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Toward a Collective Space in Bloomington (draft) Introduction. The general idea is that such a space would serve to facilitate the development of collective resources that will empower town residents to address community problems at an intimate level. The Community Study alluded to is an upcoming project of some individuals from nearby Indiana University's history department. It will focus mainly on the political economy of Bloomington; who owns what, who are the chief employers, what geographic areas are associated with what income groups, what and where are the boundaries and epicenters of neighborhoods, etc. It is thought that the Study will bring guidance to various activist groups that operate here, and to projects such as a collective space. The exact purpose, need for, and feasibility of such a space here in town has yet to be established. The feasibility of the idea is dependent in part on the existence of some constant group of individuals committed to residing in the area for a period of some years. At present, no such group is considered to exist. Where Such a Space Might Be. The day after Thanksgiving I took a walk in Bloomington on what I call the Central West Side; the area west of Rogers street, bounded by 2nd and 9th, and going all the way to the weeds at the edge of town. I scoured every street and cross-street to see what suitable quarters there might be for a collective space. Storefronts are few, and concentrated on 5th street. A 5th street location would maximize visibility through exposure to traffic, but the traffic itself might be a nuisance after a while. The high traffic on 2nd makes it almost totally unsatisfactory. 3rd and 4th streets west of Rogers are a little obscure, and they are on hills as well. A collective space should give the impression that it is there for the user, not that it forces the user to come to it. Walking along 9th street, I could see the roof of the Showers building. It's to be converted into some kind of a community or civic center. There is a West Side Community Center on 7th street, built during the Roosevelt administration. Also, a number of churches are in the area. What are these places like? Who goes there? What do they do with respect to the various communities of the West Side? We need to know so that we can decide what position to take with respect to these institutions that already occupy space in public life. We can find out easily enough; probably it will figure in the Community Study somehow. Except for the West Side Community Center, I don't really like the idea of locating a space on 7th, 8th, or 9th streets because of the hill that they're on. Maybe this is petty and maybe not. But they are also located a fair distance from the nearest through street in the area, which is 5th. 6th street is about as accessible as 5th, but with no storefronts to speak of. Perhaps that's not such a problem though; the Runcible Spoon does just fine without a storefront and I suppose one could be made in a pinch anyway. 6th is also flat for much of its length. If I were to put a space in the Central West Side just for the purposes of that area, it would be on 6th street. Thinking more broadly, all of Bloomington should be characterized and explored roughly in the terms outlined above. Each sector would have its most suitable location, judging by various factors. Putting all this together, it may be that the ideal site for a collective space servicing the West Side as a whole would be in the Central part, but somewhere other than 6th street. Characterizing the sector of Bloomington society that a collective space might serve will be one of the goals of the Community Study, and hopefully ideas for the location of the space will come forth from that as well. What the Relation to the Outside Might be Like. This is up for grabs at the moment. Too little is known about the existing community organs to really say. How much confrontation is good? Who should we work with? What enemies can we afford to make? Some method for bringing all this to light is needed. Back to the Community Study again. One thing I would recommend right away, though, is that whatever the relationships to the outside are, they be made through intimate media rather than mass media. Intimate media are things like word-of-mouth, flyers, newsletters, simple oration, contact through projects, maybe a community radio or community cable production, etc. I put the radio and tv items into intimate media because of the control that we would likely get over the production process. This to me is what constitutes intimate as opposed to mass media; the tailoring that can be brought to the information. Mass media effectively puts the consumer of information in control, since it's supposed to be written for everybody. Intimate media also allows for mistakes to be corrected either before or shortly after they are propagated, since people are still listening. If you get made out as a fool by the mass media, the attention of the consumer is on something else by the time you react. Also, seeking to communicate through a mass medium is eventually subversive of grass-roots values. In certain respects, social structures resemble the structures people use to communicate. If the idea is to foster a networked participatory democracy, then our ways of speaking to each other and to the world will have to be patterned the same way. What the Inside Might be Like. It should not be a grotesque and incomprehensible departure from the outside world. The romantic image of the Berlin squat will not do in a small Indiana town. Squats are essentially products of economically dead regions. This is why they are found in large cities. Probably what would go over best is something like an old general store, which apart from being a place of business was a center for the community in its own right. Woodburning stove, a few rocking chairs, game of checkers left unfinished on an overturned barrel, people spending all day sitting around jawing about politics and whatnot. Southern Indiana is much more likely to believe this is for real. Tempting though it may be, I would advise against having a computer at first. For one thing, the amount of computer resources present in Bloomington makes the investment essentially unjustifiable. For another, using computers is fine as long as it doesn't force you to design redundancy, and thus reliability, out of the organization. Not being able to communicate if your email breaks down is an easily visible scenario. Better to force the space to develop US mail, telephone, and courier channels before adding a computer, if indeed it's a good idea at all. At the Peace Center, one problem in search of a policy was how people who just happened to walk in off the street should be handled. What kind of an experience do we want them to have? Some workers would introduce themselves and give the person a little tour, others would just eye visitors from a distance to make sure they weren't ripping the place off. Rosebud Commons in Portland does not have an open-door policy at all. Where the Money for All This will Come From. Income First off let's not be squeamish about selling things. As long as nobody takes money home for themselves out of what gets sold for the place nobody is being exploited, especially if everybody agrees that labor expended is for the general benefit of the project. If this really bothers you go read Kapital. All three volumes. If stuff is to be sold, we must ensure that it does not take too much time to order, set up, handle, etc. ie we cannot become such expert merchandisers that we can't really run the space. In general, we should focus on things of which a person might say, 'oh, I could run down to the space and get that' instead of going to a store outside the neighborhood. Coffee is the classic sort of service to offer this way, but I'm going to throw in some odd alternatives that I have never seen anyone suggest before. Actually most things I suggest here are some form of selling. There's a bit further on about funding by simple donation, which I have mixed feelings about. => Cafe-type stuff The coffee service that was set up at the Peace and Justice Center in Bloomington pulled in roughly $100 a week, and that entailed management problems too. This was about half the necessary rent. There is no reason that any one-horse coffee service can't make a standard cup of joe of the same quality as the finest place in town. Most just don't try. Supplementing this we could take consignments for local producers, for example in baked goods. => Market Gardening I once worked for an organic grower who had a total of four acres under crop, and he grossed about $40 000 dollars a year from it, selling some to restaurants, but most to a local food store and at the Farmers' Market held every Saturday from May until October. Obviouly we can't duplicate that directly, it's very labor intensive; but we can make a few bucks pushing veggies and maybe grow some for the Community Kitchen besides. => Hardware counter For this what I have in mind is stuff like weatherproofing materials, plastic for windows in the wintertime, maybe the odd box of screws or nails, stuff to do light plumbing with, etc. Auto supply might fit into this scheme too, motor oil, wiper blades, de-icer, things people might decide to buy on short notice. More ambitiously, sell kits for solar retrofits or other energy-saving articles like high-efficiency plumbing and lighting devices. => Benefit concerts Once again, it's not necessary to have benefits at the space itself, especially if it's located in a residential neighborhood. Benefit stuff might be farmed out as joint projects with Rhino's, the Basement Scene, or whoever else feels like being cooperative with us. How to separate people from their money on the way in the door became a grave issue at the Peace Center. Some wanted to have a definite cover charge, some wanted to make it clear that any money given was to be considered a donation and anybody could come in whether they gave money or not. My personal suggestion was that instead of printing flyers that said '$3 cover' or '$3 donation', just make flyers that say '$3'. This leaves it open to interpretation on the spot; whoever's working the door can finesse around and wring money from those that have it while giving a break to those who don't. But for whatever reason, that idea did not go over. => Propaganda stuff like pamphlets, tshirts, etc. A fellow I worked for one summer told me about his friend who had several tons of horse manure and wanted to give it away for compost, so he put up a notice at a local store to the effect that he would deliver it for free. The store owner told him that if he didn't charge at least $12 a ton, he'd never get rid of the stuff. It's often easier to get people to take something if they have to pay for it, even a tiny amount. People are just often suspicious of what's free. Look at old copies of revolutionary or subversive pamphlets from the last century. Many are marked Ten Cents or Five Cents, which was a lot more then than it is today. Hitting people up for nickels and dimes won't keep the doors open by itself but it might show people we take what we make seriously enough to ask some money for it. One of the best projects to ever come out of the Peace Center was a little zine called BloomingPeace. (ironically, the zine was also the least dependent on the Center as a facility) For a while the idea of hawking it on streetcorners was up for grabs, but it seems that the "give away anything portable" faction won out and eventually BloomingPeace was stamped -FREE-, ruining any possible effort to sell it. => Bookstore This would do the business of a regular bookseller, buying any old books at low prices and marking them up. It would not have the contacts or reputation to keep up with the regular businesses that speculate in books, but it could improve the cash flow somewhat. => Direct Donation/Grants The Peace and Justice Center had an easy source of money from a wealthy benefactor. That dependency meant that the Center's own abilities to generate funds never developed to the extent they should have. If many people had each pitched in little amounts, the attitude problem about funding could have been avoided. Researching the financial systems of small rural churches might give some clues as to how voluntary association can support a collective space with a minimum of outside assistance. Dependency is not necessarily bad; but it's important to choose what it is we depend on. Some people feel no qualms about taking money from the state in the form of grants; I am not strictly opposed to it, but I think it's ultimately debilitating. An anti-authoritarian society would have to have anti-authoritarian means of forming capital; the development of these means would be retarded by relying on the state for capital. Can a society that takes money from the state afford to subvert the state? Also, even though state money is ultimately the people's money, how do the people handle the issue of expropriating money from themselves? Using state money in the name of the people, on the grounds that it's "our wealth" is the thin edge of a thick wedge. I'm told that most anarchists eventually sell out to some form of state socialism. We should be aware of how that process may occur. We need to study the problem of capital formation in general and experiment with some anti-authoritarian solutions. How would a society without a state assemble and allocate resources to projects for the common good? This happens to be one of the state's more common excuses for itself and it's one that needs more thought than most people give it. Outlay Secondly we need to eat away at the funding issue from the other side. Organizations, of whatever sort, grow by a process of making replacements for things that they formerly got from the outside world. The last section was about replacing outside money with internal funding. This section is about finding alternatives to spending the money once we have some. There's not much to say right off but I'm sure this list would fill out quickly once an actual space starts and bills start rolling in. => Buy a building to avoid rent. This topic is covered in good detail by any How-To Manual for slimeball land speculators. Having the space combined with one or more residences may make it easier. => Find ways to mitigate or avoid utility bills. Putting in efficient heating, plumbing and lighting systems will not only lower costs in the long run, it will serve as a demonstration project to the rest of the community. The major export from the space should be change, and change is facilitated in part by example.