The Ballerina and the Bull by Johanna Isaacson

Author:Johanna Isaacson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Ballerina and the Bull
ISBN: 9781910924112
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2016-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Modern Primitive Play:

Crimethinc’s Folk Science

As the 2011 Occupy movement gained popularity and different figures and groups began to vie to define its direction and goals, longtime leftist political journalist Chris Hedges entered the fray, calling black bloc anarchists a violent “cancer of the Occupy movement,” leading to widespread and varied reaction among activists and commentators. When he was challenged to a public debate, an agent of the group CrimethInc was selected as his opponent, championing “a diversity of tactics.” CrimethInc comes to the fore during public protests as a symbol of militancy. Here, however, I want to analyze the collective for their lesser-known aspects. Their most well known book in the Nineties was called Days of War, Nights of Love, a series of playful and philosophical essays, influenced by situationist emphasis on the transformation of everyday life and the liberatory elements of insurrectionary revolt. Their most extensive work dwells on these utopian nights of love, and yet their public profile is limited to depicting them as enraged, masculine, black-clad trouble makers railing against the day. As the group themselves declare:

Nothing makes people more defensive than the suggestion that they can and should enjoy themselves: this triggers all their shame at their failures to do so, all their resentment towards those they feel must be monopolizing pleasure, and a great deal of lingering Puritanism besides. (“Fighting”)

While recognizing the limits of Crimethinc’s ludic mode, this chapter attempts to understand the uses for theory and struggle in this euphoric mobilization of play.

CrimethInc began in 1996 with the Atlanta based zine Inside Front, dedicated to radical politics and hardcore punk. The loose knit collective came to be known for its pro-situationist propaganda and advocacy of DiY projects, wage-work refusal, and subversion of dominant institutions. CrimethInc “propagandists” (a stigmatized term they reclaim to emphasize their pedagogical, deeply politicized view of culture) have hubs in many regions of the US but are strongest in Atlanta, Georgia, Olympia, Washington, and Ashville, N. Carolina. Some major projects are the zines Hunter/Gatherer, Harbinger, Rolling Thunder; the books Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs, Days of War, Nights of Love, Evasion, Expect Resistance, Recipes for Disaster, and The Secret World of Terijian; as well as distribution of hardcore punk bands such as Catharsis, Gehenna, Kilara, Timebomb, Trial Umlaut, Aluminum Noise, Ire What Seed, What Root? Black Market Fetus, Breed/extinction, and Zegota. They participate in and propagandize many other projects such as the “black bloc” contingent of the “Battle of Seattle,” the large scale 1999 protest of the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, and the Occupy movement. In their words, the major concepts CrimethInc introduced in the Nineties were: immediacy, decentralization, do-it-yourself resistance to capitalism, anonymity, plagiarism, crime, hedonism, the refusal of work, the delegitimization of history in favor of myth, the idea that revolutionary struggle could be a romantic adventure (“Fighting”).

CrimethInc’s publications circulate in the thousands and they have a highly visible web presence. Their aim is to encourage young people to drop out of work and school regimes in order to dedicate themselves to direct action and militant play.

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