Making Worlds: An Occupy Wall St Forum on the Commons

Check it out, a conference happening this month in NYC on Occupy and the commons: http://makingworlds.wikispaces.com/

To create mass possibilities for collective autonomy, we need a return to and a seizure of the commons — direct access to land, social resources, shelter, clean water, gathering space, and everything else, outside money, wage, and the enclosures of private property.

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Making Worlds: An OWS Forum on the Commons
February 16-18, 2012

An Invitation
The Occupy movement is entering a new phase, one in which many of us feel the need to combine renewed engagement through direct actions and mobilizations with a deep reflection on the strategic objectives of our movement. In order to fulfill this need, the organizing committee of Making Worlds* is inviting all the Occupy supporters and sympathizers as well as other organizations to participate in this Forum on the politics of the commons. In particular, we are interested in understanding how groups and communities working on housing, health care, education, food, water, energy, information, communication and knowledge resources can develop a vision of these resources as commons, that is, as a third form of social organization to the state and corporate capitalism. Making Worlds has the ambitious goal of articulating a strategic vision from and for the movement as well as specific political initiatives aiming at its realization.

The Forum
The departure point of Making Worlds is to deepen our knowledge about existing forms and practices of the commons in the United States and abroad. For the purpose of this discussion, we provisionally define the commons in two main ways:
1) As a resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of its users and producers. Examples of commons may include the air and the oceans, water sources managed by local communities, self-managed factories and agricultural lands, (squatted) community centers and houses, community gardens, free and open source software, and users-run repositories of knowledge such as Wikipedia.
2) As a way of organizing social practices, living experiences, community relationships and pathways for our collective reproduction. These activities may include cooperative strategies such as reciprocal caring, self-education, and workers cooperatives.

We believe that the organizational forms developed by our movement are already functioning, in many ways, as institutions of the commons. We also think that there are plenty of existing initiatives in New York and beyond from which important lessons can be learnt. Securing the commons for the collective good, protecting it from private appropriation as well as from over-use takes ingenuity, cooperation, and planning. Making Worlds will provide a common space and framework for such cooperation and planning to take place. Starting from these considerations we pose three broad, overarching questions:

1) What are the examples of existing commons we can draw inspiration from and how are they governed?
2) How can new commons be created and expanded in our society?; and
3) How can we think of social and political relationships as a commons in its own right?

Your Contribution
Making Worlds is open to every sympathizer and participant in the Occupy movement as well as to other independent activist groups. If you are interested in participating in Making Worlds, we ask you to approach it by posing questions related to your field of interest or activity. For instance, if you are part of the kitchen committee or any other group working on and with food how can you tackle the question of food production and consumption as commons? How is the food we eat every day produced (or not produced) in common? And how can we extend the common production and distribution of food? If you work in a sustainability group you may ask similar questions in relation to drinkable water or the atmosphere. What kinds of initiatives and actions can be taken at a local and regional level to protect and build a commons? And what kind of coordination could make feasible a national campaign to make the ground waters a common good? Would it be possible to link such a campaign to the anti-fracking movement? Similar questions can be explored in relation to education, health care, the production of energy, the reproduction of the labor force, medical and scientific knowledge, and communication infrastructures. After your group has explored these preliminary questions, we ask you to reach out to us with a proposed title for a workshop and speakers who can help you facilitate it. Please email your idea to makingworldsows at gmail dot com no later than January 28.

Structure of the Forum
Making Worlds is evolving and is now envisioned as a three day Forum:

1) The first day will be dedicated to the introduction of broad themes regarding the commons. Notable speakers and activists who have been studying the commons and struggling for will share their perspectives and experiences.

2) The second day will be managed directly by the working groups that have participated in the preparatory phases of the Forum. The groups will run their own workshops as they want. Our suggestion is to divide the workshops in two sections: the first part will serve to flesh out the research questions and foster a debate around them; the second part will be dedicated to the production of a short document containing ideas and pragmatic suggestions that will be posted the Forum’s web site by the end of the second day.

3) The third day will be dedicated to bring all these perspectives together. Ideally, by the end of the Forum we will have drafted a charter and a set of documents and materials envisioning concrete initiatives, lines of action, and intervention.

Timeline
We ask you to email us a workshop title and a short description no later than January 28. If you are interested in inviting specific speakers who can help you facilitate the workshop feel free to do so. The workshops descriptions will be uploaded to the Wiki makingworlds.wikispaces.com to which you will be granted access so that you will be able to update your announcement over time.
The organizing committee of Making Worlds is part of the Empowerment & Education Committee of OWS. You can contact us at makingworldsows at gmail dot com.

First-Ever Radical Mycology Convergence

!!!!PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!!!!

Hello there!
Greetings from the organizers of the first ever Radical Mycology Convergence (RMC)! This email is our official invitation to join us in building a network of mycophiles (mushroom lovers) interested in working with the fungal kingdom for social and ecological change.  In case you haven’t heard of the RMC, here is a brief description of what we envision for the event.

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.

Growing Power in an Urban Food Desert

Will Allen is bringing farming and fresh foods back into city neighborhoods.

read original in Yes Magazine

by Roger Bybee

posted Feb 13, 2009

Will Allen shows some of the 10,000 fish growing in one of Growing Power’s four-foot-deep, 10,000-gallon aquaponics tanks. Waste from the fish feeds greens and tomatoes. The plants purify the water for the fish. The fish eventually go to market.

At the northern outskirts of Milwaukee, in a neighborhood of boxy post-WWII homes near the sprawling Park Lawn housing project, stand 14 greenhouses arrayed on two acres of land. This is Growing Power, the only land within the Milwaukee city limits zoned as farmland.

Founded by MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow Will Allen, Growing Power is an active farm producing tons of food each year, a food distribution hub, and a training center. It’s also the home base for an expanding network of similar community food centers, including a Chicago branch run by Allen’s daughter, Erika. Growing Power is in what Allen calls a “food desert,” a part of the city devoid of full-service grocery stores but lined with fast-food joints, liquor stores, and convenience stores selling mostly soda and sweets. Growing Power is an oasis in that desert.

Allen’s parents were sharecroppers in South Carolina until they bought the small farm in Rockville, Maryland, where Allen grew up. “My parents were the biggest influence on my life,” says Allen. “We didn’t have a TV and we relied on a wood stove, but we were known as the ‘food family’ because we had so much food. We could feed 30 people for supper.”

He was a high school All-American in basketball, played for the University of Miami, and played pro ball with the American Basketball Association in Europe. At a towering 6 feet 7 inches, with Schwarzenegger-size biceps, and chiseled features, Allen looks ready to step back onto the court.

After stints as an executive for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Proctor and Gamble, he returned to his family roots. “I never wanted a career in the corporate world, but I wanted to be able to afford a good education for my kids,” he explains. “At the right time, the kids were in college and the opportunity to buy the farm and start Growing Power came up,” Allen remembers. “From a spiritual standpoint, it worked out right; it was a natural thing, something I wanted to do.”

Growing Food

Since 1993, Allen has focused on developing Growing Power’s urban agriculture project, which grows vegetables and fruit in its greenhouses, raises goats, ducks, bees, turkeys, and—in an aquaponics system designed by Allen—tilapia and Great Lakes Perch—altogether, 159 varieties of food.

Growing Power also has a 40-acre rural farm in Merton, 45 minutes outside Milwaukee, with five acres devoted to intensive vegetable growing and the balance used for sustainably grown hays, grasses, and legumes which provide food for the urban farm’s livestock.

Allen has taken the knowledge he gained growing up on the farm and supplemented it with the latest in sustainable techniques and his own experimentation.

Growing Power composts more than 6 million pounds of food waste a year, including the farm’s own waste, material from local food distributors, spent grain from a local brewery, and the grounds from a local coffee shop. Allen counts as part of his livestock the red wiggler worms that turn that waste into “Milwaukee Black Gold” worm castings.

Allen seems to take a particular delight in thrusting his steam-shovel-sized hands into a rich mixture of soil and worms in Growing Power’s greenhouses. “You can’t grow anything without good soil,” he preaches to a group touring the project.

Allen designed an aquaponics system, built for just $3,000, a fraction of the $50,000 cost of a commercially-built system. In addition to tilapia, a common fish in aquaculture, Allen also grows yellow perch, a fish once a staple of the Milwaukee diet. Pollution and overfishing killed the Lake Michigan perch fishery; Growing Power will soon make this local favorite available again. The fish are raised in 10,000-gallon tanks where 10,000 fingerlings grow to market size in as little as nine months.

But the fish are only one product of Allen’s aquaponics system. The water from the fish tanks flows into a gravel bed, where the waste breaks down to produce nitrogen in a form plants can use. The gravel bed supports a crop of watercress, which further filters the water. The nutrient-rich water is then pumped to overhead beds to feed crops of tomatoes and salad greens.

The plants extract the nutrients while the worms in the soil consume bacteria from the water, which emerges virtually pristine and flows back into the fish tanks. This vertical growing system multiplies the productivity of the farm’s limited space.

“Growing Power is probably the leading urban agricultural project in the United States,” says Jerry Kaufman, a professor emeritus in urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Growing Power is not just talking about what needs to be changed, it’s accomplishing it.”

Growing Community

Simply growing that much food in a small space is a remarkable achievement. But it’s only the start of Growing Power’s mission. “Low-quality food is resulting in diabetes, obesity, and sickness from processed food,” Allen maintains. “Poor people are not educated about nutrition and don’t have access to stores that sell nutritious food, and they wind up with diabetes and heart disease.”

Growing healthy food is part of a larger transformational project that will create a more just society, as Allen sees it.

He also works on the Growing Food and Justice Initiative, a national network of about 500 people that fights what he calls “food racism,” the structural denial of wholesome food to poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods. “One of our four strategic goals is to dismantle racism in the food system. Just as there is redlining in lending, there is redlining by grocery stores, denying access to people of color by staying out of minority communities.”

MacArthur genius Will Allen and daughter Erika, photographed in January in the aquaponic greeenhouse of the Milwaukee Growing Power facility, minutes before an international training conference began. The sprouts in the foreground lie above a four-foot deep, water-filled trench holding 10,000 tilapia and yellow perch.

The store at Growing Power’s Milwaukee farm is the only place for miles around that carries fresh produce, free-range eggs, grass-fed beef, and homegrown honey. Even in winter, customers find the handmade shelves and aging coolers stocked with fresh-picked salad greens.

Growing Power co-director Karen Parker, who has worked alongside Allen since the project started, says, “It’s a wonderful thing to change people’s lives through changing what they’re eating.” Parker believes her parents would have lived much longer with a healthier diet. She takes a deep pride in providing fresh, healthy food. “Last summer during the salmonella problem with tomatoes, I was able to tell customers, ‘You don’t have to worry. These tomatoes were grown right here.’ I found myself selling out of tomatoes.”

Growing Power supplements its own products with food from the Rainbow Farming Cooperative, which Allen started at the same time as Growing Power. The cooperative is made up of about 300 family farms in Wisconsin, Michigan, Northern Illinois, and the South. The southern farmers, who are primarily African-Americans, make it possible to offer fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. The produce goes into Growing Power’s popular Farm-to-City Market Baskets. A week’s worth of 12-15 varieties of produce costs $16. A $9 “Junior/Senior” basket, with smaller quantities of the same produce, is also available.

Each Friday, Growing Power delivers 275–350 Market Baskets of food to more than 20 agencies, community centers, and other sites around Milwaukee for distribution. Bernita Samson, a retiree in her 60s with eight grandchildren, picked up the Market Basket habit from her brother and late mother. “I get the biggest kick out of what I get in my bag each week,” she says. “At Sunday dinners my grandkids say, ‘Ooh, Grandma this is good!’ They really like what they call the ‘smashed potatoes.’”

For Samson, Growing Power provides not only healthy food but also a vital source of community. “Sometimes it’s so crowded at the [Growing Power] store on Saturdays you can’t even get up in there. Going there gives you a chance to meet people and talk.”

Growing Power is also a source of 35 good-paying jobs in an area of high unemployment. The staff of Growing Power is highly diverse—a mixture of young and old, African-American, white, Asian, Native American, and Latino, with remarkably varied work histories. All live nearby. Co-director Karen Parker, a high-energy African-American woman who radiates warmth whether greeting her 6-year-old granddaughter or welcoming a volunteer, notes that some staff are former professionals who left the high-stress environments of corporations, social work, and other fields. At Growing Power they find a new kind of fulfillment in the blend of hard physical labor and thoughtful planning based on scientific research. Others are former blue-collar workers, farmers, or recent college graduates. All find satisfaction in transforming how Americans eat.

Loretta Mays, 21, who works in the marketing department, was only 14 when Karen Parker recruited her into the Growing Power Youth Corps program. “It’s a good learning experience, and you learn the importance of good food. I never understood how food was grown. Now, its like, ‘Wow, I can grow my own garden.’”

Growing Youth

Four middle and high schools bring students to Growing Power to learn about vermiculture (raising worms) and growing crops, and to eat the food they’ve grown. The impact can change the kids’ lives.

Anthony Jackson started working at Growing Power when he was 14, with half of his earnings going to school clothes and half to a bank account that his church set up. At age 20, he went away to college.

“I learned a good work ethic—that things don’t come easy,” he says of his time at Growing Power. “You’d see Will doing the same things he asked you to do.”

The experience helped to shape the direction of his college education. “Early on, the importance of the healthy food really didn’t hit home,” he says. “But when I got a degree in natural resources, it came to mean a lot more.” Jackson, now 29, still maintains a strong connection, shopping at Growing Power and attending workshops.

Working with the young people in the community is central to Growing Power’s work and its hopes for the future. It provides year-round gardening activities for kids aged 10-18 at its Milwaukee headquarters and offers summertime farming experience on its parcel in Merton, adjacent to the Boys and Girls Club’s Camp Mason. Growing Power recently leased five acres at Milwaukee’s Maple Tree School and built a community garden in partnership with the school. Growing Power also assists school gardens at the Urban Day School and the University School of Milwaukee.

“For kids to make their own soil, grow their own food, and then get to eat it, that’s a very powerful experience,” Will Allen says. “There’s nothing like hands-on experience for kids who are bored with school. They get excited about what they’re learning and then take it back to their classes.”

Growing Power on the Road

Success in Milwaukee isn’t enough for Allen. Growing Power seeks nothing less than, in the words of the organization’s mission statement, “creating a just world, one food-secure community at a time.” To show that the techniques pioneered in Milwaukee can work anywhere, Growing Power is helping set up five projects in impoverished areas across the United States, including training centers in Forest City, Arkansas; Lancaster, Massachusetts; and Shelby and Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

Erika Allen is carrying on her family’s 400-year-old farming tradition at Growing Power’s Chicago project.

The largest application of Growing Power’s model is in Chicago, where Erika Allen, Will’s daughter, is carrying on the family tradition. The Chicago project started in the Cabrini-Green public housing project, where Growing Power’s techniques helped the Fourth Presbyterian Church transform a basketball court into a flourishing community garden fueled by Will Allen’s beloved red worms. Growing Power also has a half-acre farm in Grant Park, in the heart of downtown Chicago. The Grant Park project focuses on job training for young people, involving them in all aspects of growing the 150 varieties of heirloom vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers the farm sells in Chicago farmers markets and through the Farm-to-City Market Basket program, like the one pioneered in Milwaukee.

After Erika Allen, 39, earned a degree in art therapy, she eventually settled back into her family’s farming tradition, which she believes extends back some 400 years. “I was very much influenced by that tradition, and I got really inspired,” she says. “It was a way of learning to honor my ancestors.”

But she has not turned her back on her artistic impulses. “With my love of art, the Grant Park project is an opportunity to integrate the two—with the colors, design, textures of the plants.”

The most important element, she says, is “to see it inspiring other people. When people in communities like Detroit are really suffering, we can show that we did it in Chicago, with women and a bunch of teenagers.”

The work of involving people in producing and distributing healthy food in Chicago’s food deserts is part of equalizing power in American society, Erika Allen says. “Our work is infused with social justice, fighting racism and oppression.”

The same hunger for justice drives Will Allen’s vision of changing the food system. “How do you take our model and our vision around the world?” Allen asks. “It takes some foot-soldiers who become change agents. We’ve trained an awful lot of people.”

Every year, 10,000 people tour the Growing Power farms. About 3,000 youths and adults from around the world participate in formal training sessions, learning how to build aquaponics systems, construct “hoop houses” (low-cost greenhouses covered by clear plastic), use compost to heat greenhouses, use worms to turn waste into rich fertilizer, and all the other low-tech, high-yield techniques that Growing Power has developed or adapted.

Will Allen takes obvious pleasure in seeing people fed healthy food in great quantities, just as his parents did on their small farm. But he says he derives his deepest satisfaction from a sense of changing the lives of other people harmed by the present food system and the inequities it reflects. “I don’t do things to satisfy myself,” he states firmly. “This is what I’m doing for a bigger pool of people out there.”

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Roger Bybee wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Roger is a Milwaukee-based writer and has been a progressive activist for 40 years. His work has appeared in Z, Dollars & Sense, Multinational Monitor, The Progressive, and elsewhere. His website is www.zcommunications.org-/zspace/rogerdbybee.

Growing Food and Justice 2nd Annual Gathering in Milwaukee

Growing Food and Justice 2nd Annual Gathering
Food and Spirit: Building Cross Cultural Understanding for Systems Change

https://www.growingfoodandjustice.org/2009_Gathering.html

October 30 – November 1, 2009
(Pre gathering trainings: October 28-29)
Wisconsin State Fair Grounds: Tommy Thompson Youth Center • Milwaukee, WI

Scholarships available (applications due September 15).

Who Should Attend?
Individuals, organizations, institutions, agencies, and community-based entities, and anyone who wants to participate in a process create a food secure and just world.

The gathering has several key goals:
– To build networks and alliances between GFJI members and affiliates
– To strengthen and support leadership prowess and confidence
– To facilitate anti-racism, dismantling racism and multicultural alliance
building workshops and trainings geared toward all levels of experience
– To share stories, engage in dialogues and build community

What is GFJI?
Growing Food and Justice for all Initiative is striving to create a network of activists who are working toward a just food system and world. We are a group of individuals, organizations and institutional partners aimed at dismantling racism and empowering low-income and communities of color through sustainable and local agriculture, but also linking with parallel social and environmental movements.

This comprehensive network views dismantling racism as a core principal which brings together social change agents from diverse sectors working to bring about new, healthy and sustainable food systems and supporting and building multicultural leadership in impoverished communities throughout the world.

The vision for this initiative is to establish a powerful network of individuals, organizations and community based entities all working toward a food secure and just world.

10th Continental Bioregional Congress at the Farm in TN

Tenth Continental Bioregional Congress (CBCX) at The Farm in Summertown, TN Cumberland Green Bioregion

Discounts for: Cumberland Green Bioregion, Plenty, Farm Members, FIC members, Kids and Youth, Students, Individuals and groups from the 2/3rds world. Please see online registration for details of the fee schedule.

http://biocongress.org/

During a time of environmental devastation, social injustice and economic upheaval, CBCX promises to be another landmark event, bringing together activists, artists and writers, permaculturalists and farmers, entreprenuers, public policy-makers, community leaders, scientists and researchers, homesteaders and ecovillagers, children and adults, and all concerned about the state of the planet. In the ceremonial village of the congress that links us across the artificial boundaries of state, province, and nation, we will gather to share and celebrate stories of place, model the communities we wish to support and create, and replenish ourselves for the ecological and cultural restoration. The congress will also pilot the emerging bioregional curriculum — a toolbox of workshops, approaches, and practices for generating, reclaiming and re-energizing our culture – which began to take shape at the CBC IX at Earthaven Ecovillage in 2005. Holding this event at a successful ecovillage allows us to experience life in a permaculture-designed village full of earth-friendly housing, cooperative forestry, and consensus-based decision-making.

Bioregionalism offers us a glimpse of a sustainable and just human culture that is firmly grounded on earth, and woven into the interdependent tapestry of life. This event will weave the traditions and culture of the bioregional movement with emerging global practices and tools for creating and sustaining local culture. This regenerative vision has been in the vanguard of the American Green Movement (which was largely inspired by the bioregional movement), and its influence can now be seen in the rapid spread of re-localization and transition movements across the globe. In calling together these movements during a time when public opinion is shifting toward a more sustainable outlook, we embrace the many-voiced, regenerative culture on the cusp of catalyzing global awareness and action. reaching out to other groups and including them in the Congressional discussion we are opening the doors to fresh new energy and creating alliances that will further actualize the vision and mission of bioregionalism in the 21st Century.

PermiBus Skills for A New Millenium Tour – coming to a town near you

ANNOUNCING:

THE SKILLS FOR NEW MILLENNIUM TOUR 2009-2010

Putting the Green in the Red, White, And Blue!

The PermiBus on tour

The PermiBus II is Coming to Town!

The world is changing fast – peak oil, climate change, globalization, difficult economic times, banking crisis, government infringement of personal rights…the list goes on.

What new world will emerge as we boldly step into this new millennium? What will you contribute to shaping the future? What skills do you need to create your tomorrow?

The Skills for New Millennium Tour hits the road again in 2009 bringing you skills you need to meet the challenges of the New Millennium. Change can be intimidating. Therefore, the skills we offer; grounded in decades of activism, poverty, and spiritual consciousness; emphasize making small, marginal changes that are critical to survival in difficult economic times, changes that help you live what you believe.

The improved Earth Activist Training (EAT) Permaculture Demonstration Bus (Permibus II) is on the road, visiting communities nationwide, in order to offer you and your community practical skills to help you wrest control of your life from corporate hands. The PermiBus is a 36-foot mobile permaculture demonstration project in progress; complete with solar power, greywater system, herb garden, composting toilet, three dogs, a clutch of chickens, and a box of worms. Our goal? To teach practical skills that make you and your community more environmentally and economically sustainable.

The Skills for the New Millennium Tour offers programs to anyone who wants to host a Skills Event: individuals, community groups, high schools, colleges, intentional communities…. We know that community needs are diverse, so we offer a wide variety of program options that can be mixed and matched to best meet your needs. In addition we can bring the Permibus to your local Co-op, event, or festival. We provide tours of our permaculture systems, perform the permi-puppet show, and teach short informationals to demonstrate the simple ways folks can take fun, easy steps toward more sustainable lives.

SKILLS TOUR PROGRAMS:

We offer a variety of programs in the areas of:

-Homesteading Skills such as a variety of Permaculture classes, canning, and chickens

-Citizenship Skills such as community conflict resolution, consensus, and nonviolent direct action

-Life Skills such as self-defense, rearing wild children, and understanding your companion animals

We can mix and match or combine trainings to your community’s needs. To see a complete list of our offerings visit our website at http://www.permibus.org

SUPPORT THE SKILLS TOUR

1) ORGANIZE SKILLS TOUR PROGRAMS IN YOUR COMMUNITY: You’ll find a general schedule of our travels below.. Contact us if you are interested in organizing trainings in your community. The Skills Tour programs are designed to range from small classes in the bus or your living room to campus classrooms to large venues with big groups.

2) INVITE THE PERMIBUS II TO AN EVENT IN YOUR COMMUNITY: The Permibus II is a great educational addition to festivals, concerts, coops, farmers markets, and other events. Let us know about events in your region while we are there. Invite us to a festival you are planning, or set us up with your local health food store or farmer’s market.

3) DONATE MONEY: The Skills for a New Millennium Tour does not charge for our programs. We ask for donations from who support our work. Please give as generously as possible to support this important work. Or organize a fundraiser in your community: have a canning party, hold a house concert, tell your friends about our work, pass the hat…we survive on the margin and every little bit helps. The 2009/2010 Skills Tour is starting $5000 in debt due to the need to replace our bus. Donations are needed now more than ever. To donate visit our website at http://www.permibus.org.

4) HELP OUR NETWORK GROW: Connected up? Help weave the web of sustainability. Introduce us to your friends who might be interested in hosting a program in their community!

5) BE A GUEST TRAINER OR TRAINER IN TRAINING: Know some of your own Skills for a New Millennium? Want to learn how to teach our skills? Travel with the Skills Tour for a short period of time learning, sharing and teaching others!

According to our current schedule we will be available in the Northeast starting on Sept. 15th until Sept. 20th and again from Sept. 26th until Oct. 5th. To make sure we are in your area during that time please contact us as soon as possible.

We are working the East Coast from New York City to D.C. from Oct. 5th to Nov. 1st.

We will be in the Southeast from Nov. 1st-24th. We will be off the road for our winter break until Jan. 2nd.

Jan. we will be in Florida and then heading West late Jan./early Feb. across the Southeast to thru Texas and into Arizona.

By Mid-March we will head up to the Rockies getting to Minnesota again by May 22nd.

We are currently only scheduled through the Earth First! Round River Rendezvous in Maine July 2010.

If you are interested in putting together a college gig that is not right along our scheduled route please contact us anyway to check availability. We work with a very flexible schedule so details are subject to change.

If you wish to schedule an event in your area please contact us at skillsmc@gmail.com or (406)-544-2767. As we finalize events our schedule is posted on our website at http://www.permibus.org. The schedule is subject to change based on the availability of events in an area.

Virginia: Anarchy Summer Camp July 17th-19th

see original at Infoshop News

As we prepare for the upcoming G20 summit in Pittsburgh, the Spring World Bank and IMF meetings, the ebbs and flows of our respective local campaigns, and anything else under the sun, we’ll be congregating in the woods of Northern Virginia for an action-packed Anarchy Summer Camp.

Anarchy Summer Camp
July 17-19
Woods of Northern Virginia

As we prepare for the upcoming G20 summit in Pittsburgh, the Spring World
Bank and IMF meetings, the ebbs and flows of our respective local campaigns,
and anything else under the sun, we’ll be congregating in the woods of
Northern Virginia for an action-packed Anarchy Summer Camp.

Anarchy Summer Camp (ASC) is tailored to fit every anarchists’ needs: from
the veteran to the newbie, all are welcome. ASC is not an accredited Summer
Camp. We do, however, have the following skills and knowledge to share with
all campers: building and using shields and reinforced banners, navigating
through the woods, sharpening your knives, permaculture, terrain analysis,
health and safety in the streets, and more! Campers will start their day
with a morning run to get the blood flowing and a group stretch. We will
explore area ponds, lakes, and dumpsters. Group activities abound at Anarchy
Summer Camp including, but not limited to: Capture the Flag, evasion games,
wind sprints, and tactical aquatics.

And if you’re concerned about your camper not getting a well balanced camp
experience, we also offer educational workshops on: anarchist theory, World
Bank/IMF/World Bank Group, neoliberalism, monetary theory, radical
environmental history, police tactics, know your rights, alternative
research sources, internet security, and corporate crimes.

The peak of Anarchy Summer Camp will be the “G20 in 412 Infosession and
Discussion,” to take place Saturday evening. This will be the culmination of
Summer Camp. We hope all campers can stay for this important gathering.

If you would like to join us for Anarchy Summer Camp, please act quickly, as
space is limited. Please fill out the form below. We kindly ask that you do
not provide any personal information unless you really want us to have it.
We really don’t want your personal information though…really. Upon receipt
of the form, we will send you the exact location of Anarchy Summer Camp.

Anarchy Summer Camp is open to all, regardless of anyone’s ability to pay.
That being said, it does cost some money to put the camp together, as we
will be providing all meals, workshops, and cabin space. We therefore kindly
ask for a suggested donation of $10-50 for the camp. No one will be turned
away for lack of funds.

All campers will be on a task/chore group. Please indicate in the form which
one you prefer (see below for options). Remember, Summer Camp is supposed to
be fun, but we all need to chip in to make it run smoothly. If you do not
indicate your preference, one will be assigned for you…and that’s no fun.

We have agreed to the following general rules for ASC. If you do not think
you can abide by them, then Anarchy Summer Camp is not the place for you.
Sorry.

1. No drugs or alcohol.
2. No weapons other than pocket knives.
3. Oppressive behavior will not be tolerated.

Finally, (do we really need to say this?) law enforcement and snitches are
not permitted at Anarchy Summer Camp.

Please bring the following items to Anarchy Summer Camp. If you do not have
any of them, please let us know beforehand, and we will try to help you
acquire them.

pillows
sheets/sleeping bag/blanket (we have cots)
headlight/flashlight
pocket knife
toothbrush/paste
citronella to ward off mosquitos (or bug spray)
sunscreen
hat
sunglasses
sneakers
sandals
swimsuit
rain gear
workout clothes
change of clothes
bandanna
towel
bowl,plate, fork,spoon, cup
soap
notebook/pen
day pack
mountain bike (optional)
water bottles
food to share

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!