Of friends

A radical social experiment on Moray Pl has kai and connection at its heart. reports.

Aguy walks into Yours cafe in Moray Pl. He’s got kind of antiestablishment hair and an air of sideways about him. Turns out he’s a poet. What he wants to know is whether he and his fellow poets can meet there, at Yours.

‘‘Looking at your website, your values kind of fit,’’ he says.

So, what he didn’t say was,

‘‘I’ve heard you make your own nut milk’’, or ‘‘people talk highly of your friands’’, or even ‘‘you appear to have the right number of chairs’’.

No, he said ‘‘your values kind of fit’’.

Here’s what it says on the

Yours website about those values: ‘‘Yours is a workerowned and managed cafe/venue that imagines a better food system and provides space for radical action, music, art and cooperation.’’

It also introduces the cafe as a real world expression of O¯ tepoti Possibilities Cooperative (O¯ PCo), which is ‘‘organising to explore possibilities for a postcapitalist future’’.

Go to the O¯ PCo page and it says ‘‘We’re waving the black flag’’.

They are anarchists, Yours is anarchist. Not Sex Pistolstype anarchists — though ‘‘Be Gay, Do Crimes’’ is painted on the floor — but proper critical thinkers, manifesto drafters and propagandists by the deed. Their deed being a cafe.

In the end, the poets are meeting elsewhere this year — down at the Athenaeum, if you’re interested — but the fact remains, the Yours values, the O¯ PCo view of the world resonated. Is resonating.

Yours cooperative member Carl Naus was on hand to field the poet’s inquiry — which immediately ran into difficulty because their preference was for an evening already allocated to the O¯ PCo film club — and says his impression is that there are a lot of people out there interested in or searching for alternatives to our society’s prevailing values, modus operandi and outcomes.

That would include capitalism (rentier and otherwise) certainly, the prison industrial complex, obviously, and climate collapse, necessarily. But that’s by no means exhaustive.

‘‘There are a lot of people like myself, and other members of the cooperative, who are really into reading books about this kind of stuff and understanding all the theory and trying to understand why we are where we are and understand the power that shapes that,’’ Naus says.

‘‘I think there are a lot of other people who just feel it. They feel that something is wrong.’’

Naus finishes his sentence, then has a dread feeling himself. He has some baking in the Yours oven and needs to check it. Insightful social commentary is all very well, but you don’t want to overcook stuff.

On his return, he says he was himself there once, when he was younger, unable to articulate that unease.

‘‘I didn’t understand the system or that there were other possibilities, but understood that something was deeply wrong.’’

It’s a serious assessment.

Naus is a serious person. Serious but friendly, his Guevara (or perhaps more properly Malatesta) good looks regularly bisected by a wide smile that seems to stand guard against any didactic tendencies.

The venue’s doing the same balancing act. Serious but friendly.

Serious about sourcing its food ethically, sustainability — they began making their hummus out of split peas because they could be sure of where they were grown and how they were grown, and they’re happy to use food that ‘‘capital has lost interest in’’.

Serious about a different sort of relationship with the people who might elsewhere be referred to as customers — there is no fixed price for food and drink. Indeed, you can pay in kind.

But also just explicitly, inclusively, gregariously, friendly.

Which helps explain the carnival colour scheme inside, a riotous palette of ideas, motifs and hues handpainted across the floor and up the walls.

‘‘We tried to make sure it didn’t seem aggressive, because people have this notion of anarchists as crazy people who light fires and stuff,’’ Naus says.

Aucklandraised Naus’ background helps explain where some of this politics is coming from, the determination to try something different.

His entry into political organising was around climate change, as a founding member of the big smoke’s branch of 350.org,

Sol Parsons performs barista duties.

then took in protests against the New Zealand Defence Industry Association’s annual forum — regarded by Naus and others as a ‘‘weapons expo’’.

‘‘We blockaded them year after year to the point where they stopped,’’ he says.

❜

— Carl Naus

However, a constant of those involvements was the struggle to find places to meet, or hold trainings.

‘‘We would use the trades hall building or a library building . . . we never had somewhere to go after an action and coalesce.

Somewhere safe. In fact, one time at an Auckland Peace Action meeting we got kicked out of this space halfway through a meeting.’’

It’s hoped Yours can help fill that sort of gap here.

‘‘I think in creating what you might call a radical space, that’s what we might call this space, it is not just creating that space but maintaining a vibe that is both true to its values but is also inclusive of people.’’

The traditionally anarchist bit about how this all works is the worker cooperative nature of it.

No bosses and a commitment to sharing what’s produced, each according to their needs kind of style. The belief is that those doing the work are in the best position to make decisions about it.

In the kitchen, another of the cooperative’s members, Jack Brazil, has an apron on and dry ingredients assembled, because

The cafe’s carnival colour scheme tells its own story. there’s no vibe without food.

He says manaakitaka, hospitality, is central to what they are doing.

‘‘The fundamental act of feeding someone is, like, ‘I care about your survival, I want to nourish you’. You are being looked after,’’ he says.

Both Brazil and Naus compare the connected way in which they are working and the connections Yours is attempting to build with the atomising and individualistic nature of Western capitalism, a system they say has no solutions for the many problems it causes.

Here’s where the practical work of running their cafe, music venue, meeting space and salon, meets the theory, and where the work of late anarchist anthropologist and activist David Graeber is influential, in particular, his recent book The Dawn of Everything.

It’s a solid volume, sifting through tens of millennia of human history, but there are a couple of central underpinning themes.

One is the idea of schismogenesis, the other is the freedoms that are necessary to keep people free.

Schismogenesis describes people’s tendency to define themselves in opposition to someone or something else. So, for example, capitalism is currently failing to feed or house people — witness the cost of living crisis, spiralling rents and homelessness — so defining yourself in opposition to that starts to look pretty good.

The freedoms Graeber talks about are the freedom to walk away, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to shape entirely new social realities.

I think there are a lot of other people who just feel it. They feel that something is wrong