Archive for Read All About It
August 23, 2010 at 10:03 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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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.
August 18, 2010 at 10:25 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
Over the past decade, CrimethInc. texts have appeared in over two dozen languages, both as translations and original texts. Unfortunately, no one has done a thorough job of archiving these or maintaining contacts between different groups. We’d like to change that, but we need help. If you’d like to assist with such an archive or with maintaining communication between related projects around the world, please email us at foreignlegion@crimethinc.com.
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.
August 11, 2010 at 7:42 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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While religious fundamentalism is still a powerful force, ideology seems to be on the wane as a motor of secular revolutionary activity. The days are long past when groups like the Communist Party could command millions of adherents worldwide. Should anarchists celebrate this decline, positioning ourselves atop the crashing wave of history? Is ideology itself the problem? But what would it mean to be against ideology?
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.
July 27, 2010 at 3:31 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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Looking back over the past decade, it appears that North American law enforcement agencies are increasingly utilizing conspiracy charges to target anarchists and other radicals. In hopes of countering this, we’ve composed an in-depth report reviewing recent conspiracy cases and analyzing what we can do to discourage the state from pursuing this strategy of repression.
Meanwhile, our comrades are embarking on a nationwide tour to address this same issue. The full list of tour dates is available here.
July 5, 2010 at 7:15 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut
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Our last update offered an overview of what happened in Toronto during the anarchist actions against the G20 June 25-27. We’ve received the following blow-by-blow report from on the ground there, offering context and analysis from inside the riots that shook Canada’s largest city. Anarchists have fully emerged in North America as a force to be reckoned with following the events in Toronto, and it is important to understand how this came about. The black bloc has become a household name throughout the region, and we must use this exposure to our advantage by maintaining our visibility even in the face of repression. We must also look critically at the events of the weekend in order to make strategic advances toward our goal of completely dismantling the domination and hierarchy of the present world.
Information on the situation facing arrestees in Toronto is still sketchy at best, as most of those with serious charges have not received bail hearings yet and full coordination of support campaigns has yet to emerge. We will present an additional update on repression and arrestee support as soon as possible.
Full report here.
July 1, 2010 at 2:57 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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On June 26, 2010, thousands of anarchists and other protesters gathered outside the G20 summit in Toronto, facing off against more than 19,000 security officials with a budget of nearly a billion dollars. The riots that followed have provoked outrage from public officials and corporate media commentators.
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.
March 9, 2010 at 1:17 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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Anarchists in the US have been slow to respond to the economic crisis, missing many of the opportunities it has offered. One of the exceptions is the recent participation of anarchists in the student movement protesting budget cuts and austerity measures. This came into the national consciousness in December 2008 when students occupied a building at the New School in New York City. NYU followed suit in February, and the following fall students in California began occupying schools up and down the coast.
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
January 7, 2010 at 11:49 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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So do we—a total break with domination and hierarchy in all their forms, involving an armed uprising if need be. Until that’s possible, we’ll settle for recurring clashes in which to develop our skills, find comrades, and emphasize the gulf between ourselves and our oppressors.
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.
December 22, 2009 at 12:07 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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On the heels of three new settlements in which the government of Washington, D.C. is paying protesters well over $22 million, we’ve completed a new feature and two-sided poster on the subject of payouts to survivors of police repression. Both black and white and color versions of the poster are available.
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.
December 10, 2009 at 11:24 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
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In the past few years, scientific consensus has finally emerged that global warming is taking place as a result of industrial capitalism and with dire consequences for life on earth. Corporate efforts to bribe scientists to argue otherwise are attracting fewer and fewer takers; this is especially telling in view of how many researchers depend on industry backing. But rather than engaging with the fact that capitalism itself is destructive, governments and liberal environmentalists are promoting corporate responses to the problems posed by climate change.
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
November 5, 2009 at 9:11 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
I first saw Testament perform in 2007, following a small-scale riot in Athens, Ohio. It was exciting to see an MC delivering an explicitly anarchist message with the skills and charisma it takes to make real hip hop, rather than the well-intentioned imitation one sometimes finds in politicized circles.
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.
Read on after the jump.
October 29, 2009 at 1:49 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut
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In our initial coverage of last month’s G20 protests, we challenged readers to imagine the offensive role dumpsters played in the conflict as a fable in which a tool refuses its prescribed social function:
Imagine, if you will, gentle reader, the animist version of this story in which dumpsters, long accused of complicity in anarchist “lifestylism,” step out of their social role to join the social war. Free food, even when distributed via programs like Food Not Bombs, is not enough—we want freedom itself, and the dumpster does too, and it gains momentum down the hill as it rolls, alone and magnificent, directly into a pair of oblivious policemen.
Our friends at the Super Happy Anarcho-Fun Pages, profiled earlier on this blog, have risen to the challenge, publishing a special issue of their comic delightfully lampooning our biannual Rolling Thunder. This sendup chronicles the adventures of one Skip, a dumpster who forsakes his place in a dropout community to make war on the ruling social order. It is available for downloading here:
web version [6MB PDF] : letter-size print [6.6MB PDF] : A4 print [6.7MB PDF]
October 13, 2009 at 5:48 am · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
AK Press has just published a collection of interviews with anarchist authors who write fiction, entitled Mythmakers and Lawbreakers. The interviewees include Ursula Le Guin, Derrick Jensen, Alan Moore, Starhawk, and an anonymous CrimethInc. ex-worker. The interview references two children’s books, The Secret World of Terijian and The Secret World of Duvbo, that are neither published by nor available through CrimethInc. Far East.
Read the full interview after the jump.
October 7, 2009 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by ret marut
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The reports are coming in, and many participants are describing the G20 protests in Pittsburgh as a success. This is exciting news; the US anarchist movement hasn’t pulled off an unequivocally successful nationwide mobilization in half a decade or more. At the same time, success entails risks of its own: we may overlook the things we didn’t do well, take credit for things outside our actual influence, or fixate on attempting to repeat ourselves. Meanwhile the authorities, who often exaggerate our effectiveness to justify repressing us, appear to be understating the extent of anarchist damage and disruption in Pittsburgh, perhaps to downplay the possibility of militant anticapitalism regaining momentum.
This appraisal explores the triumphs and shortcomings of the G20 mobilization, in hopes that these lessons can be applied soon on a variety of other battlefields.
Read full piece here.
August 20, 2009 at 8:28 pm · Filed under Read All About It, posted by b. traven
People are going to be talking about the 2009 CrimethInc. Convergence for years to come. As usual, ready or not, we end up at the center of every storm.
This full report offers a summary of the events and a discussion of the issues, prepared with input from several convergence organizers after countless conversations. If you’re already familiar with the basic story, skip right to the analysis.
For a basic discussion of some of the issues around privilege, power dynamics, and identity, try “Undermining Oppression” in our online reading library.
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