CrimethInc.
I’ve decided I like these guys. It revives my dying anarchist spirit that my career has sucked from my fucking soul.
I’m on a Daniel Quinn list with some of them and they turn out to be fairly local to me.
Check them out!
http://crimethinc.com/ - Their main website.
http://www.buyolympia.com/crimethinc Where you can buy their books, flyers, news-rags. I’m ordering some now.
There is a web community at www.crimethinc.net as well.
I’ll quote the FAQ now… Move on if you couldn’t care less…
Some frequently asked questions, answered by CrimethInc.
Secret-ary of the Interior Nadia C.
Dear CrimethInc. Collective, I wrote you a long letter,
and after four months I still havent gotten a reply. I want to participate
in the collective, but I dont know what to do! Please tell me!
When was CrimthInc. started? What was its original goal?
How are decisions made inside the CrimethInc.? How are responsiblities
divided up?
How many people are involved in CrimethInc.?
What if any are the qualifications for joining?
Does CrimethInc. have a platform or political ideology?
If so, what is it?
Dear CrimethInc. Collective, I wrote you a long letter, and after
four months I still havent gotten a reply. I want to participate in the
collective, but I dont know what to do! Please tell me!
First, I want to apologize to all the people who have had to wait for
responses to their letters. We try to keep on top of the vast amounts
of mail arriving at our various addresses, but its difficultÑin order
for the orders, for books and literature to get out on time, people who
write personal letters have to wait a long time sometimes (although thats
the opposite of how it should be, perhaps). I’ll let you in on a little
secret: this isnt a big organization with an office, a budget, and a forty
hour work week for all the secretaries. Everyone who answers the CrimethInc.
mail and email is involved in a hundred other projects. We’re not interested
in becoming more efficient, because were all committed to living full,
adventurous lives, without division of labor or acceptance, of productivity
as a valueÑrather, we hope to empower others to be able to do everything
themselves, so efficiency on our part will be unnecessary. The last thing
we want is to have the work here divided up into official tasks for different
posts, as if we were employees.
That also means that we dont have roles waiting for people who want to
join CrimethInc. The C.W.C. is totally decentralized. That means if you
want to be involved, you should pick something you think CrimethInc. should
do, and start doing it. If you need our help with something (getting copies
of Harbinger to distribute, getting hints about how to make your own stickers
for free, finding addresses of housing collectives you should visit to
learn how to organize your own, getting one of our bands to play at your
house) well be happy to give it, thats what this is all about. But it’ll
be a lot easier for us to offer if you already know what youre trying
to do.
There may come a day, you know, when there is no one answering mail or
sending out zines, when every CrimethInc. group becomes a splinter of
the CrimethInc. Action Faction (the chapter of the C.W.C. notorious for
eschewing all rhetoric and declarations in favor of just doing things,
with the medium of activity being the message itself). On that day everyone
will be in the streets serving free food or in the communes kissing or
playing music, everyone will pronounce himself or herself Commander in
Chief of CrimethInc., no one will need to be at the center sending out
magazines and books and advice. The sooner that day comes, the better.
In the meantime, what we need most are people writing us who know what
we should be doing better than we do.
In the end, it is not us, but you who decide your own level of involvement.
On the other hand, please don’t be intimidated about writing to us about
anything. Just understand why we take so long to write back, and why we
may not have all the answers for you. Whose revolution is this, anyway?
Yours!
When was CrimthInc. started? What was its original goal?
CrimethInc. began in the mid-1990’s. I can’t report on the original goals
of all the participants, but I can trace my own initial intentions to
a discussion among some friends about the revolutionary organization Winston
joins in Orwell’s 1984. The idea came up that it was actually a branch
of the government… and from there, we began to consider what the opposite
kind of organization would be (one that purported to be a part of the
culture industry that rules today, while secretly undermining it), and
how to form one. The irony, the margin-walking between contradictions,
both were intrinsic to CrimethInc. from the beginning… and honestly,
I can tell you no better now than I could have then whether we are just
indulging reactionary desires by forming yet another “revolutionary organization,”
or heroically helping humanity to evolve past the despoticism of such
a thing by detourning/deconstructing the idea of the revolutionary organization.
How are decisions made inside the CrimethInc.? How are responsiblities
divided up?
We are different from your average collective in that we do not vote
democratically on things, nor do we seek consensus for its own sake. When
consensus is sought, it is not to appease other participants, but rather
to get their ideas and perspectives. The collective functions like an
anarchist village in that individuals within it work on whatever projects
they want, seeking help from others when they desire it (that’s how responsibilities
are chosen and shared, not assigned like they are in some Communist parties);
but the really utopian aspect of our dis-Organization is that, unlike
in a village in which everyone’s survival depends on cooperation and participation,
departure from the group/working outside the group have no really negative
consequences for anyone. This means that, to date, there has been very
little squabbling about what we should do and how… those who have ideas
of what they believe CrimethInc. should do work on them together in small
teams, in a constantly shifting net of responsibilities. Resources are
shared as they are in a gift economy, according to the needs of the various
projects. This requires plenty of planning, to make things work out, but
thus far not much conflict. Admittedly, power tends to centralize itself
in the hands of those who have been involved the longest, but (unlike
in a fascist or traditional democratic environment) there is no scarcity
of power, since anyone can start her own CrimethInc. group and develop
resources and knowledge of her own to share. This reflects my own personal
idealistic dream, that we can create a world in which power itself is
no more a scarcity resource than food, love, or selfhood.
How many people are involved in CrimethInc.?
That’s the most difficult question of all. Since we pretentiously consider
ourselves a social phenomenon, rather than a movement or (heaven forbid!)
a membership club, we prefer not to answer it. I have personal experience
working with a little over a thousand different people on CrimethInc.
projects of varying seriousness, from mailing along fliers to be given
away to writing and publishing ‘zines and books. Of those thousand people,
I would describe all of them as being involved in CrimethInc., but only
a hundred or so would probably have the admirable audacity to claim CrimethInc.
as something of their own the way I do.
What if any are the qualifications for joining?
One doesn’t need qualifications for “joining” a social phenomenon–it’s
something that happens in the course of practice. If someone contacts
us to get some posters, wheatpastes them up around town, enjoys it, and
designs their own posters for the next wheatpasting, putting the CrimethInc.
logo on the posters for whatever reasons of their own, they have effectively
“joined” CrimethInc. If they get along with another CrimethInc. “member”
who has been doing similar projects for a long time and has a means to
steal photocopies available, she will probably provide the photocopying
for the next generation of posters, and there you have CrimethInc. organization
at work–totally decentralized and autonomous. The criticism that this
could result in the “CrimethInc.” label being applied to just about anything
frequently arises from those used to working in groups that march under
a certain ideology. To march under an ideology, you need constant bickering
about what the specific goals, motives, logistics, and rhetoric must be,
from all involved. But since we are not trying to do that, autonomous
action is much simpler. Consider the “anarchist movement” as a whole as
another example–what “anarchism” is is basically de facto decided by
those who call themselves anarchists. Certain anarchist parties (a phenomenon
some see as a contradiction in terms) may agree on partuicular tenets
of their own, but in general the nature of the phenomenon is decided and
adjusted at every moment by those who act within it.
In our experience, people come to be involved with CrimethInc. projects
through a sort of self-selecting process: those who are interested in
or inspired by what we have done before come to us, bringing their own
new ideas and inspirations. We want CrimethInc. to be something constantly
evolving and changing, to be a vast, beautiful monster that contains the
same contradictions within it that we do within ourselves as individuals,
so little effort is made to “police” the activities individuals do under
the name. The identity of CrimethInc., if it must have one, can thus be
described not by a set of characteristics or rules, but rather by the
historical process which has been its development as new ideas and activities
grew out of the old ones (again, just like in the anarchist community).
Incidentally, this was the only way Hume thought the identity of an individual
human being could be explained: from birth to death, nothing is constant
(as all the cells of the body are constantly dying and being replaced,
memories forgotten, mind states shifting…) except for the process of
living and evolving, the chain of events which actually goes back far
before conception and extends in every other direction throughout the
world as well. In the same sense, since CrimethInc. is not the intellectual
property of any one group of people, we consider our projects “communalized”
as a part of the cosmos–thus, “CrimethInc.” can belong to anyone who
sees a part of herself reflected within our actions.
When I first heard about yall, and, say, Inside Front, the whole
thing came off to me as being a bit cultish. How would you respond to
people who say your image is exclusionary and, well, cult like?
I hope I’ve already dealt with the “exclusionary” issue–we actually
practice NO exclusion, and although individual members can choose not
to associate with others this does not make CrimethInc. itself exclusive.
The intellectual language I’m using here to get these ideas across is
admittedly exclusive, as all dialects are–but I am to blame for that,
not CrimethInc.
As for the charge that, despite our non-exclusive policies, CrimethInc.
is cultish… perhaps that is true, who knows? Given there are some pernicious
things about revolutionary organizations in the first place: they tend
to gather glory for themselves (when they are really just myths constructed
out of the actions of individuals), they can be as seductive and dangerous
to “rally around” as flags or ideologies… Our experiment here is, rather
than denying our desires to be part of a group with revolutionary pretentions
(desires which I feel are negative, dangerous, spawned from living in
a world of teams and nations and clubs), to similaneously indulge and
subvert that desire–by participating in a revolutionary organization
which is avowedly a myth, which is up front about being anti-organization.
My own experience is that beating yourself up (in the best Christian tradition)
for having the “wrong” desires does no good–it is much better to find
ways to put yourself in new situations which can foster new and different
desires within you, and this is our undertaking here. Perhaps we will
end up becoming just another reactionary cult, but for us this is a new
experiment, and thus worth it.
People are generally not credited for their involvement with your
organization. Whats the logic behind that, and how do you feel this could
effect long term involvement with CrimethInc.? Do you even worry about
long term involvement?
For me, one of the primary values of using the CrimethInc. label is the
anonymity it provides. In this society, in which any action is seen to
glorify the individual at the expense of others (see scenester fame in
the punk community for a good example, or celebrities in the mainstream
if you need a basic primer in the concept), it is a wonderful thing to
have a name I can sign to a project that offers credit for the project
to anyone who wants to share that name with me. Thus, I escape being singled
out for praise and recognition as someone who does something, the implications
of that praise and recognition being that others are not “activists” like
myself. In another world this would not be an issue, but we have a “scarcity
economy of self” in this society, thanks to our our spectacular economy
and the values of competition. Being able to escape being put on a pedastal
for my work saves me that embarassment, and others the humiliation of
seeing me as “above” them. There are a thousand other reasons for anonymity,
such as doubts about the validity of the concept of “authorship” itself
(in a world in which everything is intrinsically connected, especially
ideas), but let’s not go into those now.
As for worrying about long-term involvement, we don’t. The “CrimethInc.”
label can be set down as instantly as it has been picked up, should it
prove unnecessary at some point to any or all of us–assuming we do not
fall for our own cover story (as the agent in William Burrough’s books
always does) and get carried away by the mythical grandeur of our fabrication,
that is.
Does CrimethInc. have a platform or political ideology? If so,
what is it?
As I’ve described above, CrimethInc. has no platform or ideology except
that which could be generalized from the similarities between the beliefs
and goals of the individuals who choose to be involved–and that is constantly
in flux. For that reason, you could call it an anarchist organization,
if you like, although only in the original sense of the term.
