![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/14/1.jpg\")
Copies of the new issue of Inside Front on a literature table in Budapest. This is like sighting a coelacanth in the wild.
\nOver three decades ago, some of the first people to collaborate on CrimethInc. projects met via the international networks that had developed in the zine underground associated with the hardcore punk scene. One of the first projects they collaborated on was the hardcore zine Inside Front, the archives of which are available here.
\n\n\n\n\nIn those days, without the internet, how did people discover and pass on anarchist ideas and tactics?
\n\nBy embedding these values in rebellious subcultural milieus such as the punk scene—by reading dogeared books about the Yippies, the Situationists, and the Spanish Civil War—and by having adventures.
\n\nThese three elements—subculture, reading, and adventure—came together in the hardcore journal Inside Front.
\n
The last issue of Inside Front came out in 2003.
\n\nIn August 2025, as the hardcore band Catharsis was preparing to play their first shows debuting their album “Hope against Hope,” the team behind Inside Front suddenly came out of retirement and threw together a new issue of the magazine in a week flat.
\n\nAs a consequences of some wrongheaded notions about authenticity and immediatism, the issue never appeared online, though Catharsis distributed them from New York City to Budapest.
\n\nNever, at least, until now.
\n\nWe’ve added this new issue of Inside Front to our online archive, so you can print and distribute your own copies.
\n\nFrom the introduction:
\n\n\n\n\nWe hastily prepared this special limited edition of Inside Front in just a few days, scrambling to finish it in time for the record release shows for the Catharsis LP “Hope against Hope.” Although it has been well over two\ndecades since the previous issue, many people who contributed to previous issues of Inside Front sent new material for this one—not to mention at least one contributor who was not yet born when the first issues of Inside Front appeared.
\n
Copies of the new issue of Inside Front on a literature table in Budapest. This is like sighting a coelacanth in the wild.
\nFrom a review by Martin on the Counterforce site:
\n\n\n\n\nThe cover says “For anarcho-punks and hardcore anarchists” and I could just stop the review right there. This might be the epitome of “perfect zine” for me. The first non-meta content is “Like Weeds – A Dialogue about HIS HERO IS GONE’s Timeless Anthem” in which two thinkers trade increasingly deep and heady observations and anecdotes about the song and it’s context (even more impressive when you realize both parties are almost certainly completely sober).
\n\nThere’s also a relatable story about en EXTREME NOISE TERROR CD triggering scrutiny at the US border, a show review from someone’s first hardcore show ever, top-10 lists, a few reviews, ideas for a Stateless Fair, and a pair of parallel accounts from fighters in the Syrian civil war bonding over a Czechoslovakian hardcore song they all happened to know, and the struggle to finally download and listen to the song in the middle of a war zone.
\n\nIt feels like a special and unique zine, since it draws on energy built up over 20+ years since the last issue. I’m not sure if Inside Front will return in a more permanent way, but I hope this issue gets wider distribution than just the CATHARSIS tour so more of you can enjoy it.
\n
From the introduction to the zine:
\n\nIn the 1990s, in a time of social peace (at least in the United States), the hardcore scene was ahead of the times in that it was hyper-connected, internationally networked, and artistically experimental.
\n\nToday, the hardcore scene is increasingly conservative, artistically speaking (though we challenge you to prove us wrong!). It’s no longer any better networked than any other social milieu. But it is now old-fashioned in a potentially explosive way, because it involves physical collectivity, togetherness that unfolds on a slower time frame than the virtual reality of internet relations.
\n\nPeople have also become more aesthetically literate than they used to be. Whereas both a blast beat and a black bloc were completely foreign and incomprehensible to most people in 1999 (and both models derived both their strength and their limits from that fact), today, a much wider range of people can understand both of them. Yet as these reference points have become more widely shared, a crucial detail of the punk program has been lost: context is everything.
\n\nThe very same song can be meaningless in an expensive club and transformative in a squatted space of resistance. Banksy has demonstrated this in the field of the visual arts. Pussy Riot did the same when they performed “Punk Prayer” at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012. Real, living art has to break the frame.
\n\nAs the social peace that used to exist crashes and burns, countless people are grasping for new ways of connecting and fighting. Hardcore and punk still have something to offer people today-perhaps now more than ever.
\n\nThe story goes that a participant in the defense of Weelaunee Forest once said that, proportionate to their numbers, punks were the most impactful participants in that movement. Those from any other walk of life could learn about the situation without necessarily feeling impelled to take action—but punks could not learn about anything without immediately asking how they themselves could take action in relation to it.
\n\nDo it yourself: this is still the key.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/09/14/2.jpg\")
\nTwo and a half decades ago, some of the first people to collaborate on CrimethInc. projects met via the international networks that had developed in the zine underground associated with the hardcore punk scene. We’ve finally scanned the last five issues of one of these zines, Inside Front, to add to our archives. Bear in mind, these are relics from a very different time. We hope, in putting them at your disposal, to offer new generations of anarchists—and punks?—some context for what came before. We’ve also added the hardcore compilations that came with issues of Inside Front to our music page for free downloading.
\n\nOnce upon a time, in another century—
\n\nWhen only doctors and lawyers had cell phones, and long distance calls were so expensive that punks used hacked phone dialers to trick pay phones into letting them place calls free of charge;
\n\nWhen zinesters secured freedom of the press by scamming photocopies on a scale today’s social media users cannot imagine;
\n\nWhen traveler kids sneaked onto freight train cars to ride for free, watching mountains and oceans whizzing by as the earth rumbled past beneath them;
\n\nWhen the singer of every hardcore band spoke earnestly to introduce each song, if only to entreat audience members to cause each other serious injury;
\n\nWhen punk itself was not an ossified tradition, but a living challenge to corporate aesthetics, in a process of constant challenge and change;
\n\nWhen DIY bands traversed a network of squatted social centers from Trondheim to Santiago, and you could play a hundred shows in a row without ever performing in a venue that was legally owned or leased;
\n\nWhen dropouts lived on bread alone in order to dedicate themselves entirely to lives of daring adventure;
\n\nWhen MAXIMUM ULTRAISTS committed to risk-tolerant experimentation organized guerrilla noise shows in convenience stores and mashed pies into the faces of corporate entrepreneurs;
\n\nWhen young people inspired by punk music set out to reclaim the streets and destroy the World Trade Organization, and everyone understood that anarchists were among the foremost threats to capitalist globalization;
\n\nIn those days, without the internet, how did people discover and pass on anarchist ideas and tactics?
\n\nBy embedding these values in rebellious subcultural milieus such as the punk scene—by reading dogeared books about the Yippies, the Situationists, and the Spanish Civil War—and by having adventures.
\n\nThese three elements—subculture, reading, and adventure—came together in the hardcore journal Inside Front, one of the first projects to bring together people who still collaborate on CrimethInc. projects today. We invite you to explore its pages, as if holding a candle up to the dusty walls of the past.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-14/inside-front-14_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nYou can download the CD compilation that came with the final issue of Inside Front here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-13/inside-front-13_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nYou can download the CD compilation that came with Inside Front #13 here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-12/inside-front-12_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-11/inside-front-11_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nYou can download the CD compilation that came with Inside Front #11 here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/journals/inside-front-10/inside-front-10_front.jpg\")
Click the image above to access the PDF
\nThis is about so-called “non-monogamous relationships,” about some of the benefits of trying out one of the alternatives to the formulaic dating/marriage/divorce model for love. Your response to this article will probably be similar to the one I had a few years ago when I read a discussion of the same subject by David Sandstrom in the Swedish zine Handbook for Revolutionaries: “good idea, but, uh, not relevant to me, of course…” It turned out I was wrong. Had I remembered a lesson I’ve learned over and over, I would have realized that often the ideas that make me the most defensive and uncomfortable at first turn out to be the most important for me in the long run. Not to say that I’m offering a program that you must all immediate adjust yourselves to… but we can’t remind each other enough to be open to new ideas, in case they do prove to be helpful in our lives.
\n\nA couple years ago I had a wonderful experience on tour, in which I finally experienced what it felt like for men’s gender roles to be dissolved: over the course of the tour everyone in the band and the people touring with us were all able to open up and become emotionally supportive and loving, and suddenly the experience of being with a lot of other boys was totally fucking different from anything I’d encountered before. In this safe, encouraging environment, all of us really felt fearless, free, ready to try anything, with no more doubt or need for walls to protect us. On the surface, it was just that we weren’t afraid to touch and hold each other, and that we stopped complaining and being selfish; but the implications beneath this were immense: I realized that there was no need for intimacy and emotional support to be confined to my romantic relationships—I could create and benefit from these things in every relationship.
\n\nThis got me thinking about my romantic relationships… if there was no reason my friendships couldn’t be more like my love affairs, why couldn’t my love affairs be more like my friendships? When I thought about it, my friendships had a lot going for them that my love affairs never did: my friends were never jealous or possessive, my friendships didn’t tend to adhere to some strict socialized image of what they “should” be, and while my friendships generally continued on in one form or another through my life, once it turned out that a romantic relationship wasn’t storybook perfect it would end and I wouldn’t see the lover anymore.
\n\nAll my love relationships had proceeded something like this: in the beginning I would meet a beautiful new person, we would broaden each others’ horizons and have wonderful experiences together, and thus fall in love. At first we would feel more free together than either of us ever had, and the world would seem full to overflowing with possibility and wild joy. But slowly, not trusting the rest of the world, or the future in which we might not feel such wonderful things, we would build our relationship into a castle, to keep out the cold and dangerous outside world, and protect our passion by turning it into an institution. Sex, which at the beginning had been something that came more naturally and freely than anything else, became jealously guarded as the seal sanctifying our love relationship, as proof that it was different than all our other relationships. [This seems, in retrospect, like a really strange role for sex to play.] Inevitably, I would wake up one day and realize that the free, feral passion that we’d been united by was gone, replaced by habit, routine, fear of change; the castle we’d built had become a tomb, sealing us inside and away from the outside world, which we’d actually needed all along to bring us each new things to offer the other and sustain ourselves. Inside the coffin, we fought more and more, each demanding that the other prove her love by sacrificing more and more—when love is supposed to enable you to live more, not disable you in return for an assurance of basic companionship, a companionship that often replaces your participation in larger communities anyway. Falling in love had been like finding a secret entrance to the garden of Eden, a gift economy in which we shared everything without keeping score or worrying about “fair trade”; but now we were back in the exchange economy, competing to see who could need more, who could control more. After all my attempts to transcend the stereotyped roles of people in romantic relationships, I suddenly found that I was a “boyfriend” again, with a “girlfriend” (which is not a healthy role for anyone to have to play in this sexist society!), with no idea how it had all happened.
\n\nI started thinking about how it is that we all keep falling into these patterns, and how we could avoid them. The issue of limitation kept coming up: the idea that some things had to be off limits for the relationship to work. With my friends, nothing is off limits, and nothing is demanded either: we offer each other whatever we can, whenever we have it to give, and we don’t demand anything that doesn’t come naturally for the other (that’s how my friendships go when they’re healthy at least, and most of them are at this point). I decided to look into what other models for love relationships there were, and discovered that there is a long tradition of relationships without these limits and expectations: non-monogamous, or “open,” relationships.
\n\nI’m not trying to say that monogamous relationships are bad, exactly, but there are a thousand kinds of relationships, and we generally only permit ourselves to try one format, which seems ridiculous. Let’s explore a bit. Every time I hear about another wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend cheating and sneaking around, every time I hear someone speaking proudly about how (in the name of monogamy) he has managed to resist doing something he really wants to, every time I must listen to someone pathetically lamenting the feeling of being “trapped” in a relationship or unable to pursue her desires out of some kind of fear, every fucking time I have to witness someone leering voyeuristically (“it’s ok to look if you don’t touch”), it make me so furious about how we’ve trapped ourselves in this one-option relationship system, accepting these symptoms of suffocation as inevitable instead of experimenting with the other possibilities. More than anything else, our commitment to supporting monogamy as the only option (other than “casual sex,” I guess, which is boring as fuck and bad in other ways too) keeps us from being honest with each other. We’ve got to dare to address all these complexities of life and desire openly, even if it is painful.
\n\nWe punk rockers always act like we’re such radical people, but when it comes down to acting, in practice, to try out radically different ways of living that might be more in line with our ideas (or just plain challenging, for once, not safe—nothing is more dangerous than playing it safe!), it doesn’t occur to us to question our programmed habits. All too often our revolutionary ideas are just badges, a different ideology for us to vote for, not catalysts for transforming life. This is an issue that affects everyone, where anarchist values can be tried out in the real world, but thus far I’ve seen very little discussion of this subject in our community; if we’re going to question the way the world works, we should take that home to our own personal relationships, and perhaps try out alternatives there first before proposing solutions to the ills of the world. That is—if we really have solutions to the ills of our society, let’s put those into practice to solve the ills of our own relations. Healer, heal thyself.
\n\nThe most important thing here is to get over the idea that a person’s value is measured by whether she alone can be “enough” for another person. The world is infinite, and so are we—no amount of living, no number or depth of interactions with others should be “enough” for any of us, just as no amount of interactions with a person you love will ever be “enough.” (To set borders on what another person can do or feel, as a condition for them to be able to receive my love and affection, goes against everything I believe as an anarchist and a human being; I want to trust others to know what they need, and never limit them—and I certainly don’t think my life will be any richer from the limitations I place on others). We have to free each other to be and become ourselves. This isn’t just about other lovers or sex partners or friends, it’s also about other undertakings, needs, even the desire for space and solitude—it’s heartbreaking how much of our selves our lovers often ask us to sacrifice to be with them.
\n\nI want to be valued for what I am, for what I do naturally, not how well I conform to some pre-set list of needs that someone has. If someone else can fill some of those needs, I wouldn’t deny that to anyone, and I don’t want to be jealous when others have something different to offer; I just want the chance to offer what I have to give to those I love, and to remember that those things are priceless and not comparable to whatever unique gifts others may have. None of us should ever be saddled with the role of sole provider for someone’s needs (romantic or otherwise), anyway; our purpose on this earth is not to serve others, but to find ways to be ourselves in ways that also benefit others. By saying the rest of the world isn’t off limits to your partner, you free yourself of the job of being the whole world to your partner.
\n\nThe monogamy system means that people hesitate to share themselves with others in certain ways, lest they become romantically involved—for since you can only have one romantic partner at a time, you have to make sure that your one partner is a good investment (and here we are back in the capitalist market even in our love relationships). Women check men out for financial means. Men ponder whether a woman’s beauty is socially recognized enough to offer the prestige he hopes to get by having her at his side, and no one is able to experiment with partners who don’t meet enough of these criteria to be potential spouses. For that matter—just as in your friendships, there may be people in the world with whom you can spend some wonderfully romantic time once or twice a month, but with whom you don’t have enough in common to date steadily and then marry, etc (although you often see such mismatched couples, who would have been happy as more sporadic partners, making each other miserable in fifty-year marriages). Non-monogamous relationships make such things possible without paying any price of mutual unhappiness.
\n\nI’ve decided that I no longer want to have a hierarchy of value between my friendships and my love relationships: they’re both crucial, irreplaceable in my life, and fuck anyone who wants me to choose between any of them. Not only that, but I’ve stopped classifying things as “love” or “friendship” according to arbitrary superficial details—the feelings I share with certain friends are so intimate, so beautiful, that it’s ridiculous that I don’t call them lovers just because we don’t sleep together. It’s fucking absurd that sex should be the dividing line between our relationships, between which ones take precedence, between who we play with, live with, sleep with, who we take care of first, who we die with at last.
\n\nBy the same token, in open relationships, sex isn’t weighed down with so many implications and restrictions. Love and desire outside the lines of the monogamy model are demonized and attacked on every front in this society—in the lives of women, at least, and those men who don’t want to be monogamous but also despise the superficiality and sexist bullshit of the “player” scene are unlikely to find support in feminist circles, either. Sex should not be contained, and it should not be made symbolic of anything—it should simply be another way for people to be physically affectionate with each other, to give each other pleasure, to be intimate and emotionally expressive, taking equal responsibility for their involvement but without having to answer to some hypercritical mass, social expectation, or moral taboo.
\n\nAn open relationship is just that: it is a relationship is which people can be open with each other, and with themselves—in which nothing need be hidden or suppressed or off limits, in which the whole world can be ours to explore without fear of transgressing imaginary boundaries. When we demand total openness and honesty from each other in relationships that include limits and taboos, we’re setting ourselves up for betrayals and dishonesty: to say “be open!” without being receptive to all of the possible truths is fascist and preposterous. We have to be supportive of each other, in every aspect of our individual characters, if we want real honesty to be possible. Otherwise, we’re like Christians at confession with each other, demanding that we reveal all out of some moral imperative, with the whip of shame ready for any straying impulse. We have to learn to embrace and celebrate anything that feels good for each other. If it’s good for our lovers, it’s good for us—are we really so selfish that we can’t see this?
\n\nFor one example of how this could work, let’s go back to the story of our tour. On the tour, different individuals formed close bonds, and shared private worlds together like lovers do; but they also remembered that for the community to function, they couldn’t withdraw from their relationships with everyone else. And whenever two people needed a break from each other or wanted to expand their horizons a bit, they would spend more time with others, because there were always others around them who also had things to offer. Everyone was safe and cared for, and no one was left out, because we weren’t paired off in exclusive twos.
\n\nConversely, the scarcity economy of lovers which we have right now makes each person hurry to pick another and chain her to him, before he is left alone forever. The alternative, which this fear of solitude prevents us from seeing, seems more preferable: a world without borders, in which each of us would be part of a broader family of lovers and friends, with no distinction made between the two—and no set format for any relationship, so experimentation would be a constant feature of every one, and no relationship could ever get dull or overwhelming. To get to such a world, we just have to get used to not limiting each other, to not thinking of love as a limited commodity.
\n\nYes, I still feel jealous sometimes. I’ve had experiences before of being insanely jealous—not just of another man, but of other things my partners loved or experienced or were excited about. Being able to come to terms with these things has been very important in the development of my confidence and sense of self. It took me years to feel (not just understand) that if my lover loves other things or other people as well, it doesn’t mean I am less valuable. Besides, if (he or) she truly loves me, it’s not because I match up to some list of desired qualities that someone else can outmatch me at—she loves me for reasons that are unique to me, that no one else can compete with, so I have nothing to fear. Love isn’t a scarcity commodity—it increases, just like joy, the more it is permitted and shared and given away. I don’t feel like I have to hoard anyone all to myself now. I know that doesn’t work, or help to project love (or me, for that matter).
\n\nI consider my jealousy a worthy adversary, one that can teach me a lot about myself if I confront it rather than trying to protect myself from it by controlling others. I’ve had experiences in relationships before where lovers of mine have limited themselves in order to protect me from my jealousy, and it has been catastrophic for both of us, you can imagine. It’s just as important to me now that I help others to not be “afraid for me” as it is that I learn not to be afraid for myself.
\n\nOne of the things jealousy has taught me about is my attitude toward other men. It’s interesting for me to note that I’ve never felt threatened by women whom my partners were attracted to or involved with, but other men have always made me see red. In our society, men are conditioned not to trust each other, to hate each other, to try to “protect” women from other men (which often looks more like hoarding and protecting “property”), and this inclination makes sense when you look at how fucked up many men are when it comes to interacting with women. But for me to not trust any men to be something good for my partners (past the point of limited friendship) is outright paranoia and territorial bullshit. If I trust the judgment of my partner, I should trust her to know what and who is good for her, and to not let my each-against-all male conditioning interfere.
\n\n\n\n\n“It sounds good in theory, but the way people feel is more important than these abstractions…”
\n
Some people think that we come up with ideas and theories not as solutions to the real problems of our lives, but to show off what good ideas we can come up with. If it’s not clear by now that I’ve been thinking about this as an attempt to solve rather than exacerbate the problems in my love relationships, then I apologize for doing such a poor job writing this article. And hey—if you think open relationships can be tough on your emotions, just try long-term monogamy. They’re both hard sometimes.
\n\n\n\n\n“But human nature—“
\n
Fuck you. Enough said. Human nature is what we make it, and you know that too, whether or not you want to own up to it—you cowardly excuse-mongering bastards.
\n\n\n\n\n“I guess that’s fine if it’s what you want to try, but luckily I only want monogamy for myself! I’m all set!”
\n
That’s great for you, if it really is true—for the time being, at least. We’re always so thrilled when our desires happen to coincide with social rules; then it’s easy for us to feel proud of our desires, to think they’re beautiful, since they are universally accepted (indeed, everything around you is reinforcing the idea that what you are lucky enough to feel for the moment is perfection itself)… but you might not always be that “lucky,” you know. Should you (or someone else) ever feel a need that isn’t satisfied by the monogamy system, if you haven’t already made the effort to get others to understand and accept the idea that there are many different acceptable kind of relationships and desire, you’ll be back at ground zero, finding yourself misunderstood, hated, called slut and whore. Nobody should have to go through that, ever, so whatever you personally need, you have a stake in promoting non-monogamy as a viable option too. Otherwise, we’ll all live in fear of waking up one day feeling a desire that is unacceptable—and that fascist power of moralism over our lives is exactly what I thought we were trying to fight in punk rock.
\n\nThat’s why I consider myself non-monogamous right now, even though I’ve only had sexual relations with one person over the past five months: I do what I do not out of a commitment to monogamy, but rather a commitment to meeting my own needs and those of others, with no fucking regard for social norms—and to supporting others who do the same thing, whether or not they do it in the same way. Non-monogamy isn’t about sex, anyway—it’s a general approach to relationships with people, as I discussed above.
\n\n\n\n\n“Open relationships are bad for women—it’s just another way for men to be selfish and absent when women need them…”
\n
This is the kind of sexist remark I’d rather not have to deal with, but I’ve heard it before. It reminds me of the old myth that all [“good”] women want “responsible” monogamous relationships, and the ones who don’t must be confused [so it’s OK for us to doubt them or look down on them, just as misogynist pigs call them sluts]. First of all, women have been the ones who introduced me to most of these ideas. Besides the women I know personally, the very best book I’ve been able to find on this subject (The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt, on Greenery Press), which I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in this issue, is written by women [if you can’t find it, write me and I’ll lend you my copy]. Second of all, a lot of the men and women involved in pioneering different models for relationships over the past few decades have not been involved in heterosexual relationships, so in those cases this a totally unfounded criticism. Third—people who say this make it sound like they think men are only emotionally nurturing to women who are paying them off for it with sex… and denying them access to any other sex as a way to be sure the payoff will always work. God, I hope that’s not the best we can hope for in heterosexual relationships…
\n\nFinally—yes, it’s true that men have been conditioned to be selfish and somewhat less than nurturing in their relationships, and just shifting relationship models is not going to cure that. But that’s going to be a problem in whatever kinds of relationships they have, not just open ones, and has to be dealt with as a separate issue. A loving, caring boy is not gong to go running off for sex with some stranger when his lover (or one of his lovers) really needs him. There are so many landmines hidden in our sexuality, since so much of it has been programmed by our enemies; we men need to unlearn the pressures that make us seek out superficial sex as a way to avoid real intimacy and support. That brings me to the third objection:
\n\n\n\n\n“So does this mean you’re giving up on your romantic dreams, your hopes for living happily ever, just trading them for a series of sexual episodes with acquaintances?”
\n
No, not at all. I’m not interested in evading personal commitments and long term relationships—rather I want to protect them from being unnecessarily at risk. I want to secure my romantic relationships, so they won’t be at risk from trivial things like temporary boredom or attraction to others, by creating relationships that are sustainable through changes in my life and needs. That way I can hope to have my lovers as long as I have my friends, ‘til death do us part for real, and no old taboos (or jealousy, insecurity, etc) will interfere. Sure, this will be hard sometimes, just like everything is hard sometimes—but the rewards of making this work will be greater in every way, I think.
\n\nWhat I’m hoping to do here is free us from the unnecessary tragedies of our love affairs, the insecurities and possessiveness that deny us the commitment and pleasure we could have together. In order to be ready to remove those obstacles, we have to be ready to face the real tragedies head on, with great courage: we can’t demand that others protect us from our insecurities by limiting themselves, and we have to face the fact that there will be moments when we are alone. The price of not doing this is absurd—today, we suffer both the necessary and unnecessary tragedies in our relationships, because of the courage we lack. Is it too much to ask that we try something new?
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/veganism", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/veganism", "title": "Veganism.", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "2000-09-11T07:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [ "anarchism", "hardcore", "inside front", "veganism" ], "content_html": "What I find sorely lacking in most of the discussions of veganism I encounter is any sense of economic context. Usually, the question of animal oppression is approached only in terms of compassion and prejudice: animals are exploited and destroyed, vegan activists would have us believe, simply because we see them as subhuman and are willing to abuse them in order to satisfy our greed.
\n\nI suspect that the problem runs much deeper than mere cruelty and avarice. Under capitalism, it’s not just animals that are exploited — it’s everyone and everything from farmlands and forests to farmhands and grocery clerks. The oppression of animals is just a little more obvious to us because it involves the murder of living things; but it’s not just animals that have been enslaved and transformed by our society, it’s everything, ourselves included. Without an understanding of how and why our social/economic system drives us to seek to dominate and exploit everything, we will not be able to alter the way animals are treated in any significant or long-lasting way. Capitalism forces us to evaluate our environment and each other according to market value. Under the capitalist system, every man is encouraged to ask the question of how useful the animals and people around him might be as economic resources in his competition with others. Everything becomes fair game for exploitation—because if you don’t exploit something in the rush to gain the upper hand in the free market’s “exchange of goods and services,” someone else will exploit it, and quite possibly use it to exploit you. Those who have realized this are not afraid to exploit animals or humans, to treat them as objects, because they believe that the alternative is to be treated as objects and exploited by others themselves. In this way, capitalism divides us against each other and spurs on our destruction of the environment.
\n\nWhen I walk through the aisles at the supermarket, looking at all the products for sale around me, perhaps I can tell which ones are manufactured from the exploitation of animals, but I can’t tell which ones — if any — are manufactured without exploiting anyone or anything. That is one of the biggest drawbacks about our modern mass-production/distribution/consumption economy: by the time the product has reached you, it is virtually impossible to tell who made it, how it was made, what it was made from, or where it has been. Toilet paper, canned kidney beans, and athletic shoes all sit on the shelves next to each other, as if they appeared out of the air, and it would be a long hard struggle to track down any real, sound information about the origins of any of them. But there are some things I do know, though, even if I can’t research the life story of each individual packet of ramen noodles: there are migrant workers in this country who are underpaid and mistreated, there are corporations (like Pepsi) known for supporting totalitarian governments that mercilessly destroy human life, there are shoe manufacturers (like Nike) that underpay and mistreat foreign workers, there are companies (like Exxon) whose policies result in permanent damage to the environment. So the idea that you can be sure that your dollars are not financing anything inhumane or destructive just by examining the ingredients of a product and ascertaining that it includes no animal products strikes me as absurd. There are a thousand other kinds of oppression, just as outrageous as animal oppression, that keep the wheels of our economy turning, and there is no reason to be less concerned about any of them than about animal oppression.
\n\nIt seems to me that the long term solution to this problem is not just to buy vegan food and animal-friendly products. If we want to change the conditions that have resulted in the widespread destruction and exploitation that characterize our world, we must work towards a complete overhauling of our economy — we must somehow escape from the vicious cycle of capitalism. The only way to fight capitalism is to undermine its assumptions: that happiness is having things (“the one who dies with the most toys wins”), that there is no realistic way to work with each other rather than competing against each other, that any other economic system means some kind of slavery (like the former communist U.S.S.R.). If these assumptions are untrue, which isn’t hard to imagine, then it should be possible for us to create a different kind of economy and a different kind of world. If people start to conceive of happiness as the freedom to do things rather than have things, if they decide that they enjoy being generous more than being selfish, if they can imagine that it might be possible to create a society in which we work together for the good of everybody rather than against each other and the environment for (what advertisements claim is) our own good, then capitalism will ultimately fall.
\n\nIn the meantime, rather than practicing veganism, I practice “freeganism.” I know that as long as I participate in the mainstream economy, whether I am buying vegan or non-vegan products, I am supporting the corporations which represent world capitalism. So rather than just buying animal-friendly products, I try to purchase as few products as possible. I’ve written about this in earlier issues of Inside Front: it is possible, through thrifty living, creative “urban hunting and gathering,” and projects like Food Not Bombs, to survive without contributing more than a minimal amount of money or labor to the mainstream economy. Anything I can get for free at the expense of the exploiting, oppressing capitalist system is a strike against that system, while purchasing vegan food from Taco Bell (which is owned by Pepsi Co.) is still putting money into the hands of an oppressive, exploiting corporation. I live off of whatever resources I can scrounge or steal from our society, trying to avoid animal products when I can, but concentrating above all on keeping my money and labor out of of their hands. A willingness to pump money into the mainstream economy, which is responsible for the oppression of animals and humans and the destruction of the environment, through consumer spending (on fashionable athletic clothes, for example), is not compatible with the professed goal of most people who follow a vegan diet, which is to end the exploitation of animals. That’s why it strikes me as ridiculous that so many vegan activist bands like Earth Crisis are willing to perpetuate fashion consciousness in hardcore by selling so much merchandise — and by speaking only about human cruelty rather than criticizing consumerism in general, they ignore the real causes of animal oppression.
\n\nThere are some great things about veganism, by the way. First of all, if you can’t bear to put anything into your body that was actually made from the corpse of another living being, veganism is a way to avoid that (although it DOES NOT magically confer the “innocence” of animal exploitation that hardline morons claim for themselves, as my discussion of capitalism and other forms of oppression should make clear). Also, it gives you a different relationship to the food you eat than most of us have: it makes you consider where it came from and what’s in it, rather than just taking it for granted, and it also will probably make you a better cook! And finally, it brings up the issue for everybody. When you won’t eat food unless you know what is in it, it forces the people around you to think for themselves about what is in the food and how it got there. In that way, veganism does more to change the world than writing lengthy political responses to letters ever could: it brings up important questions in everyday life and forces people think about questions that they wouldn’t otherwise encounter.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/introduction-to-the-situationists", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/introduction-to-the-situationists", "title": "Introduction to the Situationists : ... the next badge of intellectual elitism.", "summary": "", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "1996-01-01T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "What’s bad about political/intellectual elitism? It alienates everyone else from politics and critical thinking, rendering them powerless more effectively than any oppressive government could ever do. The propaganda of network TV is not more responsible for the apathy of the mainstream Westerner than the average radical leftist is. Those for whom being “political” and “educated” has become an identity, who use these terms to define themselves as a certain type of person, thus make others think that politics and radical thinking are the hallmark of a certain group of people (a drab and haughty group, at that), no more, and marginalize themselves from the rest of the world which so badly needs some of their ideas—but not their scornful “specialism,” not their divisionary attitudes and identities.
\n\nOne of the Situationists’ chief goals was to fight this conception of the self according to roles played in present society (i.e. intellectual professor, indifferent bricklayer, student radical), so it’s ironic to see them used everywhere now by people who want to assert their status as members of the high political elite. Everywhere I turn now (Refused and other band lyrics and slogans, the AK Press catalog, and an even worse piece in Adbusters) I see the terms (which, since the academic language they used isn’t common, are already exclusive and exclusionary) thrown about—spectacle, detourn, derive, etc.—and the ideas misused and misrepresented by individuals who obviously have read little or none of the original texts but hope only to be impressive by citing the “latest” in hyper-radical/-intellectual French underground thinkers.
\n\nTo combat this sort of thing, which ghettoizes thinkers who had ideas relevant to everyone to the most “sophisticated” of armchair revolutionary coffee-table discussions and college historical studies (which are always about putting ideas in the museum/mausoleum, rather than bringing them to new life), a straightforward, accessible, user-friendly introduction is in order. In the punk community (my thinking is that each of us travels in a few different communities, in which they know something about the needs of the people around them and can thus figure out how to act in everyone’s best interest) that should take the form of an article, in a widely read ‘zine like Inside Front.
\n\nUnfortunately, and honesty is always the best policy on these things (though a part of me would love to set up a smokescreen and just plow through this article with no regard for content, quality, clarity or responsibility) I have to admit something to you, dearest readers of Inside Front: it’s five in the morning, I’ve slept two hours a night for two weeks, I just moved out of the last house I will stay in for at least twelve months, the article is due in three hours before we leave for a ten hour drive, and I’m too fucking exhausted to write the lengthy, detailed introduction you deserve. The more I think about it, the more I realize it could be a fucking book and still not be complete, anyway. But you’re all smart kids, so our “Introduction to the Situationists” need not be more than a suggestion that you track down the original texts yourself. It would be much better for you to do the reading yourself and pursue the stuff that interests you, anyway, than to just soak up a watered-down version here.
\n\nStill, let me offer a tiny bit of background. The Situationist Internationale started as a group of artists in the late 1950’s, from a number of different nations, publishing together a magazine critiquing modern society in its various economic/social/political aspects, and meeting periodically to discuss and further refine their theory. They wanted to bring Marxism up to date, to construct a theory of what was going on in society that was preventing people from being able to live fully and act freely. The result was a critique that centered around everyday life, what happens to people and what they do on a daily basis, rather than abstract economic forces etc. The idea of the “Spectacle,” the empty roles and values and passive rituals that modern life perpetuates (and vice versa), was at the heart of this. The Situationists were characterized by a healthy opposition to ideologies, too, and denied that there was such a thing as “Situationism,” doing their best to fight off the stultifying, paralyzing effects of dogma and party line.
\n\nEarly on, there was also a lot of interest in such topics as geography: how could cities be designed so they would bring the most pleasure to their inhabitants, rather than just being created randomly by “market forces” that people think of as beyond their control (when actually it is their actions that create these forces)? To pursue such questions, Situationists would go on extended “derives”: wanderings through environments designed to explore their psychological conditions. Another commonly-referred-to Situationist idea from that era is detourning: to detourn is to take an old art work, form, or formula that has a prescribed meaning in society, and, by adding some new element to it, bring out its “true” meaning: an example would be re-titling a “Dilbert” cartoon “Despair.” (You can probably imagine how that works.)
\n\nEventually there was a falling out between the artists and the more purely radical members, who saw no hope of real art being made until after a full scale social revolution—or at least in the act of that revolution itself. Anything less was treading water, in their eyes, keeping the farce of capitalist, alienating, uncreative life afloat for one more miserable day. The artistic faction left, and the remaining group became more and more involved in perfecting their critique. In the late ‘60’s, a student group influenced by their ideas pulled some clever stunts at their university, which eventually escalated into the events of May 1968, in which the French government was quite nearly overthrown: workers joined students in a full-scale, national strike, fighting police and riot squads in the streets, refusing to recognize any authorities, asking questions in every corner of society that were usually quarantined to the radical sector… non-stop discussions were held about how a new, truly democratic society could be formed, and for a month the fate of humanity seemed up in the air.
\n\nFinally, the labor unions sold the struggle out by negotiating merely higher wages, and everyone went back to work as if nothing had happened; but that month stands as evidence of how much dissatisfaction there is in the modern world, and how it can rise to the surface under the right conditions. They don’t teach us about May 1968 in U.S. schools because they don’t want us to know that such things are possible. Most of the ideas in Inside Front are Situationist-influenced: the emphasis on how you spend your real-life time (rather than what abstractions you pledge allegiance to), how time and space are formed and controlled by the ways our present system forces us to interact, what the effects of other systems of interaction might be, all that goes back to them (and beyond, of course). The Situationists saw themselves the same way the CrimethInc. ‘workers’ see ourselves, as full-time (neither part-time nor professional) revolutionaries, with an immediate stake in things changing and no interest in getting too comfortable in the role of dissenting outsiders. Many of the slogans you see so many bands and ‘zines use (even this one) were Situationist slogans. Their influence is everywhere in our underground. That by itself is not so significant, but the fact that in their analyses of the same things we’re thinking about in hardcore punk today (consumerism, socialized roles, issues of economic exploitation and oppression, etc.) they went so much farther than most of us have yet is important. If you’re interested in ideas you read in magazines like Inside Front, one of the next places you could go to get more ideas and inspirations is the Situationists and their texts. Don’t be too intimidated by the cliquish more-anarchist-than-thou guy at your local bookshop who claims to know Society of the Spectacle backwards in Greek; they might really have something practical to offer you for your life.
\n\nSociety of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (Black and Red, Detroit) — This starts out terrifying (insofar as it’s so abstract and theoretical that it seems to be talking about nothing, as well as being absurdly academic and dry as toast), but gets a little clearer as you proceed. If you’re going to try to learn about this stuff at all, you should eventually give it a shot, since this is one of the most central and important books to come from the Situationists; but go slowly, and with patience…
\n\nThe Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem (Rebel Press/Left Bank Books) — This book is equally academic and frustrating in places, but in place of Society’s blankfaced inhuman approach it is filled with the sort of passion for life and experience that Refused brought to the fore in their politics. That makes it a lot more likable, and perhaps more dangerous in the hands of young, romantic punk kids, since the insight is no less here than in Debord’s book—in my opinion, at least.
\n\nWhat is Situationism? A Reader edited by Stewart Home (AK Press) — This is the sort of second-hand rehash that everyone is reading. The title is a slap in the face to those of us who thought the anti-ideology aspect of the Situationist “platform” was among their most revolutionary ideas. There are some great insights and leads to follow in here, but there’s some shit as well… and even a little tiny bit of radical infighting, egotism, and careerism too, inevitably. Look past it and you’ll find, in small doses, some of the clearer summaries of and reflections on Situationist ideas and influences that you can get anywhere.
\n\nGuy Debord-Revolutionary by Len Bracken (Feral House) — This is by far my favorite critical/historical work on the Situationists. It covers a lot of the theory, with enough clarity and simplicity that it’s accessible (thank god), while also telling the life history of one of the people at the center of the whole thing. That combination of abstract ideas with factual events that played out in reality makes the stuff in here seem humanly relevant as well as theoretically right on. Yeah, this is a good book!
\n\nEnrages and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ‘68 by RenŽ Vienet (Rebel Press) — This is a blow by blow historical account, written by an insider from the radical core of the struggle, of what happened before and during the events of May 1968 in Paris and France in general. If you’re interested in seeing how the ideas we’re talking about here played out in practice, this is what you want to read… plus, it’s filled with photos of graffiti, great slogans like “Live without dead time!” that have been ripped off a thousand times in the past decade.
\n\nThere’s an anthology of articles from the Situationist Internationale journal and similar writings, translated by Ken Knabb (Bureau of Public Secrets), that has real value if you want to read these guys in their own words, too. To learn more about the artistic aspect of what they were doing, especially early on (and I think this is the most overlooked aspect of the Situationists, and wrongly so), you might be able to go to a university art library and look for catalogs from retrospective exhibitions, etc. If you’re interested in this stuff and want to go into any more depth, but can’t find the resources, just write us and we’ll photocopy or steal you more stuff.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/how-i-spent-my-permanent-vacation", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/how-i-spent-my-permanent-vacation", "title": "How I Spent My Permanent Vacation", "summary": "I'm proud to say that it's been over three years now since I worked at any job for someone else. Here's why—and how.", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "1996-01-01T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "More than what I eat, whether or not I use drugs, and what bands I go to see, the bottom line for me as a member of the hardcore community and the counterculture in general is this: stay unemployed. Do whatever it takes, but keep my time and my labor to myself. I’m proud to say that it’s been over three years now since I worked at any job for someone else. Here’s why—and how.
\n\nFirst of all, and most importantly, there just isn’t any other feeling that can compare with the sensation of complete freedom and self-determination. I wake up in the morning, when I want to, and make plans to do things that day—to do what I want to. Nobody can buy a beautiful sunny day away from me at seven dollars an hour. If I suddenly have a new inspiration or idea, I can pursue it spontaneously without having to worry about how it will reflect on my future employment. I’m free to suddenly go on tour with my favorite band, to accidentally run into an old friend and spend the day catching up on lost time, or to stay home all day and write the first chapter of a novel if I am moved to. So my life contains a great deal more diversity and spontaneous opportunity than it would otherwise. And because I don’t have to do the same thing over and over every day, all day (for example, sell real estate, wait tables, or program computers), I can do enough different things to keep everything fresh and exciting.
\n\nAnd of course I do things! I don’t just hang out or sit around—I have all the energy that would otherwise be drained from me at work free to use on all the projects I care about. I can go to the library here (it’s only $10, for anyone, for a yearly membership at the university library here—that even includes their video and CD libraries) and read or watch old movies, I can exercise, I can play music, write, do all sorts of creative, self-improving, productive things. If I had been working the past three years, it would have been impossible for me to have made Inside Front what it is—I wouldn’t have had the time or energy to research and write it, to organize and publish it, or to distribute it the way I have. The same goes for Catharsis, the band I play in; the music we have made and the experiences we have had traveling and performing mean more to me than any amount of money ever could, and Catharsis has taken up a lot of time that I wouldn’t have had if I worked. The same goes for my involvement in CrimethInc.—because I don’t sell my time to some office or business establishment, I have time of my own to dedicate to helping bands that I love get their music packaged the way it should be and available to others. The same goes for my involvement in other projects—writing for other magazines and pamphlets, fliering, and being active in my community in other ways. If I worked, even if it was at a job I liked (at a cafe with a relaxed atmosphere, etc.), I might not be unhappy, but my life certainly would not be as fulfilling as it has been with all of these activities in it in place of traditional employment.
\n\nBetter yet, I get to work on these things that I care about however I see fit. I’m not following instructions, attempting to impress anyone who will be evaluating me for a promotion, or working within the confines of any restrictions on my efforts. I have completely free reign for my creativity. I can decide for myself how and when I will be most productive, rather than having to show up at work at 9 am every day whether that is good for my concentration or not. Thus I can make myself more effective and efficient than any boss ever could.
\n\nFinally, and most importantly, I’m voting both with my dollars and my time and energy against the existing system. I don’t approve of the way most of my friends are treated in their places of employment; they usually have to deal with overbearing or incompetent managers, their tasks are often boring and repetitive, and they are typically not even given enough money to be able to take care of all their needs (many of which needs—nice clothes, transportation, etc.—are created by their jobs). I don’t approve of the way many corporations conduct business (i.e. mistreating and slaughtering animals, destroying the environment, exploiting their workers, supporting governments that oppress and exploit their citizens, making products that are harmful to humans and the environment, etc.) and I also don’t approve of the way our economy functions (with so many companies being interconnected and owned by multinational corporations) to force us to practically support the entire system whenever we support any particular company. When I don’t work for them, they don’t get to use my labor to perpetuate the status quo. When I don’t receive an income from them, I don’t have capital to give back to them for them to use to perpetuate the status quo. And most of all, my time and energy are mine to be used to fight against them, rather than to support present conditions. For example—how many of you know vegans who work at places that serve meat and dairy products, or other people in similar situations? We have to get away from that sort of thing.
\n\nReally, everybody already knows everything I’ve just described. Most people, if they had the choice, would love to leave their jobs or at least get new ones. Well-publicized, reputable poles have estimated the proportion of Americans unhappy with their jobs to be as high as 90%. That’s shocking, considering that our work is usually the most central and important thing in our lives. But people don’t feel that they have any alternatives. The companies they work for will only let them have the goods and services they need to survive if they earn the money to pay for them.
\n\nMy solution to that problem is to see which goods and services I can do without, and to look elsewhere for the others. I don’t buy Pepsi to drink with every meal—that stuff isn’t too good for you anyway, and Pepsi Co. is involved in some really bad shit. I don’t spend a lot of money in bars or nightclubs; there are plenty of free activities I can do with my friends that are just as exciting. I don’t buy fashionable or expensive clothing. I don’t spend money on expensive amenities that are supposed to “save time”—because the truth is, they don’t. Otherwise, where the fuck is all the time we should have saved up by now with our fast food, our microwave ovens, our automobiles, our fax machines, our computers? We’re busier than ever today, overloaded with so many different demands on our time from these different “time-saving” devices and the jobs we work at to buy them.
\n\nSo where do I get food, shelter, and other necessities? Food—I almost never pay for it. Here, even in North Carolina, which is not too diverse socially or culturally, we have this thing called Food Not Bombs. F.N.B. is basically a group of people who go to all the restaurants, grocery stores, etc. and collect the food they are going to throw away at the end of each day—because it’s no secret that a LOT of perfectly good food goes to waste in those places. F.N.B. then serves this food downtown so that everyone who is hungry can have food to eat. I eat there twice a week, and each time they have a fair bit of food (bread, vegetables, canned food, etc.) left over that I can take home with me. Even if your town has nothing like Food Not Bombs, you can put the ideas into practice easily enough—before F.N.B. started here, I used to go to my friend’s burrito shop and collect the beans, chips, and rice they would have thrown away at closing time. The Hare Krishnas serve free dinners here too, once a week, and I have no scruples about eating their food—who knows what they would do with those resources if they weren’t spending them on keeping me fed? You can probably find similar opportunities that are unique to your area if you look. The consumer economy thrives on excess, so why not take advantage of it? Obviously this system wouldn’t work if everybody in the world tried to do it, but that’s not going to happen for a long time, if it ever does… so in the meantime we should get by however we can as individuals. We’ll worry about arranging a completely work-free world when that actually looks like it might be in range.
\n\nFar too many useful things besides food are thrown away in our conspicuously consuming society, for that matter. You can get nice furniture that college students leave by the dumpsters at the end of the school year when they move out of their apartments. I have friends who have found everything from working clocks, stereos, and vacuum cleaners to new athletic shoes in dumpsters. And if you find the right thrift shop (not “vintage clothing” shop) you can dress yourself pretty well for less pocket change than you can scrape out of a public fountain in one night.
\n\nShelter is the second most serious challenge to a person who wants to avoid working (health care is the most serious, and I don’t have any easy answers for that one yet). In Europe and, to a lesser extent, New York, squatting is a possibility. People often complain to me that squats are too dirty and dangerous for them, but I think if the people who do not choose to live under dirty and dangerous conditions normally were to organize squats of their own, that (obviously) their squats would not be too dirty or dangerous. Think how much fucking money you could save if you didn’t pay rent! Even if squatting is not an option (since it is sort of discouraged by the authorities), it’s possible to arrange cheap places to live. Plenty of people I know pay only a little over a hundred dollars a month to share an old house with a bunch of friends. I’ve known people who have been paid to stay at someone’s house and take care of it while they were gone; I’ve known people who have worked on the house where they lived (painted it, etc.) in exchange for paying little or no rent; the list goes on. The possibilities are endless and ever changing, so I can only give examples here—you have to find concrete opportunities for yourself.
\n\nAs for things that have to do with the hardcore scene—often if you’re active, doing something that is useful to people (because I’m trying to encourage that here by speaking out against work, NOT discourage it!) you can barter it for the records, ‘zines., etc. that you’re interested in. If you write reviews, you can get all that stuff for free; you could trade a traveling band food or a place to sleep in return for their record; you could trade some rare records for a tattoo or vice versa; trade a copy of your friend’s ‘zine for another one that interests you; volunteer to help organize and clean up after a show in return for free admission.
\n\nAnother way to make ends meet when you’re unemployed is—brace yourself—stealing from corporations. This can range from the very petty to the other side of the spectrum. You can get a variety of materials you may need from some simple, low risk urban hunting and gathering. Toilet paper is, obviously, everywhere; so are cleaning products, matches, salt and pepper, coathangers, cardboard boxes, light bulbs, batteries (you can get them out of smoke detectors, for example, if you don’t think it will endanger anyone), staples and staplers, pens, soap—just keep your eyes open. Copy shops often have tape, folders, markers, paper, and a million other typical “office” needs (it’s a well-known fact that Kinko’s has financed punk rock in the U.S.A. almost single-handedly). For that matter, stealing from the workplace is a time-honored American tradition, since so many people are so frustrated there; if you make friends with people who do work at these companies, chances are they will be happy to share a little of their companies’ resources with you. Example? Since Inside Front #4, three years ago, I haven’t paid for a single xerox copy; that includes thousands of copies of each issue from 4 through 7, thousands of pamphlets, and literally tens of thousands of fliers.
\n\nDo I feel bad about this? No. Corporations are distinct from traditional businesses in that they exist as separate financial entities from their owners. When you steal from a large corporation, you’re stealing from a business entity that exists to perpetuate itself rather than from a private individual. Sure, private individuals profit from these corporations, and some of them are not really all that bad; others, though, like Pepsi or Marlboro, are up to some really bad things, and the less resources they have to pursue those goals the better. Most of the workers at these corporations receive a set salary, and will not suffer too much if you steal from the corporation. These corporations, in fact, usually figure some loss from theft, etc. into their budgets—they know that’s the price they must pay for doing business in an environment where their workers feel little loyalty to their employers or fulfillment in their work, and many people in society are hungry, fed up with their jobs, and fed up with being “honest” and waiting fruitlessly for change. If you actually did steal more from a company than they were prepared for, the people who will probably lose money are the stockholders—and the majority of stock is not held by working class men and women who are counting on it to be able to take care of their families. And if so much theft somehow occurred that these huge corporations like Kmart and McDonalds had to close, I would shed no tears about it! These companies and the multinationals that own them would disappear, never again to wreak wholesale destruction upon the earth’s environment, never again to sell the same unhealthy, nasty-tasting hamburgers in every town from Los Angeles to Moscow through sheer force of advertising dollars. Perhaps they would be replaced by individuals who could be held accountable for their behavior by their communities; individuals who would care about their communities and act accordingly, rather than having to obey the impersonal and disinterested orders of a faceless profit machine. Individuals like my friend who owns the Burrito shop, who would give me food when he knew I couldn’t afford it—because he knew I would do the same for him.
\n\nAnyway… Certainly, I’ll admit it does take some time and energy to avoid working; you have to spend a fair bit of each figuring out how to survive without a steady income (at least you can do this on your own time, when and how you want to). Not to mention that you will have to go without some comforts and conveniences you may have been used to; but is that stuff really more important to you than anything else? Of course, more than anything else, it helps to have the support and camaraderie of your friends in an undertaking like staying unemployed, and that’s where our hardcore community comes into this.
\n\nBeing a one-person economy is extremely difficult. Even if you don’t work, you will still have no free time if you have to arrange all your food, all your shelter, all of your needs for yourself from scratch. But with others to work with, it becomes a lot easier. Food Not Bombs, the organization that I mentioned earlier, works so easily and smoothly because it is a group effort. Because a number of people help with obtaining the food, cooking, serving, and cleaning, it isn’t that much work for any one individual, and the whole thing seems more like a friendly social event than a demanding task. The same goes for all the other ways of obtaining resources to stay unemployed—not only are they easier in groups, but you will feel less alienated from the world if you do them with others.
\n\nImagine if the hardcore scene wasn’t just a bunch of kids wearing funny clothes, practicing their dance moves and camera angles at punk shows once every couple weeks. Imagine if everyone in the hardcore community, at least those who could (because of course not everyone can), quit their jobs and used all the potential energy we have as idealistic young people to try to develop a new way of life. We could use the networks we have already set up for touring bands, distribution, etc. to support each other in our attempt to break away from the employment system. Imagine how much creative energy would be unleashed, if we all stopped exhausting ourselves for “the man” and put that energy back into our own lives! Surely, all together we would be able to make something like that work. And then we would no longer be just another subculture with our own characteristic “rebellious music” and “fashionable clothing.” We would be a fucking counterculture, a force that would work effectively against the status quo we all claim to reject—for the contents of our daily lives would, by themselves, do more to change the way the world works than our words ever could.
\n\nDoes this sound difficult? It probably will be! But whether it is impossible or not can only be determined by trying it. And besides, what do we have to lose? Are our diet sodas and home entertainment systems really worth the lives we must sell away to buy them?
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/selling-ourselves-out", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/selling-ourselves-out", "title": "Selling Ourselves Out : (Why just \"selling things\" is inherently counter-revolutionary)", "summary": "", "image": "", "banner_image": "", "date_published": "1996-01-01T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [ "anarchism", "hardcore", "inside front" ], "content_html": "Look at the hardcore community, from a distance—what do you see? The most visible signs of our existence, besides bands playing in basements and rented out halls, are the ‘zines and records we sell. And open up almost any one of those ‘zines, and you see advertisements for other ‘zines, other records, other products. In fact, aside from the advertisements, what are most of our ‘zines about? The record reviews, the ‘zine reviews, the top ten lists all deal with products to buy and sell. The photos of hardcore bands hopping around and shouting invariably feature kids dressed in certain styles (band shirts, tattoos, etc.), as if to indicate that these fashions, which are not too cheap, are an intrinsic part of being involved in hardcore.
\n\nAnd when you get more deeply involved in hardcore, you find that you really do spend quite a bit of time buying and selling products. You start going to more shows and buying the records and ‘zines you hear about. You buy some band shirts and maybe purchase some clothes, piercings, or tattoos that are similar to the ones your friends in the hardcore community have. You start a ‘zine of your own, and have to worry about how to buy the copies to make it, and—how to sell it. You start a band, and worry about making demos and selling them, about buying equipment and being paid to play shows; you start a distribution, and worry about how to sell all the things you order; you start a record label, and you worry about selling records, buying advertising, selling more records, more and more buying and selling. That seems to be one of the main themes of hardcore today, if not the main theme: economics. One of the main things that identifies a kid who is getting involved in hardcore is the records and ‘zines he buys; and the people who are more deeply involved usually spend even more time thinking about economics—worrying about money, about promoting their products, about sales and profits, since most of the projects we undertake in hardcore right now seem to be business enterprises. That’s the problem: most of the projects we undertake in the hardcore community right now seem to be business enterprises.
\n\nOf course we have to sell things to be able to make them and share them with each other at all, living as we do in a capitalist system where it’s difficult get anything for free. But if this is the case, we still should be more aware of the effects of the ways we conduct business, and also strive for alternatives so that we will not be limited to only one form of interaction. And if we truly are interested in transforming our lives in fundamental ways, rather than just going through the motions of being another youth subculture, buying and selling products should play a much smaller role in our community than it does. It should be extremely clear from looking at the corporate exploitation of the hippy subculture, the (pop) punk subculture, and a thousand other youth subcultures that any community/subculture that focuses primarily on products and image is vulnerable to being taken over by corporate interests. We can’t beat “the Man” by playing his own game. Besides, there are so many other kinds of interaction that are worth trying, that might be better for all of us.
\n\nFirst of all, and most importantly, we must remember that by itself selling things does not accomplish anything. Just because more kids bought hardcore records this year than ever before does not mean that the ideas on those hardcore records are going to affect more people in genuine ways. In fact, some methods of promotion and distribution that work to increase sales also work to distract attention (both the record label’s attention and the buyers’ attention) from the ideas that are addressed on the record, as we’ll discuss below.
\n\nBuying and selling goods and services is the foundation of our economy here in the U.S.A. and Europe, and consequently, it often seems to be the central focus of our lives. We spend half of our waking hours and most of our energy at our careers, and almost all the careers available have to do with selling things or services, or promoting those sales, etc. And where has that gotten us? The companies that sell the most useless products, like Coca Cola, achieve the biggest sales, because they can afford to spend the most money on advertising and promoting their pointless product. A number of large corporations are destroying the environment (McDonalds, Exxon, etc.) and animals (the meat and dairy industry), financing oppression of human beings (Pepsi, etc.), promoting products that destroy people (the tobacco industry, etc.), and mistreating or underpaying their workers (Nike and almost every other corporation I can think of)—all in the name of profit, because profit is the most important goal in this kind of economy. The corporations that will not sell things as ruthlessly as the others, that will not stomp over anything in their path to increase sales, die out, while the corporations that act with the least concern for the world in their quest for sales come to dominate the economy (and thus the world) when “selling things” is the main focus. The products that cater to the lowest common denominator (bad television shows, silly movies, etc.) achieve the widest sales in this system, and come to dominate our lives. Because our society treats “selling things” as an end rather than a means, we live in a world that is fucked up in a thousand different ways.
\n\nDo we really want to mirror mainstream society in our own community by concentrating on that same kind of economic interaction? It seems possible that that system might have the same effects in hardcore that it does in mainstream society, if we’re not careful. That is to say—the labels and other hardcore businesses that have the least scruples, that care the least about the value of their products and the effects of the ways they sell their products, might come to have the most power and influence in a scene where selling things is the main focus… because though other labels might care more about the way they go about business, they won’t be able to compete with the marketing and business savvy of their ruthless, heartless competitors. And then, though some kids who have come to be concerned about issues like consumerism would choose to support the more independent/not-profit-motivated labels, the labels that were the most visible to the most people would be the ones who concentrated the most on pure sales alone and thought little about anything else.
\n\nIn fact, if you look at hardcore right now, it’s not hard to see that very thing happening.
\n\nWhen you sell things, it’s necessary to let people know that that they are available from you, and so advertising has become a fundamental part of the way we do business today, both inside and outside of the hardcore community. This affects us in a couple of ways. First of all, “lowest common denominator” advertising, which de-emphasizes the important qualities of the product (assuming that it has important qualities to begin with) and can lead people to purchase things which are useless to them, usually is more effective than truly informative advertising; you can imagine what kinds of products and business practices this encourages. Second, in a more subtle way, advertising in the hardcore community can actually contribute to the feeling that just buying and selling things is accomplishing something.
\n\nI. Most of the big corporations that use advertising to sell their products don’t give a fuck about their consumers. Sales and profit are their chief motivations, so they will advertise their products in any way that will sell them, whether it is in the best interest of the buyers to buy them or not. Advertising of this kind boils down to low-level mind control: companies pay advertising agents (psychologists!) to figure out which images and rhetoric will sell a product most effectively. That’s why car commercials have beautiful (so-called beautiful) women in them; that’s why toothpaste commercials have meaningless statistics in them; that’s why advertisements for soda and jeans are filled with things that have nothing at all to do with soda or jeans. These images, which have fucking nothing to do with whether the product will be useful to an individual viewing the advertisement, nevertheless make it more likely that the individual will buy the product. If you give a fuck about people at all, you can see how this kind of advertising is—dare I use this term?—unethical.
\n\nAnd unfortunately, these ads really are the ones that sell products the most effectively—even in the hardcore scene, it seems. Look in any hardcore magazine, and you see advertisements that have nothing to do with the products they are selling. Instead of using the space to tell you about the records that are for sale, what the music sounds like and what the themes are, these advertisements feature some catchy slogan and/or funny picture encouraging consumerism. A good example is a recent Trustkill advertisement featuring a little girl kissing a little boy and saying “My boyfriend bought me all the new releases on Trustkill!” That doesn’t really tell you much about the records, but it uses silliness to stick in your head and maybe encourage you to buy Trustkill records—I guess the idea is that if you buy Trustkill records, you will instantly win the heart of the girl next door… just like the idea implicit in the car commercials featuring beautiful women is that buying a car will make you attract women (the image suggests that a pretty woman “comes with the car”). I hate to pick on a friend, but another good example is the latest Edison advertisement, which proclaims “the Grace of Brutality” across a photograph of crying Vietnamese children who have just had their clothes burned off by American napalm—that’s fucking tasteless, using images of real human suffering inflicted by the last generation of American men just to sell the music made by their sons. It would make sense if any of the records being advertised actually addressed the issue of the Vietnam war, but they don’t; instead they’re just described as having “evil metallic riffing,” etc.
\n\nThis is not to say that anyone is completely innocent of using image at the expense of content in advertisements. Right now, you have to, to get anyone’s attention. But if kids would pay more attention to what an advertisement says, rather than how cute or fancy it is, and advertisers would make an effort to print ad’s that would honestly inform people about the records without just trying to sell them at any cost, we could get away from some of the more negative qualities of advertising. There’s just something stomach-turning about opening a hardcore magazine that is supposed to talk about changing the world, doing something positive with our lives, etc. and seeing nothing but record companies shouting “BUY OUR STUFF!!” at the top of their lungs. If you give a fuck about us, use your ad to tell us why we might want to buy it, rather than just trying to manipulate us.
\n\nThe way these corporate-style psychological advertisements work is by selling images. For example: a soap commercial features an attractive mother cleaning her sweet, well-behaved children’s clothes, while her handsome husband relaxes in the background. This ad isn’t so much selling soap as it is selling the image of the “perfect American family”—that’s why the soap itself isn’t discussed at all. The silent suggestion is that if you buy the soap, it will bring with it the status of having a perfect family and a perfect household. This sounds sort of far-fetched, but it really works; otherwise the thousands and thousands of advertising agents across the U.S. and Europe would not use this technique over and over to get people to buy their products. Of course the truth is that when you buy the soap, you just get soap—a perfect family life is not included with it after all. But the suggestion still works to keep you buying it.
\n\nA similar effect can take place in hardcore advertisements that, like the ones CrimethInc. sometimes makes, tout how “revolutionary” the products being sold are. These advertisements can sometimes work the way the soap advertisement I just described works: they can create the impression that by buying the record or ‘zine, the revolution will come with it, when that is simply not the case. Worse than that, when they are used to advertise records revolutionary thinking and slogans become just another marketing tool to encourage kids to buy things rather than to actually cause change. “Smash the State,” which used to mean “vigorously strive to overthrow the government and the oppressive power structures built into our modern society,” now comes to mean “buy the new record by Chokehold!” Thus what was once a desire for real revolution is subverted into a motivation for consuming products and keeping the wheels of the present system turning. To sum up: Are you using your band to “sell” revolution, or are you using “revolution” to sell your band?
\n\nIn regards to this problem, it’s up to the buyer to remember that just buying a hardcore record or political pamphlet, etc. is not, by itself, going to accomplish anything. That’s common sense, but advertising can sometimes obscure the issue. And it is up to the labels to resist the temptation to make advertisements that seem to suggest that buying their records will accomplish anything by itself. Labels should make sure that it is clear in their advertisements that they are only selling tools for revolution, not revolution itself.
\n\nBesides the pitfalls of advertising, there are other possible drawbacks to selling things in the hardcore community. One of the biggest of those is that the money to buy them has to come from somewhere. The more records, ‘zines, band shirts, etc. a hardcore kid buys, the more money he needs to buy them. And not everyone can live off of a distribution/label/tattoo parlor, you know. So the more records kids buy, the more money they have to earn—the more they have to work for some employer to earn the money! Elsewhere in this issue and the last one, the unpleasant qualities of modern day employment are discussed. That’s not something we want to encourage.
\n\nBecause it’s not even like kids are buying hardcore records instead of the usual products from objectionable corporations. In the hardcore community, we sell luxuries, not necessities. No matter how many records, ‘zines, band shirts, etc. you purchase, you still have to pay for food, for rent, for health care. So our countercultural businesses only contribute to the problem of people having to work jobs they don’t like, by making it necessary that they earn more money to pay for our hardcore products as well as everything else. And no matter how independent and D.I.Y. our labels are, they still aren’t actually fighting against big business, because those big businesses have a complete monopoly on the goods and services we need to survive. It doesn’t matter much whether your CD has a bar code on it when your food, your rent, your every other need is supplied by the companies that use bar codes on CD’s.
\n\nSo selling things like records and ‘zines, at least right now, helps to perpetuate the status quo in which everyone has to work at jobs they wish they could quit. This is not to say that it’s not worth doing, if the value of the records and ‘zines outweighs their negative effects on people’s lives. But it’s worth keeping in mind. It might be more worth doing to try to figure out a way to liberate ourselves permanently from the employment system, rather than spending our energy on selling luxuries like records while most of our lives must still revolve around wasted time and wasted potential…
\n\nWhen you have to concentrate on selling things, as anyone working within the confines of today’s exchange economy must, it’s easy to get caught up in it and forget about whatever other goals you started with. In order to function at all in spreading your releases, no matter how good your intentions are, you have to worry about being at least profitable to survive—and thus, to some degree, you have to worry about making the things that you sell marketable. The ones who are willing to compromise more to make their products sell better usually do end up selling them more effectively, so the products that reach the most people are often the ones that are the most watered-down, the least genuine.
\n\nYou must compete for sales with others who may have the same goals as you, which can create unnecessary animosity, and makes people work against each other (just to survive and keep functioning) rather than together, which might be more effective in accomplishing things. This competition makes you have to think about selling competitively, and it becomes easy to associate increased sales with making progress, when in truth the things you have to do to attain these sales increases may work against the goals you originally started with.
\n\nIf you started out selling things to try to spread ideas of some kind, you find that you have much less time to think about the ideas, to talk about them with others, to work on nourishing their development. Instead, you have to always be working on practical concerns. There’s no time for reading books, because you have to answer mailorders or buy advertisements. You spend more time arguing with distributors than you do brainstorming with others who might have valuable ideas to contribute. Pretty soon sales are all you think about, all you have time to think about, and it becomes hard to stay focused on your original goals, or even to really remember them, through the haze of practical business concerns.
\n\nAnd that is why there are so many businesses in the hardcore community that started out with good intentions and were completely transformed by the years of competition and worrying about sales. Now many of them care about nothing but making money, at any cost. Selling things can do that to you—it can strip away all your ideals and dreams, until you can only focus on profit. And those who focus only on selling things for profit will never be able to change anything for the better in this world.
\n\nSome people think that the problems that an exchange economy (an economy which revolves around buying and selling things) creates for human beings are insoluble inside of such a system. This analysis suggests that as long as people only have access to the goods and services that they can trade their own goods and services for, human beings will always be in danger of being forced to spend their lives doing things they don’t enjoy or care about in order to have the resources they need to survive. The thinkers who consider this flaw to be intrinsic to the exchange economy suggest instead a “gift economy,” where things are shared rather than exchanged.
\n\nThis aspect of this discussion is really complicated, and cannot be treated in detail here. If you are interested in it, an in-depth consideration of the “exchange economy” versus the “gift economy” is scheduled to appear in the second issue of Harbinger, a free CrimethInc. propaganda tabloid, in December of this year. [If you want one, just write any of the CrimethInc. addresses and ask for one—the most dependable one is still probably the Atlanta address]
\n\nFirst of all, we should consider all the other things there are we can do together in hardcore besides just imitating the businessmen of mainstream society by selling each other things. Despite its silly name, Food Not Bombs, which I mention elsewhere in this issue, is a great example of a way people in the hardcore community can work together in ways that are positive and productive for everyone. If you want to be active and involved in hardcore, there are a million different things (more useful things?) you can do besides starting a label, or writing a ‘zine, or working on something else you have to worry about selling. You could organize fliering/propaganda troops, political action groups, sports or exercise groups, book reading clubs, self-defense (anti-police) vigilante squads, try starting a squat, arrange a hostel space for traveling bands and punk rockers, write articles for other people’s magazines, try new mediums of expression (artwork, etc.). Of course, in order to have time and resources to work on projects that you don’t earn money from, you’ll need a supportive community around you, but that topic is addressed elsewhere in this issue. Similarly, rather than just buying records, there are a million other things that a person who has only been involved in hardcore punk for a little while can do to participate. Corresponding with hardcore punk kids from far away is already common, and offers a lot of possibilities. Make mix tapes for each other. Come up with your own creative fashions, that you can wear cheaply or free, rather than paying for overpriced styles that have already been prefabricated for you. Break into abandoned buildings and go exploring, organize a walkout from your school or workplace, hitchhike around the world, sit up late at night trading stories and arguing about stupid Inside Front articles, go crazy. After you’ve broken out of traditional patterns of action and interaction, the sky’s the limit.
\n\nAnd, second, we should certainly not give up on selling things like records and ‘zines that cost money to make. Until some hardcore punk commando unit seizes a record pressing plant and starts making vinyl for free, we have to finance those records somehow. But we should always keep in mind the limitations of selling and advertising things—that these activities by themselves won’t accomplish anything. We can buy and sell things without betraying ourselves, if we stay focused on our real goals. But in order to do this, we must be aware of the ways that selling and advertising things can compromise the power and quality of the things being sold—and even of the people being sold to. In this article I tried to describe some of those dangers, but each of us should think about the topic individually.
\n\nLast March, while my band was in the studio, I made some notes on the back of a lyric sheet for a “footnote” I’d like to put in every advertisement for CrimethInc. records:
\n\nPlease do not buy this product because it looks attractive or because all your friends have one. For your sake, don’t waste your money on it unless you know what it is you’re purchasing and think that it really might be useful or meaningful to you. Please do not think that merely purchasing this product is going to do anything to change the world, or to improve your life or anyone else’s. Right now, we can’t effectively distribute these ideas and music without selling them, but just selling them is not our goal; it is only a means to an end. We try to sell these records in a way that does not compromise the power of their content—we want to sell them like we would sell any other kind of weapon against the status quo, with the emphasis upon their usefulness in making people feel alive and aware, making people dangerous.
\n\nEndnote: This article is not a criticism of anyone in particular so much as it is a self-criticism of the hard core community in general. Of course Inside Front partakes in the same things we are criticizing here as much as everyone else does—we’re NOT claiming innocence, but we are suggesting that we should all consider this issue and perhaps try to move forward.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/how-ethical-is-the-work-ethic", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/1996/01/01/how-ethical-is-the-work-ethic", "title": "How Ethical is the Work ‘Ethic’? : reconsidering work and 'leisure time'", "summary": "", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "1996-01-01T08:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:32Z", "tags": [], "content_html": "Did you ever wonder why your parents act so disoriented when it comes to ‘leisure’ activities? Why they start one little hobby, and either fail to follow through with it or become pathologically obsessed with it… even though it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with their lives? Maybe they seek to lose themselves in gardening or following the exploits of some basketball team. Maybe your father buys all sorts of fancy tools (the kind of tools many men his age have), but only uses them for a few days before setting them aside—and then buys a lot of skiing equipment the next month. Or perhaps they just spend their time trying figure out how to pay off the debt they owe for that wide screen television they spend the rest of their time watching.
\n\nAnd—have they ever been honest with you about their jobs? Do they enjoy them? Is their work the most fulfilling thing they could be doing, are they able to achieve every goal they always wanted to? Do they feel heroic or proud every day as they return home—or are they exhausted? Do they turn that wide screen television on as soon as they come in the door? Do they have the energy to do anything else?
\n\nDid you ever wonder if there might be a better way for them, for you?
\n\nBecause of ‘division of labor’, most jobs today consist of doing very specific tasks, over and over, with very little variety. If you are a dishwasher, you wash dishes: you don’t get to interact with people or solve complicated problems very often, and you never get to leave the dishroom to run around in the sunlight. If you are a real estate agent, you never use your hands to make anything, and you spend most of your time thinking about market value and selling points. Even jobs that include a certain amount of variety can only remain interesting and challenging up to a point: for we work forty hours a week on average, and at least five out of the seven days. That’s a lot of our lives to spend working. Work is the first thing we do on most of the days of our lives, and we don’t get to do anything else until we’ve been at work for quite a while. When we spend most of our time and energy working on one task, or even ten different tasks, eventually we will feel bored and desperate for variety… even if we are conditioned not to realize this.
\n\nOn top of this, because of the spread of large businesses and the consequent decrease in self-employment and small businesses, most of us do not have much voice in what our responsibilities at work will be. It is hard to start your own business or even find a friend or neighbor to work for. We often must get a job to survive in which we follow the instructions of a manager who probably doesn’t have much more control over his job than we have over ours. Since we don’t get to decide what we are doing, chances are that we will feel alienated from our work, disinterested in the quality of our labor; we may even feel that the projects we are working upon are unimportant.
\n\nIndeed it is easy to feel that most of the jobs available today are unimportant—for in a certain sense, many of them are. In a purely capitalist economy, the jobs that are available will be determined by which products are in the most demand; and often the products that are in demand (military technology, fast food, Pepsi, fashionable clothes) are not products that really make people happy. It’s easy to feel like all your labor is wasted when the products you work so hard to sell just to survive seem to do nothing for the people you sell them to. How many people really are cheered up by the soggy french fries at McDonalds? Would they perhaps be happier eating a meal prepared by a friend of theirs or a chef they knew who owned his own cafe?
\n\nIn short, “work” as we know it tends to make us unhappy because we do so much of it, because it is so repetitive, because we don’t get to choose what we do, and because what we are doing is often not in the best interest of our fellow human beings.
\n\nWe come home from these jobs exhausted from having invested all our time and energy in a project we may not have even been free to choose, and what we need most is to recover. We are emotionally and physically worn out, and nothing seems more natural than to sit down quietly for a while and watch television or read the daily paper, while we try to gather our strength for the next day’s labor. Perhaps we try to leave behind our exhaustion and frustration by concentrating on some hobby or another; but as we are not very used to directing ourselves in the workplace during the day, we often don’t know what we really want to do when we are free at home. Certainly some company or another will have some suggestions for us, whether we receive them from advertising or watching our neighbors; but chances are that this company has their profits in mind at least as much as our satisfaction, and we may discover that playing miniature golf is strangely unfulfilling.
\n\nSimilarly, of course, we don’t have much time or energy left over from work to consider our situation or participate in any rewarding activity which requires much time and energy. We don’t like to think too much about whether we enjoy our jobs or our lives—besides, that might be depressing, and what can we do if we don’t enjoy them, anyway? We don’t have the energy left to enjoy art or music or books that are really challenging; we need our music to be soothing, our art nonthreatening, our books merely entertaining.
\n\nIn fact, we come to associate having to expend effort and do things with our work, and associate relaxing and not doing anything with leisure time. So, because many of us don’t like our jobs, we tend to associate having to do things with being unhappy, while happiness, as far as we ever know it, means… not doing anything. We never act for ourselves, because we spend our whole days acting for other people, and we think that acting and working hard always leads to unhappiness; our idea of happiness is not having to act, being on permanent vacation.
\n\nAnd this is ultimately why so many of us are so unhappy: because happiness is not doing nothing, happiness is acting creatively, doing things, working hard on things you care about. Happiness is becoming an excellent long-distance runner, falling in love, cooking an original recipe for people you care about, building a bookshelf, writing a song. There is no happiness to be found in merely lying on a couch—happiness is something that we must pursue. We are not unhappy because we have to do things, we are unhappy because all the things we do are things we don’t care about. And because our jobs exhaust us and mislead us about what we want, they are the source of much of our unhappiness.
\n\nYou don’t have to work at those jobs, you know. It is possible to get by without all the Pepsi, all the expensive clothes, the wide screen television and the expensive interior decorating that all those paychecks go to pay for. You can try to start your own business doing something you care about (although this still involves the danger of having too little variety in your work), or you can try to find a job in today’s marketplace (good luck!) that you actually enjoy… and that leaves you enough time and energy to do other things in your life that you also enjoy. The most important thing is to arrange your life so that you are doing things because you want to do them, not because they are profitable—otherwise, no matter how much money you make, you will be selling your happiness for money. Remember that the less money you spend, the less you will have to worry about getting money in the first place… and the less you will have to work at those dehumanizing jobs. Learn to use all your ‘free’ time, not to vegetate or spend money on entertainment, but to create things and accomplish things—things that no one would pay you to make or do, but that make your life (and perhaps the lives of others) better anyway.
\n\nSome will argue that the system we live within would break down if we all were to walk away from our jobs—so much the better. Haven’t we built enough automobiles, enough shopping malls, enough televisions and golf clubs, enough fucking nuclear weapons already? Wouldn’t we all be better off if there was a shortage of fast food and a surplus of unique home-cooked meals? If playing music is more rewarding than working in an assembly line, why do we have so few good bands and so many transistor radios? Of course a ‘work-free’ world is a dream we will probably never see come true; but as always, the challenge is to make this dream a part of your world, as much as you can—to liberate yourself from the chains of mindless consumerism and mind-melting employment and live a more meaningful life.
\n\n" } ] }