As promised, subscription copies will be the first mailed out, so if you haven’t yet subscribed, now is the time to do it—if you miss the first bulk subscription mailing, the next one won’t be until a few weeks later. NOTE: Current subscribers should email rtsubs@crimethinc.com if they have changed their address.

Steal Something From Work Day STICKERS!

These classy black and red “silent agitators” are available for free or donation from Wild Nettle Distro, and will also be included free in orders from CrimethInc. Far East. They look great on a doorframe or coffee maker! To get a big package of them for your community, email distro@wildnettle.com.

Steal Something From Work Day PHOTO CONTEST!

We can’t urge you to steal from your workplace–and you don’t need our encouragement! But we can urge you to take a pocketful of STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK stickers and head to the nearest factory, office, housing development, shopping center, or school.

Keep your eyes open–and when you see a STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY sticker, take a photograph of it! Email your photos to stealfromworkday@gmail.com and they’ll go up in the gallery. If you’re the private sort, start a new email from a public-access computer to send your photos. The person who sends the best photograph wins a gift package–to be mailed after April 15, of course. [Sample photo here.]

Steal Something From Work Day GOES VIRAL!

A new Facebook group is promoting STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY. Invite everyone you can–let’s dispel the stigma around reclaiming the product of our labor! This is a great place to upload photos and video, and to promote the campaign in general. Be sure to use common sense whenever using social mapping technologies like Facebook.

Steal Something From Work Day GOES INTERNATIONAL!

Thanks to capitalist globalization, it’s never been easier to get exploited by some profiteering corporation–nor to steal from one! Comrades as far away as Spain, Russia, and Bulgaria are getting ready for STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY.

Meanwhile, here in the US, employee theft is reclaiming $40 billion from corporate bloodsuckers annually, and increasing by 15% per year. Keep up the good work, America!

-

The 2010 Winter Olympics will take place in Vancouver & Whistler, on unceded Indigenous land, from February 12-28 2010. We call on all anti-capitalist, Indigenous, housing rights, labour, migrant justice, environmental, anti-war, community-loving, anti-poverty, civil libertarian, and anti colonial activists to come together to confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents. We are organizing towards a global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial convergence against the 2010 Olympic Games.

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.

If you were planning to order and want to save a few dollars, the deadline for ordering with the old rates is Noon, Pacific Time, on Saturday, January 2nd. After noon, all orders will be shipped at the new rates.

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

STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY is a day of action, but it’s much more than that. The point is not so much to urge people to steal from their workplaces—employees of all ideological stripes already steal from their bosses without need of encouragement—as to raise awareness and promote dialogue about the means and causes of workplace theft. Imagine stickers and posters everywhere rendering the individualized action of workplace theft a topic of collective discussion. Imagine joking references to satirical websites spawning conversations about how coworkers can steal more and better together, and why they are entitled to. Imagine STEAL SOMETHING FROM WORK DAY.

This is an opportunity for anarchists to use the networks developed for mass mobilizations and summit protests to ignite class war on the terrain of daily life, where it matters most. Through humor and honesty, we can bring the contradictions present in practically everyone’s lives to the fore, forcing the issues our rulers and managers would rather brush under the rug. One website is already up, and more are on the way, along with videos, stickers, pins, posters, and more. For now, check these out:

Frequently Asked Questions
Posters and Other Promotional Materials
Press Office

Interviews and other inquiries are welcome to stealfromworkday@gmail.com. If you or your organization would like to participate in this campaign, please send in your endorsement, specifying whether you wish for your contact information to appear on the list of participants. Alternately, just make your own material and get it out there!

Therefore we strongly encourage everyone to select UPS Ground as their shipping option. Also, as a tip to reduce the cost of UPS Ground for your order, we suggest getting creative and having the package shipped to a place of business rather than a residence, doing so can often save several dollars.

Grand juries exist to coerce civilians into providing information about themselves and others to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. They operate in secret; no judges or defense attorneys are present, and neither Constitutional rights nor conventional evidence-gathering protocol apply. Grand juries are frequently used to harass activists and dissidents; for example, a grand jury forced independent journalist Josh Wolf to serve 226 days in a federal prison simply for refusing to turn over a videotape he had shot at a demonstration.

Carrie was already called to appear before this grand jury on October 15, and refused to answer questions, reading a statement declaring that she had “no intention of testifying before this grand” on account of her personal convictions. It is possible that if she and Scott refuse to answer questions this Tuesday, they will be thrown in jail for up to a year.

Both Carrie and Scott have contributed immensely to their communities and to the struggle for a freer world. Among other projects, Carrie has worked with EWOK!, a Twin Cities group supporting environmentalist defendants and prisoners, and the Coldsnap Legal Collective, which has been instrumental in supporting arrestees from the 2008 RNC protests. In addition to his own involvement with EWOK! and the Anarchist Black Cross, Scott participates in Oyate Nipi Kte, a group dedicated to the liberation of the Dakota people and the rediscovery of their traditional ways of life, and the editorial board of the Dakota community journal Anpao Duta. If these two are kidnapped by the state, it will be a tremendous loss.

Supporters are calling for a phone-in day to pressure the prosecutor to leave them alone. This Monday, call US Attorney Cliff Cronk and demand that he dismiss the subpoenas. Let them know this harassment is unacceptable and will be met by popular outrage and opposition at every turn. Feel free to take up as much of their time as you can—they clearly feel entitled to waste ours.

Monday, November 16, 9 am to 4 pm Central Standard Time

US Attorney’s Office
Cliff Cronk: (563)449-5432

Support Webpage for Carrie and Scott

General Purpose Poster against cooperating with police investigations [PDF, 576k]

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

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]

In addition to the felony charges filed in Pittsburgh and the house raid, the Twitter defendants—and perhaps others?—are apparently being targeted by a secretive federal grand jury. Supporters have established an informative and frequently updated blog here. A rudimentary support page for David Japenga can be found here. The Twitter case will set important precedents about people’s legal rights to use modern communications technology—a matter that could determine the shape of protest in this country for decades to come. It is also important to support David Japenga, who is the state’s scapegoat for this mobilization.

Meanwhile, last Thursday, over 100 other defendants appeared in court for charges stemming from the G20 protests. A smug judge lectured college students who had been randomly assaulted by police, while prosecutors and public defenders attempted to intimidate brutalized arrestees into accepting plea bargains and thus giving up their opportunity to sue the authorities over the abuse.

Donations to the support campaign for those targeted by the Twitter charges, the house raid, and the grand jury can be made here; the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project is also taking donations for a legal fund to support arrestees.

Current Availability (click on number to see list of all libraries with book):
Days of War — 192 Libraries
Recipes for Disaster — 57 Libraries (22 here, 20 here & 15 here)
Expect Resistance — 28 Libraries
Evasion — 112 Libraries (74 here & 38 here)
Off the Map — 62 Libraries

These numbers are great, and you can be sure almost every single one of these books was the result of someone requesting the library to acquire it. Of course, there is much room for improvement, so keep up the good work folks, and don’t forget: each request makes the next request more likely to be filled, so keep at it!

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.