Crimethinc Sabatour coming to NYC this Saturday
Hey folks,

Crimethinc recently published a book called "Recipes
for Disaster" (description below) and they are doing a
tour to promote/talk about it. This Saturday, June
4th, they'll be at Times Up (49 E. Houston b/w Mott &
Mulberry) at 7 PM. Everybody should come and tell
your friends! They'll have copies of the book as well
as other Crimethinc publications. A description of the
book and the tour, as taken from the Crimethinc
website, is below.

Hope to see y'all there.

Again its: Saturday, June 4, 7pm
Times Up!- 49 E. Houston b/w Mott &
Mulberry (or Lafayette & Bowery)


___________________
SABATOUR: Introducing 'Recipes for Disaster,' an
Anarchist Cookbook

Disaster?
yes, disaster.

When you think of disasters, perhaps some secret part
of you thrills at the idea of something happening,
something interrupting the tedious routines that
comprise existence for so many of us. You might not be
ready to own up to actually desiring one, but a
disaster would at least offer a chance to escape your
cage and allow you to explore the unknown for a little
while. what anguish, to live in longing for a reprieve
from your own life, never knowing when and if it might
come!

Or perhaps you cringe at the word, Thinking of all the
senseless tragedy that real disasters entail. In that
case, It may have already occurred to you that we are
in the midst of the most terrible slow-moving disaster
in history, as the natural environment is utterly laid
to waste and the diversity of human experience is
steam-rolled into the monoculture of capitalism. In
such a disaster, you can't cook out of the books your
ancestors wrote for more peaceful times.

Whether disaster is something you secretly pine for or
desperately hope to escape, one thing is for
certain--the old recipes just won't suffice anymore.
We need Recipes for Disaster. Here they come.

What is the Sabatour?

After months of scheming, this is the official release
of our secret plan, to bring our book to parks,
basements, coffeehouse and hotel lobbies. A troupe of
saboteurs will travel the US distributing Recipes for
Disaster and other fine works published by the elusive
Crimethinc Workers' Collective, along with some
previously unreleased projects. Performing skits and
poetry readings, skillshares and workshops for the
thousands of people disappointed by the results of the
election, the condition of the natural world and the
content of their daily lives. Hopefully, we will be
able to provide communities with free copies of this
book, to be shared in libraries, infoshops and
community spaces making the information within
available to everyone, regardless of their financial
status.

We will be stopping in up to 30 towns all across the
Untied States in a period of almost two months sharing
the things we've learned and the dreams we've had
regarding the future of anti-authoritarian resistance.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
CrimethInc. Declassifies
Top Secret Anarchist Tactics
“Why give away our secrets? Because if they stay
secrets, we’re fucked.”


For ten long years, our operatives have honed
their skills, testing their wits and mettle against
the global capitalist empire, the most formidable
adversary in the history of life on earth. We have
learned how to redecorate the walls of cities occupied
by armies of riot police, to transform random groups
of damaged, isolated individuals into loving
communities capable of supporting one another through
the most severe bouts of repression and depression, to
shut down corporate summits and franchises armed with
little more than plastic piping or eyedroppers of
glue. Now, the notorious CrimethInc. ex-Workers’
Collective has compiled many of the techniques that
made these feats possible into a 624-page manual
entitled Recipes for Disaster.

For those who have been bewildered by our
earlier publications, wondering what purpose it could
possibly serve for us to tantalize the beleaguered
masses with utopian dreams of life unfettered by
state, moral, or economic laws, it may come as a
surprise that we’ve had a plan all along: offer
visions of other possible worlds, then share concrete
means for departing from this one. For those who
gambled that CrimethInc. was nothing more than a joke,
a fad or fantasy that could be shrugged off, we hope
now it will turn out that it is a practical joke.

So what’s in this book, and how was the content
selected? The sixty-two recipes run the gamut from
Affinity Groups to Wheatpasting, stopping along the
way at topics as disparate as Hitchhiking, Sabotage,
and Supporting Survivors of Domestic Violence. Each
recipe is illustrated as necessary with photographs,
technical diagrams, and firsthand accounts—culled, of
course, from anonymous sources—of times the particular
method or tactic was applied.

Choosing and editing the content for such a work
is a difficult challenge, and it took an assembly of
more than thirty collectives nearly three years to
complete Recipes for Disaster. Content was selected
and perfected according to three basic criteria.
First, for the sake of safety and precision, subject
matter was limited to methods with which the authors
had extensive experience. Second, submissions were
given preference according to how much material was
already available on the subject: Recipes for Disaster
includes very little on herbal remedies, as extensive
literature has already been published about them, but
features a full thirty-five pages on organizing black
blocs and similar forms of anonymous mass action,
since little resource material exists for those who
would apply this potentially dangerous yet often
useful strategy. Finally, as much as possible, the
recipes are presented from a nonpartisan angle, with
an emphasis on sharing concrete skills rather than
spreading any ideological agenda, so the book might be
of use to the widest possible range of readers working
towards liberation in all its forms.

Inevitably, as we’ve learned all too well from
experience, those who take on ambitious, public
projects are subjected to the twin scourges of fan
worship and vindictive, unconstructive criticism. As
before, we urge admirers to nurture in themselves
whatever worthy qualities they mistake us for having,
and critics to complement our efforts with efforts of
their own rather than passive disparagement. No one
work on the subject of direct action can possibly be
complete, but this book might serve a useful purpose
if others supplement it with the projects they think
we should have undertaken. In publishing this
incomplete, imperfect book, we hope to provoke others
into undertaking more projects of their own, not
freeze them into adulating or offended spectatorship
of our activities.

One might ask of the publishers of this new
anarchist cookbook, as Emmett Grogan demanded of Abbie
Hoffman upon the publication of Steal This Book!,
whether it has occurred to us that making all these
secret methods public knowledge might hurry them into
obsolescence. In limited cases, this might be true,
though we’ve made an effort to slant the content
towards long-term skills, such as stencil-making, that
never go out of date. At any rate, our answer to this
charge is that these skills and the struggle for which
they are useful must both be extended to much broader
circles, or else they are doomed to obsolescence
anyway. The narrow, comparatively small explicitly
anarchist community of today is a poor match for the
assembled power of the global empire; for massive
change to be possible, anarchist skills and approaches
need to be generalized to a much broader social
spectrum. In limited cases, yes, the powers that be
will be able to use our book to prepare themselves for
our efforts to contest their control, but we hope that
this drawback will be outweighed by the ways in which
this work can help equip new generations to strike
blows for freedom from unexpected directions and in
unpredictable ways.

In short, why give away our secrets? Because if
they stay secrets, we’re fucked. If you associate
yourself with the struggle for a better world,
consider how you can do your part to get these tools
into unlikely hands.

And lest we miss this chance to make a challenge
of our own, we ask certain paragons of the anarchist
community, so pleased with themselves for perfecting
their abilities in rhetoric and disputation while
others have been quietly working on actually changing
the world, to come over to our side of the barricades.
It matters little how insightful a critique is if it
is not put into practice, and by the same token a
critique not born of practice is not likely to contain
much insight. Talk without action only sets a
precedent for more of the same; actions themselves can
be eloquent, on the other hand, in ways that words
rarely can. Some anarchists seem to conceive of the
process of anarchist organizing as consisting of a
long phase of debate over what constitutes effective
tactics, followed by agreement upon and application of
one approach, but such loquacious deferral of action
is pointless: one need only demonstrate an effective
tactic, and share the skills it requires, for others
to see its worth and adopt it for themselves. As a
dadaist wrote long ago, one is only entitled to those
ideas which one puts into practice. You don’t become
wise by having a lot of ideas, but from trying them
out.

Ultimately, as usual, the important question is
how you can make use of an inert commodity like this
in your own efforts to live with passion and dignity,
and that is something none of us could help you with
from this distance. Hopefully, however, the legions of
aspiring adventurers who have written us over the past
five years asking how they can join the CrimethInc.
collective will finally have their answer, in the form
of this book: if you want to be a part of this crazy
undertaking, just pick a recipe, or come up with an
idea of your own, and try it out. As the folk singer
croons, to fight for something is to make it your own.

All the best in all the beautiful, dangerous
ventures you’re involved in already, friends. May your
every dream come true,

—CrimethInc. Agents Provocateurs, chilly December 2004