For my photo story, I chose to highlight the Really Really Free Market in Corvallis. The market is what it's name says it is: everything displayed is 100% free. You can take as much as you need, and donate as much as you can, although the latter isn't required. The one big rule is that no one is allowed to bring money. Below is a wide-angle shot of what it looks like in less-than-ideal weather.
The Really Really Free Market in Corvallis is held in Central Park every Friday from 1-4 pm. This specific photograph shows the market on December 1st, 2023 at around 1:30 in the afternoon. Two of the market's primary organizers, Amethyst O'Connor (24) and Riva Daley (23), chat off to the side.
So what is the Really Really Free Market? In O'Connor's own words, "The free market is a foundation for people to get into mutual aid and general leftist organizing. We're not a charity, we're not a nonprofit, and we don't want to be." According to him, this is because "there's a lot of things that stifle organizing in those models" - things that might work for other groups, but that they want to avoid.
"Everything we do here is inherently political," O'Connor says. "There's conversations, there's zines, there's fucking, like, actions - there's a myriad of things, and it's all connected with the local organizing scene here in Corvallis." Or, in other words: "It's almost never just giving shit away - there's layers to this shit."
He then goes on to name Stop the Sweeps Corvallis, Sunrise Corvallis, Corvallis Antifascists, and Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) Corvallis as some of the groups they're connected with who are also working to foster mutual aid and political action in the area, as well as several Palestinian liberation groups.
"It's fucking turned into, like, a family situation," Riva muses. "It feels like [it's] extrapolating outwards from this point where like the free market is, like, the base level, and then if you just apply a lot of the principles that you see here out into your life and out into your friends' lives and stuff, it kind of builds that sense of community."
The RRFM in Corvallis began relatively recently, in April of 2021. However, the first thing to call itself a Really Really Free Market was in 2013 in Anaheim, California, Daley says. "The practice has been going on for decades," O'Connor clarifies. The Occupy movement in the early 2000s he points out as a prime example, specifically Occupy Wall Street; he also mentions the Black Panthers' distribution program in the 1960s, the big exchange fairs organized by different anarchist groups in big cities like Chicago in the early 20th century, and Seattle's long history of doing mutual aid. "Once you get the label down, you can kinda see it where you see it," he explains.
The RRFM is just as much a place to eat snacks and hang out with friends as it is a source of resources for many unhoused and/or low-income individuals. In the above photograph, Manny Borjas (center) jokingly accuses me of sneaking around with my camera. Tyler Nimchuk (right) is nicknamed "Gary" because "he looked like a Gary" when he got out of prison (i.e., when he had a mullet and a moustache), according to his friends Manny and Alex. On the left, Stevie Miller looks on with amusement.
With Manny Borjas' gleeful assistance, a man identified only as "Noodle" shows off the graphic on his shirt to further convince me of his love for noodles, already apparent from his nickname. As it turns out, Noodle obtained the shirt from this very Free Market.
Christina Abram shows off a pair of pants that she stumbled upon while looking through the bins of clothing for something to wear to an interview. She is especially excited - even offering to pose for a photograph - because the pants are brand new and still attached to the tag.
Trevor Harris, a RRFM regular, tries on a scarf he found in one of the bins full of winter clothing.
