Fighting in the New Terrain

August 23, 2010 at 10:03 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by


Ten years ago we published Days of War, Nights of Love, one of the most influential anarchist books of the turn of the century. Tremendous technological and cultural shifts have occurred since then. On reflection, it seems that many of the incidental changes radicals were calling for have taken place, but none of the fundamental transformations. We can learn a lot from studying how this happened and what is different about today’s context.

Towards that end, we present Fighting in the New Terrain: What’s Changed since the 20th Century, the product of months of discussion. We hope that this will inspire further analysis and strategizing, and we invite you to share your feedback with us.

desiderata said,

August 23, 2010 @ 4:36 pm

About time ya’ll are steppin’ up yer game.

Perhaps someone’s been reading their Tiqqun…

Takku said,

August 25, 2010 @ 9:38 am

(CrimethInc.) Taistelua uudella maaperällä – mikä on muuttunut 1900-luvun jälkeen…

Finnish translation…

ret marut said,

August 25, 2010 @ 10:34 am

Wow, people in Finland are on top of things!

There’s already a Spanish translation here, as well:
http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/?q=node/14887

fredceancis said,

August 29, 2010 @ 11:15 am

I feel that it’s important not to deny that in many of the changes that have taken place in the last decade, there is progress to celebrate for those opposed to systems of hierarchy and oppression. Denying this is another extension of the fear that we may actually succeed in transforming society.

Case in point- my parents, not “radical” by any means, are growing their own food in their front yard and learning how to get around on their long-dusty bicycles. My mom is reading a book on “suburban survivalism”, which presupposes that systems of commerce are vulnerable and subject to collapse at any time.

That the vultures of capitalism would be trying to take advantage of these massive cultural shifts should surprise no one, but it is still progress. There is now more space than ever before to connect people who are already rejecting capitalism in small ways to a larger struggle.

As it said in Expect Resistance, the point of glorifying shoplifting was to connect an activity already happening in many peoples’ lives to a more radical context. I believe that for many people who would never consider themselves “radicals”, it’s a short walk from something like “slow food”, or backyard gardening, or cheating on your taxes, to that same radical context.

The whole idea of “economic recovery” is a good place to start- why not start by asking people whether they actually want to return to where we were before the financial collapse? It doesn’t take a lot of needling to get people to admit that while their standard of living took a hit a few years ago, they have no desire to return to the meaningless chase for material goods they were previously engaged in.

Anyway. This is already too long. Cheers!

projecthumanity said,

August 29, 2010 @ 5:19 pm

In the spirit of critiquing and celebrating CrimethInc, I humbly present:
http://questionall.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/the-importance-of-crimethinc/

pfm said,

August 29, 2010 @ 7:43 pm

projecthumanity- i’m not going to spend a lot of time replying to your critique because it doesn’t appear to come from a position informed at all of the last few years of our writings (which address, at length, most of the topics you bring up as ‘new’ critique)—i’ll let someone with more patience handle it. however, i did want to say that including a link to a 4 year old, rambling critique, that was already woefully outdated and mis-informed when it was ‘published’, is not a way to earn a lot of credibility around here, and in fact, might cause some to question earnestness, at best, or a lack of research and understanding at worst.

ps:
not-anarchist=telling people to publish a wiki cause you think they should.
anarchist=you setting up a crimethinc wiki for everyone to use.

b. traven said,

August 29, 2010 @ 8:51 pm

About the text published by projecthumanity–

Your text is clearly written coming from a positive, constructive place, and I want to honor that. That’s definitely the place we need to be coming from especially when we formulate critiques in hopes of doing what we do better.

I love the story from ancient Rome. Thank you for sharing that.

In the spirit of taking your critique seriously–and perhaps critiquing even the things you say have been good about CrimethInc. projects–let’s look at that story more closely. What if the people of Rome had left and founded another city? That’s how North America got colonized, isn’t it? One of the ways capitalism has spread has been via those who try to escape it–often they prepare the way for it to follow like a plague. We have to be careful when we “drop out” that we don’t flee, but instead remain and fight.

We’ve been emphasizing that for years and years now. That’s why we cover riots more than “sustainable living”–there’s nowhere to flee to in order to start over, we have to seize the world back right here where we are. Let the liberals focus on living “off the grid”–we have to take it down, or we’re all going down with it.

At the same time, I agree absolutely that the individual rebellions that everyone engages in are the best starting point from which to search for a collective struggle.

Now, it’s not everyone’s job to read everything we publish, but it would be cool if people would critique, say, the past 8 years of our efforts rather than the first 8. I’m curious if you’ve read Rolling Thunder, for example, and whether you feel it is significantly different from Evasion?

My comrade who commented on your piece seems incensed about your referencing that terrible “rethinking crimethinc” article that appeared on Anarkismo. I can understand his frustration. That article was puerile and dishonest; it misrepresented us in the worst way, and it reflects poorly on that entire milieu that it has been circulated so widely. Apparently there is a crowd that needs a straw-man enemy within anarchism more than they need to understand their anarchist comrades. So long as they behave that way, they can hardly be comrades.

A point of clarification, though I won’t get into all the points of clarification I could make. The Salem group is not the largest active CrimethInc. group–that’s just a couple overworked people, desperately trying to keep up with mailorder and to do design work for projects by other CrimethInc. groups around the world. One can read pfm’s anguished postscriptum in that light: “Please, somebody, take the initiative to spread out the labor, instead of just telling us what to do!”

We’ve talked for a long time about setting up web structures that lend themselves better to decentralization–it just hasn’t happened, as a result of centralization (both in responsibilities and initiative). That’s one of those horrible feedback loops that’s easy to identify but hard to break. Really, it’s a wonder we’ve been able to accomplish so much over all these years.

I hope the tone of my response comes across as supportively as I mean for it to. Thanks for taking the time to care about all this.

soma satori said,

September 13, 2010 @ 4:50 pm

“anarchist=you setting up a crimethinc wiki for everyone to use.”

There’s nothing there, but here you go:

http://www.darkdarkness.com/wiki/

Wiki away.

Tsar Dmitri said,

October 12, 2010 @ 12:09 pm

This analysis fits in pretty well into Russian context as well:

1) There’s a part when the text says that in the beginning of the XX century people could dream of an assault on Czar’s palace and call it revolution – and that a generation later a takeover of a TV studio seemed like a way to go. There’s a mentioning of V for Vendetta movie as well. In 1993 in Russia there happened what to many (my parents including) seemed like a nazi coup attempt. I was a kid back then and can’t really get any comprehensible account of the events (the only film I know about is censored and history books are pretty much vague). Nevertheless, in 1993 “revolutionaries” actually did try to capture TV tower in Moscow (it seemed like a high priority target to them).

2) I take it many people in the US use 2001 as a reference point (anarchists including) when they speak of how things changed and how concepts of Seattle and Genova stopped working and how the movement was struck a stunning blow in 9/11. Something like this happened in Russia in 1999 (although of course on a smaller scale and without such dramatic world-wide consequences). So I added up this reference to presumed FSB bombings of civilian houses in Russia, which were used as an excuse for transferring power from Yeltsin to Putin and for second Chechenyan war, FSB/ Police rise in power, antiterrorist and antiextremist legislations etc. This doesnt mean that we dont feel the aftermath of 2001 or the pain it brought all over the world but for people in Russia and Chechnya many things on local level changed in 1999.

3) Speaking of Chechnya, it is pointed out in the text how National Guard regiments that saw action in Iraq are later deployed in the US during RNC/ DNC demos. In Russia we now see riot police regiments (OMON), the same ones that has been deployed in Chechnya since 1994, used against civilians in “mainland” marches of protest (like liberal opposition rallies and anarchist demos). Somewhere around 2003 or 2004 there’s been an accident when riot cops “had their way” with a whole town of Blagoveshensk. For around 72 hours OMON been ravaging the city, capturing civilians on streets, torturing and raping them. No sort of police operation whatsoever took place. Civil authorities withdrew. Army or FSB didn’t intervene. It was later suggested that cops acted out of “Chechenyan war syndrome”.

4) “Anarcho-nationalist” is a real problem in Russia as well, since state repressions made it almost impossible for nazis to operate in the open. Eventually they made the transition to autonomous action even faster than russian lefties did. Unfortunately, for many antifascists in my country (and as many anarchists), this is just a problem of “nazis stealing our culture”. So Im very grateful for the insight into the issue. Nevertheless, they don’t use the term “anarcho-nationalist”, preferring “nazi-autonom”. And russian lefties have labeled this mutation as “new right” tendency (though they do stress that “new right” is theoretical basis for “autonomous nationalists” practice).

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