–from The Anarchists’ Convention by John Sayles

Perhaps that passage can help to explain why so much of our energy goes into bickering and squabbling with each other.

Me, well, I’m a die-hard, card-carrying class warrior with politics so boring-as-fuck they’d make Kropotkin proud. I have been ever since the tender age of 11, when I met a Bangladeshi woman whose son had been shot and killed because she tried to organize a union in her factory. That jolted my ass awake like a foreman’s slap in the face. I’ve knew I wanted to be part of the labor movement ever since.

During my limited experience in the anarchist scene, I’ve made a lot of friends who love CrimethInc and say their lives were forever changed by Days of War (it was a pleasure getting locked up with you in St. Paul, by the way…you know who you are.) I’ve also befriended a lot of fellow class struggle reds. This, as you might expect, has earned me a copious amount of shit-talking from both sides of the aisle. Which is unfortunate, because I think each group could learn something from the other.

No pack of lefties–not even NEFAC, and we’ve got the sage wisdom of Grandaddy Wayne Price behind us–has been as prolific, poetic, and entertaining with their writings as y’all have. I’m sure you’re well aware of that, and your cries of “outdo us!” are appreciated. As a friend of mine wrote, “whatever your opinion of Crimethinc’s politics, you have to give them credit for helping revitalizing two very vital traditions of radical writing: on the one hand, they’ve kicked out enough all-encompassing, no-holds-barred, just barely still prose polemical manifestos to make Guy Debord proud, on the other hand, they’ve also produced some stunning personal narratives of living free in the boxcars and margins of late capitalism.”

The Reds, however, understand one very obvious yet exceedingly important thing, something I believe you have often declared without fully grasping its implications: anarchy is for EVERYONE! Our ideals are too vital to the struggle for human freedom to be the exclusive domain of people who want to be part of a particular social phenomenon; to quit work, hop trains, and make record players out of old bikes. We need to be wherever the embers of social conflict start to burn, voicing our ideas as we fight alongside people who may not identify as anarchists. Maybe this critique sounds hackneyed and trite by now, but I think it’s still valid. I don’t know if I’m being unfair to CrimethInc anarchists from areas other than mine, but throughout all my activism (with workers struggling to win more control over their lives through labor unions, with homeless-led groups fighting to keep a shelter open, and with high-schoolers who started the biggest student strike in my city’s history) it’s always been my black & red comrades who were there to support me, motivate me, cheer on the victories beside me, and comfort me through the losses. I am also constantly amazed by how eager people involved in these fights are to talk and dream about revolution. Anarchy is too important to be left to the anarchists.

http://libcom.org/forums/crimethinc-hit-back-me-libcom-years-later-16112007

I should however submit the constructive criticism that A) a lot of propaganda(and some discussions) romanticizing traveling, squating, etc. gives me the some hollow longing for the fulfillment of desires that are not my own that I got back in the day when I watched tv and was bombarded with images of happy people buying useless shit.
And B) Being cold hungry and unemployed is probably way more fun when you choose it.

I don’t want to travel the world and not work, I want to kick this gift economy off. I want to bust my ass on projects I care about for people I love and fall asleep with aching muscles softly saying ‘you’ve done wel and are stronger for it,’ the red light of a setting sun on my face and the smell of dirt in my nose.

Amen. I love a lot of what Crimethinc does but this book was boring. I have friends who loved it, but to me it seemed like nothing happened. Plus the amount of privilege possessed by the author(s) was problematic for me. I thought it was going to be a story of someone who worked out how to survive on their own. Which to a degree he did, but the amount of times he relied on support from family or free houses from wealthy friends made it infinitely less inspiring. I know people who’ve responded to this criticism like “yeah, I don’t want to be bum, I just don’t want to pay rent.” I feel like, no shit? Nobody wants to pay rent, even (perhaps especially) the people who let you sleep on their couch while you contributing nothing in return.

So for me the book was uninspiring, slightly depressing and banal. That said, I feel like Crimethinc’s other projects are very important. I love the crap out of the DVD and the Cookbook. Which brings me to the point made about “self-determination, not representation”, but I think that’s a politically loaded way to represent what could otherwise be characterized as sharing. For instance you’ve got Vol.2 of the DVD coming out.

I would love to see two things on this DVD.
1. A film with a woman narrating or featuring heavily. There are few women in any of the films of volume one and the narration on the short film about the people locked themselves in that warehouse to make instruments is painful to listen to due to the amount of times the male narrators cut of the woman narrator.
2. Something about Sherman Austin and the whole RaiseTheFist incident. I don’t live in the US so it’s hard to tell but it seems like this was/is one of the biggest Anarchist of Colour stories happening. Sherman’s doing great stuff with a cop-watch program now which would be useful to make the story seem a bit fresher.

I chose these two things to address the white male dominance in Crimethinc’s literature. I would not think of this as trying to represent People of colour or Women, but to share some of the resources your privileges have allowed Crimethinc to acquire. It didn’t seem like Crimethinc were the main people involved in all the videos on Vol. 1 either, particularly the Miami Model. So it seems to me that whether you admit it or not you are already “mediators that choose who gets to speak and for how long.” Denying this does not make it disapear, it only serves to conceal the privileges you hold.

Oooh, plus I just remembered, I loved the community garden part of the Miami model, and think there should be more of that next time.

“Fight crimethinc for the anarchist movement?”

As a “class war anarchist”, my response to this is a serious rolling of the eyes.

Personally I don’t see how you can be an anarchist and not be “class war”, since I see anarchism as striving for the creation of a stateless and class society.

I think Crimethink’s success to two fold.

First, the stuff that they produce people like to read. They also produce stickers and multimedia stuff, thus making the project even more noticeable. I was on the road the other day and I saw some guys work truck and it had a crimethinc sticker on it. I about shit myself and started laughing. He kind of gave me a weird look; didn’t look like a punk or traveler or whatever.

Second, there’s a lot of crimethinc stuff out there. Every anarchist has it. There’s a lot floating around. Like the crimethinc post on infoshop said, crimethinc has become the pole that the rest of the anarchist movement revolves around.

I think some anarchists take this as an attack on ‘real anarchism’ when they seem to be missing the point that regular people actually often like crimethinc. Often class war politics have become “boring as fuck”, when they could be exciting, rough and tough, and funny, (take for instance, the UK newspaper and ground, Class War). I think a lot of ‘class war’ anarchists, (who often come from priveledged backgrounds themselves) can’t stand the thought that regular people actually like stuff that goes against platformist or syndicalist lines. For instance, I would wager, that a publication like Green Anarchy, with a circulation of around 6-8,000, and a subcription to 800 prisoners, probably is read by more working class people than perhaps most of the ‘class war’ anarchist publications. Same might be said about Rolling Thunder.

When I was getting into anarchism, as were a lot of my working/lower middle class peers, crimethinc and punk rock were both big influences.

The problem is not crimethinc fucking up class war politics and thus fucking up anarchism, the problem is class war anarchists having a hard time being able to articulate their ideas to a large audience in the same way that crimethinc is able to.

Another point I’d like to bring up is the point about dropping out and class struggle. Most the anti-authoritarian, anti-state communist, anarchist ‘heroes’ were drop outs, travelers, and rebels. Get over it! The difference between Evasion and most of the other anarchist drop outs is that they used their free time to fight the rich, not just eat well.