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America’s election farce is over and proved to be one of the dullest in years reminiscent of the Eisenhower years as Hank Malone points out in this issue. The only pleasant surprise was the small number of Americans willing to vote for George Wallace’s militant brand of racism. They obviously prefer the more subtle and effective variety advocated by the other two creeps. Wallace pulled only 7.8 per cent of the vote outside of the South and this isn’t a hell of a lot given the amount of money he spent on his campaign.

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Recorder’s Court Judge Robert J. Colombo, the pig who sentenced John Sinclair to almost ten years in prison, recently renewed his subscription to this paper for two years. Because of the barbaric sentence he placed on John, we are cancelling his subscription, confiscating his money and donating it to the John Sinclair Defense Fund. Money is urgently needed for legal fees and we hope all brothers and sisters will contribute generously to his defense. Send donations to John Sinclair Defense Fund, 1510 Hill St., Ann Arbor, Mich. 48104.

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We are initiating this column as a means of communicating with the Fifth Estate readership. We hope to be able to give you periodic progress reports, answer your questions about the paper, and hopefully give you the feeling that there are real live people behind the newsprint and ink.

Although our Detroit circulation is increasing, distribution still remains our major problem. We feel our circulation could double if a method could be devised to get our paper close to the potential buyers. Any suggestions?

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Big changes at the Fifth Estate. As you can see by the staff box above our paper’s decisions will be made by an Editorial Group rather than by the two former co-editors. This represents an attitude on the part of the people working full-time on the paper that decisions should be made collectively by those most closely involved in its production.

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The Man’s heavy hand of repression is attempting again to strike at this paper. We have been getting reports from both sellers, distributors, and buyers about police and school harrassment.

At Southfield High, which is run by anti-Fifth Estate fanatics, Principal Robert Hall and youth pig, Richard Overmeyer, persons have been suspended for selling the paper and students have had individual copies confiscated merely for having them in their possession.

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Trouble time again at Northland. The punk rent-a-pigs out there have been giving our salesmen such a hard time when they are trying to sell that we are going to begin a suit against the shopping center to enforce our legal right to sell in a public area.

Our staff and our attorney, James Lafferty, met with the jerks that run the place last year and came to an agreement whereby the harassment of sellers would stop, but apparently it meant nothing to the businessmen who are trying to drive elements of the free community out of the shopping center.

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Everyone who wants to tune in to the music of our culture should be at the Fifth Estate Benefit to be held Sept. 1 at the Grande Ballroom from 6–11 pm. Featured will be the MC5, Stooges, and the Gold Brothers, along with Newsreel films of the San Francisco State strike and two short films from Cuba.

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The Fifth Estate’s Labor Day benefit at the Grande Ballroom was an overwhelming success. The bands were beautiful and so were the people. Newsreel’s films turned everybody on and a good time was had by all. Special thanks to the MC5, the Stooges, the Gold Brothers, Newsreel, Uncle Russ and everyone who came. It was a real Detroit city evening. Everyone got down.

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Note: A shorter version of this article appears in the print edition.

We are taught since early childhood that everything in the world exists in a food chain as a “resource” to be consumed by those higher up the chain and concurrently as the consumer of “resources” that are lower in this predatory hierarchy. We are also told that life in the wild is hungry, fraught with mortal danger and that civilization has spared us a short and brutish existence. As children, we thus come to believe that life in civilization is good for us, in fact even indispensable for our very survival.

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Edward Abbey, author of the fictional eco-sabotage novel, The Monkeywrench Gang, and numerous other volumes on the Southwestern deserts and wilderness is both the eminence grise and bête noire of Earth First! Abbey is highly revered by the EF! leadership and many of its supporters for his eloquence in expressing a sense of things wild, but also for his misanthropic irreverence towards “humanistic” values.

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Government rule was reaffirmed Nov. 6 by a slim majority as only a scant 52.3% of voting-age Americans overcame apathy and disgust enough to enter the polling booth.

Flushed with victory, President Ivan P. Pavlov read his acceptance speech via a talking computer, announcing that the hitherto secret war against the Life Force would be declared official; that more laws would be passed and more police deployed “for the protection of all Americans”; and that more citizens would be mobilized into Service Brigades to fight the Enemy in Eurasia and to increase Production. He welcomed the statement of congratulations sent by Mr. B.F. “Fritz”, Skinner, leader of the Loyal Opposition, which called for National Unity, the continuance of law and order and respect for Authority, the quarantine of Enemy Nations in the Southern Hemisphere, and the rationalization of economic policies. “Sweeping changes will be made,” promised the computer in a startlingly human-sounding voice, “so that our operations can continue unimpeded.” The President urged Americans to return to their homes and workplaces to await further orders; adding, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

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My image of the few women mentioned in history texts in school is completely one-dimensional. There’s Betsy Ross, smiling at George Washington as she sews stars onto the flag...and Dolly Madison, the super-hostess, who saved the President’s portraits from the burning White House.

I get furious now when I think about it. I never even noticed that women (not to mention non-white or working people) were practically non-existent in the history books. That is why I really became excited while reading the life of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a heroine of the American Labor Movement.

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“Elvira Madigan,” as advertised, may well be the most beautiful movie ever made. In any event, it is one of the most popular foreign films to come to Detroit in quite a while. However, I have a feeling that the capacity crowds that fill the Studio-North each night are not completely satisfied with what they see.

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Her pallor of skin and her gauntness (both doubtless accentuated by the austerities of the Weatherman life-style) and her cool light blue eyes behind gold frames put me in mind of the woman in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” Her vibrant contralto voice and sensuous mouth suggested a tremendous courage for struggle and love.

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a review of

Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs by the Curious George Brigade, Mosinee, WI, 2003, 154 pp, $6. See pages 63–64 to order.

For a few years, the CrimethInc. collective has been willfully monkeying around with our assumptions about anarchism. Most recently, the CrimethInc. mantle has been taken up by a collective calling itself the Curious George Brigade. With Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs (AAD), the Brigade romps on the jungle gym of anarchism with an innocence both inspiring and exasperating.

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Related: see “Anti-Fascism 101,” FE #400, Spring, 2018.

About 100 people filled a small auditorium at Detroit’s Wayne State University, October 17, to hear a talk by Mark Bray, a Dartmouth College lecturer on human rights and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.

Bray’s lecture followed the lines of his book, that fascism was and is an authentic threat which should be confronted by means appropriate to the dangers it poses. Tactically, he advocates alliances between anarchists, a tradition with which Bray identifies, and sectors of the left, without consideration of their authoritarian nature.

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FLASH! As we go to press, word has reached us that brother Ken Kelley, editor of the Ann Arbor Argus, has been busted for “distributing obscene and lascivious material.”

The offending material is in the August 13 issue of our sister underground paper that showed a picture of Ann Arbor councilman James Stephenson holding what appears to be a superimposed drawing of a male cock in his hands. He has a broad grin on his face.

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The text which begins on the following page is excerpted from Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology, a new title co-published in fall 1996 by Black & Red, Detroit, and Autonomedia, Brooklyn. Its author is Fifth Estate staff member David Watson.

In Murray Bookchin’s extensive writings on ecology and anarchism spanning four decades, he has tried to take us beyond Marx toward a more fundamental critique, a holistic rationality, a deeper freedom. He is recognized in many anti-authoritarian circles as an anarchist luminary and elder of significant importance to the extent that some identify themselves as “Bookchinites.” Under the watchword of “coherence,” Bookchin has sought nothing less than the full explanation. But David Watson’s latest book shows that Bookchin’s work ultimately falls far short of its pretensions, and thus fails to guide us toward the promised “pathways to a green future.”

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a review of

Black and Green Review #4, Winter 2016 BlackAndGreenPress.org, 214 pp., $10

Kevin Tucker started the Black and Green Network in 2000 to create a centralized place where green anarchist and anarcho-primitivist projects, both nationally and internationally, could connect. After years of successful gatherings, Tucker launched Black and Green Review (BGAR) which he co-edits with five others.

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The Detroit News has once again exposed the latest Communist conspiracy nesting in the Motor City. This time the villains are the Radical Education Project and the Revolutionary Printing Co-op, which print and distribute movement literature.

The story was revealed in the Sunday News edition of May 24 by vanguard crime and subversion fighter John Peterson with a little help from W. Howard Erickson. Peterson, who was named best writer in Michigan on crime and corrections in 1969, really outdid himself this time. He and his pal managed to write a half page article about REP and the Printing Co-op that was fabrication and distortion from beginning to end, except for the addresses of the groups.

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a review of

Do It! by Jerry Rubin. $2.45, Simon and Schuster, 256 pp.

“Do it!” A lot of people did it at Isla Vista. And there’ll be a lot more doings. Do it! It’s the title of Jerry Rubin’s new book. The slogan “Do it!” is the yippie version of the Panther’s “Seize the time.” “Dig it, Do it, seize the time” in whatever way you know how.

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Reprinted from The Daily Collegian, Thursday, October 27, 1966, Vartan Knpelian, Editor-in-Chief. Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan

Against New Tabloid

It is always interesting to observe the machinations of the New Left. Therefore, it would seem to be even more interesting to observe their latest innovation designed to spread their particular form of radicalism.

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Longtime contributor Penelope Rosemont has given the Fifth Estate a great many articles and graphics, all of them insightful and inciting to revolt (See her Fall 2013, “The Poisonous Cobra of Surrealism” essay). Her achievements go beyond writing and graphic arts. In 1966, along with her late comrade and partner, Franklin Rosemont, she was instrumental in founding the Chicago Surrealist Group.

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Richard Mock: The American Voter

The Plains Art Museum (in Fargo, ND) has produced a book called Hardlines. The book is the result of classes taught by Richard Mock of New York. Hardlines features social commentary linocut prints from each of the participants ages ten; through adult who worked with Richard Mock. The themes presented in each artwork represent social commentary about present day issues, personal points of view, experiences, or memories.

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a review of

Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets by Kathy E. Ferguson. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland, 2011, 362 pp, $35.

In her fascinating book on Emma Goldman, Kathy Ferguson focuses on Goldman as a dynamic anarchist thinker whose differing social activist contexts and personal challenges produced constantly evolving theoretical perspectives.

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More successfully than any other figure in US history, Emma Goldman communicated an anarchist vision to a broad audience of immigrants, native-born middle-class, and workers.

Goldman’s fundamentally anarchist self-identity and vision of political change are elements neglected or misinterpreted by some of her biographers.

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The Emma Goldman Papers Project, housed at the University of California at Berkeley, collects facsimile copies of the writings, letters and personal papers of Emma Goldman (1869–1940) and distributes them on microfilm.

The project is headed by Candace Falk, who discovered numerous lost love letters of Goldman’s in a Chicago guitar shop and turned them into a book, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman. They also became the first documents of the project’s collection.

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a review of

Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, Alice Wexler, Beacon Press, Boston, 1989, 301 pp.

The nature and purpose of “doing history” are at stake in Alice Wexler’s new book, Emma Goldman in Exile. America’s best-known anarchist endured numerous personal and political crises from her 1919 deportation to Civil War Russia to her subsequent odyssey throughout Europe and Canada, her immersion in the 1930s Spanish revolution, and her-death in 1940. Based on extensive research, Wexler’s book usefully describes this journey. But the book is more than this. Unfortunately so, since the interpretive voice of the author is usually louder than her subject.

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a review of

Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution. David Porter, editor, New Paltz NY, Commonground Press, 1983, 346 pp., $7.50.

Georg Groddeck once wrote that his aim in life was not to cure others but to become a human being. Throughout Emma Goldman’s life, this human struggle was identified with freedom: freedom to love and grow, learn and create, work and seek fulfillment, think, experience and act in every domain of interest.

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The history of the Vietnamese people is clearly a history of struggle, of choosing what to tolerate and what and how to change. No Vietnamese man, woman, or child has been spared the struggle because it is one of survival and the protection of the freedom to define how to live, once in the face of Chinese occupation, then, French colonialism and Catholicism, and now American imperialism.

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Thirteen months into Operation Iraqi Humiliation (actually 14 years into the Bush Family’s well-financed takeover Of the Middle East), all of the predictions made by activists and other assorted radicals a year ago about the utter stupidity of the Empire’s expansion into the Fertile Crescent appear to have been fierce understatements.

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a review of

The Utopian: A journal of Anarchism and Libertarian Socialism, August 2000, 58 pp. Published by The Utopian Publishing Co., P.O. Box 387, College Station, New York, NY 10030. $5.00 for one issue or $8.00 for two.

The Utopian is a promising new anarchist journal that will probably strike various readers quite differently, depending on their expectations. Those who, guided by the subtitle, are looking for a new “journal of anarchism and libertarian socialism” will probably find it to be much to their liking, since it focuses heavily on theory and is more sophisticated in this area than most anarchist publications. On the other hand, those drawn to the title expecting daring flights of the utopian imagination, or investigations of the status of various Temporary Autonomous Zones may be a bit let down.

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Six years ago, Robert Enrico directed the award-winning “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This short film told of a condemned man during the Civil War who, seconds before he is about to be hanged, fantasizes his escape. Enrico’s current “Zita,” at the Studio New Center through December 18, carries this same theme even further.

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a review of

Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction by Alex Prichard. Oxford University Press, 2023

Anarchists have been devising short guides for the anarcho-curious practically since anarchism existed as a coherent ideological thread. They date back at least to Kropotkin’s contribution to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) and including Alexander Berkman’s ABC of Communist Anarchism (1929), Colin Ward’s Anarchy in Action (1973), and Cindy Milstein’s Anarchism and its Aspirations (2010).

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a review of

Endgame, Volume I: The Problem of Civilization, Volume 2: Resistance by Derrick Jensen. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006

“Do not listen to me.”

--Derrick Jensen, Endgame

Derek Jensen, author of A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe, has become a best-selling author and a popular lecturer at conferences and campuses. If mainstream environmentalists would reform industrial civilization through sustainable practices, Derrick Jensen wants to destroy it by any means necessary. No pacifist with illusions about transforming civilization into a wild, primal culture through love and nonviolence, he fantasizes about blowing up dams. He’s sticking it to the man to save the salmon. Jensen wants a wild world, and he demands doing “whatever it takes to get there.”

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Before anything can be said or written about what has happened in Palestine and Israel since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, recognition must be given to the enormity of the crimes Israel’s merciless army has committed against the Palestinian people.

This is being written in late May 2024 and hopefully Israel’s genocidal intentions have been stilled by the time it is read.

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Ya know, the Army’s pretty neat. They even write special books that the Army guys can read if they get bored.

Of course, with all the salutin’ and peelin’ potatoes and killin’ the enemy they gotta do, the soldiers are probably pretty busy, but I bet they enjoy reading the Army books and comic books when they get the time.

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The discovery of Columbus by the Arawaks was fortuitous as the three ships might have made landfall almost anywhere else on the continent that lay between the explorers’ intended destination in eastern Asia. The random meeting had deadly consequences for the tribal people who had cheerfully welcomed their strange visitors.

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“Is the enemy strong? One avoids him.”

-- Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army

Sun Tzu, Von Clausewitz, and Napoleon all agree. When the battle’s over and one has lost and they have triumphed again, one must run away--especially if one hopes to fight another day. Napoleon points out that a good tactical retreat is not a rout and shambles but an orderly withdrawal toward sources of logistical reinforcement, complete with rear-guard guerrilla and political action.

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Train sounds.

Stars are showing and the sun is down, and high above us the sky is crested with an even, purple glow. All around us are trees ripened with green leaves, and vesper bats course fireflies while I stand on the edge of the woods with Apple kneeling before me, obscuring herself with wry branches jutting in all directions.

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“Paroli Esperanton estis iam esenca parto de anarkiismo.”

(There was a time when speaking Esperanto was an essential part of being an anarchist.)

When 97-year-old, Barcelona-born Eduardo Vivancos walks down the streets of Toronto where he has lived as an exile since 1954, he never comes across another Esperanto speaker.

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The Fifth Estate, our answer “to what could be happening in Detroit if people knew where to find it,” has moved from its Post Office box in Bloomfield Hills to 1107 Warren. Located just off the John Lodge expressway and four blocks from Wayne State University, the paper is making the move as the first of many steps to improve itself and to eventually come out weekly.

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Releted: see “Workers Aid & the Betrayals of the Left: An Introduction” in this ussue.

It’s very hard now, probably impossible, to capture the urgency of the spring, summer and autumn of 1992. In a few months, hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Not just that, the survivors were driven from their homes. Two million of them.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS APRIL 2

JOHN SINCLAIR, White Panther Party Chairman, appears in Recorders Court at 9:30 am to seek an appeal bond on his marijuana case. Come and show your support! at Frank Murphy Hall of Just-us, Gratiot and St. Antoine.

They’re making REMARKS ON THE PERSONALITY OF MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI in the Det. Inst. of Arts Lecture Hall (for $2.50 no less). “They” are psychoanalysts Richard& Editha Sterba. 2:00 p.m.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS APRIL 30

Folksinger DANNY COX folksings and stuff in the University Ballroom, Student Center Bldg., WSU, 7:30–10:30 p.m. Adm. $1.50.

SALESMAN, one of the most highly acclaimed films of the year. Rackham Aud., Woodward at Farnsworth. 8:30 p.m. Students $1.50, others $2.50.

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In Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS. SEPT. 18

WOODLAND INDIANS: Their Arts and Crafts. An exciting lecture dealing with this fascinating topic with Donald Sebastion, at the Historical Museum. 3:30 pm.

DETROIT SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA in concert with Sixten Ehrling conducting. Soloist is Alicia de Larrocha, pianist. With the Kenneth Jewell Chorale. Ford Aud. 8:30 pm.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURS JULY 9

SYMPHONY UNDER THE STARS. Sixten Ehrling conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and soloist, Vladimir Ashkenazy, pianist. Oakland Univ. at Meadowbrook Music Festival. 8:30 p.m.

INDIAN POW WOW. Wow! it’s a pow wow at Cross Village, Michigan. Consult your favorite map for more details.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

Thurs., May 14

FROM THE WAYNE CINEMA GUILD... Picnic on the Grass and Le Bonheur, both in color. Upper DeRoy Auditorium. 7:00 p.m. 75 cents.

OPEN CITY FREE MEDICAL CLINIC. Come get cured of your ills and aches and pains and anything else that hurts. 6:30–8:30 p.m. 4225 Second at Canfield.

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in Cooperation with Detroit Adventure

THURSDAY, MAY 28

ROMAN POLANSKI’S “Fearless Vampire Killers” with Sharon Tate in color, and f.w. Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” loosely based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Two bloody chiller killers. There is a $1 donation to go to Lafayette Clinic to help finance the Methadone Clinic, headed by Dr. Paul Lowinger. 7 p.m. Be there.

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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.

Web posting note: None of the events are marked with an asterisk in the print original.

FRI. MARCH 21

JOHN WATSON speaking on the South End newspaper and its defense. Militant Forum, Debs Hall, 3737 Woodward. 8 p.m. Adm.

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