Compiled by Jesse D. Palmer

Here are some new radical spaces as well as some corrections to the Radical Contact list published in the 2018 Organizer. Our existence, our resistance — it only really matters on the local level. It is inspiring that so many people nurture DIY community projects against all odds that serve as islands of cooperation, tenderness and humanity in this soulless capitalist world.

Slingshot has an on-line version of the contact list (slingshot.tao.ca/contacts), but because of a series of computer hassles, we have been unable to update it or fix errors for almost a year (!) We receive lots of emails pointing out errors in the on-line list — for instance the entire continent of Europe disappeared — but we can’t do anything and we’re sorry. We are trying to create a new on-line radical contact list at our new website slingshotcollective.org which we thought would be easy, but 6 months after buying a new domain name and server space, it still isn’t working and it just points to the old broken-down website. So anyway, let’s all play 1980s — get the 2018 organizer and look it up on paper!

Slingshot has received an increasing number of emails asking us to take particular spots off the contact list because they are not safe spaces to women, queers and/or people of color. We don’t want to include such spaces. But it isn’t simple for us to make decisions about de-listing a space based on a single email because there are legitimate internal splits within communities when some people reject a space while others do not. Case in point is 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, a punk club that faced a boycott a couple of years ago. At close range, it really seemed like there were various sides of the story and de-listing Gilman St. wouldn’t have been a good move. It is also important to recall that the FBI has used single-source allegations to engineer splits within radical groups such as the Black Panthers. There are security culture concerns with acting on information without checking it out carefully.

Because we are a tiny collective in Berkeley with few if any resources to check out any information we receive as an email, we’re still working out what to do when we receive tips like this. We did remove a few spaces from the 2018 Organizer after we contacted them. For the moment, we’re going to print reports here (see below) and if there are folks in the town mentioned who can give us more info, that would help us figure out what to do in August, 2018 when we publish the 2019 organizer.

Here’s the latest info as of mid-January:

Flora y Tierra – Long Beach, CA

A community space “prioritizing QTBIPOC” that “honors all of life, our fungal & plant ancestors, all the seen and unseen.” 811 E. 7th St, Long Beach CA 90813

On Pop of the World DIY Collective – Greensboro, NC

They host shows and have a recording studio. 1333 Grove St. Greensboro NC 27403 336-383-9332 onpopstudios.com

Otto’s Abode – Wanakena, NY

A community-based experimental art center with a zine store. 6 Hamele St. Wanakena, NY 13695 (mail: PO Box 1) 315-848-3008 ottosadobe.org.

Comic Girl Coffee – Charlotte, NC

An all-vegan, queer-worker-owned coop cafe and comic shop. 1224 Commercial Ave. Charlotte, NC 28205 704-456-9276 comicgirlcoffee.com

Hasta Muerte coffee – Oakland, CA

A people of color collectively run, worker-owned coffee shop with a bookstore. 2703 Fruitvale Ave., Oakland, CA 94601 510 689 2922 hastamuertecoffee.com

South City Art Supply – St. Louis, MO

An independent art supply store and bookshop with politics and theory books that hosts workshops and an art gallery. 1926 Cherokee St. St. Louis, MO 63118 314-884-8345.

General Store Co-op – La Jolla, CA

A student-run coop that hosts events and has a hangout/studying space for students. University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, 0323 F Student Center, La Jolla, CA 92037 858-450-3080.

Rincon Zapatista – Mexico City, MX

A shop supporting the Zapatistas by selling goods and publications that hosts events. Calle Zapotecas no. 7, Obreros, Mexico City. Near Isabel la Católica y Doctores Metro stop. Tel. 57614236.

Autonome Wohnfabrik – Salzburg, Austria

A radical house project. Poschingerstrasze 10, 5020 Salzburg, Austria

Planning a visit to South Dakota?

Drea emailed and suggested adding these spaces to the radical contact list. They are mostly businesses so “maybe”.

• Breadroot Natural Foods Co-op – 100 East Blvd N, Rapid City, SD 57701 605-348-3331 breadroot.com.

• Ernie November’s (record store) 1319 W. Main St, Rapid City, SD 57701 605-341-0768

• Black Hills Vinyl (record store) 622 Saint Joseph St, Rapid City, SD 57701 605-791-4040 blackhillsvinyl.com.

Planning a visit to Mexico?

Pez emailed these suggestions:

• In Mexico City visit Tianguis Cultural El Chopo flea market, which has happened every Saturday for 30 years and has a well established anarchist/antifascist area at the north end where they sell vegan sandwiches, literature, zines, patches, etc.

• You can visit Cafeteria Beneficio de Abajo at Av de los Insurgentes Sur 228, Roma Norte, Mexico City.

• Check out TierrAdentro, Real de Guadalupe 24, San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.

Stores that now stock the 2018 Organizer & seem interesting

• Green Noise Records 720 N. Killingsworth St. Portland, OR 97217 503-208-3751

• Urge Palette Art Supply 3635 9th St. Riverside, CA 92501 951-782-0414

Changes to the 2018 Organizer

• Boxcar Books in Bloomington, Indiana closed. They existed for 16 years and posted a thoughtful closing statement on their website that is worth a look. (See the very end of this post for the full text.)

• The Rad-ish Collective in Boulder, CO moved. The new address is: 465 S 39th St. Boulder, CO 80305.

• 1919 in Fort Worth, TX had to close, but they are working on re-opening at the same location. Contact them before you drop in.

• We got a report that Backspace in Fayetteville, AR is not a safe place for women, POC and queer people and should not be listed in the organizer. As noted above, Slingshot is trying to figure out how to handle such reports and requests. Send us info.

• La Furia de Las Calles in Mexcio no longer exists.

• Centro de Informacion Anarquista CEDIA in Mexico no longer exists.

• We got an email indicating that all the spaces we have listed in Taiwan are “normal places, not radical … similar to any capital-hungry business.” See above – it is hard for Slingshot to verify this information. The emailer suggested the Neng-sheng-xing Factory in Tainan, which appears to be an eco/rad hostel that has an art gallery, hosts events and provides free space for NGOs. The address is in Chinese but there are directions at ffffactory.blogspot.tw or search NSXFactory on fuckin-facebook (vomit). Even NSXFActory might be about to move, according to the email we got.

 

Boxcar books
CLOSING STATEMENT
BY HELLEBORE | DECEMBER 2, 2017
The climate and landscape in Bloomington has been changing rapidly. This is clear on any drive or walk around town, particularly around Kirkwood, the Square, and in the areas off the B-line trail. Massive luxury condo developments, the bank and future hotel on Kirkwood across from the Monroe County Public Library, the Hyatt Place hotel, and further projects off Kirkwood and elsewhere are constructed with a particular population in mind. It is not for those of us struggling to find ever-elusive affordable housing near our jobs or schools, and it’s surely not the numerous community members who are left homeless without a year-round shelter: temporary shelter or places of gathering set up by people experiencing homelessness are regularly attacked and evicted by police, often to make room for developments like the “Artisan Row” houses on the B-Line off Dodds, Echo Park development South of Country Club Rd, and the forthcoming Switchyard Park. We saw this more recently with the clearing of People’s Park’s homeless population by the police, which coincided with both increased surveillance downtown and the construction of new micro-apartments on the site of the Bloomington Bagel building overlooking People’s Park.
Boxcar Books and Community Center has stood throughout all of this. It’s no secret that brick and mortar bookstores have struggled, and folded, in an increasingly digitized age. We’ve watched independent bookstores and infoshops around the country, including Bloomington’s own Howard’s, close in recent years. Rising rent and a Kirkwood increasingly geared toward techies and wealthy students and their families did not bode well for an independent, radical, volunteer-run collective bookstore.
Boxcar has existed as a bookstore in Bloomington for 16 years — occupying our current location on 6th St. for 9 years — but our role as a community center was often backgrounded. In the last couple years we have focused on promoting ourselves as a place to gather, and often simply exist, in an increasingly policed and surveilled downtown. As the wider community has struggled with homelessness, addiction, and hyper-policing of the poor, so has Boxcar Books. In addition to serving as a hub for marginalized and underrepresented literature and radical thought, we, to our knowledge, continue to have the only open-access bathroom in the area. We offer free coffee, wifi, device charging, a place to engage with ideas and meet, and a warm space to rest or hang out for anyone, regardless of their background, housing situation, or financial standing.
At times, this led to a struggle to establish healthy boundaries as we worked to offer space for all people, including those experiencing homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. While our dwindling collective struggled every month to raise enough money to pay our exorbitant rent and bills and combat the structural decay of the building, we also struggled with the reality of what creating open space actually entails. As the downtown area was transformed, Boxcar became a locus of the city’s refusal to deal with those social problems highlighted by development. We struggled to be able to continue to offer space for those people who most desperately needed it, while still having a store that felt accessible and enjoyable for customers and groups holding events. It was a learning process, and we did not always succeed. Even with this constant crisis over the last two years, we felt that it was incredibly important to continue to offer what little we could: an open community space to all. We understand that poverty, housing insecurity, and, to a large extent, addiction are the manifestations of those issues highlighted by the books and zines we carry. Oppression and gentrification are more than ideas – they live and breathe, they transform towns and they quash independent thought.
While we ultimately learned how to balance the needs of the bookstore with those of the community center, the strain put on our volunteers during the heightened cleansing of Kirkwood was immense and many left. The extreme pressure we felt from our landlord, the police, and, most fiercely, our neighbors to make our space off-limits to people without homes, combined with our own emotional ability to handle constant crises, made it hard for us to focus on what we love about running a radical collective bookstore.
When Boxcar started in 2002, we paid $350 in rent for a storefront at 3rd and Washington. We were able to expand our collection and even start renting the storefront next door during those years. Then, in 2008, the building was demolished to make way for the new downtown bus station, and we were forced to find a new location to house both Boxcar and Pages to Prisoners. We found a new space closer to IU campus, and our total rent for Boxcar and Pages to Prisoners nearly quadrupled overnight. Since then it has steadily gone up, and we are now paying 725% more rent than we paid 15 years ago. We now pay more rent than Bluestockings infoshop in Manhattan, NY. Our sales, and bookstore sales in general, could not and cannot compete with that staggering increase. We’ve definitely had some good times, but for many years we have been burning through savings to keep the space going. We got to the point a year or two ago where we could no longer afford to buy new books. Our only new titles were from donations. Even as we sold titles from our shelves, we could not afford to restock the books we were selling because every dollar earned was being spent to pay for rent, utilities, and supplies to keep the place open, leading to a situation where our sections have been shriveling over time. This then fed the problem because having less new and interesting titles, and a constantly shrinking collection, made the store less exciting to browse and led to even slower sales.
Prior to our renovation of the space in 2016, which followed a protracted hunt for a new location, we knew that staying afloat at our current location would be a struggle, but with downtown rapidly changing and prices increasing, our rental options were very limited. We came close to renting a new exciting space, but at the last moment it was sold to an “anonymous investor.” Out of options and not able to move, we decided to continue our lease with an increase in rent. It’s not news that bookstores have been feeling the heat to stay relevant in an ever digitized world. We have been told countless of times by shoppers that, while it was easier and cheaper to get books off of Amazon, they come to Boxcar to support us and our mission. That’s a wonderful thing and we wholeheartedly thank those people, but we also see which way the wind has been blowing.
Unfortunately, our declining sales, constantly rising rent and bills, and a neighborhood that no longer has space for places like Boxcar has finally caught up to us. To say that we have tried everything we could to remain open would be an understatement. From hosting numerous public fundraising events, online fundraising campaigns, special store sales, and adjustment of store hours to looking for new buildings and new partnerships, we have all but exhausted our ability to dream and feel inspired by the project we have committed years to. Boxcar and Pages to Prisoners volunteers have spent their own money buying supplies, sometimes even covering bills, in an attempt to buy us more time. After well over a year of operating at complete scarcity, we feel we are in a financial place that can’t be recovered from in the long term without a $20-30k investment in new books, new computers and software, and funds to pay off and leave our unaffordable rental space. We also simply lack the volunteer power to make good on these dreams. It is easy to get folks excited about helping out with a new venture; it’s much harder to get those people to stick around for years to do the hard work that has to be done to keep a project open, particularly when that work is all volunteer.
It is remarkable that the people that started Boxcar in 2001 were able to pass the reins off to new volunteers after only a few years. So many different groups of volunteers have come and gone and somehow the project has persisted. While we feel a definite sadness and weight at being the last group of volunteers, we also hope folks will take their sadness at the ending of this particular Bloomington place and not simply say “Oh well, Bloomington is changing,” but fight for a different kind of change – change for the better.
We understand, in a world that is forcing people to become ever more isolated, that nothing can quite take away from the charm of meeting people face to face in a physical space. We have valued being able to offer a place where people could exchange ideas freely and gather to discuss the storm that is the current political climate. Our most valued memories will be witnessing the awe young folks have in discovering zines and radical literature for the first time, being able to host outdoor and indoor movie screenings, readings, and political meetings, and, most importantly, being a place that strived to be a voice for prisoners. We understand the necessity of spaces like this to exist and hope another will again in Bloomington. Thank you to everyone who has supported us financially, materially, emotionally – you may not know it, but often your support came at a time when we couldn’t have continued without it. Our future projects may look different, but we’re not going anywhere. Whether under the moniker of Boxcar or not, we’ll be fighting for change and finding new places to meet. We hope to find you there.

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.

When people started making Slingshot 30 years ago, mainstream media was at the early stages of a 24 hour news cycle. A miracle where events around the world could be reported every hour (along with 58 minutes of filler and advertising). The world was entering an era where people could be more “connected” and informed. The collective was started to publicize direct actions and protests happening within a mile of us, almost in real time, with articles promoting a protest planned for the next day, and reporting about the arrests and beatings that had happened earlier in the afternoon.

Since then, news and information is accessible on a moment to moment basis yet somehow there’s a new form of paralysis. Either people are glued to the screen or they are allergic to the manipulation of bad news and thus stay away from anything political. In both cases, it appears there are less protests, less projects of open resistance and yet everyone is complaining about the way things are.

Our collective fell into a practice of printing with an awkward cycle of every 3 months or so. Most people can’t grasp our rhythm and many feel we are out of touch. If one looked at the news we cover, it would seem we are neglecting pressing issues. 200,000 Salvadorans are threatened with deportation, all U.S. waters are open to oil and gas drilling, and we are writing about microaggressions — really!? Each issue the collective often pauses to reflect on the missing content — it is in our hearts and the hearts of people we care about.

Two curious things come out of this so-called neglect. One, people who are hooked-up to the constant news cycle often struggle to process the events they are viewing and thus can’t engage — they’re just hypnotized by the spectacle. The other thing is illustrated by backyard overgrowth. It may look like a fire hazard, unsightly, needing a manicure, but things of beauty grow in areas not messed up by human intervention.

In between making issues we often do other things not related to running a radical publication. The life that isn’t keeping up an industrial news complex informs how we approach producing a paper. If we spent every day writing the newspaper, we’d have no lived experience to write about.

If you haven’t noticed, we publish content that points for people to act. This issue fails to address significant topics (#MeToo, Immigration), but at least we are not frozen and are getting a spark going to start a fire. Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers, translators, distributors, etc. to make this paper. If you send an article, please be open to editing.

We’re a collective but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this issue: Carli, eggplant, Elke, Dov, Gerald, Hannah, Hayley, Jesse, Joey, Isabel, Laundro-Matt, Lew, Reverend Egg King, Romi, Talia, Tho and all the authors and artists!

Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting

Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on March 4, 2018 at 7 pm at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below.)

Article Deadline & Next Issue Date

Submit your articles for issue 127 by April 14, 2018 at 3 pm.

Volume 1, Number 126, Circulation 22,000

Printed January 26, 2018

Slingshot Newspaper

A publication of Long Haul

Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley CA 94705

Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

510-540-0751 slingshotcollective@protonmail.com

slingshotcollective.org • twitter @slingshotnews

 

 

Slingshot free stuff

We’ll send you a random assortment of back issues for the cost of postage. Send $4 for 2 lbs. Free if you’re an infoshop or library. slingshotcollective.org

 

Circulation information

Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income, or anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or $1 per issue. International $3 per issue. Outside the Bay Area we’ll mail you a free stack of copies if you give them out for free. Say how many copies and how long you’ll be at your address. In the Bay Area pick up copies at Long Haul and Bound Together books, SF.

By Kyle Chastain

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, conversing, and reading about housing under capitalism, what post-capitalist housing might look like, collective housing in capitalism with its potentials and short-comings, and some tactics we might consider in trying to form post-capitalist housing (and solutions to the so-called “housing crisis”). This submission is a reflection of these.

In terms of collective housing and potential for relating to unhoused folks, I recently found a collective house near where I live in Everson, Washington, which brings forth an interesting model for fluid-ish housing and the accommodation of new people to an area. After going to open mics hosted by the house, and to one of their house meetings, I realized that the house was functioning as a transitional space for some people. There are three floors in the house – two of which have community space (non-private living quarters) where people may stay for 5 nights a month free, and the rest of the month at $8.00 a day (to contribute to the cost of the space in utilities, house essentials, etc.). At the house meeting that I attended there were at least four people who were there living in community space, new to the area, and looking for housing. While probably not everyone would be comfortable dealing with the fluid nature of a space like this (having new people in and out of community spaces as they transition into longer-term housing) I think that those who can hold down very important spaces with a lot of potential. They are important in that they not only provide relatively inexpensive places to stay for people new to town – but also in that they are social spaces. They host events like the open mic for entertainment and gathering and provide an actual physical location to go to begin building new relationships in a new place. And collective spaces that have meetings to decide together show radical direct democracy in practice and have the potential to introduce new people to these politics in action (which could inspire more action like this i.e. propaganda of the deed)! Furthermore we move around a lot! Some of us for adventure, some of us to find new social relations, some of us are getting away from something unhealthy; there are so many reasons. If we want to live in a world in which this is easier to do whenever we feel compelled to do so we will have to make it so! Let’s make more social centers like this!

Another alternative to capitalist housing that we might continue to mobilize in the future is squatting1 (there was a lot of mobilization around this during Occupy and earlier movements i.e. Organizing For Occupation, Homes Not Jails, Operation Move-In in the 70’s, etc.). Squatting is a term used in various ways with lots of connotations. Here, I use it to mean: squatting because housing is fucking expensive, squatting out of necessity, squatting to collectively resist and create alternatives to the real estate market that turns homes into commodities, squatting because there are empty houses and people who need them so let’s fucking use them. I just recently finished a book by Hannah Dobbz called, “Nine Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States” (I highly recommend it)2 which goes through the ins and outs of squatting in the so-called U.S.

I want to bring up a couple of points that Dobbz makes in this book that are important. One is that squatting could become an effective way of coping with so-called housing crisis. Now, I say so-called because Dobbz makes a compelling point that, in the U.S. as a whole, the housing crisis does not stem from a shortage of habitable housing. She cites statistics that show that even if we were to house all houseless people in the U.S. into their own homes that there would still be an enormous amount of housing empty. Rather, housing is seen as as a commodity (a thing to be bought and sold ideally at a profit) and that is what renders housing scarce. We have an artificial crisis. Another is that public support for squatting has fluctuated through time and by region in the U.S. While this is not important if one’s goal in squatting is to secure housing for as long as you can without getting caught, popular opinion is very important if we’re interested in gaining momentum around squatting as an effective means of dealing with “the housing crisis” (a.k.a. peeps trying to make mad profits off of our shelter) and having serious collective support if and when the police come to evict us. We need to “normalize” squatting.

This could also be dangerous. I think we’d have to watch out for profiteers who might take advantage of public support for squatting to gentrify; I think we’d also need to keep in mind a potential for racist outcomes (particularly in this moment of heightened xenophobia). That is, given the histories and continued institutional racism in the U.S. I think we would need to keep an eye to make sure that we mobilize public support around people of color and LGBTQ folks squatting in particular (this could open up a whole conversation around community self-defense). Maybe some consciousness raising tactics (conversations, reading, demonstrations, etc.) around squatting might be a good place to start?

Lastly, in theorizing post-capitalist housing, and really “ownership”, Dobbz suggests stewardship as a concept of ownership rooted primarily in the use and care of a space as a viable replacement for ownership based on title. In the U.S. the “ownership” of a space is based on legal title. Thus a person may have legal title to a space, regardless of whether they use or care for the space in anyway, and often can leverage legal title (though mostly this means force which is not always legal) to remove people from a place where they have the title even when the folks in the place have been stewards to it (Lower Eastside Squats, actions of settlers in colonizing the U.S., Zuccotti Park during Occupy).

If we could collectively shift to an understanding of ownership based on care, rather than on title, perhaps we could lessen the effects of careless landowning (derelict properties, gentrification, redevelopment with no concern for social equity or ecology, etc.). A non-profit called Land Action in Oakland is beginning some of this work. Land Action has engaged in multiple forms of struggle to create a new form of ownership including: squatting and going to court to gain ownership of property through adverse possession3 and fundraising to buy public lands for urban farming/land stewardship space. I think that this multi-pronged approach to creating decommodified space is very important. Sadly not everyone is down with squatting as a way to acquire lands and housing and this approach currently rubs a lot of folks the wrong way. See their website @ www.landaction.org. There is a video from CNN in which a reporter calls Steve DeCaprio’s actions and attempts at adverse possession “morally yucky.” However another guest on the show, a legislator, backs Steve up about his claims that this kind of caretaking squatting is good for the community and local ecology. According to their website Land Action has also fundraised to create urban farms in Oakland. Their goal is to create 100+ “microfarms” within the next five years which will take these lands out of the speculative land/housing market for good. Land Action is using direct action to counter gentrification which in turn is also raising awareness around squatting, land stewardship, and alternatives to capitalist housing.

In conclusion, perhaps based on the model utilized by groups like Land Action, we should attempt a multi-pronged approach to blow up capitalist housing for good. I think that squatting will remain an essential tactic – both for survival in the now, and for making moves to take care of spaces, and cultivate the kinds of communities we want to live in. I also think that taking a fundraising approach will be good for consciousness raising about both capitalist housing and what that really is, who benefits, etc., and the alternatives that we can use to create housing that benefits more of us in enriching social and ecologically mindful ways.

Editor’s note: We are overjoyed to announce that Alameda County recently dropped squatting-related charges against 4 Land Action organizers after a 2 year legal battle!

 

 

3. Adverse possession is a legal principle through which squatters may be able to legally “own” properties after certain amounts of time, or after making improvements to the property or paying the property taxes. Rules around adverse possession vary across the so-called U.S.

By Aster

Geopolitical strife has been on the rise on the Puget Sound landscape. Seattle’s unfixable housing crisis displaces low-income folk and people of color farther away from their homes; the cohorts of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft swoop in with placeless high-rises. Completely dispossessed residents face the street, tents, and the Seattle Police Department’s sweeps and seizures. In Tacoma, Puyallup Tribe members and environmental affinity groups demonstrate against the looming natural disaster of Puget Sound Energy’s liquid natural gas plant. In Olympia, a blockade stood for two weeks on the city’s rail to defy the transport of fracking proppants through the city’s port.

Before my involvement in the geopolitical, I acquainted myself with groups who organized themselves around identity or political ideology; the more time I spent with these groups, the more I became alienated from my place in my own anti-capitalist struggle. Folks seemed set on liberating POCness instead of dissembling race as a tool used to dehumanize and oppress; some groups liberate womanhood, queerness, and transness instead of deleting the reified abstractions of gender and sexuality altogether. Dem-socialists, commies, and anarchists corral folks under a flag, as if a religion, fighting for socialism, communism, anarchism, the Left, fighting as if ideology were an end and not merely one of many means towards a better world.

As someone who identifies as second-gen Southeast Asian, queer, of financial privilege, as an anarchist, I don’t see my identity as important – it’s not real. It hardly tells anyone who I am or what my unique relationship to capitalism is. Maybe it’s my privilege talking, maybe I’m pretentious, maybe I’m just jaded.

Yet I’ve found a certain arousing magic to the geopolitical struggles up here in the Sound. When I first entered the Olympia blockade back in November, I was taken aback by the constructed sense of place – fairy lights and tea candles, a well-stocked kitchen, a blaze-it space, reading material, and sleeping spaces (its facade was a precarious mishmash of tarps and political slogans, but that’s besides the point). The blockade attracted local punks, college kids, homeless folk; a travelling kid from the East Coast found his way into the blockade. Gradually the blockade’s overarching politics (however so individually defined) ebbed, uncovering the fun of everyday occupation life. A tiny kid and I jumped around into the sunset; a bunch of us roasted marshmallows on the barrel fire; a group discussion on blockade needs yielded “laundry, dish soap, sleeping bags” and “musical instruments and an end to capitalism.” The anxiety of an always-tonight raid by Olympia and state police loomed, but the blockade never stopped being fun.

Tangible direct action is one secret to the magic. Occupations, even if only ephemeral, seize back tangible spaces and lands appropriated by capitalist forces, in this case the Port of Olympia, and return it to the sovereignty of the land’s most important stakeholders: us and the people and lands we value.

But why such a fixation upon land?

Capitalism finds its power in the geopolitical. Capitalism needs land bases, property lines drawn and enforced by law and police – it needs entire mountainsides of pines to destroy for the timber market, it needs a chemical-pumping factory to process its raw materials, it needs a warehouse from which to trade. Capitalism destroys even the common lands, eroding ecosystems and health worldwide with pesticides, industrial reagents, and sulfurous oxides. States need borders to manage the flux of bodies, so that security industries can profit off detention centers and border militarization, so that “illegal” immigrants work lower wages to earn their employer’s fingers-crossed promise of no-tell, so that the brown undesirables stay out of the country… the list doesn’t end.

But just like capitalism, we and our radical movements find strength in the geopolitical, in the construction and fostering of defiantly autonomous spaces. We need spaces to grow our food, spaces to live and relax, spaces to congregate. Yet as much as capitalism leads one to believe, land is not just a resource to be fashioned into structures: land forms the base of the resilient relationships and friendships implicated in the word “community”. Here too is the magic of occupations. In less noteworthy circumstances, the first blip of a relationship begins with conversations about the weather, traffic, and other local geographical particularities. As a kid, my few friendships blossomed because we shared not only neighborhoods, classrooms, and parks, but because we shared them over time. Now 20 and anxiety-ridden, it still comes relatively easily to converse with folk in the space of a blockade or occupation; it yet comes easy when we’re partaking in the same occupation, the same community potluck, the same garden. It’s no surprise that the etymology of the word “comrade” (according to Wiktionary) is the Latinate camarata, meaning room or chamber mate.

The autonomous spaces we build take many different forms, but what matters is that they are the unique invention of us and our friends. In a time when capitalism homogenizes places and localities into placeless industries like ports, fast food franchises, prisons, and eerily similar “modern” microstudio complexes, we will find strength in the construction of the place, a hyperlocal, highly personal, convergence of people and land. For those who prefer the pastoral, I imagine picturesque, rural, self-sustaining communes built on gently sloping mountainsides blanketed with deciduous broadleafs. In urban areas, I imagine democratic co-ops and group houses, obscure congregation spaces for anarchists and other radicals; even Left Bank Books in Downtown Seattle serves as an infoshop for the radical scene here. Graffiti reclaims spaces for art and performance; both leftists and rightists poster, sticker, and tag public spaces to symbolize reclamation. Your favorite bank-under-the-bridge to blaze up at is just as autonomous as the Olympia blockade.

Radicals must prioritize holding these spaces dear, especially in places like Seattle where rising rent and gentrification threaten to dehouse entire movements. In sharing these spaces and their experiences, relationships among people and land, and eventually movements, gather momentum and build resiliency.

While taking back land from the capitalistic forces that strip history, place, and context, even for the ephemeral occupation, is satisfying as hell, the geopolitical remains the personal, the local – the search for one’s land is just as crucial as its defense. Finding one’s home, a place not only autonomous for everyone but for oneself, is always a journey. Even to understand what makes one’s home a home is a journey, one that I undertake day-to-day.

I used to think that home lay in the things of a place, its trees, its animals, maybe a favorite lake, but when I visit my rural Central Florida hometown, I am reminded this is far from the case. In terms of environment my hometown ranks as top in the country; the region is home to beautiful, largely endangered Florida scrub ecosystem. The palmettos resound like shaken poster-paper upon the scurry of a gopher tortoise; bald-cypresses buttress a swampy cathedral; in autumn pine cones release their samaras and they come twirling golden to Earth… yet while an extraordinarily comfy region, I cannot participate in a dialogue with a tree. I am only a passive observer to an art here.

Then I thought home lay in the people of the place, and while closer to my truth, it wasn’t quite there. When I visited Chicago last summer, every night I was reconnecting with an old friend or attending an obscure DIY show whose address was buried deep in Facebook friends-of-friends-of-friends; my favorite was a city folk punk show, kids strumming guitars and playing cellos, chanting about self-deprecation and big tobacco and “getting out of this city.” Chicago’s DIY scene was a geographical particularity like the Florida scrub, a stochastic occurrence of individuals, buildings, and time. Yet I was a passive observer to the DIY scene as I was to the Florida scrub; I reified “the scene” into an object of entertainment, a Chicago-specific amenity. I chatted a conversation easy enough with folks there, but it’s not like I was collaborating or performing with any individual there.

In the same summer I visited Detroit and realized that the true home was an ecology, a web of relationships with people and things. My first day in Detroit I relied on Slingshot’s Radical Contact List to find the radical scene – with it I found the institutions of the Trumbullplex, Back Alley Bikes, and the Universe Intentional Organization, attended a few shows and parties, and that was that. But I also happened to stumble upon a block of run-down burnt-out colorfully painted houses one afternoon; a sign proclaimed the block the Fireweed Universe-City, a squatting community. I lost my manners and wandered into a house asking if I could chill the night – the folks I talked to were so nice I stayed around for three weeks!

Much like protest-occupations, squatting’s lifestyle geopolitical re-appropriation was enticing, but like the Olympia blockade, the politics faded as I started to form relationships with the area and the people. I took a very mutual affinity with two of the neighborhood kids, biking them around the area and carrying them on my shoulders into their home when they fell asleep on the ride back. Days I read or worked in gardens and urban farms around Detroit, nights I blazed, snacked, and chatted around bonfires. While not a perfect ideal – drama abounded and Midwest winters were brutal – it was very much a resilient ecological web that, if I stayed longer, I could probably call home myself.

Spinning your own ecological web is what makes a space your place. Fostering a relationship with the land and with its people makes a place so much more dearer to defend – you can lose things, you can lose people you hardly know, but when you’ve formed an art and a friendship, fuck, what do you do if you do lose it? Find your own land, root and enter the ecology and seize it back from an exploitative, homogenizing capitalism and all its devices however you know how, squats, occupations, co-ops, communes, communities. We find strength in the geopolitical, because the geopolitical is the personal.

By Carli

Legitimate consent cannot be given without real freedom of choice. If a no is not available, then a yes is not valid. In any moment when someone asks me if I consent to something, there are countless factors that can prevent me from accessing no. Socialization. Expectation. Obligation. Coercion. Power. Fear. He was driving me home, I couldn’t say no. I had said yes already, how could I take it back? And the way she looked at me when she asked—I heard myself say yes before I even considered the question.

All of our interactions are wrapped up in powerful social forces influenced by our identities. Living consensually in relation to one another is an active practice of cultivating our own awareness of power dynamics and social cues, asking questions with an openness to hearing no, and checking in often with ourselves and others. Was I projecting my own assumptions and desires onto her? Did they seem nervous when they said yes? Did I ignore the hesitation in his voice because yes was what I wanted to hear? How can I help make no more accessible in the way I ask?

This dynamic process of relating is complex and nuanced in exactly the way that “the system” is not. Under capitalism, your consent is assumed—in fact, your consent is required. You must consent to giving over control of your time to an employer if you want your paycheck. How could you say no when the alternative is no money, no food, no housing? And what if you don’t even get the opportunity to say yes?

Everything about us—where we are born, who we are born to, how we look, how we speak, how we identify—affects whether or not we will be able to access the basic goods that we all need to survive. We cannot say no to the color of our skin or the feelings we have for people of our same gender, nor should we have to. Instead of succumbing to this pressure to deny the identities that disempower us under capitalism, how can we deny the power of the system itself? How can we live in ways that say no to capitalism while still existing within a capitalist society?

If you do have power under capitalism, ask yourself “how can I use it to give?” Share the resources that your privilege grants you: tutor someone for free; make a hot meal for houseless folks in your area; open a cooperative for people who are getting pushed out of the city because you can afford to pay higher rent. Share your intangible resources too by listening to and amplifying the voices and perspectives of people who are not given the social power that you are.

If you do not have power under this system, how can you undermine the legitimacy and power of the system itself? Capitalism relies on all of our silence for its power, so speak out. Show the world the power that you do have. Expose the injustice inherent in this system. Seek out and spread just alternatives. Live them now. And then maybe even write about it for your local anarchist newspaper.