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.