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CrimethInc


Guest fr8lover

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Guest fr8lover

i just donated 10 bones and got about 4 great zines, stickers, flyers, newsletters and EVASION and DAYS OF WAR, NIGHTS OF LOVE in a nice box.

 

i read this zine called DROPPING OUT, this girl drops out of high school and writes about how you can live off the fat of the land and hoptrains/hitch and do whatever you want and steal to get by. interesting read.

 

DIY GUIDE II was fresh too, everything from how to hop trains, shoplifting and even a do-it-yourself herbal abortion pill (this was the only thing that kinda weirded me out heh).

 

now im reading EVASION and i can already tell ill read this book in a matter of a day or two it is a great narrative about living the free "anti-capitalist" lifestyle.

 

even though im a big chicken and probably wont go to these lengths to be "free," it is a great read and a chance for every suburban ock like myself to escape the clutches of money and greed through others.

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the whole crimethink deal (including evasion) is pretty rad, and i will admit it changed the way i view some things, but the longer they're around the less i respect them... they really blew up when they released the collected evasions... ever since then there's been more and more people and their zines talking about how they're so alternative and subversive... they all write with the same style that evasion made popular and they all portray the exact same mentality and morals... i definately don't bathe on any regular basis, but if i hear the words "i don't believe in following other people's standards of cleanliness" i'm gonna hit someone...

 

the other thing that bugs the shit out of me is that while i whole-heartedly support theft, i support theft from large companies and corporations! the crimethinc kids not only don't speak against it, but they have admitted to stealing a car to fund publishing a zine, and ran a contest which involved breaking several individual's houses... that gets a big fuck that from me...

 

but anyways, good score...

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Been There

 

I got into a big argument about this already on here, so I won't do it again, but I'd like to point out that I was into all this same shit (except for shoplifting and stealing) IN 1969.

 

It makes me laugh. How many times are we going to re-invent the wheel? Anarchism dates from 1866. Anarcho-syndicalism in the form we see today, from about 1920. The IWW from 1905. The International Working Men's Association (just the name ought to tell you how old this outfit is) dates from the first International and the split between Karl Marx & Fredrich Engels and Mikhail Bakunin.

 

The ideas put forth by Crimethinc.com have been discredited since well before 1940. What's next? Bismarckism? How about something really new and untried? I don't think petty theft and vandalism is going to be a lifestyle with currency and staying power. Anybody remember Situationism? From the '70s/ early '80s? Weatherman Underground Organization? I didn't think so. They thought they were hot shit on a stick back in those days.

 

Rudy the Red? Bernadine Rae Dohrn? Bill Ayers? Kathy Boudin? David Gilbert? Jeff Jones? Susan Rosenberg? Silas Bissell? (ever bought a vacuum cleaner?) Linda Evans? Ted Gold? Diana Oughton? Terry Robbins? No? Use your browser, it's an interesting story. Sort of.

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Guest fr8lover

LOOK, i didnt get this stuff to do a 180 and change my life, i got it for some interesting reading material. im in no way a radical, and some of the stuff said i find funny instead of motivational. nevertheless, ive so far enjoyed reading the material and it has passed the time. THATS what i got it for.

 

jesus you guys...

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harbinger is an awesome paper. i liked days of war nights of love alot and evasive was good as well. i agree with siege to a degree but at the same time the idea that everybody running around dumpstering and living the crimethinc lifestyle is a little richkid is a huge misconception. i think that the longer they are around the better, although a total hypocrisy to a degree. the reason why i think this is because they are one of the few groups that are actually getting radical thought out there succesfully and because of the way that they are able to package their stuff it is more appealing to people that would not normally be interested in radical thought. it at least is able to bring information about our society to people that support it that would not normally even think about some of the questions that are raised, and even if they dont see eye to eye they have looked at it.

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Guest im not witty

theyre just books, yes sometimes the peace punk scene gets as pretentious as the country club scene, and yes we are all hypocrites, but i happen to know a little about the people directly involved with the conception of this organization ...though its really not much of a "organization" (although they sure as fuck are organized) and its amazing how far theyve come.

 

maybe i cant change "the world".. but i can change mine

 

and for god sakes why not reinvent the wheel Kabar? everyone else in any media outlet does, why not anarchists? ahh whatever, just glad that ideas can be spread ....even if they are rehased ideas, at least theres a bit of variety.

 

www.crimethinc.com

www.crimethinc.net

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

____________________________________

our lives are our weapons

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Guest im not witty

DISPATCH FROM THE CRIMETHINC. CENTRAL COMMITTEE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: ALL TRAVELER KIDS PURGED FROM CRIMETHINC. MEMBERSHIP

 

Quitting your job was about having more time to do what needs doing, not just isolating yourself from the rest of humanity, wasn't it?

 

If one makes propaganda extolling what is revolutionary about shoplifting, one is not necessarily trying to get would-be revolutionaries to shoplift so they can be "more revolutionary" [obviously a stupid approach if there ever was one-- although exploring the tactical benefits of shoplifting for a class of people looking to do less buying might make sense]-- one might instead be trying to identify for shoplifters what is already insurrectionary in their actions, so they can broaden their analysis of their own lives.

 

Crimethought is not any ideology or value system or lifestyle, but rather a way of challenging all ideologies and value systems and lifestyles-- and, for the advanced agent, a way of making all ideologies, value systems, and lifestyles challenging. It is not crimethought just to survive without a job by dumpstering, squatting, and hitchhiking; it is crimethought to realize that this lifestyle provides resources that can be used to revolutionize demonstration activism, or underground literature. It is not crimethought simply to distribute propaganda attacking the monotony and limited options of traditional employment; it is crimethought to create situations in which both workers and ex-workers benefit from each others' different experiences, and consequently discover new options and new adventures that were previously obscured.

 

The Stalinists, Surrealists, Situationists, and even Southern Baptists all had their bloody purges and internal dissensions, so why can't we, too? Having no membership should be no obstacle: we can still hold exclusions from time to time, just to be sure everyone remembers. These are festive occasions for us weathered politicos, analagous to the subtextual backbiting at the dinner parties of the bourgeoisie or the witch trials in the Salem, Massachusetts of old. But first, before we get into the firey self-righteousness of the thing, some background.

 

It's been nearly a year now since I went through my entire proofing copy of the Evasion book in the dark back seat of a Greyhound traveling by night, with only my trendy activist headlamp for light. Even then, we knew already what the greatest drawback of publishing it in book form would be: all the general ideas in Days of War, Nights of Love, the inspirations and analyses and especially the rhetoric calculated to encourage revolt, would now be summed up in some minds by the specific formula spelled out by the stories in this new book. Even though Evasion is not a work of political theory, or a prescription of tactics, but clearly a personal account, a memoir-- even though we've mantained from the beginning that there is no single strategy for insurgency, but that everyone must invent and reinvent their own-- it was inevitable that we would be misunderstood by some, and we accepted that in publishing the book.

 

In publishing it, we wanted-- to articulate this for the thousandth and last time-- to introduce an account (one of many) of work-free living to a wider readership, and thus challenge conventional notions about the sanctity of property and the misery of material poverty. With this cultural warfare, we hoped to do our part to expand the anticapitalist movement. Sharing particular scams, extoling the lifestyle of the scam artist, these were secondary goals at best. The 'zine had already been produced and distributed on as massive a scale as the infrastructure of our d.i.y. underground allowed, to the demographics who would be most likely to utilize its scams and emulate the author's life choices; we printed the book version to see if this narrative of refusal and adventure could sow other seeds outside its native environment. Some of the feedback we've received from beyond the existing activist and anarchist communities suggests that it has; but now it's time to shake off whatever success we've achieved, as one must always do to make space for new attempts.

 

And to speak, for the last time as well, of how our efforts, with this book and other projects, have been misunderstood. There is a certain kind of reader who, though you do your best to bring out the subtleties and ironies, will always focus on the most superficial, controversial terms in your works, and interpret your complex critiques as simple dismissals and endorsements ("paying=bad; shoplifting=good" or, far worse, "=anticapitalist"). Whether he professes to be your adversary or accomplice, it is best to avoid him altogether, for he will lower the level of dialogue on any issue to his own low denominator-- and at that elevation, little of value can be discussed or achieved. Perhaps we can be blamed, in part, for creating some of these readers, by producing material that was too simplistic or too complex; perhaps this kind of reader is simply too rampant today to be altogether avoided by even the nimblest of propagandist's pens. One certainly can't say enough, though, that nothing in the world is one-dimensional.

 

So while this, too, has been said a million times, perhaps it will do some good to say it again in this context: the traveler kid lifestyle is not in itself at all revolutionary. It may surprise some to hear this from us-- that shows how little they've been listening all along. Shoplifting, hitchhiking, scamming, unemployment-- separated from a program of life- and world-transformation, all these are merely alternative tools for survival, a survival which makes do with and ultimately accepts the status quo. Yes, it is better, however infinitesimally, to steal products than to give money to our executioners-- but it's not enough! Three millenia of shoplifting now, and the exchange economy is still thriving. If it's life we're after, not mere survival, as the old dichotomy goes, we can't just sit tight now in our squats and punkhouses, eating dumpstered bagels and selling our shoplifted wares on e-bay; we have to keep on risking everything to challenge the system that denies us the rest of the world, if for nothing else at least to continue challenging ourselves.

 

For the record, and to briskly repudiate every imbecile who has used "CrimethInc." as a synonym for scamming and freeloading, we've never been interested in being or being seen as partisans of any lifestyle; we've always insisted that being radical involves subverting all possible lifestyle choices, all traditional strategies and identities. Revolution occurs when some part of the social equation changes: when apolitical workers initiate a wildcat strike, when middle-aged mothers start to show up in the black bloc beside their sons and daughters, when vagabond dropouts integrate themselves into local struggles for affordable housing. The letters we receive from adult secretaries who have used CrimethInc. literature to inspire themselves to change their lives are infinitely more encouraging to me than the scores of teenagers reading Harbinger as they set out on the hitchhiking excursions young folks always have. Not that there is anything wrong with being a hitchhiking teenager-- but to be a dangerous hitchhiking teenager, you must do something more than simply hitchhike, and interpreting anticapitalist texts as glorifications of your hitchhiking doesn't count.

 

I hopped my very first train just a few weeks ago, after nearly eight straight years of unemployment and anticapitalist agitation. For most of that time, I was never much of a hitch-hiking, train-hopping, scam-pulling traveler kid, and neither were most of the individuals I collaborated with-- there are, believe it or not, a wide variety of other lifestyles that are equally conducive to such endeavors. The historical intersection of the latest wave of youth nomadism with the propaganda groups like ours have been spreading is, in some ways, unfortunate; it has had some good effects, but it has also made it easier for people to dismiss some radical ideas as the alibis of a new youth trend-- or, worse, to believe that they are being radical simply by joining such a trend!

 

The creation of subcultural ghettos, the reinterpretation of subversive acts as promotions of some alternative lifestyle-- these are processes by which opposition and subversion have been repeatedly neutralized over the past four decades, if not centuries. Yes, it is critical that we build new communities, with new cultural values and approaches, and that we not belittle these as "mere subcultures" when they do arise-- for it is in these communities that we can develop and sustain a resistance, and create a context in which to lead free lives. It is also critical that we keep challenging these communities, that they do not become stagnant or self-satisfied: for as long as we are all under the great thumb, freedom is always for all or none.

 

CrimethInc., and for that matter (and far more important) crimethink, are not membership organizations, anyway. Subverting is not something you are, it's something you do, and must find new ways to do in every attempt. Let's not rest at expelling the traveler kids-- hell, we're all expelled, time-tested CrimethInc. agents first and foremost! Even the most experienced of us insurrectionists must start from scratch every morning to foment insurrection, shaking off the inertia of the past to see anew what the current context calls for. When we succeed in doing this, we can change the world, for it is inertia above all that keeps the wheels spinning as they do. If we cannot, we are done for-- we will be more anachronists than anarchists, and our activism mere retroactivism.

 

And so now we turn away from the past, from all explanations and justifications and apologies, to face the future and the experiments we have in store for it. Doubtless, they will occasion comparable storms of controversy and misconception, if we are ambitious enough to keep pushing our own limits and hazarding schemes crazy enough to work. So, all would-be crimethinkers are hereby expelled from CrimethInc-- ;whoever can discover the strategies for the next offensive, set the terms for the next infectious revolts and heated debates and social upheavals, let them claim it for themselves! Expect our next book, or one of them, to be a liberation manual for middle-aged mothers, not another youth's chronicle of willful indigence. In the meantime, let's us traveler kids stop congratulating ourselves on how free we are and start using that word, free, as a verb, not an adjective.

 

Coming soon, for those not alienated enough by this piece: an anarchist critique of alcohol and intoxication. Talk about an issue relevant to traveler kids!

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