The collectively operated bookstores examined in this research paper offer compelling,
concrete, and actually existing examples of non-capitalist practices and relational forms
located within the negotiated interstices of capitalist modernity, which thereby retain a
significant degree of autonomy from both capitalist and state forms. Indeed, radical
bookstores have a long history as important sites for community-based organizing and
empowerment that have accompanied many radical movements.

Five case studies are presented in this paper, only one of which is organized in
accordance with a worker’s co-operative model. The Modern Times Bookstore in San
Francisco is owned and operated completely by its workers. The Bound Together
Bookstore in San Francisco is a collectively operated bookstore that has adopted a nonprofit and volunteer-run model. Two further cases are examples of “infoshops.” One is
the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley CA; the second is the Shamrock House Infoshop,
which flourished for several years in the late 1990s before having to close its doors in
2002. The final example is Camas Bookstore and Infoshop in Victoria BC, in which the
author was personally involved in founding.

In the conclusion, the author discusses a number of underlying challenges, tensions, and
questions with which each of these projects had to contend, and how these tensions are
mediated differently through each of the model.