Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective

by Scott Crow, Kathleen Cleaver (Foreword)

Tracing a life of radical activism and the emergence of a grassroots organization in the face of disaster, this chronicle describes scott crow's headlong rush into the political storm surrounding the catastrophic failure of the levee in New Orleans in 2005 and the subsequent failure of state and local government agencies in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It recounts crow's efforts with others in the community to found Common Ground Collective, a grassroots relief organization that built medical clinics, set up food and water distribution, and created community gardens when local government agencies, FEMA, and the Red Cross were absent or ineffective. The members also stood alongside the beleaguered residents of New Orleans in resisting home demolitions, white militias, police brutality, and FEMA incompetence. This vivid, personal account maps the intersection of radical ideology with pragmatic action and chronicles a community's efforts to translate ideals into tangible results. Resisting indifference, rebuilding hope amidst collapse, and independence from government entities emerge as persistent themes in this call to activism, demonstrating what can be done by determined individuals in extreme circumstances.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Activism, Memoir, Anarchism, Philosophy

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the politics book club, we were forced to read ebooks whether I like it or not. This makes me cranky as I much prefer reading regular books, but COVID-19 has other ideas. On the upside, many leftist publishers are giving away free ebooks so we can all politically educate ourselves about why we're stuck in quarantine, during the supposedly copious spare time we all have now, which some of us do and some of us very much do not.

I am in the very much do not camp, but I did manage to find the time to actually read the thing that I suggested, scott crow's Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective, which was being very kindly given away by PM press in exchange for signing up for their newsletter.

The book and the giveaway had been brought to my attention by a comrade who thought it might be a timely read. The Common Ground Collective was a mutual aid group that was founded in the middle of the majority-black neighborhood of Algiers in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when the state and mainstream disaster orgs like the Red Cross were either nowhere to be found or causing more problems than they were alleviating.

The author, scott crow, is not from New Orleans. Before Katrina hit he was involved in campaigns to free political prisoners, which is how he knew some folks in New Orleans, including former Black Panther Malik Rahim. When the disaster hit, some of crow's contacts reached out and asked anybody available to come and bring supplies. Not too many people could, but crow and another friend bought a shitty little boat, loaded up a truck, and headed into the disaster.

The scenes of coming into immediate-aftermath New Orleans are really striking. scott crow's not a bad writer but I wouldn't necessarily call him a master prose stylist either, but his plain language works really well for these parts. The straightforward descriptions of the devastation, the bureaucratic incompetence, the police violence, and the various absurdities of the flood zone really do well to ground you in the sense of surreality that disaster sites always have. (I have not been in any disaster sites quite as disastrous or dangerous as Katrina, fortunately, but there is a vibe that crops up when, say, the snow is taller than you are.)

After some initial fuckery, the Collective comes together and some actual organizing gets going. This is an excellent look into how this sort of thing works--in some ways, it's the simplest thing in the world: stuff needs to get done, and some people start doing it instead of waiting for someone to do it for them. In other ways, it's incredibly complex and difficult: Doing stuff usually requires resources, and obtaining those resources in order to distribute them is quite difficult in the middle of a disaster zone in a society where most resources are hoarded by a small number of unconscionable bastards to start with. But people who can give give what they can, and people who can labor do what labor they can, and somehow some degree of material aid gets acquired and distributed and an organization is stone-souped into existence. One thing that was notable about Common Ground was that at several points it was able to scoop up material resources that had been brought into the area by other, less helpful bureaucratic bodies, who basically dumped them when they gave up pretending to be helpful.

Some aspects of the work of Common Ground are utterly unfamiliar to me--it's not a good idea to do armed patrols in Boston, and even Boston's shitty racists don't tend to dick around with armed vigilantism with great frequency either, and obviously the environment and type of disaster are quite different than anything I've had to work on. But there were also a lot of little moments of "Oh, I recognize that" that wouldn't have been the case five years ago, that made me realize a) how much the idea of Doing Anarchism (or socialism, or antifascism, or whatever) somehow always manages to sound more esoteric and exciting than it is, and b) how much stuff I've actually been involved in. But on the day-to-day level it really does tend to be a bunch of meetings and some spreadsheets and some shifts breaking down cardboard boxes in an old building with bits of paper taped up all over the walls, and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything that warrants fancy terms like "mutual aid" or whatever, but that's actually how it works. And I've been on projects where I had major admin roles that left my meeting and correspondence loads too heavy for me to do any of the hands-on main tasks, and I've been on other projects where I'm one of the people that shows up in X place at Y time and does task Z and then goes home. (Sometimes Task Z is just to sit quietly in a room for several hours and watch bureaucratic bullshit happen and then go to lunch, and we call that "court support," and it's absolutely mind-blowing and everyone should do it.) But anyway, I am being self-indulgent; I was on a bunch of calls this week but I've barely really done anything.

One thing I appreciated about this book was that it really showed what regular people doing things themselves can accomplish, without overstating how fucking hard it is to do even simple things collectively when you have few resources and the state is harassing you, especially when the need is seemingly endless. These sorts of projects are inspiring and important and remarkable and show that people really can do things themselves, but it's also very clear why they have not won yet and why the simple idea of "why don't we run society more like this" is so difficult to do.

This is largely because the book is a personal narrative and not a work of political theory, although if you spend enough time steeped in radical politics your personal narration tends to start going on about theory a bit. But the personal narrative does a great job of showing the praxis that comes out of that sort of theory, and humanizing ideas that can seem inaccessible because they come out of a way of thinking about stuff that isn't how most of us are taught to think about stuff. It also shows the psychological toll of being a an actual person and not a Big Damn Hero who winds up, through personal connections and a principled commitment to doing what you can, slogging through all sorts of dangerous bullshit and seeing and doing things you were never prepared to see or do until you did them. In particular, crow talks about the psychological effects of witnessing and defending against the racist violence that the neighborhood of Algiers constantly faced from both white vigilantes and official law enforcement and military personnel--violence that crow, as a white guy, was one of the folks in a relatively safer position to face off against directly. Again, I recognize some of the tricks he uses from my own experiences in community safety work, but turned up to 11--I've never had to use them in a situation where everyone has guns, and the presence of guns puts everything at a higher level of escalation. Which is not to say that I don't think the left should use them; it's quite clear the CGC would have been completely and absolutely fucked if they were unarmed.

Overall I am really glad I read this and can't wait to discuss it. There's a lot there that's really illuminating and applicable, especially in our current moment of organizing in a crisis, but it also definitely reminded me to take a deep breath and be thankful that at least all of Boston's physical infrastructure isn't falling apart any worse than it usually is right now, which is not usually the case with weather-related disasters. Obviously there are things that are horrible about the pandemic that aren't the case in other sorts of disasters, like trying to get shit done without being allowed to physically interact with people, but all in all it's nice that the city's not underwater.

Originally posted at It's mutual aid o'clock, baby.

[Kevin Meter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interview with scott crow on Left Eye on Books

* * *

Black Flags and Radical Relief Efforts in New Orleans: An Interview with scott crow

Author and activist scott crow

“Solidarity not Charity” is a way of feeding people while addressing the underlying problems that cause hunger. The way this manifested itself in Common Ground was to immediately deliver and render aid where the state had failed, and then to leave structures in place so communities can continue to rebuild themselves as they see fit.”

Interview by Stevie Peace & Kevin Van Meter

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina both federal and local authorities failed the population of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. As a result, relief efforts from various sectors of American society flowed south. One of the first and most spectacular and aggressive efforts was Common Ground Relief — formed by strands of the anti-globalization and anarchist movements. scott crow documents these struggles in “Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective”, recently released by PM Press. In this interview, Crow describes the process of becoming an author after being an organizer, reviews the history and myths of Common Ground and explores possible lessons for future progressive and radical organizing. Visit crow’s website at http://scottcrow.org/.

Can you speak to the writing process behind “Black Flags and Windmills” and your shift from an organizer to an author?

One word: difficult. I don’t consider myself a writer; and while I have written a few pieces over the years, it has mostly been out of necessity. From my arrival in New Orleans I took copious notes. Every time I would get moments to get away, I would take notes about organizing and creating an organization to deal with the disaster following Hurricane Katrina. Additionally, I wrote communiqués from just days after the storm and continued for three years. I went back to all of those writings and began turning them into chapters. On a personal level it was healing to write: I came back with post-traumatic stress, couldn’t function in society and felt like the ghost in the machine a lot. The writing actually helped me to relive those traumas in a different way, to really dissect them. It was almost a five-year process; I feel so much better now than I did when I started the book. This is not to say that “Black Flags and Windmills” is a sorrow-filled book. There are lots of beautiful stories along the way and lots of really engaging organizing that was going on. The book describes the anarchist heyday of Common Ground, when the most self-identified anarchists came; this was early September 2005 until 2008. Afterward, the organization became much more structured in a traditional nonprofit way. This is not to denigrate it — just to say that the book focuses on this initial period of “black flags” at Common Ground.

Since memory is a tricky thing, I did outside research and revisited with people. I went back to news articles from grassroots media, reports and blogs to look at specific events and the way things unfolded. Then, I would ask key organizers and New Orleans residents, “Do you remember when this thing happened?” Sometimes it was completely different from how I remembered it. I don’t claim to speak for Common Ground, as I think that would do a disservice to the thousands of people who participated and the hundreds of key organizers that were there.

When I tell a story I want people to understand it and create common bonds. I wrote this book for people who might not have any understanding about radical or anarchist concepts. I always ask myself, “What would my mom think about this?” While I wrote it for people like her, my target audience was those who were coming into movements and might be inspired by what Common Ground was building. I used the stories in the book to give a primer on the theoretical background of anarchism in practice. Another part of the book is telling my own personal narrative. It’s not because I think my story is important, but I wanted to show that I am a regular person that was just caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

Can you describe the work of the Common Ground Collective — as well as its guidelines of “solidarity not charity” — as it sought to stabilize and improve the lives of traumatized New Orleans residents?

Common Ground grew out of short-term relief efforts with a long-term vision. What we wanted to do was rebuild infrastructure that had collapsed before the storm — even decades before the storm — and also to build infrastructure that had never existed in certain communities. The idea was that we would then turn it all over to community members and they would develop it further than we ever could. We never went in with the idea that we were going to save all of these people; we wanted to build capacity for the community, to empower them to do things for themselves and to expand the things that they are already trying to do. There are tons of organizations that feed people, but it doesn’t solve the problems of why people are hungry. “Solidarity not Charity” is a way of feeding people while addressing the underlying problems that cause hunger. The way this manifested itself in Common Ground was to immediately deliver and render aid where the state had failed, and then to leave structures in place so communities can continue to rebuild themselves as they see fit. This involved medical clinics, women’s shelters, free schools, access to school supplies, basic things. It was basic service work; it’s only revolutionary in the way that we thought about it.

Can you trace out the early history of the organization, the initiatives it launched beyond the Algiers neighborhood into the devastated 8th and 9th wards, and other projects that developed?

When the levees failed and the flooding began, most of my friends hadn’t gotten out of New Orleans. One of them was Robert King – a former political prisoner who had been released in 2001, after being exonerated and held in solitary confinement for 29 years. He had lived through hurricanes all of his life so he decided to stay. Brandon Darby, a friend of mine at the time – he came out much later as a FBI informant, which is a whole other story – said, “Hey, maybe we should go find King; we can gather supplies and go do it.” It was a crazy idea. Once we were on the ground we could see the failure of the state and watched bureaucracies and government agencies fight over who was going to have access to search-and-rescue boats and how things were going to be administrated. As they were fighting, people were dying. I couldn’t stand it. They were more interested in restoring law and order then trying to help people, and it was heartbreaking. Then Malik Rahim, another friend of mine who’s a New Orleans resident and who used to be part of the Black Panther Party, called me and said, “Hey, we have these white vigilantes driving around and are threatening to kill me and my neighbors, and I need some support.” So we loaded up guns and ammo and some basic supplies and headed to Algiers, his neighborhood on the west bank of the river. While we were there, Brandon went across the river to look for King, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ended up finding King and brought him to Brandon. We were totally elated; I cried I was so happy. I thought King was dead as it had been almost nine days since we had heard from him. In the midst of all this, I floated the idea of forming a relief organization that would be based on the principles of the Black Panther Party, the Zapatistas and anarchism. So I went back to Austin to gather supplies and the first of the volunteers. Upon our return, two weeks after the storm had struck, we unfurled tarps and started Common Ground Relief.

In the early stages, there were very few of us and little money. We started with a few programs and kept adding more; every time we saw something that needed to be done we would just organize a program. Mayday DC, a housing rights organization, opened a first aid station at the mosque Malik attended, and then other organizations came and turned it into a full-scale medical clinic. We set up portable medical patrols in Algiers and other locations; there were Vietnamese, Cajun and First Nation communities that hadn’t seen any medical attention. There were programs to remove tree debris, clean gutters and tarp houses. We provided access to food and water and started armed patrols to fend off the militias. In a way, Common Ground functioned as an incubator and as a network that gave support to programs as they grew: the Rhubarb Bike Collective, Women’s Health Center, Legal Aid, eviction defense, replanting grass along the coastline, community gardens. Not all of these projects were successful, but many were and many succeeded for a long time. What mattered was that we went into areas where the state said we could not be. If they said we couldn’t be there but we found residents that needed support, we would defy them, and then do it over and over again.

How did the collective use existing organizations and networks to funnel volunteers and resources into its work?

These networks were instrumental in obtaining support and volunteers for Common Ground. Early on we knew that we were not going to work with the Red Cross or government agencies, especially with the state failing and police brutalizing residents. It was the networks that formed in the alter-globalization movement that brought in medical, logistics and communications people. The idea was to draw on these networks to create long-term support and infrastructure. Additionally, we were willing to work with any organization that wasn’t looking to take over or tell us what to do, because we were clear with our objectives and what we wanted to achieve. Without groups such as Veterans Against the War, Food Not Bombs and the Bay Area Radical Health Collective we would have been dead in the first week, as they provided support by letting people know what was happening and often were able to give material aid and money. Another key piece was that they were able to spread information about what was taking place in New Orleans. But it wasn’t just our voice; we were able to amplify many different voices from different communities in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region.

What limitations did the Common Ground Collective encounter, and in what ways did it seek to challenge and possibly overcome these limitations?

This organization grew in the middle of a disaster from basically nothing, using existing relationships and political organizing experience. So we didn’t have a long history as an organization and I think that plays into why getting access to funding was critically difficult at the very beginning. Additionally, volunteers would come in waves that we weren’t anticipating. During a Road Trip for Relief campaign that took place in November 2005, we went from under a hundred people to thousands. There wasn’t infrastructure to address basic needs: Where are people going to sleep? Where are they going to eat? How are we going to maintain people? These tensions were always chronic to the organization and so we devised methods along the way to reach out to the immediate neighborhoods we were working in. We would approach churches and community centers and offered to gut and clean their spaces if they let us use them to house volunteers, or as a distribution center.

Even with a horizontal structure, we had no clear delineation as to how to deal with this stuff and often projects operated completely autonomously from us. Some projects worked very hierarchically, with one person in charge; we didn’t have mechanisms for accountability or even simple reports on the successes and failures of those projects. From the beginning I wanted to create a culture focused on challenging oppression. Starting an amorphous organization from scratch and then having thousands of people arrive made this really difficult. In early December 2005 we started to have trainings with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and over the next year we trained over 5000 people, mostly middle-class white students, giving them their first introduction to anti-racist ideas. This was incorporated into orientations where we talked about the historically marginalized communities of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. These ideas were also present in the language that we used: we didn’t say “poor black communities” or “poor Vietnamese communities,” we used terms like marginalized communities or historically neglected communities. We didn’t want to essentialize these communities so we were very conscious of the narratives we told. Eventually an antiracist working group was formed to continue efforts to address oppression. Unfortunately, Common Ground created an informal hierarchy of oppression within the organization. Race was valued first, class as a distant second, at distant, distant third was gender, and off the map were sexual orientation, disability and other forms of oppression. This was reinforced because we didn’t have effective ways to combat it.

I want people to understand that crisis was everywhere; there was a “top 10” list but everything was number one. In this situation you can’t operate sustainably, so individuals in the organization faced huge burnout, as well as mental and physical stress. The idea of self-care and collective care was a failure at Common Ground. I think it got better as things calmed down, but in the first few years people operated with “emergency hearts,” so much that it was hard to make organizers and volunteers stop working. For a number of the long-term people, either it was the best experience of their lives or it was the worst experience of their lives. I think a lot of this depends on how they came in, how they were treated, what kind of power they had, and how they were taken care of while they were in New Orleans.

Concepts such as non-violence, solidarity, accountability, self-determination, privilege, leadership and anti-authoritarianism are often debated in a vacuum; in the work of Common Ground, these concepts collided with the realities of organizing. Can you describe some of the ways these ideas raised challenges when translated into the work of the collective?

In the book I touch on the question of language. I think it is important to have language that doesn’t box us in. I’m not just radical or an anarchist; I’m a father, a son, a neighbor, a worker, a Texan, and all of these identities are valid. Additionally, it’s important to talk about power. I use power with a capital “P” to describe illegitimate power or power over someone; and, taking again from the Zapatistas, there is power from below.

Let’s look at this another way. Imagine that in the first few years, 10,000 self-identified anarchists and anti-authoritarians came through Common Ground. Every person brought with them assumptions, not just about privilege and power, but also about what anarchism, solidarity, accountability, self-determination and leadership means. What I found is that there wasn’t a lot of understanding about these concepts in practice. What does it mean to be a horizontal organization? What does it mean to be a collective? These questions always created conflict between the organization and people that came. Some anarchists would show up and would expect to have full input and decision-making power over the organization. I found it really interesting that people didn’t ask, “What do these things mean to you as an organization?”

Post-Katrina New Orleans has been described as a “disaster within a disaster.” How do we address current and less spectacular disasters with an eye to preparing for future large-scale relief efforts and organizing?

I think that preparing for the future is the answer; we don’t need to look for the next disaster or the next crisis to organize. We cannot afford to be short-sighted when it comes to practical applications of long-term vision. We need to develop dual power: you have to resist on one hand, and you have to build and create on the other hand. What I would like to do is get people to really think about 20-year, 30-year and 50-year futures. If we protest day in and day out, we squander our energy and limited resources to build long-term capacity and power. I am proposing that we build our own power all the time, and that we save resistance for when it’s really, really important and has dramatic, incredible and far-reaching effects. We should look at movements as having multiple points of intersection; it takes all kinds of things to make changes happen, and people come into movements for all different reasons. We need to make our mirror reflection bigger than ourselves, and we have to meet people where they are. This is a longer conversation that we are not going to wrap up in this one question, but I think these are key pieces. As I often put it, “Dream a future. Know our history. Organize ourselves. Fight to win.”

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-meaning though rambling recollection of an anarchist mutual aid collective in post-levee New Orleans. I wish the author had delved more into the concrete details of *how* the collective was set up; *how* administrative tasks were distributed; *how* a crew of white strangers made connections with the locals; *how* internal conflicts were resolved; etc. I don't know if crow wrote about those issues so abstractly because every response must arise from its particular conditions and we shouldn't take this as a recipe, etc, or because putting in 100 hours a week saving one of the oldest cities in America from its own government is an exhausting nightmare and it's hard to take notes. Either way, I found myself skimming.

[Tinea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another wonderful one that deserves a full review, and maybe a blog post-- I was there for some of this, I know many characters, I really appreciated scott's thoughtful but forceful narrative-shaping, and I'm embarking on my most intimidating international disaster relief project yet while reflecting on the anarchist, survivor-driven processes of this amazing and at times troubled organization back home. Perhaps I can make time for book reviewing during my upcoming 60+ hours of airplane/airport travel?

[William Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a newbie into the political realm of anarchism (and doing research on it for my novels) I came across this book by scott crow. I must say, this is an excellent treatise into not only how anarchism functions in real time, but has real world value, as opposed to the violent minority and large scale opposers who have given it a bad name. Common Ground Collective sounds like a ray of sunshine piercing through the abandoned home of government corruption, economic blight and human selfishness so pervasive these days. I'm glad I read it, and I can say I agree with (and always have agreed with I found out) many of the thoughts laid out by wavers of black flags worldwide. People as equals. Working together. The removal of hierarchies. Equality. Work hard and work well and work for others. A brilliant encapsulation of your struggles and others, Mister crow. I shall look forward to reading your other tomes. Everybody else, get a copy. And take notes.

[rrroman · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Черные флаги и ветряные мельницы" произвели на меня неоднозначное впечатление. Начало книги было многообещающим, интригующие события и яркие образы сразу же захватили мое внимание. Однако, по мере чтения, я все больше терялся в лабиринте событий и образов. Сюжет постоянно скакал с одного события на другое, не позволяя мне погрузиться в историю. Внезапное появление истории пантер совершенно выбило меня из колеи, так как я не увидел связи этого эпизода с основной сюжетной линией.

В итоге, я так и не смог понять, к чему автор хотел меня привести. Отсутствие ясной структуры и цели повествования создало ощущение недосказанности и разочарования.

[Rainy · Rating 3 out of 5]

That was certainly… something. There were so many nonsequitors and rambling asides that I could barely get through it, and any message was lost. Well, I guess the message of “help each other” showed up. I was expecting better out of this book

[Jay Bay Bay · Rating 5 out of 5]

🖤

[PhattandyPDX · Rating 5 out of 5]

Support for people in New Orleans while the Bush administration failed.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging story of hope and radical change in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In a few hundred pages, activist scott crow takes the reader through the origins and growth of the Common Ground Collective, an anarchist direct service group that arose in the West Bank of New Orleans. Along the way, we see the horrors of the hurricane's aftermath, we see scott in over his head as he searches for his friend and faces down white racist militias with his friends, we see the failure of huge, better-funded organizations like the Red Cross and FEMA, the aggression of police and soldiers, and the creation of a radical answer to crisis situations.

This book is extremely accessible, even if you aren't very familiar with language used by many US anarchists - crow includes definitions of some radical terms he uses, and does a good job of providing some analysis while he relates his experiences. A fair portion of the last part of the book is used as an overview of what Common Ground was able to accomplish and some of the challenges it faced. At the same time, the heart of this book isn't analysis, but a personal narrative for a public audience. The book is light on critique of Common Ground, so if you're looking for that, look elsewhere. I walk away from this book with some inspiration for what radical projects could look like and some of the lessons learned by crow and his friends, but moreso, I was moved by the capacity an individual has for creating change in the face of extreme difficulty.

[Kirby · Rating 4 out of 5]

It may not touch on all of the important tenets of anarchy, but it certainly gives one some perspective on the state's overwhelming failures and atrocities. Most specifically this books talks about the state's actions during the events following hurricane Katrina and how a non-coercive group of people saved and improved a community by breaking laws and actually working together. A very poignant argument against statism and a heartwarming story about direct action, friendship and the spirit of community.

[Marc Lucke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most vivid memoir of post-Katrina reconstruction I've read and an amazing story of anarchism in action. Both terrifying and inspiring, it shows a totally different perspective than what's been reported in the major (and minor) news outlets. It's a bit muddled at the beginning, but everything falls into place eventually. Great reading now that we have a (little) historical perspective on the hurricane.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"'Twas like where you're from weren't never there. Where you're going doesn't matter. And where you are ain't no good unless you can get away from it!"

"Para todos todo, para nosotros nada."

"Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos."

"Solidarity Not Charity."

"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories."

[Sam Kroll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seriously a good read, a part of the story i never heard about. I knew how the govt failed the communities of New Orleans, but i never knew there was a rising organization there on ground zero trying to build it back up, co operated by incomers and locals. Sometimes it's a little hard to keep going thru, but still would recommend for others to read.

[Jess Kant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a solid start to explaining some of the circumstances and tactics that led to the formation of the collective. Crow writes passionately and attempts to cover a nearly inconceivable amount of territory with this book.

[Soph Nova · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book floats between telling the story of the Common Ground Collective, scott crow's personal reflections/life story, and digging in to movement histories and strategies. It's an intense, moving narrative that really does show the promise of how to put a radical vision into practice.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspiring account of the growth of informally organized community in the wake of disaster. A representation of anarchist organizing principles in action.

[K. Zhou · Rating 5 out of 5]

shows what world is possible through communal efforts in face of brutal state indifference