What is Crimethink?
Crimethink can be reached from the subway station only by means of a daring double somersault. It is only a multiple orgasm away from the checkout counter of the grocery store, and a mere lobbed brick distant from the witness bench of the courtroom, but it is much harder to access from the closed playpens of your homes, schools, workplaces, and punk rock clubs—only a mystical revelation or masterless revolution will suffice. Crimethink riots rather than diets, so as to love itself body and soul.
Crimethink cannot be captured by the cameras of the photojournalists. Crimethink dies on its feet before it lives on its knees, but it’s more likely to be found on the run in between. . . just like you, perhaps.
Crimethink is the burning bush in the desert of industrial society, which can still be found between the thighs of the most mercilessly free and beautiful. Crimethink is revenge for that fucking flag they put on the moon.
Crimethink doesn’t speak, it acts, and only speaks when speaking is acting. Crimethink stakes out its dominion where the body is the jagged edge of the world, stopping proudly short of the abyss of abstraction. Crimethink says to you: I put a spell on you, because you’re mine.
For the market manages the managers, hierarchy bosses the bosses, capitalism owns the owners, but a crimethinker is truly a human being, free and wild.
What is CrimethInc.?
One must be enough of a crimethinker to adopt a crimethoughtful stance towards one’s own crimethink. Crimethink is not CrimethInc.—it is, rather, the spirit of playful destruction that saves CrimethInc. from itself.
CrimethInc. throws up contradictions around itself like fences, to protect itself from ideology, from stiffening—yet still sends out a call to revolt that will be heard in every corner of the Occupied Territories by this year’s end.
Listen hard to silence, and you’ll hear thunder deep inside.
CrimethInc. is the hip gnosis of a new youth rebellion that goes beyond both youth and rebellion. CrimethInc. is a Non-Prophet Organization: it is full of love, but if it comes down to pledging allegiance, it will be nadaist rather than dadaist, or -ist at all, for that matter. CrimethInc. is beautiful: it’s ugly. . . in a world where every old pretty thing has been copyrighted by the greeting card companies, the calling card companies, and the credit card companies, it is a foray into the unknown, to seek new veins of joy before we all suffocate like yeast in our own excrement.
CrimethInc. is the cure for the cancers with which they propose to cure cancer. CrimethInc. sweeps through the streets with fire and banners, and steals through the classroom in xeroxes and whispers. CrimethInc. pilots the rudderless ships of the Movement movement, coded into the paths of those nomads who trade bondage for vagabondage; CrimethInc. smashes tourism and all other despicable formulas for running in place.
CrimethInc. is the Last Loosening: it is here by order of those out of order, so that nothing may ever be in order, or made to order, again. O ye rabble without a cause, CrimethInc. is the ticket out of here you’ve been waiting for—if you’re willing to cash it in yourself, that is. CrimethInc. is very much more what you do than what we do.
CrimethInc. is constantly in effect at lockdown faceoffs on city blocks, in banks that are being robbed, on airplanes passing over the Brazilian desert at sunrise. It maintains office hours in squats under riot squad siege occupied by boys and girls who have escaped the suburbs to fall in love. Take the last night train from La Plata to Buenos Aires, and if the doors are open so you can sit on the steps of the train listening to the young passengers beating out a samba rhythm on the seats and singing along behind you as the Argentinean night speeds past, you might realize there is a letter or a novel you need to write—and at that moment, you’ll enter an outpost.
CrimethInc. is present wherever anything or anyone is on fire. CrimethInc.’s field of operations extends as far as there is crimethought, and beyond, into some places where it is impending or unnecessary:
it speeds through Arctic waters in the wake of comets fallen and swallowed up by the cold, into mythical Russian cities ringed by vast rivers at the end of winter—the crack of thawing ice bellowing into the night, arriving at the magnetic poles where compasses spin, and moving on to the bottom of the ocean where the waterlogged corpses of whales lie.
In Conclusion:
Obviously, gentlemen, if you fear for the morality of your wives, the education of your children, the peace of mind of your investors, the submissiveness of your mistresses and housepets, the solidity of your armchairs and privatized prisons and factory farms, the manner in which your whorehouses are licensed and the security of the State. . . then you are right. But what can you do? You are rotten, and the fire has been lit.
But as for you would-be revolutionaries, radicals wedded to a license without limits, girls and boys who love without leave, we urge you:
More rigor in your recklessness!
More ambition in your hedonism!
When you’re young,
and it feels like you’re invincible,
it’s because you are.
From this moment forth,
no one shall ever die.
Crimethink is the first stirrings of a new world, smuggled across every border in the heads and hearts of a dissident nation of millions, thrown through plate glass windows on notes tied to bricks. It is everything that evades control—the stolen sick-day at the seashore, the shared meal free when the manager is away, the city street liberated for an hour during a demonstration. . . the proud look in her eyes when she walks into the principal’s office holding her girlfriend’s hand.
CrimethInc. is the underground railroad from this world to the next. Hop on.
