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Title: Rethinking Crimethinc.
Author: W.
Date: 2006-09-04
Language: en
Topics: CrimethInc., criticism, lifestylism, post-left
Source: Retrieved on 10/10/2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=3664

W.

Rethinking Crimethinc.

There are two ways out of capitalism, revolution or death. Anybody who

tells you otherwise is simply wrong. The US based sub-cultural cult

“Crimethinc” (CWC) who mix anarchism with bohemian drop-out lifestyles

and vague anti-civilisation sentiment would have you believe that

capitalism is something from which you can merely remove yourself by

quitting work, eating from bins and doing whatever “feels good”. They

carry on the legacy of prize-idiot Abbie Hoffman, printing books and

zines which fetishise scams, petty crime and useless activist/punk

sub-cultural activity like food not bombs, squatting, etc. They are

anarchists by name only with little relevance to the rest of the

anarchist milieu and no class analysis, let’s venture into their secret

underground “anarchy club”.

Crimethinc claims to not exist in a failed attempt at being both

mysterious and poetic, we’ll have to start by stating that it does

exist, it has a few addresses, a number of books in print and an online

shop as well as a number of websites. It is a loose organization which

represents a variety of political views a mish-mash of post-leftism,

situationism, primitivism and all those “introducing..” philosophy books

you don’t tell people you read. Anyone can publish under the name or

create content using their logo and each “agent” or group operates

individually. There is no formal structure, membership or decision

making process. One has to wonder whether it’s as decentralised as they

claim to be, while the hundreds of kids who post on the forum have as

much legitimate claim to call themselves part of crimethinc there are

really only a vanguard of 20 people maybe less who have had the pleasure

of being published under the CWC title and who run the entire show.

Calling yourself a crimethincer allows you the illusion that you’re a

part of something much grander though, when you’re a bored suburban

teenager that’s very important and the well designed publications and

impassioned prose in their texts makes for a very inspiring read. The

problem is that once you analyse them critically you quickly realise

they’re barely saying anything at all.

Many aspects of crimethinc reference the Situationist Internationale and

a large chunk of their ideas are based around the Situationist concept

“the transformation of everyday life”. The Situationists were heavily

influenced by Marx and CWC are heavily influenced by American consumer

culture it would seem. The call to transform everyday is a call to smash

the current exploitative system, to participate in the class struggle,

an ongoing historical conflict between the proletariat and the ruling

class. Crimethinc substitute this class struggle with a teenage

individualistic rebellion based on having fun now. Shoplifting, dumpster

diving, quitting work are all put forward as revolutionary ways to live

outside the system but amount to nothing more than a parasitic way of

life which depends on capitalism without providing any real challenge.

The arrogance of middle class kids (just like the hippies) supposing to

change by world by roughing it as “poor” people for a few years is

captured perfectly in the quote on the back cover of their book evasion.

“Poverty, unemployment, homelessness — if you’re not having fun, you’re

not doing it right!”

Condescending, privileged, middle class crap. The only people who could

think that poverty is in any way fun are wealthy kids playing at being

poor for a few years, the daily reality of poverty, unemployment and

homelessness for the average person is very serious and something

anarchists should always organise against rather than mock.

The reality of the situation is that you can’t boycott your way out of

capitalism, dropping out of the system is never going to bring it down

if anything you just re-enforce the system by recuperating people’s

alienation and desire for revolution by selling them a new lifestyle

under the same system. Capitalism is a system of coercion and control,

we don’t work to support the system, we work because we need food and

shelter and healthcare and the only way to get that under capitalism is

with money. The only way we can get money is by selling our labour — the

alternative is to rot, that’s Capitalism. I don’t want to feed my kids

out of a dumpster or have to scam free healthcare if I get cancer, it’s

not appealing or practical. There’s nothing revolutionary about using

your white, middle-class, western privilege to remove yourself from the

system at the expense of those who remain trapped in it. None of us are

free until we all are.

This idolisation of the grifter and scam as a somehow revolutionary

tactic has led their followers, and they are followers they certainly

don’t have much say in the running of the sites and the shop, the

informal organisational structure “we’re all crimethinc” enforces this,

to be mostly bored teenage boys. A quick browse around crimethinc.net

will show you this. The more worrying aspect is the “us against the

world” mindset many of these youths have. Many view people who work

regular jobs as an enemy complicit in the capitalist system, a system

they don’t fully understand and which crimethinc’s literature never

fully explains. They have an embarrassingly liberal interpretation of

capital and the struggle against it,

“By your ‘support the working class’ logic, I guess y’all should feel

guilty every time ya boycott any megacrop like Wal-Mart — after all,

they’ve got “working class” clerks workin’ there too” – DizzIE

In this quote from a row over a scam to rob tourists (or

neo-colonialists as some bizarrely called them), a crimethincer shows up

the dangerous lack of understanding of class struggle. Boycotts of

multinationals, much like drop-out lifestyles, will do little to bring

about the fall of Capitalism which is a social relationship based on

wage labour. I do not wish to deny them their right to be drop-outs and

live out of bins so long as they realise they will change nothing by

living like this. An inflated sense of self importance has convinced

them that their chosen path is righteous and all others are brainwashed

by the system or are revolutionary beauraucrats.

One of crimethinc’s more recent publications “recipes for disaster:an

anarchist cookbook”, is indicative of the massive problems with them.

The book is a somewhat interesting list of pranks, scams and activist

information. Proclaimed as the follow up to “Days of war, Nights of

love” this book has many serious shortcomings. Recipes (little more than

DIY guides) range from how to organise a black bloc to gynecology,

Squatting, and “how to make a bicycle into a record player”. An eclectic

mix of information, most of which is crap the rest of which is useless

without political understanding. This is meant to be the practice where

“days of war” was the theory but unfortunately DOW had no real theory

beyond drop out and do what feels good. Organising a black bloc out of a

handbook without any understanding of the social conditions which

necessitate mass militant anarchist direct action is not just dangerous

it’s counter-productive to our entire movement. The book shies away from

serious revolutionary information like how to organise a union in your

workplace, how to organise at school, how to make contact and work with

communities in struggle, how to break out of the activist ghetto, how to

set up a social centre, how to provide prisoner support or how to

support asylum seekers etc. All the activities amount to little more

than activist busy-work, something to waste your time with while being a

“drop-out”, ease your social conscience and not have to do any hard work

or compromise yourself by working with people who are complicit in the

system. The Antifascist Action guide is well meaning but pathetic, it

amounts to a bunch of kids masking up and getting their rocks off by

confronting the cops before running off again. This is a common element

throughout, these things are listed because they are exciting and

dangerous and make you “feel good”, not because they are effective forms

of revolutionary organising.

Ramor Ryans review of Days of War.. is spot on and does not really need

expanding on. DOW is massively plagirised, full of inaccurate and

offensive accounts of radical history and tends to define things in very

basic terms like good and bad without any solid ideas backing up most of

their claims.

“Text, ideas, and graphics are borrowed and pilfered from the

Stoke-Newington fanzine Vague, British graphic artist Clifford Harper,

French situationist Raoul Vaneigem and indeed, the whole of the

Situationist pantheon. They sack the archives of radical sub-culture to

compound a falsehood, the basic premise of this book, that it is an

instrument for “total liberation.” In reality, CrimethInc’s vision

seldom rises above that of a suburban kid rebelling against authority.

Mired in the punk rock and crusty sub-culture, the practical application

of all this revolutionary theory is apparently realized by forming a

band, fucking in a park, going vegan or—oh my God now we’re really

fucking doing it!—giving out phony free tickets to the local cinema.9 It

soon becomes clear that the real crime here is the way they plunder some

of the finest and most invigorating ideas from the end of the 20^(th)

century, and render them dull and inchoate.” – Ramor Ryan

When thousands of french students recently occupied their universities

and trashed their cities in opposition to the introduction of the CPE

law one crimethincer had this to say about the organised students;

“When I looked at the situation in France, I often thought that they

were not enough dumpster divers collectives!”

What purpose or relevance this person thinks a dumpster diving

collective would have served to a mass radical movement beyond getting

some old sandwiches which could be looted anyway is beyond me. When mass

struggles emerge crimethincers are of course thin on the ground, mass

struggle means working with squares and allowing workers to be part of

their revolutionary subculture, which just wont do. The book “Anarchy in

the age of dinosaurs” published under Crimethinc by the Furious George

collective (who each deserve a bullet for crimes against anarchism) is

short and poorly written arguing against the idea of mass organisation

and for “chaos” and “butterfly wings”, apparently.

“Folk Anarchy is the name we have given to the arrow aimed at the heart

of every dinosaur. We are replacing the mass movement with a scrappy

multitude of mutineers, gypsies, sprawling shanties, thieves in the

knight and mad scientists”

The lack of any critical analysis and focus on spontaneity are serious

shortcomings for crimethinc which lead me to believe they do not believe

in revolution and are quite possibly happy to be the kids living on the

“edge” of Capitalism, a system whose excess supports their drop-out

lifestyles anyway. This would explain why crimethinc have no theory for

revolution, how to build to overthrow this system and how to make sure

that once we do we hold on to our gains, how to organise a

post-revolutionary world so that we don’t repeat the failures of the CNT

and other historical precedents. A spontaneous revolution leaves the

working class no means to defend itself from reactionaries and state

socialists. Crimethinc call for a revolution in everyday lifestyles and

not life, they seek to define a subculture of individualists who care

only about themselves and those immediately around them. A revolution of

restless and spoiled middle class Americans that is contemptuous of

workers and organised anarchists because in them they see the greatest

threat to their bourgeois lifestyles.

The supposedly self-critical analysis in crimethinc’s 10 year report

never touched on their failures as listed here. Perhaps this is

something these kids will address now and hopefully other anarchists

will add to the debate. I spent a few years uncritically spewing out

empty crimethinc rhetoric and wasting time with their ineffective

tactics and don’t wish to see another generation fooled. I would urge

all comrades to seriously consider the easy solutions being peddled by

CWC. The world can’t wait while serious revolutionaries are side-tracked

by poor ideas and poorer tactics.

“Our demands most moderate are – We only want the earth!”

— James Connolly