Red Emma’s

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From Wikipedia:

Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse is a radical infoshop located in Baltimore, Maryland, USA and run by a worker-owner collective. Named for anarchist Emma Goldman, Red Emma’s opened in November 2004 and sells fair trade coffee, vegetarian and vegan foods and books. The space also provides free computer access to the Baltimore community, wireless internet and film screenings, political teach-ins, and community events.

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Since before the official opening in 2004, all decisions regarding the operations of the space have been made by consensus. The collective of worker-owners has ranged in size from 10 to 20 over the 7 years the shop has been open, usually hovering around 15. Collective meetings are open to the public.

The Red Emma’s Collective is a closed shop, organized with the Industrial Workers of the World. That means that all collective members are also members of IU 660—the “One Big Union”.

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From Red Emma’s:

Our project started in 2004, rising from the ashes of Black Planet Books, a volunteer-run anarchist collective bookstore in Fells Point. In building a cafe component in the new space, we wanted to both establish a firmer financial foundation to keep the new project afloat, but also to create a more welcoming environment. There’s no point, after all, in a space dedicated to spreading radical information if the only people who ever come in are already radicalized!

Baltimore in 2004 was a very different place then it is today. When we started, radical, self-managed collective spaces were few and far between. While there were many amazing activists, radical artists, and politically engaged thinkers and writers in the city, there was no place to bring them together to spark encounters and conversations. If Baltimore today has a stronger network of social justice movements, and a rapidly proliferating movement of collectively run spaces and businesses, we’d like to think that our project has had some small part in making that happen.

Our mission is twofold: first, to demonstrate, concretely, that it’s possible to build institutions that directly put values like sustainability and democracy to work, and second, in doing so, to build a resource for movements for social justice here in Baltimore.

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At Red Emma’s, we’ve decided to call ourselves a “radical” project, rather than an “anarchist” or “communist” one. This doesn’t mean that we think anarchism and communism have nothing to offer as ways of thinking about what’s fundamentally wrong with the current world, and how to go about fixing it. But as a space that’s intended to welcome both people who have been in the struggle for decades and people just getting their feet wet for the first time, we felt that committing ourselves to a label and a specific ideological tradition was unecessarily limiting. The people working on the project may be anarchists or communists, but the space is both and neither, or something else entirely.

“Radical” sums this up for us quite nicely; it’s a word derived from the Latin word for “root”, and to be “radical” is to go to the root of the problem, to not be afraid to attack root causes rather than be distracted by the symptoms on the surface. Being “radical” means that we’re always working to redevelop and reinforce our own political committments, and to reach out to other people and communities who share our sense of outrage at injustice, but we’re not hamstringing ourselves in this work by insisting that every thing we do or every book we carry passes some dogmatic political litmus test.

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Our immediate model and inspiration for our space is the “infoshop”: the DIY anarchist spaces that have started to spring up like mushrooms across the globe in the past few decades, building on long traditions of underground bookstores, hobohemian hangouts, and Utopian alternatives.

Practically, these kind of spaces arose to provide points of distribution for viewpoints and information that could never get a hearing in mainstream media and bookstores: not just books, but radical newspapers and periodicals, and self-published material like zines. In a world where information is treated like a commodity, an infoshop turns it back into something that belongs to a community. If an infoshop sells books and other merchandise, and even depends on these sales to keep the doors open, it’s never because of a desire to turn a profit: the mission is to distribute information you can’t find elsewhere, and to do so in a way which maximally agrees with the principles we’re preaching. Even as the internet has made getting access to radical information easier, the physical presence of an infoshop can help pop “filter bubbles”, exposing people to new ideas, and above all helps to bring people together to dream and scheme on how to turn information into a weapon in the fight for a better world.

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A big part of our project is demonstrating that the ideals we have politically are possible to translate into the real world. We want to show that anarchism doesn’t mean being disorganized and that anticapitalism doesn’t mean being unable to operate effectively and efficiently. If you’ve ever had to defend your conviction that the world would be a better place without bosses against hostile questions about who would take out the trash and who would scrub the toilets, you can point to Red Emma’s and win your argument. No bosses and no hierarchy, but we’ve been taking out the trash, ordering books, running a restaurant, dealing with the accounting, and a thousand other things for the better part of a decade.

Technically speaking, Red Emma’s is organized as a worker cooperative: everybody who is a part of the collective owns an equal share of the business, and has an equal voice in the decisions we make to run it. Worker cooperatives—which are taking off all around the country—are a way to build a world without bosses one workplace at a time, creating real world projects that meet the real needs of individuals and communities while at the same time staying true to the ideals of workplace democracy and an egalitarian division of wealth and labor.

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