Category Archives: Internal Memos

Putting the “latest” in “latest episode,” we present the fifth installment of our bimonthly podcast, wherein we turn our attention to police and the systematic violence they incarnate. Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue, joins us to discuss the development of police tactics since 1968; other special guests include members of East Atlanta Copwatch and a comrade from Çarşı, a Turkish football-ultra group holding it down at Gezi Park in İstanbul. All this is filled out with news from around the world, and a review of “To the Indomitable Hearts: The Prison Letters of Luciano ‘Tortuga’ Pitronello.”

Download the episode or stream it online or read the full transcript. You can also subscribe in iTunes here or add the feed URL to your podcast player of choice. Rate us on iTunes and let us know what you think, or email us at podcast@crimethinc.com. Episodes appear on the first and third Sunday of every month. No, really.

Hot on the heels of sending out the last copy of #6, we are now finally out of Rolling Thunder #7 as well. As a result, we’ve made the complete PDF of the issue available for free download. Packed more densely than any to that point, our seventh issue strained at it’s 114-page limit:

Anarchists coordinated mass mobilizations against the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, provoking major clashes; the global economy collapsed; Greece experienced an anarchist-organized insurrection in response to a police murder; and at the beginning of 2009, Oakland was shaken by similar unrest. Our coverage pushes beyond the surface of events to offer insight into the organizing structures and historical background, fleshing out timelines and analyses with personal narratives and cutting-edge cartography. In addition to all this, the issue includes an exploration of the relationship between the punk subculture and the anarchist movement, complemented by interviews with bands and collectives from beyond the white punk ghetto, and ends with a primer on small-town organizing using Winona, Minnesota as a case study.

We’ve reduced the price to just $8 for our Rolling Thunder Bundle bundle containing issues #8 – #10. And, don’t forget, you can subscribe to Rolling Thunder to get future issues hot off the press, while also supporting the project and ensuring the journal’s continued existence. Our current plan is to release issue #11 this fall.

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At long last, we’re finally out of Rolling Thunder #6, and accordingly, a free, complete PDF of the issue is now available. This issue is one of my personal favorites, filled with spectacular photography and a diverse selection of writings based around the theme of experimentation. From Swedish anarchists literally building a social center to a detailed look at anarchist organizing in NYC, this issue has many hours of good reading between its covers.

And as the print edition of RT #6 sails off into the sunset, the newest issue from this past summer, RT #10, has now been added to the Rolling Thunder Bundle, where you can now get the last four issues for just $10. Happy reading!

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Two decades ago, before the music industry had fully colonized it, the do-it-yourself underground was a space of exodus and experimentation, often in violent opposition to the rest of the world. This was the context in which Catharsis appeared, one of a new wave of bands to meld metal drama with the raw urgency of hardcore punk. They quickly distinguished themselves by an almost self-destructive intensity and uncompromising anticapitalist ethic. Inverting Christian iconography to champion the struggle of the individual against a hostile cosmos, they took up the centuries-old banner No Gods, No Masters, extending this project of total defiance into their increasingly tumultuous lives. This apocalyptic orientation in turn informed their music, as they sought to hit upon the magic combination of words, harmonies, and rhythms that could spark a global conflagration.

Catharsis broke up in 2002, following relentless touring on three continents and a final catastrophic five months in Europe. After a decade of watching the old records sell for absurd prices while bootleggers profited off substandard editions, we’ve finally taken it upon ourselves to offer a proper collection of their work.

This discography, “Light from a Dead Star,” includes their debut 7”, the “Samsara” and “Passion” LPs, and the split LPs with Gehenna and Newborn. It also includes the final Catharsis song, “Absolution,” recorded alongside “Arsonist’s Prayer” in their last session but never released. That totals two hours of music on four LPs, packaged in a box with oversize booklets offering all the original artwork.

These will be back from the pressing plant in mid-January, just in time for a handful of Catharsis reunion shows. In the meantime, the discography can be pre-ordered from CrimethInc. Far East (North America) and Refuse Records (Europe).

All records are now sold out. Pre-orders from CrimethInc. will come on limited-edition colored vinyl; they will include digital versions of all these songs and others, plus video footage, fliers, and other archival material. We’ll throw in some additional treats as well. These are unavoidably expensive, but the digital download of the discography will be available in January at a price anyone can afford.

[UPDATE: The colored vinyl, limited to 100 copies, has sold-out. All pre-orders from here on will include black vinyl, limited also, to 400 copies.]

In addition, Catharsis is briefly reuniting to play four shows this January: January 17 in Raleigh, NC; January 18 in Baltimore, MD; January 19 in New York City; and January 20 in Washington, DC, at a benefit show for political prisoners as part of a counter-inaugural festival of resistance.

CrimethInc. agents have completed a speaking tour of northern Europe, offering 45 presentations in less than two months. We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the countless organizers, hosts, and attendees who made this possible and inspired us so much in the course of our trip.

Some of the highlights of the tour included the Zrenjanin Antifascist Festival, attended by anarchists from over a dozen countries; radical history walking tours of Helsinki and several other cities; the candles filling Skogskyrkogården cemetery on the night of All Saints’ Day; and traveling with our comrade from Black Mosquito, whose hard work got the tour off the ground in the first place. We were struck by the large turnouts—peaking at almost 120, but regularly 50 or more. These seem to indicate a growing interest in anarchism throughout northern Europe.

And none too soon. Up to now, the nations of northern Europe have remained islands of relative economic stability and social peace as the continent burns from the south up, but this won’t last forever. Outside of Oslo, a European Dubai still buoyed by oil money, growing fascist power in the parliaments and on the streets attests to the general sense that it’s just a matter of time before capitalism fails its most historically privileged middle classes. As faith in the present system erodes, it’s especially important for anarchists to offer a vision of liberation, rather than simply preserving subcultural ghettos or taking a quixotic stand as the last defenders of social democracy. One of the reasons we chose to tour northern Europe at this time was to offer comrades there a preview of the context they may soon find themselves in, which is already upon us in the United States. What happens in northern Europe in the next few years may well determine the scope of what is possible in the rest of the world.

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We’re excited to announce our collaboration with Minneapolis rapper P.O.S in distributing over 600 copies of our Work book and several times that many “Capitalism Is a Pyramid Scheme” posters in preorders for his excellent new album, “We Don’t Even Live Here,” on Rhymesayers Entertainment.

P.O.S approached us some time ago about including our material in this release, his fourth solo album, which deals with some of the same subjects. We were flattered to receive this invitation from someone whose music we appreciate so much. His razor-sharp wit opens windows on startling vulnerability; his insouciance comes off a thousand times realer than garden-variety hip hop posturing. And we think it’s high time that someone in his position reached out to combine art with radical points of departure: music should offer emergency escape hatches out of this world, not just temporary vacations from it.

We’re interested in future collaborations with other musicians, artists, and anyone else who wants to shake things up. But P.O.S got there first, and he deserves credit for that.

A big thanks to him and his team for making this happen. We’re looking forward to making contact with everyone who learns about our projects via his album.

Video for “Fuck Your Stuff” after the jump.

For the next two months, CrimethInc. operatives are conducting a speaking tour in Europe to support the recent publication of CrimethInc. texts in German, Serbo-Croat, Russian, Finnish, and other languages. The discussions will draw on the past decade and a half of CrimethInc. activity to discuss liberation and anarchist strategy in the changing context of the 21st century.

Dates and further information after the jump!

I’ve wanted to reformat and redesign Recipes for Disaster for more than five years. Shortly after the dust had settled from the second printing, I had enough distance from working on the first edition to start noticing its flaws, or, more accurately, the mistakes I’d made. However, recognizing imperfections and failed objectives isn’t the same as finding solutions, and for years I’ve lived with the book, handling it nearly every day, sending out tens of thousands of copies to people and coordinating subsequent printings—all the while feeling like it wasn’t the absolute best version we could make. I made notes, registered feedback from readers, tinkered with prototype templates in InDesign, and—more than anything else—fretted. Today we announce the availability of the newly redesigned second edition, and holding it in my hands fills me with more than just relief, but also the sweet feeling of satisfaction. We really got it right.

What follows is a beyond-nerdy breakdown of the changes made in the second edition, the reasoning behind the changes, and a look into what led to the shortcomings of the first edition. To do that we’ll have to travel back to 2004, but first we’ll show off a few of the improvements . . .

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For many weeks now, our classic all-purpose anarchist cookbook, Recipes for Disaster has been out of stock. We’ve just received a flawless printed sample and are relieved to report that on September 24, a reformatted and enhanced second edition of the cookbook will be available.

Meanwhile, our Russian comrades have published their own version of Recipes for Disaster, which is available for free downloading. They have added many of their own recipes and adjusted others based on experience. Here, in their own words, are the contents of their version, which provide as entertaining a glimpse into the Russian anarchist context as the time capsule of our 2004 version offers into our own past:

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We won’t mince words, this issue of Rolling Thunder is very, very late. All we can offer is our sincere apology, and an assurance that it was not due to negligence—in the past year we’ve had both a death and a birth here at Far East HQ as well as truly dark times in our personal lives, and our operation, already pushed to the limits of human capacity, suffered greatly. While we’ve managed to keep on top of mailorder and the website, other projects like Rolling Thunder, the Recipes for Disaster redesign and reprint, and others yet to be revealed, have suffered setbacks and delays. Throughout it all, y’all have been very patient and understanding, and for that you have our true gratitude—it made a trying situation more bearable. Thank you.

We’ve struggled to find an equilibrium and while not there yet, the thread is in our grasp. We’re beginning to catch up and we can promise an action-packed last third of 2012 beginning now. To begin, we are releasing Rolling Thunder #10 today, which you can read about above. As a token of appreciation and thanks to all of those who subscribed to Rolling Thunder, we are sending this issue free to all current subscribers; in other words, if you subscribed to Rolling Thunder before today, your four issue subscription has just turned into a five issue subscription. It’s the least we could do to reward you for your support in light of the delay.

Speaking of transitions, Rolling Thunder is undergoing one itself. Our initial vision was a mass-distributed, inexpensive but high-quality journal that would come out in a timely manner and be a project that simply broke even for us financially. We tried to will it into existence by mass-producing it right from the get go, and offering it at a break even price, however sales never reached the needed levels to be sustainable—as the currently available ancient back issues will attest. RT is still very important to us, so rather than give it up, we’ve decided to print 33% less copies, at the same high-quality, and charge more, which is necessary because as the print-run lowers, cost-per-issue goes up. We believe this model will enable us to keep publishing it until there is no need for RT in this world.