July 1, 2009 at 9:28 am · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by b. traven
This year’s CrimethInc. Convergence is a mere three weeks away. In Pittsburgh we are busy stock-piling foodstuffs and getting together a child-care collective, amongst other numerous tasks, but we wanted to announce a few things we’ve got in store for this year; rest assured that these are just the beginnings of the mad schemes and maniac plots we’re devising for the end of July. Our aim is that this year’s convergence opens up the space for new and exciting experiences, inspiring conversations, and connections with new and old friends alike. To facilitate this environment, we have a schedule of workshops and events, to which much more will be added in the coming weeks. Of course, every one of these workshops and events is contingent upon the active participation of those who attend.
Anyone with questions about what they need to bring or what items could be useful to our organizing can consult the list here, and those who want to share ideas beforehand or are looking for rides can coordinate on the Convergence forums. Any queries, concerns about the accessibility of the space, or offers of help can be sent to info@crimethincconvergence.com. Our website will be updated frequently in the next three weeks.
What follows is a initial list of some of the workshops that will be offered this year. Don’t think this gets you off the hook. We ask that everyone who plans to attend, in fact we demand, that each and every beautiful and unique individual coming to Pittsburgh doesn’t sit passively listening to others talk or perform; we couldn’t bear not being graced with your exceptional talents or insights as well.The convergence is like a giant potluck of epic proportions, and it requires that every single person bring something to share. If you are used to talking a lot in front of crowds and being in charge, challenge yourself further by supporting the efforts of others, or even presenting or performing something that goes beyond the limits of what you’ve done in the past. If you have a workshop to present please post on the forums or e-mail cwc.booking@gmail.com.
That said, here’s a preview of what to expect:
June 24, 2009 at 7:35 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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For as long as anyone can remember, the FBI has infiltrated radical communities in hopes of framing people on criminal charges. This has intensified in anarchist circles over the past few years. A handful of unfortunates now languish in prison, serving up to decades for actions they never carried out and probably would never have even considered were it not for the efforts of agents provocateurs. How does the government choose who to target? What factors put people at risk? Most importantly, what can we do to protect ourselves and each other?
This is required reading for anyone going to the impending Earth First! Rendezvous in Oregon, the CrimethInc. convergence in Pittsburgh July 20-26, or, for that matter, any other radical gathering or protest. We’ve also added a guide to security culture to our online library, which we hope everyone will read as well.
Read on after the jump!
June 9, 2009 at 4:39 am · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by ret marut
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Once again, despite ourselves, we are thrust onto the front lines of history. In the midst of an economic crisis, the leaders of the wealthiest nations on earth are meeting in Pittsburgh to discuss how to preserve global capitalism and reform the loathsome International Monetary Fund—and we are hosting our convergence in Pittsburgh a mere two months earlier.
We hadn’t planned on this—perhaps we’d forgotten that we are in a war that is constantly unfolding, that doesn’t permit truce or respite. It’s hard to bear in mind at all times how much depends on us, to remember that we are responsible for making the kind of resistance we want to participate in come about in our lifetime. At the same time, we can’t only react to our enemies, even when they are constantly provoking us—we must also take the time to develop long-term relationships and projects, or else we’ll never be able to take the initiative.
So what will the convergence in Pittsburgh look like?
Reflections, Solicitations, and Announcements after the jump!
May 28, 2009 at 1:49 pm · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by b. traven
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Following the death of an anarchist alleged by corporate media to be transporting a destructive device, a wave of government repression is sweeping Chile. We extend our heartfelt condolences to those who mourn the loss of a friend, and our support to all who still suffer under a repressive apparatus that has not fundamentally changed since the reign of Pinochet. We fear the worst is yet to come, as the Chilean government will likely use this as a pretext for further raids, arrests, and harassment.
As a humble gesture of solidarity, the next issue of our biannual journal Rolling Thunder will include a report on Chilean resistance movements over the past decade; we hope this will provide more context for and awareness of the Chilean situation for readers around the world. As we did for our coverage of the Ungdomshuset and G8 protests, we are soliciting anonymous accounts from participants in the past decade of social struggles in Chile to fill out our coverage.
If you have experiences you are willing to share or can direct us to publicly available narratives, please contact us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com. Those who have privacy concerns should consider starting a new email account on a public-access computer.
Please circulate this statement anywhere it may be relevant. Thank you.
En Español After the Jump
May 10, 2009 at 7:56 am · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by b. traven
Meet at the Northside Commons (W. North Ave. and Brighton) by the pond, on Monday, July 20. Write to info@crimethincconvergence.com with workshop proposals, offers of assistance, and accessibility concerns.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the first CrimethInc. convergence in August 2002. We’ve witnessed a protracted war and occupation, an economic crisis, and most recently a change—however superficial—of rulers. We have come full circle from being isolated dissidents in a time of patriotic consensus to seeing our radical critique co-opted by politicians at the very moment our neighbors are becoming aware of the injustices of capitalism and empire.
Seven convergences later, we have reduced the limitless possibilities of the format we first tested to a precise science. We’re in a different social context now, and it’s time to debut a new experiment.
As the economic downturn affects the geography of urban centers, tremendous spaces are opening up that could become new sites of autonomy and struggle. This year, rather than gathering in a wilderness setting to nurture our subversive desires in seclusion, we will stage our convergence in the decaying metropolis of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We hope that this event can contribute to building long-term infrastructure for our culture of resistance.
This will be nothing like the urban anarchist conferences of the past decade–no antiseptic university setting, no dispersing to isolation in individual meals and housing at the end of the scheduled programming. We will actively contest the city environment in an effort leave a permanent mark upon it, just as we hope to contest the rituals and informal hierarchies of the anarchist milieu.
All spring, rumors have circulated about the secret plans of the contingent in Pittsburgh organizing this event. What’s this about squatting a castle? Is it true that they’re buying a giant warehouse in the city center? Will we be building a hammock village spread across empty lots? There aren’t actually catacombs in Pittsburgh, are there?
We’ll have more news here shortly. In the meantime, here are fliers announcing the event {2-up Handbill [2.6MB] & Full-page Flyer [2.4MB]}–please disseminate them everywhere you can. There also a rudimentary website at www.crimethincconvergence.com, which will be expanded soon.
Finally, here are the policies for this summer’s convergence, which have been thoughtfully revised by the locals bottomlining the event. If you are frustrated about any of them, please organize your own event!
Policies after the jump.
May 5, 2009 at 10:40 am · Filed under From the Trenches, posted by pfm
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At long last, we’ve completed our 35,000-word full report on last summer’s anarchist mobilizations against the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, complete with chronological maps and painstaking documentation. Updated from the feature in Rolling Thunder #7 and expanded to include the complete text of thirteen different participant narratives, this report offers a comprehensive history of the preparations for, events of, and aftermath following the protests, and an analysis of their context and implications.
Unlike virtually every other analysis yet published from the radical community, this one utilizes subsequent internal government reports, comparing them against a wide variety of other sources. We hope our investigation and the accompanying archive of personal testimonies will prove useful both to participants still trying to understand the events of this past summer and to organizers looking to derive lessons from them for the future.
In a nutshell, we hypothesize that the chief significance of the 2008 anti-convention mobilizations was in the precedents they might set for future organizing. Anarchists took the initiative to determine their own goals and strategies for the protests, establishing decentralized networks throughout the US far in advance. This enabled them to build relationships with other organizing groups and to coordinate their actions, effectively setting the tone for the protests at both conventions. At the same time, the protests were less attended than expected, perhaps as a result of the Obama campaign detracting from street-level participation in the antiwar movement. In this regard, they were the final act of an era that has now passed.
The RNC protests met with an almost unprecedented degree of state repression, which is still playing out today even as the political climate has changed. The federal government continued its strategy of gathering intelligence and entrapping stragglers, already familiar from attacks on environmentalists and animal rights activists. Local authorities focused on infiltration, profiling, and raids, ultimately arresting over 800 people and bringing conspiracy charges against organizers. Despite all this, they seem to have been remarkably unprepared to maintain order in the streets on the first day of the RNC, and their subsequent overreaction helped discredit them in the public eye. Most arrestees have gotten off scot-free; it remains to be seen how the ongoing felony cases will conclude. The outcome of the RNC 8 conspiracy trial in particular will indicate how sustainable we can expect the organizing model debuted at the 2008 conventions to be.
Going It Alone: Anarchist Action at the Democratic
and Republican National Conventions
We Are All Legal Workers: Legal Support at the RNC and After
Accounts from the Democratic
and Republican National Conventions
April 25, 2009 at 1:23 pm · Filed under From the Trenches, posted by ret marut
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Over the past three decades, Earth First! has waged a life-or-death campaign to halt the destruction of the natural environment. Right now, the Earth First! Roadshow is halfway through a five month revival tour across the United States, sharing direct action skills, ecodefense history, and opportunities to get involved in protecting the wilderness. Consult their schedule here to see if they’ll be passing through your bioregion before the tour ends at this summer’s Earth First! rendezvous in Cascadia.
One of the acts on the roadshow, a puppet show teaching basic security culture skills, is especially timely in view of recent government efforts to entrap and frame environmental activists. We’ve obtained the script and an audio file, and are sharing them here to equip you to put on the puppet show yourself if you so desire. If your community could use a refresher in protecting your privacy and safety against snooping, evil-intentioned G-men, just build some puppets and adjust the show to your local needs! You can even use the audio recording if you prefer not to memorize the script yourself.
It’s all after the jump!
April 14, 2009 at 12:45 pm · Filed under Hot Off the Presses, posted by b. traven
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We now have the CD version of the From the Depths “Germinate” recording in stock. They are packaged in letter-pressed gatefold chipboard sleeves, hand-made by the band and their friends. For those who regard ownership of a physical object to be a needless hassle, the download version of the recording is still available, and significantly cheaper.
From the Depths just completed their West Coast tour, which went smashingly, and extend their deep appreciation to everyone who helped them along the way. They expect to return to the road in autumn.
March 28, 2009 at 11:49 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut
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Over the past decade, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty—SHAC—has waged an international direct action campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences, Europe’s largest contract animal testing corporation. By targeting investors and business partners of HLS, SHAC repeatedly brought HLS to the brink of collapse; it took direct assistance from the British government and an international counter-campaign of severe legal repression to keep the corporation afloat.
In the wake of this campaign, there has been talk of applying the SHAC model in other contexts, such as environmental defense and anti-war organizing. But what is the SHAC model, precisely? What are its strengths and limitations? Is it, in fact, an effective model? If so, for what?
This analysis explores these questions in depth, charting the history of anti-HLS organizing and reviewing subsequent attempts to utilize the same tactics.
Read full piece here.
March 24, 2009 at 6:52 pm · Filed under Internal Memos, posted by pfm
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We’re back from our annual bookfair trip, rested and ready for Spring, and we thought we’d start with some photos from the bookfair this year. For the first time in nine years, we noticed that less people came this year than the previous year—we’re not sure what to blame, but we’d place our bet on the combo of crappy weather and Obama. At any rate, y’all can expect more frequent blog updates from us in the coming months and more content to be added to the site.
Click through to see all the photos.
March 11, 2009 at 9:55 am · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by pfm
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For the 9th consecutive year, we will be attending the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco (their 14th annual showing) in Golden Gate Park this coming weekend, March 14th and 15th. We’ll have two tables again this year, one chock full of free posters and pamphlets and stickers, and the other with all our books for sale, including the brand new issue of Rolling Thunder. From the Depths will also be playing shows in Oakland this Friday and in Berkeley this Sunday, so it could very well be worth your while to make it out to the bookfair this year. [Above image is from our first bookfair in 2001].
March 4, 2009 at 9:34 am · Filed under Hot Off the Presses, posted by b. traven
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The seventh issue of Rolling Thunder is back from the presses—a mere five months after the previous issue, which is a record for us! We lost a lot of sleep working on this one; it’s definitely our best effort yet. We’ll also be losing money on it, but there was no way around it—so much happened in the second half of 2008 that we had to put off all our other content and add an extra 8 pages to cover it all.
Rolling Thunder #7 examines the events of those busy months in careful detail. Anarchists coordinated mass mobilizations against the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, provoking major clashes at the latter; the global economy collapsed, and radicals are still scrambling to find appropriate responses; Greece experienced an anarchist-organized insurrection in response to a police murder; and at the beginning of 2009, Oakland, California was shaken by similar unrest in response to a similar killing. Our coverage pushes beyond the surface of events to offer insight into the organizing structures and historical background, fleshing out timelines and analyses with personal narratives and cutting-edge cartography, and drawing on this material to pose questions about long-term strategy. In addition to all this, the issue includes an exploration of the relationship between the punk subculture and the anarchist movement, complemented by interviews with bands and collectives from beyond the white punk ghetto, and ends with a primer on small-town organizing using Winona, Minnesota as a case study. No advertisements or pleas for funding; an unprecedented 24 pages in full color; 114 pages, altogether.
February 19, 2009 at 7:03 pm · Filed under Hot Off the Presses, posted by b. traven
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Anarchist punk band From the Depths, currently on tour in the US, have just finished their debut album. Recorded at Mars Studio (known for recording Catharsis, Undying, and scores of more famous hardcore bands), “Germinate” comprises 7 songs in 36 minutes, an epic paean to self-determination and resistance.
Hearkening back to the days when anarcho-punk was characterized by bands as diverse as Crass, Chumbawumba, and Contropotere, the songs on this album combine d-beat power, slower and faster hardcore, harsh noise, and even a passage from a traditional Italian anarchist folk ballad. This is intense, defiant, dark music, but it is based in compelling melodies; you can scream these songs at the top of your lungs in a riot, but you could also sing them quietly to yourself in jail to maintain your spirits.
From the Depths was formed at the beginning of 2008 by members of Catharsis, Requiem, Network of Terror, Auryn, and Balaclava. Traveling in a van donated by Winona’s Really Really Free Market after their vegetable-oil-powered truck died mid-tour, they performed for fellow demonstrators outside the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions; they’ve also played benefit shows for RNC arrestees, Green Scare defendants, and other prisoners in the anticapitalist struggle.
We’re trying a new experiment with this release, making it available via online downloading. We’re hardly convinced that the internet is a positive thing for humanity, but we recognize that it is one of the primary ways people get music these days. In order to offset the tendency of internet downloading to separate music from the context that gives it meaning, the download includes all the lyrics, artwork, and liner notes.
The band paid $3100 to record the album, and mastering cost another several hundred dollars. Presuming that at least 1000 people are interested in the record, we’re requesting that people donate $4 in return for downloading it. If you have particular access to resources, consider donating more to cover those who have less; to do so, simply increase the number in the “Quantity” column of your order. As soon as the recording and mastering expenses are covered, we’ll make downloading free; thus any donation goes towards making this available to everyone. If you can help the band break even on the costs of recording, that will also help them to play more benefit shows so as to contribute more than music to the public.
More info and tour dates after the jump.
February 15, 2009 at 12:51 pm · Filed under Calling All Anarchists, posted by pfm
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In the past, we’ve held festive gatherings far from industry and concrete: hundreds camped out in forests, underneath stars, beside lakes, rivers, streams, and creeks. Climbing bluffs overlooking rolling hills and vast plains, we fell in love, met allies, and experimented with the experience of freedom. To create the spaces where this could happen, we sought temporary escape from the cities that had in so many ways coerced and constrained our very existence.
Some of us, however, felt limited by this flight. We dreamed of building an anarchist castle out of the derelict abandonment right under our enemies’ noses. Hundreds would arrive to help us paint a masterpiece upon our canvas of rubble: workshops, meeting halls, libraries, performance spaces, gardens, and orchards would be constructed out of ruins and wreckage. We’d supply food, shelter, and so much more; like before, we would exchange stories, ideas, laughter, and dance moves with the maniac nomads, eloquent criminals, and dedicated rebels who descended upon our city for a week of chaos and feverish activity. The beauty of this dream was that at the end of it all, some of us could stay; for another week, a season, a year, or maybe even the rest of our lives. It never had to end.
We held onto this plan in secret, believing it to be impossible. Our dream was fraught with complications and seemed doomed to fail. It remained a fantastical plot we lacked the daring to attempt. Until now.
Save the date, July 20-26, Pittsburgh, PA, and stay tuned for more details.
January 24, 2009 at 8:40 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by pfm
We mailed out the last Rolling Thunder #3 yesterday, and as such, the complete PDF is now available for free download.
Download Rolling Thunder #3 PDF [9 MB]
International reports from last Mayday’s pro-immigrant rallies! Analysis of the Bush regime’s strategy to promote terrorism worldwide! Discussion of the latest wave of federal repression! Testimony from a convicted anti-war arsonist! Anarchist perspectives on and reports from the struggle against domestic violence! A tell-all interview with notorious graffiti artist(s) BORF! A shocking exposé on German pro-Zionist lunatics! A how-to guide to funneling resources out of universities! A spy’s-eye-view of immigrant labor in factory farming! A narrow escape from the flaming Pentagon on September 11, 2001! A history of direct action and rioting in queer liberation struggles! A cartoon recounting the riots at the canceled World Bank conference in Barcelona! A mad-lib for radicals with poor social skills! A satirical guide to writing reviews! Visionary storytelling, technical advice on computer security, eulogies and poster designs and more!
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