textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp000169.txt

		PEACE CENTER ACCIDENT REPORT

	Here is a story of the Peace and Justice Center,  a collective
space that existed in Bloomington,  Indiana from Spring of '91 until
Fall of '92.  It's mainly a story of problems,  and I am writing it so
that others,  in Bloomington and elsewhere,  can recognize and avoid them.



			Abstract

	The Peace and Justice Center was founded by people who
wanted to continue a struggle they had adopted during the Gulf War.
But activism based around issues rather than community led to
misshapen priorities,  and the deliberate avoidance of firm
positions meant that nobody felt at home.  These problems were
compounded by financial insolvency and lack of a community-based
location.  In addition to the conceptual and strategic disadvantages,
there were many tactical gaffes that helped wreck the place.






1.  The Good Ole Days

	The Center was started in May of '91, just after the end of
the Gulf War. Many people had great fun working and struggling
together against the war and felt a continuing need for a visible
activist presence in the town.  The Center was in that sense
founded on nostalgia for the prior community of struggle,  in part a
reincarnation of a tent city that had gone up on the local campus for
the duration of the war,  and which had existed in a more urgent
environment than the Center itself.  At that time,  when Iraqis were
getting blown away left and right,  the antiwar coalition felt
perfectly comfortable being a 'moral minority' and decrying the larger
society for its complicity in the war.  This attitude,  that the
community was there to be lectured to,  carried over into the PJC and
closed it off from its social surroundings,  even after the situation
had changed and the intensity had faded.  No effort was made to characterize
the needs of the community;  the space existed in large part to serve the
indignance of its operators.

2.  Thinking Too Big

	One of the ideas about the founding of the PJC was that it
would serve to "put Bloomington on the map" of the peace and justice
community;  it was conceived as more of a national node working on
"broad social issues" than as a focus for the town itself.  Some feel
that a better policy would have been to use a broad social
justice/anti-authoritarian vision to interpret and deal with local
needs,  instead of drumming up local action to suit the needs of a vision.

3.  Trying to Please All

	The people involved in the antiwar coalition were a diverse
mix (pacifists, Leninists, progressives,  anarchists, liberal
dissenters, etc.) that worked well together-- as long as the war was
on.  But the PJC had no such clear purpose that promoted unity.  The
result was that lots of energy went into making the space a neutral
ground that could accomodate varying activist agendas and wound up
advancing really none of them.
	The only way this could have ended was if one or more factions
had managed to cook up a common agenda,  and then found some way to
get rid of the other factions.  Or if some factions had just decided
to strike out on their own;  probably a better move.  But nobody
wanted to do this.  The Center did not want to have to go to the
people,  the idea was that the people would come to it.  Being
agenda-less and welcoming every position was thought to be the best way
to get "them" in "here."
	The deliberate neutrality was even considered selective and
hypocritical by some;  the people running the Center had come out
strongly against the Gulf War,  for example,  but refused to take a
position on prisoner support or abortion rights.
	With some positive agenda to pursue, the diversity there might
have been a promising asset.  But in the vacuum that actually existed,
it just meant that nobody's needs were met.

4.  We Had it Too Easy

	One of the professors at nearby Indiana University felt the
PJC was a good enough idea that she would bankroll it until it could
"get on its feet" and begin to support itself.  This was a death
sentence for people's attitudes; we got spoiled.  One Center worker
went so far as to state that Gandhi was only able to live the way he did
because he had rich friends, so it was alright for us too.  If we had
forced ourselves to work out of a shoebox for a couple years until we
got the place running properly,  doing what activism we could,  it
would have recreated the climate of struggle against circumstances
that leads to good problem-solving and sound policies.  
	To make matters worse, many people lived in a state of denial
about where the money was coming from.  Budget statements were always
in absolute terms of what was in the account, no detailing of where it
came from.  People became complacent about finances and the PJC died with
a whimper not long after the benefactor became reconciled to the fact that the
dollar-to-action ratio was pathetic.  
	It is true that we had music benefits,  and a coffee service
that brought in about $100 a week.  But the damage to attitudes had
been done;  management of the cash flow was erratic and on at least
one occasion,  corrupt.  (Never let a man with nothing to lose take
charge of your treasury.)

5.  Location,  Location,  Location

	Related to this was the question of rent and location itself.
The PJC was in a high-rent district-- $800 a month.  There are some who
feel that the high rent is what did the place in,  but this doesn't
explain a lot.  True, the activity going on at the Center wasn't worth
$800 a month, but it also wasn't worth $400 a month,  or even $200 a month.
	One reason for choosing that site was its location near
the center of town.  Other desirable features were: large windows,
large floor space,  and a park close by across the street.
	This "central location" was more apparent than real.  It was
centered on the town of Bloomington only in a cheap geometric
sense;  in fact it had no central position in the minds of town
residents,  no embeddedness in a surrounding neighborhood or
community.  The nearest thing resembling a neighborhood was the
student district three blocks away,  and this really wasn't
satisfactory;  the student population is too transient.  It doesn't
have the social connection or staying power to commit to
community-based activism.  The PJC would have been better off to
position itself in an area of town where the residents are more
permanent and have more of a vested interest in improving the
community;  the West or Southwest-side neighborhoods,  for example.
	The Center had more or less accepted a role as an enemy of
commercial culture  and it further isolated itself by setting up in a
commercial district,  truly unable and unwilling to ally with the
concerns of its immediate neighbors.

6.  Various Tactical Blunders
	
=>	One of the regular drains on energy was the practice of
having every decision made at a weekly general council instead of
"subcontracting" various tasks to smaller, more directly involved
groups.  The general meetings were long, boring, often argumentative
and produced little in the way of actual policy.  Essentially the
Center was run on the fly by people taking autonomous action, but it
was sad that this decentralism wasn't a formal organizing principle.
People by and large did not feel liberated to act without the
consensus of the weekly mass meeting.

=>	Another organizing problem was the so-called "structure
debate."  Some people wanted to have a written charter and guidelines,
others wanted the space to be run entirely on the fly by oral
tradition.  Some wanted tasks to be defined and the group decide on
persons to fill those tasks while others wanted tasking to be done as
kind of a cult of personality, they "didn't want human beings to be
replaceable" or something like that.  This second position contributed
to a clubhouse atmosphere which clashed with the inborn mandate of
"neutral ground" mentioned before.  
	This all could have been avoided by the presence of some
positive agenda;  the "structure debate" was in part a surrogate
struggle because the Center had self-consciously avoided choosing
a real struggle for itself.  A common set of suppositions about what
would constitute success and what would constitute failure for the
project as a whole would have allowed individuals to compare various
structures with collective needs and goals,  and to agree on those most
appropriate.

=>	No firm policy was made on who could participate in
decision-making.  The Center operators were eager to erase 
demarcations between themselves and the outside world,  and this meant
that anybody who just walked in could conceivably make or break a
decision.  There was no necessary correspondence between an individual's
commitment to the space and the individual's empowerment within the space.

=>	There was a strong sentiment on the part of several persons
that the PJC should not sell anything.  At the establishment of the
Center,  a letter was circulated soliciting donations to cover
expenses.  The letter apologized for itself in part by saying that the
Center operators did not want to engage in any "capitalistic
endeavors" to support the project.
	People should not take themselves so seriously.  All labor
that went into the place was for the general benefit of the
collective;  this was taken for granted,  and it would have been the
same for labor that went to procure or produce items for sale.	
	It seems likely that this abstinence from buying and
selling came from some wish not to be dirtied by the touch of money.
But the result of this wish is that one develops no intimate
understanding of how economic life works,  and certainly no
understanding of how it could be made to work differently.  So apart
from the obvious effect on cash flow,  this preference for
funding by solicitation did nothing to sharpen the productive and
facilitative skills of the Center operators.  Instead it fostered
dependency,  as systems of transfer payment tend to do. 
	
7.  Business as Usual

	Bickering and collective indecision showed itself over a
homeless man who had for all practical purposes set up house in the
Center,  despite the group's consensus that nobody was to sleep there.
Opinions on how to handle the situation ranged from "accomodate him
indefinitely" to "throw him out on his ear,"  complete with
accusations of heartlessness and nervelessness.  Both of these may
have been true.
	With the virtue of hindsight,  and the experience of a former
Center worker who has since moved on to the Community Kitchen,  it
would have been easy enough to write a little grant and get a few
thousand dollars to take care of the man.  But problem solving at the
PJC tended to be an infantile grasp for the known rather than for the
unknown,  a  struggle between solutions rather than a struggle towards
a solution.  And so it went.