only a month the response has already been very encouraging. At this time plans are being considered to keep the service open three days a week and additional doctors and nurses have expressed an interest in Open City.
Feb 10, 2019 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Keeps Serving Community
A gala fund raising party for Open City’s summer campaign will be held on Friday, July 11 at Alvin’s Finer Deli on Cass at Palmer.
Admission will be $1 and the celebration will begin at 8 pm. Proceeds will go to the Open City Free Clinic and the new Open City General Store soon to open in the Warren Forest area.
Apr 14, 2019 Read the whole text...
David Gaynes
Open City Meeting
On Monday evening, February 20th, Alvin’s Delicatessen hosted the second “official” meeting of the OPEN CITY project.
After smoldering in the cauldrons of the finest minds in Detroit’s underground, OPEN CITY is being realized at a killer pace.
The primary objective of this meeting was to create committees around which people can be organized. This was accomplished in such an organized and (lo and behold) enjoyable manner as to make one wonder whether organizational meetings are worthy of the profound aversion which most people have for them.
Aug 19, 2021 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Opens
Several hundred people attended Open City’s first benefit held February 28 at Alvin’s Delicatessen.
The three hundred dollars collected at the door was used to purchase the community switchboard now in operation at the Open City office.
For the last few weeks Open City members have met in committees, rapped on telephones and have generally been putting their projects together. The most obvious result of all this has been the opening of the Open City office now located at 4726 Third, near Forest, 2nd Floor, office number 5.
Sep 3, 2021 Read the whole text...
Harvey Ovshinsky
Open City Progress
Open City’s first financial setback occurred April 1st when the Studio 1 benefit was canceled at the last minute. Bob Scott was supposed to receive enough backing to open his Optek Pharmacy at the old Studio location, but things back-rued and our April Fools benefit hit the dust.
Uncle Russ has come through for an Open City “Rites of Spring” benefit that will be held at the Grande on April 23. The celebration will begin at 7 p.m. and last only until 11 p.m.
May 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Open Letter To Judd Arnett & Lou Gordon
The Fifth Estate Staff Death Penalty for Newspaper Columnists
To: Judd Arnett, The Detroit Free Press
Lou Gordon, The Detroit News
Lift up a rock in Detroit these days—more correctly, in one of its outlying suburbs—and out will crawl a newspaper columnist.
Regarding your respective columns of August 25 in the Free Press and the News on the subject of street gang violence in the city: In general, when we have been forced to think about you at all, we’ve been inclined to think of you as just two more transparent apologists for the status quo. We’ve always felt it symptomatic of your distorted self-perceptions that you should think your banal and witless observations deserving of the least attention, and symptomatic of this sick society that it should pay you to make them public. We have thought of you, in other words, as fit only to be ignored.
Apr 29, 2016 Read the whole text...
Edward D’Angelo
Open Letter to Police Commissioner Spreen
Commissioner Spreen,
In regards to your public clearing of your fellow police officers for their actions at the Wallace rally at Cobo Hall, I would like to say a few words as a victim of police brutality that you say didn’t take place.
First of all, having suffered a broken leg and a sprained arm at the hands of your “law enforcement officers” and now of hearing your words of praise for the “fine work” of your police I can now have a better understanding of the reasons for the ghetto uprisings of two summers ago. When the work of your sadistic men in blue goes unchecked and even praised how do you think people should react? How would you react, Mr. Spreen?
May 21, 2022 Read the whole text...
Norman Solomon
Open Letter to the Disarmament Movement
Late 1985
Dear People:
North America’s disarmament movement has gone from momentum to defeat during the first half of the 1980s, but we have not heard much candor about the dimensions of the loss. Arms-race boosters see little reason to taunt floundering adversaries—who tend to be busy cheering for the disarmament team while steering clear of somber assessments. Increasingly, the anti-nuclear movement’s propaganda of the word is being outmatched by the nuclear establishment’s propaganda of the deed; disarmament advocates decry while thermonuclear advocates deploy.
Jul 3, 2020 Read the whole text...
Len Schafer
Open letter to the people
The Detroit community is getting together. Although militant demonstrations and spreading the movements’ rap are important functions, community people have initiated a number of programs needed to deal with the different levels of the People’s oppression.
To strengthen these programs, community organizations have gotten together to form the SERVE THE PEOPLE COALITION. STP was born out of an awareness of these groups that the common denominator of serving the People takes priority over minor political disagreements.
Jul 23, 2022 Read the whole text...
Fifth Estate Collective
Opera Company Finks Out
The May 28th performance of “Lysistrata and the War” at Community Arts Auditorium was permanently canceled, due in part to the war which the opera opposes: one of the leading male singers was drafted.
The people in charge of the production postponed the performance until June 14, to be held, with a new singer, in a room with much smaller seating capacity.
Apr 6, 2018 Read the whole text...
Valerie Morse
Operation 8: Terror Down Under
New Zealand government repression against Maori people and their supporters
Ka whawhai tonu matou. Ake! Ake! Ake!--“We will fight forever and ever and ever.”
-- Rewi Maniapoto, leader of the armed resistance against colonial settlement in New Zealand, at the Battle of Orakau, 1864
It is hard to imagine the reach of the United States if you have never lived outside of it. In New Zealand, it is pervasive and simultaneously invisible: ideas, culture, and laws are imported and imposed. Following 9/11, New Zealand (NZ) jumped to ratify its own version of the US Patriot Act.
Apr 22, 2013 Read the whole text...
Sunfrog (Andy “Sunfrog” Smith)
Operation Gender Blur
Book review
a review of
Bisexuality: A Reader and Sourcebook edited by Thomas Geller (available for $10.95 from Times Change Press c/o Publishers Services, Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948 or the FE Bookstore)
We are sometimes afraid of the risks which must be taken when we integrate discussions of sexuality and gender into the life of our activist community. It’s rather dangerous to try to define a “politically correct” sexuality for anti-authoritarians. The gay vs. straight or monogamy vs. non-monogamy discussions (and a huge list of other related discussions) should be most familiar to those of us whose lives, identified with communities of resistance, transcend (or defy) a purely political involvement. Discussions of gender and sexuality do have serious implications for our politics (or anti-politics).
Nov 21, 2019 Read the whole text...
anon.
Operation Intercept
MEXICO CITY (DF)—Mounting resentment against “Operation Intercept”—the U.S. effort to halt illegal drug traffic by thorough inspection of cars at border points has been voiced by border officials, business organizations and the Mexican press.
“Whoever dreamed up this witch hunt should have his head examined,” said Mexico City’s News. “By last night a million people had been hurt by it to net a handful of two-bit pushers.”
Jul 16, 2019 Read the whole text...
Liberation News Service
Operation Intercept Junked
LOS ANGELES (LNS)—Operation Intercept, billed as the biggest and best-publicized anti-narcotics campaign in history, has come to a close, according to officials in Washington—and with it closes a colorful and exciting chapter in the continuing story of America’s War on Dope.
Late in September, Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst sat down behind a mountain of kilo bricks of pot at a Los Angeles press conference and said, “this is war.” Two explanations were advanced by observers.
Aug 1, 2019 Read the whole text...
J. M. White
O (poem)
“A way that is laid out, is not the way.”
--Tao Te Ching
O
life is a journey
fraught with peril
the way is never clear
naive faith
and sarcastic doubt
circle aimlessly
resolving nothing
pay attention
your time is short
the way long
there are people watching television
while the house is on fire
Jan 25, 2014 Read the whole text...
Rui Preti
Opposing the Rise of the Far-right
Building Solidarity, Protecting Our Communities
These are anarchistic times—times in which increasing numbers of people are resisting the horrors of contemporary society by engaging in direct action without waiting for leaders to tell them what to do. So, it is no surprise that anarchists are once again at the center of fights against the capitalist system and the subjugation of the many to the will of the few.
Nov 7, 2017 Read the whole text...