The Revolution of Everyday Life

It's midnight on Saturday, May 20, in the parking lot of a natural-foods supermarket on the Eastside, and two of the members of the Emma Goldman Finishing School (egfs.org), a 10-year-old, 10-member commune on Beacon Hill, are doing their weekly food shopping. Emma's Sasha Berkman (not his real name), 32, who co-founded and works for a nonprofit computer collective, is inside the supermarket Dumpster methodically going through the bags of garbage. An intensely skinny man who suffers from Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestinal tract, Berkman is wearing gloves with blue rubber palms and cotton backing and carries a non-battery-operated flashlight that requires frequent noisy cranking to work. The Dumpster stinks. As Berkman sorts through the garbage, the sound of glass breaking reverberates off of the Dumpster's metallic walls. He starts handing out treasures to another of Emma's members, Thea Schnase, 25, and a houseguest from Canada, who are standing next to the Dumpster dressed in beat-up work clothes. First he passes out jars of curry sauce. Next comes cooked butternut squash in a microwaveable bag, then a plastic container of muffins, apples, and pints of organic strawberries. "Ooooh! Smoothies!" says Schnase enthusiastically.

There is a lot of noise and activity from the store's maintenance area, which is behind a chain-link fence next to the parking lot. "What are these people doing working at midnight on a Saturday? We should protest!" says Berkman. "If they come out, you can leave me."

Shortly, three supermarket workers—two young men and a young woman—walk out carrying more bags of garbage. Berkman disappears into the back of the Dumpster and stops moving. Schnase tries to act casually and greets the supermarket workers with a friendly hello.

The young female worker seems genuinely confused. "May I ask what you are doing?" she asks.

The Canadian houseguest answers in a timid voice, "Dumpstering."

One of the young male workers gets upset. "You are not supposed to be doing this. It's not particularly legal."

The young woman says, "There is broken glass!"

Schnase, who deals with lots of explosive situations at her job at a social service agency, puts on a very reassuring tone. "We are being very careful," she says.

Apparently satisfied, the workers toss their garbage bags into the Dumpster and return to the supermarket. The three Dumpster divers finish up quickly and get back into Emma's 1992 biodiesel VW Jetta.

"That Dumpster is usually a lot more productive," complains Berkman. He counsels the others on how to deal with supermarket workers: "In the future, we should say we are graduate students conducting a study on waste."

DIY Revolution

Commune members gather for their weekly house meeting. Coming to consensus can be hard work.

Rex Rystedt

The Dumpster revolution will not be televised. Unlike Seattle in 1999, there will be no dramatic shots of young people in black, their faces hidden by bandanas, heaving newspaper boxes through Starbucks' windows while the secretary of state seethes in her hotel room unable to get through the tear gas to meetings of the World Trade Organization. Instead, Emma's members are organizing their daily lives to provide a rebuke and an alternative to current American cultural norms. The most colorful aspect of this experiment is Dumpster diving, but to them it's probably the least important. Much more of their time and energy is spent in hours of meetings where they carefully construct consensus about many aspects of their communal existence. Berkman, whose work involves supporting radical movements in Third World countries where death threats are not uncommon, and who therefore asked Seattle Weekly to use a pseudonym, explains the idea behind the commune's practice. "The theory is: Revolution is not the moment that you seize power. The revolution is the building of day-to-day alternative systems and structures."

This approach to revolution is not new. The 19th century was filled with utopian communities that sought alternatives to the emergence of industrial capitalism. More recently, the commune movement of the 1960s experimented with different living and working arrangements as a "counterculture" to mainstream society.

While Emma's members are respectful of the past, they're trying to learn from its failures. For instance, Berkman believes that the debauched life of heavy drug use and casual sex associated with the '60s contributed to the movement's downfall. This gives Emma's a puritanical feel. The ironically named "finishing school" forbids the use of illegal drugs, for instance. And let's get a common misconception out of the way: There's no "free love" at Emma's house. The members are in fact somewhat conventional in personal terms; the commune consists of three long-term, monogamous, heterosexual couples and four single people.

What distinguishes Emma's commune is, first of all, location, location, location—most places like Emma's in America are rural (see the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, thefec.org). Emma's is literally a stone's throw from the head- quarters of Amazon.com on Beacon Hill. The two institutions represent polar- opposite approaches to the dilemmas of the 21st century. Amazon.com is the latest manifestation of capitalism's revolutionary nature, where vast computer networks carry consumer-based society to new heights. Emma's is a tiny grassroots revolution that refuses to die; it has survived for 10 years and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. While millions click and buy, Emma's stubbornly and quietly advocates an entirely different way of life. Emma's is dedicated to the creation of a society free of capitalism, patriarchy, atomized individualism, and hierarchy.