Once more on the failed transit system fare strike in San Francisco in 2005

What if we just key their cars and boycott the radio stations they like to listen to?

I'll go in on the same terms for how long it'll be before half of anglophone NEFACers work for unions or "community organizations".

Ace.

Anyway, do you deny that since the '60s the United States and European governments have been following a two-pronged strategy consisting of counter-insurgency activity and a "strategy of tension"? I mean, the incidents at the MOVE communal house, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City * would certainly suggest the United States government is quite sufficiently ruthless. The "Stay Behind" network in Europe and the "strategy of tension" (e.g. Gladio in Italy and the Supermarket shootings in Belgium, for example) are now quite well known. Keeping yr head up isn't insurrectionist and it's certainly not "paranoid" - its practical.

* See "The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror" by David Hoffman

Is there an insult hidden in there somewhere? Not sure about you but -- with the exception of cops, prison screws and bosses -- I could give a fuck where anyone gets their paycheck. Shit, I've worked all sorts of crap jobs (factory work, gutting crack houses, roofing/house painting, dish washing, line cook, etc.) and am pretty happy to currently be able to work a "movement" job that pays okay and gives me dental insurance. I couldn't imagine knocking any other working class person who is able to land a similar job through the skills/experience they've aquired from their activism. But that's just me.

But church secretaries and food pantry staffers are capital's last line of defense against the emergent Government of Workers' Councils!

But I'm not in a union, so at least there's no bureaucratic machine to mediate my class rage against... well, the volunteer board of cute little old ladies and activist fluffies who are my oppressive overseers.

Fuck, maybe after I finish up this mailing I'm working on I'll declare a workers' soviet in my office.

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON

Hell I'm all about working class folks dodging tough work and living as high as they can while doing it.

That said I see working for a "movement" church as being similar to "dropping out" - if you can get away with it, and you're still raising hell in the rest of your life, great. At the same time becoming "paid organizers" is an extremely seductive choice for many activists who look at it as getting paid for their activism, without analyzing the roles that NGOs or unions play in maintaining the status quo.

"lifestylism" as a practice crops up as easily in twenty-something "professional organizers" as it does in twenty-something "traveler kids".

Also marxistically speaking conditions determine consciousness. Groups made up primarily of "traveler kids" can easily begin to fetishize that as "revolutionary praxis", but groups made up primarily (or with a significant proportion) of "professional organizers" can also easily fetishize THAT as "revolutionary praxis".

So consider it not so much as an insult, but as a light-hearted jab, especially because although I don't know you I know that jokes/insults about those who aren't "credible revs" (to use rises term), whether they are traveler kids or just folks who seem to be too critical of the existing labor mvoement, etc. can be too common in the "credible rev" milieu. I know because I've made them myself, and heard others make them (and I take the jokes from MJ and duke to be in that vein).

So again, its not an insult so much as a reminder that "credible revs" like MJ and duke don't have all the answers and needn't be so ubiquitous with insults.

Edited to say: this reaches ridiculous extremes when for example "rise" begins dismissing everyone who disagrees with him as "shameless mcanarchyists", even folks like the "Furious Five" collective, whom I'm sure anyone in the Bay Area could vouch for as authentic anarchist-communists/especifistas (as Tom already has).

Whats "ubiquitous" mean college boy?

Just like you bureaucrats, getting twenty-something radicals to do your work for you!

SRB get back to canning cranberries you damn hippie! The left and right wings of capital are exactly the same... but... real communists should only be employed by the right wing of capital...

wait

Tricks on you. I learned that word when my old band's sticker campaign was insulted in the newspaper.

Well we all know that bureaucrats want to hold back anything new, and keep those under them constantly doing the same tasks that the porkchoppers already know will accomplish nothing.

You guessed our plan! We've been keeping the IWW from exploding in membership growth by getting y'all to google words on the internet for us.

What does mountebank mean?

Shits can defecate?

it means you

Good looking?

er, yes. exactly. a mountebank is a good looking guy.
i think you should ask everyone you meet, "i'm a mountebank, right?"

actually a mountebank is a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman.

But a good looking one, right?

good looks would probably help in that endeavour.

Wanna join my union big boy?

mountebanks union?
where do i sign up

its not a union of mountebanks - mountebanks are the ones who "organize" you.

aw, fuck.
i'll just have to start it myself then.
(hey there's a logical joke i there, if i started a mountebanks union i would eo ipso have to be a mountebank becuase i was organizing mountebanks.)

KK has to make the debate over the fare strike into a comparison of his fantasy resume with his denunciations of others “never having done anything” because as we’ve seen, his central charges against us have now all fallen away. Assuming he is not, as he pretends, the only one “out here in the real world,” let’s not fall for his first rhetorical trap.

Next he claims that the people he worked with in Social Strike did not make “any collective decision.” This is supposed to excuse what he is tacitly now admitting were his authoritarian tactics and actions in the fare strike. See, you have to look closely for when KK admits he just lost an argument, but it is there. He now claims, since no one else was doing anything, he could not have ignored their input because they had none, and that this erases any charges against him for his actions. He “proves” that no one else was doing anything by resorting to ad hominem attacks on their alleged status as trust fund liberals who know nothing of the world. This is painting with a broad brush so I will offer a more nuanced report from reality. One of the people in Social Strike I worked with: “F”, grew up in the Oakland projects. The other main person at City College, who is an anarchist: “D” was struggling with housing issues and had no money coming from parents or relatives. Aside from the fact that merely labeling someone “petit bourgeoisie” is the oldest Stalinist play book standard, the hypocrisy reaches Herculean proportions when KKs own parents economic status is considered, and their willingness to help with cash and connections. This doesn’t mean KK is not a worker, he is. I believe him when he says he washes dishes and does restaurant work. But it does mean he’s denouncing others in a hypocritical way. Such tactics hurt his own credibility more than anything.

Specifically on the claim that none of his comrades were “doing anything” this is absurd. The people he was working with were keeping the fare strike alive as one of their projects, and this is clear in the posts on indymedia at the time. They also organized against the G8. Many of them were also traveling to New Orleans to help Hurricane Katrina victims, given the emergency that it was (and still is in many ways). There was a lot going on. But doing nothing? That’s wrong. KK claims, in typical Leninist fashion, that the group lacked the capacity to make a collective decision. If it were true, it would conveniently leave him as the (self-imagined)leader not by choice, but by default. But the group of anarchists around Anarchist Action and Social Strike were extremely capable, they were energetic in their outreach about the strike, open in their class struggle politics, and very clear-eyed about who KK was and what he was trying to do. That’s why KK got the write off from most of these organizers, with a few maintaining contact with him in the hopes he might become more useful and honest given the, at the time, assumed value of his self-promoted resume as an expert. When the rhetoric of the resume failed to connect with his abilities in the actual strike, he was exposed. But it wasn’t until it was clear he was a totally vindictive asshole that people understood they had to get away from him. In the KK revisionist version, this is explained by designating every single person other than himself as a “leftist”.

Next, KK claims that because he has known the people he has slandered as fat, left wing of capital, golf caddies for the system, leninist dupes, liberals, pro-wage-labor, downe’s syndrome victims, longer than I have, that he is more qualified to judge their participation in the fare strike. I have known them all now for about three years, and some of them longer. In that time I know that they were instrumental in carrying off the fare strike to the degree it did happen, with thousands, maybe tens of thousands participating. They had a lively discussion of the fare strike at the last BASTARD conference, and they put together a democratically created pamphlet providing ten on the ground accounts of the fare strike. They carried out a direct intervention against scab hirings in the oakland school system. They participated in solidarity with hotel workers’ picket lines. They have arranged meetings and discussions around council communism at the Marxist Library in Berkeley. They have collaborated with Loren Goldner on translation projects, and a roundtable discussion online. They have been in contact with comrades in the IWW. One of them put together presentations on the Oakland General Strike of 1946, and many of them are at work on a book to be published on the same subject. Several of them have had critical articles published in places like Shaping San Francisco and Anarchy magazine. They have challenged and dismantled an ISO front group, with ripples emanating nationwide that caused the ISO’s California senatorial candidate and one of the published authors from the ISO’s central organization to join the attack on them (an indication that they took it seriously), and which also produced a pamphlet describing Leninist front group tactics that reached many students and anarchists and has thousands of reads online. They have produced a sharply critical piece on a teacher’s union in hawaii which is available on libcom. They have continued to publish pamphlets by Loren Goldner, Martin Glaberman, Stan Weir, Ron Rothbart, Jean Barrot, Gilles Dauvé, and others. They have hosted a talk in San Francisco and L.A. from a member of the German Wildcat group on his observations of “socialism” in Latin America. One of them has been asked to teach a class at the New College in San Francisco. They have been a distributor of Aufheben magazine in the Bay Area. They have shown the English dub of society of the spectacle, and the films of Guy Debord. They have, along with Ken Knabb, held Society of the Spectacle reading groups. I can’t speak for KK, but even if his “resume” is “better” than my group of friends’ I still think it should not be a cause for shame on our part. I also think the group shows promise for future thought and actions. So I still reject the baseless claim that the people around the fare strike grouping ever acted as recuperators or leftists.

The saddest, most embarrassing, and most confused portion of KK’s post above is where he attempts to explain that only a minority communist group under his lead could have spread the deep insight that the attacks of 9-11 were linked to US foreign policy. But this “bombshell” is so banal that it was trumpeted from “subversive” sources like Pat Buchanon, NPR, the Nation Magazine, the State Department, and Al Gore. When KK insists the group with Loren Goldner should have gotten out this supposedly unknown analysis, he says they should have done it “in the biggest way possible.” But his only explanation of doing something in a big way, as opposed to small, or medium sized way, seems to be the size of the posters they should have put up. There is literally no further explanation on possible action, nor even a vague insight into the weird concept that it would have changed the world if only people had discovered that US foreign policy was to blame for 9-11. Apparently, the never heard of Ward Churchil, Chalmers Johnson, or even Noam Chomsky (these are sited as the most glaringly obvious celebrity messengers of KK’s supposedly unheard of analysis) never made it onto the radar at KK compound, which is shaped like a vast brain encased in an information resistant bubble. “What?!!! US foreign policy responsible for attacks on us?!!! I assumed it was because they hated freedom! This KK chap is onto something, it’s so wild it just might work!” What any of that has to do with the fare strike, or any kind of critique of the participants is left unexplained by KK., other than that it is supposed to prove we are all leftists.

Next, KK attempts to smear me as a meth addict. His known battles with certain demons render this a non starter. Other than that, I do feel the need to say I don’t do meth or any hard drugs at all. I don’t appreciate his implications that I’m an addict. And for him to say I don’t pick up on what has been written numerous times is a transparent reversal of the form the exchange has taken, in which I’ve reprinted all of his statements and responded directly to each one (this explains the length of some of my responses, in that they also contained much of his writing), as he has ignored my points. The real obliviousness here is not on my part, but on the part of KK. He is still writing to an imaginary audience, one that has not roundly denounced him at every turn. It is a kind of autism in which the actions of others around him go undetected. Despite his rationalization that he doesn’t write to make friends, can he not be aware that it is the low level of critical capability, his utter failure to treat others with respect, and his megalomania that are to blame for his now total isolation (his own description of his current situation)? Having everyone disagree with you is not in of itself an indication that you are a genius. Being unable to respond honestly or in a meaningful way to what people put to you, or to acknowledge material realities is, however, a sign of a problem. Sooner or later you will have to address the disconnect between your self-promoting version of reality, and the reactions of people who really do work to bring about the values you loudly proclaim only you hold.

Then we go the “rehash: the fiftieth generation” portion, where KK now backs even further away from the “fact” that Marc Norton wrote our flyer, and even away from the claim that it “appears” he did, to a new nebulous claim that Marc’s “attitude” makes it “tend” to seem he appeared to do so. Talk about weasel words. Yeesh.

KK also lays out a non-comment about the PLP stalinists in the Drivers Action Committee, merely saying they are lies, nuff said. Now, instead of drivers who were “about to retire anyway,” we are given some who “used to work for Muni.” But they were working for Muni when KK was working with them, in direct contravention of his self-proclaimed prime directive of “never working with Stalinists” in his “Poor the Bad and the Angry” pamphlet. We are supposed to believe that only the leaders of the DAC were in the PLP cadre in the DAC, no one else. And he still has not grocked that this is not a criticism of working with people in a coalition, which everyone did, but of the DOUBLE STANDARD he has laid out, claiming that when we work with someone who was kicked out of a Maoist group 25 or more years ago, it means we are all under his control, but when he works with NOW PRACTICING STALINISTS, who he claims not to really know, despite going to one of their retirement parties and being on an email list of theirs, it is nothing but proof that he is a pristine left-communist, despite him going against even his own writings!

The level of hypocrisy is mind boggling! What is KK’s excuse for not “picking up” on this after it has been written probably more than ten times now? He claims to have “dealt with” the issue, but he has only offered shallow and unconvincing rationalizations.

One of the most important sections of his post above is where he tacitly admits he can’t disprove the charges that he acted as a choke point between riders and drivers with no democratic input into this top down controlling action, and that he lied to comrades to do it. In his own words he claims it is justified to act as a controlling authoritarian because only he could prevent “leftist rip-off shits” from taking over a “new kind of effort.” But is a conspiratorial stranglehold really anything “new”? This is why when KK discusses the fare strike, he can never describe any of the outreach, face to face time, actual actions, statements of the people in Social Strike, or the number of people who participated in it. It has to be negated as a “debacle” so he can ignore it to focus on the war in his head which is reflective only of himself, Marc Norton, and one other individual in a perceived struggle for power. The fact that the fare strike was an autonomous grouping of freely associating people, not a Leninist dictatorship, and that these people were self-organizing and effective, and open in their class struggle/anti-capitalist focus must be flushed down the memory hole to make way for KK’s revisionism. It’s more than airbrushing, it’s burying the truth.

KK then claims that because a website Marc Norton created to promote the fare strike announces a march to city Hall which took place after the strike was over, put together by the Day Laborers (it states this clearly in the announcement) whom KK has described as victims of downe’s syndrome for marching on city hall, that anyone who was involved with the fare strike group “automatically” is a reformist and had made a call to vote. This is silly on the face of it once we apply the exact same criteria to KK’s articles on the Social Strike website. Here, we find KK’s writing, alongside a call for religious groups to organize in the social strike, and articles by a Stalinist from the PLP. Using KK’s criteria, we discover that KK is both a Stalinist and a Christian. After all, these things appeared on “his” website. By that logic, anything on libcom or anti-politics is a direct reflection of everyone's’ beliefs who participates. We don’t now, nor have we ever attempted to disassociate ourselves from Marc’s website, which has a lot of useful articles, backgrounders, interviews, photos, and so on. But for KK to claim everything on the site can be cherry picked in isolation to “prove” that we are responsible for it doesn’t hold water.

KK then claims that if we didn’t “control” Marc’s website, it somehow proves he also wrote our leaflet. A four year old could see through this fallacy with no help, and it merits no response. The leaflet writing process has been posted enough times that KK should have “picked up” on it by now. I’m tired of this having to spoon feed him his thought process.

KK thinks he is enlightening us when he says we should learn from our failure, but had he read our pamphlet, he might have seen there is an entire section in which we discuss what went right and what went wrong.

Overall, we do see him retreating away from many of his unsustainable arguments, if not entirely, then at least into forms in which they lack any actual meaning. Aside from his clueless repetition, there is almost nothing of value left to even consider in his failed two year campaign of lies. The unexpected thing is that he is, as we saw above, now tacitly admitting that.

this back and forth is unfortunately an example of the character of the local "ultra-left" in the Bay Area. this "ultra-left" is a milieu that runs from "council communists" to situationists to "post-left" anarchy-ists.

The good thing about the fare strike is that it was an actual attempt by revolutionaries at mass organizing. in my observation, this is rather rare for the local "ultra-lefts". Comrade M. refers to participation on picket lines, and that is a good thing. but what exactly is the position of Comrade M.'s group on unions and the building of mass organizations?

But this last sentence sort of contradicts what he says later:

I never saw Muni Social Strike attempt to control KK or discipline him to the group. My impression was that at the outset they sort of looked up to him as an older and more experienced comrade. They were indeed an energetic and intelligent group. However, some of them sort of disappeared halfway into the organizing, a point that KK has mentioned before. As time went on the Social Strike folks paid less and less attention to KK, which may have contributed to KK's sour grapes.

Neither Muni Fare Strike nor Muni Social Strike ever tried to build a mass organization, a venue where ordinary folks who ride Muni would be comfortable being themselves and participating as equal members. Both Fare Strike and Social Strike were loosey-goosey groups without any concept of membership, any taking of minutes to ensure correct understanding of what had been decided. The Muni Social Strike folks, at the early meetings I went to, insisted that their revolutionary anti-capitalist politics had to be in command, that putting out "anti-market" and an anti-capitalist perspective was central to what they wanted to do. This was combined with unrealistic "spontaneist" ideas -- such as the idea that people would just organize their own bus stops, without any idea of the need for a larger network for them to plug into or any actual organizing of people to do this.

in their selection of paragraphs from my own writings in their pamphlet on the fare strike, Comrade M.'s group pointedly did not include my comments about the need for organizing a mass organization of riders (unless I've overlooked it...I confess I've not read all the way through it yet).

This way of talking about what happened contributes to a self-delusional failure to examine the actual distinction between leaders and followers that came to exist from the way the whole effort was structured. The Social Strike and Fare Strike groups were actually the leadership of the effort, but they failed to make any effort to create a structure or venue through which their leadership could be made accountable. This is not a difference between Comrade M. and his group, on the one hand, and KK, but is something they both are guilty of.

Maybe i've missed this but i don't remember you explaining this. Anyways, Marc had written a leaflet that was at least very similar to the 2005 leaflet. But so what? Who cares who wrote it? The only real question would be whether it's content made sense and was a good piece of organizing literature. I think it was short, to the point, and clear. I think it was a perfectly fine piece for the actual organizing on the street that we did. Comrade M., I don't think you should be defensive about this. the folks in Muni Fare Strike were intelligent and critical and I'm sure if they didn't like the content of the leaflet, no matter who wrote the draft, they'd have said something about it in meetings.