Expect Resistance is not one but three books, each of which may be read as a complete work unto itself. The first book, printed in standard black ink, continues the inquiry into modern life and its discontents begun in Days of War, Nights of Love. Just as that book included improved versions of texts originally published between 1996 and 1999, this book draws on CrimethInc. material from 2000 to 2004, painstakingly refined and augmented with a great deal of new content. The second book, in red ink, is a composite account, related by three narrators, of the adventures and tribulations that inevitably ensue when people pursuing their dreams enter into conflict with the world as it is.

Together these comprise a third book, an exploration of the complex relationship between ideals and reality. Expect Resistance is a field manual for a field on which all manuals are useless, a meditation on individual transformation and collective resistance in disastrous times, and a masterpiece that raises the bar for radical publishing.

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Stockholders! Police chiefs! Baristas! Zapatistas! ANARCHISTS!

Read and Reading Tremble

CrimethInc. Launches New Offensive
with the Publication of Expect Resistance

They called us bourgeois for urging people to abandon bourgeois culture.
They called us anti-worker for refusing complicity in exploitation.
They dismissed our advocacy of plagiarism as unoriginal.
They mocked us for producing paper bullets,
Then cried foul play when those projectiles hit their targets.
When we subsisted on crusts of bread, they insisted it was the upper crusts;
When we discovered cornucopias of abundance, they preferred their sour grapes.
We’ve been branded militants and dilettantes, black bloc and bête noire, primus inter pariahs.

We reply, as Marie Antoinette might have, that they can have their words and eat them too—like Samuel Clemens, we don’t care what our detractors say about us, so long as they don’t tell the truth.

Long ago, we embarked on the greatest adventure of our lives: the total rejection of hierarchy, submission, and tedium, of status and status quo. Seceding from an entirely colonized world, we cast ourselves as crash-test dummies in a life-or-death mission to smash through the walls of capitalism.

Contrary to all expectations, we’ve survived. To our surprise, we are now able to present Expect Resistance, a coded account of our adventures hitting those walls and a full report on our findings beyond them.

Printed in stunning black and red and bound in the skin of corporate executives, Expect Resistance is the perfect coffee table book for anyone who lives out of a backpack. Our writers have spent years experimenting with every possible extremity of existence; our editors have spent months hammering out imperfections and adding sickles to the periods to turn them into question marks; our designers, as everyone knows, are the best in the business, not to mention the best against it. A thousand sleeper cells across the planet prepare to swing into action as this announcement is typed.

Concerned citizens may object that some of the raw materials from which this book has been assembled have yet to enter the public domain; we ask them to think of Expect Resistance as a book ahead of its time.

To enjoy your very own copy of Expect Resistance, simply commit to a project as ambitious and absurd as our own, blunder obstinately forward for several years, then send a few dollars to CrimethInc. Far East to defray printing and shipping expenses. Better yet, save your money and request a copy at your local library.

Still in love with all of you and the amazing things we have yet to do–

–your faithful ex-workers

 

They will say we refused everything to make a beautiful but utopian negation—as if it were just a work of art we were out to create. They will say that, like generations of nihilists before us, we uttered our grandiose denial and then were driven by it into the wilds of oblivion. They will praise the product—product being their specialty—and deny the evidence. They will imply that we could not have lived—but we do live, we live!—and so we give you these fragments, this poorly charted record, to spit in their faces… or whisper in their ears as they sleep.

$8
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[Wholesale copies are $5 each]

Early versions of many of the texts in
Expect Resistance can be
found in our Reading Library.

Tech specs

Contents

I. The Fantasy Rebels…

  It Begins
  The Secret World
  New Wings for Flighty Youth
  The Invitation
  The Rebellion of the Dead
  On the Threshold
  The Stillest Hour
  The Fault Line
  Wolves
  Indulge and Undermine
  At Sea
  We Can Make Our Own
  Mapping
  A Map
  Dreams
  Alchemy

  Beyond Democracy
  Two Councils
  Divided and Conquered
  The Eviction
  Crowd Dynamics and the Mass Psychology of Possibility
  And the Crowd Goes Wild
  One-Dimensional Man in the Three-Dimensional World
  Other Encampments
  You Can Run but You Can’t Hide
  All Roads Lead to Roam
  Infighting the Good Fight
  Hitting the Wall

  On the Battlefield

 

II. …Becomes Reality

  The End of the World
  Some Run for Cover—We Rush to Bear Witness
  Disaster
  Off the Cliff
  Failure
  Crash and Burn
  Adultery
  Betrayers and Betrayed
  Abomination
  Reform and Revolution
  Despair
  Believing in Miracles
  Hope
  Explosions
  History as We Live It
  Extinction
  Nostalgia
  Darkness
  The Future
  Countdown to Civil War
  Leaving the 21st Century
  Dear Reader
  Where We’re Going

 

III. Afterward

  Inflamed Appendix: Maximum Ultraism!
  Disconnecting the Power
  About the Authors
  Hijack the Moon
  The Explosion of Stars
  The Future is Unwritten