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Title: CrimethInc. in Anarchist Fiction Anthology Author: CrimethInc. Date: October 13, 2009 Language: en Topics: fiction, interview, AK Press, CrimethInc., Read All About It Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2009/10/13/crimethinc-in-anarchist-fiction-anthology
AK Press has just published a collection of interviews with anarchist
authors who write fiction, entitled Mythmakers and Lawbreakers. The
interviewees include Ursula Le Guin, Derrick Jensen, Alan Moore,
Starhawk, and an anonymous CrimethInc. ex-worker. The interview
references two children’s books, The Secret World of Terijian and The
Secret World of Duvbo, that are neither published by nor available
through CrimethInc. Far East.
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.