Disorderly conduct

A report from the first-ever New England Anarchist Book Fair

by Jason Gay

For a city that once gave rise to a revolution, Boston has become a rather tepid place for political agitation. Radicalism, for the most part, is dead. A typical political protest these days rarely involves more than a frizzly bullhorn and a few hundred picket signs. If the rally makes the 11 o'clock news, it's considered a rousing success.

So if you were in the vicinity of Copley Square last Saturday afternoon, you might have done a double-take and dropped your double Frappuccino if you'd noticed the sandwich board outside the Community Church of Boston, on Boylston Street, advertising the first-ever New England Anarchist Book Fair. Anarchists congregating in Boston? It sounded too radical to be true.

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But it was true. For eight-plus hours, several hundred real-live anarchists, near-anarchists, and anarchist wanna-bes gathered inside the church's cramped second-floor space, where they bought and sold radical manifestos ranging from the collected works of Emma Goldman and Howard Zinn to lesser-known treatises such as Alfred Bonanno's trenchant Critique of Syndicalist Methods. Here, one could drop the state's coin on anything from a "McMurder" bumper sticker to tape recordings of Noam Chomsky's latest homilies to a T-shirt reading FIRE YOUR BOSS.

Between sips of free coffee (no cream; soy), it was possible to listen to a handful of speakers, including Montreal-based anarchist Patrick Borden, who delivered a lecture titled (no joke intended) "Anarchist Organizing." You could have signed your Peter Kropotkin to any number of petitions condemning the likes of NATO, Home Depot, and FleetBoston (rechristened "FleeceBoston"); you could have made donations to anarchy-friendly groups such as Food Not Bombs, which distributes food to the homeless; you could have registered for the mailing lists of radical organs such as the Anarcho-Punk Federation, Queer Revolt, and the Long Island-based Atlantic Anarchist Circle.

If the most radical thing you'd done recently was to order curly fries with a caesar salad, this was an opportunity to take a bold step.

"This is a place for people to network, to come together face-to-face and find out what's going on," said Frank Richards, a cabinet-maker from Long Island who serves as an editor of the Atlantic Anarchist Circle's newsletter. "It's a way to take the temperature of the anarchist movement."

After lingering for more than a century on America's political fringe, anarchy is apparently enjoying a bit of a youth movement. Richards, who is 44, said he and his graying anarchist colleagues on Long Island now find themselves outflanked by young punk rockers and various alterna-hipsters, and this development was very much in evidence at the book fair. Most of the people in attendance were in their teens and 20s; many of them were decked in de rigueur punkish outfits of black boots, patched jeans, and hooded sweatshirts. Tattoos and piercings abounded, as did Converse high-tops, bike-messenger bags, and buttons touting local and regional hardcore bands.

"Anarchy is pretty much the only revolutionary movement left," said Angel, a nose-ringed anarchist from Baltimore who heads the East Coast group the Anarcho-Punk Federation, which places information tables at various punk shows. "All of the other socialism movements have pretty much been failures."

It would be easy to dismiss youthful anarchism as fashion, a kind of shock-value political philosophy good for putting a scare into your peers and parents. But there's bona fide passion here, not to mention a genuine, budding mistrust of the establishment. Consider the cases of Ethan Wolf and Heather LaCapria. Both 20 years old, they were on hand at the book fair representing a group called Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, or CAFT. Even by animal-rights-activism standards, CAFT is so bold that it makes organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which is routinely blasted for being too aggressive, look like the United Way.

Three weeks ago, Wolf and LaCapria spent part of their Sunday afternoon being buzz-sawed out of the entrance to Macy's in Downtown Crossing, where they had used metal rods to lash themselves to the doors in order to protest fur sales. It took police several minutes to cut through the rods, whereupon Wolf and LaCapria were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Both were sentenced to five hours of community service, and were forced to sweep floors at a city courthouse.

It's hardly what you'd call faddish behavior. "We tried to get them to make us clean up the MSPCA, or Food Not Bombs," LaCapria said. "But they said it would be a conflict of interest."

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To those whose idea of questioning authority is wearing sneakers to work on Thursdays, anarchy can sound pretty menacing. But the anarchists at Saturday's book fair were more of the smartass, merry-prankster kind than the let's-lob-a-homemade-bomb-into-the-state-capitol type. That's not to say that, if pressed, you couldn't have found someone to show you how to mix a rather effective Molotov cocktail. But the general attitude seemed to be: smash the state, or at least have fun trying.

To some, in fact, the lure of anarchism is as much social as it is political. Blaine Atkins, a 45-year-old software engineer from Lynn, recalled his days in the Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade, a now-defunct group known for its sudsy sessions at local watering holes like the Green Street Grill in Cambridge. Atkins once attended an anarchist clambake. "Probably between 50 and 60 people showed up," he said. "It was a good time."

Of course, among its partisans, there is no absolute agreement on what anarchism is. Atkins loosely defined it as a "lack of a state, and the lack of a hierarchical structure." Author Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, in his book Anarchism and the Black Revolution, defines anarchists as "social revolutionaries who seek a stateless, classless, voluntary, cooperative federation of decentralized communities based upon social ownership, individual liberty and autonomous self-management of social and economic life."

Unattainable utopia? Perhaps. Whatever the case, it's fair to say that many anarchists feel dicked around by the establishment, be it cops, corporations, or bureaucrats. Some are square pegs who've never felt comfortable in any mainstream political persuasion. Some devotees start out as your basic left-leaning progressives, but turn to anarchism after growing frustrated with the pecking orders and power grabs found in mainstream political movements. "They get turned off," Atkins said.

If there's one thing that many of today's anarchists can agree on, however, it's the inability of other political reformers to seize the day. In their minds, today's crusaders don't know the first thing about shocking the system. One of the book fair's main organizers, Mark Laskey, said he was disillusioned by the scene he encountered at a recent rally in Philadelphia for death-row convict Mumia Abu-Jamal, where the fare was straight out of the antiwar-era playbook of speeches, songs, and marches.

"People need to get more creative," said Laskey, who edits We Dare Be Free, a local anarchist newspaper, and volunteers at the Lucy Parsons Center, the radical bookstore that recently resettled from Cambridge to the South End. "People don't care about numbers [of protesters] anymore."

On this very day, in fact, some of the book-fair attendees stood outside the community church's front door and watched an anti-NATO protest unwinding on Copley Square. The cause (stopping the war in Kosovo) was something that the anarchists could endorse; the methods, not so much. The event was fairly formulaic: lots of picket signs (IF YOU CAN'T SPELL IT, DON'T BOMB IT), a bullhorn or two, and a few tired, albeit impassioned, chants.

"See that boring demonstration out there? We don't want that kind of demonstration, ever," Patrick Borden, the Montreal anarchist, told the crowd sitting down to hear his "Anarchist Organizing" lecture.

"It's boring for the people who participate, as anyone who's ever held a sign on a cold day can attest," said Borden, a thin raconteur with long brown hair who has been thrown in the clink on more than one occasion. Rather, he focuses on finding original approaches; he often tries to convert typical rallies into Brazilian-style carnivales, telling marchers to spend a few bucks on party favors before arriving.

Recently, Borden and his colleagues in Montreal made waves when they interrupted a hotel buffet luncheon for city leaders by removing the buffet table and taking it outside to feed local homeless people. The move showed some panache, he said, and local anarchists received some unexpectedly positive media coverage.

Call it anarchism's warm, fuzzy side. The youthful anarchists seated around Borden nodded their pierced heads in approval.

"Today, when the [Montreal] media use the word anarchist, they use it the way we mean it," Borden said. "It's because we have created a beautiful thing."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.