The Redfern Black Rose Collective has been running a bookshop for 3½ years. Prior to that time most of the founding members of this collective had been involved in another anarchist bookshop project which had been going for five years. At Black Rose we have been selling about $20,000 worth of anarchist books, records and related materials each year. By commercial standards, this figure is very small and would not even pay the rent if it were required to do so. Never the less we feel our efforts are yielding worthwhile results, partly because of the nature of what we are selling and partly because of the way in which we operate.
Everything which we sell is related in some way to anarchism, as we understand the concept. Either the contents describes, discusses or promotes anarchist action or lifestyle, or it is produced by anarchists or in an anarchistic way. In this way we offer information for people wanting to find out about anarchism, resources for people trying to put anarchism into practice in both the political and cultural domains, and distribution point for anarchist publishers.
Some of the material we sell is difficult if not impossible to get elsewhere. For example, we are one of the largest suppliers of Movement for a New Society literature in Australia, and we have the largest range of anarchist punk records in the country. Furthermore, the quantities in which we buy from some small scale anarchist publishers is sufficient to affect the viability and scale of their operation. Even where we handle works like LeGuin's "The Dispossessed", which are freely available through regular commercial outlets, we are able to place them in an anarchist context. In doing so, they take on the voice of a living tradition rather than appearing merely as an interesting academic idea.
The commercial structure which we have established is designed to challenge mainstream economic institutions in the most fundamental manner we can achieve. All money received from sales of stock goes into a special account which is used only for purchasing more stock. We sell at a nominal markup of 10% on wholesale costs. The normal commercial markup for books is 66%. Some of us were previously involved in a project which sold books at cost, but we found that stock ran down due to unavoidable damage and loss. So we settled on the relatively insignificant 10% markup to prevent this from happening. All work in the shop is voluntary, no one has any financial interest in the form of wages or profits, and all of the shop's running expenses (rent, electricity, advertising, etc.) are financed from donations. The result is fulling in keeping with our opposition to the wage system and our support for land rights as against private ownership of property.
We follow a land-rights model of practice in that no one is understood to own the shop's stock or trading name. Rather, we see the collective as trustees or stewards of this resource. By remaining outside the wage system we have created a situation where nobody has any reason to work in the shop other than the immediate gratification of seeing this project continue, and the feelings of solidarity arising out of working with this particular group of people. When these are insufficient to offset the hassles and effort of working in the shop there is nothing to bind people to the shop, no income on which people may become dependant, and no perks or privileges. In this way, the project is protected from ever becoming a means to an end, it can only survive as long as enough people see it as an end in itself, to keep it going. This structure means that every item we have for sale is something we have selected purely because we want to make it available. Our method also means that the shop will survive and continue to offer its services regardless of the judgement of the market.
So we have severed many of the control strings of the capitalist status quo. This means that for people working in the shop we have to learn a whole new way of thinking about what we are doing. Our customers and supporters are also challenged by circumstances which do not fit conventional attitudes. From the customer's point of view there are the benefits of our low prices (our import records are about half the prices charged by commercial import shops) and the fact that we are under no pressure to sell to people. This, we hope, contributes to a relaxed and friendly attitude in the shop.
In our internal organisation we are trying to translate the cliched buzzwords of the anarchist movement, like "consensus decision making" and "job rotation", into practical working procedures. In order to do this we have defined the membership of the collective very clearly. We have put into place precise mechanisms whereby people can join, leave, or if necessary be expelled. (Though we naturally hope that this last procedure will never have to be used.) The joining procedure takes 3 months. In this time a person has the chance to learn how the shop works, and both they and the collective have an opportunity to assess their compatibility for working together in the group. Once accepted as a member each person undertakes to come to meetings regularly, spend some time each week minding the shop, and take responsibility for at least one of the 12 "back-room" jobs like book ordering, accounts, or publicity. We require people to do all three of these things so that everyone is seen to take responsibility for the decisions which they will be carrying out, and so that only people who work in the shop hold the power to make decisions.
From the time we opened we have had a job rotation system whereby every 8 months the "back-room" jobs change hands. It is understood that eventually every member will do every job before a member takes on the same job twice. This is a mechanism which has worked fairly smoothly and has ensured that no one individual has exclusive knowledge of any area of the shop's operation.
At the same time we have put a lot of effort into understanding and implementing consensus decision making. We have formulated our own working definition of consensus and have found it to work well. We have no provision to fall back on voting except for an expulsion. We have however provided an opportunity for individuals to register a formal dissent from a decision as a weighty protest in especially intractable circumstances.
Consensus decision making and job rotation are part of a general commitment by the collective to challenge hierarchy and to promote equal, caring and cooperative practices within our group. In this respect we have also incorporated a number of practices within our weekly meetings. Firstly, we start each meeting with a sharing in which each person has a chance to speak uninterrupted. Usually people say how they are feeling and maybe mention anything significant that has happened to them in the past week. Or it can be an opportunity to raise a topic which they can't find the space to bring up elsewhere or to let off steam about something that is bugging them with the shop, collective, or life in general.
During the meetings we have a minutes taker, facilitator, and a time keeper. Between these three the meeting is kept focussed on the agenda, the meeting is kept flowing smoothly, they ensure that everyone has space to put their opinions and feelings forward, and a record is kept of what was discussed and decided. In evolving the role of the facilitator we have drawn heavily from Movement for a New Society literature, especially the pamphlet "Meeting Facilitation: The No Magic Method", the "Manual for Group Facilitators", and the relevant sections of the "Resource Manual for a Living Revolution". The minutes taker, facilitator and time keeper jobs are rotated each week according to a roster which involves all members of the collective.
Each meeting is conducted in two parts. First we spend about an hour and a half discussing a major theoretical question like "what is Consensus?" or "Sexual politics in relation to the collective' or the drafting of this document. Then, after a short break, we deal with the more mundane business items, drawing up the shop roster, for the following week, processing the incoming mail, book selection, and the like. At the end of the meeting we have an evaluation of the meeting. This followed by an affirmation exercise in which each member affirms another member according to a pattern which ensures that each person is affirmed. After that we close the meeting by going around the room and each person saying something that they are looking forward to in the week ahead. In addition to the above we use cooperative games on occasion (about one in three meetings) to break tension or to invigorate a drowsy meeting. We also frequently interrupt proceedings to go around the group and get everyone's point of view on the question at hand.
Our experience has shown that applying these practices makes us more rather than less efficient. They help us towards putting our politics into practice. This, of course, is not to say we haven't been without problems. Whilst we haven't been able to completely eradicate hierarchy in the collective, we have made significant progress towards that goal. We have done this by consistently trying to identify problems and dealing with them; rather than hiding them under a cloak of unstructured practice and obscurantist ideology, and then pretending they don't exist any more. Some of these problems arise out of our incomplete political awareness, whilst others are more or less deliberate results of choices we have made.
Membership of our collective requires a very substantial commitment. At minimum there is a four hour meeting every Saturday afternoon, plus four hours of looking after the shop and responsibility for one of the back-room jobs. For some of us it can involve three or more times this. Our decision not to have any kind of wages paid by the shop means that all this comes on top of our day to day struggle to survive within the capitalist system. Revolutionary change is bound to be a huge undertaking, so it would be surprising if joining a group which has a serious revolutionary intent were not to involve a major commitment. Furthermore, the dominant culture's promotion of consumer lifestyles and the resultant lack of confidence in our own ability to change things directly means that people don't tend to have that kind of commitment. Even when they do, the sheer difficulty of surviving a job or life on the dole makes it very difficult to sustain. Add this to the inevitable personality clashes which arise in any group and it will come as no surprise that finding enough people to join the collective is a continual problem.
When we opened we had 7 people and this gradually increased to 10 in January 1985. By February 1986 we were down to 4 and it looked as if the shop would have to close. We are now back up to 7 members which is about the minimum number we can properly survive on. But we need one more before we can resume opening on Mondays and more still before all the back-room jobs are fully attended to.
Our decision to pay all the shop's overheads (rent, electricity, etc.) from donations also brings its own problems. About 80% of the donations come from regular pledges by members of the collective. This is hardly surprising and not, in itself, a bad thing; but it does make us dependant on the wages of members employed in the capitalist system. At the same time, because the shop is open 5 days, and hopefully 6 days a week, we are also dependant upon the time of people who are not employed, in the conventional sense of the word. The problems arise in that people with full time jobs and people who are "unemployed" tend to have quite attitudes, social activities and priorities. These differences can be very difficult to reconcile. When the collective was down to 5 and then 4 members they were all people who had full time jobs and either owned their own home or were paying off a mortgage. Several of the people who had left the collective in the previous 6 months had referred to the social atmosphere created by people with jobs in their reasons for leaving.
Our location has also been seen by some people as a problem. It was originally selected because of the low rent and Redfern Station, served by every train route in the Sydney region, is only a ten minute walk up the street. We were also pleased that the Redfern / Alexandria / Waterloo region is one of the last major enclaves of aboriginal, poor, marginalised and traditional working class people in the inner Sydney area, for these are the people to whom anarchism speaks most directly. However, people joining the collective have also pointed out that we would be selling far more if we had a more "up market" location, and that the Redfern location is out of the way for most of our potential customers and is particularly hostile for women travelling alone in the evening to the shop. Partly in response to this last point we have moved our meeting times from Sunday evenings to Saturday afternoons, and our weekly "meet the collective" dinners from late Wednesday evenings to early Saturday evenings. Apart from the fact that we are under no pressure to sell books in order to stay open, a more "up market" location would mean higher rent, the cost of moving and a loss of continuity with established customers. Also, we are now in an area which could never support a book or record shop which wasn't heavily protected from market forces. We are the only bookshop in the area and have been thanked by some local people for being there as well as for our low prices.
Sexual issues, despite the collective's endorsement of radical feminist politics, has been another source of major problems. This has been on a level of "who is or is not sleeping with who" as well as centering around different perceptions of how to encourage personal growth or consciousness raising within the group. Eighteen months ago our collective had more women members than men, for the last six months we have had only one woman member. The series of resignations which brought about this change were disappointing, for various aspects of sexual politics were given by different women in their reasons for leaving.
On questions of sharing the work in the shop we have been fairly successful in breaking down normal gender stereotypes. All members share in cleaning, washing up and cooking as well as the other bookshop jobs (correspondence, book ordering, etc.). On the other hand, child care has been a question we haven't dealt with at all well, despite its' occupying us in our meetings for 12 months at one stage.
Jealousies and frustrations arising out of who was and was not sleeping with who set the main part of the emotional atmosphere for the first 3 years without ever being properly discussed. We now have a situation where no two members of the collective are engaged in a sexual relationship together and we have taken advantage of this space to start discussing the issues involved. Hopefully we will do better on this count in the future.
More important than all of these, though, has been a series of personality clashes which seem to have some gender based roots. These are situations where women have been characterised as irresolute, over sensitive, or high strung, while men have been bullheaded, insensitive, selfish and moody. These issues came into focus in an argument over how to proceed with consciousness raising type discussions where individuals would feel exposed and threatened as a result. Should we proceed boldly, taking risks and ignoring many potential reasons not to proceed (a view which became identified as predominantly "male") or should we concentrate on building a sense of security amongst the group, a 'safe space' where people would eventually feel comfortable about discussing any subject (a view which became identified as predominantly 'female'). In the end the former position tended to win out and two of the women in the group resigned shortly thereafter, each giving this as part of their reason for leaving.
Another problem area in which we have received a lot of criticism is our apparent insularity, not participating in current campaigns or debates, not putting energy into networking or even into correspondence with our friends and comrades. In part this is a consequence of our views on how the movement should be structured. We are a bookshop collective and need to keep this clearly in focus. There will need to be other collectives to do other jobs. With regard to networking, we will be ready to do this only when there are more substantial collectives in existence to give the network some purpose. In the meantime, we are much too busy to join a mutual support structure for people who wish to celebrate the fact that they cannot think of anything to do for themselves in whatever circumstances they happen to be. We would, however, point out that we have cooperated very effectively with the Victorian Down to Earth in our coordination of the self-management village at the 1986 Confest. And we stand ready to talk with groups like Libertarian Workers if they have any specific proposals for cooperation on a relevant project.
Our low level of communication with other groups and individuals and writing articles for relevant magazines is something we are not so complacent about. Unfortunately, even when our membership is of reasonable size we have found that certain jobs in the rotation get relatively poor attention if the person with that job also has another job. External communications (or correspondence) , internal communication, and publicity, tend to be the main things which suffer in this respect. When our membership plummeted to its lowest level, and even since then with 3 new members learning how the shop operates, the more regular jobs like book ordering, accounts, and mail orders have gotten bogged down and the communications and publicity have just about ground to a halt. However we are beginning to get back on our feet and hopefully with a further increase in membership we can establish a better reputation for correspondence and writing articles.
A related problem is our lack of participation in political discussion and agitational work either within the movement or in the wider population. One answer to this would be to fall back on our self-definition as a bookshop and call for the setting up of other collectives for the specific purpose of agitation. But we feel that would be undesirable to separate the perspective of the working collective from that of agitation. In order to bring these together we have created the position of 'agitator' and incorporated it into our job rotation system. This would effectively give each of us in turn an eight month break from other back room jobs in order to engage in political debates in a wider forum, whilst still having the support and grounding of membership in the ongoing bookshop collective. Unfortunately, since creating this position we have not had enough people to put it into practice. So again this will need to wait until we have more members.