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Title: Demise of the Beehive Collective Author: brad Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, infoshops Source: 1995 Aug/Sep issue of L&R. Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160613073201/http://loveandrage.org/?q=infoshop
In April, 1995 the Beehive Community Space & Infoshop in Washington, DC
shut its doors. The Beehive Autonomous Collective, which started and
operated the infoshop, had started meeting in July 1993, and opened the
infoshop in October, 1993. This article will analyze some of what
happened at Beehive and attempt to draw some lessons that might be
useful for the Infoshop movement and the anarchist movement in general.
I was involved with Beehive for the entire life span of the group. In
this article I am only speaking for myself as one member of the project.
An infoshop is a space where people involved with radical movements and
countercultures can trade information, meet and network with other
people & groups, and hold meetings and/or events. They often house âfree
schoolsâ and educational workshops. Infoshops have existed in Europe for
decades. The Spanish revolutionary infoshops of the 1930s, and the
current European infoshops provided some of the inspiration for the
newer North American infoshops.
While a few bookstores/infoshops existed in the 1980s, the current wave
of infoshops basically started in the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991.
Their growth seems to have in some ways been a direct response to
frustrations some anarchists felt trying to organize a movement against
the Gulf War without any institutions to draw upon or sustain day-to-day
activism in our communities. The Long Haul infoshop in the Bay Area and
the Emma Center in Minneapolis served as inspirations and models for
some of the other infoshops. The more punk music oriented spaces like
Epicenter in San Francisco and Reconstruction Records in New York were
also inspirations for some people.
Like many of todayâs infoshops, Beehiveâs origins are in the punk-rock
counterculture. It developed out of the contradictions facing the DC
punk community in 1993. Many people in the DC punk scene had been
politically active since the mid-1980s, and many of the more popular DC
punk bands had political lyrics and had played many benefit concerts
during that time. While the benefit concerts have continued, by 1993 the
tendency toward activism in the punk scene was fading. A few of us who
had been involved in punk- oriented activist groups, such as Positive
Force, Riot Grrrl and Food Not Bombs, were feeling more isolated from
the rest of the punk scene. We came together out of the experiences we
had in these other groups, in a mostly unarticulated attempt to move
beyond the confines of the âpunk sceneâ to become more involved with and
relevant to other DC communities. Others who hadnât been previously
involved in DC punk/political groups also got involved, attracted to the
concept of either a âfree space,â a record store or a hangout space.
One of the most noticeable things about Beehiveâs beginning was that
almost all of the people who got involved were not from DC--and even
further, many people had just recently moved to DC Only a few people who
were ever involved with Beehive actually grew up in the DC area or had
lived here more than a couple of years. This helped produce a larger
problem--none of the people in the collective were from the particular
neighborhood where we opened our infoshop, and we never succeeded in
attracting neighborhood residents to the project.
When Beehive was starting out, the fact that so many people were from
out of town was refreshing, as it strengthened the waning âpoliticalâ
tendency in the DC punk scene. But in retrospect it was a weakness which
caused a continual shortsightedness, and contributed to the groupâs end.
This âtransientâ tendency isnât surprising considering the social base
Beehive came out of. The punk scene is generally young, politically
inexperienced and has very high turnover. There is a strong commitment
to individual and/or spontaneous acts of creativity (bands, fanzines,
fashion, etc.) but a non-committal or skeptical attitude toward
organized movements or organizations. To start a community- based
organization such as an infoshop, however, requires long-term thinking
and commitment. This basic tension-- between the attention span and
commitment level of our social base, and the commitment necessary to do
what we said we wanted to do--was a problem in Beehive from beginning to
end.
The fact that Beehive came out of the punk-rock community isnât
inherently bad by any means. But we need to recognize the limitations of
the punk scene, and how those limitations make a community organizing
project very difficult, if not impossible.
At Beehive we also experienced the strange tendency for punk to dominate
all that it comes in contact with. While Beehive was started by punks,
some non-punk anarchists and other activists were attracted to it at
first. But none of the non-punk activists stayed involved, and it wasnât
until the last few months of the group that a few more non-punk
anarchists got involved. While the non-punks who left had their
individual reasons for leaving the group, I think in most cases it was
partly related to the dominance of punk in the group.
Since the visible activities happening at Beehive were punk-related,
more middle-class punks continued to be attracted to the project, mostly
from outside of DC So we were continually treading water, always saying
we wanted to âget beyondâ the punk community and interact with and
involve people from the neighborhood around us, but continually
attracting more and more punks (with varying degrees of commitment to
community organizing). This further strengthened the association of
Beehive with the punk scene, and made it increasingly more difficult to
attract other communities to the project.
The answer to this question is not easy, as punk has probably done more
than anything else in the last 20 years to popularize anarchism and to
articulate the anti- authoritarianism of alienated white youth. Punk
culture should exist, and thrive, in radical spaces, but it shouldnât
dominate.
There is an underlying strain of arrogance and elitism to much of punk
culture, a belief that âthe masses are assesâ or that everyone else is
just stupid and conforms to societyâs expectations. Also the fact that
punks tend to come from white, middle- class backgrounds means that many
punks have more resources and money at their disposal to develop their
projects than do people from more working- class countercultures. This
factor makes it easy for punk to unintentionally dominate a space--many
punks receive âhiddenâ support from parents and middle- class jobs,
which allow more punk bands to buy nicer equipment, put out their own
records, tour more easily, etc.
Gentrification
When we started looking for a building to move our community space into,
we were immediately confronted with the high cost of rent in DC. The
cheapest rent we were able to find--somewhat near a subway station and
somewhat near where some of us lived--was in a neighborhood that is in
the process of gentrification.
Gentrification is the process by which a working- class or poor urban
neighborhood starts to become desirable to middle-class or yuppie people
(âgentryâ) from outside of that neighborhood. One of the main desirable
factors is the cheap rent. Once middle-class people move in, they start
to make âimprovements,â demand more police presence to protect their
property, and businesses start to appear to cater to their middle-class
and yuppie tastes. As the neighborhood becomes more âdesirableâ for
people with more money, property values start to rise, and the original
poor or working-class residents of the neighborhood canât keep up with
the rising costs and have to move out. It is a process of colonization
on a smaller level.
Some of us repeatedly raised the issue of gentrification in the group
while we were deciding where to locate our infoshop. We were conscious
of our role as outsiders to the U Street neighborhood we were
considering, and we were weary of the ârevitalizationâ going on a few
blocks down the street. The U Street & 14^(th) Street corridors were
burned out in April 1968 in the urban uprisings after Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. was assassinated.
Until the early 90s, the commercial corridors remained partly vacant
while surrounding neighborhoods suffered from the violence and decay
that has wreaked havoc on inner cities over the past 30 years.
Around when we were looking at the neighborhood, a group of new âhipâ
businesses had joined together to market the concept of âThe New U,â
which was used in ads in citywide papers to try to attract outsiders to
come shop the new U Street businesses. The âNew Uâ businesses down the
street hit a nerve with us because many of them were started by people
from our community--punks and alternative types. Since they were from
our community, we wanted to differentiate from them, but in reality we
didnât really know how.
We didnât want to contribute to the gentrification process, although
none of us had a clear idea of how to oppose it. We agreed that we would
try to be different than the stores of âThe New Uâ down the street. We
would be different because we would try to serve needs of people who
lived in the neighborhood (through free clothing, free food, and free
daycare programs, for example) rather than trying to bring in yuppies
from outside with money. We knew we would make mistakes, but we didnât
see ourselves as contributing to gentrification as long as we were
actively struggling against it politically.
Gentrification turned out to be one of the two major divisive issues in
Beehive, and it seems to be that way at most infoshops around the US.
Other than gentrification, it was internal group dynamics centering on
race, class and gender that were the most pressing and most divisive
issues that Beehive faced. This also seems to mirror the experience of
other infoshops around the US. We had a series of internal conflicts
which escalated in intensity, until May 1994 when two members and two
non-members of the group confronted the rest of the group in a very
abrasive way for what they saw as sexism, classism and racism in the way
the group operated. Those of us involved in Beehive learned a lot from
these internal struggles. It forced us to confront many of our personal
motivations and approaches, to try to figure out which of our actions
come out of our genuinely progressive aspirations, and which come from
our culturally brainwashed upbringing in a white-supremacist,
patriarchal, and capitalist society.
Unfortunately, some who supported Beehive but werenât directly involved
seemed turned off or intimidated by the perceived hostile infighting.
This further isolated us from the community that we originally emerged
from.
More importantly, I think these internal struggles happened in a way
that was disconnected to any practice of trying to change oppressive
institutions in society, and without seeing that our mistakes were not
just due to our individual shortcomings, but were being replicated by
many other groups at the same time. Although it wasnât easy to see at
the time, the struggles over internal dynamics in the group escalated
precisely when it had become clear that Beehive wasnât accomplishing the
political goals that we claimed to aspire to. The free daycare never
happened. A proposal for a community organizing project was passed but
then never acted on. Anti-gentrification discussion and efforts had been
pushed into the background. Other activist groups werenât using Beehive
as a meeting space or resource center. The lending library was falling
apart.
This wasnât because we didnât care about these things anymore. We just
hadnât realized how much work it would take just to maintain and staff
the infoshop, let alone actually using it as a base from which to launch
activist projects. Once we had rented a building and moved in, it took
all our energy (and then some!) to just staff and open the infoshop
three days a week (we would have liked to have been open every day).
Repairs to the building were never made. Bureaucratic paperwork with the
government to make our infoshop âlegalâ was never filled out--partly
because we decided not to, but even if we had wanted to we just werenât
organized enough to handle it.
Among the people who were consistently involved with the group, many of
us traveled for weeks or months at a time and our involvement varied
accordingly. Core people moved away from DC at a few key moments in the
groupâs history. There was never a clear sense that people would be
around very long. This âcome and goâ situation among core members and
the high turnover among others made it impossible to progress on
internal group dynamics.
For example, at a meeting one week, a woman would confront the group
about sexism, and we would agree to spend the next meeting discussing
the situation in depth. Then at the next meeting there would only be a
few people there who were at the previous meeting. Everyone else there
missed âthe incidentâ and had no idea what was happening or why it was
suddenly so urgent to spend the whole meeting talking about our sexism.
The discussions on internal dynamics would mostly consist of
uncomfortable silence. The people who brought the issue up in the first
place would say what they thought, and there would be some hesitant
discussion, but real group dialogue on these issues almost never
happened. We just werenât able to handle it as a group.
Transience makes it impossible to deal with internal dynamics. To get
anywhere on such issues, I think a group needs to have a somewhat stable
membership who can work out interpersonal dynamics over time, and the
group also needs to be actively struggling to bring about change outside
of itself. Otherwise, dealing with internal dynamics becomes
all-consuming, and becomes more like group therapy than struggling to
change the society we live in. (This is not to degrade therapy for those
who want or need it to deal with life in a fucked up society; It is just
to say that political organizing and therapy are different things, and
we should be clear which one we want to be doing at what times.)
Some people attracted to counter-institutions, like many other political
projects, like this act in oppressive ways (intentionally or not) and
take up more than their share of the groupâs time in dealing with their
personal problems or idiosyncrasies. I donât think we should be afraid
of criticizing or âalienatingâ people who are detracting from the focus
of the group or making others feel uncomfortable. I think we need to
commit ourselves to finding ways to deal seriously with oppressive
aspects of our group dynamics in a way that encourages people to speak,
grow, and learn to become better activists through experience and
comradely criticism.
The other missing link in dealing with internal dynamics is a clear
sense of vision in the group. If everyone involved is clear about the
purpose of the group (i.e. if the purpose and goals are worked out at
the beginning, and clarified into a written statement) then the group
can always refer back to that to see if its outward activities and
internal dynamics are actually helping to fulfill those goals or not.
But with Beehive, and I think at many other infoshops too, we never
truly had political agreement on what our goals or purpose were.
We did have a statement of purpose, but it was crafted in a carefully
vague way to basically allow for anything and avoid making choices about
a specific course of action. We defined Beehive as, âan all volunteer
collective promoting communication through books, records, âzines,
performance, meetings, and social/political networking. In our attempt
to break the cycle of an historically classist, sexist, racist,
heterosexist and authoritarian social system, we feel it is imperative
to oppose capitalist oppression. It has denied us self-realization and
free association. Beehive intends to bridge the ever increasing gap
between privilege and underdevelopment by providing access to space and
information at low cost or free. We will: be organic, radical, wild, and
revolutionary; creative and critical locally and internationally.â
When you take away what we are abstractly for & against, that leaves
only promoting communication and providing a space for other people to
âdo their own thing.â While this is a good thing to do, it does not
differ fundamentally from the mission of a public library, for example.
And I would argue in the current context, at least in DC, it is not the
most valuable use of our energies in building a revolutionary
anti-authoritarian movement.
While our statement took some political stands (against capitalism,
racism, sexism, heterosexism), we did not have a political focus of our
own to fight against those things. By coming out against those things
politically while having no program to work against them, we were
setting ourselves up to be torn apart by struggles over those
oppressions in the internal dynamics of the group--and thatâs what
happened. This shows why it is important to have an agreed upon purpose
for the group, as well as an attempt to create a strategy to realize
those goals.
Having no agreed upon purpose creates one set of problems that will
probably lead to misunderstandings and frustration, factionalism, and
people leaving the group confused or frustrated about what the group is
supposed to be doing. Having a unified purpose but no strategy creates
another similar set of problems, which will also often cause people to
become frustrated and look to each othersâ individual shortcomings for
the source of the problem, rather than trying to create a strategy to
have an effect on the world around us. Most infoshops seem to be stuck
in one or the other of these problems; Beehive was usually somewhere in
between.
While Beehiveâs political statement avoided articulating a specific
strategy or focus, we were still following an unspoken strategy. The
failure to articulate a strategy doesnât mean that you donât have one,
it just means that you havenât consciously worked through it as a group.
I think most infoshops try to take the easy way out of developing and
implementing a strategy to reach our stated ideals, by stating our
purpose simply as sharing information and providing a space for people
to use. This creates a big gap between our stated goals (against
capitalism, racism, sexism, heterosexism) and our actual activities
(educational and logistical support work). We had revolutionary ideas
but little strategy to work toward realizing them.
As you can probably tell by now, I donât see infoshops or
counter-institutions as âthe answerâ or âthe strategyâ for building a
revolutionary anarchist movement. I do, however, think that they can be
an important part of a strategy, if there is a mass movement to support
and sustain them. Some people (though probably not many in the anarchist
infoshop movement) do see counter-institutions as âthe revolution.â
Their strategy basically says that through creating non- profit
cooperatives (food co- ops, free medical clinics, housing co-ops, etc.)
we will set examples of a different type of society and serve the needs
of our communities, which others will then copy. The
counter-institutions will continue to gain power and will be able to
serve the needs of the people, making the current power structures
irrelevant without having to struggle directly against them.
What this strategy leaves out is that the institutions in power now have
an interest in staying in power, and will fight to preserve and expand
their power. They will struggle directly against our
counter-institutions whether we fight them or not. So without a means to
directly confront them, our counter-institutions will be crushed when
they are perceived as enough of a threat to the status quo.
However, in the current political context without strong mass movements,
the greater danger to counter-institutions is being co-opted into a
harmless âalternativeâ without revolutionary content. We can see this in
many food co-ops that started in the co-op upsurge of the early 1970s
which are now catering increasingly to a yuppie clientele and adopting
more of a capitalist approach. I think this shows that counter-
institutions are not inherently revolutionary--they can go in many
directions.
A more developed analysis sees infoshops not as inherently revolutionary
but as one part of a revolutionary strategy. As Jacinto from Chicagoâs
Autonomous Zone Infoshop wrote in the first issue of (dis)connection,
âthe revolution is not in the formation of these counter-institutions,
but in the revolutionary potential of the collectives which can use the
resources provided by liberated spaces.â Jacinto argues that building
sustainable radical counter-institutions now will provide a launching
pad for all sorts of radical projects and collectives. This strategy
makes sense--it sees the need for building ongoing institutions to
sustain radical activism, and it also sees the limitations of those
counter- institutions by themselves. This strategy says that the missing
ingredient--the reason there are not more radical projects and
collectives--is that there is not a base of support, information, and
resources for such projects to develop. According to this strategy, if
we build infoshops as that base, then the amount of activist projects in
our communities should grow.
This was the unstated strategy that I was pursuing through Beehive, and
I think itâs the unstated strategy of a lot of people who are involved
in infoshops. While this strategy sounds good, it did not work in
practice for us, and I donât see much evidence of it working elsewhere.
One possibility is that Beehive did not survive long enough to âbear
fruitâ in the form of new projects and collectives. But as it was, our
whole group was drained just keeping the Beehive infoshop afloat and
staffed from week to week. The anarchist and radical communities are
just too small in DC to sustain an anarchist infoshop and to also
develop other projects. Rather than building the basis for further
growth of radical projects, my experience is that infoshops will burn
out the core group of activists and thus prevent them from developing or
contributing to new projects.
a Revolutionary Strategy
This is the situation we find ourselves in--in North America in 1995 we
are trying to build a revolutionary anti- authoritarian movement on
almost no solid foundation. Many young anarchists realize that we need
ongoing institutions to sustain our work during the high points and low
points of mass movements. Over the past few years, many of us have tried
to build local infoshops and community centers to fulfill that function.
At best, the results have been mixed. Most of the infoshop collectives
have attracted new people to anarchist politics, and have given
anarchists an ongoing project to work on that at least has the potential
to deal with the issues faced by oppressed and alienated people in our
daily lives. Some of the infoshops have improved the reputation of
anarchists in their cities by having a visible example of their
politics, while a couple have also taken militant direct action on
neighborhood issues such as gentrification.
At the same time, every infoshop I know of has experienced severe
internal problems, with serious factional fights and with many people
leaving infoshops frustrated, angry, or burnt out. The factional fights
and splits have escalated to vandalism or threats of violence at places
like Emma Center in Minneapolis, Beehive in DC, and Epicenter in San
Francisco.
While much of the initial point of starting infoshops was to create a
stable, ongoing presence in a particular city or community, some
infoshops which opened with lofty expectations are already closed, such
as Croatan in Baltimore and Beehive in DC Other infoshops which are
still open have already had to move once or twice, like Chicagoâs
A-Zone. And of all the infoshops Iâm familiar with, I canât think of any
that have helped facilitate the starting of new projects or collectives
except as hostile splits from the infoshop collective! Other projects
that have developed probably would have formed anyway without the
existence of the infoshops.
In cities where active anarchist projects and collectives already exist,
it might make sense to set up an infoshop. But generally infoshops
havenât been very successful at supporting and helping develop new
projects. I think this is because of a lack of open discussion about our
politics, vision, and strategy. While skills-sharing is crucial to
helping disempowered and alienated people take control over our lives, I
think the âmissing ingredientâ in the lack of new anarchist projects is
our lack of a political vision for the future, and our lack of
developing realistic strategies to move toward that vision. Can we
really consider infoshops a cornerstone of a revolutionary movement if
we canât have a discussion about anything deeper than what color to
paint the room without causing a major split in the collective?
To deal with these questions, I think we need to take a step back from
the specific political projects, such as infoshops, that weâve chosen to
work on. I donât mean to say that we should abandon such projects, but
that they are bound to fail unless we simultaneously take a step back
and build stable, ongoing political collectives, organizations, or other
forums as a political infrastructure for our movement. The focus of such
organizations hsoul be specifically to develop political vision and
strategy, and hen work to implement that strategy. These can be local,
regional, national or international groupings. Love and Rage is one
example of such a group, but there are many such organizations with
varying visions and strategies that will be part of any revolutionary
movement. This is what I think of when I think of ârevolutionary
pluralism.â
Infoshops may be one aspect of a political strategy that such political
groupings could develop. But infoshops arenât a strategy in themselves,
and are failing as a shortcut for working through our political
differences and coming up with coherent visions and strategies to
realize an anarchist future. I donât think that itâs a mistake to work
on infoshops, and I wouldnât say that the two years working on Beehive
were a waste of time, as long as we are willing to admit our
shortcomings and honestly sum up that experience to learn from it an
move forward. This article is my attempt to do that, and my view is that
itâs time to work on other projects instead of starting another
infoshop.