Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.06.2009, Qupperneq 18

18
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 7 — 2009
AN INTRODUCTION TO ANARCHISM IN REYKJAVÍK:
THE ‘GROUP,’ THE MOTIVE, THE GOAL
Text By: Catharine Fulton, Photos By: Páll Hilmarsson
A IS FOR
ANARCHY
“I don’t like being interviewed,” said Njáll with a
sceptical air about his furrowed brow.
Shit, I thought. This isn’t going to be easy.
He let out a long, slow sigh, looking toward the
group of young people who moments earlier had
refused to speak with me, referring me instead to
the young man who was himself now on the verge
of refusal. “Fine. I have a few minutes.”
Standing in Lækjartorg on a particularly windy
Saturday, the tall young man, dressed in earth
tones, with an unruly head of sandy hair and a
kind smile – in stark contrast to his peers who had
a clear penchant for piercings, studded leather
and hair dye – watched as people idled up to the
white plastic pails on the folding table he manned
and help themselves to the vegan food therein.
Njáll explained how Food Not Bombs came to be a
weekend staple in Reykjavík just about a year ago,
after an American friend implored him to help
launch a program modelled after that which had
been running in Boston since the 1980’s. For the
past year an ever-changing group of supporters
amass in a private Reykjavík residence at 10 a.m.
every Saturday to prepare vegan dishes from near-
expired food that would otherwise be thrown
away.
“We noticed for a long time there was a lot of
over consumption in Iceland. The average Icelander
is a very wasteful person and the companies are not
making it any better,” the young man espoused.
“We thought it would be a great community project
to give the stupid lifestyle consumer people here a big
fuck-you and serve this ‘unhygienic’ food here on the
street to show other people and ourselves that food is
not supposed to be a luxury that only the privileged
can afford.
Njáll is an anarchist; he said so himself.
What I heard in the windy square about Food
Not Bombs was expected. It’s a well-known
initiative and the anti-consumer sentiment that
Njáll expressed was commonplace among some
others of his kind that I had spoken with. But then
the brow furrowed once more and through his lips
passed words that I did not expect whatsoever.
“I wasn’t very interested in the protests [of last
autumn and winter] because I found them very
shallow, only about money.”
Did he just say that? He’s not interested in
the now infamous pots-and-pans revolution that
brought down the corrupt Icelandic government?
He thinks the movement that headlines the Iceland
portion of the weekly “news and comments from
the anarchists” distributed by Anarchy.no was
shallow? What kind of anarchist is he?
“I feel that most people just wanted the profit
to come pouring back in and they were protesting
against the government for not bringing it to them,”
he explained. “But that’s not something someone can
bring to you.”
But, Njáll is an anarchist! As such, he should
be championing the great success of the protests.
It was, after all, his fellow anarchists who were
pivotal players in commencing the citizens’
movement against the government. They had
foreseen the grim future in every highly inf lated
currency trade made and in every square
centimetre of highlands f looded. They taught
the common folk how to resist, how to engage in
civil disobedience – local anarchist Siggi Pönk’s
own book on direct action and civil disobedience
appears a great success. Once the government had
toppled, they persisted and squatted a house on
Vatnsstígur to stick it to the capitalistic man that
survived the regime change. In fact, they did that
three times for posterity’s sake.
If Njáll is a card-carrying member of this socially
active group – he did openly call himself an
anarchist, after all – he should subscribe to
the same ideals, support the same initiatives
and applaud the same means and ends without
question. Or should he?
Let’s start at the beginning, often a good place
to start
Before you can understand Njáll and the people
calling themselves ‘anarchists’ in and around
Reykjavík you first must understand the basics of
what anarchism is and where it comes from. Firstly,
anarchism is political in nature and considers the
state, the man, hierarchy, compulsory government,
etc. to be a scourge on society, entirely unnecessary
and harmful to the people within society. I got
the feeling early on that journalists, however
young and sympathetic to “the cause”, seem to be
grouped in among those not to be trusted – the
analogy of a tree falling in the woods making or
not making a sound if nobody is around was given
to explain that grassroots initiatives will happen
with or without journalists, so we’re really not all
that important. I’m expendable. Ouch.
“Community functions better when it has to take
responsibility for itself, when we don’t trust on the state
institutions for earning things,” clarifies Siggi Pönk.
“To quote an old anarchist: ‘freedom is the mother of
order.’ We have to be free, we have to organise, and if
you look at anthropology you’ll see this is a natural
phenomenon in all societies or communities. There
is a social order through sanctions. Through negative
and positive actions we learn how to behave. So we
innately know how to behave within community.”
Historically, anarchist-like thought has been
prevalent in the settlement of nations (primarily
agricultural nations, like Iceland) and in Eastern
philosophical thought, like that of Lao Tse in his
Daodejing. Modern anarchist philosophy has its
roots in post-enlightenment thought and has been
attributed to William Godwin, who repurposed the
negative term to stand for progressive economical
and political concepts that are still attached to
anarchism today. This is not to say that there
is one train of anarchist thought, as anarchist
beliefs differ greatly from one subscriber to the
next. Some anarchists purport individualism,
while others champion collectivism; some
adopt communist thought and still others have
libertarian tendencies.
Siggi Pönk, for example, chooses to pick and
choose theories from a wide range of anarchist
thought to create a lifestyle that suits him best.
“If you want to change
something don’t just get
somebody who is higher up
than you to change it, get
out on the fucking street and
change it yourself in some
way. Start working for your
community rather than begging
somebody else to work for your
community.”