No Justice, No Peace

One of the longest-running and last-surviving anarchist newspapers in the country, West Philadelphia's The Defenestrator continues to deliver the news nobody else sees fit to print.

by Matt Stroud

Neal Santos

Right around 8 p.m., just before the impulse to flee has all but played out, a lithe, white, cute hipster shows up in beat-up gray Chuck Taylors, long cutoff jean shorts, a tight yellow T-shirt and a green trucker cap. She's grinning wide and awkwardly cradling a giant plastic bowl that even from 100 feet away appears to be splashed with red sauce. As she approaches a park bench in the grass, more young people draw near, maybe 15 total, emerging from the 19th Street side of the library. They all carry food. The scene begins to play out:

First the front door of the library opens and a gray-haired dude — Caucasian, unwashed and unshaven — comes striding out toward the bench, staring intently at it with wide, dark eyes. A few more people trickle out from inside the library. The door closes and then opens again as more people exit. From the other side of the bench a tattered squadron steps in weird unison, some limping, some stepping faster, close to a jog, toward what one could imagine looks aerially like a vortex of men and women all converging on one spot to get what turns out to be a spatula full of vegan spaghetti each, some potatoes and a ripe orange served on a paper plate. They eat using plastic forks. At least 100 people arrive to feast and no one pushes, no one raises their voice and, in fact, the whole scene is surprisingly silent — the only sounds coming from mouths chewing and shoes walking, first toward the bench and then, after they've received their meal, toward spots on grass and concrete. They eat in peace and chew and sit quietly, if only for a few moments, before they either depart or get up with a clean plate to ask for seconds. They'll receive it if they ask; there's plenty to go around.

This gathering has a name: Food Not Bombs. It's a type of franchise activism initiated in Cambridge, Mass., to protest war, poverty and needless excesses. In the early 1980s, "Money for food, not for bombs" was spray-painted all over Cambridge to challenge Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant's expansion into military arms. At a publicized meeting of high-powered business executives at Seabrook, a group of protesters gathered outside to cook and distribute locally grown vegan food for free. The idea caught on, and now Food Not Bombs chapters assemble in cities all over the world. That includes Philadelphia: Mondays at 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 5:30 p.m., a group meets to cook a vegan feast at the Lancaster Avenue Autonomous Space — or LAVA, near 42nd and Lancaster. They'll arrive at 19th and Vine as close to their scheduled delivery time as humanly possible. Their goal is to serve free, fresh-made vegan fare to anyone who wants it, and to encourage the poor and homeless to gather and hang out and maybe even germinate ideas for personal and collective growth.

The Web provides ample opportunities to advertise gatherings like this, but ask anyone here how they discovered the free food and they'll likely say one of two things: "My friend told me," or "I read it in the newspaper."

The "newspaper" is not the Inquirer or the Daily News or even City Paper, but a printed anarchist publication called The Defenestrator. It is a stark, black-and-white newsprint publication distributed for free in independent shops and meeting places along Lancaster and Baltimore avenues in West Philadelphia, and at a few places within tentacle reach of South Street's business district.

The Defenestrator is available online, but operates in perpetuity with a print mentality. Sending an e-mail to the Web link that says "contact us," for example, will likely prove futile: The e-mail will go to a fictional person named "Rosa," and she'll likely not respond. However, if one locates a print copy of The Defenestrator, it's a storehouse for planned opportunities, like Food Not Bombs, to maybe meet the editorial staff, and maybe also meet with other people to participate in activities that ostensibly matter. In the works now is a cross-state journey — and special issue — to protest the upcoming G20 Summit in Pittsburgh.

Jessica Kourkounis DEMOCRACY NOW: The Defenestrator's consensus-based structure attracted Bronwyn Lepore.

Dave Onion (not his real name) is 37 years old and the only founding member still working for the paper today. He wrote a reflection on 10 years of publishing The Defenestrator in 2007, called "Looking back on a decade of throwing power out the window." ("Defenestration" is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window as an act of political dissent. The word originates from the Defenestration of Prague, in 1618, which marked the start of the Thirty Years War — a duel to the death between Catholics and Protestants all over Europe. The original defenestration involved two Catholic deputies and a secretary being flung out the window of a castle and into a moat.) In it, he describes the events that defined the publication — including the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia that galvanized protest action here — and the injustices and motivations that inspired the unpaid, constantly revolving staff to keep publishing.

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Bronwyn Lepore, a full-time English professor at the Community College of Philadelphia, first got involved with The Defenestrator during RNC 2000. She and Onion are the longest-serving members of the group. Others come and go.

Lepore says what attracted her to the publication was its structure — its collectivism and its focus on concordance: "It's very much organized around consensus," she says. "There's lots of sharing, and every decision is completely democratic." There is no editor, no art director, no account executives, and generally no set task any one person officially and exclusively agrees to do. People have their specialties — Onion writes and does a lot of the layout and design, for example, and Lepore does a great deal of editing and writing — but duties are agreed upon among a group of 10 (or so) who gather in a second-story room at LAVA at least one evening per week.

LAVA is a collectively owned space that acts as "a center for radical media and organizing" in the Belmont neighborhood of West Philadelphia. The space has three floors and it's in a part of the city defined by a lack of exposed windows on main drag businesses after dark. At 10 p.m., everything's locked up behind thick metal garage doors and the very few open bars and convenience stores look like fallout shelters — dark and encased behind metal. LAVA's front door is a thick, black steel cage in front of a heavy door. On the inside of the door — facing in, toward a room with chairs and a library and a couple of computers — are instructions on what to do if the space is raided by cops.

Purchased for somewhere around $15,000 with money raised at benefit parties and through the Philadelphia Independent Media Center, LAVA is technically owned by Lancaster Avenue Autonomous Space Inc., a nonprofit organization with a board represented by all the varied groups who take part in LAVA-based activism. The Defenestrator collective is one of these, and their office looks out over 42nd and Aspen streets. It contains a well-worn green couch, art on the walls from past issues, some chairs and a few older PCs that serve as an editorial hub for the organization. At their weekly meetings, the collective gathers to discuss what's happening in Philadelphia — what sorts of movements are forming and growing, and what news events are worth discussing in print — and what sorts of content they're expecting. They often receive submissions from prisoners and activists, many of whom they've never met. Nathaniel Miller, who organizes for the Industrial Workers of the World and is known to make his living as a guinea pig for local pharmaceutical tests, is a regular contributor to The Defenestrator. He recently wrote about his journey to visit the Confederation of Haitian Workers. Other recent issues have covered topics ranging from a story expanding upon coverage about cab drivers winning a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling over the Parking Authority, to the case of Andre Jacobs, who recently won a $185,000 settlement against the Department of Corrections after being beaten senseless and tortured by correctional officers at SCI-Pittsburgh.

Over a couple of months, The Defenestrator collective will build material. When it appears they have enough for a release (generally 24 pages worth, though it has been as few as four pages in the past, for special issues), they start designing and look for ways to fundraise. When they have enough cash to print, they do. Five-thousand copies, black and white, just as wide and about 2 inches taller than the publication you're holding. The printing bill is normally about $700, and they mail copies to inmates in various prisons statewide. They used to print at Prompt Printing in Camden, N.J. — a collectively run, worker-owned press — but when Prompt closed in 2008, they went with the next cheapest option, Linco Press in Queens. Linco isn't a collective, but they also print New York's Indypendent — a publication that The Defenestrator models.

Neal Santos BURNING UP: Inside the newspaper's office at LAVA Lancaster Avenue Autonomous Space.

Onion says a problem among radical groups is not deciding what they're against — "we can normally agree on what we dislike," he says — but declaring what, exactly, they're for. "I have no interest in getting into ideological discussions," he says, but if the collective had to make clear their motivations, the People's Global Action "Hallmarks" do a sufficient job. PGA is a worldwide grouping of radical social movements in resistance to capitalism and "for social and environmental justice." The Hallmarks are, in order:

1. A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive globalization.

2. We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human beings.

3. A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker.

4. A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements' struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples' rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism.

5. An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy.

To over-summarize, The Defenestrator's motives are activist in essence: Pretty much every article comes with a call to action, an opportunity to participate in a movement forwarding their beliefs.

Imagine a publication that not only doesn't pay its volunteers, but also uses all its editorial content to publicize news that requires even more volunteering. Nothing pays at The Defenestrator. And that's the idea: Every article is its own crusade, so getting paid to amplify those crusades would feel a little like capitalism — which the publication tries to avoid at all costs. In The Defenestrator's April edition, Onion wrote an article called "We Can Live Without Capitalism," containing "calls for people to organize alternatives to capitalism by removing deposits from banks, ceasing payments of debts and mortgages, and developing self-managed institutions to meet people's needs."

Though The Defenestrator has run advertisements for places like Firehouse Bikes and Wooden Shoe Books (worker-owned and collectively run businesses themselves), the articles cover topics that don't really cater to any sort of industry that might provide ad revenue. You won't find advertisements for spas or university programs. (The bumper stickers "This is West Philly, University City is a marketing campaign" pretty well summarize an accepted opinion in the collective.) "Advertising just really isn't all that important to us," Onion says, and so volunteers really must want to be involved. It can actually cost money to be a part of The Defenestrator's editorial board: Onion says they generally have a dance party to raise money for each issue, but if that doesn't generate enough revenue, they just pass the proverbial printing hat around. Despite all this, The Defenestrator has printed 45 full issues in 12 years.

Content-wise, the publication's tagline — "for a world without cops or bosses" — says quite a bit, but Nathaniel Miller breaks it down further: "I think all journalists have a bias," he says. "And some say they don't. But they do. We recognize our bias and acknowledge where we're coming from and try to report on news from a certain perspective. We're not trying to come across as impartial."

Neal Santos Defenestrator members Nathaniel Miller (left) and Eian Weissman at a weekly meeting (opposite). (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

It's for these reasons that Onion particularly is vehement about publishing voices from prisoners and reporting stories about prisoners' rights and injustices.

As nationwide media discussion focuses on the "death of print" and various daily newspapers' inability to continue distributing paper sustainably, it's almost required that we ask why The Defenestrator has kept to a print model instead of merely reporting on the Web.

An obvious answer is that PhillyIMC — which also runs out of LAVA — does pretty much what The Defenestrator does online, in a format that encourages daily citizen activism and journalism. The Defenestrator stays unique by offering a newspaper.

Another answer is a little more ethereal. "Personally, I've always been a fan of print journalism," Miller says. "I hate reading things online, and there's something about having a print product everyone can see and touch."

The real answer, though, is something more practical: They print not because they have some gleeful, utopian vision of "the power of print" or "the way print feels in one's hands," but because prisoners can't access the Web, and that's where a great deal of Defenestrator copies go — into places where the Internet is either not allowed or regulated in such a way as to make it functionless.

"We're about putting out alternatives," Onion says. "We try to create a dialogue with people in the city, regardless of where they are and who they are. And if we can't reach people who are locked up, what good are we?"

(editorial@citypaper.net)