In the days after the Alternative bookshop's closing,
after being
open since 1973 as an anarchist bookshop in Montreal, I
felt it
appropriate, as a collective member of 10 months, to
express publicly how
I fell about our bookshop, its collective, and the
AEELI which runs the
building.

A few things I learned working at the Alternative
Bookshop

In the days after the Alternative bookshop's closing,
after being
open since 1973 as an anarchist bookshop in Montreal, I
felt it
appropriate, as a collective member of 10 months, to
express publicly how
I fell about our bookshop, its collective, and the
AEELI which runs the
building.

An important first disclaimer is that this is a
personal statement and
that I am not speaking on behalf of the entire bookshop
collective.

Throughout this statement, I may use the AEELI and the
Libertarian
Distributors interchangeably. This is for good reason,
because the
current AEELI is composed of many members of the
Libertarian Distributors,
and hence they carry many of the same views towards the
Alternative
Bookshop.

Also, I am painfully aware that I am writing this in
English (a french version of this message was also
circulated). I am also aware that I will probably be
called a colonizer for doing so. Such
attempts are a method of side-tracking the ongoing
conflict from its real
focus (which is often a power-grab over resources) and
it's a regression
to mud-slinging which has also characterized this
conflict. Let us
remember that as anglophones and francophones, we both
speak colonial
languages, so perhaps none of us can refute the label
of colonizer.

On the subject of labels, I thought it necessary to
respond to a criticism of the AEELI concerning our most
recent public statement. In this statement our
collective wrote;

"Whereas our revolutionary potential has been sucked
dry by the
capitalists and cops masquerading as anarchists in the
AEELI"

Many people, in Montreal and elsewhere, have asked that
we clafify this point. We weren't correct in saying
theat the AEELI is a collective made up of capitalists
and cops. The AEELI and LD are large coalitions, and
there are certainly members in there I respect. No one
should say things which attempt to characterize all
members of a collecitve under one banner. For myself,
we weren't trying to say that there are real
capitalists and cops (SPVM, CSIS, whatever) in the
AEELI, but that the behaviour of many individuals in
the AEELI towards our collective was of an
authoritarian, hard-fisted manner which instilled an
atmosphere of their contro over us. The use of the
words "capitalists" and "cops", according to myself,
was a metaphor, and one that I would take back. That
is not to say that I can accept what has happened.

I am also aware that I am writing this statement from
the perspective
viewpoint of a white male, so it may not capture some
of the feelings my
sisters and brother of colour have probably felt over
the last year in
dealing painfully with an AEELI composed of many
outspoken white males.

I feel so much of this conflict revolves around
identity politics.

To begin, we have been accused by our boycotters, the
coalition of
libertarian distributors, as being a bookshop which
represents, I quote
from one of their previous statements an “unhealthy
ideological drift