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Title: Selling Ourselves Out
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: 1996
Language: en
Topics: commodification, anti-capitalism, Inside Front
Source: Retrieved on 3rd November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/selling-ourselves-out

CrimethInc.

Selling Ourselves Out

Look at the hardcore community, from a distance—what do you see? The

most visible signs of our existence, besides bands playing in basements

and rented out halls, are the ‘zines and records we sell. And open up

almost any one of those ‘zines, and you see advertisements for other

‘zines, other records, other products. In fact, aside from the

advertisements, what are most of our ‘zines about? The record reviews,

the ‘zine reviews, the top ten lists all deal with products to buy and

sell. The photos of hardcore bands hopping around and shouting

invariably feature kids dressed in certain styles (band shirts, tattoos,

etc.), as if to indicate that these fashions, which are not too cheap,

are an intrinsic part of being involved in hardcore.

And when you get more deeply involved in hardcore, you find that you

really do spend quite a bit of time buying and selling products. You

start going to more shows and buying the records and ‘zines you hear

about. You buy some band shirts and maybe purchase some clothes,

piercings, or tattoos that are similar to the ones your friends in the

hardcore community have. You start a ‘zine of your own, and have to

worry about how to buy the copies to make it, and—how to sell it. You

start a band, and worry about making demos and selling them, about

buying equipment and being paid to play shows; you start a distribution,

and worry about how to sell all the things you order; you start a record

label, and you worry about selling records, buying advertising, selling

more records, more and more buying and selling. That seems to be one of

the main themes of hardcore today, if not the main theme: economics. One

of the main things that identifies a kid who is getting involved in

hardcore is the records and ‘zines he buys; and the people who are more

deeply involved usually spend even more time thinking about

economics—worrying about money, about promoting their products, about

sales and profits, since most of the projects we undertake in hardcore

right now seem to be business enterprises. That’s the problem: most of

the projects we undertake in the hardcore community right now seem to be

business enterprises.

Of course we have to sell things to be able to make them and share them

with each other at all, living as we do in a capitalist system where

it’s difficult get anything for free. But if this is the case, we still

should be more aware of the effects of the ways we conduct business, and

also strive for alternatives so that we will not be limited to only one

form of interaction. And if we truly are interested in transforming our

lives in fundamental ways, rather than just going through the motions of

being another youth subculture, buying and selling products should play

a much smaller role in our community than it does. It should be

extremely clear from looking at the corporate exploitation of the hippy

subculture, the (pop) punk subculture, and a thousand other youth

subcultures that any community/subculture that focuses primarily on

products and image is vulnerable to being taken over by corporate

interests. We can’t beat “the Man” by playing his own game. Besides,

there are so many other kinds of interaction that are worth trying, that

might be better for all of us.

SELLING THINGS IS NOT “PROGRESS”

First of all, and most importantly, we must remember that by itself

selling things does not accomplish anything. Just because more kids

bought hardcore records this year than ever before does not mean that

the ideas on those hardcore records are going to affect more people in

genuine ways. In fact, some methods of promotion and distribution that

work to increase sales also work to distract attention (both the record

label’s attention and the buyers’ attention) from the ideas that are

addressed on the record, as we’ll discuss below.

Buying and selling goods and services is the foundation of our economy

here in the U.S.A. and Europe, and consequently, it often seems to be

the central focus of our lives. We spend half of our waking hours and

most of our energy at our careers, and almost all the careers available

have to do with selling things or services, or promoting those sales,

etc. And where has that gotten us? The companies that sell the most

useless products, like Coca Cola, achieve the biggest sales, because

they can afford to spend the most money on advertising and promoting

their pointless product. A number of large corporations are destroying

the environment (McDonalds, Exxon, etc.) and animals (the meat and dairy

industry), financing oppression of human beings (Pepsi, etc.), promoting

products that destroy people (the tobacco industry, etc.), and

mistreating or underpaying their workers (Nike and almost every other

corporation I can think of)—all in the name of profit, because profit is

the most important goal in this kind of economy. The corporations that

will not sell things as ruthlessly as the others, that will not stomp

over anything in their path to increase sales, die out, while the

corporations that act with the least concern for the world in their

quest for sales come to dominate the economy (and thus the world) when

“selling things” is the main focus. The products that cater to the

lowest common denominator (bad television shows, silly movies, etc.)

achieve the widest sales in this system, and come to dominate our lives.

Because our society treats “selling things” as an end rather than a

means, we live in a world that is fucked up in a thousand different

ways.

Do we really want to mirror mainstream society in our own community by

concentrating on that same kind of economic interaction? It seems

possible that that system might have the same effects in hardcore that

it does in mainstream society, if we’re not careful. That is to say—the

labels and other hardcore businesses that have the least scruples, that

care the least about the value of their products and the effects of the

ways they sell their products, might come to have the most power and

influence in a scene where selling things is the main focus… because

though other labels might care more about the way they go about

business, they won’t be able to compete with the marketing and business

savvy of their ruthless, heartless competitors. And then, though some

kids who have come to be concerned about issues like consumerism would

choose to support the more independent/not-profit-motivated labels, the

labels that were the most visible to the most people would be the ones

who concentrated the most on pure sales alone and thought little about

anything else.

In fact, if you look at hardcore right now, it’s not hard to see that

very thing happening.

ADVERTISING

When you sell things, it’s necessary to let people know that that they

are available from you, and so advertising has become a fundamental part

of the way we do business today, both inside and outside of the hardcore

community. This affects us in a couple of ways. First of all, “lowest

common denominator” advertising, which de-emphasizes the important

qualities of the product (assuming that it has important qualities to

begin with) and can lead people to purchase things which are useless to

them, usually is more effective than truly informative advertising; you

can imagine what kinds of products and business practices this

encourages. Second, in a more subtle way, advertising in the hardcore

community can actually contribute to the feeling that just buying and

selling things is accomplishing something.

I. Most of the big corporations that use advertising to sell their

products don’t give a fuck about their consumers.

Sales and profit are their chief motivations, so they will advertise

their products in any way that will sell them, whether it is in the best

interest of the buyers to buy them or not. Advertising of this kind

boils down to low-level mind control: companies pay advertising agents

(psychologists!) to figure out which images and rhetoric will sell a

product most effectively. That’s why car commercials have beautiful

(so-called beautiful) women in them; that’s why toothpaste commercials

have meaningless statistics in them; that’s why advertisements for soda

and jeans are filled with things that have nothing at all to do with

soda or jeans. These images, which have fucking nothing to do with

whether the product will be useful to an individual viewing the

advertisement, nevertheless make it more likely that the individual will

buy the product. If you give a fuck about people at all, you can see how

this kind of advertising is—dare I use this term?—unethical.

And unfortunately, these ads really are the ones that sell products the

most effectively—even in the hardcore scene, it seems. Look in any

hardcore magazine, and you see advertisements that have nothing to do

with the products they are selling. Instead of using the space to tell

you about the records that are for sale, what the music sounds like and

what the themes are, these advertisements feature some catchy slogan

and/or funny picture encouraging consumerism. A good example is a recent

Trustkill advertisement featuring a little girl kissing a little boy and

saying “My boyfriend bought me all the new releases on Trustkill!” That

doesn’t really tell you much about the records, but it uses silliness to

stick in your head and maybe encourage you to buy Trustkill records—I

guess the idea is that if you buy Trustkill records, you will instantly

win the heart of the girl next door… just like the idea implicit in the

car commercials featuring beautiful women is that buying a car will make

you attract women (the image suggests that a pretty woman “comes with

the car”). I hate to pick on a friend, but another good example is the

latest Edison advertisement, which proclaims “the Grace of Brutality”

across a photograph of crying Vietnamese children who have just had

their clothes burned off by American napalm—that’s fucking tasteless,

using images of real human suffering inflicted by the last generation of

American men just to sell the music made by their sons. It would make

sense if any of the records being advertised actually addressed the

issue of the Vietnam war, but they don’t; instead they’re just described

as having “evil metallic riffing,” etc.

This is not to say that anyone is completely innocent of using image at

the expense of content in advertisements. Right now, you have to, to get

anyone’s attention. But if kids would pay more attention to what an

advertisement says, rather than how cute or fancy it is, and advertisers

would make an effort to print ad’s that would honestly inform people

about the records without just trying to sell them at any cost, we could

get away from some of the more negative qualities of advertising.

There’s just something stomach-turning about opening a hardcore magazine

that is supposed to talk about changing the world, doing something

positive with our lives, etc. and seeing nothing but record companies

shouting “BUY OUR STUFF!!” at the top of their lungs. If you give a fuck

about us, use your ad to tell us why we might want to buy it, rather

than just trying to manipulate us.

II. But there’s another issue to consider in our advertising as

well.

The way these corporate-style psychological advertisements work is by

selling images. For example: a soap commercial features an attractive

mother cleaning her sweet, well-behaved children’s clothes, while her

handsome husband relaxes in the background. This ad isn’t so much

selling soap as it is selling the image of the “perfect American

family”—that’s why the soap itself isn’t discussed at all. The silent

suggestion is that if you buy the soap, it will bring with it the status

of having a perfect family and a perfect household. This sounds sort of

far-fetched, but it really works; otherwise the thousands and thousands

of advertising agents across the U.S. and Europe would not use this

technique over and over to get people to buy their products. Of course

the truth is that when you buy the soap, you just get soap—a perfect

family life is not included with it after all. But the suggestion still

works to keep you buying it.

A similar effect can take place in hardcore advertisements that, like

the ones CrimethInc. sometimes makes, tout how “revolutionary” the

products being sold are. These advertisements can sometimes work the way

the soap advertisement I just described works: they can create the

impression that by buying the record or ‘zine, the revolution will come

with it, when that is simply not the case. Worse than that, when they

are used to advertise records revolutionary thinking and slogans become

just another marketing tool to encourage kids to buy things rather than

to actually cause change. “Smash the State,” which used to mean

“vigorously strive to overthrow the government and the oppressive power

structures built into our modern society,” now comes to mean “buy the

new record by Chokehold!” Thus what was once a desire for real

revolution is subverted into a motivation for consuming products and

keeping the wheels of the present system turning. To sum up: Are you

using your band to “sell” revolution, or are you using “revolution” to

sell your band?

In regards to this problem, it’s up to the buyer to remember that just

buying a hardcore record or political pamphlet, etc. is not, by itself,

going to accomplish anything. That’s common sense, but advertising can

sometimes obscure the issue. And it is up to the labels to resist the

temptation to make advertisements that seem to suggest that buying their

records will accomplish anything by itself. Labels should make sure that

it is clear in their advertisements that they are only selling tools for

revolution, not revolution itself.

HOW BUYING THINGS AFFECTS THE BUYER

Besides the pitfalls of advertising, there are other possible drawbacks

to selling things in the hardcore community. One of the biggest of those

is that the money to buy them has to come from somewhere. The more

records, ‘zines, band shirts, etc. a hardcore kid buys, the more money

he needs to buy them. And not everyone can live off of a

distribution/label/tattoo parlor, you know. So the more records kids

buy, the more money they have to earn—the more they have to work for

some employer to earn the money! Elsewhere in this issue and the last

one, the unpleasant qualities of modern day employment are discussed.

That’s not something we want to encourage.

Because it’s not even like kids are buying hardcore records instead of

the usual products from objectionable corporations. In the hardcore

community, we sell luxuries, not necessities. No matter how many

records, ‘zines, band shirts, etc. you purchase, you still have to pay

for food, for rent, for health care. So our countercultural businesses

only contribute to the problem of people having to work jobs they don’t

like, by making it necessary that they earn more money to pay for our

hardcore products as well as everything else. And no matter how

independent and D.I.Y. our labels are, they still aren’t actually

fighting against big business, because those big businesses have a

complete monopoly on the goods and services we need to survive. It

doesn’t matter much whether your CD has a bar code on it when your food,

your rent, your every other need is supplied by the companies that use

bar codes on CD’s.

So selling things like records and ‘zines, at least right now, helps to

perpetuate the status quo in which everyone has to work at jobs they

wish they could quit. This is not to say that it’s not worth doing, if

the value of the records and ‘zines outweighs their negative effects on

people’s lives. But it’s worth keeping in mind. It might be more worth

doing to try to figure out a way to liberate ourselves permanently from

the employment system, rather than spending our energy on selling

luxuries like records while most of our lives must still revolve around

wasted time and wasted potential…

HOW SELLING THINGS AFFECTS THE SELLER

When you have to concentrate on selling things, as anyone working within

the confines of today’s exchange economy must, it’s easy to get caught

up in it and forget about whatever other goals you started with. In

order to function at all in spreading your releases, no matter how good

your intentions are, you have to worry about being at least profitable

to survive—and thus, to some degree, you have to worry about making the

things that you sell marketable. The ones who are willing to compromise

more to make their products sell better usually do end up selling them

more effectively, so the products that reach the most people are often

the ones that are the most watered-down, the least genuine.

You must compete for sales with others who may have the same goals as

you, which can create unnecessary animosity, and makes people work

against each other (just to survive and keep functioning) rather than

together, which might be more effective in accomplishing things. This

competition makes you have to think about selling competitively, and it

becomes easy to associate increased sales with making progress, when in

truth the things you have to do to attain these sales increases may work

against the goals you originally started with.

If you started out selling things to try to spread ideas of some kind,

you find that you have much less time to think about the ideas, to talk

about them with others, to work on nourishing their development.

Instead, you have to always be working on practical concerns. There’s no

time for reading books, because you have to answer mailorders or buy

advertisements. You spend more time arguing with distributors than you

do brainstorming with others who might have valuable ideas to

contribute. Pretty soon sales are all you think about, all you have time

to think about, and it becomes hard to stay focused on your original

goals, or even to really remember them, through the haze of practical

business concerns.

And that is why there are so many businesses in the hardcore community

that started out with good intentions and were completely transformed by

the years of competition and worrying about sales. Now many of them care

about nothing but making money, at any cost. Selling things can do that

to you—it can strip away all your ideals and dreams, until you can only

focus on profit. And those who focus only on selling things for profit

will never be able to change anything for the better in this world.

OTHER CONCERNS

Some people think that the problems that an exchange economy (an economy

which revolves around buying and selling things) creates for human

beings are insoluble inside of such a system. This analysis suggests

that as long as people only have access to the goods and services that

they can trade their own goods and services for, human beings will

always be in danger of being forced to spend their lives doing things

they don’t enjoy or care about in order to have the resources they need

to survive. The thinkers who consider this flaw to be intrinsic to the

exchange economy suggest instead a “gift economy,” where things are

shared rather than exchanged.

This aspect of this discussion is really complicated, and cannot be

treated in detail here. If you are interested in it, an in-depth

consideration of the “exchange economy” versus the “gift economy” is

scheduled to appear in the second issue of Harbinger, a free CrimethInc.

propaganda tabloid, in December of this year. [If you want one, just

write any of the CrimethInc. addresses and ask for one—the most

dependable one is still probably the Atlanta address]

TO CONCLUDE: TWO SUGGESTIONS

First of all, we should consider all the other things there are we can

do together in hardcore besides just imitating the businessmen of

mainstream society by selling each other things. Despite its silly name,

Food Not Bombs, which I mention elsewhere in this issue, is a great

example of a way people in the hardcore community can work together in

ways that are positive and productive for everyone. If you want to be

active and involved in hardcore, there are a million different things

(more useful things?) you can do besides starting a label, or writing a

‘zine, or working on something else you have to worry about selling. You

could organize fliering/propaganda troops, political action groups,

sports or exercise groups, book reading clubs, self-defense

(anti-police) vigilante squads, try starting a squat, arrange a hostel

space for traveling bands and punk rockers, write articles for other

people’s magazines, try new mediums of expression (artwork, etc.). Of

course, in order to have time and resources to work on projects that you

don’t earn money from, you’ll need a supportive community around you,

but that topic is addressed elsewhere in this issue. Similarly, rather

than just buying records, there are a million other things that a person

who has only been involved in hardcore punk for a little while can do to

participate. Corresponding with hardcore punk kids from far away is

already common, and offers a lot of possibilities. Make mix tapes for

each other. Come up with your own creative fashions, that you can wear

cheaply or free, rather than paying for overpriced styles that have

already been prefabricated for you. Break into abandoned buildings and

go exploring, organize a walkout from your school or workplace,

hitchhike around the world, sit up late at night trading stories and

arguing about stupid Inside Front articles, go crazy. After you’ve

broken out of traditional patterns of action and interaction, the sky’s

the limit.

And, second, we should certainly not give up on selling things like

records and ‘zines that cost money to make. Until some hardcore punk

commando unit seizes a record pressing plant and starts making vinyl for

free, we have to finance those records somehow. But we should always

keep in mind the limitations of selling and advertising things—that

these activities by themselves won’t accomplish anything. We can buy and

sell things without betraying ourselves, if we stay focused on our real

goals. But in order to do this, we must be aware of the ways that

selling and advertising things can compromise the power and quality of

the things being sold—and even of the people being sold to. In this

article I tried to describe some of those dangers, but each of us should

think about the topic individually.

Last March, while my band was in the studio, I made some notes on the

back of a lyric sheet for a “footnote” I’d like to put in every

advertisement for CrimethInc. records:

Please do not buy this product because it looks attractive or because

all your friends have one. For your sake, don’t waste your money on it

unless you know what it is you’re purchasing and think that it really

might be useful or meaningful to you. Please do not think that merely

purchasing this product is going to do anything to change the world, or

to improve your life or anyone else’s. Right now, we can’t effectively

distribute these ideas and music without selling them, but just selling

them is not our goal; it is only a means to an end. We try to sell these

records in a way that does not compromise the power of their content—we

want to sell them like we would sell any other kind of weapon against

the status quo, with the emphasis upon their usefulness in making people

feel alive and aware, making people dangerous.

You should buy a CrimethInc. product like you would buy a bomb—to use

it, dangerously!

Endnote: This article is not a criticism of anyone in particular so much

as it is a self-criticism of the hard core community in general. Of

course Inside Front partakes in the same things we are criticizing here

as much as everyone else does—we’re NOT claiming innocence, but we are

suggesting that we should all consider this issue and perhaps try to

move forward.