Welcome to our Nightmare ahem Dream

It’s our one year anniversary from when we did our soft launch, and it’s been about six months since we fully launched CAW (we're going to avoid a bird metaphor here, just once though). However, the general need that we were trying to fill, if only for our collective, hasn’t changed. We are so grateful for those of you who helped us get this started and support our work. But we thought we’d talk again about why we are doing this and the ideals that underpin it.

If you are out in the world working in some kind of creative pursuit, writing, making music, painting, whatever, you are on your own navigating an impossibility of venues, grants, and ideas of success that never seem achievable. But on top of this, if you are politically minded, add the pressure of choosing the right outlets, ones that don’t betray your political purity. 

Now there are some clearly heinous rags that we as writers would collectively withdraw our work from—or never submit to in the first place. For example, the NY Times has helped normalize the genocide in Gaza and mobilize the political and medical attack on trans people. It’s hard to imagine contributing to them (even if they accepted us), since when they publish a voice that speaks some kind of truth, they bury it and balance it out with a bunch of filth. So-called objectivity in journalism. We wear our biases on our sleeves. 

But after these places we would never touch, there are a remainder of outlets, mostly not attuned to any particular politics, but if so some version left-liberal weak socialism. These latter venues don’t typically like to print anything that goes beyond an idea of “unionizing the work place” and “voting for Bernie.”

All of the same dynamics apply to finding work in other artistic and creative worlds, putting your stuff out in the world or installing it into art spaces–these places might have no avowed politics at all, so as not to alienate buyers or the “public.” 

The thing is, if you trace the money in any outlet from which we may draw support for our creative endeavors, you will find blood. 

For many workers, the blood on their money might not wear on their conscience, not simply because they are trying to keep their heads down and survive, but also because a worker with firsthand experience of the hierarchy of the workplace knows it’s bloody all the way down. 

But for those of us who avow some kind of politics or affiliate ourselves with the goal of destroying this society . . . how do we rationalize where we get our money? Some people like to point out smugly that basically anything we do in this current society doesn’t match our ideals in any way, so we must be hypocrites. And people newly open to anti-authoritarian ideas ask with a valid urgency how they can live up to these ideals. We are not satisfied with the meme, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And we don’t want to punish ourselves for living in a world that contradicts our collective dreams.

So this question of survival and complicity isn’t just one we rack ourselves with, but one that gets asked of us. In a different time, the question would boil down to the problems of selling out, a phenomenon that some people have claimed is over in this so-called late stage of capitalism. (If you don’t know about selling out, it was like when Green Day signed to a major label and none of the punks in the Bay would listen to them any more. Or when Lars Frederiksen from Rancid got punched in the face for showing up at a “real” punk show.)

Despite all of our better wisdom about the way that capitalism demands our complicity for survival and the way that the state works on creating a dependency on it, there have been many circumstances where fellow writers and artists excoriate others for putting their work out with the wrong people. Didn’t you know there was a boycott? (N.B. a boycott is not the same as a picket line). Didn’t you know they published this terrible piece? Didn’t you know they aren’t anarchists? The blame gets heaped on the individual and their wrong choice, a contract they probably signed out of a need for survival, since being an independently contracting and not independently wealthy artist entails many lean times. 

The lie about capitalism is that everyone is free to sell their labor on the open market to the highest bidder. But people who have had a job know that this is not the actual experience of work; most often you have to take what you can get, or else you don’t buy groceries or pay rent, except perhaps accumulating debt on a credit card.

So, when do we draw a line? 

The dream behind CAW was one possible response to some of these questions. 

The major theoretical and practical insight here is that those who call out others for purity still have nothing to offer the person whose actions they criticize. If we want everyone to withdraw their labor from one magazine or gallery or museum, or hell, from all mainstream venues, then we need to build out a counter-media (a counter-culture), a scaffold that allows people to do the work and survive. We can’t expect individuals to do it alone without backup. Like with mutual aid, our survival is collective and interwoven. Heaping blame on one artist just follows the individualist ethos and the liberal notion that problems can be solved with independent choices.

Surely some people will claim that cultural work is less important in terms of revolutionary activity, and therefore ask, why waste resources or time on it? Besides this viewpoint being patently wrong, historically inaccurate, and siding with the authoritarian killers—we might just respond, what do you care? The money is so scarce, we just pass it around. Should I not give this $50 I have right now to someone’s top/bottom surgery, or other health fund? Should I not feed this cat while millions of strays don’t have access to this foodbowl? 

CAW was an answer for us. We kept talking to each other about the projects we are doing or that we want to do but that would get rejected, even by the anarchist publishers. Not because the work is bad, but because they don’t have time, or they also need to make their money with the big draws. On top of writing and making art, there is a whole other job of applying for support and submitting your work (and usually a full-time job or a full-time job search). 

So we thought we might start with a small group of people we have affinity with, both artistically and intimately, and see how we might begin to collectivize the labor of writing: to produce that scaffolding that few seem to want to consider generalizing as part of our world-building projects. 

All four of us were introduced to anarchism through our participation in punk subculture. For us, then, anarchism already has an innate sense of making art and building worlds simultaneously. In the world of punk (at its best), it is us who put the bands together, book the shows, make the zines, find each other around the world, and create temporary spaces of pleasure and autonomy. 

We are sure some of you have similar experiences of DIY culture, whether punk or not, where you have lived anarchism in the moment. There is a punk phrase–no future–which we take to mean that we can’t wait to start living the lives we want. We want to stop deferring our enjoyment until “after the revolution,” and stop prioritizing a productivity mindset that values one kind of labor over another, or the “real work” from our pleasures. Let’s stop being boring. There is no after the revolution. 

Our hope is that this project can be a seed for something bigger in the creation of an anti-social, anti-political counterculture, just like we experienced with punk. Pulling on the early 20th century histories of an anarchist newspaper in every neighborhood, we want to reproduce infinitely the possibilities of sharing knowledge, inspiration, and desire. And we had to start somewhere.

This isn’t just a zine distro—we are actually asking for money. Something that we have also been criticized for by other anarchists. Like, don’t we just do this shit for free? But we might counter, does the person who asks this question have a job that pays well with generous time off, or maybe an inheritance? or are they able to squat and dumpster and not deal with chronic illness or any care responsibilities? 

We consider the contributions we make to this culture of autonomy and mutuality to be worthwhile and see them appreciated in our conversations with people who access our work. Since we do see value in what we do, we want to be able to devote more time to this work, and in our tradition and history, we thought of collectivizing. 

As a group, we rely on each other to maintain our work. But we also rely on people who appreciate and are able to help support us. We don’t find this to be a hierarchy, but a mutuality. We have also created a participative community around CAW. As we generate more support, we will be able to make more work, and to catch each other when our illnesses flare, or the crises occur. 

Our intention ultimately is to generalize this kind of collectivity, to support more people, to help others do what they want. We appreciate everything, take nothing for granted, and love you all for allowing us the space and time to grow our ideas. 

Below are some upcoming offers + ways you can help us reach our (impossible) beautiful dreams! 

Coming soon for paid members: 

Join our Winter Solstice CAW (Corvid Anarcho Witchcraft) Writing Circle, with carla and Dani, on December 13th from 10 am-12 pm, pacific time.

Bookclub with Shuli! Over on the CAW Murder discord, Shuli hosts bookclubs, mostly discussions that have some structure but also go wherever the participants are interested. The next meeting is Wednesday January 14 at 5pm EST. We will be reading Gender Without Identity by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini. Come even if you don’t read or finish the book! 

Ways everyone can support us:

1. Share our work:

A quick way to help us out is by sharing this post (like now!!)  But also, it really helps when you take a moment to spread our work with your networks far and wide and say something about it… You can share this post on your social media platforms, over emails, signal chats, at the dinner table, to the random stranger at the cafe, anywhere you want! It really does help us get the word out.

But beyond helping us get the word and our words out, you can sign up as a free member or become a paid member and join our community.

2. Join the murder for free:

To subscribe for free: As a Bougainville Crow (corvus meeki), you will receive weekly-ish email updates and editor's notes, including summaries of the week's shiny things, and special offers for membership. and receive our newsletter and other shiny things.

3. Become a paid member:

Our goal was to offer a pay what you want option but our platform Ghost is unable to support that, so we did our best to capture the idea of that (and yes they are named after various corvids!)

Every member gets: Full access to all articles; Access to writing workshops; Membership in our Reading Group; Attendance at Movie Nights; Membership in Community Discord; All the Shiny Things We Can Find! Our undying Gratitude…. 

No matter which rate you choose for your membership, you have the same access! We didn’t want to create a hierarchy of support, but we appreciate people who are able to donate more to help support our project. Here are the different membership options with their monthly rates (you can also sign up yearly and receive a discount on the subscription).

• $5/month: As a Chihuahuahn Raven (corvus cryptoleucus) you are the most numerous number of our murder. Ravens have full access to everything we offer!
• $10/month: We don't yet have the technology for a full pay what you want experience, but Sri-Lankan Magpies get everything the ravens do, and know that being pretty is its own reward.
• $20/month: Palawan Crows come through to show major support in a major way, receiving everything of the previous tiers and fighting like hell in solidarity for the murder.
• $100/month: Crypsirina temia we can hardly believe you are real, racket-tail treepies, thank you! You get everything from previous tiers, and we are shocked at your very existence! 

4.  Send us a one time tip or donation!

THANK YOU,

Shuli, Dani, Vicky, and carla

our inspo: Alice Cooper - Welcome To My Nightmare (Official Audio)