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Title: CrimethInc. Shareholder Report Author: CrimethInc. Date: April 1, 2006 Language: en Topics: CrimethInc., reportback, analysis Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2006/04/01/crimethinc-shareholder-report-an-incomplete-report-on-and-critical-analysis-of-the-past-decade-of-activity
Today, April Foolâs Day, 2006, we announce the third printing of our
free anarchist primer, Fighting For Our Lives, which is once again
available from us in bulk throughout North America. This printing of
150,000 brings the total print run of this pamphlet to 500,000 copies,
the target we set for this project three and a half years ago.
A half million copies of a paper is a lot in some circles, but in our
eyes, this is the very least we can do to help keep the anarchist
alternative accessible. We would like to see a similar level of activity
from all other anarchist groups, whether that takes the form of
outreach, artistic expression, community infrastructure, labor
organizing, mass mobilizations, sabotage, or other means of struggle. We
challenge our colleagues not to stop at calling for a world without
hierarchies, but to do what it takes to live and act outside them
todayâto perform the miracles itâs going to take to get us all out of
here.
In that spirit, to inspire or outrage others into action of their own,
this seems as good a time as any to review the activity that has taken
place over the past decade under the CrimethInc. moniker. This
accounting will necessarily be incomplete; it only covers the most
obvious and quantifiable activities we could discern from the vantage
point of this particular CWC nucleus, the CrimethInc. Far East
distribution hub. All the same, it may help to establish the scope of
what has been accomplished and of what yet remains to be done.
During this time, to our knowledge, CrimethInc. operatives have
produced, distributed, and/or organized:
copies each
and Evasion
one of them produced for free at the expense of corporate franchises
childrenâs book to a tactical direct action manual
accompanying CD or vinyl record, at 3000 copies each
bands from three continents; some of these bands have toured those
continents extensively, distributing literature in the process and
sometimes offering workshops
several films previously released individually) at 1500 and 2000 copies,
respectively
participated
approximately 200 participants (and at least 1 FBI infiltrator, whom we
count neither as a participant nor as a human being)
presentations, workshops, guerrilla âbook signings,â and other events
against the Iraq war and the FTAA agreements, as well as the âDonât Just
Vote, Get Activeâ campaign that culminated during the 2004 elections;
ELF actions have also been claimed by CrimethInc. splinter groups,
though no other CrimethInc. operatives have had knowledge of or
involvement in these actions
least 2 million unique visitors; of the 25 posters, pamphlets, and
papers currently available on it, the most frequently accessed has been
downloaded over 150,000 times
despite a policy of non-cooperation with the capitalist media (granted,
this coverage has dealt with the supposed threats CrimethInc. poses to
civil society as often as it has focused on specific projects)
punk underground, for example, this has included pull-out sections in
Slug and Lettuce and Profane Existence and a column that has appeared
regularly in Maximum RockânâRoll for 6 years
new material or in translation; Harbinger alone has appeared in German-,
Portuguese-, and Spanish-language versions, each in a print run of
thousands and the last of those being a collaboration between groups
spread across three continents
and used, ironically enough, in countless high school and college
courses
This is what you call mass production; some of these figures really put
the âInc.â in CrimethInc. An economist might say that by distributing
our wares free of charge or for the production costs alone and operating
with a highly motivated staff that works entirely without pay, we are
breaking new ground in free market competition. Ironically, we oppose
mass production, economists, markets, and competitionâbut weâre not
interested in simply keeping our hands clean.
Nor are we interested in personal gain. To this day, no participant in
any of these projects has received a dime for his or her efforts[1].
Everything that can possibly be distributed for free is, and all
proceeds from sales go immediately into further projects. All our
projects are either funded by their own sales, the sales of other
projects, criminal activity, or donations[2]. This is a stark contrast
to radical publishers who must give away much of the press runs of
magazines they hoped to sell, not to mention miserly communist splinter
groups that sell even their outreach material.
We do almost all our own distribution, working out of a few main hubs
and a scattering of other nerve centers; this enables us to make sure
that our material is always available through independent channels
before we use corporate and institutional means to get it to those who
might not otherwise see it[3]. We produce everything without barcodes,
regarding them as a noxious concession to the corporate market[4].
The limited accounting above, of course, leaves out the best endeavors,
the unique and irreproducible ones. I recall a letter from a young
person in a small town in the Midwest, reporting on the activities of
the local CrimethInc. cell over the preceding months: these included
distributing free pirated CDRs of Rage Against the Machine and Ani
DiFranco to middle school students and pushing over a bike cop (and
getting away with it!). Likewise, the âworkshopâ at the Youth Liberation
conference in Florida at the end of 2000 that ended in the participants
dancing naked around a fire in the rain, while remembered by many as a
high water mark of excitement and transformation, remains invisible to
history.
These are just the projects that have taken place under the CrimethInc.
moniker, not to speak of all the other activities of those who have
sometimes participated in these. Everything described here has been
achieved in collaboration with countless other groups and individualsâto
be precise, it is all the result of the collaboration of various groups
and individuals, sometimes under the CrimethInc. name and sometimes not.
Some have accused CrimethInc. of being elitist or alienating, but it is
precisely the radically participatory and decentralized aspects of the
CrimethInc. experiment that have enabled it to be this far-reaching.
This is not to say there is no room for improvementâfar from it! But
this record should satisfactorily refute the charges of certain
ideologues that informal networks and autonomous cells are incapable of
sustained, effective activity. Whatever anyone might say against
decentralization and voluntary association, they work for us. Likewise,
our work over the past decade attests to the tremendous power
individuals can discover in themselves and their communities when they
extract even a part of their lives from the machinery of capitalism to
invest in the liberation struggle. You can accuse us ex-workers of many
things, but idleness is not one of them.
All this productivity and activity, of course, indicates only one thing:
the cataclysmic defeat of the CrimethInc. project thus far. We set out
to raze Western civilization to the ground, and stocked its libraries
instead. We began as iconoclasts, and became icons. Our first forays
into the media were calculated to cast doubt upon themselves as well as
all other media (hence the misattributed quotes, recontextualized
images, and vicious sarcasm); our more recent mass-produced tracts
unironically adopt a tone of earnest proselytizing, as if the ideas and
skills thus conveyed could somehow outweigh the negative effects of mass
production and mediated communication themselves. Starting out free of
ideological commitments, we eventually settled into anarchism because it
seemed the most free of dogma, only to become a mainstay of that milieu
with all the usual responsibilities of good citizenship. Our quixotic
assault on history has become a part of historyâand now here we are
making it easier on the biographers with a retrospective!
We have achieved moments of liberation in which we leave behind the
world of hierarchy and powerlessness and despair; these cannot be
discounted. But thus far, when the dust has cleared after each such
departure, the old order has reestablished itselfâand we have accrued
more inertia, slowly becoming a part of the world we wish to destroy.
Today, an internet search for âCrimethInc.â turns up more results than
âcrimethinkâ: like so many other organs of resistance, we run the risk
of supplanting the original object of our struggle.
Of course, this is not necessarily for the worst. Destroying CrimethInc.
will be no more difficult than destroying the capitalist system that
gave rise to it. The CrimethInc. vehicleâa memberless underground, a
front group for those opposed to front groups but in need of
anonymityâwas created to be abandoned, and none of us is foolish enough
to conflate this fabrication with the unique and amazing human beings we
all are in real life. Unfortunately, as capitalism, hierarchy, and
miserablist indifference still hold sway across the world, all no less
noxious than CrimethInc. itself, we are not ready to set fire to our
Frankensteinâs monster just yet. The perfect murder-suicide, to extend
the metaphor as far as our reluctant pacifist hearts permit, will
require long and careful planning.
Besides, every numbskull announces that â[fill in the blank] isnât like
the old days!â as soon as he learns to talk. Black Star North, an
obscure and short-lived splinter group that otherwise would probably
never be mentioned again, once issued a demand that CrimethInc.
disbandâan appeal akin to calling on Food Not Bombs to quit serving, as
if it was just a matter of beseeching the board of directors to call the
whole thing off. That was at the beginning of 2001, when we had
accomplished so little of what lay before us! However disillusioned we
are with our own efforts, we are even more disillusioned with
disillusionment and capitulationâstrategies which, sad to tell, have
been tested over and over in radical circles, always with the same
effects. No, we are not done yetâwe have hardly completed the first
phase of this experiment, and distributing 500,000 papers is hardly
comparable to the full-scale revolutions in which we hope to
participate.
Resistance as a whole is an ebb and flow of movements that replenishes
itself from the undifferentiated masses[5] through the same processes by
which CrimethInc. has been assimilated into todayâs anarchist milieu.
All who have thus far constituted the CrimethInc. experiment emerged
from this uncommitted mass; we have made our ways to resistance
individually or in small groups, developing certain skills (and failing
to develop others) in this process, eventually finding one another and
establishing common cause and reference points as part of a broader
social current.
Unfortunately, just as the masses from which we appeared are
characterized by inertia, circles of resistance suffer from inertia of
their own. This symmetry does a lot to explain the persistence of the
status quo: as long as a society is divided cleanly into opposing camps,
each rigid and predictable, it remains essentially static.
When contradictions deepen between the lives people lead and the lives
they desire and believe to be possible, the resulting tremors dislodge
new dissidents from the ranks of the complacent; transforming
themselves, they wash into the camps of resistance in waves. The
fundamental goal of most CrimethInc. projects, accordingly, has not been
to fortify one camp, but to deepen the widespread contradictions that
give rise to social instability. One might argue that it is not
resistance movements themselves that make social change so much as it is
contagious examples of transformation; working from this proposition,
one might further hypothesize that those actually in the midst of
transformation have more to offer to the project of revolution than
partisans of revolution who have not changed in thirty years. The former
may not have thought through all their politics and tactics yet, but
their inconsistency and awkwardness are balanced out by flexibility,
momentum, and optimism, not to mention the relationships they retain
from their former lives. Once their new identities as radicals have
crystallized, the roles they play in social upheavals are likely to be
less and less dynamic: they can still fight, of course, perhaps with
increasing expertise, but only from a fixed position[6].
Hence the antagonism towards the established radical milieu that
characterized early CrimethInc. projects: it was the bravado of rebels
savoring weightless freedom while they still possessed it, knowing they
were doomed to be isolated and immobilized within that milieu
eventually. For good or ill, that phase is over now. CrimethInc. is a
known quantity. The original vague inclinations towards liberation have
solidified into a concrete program, and in the process much that was
muddled or just plain juvenile has been dispensed withâbut from this
point on, CrimethInc. must do without all advantages save those of
perseverance and pervasiveness, or else somehow defy the chains of
causality to wrest free from history and repeat the process of
development all over again.
This is one of our hard-won lessons: in order that resistance remain
diverse and organic, upstart dissidents should preserve as long as
possible all that is autonomous and anomalous about their revolts.
Whenever a new dissident individual, group, or tendency appears,
established radicals rush to engage them in dialogue; in the course of
this dialogue, however contentious it may be, the reference points of
the neophytes shift slowly towards those of the old guard and away from
those of the rest of the population. Those who desire to resist
quarantine in the existing radical milieu should be sure that the bulk
of their dialogue takes place with others who do not yet have rigid
political commitments.
Above all, it is necessary to pick the right enemies. Oneâs enemies
determine oneâs actions more decisively than any other factor, and there
are always petulant radicals ready to incapacitate others by locking
them in irrelevant debates. Those who wish to keep their hands free for
the struggles that really matter must learn when to protect themselves
by refusing to defend themselves, just as they must learn to benefit
from criticism even when it is not intended constructively. CrimethInc.
exists to engage capitalism in a fight to the death, not to battle it
out with other radical splinter groups in a war of attrition.
We have learned to keep the radical community behind us, as it were, to
draw ideas and inspiration from it while facing outward to the rest of
the world. Experience has shown that little constructive criticism can
be expected from ideologues with fixed agendasâtheir critiques of
CrimethInc. material, which almost always bypass content to focus on
reputation, show that they literally cannot read âbut it is still of
paramount importance to learn from and coordinate with others, and to
collaborate whenever possible. Even the most entrenched can create
unpredictable situations by joining forces with unlikely allies.
Among other things, CrimethInc. has been an experiment in structure. In
adapting the decentralized, radically participatory approach of Food Not
Bombs and the Earth Liberation Front to the project of propaganda
outreach, we have attempted to put whatever notoriety we win for
ourselves at the disposal of all. The objections of traditionalists that
this approach could not provide enough control over who acts as
CrimethInc. have not been borne out by reality: neither fascists nor
communists nor liberals have attempted to hijack the CrimethInc. bullet
mid-trajectory[7].
On the contrary, while thousands have associated themselves with the
CrimethInc. banner, comparatively few have taken ownership of it to the
point of carrying on long-term activity beneath it. To some extent, we
are victims of the success of a few well-known CrimethInc. nuclei, whose
efforts have raised the bar so high as to obscure the efforts of other
CrimethInc. cells and the possibility of more such efforts. While our
decentralized structure and emphasis on anonymous participation have
served to protect participants from the various hazards of celebrity,
they have not sufficed to collectivize CrimethInc. entirely. This should
not come as a surprise: it is not an insignia that enables people to do
things, but access to resources, experience to draw upon, and above all
the feeling that one is entitled to act. Until the more established
CrimethInc. cells are able to do more to extend these resources to
others, it will be optimistic to expect anything different.
So, like most other revolutionaries to date, we have failed to
decentralize power within our own ranks as well as within society at
large. Fortunately, unlike the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution,
we hardly have a monopoly on powerâmost of the power in this society is
still in the hands of capitalists and, less obviously, the dutiful
citizens who serve them. Our strategy is not to seize that power
ourselves in naive hope of redistributing it, but to share tactics by
which others can seize it for themselves. Whatever weâre doing wrong,
others can do better.
And now (drum roll, please), the single greatest shortcoming of all our
efforts thus far. No, it hasnât been our contention that those who can
should experiment with confrontational unemployment as a means to focus
on revolutionary struggleâseriously, would it have been better if weâd
spent all these years working for the man? Nor has it been our failure
to address the needs of âtheâ working class: those who desire a monopoly
on the political organizing of working people would hardly waste so much
bile on us if our efforts were of no interest to their target audience.
Far worse: all too often, weâve failed to follow up our outreach efforts
with concrete opportunities for people to connect to one another. Of the
scores of people who have traveled to various CrimethInc. addresses
hoping to join a standing army of revolutionaries, of the thousands who
have written letters to those addresses beseeching the recipients to
direct them to radical communities in which to take control of their
lives, few have received more than words of encouragement for their
pains; our resources were stretched thin enough as it was just collating
stolen photocopies. Nobody can save anyone the trouble of developing
initiative and experience for herself or himself; but people develop
their abilities in communities, and more often than not we have failed
to bring people together so this could take place. Whenever we have been
able to do so, the results have been explosive; this makes all these
missed opportunities all the more tragic.
We have counted on anarchist communities at large to be available to
those who are inspired by our projects, but all too often this has not
been the case. The focus on lifestyle as an end in itself among passive
consumers of CrimethInc. literature, which has maddened its authors as
well as their critics, has probably stemmed from this dearth of other
points of departure. This is the great failure of the past ten years,
the one that has perhaps made the difference between agitation and
insurrection. Simply publishing and agitating is not enough; those of us
who are already active need to put more energy into fostering networks
and keeping them accessible to new participants. This must be an even
higher priority than propaganda and outreach if the latter are to be of
any useâthat is to say, if the efforts of the next ten years are to
produce different results than those of the past ten.
Over the past decade, CrimethInc. has at some points been literally one
person alone, abandoned by all, desperately struggling to crack the code
for collective liberation before starving to deathâand at other times, a
crack team of seasoned comrades maintaining long-term projects, a crowd
of hundreds suddenly erupting into the street, a vibrant international
network of thousands. If anything, we have learned the value of dreaming
big, of patiently maintaining our spirits through difficult periods and
going all out when the time is right.
We still have some tricks up our sleeveâperhaps weâve lost the element
of surprise, but we never thought weâd live to see the opportunities we
have now. Even so, we wonât be the ones to win this struggle. The
weapons weâre fighting with cannot win it. 500,000 unique anarchist
projects could pose a real threat; the fact that we have to make 500,000
identical copies of a single one is an admission of defeat, albeit an
optimistic one. The only real value CrimethInc. can have is as a
challenge to provoke others into more ambitious revolutionary action.
This is our plea to you, if you care one whit for liberation, whether or
not youâve ever been fond of any of our projects: put everything weâve
done to shame. Donât waste your breath criticizing our effortsâthereâs
work to be done. Demonstrate approaches that work better than the ones
weâve employed, and weâll gladly take them up.
Perhaps it is necessary to put all this in plainer language for those
who are still reading as spectators and critics rather than
comrades-in-arms. So if you please, dear friends:
PULL OUT THE STOPS! FILL YOUR SPINE WITH GUNPOWDER! LIGHT A MATCH IN
YOUR BRAIN!
Some of you have labored hard, as have weâbut perhaps it would be better
to trade all our calluses for dynamite. We may yet have the chance.
[1] That Reagan Butcher, whose poetry first appeared in the CrimethInc.
Letters series while he was in prison, has received $253 in royalties
(as documented in his poem âMy Publishersâ)âhardly enough to ease the
difficult transition from incarceration to wage slavery, we
fearâidentifies him as a fellow traveler who contributes to projects
without actually acting as part of the collective. This should be clear
anyway, as he writes under his own name.
[2] Rumors that CrimethInc. is financed by trust funds or foreign
governments are malicious fabrications.
[3] For the record, Wal-Mart has CrimethInc. books on their website not
because they stock them but because they list as âavailableâ all books
they can order through corporate distributors. After initially balking
at working with such distributors, we eventually had to compromise so
that libraries that do not work with independent distributors could
obtain our books.
[4] Approximately 5% of our books have been sold with removable barcode
stickers on them, required by large book distributors who would
otherwise charge us 25¢ per copy to put them on themselves.
[5] For the purposes of this analysis, the only common quality that
unites this mass is the fact that none of its constituents consider
themselves to be revolutionaries. This is precisely the formless,
infinite mass that certain organizers so ardently wish to win over to
the revolution; by definition, this is impossible, for whenever an
individual or group joins the resistance they step forward out of it. No
wonder whenever one of those organizers looks around a meeting, he fails
to see The People he believes to be the proper object of his efforts.
[6] Earth First! is one of many radical institutions that began as
unique, if problematic, manifestations of discontent only to be slowly
absorbed into a more homogeneous culture of resistance.
[7] Perhaps those who are still concerned about this issue should
suspend their notions about intellectual property long enough to publish
something as CrimethInc. themselves, to show us the error of our ways!