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Much of primitivist theorist John Zerzan’s early work appeared in the Fifth Estate. His Cassandra-like predictions of imminent collapse of modern society began in 1976 with his FE article, “The Decline and Fall of Everything” [FE # 268, January, 1976]—a compendium of statistics of social dislocation.

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The Revolutionary Newspaper Conference held at Wayne State’s Lower DeRoy on April 12 was fairly successful. Over 70 persons registered and over 125 were in attendance throughout the day.

The morning session consisted of a panel on the function of the media in a revolutionary movement. On the panel were Nick Medvecky and James Tripp of the South End, Peter Werbe from this paper, Marty Glaberman from Speak Out, and Mike Honey from the Oakland Observer.

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It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of our friend and comrade, Fredy Perlman, who died while undergoing heart surgery in Detroit on July 26, 1985.

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“I’d rath

er face the uncertainty of opposing the war and going AWOL than face the certainty of being shipped and fighting in a war that I am against.

“I’m going to continue to speak up because I want to encourage other people to not go quietly.”

-- Carl Webb

The Pentagon says more than 5,500 soldiers have deserted since the war started in Iraq. From Iraq Veterans Against the War to Military Families Speak Out, a new anti-war movement finds its center in the disaffected and disillusioned ranks refusing to go. We offer solidarity to each one.

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This 1986 intervention by the Fifth Estate gang (under the banner of the Eat The Rich Gang, the Workers Revenge Party, and Citizens for Clean Urine) was carried out at an anti-Reagan demonstration at Detroit’s Cobo Arena. At the height of the “Just Say No to Drugs” hysteria, we brought a five-gallon bucket of what we said was our drug-free piss to present to the president. Arguing that the war on drugs was more important than other wars, our leaflet announced, “Let’s show our President we support his war on drugs! Bring him a sample of your urine to present to him at Cobo Hall to show you are drug free!”

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This article was originally written for our 30^th anniversary edition which appeared in 1996. It has been updated and expanded for this issue.

“The Fifth Estate supports the cause of revolution everywhere.”

-- FBI Report

This nine-word summary by the nation’s secret police, I suspect, serves adequately as an abbreviated history of this paper on the occasion of its 40^th anniversary. It is not due to an inflated sense of self-importance or radical nostalgia that people in the current Fifth Estate collective feel the story of our four decades of print should be recounted. Rather, it is because the history of this paper mirrored a period of large-scale rebellion throughout those years and continues today to give expression to a body of ideas which often finds little expression elsewhere.

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“Hey! What are you guys doing here? You hate unions!”

--A strike supporter

The labor militant who aimed this question at us was surprised, almost shocked, to see a group whom she considers anarchists critical of unions, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with striking Teamsters and newspaper reporters, squaring off against the cops at a suburban Detroit printing plant late one night last summer.

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It is said that the automobile created and brought life to the cities, but once again official history dangerously misrepresents and distorts the facts. In reality, it is responsible for the destruction of viable human communities and emblematic of death culture all over the world. The auto industry’s monopolistic power kept Detroit and the rest of the world from creating alternative urban environments and consciously built car cities and a car world--chopped up and destroyed by incredible expressway systems. Cities and a world for cars, not for people.

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Filled with debates and discussions, challenges and responses, clarification and indignation, a lively letters section is a crucial component in an anarchist journal. At times in our past, a huge portion of any given edition would be filled with long letters and responses to them.

Recently, however, the tradition has changed. The kind of debate once found on this letters’ page has not disappeared from the radical press, but it has relocated. Today, the more heated exchanges often take place on interactive websites and bulletin boards. Notably, the anarchist website Infoshop is known for its lively threads. Local indymedia sites are also places where debate takes place.

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Mark Rudd, National Secretary

Students for a Democratic Society

Brother Mark,

When SDS proposed having an action in Chicago October 11, focusing on anti- imperialism, we at The Fifth Estate felt that it had the potential of being a very heavy action and crucial to the growth of a revolutionary movement in this country.

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For us, here in inner-city Detroit, the crumbling of a “progress-oriented society” is very real and present. Its evidence--ragged empty shells of concrete-lined 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 throughout history by an increasingly urban society impelled by a limitless want of power brought to self-destruction.

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“Only movement can know movement.”

--Herakleitos

Someday, if anything is left of any of this, and this epoch’s fascination with historical records and documentation endures, I imagine some historian, grad student, or amateur archivist will write a text detailing, accurately or less than so, the vicissitudes of the small group of friends and comrades in Detroit and elsewhere who have produced the FE. This task will probably have to fall to such a person, I fear. My original attempt to write something that was both memoir and intellectual history led to arguments not only about how the history should be presented, but about what happened. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it was Rashomon all over again. Woe to anyone who tries to write the history of shared, intense activities.

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The traditional pomp and circumstance of the US January presidential inauguration disappeared amid chants and tear gas, when what was expected to be a grand victory march down Pennsylvania Avenue descended into an embarrassing spectacle for the elite and their “mandate.”

With all eyes on DC, people across the world were treated to televised parade images of wafting smoke and pepper spray, as police battled protesters directly on the inaugural motorcade route. At one point about a mile ahead of the presidential parade, the barricades on Pennsylvania Avenue were brought down by demonstrators. During a prolonged clash, protesters slowed the president’s motorcade and then brought it to a stand-still.

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Those events marked with an asterisk (* ) need Fifth Estate salesmen. If you want to earn some extra money, come down to our office.and pick up some papers.

FRI. APRIL 18

* EUGENE O’NEILL’S “Long Journey into the Night” in the Library Lecture Hall, Marygrove College. 7:30 p.m.

WSU CHAMBER SINGERS and CHAMBER ENSEMBLE, Wayne Community Arts Auditorium. 8:30 p.m.

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The evolution of the FE has been characterized by a willingness to reexamine all the assumptions of radical criticism, which has led it away from its earlier libertarian communist perspective toward a more critical analysis of the technological structure of civilization, and toward a criticism of the trajectory of Western civilization combined with a reappraisal of the indigenous world and the character of primitive or original communities. In this sense we are primitivists.

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Hakim Bey, whose writings frequently appear in these pages, is perhaps best known for his book the TAZ--temporary autonomous zone--that describes when normally domesticated space is liberated, if only for a moment, for festive and subversive moments of happiness.

In 1969, Leni Sinclair took this photo during a meeting at the Fifth Estate office at 1107 West Warren. Included are members of the White Panthers and the FE, yet we’re not sure what the meeting was about. Seated on the chair to the right is Diana Oughton of Motor City SDS, and later, the Weather Underground. Oughton died (with her comrades Terry Robbins and Ted Gold) on March 6, 1970 in a Greenwich Village townhouse, from an explosion likely caused by a bomb she was making.

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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.

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Gritty and grimy to the core, inner-city Detroit was a daily regimen of gravel and glass.

Detroit defines the impossibility and the necessity of Fifth Estate. To advocate a complete break from autocratic technotopia yet tolerate the harsh topography required by the automobile; to desire a primitive, communal, eclectic new world while daily enduring the insults of the old world; to publish an intelligent and irreverent response to the inadequacies and inanities of modern life, even as a desperate plea pitched to a small audience--to do all these things despite the distractions of driving and wage work amid the vast exurban expanses of a postmodern megatropolis requires a testy combination of courage, vision, and recklessness.

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The region known as Appalachia is one of the most beautiful and biologically diverse areas of this gorgeous little green-and-blue planet that we call home. The mountains and forests of Appalachia filter air and water, create soil, provide habitat and spiritual sanctuary, and generally make life possible and desirable. The beauty and diversity have been evolving here for eons.

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We look at them, their fat, sagging bellies, hard faces, tight lips, and we despair. It is logical in our eyes that they should support Wallace, for they are ugly and Wallace is ugly and we are beautiful and gentle and want to do nothing more than love everyone in the rising of each sun. We look at them and the conclusion is quickly reached that they will never change. They will always be filled with resentments, fears and hates. And having so concluded, we end our examination and analysis of them and prepare to wait for more propitious times.

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WASHINGTON, Oct. 29—The U.S. Treasury Department ordered the confiscation of perhaps the most unusual piece of campaign literature in use as the electoral farce drew near its completion.

Treasury agents broke into the New York Dick Gregory for President headquarters and seized all the Gregory campaign “dollar bills” they could find. Agents were reported scouring Chicago for the contraband material.

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NEW YORK (LNS) — A new press service especially for the growing network of high school underground papers has been established in New York City.

The High School Independent Press Service (HIPS) sends out news packets weekly to several hundred high school publications. HIPS works out of the LNS office at 160 Claremont Ave., New York, N.Y. 10027, phone: (212) 749–2200.

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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a review of

Poll Tax Rebellion by Danny Burns, Photographs by Mark Simmons, AK Press, Stirling, Scotland and Attack International, London, 202 pp.

Imagine the euphoria of making a government back down! Danny Burns’ vivid 200-page account of the popular and widespread rebellion against the British poll tax warms the heart.

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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.

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This slightly abridged Encyclopedie des Nuisances text first appeared as a pamphlet in July 1990. In French, the term “nuisance” denotes a serious affliction, not a mere annoyance. Thus, the authors refer to “the State as the ultimate nuisance,” and challenge the reader to look beyond the mere management of our distress.

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I was glad to see your discussion of my pamphlet, Misinformation and Manipulation: An Anarchist Critique of the Politics of AIDS, in your Spring 1992 issue (see “AIDS: Sex in the Safe: Repression & Treatment,” FE #339, Spring, 1992). However, I would like to comment on a few of the points raised in the article.

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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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(written on the 500^th anniversary of the European “discovery” of the Americas)

Oh that he had fallen off the edge of the world.

Oh that there had been an edge to fall off,

an edge the natives knew and revered

sharp and well-defined

a cutting edge

the edge the fearful sailors dreamed of

a never-ending point of no return.

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FE NOTE: The following exchange concerns an interview done by Ariel Salleh with German ecofeminist author-activist Maria Mies, titled “Patriarchy and Progress: A Critique of Technological Domination,” and printed in FE #338, Winter 1992.

In a generally excellent issue, FE #338, Winter 1992, the interview with Maria Mies was disturbing in a number of ways. I would like to focus here on one major problem, her distortion of Marx’s ideas, which enables her to present him as a patriarchal techno-fixated materialist with no moral principles (as if he were indistinguishable from your average capitalist).

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Some 200 local residents turned out to show their opposition to the Detroit incinerator and the ongoing destruction of planetary life systems in early June. Following a dormant phase, this demonstration did much to clear away a pall hanging over our community since the incinerator restarted in 1990 and the Gulf War damaged our spirit.

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WASHINGTON (LNS) Look out, Spiro, there’s an effete snob in your very midst!

Spiro T. Agnew had a very unpleasant surprise come Moratorium day. Agnew’s 14-year-old daughter, Kim (after Kim il Sung, famed leader of the Korean People’s Revolution) decided she wanted to do her part in the struggle.

Attending the National Cathedral School for Girls, young Kim wanted to put on a black armband and march in the anti-war procession held in Washington on Moratorium eve. Papa said no.

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Last December, Lawrence Summers the chief economist for the World Bank issued a surprisingly forthright memorandum to other senior World Bank staff in which he called for the distribution of toxic wastes and pollution away from the big industrialized nations and into relatively non-polluted areas of the world, as a means of rectifying the current toxic “imbalance.” “I’ve always thought,” Summers wrote, “that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”

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The calendar is prepared by Fifth Estate calendar girls Karen Kovac and Naomi Epel with cooperation from Detroit Adventure. Copy deadline is the 6^th and 22^nd of each month and should be sent to the Fifth Estate Calendar, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

wed. the 2^nd

DEMONSTRATION: LBJ in Detroit August 2^nd. All opposed to the war, demonstrate on August 2^nd at Cobo Hall, 7:30 p.m. For information call 832–5700 or 963–7711. 8/2.

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Ah rode all night, and all day long,

‘Cause ah’m in love with you.”

—old ballad

They wouldn’t let us into the bar. It was 2:30 a.m. and we wanted to get one last six pack of beer. We climbed on our scooters, pulled our “safety helmets” (as the state law now required), kicked over our hogs, and rolled out onto 14 Mile road. The light at Gratiot turned green, and with a healthy jerk of the right wrist, smoke and noise began to vomit forth from our high-rise pipes, as our rubber ground into the asphalt and the combined thirty-six hundred cubic centimeters of our three vintage Harley-Davidsons growled across Gratiot.

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“A lot of us have been smokin’ reefers and layin’ broads in the bushes at Belle Isle for the last twenty years...and nobody ever called that a Love-In.”

—anonymous

Greaser and Frat Rocker and Mod Lower-middle class versus upper-middle-class America.

The struggle for the supremacy of class values among the recent Young. Both begin more or less together, as Screamies. It is the Mod who characteristically veers off to become the Teeny-Bopper and eventually the Hippie.

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Sunday night a bunch of us were over at a friend’s house. We didn’t have room to stay there so we thought we’d try to make it back to another guy’s apartment. We were almost home when five cop cars pulled up with guns sticking out of all the windows and stopped us.

We were in two cars. The cops that came over to our car stuck shot guns in our faces and made us get out. They handcuffed our hands behind our backs. The handcuffs were fastened very tightly just at the wrist joint so that today, Thursday, our hands are still numb.

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The movement to re-legalize marijuana was dealt a severe blow several weeks ago according to an article in the Village Voice of June 22, 1967.

On May 25 President Johnson, a reputed speed freak, signed a treaty known as the Single Convention after it was ratified by the Senate. There was virtually no opposition to the treaty during hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and no publicity was given to the treaty’ s progress.

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To the Editor:

The U.S. Congress is a disreputable club. It’s easy to find fault with anybody who’s a member. But if you are going to pan a congressman, why pick on the best one in sight?

The question occurred to me as I read Plafkin’s silly, self-important, time-serving attack on John Conyers. Let me explain my adjectives. It’s silly to yell “Opportunist!” at one of the handful of congressmen with guts enough to oppose Johnson’s requests for money for the dirty war, to oppose the jingo flag-burning bill, and to oppose using government money on projects in lily-white towns like Weston, Illinois.

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George Vissard, peace activist in Austin, Texas, was killed last week in an Austin grocery store. Vissard was found at about 11:00 a.m. with a shot through the back and shot through the arm; his body had been placed in the meat freezer of the drive-in market.

Early reports from Texas indicated that his death was probably due to political reasons and that no money was missing from the cash register of the store. Later reports claimed that a “sizable amount” of money had been taken—but not from the cash register. Austin police authorities say that they are moving under the assumption that the motive is robbery and that Vissard tried to resist, which brought about his death.

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Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36^th President of the U-nited States of America; the man who sends troops to Vietnam, Santo Domingo, the Congo, and now our own home town is scheduled to speak in Detroit on August 2^nd.

Peace activists across the country have promised that Johnson will be met with demonstrations wherever he goes as long as he continues the war in Vietnam. And if Johnson is not frightened away by a little rioting the major peace and civil rights groups plan a large reception for him in the form of a giant picket line.

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“The ghetto atmosphere was illuminated last week in a study prepared for the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement. In a survey of three cities—Chicago, Washington and Boston—the study found that four out of every five white policemen working in Negro neighborhoods have prejudiced attitudes towards Negroes.

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The first GIs to publicly refuse to go to Vietnam, known as the Fort Hood Three, asked the Supreme Court to hear their suit against the war, and against the government’s right to send them to Vietnam.

Jimmy Johnson, 21, Dennis Mora, 25, and David Samas, 21, first brought this suit while on leave from the army in June, 1966. At that time, they made public their refusal to go to Vietnam.

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More than 200 peace, civil rights and church activists honored David M. Gracie at a testimonial dinner Friday, July 21, as the Rev. Gracie prepared to leave Detroit for a new job with the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.

The gathering represented a wide cross section of Detroit’s “Left” community, ranging in age from late teens to late sixties, and in ideology from pacifism to revolution. They came to listen to perhaps the one man in the city who could speak to, and listen to, all of them.

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Send to: The Fifth Estate, 1107 W. Warren, Detroit, Mich. 48201, phone 831–6800

Unclassified costs 50 cents per line per week. Figure 5 words per line. A word is a word, including I and 2 letter words. A phone number is a word. Street numbers are words. Abbreviations should be sensible.

(No limit on number of lines)

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The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam will take initial steps to place a referendum on the war in Vietnam on the ballot in Detroit.

Dean Jabara, attorney for the Detroit Referendum Committee, submitted to the Corporation Council a proposed amendment to the Detroit City Charter, the amendment would create the office of the “Director of Peace Priorities,” who would work to bring about an “immediate withdrawal of all U. S. military forces from Vietnam.”

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“It is time now to meet the escalation of the War in Vietnam with an escalation of opposition to that War. I think the time has come for all people of good will to engage in a massive program of organization, of mobilization. This is the purpose of Vietnam Summer. And I’m happy to join as one of the sponsors of what I consider a most necessary program, a program that may well determine the destiny of our nation.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at press conference announcing VIETNAM SUMMER, Cambridge, Mass., April 23, 1967

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Everybody should make films.

Film-making is a beautiful thing and it’s something that anyone can do. Really.

Sure there’s a lot of strange professional things to get hung up on, but it’s like the cat hustling Wurlitzer organs on television: “you can be playing your favorite songs in minutes.” You’re not going to be ready to take over for Boot if he doesn’t make it to a gig with Billy C., and it’s the same thing with film.

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Curious.

The same people who built the old Detroit, which the people burned down because apparently they didn’t like it much, have been selected to build the new Detroit.

Mostly they have already built the new Detroit. It is called Southfield and Oak Park and Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham and Westland and Harper Woods and Grosse Pointe and Livonia and Madison Heights. That is the new Detroit. They built it in the ‘fifties while we weren’t looking.

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) expressed its regret and dismay July 25 that the conviction of Arthur Kinoy for disorderly conduct had been affirmed by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. The conviction of Prof. Kinoy stems from the attorney’s forcible ejection by the House Un-American Activities Committee during its probe in August, 1966, of anti-Vietnam War groups.

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