This month, we are publishing a series exploring an anarchist analysis of democracy, including case studies from anarchist participants in directly democratic movements around the world. As an offline counterpart to the series, we invite you to organize discussion groups about the relation between democracy and anarchy. We’re not finished thinking through this topic, and we want your help engaging with these questions. Our hope is that together we can produce new ideas and tactics that can be put to use in the next wave of unrest.

To facilitate all this, we’ve prepared print-ready PDF of the flagship text in the series, “From Democracy to Freedom”:

From Democracy to Freedom imposed PDF [6.5mb]

To complement what we hope will be a network of such discussion groups, we’ve established a participatory forum utilizing our comrades’ platform Crabgrass, here:

we.riseup.net/democracyandanarchy

Here’s how to use the forums:

1. Visit we.riseup.net and make yourself a user profile.
2. Click on the “Settings” tab and configure your profile to match your needs.
3. Click on the “Groups” tab at the top left of the page (next to the raven icon).
4. From the “Groups” tab, select “Search” from your options on the left. Type “democracyandanarchy” into the search box and click “Search.”
5. Join the “democracyandanarchy” forum by clicking on it and then clicking “Join Organization” on the left. This enables you to read and contribute to discussion threads.
6. Commence critiquing the articles, posing and answering hard questions, summarizing the discussions you’ve had offline, and more!

Ideally, we’d like people to meet in person to discuss the texts, even in groups as small as two, and to use the online forum to compare your thoughts with other groups and pose each other questions. If you lack offline community, or want to share the discussion from your local group, we hope the forum can connect you with others who share your interests. The Ex-Worker podcast will draw material from the discussions on the forum to include in future episodes of the podcast.

You can draw from and add to a list of discussion questions for reading groups at the forum site. If you have technical questions about using Crabgrass or other Riseup services, try the Crabgrass Help Pages. You can also email us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.

Read on here for some discussion questions.

This Tuesday, our comrades are embarking on a two-month tour of the US, comprising fifty events in twenty-five states. Where our massive outreach project To Change Everything introduces anarchist ideas, on this tour anarchists from three continents will discuss their experiences acting on these ideas in a variety of struggles, movements, and uprisings.

There are still a couple days open in Southern California in late October. If you want to help us book those dates, or you would like to host future CrimethInc. tours anywhere in the world, please contact us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.

With the fall and the tour just getting underway, this is a great time to order a vast quantity of print copies of To Change Everything to distribute in your area. You can also get copies en Español.

Hope to see you this fall!

Description, posters, and tour dates after the jump.

We’re organizing a US tour for this September and October including anarchists from the groups that have produced versions of To Change Everything in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, as well as North America. Together, they will present a panel discussion comparing experiences from the recent global wave of uprisings and exploring the significance of anarchism in the 21st century. We’re excited to facilitate this exchange of perspectives across different continents and struggles, in hopes of helping to foster more global connections and solidarity.

But we need your help! If you are able to host an event, please contact us at rollingthunder@crimethinc.com. We’re especially interested in setting up events outside the usual venues. We would love to hear from student groups, community centers, and anyone else with a good idea.

A description of the presentation is after the jump.

This May, to support the Czech, Polish, and German versions of To Change Everything, a rotating cast of participants from the US, Czech Republic, Germany, and the Balkans are presenting a series of speaking events in Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Germany.

Coinciding with this, we have added the Polish and Czech versions of To Change Everything to the website, including PDFs of the print versions.

We are planning a full US tour for the fall, bringing together participants in To Change Everything from several continents. Email rollingthunder@crimethinc.com if you can help set up an event.

Tour dates after the jump.

Tomorrow, April 15, is tax day: the day by which you are required to file income tax returns so the US government can extort some of your earnings, the greatest part of which traditionally goes to funding the military and police without which such banditry would be impossible. Thanks to the tax breaks available to the wealthy, your employers may pay less in taxes than you, even as they take more profit home. Many corporations—like Citigroup and Bank of America—pay no federal taxes whatsoever.

In addition, April 15 is a nationwide day of protest under the banner Fight for $15, aimed at winning workers $15-an-hour wages and the right to unionize. Now, we’d love to think that a few protests would suffice to make corporations treat their employees better, or to make the government that exists to protect those corporations suddenly change sides… but we’re not holding our breath. If you’re participating in those actions, we wish you success; just don’t get so comfortable negotiating the details of our exploitation that you come to take it for granted. Even $150 an hour couldn’t justify the humiliating jobs many of us are forced to hold. Real dignity isn’t a question of getting higher wages to do the same thing; we deserve complete self-determination, not better compensation for squandering our lives.

April 15 is also the sixth annual Steal Something from Work Day. Whether or not your employer raises your wages or permits you to unionize, you can conspire with your fellow employees to expand your take-home pay yourselves. You can that do right now, on your own terms, without waiting for legislation, without opening negotiations with your enemies, without the assistance of paid organizers or condescending nonprofits, without struggling to get the attention of politicians who answer to the highest bidder. Sure, stealing from your workplace is dangerous, but it’s no more dangerous than the kind of pressure campaign it would take to win a living wage for everyone nationwide—consult the bloody history of the old US labor movement if you want to know how people won the right to unionize in the first place. And what is more likely to equip us to move towards a real revolution, collective illegal activity or legal reform campaigns? Not that you necessarily have to choose—try both, if you like.

Read on.

For many months now, we’ve been hard at work on a new anarchist outreach project that picks up where Fighting for Our Lives left off—drawing on everything we’ve learned since then and updating the contents and format. Now that work is completed—we just need your help to get it into the world.

To Change Everything is a full-color 48-page booklet. In fresh, accessible language, it explores the virtues of self-determination, illuminates why authoritarian power structures cannot resolve the crises they produce, and discusses how to weave our personal revolts together into a collective struggle for liberation.

We want to print 100,000 copies and circulate it for free, so as to reach the generations radicalized by the global movements and catastrophes of the past few years. We’ve worked with Submedia.tv to produce an accompanying video; we’re coordinating with comrades around the world so the text will appear simultaneously on at least three continents in at least a dozen languages. The video and text will be available in all those languages on a fully responsive website. With your help, we can accomplish all this by the end of 2014.

We’re using Kickstarter to raise the funds to cover printing. If you aren’t familiar with Kickstarter, you can learn about how to use it here. If you’re curious why we’re using a fundraising platform for this project, read our explanation Why a Kickstarter? Why Now?. If you think we do good work, please help us—every little bit counts, and you’ll be ensuring that this project is available to everyone for free. To sweeten the pot, we’ve come up with some fancy rewards for donors, including our first-ever t-shirts.

Kickstarter To Change Everything

 
New anarchist outreach material is long overdue. Even entrenched representatives of the status quo are now admitting that it is necessary to change everything, but the best they can come up with is to appeal to the same authorities that are responsible for our problems in the first place. Meanwhile, the rise of the far right in Europe and the ongoing debacle in Ukraine show how high the stakes are and how bleak the future will be if fascists succeed in presenting themselves as the partisans of change. When the next round of uprisings arrives, it may be too late to reach out to people.

We don’t ask for much, but if ever there were a time for you to help us, this is it. Even if you can’t contribute financially, please send word of this project out on twitter or Facebook, yell it out from street corners. Thanks so much, dear friends.

Why a Kickstarter? Why Now?

This coming month, CrimethInc. operatives will offer two presentations in Scandinavia about the new wave of global revolts and a three-week speaking tour in the Balkans on the theme “After the Crest,” discussing the life cycle of social movements. Catharsis, one of the flagship bands of passionate anarchic hardcore, will also be playing a rare handful of shows in northern Europe.

Hope to see you at one of these events!

Consult the event descriptions and tour dates.

This April, CrimethInc. operatives will speak in ten countries on three continents. In Europe, we’ve organized a seven-nation speaking tour to discuss the role of anarchism in the unfolding wave of global revolts and promote the forthcoming German translation of Work from our friends with Black Mosquito. In the Pacific Northwest, contributors to Self as Other: Reflections on Self-Care offer another leg of their tour exploring the revolutionary potential of care. Finally, in Chile, another operative is attending the third Anarchist Book Fair in Santiago, Chile to present two workshops and table with a variety of English and Spanish literature.

If you are interested in setting up a speaking event where you are, email rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.

Tour dates, event descriptions, and more information!

We will be tabling at this year’s Bay Area Book Fair on March 22, as we have for over a decade. We will bring the brand new issue of Rolling Thunder and a great deal of other exciting material. One of the authors of our zine Self as Other will be presenting the workshop “Beyond Self-Care: The Subversive Potential of Care”. That evening, Catharsis will be playing a single West Coast reunion show. If you live in the area, we hope to see you at one of these events! Stay tuned for Crimethinc. activities on at least three continents in April.

Continue reading →

In hopes of fostering an exchange of tactics and momentum between liberation movements in North and South America, we have arranged a speaking tour of the East Coast for comrades from Brazil. In these presentations, they will explain the context of the new wave of unrest sweeping Brazil, tracing its trajectory and distilling lessons for anarchists and others organizing in the US. Don’t miss!

Speaking dates and full description after the jump.