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CrimethInc. is a decentralized anarchist collective which emerged in mid-1990s North America from its beginnings as the hardcore punk/anarchist zine Inside Front. The collective's core function, according to journalist Matthew Power, is the creation and publication of propaganda, and theirs is widely read in the anarchist movement.
Contents
Among their best-known publications are the books Days of War, Nights of Love, Evasion, Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook and the pamphlet Fighting For Our Lives (of which, to date, they claim to have printed 600,000 copies), Inside Front and a decade of album releases by North American anarcho-punk artists. Several websites are maintained by individual cells of the collective, including Crimethinc.com, a clearing house for CrimethInc. activities operated by the Far East Cell which hosts excerpts from previously published works as well as a blog.
CrimethInc. is connected to publishing collectives/organizations with similar ideas, notably the Curious George Brigade which has produced a number of works, including Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs. In 2005, they began publishing a half-gloss journal, Rolling Thunder, with the byline "An Anarchist Journal of Dangerous Living", which released its fifth issue in 2008. CrimethInc. texts have received wide coverage in the anarchist media and in academic publications, and have been used as reading materials for university courses on anarchism.
Books
CrimethInc. has published three collectively authored books that collect and expand upon the individual essays produced by the group in a particular period; authors are generally uncredited or credited pseudonymously.
Letters series
The CrimethInc. Letters series of books are not intended as direct propaganda, but rather as letters to the reader detailing the story of the experiences of the authors.
Related
Video
In March 2001, two documentaries from Eugene, Oregon's Pickaxe Productions were published by a CrimethInc. cell: Pickaxe, an eyewitness account of environmental activism in the Pacific Northwest and Breaking the Spell, which documented anarchist activism at the Battle of Seattle in 1999.
At the end of 2005 (a year after the release of Recipes for Disaster), CrimethInc. announced the first volume in a Guerrilla Film Series, a DVD including three feature-length documentaries and a collection of short films. A few of CrimethInc.'s "thinktank" experiments had been documented on film by the "folk-scientists" themselves, and copies of these lived in relative obscurity until included in the series. CrimethInc. Guerilla Film Series, Volume One included Pickaxe, Breaking the Spell, The Miami Model, two subMedia shorts and three Thinktank documentaries.
Music
CrimethInc. is associated with the North American anarcho-punk scene because of its long relationship with notable musicians in the genre and its publishing of Inside Front, a "journal of hardcore punk and anarchist action". CrimethInc. releases include LPs, CDs, and 7"s from North American and European anarcho-punk, hardcore and anti-folk bands. Academic Stacy Thompson has situated CrimethInc. as "exemplary of a more contemporary and nuanced approach" to the possible forms anarcho-punk could take to resist commodification through aesthetic expression. However, Thompson does not consider the aesthetic choices of the collective to be substantially different from the anarcho- and crust punk bands released by fellow anarcho-punk collective Profane Existence in the mid-to-late 90s.