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.

A “spin-off” of Days of War, Nights of Love has recently been published in Danish. It’s not just a translation of the original material, but a new version with a lot of original content, a new design, and new illustrations. The book is available via the website www.tankekriminalitet.tk or in underground shops in Denmark. Most of the original contents are included and expanded; the new articles explore child-rearing, street art, the education system, and vegetarianism.

In Brazil, Protopia is translating CrimethInc. books into Brazilian Portuguese. They have already translated Days of War, Nights of Love and Expect Resistance, and are currently midway through Recipes for Disaster. All the texts are available on the Protopia website, and they plan to print Days of War, Nights of Love through a local anarchist publisher, Deriva, soon. Lots of texts by Protopia’s own agents and others are available on their website as well.

Since our last update about German-language CrimethInc. projects, our gender poster has appeared in German [PDF, 322kb] as well, and in Spanish [PDF, 363kb]. We reported on the Icelandic translation of Days of War, Nights of Love when it was printed in 2006. An abridged Italian translation of Recipes for Disaster, Ricette per il Caos [PDF, 3.29MB], was published around the same time and is now available online.

A Czech CrimethInc. group has long maintained websites here and here. A CrimethInc. cell in South Africa maintains a website here. An old Spanish-language CrimethInc. site is archived on this website; you can find our humorous dishwashing poster in Spanish here. A Finnish translation of our pamphlet “Beyond Democracy” appeared here. Various texts have appeared in Bulgarian on this website and in the zine Katarzis. An Indonesian group publishes a sort of sister journal to Rolling Thunder entitled Amor Fati.

It’s especially difficult to keep up with smaller-scale translations. For example, our interview ”How to Organize an Insurrection” swiftly appeared in German, French, Polish, and Catalan, among other languages. Some other translations of this interview, including the Russian version, appear to no longer be available online, another good reason to organize a more permanent archive.

Countless more texts and translations, like this Hebrew translation of Fighting for Our Lives [PDF, 2.2 MB], have never been widely available on the internet. Somewhere out there are Swedish, Norwegian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croat, Slovakian, Lithuanian, Basque, Mandarin Chinese, and Esperanto translations we have lost track of over the years, some of them full books. If you have access to any of these, please contact us and we’ll try to help make them available to the public.

Last May, a CrimethInc. agent was invited to speak about “The End of Ideology and the Future Events” on a panel at the 2010 Babylonia festival in Athens, Greece. We’ve polished the notes from that discussion into a text exploring what ideology is, what it could mean to oppose it, and what could replace it as a foundation for resistance.

Read the full analysis here.

Meanwhile, our comrades are embarking on a nationwide tour to address this same issue. The full list of tour dates is available here.

Black and White Version [PDF, 1.4 MB]

-

-

THE POLICE

The ones who beat Rodney King, who gunned down Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo and Oscar Grant, who murdered Fred Hampton in his bed. The ones who broke Víctor Jara’s hands and Steve Biko’s skull, who disappeared dissidents from Argentina to Zaire, who served Josef Stalin. The ones who enforced Apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States. The ones who interrogated Black Panthers and Catholic Workers, who maintained records on 16 million people in East Germany, who track us through surveillance cameras and phone taps. The ones firing tear gas and rubber bullets whenever a demonstration gets out of hand, who back the bosses in every strike. The ones who stand between every hungry person and the grocery shelves stocked with food, between every homeless person and the buildings standing empty, between every immigrant and her family.

In every nation, in every age, you tell us you’re indispensable, that without you we’d all be killing each other. But we know well enough who the killers are. You won’t fuck with us much longer.

POLICE EVERYWHERE, JUSTICE NOWHERE
www.crimethinc.com/police

We salute the courage of those who put themselves at tremendous risk to shatter the illusion of social consensus and reveal the depth of public outrage against the G20 leaders and the capitalist system they defend. If you put your freedom on the line in Toronto—thank you.

Full statement here.

An updated list of the shows is available here. Contact the band at fromthedepthsnc@gmail.com.

Geoff, who has played drums in From the Depths, will not be joining the band on this tour, in order to focus on an accountability process he is participating in. More information is available on the band’s website.

Send stories to stealfromworkday@gmail.com. The deadline is Tuesday, March 30.

The most recent phase of the student movement came to a head on March 4, when protests took place all around the US. The Bay Area was perhaps the epicenter of this day of action, seeing thousands of people on the streets—but at this epicenter, the tensions and contradictions around anarchist participation in the student movement came to the fore. Here, we present an eyewitness report on March 4 actions in the Bay, and complement it with a set of discussion questions we hope will help anarchists and others in the student movement hone their strategies. We’re seeking responses to these questions—email answers to rollingthunder@crimethinc.com or post them in the comments section here.

Report from the Bay Area, March 4
Anarchists in the March 4 Protests: Discussion Questions

Following up on our coverage of the 2008 DNC and RNC protests, this issue of Rolling Thunder appraises anarchist action at the 2009 G20 summit, detailing the background of the mobilization, mapping conflict throughout the city, and analyzing the factors that determined the strategies of the police and protesters. The accompanying Pittsburgh scene report examines the decade of local organizing that prepared the ground for this and other confrontations, deriving lessons relevant to communities around the country.

Elsewhere within, this issue scrutinizes protest and resistance on campus—from the recent student occupation movement in the US to the campaign to shut down a fascist organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Overseas, we survey Smash EDO, a British anti-military campaign that tests some of the hypotheses advanced in coverage of the SHAC campaign in Rolling Thunder #6.

This issue also includes Russian history from the “time of troubles” to Kropotkin’s escape from prison, reviews of Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! and the obscurantist publication Politics Is Not a Banana, and more of the reflections and witticisms that set Rolling Thunder apart as a peerless exemplar of “how beautiful anarchist journals can be.”

Starting with this issue, we’ll also be complementing each issue of Rolling Thunder with an online supplement offering additional information, links, and materials. Among other things, the supplement to this issue features maps of action during the Pittsburgh G20 protests, a PDF of the newspaper wrap anarchists used in their campaign against a fascist student group, and a FAQ flier answering objections to militant antifascist organizing commonly posed by partisans of liberal democracy.

Rolling Thunder #9 Online Supplement

Pittsburgh G20 Summit

The coverage of the G20 summit in Rolling Thunder #9 fills out and refines reports that appeared earlier on this website, including eyewitness accounts, analysis of police strategy, and a general assessment of the organizing. It also includes painstakingly assembled maps [PDF, 356 KB] charting movements and confrontations throughout the primary day of action, which should be invaluable for future anarchist strategizing:

-
Student Occupations from New York to California

This issue includes accounts from the occupations of the New School in NYC December 2008 and April 2009 and University of California at Berkeley the following November–two formative incidents in the development of the student movement that came to a head March 4, 2010, the day after this issue was released. To read more about recent outbreaks of student insurgency, one might begin with:

After the Fall, a paper collecting statements from participants in the 2009 occupations in California

7-Day Weekend, a UC Santa Cruz newsletter covering the same subject in somewhat plainer language

The New School Reoccupied, focusing on occupation and resistance at the New School in NYC

Occupy CA, a frequently updated blog detailing the occupation movement throughout California and the world

Shutting Down “Youth for Western Civilization”

This issue takes an in-depth view of the struggle that played out on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill between local radicals and the fascist student group Youth for Western Civilization. Much of the corporate and campus news coverage of these events is now apparently offline, but one can still read anarchist coverage of some of the important moments of the conflict here:

Protesters Kick Racist Speaker Off Campus
Youth for Western Civilization Co-Founder Faces Sentencing on Hate Crime
Media Saboteurs Take on Youth for Western Civilization

Youtube still has some footage up of the initial disruption, when anti-immigrant politician Tom Tancredo was prevented from speaking. Some of this is from right-wing cranks who cry about the “free speech” of an ex-congressman while police are beating, peppers-spraying, and tasering student protesters.

To download the “Special Anti-Racist Issue” that anarchists used to wrap copies of the “real” campus paper on the first day of the fall 2009 semester, click here [PDF, 717 KB].

Anarchists also distributed a text entitled “War by Other Means,” elucidating the ways that the notion of the university as a “marketplace of ideas” serves to obscure the real power relationships at work in conflicts such as the struggle over YWC.

Finally, retired professor Elliot Cramer, who briefly served as the group’s advisor before protesters provoked him into getting himself forcibly removed by the administration, maintains his own online archive of material relating to the Youth for Western Civilization debacle—albeit from his own skewed perspective.

Bonus for extra credit: A moronic newscaster attempts to combine “university” and “diversity” into one word: “unidiversity.” Even liberals should find it somewhat distressing that anarchist editing standards are higher than those of the corporate outlets charged with producing informed voters.

Free Speech

To fill out the coverage of the Youth for Western Civilization fracas, this issue examines the ways that the rhetoric of free speech is used to suppress dissent and fortify the legitimacy of those in power. For the convenience of anti-fascist organizers, we’ve prepared a FAQ PDF addressing common objections to militant resistance to fascism. Print these out and distribute them next time you shut down a KKK rally or an anti-immigrant speaking event and all the liberals are crying that you “killed democracy.”

Pittsburgh Scene Report

The Pittsburgh scene report in Rolling Thunder #9 spans the past one-hundred-and-forty years of anarchist activity in the city, zooming in on the opening decade of the 21st century. Here’s an incomplete list of contemporary projects in Pittsburgh that either are explicitly anarchist, involve a lot of anarchists, or are consistent with anarchist ethics:
Pittsburgh Organizing Group – longtime anarchist organizers
Greater Pittsburgh Anarchist Collective and Anti-Racist Action
Landslide Community Farm
The BigIdea Radical Bookstore
Pittsburgh Indymedia and Rustbelt Radio
Bash Back
Food Not Bombs
Pittsburgh Association for the Abolition of Vivisection
Rusty Strings Collective – Pittsburgh folk punk
Howling Mob Society – anarchist historical society
Book ‘Em books-to-prisoners program
Free Ride – do-it-yourself bicycle repair
Critical Mass
Thomas Merton Center – for peace and justice organizing
FedUp! – prisoner defense letter-writing group
East End Mutual-Aid Association – anarchist community organizing in the neighborhoods of Bloomfield, Garfield, Friendship, and East Liberty

But how do we bring about these confrontations? How do we ensure that they strengthen us more than our enemies? What pitfalls await us on this road? And what else do we have to do to make our efforts effective?

Over the past few years, a small current has gained visibility in US anarchist circles prioritizing the themes of insurrection and social conflict. This analysis explores how effective these strategies are at achieving their professed goals, as well as the relationship between insurrectionist theory and the activities associated with it in the current US context.

Read full piece here.

Over the past decade of mobilizations, CrimethInc. agents have repeatedly pulled off narrow escapes from mass-arrest situations in which all our comrades were captured. We felt pretty pleased with ourselves until we learned, some years too late, that everyone who didn’t get away was making thousands of dollars! How embarrassing—we’re such dropouts, we can’t even get a job getting arrested! This, despite the FBI defaming our milieu as the “top domestic terror threat.” What’s a ne’er-do-well supposed to do? So we read with sympathy the account from our comrades who followed in the footsteps of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, crawling through the sewers to escape arrest and, little did they know, a whopping $18,000.

Pass the word around—resistance doesn’t always end in defeat, even when we get beaten and arrested. We may not believe in the legitimacy of the law any more than our rulers do, but we still ought to include the battle in the courts in our strategizing alongside the battle in the streets. By bringing lawsuits against our oppressors, we can increase the costs of repressing us, and sometimes tie their hands for future demonstrations—compare the behavior of the Washington, D.C. police at the 2000 and 2002 IMF protests to their conduct during the 2007 IMF protests. Unfortunately, some sectors of the current anarchist milieu have such short memories that by the time the lawsuits are concluded, many have stopped paying attention, and the initial thoughtless appraisal of protests as “a failure” is all that sticks in people’s heads. We’re only now learning the net results of mobilizations that occurred a decade ago. To mount an effective resistance to capitalism, we need to think in terms of decades, not months.

Read full text here.

This week, representatives of governments around the world are meeting in Copenhagen for the COP15, ostensibly to make decisions on how to respond to the climate crisis. The results are bound to cater to the agenda of corporate interests hoping to legitimize carbon trading and other false solutions. Fortunately, anarchists and other opponents of self-inflicted extinction will be there to crash the party.

Comrades have published a full-length critique of the prevailing narratives around climate change, Introduction to the Apocalypse [PDF, 1 MB]. Likewise, we’ve added new material to our online reading library addressing the issues:

The Climate Is Changing & A Field Guide to False Solutions

Testament has since released a handful of recordings, some of which are freely available for downloading. His original work, such as “Get Into It” with Illogik as Test Their Logik, shows great promise, but thus far my favorite track is his interpretation of pop radio hit “Kiss Me Thru The Phone.”

Testament does with this song what we did with pay phones and the Situationists did with comic strips. Just as a minor billboard alteration can expose the sinister truths concealed in an advertisement, Testament’s cover version reveals the story latent within the original. No one can relate to the chorus more intensely than those separated from their lovers by prison walls—and with 2.3 million behind bars in the US, that may help to explain the song’s popularity.

Testament raises this plotline to the surface:

I wanna see you
but all I can do is listen
to your voice on this phone
we’re digitally kissin
through telephone wires
til they let me outta prison

This brings out all the longing and sadness in the original, formerly buried beneath a thick layer of pop glitz. It’s surprising how much feeling this trite, throwaway jingle can convey when the lyrics deal with something real. Like every other product of industrial capitalist society, radio hits are produced from the toil and tribulation of thousands never credited; superficial and disposable, they’re designed to mask the coercive social relations behind them. But the ghost of all the humanity squandered to produce them lingers somewhere within, and all it takes to summon it is to draw back the curtain.

Drawing it back, Testamant casts light on a civilization in which life at every level of society increasingly resembles imprisonment. The backstory of “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” is that most of us are separated from our loved ones to such an extent that even our fantasies and love songs include this distance. Our friends and families are scattered across the continent by the enforced transience of the job market; our lovers are gone at school or work, even when we are not; we hardly even get to raise our own children. The shelves stocked with energy drinks at every gas station attest to the unsustainable pace of modern life: scrambling to keep up forces us beyond the limits imposed by our own bodies, without ever delivering the promised pleasure and belonging. How many people have absentmindedly nodded along to the original version of this song in semi cabs, in Greyhound buses, in canneries and warehouses, in barracks in Iraq? How many use mp3 players and Ipods as surrogates when they cannot even call their loved ones, or have none to call?

In the music video produced by Interscope, romance mediated by commodities gives way to a romanticized relationship to commodities themselves: the singer’s lover is shown listening to his recordings in place of talking with him, and the love song becomes a product-placement ad for the latest in cellular technology. The more impositions we accept on our lives, the more false substitutes we settle for in place of intimacy, the further removed we become from each other and the possibility of self-determination. The function of pop music is to channel real longing into emotional release without raising the question of where that longing comes from. Yet all it takes to render this longing dangerous again is to show it in its true context, as Testament has done here.

Testament will be performing with From the Depths at a few shows on their upcoming tour through the eastern half of North America.

This review is dedicated to a few of our many comrades currently serving or threatened with time behind bars:

Political prisoner Jeffrey Luers
Environmental activist Marie Mason
Imprisoned organizer Daniel McGowan
Victim of FBI entrapment Eric McDavid
Grand Jury resister Carrie Feldman

CrimethInc. is a collective entity that invites open participation: anyone can write, organize, and publish under the name. For the past decade or so they have turned out an incredible body of books, in many ways revitalizing the world of anarchist publishing. Their books are high quality, available quite cheaply, well-designed, and speak to a different audience than a lot of other anarchist literature. While much of the “history” in Days of War, Nights of Love might be considered fiction, I was also deeply interested in their two children’s books: The Secret World of Duvbo and The Secret World of Terijan. Since this interview, they’ve also released Expect Resistance, a unique book that moves between fictional narrative and theoretical essay quite fluidly.

After a brief email correspondence, I had the pleasure of interviewing an anonymous author who, along with many others, writes under the CrimethInc. moniker. We climbed up into a dusty belfry while a radical bookfair bustled beneath our feet. And contrary to the way most interviews go, this one started with the author asking me a question:

CrimethInc.: What did you think the main differences between The Secret World of Terijian and The Secret World of Duvbo were?

Margaret: Well, they were both trying to get a political point across, but the Duvbo book had a lot more subtlety to it; it wasn’t as much about fighting as it was about discovering your imagination, as compared to the Terijian book, which was “kids discover the ELF.”

CrimethInc.: I don’t think that they’re too different. The Duvbo story is supposed to bring out the ways in which the dynamics within people and communities contribute to their subjugation. They’re subjugated by their own inertia, their cultural norms, and their fear of acknowledging all the secret parts of themselves. It’s an optimistic story; in the end, it is only two ruling class people against the whole town.

Whereas with Terijian, it’s actually two protagonists versus the world; their parents aren’t on board for the struggle. Well, there’s the two kids and then there are the ELFs—there are just a few of them.

Perhaps you could argue that both books bring out the limitations or shortcomings of the political programs they propose. I hadn’t thought about this until now, but the former book seems to suggest, “We’re all anarchists in waiting and if we could just be openly what we secretly are, everything will change. The ruling powers will just leave.” It’s a little optimistic, like I said. Terijian—which is a benefit for the Green Scare victims—tells a story similar to the one that the Green Scare came out of: it’s just us, and maybe a few other people, but we’ll never know who they are because they’re in masks, and we’re the ones who have to make a revolution against normal society. That’s also not a recipe for success. I mean, the parents don’t get involved in the struggle, they’re not punching the construction workers in the end, and the construction workers aren’t punching their bosses.

Terijian is a true story, in that the authors see it as a sort of allegory of the Minnehaha Freestate. Duvbo is like a creation myth for a world that hasn’t come to be yet.

Margaret: What are you attempting to accomplish when you write fiction? Do you think you have accomplished anything with your fiction writing?

CrimethInc.: There are writers whose whole project is to express themselves: “This really expresses me, these are my innermost feelings.” Personally, I’m not interested in that. I think that writing is an attempt to… if I say the word “communicate,” it sounds like there is some sort of object that is in one place that I’m attempting to convey to another place, and I would rather use a word that emphasizes that you’re trying to create a dynamic between people by introducing some new force, which is the words. So for me, writing isn’t about expressing myself, like I have some thing inside of me that I have to bring out and I’ll give it to people and they’ll be different or richer or something. It’s more like it’s a way to exert a lever on social situations. So I’m not possessive of my work per se; I try to contribute to the social milieu, or to the ongoing dialogue, in such a way that things happen.

I think non-fiction is overrated in terms of how non-fiction it is. Everything that you write is going to be a construct; when you’re writing history you’re choosing to leave out 99.9% of everything. You’re basically making up a story by choosing what to include. You could tell the story of the Spanish civil war by writing about what everyone had for breakfast every morning. The fact that we throw out the breakfasts and focus only on the military engagements or what was mentioned in the newspapers, that’s not totally true to reality. But how could you be true to reality?

So writing fiction is just a way to let yourself off the hook: “I’m telling a story.” Maybe it’s a way to be more accountable, because you’re actually telling a story and that’s the focus, the story, as opposed to, “Oh, this is the truth,” which is debatable in every case, be it a historical truth or a philosophical truth.

Margaret: CrimethInc. is both famous and notorious for blurring history and fiction anyway. In Days of War, Nights of Love, there are all the references to fictional historical events or a certain spin on historical events. What led CrimethInc. to do that?

CrimethInc.: I can’t answer for everything in Days of War. You can sort of tell that Days of War was put together by enthusiastic young people who were saying to themselves, “Fuck it! Let’s just say this! Let’s see what happens!” That can have bad results or good results. The exciting thing about Days of War is the vitality; you can tell that the people who put it together weren’t thinking about it as a book that a lot of people were going to read. And that’s the kind of fearlessness that you can only have once as a publisher; once everything you put out under that name is going to receive attention, your actions are whole lot heavier. It’s a lot harder to move that freely.

One of the aspects of free motion in that book is the devil-may-care approach to history: “Oh, we’ll just say this, maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t.” One of the points of that, presumably, is to cast into doubt all the other books that say, “This happened, and this was the truth.” Days of War seems to proclaim, “Don’t believe us, obviously we’re making things up; maybe you shouldn’t believe them either, maybe they’re making things up.” Maybe all the other books you can get are also fabrications, constructions, or at least should be treated as such.

One might say the traditional way to approach activism or radical literature is to ask, “How do we get people to believe our new idea? How do we get people to believe this new ideology?” That’s not actually particularly useful. Everybody is trying to compete to convert people to their ideology. It seems like the revolutionary thing would be to get people to look at ideologies and reality differently. That would be a part of moving to another phase of revolutionary struggle. So how do you write a book that simultaneously calls itself and all other books into question, in such a way that it has a dynamic effect on the readership rather than persuading people to your opinion? In the regard you mention, Days of War is a clumsy but audacious attempt to answer that question.

Margaret: Why do you choose to be anonymous under the CrimethInc. moniker?

CrimethInc.: As I mentioned, I’m not convinced by the myth of authorship. “These are my thoughts, I came up with them, they’re under my name.” That whole copyright thing? That’s all about private property. Folk songs—before so-called “riot” folk I mean—there are songs that nobody knows who wrote them, everybody sings them. They’re collective property. Everybody adjusts them to their specific situations. I think that that’s a much more sensible format. All sorts of CrimethInc. material has been published about the question of authorship, so maybe I’d better focus on my own choices, rather than the ideological ones?

First of all, I want to emphasize that language and all the stories inside of it are collectively produced. That is not to say that they are horizontally produced, but they are collectively produced. Capitalism is collectively produced: it’s a collective relation that we all participate in, in some ways, but a hierarchical one. We collectively produce language, we collectively produce our ideas. They come out of the conversations we’re all having. One person takes some ideas that have been gestating for hundreds of years, writes a book about them, puts his name on it, and makes a whole lot of money or a whole lot of intellectual capital, wins a whole lot of respect, for being the person who’s basically privatized this previously wild rainforest of ideas. I think that’s bullshit.

Authorship can be useful for accountability, if you’re making a claim that you need to be personally answerable for. But if you’re testing out an idea on other people, I think removing the authorship can be a pretty good thing. “Don’t worry about me and how exciting my biography is—how does this idea affect you? Does it just bounce off of you? Is it useless to you? Is it exciting?”

I’m interested in seeing language play out as a dynamic between people. Not as an expression of one person’s personal reality, but as a collective construction. And personally, in addition to finding that critique compelling, I’m just not interested in being some John Zerzan or Ernest Hemingway or something, who has to contend with more people knowing my shadow self than my real self. I enjoy working collectively on writing projects with other people; I think that I’m more intelligent contributing to a collective process of writing, just as people are generally more articulate in conversation than they are when they have to compose a monologue extemporaneously. I don’t think anybody deserves, in the good sense or the bad sense, the positives that Hemingway gets. Nobody deserves the misery of being a famous public figure, upon whom everybody else can project their personal psychodramas and resentments.

Margaret: I feel like that happens to a certain degree with the moniker CrimethInc.

CrimethInc.: Well, CrimethInc.’s not important. Everybody can hate CrimethInc. and that’s not a problem. It’s like a false front to absorb all the projections, all the good and bad associations, so that the people involved in it can still be the real individuals they are in their communities, doing the things they care about, without being crippled by people walking up to them on the street and being like, “Oh my god, it’s really you, sign my blah blah blah.”

Since a lot of the attitudes around authors tend toward mythologizing, better to present something that is explicitly a myth for people to mythologize and leave the people who are involved with the project free to go about their real lives.

Margaret: Why did CrimethInc. choose to self-publish?

CrimethInc.: Self-management. CrimethInc. is just a name that a small group of people initially started sticking on self-published projects, with the critique that it is best to have control of what you’re doing. This is a long-running question that goes back much further than The Clash signing with a major label. Let’s say you’re trying to get to know people in your town. Do you go to their parties or throw your own parties? If you only throw your own parties, maybe you’ll only meet the people you can persuade to come to them, but you can create an environment that brings what you want out of those interactions—what’s good for you, and hopefully will be good for the people who choose to come. If you only go to other people’s parties, you’ll always have a limited agency in framing the interactions you have with others.

I remember when they killed Brad Will in Oaxaca, a year ago now, it was right before Halloween. We went to someone’s Halloween party to try to turn people out to come occupy the Mexican consulate with us. We were trying to explain to people that our friend had just been killed, at some fucking party where everybody was just there to drink. It’s sort of a stretch, as metaphors go, but that is why we have our own dinner parties, right, so we can have a space in which the dialogue is about the things that are important to us. I was at some else’s fancy vegan bourgeois Halloween party where everyone’s in costumes and they don’t give a fuck about my friend who got killed, you know what I’m saying? They care about me, but it’s not a space in which we can discuss that, let alone discuss what to do.

So first of all, we’re creating a space that is self-organized and controlled by everyone who participates in it. CrimethInc. isn’t necessarily the most radical experiment in this direction, but it’s significant that the name itself, if not all of the structures that exist under it, is open and freely accessible to all. The Terijian book was published by a totally different group of people than the people who are involved in crimethinc.com. That particular website is still an exclusive and difficult-to-participate-in structure, but the CrimethInc. myth itself is open and accessible to the public.

Why do things ourselves? I mean, fuck capitalism, you know? The initial projects that I was aware of were ones in which people were committing small-scale crime, taking the money, and making free things out of it, saying, “Here’s some free things funded by anti-capitalist crime—can we have some more of this please?” When you first got a copy of Evasion in zine form, and you’re reading the zine, you’re some 16-year-old kid, it dawns on you that obviously, that zine was stolen and is a sign of an entire underground community of people who believe in anti-corporate theft as a ethical way of life. The zine is the message, however repetitive and dumb the text in it may be.

I think the content of self-organization is worth 1000 times whatever you can say. I’m sure Verso [largest English language radical book publisher] or someone might publish an amazing anarchist text that lots of people would then read, but the question isn’t how to get everyone to read anarchist texts, the question is how we can interact in anarchic ways. You can assign Bakunin at Columbia University and the world won’t be any more anarchist.

Margaret: [Here, dear reader, I rambled incoherently for a moment before reaching my point:] I know that CrimethInc. in particular is a scapegoat for people’s accusations of lifestylism.

CrimethInc.: You’re talking about The Wooden Shoe [a Philadelphia anarchist bookstore] not carrying Evasion? I support The Wooden Shoe’s choice to not carry Evasion. [Note: Evasion is a zine that CrimethInc. published in book form, a memoir of a traveling shoplifter that offended some people through its flippant view on homelessness and lack of class critique.] Evasion wasn’t made to be sold at The Wooden Shoe in its book form. The people who are going to The Wooden Shoe need other things that are available at The Wooden Shoe much more than they need Evasion. Evasion was made, specifically in book form at least, to subvert the materialism of a certain class of youth, by valorizing another mode of life, not as an end in itself, but with the understanding that if those alternate values were presented as a possibility, as an exciting possibility, that they could only lead, at least for some people, to readers eventually developing a deeper anti-capitalist analysis. I feel that that book has served that purpose in some circles. That’s the great thing about us organizing horizontally—freedom of association is one of the other anarchist catchphrases: if people don’t want to organize with us it’s fine. It’s not like the CrimethInc. distribution hub is some giant monolith that if you don’t take all of the books suddenly you can’t get any of the other books you want either. That what’s good about things being structured on a more horizontal basis: everybody can take care of their own stuff rather than depending on one big distributor.

Back to what I said about The Clash signing to that big record label, as one of the first punk bands to sell out or whatever: if all of the energy that had been put into that compromise had been put into building autonomous structures instead, it would be so much easier for us to circulate our ideas today without reinforcing hierarchies. I think that it’s absolutely worth whatever you won’t be able to do, whatever the drawbacks of doing things yourself are, to reinforce the culture of self-directed activity.

We did finally have to work with Baker & Taylor, the giant distributor, to get books into the libraries. I grew up reading books in the library. I think that that is important, that’s one of the few currently existing communal forms of wealth, our libraries. The way I understand the way the distribution is set up, first the books go into all the DIY channels of circulation that are available, then they also go to Baker & Taylor and the bigger distributors, so that people who can’t find them in the DIY environment maybe encounter them elsewhere, because it’s also not good to keep our projects a secret. Baker & Taylor and all of those motherfuckers… you know, to get one ISBN number you have to buy 10 of them, so you can’t just be one person with a book. I think we need more cooperatives, more groups of people who would need ten ISBN numbers, so the individuals don’t get screwed. I’m not saying that that is a solution to capitalism, but it is a way to collectively organize in the meantime.