anarchism, anti-globalization - book - 2000 - Days of War, Nights of Love

Days of War, Nights of Love
Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective
2000
CrimethInc

Available in PDF format from http://www.daysofwarnightsoflove.com/

This book, the first full book published by the CrimethInc Ex-Workers collective, can be read as a poorly developed collection of ideas about capitalism, the media, work, and everyday life.  The collective is described, on their website, as a “decentralized anarchist collective composed of many cells which act independently in pursuit of a freer and more joyous world.”  I take that statement to mean that there is a small group of actual members directly involved in the work of writing and publishing the books and pamphlets they release... and that’s it.  The independent cells referred to are likely any show of activism that occurs   Days of War is useful to researchers in the sense that it is a quintessential manifestation of a radicalism that admires historical radical leftism yet lacks the will to develop a coherent philosophy of its own.  The book reads as a tribute to personal zines of the 1990s, hardcore punk, and the underground radical press of the 1960s. Futhermore in its graphic array much inspiration has been drawn from Situationism, albeit CrimethInc's text is lacking in the intellectual rigor the French neo-Marxists once displayed.  


This book is a series of rants, driven by a collection of angry attitudes directed towards ‘capitalism’ and anything hegemonic.  I characterize the philosophical program of the text to be incoherent because its authors do not establish any kind of analytic framework.  The attitudes represented by this book are quite commonly expressed in zines, on the Internet, and less intellectually focused journals of radical ideas, like Adbusters (although Adbusters tends to accompany their luke-warm critiques with interesting images).  Days of War, Nights of Love emerges from a strained point of view where its writers have chosen to articulate, over three hundred pages, that action is more important than developing theory.  So while in its presentation, the book appears to benefit from a history of radical slogans and images, it appears to disavow that history while simultaneously ignoring the base of ideas and radical thought those slogans and images emerge from.  Ultimately, what this book conveys most strongly is a desperation by its authors to speak out against the things they hate, without considering the form of their statements or whether or not their utterances have previously been uttered.

Days of War also plays with history in strange ways that I suspect pertain to little more than the prejudices of the authors.  One particular example is a description of the prank pulled by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and friends in 1967 when they threw several hundred dollars in cash onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  While the CrimethInc Collective lauded the action, they simply described its actors as friends of Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver.  Not only were the fellows in question NOT friends with Cleaver, they were famous sixties radicals in their own right.  So why erase their names?  Is there some vestigial hatred of Hoffman of the Yippies!?  Are they not to be named, even if their actions are to be admired?  Is there a vestigial admiration of Cleaver and the Black Panthers as the exemplars of American radicalism?  If that is the case then that is the exact same attitude many late-sixties American radicals held towards the Panthers.... during the late-sixties.

This book strives to be a forceful message of radical urgency.  It does not contain a single unique idea.  In fact, in its incoherence Days of War, Nights of Love manages to convey an implicit support for consumerism, embedded near to the surface of its passages calling for perpetual pleasure.  What is interesting about Days of War, Nights of Love is its appearance as a pastiche or an agglomeration of a number of distinct strains of twentieth century radicalism.  Furthermore, it is interesting because it valorizes anti-intellectualism, another theme of the 1960s (see Counterrevolution and Revolt by Herbert Marcuse for a critique of anti-intellectual tendencies among 1960s radicals), and it strives to make a virtue of its own incoherence.