The DIY Post-Punk Post-Situationist Politics of Crimethlnc

ABSTRACT This paper takes a personal and theoretical approach to the politics of guerrilla text production by the loose-knit grouping of ex-workers known only as CrimethInc., situating the texts in a predominantly white middle-class North American social context, considering questions of post-punk economics and the 'disavowal of the economic' from Bourdieu, post-situationist politics, anti-capitalist modes of textual production and distribution, and anarchy as an anti-ideology. Following this mapping of CrimethInc.'s texts, the paper analyses notions of privilege and oppression along the intersecting axes of class, gender, sexual orientation, whiteness and race in CrimethInc.'s texts and the punk subcultures from which they emerge. Keywords CrimethInc., DIY, punk, gender, feminism, whiteness 1 . LEAVING THE SUBURBS: PUNK MEETS ANARCHY Like many Crimethlnc. readers, I found the punk scene and then anarchism as an escapee from the suburbs. As Felix Guattari describes it, 'the militant path ... saved me from the suburbs, the universe of my childhood, kind of wonderful, but which is often, all the same, a cultural dead end' (Guattari 8). I come from a lower middleclass family with working class roots who never quite fit in the suburbs. My parents were non-monogamous antiracist free-thinking non-conformist party-throwing hippies who were opposed to manners and never mowed die lawn. Somehow we never had enough money. Our neighbours seemed much wealthier government workers and corporate ladder-climbers. My father worked at the same job his whole life and my mother stayed home doing unpaid domestic labour. Neither option appealed to me. Neither did marriage. I had no class aspirations, I did not like shopping, I could not be the lifestyle-advertising girl everyone in my school seemed to want to be. Instead I wanted to travel, read poetry, and live with the sex workers, junkies, artists, writers and anarchists I had read about in books like The Thief's Journal, Empire of the Senseless, or On the Road. I loved punk music, drinking beer, boys and girls with mohawks and after hours spoken word clubs. But that would come later. In the suburbs people pretended nothing was wrong in the world but to me things were very wrong: my parents' unequal relationship, my mother happily stuck at home, my father always at work, my sisters and I always competing, the neighbours always one-upping each other. Our community was adrift, with no control over the political or social direction. Social services were being cut, there was growing poverty and homelessness, environmental degradation and species loss, unequal gendered and racialised relationships, and increasingly free capital subjugating a growing global underclass. Among my friends there was a collective ennui that comes from disempowerment, the 'no future' ethos. My suburban friends, however, told me I was crazy for thinking this way. Like I was making it all up. I simply did not have the language to describe the things I saw in the world, a phenomenon Felix Guattari refers to as semiotk subjugation. As a teen-ager I quickly became an outsider both at school and in my family, the strange kid who wore weird clothes and read too many books. And then I discovered punk. The punk scene was different. It was a place where I didn't feel crazy. Where people embraced their collective alienation through music, fashion, a poverty lifestyle, a gritty urban creativity, spontaneity, writing and rioting. As CrimethInc. in 'No Gods, No Masters Degrees,' writes: ? did what most people in that situation do. I began drinking heavily' (303), though I never 'started cooking bags of instant rice in malt liquor' (303), instead I started eating vegan. I went to literally hundreds of punk shows, usually ending up in some underground after-hours party, or passed out on someone's dumpstered couch in a band practice space. I moved into a cheap Montreal warehouse where we put on punk shows, booze cans and poetry readings. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.