CrimethInc. texts not available elsewhere on the internet, drafts in progress, other material of interest
Just in time for the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, we have the video footage of last Wednesday’s debate with Chris Hedges, courtesy of our comrades at Global Uprisings. We’re also including a summary of the results of the debate and some of the points we set out to make in it.
At 7 pm on Wednesday, September 12, Chris Hedges, author of “The Cancer in Occupy,” and a participant in the CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective will meet for a pubic debate about tactics in the Occupy movement and beyond. The debate, free and open to the public, will take place in Proshansky Auditorium at CUNY in New York City.
For those who can’t attend, the debate will be live-streamed at http://www.crimethinc.com/livestream; the link won’t go live until the event proper begins, shortly after 6:30 pm Eastern Standard Time.
The livestream will be publicly screened at several events around the country, including:
Chapel HIll, NC: Internationalist Books, Facebook event page
Minneapolis, MN: Minnehaha Free Space, Facebook event page
Oakland, CA: The Holdout
Philadelphia, PA: Wooden Shoe Books, Facebook event page
Toronto, Ontario: “The Central,” 603 Markham Street
If you are also presenting a public screening of the debate and would like your event listed here, please email info@crimethinc.com with the details or post comment below.
In February 2012, as the Occupy movement tapered off, a strike broke out against austerity measures in the Québécois higher education system. Prevented from occupying buildings as it had in 2005, the student movement shifted to a strategy of economic disruption: blockading businesses, interrupting conferences, and spreading chaos in the streets. At its peak, the resulting unrest surpassed any protest movement in North America for a generation.
To counteract the media blackout, we’ve worked with participants to prepare a two-part feature:
While the Iron Is Hot, I: Student Strike & Social Revolt in Québec, Spring 2012
While the Iron Is Hot, II: Anarchist Analysis of the Revolt in Québec
In this comprehensive report, we chart the strike action by action, from its awkward beginnings through the high point of the revolt and the emergency measures with which the government attempted to suppress it. At each stage in its development, we explore why the strike assumed the forms it did, and analyze the forces competing to push it forward, suppress it, or coopt it. Like the Oakland port blockade of November 2, 2011, the strike suggests a path forward out of the strategic impasse resulting from the Occupy evictions; it also demonstrates that building a capacity for confrontation is an infrastructural project, as much as any community institution.
At nearly 30,000 words and almost 100 photos and videos, be warned that the page may take some time to load.
The next chapter of the story is about to be written: militants have called for a convergence beginning August 13, to continue the strike in the face of government repression. Stay tuned.
To complement the online edition of Vortext, we’ve uploaded its sister publication TERROR INCOGNITA in pdf form. Terror Incognita challenges conventional notions about consent, violence, sexuality, desire, and freedom, in hopes of pushing the discourse about these subjects far out of familiar territory.
TERROR INCOGNITA
PDF (22.6 MB) Imposed Zine Version (Legal Size)
PDF (22.6 MB) Online Reading Version
Please spread these far and wide.
At long last, we’ve uploaded a pdf version of VORTEXT, organ of the Experimentation Committee, to our downloads page. Please print these out and share them freely—or, heaven help you, miserably slog through it online.
VORTEXT:
ORGAN OF THE EXPERIMENTATION COMMITTEE
PDF (35.4 MB) Imposed Zine Version (Legal Size)
PDF (36.1 MB) Online Reading Version
Therein, you may read about the hijinks and provocations of the Experimentation Committee; about the uses of black magic and self-destruction in the service of insurrection; about passionism, consonance, and terrible freedom; a philosophical inquiry into the relation between anarchy and friendship; and a great deal more. We’ve also added the manifesto of the Experimentation Committee to our reading library:
Beware/Join the Experimentation Committee!
We’ll upload a pdf of TERROR INCOGNITA next.
Over the past month, the FBI has initiated a spate of entrapment operations designed to frame anarchists as “terrorists.” Significantly, they have not targeted longtime organizers, but rather people who are relatively peripheral to anarchist communities.
In response, we’ve prepared a pamphlet suitable for a wide readership explaining how this entrapment strategy works, and an analysis exploring why the FBI has adopted it. Please circulate these widely.
On May Day 2012, anarchists around the US succeeded in precipitating clashes on a larger scale than in previous years. But it’s important to strategize ahead of our immediate problems, in order to be prepared for the subsequent challenges we will face when we succeed. This report from the May Day 2012 mobilization in Berlin offers a cautionary tale, showing how the commodification of rebellion, the influence of accommodating movement leaders, and the rhetoric of creating safe spaces have been used to neutralize a popular tradition of resistance. If revolt continues to gain momentum in the United States, we can expect to see some of these strategies employed here as well.
As the momentum that originated with Occupy Wall Street tapers off, May Day 2012 saw anarchists on the West Coast consolidate their gains in the street with actions from Los Angeles to Vancouver. In a series of first-person vignettes from the Bay Area, supplemented by a photoessay from Seattle set to a song by Underground Reverie, we evoke the atmosphere of May Day 2012 and plumb the questions it poses.
We’ve added a new video to our Emergency Broadcast System, Ethan Silverstein’s Roses on My Table. This documentary short tells the story of the Wingnut Anarchist Collective in Richmond, VA, an organizing group and cooperative living space aimed at fostering mutual aid and grassroots resistance to authority. From maintaining a community center to carrying out occupations and disaster relief, the video illustrates some of the many ways a handful of committed people can transform their lives and their community.
Over the past years, anarchists have helped popularize the discourses of
consent in interpersonal relationships as a way to counter rape culture, and
consensus in political organizing as an anti-authoritarian approach to decision-making. Recently, however, we’ve seen the language of consent and consensus used to condemn direct action and delegitimize autonomous initiatives.
Does consent discourse offer a useful framework with which to evaluate direct action tactics and strategy? Can we challenge consensus reality effectively while respecting everyone’s wishes? What’s the relationship between desire and social transformation? Breaking with Consensus Reality grapples with these questions, exploring the limits of the politics of consent and proposing an alternative.
Breaking with Consensus Reality
(PDF [1.8 MB] Imposed Zine Version)
(PDF [1.7 MB] Online Reading Zine Version)
This text is drawn from the publication TERROR INCOGNITA, which will soon be available online in full.
