Fondly Remembering the Solidarity Books Collective

 

They were known fondly, but also, sadly, hostilely, as “The Kids.”  They, the Solidarity Books Collective, were comprised, when they formed in 2001, as a group of feisty young anarchists ranging in age from 17 to 25.  Some were Indianapolis homegrown, some had come from out-of-state to take jobs here.  Their great ambition was to form a nonsectarian left bookstore in Indianapolis, which they did—Solidarity Books, on Indy’s South Side.  And from the beginning, they were regarded hostilely by the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” who comprised what passed for a left here in the justly named IndiaNOPLACE.  As I was alienated from these “churchgoing progressives” already, I was naturally drawn to the Collective by the very hostility it generated.  My first exposure to the Collective came when I overheard Harry Van Der Linden, a pacifist philosophy professor at Indianapolis’s Butler University and then President of the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, the political home of the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” indignantly complaining to the two leading “churchgoing progressives,” Ron and Jane Haldeman, how the Solidarity Books Collective had the temerity to ask Van Der Linden’s son, a teenager same as others in the Collective, to give $70 toward making the bookstore a reality.  A whole $70!  (But that’s typical of cheapskate Indianapolis—I had encountered it many a time as a writer here, people telling me, “I love what you’re doing!  Where’s my free copy?” with the emphasis on “free,” as though everything just grew on trees!)  Right then and there, I just knew I had to check out the Solidarity Books Collective.  I wasn’t in the least disappointed when I did, met them, and from the beginning regarded them as a fine bunch of young radicals of whom more were needed in IndiaNOPLACE.

 

They formed their bookstore, Solidarity Books, and kept it alive even after having to relocate it, then having to relocate it again, changing the store’s name to Paper Matches, and worked long and hard to keep it alive, despite its being deliberately boycotted by the “respectable progressives” due to the young Collective’s open espousal of anarchism, and its frequent non-pacifist rhetoric, even though the Collective’s members themselves were all de facto nonviolent and highly democratic, welcoming, and inclusive.  Certainly at first.   Further, they took Solidarity Books’ non-sectarianism seriously by stocking its shelves with a wide range of offerings for sale.  (Later, frustrated and beleaguered by the “respectables’” slighting of its efforts, the Collective became more specifically, more hegemonically, anarchist, and stocked the bookstore’s new titles exclusively with offerings from anarchist AK Press.)  Frustration, and with it, sectarianism, had set in, as the Collective grew beleaguered and chagrined by the deliberate sabotage of what they were trying to do by the “respectables,” and by 2005 they’d all left, in anger, frustration, bitterness and resentment.  Meanwhile, what remained of the left in Indianapolis only grew older and more hidebound, and lost all attraction it had once had among Indianapolis’s young.  Yes, a fatality engineered by the “respectable churchgoing progressives,” who just couldn’t stomach anyone not calling himself (or herself) a Christian, a “spiritual person,” or religious.  (The members of the Solidarity Books Collective, same as I, were overwhelmingly atheists.)  Or possessing boldness, which the Solidarity Books Collective had.  But they were gone by 2005, killed off by “churchgoing respectability,” a “left” form of it that differed only from the right-wing version of it by whom they considered “fellow respectables.”  Their “respectables” were Democrats, as opposed to the others’ Republicans.  But that was the only major difference.  Rather than embrace the Quaker principle of “Speaking truth to power,” I’d suggested to the Solidarity Books Collective, which heartily agreed with me, the “respectables’” approach was, instead, “Begging ‘Pretty please’ from power,” which, I really believe, sums up the whole of the “political approach” of Indianapolis’s “respectable churchgoing progressives”—a group not nearly so much pacifist with a “c” as they were passive-ists with an “i-v-e,” when they weren’t being outwardly passive-aggressive!

 

Needless to say, Indianapolis, one of the Top Ten cities in the U.S. by population size, thus lost its chance to have what nearly every large city has, a prominent left bookstore.  Now it has no independent bookstores, only national chains, and the chief source of left books in Indianapolis is ordering them online.  All because Indianapolis, through its “respectable churchgoing progressive” denizens, insisted on being moored down by “respectability” first and foremost, thus ensuring that Indianapolis would resemble, and remain resembling, despite its growth and gentrification, a city more out of a Sinclair Lewis novel than anything else.

 

Which is a prime reason why Indianapolis has not, nor ever has really had, any kind of serious left movement, let alone any left movement of any notable size.  But it’s always had “respectability” of a shabby middle-class sort.  A “respectability” borne of—not being anything of consequence!