"Eight Simple Steps towards Revolution" by Crimethinc

Over the winter, the social momentum that picked up with the occupation of Zuccotti Park has predictably cooled. We can be sure that conflict will intensify again soon, whether with the coming of spring or later; if overseas examples are any indication, we should anticipate new waves of unrest, each sweeping in new sectors of the population. In hopes of helping to prepare for the next phase, we present an eight-point program distilled from the experiences of the last several months.

Once again, please forward this and print out copies to distribute in your community!

• Eight Simple Steps [online viewing version, 195 KB]

• Eight Simple Steps [print version, 496 KB]
A two-sided flier to be folded down the middle, longways.

Cast a spell. 

People in North America are already under a spell: the spell of private property, of the legitimacy of government, of hopelessness. None of these are inherently real; they derive their reality from our collective belief and activity. You have to be hypnotized indeed to believe that property is more sacred than the needs of human beings—that the decisions of the government are more legitimate than your own judgment.

To break this spell, cast another. When a few people invest themselves entirely in another vision of reality, they open up space for others to invest in it as well. It doesn’t have to be realistic at first—it just has to spread until it creates the conditions of its possibility. The original call to occupy Wall Street on September 17 was an example of such a spell. What could take us further?

Find each other. 

Facebook and Twitter notwithstanding, we’re more isolated today than ever. There is a fundamental difference between merely circulating information and making connections that enable people to act together. In an era when social networks are effectively mapped and contained, it’s subversive to make these connections beyond your usual social milieu; some of your friends may not have much fight in them after all, while others with goals complementary to yours might be very different from you. You can’t expect other people to leave their comfort zones unless you’re prepared to leave your own.

Together we can do anything. 

Preparing a revolution isn’t a matter of a radical minority building up the skills and resources to change the world; when enough of us get together, we have access to the knowledge and resources of our whole society. It’s not our job to orchestrate every aspect of the struggle, nor could we; we just have to create conduits through which subversive practices and momentum can flow. Preparation could go on endlessly, as the world goes on changing—circulation is what counts.

The secret is to really begin. 

Until there’s something new happening, something that interrupts the status quo, there’s no reason for anyone to pay attention. It’s not enough to try to start a dialogue in a vacuum; for people to take the dialogue seriously, there has to be something to talk about. Don’t just chant that another world is possible; manifest it, so everyone who might believe in it can. Don’t just talk about abolishing capitalism; pick a pressure point, have a go at it, and see who joins in.

Build the will. 

Nowadays most of us don’t know our own strength. We’re not used to relying on our own capabilities; we assume we can always be defeated. Most of the strength of those who hold power is founded on this defeatism. But a little courage can be infectious, and once people get used to wielding power together they won’t quickly give it up.

The first compromise is the last one. 

Over and over, our occupations and movements are undermined one compromise at a time. Whenever we concede anything, we set a precedent that will be repeated again and again, emboldening those for whom it is more convenient for us to remain passive. If police don’t arrest us when we stand up for ourselves, it isn’t because they support us, or because we’re within our legal rights—it’s because we’ve mobilized enough social power to make them back down. Timidity, placation, and obedience only detract from this leverage.

Address the 99%, not the 1%. 

Demands oriented towards those in power direct the focus away from what we can do ourselves; joint action, on the other hand, empowers us and creates a space where we can weave our differences into collective strength. To put this in the language of the Occupy movement, why address demands to the 1% at the top of the capitalist pyramid, who will never share our priorities? Why not instead address proposals to the rest of the 99%, whose combined power could render the authority of the 1% meaningless?

We’ve been taught by a thousand classes, newspapers, and job interviews to present everything in the language and logic of our superiors. We must finally learn to speak each other’s languages, to make proposals that are relevant to our own needs rather than “realistic” in the framework of our rulers. This means dispensing with every conception of legitimacy we inherited from the prevailing order—not just the authority of the politicians and the courts, but also academic prestige and middle-class “common sense” and activist credentials—in favor of value systems that legitimize our voices and our resistance on our own terms.

Aim beyond the target.  

Often, to accomplish small concrete objectives, we have to set our sites much higher. Conversely, it sometimes happens that we accomplish what we set out to easily enough, but have no idea what to do with the new opportunities that open up next. Every time we act, let’s act in a way that points towards the world we want and equips us to go on moving towards it. The most important thing is not whether we achieve our immediate goals, but how each engagement positions us for the next round.

more info about Crimethinc: http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2012/02/09/eight-simple-steps-towards-revolution/

"Work" // New CrimethInc. Book and Poster: Work and the Pyramid of the Capitalist System

Work is a book published by Crimethinc Far East, a decentralized anarchist publishing collective. It covers a wide range of economic, political, and philosophical issues, mostly relating to the ethical and utilitarian implications of Capitalism. Central to the book's theme is that Capitalism is inherently immoral and inevitably causes massive wealth inequality and degradation of general human experience. The book focuses specifically on the causes and effects crises suffered by capitalist economies, such as the 2008 financial crisis, and how the people can subvert global Capitalism to create a better future. The book features an "updated" version of the Pyramid of the Capitalist System, designed by Packard Jennings, on the inside flap. Shortly after the first printing of Work began, it was discovered that a certain percentage of the books had a defect which caused the cover to separate from the pages at the spine. The printing was canceled and all copies that were set to be shipped were held until a solution was found. Non-defective books are being printed and are scheduled to be shipped in mid-June 2011.^[1]

After so much technological progress, why do we have to work more than ever before? How is it that the harder we work, the poorer we end up compared to our bosses? When the economy crashes, why do people focus on protecting their jobs when no one likes working in the first place? Can capitalism survive another century of crises?
Our newest book, entitled Work, addresses these questions and a great many more. To answer them, we had to revisit our previous analysis of employment and develop a more nuanced understanding of the economy. We spent months studying obscure history and comparing notes about how we experience exploitation in our daily lives, slowly hammering out a grand unified theory of contemporary capitalism.
In addition to distilling our findings in this book, we’ve also prepared a poster to diagram the system it describes. The poster is based on the classic illustration of the pyramid of the capitalist system published in the Industrial Worker in 1911. With the assistance of Packard Jennings, we’ve created a new version, much more detailed than the original and updated to account for all the transformations of the past one hundred years.
In combination, the book and poster explore the positions we occupy within this pyramid and the mechanics that maintain it. From the industrial revolution to the internet, from the colonization of the Americas to the explosion of the service sector and the stock market, from the 2008 financial crisis to the upheavals taking place right now across the globe, Work offers an overview of how capitalism functions in the 21st century and what we can do to get beyond it.
(Orders placed right now receive a free bookmark, limited to 999 copies.)

After so much technological progress, why do we have to work more than ever before? How is it that the harder we work, the poorer we end up compared to our bosses? When the economy crashes, why do people focus on protecting their jobs when no one likes working in the first place? Can capitalism survive another century of crises?
Our newest book, entitled Work, addresses these questions and a great many more. To answer them, we had to revisit our previous analysis of employment and develop a more nuanced understanding of the economy. We spent months studying obscure history and comparing notes about how we experience exploitation in our daily lives, slowly hammering out a grand unified theory of contemporary capitalism.
In addition to distilling our findings in this book, we’ve also prepared a poster to diagram the system it describes. The poster is based on the classic illustration of the pyramid of the capitalist system published in the Industrial Worker in 1911. With the assistance of Packard Jennings, we’ve created a new version, much more detailed than the original and updated to account for all the transformations of the past one hundred years.
In combination, the book and poster explore the positions we occupy within this pyramid and the mechanics that maintain it. From the industrial revolution to the internet, from the colonization of the Americas to the explosion of the service sector and the stock market, from the 2008 financial crisis to the upheavals taking place right now across the globe, Work offers an overview of how capitalism functions in the 21st century and what we can do to get beyond it.
(Orders placed right now receive a free bookmark, limited to 999 copies.)

more info, extras and posters that you can spread at your city:
http://crimethinc.com/books/work_extras.html

What Happened to Spanish Revolution 2011 / M15 "Real Democracy" movement?

For all of us that we found ourselves excited observing Spanish Revolution 2011 / M15 "Real Democracy" movement, for all of us that we published and networked enthousiastic reports from commrades and friends from late night slow connections from squares of Madrid, Barcelona and elsewhere, for all of us still fighting in more than 40 squares in Greece to communicate, co-ordinate, expand and avoid manipulation and collolapse....its obvious that we have to investigate what happened in Spain, understand the successes and failures of the M15 movement and continue our efforts to  

FAST FORWARD THE FUTURE!

Void Network publishes here a link to 3 different reports about the Spanish Revolution 2011 Movement and tries to understand :

What Happened to Spanish Revolution 2011 / M15 "Real Democracy" movement?

read here:

http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/14748

Fighting in the New Terrain by Crimethinc Ex Workers Collective

  Fighting in the New Terrain by Crimethinc Ex Workers Collective

  Overture: The More Things Change…

Once, the basic building block of patriarchy was the nuclear family, and calling for its abolition was a radical demand. Now families are increasingly fragmented—yet has this fundamentally expanded women’s power or children’s autonomy?

Once, the mainstream media consisted of only a few television and radio channels. These have not only multiplied into infinity but are being supplanted by forms of media such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. But has this done away with passive consumption? And how much more control over these formats do users really have, structurally speaking?

Once, movies represented the epitome of a society based on spectatorship; today, video games let us star in our own shoot-'em-up epics, and the video game industry does as much business as Hollywood. In an audience watching a movie, everyone is alone; the most you can do is boo if the storyline outrages you. In the new video games, on the other hand, you can interact with virtual versions of other players in real time. But is this greater freedom? Is it more togetherness?

Once, one could speak of a social and cultural mainstream, and subculture itself seemed subversive. Now “diversity” is at a premium for our rulers, and subculture is an essential motor of consumer society: the more identities, the more markets.

Once, people grew up in the same community as their parents and grandparents, and travel could be considered a destabilizing force interrupting static social and cultural configurations. Today life is characterized by constant movement as people struggle to keep up with the demands of the market; in place of repressive configurations, we have permanent transience, universal atomization.

Once, laborers stayed at one workplace for years or decades, developing the social ties and common reference points that made old-fashioned unions possible. Today, employment is increasingly temporary and precarious, as more and more workers shift from factories and unions to service industry and compulsory flexibility.

Once, wage labor was a distinct sphere of life, and it was easy to recognize and rebel against the ways our productive potential was exploited. Now every aspect of existence is becoming “work,” in the sense of activity that produces value in the capitalist economy: glancing at one’s email account, one increases the capital of those who sell advertisements. In place of distinct specialized roles in the capitalist economy, we increasingly see flexible, collective production of capital, much of which goes unpaid.

Once, the world was full of dictatorships in which power was clearly wielded from above and could be contested as such. Now these are giving way to democracies that seem to include more people in the political process, thus legitimizing the repressive powers of the state.

Once, the essential unit of state power was the nation, and nations competed among themselves to assert their individual interests. In the era of capitalist globalization, the interests of state power transcend national boundaries, and the dominant mode of conflict is not war but policing. This is occasionally employed against rogue nations, but continuously implemented against people.

Once, one could draw lines, however arbitrary, between the so-called First World and Third World. Today the First World and the Third World coexist in every metropolis, and white supremacy is administered in the United States by an African-American president.

read all the essay here:

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/terrain.php

Toronto G20: Eyewitness Report by Crimethinc

In the last update offered by Crimethinc an overview of what happened in Toronto during the anarchist actions against the G20 June 25-27. We’ve received the following blow-by-blow report from on the ground there, offering context and analysis from inside the riots that shook Canada’s largest city. Anarchists have fully emerged in North America as a force to be reckoned with following the events in Toronto, and it is important to understand how this came about. The black bloc has become a household name throughout the region, and we must use this exposure to our advantage by maintaining our visibility even in the face of repression. We must also look critically at the events of the weekend in order to make strategic advances toward our goal of completely dismantling the domination and hierarchy of the present world. Lead-up The June G20 meeting was announced for Toronto in December of 2009. While anarchists were already preparing for the G8 in Huntsville, the announcement that a major summit would be held in the downtown core of Canada’s largest city created a stir among anarchists, and generated significant momentum for counter-summit actions to take place in Toronto. To our knowledge, anarchists participated in three basic models of organizing against the G20. We will briefly outline these to offer context to those seeking to understand the successes and failures of the Toronto protests.

Some anarchists were involved in the Toronto Community Mobilization Network (TCMN), which was not an anarchist group and did not organize actions but sought only to provide infrastructure and coordination for the convergence in Toronto. Many anarchists, especially those based in Toronto, chose to put their efforts into this group rather than organize along explicitly anarchist lines. Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR) was born of the desire for an explicitly anarchist group to organize an action framework against the summit, creating a semi-public format that many anarchists and allies could plug into. They issued calls to action fairly early on and while they saw fierce divisions over tactics and strategy in the immediate lead-up to the G20, they maintained the public call for three explicitly anarchist actions during the weekend. Other anarchists organized informally through established networks of friends sharing affinity and agreements on tactics, and they made a public call for a demonstration against prisons on Sunday June 26, the last day of the G20 summit. Also significant is that many different groups in Montreal organized massive support for the convergence against the G20; this included a reforming of CLAC, which had originally existed to oppose the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001.

There were other groups organizing against the G20, with which anarchists interacted in various ways. No One Is Illegal, a cross-Canada network working to end deportations and regularize non-status migrants, held a march and participated in much of the street action. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) also organized for the summit, focusing on a march it called for Friday. The Canadian Labour Congress, a mainstream union coalition, organized the largest permitted march on Saturday. Various other protests occurred in the week leading up to the summit, including a queer action on Tuesday, a day of protest for climate justice on Wednesday, and a march in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty on Thursday.

This is only a general overview of the different approaches anarchists took in Toronto, but perhaps it will help others understand how the Toronto actions compare to other convergences against global capitalism.

read all report here:

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/toronto2.php

Fight Against G-20 in Pittsburgh...What Happened There?

photos originaly from Reuters and Associated Press






























Void Network and Void Mirror international blog offers here analysis and review from Crimethic Ex Workers Collective about the riots took place in Pittsburgh-U.S.A. during the conference of G-20 there... As long as the "world leaders" and the financial elite will gather to organize the exploitation of human beings and the destruction of Earth, they will be allways sensitive and consciouss human beings to confront their power...

Disclaimer: This was written the night of September 24, immediately following the events described, without time to verify all the reports summarized or assemble additional information. There may be errors; if so, we will correct them shortly.

This is on-the-spot reporting just in from the first day of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, which has seen a great deal of spirited resistance and confrontation—perhaps as much as has occurred at any anarchist mobilization in North America in half a decade. This gushy, hastily composed account presents the context, attempts to convey the spirit of the day, and raises a few preliminary questions.

The basic narrative of the day runs thus: The protesters attempt to reach the summit site, but are brutally forced back by police. They eventually turn around and march through Pittsburgh neighborhoods and shopping districts, where the police pursue and attack them. Property destruction intensifies in response to these attacks, and the conflict culminates in a standoff between police and students during which a black bloc destroys a business district.

One might interpret all this as legitimate acts of revenge for the police murder in London at last spring’s G20 summit; but it also signifies the survival of militant street resistance in the Obama era.

Never Felt More Alive

In the monotony of capitalist daily life, it’s easy to forget that we have a negotiable relationship to reality. Streets are for faceless traffic; crowds are impersonal assemblies of strangers studiously ignoring each other; windows are for displaying merchandise, or staring out of as we wait for shifts or classes to conclude; decorative stones outside banks or fast food franchises are inert objects devoid of interest or possibility.

When all this is interrupted and the unknown opens before us in every instant, the world becomes a magical place. In these moments, we discover new organs within ourselves—or if not new, then atrophied or atavistic—adapted for an entirely different way of life than we are used to. It turns out we are creatures made for another world—and made well for it!—who are barely getting by in this one. Changing worlds, we shift from malaise and misery to incredible joy and pleasure: finally, we are at home in our own skin, in our own environment. Charging down the street together rather than driving down it separately, fighting or outrunning police rather than submissively accepting their authority, we come to life.

No words can do justice to this experience, but it is real—one day of it is realer than a decade of rental contracts, traffic tickets, service work, and nights at the bar.

continue reading the analysis and detailed review of the fights against G-20 in Pittsburgh here:

http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/g20.php