May 15, 2012 at 10:21 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut
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On May Day 2012, anarchists around the US succeeded in precipitating clashes on a larger scale than in previous years. But it’s important to strategize ahead of our immediate problems, in order to be prepared for the subsequent challenges we will face when we succeed. This report from the May Day 2012 mobilization in Berlin offers a cautionary tale, showing how the commodification of rebellion, the influence of accommodating movement leaders, and the rhetoric of creating safe spaces have been used to neutralize a popular tradition of resistance. If revolt continues to gain momentum in the United States, we can expect to see some of these strategies employed here as well.
Read on after the jump.
May 10, 2012 at 3:05 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by pfm
As the momentum that originated with Occupy Wall Street tapers off, May Day 2012 saw anarchists on the West Coast consolidate their gains in the street with actions from Los Angeles to Vancouver. In a series of first-person vignettes from the Bay Area, supplemented by a photoessay from Seattle set to a song by Underground Reverie, we evoke the atmosphere of May Day 2012 and plumb the questions it poses.
Read on for the view from behind the mask.
April 29, 2012 at 5:02 pm · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by b. traven
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Just in time for May Day, we are excited to debut a new line of posters: “What Does Democracy Mean?” [PDFs 700k] Together, the posters explain how democracy depends upon policing, borders, and other institutions of control. Please print, photocopy, and circulate widely!
We hope that this series will help to clear up lingering confusion about the differences between democracy (a form of government) and anarchy (i.e., freedom). Democracy, even direct democracy, is not the same as self-determination. Democracy is premised on the idea that only one decision-making body should have legitimate authority, while anarchism proposes the decentralization of power: not just horizontality, but also autonomy.
Just as anticapitalism has entered public consciousness in the US since we published last year’s line of anti-capitalist posters, the coming year may see people looking for alternatives to democracy as well. It’s up to us to offer liberating possibilities, since the other alternatives to democracy are even more oppressive than it is.
Read on after the jump.
April 26, 2012 at 1:06 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by pfm
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We’ve added a new video to our Emergency Broadcast System, Ethan Silverstein’s Roses on My Table. This documentary short tells the story of the Wingnut Anarchist Collective in Richmond, VA, an organizing group and cooperative living space aimed at fostering mutual aid and grassroots resistance to authority. From maintaining a community center to carrying out occupations and disaster relief, the video illustrates some of the many ways a handful of committed people can transform their lives and their community.
April 23, 2012 at 11:24 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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Over the past years, anarchists have helped popularize the discourses of
consent in interpersonal relationships as a way to counter rape culture, and
consensus in political organizing as an anti-authoritarian approach to decision-making. Recently, however, we’ve seen the language of consent and consensus used to condemn direct action and delegitimize autonomous initiatives.
Does consent discourse offer a useful framework with which to evaluate direct action tactics and strategy? Can we challenge consensus reality effectively while respecting everyone’s wishes? What’s the relationship between desire and social transformation? Breaking with Consensus Reality grapples with these questions, exploring the limits of the politics of consent and proposing an alternative.
Breaking with Consensus Reality
(PDF [1.8 MB] Imposed Zine Version)
(PDF [1.7 MB] Online Reading Zine Version)
This text is drawn from the publication TERROR INCOGNITA, which will soon be available online in full.
April 18, 2012 at 10:46 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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In May 2011, tens of thousands occupied plazas throughout Spain in a protest movement that prefigured similar occupations around the world, including the Occupy movement in the United States. On March 29, 2012, a nationwide general strike erupted into massive street-fighting in Barcelona, as participants wrested control of the streets from riot police. How did this come to pass, and what can it tell us about what will follow the occupation movements outside Spain?
In this new feature, “The Rose of Fire Has Returned!” our Barcelona correspondent provides extensive background on the riots of March 29, tracing the trajectory from the plaza occupations to the general strike, and explores the questions that have arisen in this context as anarchists face new opportunities and challenges.
April 12, 2012 at 10:02 pm · Filed under Hot Off the Presses, posted by b. traven
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We’ve produced a new sticker to express the national mood about the upcoming election. Reading “VOTE HERE” with an arrow on patriotic red, white, and blue, it’s the perfect addition to trash cans, toilets, sewer drains, and other waste disposal sites. These are 4″ wide, printed on paper stickers (as opposed to vinyl) so as to be difficult to remove, and feature a QR code directing the curious to a new webpage discussing why democracy is bankrupt. They are available in quantities from 25-1,000, and, of course, one sticker comes free in every order from our online store.
We’d love to expand our photo gallery depicting these in action. If you see these stickers in use anywhere clever, please take a picture and email it to us, or better yet tweet it with the hashtag #votehere.
We gave away 1000 of these in a single day at last week’s Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair and we anticipate them going quickly. We’ll follow these up with a poster series in time for May Day.
Order the stickers here!
April 12, 2012 at 9:50 pm · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by b. traven
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The ides of April are here again: Steal Something from Work Day! The bane of corporate consultants and security guards, Steal Something from Work Day is responsible for taking a couple years off poor Glenn Beck’s life and putting food on the table for underpaid employees around the world. If it’s good enough for executives and heads of state, stealing from work is good enough for the rest of us.
This year, April 15 falls on a Sunday, but that won’t stop people from participating—thanks to the shift from production to service sector employment, more people than ever find themselves working every day of the week. And in the wake of the financial recession, with millions struggling to get by, can you imagine how much worse off working folks would be if they didn’t steal from work? Here are some resources with which to help your community celebrate Steal Something from Work Day:
Steal Something from Work Day website
Steal Something from Work Day video and follow-up video
Frequently asked questions about stealing from work
Steal Something from Work Day theme song by Test Their Logik
Steal Something from Work Day journal: color reading PDF (4.3MB) and imposed B&W printing PDF (2.3MB)
We also send a shout out to the Steal from Work tumblr and to the book, Steal Stuff from Work. In addition, let’s take a moment to remember the 25 people killed in the chicken processing plant fire in Hamlet, North Carolina in 1991, as a result of the owners keeping the fire doors locked for fear that employees might pilfer a little of the food they were packaging. We observe Steal Something from Work Day because human life is more precious than capitalist profit.
To mark the occasion, we present this narrative of resistance from an insurgent service worker, Out Of Stock: Confessions Of A Grocery Store Guerrilla.
Read the account after the jump.
April 8, 2012 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Hot Off the Presses, posted by b. traven
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In times of high activity, it’s easy to get absorbed in the quotidian, responding to every opportunity and crisis and abandoning more playful pursuits. Yet in so doing WE LOSE OUR GREATEST STRENGTH. If anarchist practices are finally gaining currency, it is because they’ve had time and space to gestate at the margins, outside the logic of narrowly goal-oriented thinking. THOSE WHO DOMINATE THE PRESENT ABDICATE THE FUTURE: one must step back from the demands of this world to attune oneself to the secret tremors hinting at worlds to come.
Lest we lose our edge, THE EXPERIMENTATION COMMITTEE has been hard at work on a new publication, VORTEXT, the contents of which HAVE NOTHING TO DO with the recent surge of social movements. Vortext explores speculative philosophy, nihilist performance art, black magic, and MAXIMUM FUCKING ULTRAISM, celebrating the nonfunctional, non-productive, and irrational. OUTLIERS TO THE FRONT!
Each copy features a lovingly letter-pressed cover and further printing STOLEN FROM OUR FUCKING ENEMIES. Proceeds from Vortext, HOWEVER SCANTY, will offset the legal expenses of the various contributing FELONY DEFENDANTS. We encourage readers to support the Asheville 11, surely among the most NONFUNCTIONAL, NON-PRODUCTIVE, AND IRRATIONAL anarchist defendants of recent years.
Vortext is to anarchist literature what ÜMLAÜT was to hardcore and the MARQUIS DE SADE was to political prisoners. Vortext is the perfect gift for every fugitive trying to figure out what Wittgenstein can tell her about FACING CONSPIRACY CHARGES. Vortext is NOT FOR EVERYONE and it’s probably NOT FOR YOU.
Contents and ordering information.
April 8, 2012 at 8:12 pm · Filed under Hot Off the Presses, posted by ret marut
We are pleased to present TERROR INCOGNITA, an outsize barnacle clinging to the hull of Vortext, a meditation on seduction, desire, and insurrection.
Why do liberals label nearly any form of direct action as violence? What do queer black blocs have in common in with Christian hardcore? Why are anarchists so hung up on breaking windows and fucking?
In three interlocking movements, TERROR INCOGNITA answers all of these questions and more, while overturning some of our deepest assumptions about desire, identity, strategy, and freedom.
Contents and ordering information.
March 29, 2012 at 10:21 am · Filed under Internal Memos, posted by pfm
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We’ll be attending the 17th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair this weekend for our 13th consecutive time, and, as usual, will have thousands of posters, pamphlets and stickers to give away for free as well as our books and fancy posters for sale. We’ll be there both Saturday and Sunday, so stop on by.
We will also debut a new sticker and a brand new experimental publication, Vortext, a journal of philosophy, nihilist performance art, and MAXIMUM ULTRAISM. Vortext will be available for online orders afterwards if we have any left, and the stickers will be available here in bulk next week. We’ll have our new, free postcard, as well.
Teaser pics after the break.
March 27, 2012 at 11:07 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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What is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in our movements? These age-old questions have returned to the fore during the Occupy movement. But this discussion never takes place on a level playing field; while some delegitimize violence, the language of legitimacy itself paves the way for the authorities to employ it.
In response to the recent backlash against diversity of tactics, we’ve prepared a new feature—The Illegitimacy of Violence, the Violence of Legitimacy—explaining why we consider this an important principle for anyone invested in the pursuit of liberation.
A print-ready pdf of this text is available here.
March 3, 2012 at 9:56 am · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by b. traven
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Next week, CrimethInc. operatives will return to the Midwest for events in Columbus, OH, Champaigne-Urbana, IL, Chicago, IL, and Indianapolis, IN, continuing their ongoing speaking tour about the subjects discussed in the Work book. These talks will also engage with the strategic lessons of the Occupy movement in the broader context of anti-capitalist resistance.
Details after the jump.
February 20, 2012 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut
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The past few months have seen a backlash led by professional journalists against diversity of tactics in the Occupy movement. Rebecca Solnit represented our Dear Occupiers pamphlet as “a screed in justification of violence” simply because it endorsed diversity of tactics. Chris Hedges followed up by calling “black bloc anarchists”—an invented category—“The Cancer in Occupy.” Both allege that a violent fringe is undermining the movement and must be excluded from it.
What is taking place here is a kind of silencing. Defining people as “violent” is fundamentally a way to delegitimize them; Solnit and Hedges feel entitled to spread falsehoods about their political adversaries because their goal is to shut them out of the discussion entirely. That’s why Hedges acknowledges he never spoke to anyone involved in a black bloc in the course of composing his diatribe. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect better from journalists with their own wikipedia pages and glamor shots, who have much to lose should popular movements cease to be managed from the top down.
To counteract this silencing, we sought out our comrades from the heart of the black bloc and asked them to tell their side of the story: where they come from, why they participate, how they see the world. We do not accept the terms set by the mudslingers: our intent is not to compete for ideological legitimacy on a battlefield of abstractions, but to foster mutual understanding grounded in personal experience. As the expression goes, God only knows what devils we are: He can’t know anything else.
A ’zine version is available as a pdf; a reading version is available here.
Read on after the jump.
February 9, 2012 at 1:48 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut
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Over the winter, the social momentum that picked up with the occupation of Zuccotti Park has predictably cooled. We can be sure that conflict will intensify again soon, whether with the coming of spring or later; if overseas examples are any indication, we should anticipate new waves of unrest, each sweeping in new sectors of the population. In hopes of helping to prepare for the next phase, we present an eight-point program distilled from the experiences of the last several months.
Once again, please forward this and print out copies to distribute in your community!
• Eight Simple Steps [online viewing version, 195 KB]
• Eight Simple Steps [print version, 496 KB]
A two-sided flier to be folded down the middle, longways.
Read on after the jump.
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