CrimethInc.

CrimethInc. also known as CWC, which stands for either "CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective" or "CrimethInc Ex-Workers Ex-Collective is a decentralized anarchist collective of autonomous cells.

Quotes

Days of War, Nights of Love

• CrimethInc. is significant in what it is not: It is not a membership organization It is not an elitist vanguard that purports to lead the masses out of darkness to salvation - experience has shown a thousand times that such parties are the social forces that create masses. And it is not a Movement, either: for such things only exist as part of history, and as such are subject to its laws - gestation, ascendance, decline. As crimethink is a force that exists beneath te currents of history, outside the chain of events, CrimethInc. is the first stirring of a revolt that will take us all out of history.
  • Preface: "What is CrimethInc.?"
• I always secretly looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasn't limited by my imagination. That way, anything can, and always did, happen.
• No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to.
• Life's most beautiful and inspiring moments occur at 3am, just prowling, looking for nothing but always finding something.
• Anarchism is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be.
• Can we imagine a togetherness that isn't founded on gross generalizations, conceptualizing ourselves as unique individuals who still stand to gain from looking out for one another? Can we identify with each other rather than with categories or masters?
• We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker
• Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?
• Nothing can replace the feel of the paper against your fingers, the ink soaked up by paper, the sensation of turning a page with the wind rustling your hair, or the deliberate and intricate presentation of images and text that you can only get in the real world, on real pages. And few things can be as torturous as sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end.
• Gender is another false division of life into arbitrary categories, none of which can adequately describe or contain any of us, in order to define us against each other in the interests of Power. There is no male. There is no female. Get free. Go off the maps.
  • G is for Gender
• Those who cannot forget the past, are doomed to repeat it.
  • H is for History, 113

Expect Resistance

• We move in spiral paths, imploding or expanding, relinquishing everything to become what we hate or finding the faith to discover new possibilities and new loves.
  • "A Map"
• "Abundance and scarcity are above all the manifestations of opposing approaches to life: ingenuity or inertia, faith or fear. If we restructure our values and assumptions about what the cosmos has to offer us, we can enter a new world of possibilities.:
  • "A Map"
• Everyone can have a full life-but not everyone can have a full wallet.
  • "A Map"
• Here's a story: once upon a time, human beings lived in a relationship of trust with the earth, seeing it as a wellspring of abundance.We ate fruit, which grew freely around us, naturally wrapped in a biodegradable peel and containing seeds from which more fruit trees would grow after the fruit was eaten. Today we eat candy bars, for which we must exchange our labor, of which supplies are strictly limited-and when we throw away the wrappers, which are manufactures from plastics and chemicals foreign to nature, we can be sure that we are adding to the slow accumulation of garbage that makes fruit trees less and less abundant.

Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance

• At this moment, an employee in a grocery store is setting
  out genetically engineered produce rather than tending her garden;
  A dishwasher is sweating over a steaming sink while unwashed dishes stack up in his kitchen;
  A line cook is taking orders from strangers instead of cooking at a neighborhood barbecue;
  An advertising agent is composing jingles for laundry detergent rather than playing music with his friends.
  A woman is watching wealthier people's children at a daycare program rather than spending time with her own;
  A child is being dropped off there instead of growing up with those who know and love him;
  A student is writing a thesis about an activity that interests her instead of participating in it.
  A man is masturbating with internet pornography instead of exploring his sexuality with a partner;
  An activist, weary after a hard day's work, is putting on a Hollywood movie for entertainment;
  And a demonstrator who has her own unique reasons to protest is carrying a sign mass-produced by a bureaucratic organization.

• There is a rebel army out in the bush plotting the abolition of wage slavery, as sure as there are employees in every workplace waging guerilla war with loafing, pilfering, and disobedience-and you can join up, too, if youhaven't already. But before we start laying plans and sharpening spears, let's look more closely at what we're up against.
• What exactly is work? We could define it as activity for the sake of making money. But aren't slave labor and unpaid internships work, too? We could say it's activity that accumulates profit for someone , whether or not it benefits the one who carries it out. But does that mean that as soon as you start making money from an activity, it becomes work even if it was play before? Perhaps we could define work as labor that takes more from us that it gives back, or that is governed by external forces.
• What else can you do? If you refuse, the economy will go on without you; it doesn't need you any more than it needs any of the hundreds of millions already unemployed, and there's no point going hungry for nothing.
• What if nobody worked? Sweatshops would empty out and assembly lines would grind to a halt, at least the ones producing things no one would make voluntarily. Telemarketing would cease. Despicable individuals who only hold sway over others because of wealth and title would have to learn better social skills. Traffic Jams would come to an end; so would oil spills. Paper money and job applications would be used as fire starter as people reverted to barter and sharing. Grass and flowers would grow from the cracks in the sidewalk, eventually making the way for fruit trees.
• Capitalism exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the marketplace, all our resources at the supermarket and in the stock market, all our attention in the media. To be more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it. But would we continue to reproduce it if we felt we and another choice?
• Obeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market-not to mention laws, parents' expectations, religious scriptures social norms- we're conditioned from infancy to put our desire on hold. Following orders becomes an unconscious reflex, whether or not they are in our best interest; deferring to experts becomes second nature.
• Because human beings are social animals, attention creates meaning and thus value: when everyone else runs to see what's going on, each of us can't help but do the same. Thus the collective creativity and potential of a whole society is channeled into a few figureheads. Of course we love them, or at least love to hate them-they represent the only way accesses our own displaced potential.
  • ii. Economy, Superstars
• Capitalism developed in a symbiotic relationship with the apparatus of the state. In feudal times, most people had obtained much of what they needed outside the exchange economy . But as the state consolidated power, the fields and pastures that had been held in common were privatized and local minorities and overseas continents were ruthlessly plundered. As resources began to flow more dynamically, merchants and bankers gained increasing power and influence.
  • ii. Economy, Politicians, pp. 59
• Self-employment is associated with personal freedom; but managing your own business generally makes more demands on your time than working for a corporation, and not necessarily at comparable rates.
  • ii. Economy, Self-employment, pp. 87
• Self-employment gives you more agency without offering any more liberty: you get to manage you own affairs, but only on the market's terms. Being self-employed simply means organizing the sale of your labor yourself and personally taking on all the risks of competing.
  • ii. Economy, Self-employment, pp. 87
• It takes a lot to beat this natural curiousity out of children. You have to take them away from their families, isolate them in sterile environments with only a few overworked adults, and teach them that learning is a discipline. You had to send them to school.
  • ii. Economy,Teachers and Students, pp. 99
• What is the function of prisons? Above all, to keep people docile in other prisons, Prisons are necessary not to pres eve order so much as to protect and enforce the inequalities produced by the market. The coercion and control they represent isn't an aberration in an otherwise free society, but the essential precondition for capitalism. Prisons are simply a more extreme manifestation of the same logic inherent in property rights and national borders.
  • ii. Economy, Prisoners, pp. 143
• Today there are as many people behind bars in the United States as there were in the Soviet gulags at the height of Stalin's power.
  • ii. Economy, Prisoners, pp. 147