#3 Hating on Crimethinc

Fewer things drives anarchists crazier than the “ex-workers collective” of Crimethinc. The entire collective draws light to the “wrong kind of anarchist” that most anarchists try to distance themselves from.

For this, anarchists have an easy target. Most of the energy of the collective is spent on trying to convince bored, suburban youth to eat out of dumpsters, drop out of high school, and hop trains for the rest of their foreseeable future. When not publishing books on how to do this, they’ll sometimes set themselves up for anarchist flak by talking about the evil capitalist invention of soap. During a slow news cycle when there isn’t a revolution occurring in the third world, police brutality at a protest, or legislation curtailing freedom of speech, you can be sure that there is an anti-Crimethinc forum thread going on somewhere.

It’s not hard to see why anarchists have it out for this collective. Popular one liners of the collective are: “Poverty, unemployment, homelessness – if you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right!” This infuriates the socialist side of every anarchist who hopes to shape an egalitarian society. Seeing as most of the libertarian left are anarcho-syndicalists, it completely defeats their plan for an anarchist revolution if the working class are all unemployed and eating out of dumpsters. After all, you can’t organise a squat, or occupy a dumpster.

The collective has even gone so far as to take jabs at anarchist’s “Kropotkin reading groups.” This is one of the gravest offenses someone can commit in front of an anarchist. The equivalent to this would be insulting a Christian for going to church.

If your conversation begins to slow with an anarchist, just utter the line “Did you hear what Crimethinc did recently?” You don’t actually have to be up to date on the happenings of this collective. Rest assured, every anarchist vaguely involved in the philosophy will know exactly what Crimethinc has done, and will already have a canned gripe to tell you. Be careful though, this could backfire. You could end up in a conversation for an hour about how the collective is working to thwart working class revolution and usher in another hundred years of neo-liberal capitalist domination.