It’s taken us a while, but today, at last, the members of Doncaster Skate Co-operative finally played Co-opoly, the game of setting up a worker co-op. Several ‘chance’ cards mirrored real life – being featured in the paper, getting co-op governance training and the unexpected costs of asbestos removal all elicited squeaks of recognition.
I’ve been pushing to do this since before we took over the skate park in March, because it’s such a good exercise in practising collective…
Revolutionary eco-anarchist food producers, bookkeepers, cafe managers, visual communicators and documenters – there are free homes and unpaid commune jobs for you here in sunny Doncaster!
Just go through our two-month political education programme and two-month joining process and maybe we’ll accept you :-).
Hmm – perhaps it’s not surprising that recruitment is a bit slower than planned.
Given our very low capacity (managing Bentley Urban Farm, Twisted skate park, …
Usually when I sit down to write this column I try to scrape up ideas and make connections between completely random things happening in my life and then shoehorn in some kind of significant observation or realisation.
But this month there are just too many exciting things to tell you, all filling my brain with new twists and turns and deadlines, leaving no space for reflections and ponderings.
We bought a skate park!
One of our new communards, who joined us via Bentley…
Back in November, I finally stopped paying rent to Cornerstone Housing Co-op in Leeds and moved my remaining things to a rented house in Bentley (Doncaster) – rented not by me, but by A Commune in the North. How did that feel? Well, having dragged it out for nearly a year, moving over in dribs and drabs and staying in Bentley for days or weeks at a time, it didn’t feel like a big deal – much more like a relief that my crap has all finally been cleared out (well, you know, mostly).
But…
I was just at my last annual Cornerstone party as a tenant member of the co-op. After my dark comic (and very middle-aged) contribution of Victoria Wood and ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’ by Tom Lehrer, other younger people came on who spoke very seriously indeed.
One Colombian talked about the pain and damage of the cocaine industry on their people and how they felt about people around them disregarding that for their own pleasure.
I felt so weird – I felt like it was the…
As the hecticness of summer recedes, the autumnal ‘new projects’ feeling has taken a real hold, despite the monarchical brake being applied. Festival stalls and workshops have generated relationships and ideas to follow up and enquiries to answer, while projects that were on a summer go-slow have risen to the top of the urgent list.
The world seems to be speeding up, and society finding it a little harder each day to hold the panic at bay. Or maybe it’s just adjusting back to life…
So I tried to leave my co-op bubble.
I’ve been living and working in my lovely co-op community for nearly 30 years – a very comfy setup where my cost of living is super-low, so I don’t have to worry about working very much for money, I’ve never had a credit card and never taken out a loan, I’ve never been personally liable for utility bills or worried about whether there’s enough money for food or whether we can afford to heat or fix the house.
For over 20 years I’ve been my…
The long wait to see if Croydon would elect its first Green councillors was nerve-wracking. After all the leaflets had been delivered and hundreds of residents had been spoken to, all the campaigning that we could do was done.
At the count, the mayoral ballots were counted first, so I was expecting to have to wait a while before ballot papers for the council elections were counted.
As the delays continued, I thought it might be daylight before the results were announced on…
I seem to have fallen into a never-ending recruitment drive – not satisfied with the ongoing search for commune members, or the renewed need to fill vacancies in my housing co-op, nor even the unusual situation of shortlisting and interviewing for a Radical Routes contract, I’ve found myself accepting a job recruiting people into a new housing co-op. For many hours a week.
Just in case the craziness of that sentence didn’t sink in – I am being paid (paid!) to help set up a housing co-…
Today I moved a small load of my belongings to a former shed (now ‘therapy room’) at a community garden in South Yorkshire.
This is the first physical step to becoming a communard – to creating a large, egalitarian commune, fully income-sharing, collectively generating income and producing our own food, with a shared political agenda and commitment.
Am I happy? Excited? Actually... more scared, unsure, frankly a bit blank emotionally.
It must be said, that leaving a…
Does anyone else feel an increasing amount of history repeating?
A few months ago, in Brighton, I saw a gig poster for a triple bill of Eat Static, Banco de Gaia and Zion Train – had I fallen down a wormhole into 1995? I pinched myself.
But it is a fitting soundtrack for the year: just like 1995, there’s a Kill the Bill campaign to really bring back memories of the Freedom Network – past attempts to defend our freedoms against legislation increasing police powers, restricting…
The Zapatistas are coming!
Oh no they’re not! Oh yes they are!
Activists around Europe have been planning since January to receive touring Zapatistas, on a ‘Journey of Life’, a field survey of Europe, trying to understand our social and political context and to find accomplices.
The news that they might arrive in a week is apparently surprising.
A chance conversation, being in the right place at the right time, means I’m suddenly involved in trying to find…
Today was weird. On whatever untrained basis, I ‘mediated’ two people from another housing co-op for six hours. A really overwhelming sentiment was the disappointment, disillusion and disengagement created by other people’s apathy.
It’s hard to hold a neutral space and encourage creative, open thinking when you’re hearing your own cynical and depressed thoughts repeated back to you.
So what I need now is to celebrate all the joyous, proactive, connected, determined, adventurous…
Money is power, money is message, money makes the world go round. Time is money. Every little counts. It’s all about money.
Credo: I want to see a world without money, where people give according their ability and receive according to their needs, where power is collective and resources are shared.
In the meantime though….
As I go to sleep thinking about money for this article, Liza Minelli and Joel Grey* are shimmying, pouting and grimacing across my mental…
Photograph: my parents’ registry-office wedding in 1971, drinks with my dad’s family.
Photograph: my mother with all my dad’s female relatives, glamorous hair and flowing dresses and cigarettes, all laughing.
Photographs: one-year-old, two-year-old, three-year-old me with various other small children in various large gardens.
Odd/not odd – all white faces, well I suppose they would be. Even though they were living in a country with a white population around 20 percent.…
