"Fifth Estate at 40:
Detroit Radical Rag Celebrates Its Ruby Anniversary"
Carleton S. Gholz, Detroit Metro Times
It is 2005, 40 years after the Watts riots, the death of Malcolm X and the
prime time of Motown Records. On his WRIF radio show, Night Call, Peter
Werbe's husky voice is intoning some of the 217 reasons why he didn't feel
joyous about the recent "coronation" of George W. Bush. Some of Werbe's
callers are longtime listeners, so disturbed by America's current political
reality that the words stammer out of their mouths. Still others call in,
clearly believing they have exposed a late-night communist conspiracy.Werbe's radio voice has been heard for decades. But it was his voice as a
radical print journalist, once part of the Fifth Estate magazine
collective, that first got the attention of Detroit's old new left.
Fifth Estate was launched in 1965 as a quarterly publication dedicated to
pursuing a gritty yet idealistic critique that was rarely found anywhere
else in the media. Its name and mission came from the idea that the
mainstream press, otherwise known as the fourth estate, was not doing its
job. Decades later, the group is still going strong and the publication is
just as relevant. Last year, the nationally and internationally read
magazine tackled racism, education, primitivism, the election and
resistance. This year marks the quarterly publication's 40th anniversary.
Harvey Ovshinsky started the magazine when he was 17 years old, financed by
his rich father and inspired by a summer working for the Los Angeles Free
Times. Ovshinsky, now an Ann Arbor-based filmmaker, educator and
consultant, quickly moved the paper out of his parents' basement in their
affluent suburban home and onto Plum Street, Detroit's one-time freak-haven
that was bulldozed in the '70s.
FE was initially printed by Reverend Albert Cleage's Shrine of the Black
Madonna organization. The paper carried stories from the Underground Press
Syndicate and tapped local writers, such as John Sinclair, the
twenty-something manager of the MC5, in order to create a unique outlet for
a growing youth community finding its voice. "I wanted it to be a bridge
between the politicos and the freaks and druggies," Ovshinksy says. "My
opinion was, 'Look, you are all going to get arrested by the same police.'"
The magazine relocated its office to Detroit's Cass Corridor, where it
flourished, covering revolution and unrest both abroad (the Third World,
Vietnam) and at home (civil rights in Mississippi, hippie protests in
Berkeley, uprisings on 12th Street). By 1967, though, Ovshinksy was
interested in other media, including radio. He eventually became the first
news director at WABX, Detroit's infamous freeform FM station.
Fuck authority
In 1975, a group calling itself the "Eat the Rich Gang" (ETR) took over the
paper. Fredy Perlman, who helped found Detroit's Black and Red Press in the
'70s, became a contributor. Perlman helped bring a wider array of
influences to bear on the new FE, including ideas from the Situationist
International and Italian council communists. Black and Red Press published
the first English edition of Situationist theorist Guy Debord's Society of
the Spectacle.
The Fifth Estate crew called out lefty intellectual Noam Chomsky as an
"idiot savant," and participated in street theater, poetry readings and
demonstrations against incinerators and nuclear plants. They even printed
Big Three CEOs' home phone numbers. Capitalism and empire were always
targets of FE prose but, increasingly, so were the false hopes and
reactionary reformists on the left. Eventually the critique came full
circle with the paper's own history, culminating in a fake ad, "Jail John
Now!" branding its own former writer John Sinclair as a plastic
revolutionary.
David Watson, now a Cranbook educator, states in his memoirs that, "We were
not genteel in our approach, but the ideas had merit."
Permaculture
The years have taken their toll. FE's grand theorist, Fredy Perlman, died
on an operating table in 1985. Other members have dispersed into the
Detroit suburbs and around the country. But Andy "Sunfrog Bonobo" Smith and
his wife, Victoria "Viva Bonobo" Jackson, are at the FE helm now in
Liberty, Tenn. Pumpkin Hollow is the anarchist community currently putting
out the publication.
The magazine's contributors now meet largely over the Internet, instead of
in the Cass Corridor. But as recent issues of the magazine show, the
current publication is offering a different take than much of the new
media's blogosphere and Indy Media Web outlets. According to Sunfrog, "the
FE is creating something that can germinate and be thought about over time."
At the end of 2004, the collective reached consensus on not achieving
consensus by printing a number of ambiguous yet distrustful critiques about
choosing between John Kerry and George W. Bush. The issue also included a
full-color center poster that stated, "If war is the last step — then
voting is the first!" and "Don't vote! Change Your Life Not Your Leader."
Though recent issues — such as last fall's "Unschooling the World," and
winter's "Deconstructing Race" — have utilized diverse voices and
international perspectives, the 20 or so active collective members are
still majority male and, at the moment, all white.
Sunfrog doesn't want to get drawn into guilt ideology though. "We support
the self-determination of all people. But we aren't interested in just
exchanging one power for another. As Fredy Perlman talked about, we want to
do away with power not seize power."
Big words. The FE has always had them, yet corrupt conditions and
right-wing revolutions maintain their ascendance. Perhaps not properly
practical, the FE's gritty idealism does encourage its readers to ponder a
new world just a rant away.
The 40th Anniversary issue — filled with personal histories and
explorations by longtime members such as Peter Werbe, David Watson,
Lorraine Perlman and Sunfrog — launches with a release party 5–7 p.m.,
Saturday, Feb. 26, at Book Beat, 26010 Greenfield, Oak Park. 248-968-1190.
[Carleton S. Gholz is a freelance writer for Detroit Metro Times. Send comments to
letters@metrotimes.com
