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Realizing that he who jumps into the middle of a fight gets shot at from both sides, I must say that both sides in the debate over “On Organization” are wrong: Ed Clark with his impersonal formal organization, and Camatte/Collu, and their defender Maple, with their unorganized formal persons. [See “On Organization: Two Reviews of The Camatte/Collu Pamphlet,” FE# 279, December, 1976.] Here are two positions badly in need of dialectic. (I’m more sympathetic to Clark, mostly because I worked with him for a number of years, but also because he’s less pretentious and dogmatic than Camatte/Collu.)

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LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE—As the unexpectedly early monsoon rains fell on War Zone “C” by the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border, a U.S. divisional planning officer said, “The people who advised President Nixon to start something like this at this time of year must be the same ones who advised him on candidates for the Supreme Court.”

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The “socialist” government of unified Vietnam, after telling the Vietnamese people for the past twenty years that they must expel the imperialist nations of France and the United States, is proposing to invite private corporations of those same countries, along with those of Japan, Canada, Australia and Norway, to exploit Vietnam’s wealth of cheap labor and natural resources—all in the name of “industrial development” and production.

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Cara Hoffman published her first major novel, So Much Pretty, in 2011. It is a tale of family, community, and storytelling, but also about the ongoing acceptance of violence against women. Cara’s writing has appeared frequently in these pages. The Spring 2012 Fifth Estate featured a review of her book which was nominated for the National Book Award.

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Carla Glidden (1964–1994)

It is very difficult for me to write about Carla in the past tense. When she died of a blood clot in June, I lost my best friend and the Detroit alternative community and the Fifth Estate lost an untiring participant and supporter. Carla embodied the philosophy of community and mutual aid more than anyone I’ve known. Carla spurned no task as too humble or dangerous.

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Poet, revolutionary, artist--an inspiration to three generations of radicals in the struggle for a better world--Carlos Cortez died in his sleep at his home in Chicago on January 18, after an illness that had long confined him to a wheelchair; he was 81. A member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for nearly sixty years, with red card number X321826, he remained to the end a fervent supporter of working class self-emancipation and an irreconcilable enemy of capitalism and the state. Fellow Worker Cortez died like a good Wobbly, with his union dues paid up.

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This cartoon strip consists of seven interchanges between two people.

Person 1: Tell me the reason for The Bay of Pigs.

Person 2: Kennedy believed that after an invasion there’d be a popular uprising.

Person 1: And who else believed that? Anybody you know?

Person 2: Nobody...

Person 1: Now tell me the reason for Santo Domingo.

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“Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective.”

—Kerner Report, p. 389

The headline of the Free Press editorial of April 1 reads, “Keep Isolated Incidents Within Narrow Limits.” This is a typical example of the racist distortion of reality practiced by Detroit’s major newspapers. There is nothing isolated about assaults on the black community by the white police. There is nothing isolated about attacks on Judge George Crockett for dispensing true justice to black people.

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The weekend of September 6^th, 7^th and 8^th will provide for diggers of radical-rock an unusual and revolutionary concept at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church, in the heart of the Warren-Forest Community (corner of Forest and Cass).

Long active in social and cultural activities, the church, through the sponsorship of its “Social Singles” group, will host a weekend of hard rock music, psychedelic and stroboscopic light shows, underground films, love-ins and similar activities related to the theme of the festival—DIALOGUE 68

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Protesting the threat of the removal of their school performing arts curriculum, about five hundred students from Cass Technical High School demonstrated at the Schools Center Building on Woodward November 26.

Mrs. Betty Gittlen, a parent, asked simply for the board to “state clearly that it will maintain Cass Tech as an undistributed, city-wide, specialized high school with its present curricula intact.”

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Now that a significant number of both patricians and plebes of the American metropole, from wealthy futures traders to dishwashers, have become collateral damage in the crossfire between Jihad and McWorld, it bears asking ourselves what forces are really clashing and what is at stake.

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The following text is a speech given by Fifth Estate staff member David Watson at a conference on July 9, 1994 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, hosted by the New Jersey Greens. Entitled “A Radical Ecology Forum: Ecological and Communitarian Visions,” the gathering drew approximately one hundred people. For a report of the conference, and the introductory remarks made by Steve Welzer, see the latest edition of the Jersey Greens Journal, c/o Green World, P.O. Box 2029, Princeton NJ 08543. Please send $2 to cover costs.

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“When we first began speaking to the guerrilla forces, we were afraid of being used. We re-examined our reasoning and said to ourselves: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if for once we were used by the people at the bottom instead of being used by the people at the top.’”

Marge and Tom Melville, former Catholic missionaries in Guatemala, spoke these words during their recent visit to Detroit (July 31-August 1). They made three speaking engagements, sponsored by Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice, in Ann Arbor, Southfield, and Detroit.

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“The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it and mastering it?”

-- Walt Whitman

Early in 1905, Leo Tolstoy wrote to a close friend in England: “Yesterday and today I have been reading Edward Carpenter’s book, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, and am enraptured by it.... Please inform me of what you know about Carpenter himself. I consider him a worthy successor to Carlyle and Ruskin.” The query as to Carpenter’s identity may well be repeated a hundred years later; his striking originality, which at one time inspired poets and anarchists alike, has since been virtually forgotten.

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No one really consciously planned the thorough integration of the middle-class worker with capitalism. Capitalists were forced to develop a more productive worker, a more extravagant consumer, simply because their own fixation on accumulation (profit) is continuously frustrated by the tendency of the rate of profit to decline as automation grows.

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Part I

These are the last days of the Weimar Republic.

In Berkeley, police ‘opened fire with buckshot on unarmed people by the Peoples’ Park, wounding over a hundred and killing one, James Rector. Across the country—in Madison, in Ann Arbor—police repeated the same repression with only slightly less savagery. Meanwhile, the government is quietly extending its stop-and-frisk, no-knock police state over almost everybody under 30.

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the cosco busan

a shipping ship

hit the bridge in the san francisco bay some weeks ago

and — perhaps you’ve heard

hundreds of birds--were oiled

poisoned corroded

bunker fuel’d

well

Monte ran the wash room

and i became a rinser

(convergent volunteers:

flock weep work keep

awake)

hot jet under into each feather

of each bird

dawn cuts grease

later then earlier each day

close up right here

waking dream life

remedies

lack of sleep

steam

bites

feather condition

waterproofing

feet

eyes

lines

death

leakage

slip

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The 1980 census has come and gone without much ado. On the face of it, it appears as though most Americans dutifully mailed back their forms and provided the government with its constitutionally mandated information needed to apportion each state’s Congressional representation. Although there was a massive propaganda effort on the part of the Census Bureau to count every resident of the U.S., it is still believed that millions of illegal aliens, poor and minority group members went uncounted.

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On September 16 charges of Inciting to Riot against Moses Wedlow and James Roberts were dismissed in Recorder’s Court by visiting Judge John Seiler. The charges grew out of the August 9–12 “Policeman’s Field Days” on Kercheval on Detroit’s East Side. Three additional charges of rioting, conspiracy to disturb the peace and possession of a bomb against the two men had previously been dropped for lack of evidence.

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Issue #12 of Internationale Situationniste reported that, during a general strike in Paris on March 10, 1969, a group identified only as the “Guy-Lassac Street Barricaders” erected a handmade bronze-coated plaster statue of Charles Fourier. The new monument was placed on the empty pedestal where his statue had stood before being torn down during the Nazi Occupation of the 1940s. Within a day, however, French security forces had restored control to the street and the technical service of the Paris prefecture tore the Fourier statue down; like the Nazis, the French government obviously regarded the presence of this early nineteenth-century utopian writer to be a distinct threat to public order.

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Cesar Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers union, and perennial darling of the liberal-Catholic-Stalinist milieu, has recently been making his followers uncomfortable by behaving like a George Meany-style labor hack. At the end of July, Chavez, touring the Philippines at the request of the Philippine farmworkers in California to see how their families were faring under martial law imposed by dictator Ferdinand Marcos, ended up being given the royal treatment by the regime and presented an award by Marcos himself! Chavez, who admitted having no knowledge of Marcos’ ban on strikes or the arrests of thousands of striking workers, defended the Marcos regime, claiming that life under martial law was “a hell of a lot better” for the Philippine workers than before. Chavez had never been in the Philippines previous to his July trip.

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“In culture, capitalism has given all that it had to give and all that remains of it is the foretaste of a bad-smelling corpse.”

—Che Guevara, Man & Socialism in Cuba

Liberation News Service — Twentieth Century-Fox’s sense of the box office hasn’t diminished. Last year they produced such money-makers as “Valley of the Dolls,” “Boston Strangler,” and “Planet of the Apes.”

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A lone figure stood before a door. Townsfolk had ridiculed her for years because she walked daily to this same spot.

No one else saw any reason to do so. And when they asked her what drew her, she could only shake her head. An answer reverberated deep in her brain but she could never quite grasp what it was.

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CHICAGO, LNS—City Hall sources were buzzing this morning as the mayor’s office shamefacedly admitted to what may be one of the greatest blunders in the history of law enforcement. A mud-splattered blue Chevrolet van carrying 14 dangerous political criminals had passed through the clutches of the city’s police and was allowed to escape through what Mayor Daley called “criminal negligence” on the part of his force early Sunday morning.

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Having had the privilege of living for a time among stone age peoples of Brazil, a very civilized European of considerable erudition wrote afterwards, “Civilization is no longer a fragile flower, to be carefully preserved and reared with great difficulty here and there in sheltered corners...All that is over: humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk, as if it were sugar-beet. The same dish will be served to us every day.” [1]

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Chicago (UNS)—A meeting called to rename a southside Chicago park in honor of slain leader Malcolm X Shabazz was turned into a scene of police violence, complete with billy clubs and riot guns, Sunday, May 21.

The occasion started out on a joyous note, with speeches, Afro-American music and dance, but friction developed when two young women attempted to join the crowd of between 250 and 300 black people. When the women were asked to leave and refused to do so, they were set upon by two young women from the group, who pushed and shoved them away.

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Last issue we promised to print more reactions to the May Day centenary celebration of the Haymarket Affair (see FE #323, Summer 1986), but much of what we had intended for publication failed to come together. This is unfortunate since many of the criticisms—of responsibility for the arrests at the Friday march (see report further on), the structure of the workshops, meat at the banquet, and even anarchism itself—made for important reflections on an experience that was significant to many of us.

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(LNS) Some 100,000 people including hippy-Yippies, McCarthy kids and SDS organizers, are expected to converge upon Chicago sometime before the Democratic National Convention, August 25–30.

Some will be there to do their thing, others to attempt serious political organizing, others to disrupt and demonstrate, others to do all three.

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The sun of the austral summer rose warm on Santiago, the capital of Chile, as hundreds of thousands of women began to take to the streets on International Women’s Day. This traditional day of feminist mobilization celebrated annually on March 8 carried with it a special anti-patriarchal power in 2020 due to the fervent momentum that had been maintained on the streets of Chile since the social explosion in October of last year.

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China is in fashion. Enthusiasm for China can be found amongst liberals, technocrats and members of the World Bank. In the popular view “the people are brave and the culture squeaky clean.”

Maoists and proto-Maoists proclaim China as a genuine Socialist country, valiantly struggling through the unity of its three “classes”—the peasants, workers and the glorious Peoples’ Liberation Army—to industrialize without the bureaucratic distortions of the revisionist USSR.

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a review of

Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives, Robert Ovetz, Editor. Pluto Press 2020

“There’s not a Hand in this town, Sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life. That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Now, they’re not a-going—none of ‘em—ever to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon.”

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“Liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”

— Michael Bakunin

When more than a million people- visibly break out of forty years of totalitarianism in a relatively spontaneous manner, their opinions, ideas, and fantasies inevitably vary wildly. However, the statements, interviews, and documents of the Chinese students’ and workers’ movements that have gradually become visible in the months after the June 1989 repression reveal distinct patterns and common attitudes among vast numbers of people. Even if this material doesn’t delineate an explicitly “revolutionary” program, the perspective that emerges still. provides a wonderful breath of fresh air in a country long stagnant with authoritarian ideas and practice. Through this we can see a Chinese democracy movement that contains a molten mixture of many different ideas, many half-baked but all of them subordinate to the exhilarating actions of people refusing to be submissive.

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a review of

Ecrits Politiques, 1977–1983. Noam Chomsky, Paris. Editions Acratie, 1984 189 pp.

There is Noam Chomsky the world-famous linguist, Chomsky the anarchist theorist, Chomsky the political activist against American foreign policy; last but not least, there is Chomsky the polemicist and ideology critic.

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It doesn’t take long before you fall in love with a helicopter.

The ponderous, heavy, and wholly improbable flight of a cargo plane, or the enclosed cocoon of a commercial airliner are too similar to driving in a delivery truck rather than tearing down the highway in a four-seat convertible.

The chopper has its own rhythm, and moves impossibly in all directions—or none at all; still as a kite, if not quite as silent.

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It’s a rare case when someone can go home from the job and say they’ve done a constructive day’s work, and an even rarer case when 4,000 people from the same place can say it at the same time.

But that was exactly the case September 21, when the Chrysler Corporation was forced to close its Lynch Road Plant in Detroit because of worker sabotage and vandalism.

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Anarchist solidarity can take many forms, including collecting books, pamphlets, and letters. Through such activity, comrades active in the world’s anarchist archives are part of anchoring an important segment of the struggle for a libertarian and egalitarian world.

They are helping to maintain a living connection between present-day anarchist activities and that of yesterday’s rebels whose values and goals continue to inspire.

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Citizens for Peace in Vietnam, an organization of Detroit area residents opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, was re-activated recently with the holding of its first general ‘meeting since last March.

“There has been a widespread demand for the re-convening of CPV,” stated a committee spokesman, “and the administration’s continued escalation leaves us no moral alternative but to reaffirm our condemnation of the nature and the fact of America’s participation in this war.”

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The night the Korean airliner crashed into the newspapers, I dreamed of a tornado. A tornado is a kind of spiral, which is the labyrinth and which is Death.

Death is very powerful right now. Instead of being a passage, Death has become a kind of equipment failure, a technical slaughterhouse. Human and technical failure become indistinguishable when the unquestioning robot and the drooling sadist merge. (I see the Soviet pilot being interviewed—he could be any Air Force gunslinger in any military machine—“I’d do it again—and even more—and love every second of it.” Of course he had the cooperation of the CIA and the U.S. military, who listened in, taping it all, without issuing any warnings to save lives. That, after all, is certainly not their business.)

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The Clamshell Alliance and more than 20 anti-nuclear organizations around the country plan a major shift in tactics in their opposition to nuclear power plants. Angered by the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of the cooling system of the nuclear plant at Seabrook, New Hampshire, the Clamshell Alliance says the era of fighting nuclear power in the courts is over. Direct action, civil disobedience and site occupation will take its place.

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a review of

We Take Care of Our Own by Christopher Clancy. Montag Press 2021

Imagine Amazon, Walmart, Exxon, Mobil, Pepsi, Coke, Fox News, Blackwater, the AMA, and Haliburton all rolled into one messy Play Dough ball of a supraconglomerate. The only corporation.

Add the military, and you have USoFA Worldwide with its finger in every pie, in bed with everyone and everything. And, it’s leading the War on Terror around the world the way a rock band goes on tour.

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(UPS) One of the most feared (and most frequently fantasied) of sexual activities is the orgy.

Right now you are probably fantasizing one of your own, right?

The word “orgy” is ambiguous. In its broadest sense it connotes a sensual activity which is pursued without restraint of appetite, or an “unbridled exercise of passions,” as my dictionary would have it.

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Friends:

In the FE report of the July ’88 Toronto @ Un-convention [FE #329, Summer, 1988], the description of a workshop that I gave, “Empire and Ecological Destruction,” contained a misleading inaccuracy. Since I was not in town when the FE was produced, I wasn’t able to clear it up then but would like to do so now.

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a review of

The Haymarket Affair, Chicago, 1886: The “Great Anarchist” Riot and Trial by Corrine J. Naden. Moffa Press 1968

On a rainy Tuesday night in May of 1886, a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square calling for an eight-hour workday turned suddenly violent when someone threw a bomb into the crowd of 200 policemen sent to break things up. The blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and four civilians. News of the incident, known as the Haymarket Bombing, sent shockwaves around the world.

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The following appeared in the March 15 issue of the Black Panther, official organ of the Black Panther Party.

CONCERNING: The pre-planned political murder of Bobby Seale, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, in the electric chair in the state of Connecticut.

The Primary Task of the American Revolution, at this point in our history, is to defeat the Number One maneuver of the fascist power structure, which is to make an example of Bobby Seale by putting him to death in the Electric Chair in the state of Connecticut.

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Why isn’t anyone doing anything to protest Clinton’s bombing of Iraq? There seems to be a growing resignation about the U.S. bashing Saddam Hussein to boost the approval ratings of American politicians.

The reaction in Iraq, where 16 American Tomahawk cruise missiles slammed into the capital city of Baghdad June 26, was much different as 100,000 people took to the streets to protest the latest attack from the U.S. As usual, it was the civilian population who paid the cost in lives and destruction, not Saddam their belligerent ruler.

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The Committee for Nonviolent Action has issued an urgent request for additional financial backing. CNVA and the War Resisters League are mutually considering a merger and the CNVA Executive Committee has already authorized the partnership. The major obstacle, however, seems to be the current CNVA deficit of about $7500 which must be greatly reduced before the merger can be completed. UPS member, WIN magazine, currently behind in its printing bills, will be unable to publish an October issue unless new and immediate financial help becomes available. CNVA staff members have not received salaries for the last several weeks.

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Police mass for attack on peaceful demonstrators / Photo: Ken Hamblin

“I really got this one guy who called me a fascist pig. I beat him to a pulp.”

— A Detroit Policeman (Detroit Scope Magazine, November 9, 1968)

The October 29 rally for George Wallace at Cobo Hall in downtown Detroit ended in what can only be called a full scale police riot. Events inside the Arena set the stage for what later occurred after the rally when 350 club-swinging Detroit pigs attacked a group of about 1,000 demonstrators who had assembled to express their opposition to Wallace’s candidacy.

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A rose, is a rose, is a rose, is a rose.

And a racist judge is, in fact, a racist judge.

This is how attorneys for Kenneth Cockrel developed their case that the young black attorney should not be cited for contempt of Detroit Recorder’s Court.

Cockrel was ordered to show cause why he should not be cited for contempt after he accused Recorder’s Court Judge Joseph E. Maher of being “a criminal judge violating the law.” The remarks came following the April 19 pre-trial examination for Alfred Hibbitt, accused of assault with intent to murder in the shooting of Patrolman Richard E. Worobec outside the New Bethel Baptist Church March 29.

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WED., MAY 1

WHICH GOD IS DEAD? Agnostic Humanist Rabbi SHERWIN WINE speaks in the Detroit Rackham ESD Aud. at Farnsworth & Woodward at 8:30 p.m.

EMERGENCY IN THE GHETTO: Family, Pathology & Power. Dr. Hyman Rodman speaks at Merril Palmer Institute, 71 Ferry at 8:30 p.m.

THURS., MAY 2

THE KNACK, Richard Lesters crazy film starring Rita Tushingham, MSU Welles Hall in the Student Union.

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As the Covid-19 epidemic spread through the world at the beginning of 2020, the governments of many countries, including Greece, enacted emergency quarantine and stringent lock-down measures. There was a fear among social activists that collective action would be stifled.

Nonetheless, collective action emerged in Greece, mainly on two fronts. There was a mobilization of health workers against the government’s inadequate funding of public health care, as well as grassroots forms of mutual aid. The latter took shape mainly in Athens through two distinct networks.

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