Passionate and Dangerous is a recent compilation of “conversations with Midwestern Anti-Authoritarians and Anarchists.” The zine interviews anarchists active in St. Louis, Chicago, Tennessee, Columbia, Bloomington, and one unknown location. These anarchists are involved in some exciting practical projects. Copies are available for $4 ppd. from Passionate and Dangerous, POB 63232, St. Louis, MO 63163
Mark: Amy, how and when did Free Radio Memphis 94.7 FM start?
Amy: We got the equipment in ’95 right after the 9th Court judge refused to
grant the FCC injunction against Steven Dunifer and Free Radio Berkeley. There
was the creation of this time period when it was questionable as to how micro-powered
broadcasting was to be regulated. Denny sent away for the equipment: “OK, I’ve
got all this pirate radio equipment who wants to give me money to help pay for
it?” The transmitter was broken. It sat in our office space for about a year.
The cat slept on it. In August, 96 the transmitter was fixed and we began broadcasting.
They had already formed as the Constructive Interference Collective. “Constructive
interference” is a technical term for something that happens with radio waves.
We thought, “Oh, that’s cute!” 
Mark: Have you had DJs on the air for 24 hours a day?
Amy: We’ve never had enough DJs to do that. Our official hours to have DJs at the DeCleyre Coop house are 7 to midnight. We have a 50 disc changer for other times. It took the wind out of our sails to shut down to move to this new location at the DeCleyre coop. But we have this Fall Rush planned: a big fire and ‘FRM’ in Greek-style letters. Everyone is supposed to bring ties and button down shirts to the meeting so we can have pictures of us taken looking seriously at the camera.
Mark: How many watts is your station?
Amy: 20.
Mark: What’s the radius of your signal?
Amy: It’s like 2 to 5 miles depending on where you are in relation to the trees around the house. We were thinking we would put the antennae up in one of the trees. When the FCC came to confiscate the equipment they would have to climb a tree to get it down.
Mark: You could build a tree house! So what’s your news program about?
Amy: It’s a daily news program that I do live at 7 am and the tape is played again at 5pm. Denny downloads information, and I turn it into something that I can make sense of and read over the air. I don’t watch TV, and my car stereo got stolen out of my car so I don’t have other sources of information. All things considered, it’s really nice to have this information to broadcast. Usually we get the information the day of, so its really timely. Recently, I read about an October delegation going to Chiapas and an Earth First! conference in Cedar Hill.
Mark: So how do you think this fits into a broader social movement such as creating your own media?
Amy: In terms of our specific station, we deliberately refer to ourselves as micropower broadcasting rather than pirate radio because we aren’t interested in “pirates come in and break the law.”
Memphis is a difficult city. The South is a difficult area. There are some very unique challenges to doing activism in Memphis that I just don’t see as being problems in the Northeast. We are faced with a lot more conservatism. The hegemonic way in which people go about assembling information around here is different than up North. Not that people don’t want to hear, but they aren’t equipped with critical thinking skills. It’s more of an issue in the south. People aren’t used to challenging the government or centralization in the same way.
You don’t want to offend people before you get a chance to communicate with them. If you’ve tried to communicate and it just doesn’t work, please offend them all you want. Make fun of them. For the most part people around here are pretty good people. It’s not like everyone is classist or racist. Most people are ok. They don’t think about stuff, and their information is from standard media sources. I was talking to some people at the Institute for Social Ecology telling them, “We’ve been organizing in Memphis and it doesn’t seem like we’ve gotten anywhere. I’ve discovered this to be false because we do have a stable and growing activist community here, but I can’t say that we organized this demonstration and all these thousands of people showed up. I asked them, “What are we doing wrong?” They gave me stories of what we could try but they were all stories from liberal cities, Portland, Berkeley. Tell me about Atlanta, Birmingham! Eventually we concluded it just takes a long time and we are operating on that principle.
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So with the radio station we’ve tried to keep it small. Keep it non-threatening. It’s not to say that we censor any of our broadcasting—I think our programming is as radical as any you’d hear on any pirate station. Rather, all of our publicity is very genial. Our logo is a couple of kids and images of community. We repeatedly project to the public that we want people to come in and do community stuff. Mark: You don’t say “Smash the State.” You say, “Let’s talk about government.” Amy: Some people say, “smash the state” but we don’t put it on the flyers. The community station asks for money, fundraising. They do a lot of local programming but there are a lot of folks feeling disillusioned with them. It’s like NPR. For the most part it’s the standard corporate media. We like to see ourselves as a “voice for the community” and another form of information. Mark: What are some of the other exciting shows on FRM? Amy: Sundays are really fun because we have back to back talk shows. It starts off with one person who does stream of consciousness analysis that’s wonderful. He integrates botany, biology, and politics and history. And that’s followed by Ray G, who does an anti-religion show while playing gospel music. It’s followed by the atheism hour, “Atheism Unbound.” DJ Red does a show called the “Estrogen Bomb,” which is all women’s music. And that’s followed by the “Lit Bomb,” which is readings from women’s zines. “Lit” as in “literature” and also implying “on fire.” I do a do-it-yourself health show which covers herbal medicine, alternative healing, and how to make your own menstrual rags. There’s an IWW show: “Solidarity Forever!” Kiern does “The History You Never Hear.” We have a couple of hip-hop shows but don’t have a lot that integrates the black community as much as we’d like. We’d love a Calypso show. One punk has over 10,000 records and does an amazing 2-hour international punk and hardcore show with “that was blah-blah from Holland and now we’re going to hear blah-blah from the Czech Republic and before that was blah-blah from Japan.” |
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Mark: The FCC has harassed you because you’re not following their regulations—a minimum 100 watts and licensing.
Amy: They keep hitting our website. Recently they delivered us a form letter: “What you’re doing is illegal. Stop.” The color copy letter flattered me. But our equipment has never been seized. The nearest field office is Atlanta, a 12-hour drive, whereas in Philadelphia where Radio Mutiny was broadcasting the field office was a 30-minute drive. So distance has something to do with the FCC’s lack of physical harassment. And a lot has to do with the apathy of the South. How many people are listening to us in the first place or would even support the FCC or local police to do something about it?
Mark: When the FCC official visited, he wouldn’t leave. You had to ask him to.
Amy: He was just hanging around. Julie asked him, “Are you going to leave?” Later he did.
Mark: You all operate as a collective.
Amy: We have a really great collective and get along really well. We actually make time for emotional issues. We don’t ignore it. A lot of the men in the group tend to repeat things: you can’t just say, “I agree.” You have to reframe it in your own words. So we made a policy that it’s ok to say, “Excuse me you’re just repeating what this person just said.” Usually in groups you have to sit there and be polite or people just get up and walk out. We have that space for a certain degree of self-work to go on improving our ability to communicate with one another.
We had this one guy involved convinced about the coming “Armageddon”; in the South you meet these bible-beating types. Like environmentalists who believe that God has given us the Earth for “stewardship.” Nature Theology.
Mark: I’m sure that involves fetuses too.
Amy: The local animal rights group is all anti-choice. There’s this 15-year old—a couple who are convinced they are going to be monogamous forever—they’ve never had sex. Abortion is wrong. Women’s reproductive rights are wrong...why don’t you just bring out the Bible?
Mark: What if the FCC returns?
Amy: There’s a buzzer in the studio that rings in the house. We tell guest DJs if someone knocks on the door, don’t let them in because we don’t want the guest DJ to be stuck being responsible. FCC has been making threats that whoever is at the transmitter would be the person who the fine is issued against. But if they start fining people for microbroadcasting, they’ll be actually opening up a legal case, a space for it to be debated as a free speech issue. So right now all they are doing is taking people’s equipment which is why FRM has the sub-contract from the coop house. The studio is not actually legally part of the house. Different mail box, separate part of the house. The ACLU in Tennessee said they might take on our case if the FCC does something. They can’t harm us or touch the house. The only thing they could do is confiscate the equipment. Even then we have a backup plan.
Mark: It’s such an ambitious project.
Amy: Micropowered radio is fun! I wish every city had one. It’s such a great way to get out information. Radio activism brings people together. In terms of building community, where’s the public space for people to get together? Doing radio makes that space.
Rich: In our interviews, we’ve found some anarchists in the upper Midwest (the Rust Belt area) who are using the leftover resources in urban areas. We’d like to see this as a positive thing, people are making use of somewhat abandoned stuff-buildings, land.
Peter: Those of us at the Fifth Estate aren’t doing too much of that. For the most part, our living patterns are fairly conventional. The best example in Detroit is the two-house project at the Trumbull Theatre. There is a benefit to living in an old Rust Belt city like Detroit. It’s much easier to establish what Hakim Bey calls “Permanent Autonomous Zones,” because of cheap rent and low property values. The Fifth Estate office, for instance, only pays $200 a month including all utilities, and the Trumbull property which includes the two houses and a theater for about $30,000.
Mark : Do you think the situation where people are buying and rehabbing houses, such as ones marginalized anarchists have access to, has potential within the Fifth Estate’s concept of “abolishing civilization” and your critique of technology?
Peter: I don’t think I would put such grandiose pronouncements on communal living. However, historically, people have had convivial, communal living arrangements within the context of radical movements, particularly younger people before they establish families. The larger the movement, the more people are involved in such activities such as in the 1960s. If its only attraction is cheaper rent than conventional forms of housing then it’s only like co-op housing at universities. Anything that steps outside the normal definitions of capitalist society (and the whole idea of communal living flies in the face of that), I think is positive. Capitalism depends on atomization.
Widespread communal living generally comes about when a movement has reached a certain level of coherence. In certain areas, often adjacent to universities or historically bohemian districts, some people say, “Hey, we all have similar ideas, we like the same music, go to the same demos, we ought to have a communal household that expresses in day-to-day life our values—sharing, the economy of the gift rather than the commodity (although this is usually implied rather than explicitly stated), consensus decision-making.” These living arrangements then easily become the locus of political action because of the number of revolutionaries grouped together. Activism becomes integrated into life from the moment of awakening rather than going to it like a job.
Mark: From a theoretical perspective, what are some ideas that you’ve been considering lately?
Peter: The last few years have been sobering. A certain humility has crept into our thinking and way of life. It doesn’t look like much of what we advocate is on the agenda. The machine rules everywhere. We are in a period of the total domination of capital where even the pseudo-opposition of socialism has left the scene —capital’s major 20th century rival. There is no more terra incognito. There is no longer any significant area, geography and thought that technology and capital hasn’t extended itself into.
Calls, such as the one which appears on the masthead of the Green Anarchist saying, “For the Destruction of Civilization,” sound shrill and incoherent at best, and, I’m sure nihilistic to most readers not steeped in their ideology. I’m not saying we should step away from radical critiques of capital and technology, but increasingly we’re being forced into rearguard actions whose demands step away from the totality and sound more like, Please don’t kill everything so fast.”
The idea that because we at the Fifth Estate make critiques of technologized capital doesn’t mean that we can escape the consequences we describe. We are at a critical point now trying to preserve those ideas which are at risk from being pushed from human consciousness. The Appendix to Orwell’s wonderful dystopian novel, 1984, is instructive. The idea of Newspeak was to remove words from language and thus the ideas they represent. I see our projects and journals as repositories of anti-authoritarian ideas that include an understanding that technology as manifested under industrial capitalism is a major factor in the domination of the human spirit.
Mark: When you say “humility” do you mean that you have opened up or softened your views?
Peter: It doesn’t mean I’m going to buy an electric steak knife! At one level, the world is as depressing as it always has been, but that’s not to say we can’t find elements of joy in our resistance and within an alternative culture we build around it.
At the same time, we have to recognize we are in a precarious position. We are in a biological, social and spiritual (and I don’t mean religious which I don’t care about) decline. There’s nothing left to hang our hats on that has substance. But people retain something in spite of this, even those immersed in the spectacle and commodity society. An inherent sociobiology rooted in our basic humanity manifests itself in our wanting to be communal figures like we were for 90 percent of human existence on the planet, even in things that may appear as dumb as a bowling league or a Star Trek convention. People want to do things together that are affirming and convivial no matter how much the culture of capital tries to domesticate us. We’ve been domesticated by the state; we’ve been domesticated by capital; we’ve been domesticated by technology, but there’s a million instances where people act contrary to that. But people could forget how to do it. As it is, the Star Trek convention holds no capacity to effectively confront our domestication. Worse examples, such as rooting for sports teams or worse, wars, take the impulses of communality and manipulates them for commodity consumption or the needs of the imperial state.
That’s why it’s critically important for us to continue our projects on the margins of this society, even if it looks absolutely hopeless. For one thing, if we want to live out our lives as distant as possible from the dominant society, we better work hard to create an alternative culture and communities, hopefully ones that have the potential to eventually confront the dominant paradigms that currently rule us.
Mark: So, there is some ray of hope?
Peter: I don’t think we can live without it. We continue to fight against the worst excesses of technology and the empire and we hope that something will occur—some incident or some sense of what the futility and harm of this world does to everything and everybody will impel people to move in a direction that reasserts human community and our own humanity. Maybe it will happen; maybe it won’t. A Leninist will scoff at what they would consider this lack of vision for how to achieve revolution, and will propose any number of strategies for the “people” or the “workers,’ but won’t end up any better than we do.
Mark: Does distant human history offer any guidance?
“Anarchy is natural; everything else is learned,” I’ve heard said; and the cooperative forms that nurtured every form of pre-historical, pre-state, pre-technological society gave them the capacity to exist. In that sense, you can “prove” that anarchism is a clumsy way of enunciating the ‘Old Ways’ as poet Gary Snyder calls them—ancient wisdom and sensibilities about how to live on the planet and with each other. This doesn’t mean, as dishonest opponents of this perspective have charged (and that includes not only Murray Bookchin, but Noam Chomsky, as well), that I or we or the Fifth Estate are advocating “going back to the caves.”
It means looking at the ideas that were operative in societies that did much better than us in living their lives. I think for our bioregion, the Ottawas, for instance, had a society where the major aspects of social and personal relationships were worthy of emulation. The culture brought here by the European invaders was a disaster for both the carriers of it as well as their victims. Unfortunately, we are the inheritors of that culture which is a planet eater and not the one which knew how to live in harmony with the earth.
The task of resurrecting the Old Ways as a basis for a new world is challenging, but also rewarding. Actually, we have no other choice if we have any hopes for our children and the future of the planet.
Mark: Tell us a little about Food Not Bombs (FNB).
Keith: I’m one of the co-founders of Food Not Bombs. There were eight of us in 1980 that started the group. We came out of the Clamshell Alliance. The Clamshell Alliance was trying to shut down Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, and it was a collection of mostly anarchists but also included Quakers and the Red Clams, who were socialists.
Keith explained at length the beginnings of Food Not Bombs. One of the early inspirational events was a street theater against the First National Bank in Boston whose directors were tied to the nuclear arms industry. As part of the theater, they invited homeless from a shelter to a 30’s style soup line in depression style costumes. “Your banking policies will cause economic collapse like the Great Depression.”
Keith: It was really inspiring. So we all quit our jobs. We started this collective house called Food Not Bombs. To finance the thing, we were trying to sell mushrooms and pot. That was really intense. Some people suggested we sell cocaine. But we discovered cocaine was something the contras were using, so we thought for political reasons we would not get into it. We thought in 1980 cocaine was a safe non-addictive drug. But we know now that’s crazy.
Mark: So then FNB really took hold nationally.
Keith: For the first 8 years there was only Boston FNB. We had about 3 different houses. Everything came from garbage. Recycled food. Recycled cameras. We made massive plays and grafitti.
As you were mentioning, it did grow. I got chased out of Boston protesting the eviction of people in the wake of the World Series in 1986. I started a second group in San Francisco. And that group got arrested on August 15, 1988. These arrests started this whole series of arrests and there were ultimately over 1,000 arrests in San Francisco for serving free food. Every time there was a wave of arrests, there would be more FNB chapters started. Now there’s over 200 chapters, probably, worldwide.
Autonomous anti-authoritorian groups are growing rapidly worldwide. It’s great that people are starting to understand that it’s arbitrary that banks and wealthy people own property. Many people around the world realize that’s ridiculous. We allow them to pull that over on us. That way of social order is as arbitrary as any other.
Mark: Tell me about Food Not Bombs activists.
Keith: When you come into a town, you can pick out the FNB activists. There’s a certain energy among the people doing FNB. They’re really doing something. They’ve had to solve a lot of problems. Logistical problems. There’s kind of this pride, this energy, that we can do things. The lack of hierarchy is really evident between FNB and the people on the streets. The intermingling at our food sharings is totally different from the traditional church soup line.
Rich: St. Louis is a relatively empty city with a lot of decaying housing that is abandoned or empty. You can buy a house here for less than a car—less than $7,000.
Keith: You could sell 3 pounds of pot and buy a house! When I come to St. Louis, I always think, “This is squatter’s heaven.” The buildings are really cool old brick buildings. They would be really nice to live in. Lots of tree-lined streets. And there are 1,000s of abandoned buildings. Why doesn’t every single anarchist in the world show up here? You could have 40,000 or 50,000 people living here for free with their own apartments. The thing is that this town is very similar to Philadelphia. In Philadelphia they really do have whole neighborhoods of anarchists living together, squatting. No one’s paying rent. The government is trying to co-opt that. The sheriff will come by and put the house up for auction. They let the squatters have first option to bid on the house, and then own it. A big debate, at least the last time I was in Philadelphia, was: “Should we bid on the houses and then physically own them and pay money on them or is that dooming us to becoming part of the economic system?” Or should we have this stance: “No, this is our house. Now. And we don’t need to be paying money and have a title.”
Mark: Some people talk about land trusts.
Keith: And some squatters talk about it as if that is also taking part in capitalism at some level. And there is also the hardcore idea that the land can’t be bought or sold‹it needn’t be that formal (i.e. have a title) at all. But others say you’ll get evicted or driven out after you’ve invested a lot of time and money fixing-up an old house that somebody else will claim is theirs and go to the cops to force you out. But in a way it’s wierd that there isn’t this movement of all the people that are having a difficult time everywhere from San Francisco to St. Louis. The capitalists have given up on this city. So you could have a whole squatters trip and have pirate radio stations and grow food...
Mark: If you lived in St. Louis and were in our position, and houses were really cheap and it would be easy to squat or buy a house what would you be doing?
Keith: Trying to get more people to come here. Part of the problem is that you really don’t have enough critical mass to buy and sell amongst yourselves. If you had another 20,000 people here, that were squatting all these buildings...
Rich: Or even 200.
Keith: We need a strategy. Maybe it’s an issue that we need to get more people from St. Louis to squat and organize St. Louis. That’s one strategy. When we were in Winnipeg, Canada, they were saying they’re living in a police state. Maybe they should get all the anarchists to move to Winnipeg and take over Winnipeg and have it be this giant anarchist town.
Rich: It’s too cold.
Keith: They were telling me that during an ice storm! And I’m thinking, “I don’t want to move to Winnipeg.” I was in Chicago and only 4 anarchists came to the FNB/IMF show, and 6 others from other cities were there. We talked to these Mexican-American organizers and we talked to these Puerto Rican organizers. We found the Puerto Rican organizers didn’t know the Mexican-American organizers and the Puerto Rican organizers didn’t know the organizers from the anarchist community. None of those communities worked together and did stuff.
Mark: Is there a lot more overlap in San Francisco?
Keith: In San Francisco we have a big effort to unite all races and movements. Communists or anarchists, Black, Latino, immigrant rights. I spend all this time attending all the other groups’ meetings. I try to unite everyone. I try to develop friendships with the Black Panthers, La Raza people.
Mark: Networking is important...
Keith: A lot of people were jealous of our Oct. 22, 1997 Days of Action Against Police Brutality protest in San Francisco. We had the largest protest in the US. We had over 1000 people. That’s because we do the amount of networking to get people to really come to each other’s events.
There are really two tendencies in the anarchist movement. Anarchists, who work only with other anarchists, and know about syndicalism and the IWW, which is growing and it’s a really good thing. The other group approaches people outside our culture. The TV culture is revolting. The whole US culture is sickening pathology. We have to overcome our disgust of this and somehow link up with people who shop. And watch TV. People who only know about celebrity politics. We have to be able to talk to Democrats and Republicans. But more so since they are a minority. I think there are 30 to 40 Democrats in San Francisco, but they’re the only ones in power. Every meeting you go to has 5 people. The anarchists outnumber the Democrats 20 to 1. (laughs)
We have to connect with people. My personal strategy is getting literature tables out in the streets in areas with multiple classes and different political backrounds and races. And standing there with a table that says “Food Not Bombs.” Not having pamphlets saying ‘anarchism’ all over them. But having “we organize by consensus. We don’t have a hierarchy. We are not going to force you to do something. We are against coercion.” We say all the things about what anarchy is but we do not say, “We are anarchists: you gotta do our trip our way.” It’s more important that people reject hierarchy in decision-making and work collectively. The attributes of anarchy are the best possible way to organize society. We need to build somehow. We need to get out into the shopping malls.
Rich: How?
Keith: You could start a Homes Not Jails group and take over empty buildings and occupy them to demonstrate housing problems. You could serve breakfast at the courthouse every first Monday of the month and give out free literature with coffee. Or watch the news and get a hold of families who had a relative shot by police. Tell them about the police brutality coalition.
Mark: How do you translate day to day activities to long term political change?
Keith: One of the biggest challenges we face is: people in the low-income communities aspire to become wealthy. We gotta break that down. That’s not any kind of goal. That goal encourages your own personal slavery. One way is to connect with people who are organizing around different issues. For instance talking to people in public housing when it’s being demolished. Propaganda: we can’t underestimate the power of gluing posters all over the city denouncing corporations and the government. If you have your literature tables, posters all over, graffiti and flyers taped to windows that talk about the cruelty and viciousness of corporations and about the myth of democracy, you’re doing a lot.
People used to believe in the idea of democracy even if they thought it was a scam. But now we’re at a point where people are forgetting the very idea of self-rule and local political control. We are abdicating all power to a board of directors voted into office by stockholders who have complete power over all aspects of political life. And this is beginning to seem normal for lots of people all over the world. If we’re going to change this, we have to have literature that is very clear and easy to understand and videos on street corners. Everything needs to be fun. Puppets. Beautiful things. Theatrical events on the streets. Getting lots of people to arrive in one place and doing something extravagant that catches people’s attention.
James Mumm: Why did you get involved (help start) in an Infoshop? Where does it fit into your strategy for revolution?
Bill: I was involved in all of the four Azone spaces, but got fully involved in the third space. I was in SDS and Weatherman for a short time those groups were based on a lot of theory and talk. I didn’t see many institutions being built, although a lot of action of an illegal nature took place. I didn’t have the experiences of having a free space back then. I saw the infoshop movement as something tangible, very different from other anarchists in Chicago that simply put out fliers and had discussions. I was very excited about the idea of having a space where people can come together and have community.
Tony: I wanted to have a physical space that people could come to and get familiar with anarchist ideas—a small place where people could have solidarity with each other. That solidarity feels more real because of the physical space. The Azone is an attempt to set up the community that you would like to see in larger society—non-hierarchical relationships, appreciation of the individuals involved and a real respect for people. Community can be a focal point for resources that you can share. By working collectively we are experimenting with running our lives collectively. Our experience proves that you don’t need bosses to organize society. Our work here is a small example of what can be done without hierarchical relationships.
Bill: The infoshop movement has a historical continuity with the anteneos (workers centers) in Spain. My strategy for revolution starts with building concrete institutions based on peoples’ needs (food, shelter, info, etc.). Infoshops can meet some of those needs. A lot of people don’t like to go to meetings, but they do enjoy building culture together concrete, real activity. When you have a space that can offer that sense, it can bring people together— just look at churches. Infoshops offer a community base for people. This doesn’t mean you don’t build for revolution in other ways. Infoshops are just one part of a revolutionary strategy. There must also be outreach beyond the infoshop, community organizing, health collectives, alternative schools, etc. Infoshops are simply the easiest to get off the ground, in large part because you don’t need special expertise. Just get a space, get some books, and have a willingness to talk and be with people. Those are the first steps in the right direction.
Tony: Infoshops are important as a primary way of educating people about anarchism. The biggest thing that anarchists should be concerned with is solidarity with working class folksand bringing middle class people to a class-conscious perspective. Just because you were born into the middle class doesn’t mean you can’t reject the middle class—reject the value system and become conscious of the nature of oppression. This brings an awareness of the root causes of suffering. We’re here to show that you can do things without using oppressive hierarchical structures to get things done. Together with infoshops and other alternative institutions, there has to be an emphasis on oppositional politics.
Bill: An infoshop is a space in which people can relate to each other in a way that they can’t anywhere else. This has an impact on people’s everyday lives (family, work, etc.), through relating to each other in a consensus way. At the Azone we work in common on issues and problems. This space allows people to address issues that are a part of their everyday lives in a new way. This is revolutionary.
Tony: A working class focus doesn’t mean you ignore race, gender, sexuality, etc, when analyzing oppression. We’re building class consciousness in the working class, class traitors in the middle class, and throughout dealing with identity issues so that those issues do not become a stumbling block to class action and the ability of people to run society in a non-hierarchical manner.
Bill: Infoshops exist to create social revolution. The key is in the nature of our social relationships—how we relate to each other, how we relate in groups, how we meet our material needs, etc. All mainstream institutions are hierarchical, infoshops move beyond them by offering a place to get information, practice new social relationships, and then carry the experience to anti-authoritarian relationships beyond the space. How do you build consensus? How is the debate framed? How do you change the environment in order to change the relationships? Consensus process can be used as an organizing tool that alters peoples’ way of behavingfrom authoritarian to anti-authoritarian.
James: How has your Infoshop evolved since it began? How is it run? How has all that changed over time?
Bill: On a biological level, we have a smaller toilet than ever before.
Tony: I’ve been involved at the Azone for two years. We have made a real attempt to make this new space [the Azone’s fourth] a very nice place to be. We’re trying to be accessible to a broader range of people. People have, and rightfully so, biases against peeling paint and dirt, messy, filthy, sloppy—apparently disorganized spaces. So we’re now experimenting with being aesthetically accessible. There are currently ten people in the Azone collective, all volunteer.
Bill: There are historic problems with anarchism being deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented as unstructured, so spontaneous that people do whatever they want whenever they want. Makhno’s more centralized organizational structure leads to greater organizational discipline. We can build a culture in the anarchist movement that has structure, consensus and responsibility. Consensus process empowers people because of the equal responsibility to give and take. When people understand that they have a responsibility to themselves and other people it creates a value structure that builds self-discipline. Such discipline does not have to come from people who are seen as leaders. Discipline is something we share with each other—recognizing that answers can come from the people who are quiet or slow. This is the third way.
James: Who is your membership?
Tony: We currently have a fairly decent level of diversity, unusual in the anarchist or punk movements. There are 2 African-Americans, 1 Latino, 2 Polish immigrants, and 2 people over 55. The average age at our last meeting was 40, ranging from 18 to 63. There are queer and bisexual people, although we do need more women involved.
Bill: The women that have stayed involved are strong, articulate, aggressive women.
Tony: I felt there was a greater egalitarian element a few months ago, but that dwindled away recently. I have come to realize that shifting leadership is okay. I would like to see a more participatory group.
Bill: We need to find a way to do away with informal hierarchy. The Azone has had a core of leadership since the very beginning. Mainstream society conditions us to accept relationships that reinforce hierarchy. In order to equalize power, people need opportunities to participate fully in groups. The Azone uses a consensus process, but what does that mean in terms of taking a role in a meeting? The goal of consensus is everybody facilitating the meeting together.
James: Who are your constituents?
Tony: The Azone started off closely tied to anarcho-punk culture, but now that element isn’t as strong. Lately though we’ve been tabling at Los Crudos shows, so we’ve actually been getting back into it a bit. Many of our current collective members wouldn’t go to a punk show. We have a broader representation of society than ever before. Our constituents are people who know people in the Azone. We get some random people in to the space, and a lot of travelers. Many people know about the Azone because of its connection to the broader infoshop movement. There is still a strong counter-cultural youth element. We need to have more folks coming in. In order for more people to be a part of the Azone, it needs to relate to their agenda.
Bill: We now have a greater ability for people to call themselves anarchists instead of anti-authoritarians or autonomists. We are reaching out to the whole city-not just the neighborhood.
In terms of relating to the people in the neighborhood, we are still doing it through other groups like the West Town Tenants Union. Vic has been talking about setting up a drop in time for tenants’ rights counseling. This might be a concrete way for WTTU to use the Azone. It is necessary to fight for day to day reform, as long as you have your eyes on the prize of revolution. When you think you have everything good and don’t need a revolution, then there’s a problem. For example, the Spanish anarchists fought for working condition reform. They synthesized a revolutionary vision and with a practical approach to dealing with everyday problems. In order for infoshops to take on this role people need to get a lot more serious. I understand this from working at Metropolitan Tenants Organizationdealing with a broad range of people: folks on public assistance, food stamps, people with subsidized housing, etc. I work with a very diverse group of people, diverse racially and economically. As anarchists we need to relate to ordinary folks. Many people see anarchism as a great idea, but unfortunately it’s seen as a social club. Anarchists feel alienated and also alienate people. We have to be appealing and open to people who may eat meat, make sexist comments, act or think in other oppressive ways.
Bill: The Black Panther’s breakfast program is the classic example of radical social service. Volunteer projects should be built so that others can run with them. I come from a grassroots organizing, labor organizing perspective. I first got involved as a youth outreach worker in the projects with the YMCA. The way to make anarchism a practical thing is to bring it to where people are at. You have to show people that anarchism is about food, shelter and clothing. We have to show people that our process is a different way than they are used to.
Tony: People are isolated out there, some may read MaximumRockNRoll on a regular basis, some may feel part of a community that makes sense to them. We can find those people and they can find us. We are definitely looking for more people to get involved. I think that our experience mirrors that of others across the country. We want the Azone to be an open and inclusive place.
Bill: People that are anarchists or inclined to anarchism need to be building an anarchist movement. Recently, I have seen a number of anarchist-minded people working in solidarity with state-oriented people. But those anarchists are not involved in the decision-making process like they would be as part of an anarchist process. Outside of the consensus process there is very little room for criticism. People find themselves always on the outside looking in.
Tony: I believe in the theory that in a world of oppression you find the most oppressed and work with them.
Bill: I believe in the theory you have to start with your own oppression. If you get involved with people who do not share similar oppressions, then there is not a real relationship taking place.
Tony: Maybe we’ve let people down, come short of what we claimed to be, not provided what they want, and so they’re fed up with this particular place. They go somewhere else.
Bill: This says something about us, and it also says something about them. In the end it’s nothing but liberalism. When you find other people who share your oppression and you work on it together, then you’re about real revolution. Otherwise it’s not a real relationship.
James: What is the ideal role for an Infoshop in the revolutionary movement?
Tony: The ideal role for infoshops is that of a sparkplug of sorts. Infoshops are a place to practice new roles and social relationships, a place for information, a place to make you feel sane, less isolated and alienated. The Azone can build self-confidence through experience, perhaps even encouraging people to start up their own workers collective. To make all this happen we will need a greater number of people taking on greater responsibility. This means spreading out responsibilities-people can stay sane, feel involved and participate. Everyone should feel that their role is important, ideally without some folks feeling like they have a major role and others a minor one. We must also have a real serious approach to publicity. I think that many more people would be interested in anarchism and the Azone-if they knew about it.
Reprinted with permission
Anticopyright 1999
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