Full list of texts

James Bay II—the so-called “Project of the Century”—is on hold this winter in Quebec, snarled by legal and political obstacles, but a furious battle looms again in a year’s time. On one side is Hydro-Quebec, a goliath of an electricity utility, and its owner the provincial government; on the other, a fast-growing coalition of native Cree people, aboriginal rights solidarity groups, environmental activists, economic policy critics, alternative energy advocates, and a few no-growth libertarians, too.

...

The anthropologist James Campbell Scott, who passed away on July 19, 2024, approached the world from an egalitarian perspective. While not identifying as an anarchist, he brought an anarchistic sensibility to his study of the dynamics of power relations and the varied ways peoples have resisted authority in the past and present.

...

So intense was the air war against Vietnam, known as Operation Rolling Thunder, that more bomb tonnage was dropped on this small nation than the combined total expended during World War II.

These raids contributed heavily to the enormous Vietnamese casualties ranging up to four million dead, numbers which dwarf those suffered by the U.S. invaders.

...

Mark me words, Janis Joplin is fated to be the next American pop superstar.

If, that is, Janis and her fellow members of Big Brother and the Holding Company decide that stardom is their goal. Right now, they are properly ambivalent about that trip, because they are mindful of the way in which pop fame and fortune can erode the soul. Fearful of losing their own, they teeter on the brink.

...

Editor’s note: Frank Kofsky’s byline was inadvertently left off his piece, “End of Jazz Clubs?” in the last issue. Joseph Jarman, whose picture ran with the article, is a young altoist from Chicago.

It always comes as a distinct pleasure to be able to recommend an outstanding jazz recording. Particularly so with the new music, since, as we shall see, the obstacles in the way of artistic creation for the men of this persuasion are especially severe. Because of these obstacles, the new music, when finally it does get set down on record, is often not presented as advantageously as it might be.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, said the black radicals and white New Leftists constitute “a potential threat to the internal security of the Nation.”

He reserved his harshest words for the Black Panthers and SDS.

Hoover noted that some officers in SDS identify themselves as “small c” communists rather than regular Communist Party members, adding:

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Nearly 4,000 young people jammed Into the Ford Auditorium on Friday June 30 to hear the Jefferson Airplane.

Three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine people enjoyed themselves.

The Detroit News didn’t.

Their reporter came on like a middle aged Brenda Starr equipped only with platinum hair and a super-hostile attitude towards rock and roll, folk-rock and Grace Slick:

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Since the punitive government witch hunt of the Green Scare has commenced, we usually have only apprehensions, snitching, and sentencing on which to report. But, this time it’s good news!

Jeff “Free” Luers, political prisoner and environmental activist, was released from prison in Oregon after serving nine and a half years. Luers was originally sentenced in 2001 to twenty-two years and eight months for the politically motivated arson of three SUVs at an auto dealership in Eugene.

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NEW YORK, N.Y., June 15 (Liberation News Service)—Three plainclothes police arrested YIPPEE coordinator Jerry Rubin at his apartment late Thursday afternoon and charged him with possession of dangerous drugs—a felony. From the conduct of the police, it was clear that the bust was politically motivated.

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“The National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC) will in no way yield to threats of prosecution for non-existent crimes or other intimidation. On the contrary, we will continue to press our demands which are known to be just by all, including the religious industry and the U.S. Department of Justice.”

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a review of

Taking the State Out of the Body: A Guide to Embodied Resistance to Zionism by Eliana Rubin. PM Press, 2024

A disclosure at the outset: Parts of this book lie outside the competence of this reviewer, notably sections at the end of each chapter called “Embodied Practices.” These are hands-on exercises intended for collective and individual healing from various forms of trauma and harm resulting from our colonial-settler, sexist, and oppressive system. Interested readers can evaluate their use for themselves.

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“I shall never be able to forget where I was standing on that dramatic day when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me. It was during the nuclear confrontation that arose out of his war on Cuba.”

—Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, Feb. 3, 1992

John Kennedy has been described as a popular president who stood up to powerful business interests and was ready to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam. His assassination, assert many, including Oliver Stone in his latest film JFK, resulted from his impending shift of Indochina policies; it marked the end of democracy in the U.S. and the beginning of a military dictatorship dominated by military-oil interests and executed by the CIA.

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Be kind to other people—this is what Jim and Jean are essentially about. They were in town last week and during a 3 a.m. interview with WABX I had a chance to know them a little better.

I’ve always thought their act was one of the most independently polished in the business mainly because they seem to have a feeling for doing the right thing just at the right moment. Jim and Jean sparkle on stage and off and it’s never an act. Jean sings even when she talks and when she describes a song she or Jim has written, you want to ask for more.

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In an issue of Esquire magazine of a year or so ago, a brace of famous writers suggested that the ‘60s have been too long with us, and that we hereby declare them at an end and devote the next few years to resting up.

In the course of that event, an occasional look at “Joanna” and “The Chelsea Girls” will tell us much of what we were.

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Is Detroit headed for the sort of scenes that have gone down in Pittsburgh and Chicago around demands by blacks for more construction jobs?

The NAACP and the Urban League of Detroit have announced plans to work with the construction industry in an effort to include more blacks and other minorities in the building trades.

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a review of

Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Working-class Counterculture, by Franklin Rosemont, Charles H. Kerr, Chicago, 2003, 639 pp. $17.00

“...singing through the hard time for the good times to come...”

—Utah Phillips, IWW storyteller and folk singer

The day I received this book, I also went to see Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony, a documentary about the protest music of Apartheid South Africa. In the film, freedom fighter Lindiwe Zulu told about the reaction when black activists would lose one of their comrades in the struggle.

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Labor History Archives of Wayne State University is commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the execution of Joe Hill, America’s most famous Wobbly and the “Man Who Never Died.” The program will be held at 8 p.m. Friday, November 19, in the WSU McGregor Memorial Conference Center, Second at Ferry, and will highlight Hill’s life in “living newspaper style.” Further details about the event can be obtained by calling the University Archives office at TE 3–1400.

Friend and comrade, Joel Silvers, died unexpectedly at age 72 in Detroit on December 8, 2018.

Joel was present when the Fifth Estate was launched in 1965 and at the 2015 festivities that celebrated the 50^th anniversary of this publication.

As an award-winning filmmaker, he produced a documentary of interviews with some of the early staff, a trailer of which is available on our web site, FifthEstate.org, “Enduring Voices: 50 years of the Fifth Estate.”

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a review of

Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson. PM Press, 2009

Forget Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lincoln was wrong or disingenuous when he told Harriet Beecher Stowe that her novel brought on the Civil War. The Slavocracy was not frightened by mawkish sentiment.

No, it was rifle-toting abolitionist zealots willing to die that caused Southern panic.

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a review of

The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism, Second Edition by John P. Clark. PM Press, 2022

Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, was “the most devastating experience I have lived through, but also the most uplifting and inspiring,” writes NOLA native John P. Clark, whose family goes back generations in the Crescent City.

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a review of

Johnny Got His Gun: A novel by Dalton Trumbo. York: Bantam Books, Inc., 150 pp.

Let’s make America nauseous!!!

In 1939 Dalton Trumbo published a novel calculated at times to send the reader scurrying to the commode to brace his arms against the bowl and retch.

The book is Johnny Got His Gun. It was released in paperback last month by Bantam Books.

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The past few years have seen an explosion in politically conscious hip-hop, with many artists like Rebel Diaz and Final Outlaw gaining widespread recognition for their affiliation with Occupy Wall Street and other social justice causes.

Add to this list another up and coming emcee, Johnny Spanish, whose free mix tape Dissent can be found online. Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, but currently living in Brooklyn, Spanish says Dissent “[was] heavily influenced by my anarchist beliefs and was my first real foray into explaining my philosophy.”

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John Sinclair, poet, author of Guitar Army, manager of the MC5 rock band, anti-racist White Panther Party co-founder, and early Fifth Estate writer, died of heart failure at 82 in Detroit on April 9. Sinclair was remembered in publications across the U.S. and the world far from his Motor City base as a counterculture icon, a marijuana legalization campaigner, and a rock and roll enthusiast who was immortalized in a John Lennon song.

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Web Archive note: John Wilcock’s usual column heading is “Other Scenes”.

Every time somebody steals a masterpiece from a museum or fakes a Renoir or mutilates a Rubens the cause of art is served. Because we are reminded that art, like us, is mortal.

But the screams that arise from the culture vultures remind us of something else, too; that art today has less of an aesthetic value than an economic one.

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a review of Twilight of the Machines, John Zerzan, Feral House, 2009; 140 pages, $12, www.feralhouse.com

John Zerzan has infuriated and fascinated readers for decades. His sweeping critique of the modern world condemns not just capitalism, the state, technology and even “civilization,” but he openly calls for the abolition of all forms of symbolic representation and a return to a hunting and gathering existence.

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The demonstrations against the war, though they were probably the biggest and most widespread demonstrations in the history of the world, were ignored by our so-called representatives. That’s right: neither our votes, nor our letters to our congressmen, nor the opinions of our allies, nor our efforts to show our numbers in the streets have had any influence on their decisions.

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INTRODUCE A LITTLE ANARCHY

UPSET THE ESTABLISHED ORDER

AND EVERYTHING BECOMES CHAOS

I AM AN AGENT OF CHAOS

OH AND YOU KNOW

THE THING ABOUT CHAOS IT IS FAIR

DO NOT TALK LIKE ONE OF THEM

YOU ARE NOT! EVEN IF YOU WOULD

LIKE TO BE

TO THEM

YOU ARE JUST A FREAK LIKE ME

THEIR MORALS THEIR CODE

IT IS A BAD JOKE THEY ARE DROPPED AT THE

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José Peirats Valls (1908–1989)

José Peirats Valls 1908–1989

José Peirats Valls was born March 15, 1908 in the village of Vall d’Uxo, in the province of Castellon, Spain, and he died at the beach near Burriana, a few kilometers south of this village on August 20 of this year. He was 81.

The son of humble parents, Peirats’ family emigrated to Barcelona in search of a better life. At eight years of age, he started working as an apprentice, making thumbtacks for coffins. He then worked other jobs and attended school occasionally until he discovered the Rationalist Ferrer School where a gifted libertarian teacher awoke in him the desire to learn. At fourteen, he started work as a bricklayer’s apprentice, a job he was always very proud to mention, and at that time, he joined the CNT (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajadores), the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union.

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Joseph Déjacque was a major 19^th-century communist anarchist political theorist and visionary utopian writer, born in Besancon, France on December 27, 1821. To celebrate the bicentennial year of his birth, two New Orleans-based groups, are convening a Déjacque Bicentennial Conference on December 10 and 11.

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</strong> Sunday, December 11, 2022

The Joseph Déjacque Bicentennial Conference is being held in recognition of the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of this major nineteenth-century communist anarchist political theorist and visionary utopian writer. It is sponsored by La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology and Yes We Cannibal, with the support of the Anarchist Political Ecology Group and the Dialectical Social Ecology Group.

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a review of

All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement, Carlotta R. Anderson, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1998, 324 pp., $34.95

As a native Detroiter, I was raised with a belief in the strength of the labor movement, the power of the unions, and the importance of the Almighty Henry Ford to the economic life of Detroit.

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Brothers & Sisters:

After a long literary silence, I write again to the people of the planet. Joshua Newton, the phantom bomber, is still alive and carrying on the struggle. Are you?

The sooner we unite to off the oppressor, the sooner we will be able to live free lives by our own principles and our own values.

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FE note: This is one of three responses to John Zerzan’s “The Case Against Art,” in FE #324, Fall 1986. The other two articles are: “A ‘Culture-in-Action’” by George Bradford and “Art, Life & Death” by Ratticus.

Of course, while in Paris it is one’s duty to see the art and the many monuments. This is called “sightseeing.” You travel thousands of miles; peasants must be killed, perhaps, to get you there. Certainly whole estuaries have been fouled and species pushed over the critical edge toward extinction. But you cannot deny it: you are in Paris to see the sights and the sites. (Some sociologist has written a book describing tourism as paradigmatic of modernity. Without knowing the details of his argument, it is possible to agree that the rootlessness, the craving for authentic experience, and the pseudopraxis which is only another variant of commodity passivity, all of which characterize the modern traveler or tourist, do represent central elements in modern life. By criticizing it, we in no way escape its implications.)

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The article which follows was originally produced as a leaflet and distributed at the Monroe anti-nuke demonstration on June 2^nd, 1979. The Monroe demo was itself even more frustrating than the Midland gathering, and has solidified for many of us involved in it our determination to undertake our own anti-nuke activities in our communities, outside of the context of the increasingly paralytic mass organizations.

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Anarchists from all over Europe and the Americas, as well as several from Israel, attended an International Study Conference on Anarchism and Judaism, held in Venice, Italy, May 5–7.

It was organized by Milan’s Centro Studi Libertari Archivio G. Pinelli and the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme in Lausanne, in collaboration with the Venice City Council and held on the University of Venice campus.

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Editors’ Note: The following is a public statement on the New Bethel incident released by George W. Crockett, Judge, Recorder’s Court, Detroit.

The distortions of fact and the confusion over this Court’s actions in the recent events at New Bethel Church compel me to make certain facts clear. I am personally deeply affronted by reports and stories which have clearly and deliberately twisted the truth and the law in this matter.

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Three hundred and fifty supporters of two Earth First! forest defense activists rallied outside the San Francisco FBI field office May 24 on the tenth anniversary of the day when a shrapnel-stuffed pipe bomb exploded in a car driven by Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, crippling her.

(Ieft) Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, victims of an assassin’s bomb, playing earlier at a Redwood Summer benefit. (right) The car they were driving when the bomb exploded.

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“My ideals will live long after I am dead.”

—Emma Goldman

In a moving memorial to his dear friend and comrade Judi Bari (in the March 1997 Earth First! Journal), Darryl Cherney writes that he was plagued by a number of unsettling signs before her death, including the crash of an enormous old-growth redwood to the forest floor on a windless night near the Earth First! base camp in Myers Flat, California. That redwood turned out to be Judi Bari, whose death meant not only a terrible loss to her children and her family, to her community and the movement, but to the earth.

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Conversations with Judith Malina rarely ended without her advocating “the beautiful nonviolent anarchist revolution.” Strategy to realize it always followed. Her efforts to achieve this ideal resulted in her arrest for civil disobedience in twelve different countries.

She and her husband Julian Beck established The Living Theatre in New York City in 1947 when they were in their 20s. Cultural foundations offering support were non-existent. Despite the constant shortage of physical space to rehearse and perform, they produced plays by radical playwrights like William Carlos Williams, Antonin Artaud, Paul Goodman and Tennessee Williams.

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Judy Collins’ Masonic Auditorium concert on December 10^th, provided one of the most refreshing musical experiences of the year. No massive ego-trips, no carefully choreographed onstage “chaos”; just lots of talent, thoughtful material, and an evening of good music.

A Judy Collins concert is a virtuoso performance. Collins displays her talents on piano, guitar and autoharp, and brings all of them off well. But what dominates the evening is her voice; she is perhaps the clearest, most compelling singer around today.

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We all know how lousy Detroit winters are. The snow is gray after an hour, then it turns to slush. It’s bitter cold. Your car can’t start and when it does it skids. You can’t take it anymore and want to split to Florida or California.

And then one nice day comes along. The temperature might only be twenty-five degrees, but it’s no longer bitter. There is no wind and the sun is bright and warm. The snow seems white again. You walk (and don’t even cut through buildings). The snow sparkles. You feel good and your blood tingles. You feel alive and radiant and for a poetic moment winter’s almost worth it.

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July ’87 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Detroit riots: the largest American rebellion of the century. Reactions to an early morning police raid on a ghetto after-hours drinking spot began with stones and bricks aimed at cop cars and quickly grew into excited looting within hours. The retreating police were eventually reinforced by 8,000 national guardsmen and 4,700 federal troops (82^nd and 101^st Airborne). The official body count after one wild week of looting, smashing, and burning was 43 killed, 657 wounded—at least 30 were slain by police or government forces. Rumors of snipers provoked troops to fire wildly at people, windows, buildings, and each other. Of the 682 fires, 412 buildings were destroyed. Over 1,700 stores were looted as whites quickly joined blacks in a true communal uprising. The number one song in the country that week was The Doors’ “Light My Fire.”

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World-wide events organized to show solidarity with Marie Mason and Eric McDavid, the two longest sentenced environmental prisoners, were an overwhelming success.

Events took place in at least 30 cities across the world including two in New York City, ones in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and San Francisco, but also in places such as Fresno, Calif, Worcester, Mass., Salt Lake City, and Asheville, NC. Internationally, people responded in Toronto, Guelph, Ontario, Montreal, Melbourne, Barcelona, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.

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June 11 brought activists and revolutionaries from across the country together with former prisoners and family members of prisoners for a weekend gathering in Washington, D.C. for a “Convergence Against Toxic Prisons.”

Around two hundred people participated in two days of networking, strategizing, and listening to black liberation fighters Ramona Africa and Jihad Abdulmumit, and recently-released eco-prisoners Eric McDavid and Daniel McGowan. There was a Monday morning march against the prison system’s legacy of building their warehouses of repression on toxic sites across the country.

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a review of

AMOK by Steven Cline. Trapart Books, 2022

Alone hitchhiker sticks out his thumb on a dusty Georgia back-road. He is wearing an all-white paint suit, clutching an ambiguous briefcase. His bearded face is ornamented in haphazard colors, ghastly reds and yellows. Disturbingly, he is not wearing any shoes. Does he not know where he is headed? Maybe he just wants to go, to go out there, to go with you, to show you...What? Do you pick him up?

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CHICAGO, Oct. 1 (Liberation News Service) — I am at this writing locked in a tiny cell in the Cook County Jail, a cell which I share with too many friendly cockroaches. I can’t get out except to go to court. I can’t see any other people, but I hear their screams. The hysterical cries of people going mad because they’re treated like caged animals.

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A second man has been ordered to stand trial in the March 29 wounding of Patrolman Richard E. Worobec outside the New Bethel Baptist Church on Linwood.

Clarence J. Fuller, of Detroit, was bound over for trial on a charge of assault with intent to commit murder by Recorder’s Court Judge Joseph A. Gillis. Fuller and the first man due to stand trial in the New Bethel Incident, Alfred Hibbitt, also of Detroit, have been both accused of wounding Worobec.

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a review of

A Cultural History of The Punisher: Marvel Comics and the Politics of Vengeance by Kent Worcester. University of Chicago Press, 2023

Literally hundreds of comic books and graphic novels bear the imprint, directly and indirectly, of one luminous character: the Punisher. Most of us know little about this ultra-violent global icon who has been around since 1974 and continues to draw millions of readers. That the Punisher seems so deeply ambivalent, heroic or anti-heroic by turns, is obviously key to his status.

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The cornerstone of traditional anarchism has always been a revolutionary critique of the concept of justice in all its variations, particularly as it relates to the state’s repressive apparatus and the oppressive nature of capitalism. Today, that has been extended even further to issues such as restorative and ecological justice. The insights of classical anarchist philosophers remain relevant, particularly when we add to them social-psychological observations of human behavior.

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“In areas where our people are the constant victims of brutality, and the government seems unable or unwilling to protect them, we should form rifle clubs that can be used to defend our lives and our property in times of emergency...When our people are bitten by dogs, they are within their rights to kill those dogs.”

—Malcolm X

...

Charles Costa, an Inner City slumlord that lives in Southfield, has a habit of always trying to grab the media limelight. Through his hustling, Costa has gained a favorable reputation with Detroit’s straight papers.

Among the people that he exploits in this community, however, he is branded for the pig that he is. His latest publicity ruse is to offer a 20 cent bounty on dead rats to all local residents.

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The League of Revolutionary Black Workers has been participating in elections of UAW locals and found itself confronted with vote fraud when it was clear the union bureaucrats could win in no other way.

At the Chrysler Eldon Avenue gear and axel plant four white company hacks won a recent election although the plant employees are 85% black, as is the local president, who won last year with League support. League leaders attribute the loss to the fact that the ballot box was locked in a police station overnight for “safekeeping” while waiting to be counted the next morning. The group plans to contest the election.

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Josh MacPhee of Chicago has been very busy this summer. Touring his stencil graffiti art show to infoshops, cafes, independent art galleries, and even the Allied Media Conference, selling prints from five to fifty dollars to raise funds for a book of collected stencils from around the country.

MacPhee facilitates “Just Seeds,” organizing artists from all walks, styles, and artistic backgrounds to create beautiful works of educational art entitled “Celebrate Peoples History.” Each poster is a highly unique tribute, honoring radical speakers, thinkers, organizers, agitators, and events. This is the history our textbooks seemed to have “left out.” The series pays homage to such prominent figures as Harriet Tubman, Augusto Sandino, and Fred Hampton. Shining light on events like Little Bighorn, the Stonewall riots, and the Battle of Homestead. This project continues to grow as new artists approach MacPhee with new ideas.

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Recorder’s Court Judge Robert DeMascio is a vicious man who wields a heavy hand against poor and black defendants that have the misfortune to enter “his” courtroom. He is almost as hard on youth dope offenders that come before him.

Recently though, two freaks had the last laugh when they ripped off the Judge’s gavel from his bench after he had just arraigned them on a charge of possession of marijuana.

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“You are going to complain? You? And just who are you? You are no American. Prove it. Come, come, show us your passport. Or your sailor’s card...You have no passport. In any civilized country he who has no passport is nobody. He does not exist for us or for anybody else.”

— from Death Ship by B. Traven

...

With the exception of one or two judges, the Recorder’s Court of the city of Detroit has never acted as anything more than an extension of the police department. The police can only hold a suspect for 72 hours. Recorder’s Court can do it for the rest of your natural born life.

Except for the volume of cases involved it will be impossible for the court to return to normal. It never departed from it. And while various sections of Detroit’s power structure were brought into sharp relief in recent weeks -Recorder’s Court surpassed itself.

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Special to the Fifth Estate

CHICAGO, Oct. 25—This week the Conspiracy is still learning about agents and informers.

Tobin, Chicago Police-undercover; Carcarano, Chicago Police-undercover; Rodriguez, Chicago Police-undercover; Salzberg, underground press photographer known personally and more or less trusted by many of the defendants, got paid $10,000 as an FBI informer for the last two years, code name Winston; Sweeny, FBI Informer; Killian, reporter for the far right Chicago Tribune, Chicago Police-undercover. The list goes on.

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What if the lights went out? What if you couldn’t get clean water to drink? What if there were no police, no schools, and no place to go if you were sick or hurt? If the shelves, in the grocery store were never re-stocked, and no one came to pick up the trash?

What if most everything we take for granted about the rhythms of life ceased to be? If the relentless motion--the motion that pushes us on to the next paycheck, the next month’s rent, the next deadline, social event, vacation, the next goal in our imagined future--came to a halt, and these landmarks in our lives were suddenly irrelevant?

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The Second Coming, a new underground newspaper at Eastern Michigan University, is locked in battle with the administration of that school over its right to distribute on campus.

University president Harold Sponberg (called the Phantom by students) is largely responsible for the hysteria, having freaked out after seeing issue number two of the Second Coming.

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Kelly Pflug-Back sentenced to 15 months for attacks in Toronto

by Fifth Estate

Fifth Estate writer and editor, Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, was sentenced by a Canadian court July 19 to 15 months in prison for militant actions carried out by a Black Bloc contingent during protests at the 2010 Toronto G20 meeting.

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Fifty years ago, July 1964, a 1939 school bus furnished with bunk beds, basic kitchen facilities, and wired-up audio equipment, sets out from Palo Alto, California to journey across America. It is painted in bright psychedelic colors with the destination sign of, “Further,” on the front and, “Caution: Weird Load,” on the rear. It carries on board ten or so 60s drop-outs from various walks of life, as the bus makes its erratic way towards Route 60 and the road to New York.

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KENT, Ohio (LNS)—William Schroeder, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Schcur.

Four brothers and sisters were murdered by the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State University campus May 4. At least 15 others were wounded. Three are on the critical list. Injuries to police officers were minimal.

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Collage by Freddie Baer

“It’s rubble now.”

—General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, surveying damage from U.S. missile attacks on Iraq, December 17, 1998.

You were once a place before maps were drawn

and what became of you was named, a single morning

inhabited by winds off blue water—and perhaps

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(Women’s News Co-op) As women step out of their passive housewife role and become more active outside of the home they are discovering the need for child care centers. Many women are interested in starting their own, collectively run centers, because the present day care centers are run as money making ventures and glorified baby sitting services.

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Media manufactured crises come and go so quickly these days that it is often hard to comment on one before it has disappeared from immediate concern. At the height of frenzy about a particular issue—whether it is terrorism, the space shuttle crash or most recently, drugs—the unitary message of power appears to command all thought. Nothing seems to exist outside of the official messages: we are all portrayed as angry or sad or worried.

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a review of

Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, New York, Westview Press, 2005

Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey opens with a primal scene: to the stirring music of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. With the rising sun in the background, one ape-man lifts a weapon and murders another.

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All of a sudden the media has discovered police brutality after years of denying its existence. The spotlight on this public secret came as a result of a particularly hideous incident of police torture recently by New York City cops who rival their L.A. counterparts for racism, brutal behavior and right wing politics.

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In Detroit, the skies are the color of lead most of the time, a sordid color that sweeps everything else along like a dynamo.

On these bleak days, all the houses are grey, the ground is grey, the buildings are grey, and for those who live in such a purgatory it is likely that the heart will also look very grey indeed. The physical environment, the very atmosphere, seems to invite leaden thoughts.

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The Michigan State News ran a front-page headline this summer, “Find No MSU Students Using LSD, Dope,” and an article this fall quoting the director of the University Health Center on “Dr. O’Leary,” the man who was deceiving the nation on the dangers of psychedelic drugs. Things may not be as bad at MSU as this makes them seem, but it was into an atmosphere not terribly knowledgeable about psychedelics that Timothy Leary descended November 17, to speak before an audience of more than 4,000 MSU students and faculty on “LSD: Man, God and Law.”

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“Shit, I beat my wife once a week--and she LOVES it!”

The above quote, issued from the lips of my supervisor one day at work last week, did not particularly surprise me. It seemed the “typical” American macho male’s rationale to any implication that women/wives may not enjoy playing subservient roles.

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ATLANTA, GA.—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has announced a nationwide campaign “to give Americans an opportunity to vote on the Vietnam war -through the time honored institutions of initiative and referendum.”

The campaign, supported by the organization Vietnam Summer, seeks to place anti-war referenda or initiative petitions on local and state ballots across the nation this fall and next Spring. Projects are already underway in over a dozen localities including Detroit and Ann Arbor.

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Fr. James Markunas of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church has been convicted of illegally marching last April during the so-called “emergency” following Martin Luther King’s assassination. (See Fifth Estate, April 16–30, 1968.)

Markunas was arrested April 7, 1968 with 107 others while attempting to march to the Royal Oak City Hall in memory of Dr. King. A ban had been put on all gatherings of over three people by then Gov. Romney.

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a review of

King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art by David and Stuart Wise. Wise Books, 2024

New York City, 1967. Roaming the streets in debate on the merits of the then-peak vogue art movement, Abstract Expressionism, are Ben Morea, part of a local affinity group, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, and David Wise and Anne Ryder of the English group of cultural subversives known as King Mob.

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At this point, the only safe speculation regarding the New Politics Conference to be held in Chicago over Labor Day is that you shouldn’t believe what the underground press is going to say about it.

The key debates at the Convention will center on 1968 electoral strategy.

Should energy and resources be expended on a national presidential campaign or a series of local insurgent campaigns or both? Should campaigns be conceived as one-shot protests against the war and racism or should they be viewed as mere organizing devices to create long range radical institutions? Should campaigns aim to bolster Reform and “Concerned” ‘ Democrats and “peace candidates” or is it necessary to abandon attempts to reform the two party system, creating a third party?

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A few of us got together to talk, as women, about masturbation, because we felt that it is an important and much-neglected topic. Here is the resulting conversation:

Carol: I can’t remember ever masturbating when I was a child. And I know I see little girls do it alt the time!

Joanne: I did it a lot when I was a little girl, with a stuffed elephant I had, and I always had this feeling that my mother was watching me. I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I used to look for her feet under the door. Then I just stopped. When I was five or six, I started believing the chastity thing—and thinking that sex and those parts of your body were nasty.

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Lorenzo “Komboa” Ervin is a thirty year old ex-GI now serving life in Marion maximum security jail for hijacking a plane as a protest against US involvement in Vietnam.

In the early ‘sixties, soon after joining up, he and other young black GIs serving in Mannheim, West Germany, secretly formed Black GIs United to fight racism in the army, and became involved in anti-Vietnam war activities, taking part in demonstrations with West German students. Later, as whole units of GIs in France and West Germany were sent to Vietnam, Black GIs United responded by calling on soldiers to desert. The consequent harassment suffered by Komboa and his friends came to a head when Komboa was himself drafted to Vietnam and decided to go AWOL instead.

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LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE—When two North Korean MIG fighters attacked a U.S. spy plane and shot it down on April 15, self-righteous protests immediately came puttering out of Washington.

The official response has been a “protest” and action by President Nixon ordering fighter plane protection for future reconnaissance flights over North Korea.

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The articles on Kosovo were written in early April. The death rates from Serbian ethnic cleansing increase daily.

The articles have been edited for length; full text of the Chomsky and Cockburn pieces are available at www.zmag.org, a web site which contains many useful observations about the war in the Balkans.

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Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.

This 16 word Hindu chant was first heard in Detroit when poet Allen Ginsberg led the hippie community in a Lovefare last February. Jerry Younkins and Anarchy next brought the Hare Krishna to the Grande Ballroom for a SUN benefit and the recent Love-In at Belle Isle witnessed hundreds of young people chanting Hare Rama for hours.

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For three-quarters of a century, anarchists and other opponents of the 1917 Bolshevik putsch and subsequent counterrevolution have cited the uprising of the mutinous Baltic Fleet sailors and garrison soldiers at Kronstadt as one of the final social eruptions of the Russian Revolution.

The March 1921 events at the naval base on Kotlin Island, situated in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of St. Petersburg, are one of the landmark occurrences in the history of revolutionary resistance to the authoritarian state. In the wake of Kronstadt’s suppression, Lenin and his cabal were left in uncontested command of the solidified “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

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a review of

Graham Purchase, Evolution & Revolution: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Peter Kropotkin (Petersham, Australia: Jura Books, 1996)

Graham Purchase’s recent book, Evolution & Revolution, is a concise and generally useful assessment of Kropotkin’s-life and work from a social anarchist perspective. In addition to presenting a brief biography of the famous anarchist, Purchase analyses Kropotkin’s ideas on such topics as mutual aid, evolution and revolution, conflict resolution, social individuality, and the “metaphysics of nature.”

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An Introduction to Graham Purchase’s Kropotkin

Graham Purchase’s essay reveals what a subtle and revolutionary thinker Kropotkin was. While underestimating the importance of the mutual aid theory (certainly it was more than the one per cent of Kropotkin’s theoretical perspective and his written work that Purchase claims, but this is a secondary point to the subject at hand), Purchase has demonstrated other aspects of the anarchist Prince’s thinking that were vastly important and prescient in recognizing where ideas about nature (ecological nature but also the very structure of the cosmos) were going in this century. Readers familiar with the Gaia hypothesis and chaos theory will find much here of interest. Finally, the convergence of Kropotkin’s perspective on anarchy and the modern synthesis of holism and organicism is a vindication of anarchy as both a theoretical perspective and a model or paradigm for nature.

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The demonstration in Kalamazoo that resulted in a police riot on Feb. 17 has given rise to a full-scale witch hunt in the city. The local citizens grand jury has turned in indictments against members of the United Front, a local community organization, which is a coalition of black, brown and student groups.

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Motor City Labor News is a regular feature of the Fifth Estate. In this column we want to provide a space for people from different parts of the Detroit labor scene to exchange their experiences—experiences of the struggle to gain control over the rate and conditions of work as well as experiences of the fight to regain control over their unions, where these have gotten bogged down in bureaucracy.

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Mystique of Capital

Before people began to understand their natural environment, the forces of nature presented real, awesome and bewildering problems in the struggle for survival. Today the problems remain awesome and bewildering, not because of our failure to understand the forces of nature, but because of Our ineptitude to cope with and transcend the perversity of a socioeconomic system which has usurped control over both people and nature.

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America moves closer to a labor crisis as other unions enter or poise for strikes throughout the country. Air travel has been seriously crippled by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) walk-out in many major U.S. cities, and they have affected air travel throughout the world.

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NEW YORK ( LNS) “Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman” runs the slogan of Ladies Home Journal, a monthly women’s magazine with a circulation of seven million.

Over a hundred radical women barged into the magazine’s editorial offices March 18 to bring substance to that slogan, demanding a liberated issue of the magazine.

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In the last issue of the Fifth Estate [#283, June 1977], a letter appeared signed by a Joe Doaks criticizing Black Rose Books of Montreal. Doaks charged that a recent BRB publication, Durruti: The People Armed, by Abel Paz and translated by Nancy MacDonald, omitted a key section without informing the reader, failed to give the book’s printing history (thus making it appear as though it were a BRB original), that it was overpriced, poorly produced (typesetting and proofreading) and that BRB had a history of appropriating titles from other publishers and putting BRB covers on them. Doaks further said that he and others planned to put out another edition at a third the BRB cost and ended by stating that “Durruti would have shot those (BRB) fuckers.”

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The game is definitely played in someone else’s ballpark! The rules are really quite simple: attend an endless stream of meetings attended only by other candidates; seek publicity, but avoid notoriety; have a platform, but don’t say anything really controversial (substitute “honest”?) belong to as many organizations as possible, but list only the respectable ones on your literature; make the proper deals and alignments with a variety of political hacks; etc., etc.

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Una Revisión de

Lago de sangre: un libro de misterio sobre Filomena Buscarsela por Kenneth Wishnia. PM Press edición en español 2018; edición en inglés 2014; Publicado originalmente en 2002

Los anarquistas amantes de las novelas de detectives y de misteriosos asesinatos, a quienes no les gustan los polis, tendrán que suspender momentáneamente su crítica social porque son precisamente la policía, los ex polis y los detectives privados quienes resuelven los crímenes. Los anarquistas, segun la regla, no se encargan de actividades detectivescas de esa índole.

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Perhaps it’s for the best that you don’t have a memory of yourself centuries ago as you looked proudly around your community—a community deeply embedded in a habitat. This is where you first made love, learned to swim, caught your first fish, perhaps even fought a first battle against belligerent neighbors. Practically everybody in your community knows the names of the flora and fauna of your habitat, where the berries are, when the birds leave and return. There is a common history that is told and re-told. Most of you have felt a kinship with the totality of your habitat—its weather patterns, rocks, streams, mountains and its unique smells and sounds—the singular music of your home. In short, you have a sense of place, you belong. These are all my relations, you will exclaim, as you look around.

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When Winston Smith, in Orwell’s 1984, sits down to begin the diary which he has secretly acquired and which in and of itself is a criminal possession, he is mortified to discover that he has nothing—and everything—to say, that to begin means to start from scratch, to recreate language and meaning, to challenge everything, to make a statement large enough to identify the horror which pervades life and yet which can transcend that horror.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LNS)—Laos hit the front pages of the nation’s dailies recently with a story about how “U.S.-backed” troops took over liberated areas in new counter-offensives.

The very phrase “U.S.-backed” could not help but remind readers of the early years of the conflict in Vietnam.

“In a very real sense,” a diplomatic source told The New York Times, “the war in Vietnam is now being fought in Laos.”

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Both TIME and NEWSWEEK have picked up the word that the “largest demonstration in the history of Los Angeles” will greet Lyndon Johnson when he arrives to kick off the 1968 Presidential campaign with a gala $1000 a plate dinner in the Century Plaza Hotel on June 23^rd.

The Peace Action Council is coordinating the efforts of over 60 peace groups, all of which plan to participate in a massive protest march, which, since permits have so far been witheld, may be in violation of the law.

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There are some records around that are worth taking a look at...The Sunshine Superman album by Donovan is one of the best records of its kind ever done. On this record, we hear great writing, good tunes, excellent musicianship, and the main ingredient, imagination. Goodies are borrowed from almost every musical idiom imaginable and put together in totally new ways. The sitar is put to particularly good use. Donovan has overcome any labels that might have been attached in the beginning, and has become a singer-songwriter as good as or better than any we’ve heard.

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This week, a record review concerning not fact, but opinion about Bob Dylan’s “BLONDE ON BLONDE”, (Columbia C2S 841). The current interview in these pages [FE #12, August 15, 1966] is covering the personal side of Dylan far better than anything I could write, so we shall instead talk about music. The main thing wrong with the record is the quality, or lack thereof, of the vocals. From the earlier Dylan records, particularly the last two rockers, we know that he is capable of sounding damn good when he wants to. The impression one gets is that he is sort of putting the listener down, trying to see how much he can get away with. Dylan is probably THE supreme individualist, and makes a point of not being what his audience expects him to be. However, when this protection of personal identity goes too far, it can and does detract from the art itself. What would have been a truly great recording is spoiled by the Rex Harrison manner of talking thought words, and the record is then merely good. The second point of criticism is based on Dylan’s apparent inability to grow musically. In spite of Dylan’s obvious genius as a lyricist, the inability to keep the musical idiom growing and changing detracts from the possible real greatness of this record. Apparently, in order to venture in to the rock field, Dylan felt it necessary to establish a certain sort of sound as a base, a musical framework. The truly exciting thing about this music (to me) is the search for new sounds, along with the expression of new ideas. In making BLONDE ON BLONDE he resorted to rather drastic measures to perhaps try to do something better with the music; he recorded in Nashville, used practically all new sidemen, but, with several exceptions, for the most part it sounds the same.

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First, I would like to thank the editors of The Fifth Estate for asking me to contribute. Folk music and the new music, called Folk-rock are my own areas of endeavor, and I hope I will be able to add something of value to these already diversified pages. In coming issues, I will try to pass along news of interest in these areas, including record reviews, articles on the artists appearing in Detroit, and news in general.

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Well, attentive readers, I must say there is nothing like an occasional attack to sharpen up one’s reflexes... Having had several lately, I shall at this point contribute several counter-attacks...

To our friendly neighbor “Virile American”...(see letters, last issue) I would not ordinarily dignify such arch-type fascist ravings with a response, however I feel that this letter is representative of the thinking of a good many people, so therefore: Dear V.A.: Thank OM that there is no F.C.C. type of agency monitoring the papers... In the popular Press, the effect is much the same when you consider the fact that the AP and UPI must pass along to the public the obvious propaganda as delivered to them by the government news agencies, or risk losing their sources...There is, however, still room for some free journalism...The “pasty-faced faggoty followers” in my comparison were actually the “Virile Romans,” as they called themselves... As a humane person, genuinely concerned with the welfare of my fellow Americans, I hope, Mr. V.A., sir, that you will be able to overcome your rather psychotic hang-ups about “org**m”, “Pasty-faced faggots,” and “commie perverts”...Moreover, I am quite sure that your stated intention of being in Hell will be easily fulfilled...Just continue to be a “Virile American” and before long you’ll be living right in the middle of hell, right here in the good old virile U.S. of A...

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Larry Portis (1943–2011)

Larry:Portis grew up in a working-class family in Seattle, Washington and Billings, Montana. His father was a sheet metal worker and city fireman. His mother was an occasional secretary. At the age of 18 he married and quickly had two children. In 1968 he graduated from Montana State University Billings where he was active in university and local politics, wrote (1965 through 1968) weekly articles on politics for the university- newspaper (The Retort) and created an underground newspaper (The Free Student Press) in addition to working for a living. Before leaving the area he participated in organizing the municipal water workers in Billings.

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Your growing conviction that people are unable (or have lost the ability) to learn from and develop conclusions about their experience, and to act to change the conditions of their lives finds its latest confirmation in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (See review, FE #299, Oct 22, 1979). Lasch’s central idea is that a given state of capitalist development contains a corresponding individual personality structure (the “narcissistic” personality type corresponding to the bureaucratic “consumer society” of “late capitalism”) and that the analysis of this personality structure is the key to understanding human behavior and activity. Despite lip service to revolutionary possibilities, Lasch’s thesis is a determinist one which vitiates the likelihood of the emergence of an autonomous politics in the present period.

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