Recreate '68 Plans to Do Just That

Standing near the industrial-sized kitchen, Stavropoulos watched visitors as they separated their potluck waste into designated recycling and compost bags. The overarching theme for Woodbine, he said, was to create a community free of the colonialist structure of hierarchy and domination.

"How do we all learn to live with each other in this place?" he asked, adding that he hoped Woodbine would serve as a model of the type of interpersonal, environmentally balanced society that's possible, if only on a small scale.

An old jeep painted with the classic anarchist circle-A symbol was parked outside the building. Although it has dozens of intellectual schools and mutant offshoots, anarchism essentially holds that the ills of societies can be blamed on people who have power imposing their will on people who don't have power. If economists look at the world as a system of capitalist market forces, anarchists see the world as a system of power forces that oppress workers, minorities, poor people and others. Power should be held by a collective, they say, not by an individual or a government.

But to be the owner of a large property like Woodbine, where people live and work, is to have power. And that put anarchist Stavropoulos in an awkward position.

Activists repeatedly assert that Woodbine is a project separate from the Transform Columbus Day Alliance, which is separate from R-68. But the three efforts involve several of the same principal players and pull from the same stable of supporters. Morris, for example, is a leader in Woodbine and TCD, but not R-68. The Cohens are main organizers for R-68 and TCD, but not Woodbine. Spagnuolo has been a top dog in all three — and as the most vocal member of a group that's gotten attention through sheer vocalness, he's become the de facto representative of all potential DNC protesters.

R-68 has met with representatives of the DPD, the Mayor's Office and the FBI. This past June, it found a surprise supporter in then-District 7 City Councilwoman Kathleen Mackenzie. She worked with the group to draft a proposed proclamation that called for the city to respect the rights of protesters during the DNC by issuing parade permits promptly, minimizing police use of pepper spray and horses, allowing protests near the convention center, and restricting the use of four-sided barricades to pen in demonstrators.

These points were not arbitrary. R-68's aggressive public efforts are based on concerns raised by treatment of protesters at the 2004 Republican and Democratic national conventions. In New York, where the RNC was held, police rounded up thousands of protesters in the week before the convention and housed them in a bus terminal for days with little food and water. The NYPD also spied broadly on protest groups, even embedding undercover officers. At the DNC in Boston, protesters were relegated to what officials dubbed "free-speech zones" — protest pens. Spagnuolo was there, and says the area was located beneath overhead rail tracks, closed off by a ten-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire, and surrounded by police.

Federal law-enforcement agencies were doing their own reconnaissance. Before the 2004 conventions, the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, working in conjunction with local law enforcement, had questioned political demonstrators across the country in an effort to forestall potential trouble. In Denver, they showed up at the door of the Derailer Bike Collective — a group of young activists who provide free bikes and bike services to children and the homeless — dressed in full SWAT gear. To Mark Silverstein of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the tactic seemed designed to intimidate activists and definitely violated Denver's spy-file agreement made the year before. That fall, he worked with ACLU offices in other states to file a joint request for information that revealed the feds had been keeping detailed files on this younger generation of activists.

R-68 organizers assume they're being watched by police at any given moment. So at the beginning of open-door planning meetings, Spagnuolo will often note that "it's probably pretty likely that someone in this room is an undercover cop." That's why R-68 made the preemptive move to push the city into an open discussion about protest policies during the DNC.

But other councilmembers thought Mackenzie's proclamation went too far, too fast. The city had no business bargaining with protest groups that vow to "party in the streets" while hamstringing police from using every appropriate means necessary to maintain order, they said. Corporate leaders hinted that if the proclamation passed, they might be reluctant to ante up the $40 million in donations that the city needs to host the convention. Council chairman Michael Hancock — who'd spoken at an anti-Columbus day event in 2001, back when he was a community organizer — yanked the proposal before it could be debated.