CrimethInc. Convergence in Harper’s

March 6, 2008 at 8:10 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut

The 2006 CrimethInc. convergence is described in this month’s issue of Harper’s. The subcollective responsible for maintaining this blog is divided about this description; some of us consider the author’s story a facile caricature of politicized dropouts, while others [hereafter appearing as "Ed."] find his depiction of the convergence as even-handed and honestly introspective as any non-anarchist mainstream journalist could be expected to pen. On one hand, the author suggests that the convergence kitchen was likely to give everyone dysentery [seems more like a joke at the author's expense than anything.—Ed.], an aspersion we challenge anyone to substantiate, and at another point, he causes one character to parrot a cliché straight out of some Maoist anti-dropout screed: “I’m glad everyone’s so wasteful . . . It supports my lifestyle.” [Not in the convergence section, however.—Ed.] On the other hand, he allows that the convergence itself is intelligently self-organized, is envious of the freedom and initiative of the participants, and ultimately only faults them for potentially being “naïve” and “idealistic.”

Anyway, be it hatchet job or principled journalism, here it is; the section about the convergence appears on page 62.

jackskinner said,

March 6, 2008 @ 10:18 am

I now consider myself part of crimthinc. and I also read Harper’s. Sometimes writing in Harper’s tends to be a bit on the ‘creative’ side of journalism but I feel it’s a solid magazine. I also think most that read Harper’s are too educated for their own good and can look down on everyone on both sides of an issue at the same time. I’ll read the article when it comes in the mail, Harper’s would most likely print a response from someone who was at the convergence, especially if it makes good points and is readable. I suggest responding to them. If the gathering was misrepresented it is up to a participant(s) to set the record stright. I’ve seen in their pages a willingness to accept criticism of aricles (and like any pub. they also have the chance to spit out the last word.)

FYI- I also read Reason, Z, Mother Earth News, Mother Jones, Rolling Thunder (of course) and others. I don’t subscribe to any of these publications editorial views in whole. It is up to all of us to read as many viewpoints as we can to gather and accumulate the ‘facts’ of what is happening out of our view and reach. Most mags will publish rebuttals if well thought and written and is up to their readers to keep them honest! I care not for TV.
I do most of my work by writing poetry and undermining everything I’ve worked for my ‘profesional’ life. If someone lives in my area drop me a line, if I’m not too bourgeois for ya we may be able to help each other out.
I am 36, and belong to a clan of five. I live in DeLeon Springs FL.
sw5446@hotmail.com
MAKE POETRY IN LIFE!

mattpower said,

March 9, 2008 @ 4:42 pm

hey there Crimethinc,

Thanks for posting my story. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from all sides on this piece, and opinions have been generally polarized. So I was interested to read that it had a similar reception by your blog collective, and wasn’t met with any monolithic political sensibilities. There was a real ambivalence at the heart of what I was trying to put across, and I do wish I had more space in the piece for a sophisticated or nuanced explication of crimethinc and its politics. As for the line about dysentery, it was a joke based on the observation by my friend Brad Will that the people in the camp kitchen weren’t washing their hands. Brad explained to the cooks that he had missed the riots in Prague (or somewhere, I forget) because of food poisoning from an unhygienic camp kitchen. So I made a joke about it.

I recently read your conversation on this blog with Jeff Sharlet, a friend and colleague who wrote about Brad’s murder in Rolling Stone. I also wrote a piece about Brad (we knew each other for 10 years), which can be found here: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/summer/power-one-more-martyr/

In any event, I’ve always been of the opinion that more discussion is better for mutual understanding than less, so if anyone wants to weigh in, I’m reading this.

Matt Power

Annie Nimmety said,

March 13, 2008 @ 5:23 pm

Hello The Crime Think Organization,

A friend and I had an idea. We printed out seventy five copies of the Harpers article and my friend assigned her composition class to read it. The next day she had me come in and tell her three classes of 25 each all about the dangerous anarchist underworld.

I did not reference the article very much in my lectures to the students, but the Harpers article served as an excellent introduction to an aspect of “anarchism” many of them never imagined. I am of course referring to “lifestyle anarchism”. The Harpers article provided a context for my tales of shoplifting and debauchery.

I do not know how much the students liked the article itself, but they certainly LOVED what I had to say. I was really astounded. All of them (suburban community college students) were asking me for more, more, more. They did not know how someone could be living like I was living. I should have been dead. Or in a mental asylum.

At first I thought I was merely being a monkey dancing on a box for a classroom of spectators. But by the end of the day I knew I had stirred something in them.

We should never forget that what is old to us is new to everyone else. What we do is exciting to outsiders and if they are exposed to it…they like it! I’ve got no beef with the Harpers article and found it very useful today. I think it has the potential (like many, many other things) to make people start (repeat: START) questioning the way they live their lives. Many things are better at this than the Harpers article. But they are not printed in Harpers. A magazine that a certain white middle layer enjoys reading.

My friend and I found the article useful today. Just thought I’d share our little experiment. 75 kids had some exposure to “anarchy” today. By tomorrow they will be smoking cigarettes.

Love,

Annie Nimmety

d said,

March 13, 2008 @ 8:03 pm

smoking was my gateway into reading that stupid anarchist cookbook. two years later i read emma goldman cover to cover and called myself an anarchist.

ret marut said,

March 13, 2008 @ 10:52 pm

Matt–

I read your piece on Brad at last summer’s CrimethInc. convergence; it was at the memorial set up for him. It’s a really good text.

Regarding camp kitchen hygiene–I might be wrong, but I think the dysentery in question actually occurred at the DNC in LA back in 2000; Brad was telling stories of Prague in Winona, but as far as I remember they all involved riots, not food poisoning.

Allow me to expand a bit on my reservations on the Harper’s text. Some of them, certainly, are coming out of the defensiveness resulting from years of misrepresentations of the CrimethInc. project–not by the corporate media so much as by other anarchists. Surrounded by decapitated straw men, it’s hard to keep one’s head. The Matt in your story, however true to life he may or may not be, is all too familiar as the protagonist of countless witless characterizations of CrimethInc. by those who perceive themselves to be competing for the same political territory. For any of us, it is a horrific tragedy that “everyone’s so wasteful,” and relying on others’ waste is regarded primarily as a means to focus on addressing that problem at the roots. You don’t equate Matt and the participants in the convergence, but starting with Matt and moving on to the convergence is bound to get my hackles up, just because of bad associations. The Matts of the world are socially adjacent to many of the convergence participants, and one is always most critical of (and afraid of being represented by) those who are closest to one’s own camp while occupying another.

You’ll be familiar with various anarchist takes on the role of the corporate media in maintaining the current wasteful, repressive, and depressing status quo, so I won’t belabor that issue. I’ll just say that although it came across that you were attempting to offer a sympathetic portrait, as I read I couldn’t help but picture the most smug middle-class Harper’s reader interpreting the text as a confirmation of his own rightness in maintaining his lifestyle and (lack of meaningful) political commitments.

Given the choice between catching dysentery from teenagers and sticking with restaurant dinners, for example, it seems natural to pick the latter. I can’t help but imagine my hypothetical smug Harper’s reader taking your description of the camp kitchen as confirmation of his untested hypothesis that Anarchy Couldn’t Work. Of course, any food service worker will tell you that the conditions in the back room of even the fanciest restaurants are hardly more sanitary than the kitchen at that camp–you’re risking catching dysentery from teenagers either way.

The same goes for the stuff about naiveté. Sure, everyone knows we live in an unsustainable and unfair world, but only naive teenagers think we can do anything about it. One might as easily say that the truly naive position is that of the hypothetical smug reader, who behaves as though he believes climate change can be averted by green capitalism and the inequities of capitalism itself can be redressed by electing Obama. Perhaps you can’t seriously pose a question like this in Harper’s, but really–what’s more unethical, all things considered: stealing something from Wal-mart, or BUYING it?

Again, the Matts of the world make convenient points of reference for those who would like to shrug off serious responses to the crises posed by global capitalism as naive at best and megalomaniacal at worst. I don’t take it that was the intent of your text, but I do think it risks enabling that shrugging.

Thanks very much for posting here and reading my commentary with an open mind.

mattpower said,

March 19, 2008 @ 2:59 pm

Hi Ret,

Thanks for such a thoughtful commentary. I wish I had been able to speak to you beforehand, as I could have gotten a more even-handed interpretation of crimethinc across in the piece. It wasn’t meant as a hatchet job. I wanted to convey the point that crimethinc (as a philosophy perhaps more than on an individual basis) is a deeply hopeful worldview, beset perhaps by some of the eternal problems of young people trying to figure their way in the world. And I can imagine feeling sensitive to portrayals of the movement by the mainstream media. Much of what I was exploring in the piece was my own ambivalence ( call it burn-out, growing up, selling out) about that world. I was greatly enamored of it for some time, from tree-sits in oregon to squats in the south bronx, and was active particularly in the community gardens fights of the late 90s in New York. There were some victories, and plenty of defeats, and at some point I started drifting away from that world. So my intent in the story was to struggle with and try and understand my own disenchantment. A lot of it came down to a sense that there was an absolutism in the movement, something like the “purity” that Jeff Sharlet was getting at in his earlier discussion here, which didn’t allow for a diversity of opinions. Part of it was feeling that the tactics weren’t effective and there was too much infighting and too many meetings that went nowhere.

Perhaps I should have taken a less personal and more analytical approach, and could have given crimethinc a fairer shake. I certainly didn’t intend to equate Matt with the participants at the Convergence; he certainly wouldn’t have. He just wanted to make it there for the creamed corn wrestling.

But as to the larger point, about naivete and enabling smugness: i don’t believe that real change can be achieved without engaging and persuading a great many people. It simply won’t work otherwise. I don’t think wanting change is naive, but trying to effect it while remaining detached from the world is a near-impossible place to work from. I’m not suggesting crimethincers should go sticker-bombing for Obama, but I think there has to be more engagement with the rest of the spectrum, and less getting bogged in ideological infighting and retreating from society.

On the well-framed question of whether stealing something from Wal-Mart is more unethical than buying it, I’d say Harper’s certainly wouldn’t mind posing it that way; I wish I’d thought to write it that clearly. I don’t believe that stealing will ultimately affect Wal-Mart’s bottom line, but if it makes you happy, fine. I don’t think it’s a question of ethics, I myself was too afraid of being caught. My critique was more in the notion that theft was a meaningful political act, or would ultimately change anything about capitalism.

But I do think that, as you put it, “the crises posed by global capitalism” have to be addressed seriously, and I think there are a lot of intelligent and well-intentioned people who are trying very hard to do that, across the political spectrum. I would only caution that an absolutism about how those crises must be addressed will be ineffective. Too many people are needed to participate for things to work that way.

One other aspect I really wish I had discussed has to do with the “green scares”, and the tactics the government has been using in dealing with the bogeymen of “ecoterrorists” and anarchists. I heard the story of “Anna” while at crimethinc, and I would have liked to discuss further the often-justified fears of people who commit themselves to lives of activism in the current political climate. But that’s another story, I suppose, and one in which I am not a character.

In any event, thanks for engaging in a discussion with me. This has turned out to be one of the more polarizing articles I’ve ever written, so I’m glad to get a thoughtful response.

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