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!    

A Righteous and Just Excoriation of “Woke Left” Anarchistic Nihilism

 

Bret Weinstein, the egregiously, horribly, railroaded former professor of biology at Evergreen State College, and a Bernie Sanders supporter, who spoke out against an action of de facto segregation promulgated by “woke” black student activists at Evergreen, has just spoken out on the British Unherd (https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-anarchists-captured-portland)  against the “woke” chaos now being perpetrated in his newly-adopted home city of Portland, Oregon, where he and his wife Heather, also ostracized from Evergreen, now reside—and criticizes the “woke” from a standpoint that can only be described as concerned, social-democratic left, not neoliberal right.

While he calls those promulgating violence, looting and harassment of ordinary citizens in Portland as “anarchists,” he’s not necessarily implying that they are political or philosophical anarchists; merely nihilists of the “woke left” who’ve latched onto the slogans promulgated by Black Lives Matter and concerns over the still-prevalent racism in US society to garner sympathy and support for what he calls only the ceding “by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation [British spelling, as Unherd is British—GF] to the ground” and ruefully, ironically, cries out, “Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.” 

Weinstein is scathing throughout in his denunciation of these new nihilists:  he pointedly notes of this “movement’s” origins, “suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored,” calls these activists, “a small but violent mob of misanthropes” perpetrating a “current wave of terror, and, due to the deliberate inaction against these mobs of “woke” by both Portland’s Mayor and police force, alleges directly, “anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.”  (However, Weinstein pointedly notes that, in progressive Portland, these supposedly everywhere hordes of Nazis and white supremacists are, in the famous words of Mark Twain commenting on his supposed death as published in a newspaper’s obituary, “greatly exaggerated.”)

But we of the “voices of reason on the Left” have dealt with this kind of pernicious nonsense before, famously in the case of Weatherman in the late 1960s, early 1970s, a group that, despite its florid adoption of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist rhetoric, were really, just as are the “woke” of Portland, “neo-anarchist terrorists” who only gave grist to the right-wing mill all too eager to silence those “voices of reason on the Left,” and who, under both Nixon and Reagan, succeeded masterfully, and shifted the country not to the left, but to the right (especially in Reagan’s case, to the far right, as this Great Communicator ran successfully for President twice on being against the New Left, and as a bulwark of safety against anarchy, terror, and Weatherman’s random bombings).  Thus, are there enemies of the Left clearly on the supposed left:  the “propaganda of the deed” denizens, the ultraleftists who have no idea of what is actually and actually not feasible, and the Blanquist small coteries of cadres who, by military-minded conspiracy, bring about “socialism by insurrectionary coup.”  [Blanquism is named after Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), a French revolutionary socialist who called for socialism to be achieved by small, armed groups leading insurrections.  The similarities between the “woke” of today and Blanqui’s small cadres provoking revolutionary violence are obvious—GF] Much the same happened to the Weinsteins at Evergreen State; but it no more ushered in the Olympia, Washington Commune [Olympia is the home of Evergreen State—GF] than it has the Portland Commune.  All it has done is cause fear among small business owners whether their businesses will be trashed by looting, as has happened to so many other Portland businesses; and ushered in anger among ordinary working people, who are awakened from sleep by chanting mobs demanding, “Wake up, motherfuckers, wake up!”  Thus, do ill-conceived tactics, and a general sense of nihilism masquerading as activism directly undermine the cause of the left, not enhance it—and make meaningful and extensive social change that much more difficult to achieve and attain.