Autonomous and squatted villages of Europe

From Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works
view full .pdf here (the book is anti-copyright in its entirety)

Throughout Europe, dozens of autonomous villages have built a life outside capitalism. Especially in Italy, France, and Spain, these villages exist outside regular state control and with little influence from the logic of the market. Sometimes buying cheap land, often squatting abandoned villages, these new autonomous communities create the infrastructure for a libertarian, communal life and the culture that goes with it. These new cultures replace the nuclear family with a much broader, more inclusive and flexible family united by affinity and consensual love rather than bloodlines and proprietary love; they destroy the division of labor by gender, weaken age segregation and hierarchy, and create communal and ecological values and relationships. A particularly remarkable network of autonomous villages can be found in the mountains around Itoiz, in Navarra, part of the Basque country. The oldest of these, Lakabe, has been occupied for twenty-eight years as of this writing, and is home to about thirty people. A project of love, Lakabe challenges and changes the traditional aesthetic of rural poverty. The floors and walkways are beautiful mosaics of stone and tile, and the newest house to be built there could pass for the luxury retreat of a millionaire-except that it was built by the people who live there, and designed in harmony with the environment, to catch the sun and keep out the cold. Lakabe houses a communal bakery and a communal dining room, which on a normal day hosts delicious feasts that the whole village eats together.

Another of the villages around Itoiz, Aritzkuren, exemplifies a certain aesthetic that represents another idea of history. Thirteen years ago, a handful of people occupied the village, which had been abandoned for over fifty years before that. Since then, they have constructed all their dwellings within the ruins of the old hamlet. Half of Aritzkuren is still ruins, slowly decomposing into forest on a mountainside an hour’s drive from the nearest paved road. The ruins are a reminder of the origin and foundation of the living parts of the village, and they serve as storage spaces for building materials that will be used to renovate the rest of it. The new sense of history that lives amidst these piled stones is neither linear nor amnesiac, but organic-in that the past is the shell of the present and compost of the future. It is also post-capitalist, suggesting a return to the land and the creation of a new society in the ruins of the old.

Uli, another of the abandoned and reoccupied villages, disbanded after more than a decade of autonomous existence; but the success rate of all the villages together is encouraging, with five out of six still going strong. The “failure” of Uli demonstrates another advantage of anarchist organizing: a collective can dissolve itself rather than remaining stuck in a mistake forever or suppressing individual needs to perpetuate an artificial collectivity. These villages in their prior incarnations, a century earlier, were only dissolved by the economic catastrophe of industrializing capitalism. Otherwise, their members were held fast by a conservative kinship system rigidly enforced by the church. At Aritzkuren as at other autonomous villages throughout the world, life is both laborious and relaxed. The residents must build all their infrastructure themselves and create most of the things they need with their own hands, so there is plenty of work to do. People get up in the morning and work on their own projects, or else everyone comes together for a collective effort decided on at a previous meeting. Following a huge lunch which one person cooks for everyone on a rotating basis, people have the whole afternoon to relax, read, go into town, work in the garden, or fix up a building. Some days, nobody works at all; if one person decides to skip a day, there are no recriminations, because there are meetings at which to make sure responsibilities are evenly distributed. In this context, characterized by a dose connection to nature, inviolable individual freedom mixed with a collective social life, and the blurring of work and pleasure, the people of Aritzkuren have created not only a new lifestyle, but an ethos compatible with living in an anarchist society.

The school they are building at Aritzkuren is a powerful symbol of this. A number of children live at Aritzkuren and the other villages. Their environment already provides a wealth of learning opportunities, but there is much desire for a formal educational setting and a chance to employ alternative teaching methods in a project that can be accessible to children from the entire region.

As the school indicates, the autonomous villages violate the stereotype of the hippy commune as an escapist attempt to create a utopia in microcosm rather than change the existing world. Despite their physical isolation, these villages are very much involved in the outside world and in social movements struggling to change it. The residents share their experiences in creating sustainable collectives with other anarchist and autonomous collectives throughout the country. Many people divide each year between the village and the city, balancing a more utopian existence with participation in ongoing struggles. The villages also serve as a refuge for activists taking a break from stressful city life. Many of the villages carry on projects that keep them involved in social struggles; for example, one autonomous village in Italy proVides a peaceful setting for a group that translates radical texts. LikeWise, the villages around Itoiz have been a ma jor part of the twenty-year-running resistance to the hydroelectric dam there.

For about ten years, starting with the occupation of Rala, near Aritzkuren, the autonomous villages around Itoiz have created a network, sharing tools, materials, expertise, food, seeds, and other resources. They meet periodically to discuss mutual aid and common projects; residents of one village will drop by another to eat lunch, talk, and, perhaps, deliver a dozen extra raspberry plants. They also participate in annual gatherings that bring together autonomous communities from all over Spain to discuss the process of building sustainable collectives. At these, each group presents a problem it has been unable to resolve. such as sharing responsibilities or putting consensus decisions into practice. Then they each offer to mediate while another collective discusses their problem — preferably a problem the mediating group has experience resolving.

The Itoiz villages are remarkable. but not unique. To the east, in the Pyrenees ofAragon, the mountains of La Solana contain nearly twenty abandoned villages. As of this writing, seven of these villages have been reoccupied. The network between them is still in an informal stage, and many of the villages are only inhabited by a few people at an early point in the process of renovating them; but more people are moving there every year, and before long it could be a larger constellation of rural occupations than Itoiz. Many in these villages maintain strong connections to the squatters’ movement in Barcelona, and there is an open invitation for people to visit, help out, or even move there.

Under certain circumstances, a community can also gain the autonomy it needs to build a new form of living by buying land, rather than occupying it; however though it may be more secure this method creates added pressures to produce and make money in order to survive, but these pressures are not fatal. Longo Mai is a network of cooperatives and autonomous villages that started in Basel, Switzerland, in 1972. The name is Provencal for “long may it last,” and so far they have lived up to their eponym. The first Longo Mai cooperative are the farms Le Pigeonnier, Grange neuve, and St. Hippolyte, located near the village Limans in Provence. Here 80 adults and many children live on 300 hectares ofland, where they practice agriculture, gardening, and shepherding. They keep 400 sheep, poultry, rabbits, bees, and draft horses; they run a garage, a metal workshop, a carpentry workshop, and a textile studio. The alternative station Radio Zinzine has been broadcasting from the cooperative for 25 years, as of 2007. Hundreds of youth pass through and help out at the cooperative, learning new skills and often gaining their first contact with communal living or non-industrial agriculture and crafting.

Since 1976 Longo Mai has been running a cooperative spinning-mill at Chantemerle, in the French Alps. Using natural dyes and the wool from 10,000 sheep, mostly local, they make sweaters, shirts, sheets, and cloth for direct sale. The cooperative established the union ATELIER, a network of stock-breeders and wool-workers. The mill produces its own electricity with smallscale hydropower.

Also in France, near Aries, the cooperative Mas de Granier sits on 20 hectares of land. They grow fields of hay and olive trees, on good years producing enough olive oil to provide for other Longo Mai cooperatives as well as themselves. Three hectares are devoted to organic vegetables, delivered weekly to subscribers in the broader community. Some of the vegetables are canned as preserves in the cooperative’s own factory. They also grow grain for bread, pasta, and animal feed.

In the Transkarpaty region of Ukraine, Zeleniy Hai, a small Longo Mai group, started up after the fall of the Soviet Union. Here they have created a language school, a carpentry workshop, a cattle ranch, and a dairy factory. They also have a traditional music group. The Longo Mai network used their resources to help form a cooperative in Costa Rica in 1978 that provided land to 400 landless peasants fleeing the civil war in Nicaragua, allowing them to create a new community and provide for themselves. There are also Longo Mai cooperatives in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, producing wine, building buildings with local, ecological materials, running schools, and more. In the city of Basel they maintain an office building that serves as a coordinating point, an information hub, and a visitors’ center.

The call-out for the cooperative network, drafted in Basel in 1972, reads in part,

What do you expect from us? That we, in order not to be excluded, submit to the injustice and the insane compulsions of this world, without hope or expectations?

We refuse to continue this unwinnable battle. We refuse to play a game that has already been lost, a game whose only outcome is our criminalization. This industrial society goes doubtlessly to its own downfall and we don’t want to participate.

We prefer to seek a way to build our own lives, to create our own spaces, something for which there is no place within this cynical, capitalist world. We can find enough space in the economically and socially depressed areas, where the youth depart in growing numbers, and only those stay behind who have no other choice. (“Longo Mai,” Buiten de Orde, Summer 2008, p. 38. Author’s translation.)

As capitalist agriculture becomes increasingly incapable of feeding the world in the wake of catastrophes related to climate and pollution, it seems almost inevitable that a large number of people must move back to the land to create sustainable and localized forms of agriculture. At the same time, city dwellers need to cultivate consciousness of where their food and water come from, and one way they can do this is by visiting and helping out in the villages.

Audio and Video from City From Below conference

Audio and video recordings of presentations from the recent City From Below conference that happened in March 2009 in Baltimore are now available. Some of the topics include “Community control and autonomy over community projects – self sufficiency and determination” (featuring presentations by urban farmers/guerrilla gardeners), “Children in the City,” Urban Sustainability, Countering Gentrification, “Contesting the Urban Property Regime,” Anarchitecture, a discussion on “Rustbelt Resistance: On Theory and Practice of Horizontal Organizing Where the State and Market Wither,” and an interview with Max Rameau of Take Back the Land (a squatting project for people who are homeless).

To listen and watch, go here.

The Institute of Applied Piracy: Starting Communes and so on

check out the original on the IAP’s webpage

The Journal of
The Institute for Applied Piracy
Issue Number One

In The Beginning…

By The Grand Hexapus, Spring 2002

The town-folk of Europe (called Burgers, or in French, Bourgeois) invented capitalism between the 10th and 16th centuries. Feudalism in the 10th century was a tight social knot of nobles, priests, and peasants. The nobles tied up the medieval economy to their excusive benefit – only the nobility were allowed to trade goods.

To squeeze into this knot, the Burgers were forced to resort to bribery. They bribed the kings and princes of Europe for the right to trade for profit, and for the right to build small, experimental capitalist villages called Burgs. For 800 years the Burgers toiled and traded in these villages, slowly building wealth, as they worked out the details of capitalism, and as they gradually pried loose the knot of feudalism.

The Burgs were the New World in the shell of the Old, and as they grew from villages, to towns, and finally to huge cites, the Burgers themselves grew in power and wealth to the point where they could challenge their old feudal masters: the kings and the princes. The American and French Revolutions marked the last days of feudalism and the blooming of the Age of the Capitalist Republics; a flower that took 800 years to grow.

Radicals in the 19th century looked forward to a better world, and back to the successful Bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th century, and they hoped, “Maybe we can copy the rapid gains of the capitalists and leap into our New World in one shattering lurch!” Missing from this brave dream is history. The capitalists didn’t yank the word out of feudalism in a few violent years. It actually took eight centuries.

My friends and I understand something that the commies and other coffee-shop radicals don’t understand. We understand that we are what we do – not what we believe. My friends and I are anarchists because we instigate anarchist collectives, all kinds of collectives: worker-run businesses, soup kitchens, activist centers, clubs and performance spaces, free-love networks, art collectives, bands of thieves, squats, cafes, religious heresies, day-care centers, nomadic tribes, and communes, to name a few.

In this way we are like the Burgers. Our collectives are the seeds of the New World in the shell of the Old. Not only are our collectives the beginning of a revolution, they are also our chance to live our dreams in the present, to work out the kinks in our anarchist skills, and to improve our lot in the here and now. We want a revolution, a complete turning over of everything: power, wealth, work, family, religion, sex, art, music, all of it. Our way is the only way. We will build our future one collective at a time.

I seem to be specializing in communes. Starting a commune may sound old-fashioned, an idea that failed in the ’70s and was left behind, but the communes of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t fail. A collective doesn’t have to be permanent to be a success. And the ’60s communes weren’t the first to give it a go. There have been communes in North America longer than the U$ has been a republic. As we set up our 21st-century communes, we try to learn from the victories and follies of the communes of the past. I have helped instigate about a half-dozen living collectives, including a particularly hearty group in Maine, still keeping it real, eight years on.

The State of Expensive Sunshine

My lover, Salach (pronounced Saw lock), has long dreamed of owning her own land. By last fall, the fall of 2001, we had been living in California for about two years on and off. We had moved there from Scotland, partly so Salach could take on a boat-building apprenticeship, and partly because I sit with a Zen group that makes its home in California. We were crashing with Chainsaw, Frenchy, Capt. Peachfuz, Hotlunch, and Elephanthead, all seven of us crammed in a tiny two-bedroom house that we rented north of San Francisco.

We worked weird jobs and built boats in the basement, but California was just too expensive, even for seven wage-slaves pooling money and living in a can of sardines. For the last couple of years, Salach had been haunting the Internet, looking for cheap land for sale in Northern California. But last fall, it was clear to her that there wasn’t any cheap land left in California, so she broadened her haunts and started to find some cheap land in Oregon and Washington.

Salach wanted to live on the land, I wanted to continue my experiments with living cheap and working less, and all of us at the house wanted to get out of the State of Expensive Sunshine, so we started talking about buying land together. It was at about this point, early on in the development of our wee collective, that we spied a seductive anarchist notion on the horizon, sailing toward us: piracy.

Freedom and the Blue-Grey Sea

“With deft skill and arduous labor, the pirates survived storms, avoided shoals, and escaped warships. At sea they formed a close-knit community, whose members relied on each other for their lives. Despite their democratic ways, the pirates ran a tight ship. The myth that they were lazy, drunken louts is debunked by the reports of those taken prisoner. Captives were struck by the good order of the pirate vessels as well as by the crew’s constant practice with weapons.”- Honor Among Thieves: Capt. Kidd, Henry Every, and the pirate democracy in the Indian Ocean, Jan Rogozinski, 2000.

We met the pirates and we recognized them as our own. Pirates are completely misunderstood. Until recently, most of our information about 18th century pirates comes from Dan Defoe’s, A General History of Pirates. Real pirates are mysterious – we don’t even know the names of most. However, in the 20th century, historians uncovered first-hand documents describing real pirates: colonial records, accounts by men taken captive by pirates, and the ships’ articles.

It turns out that Defoe made up most of the General History, including the intriguing character, Capt. Mission, and his pirate republic of Libertalia on Madagascar. Anarchists have long been interested in the history of Libertalia because Defoe describes something that sounds a lot like an anarchist commune. The new information revealed that behind the myth of Capt. Mission and Libertalia, there is an even more inspiring truth.

“On St. Mary’s, the pirates formed what might well be the most democratic and egalitarian society in human history.” (Ibid)

Pirates did make a settlement in the Indian Ocean, not on Madagascar, but on a nearby island called St. Mary’s. The pirates on St. Mary’s were the most successful criminals in history. Over the thirty-year life of the settlement, not one pirate was ever captured at sea and together they made off with a booty that today would be worth over a billion dollars. Most retired peacefully to enjoy their wealth. Some bought plantations on nearby French colonies, some returned to North America or Europe, while the majority married local women and blended into Polynesian society.

The real pirate republics were the ships themselves, not the settlement. Before sailing, the crew of a pirate vessel would meet and draw up a contract called the ship’s articles, and then they would bind themselves to the voyage by swearing an oath to uphold the agreement. Surviving articles describe little floating democracies. Captains were elected by the crew and could be recalled at any time. They received only 1/2 extra share of the booty, and except in the heat of battle, they were required to consult the crew on all major decisions. Crews frequently exercised their right to replace their captains, and one vessel, The Charming Mary, went all the way to Anarchy, and sailed without a commander.

This is in stark contrast to the maritime practices of the day. In both merchant fleets and navies, crewmen were almost slaves. The captain had the power of life and death and he enforced his will with beatings and torture until the decks ran red with blood. The crew didn’t dare mutiny because only the captain and the first mate were taught navigation. In the English navy, any one other than the captain or first officer caught navigating was immediately hung. Most crewmen in the 17th century were illiterate, and given the poor tools and charts at that time, navigation was more black magic than science. A ship without a trained navigator was literally lost in the world.

In general, pirates avoided fighting. “Dead pirates can’t spend booty,” as they say. And often the pirates didn’t have to put fire to powder. Some times, as a pirate vessel drew on a merchantman and raised the black flag, the abused crew of the merchantman would rejoice at the chance to throw off their tormentors, and would mutiny, tossing the officers overboard, and joining the pirates. Ho ho!

I don’t intend to romanticize. The St. Mary’s pirates were regular men of their time. Some did turn to slaving after piracy, and sometimes they did have to fight, and it was a mean, bloody business. Still, it’s inspiring to imagine the Charming Mary, an anarchist utopia, sailing the high seas 300 years ago. 17th century pirates could not exist in our world of instant, global communications, and, what is called piracy today is a wholly different animal. Yet, the St. Mary’s pirates were called pirates not because they used ships to steal things. Indeed, it was standard for warring European nations to use privateers to loot each other’s merchant fleets.

What made seamen pirates in the 17th century was not what they did, but how and why. The pirates wanted gold for sure, but they also wanted freedom. They sailed to freedom by overturning the maritime laws of their era, and at least in one case, the pirates sailed all the way to Anarchy.

Crusty Punk Pirate Riot

I grew up on the water. Before I turned veggie, I was a fanatic sports fisherman, and from my teens into my twenties, I worked summers as a commercial fisherman. I also sailed and surfed and generally messed around on the water all my waking hours. I used to love hanging around the docks and I still do. I meet the coolest people there: crusty old fishermen, crazy wharf rats, and coolest of all, world-traveling sailors.

These sailors also use boats to sail to freedom. There is a whole class of modern pirate/adventurer that sees the world from the deck of a small boat. Some yachties are rich, but many aren’t. The sailing couple, the Pardees, have written volumes on the esoteric art of sailing on a wharf-rat budget. Most of these folks aren’t consciously anarchist, but they share with us some anarchist goals, particularly with a “living cheap and working less” anarchist like myself.

It got me thinking. I am a restless person. I rarely stay in one place for long. I love boats and the sea, and the freedom of living low; surviving without punching a clock. Hmmm. A few of my anarchist friends are thinking along the same lines. Old Guano Crash has lately been pricing used sailboats, and Capt. Peachfuz, and even Salach. I sensed a movement afoot – anarchist neo-pirates sailing the globe, spreading the faith, meeting up in Ponape for nakid tropical disco on the beach, then off to Nagasaki to smuggle pirate radio parts to anarchist in Africa!

Ahh, but first we needed to establish a cast-off point and a haven, a modern St. Mary’s where we can meet other pirates, hone our nautical skills, store our sea chests, and rest between voyages. Salach and I had been talking about going back to Scotland to study Gaelic. One way or another, we yearn to travel.

We don’t own much, but we do have some stuff: a truck, Salach’s boat-building tools, some books, a half-completed Rangely Lakes Boat. Every time we travel, we have to store this stuff, or take it with us. Do we sell our truck? We love our beat up little ford, Snowflake. Salach rebuilt Snowflake’s engine herself and the three of us have been through a lot together. Where is it safe to store a fragile, half-made boat? Dragging all our garbage around from place to place – it was cramping our style. Piracy, anarchy, living-cheap, Gaelic, they were all pointing in the same direction. We needed to buy some land where we could live rent-free, store our crap, and plan our adventures!

A Bold Plan

With all these ideas kicking up the dust in our sculls, six of us, Frenchy, Chainsaw, Elephanthead, Hotlunch, Salach, and I started meeting to discuss buying land and instigating a new commune. Our first meetings were light and relaxed. We sat at a café, drinking jo, while we took turns rambling on about our dreams for out new group. At this stage, we didn’t work too hard to be specific or to agree on anything.

Still, we did share some general goals: We wanted bare land so we could live off the power grid, and also build our own structures. We wanted our structures to be cheap, weird, but also well-made. Blue-tarp and sheet-rock-screw shanties might be the least expensive, but we all planned to take the time and spend a little extra cash to build little homes that would be fantastic and beautiful. We wanted a garden, maybe with some French-intensive raised beds, and also maybe with some paradise-garden influences like nut trees, fruits, and other perennials.

We figured that we needed about five acres and that we could each reasonably raise about $3K, or a total of 18 thousand dollars. We also wanted to be nearish to a medium-sized town for jobs and social activities, arts, movies, punk shows, and such, and we should be near salt water for our piracy. We know of anarchist kids who have purchased land outside Taos, New Mexico, or in upstate New Hampshire, for as little as $200/acre, but we were willing to pay more to be near a town and the sea. $3,000 is still less than we often pay in rent for a year, so while it is a lot of cash to produce all at once, it is not really that much money for living in the U$.

We also agreed from the outset that this would be a collective and that we would organize ourselves by consensus, which raises the question, is this group an anarchist commune? The mark of an anarchist group is consensus, but several members of this new pirate settlement wouldn’t call themselves anarchists. This is common. The international soup-kitchen movement, Food Not Bombs, is a good example of a network of collectives that uses consensus but that also includes thousands of non-anarchist volunteers.

Consensus is simply useful. I have used consensus for more than a decade in dozens of groups, and I could write pages about its virtues and pitfalls, but I will spare you young buccaneers with this brief definition: Consensus is a rigorous form of democracy where every member of a group must agree to all of the decisions that the group makes. At first blush it doesn’t look like this could possibly work. But with some practice, consensus is fast and fair.

Consensus crafts better decisions than majority-rules because all of the concerns of the members of a group must be addressed before the group goes forward. Also, consensus forestalls conflicts because all of the voices in a group are heard, even minorities of one. So is this group anarchist if it uses consensus? Maybe, I don’t know. That is more of a semantic question, but practically we use consensus because it works and because we are pirates and we don’t care. Har, har!

So with our requirements in mind (five bare acres, 18K, near sea and town), Salach drew up a list from the Internet of likely properties. Then Frenchy, Chainsaw, Elephanthead, and Salach climbed into Frenchy’s Honda Civic, Stuffsack, and on October 15th they headed 13 hours north to Oregon and Washington to look for land. I was the only one in our group that had ever bought land before, but I was staying behind, so I was anxious.

Rafting a River of Sleaze

Buying real estate is unlike buying anything else and also real estate is the slimiest, scummiest market out there; way scummier than used cars. Before the scouting expedition, we armed ourselves by reading up on real estate. But in the end, sellers and agents always have more information than buyers, and they can use this information as power over buyers, more so yet, first-time buyers.

There are 1001 ways to get hosed in real estate. Even for hardened sea rovers, buying property is emotional, and real estate agents learn to play buyer’s emotions like a well-tuned fiddle. There is the old “it doesn’t exist” scam: You name your home size and price range, and the agent roles her eyes and cackles, “You’ll never find a house like that for so little around here.”

I remember buying the farmhouse for the Maine collective. We said we wanted a small farm with a barn, in the city limits, for under $250K. Our agent laughed and said, “It doesn’t exist.”

So we retorted, “Let us look in the book.” (Note: this was way back in 1994, before computers were very common, when real estate was still listed in big books.) In a few minutes we found three properties that fit our criteria.

Then there is the scam that is a real emotional gambit, the “price creep” scam. It goes like this: You name your top price, so the agent shows you properties just above that price. You fall in love with one of these properties, so you adjust your top price up a little, so the agent shows you properties just above your new price, and so on. It takes nerves of steel to resist, and you must to be ready to be rude to your agent, and tell him to go fuck himself if he starts playing these games.

My experience buying the Maine property is a perfect example of the First Sad Truth of the real estate market: the agent works for the deal. In theory, there are two types of agents – buyers’ and sellers’ agents. Sellers’ agents are more common. A seller’s agent is hired by an owner to list their home and to represent their interests in the deal. It is also possible for buyers to hire an agent to help them look at property and to represent their interests in the deal, but beware!

Both buyers’ and sellers’ agents have a hidden agenda. They all earn their fees as a percentage of the sale price, so they have a financial self-interest in landing the phatest deals possible, without regard to the best interests of either buyers or sellers. The woman who tried to pull the “it doesn’t exist” scam on us in Maine was our buyers’ agent.

So with all this anxiety and mistrust in my mind, I went into work each day, and then paced around at home after work, and I waited. Four days later, our scouting party returned, covered in smiles and excited with good news. Most of the properties had some damning problem. We were planning to live off the grid and build crazy homes without permits, so we couldn’t be too near nosy Middle-American neighbors, or a major road. That constraint ruled out about half the properties on our list. Some were cliffs, some were swamps, some were under high-voltage power lines, and some were just improperly listed, wrong price, wrong location, and so on. But one plot looked like it might work.

Land Ho!

In fact, it looked perfect. Our scouts found the Promised Land about twenty minutes from a good-sized town, and about two hours from Portland, in Northwest Oregon. It was the right size: five acres, mostly wooded with alder, but also a small stand of old fir. A year-round brook cut across one corner, and while it was steep over all, it had some flat spots, including a roughly 1/2 acre clearing for a garden. And the price was right at 20K, within bargaining distance of our 18K target.

Our scouting party was breathless and their enthusiasm was catching. I found myself already calling it “our” land, and that scared me. If we allowed ourselves to become attached to this particular plot, we would be easy prey in any negotiations coming up.

Adding to my fears, the agent showing the property sounded like a real snake. His name was Jebb Mudd, and although he came off as perfectly pleasant at the time, after comparing notes on the drive home, our scouts felt manipulated.

“He was totally up to something,” Elephanthead reported at our next meeting. “He had me going, but now, thinking about it, I totally don’t trust him.”

Before we made an offer, we researched the property as best as we could, searching the Internet for information, and calling gov’ment offices in Oregon. The plot was on the corner of a 40-acre “back to the land” subdivision. All the other properties were owned by a fine collection of wingnuts, hillbillies, pinkos, and bail-jumpers. It was our kind of neighborhood. To the North and East, the land bordered a giant tract of timberland. Frenchy majored in forestry in college, so she looked into the timber plan. We also investigated the history of the property itself.

We were poor but crafty, so we were shopping for land that is sometimes called problem property. Problem property is typically the only kind of land low-rent losers like us can afford. In general, five acres in this area of OR would cost over 30K, and up to 150K. Most buyers want a pristine piece of land, with a clear title, good neighbors, and so on. If however, a buyer is willing to spend some time solving problems, she can find bargains. The asking price for this land was way below the prevailing market, so we expected to find some problems that needed solving.

The first problem was obvious. The Southwest corner of the plot was badly trashed. Twenty years ago, “our” land and the plot to the South were owned together by a hippie family. We didn’t know the full story, but the basic gist was that the couple went crazy, had an ugly divorce, and split the land. Mr. Hippie sold his plot, the Southern plot, to a young family about two years ago. Mrs. Hippie was selling us “our” plot.

As the Hippie couple went crazy, they crashed the land. The Southern plot was really trashed; a sad hick pile of engine blocks, broken kids toys, a psychedelic bus, some campers, and many, many rusted, shot-up, burned-out cars. An ugly legacy of all that failed in the hippie-dippie 70’s lay strewn around, slowly disappearing under a heap of brambles.

“Our” property was much better off with only twelve cars, one truck, and a little trash, all on one edge. We would have to get rid of the cars, but the more we asked around, the more it looked like removing the cars would be expensive and difficult. Some were flipped over, some had trees growing up through them, and all were trashed, smashed, and peppered with buckshot holes. None would ever roll again.

Frenchy’s work was hair-raising too. In one respect, it was cool that we might live next to timberland. It was logged only about a decade ago, so it had two or three decades to go until it would be logged again. In that time, it would just sit there quietly growing, like the perfect neighbor. But, private timberland is also really just another kind of agriculture, with all the usual nasties, including aerial spraying. The local timber company controlled the growth of alder on its land by spraying with a mix of herbicides and diesel fuel!

So we had hippie-dissipation trash to our west, and diesel fuel to our north and east. We discovered that to our south we had problems too. During the ugly, crazy Hippie breakup, the boundary between the plots was not well defined. The Hippies had built a rambling row of whimsical cedar-shake buildings right along the boundary. Cool, but falling down and apart, these buildings could be on either property, or both. The young family that bought the southern property from Mr. Hippie was now living in these buildings, so we might be facing the ultimate real estate deal-breaker: encroachment.

It is called encroachment if a neighbor builds structures, or worse, is living partly on your land. Encroachment is such a deal-breaker in real estate because it can be so difficult to sort out peacefully. While we didn’t really care if our neighbors were living three feet onto our land, if the land was ever sold again in the future, it would be a big deal then, so it had to be a big deal now. Well me maties, we be surrounded!

Oh, there was one more thing… On old maps of the area, we could clearly see a power line crossing right through the middle of “our” land. There weren’t any high-voltage lines crossing the land Mudd had shown us. Did he show us the correct plot? Was there some old power-line easement across “our” land? Would power lines be strung in the future? That would be awful! Who would move into the country only to live under the buzz of high-voltage lines? A dagger through the heart maties!

With Friends Like These…

We put our heads together at more meetings and agreed that we needed answers to these questions, and that we also needed to stall for time while we raised the last of the cash. I was steadfast that we should not make an offer until we had all the money in hand to cover our bid. So, we opened a group bank account and deposited our money as we made it. Meanwhile, the scouts had played good cop with Mr. Mudd, so I agreed to play bad cop, and I banged out a terse, but polite email to Mudd listing our concerns. We hoped that Mudd would research our problems and email us back with some information.

Instead, Mudd sent a bomb. His reply was hot and heavy. He implied that we were fools not to pay the asking price on the spot. He wrote, “If I had some extra money, I would buy it myself.” Now that is the oldest, cheesiest real-estate come-on line in the book! As for our concerns, he just brushed them off. To solve the encroachment problem, he actually suggested that we burn the cabins. He was serious. His solution to this complicated encroachment problem was for us to burn our future neighbors’ home. Jesus!

Finally, he proposed that for the purposes of the deal, he would serve as our buyers’ agent and his brother would serve as Mrs. Hippie’s seller’s agent. That was a clear conflict of interest, and the straw that broke the pirate’s keel. What a shady, shady dealer!

It was impossible for us to do any better research from a distance and Jeb Mudd was a true villain. We needed a bonafide buyers’ agent. I called some friends in Oregon, and they found me the name of a local agent, Hamish Macillin. Salach gave him a call and he agreed to take us on board. Screw Jeb and his slimy brother too! Meanwhile, we prepared a second scouting party. This time I was going. Along with Frenchy and Salach, I climbed into little Stuffsack, and we headed north for another 13-hour dash to “our” land.

We met Hamish at his office, and we were relieved that he was the yang to Jeb’s ying. He was an older, dignified fly-fishing dude and he reeked of respectability. We all traveled together to the land. For the last month, “our” land had been a vague map of problems floating in my wee brain. Other than a few grainy, out-of-focus photos that came back from the first scouting trip, this would be my virgin view.

I was first struck by the easement. We crossed a wide, swampy field and then snaked through the trees to the southwesterly corner of the property. The last bit of the easement was more of an advanced goat path than a primitive road. We barely made it up. And the hippie junk heap was striking in it’s own sad way.

But the land – it was gorgeous. The brook gurgled by, even without any recent rain, and I could see the remains of terraces dug into the old garden in the clearing. The fir forest was as big and old and dark as the clearing was bright and green. I did my best to keep my enthusiasm in check, but I was failing. Frenchy bravely walked over and talked to our neighbors. We feared we would be greeted by a shotgun brandishing nut-ball, but Ray turned out to be a very sweet hickster; someone we thought we could deal with.

So, armed with encouraging information, and a decent buyers’ agent, when we returned home, we agreed to make an offer with what we had: 15K. Mudd had never properly listed the property, so Hamish was free to contact Mrs. Hippie directly. We would just cut ol’ Mudd out of the loop. His own underhanded foolishness would be his undoing.

What followed was a mad storm of faxes, emails, and phone calls as we negotiated the deal. Hamish couldn’t find any solid new information about the power-lines, but we hoped we would find out more at the title-search stage. It was also at this point that Hotlunch decided not to join us. It was a little sad, but he wanted to go to art school, and we gave him our blessing.

Free Love and the Kitchen Sink

While we bought the land, we held regular meetings to add flesh to the bones of our new collective. We still dreamed out loud, but we also began to nail down some of the details. We lived together already, and all of us had been involved in collectives of one sort or another before, so we weren’t starting from scratch.

My old group in Maine is getting famous for staying together for so long. The average life span of a secular commune in the 70s was about five years. (Religious groups lasted twice as long for some reason.) And yet, the Maine collective is cruising towards a decade together. Long ago, when we instigated our first living collective, my friends and I carefully studied the history of the rise and fall of the 70s communes. Collective living is definitely a skill and it is not something we are born with. By reading about the 70s communes, we avoided mistakes that might have sunk us in the harbor.

We stayed together long enough to make our own mistakes and learn some hard and valuable lessons. We are good at this now and I know that living together has taught us how to be fabulous anarchists. In the hopes that you will not have to repeat all of our mistakes too, here is our recipe for a strong and happy collective. There are many ingredients in the mix, but any robust collective needs at least these four:

ONE. Successful collectives hold regular house meetings. I know that all the old-timers in Maine would agree that the secret to our long life together was holding regular meetings. It wasn’t easy to get 10 to 15 busy anarchists into the same room at the same time each week, but we painfully learned several times that if we let the meetings slide, life together got rough really fast. Well-run meeting are painless, and often even fun, and a collective simply will not last without them.

TWO. Successful collectives eat together. From !Kung San nomadic foragers in the Kalahari, to Japanese salarymen in Tokyo, sharing food is the glue that holds groups of human beings together. Some communes eat one dinner together a month and other groups eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together every day. Whatever works, but generally, more often is better. A group meal also serves as another informal house meeting.

THREE. Successful anarchist collectives are neat, clean, and organized. This flies splat in the face of the popular notion of anarchy: anarchy as chaos. Anarchy is not chaos, and it is not order either. Anarchy means “without rulers” in Greek. Anarchy is freedom and she is silent about order and chaos.

The argument that without rulers there would be chaos is a political prejudice, that’s all. When journalists described the situation in Somalia during the U.S. intervention a few years back as anarchy, they were misusing the word. The chaos in Somalia was not a problem of too few rulers, but too many. Dozens of petty warlords were fighting each other for control and creating death and mayhem in the process.

Anarchy only cares about what works. An anarchist commune is a complicated beast, but strip it down to its knickers, and a commune is just a group of people that holds and organizes a living space. If I live on my own, I can be as scattered and messy as I please. But the more people I add to my space, and particularly, the more things we share (like a kitchen, a workshop, or a garden), the more important it is to be neat and organized.

A pirate ship is a perfect example. Remember the passage I quoted back a few pages about the surprisingly ordered and self-disciplined pirate ships. Pirates had to be self-organized because a confused, messy boat is a danger to her crew. In a commune, a mess isn’t (often) a matter of life-and-death, but if you are forced to cook in a kitchen buried in unwashed dishes, or forced to work in a shop where all the tools are misused and misplaced, forced to constantly clean up after your housemates, you will eventually give up and move out. You would be a sucker and a fool not to.

A messy and disorganized anarchist is a piss-poor anarchist because she forces her friends and housemates to clean up after her; to be her servants. This is clearly not the attitude of a mature anarchist, but it is a common attitude and it is understandable. Anarchy starts in the guts. When we were younger, we rebelled against our first masters: our parents, our teachers, and our first employers. We rebelled by refusing to be managed. If our parents wanted a clean home, we were messy. If our employers wanted us to be on time and work hard, we were late and lazy.

The mistake is to turn our gut-level refusal into a messy, disorganized personal style, and then call that anarchy. If we want to accomplish great things then our anarchy must come from our guts and our brains. Anarchists are self-organized. We will allow no one to manage us, so we must manage ourselves. OK, that was a long rant on number three, but more anarchist collectives of all kinds founder on this point than anything else. “The kitchen sink is the crucible of anarchy.”

FOUR. Successful collectives carefully screen new members. There is nothing about anarchy that requires open membership. The truth is quite the opposite. A cardinal freedom is the right to free association. This is the right to choose whom you will hang with, and whom you will not. Anarchism is a tolerant, open scene and it attracts some cool, kind folks on the one hand, and some anti-social wingnuts on the other. Winnowing the former from the latter is a key skill.

In Maine, we would never admit someone to the group that we didn’t already know somehow; if not directly, then through someone else, like a friend of a friend. We had to have some point of reference on a candidate. And we practiced a slow and careful selection process. We would have candidates over to dinner several times and we would invite them to stay at the farm for a while to get acquainted. If your collective is doing something illegal or if it is an activist group, then selecting new members also includes trying to separate out the anarchists from the undercover cops, agent provocateurs, and informers.

Our new group was at the stage where it was wise to write down some of our ideas as a collective agreement. Someday we wanted to legally make the land collective by putting it into a group trust, but in the mean time, Frenchy agreed that we could buy the land in her name. The collective agreement would serve as the official instigation of the group, and also as a documentation of how we understood that the land would be owned.

We didn’t say much in our agreement about the day-to-day structure of our commune. We would work that out by consensus as time unfolded. We did however comment in some detail about three common collective danger areas: how someone new becomes a member, how a failed member could be booted out of the group, and how the land will be sold when the group self-destructs. Everything with a beginning also in time has an end. It is smart to plan for it.

An Emotional Thrashing

Mrs. Hippie refused our first offer of course. I am sure that if we had stalled some at this point, and played a little poker with her, we could have shaved several thousand off the final price. But it was coming up to Crustmoose, and everyone was planning to be away for the holidays. Even Hamish was planning to be out of town for a month. We wanted to be on the land in early spring. We couldn’t abide waiting another month to continue the negotiations, so we blinked first, and we settled for 17.5K, still under our target price.

It would be a simple cash-for-land deal, so Hamish assured us that if the title work went well, we should be able to close the deal in the middle of January, when everyone returned. So the whole clan went east, and I was left in California again to work, wait and worry.

While the kids were gone, shortly before Crustmoose, the papers came back from the title company, and sure as shit, there was a 100′-wide power easement across the land. Our hearts sank. We panicked at each other over the phone, but there was little we could do until Hamish got back. We were really attached to the land by now. In our minds we owned it. And we were committed. We had given notice to our landlord that we were moving out. We had given notice at our jobs. We had reserved a moving truck and we had even packed a little.

I called Hamish on his cell phone, at his home, the day he got back, and he earned his living. With the actual number of the easement, he made a few calls and quickly discovered that the easement was bought by the U$ gov’ment about 40 years ago and never used. The gov’ment officially abandoned the claim about 20 years ago.

Our hearts leapt. We were cruisin’ Happy Street again – but it wouldn’t last. There was no way we could know it at the time, but we had just boarded an emotional tilt-o-whirl that would have us spinning for about a month as the title company found one problem after another with the title. Just as we would turn and sort one problem out, another would slap us from behind.

While back in Maine, Elephanthead dropped out of our group. I can’t say why, but in my heart, I kinda guessed he might. It clearly wasn’t about us – but about him and his life. Still, it was another blow. Now we were down to four. Everyone came back to California feeling low, so it was like a bolt of lightning out of the blue when Capt. Peachfuzz returned and announced that he was interested in joining our jolly crew. Saved by Capt. Peachfuzz! He brought with him his trusted confidant and sidekick, Coolmint. Coolmint would come up with us and stay for a few weeks to help Capt. Peachfuzz build his tree house. Woo, woo!

A Dash for Freedom

It was getting close to the end of our lease on our house in California, and we still didn’t own the land. We trusted Hamish, but we weren’t about to tell him our mildly illegal plans for the property. It was a small town we were moving to up there in Oregon, so we were careful not to take any chances until we understood the territory better.

When we first contacted Hamish, like good anarchists everywhere, we dissimulated, we misinformed, we lied. We said that we were a group of dot-com yuppies buying recreational property. Um, yea, right. Only now we had to stick to our story. There was no way to let Hamish know that we had a deadline. We just had to keep packing and quietly panicking to ourselves.

We had a lot to pack. As anarcho-slackers, we didn’t own much personal stuff; just a change of cloths and a mattress on the floor. Yet, there was the pirate thing: Salach’s boat shop, stacks of boat-building wood, a couple boats, and so on. It filled Stuffsack, Chainsaw’s van, Snowflake, and a 17-foot Ryder truck. We said good-bye to Hotlunch, and just left California, just like that, with no home to go to, but hoping for the best.

We checked our voicemail at gas stops along the way. I was a basket case and so was the rest of the crew. Salach, Chainsaw, and I are particularly bad stress-balls. In addition to our land problems, I was worried about the vehicles. The van was running one cylinder short of a full stack, and Stuffsack and Snowflake were old, fragile, and over-loaded. The van wasn’t registered. Chainsaw was on probation in California, and Coolmint had two outstanding arrest warrants.

Finally it happened somewhere near Yreka, California – the deal went through. I called our voicemail one last time in California, and there was a message from the title company. “Congratulations,” it said, “you own the land.”

Post Script

So as I write these last words, the light Northwest spring rains are pattering outside my tipi. A fire is burning in the woodstove and tea is brewing. Chainsaw and Frenchy are warm in their tree house. Capt. Peachfuzz and Coolmint also built a tree house and then disappeared on a road trip, hopefully to reappear soon. The garden is planted and Salach is almost finished building the boat shop…but that is all for the next issue. I will fill you in soon.

In the mean time, start a collective. We are anarchists because of what we do. If you need a job, start a worker-owned business. If you need a home, start a commune. If you need a place for your band to play, organize a collective performance space or dance club, and so on. You can do it. Yes, from one angle, it is difficult to make a collective work, but from a slightly different angle, it is also quite easy. You just charge ahead as if you know what you are doing. Fake it. Have fun. The revolution is our lifestyle. Get nakid, go wild, destroy everything!

ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION! CONFERENCE, April 24, 25, and 26th 2009

Check out the  2nd Annual ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION! CONFERENCE happening April 24, 25, and 26th 2009.

The second annual All Power to the Imagination! Conference  is being organized by the New College Infoshop/Radical Alliance. The focus is on attempting to bridge the gap between “radical theory and practice.” The weekend will feature a range of presentations, workshops, and activities geared toward illuminating various kinds of alternative/grassroots theories, practices, and real life examples of organized resistance against abusive power. API is organized around the premise of creating a forum in which ANYONE interested in positive action can discuss, contribute to, and learn from the discourse, experiences, and methodologies of those actively engaged in efforts to make the changes they want to see in the world.

For a list of confirmed speakers, workshops, and entertainment, check out the schedule. We are currently updating the website twice weekly and will keep you posted!

If you are intrigued and want more information regarding the details of the conference or would like to present, please contact Melissa Fisher by email (melissa.fisher@ncf.edu) or phone 727-460-5021.

The All Power to the Imagination! Conference is April 24th-26th! Please come out and join us!

Denmark’s hippie haven faces shutdown

see original article at the Christian Science Monitor
Freetown Christiania’s homepage, in English (click on the British flags to translate other pages)

Christiania has flown its own flag for decades now, but the Danish government and real estate interests say, Enough!

By Patti McCracken | Contributor / February 17, 2009 edition

Copenhagen, Denmark

COPENHAGEN, Denmark

The whole thing started with a hole in a fence around an abandoned military barracks in central Copenhagen.

Parents in the neighborhood tugged at the hole to widen it. Soon it was big enough for their little kids to scramble through to play in the grassy open spaces within.

Not long after, squatters cut a large patch out of the fence and commandeered the whole barracks for their own use. They named the area “Christiania,” stuck out a flag, and declared themselves free from the rule of Danish law. Nearly four decades later, the flag is still flying.

This derelict army depot’s run as a makeshift playground was short. But it has had a long and often troubled run as a refuge for Copenhagen’s fringe society. And now the Danish government, which has been listing right in recent years, has given up on clemency for the collective. It appears determined to finally dissolve the self-governing community of nearly 1,000 in what it calls “normalization.”

But Christiania took a preemptive strike late last year and filed a couple of lawsuits, which are now being heard by Denmark’s Eastern High Court. Decisions are expected at the end of this month.

The first suit cites as precedent a 1973 agreement that briefly allowed the commune to exist as a “social experiment.” The second is, in essence, a class-action suit filed by the residents, claiming a right to live on the site without eviction, because they have now possessed it into the third generation.

In October, police evicted residents from a house on the rim of the commune, setting off a six-hour showdown.

Christianites lobbed beer bottles and Molotov cocktails at police, and were answered with sprays of tear gas. Danes caution that if the court rules against Christiania in either case, more widespread rioting is a given.

The situation is more farce than tragedy, but Denmark is once again the stage for a pondering first posed 400 years ago by Hamlet: To be or not to be.

• • •

For Danes, the question is a fiery one, igniting on one side deeply held principles about freedom, nonconformity, and tolerance. A great number of Danes look to Christiania as the alter ego of the nation, and its right to exist is robustly defended. “In Denmark, everything is occupied and controlled. There’s not much space left in the cities, but Christiania is a kind of asylum. People feel more freer there than in the rest of the society,” says Rene Elley Karpantschof, a sociologist at the University of Copenhagen. But those opposed are fed up with the deeply rooted drug use, the land occupation, and the snubbing of laws. “It has been made a haven for criminals from neighboring countries, like Sweden or Norway,” says Jesper Nielsen, a cultural historian at Denmark’s National Museum. “So you could say they accept a criminal form of control within Christiania, but they resist control from without.”

Christiania, which takes its name from the Christhavn district in which it sits, began as a protest against the lack of affordable housing. The far left grandly championed the squatters. “Christiania is the land of settlers. It is so far the biggest opportunity to build up a society from scratch,” wrote well-known counterculture activist and journalist Jacob Ludvigsen as the squatters set up. Dilapidated army barracks were transformed into houses, and warehouses were outfitted with printing presses. Kindergartens were created, more houses built, stores and clinics opened, and a local post office was opened. No one paid utilities, rent, or taxes. Money was doled out equally, and smoking hash was as common as blinking. The “Freetown of Christiania” designed its own postage stamp, its own constitution, and its own flag. It had its own currency. It was known for its freewheeling lifestyle and funky, brightly painted houses.

Eventually, Christiania agreed to pay for utilities and a nominal tax per house. But the area, centrally located and with a pristine waterfront, has long been eyed by developers.

“When I first came here, I was Red. I was for a revolution,” says Hjordis Oppedal, an artist who moved to Christiania in 1976 and maintains a studio there. “At first I didn’t like the drug users here, the addicts. But I realized all people have rights and I learned to keep an open mind.” Yet the hard drug use spiraled out of control, and an underworld of dealers swooped in to tap the growing market. What began as an anticapitalist utopia became a battleground of drug lords fighting for real estate. Police began regular raids on the drug-laden kiosks along Pusher Street, the commune’s main street.

Concerned that history was about to be swept away, the National Museum snatched up one of the infamous kiosks and put it on permanent display. Residents say the days of hard drugs are over, but they keep a lid on exposure and strictly forbid photos and videos. As one young Christianite mother, holding the hand of her blond toddler, explained recently, “There are drugs here, and we don’t want the police coming around.” The stalls remain, but police still sweep through. “Many people are ready to fight for Christiania,” says Dr. Karpantschof. “If the state wants to continue to try to destroy it bit by bit, there will be a whole lot of unrest.”

But the flag of tolerance doesn’t wave freely. Living space is at a premium inside the commune, so it is officially closed to new residents. Tolerance is relative and random within the Freetown of Christiania. Musician and artist Denis Agerblad was invited to take over the downstairs of a house for use as a studio. But soon he found he had to contend with three teenage squatters.

“It just happened one day that we had people pushing on the other side of the door, trying to get in,” says Mr. Agerblad. “They were actually drilling and eventually got in. As far as I know, they’re still living there.” Parents in Christiana “will do anything” to get living space there for their grown children, he adds.

• • •

Christiania was born under a hopeful light at a time when Denmark was darkened by social problems. The commune held out the ideal that there was the possibility of another possibility. But its revolution is complete. Today’s Denmark is among the wealthiest, safest, most liberal, most socially articulate of nations. Two recent surveys have ranked Danes as the happiest people in the world (one by Stockholm-based World Values Survey, another by University of Leicester in England). The nation’s evolution leaves the Freetown of Christiania chained to the past. A museum piece.

Tuned in, not out: Counterculture ideals bring activists together at Raleigh collective

Original article in the Raleigh News and Observer
ACRe/Mayview Collective’s homepage

Published: Tue, Aug. 07, 2007 12:00AM
Modified Tue, Aug. 07, 2007 05:58AM

RALEIGH — The living arrangement has a name, The Mayview Collective, which conjures ’60s-era images of backyard chickens and overgrown vegetable patches. Living in a duplex with three bedrooms on each side, members of the Collective kick in $325 per month toward rent, utilities and a reserve fund for household expenses. Not long ago, they bought a vacuum cleaner.

The back side of the home includes a kitchen where volunteers cook meals for the homeless and a space where more volunteers help people fix their bicycles.

Within walking distance of Cameron Village, the people who live here carry a different worldview than their neighbors. Their relationships — with one another and the community — seem to carry the influence of a prior generation.

But don’t call them hippies. By and large, members of this group identify themselves as anarchists.

“By definition, anarchy is ‘rule by no one,’ ” says Emily Tokarski, a Mayview member. “The basic idea is that people know what they need better than the white males in power.”

It’s not difficult to see, though, how the duplex, with its multicolored shutters, gives a certain impression, and how neighbors have come to assume the hippie-ness of the folks who live there.

Plus, they do have backyard chickens and overgrown vegetable patches.

The Mayview Collective is just one facet of a larger nonprofit organization, ACRe, or Action for Community in Raleigh.

Founded in 2005, ACRe aims to be a center for progressive and radical activity in Raleigh. On its Web site, the organization describes itself thusly: “ACRe blurs the line between public and private space making activism not something we do in our spare time, but some1thing that we live.”

To that end, there are six bedrooms available for rent as part of the Mayview Collective, named for the street on which it stands. The lower level of the home is devoted, in large part, to community activities.

Volunteers for Food Not Bombs, an international movement that prepares food that might otherwise go to waste, cook in the back kitchen on Sundays and hand out meals in Moore Square.

The group 1304 Bikes holds open bike workshops where riders can come to fix their bicycles, with help from volunteers and a room full of tools. There is a room devoted to the “American Waste Distro,” where visitors can pick up pamphlets devoted to ending Selective Service and guerrilla gardening, or buy a CD from a band that shares similar politics.

A perfect fit

Tokarski, 22, moved into the home around the beginning of the year, after finishing college in Michigan. She came to Raleigh to work with AmeriCorps, found out about the Mayview Collective through Craigslist, and still remembers what she thought when she first saw the ad: “Man, that sounds perfect.”

Tokarski, who studied photography and philosophy, wanted to live in a home committed to social and environmental justice. In broad terms, that means “working against oppression of all forms — sexism, racism, classism.”

She describes herself as an anarchist, although not everyone involved with the goings-on at 2419 Mayview does. In particular, the folks who work on the bikes seem less politically motivated.

Anarchy is not about chaos, Tokarski says. Rather, it emphasizes smaller communities and “providing for each other without having to depend on corporations.”

Even with that definition, anarchy is complicated. See the answer given by 17-year-old Ryan Moore, when asked to describe his political leanings.

“Anarchist syndicalism.”

He doesn’t live in the home but runs the Distro (short for “distribution”). When asked to explain a little more about this political philosophy, he began answering the question with one of his own.

“Do you have any basic understanding of the Spanish Civil War?”

Ideas into action

On a recent Sunday afternoon, with young people busily preparing food in the kitchen and others working on bikes, the house had a busy hum about it. Chickens rooted through the compost pile. Kids circled on newly repaired bicycles.

In a room in the back of the house set aside for community activities, where rock bands play and a young women’s group meets to discuss alternatives to tampons, one of ACRe’s founders, Attila Nemecz, spoke about the philosophy behind helping to start the organization.

The idea really sprouted from his time as a student at N.C. State, where Nemecz, now 27, worked with progressive organizations. He and some friends were looking for a way to organize outside the university structure, and ACRe is the result.

For Nemecz, his anarchist beliefs are put to work via ACRe. The idea? “Instead of asking others and waiting for results, take direct action to get results you want to see in the world.”

It seems directly influenced by the Summer of Love generation, and in some ways, it is. But “we look at what the hippies did and try to avoid some of that,” he says.

Drugs and free love are not part of the philosophy. This is not a tune in, turn on, drop out, kind of thing. “Here, it’s about making activism a way of life,” he says. “It’s more about the communities you make and less about whether you buy something made out of hemp or tofu.”

The ACRe homestead sticks out within its neighborhood. On Sunday afternoons, it’s not uncommon for more than 20 people to attend the various activities, bringing the cars and noise that come with a gathering of that size.

Louise Fisher, 72, understands how young people would be attracted to a back-to-basics lifestyle. Still, “I wish they did a better job of keeping up their front yard,” she says.

“I know it obviously doesn’t bother them, but it does bother the neighborhood.”

Fisher, who has lived in her home more than 40 years, can see their front yard from hers, which is lush and trim and neat. By contrast, the ACRe front yard features a large vegetable garden, which appears to have seen better days.

The garden is weeded on occasion, but in large part is left to grow naturally, Tokarski says.

In essence, it, too, is ruled by no one.

Staff writer Matt Ehlers can be reached at 829-4889 or matt.ehlers@newsobserver.com.

Inviting Anarchy Into My Home

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/garden/09anarchist.htm

Liz Seymour, in white, sitting beneath a collection of hitchhiking signs, began an experiment in group living at age 52. Five of her six housemates are pictured; the youngest is Skye Tull, 6.

By LIZ SEYMOUR

Published: March 9, 2006

Greensboro, N.C.

ON Aug. 1, 2002, I left behind the comfortably roomy semicircle marked “married-couple household” on the Census Bureau pie chart and slipped into an inconspicuous wedge labeled “two or more people, nonfamily.” Having separated from my husband of 28 years the day before, I opened our three-bedroom 1927 Colonial Revival house to a group of men and women less than half my age. Overnight, the home I had lived in for 12 years became a seven-person anarchist collective, run by consensus and fueled by punk music, curse-studded conversation and food scavenged from Dumpsters.

Thoreau famously said that he had “traveled much in Concord.” I would venture to say that I’ve traveled just as much, and maybe more, without ever leaving my house.

It happened like this: My husband and I had come to the end of the line, as married people sometimes do. We had helped each other into adulthood and careers (Bill is a high school English teacher; I’m a freelance writer). We had raised two daughters together, but with Isabell and Margaret grown and both of us entering our 50’s, it was clear that our hopes and goals for the next couple of decades were diverging.

Bill longed for quiet and solitude; I wanted noise and movement. To complicate matters, I had become the court advocate for Justin, a 15-year-old runaway from a foster home who had been in and out of juvenile detention since he was 12. After a year of trying to find a workable home for him, I had concluded that the only recourse was to be his foster mother myself.

Now, faced with the prospect of becoming a 52-year-old single mother to a teenage boy and the challenge of supporting us both, I panicked. Trying to imagine how I could make it work, I found my mind turning to a collective house in Oregon where Isabell, my older daughter, had lived the summer before, and to a group of young anarchist artists and musicians in Greensboro whom I knew through both of my daughters.

After Isabell came home from college an anarchist herself, I began to put aside my preconceptions about these people — as disorderly, violent and destructive — and to see them as a community dedicated to replacing hierarchy with consensus and cooperation. (Isabell once described them as Quakers who swear a lot.) Over time I found myself drawn to their hopeful view that people know best what is best for them and to their determination, naïve or not, to build a better world right away. Anarchism, at least as practiced here, seemed to be more about building community gardens and making your own fun than about black bandannas and confrontations with the riot police (although it was about those things, too).

Amid the chaos of my own life I wondered if this approach to living might have something in it for me. Unconventional as it was, I figured it couldn’t be any worse than struggling to pay the mortgage and being Justin’s mother on my own.

So Justin and I entered a microeconomy in which it is possible to live not just comfortably, but well, on $500 a month. When we pooled our skills in our new household, we found that we had what we needed to design a Web page, paint a ceiling or install a car stereo. Sharing services and tools with people outside the house saved us thousands of dollars a year. If there is a historical model for the way we live, it is not the communes of the 60’s or the utopian experiments of the 19th century, but the two-million-year prehistory of our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Looked at through that lens, the life of our miniature tribe feels a lot like the way people were meant to live.

That account, of course, leaves out the terror I felt through the summer of 2002 as I prepared to open my house to anarchy. Also the occasional awful days and nights early in the experiment, like the evening that began with Justin’s skateboard at the bottom of the stairs and that ended with shouting, slammed doors and the skateboard flying out a second-story window. Then there were the guests who wouldn’t leave; the short-lived but horrifying rat invasion (brought on, I suspect, by boxes of food from Dumpsters on the back porch); and the friends who drifted out of my life, baffled by my new living arrangements.

I still own about two-thirds of the house, sharing the title with two young women in the collective, Mackie Hunter, a 25-year-old full-time political activist who had an insurance settlement to invest, and Stef Smith, a 26-year-old drummer with a never-to-be-used college fund. Their investment, and my refinancing of the house, allowed me to buy out Bill after we divorced two years ago, and gave them about a third share of the property. Since I do not want to profit from the collective as its landlady, I have decided that the portion of the equity that builds up from my housemates’ monthly rent will not go to me if the house is sold or refinanced, but will serve to help keep the collective going. In essence I’ve converted my capital from the house to the household. Twenty years from now, when I’m in my mid-70’s, I may regret giving up my equity in return for time and community, but I don’t think so. I’d rather take my retirement now.

The ages in the house span 50 years, from Jodi Staley’s 6-year-old daughter, Skye, to me. Justin, now 18, moved out more than a year ago to live with his girlfriend; he hopes to go to a music conservatory. (He turned out to be one of those children it takes a village to raise, and he not only thrived under the group’s care but rebelled into surprisingly mainstream respectability.)

None of us work full time. We support ourselves by painting houses, typing legal depositions, teaching (as substitutes), subjecting ourselves to medical studies, cooking in restaurants and writing. The time I save allows me to help care for an elderly relative, cook for a free meal program, spend time with friends and work on a book.

On paper we look like paupers. The monthly cost of living in the house comes to $160 to $245 a person, based on the size of one’s bedroom. That includes the mortgage, property taxes, household insurance, utilities (we have an unlimited long-distance plan) and wireless Internet. In addition we each put $30 a month into a house fund that pays for bulk food like rice, beans, olive oil and spices, and supplies like toilet paper, light bulbs and laundry detergent.

As for produce, a typical evening of hunting and gathering in various grocery store Dumpsters brings in plenty of food: cartons of apples, oranges, potatoes, bananas and red onions, slightly soft or spotty perhaps, but still fresh and edible.

Every Sunday it is someone’s turn to fix dinner while the rest of us sweep and mop, with Al Green or the Pixies blasting from the kitchen stereo. Since the dining room has been turned into a bedroom (as have the downstairs study and a small upstairs room that was my office), we eat on the screened-in side porch or in the backyard under the crape myrtle tree when the weather is warm, or around the kitchen table or in the living room when it is cool.

On Tuesday night we hold the weekly house meeting. It is surprisingly helpful to know who has a headache, who just fell in love, who is sleepy. More than one set of roommates have blown apart over dishes piled up in the sink and wet towels left on the bathroom floor; then again, so have quite a few nuclear families. We talk things out.

Though our daily activities are a lot closer to the Waltons than to the Weather Underground, we keep “In Case of Police Raid” instructions posted by our front and back doors. It is a reminder that houses like ours in other towns do get raided.

In spite of the stigma attached to the word “anarchist” and the scrutiny openly anarchist households receive, the number of such houses is growing. Anarchists are no longer just in college towns and big cities; there are now thriving anarchist communities and houses like ours in places like Lake Worth, Fla.; Machias, Me.; and Springfield, Mo. The online directory maintained by the Fellowship for Intentional Community lists more than 1,000 collective houses, ecovillages and co-ops in the United States, compared with about 400 in the 1990 directory. Although not all of them identify themselves as anarchist, more than half make their decisions by consensus. Even that number is clearly low: none of the five collective houses I know of in Greensboro, for example, are listed in the directory.

It is a rare week when we do not have at least one guest in residence. One winter we had a Danish filmmaker living in the garage. On a rainy night last spring an entire old-time string band showed up on the doorstep. The musicians had been hopping freight trains around the country and gotten stranded; they played fiddle, banjo and musical saw in the living room and left the next day. Another guest walked from Maine to North Carolina, the first leg of a trip home to Oregon. He stayed for a week, mended some rips in his backpack, then walked off down the driveway due west.

I have friends who tell me they could not live the way I do. I believe them. The constant sound of footsteps on the stairs, the coffee cups in the sink, the mysterious things in the refrigerator that no one claims, the sheer intensity some days of so many personalities rubbing up against one another, is not for everyone. But then neither are more conventional living arrangements. For me, a household of friends — more loosely bound than a family but tied together by loyalty, affinity and shared space — satisfies a need for kinship and companionship that did not end when my family did.

The old house’s former incarnation as a middle-class, nuclear-family household still rises up in my mind now and then. Someone will ask about an umbrella or a bottle of aspirin or a pair of needle nose pliers, and I’ll picture so clearly the place where the object used to be that for a moment I’m there instead of here. It is not an unpleasant sensation, just a little strange.

For the most part, though, my memory keeps up a pretty sturdy firewall between the time I have come to think of as “before” and now. Where I live now is not utopia. What it is, though, is fun. It is fun to hear people laughing on the porch; it is fun to dance in the kitchen; it is fun to go out on a Wednesday evening Dumpster run. As messy as it is, to my mind it is a lot more interesting than utopia could ever be.