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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Editor’s Note: The following is an LNS interview with Sisana Sisane, a leader of the Pathet Lao. The Pathet Lao is the military arm of the Laotian liberation movement known as the Neo Lao Haksat.

The Laotian leader describes with clarity, not only the military statistics of a direct U.S. combat aggression against his country, but also points out and discusses details concerning U.S. ideological policies, indirect military commitment, and this country’s extensive invested economic interest.

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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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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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“In view of the solutions that are asked of us, routine completely re-upholstered in velvet is dangerous. Routine hatches more distress and death than an imaginary utopia.”

—Andre Breton

Green Anarchy #17 (Summer 2004) featured a rather amorphous seven-page article by one A Morefus as to why utopianism and anarchy are fundamentally incompatible. The author criticizes the totalizing impulses of utopian thought with a totalizing critique that glibly and thinly covers a few thousand years, from Plato’s Republic and the Shakers to the Bauhaus, the Third Reich, anarcho-primitivism, and post-human cybertopias.

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Every Christmas season, the movie market is positively flooded with the year-end glut of new releases, and 1968 proved no exception.

Trying to keep up with these new films is a major task for a pure-bred film buff like myself, but the fact is that I’ve seen only four holiday releases that I would risk recommending to you: “Faces,” John Cassavetes’ unmerciful study of middle-class mores in America; “Bullit,” a fast, lean, and exciting detective yarn, and the only successful genre film of the year; “Romeo and Juliet,” Franco Zeffirelli’s irreproachable popularization of the play; and “The Stalking Moon,” a Western that transcends itself and becomes instead a thrilling horror movie.

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Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to permit the display of the biblical Ten Commandments in schools as part of larger legislative efforts to combat youth violence.

Rather than “a first step toward reinstilling the value of human life in children influenced by violent culture,” as the politicians claim, this is yet another shallow gesture by hypocritical lawmakers to legislate ethical control in a culture that is ethically out-of-control.

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NOTE: The following Letter to the Editor of the Detroit News was written by Alvin Harrison, NSM [Northern Student Movement] field secretary in Detroit, in response to a number of letters published regarding his participation in a Teach-in on Viet Nam at Wayne University. Mr. Harrison was quoted as saying “That’s your flag, baby, not mine.”

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LOS ANGELES, Dec. 8—25 Black Panthers were arrested, three wounded, during police raids on two apartments and a four-and-a-half hour gun battle at the main Panther office in Watts.

The office was surrounded at 5:30 a.m. by a force of between 300 and 400 police. They were refused entrance to the office. They began to break down the front door, but were driven away by shotgun fire; two cops were wounded.

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A number of Detroit lawyers have indicated to Detroit LEMAR (Legalize Marijuana) that they would be interested in setting up a legal aid service for busted marijuana users if a general fund could be set up which would insure a nominal fee for those attorneys involved.

Their suggestion was that interested heads and sympathetic persons pledge a dollar or two per month to such a fund so that a backlog of available money would be made available in cases of arrests on marijuana charges.

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from L.A. Free Press (UPS)

Last week President Johnson signed into law the 1967 draft law extension thereby allowing the government to impress young men into involuntary servitude ‘til at least 1971.

In every respect the revision intensifies the coercive and regimentive features of the old law. Here are the gruesome details of the extension, which will be in effect.

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“We are bringing our legitimate grievances to the legal establishment of the white man’s government to give the racist monopoly capitalist system the opportunity to begin to redeem itself for the crimes which have been perpetuated against Black workers and Black people for centuries.”

With this statement on Friday, May 16, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the United Auto Workers International Union (UAW), Locals No. 3 and No. 961, and against the Chrysler Corporation.

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a review of

Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century by Andrew Cornell. University of California Press, 2016

Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be: Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance by Shon Meckfessel. AK Press, 2016

Reading about history with anarchist ideas in mind can often be inspiring and sometimes even lead to insights useful in present-day situations. Andrew Cornell and Shon Meckfessel have written books that are treasure-troves of information about the multifaceted 20^th century North American radical movements for societal change. They are helpful companions to the various memoirs and retrospectives on anarchist groups of the period published during the past decade by Anatole Dolgoff, Penelope Rosemont, Franklin Rosemont, Larry Gambone, Ben Morea, and others.

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Editor’s note: Cultural critic Ivan Illich died in December 2002 at the age of 76. In tribute after tribute, his personal friends and admirers of his work marvel at Illich’s enduring generosity, humility, and radical spirit. While many at Fifth Estate have appreciated his influence, we never paid proper tribute. Now with this unschooling issue, we share a poem from one of our regular contributors and a very brief excerpt from the essential and prophetic 1970 book Deschooling Society.

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LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. (LNS)—Dr. Timothy Leary, his wife and teen-age son, John, have been arrested here for possession of marijuana.

The long time and old time guru said that the arrests were part of a continuing campaign of police harassment.

Leary and his wife were released on $2,500 bail each. John was held “because of his condition.” Authorities refused to elaborate.

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Someday, it’s possible that surveillance technology may become sophisticated enough to read your mind as you’re walking down the street. If that dystopian future comes to pass, you’ll probably want one of these stylish thought-blocking accessories: When they detect scanning technology in action, they’ll distract you with a zap or a flashing light.

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< Supplement to Issue 173

In the past few weeks huge sections of the organized left in this country have been thrown into a state of chaos by a confrontation that initially erupted between the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and the Communist Party (CP). Physical clashes have ensued; debates have raged; editorials have been written. There has been much posturing and affectations of indignation.

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Detroit LEMAR will organize and sponsor a May Day Smoke-In to take place in Grand Circus Park on May 1 at 12 noon.

The Smoke-In will be held to demonstrate the strength of those who would have the archaic Michigan and Federal marijuana laws changed and have marijuana made legal for all. Free banana joints and other legal herbs will be passed out, along with pro-marijuana literature explaining the LEMAR position to passers-by.

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When Lenin and 32 other Russian refugees (30 adult revolutionaries and 2 children) were returning to Russia via a sealed train through Germany they encountered a number of problems living together. One of the earliest conflicts in the railroad carriage arose between smokers and non-smokers. Lenin was a nonsmoker and detested smoking. It had been agreed at the beginning of the journey that those people who wanted to smoke had to do so in the toilet. A line formed in the corridor outside the toilet and eventually arguments broke out between the smokers and the “comrades” who wanted to use the toilet for its intended purpose. Since the vast majority of the people were Bolsheviks, Lenin, as the leader of the Party, was called upon to settle the question. He wrote out passes, which had to be presented in order for the toilet to be used. There were two kinds of passes—those for organic use had the first priority, and those for inorganic, smoking purposes had second priority.

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I don’t know if people still buy comedy monologue records. We all know that after a couple of listenings we don’t play them until we have company and there is nothing else to do. But a Reprise-Bizarre (Frank Sinatra and Zappa together!) double album Lenny Bruce The Berkeley Concert is a service for the many of us who never heard him live.

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1992 marks the five hundred year anniversary of the Columbus expedition, which many governments and corporations are celebrating as “An Encounter of Cultures.” To counter this, a loosely organized movement under the banner of “500 Years of Resistance,” seeks to overturn the prevailing mythology about the Columbus voyages. Many people in Europe and the Americas are organizing cultural and educational events toward that end.

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At first glance, Les Biederman doesn’t appear to be the martyr type. He requested an assignment several years ago in the so-called “inner-city.” Placed in Jefferson Junior High School, just across from the Jeffries Housing Project, he found a sufficient challenge with those now popularly termed the “disadvantaged.”

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“...[A] small number of big WTO Members are leading an undesirable globalization that is inhumane, environmentally degrading, farmer-killing, and undemocratic. It should be stopped immediately. Otherwise the false logic of neo-liberalism will wipe out the diversity of global agriculture and be disastrous to all human beings.”

—Lee Kyung Hae, Korean farmer & activist who took his own life on the barricades

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a review of

The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim, T-Bone Slim, Edited by Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre, Foreword by David R. Roediger. University of Minnesota Press, 2025

There’s a new book out which should be of interest to all fans of poignant and witty anecdotes, whether or not they’re interested in history or in union organizing, and whether or not they’ve ever experienced police brutality, prison, or poverty. But for those who appreciate the written word, who have an interest in history or in union organizing, and especially for those among us who have ever gone to bed hungry and broke, this book will provide you with sustenance of all kinds.

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FE note: See also the letter exchange “L’affaire Black Rose Books” in this issue.

Dear Editor,

With reference to the slanderous letter from a Mr. Joe Doaks in your June 1977 issue, we would like you to publish the following reply in full.

(1) Why did the English-language edition of Durruti by Abel Paz not include Part 4? The history of this question is as follows. A member of our book-publishing cooperative read the French-language version some two and a half years ago. We thought about publishing an English-language version, but naturally we were overwhelmed by the complexity of the project. The one French-language edition we had was returned to the person from whom it was borrowed. Some time later we received the translation by Nancy Macdonald. We then negotiated a contractual agreement with both the author and translator. Part of the agreement included that the contents and approval of translation was a matter between the author and translator. We frankly proceeded to the publication of the book without anyone of us being aware that there was a Part 4. Last month to our embarrassment a member of our cooperative while visiting Paris was told by Paz that we had not included Part 4. This was news to us as we had insisted that the translation be cleared by the author. We have written to Nancy about this and received the following reply which we quote in part: “About the 4^th part of the Durruti it was (Paz) who suggested to me that it be cut out of the English edition as the book would be too long. And I agreed. There was never any question again of my translating it. I sent my translation to (Paz) a long time ago for him to OK it and he never mentioned the 4^th section. I have already written him to this effect a few days ago since he raised the question with me by letter...” As far as BRB was concerned it was certainly not an act of censorship in any way. If there is another edition of the book we intend to include Part 4, unless Paz thinks to the contrary.

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Since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, much information has come out about its terrible effects. The irradiation of (particularly European) people, animals and vegetation has been devastating. Dr. John Gofman, a Widely respected expert on radiation effects, estimated that more than a million people will develop cancers, half of them fatal, as a result of the accident.

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Editors’ Note: Fifth Estate staffer Rick Londin is in Cuba with Venceremos Cane Cutting Brigade. The Brigade has been there since last November to assist the Cubans in harvesting 10 million tons of sugar cane as part of their program of attaining economic independence. The contingent Rick is with will be arriving back in the U.S. in early February and a second group will leave for Cuba at that time.

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I’ve been in jail for so long now that I’ve lost count of the days, But such is the fate of the man who doesn’t have the money for bail ($10,000 or $1,000 for a bondsman).

I’ve found that there’s two types of justice in our illustrious nation: one for the rich, and one for the poor.

But if life in a “democracy” hands you a lemon, you don’t bitch. You find that there’s only steel bars to listen to you. So you do what any man who wants to make the world a better place to live would do. You squeeze the lemon and start a lemonade stand.

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The following letter was sent to an International Conference on Elisee Reclus, the 19^th century anarchist geographer and political theorist. The conference, which was held in Milan on October 12–13, was one of several planned for 2005 to celebrate the 175^th anniversary of Reclus’ birth and the 100^th anniversary of his death. I was invited to do a presentation but couldn’t leave New Orleans to attend. Fortunately, our electricity, which had been out for almost six weeks, resumed shortly before the conference, and I was able to write the letter hastily and find a place to email it. It arrived in Milan the day before the conference and was read during the proceedings, and it will be translated and published in the Italian anarchist magazine Libertaria.

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John Sinclair

Southern Michigan State

Prison Jackson, Michigan

Dear Leni & Everybody:

My letter yesterday from the Wayne County jail should be disregarded in large part since I was transferred up here this morning. It’s really good to get here at last—just like when you’ve been threatened with something for years and find out it ain’t so bad after all.

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