Days of War Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners

WARNING: This book will not save your life!

Today there is a booming discontenet industry, consisting of entrepreneurs who cash in on your misery by selling you products that describe and decry it. Thus the exchange economy finds a place even for its enemies: perpetuating both industry and discontent as we struggle to fight them, we keep the wheels turning by selling more merchandise. And as in every other aspect of your lives, your real desires to make someting happen are channeled into consuming — and your own abilities and potential are displaced, projected onto the "revolutionary" items you purchase.

This book could be a part of that process. While we hope we are using our product to "sell" revolution, it might be that we are just using "revolution to sell our product. (After all, in this society, if something isn't for sale, it might as well not exist — and it's almost impossible to think of anything to do with something of value besides market it.) The best of intentions can't protect us from this risk. But we've undertaken this project because we felt that, in addition to other, less explicitly compromised activites, it might be worth giving the old experiment one more try: to see if a commodity can be created that gives more than it takes away.

For this book to have even the smallest chance of succeeding in that tall order, you can't approach it passively, you can't expect it to from the work. You have to regard it as a tool, nothing more. This book will not save your life; that, my friend, is up to you.

"This futurist anti-futurism, this cosmology of routine and revolution, filed with a seemingly nihilistic passion for life and characterized by a wild-eyed extremism that graciously embraces hypocrisy in the same breath...absolutely refuses to be pinned down. Is it intended as disinformation, misinformation, or myth-information? Only one thing is certain: according to the authors, a mysterious 'CrimethInc. Collective,' our civilization is mindlessly living out its last days — and without them, it might perpetuate them forever." New York Times Book Review

"Their demands — that we live as if something actually depended on our actions — are seductive, even to a bourgeois book critic." Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces

"If Henry Miller had gone to fight with the anarchists in Spain while Orwell sought the caresses of beautiful women in France, and they had collaborated to write a manifesto on war and love, this is the sort of book they might have produced. If Lenin had remained in Zurich at his apartment by the Cabaret Voltaire and the Dadaists sent one of their number in his place to preside over the Russian revolution, we might live today in the world for which this book cries out." J.D. Salinger, author of The Inverted Forest

"Better that the whole world be destroyed and perish utterly that that a free man (sic) refrain from an act to which his nature moves him." Karl Marx

"The book's vehement insistence that living is more important than art carries the argument beyond the typical debate. When you make it to the end, the personal testimonials about not working and the closing art pieces become an aria of voices urging you to close the book and live. Glorious, even for the most cynical reader." Clamor Magazine

"It's an exciting book, and a great labor of love, skill, and daring." Daniel Quinn, Author of Ishmael

CrimethInc. is an international "workers' collective" of men and women who are not willing to be mere "workers" anymore. Are you?