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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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A couple of us went downtown to Cobo Hall on a cold Friday night to check out the rally to “overturn the Reagan program” and to pass out a few copies of the last issue to the curious. The rally was being staged by the “All Peoples Congress” all-weekend convention, a left-liberal amalgam; everyone from Dykes Against Racism Everywhere to trade unionists, feminists, Democratic Party hacks looking for a constituency, and leninists looking for cannon fodder. The posters had been all over the city since summer, free bus rides were being offered every fifteen minutes or so from various welfare and unemployment offices, Gil Scott Heron was supposed to perform on Saturday night for a benefit—it had all the makings of a slick, combination carnival and revival meeting. The revival, that is, of the Popular Front to Fight “Reaganism,” led by liberal politicians and trade union bureaucrats and staffed by the minions of the leninist parties looking for a piece of the action. But we had a lot of extra papers lying around turning yellow, and we were starting work on another issue, so we decided to potlatch them out of here and hand them out to the folks who might have taken the free bus ride to go somewhere where it was warm, and to perhaps shake up the true believers with some blasts against civilization.

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Reprinted from Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the 20^th Century by Harry Braverman, Monthly Review, July-August 1974 edition; pages 55–58.

The function of the capitalist is to represent capital and to enlarge it. This is done either by controlling the production of surplus value [profit] in the productive industries and activities, or by appropriating it from outside those industries and activities. The industrial capitalist, the manufacturer, is an example of the first; the banker of the second. These management functions of control and appropriation have in themselves become labor processes. Here the productive processes of society disappear into a stream of paper—a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow like that of the cannery, the meat-packing line, the car assembly conveyor, by workers organized in much the same way.

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Justice is vengeance in a world mad for blood.

Justice is debt when the slavers need their quota.

One-million innocents in one-million shackles:

one-million head of oxen

and the cops lick their lips like cannibals

when the masses scream ‘They deserve to suffer!’

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Animal experiments extend to the wretches,

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You were mad about Iran, mad about Afghanistan, mad about that and a whole lot more. You want to fight communism and the foreign scurvy who undermine our American way of life? Well, are you ready to go toe-to-toe with the Ruskies, no holds barred, for an all-out fight? Be prepared, America! Don’t lag behind your leaders! We’re doing it all for you—Presidential Directive Number 59 has given us the go-ahead to prepare for a prolonged but limited nuclear war, with cruise missiles, neutron bombs and first-strike capability!

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On Sunday, July 23, at 3 o’clock in the morning, The Doors’ “Baby Light My Fire” was the number one song in Detroit.

It couldn’t have been more appropriate.

At 3:30 a.m. a large crowd of black people watched as their brothers and sisters were arrested for drinking in a blind pig.

At 4:00 a.m. they stopped watching and began throwing things. The rest is history.

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The May 16, 1966, murder of a former Wayne State University student, Leo Bernard, and the near-fatal shooting of two others, was reviewed last week by attorney Ernest Goodman who filed a petition with Detroit Common Council requesting funds for burial costs and for medical, hospital, transportation and rehabilitation expenses.

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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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Dear FE:

“Carter’s Phony War Crisis” (FE #301, Feb. 26, 1980) was excellent. I’d only fault it in one respect—I feel that ‘you’re unduly optimistic in stating that, “Third World countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia...(will become) the super consumers of tomorrow.” My reasons are:

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Unlike the computer failures mentioned in the article above, they couldn’t hide this one on the back page of the newspapers. When a fuel explosion rocked the underground Titan II nuclear missile silo sending flaming debris 500 feet in the air, everyone for a hundred miles around knew something had blown. The accident that occurred September 19 near Damascus, Arkansas destroyed the missile and left one dead and 21 injured (all Air Force officers) and was only one of hundreds of mishaps involving the missiles since the 54 ICBMs were first deployed in 1963. Since that time 55 persons have died and scores have been injured in the numerous incidents.

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a review of

City Lights Journal Number Three. San Francisco, City Lights Books. $2.50.

City Lights Bookstore is a bookstore, a publisher, and an institution. The Journal is a good indication of what can be found in the bookstore, from the publisher and the make up of the people the institution represents.

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Two Detroit policemen, Sergeant Fred T. Wright and Lieutenant Teddy Sikora were suspended from duty over the weekend of June 1 for “conduct unbecoming a police officer,” and “bad judgment” in connection with the May 13 clash at Cobo Hall between Detroit fuzz and a group of Poor People’s Campaign marchers (FIFTH ESTATE, June 4–18). The suspensions will remain in effect until a police trial board decides what disciplinary action, if any, will be brought against the pair.

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Reading the Fifth Estate last issue was sort of a magical mystery tour with none of the teasers on the front page corresponding to the proper pages and a number of other horrors.

This was caused by last minute surgery when our printer decided he would be unable to print a two-page spread photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono posing nude because he felt it would hurt his other business.

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Thursday November 28

AN ODE TO WILHELM REICH A sexual intellectual play in two acts. At the Red Roach Coffee House. 8:30 p.m. Plum St. at Filth St

THANKSGIVING SPECIAL. The Underground Cinema will have two special showings at 7:30 and 9:30 because it is a holiday. Films will run all weekend and include “The Breath of the Bones,” “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome,” “Sacred Mushroom Version,” “A Cherry Tale,” and “Voyage Optique.” Detroit Repertory Theatre, 13103 Woodrow Wilson Cali 868–1347 for information.

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Admiral Arnold E. True will address a forum entitled Vietnam—The Wrong War to be held at Cobo Hall at 8 p.m. Wednesday, October 11.

Admiral True has been an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and has clearly stated his reasons for supporting a withdrawal of U.S. troops. The admiral served as a general line officer in the U.S. Navy for 26 years. He was Staff Commander-In-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet during World War II and has been awarded a variety of decorations, including the Purple Heart.

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The message relayed by the U.S. Strategic Air Command headquarters’ computer was unmistakable—Soviet missile attack! SAC B-52 bomber engines roared to life, their bomb bays laden with 20-megaton thermonuclear weapons; intercontinental ballistic systems were switched to command function—all that was necessary was the order from the President and the Armageddon of World War Three would commence.

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There may be no smoke signals on the horizon or the beat of drums within earshot—but the United States has a candidate for President on the Indian ticket, once he is accepted into the tribe.

The candidate is Austin Burton, who is best known to Fifth Estate readers as the man who sent a brochure for the United Artificial penis to Luci Johnson’s husband and was arrested for mailing obscene matter and held on $200,000 bond. (See Fifth Estate, April 15–30, 1967). Burton is seeking to represent the New York state tribe of Oneida Indians and is being aided by Princess Sunbeam of that tribe.

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SAT., SEPT. 30

PLAY: Pantageize, APA repertory company, Michel de Gheldero’s “farce to make you sad” Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, Ann Arbor, 8:00 p.m. 9/30

SUN., OCT. 1

PLAY: Same as 9/30 2:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. adm. 10/1

CONCERT: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Premiere of a new work by Roger Sessions commissioned for the U. of M. Sesquicentennial Celebration. Hill Aud., 2:30 p.m. adm. 10/1

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d.a. levy, 1960s

(UPS) The following is an interview with D.A. Levy, the nationally prominent young Cleveland poet who was twice arrested early this year because of his outspoken poetic opinions of the good mayor and his mucked-up administration of that city.

L.B.: When were you arrested on obscenity charges?

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To be a teenager in western Europe today is to enjoy a freedom of movement only dreamed about by American young people. During the summer, while most American kids are sitting home watching reruns on T.V., their European counterparts are out on the road.

Of course, the geographical makeup of the Continent makes travel not only possible, but irresistible.

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Jim Garrison is looking for the man whose photo appears on this page. Garrison thinks he may be one of the conspirators in the assassination of President Kennedy. [Web archive note: the photo does not appear in the original FE print edition.]

The photo, first published almost four years after the event in the September 15 Berkeley Barb, is a blow-up of part of a frame from a film which shows him seized by police and released.

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A middle-aged friend of mine helps keep his sanity by giving, on occasion, an extra 25 cents to the man in the toll booth on the bridge. Then he says, “This is to pay for my friend who is in the car behind me.” As he drives away he can look in his rear view mirror and laugh to see the policeman and driver of the following car gesturing and scratching their heads.

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Minnesota has by far the largest acreage of wild grass of any state in the nation, U.S. Bureau of Narcotics figures show.

Last year county weed inspectors reported that they had discovered 1,723 acres of Cannabis in the state. To the inspectors it’s “just another weed”.

This spring an inspector attended a town meeting in a small Minnesota community. “Did you know you have marijuana growing in the town?” he asked.

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A massive national denouncement of the continuing war in Vietnam and the Selective Service System is being readied for the week of Oct. 16–22, and by all indications it should well be the largest demonstration of its type in American history.

The Resistance does not recognize deferments, for they are part of the system. By accepting a deferment, a person does nothing to change that system.

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Sometimes it seems that history does, indeed, repeal itself. The mistakes of a radical movement are sometimes repeated several generations later by another radical movement. At other limes, a radical movement will repeat its own mistakes within the same generation. Mistakes are, of course, inevitable. They ate not bad in and of themselves if the factors which caused the mistakes are recognized and corrected. Ignorance is our greatest enemy. To know what to do, when to do it and why it is being done is the preeminent task at all times. When mistakes are repeated, it 1 an indication that there is a serious, perhaps fatal, hick of revolutionary consciousness.

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Editor’s Note — The San Francisco Mime Troupe will perform Saturday, October 28 at 8:15 in The Detroit Institute of Arts Auditorium in a benefit performance for the Fifth Estate. The Mime Troupe was in Detroit last Fall and received rave reviews (from us) for their “Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.”

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

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It is hard to reach you guys. Once you go through the doors of that induction center it is almost impossible to get to you. Well, you are inside now. Maybe you are at some base in the U.S. getting your basic training. Maybe you are stationed in Germany. Maybe you’ve gotten your orders for Vietnam. Maybe you are already there.

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My brother Greg the prosecuting attorney advises me to chill

He says the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice

I ask did it bend toward justice for the guy who said that

but he hasn’t a clue who I mean

my clue he harvested those words from a bumper sticker

his rosy perspective hogtied into irrelevance by cobwebs

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

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

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

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

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The anti-war movement surged back onto the streets Easter weekend with major demonstrations taking place in six cities, and smaller actions in 44 others.

On April 5, 100,000 people rallied in New York City to hear speeches supporting the Black Panther party, the Presidio 27 and the Chicago “Conspiracy.” The demonstration was orderly throughout; the speeches marked a departure from the “broadbased, liberal-radical coalition” to reflect a growing class consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This article is excerpted from “The Search for the Primitive,” an essay written by Stanley Diamond in 1963 and later revised and expanded for inclusion in his book In Search of the Primitive (Transaction Books, 1981). We are reprinting this excerpt because it is relevant to both our ongoing discussions of war and of primitive society, indigenism and modernity.

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Resistance to the draft is happening around the world. The Fifth Estate recently received information from the editors of “A” Rivista Anarchica about Mauro Zanoni, a 20-year-old anarchist who was arrested February 13, 1983 in the “Pavia” di Pesaro, Italy army barracks for his total refusal to cooperate with the military. Zanoni had been scheduled to report four months earlier to fulfill the one-year military “service” required of all Italian men.

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Just as today’s most obsessive notion is that of the material reality of time, self-existent time was the first lie of social life. As with nature, time did not exist before the individual became separate from it. Reification of this magnitude—the beginning of time—constitutes the Fall: the initiation of alienation, of history.

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

INTERNATIONAL BLACKLIST by the Blacklist Group

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from The Eighth Night of Creation: Life on the Edge of Human History by Jerome Deshusses

Today there is no city that the automobile has not turned into a vast parking lot, no avenue that is not a rectilinear traffic artery bordered by concrete sidewalks and strips of sickly, dying dusty, grayish grass. It will soon be impossible for people to talk to each other in the street except by walkie-talkie, impossible to breathe except high up in the mountains (where the air is only a little less toxic than elsewhere, and cars will soon be as numerous as tourists, anyway), impossible to cross a lane without thinking of the danger of being run down and killed, impossible to regard other human beings as other than so many Sunday mechanics mucking about underneath the artificial armor of their coachwork....

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Fifth Estate

The Fifth Estate is a co-operative project, published by a group of friends who are in general, but not necessarily complete agreement with the articles herein. Each segment of the paper represents the collective effort of writing, typesetting, lay-out and proofreading.

The Fifth Estate Newspaper (ISSN No. 0015–0800) is published quarterly at 5928 Second Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48202 USA; phone (313) 831–6800. Office hours vary, so please call before visiting. Subscriptions are $5.00 a year; $7.00 foreign including Canada. Second class postage paid at Detroit MI. No copyright. No paid advertisements.

The always provocative and irreverent The Match! (P.O. Box 3488, Tucson AZ 85722) is currently involved in a raging debate on pornography in which it inveighs against any censorship even by women who maintain they are victimized by it. “No one,” states The Match! “is fit to be a censor!”

Also, Kent Winslow’s serialized novelette, “Dream World,” is worth the price of admission alone.

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Editor’s Note: The following interview with General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the People’s Army of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, first appeared in Europeo Magazine in Milan. The Interviewer was an Italian newspaperwoman, Oriana Fallaci. Liberation News Service is distributing excerpts from the interview as published in the Capitol Times of Madison, Wisc.

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The factories of Detroit are the guts of the city. They are a central, common reality in the lives of Detroit people, whether people are working a 10-hour day on the line or just watching from their office windows as factory chimneys fill the air with thick, black smoke.

Most public art in Detroit tries to ignore this centrality. Factories are not pretty places. For the people who work in the factories life is not a pretty matter. So “The Spirit of Detroit” is a jolly green giant.

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During America’s most highly watched television spectacle, the Super Bowl, viewers in ten major television markets were shown an advertisement from Apple Computer Corporation on the theme of George Orwell’s 1984. In the ad, the face of Big Brother speaks from a giant telescreen to a hall full of automatons (young people with fashionably shaven heads recruited for the role). Suddenly, a young woman runs into the room and hurls a sledgehammer through the screen, shattering it. A message follows, declaring a new model computer the machine which will ensure that the year 1984 cannot be come the nightmare world of Orwell’s novel.

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It is small wonder that most Americans are not the least big cognizant of the plight of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia; the mainstream press here in the United States does not even recognize the struggles of its own indigenous population. From our perspective, the systematic statist degradation of primitive and indigenous peoples and their spirited refusal to submit to the powers of progress are central to the complex question of social domination all over the world.

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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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