Crimethinc. grants a blanket pardon to Mac Evasion and all the travelling kids
In the dawn of the 21st century, the Crimethinc. Ex-Workers Collective was synonymous with train hopping, stale bagels, dumpster sushi, and Carhart™ overalls. A world of the possible was gaining momentum against the dreary and controlled existence of the status quo. By the hundreds, young dreamers were eschewing their comfort for an opportunity to leverage their relative class and racial privilege hitchhiking and shoplifting across the country. Fueled by the example of our bestselling book Evasion, the youth were truly rising up. Whose streets? Why take the streets, when the alleys, the rooftops, and the dumpsters, were all fair game?
At some point, we (the Ex-Workers) got tired of yet another kid from soCal who showed up unannounced at our door with a box of three day old tuna fish sandwiches he had gotten from the dumpster of the local food bank. That kid always ended up in a fight with the errant ALF friend who was currently evading on our couch, and we realized that sometimes in the effort to create a new world, you also create a monster (one time a kid made an actual inflated monster in our yard out of duct tape and garbage bags, it was pretty cool, until he hopped out of town and left the garbage for us to pick up). Drastic measures had to be taken, and we soberly put into action what we thought needed to happen.
In the early dawn hours, we issued the now infamous Crimethinc. Communique 47/74, thereby expelling all traveler kids from the Ex-Workers Collective. Further, we severed ties with Mac Evasion, not because he is a dirtbag, but because he was off-brand. We pulled our bandannas up over our faces, and we looked out to the uncharted terrain of insurrection and glossy design. The world was ours, if only we would take it.
Unfortunatley, in the ensuing years, what was once a corner niche of the anarchist market (slick design, vague exhortations to riot, pictures of people in black and things on fire), became accessible to everyone with a pirated copy of inDesign, and our advancement of the struggle was outpaced by people who were just posting online and not maintaining a publishing project or record label (which never existed, in case you were wondering). Meanwhile, other anarchists were publishing books that were more challenging than ours. We had become the anarchist equivalent of a Blackberry, and we knew that to not merely slip into Adbustersist obscurity, another drastic action had to be taken.
To that end, we, the Ex-Workers, are hereby granting a full and complete pardon to Mac Evasion, and a general amnesty to all the traveling kids who hop trains, crash at houses, and make shoplifting for locals harder. You are our prodigal children, and we embrace you. We’ve missed the sweet/sour stank of lives lived in days of war and nights of love. We can’t remember the last time a bagel was so hard it nearly chipped a tooth, and we miss those things.
To the folk punks, the oogles, the kids who live in the new world that exists in the shadows of the old… …Welcome home.