7.8 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publication date December 2007 ISBN 0-9709101-6-9 Originally published December 2007 Preceded by Recipes for Disaster Subject Anarchism | 3.9/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 346 pages OCLC 181600202 Publisher CrimethInc. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Genres Philosophy, Lifestyle, Self-help Similar Works by Frederik Pohl, Anarchism books, Philosophy books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Expect Resistance is a self-described crimethink field manual published by CrimethInc. in 2007.
Contents
Composition
The book is composed of three books within the book that can be read separately or together. The first of these is a theoretical text which follows the investigation into modern life and its discontents which began in the collective's 2000 text Days of War, Nights of Love; this section incorporates CrimethInc. material from 2000 to 2004, augmented and refined with a significant amount of new content. The second text is a novella composed of the accounts, narrated by three contributors, of the attempts of anarchist adventurers to pursue their dreams in the real world, while the third book is an intertextual merger of the first two texts.
Reception
The book was favourably received by Infoshop.org; one reviewer singled out the personal stories scattered throughout the work for particular praise, whilst another lauded the book as "a field manual for a field on which all manuals are useless, a meditation on individual transformation and collective resistance in disastrous times, and a masterpiece that raises the bar for radical publishing." Red Emma's infoshop also complimented the book's intertextual weaving of narrative and theory. Cultural critic Greil Marcus, the subject of scathing criticism from CrimethInc. in Days of War, Nights of Love, commented
At first glance, it appears to be a collage of memoirs and polemics, but don t be fooled: what they [are] really doing here is telling the creation myth backwards as the symmetrical conclusion to the history of the world. Escaping exile in an alien dystopia, human beings storm paradise and, upon reentering, tear off their clothes without shame. God s judgment is overturned, nonsense is unlearned, a woman presents an apple to a snake, symbolizing the release of nature from the yoke of human will. Genders cease to be rigidly defined, each person becoming a complete unity of masculine and feminine characteristics. Finally, in only seven days time, the entirety of the old world is unmade, and on the last evening the lights of all cities, no longer powered by vast unsustainable infrastructures, blink out one by one.