CrimethInc. — Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners

Warning: this book will not save your life

Today there is a booming discontent industry, consisting of entrepreneurs who cash in on your misery by selling you products that describe and decry it. Thus the exchange economy finds a place even for its enemies: perpetuating both industry and discontent as we struggle to fight them, we keep the wheels turning by selling more merchandise. And as in every other aspect of your lives, your real desires to make something happen are channeled into consuming— and your own abilities and potential are displaced, projected onto the “revolutionary” items you purchase.

This book could be a part of that process. While we hope we are using our product to “sell” revolution, it might be that we are just using “revolution” to sell our product.{1} The best of intentions can’t protect us from this risk. But we’ve undertaken this project because we felt that, in addition to our other, less explicitly compromised activities, it might be worth giving the old experiment one more try: to see if a commodity can be created that gives more than it takes away.

For this book to have even the smallest chance of succeeding in that tall order, you can’t approach it passively, you can’t expect it to do the work. You have to regard it as a tool, nothing more. This book will not save your life; that, my friend, is up to you.

OK, that said, HERE WE GO!!!

Social Ecology

Social Ecology, developed from green anarchism, is the idea that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in our social problems. This is because the domination of nature and our ecology by humanity has its ultimate roots in the domination humanity by humans. Therefore, the solutions to our ecological problems are found by addressing our social and ecological problems simultaneously.

Quotes

Poetry and imagination must be integrated with science and technology, for we have evolved beyond an innocence that can be nourished exclusively by myths and dreams.

People want to treat ‘we’ll figure it out by working to get there’ as some sort of rhetorical evasion instead of being a fundamental expression of trust in the power of conscious collective effort.

~Anonymous, but quoted by Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

~Murray Bookchin, “A Politics for the Twenty-First Century”

There can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal. A society based on self-administration must be achieved by means of self-administration.

In modern times humans have become a wolf not only to humans, but to all nature.

The ecological question is fundamentally solved as the system is repressed and a socialist social system develops. That does not mean you cannot do something for the environment right away. On the contrary, it is necessary to combine the fight for the environment with the struggle for a general social revolution…

~Abdullah Öcalan

Social ecology advances a message that calls not only for a society free of hierarchy and hierarchical sensibilities, but for an ethics that places humanity in the natural world as an agent for rendering evolution social and natural fully self-conscious.

~ Murray Bookchin