Features

Bell Murphy’s eyes light up as she tells us the story about the homemade pumpkin wine, which had flooded the floor at Black Star Books when left to brew over a weekend. On the ground between Bell and I, a woman carefully paints a banner for an animal rights protest to be held in the Octagon the following day. Two more young, darkly dressed people arrive – one brings brioches from her work and offers them to everyone in the room. By the time Bell finishes her recount of light-hearted experimentation the whole room is laughing. The atmosphere is homely and relaxed. It feels like a flat, not the heart of Dunedin’s largest anarchist collective.

I follow Bell into Black Star’s kitchen. She continues to talk to me as she starts to gather together ingredients for a large community dinner. It’s Friday, which (more times than not) means Black Star is hosting People’s Kitchen. “An anarchist cooking” – you may wonder – “could she be making napalm?” When Bell isn’t looking I stare down into the large pot on the donated stovetop. The red liquid looks and smells like tomato soup, not a mixture of gelling agent and petrol. “It took a few years of being around anarchist ideas to get to the point where I had enough of an understanding to call myself an anarchist,” Bell tells me, ignoring my suspicious stares. “I still feel uncomfortable about labels because I don’t know what they mean in other people’s heads. I’d rather have a conversation about the actual ideas.” 2005 was the first time Bell heard about Black Star at an anarchist conference in Christchurch. In 2009, Bell became a part of the collective. Now, she is one of the longest running active members still involved.

During school almost every student will be involved in something community related or even a vaguely activist event like a bake sale to raise funds and awareness for a social cause. But for most in a country like New Zealand, that’ll be as far as they’ll go for an ideology they believe in. Bell, on the other hand, was an activist from an early age and has never stopped protesting. At fifteen years old and living in Hastings, Bell began to find out about animal testing and factory farming. It was her fervent concern for animal rights that became her entry point into activism. Angry and brave, Bell – with resources and support from SAFE – helped organise actions against Napier’s Marineland, where they had dolphins in captivity, and against those who aided the exportation of approximately one million live sheep each year to the Middle East for Halal slaughter. But it was several years later when Bell was in Auckland that she realised there were splits between safe activism and hard lined anarchist activism. “People think anarchism is about chaos and destruction but that’s a leap from the actual definition of anarchy to an assumption about what the result of anarchy would be,” Bell explains. “The word ‘anarchy’ means without leaders or no hierarchy. In order to get things done without leaders you have to have other forms of organisation. Anarchism is about finding ways to organise without authority.” It is these questions of social power that preoccupy most anarchists.

The political philosophy of anarchism has played an interesting role in New Zealand’s politics and continues to be present within organisations (like info-shops and publishing collectives) dispersed throughout the country. Both The Freedom Shop and the anarchist publishing company Rebel Press in Wellington are examples of current organisations centred around anarchist causes. In Dunedin, too, anarchism continues to have an interesting role. In Waitati, near Dunedin, there was a small anarchist scene in the 1970s. Oddly, involved in this scene was a man called Bruce Grenville who was an anarchist, film obsessionist and producer of artful stamps. Grenville gained notoriety for a hoax involving the fabrication of the Utopian Sultanate State of Oecussi-Ambeno on the Island of Timor. He also discovered in a Napier garage sale a long-missing 1965 original episode of Doctor Who. Fast forward thirty years to 2003 and the infoshop Black Star Books emerged in Dunedin. Now, Black Star’s official address is 111 Moray Place. However, the premises is hidden at the back of the building, resulting (as their website states) in “the phenomenon of people asking ‘where the F*** is Black Star Books?’” Luckily, there are detailed online instructions to finding the place. Those not familiar with Black Star might know its sister project, The Crooked Spoke, which sits at the end of the driveway just behind the infoshop. The Crooked Spoke is a bike repair project that provides help and the use of tools and bicycle parts for those wanting to look after their bikes. With synched opening hours to Black Star the two initiatives support each other in various ways.

With a purported Facebook mission of “freedom” the infoshop serves a range of functions, which include that of a community space in support of flax-root (a play on grass-root) organising, as well as selling a range of independently-produced literature, patches and t-shirts that all relate to a diverse range of subjects such as anarchism, animal liberation, community and workplace organising, art, queer sexualities and genders, indigenous struggles, feminism and radical ecologies. Black Star also provides a photocopying service, for koha, for community groups, causes and events. While this makes it a radical space for radical ideas, “radical” doesn’t actually mean battle plans and full-blown revolution. “Radical is another term that is often misunderstood,” Bell elaborates. “What radical actually means is looking at problems from the roots rather than trying to reform the branches of the system. Radical politics doesn’t just go ‘oh we need a new prime minister’ – that would just be pruning the branches or polishing the apples. Radical politics says ‘actually the problem is at the roots and we need to pull this tree up and plant a new one.’”

The infoshop is organised and staffed by a collective of volunteers who work non-hierarchically and make decisions by consensus. This decision-making is implemented in almost every anarchist get together, even when the neo-nazis turn up to threaten their kind, as Bell tells me: “They tried to come in [to an anarchist conference in Christchurch] and threw beer bottles at us. We had to decide quickly altogether what our responses would be. The ideas were discussed until a decision was come up with that everybody in the group was happy with. We came to the consensus that we’ll have a few people sitting passively outside not engaging or discussing things with the neo-nazis but just observing.”

As well as non-hierarchal, Black Star is an open collective, which means anyone is welcome to join as long as they are willing to volunteer some time and only make choices for the collective through decentralised and consensus decision-making. “Everyone’s membership in the collective is contingent on everyone in the collective being in consensus on them being part of the collective,” Bell tells me. “We’re an open collective and so people are welcome to join but the basic requirements would be that you come to meetings and participate in the space in some ways and that people agree with basic principles in our manifesto. As long as they have a commitment to consensus-based decision-making and to challenging any kind of authoritarian, oppressive behaviour and not tolerating racism, sexism and classism. When we do have differences, we try to work through them.” While The Crooked Spoke had to tell someone, who had a repeated history of sexually aggressive and inappropriate behaviour and refused to take accountability and responsibility for it, to leave years ago, Bell doesn’t believe Black Star has had such an incident.

”The people I know who are involved don’t take themselves that seriously and generally have a good sense of humour,” Beau Murrah, a frequent Black Star member who became involved when he met members at Zinefest in 2013, told me. “I disagree with a huge amount of the literature and many of the ideas of fellow people involved at Black Star but that is exactly what I like about it – being exposed to new and colourful things.” In this way, the infoshop rejects all forms of domination and discrimination, whether they are class exploitation, patriarchal privilege, racism, incarceration of refugees, homophobia, animal exploitation, or religious dogma. I ask Beau if this open mindset means that anything, including illegal activities, could occur on Black Star’s premises: “Blackstar itself engages in no illegal activities. Out of respect for CORSO, who host Blackstar, we don’t condone drug use on the premises because it might impede on other activities that take place on the complex.”

I leave Bell and other supporters of Black Star to continue cooking and return to the library area. From an initial browse, it doesn’t seem like the place stocks The Anarchist Cookbook – the infamous guide book filled with instructions on how to make explosives, telecommunications phreaking devices and how-to-riot. It’s the one product of anarchist history that I was familiar with. The original book, written by a passionate 19-year-old William Powell, was made in protest of the United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Although Powell is now a born-again Christian working for an NGO in Kuala Lumpur and has adamantly renounced the book, various versions and expansions of The Anarchist Cookbook are still available online. The Anarchist Cookbook is internationally known and likely to be one of the central images of anarchy for most non-participants. Empty handed, I turned around to re-examine the numerous shelves of zines and books wondering what purpose they served. Beau later tells me that these zines, like “any other printed material, host words or images – but a zine is a zine because of the nature of the DIY medium itself. There is something particularly freeing and creative about making a publication yourself for a limited run.”

In search for similar stories to that of the origins of The Anarchist Cookbook and delving further into overseas practices of anarchism, when I met with Bell another time she told me that before coming to Dunedin she travelled Europe for four and a half years – during which she moved between different squats and anarchist social centre spaces. “There are so many more people in Europe and layers of history of anarchical organising to be built in and many abandoned buildings to squat in. The anarchist scene is much bigger and connected there. I met anarchists as I went and found out about other anarchists’ spaces and projects in different cities. I lived on protest camps and I volunteered labour, like helping out cooking in People’s Kitchens or finding goods for Free Shops, in exchange for staying. I also helped build barricades sometimes when spaces were at risk of being evicted by the police, which involves scavenging whatever materials you can find and thinking creatively.”

Creating barricades and other more overt acts of militant resistance are frequently linked to anarchy. However, there are many different types of anarchist thought that take the idea of non-hierarchy more in one direction than the other. “In general, anarchists aren’t pacifists in the sense that sometimes a use of force can be necessary and effective in defence for whatever the project is. It depends on the context, I don’t believe there’s ever going to be just one tactic that’s appropriate for all campaigns,” Bell tells me, who has been involved in overseas riots and demonstrations where there was heavy confrontation with the police. “Peaceful, non-violent protest works great in countries where nearly all human rights are respected and lives are worth something according to the powers that be, which is a privilege we have in New Zealand. But, for example, the Zapatistas people in Chiapas, Mexico had an indigenous uprising to try and defend their lands, which were being confiscated, and their indigenous sovereignty. They armed themselves for this defence but they were facing the Mexican military that didn’t have respect for their lives. They managed to create an autonomous zone of indigenous sovereignty – they couldn’t have done that without using arms. I’m not going to sit on a high horse as a white, western activist and say that the Zapatistas people should have practiced non-violent, peaceful protest.”

As Bell tells me this, I look around the cafe where we sit drinking coffee. Considering what I’ve learned about anarchy, something still bugs me. I ask her if, despite her ideals, what she felt about the inevitable reality where she had to submit to the consumption of products of capitalism and participation in systems of central government. Focusing on consumption, Bell’s response was enlightening: “I don’t feel any sense of moral superiority in terms of my consumption practices because, at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s possible to consume ethically under capitalism. You might be eating the most animal cruelty-free meal, but who grew those soybeans? How were they shipped here? Were the labourers paid who picked those beans? You could drive yourself crazy trying to figure out the most puritanical ethical way to consume, but at the end of the day, putting all the onus onto individual people to consume ethically in order to make the world a better place is actually a way of distracting from the real systems of power and decision making that provide us with the options that we have for consumption.”

“To be able to live off everything that you’ve grown yourself in a completely ethical way means having to retract from society and go live in the hills somewhere, and even that’s a privilege that not everybody has. A solo mum with five kids doesn’t have the ability to take some moral high stance and extract herself completely from capitalism and the state, but neither should she have to bear the brunt of feeling guilty and responsible for the destructive or unethical production processes that go into the products that she has to buy because she can afford them. It’s complicated. It’s really complicated. We all have to start with what we can. We have to have those conversations about the fact that the way that things are organised at this point in history and in our culture are not inevitable, they’re not the best way and they’re not going to stay this way because things always change. We need to try to be active and imaginative about how things could change.”

I end the interview with Bell and we get up to leave from the staff cafe at the university. Disrupted by the drilling sounds the whole way through our conversation, we both stop to stare down at the huge construction work on the Leith. Considering the huge costs of this, Bell notes the campus wide cuts to tutorials. This final observation, on the back of what I’ve already learned from talking to Bell and going to Black Star, leads me to consider other changes around campus and purported changes that national parties hope to win the general election on. I turn back again to look at all the pulled up dirt and – while I’m still to understand a lot about anarchy – I find myself searching for those flax roots.