This article is migrated and was published in July 2022

The aim for this text is to establish a base framework for people interested in establishing anarchistic co-operative cafés, bars and/or social centres in the WISE islands. I’ll focus on London due to it being my primary experience and inspiration for the text. The primary questions I aim to ask and try and partially address are:

1 — What role can explicitly anarchist, co-operatively owned cafés play in building and strengthening the anarchist movement in the WISE islands?

2 — Is it viable to set up and maintain an anarchist café economically?

3 — How can we avoid the traditional pitfalls associated with co-operatives: professionalization, becoming politically conservative and risk averse and having “successful business” as a primary motivation in the project over political and community interests?

The inspiration for this text came from multiple personal sources, firstly that many of my friends and fellow organisers come from countries with more significant “café cultures” like the southern Mediterranean and specifically the Balkans in which cafés play a larger role in working class peoples’ lives than in the WISE islands. Additionally, many Italian friends discussed how significant a role social centres play in anarchist movements in Italy, with social centres playing gigs, showing football and being a hangout space for local young people primarily to build a base of people from which to build a political movement.

Secondly I started working in a café after previously spending approximately a year moving between different service, retail and manual jobs, this is my focus for the first section. As well as providing some basis for the ideas behind why a café could be desirable for an anarchist movement it also gave me a practical basis for understanding the management, costs and day to day running of a small café.

Experience in cafés

The café that I work in has a generally middle class and rich customer base, being situated near a wealthy residential area as well as close to a private school, it also borders a more working class area that makes up some but not many customers, outside of 10 to 15 customers who sit in several times a week to meet friends, work or read as well as one customer who comes 6 to 7 times a week, the majority of customers come between 7:45 and 9:30 who I refer to as the commuters. With a few exceptions commuters don’t talk that much and primarily want their coffee quickly in the morning before work. I also have roughly 3 or 4 friends who come in to keep me company and receive heavily discounted drinks or snacks. In total the average weekday sees 70–80 customers with highpoints of 110 and lowpoints of 45, weekends see between 35 and 60.

It’s a small shop and as such only one barista works at a time, with the boss and owner occasionally dropping in (probably once every 3 shifts) to catch up, close the till and do deliveries; this means that as a barista you have a fair amount of control over how the café is run including music (I have a fairly good collection of café friendly left wing music) that is often quite good at sparking conversations. I’ve now had three separate Catalans sing L’Estaca without warning before having a nice conversation about Catalan independence.

Given it’s a fairly pricey café comparative to what I’d call traditional cafs that tend to have tea for between £1 and £2 that become a bit more of a base for working class socialising it doesn’t have the same feel as a local hub of activity, more a social point in which many people happen to bump into one another.

It’s worth saying I’m not a massively social person and can be quite anxious, especially with people I don’t already know, as of the time of writing I’ve been working at the same shop for just under a year, in that time I know about 15 customers on a first name basis, 5 or 6 of which I have conversations with almost every time they come in, of these I have the contact details of 4 people with one having joined a local project I was helping set up. Several customers have actually ended up meeting and getting to know the friends I have over who are also anarchists meaning occasionally we will have a political discussion and a customer will join in or ask questions fairly comfortably. One customer who is fairly active politically on the left comes and discusses theory, Workerism, The Russian and Spanish revolutions and ongoing wars every time he comes in, he first started as he noticed me wearing an antifascist t shirt.

In terms of changes I’ve managed to make as a worker at the café, I’ve successfully managed to keep at least a black coffee lower than all other coffees so that the contractors and labourers who come in doing work nearby don’t get scalped. The café is fairly small and is aimed at more artisan customers, the beans and machinery are premium and as such prices aren’t intended to be popular more just understood and accepted. In the time since I started working prices have significantly increased with inflation, about 23% with a further price increase expected this summer. Alternative milk, of which about 50% of customers use, has doubled in price.

The other change I managed to introduce was literature, I convinced my boss that we should stock magazines and newspapers and I could be in charge of making sure we’re stocked and not messy, so I brought several copies of Dope Magazine, one Freedom Journal and some Big Issues, I would say that 1 or 2 people pick up one a day, mainly Dope magazine, several people have actually picked up and taken a copy of Dope and one 84 year old regular told me “I won’t join your Freedom Brigades but I’ll cheer you on if I see you marching”. As a side-note, several customers commented on how academic and highbrow Dope felt. I want to try and become a Dope pickup point but at the moment I think it may be difficult. I like how already I’ve seen several conversations spark after someone reads a copy of Dope without any of my intervention and also the times in which I’ve been able to launch some interesting discussions using what I’ve left lying around or pinned on the notice board as a starting point.

The café I work is not political, it’s a fairly typical small business, the owner is a liberal capitalist, the other workers at the café range from being a bit left wing to broadly progressive apoliticals, but the turnover is around 3 or 4 months per worker meaning there’s not much of a culture that can be built in the workplace. Even with this all being the case however I’ve managed to have many political discussions with customers I previously didn’t know including getting some directly involved in local projects, I’ve had two customers give me a raised fist to say goodbye, one as a joke and one dead serious, more than this, many customers know I’m an anarchist/left wing and it doesn’t go much further than that, we’ve had a conversation or two but it doesn’t need to go much further, it’s just building that network of people who now have at least a tiny amount of respect and knowledge of radical politics and more importantly I feel much more embedded in my area. It’s worth saying this works partially as I live about 15 minutes walk from the café, a bit further removed from the wealthy area into the more working class and commercial area.

I personally wouldn’t go to the café I work in if I didn’t get the free coffee there, many customers I find personally to be bad people, with a number of well paid white collar workers, private school mums and the most hated of all — young professionals making up the customer base. The café I go to regularly is closer to my flat and is significantly cheaper and has a large place in the community, acting as a meeting spot for many locals, primarily the older residents who come in and form a strong line 2 deep on the outside chairs. This café has all the hallmarks of a community hub with workers who seem to be on a first name basis with easily 60+ locals, cheap food meaning locals come and can get a proper meal for £6-£7 and even a back room that can be easily used for meetings outside of the light.

The café mentioned that I go to that I’ll call the “Locals’ Café” is open a fair bit later than my café and has an alcohol license for later in the day, the coffee is significantly worse than the coffee I make at my work but no one is really there for the coffee, as someone who really likes good coffee I can confidently say I’ll keep going there no matter how burnt their milk or bitter their coffee. It is one of the bases that I look at for how I would theoretically want an Anarchist café to be run.

The area it is in is, like a good deal of London, a working class area under the increasing pressure of development, within a 100m radius of the Locals’ café there is an expensive gentrifying food shop, a rare pub where you can get a pint for £4.20 and a school nestled in a council estate in which over 50% of children need free school meals.

It is absolutely certain that location is one of the most important aspects to whether a space becomes a community hub, a service and also useful to anarchists; the café I work in happens to be very nearby where several friends, anarchists and myself live which means it naturally has become the place we meet a fair amount and helps us build a social-political grouping in which our social lives have politics interwoven. The merging of social and political is something that seems to be extremely important and also obvious in many countries; specifically I’ve heard from a number of Italian anarchists and have started to hear similar ideas although with some interesting details and organisational concepts from Kurdish democratic confederalists. It is interesting that it’s so rare to see the idea that in order to build a political movement we also need a social base in London where I live, I wonder whether it’s a concerned reaction to the numerous scandals coming from political spaces where social cliques or individuals dominate or whether we’ve internalised the idea that politics is a type of work distinct from our “social lives” or that we just simply lack the spaces in London to build anything social!

On the economic side of things for those interested, through taking a lot of notes and listening in conversation with my boss (and sifting through what he inflated or deflated), I managed to get a rough idea of the economics of the café. The café makes 120k a year in revenue with 75k total costs (both numbers can give or take around 10–15k) meaning a profit of between 25k and 50k paying staff £10.50 an hour. This translates to approximately £13 an hour to £18 an hour if existing money allocated to wages and profits were split evenly into hourly pay and the current owners (real) weekly labour was factored into wages too. The issue in London is fairly universally property, for a multitude of reasons it would be beneficial for a co-operative café to purchase the property and pay a mortgage instead of rent which would mean the task of raising the very large sum for a deposit.

The other experience in London that many have been a part of is the Dalston Solidarity café, a project that launched out of an assembly and now runs once a month or more out of a loaned community centre space putting on workshops, talks and handing out pay what you can food and coffee. Although I think a project like DSC that isn’t a “space” in itself and is more of a regular event should be seen as distinct from the idea of opening a permanent café space, it achieves a lot of the same goals. It has become an important space not only for education and organising but also and in my opinion most importantly it’s become a rare space in which anarchists and other likeminded people can come to socialise and discuss things in a political space that isn’t pushy or urgently trying to achieve something else.

Projects like the DSC have been needed for some time in London and prove that there is the will to put the long term work into a social space, at the time of writing the DSC has only gone from strength to strength with consistent energy being brought in. A point to be made is that I would say its nature as a political project as opposed to a physical walk-in café open 7 days a week is a major limitation that means that it remains only a semi-open space where, with a few exceptions, members of the public who aren’t anarchists don’t spent significant time in the café and it’d difficult to build long term relationships with the community outside of people who actively make the effort themselves to come to DSC events and are therefore very likely to already be on board with many of the ideas presented.

##Social spaces and movement building in London

I’ll start by writing that the state of social centres in London is pretty bad, in terms of concrete anarchist social centres we’re limited to only a handful with the biggest concentration in East London, the running of some of these social centres isn’t what I would tend to call anarchistic in nature and the most important fact for me is that largely they tend not to aim to be community hubs that draw in non-anarchists but instead seem to mainly offer themselves to (certain) anarchists as a service. The point I’ll make that may cause the most arguments is that more than one of these spaces tends to be quite conservative in their outlook towards radicalism; younger, more interesting projects tend to get a cold shoulder whereas traditional, more established projects like reading groups seem to be seen as the ideal.

The best example of social centres fulfilling their purpose tends to be (unsurprisingly) Kurdish centres but firmly not “anarchist” spaces. The primary way that anarchists in London tended to try and build social centres was squatting, although there are still anarchist squatter crews who often do an incredible job given how hard it is to squat here, most of the squatters I know tend to not view squatting as a viable political project or believe that a social centre could be set up in a squat. My personal view is that with the intense anti squatting legislation in place and a poor culture in London, squatting for political projects is best done in the very short term and should be seen as quite separate from squatting for housing.

Squatting for example continues to be effective if a building is needed temporarily or for a clearly defined period of time, but we do not have a strong enough movement to resist bailiffs and carry out consistent eviction resistance, this alongside the extreme laws in place mean that holding a building in London for more than a few months tends to be extremely difficult, a social centre of course needs to stay for ideally years not months to build a base of support in the community it lives in.

For a social space to be effective and useful for the anarchist movement it needs to be able to host events and meetings, be accessible to anarchists and non-anarchist working class people, build connections to community groups and movements, be self sustaining financially and ideally support anarchists through providing employment, space and comfort. It should also be able to defend itself in a legal sense and in a physical sense. In recent memory Freedom bookshop has been firebombed by fascists and LARC has been raided by police (thanks to Just Stop Oil); no anarchist social space will be truly safe in the way a regular café would be and if it was questions should be raised about what it is actually doing with itself and how radical a space it is.

Hosting events and meetings tends to be the easier part of things although this is where location is seriously important. I’ve found that unlike in many other cities around the UK and the world, in London anarchists are particularly spread out, this is partially due to London’s size (a good case should be made that we stop viewing London as a city and instead as a country that contains a range of towns and cities) and partially due to the volatile nature of living in London, many people bounce from short term jobs and leases to having to move for financial reasons or move back home — a large amount of anarchists in London didn’t grow up in London, either moving from around the UK or largely from European countries. The more central a location the better for acting as a hub for anarchists to hold events and meet, the further out in the zones of London the more stable the space can be and often this is where neighbourhoods have a stronger working class character and operate a stronger level of self-management.

Any café will unfortunately be fairly dependent on the local and international anarchist milieu to survive at least in its early years and this has to be factored in, many people will not travel to zone 4 for a coffee and some stickers.

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This is not a full piece and I intend to add a second part that specifically asks those currently involved in anarchist co-operatives around the UK about their experience, hopefully they’ll be able to provide some more practical insight on the pitfalls and opportunities anarchist cafés can experience and avoid.