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

Kevin Keating, people would take you more seriously if you were less of a jerk and if your posts were shorter. Unfortunately, I imagine that the less people take you seriously the more of a jerk you are and the longer you go on, therefore the less people take you seriously:

J+P... ~S ... (J+P)'
(J+P)'... (~S)' ... (J+P)''

Accumulate accumulate, that is moses and the prophets.

I love not living in the Bay Area.

Whats "binky" mean? Is it the same as boring?

Kevin, touché.

J'+~P... ~S ... J'+~P

I love being an anachro-swindicalist and not having to work with KK.

I looked up "prolix"

kk:

what kk means is that the other ultras don't agree with him, or don't get along with him.

Anyone thats totally nutty?

C'mon now, its not that simple. You gotta be totally nutty AND be able to competently gush on about obscure bullshit written by commie misfits like Gilles Dauve, Herman Gorter, etc. A newsletter helps too, but a website could suffice. But it can't become too popular because if your circle of comrades becomes larger than five people a split will need to happen.

people who won't build mass organizations out of a fear they will be "reformist" is ultra-left.

Hi Syndicalistcat. First of all it’s nice to see someone other than kk posting about the actual fare strike. When we put out the pamphlet we wanted open discussions on this. We got that at the BASTARD conference and that was great. KK was not there and people actually spoke up and did some thinking. KK was not barred, but it’s interesting how him not being there tends to open things up. Compare this to the internet discussions, which immediately devolved into me trying to clear up the mess of KK’s slander campaign.

Syndicalistcat quoted me:
CM quote:
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 round 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....

Syndicalistcat:
But this last sentence sort of contradicts what he says later:
CM quote:
But it wasn’t until it was clear he was a totally vindictive asshole that people understood they had to get away from him.

CM: I can see it looking contradictory, but from what I saw it has to do with the timeline. People had gotten away from KK and congregated toward Fare Strike, but some were sort of still in touch attempting to “bridge the gap.” Many who first meet KK are familiar mostly with MYEP, but specifically, the stories he tells about it. They also know him as a published author and someone who always rhetorically takes the most radical sounding positions as he misrepresents others as “to the right” of himself. I myself was pretty excited to meet him during the strike. I didn’t realize he was a liar until afterward when he suddenly started writing that we were all pro-wage-labor leftists. Anyway, some people did not fully break with KK until after the strike when he declared they had all been leftists for working with Fare Strike. KK claims the anarchists were clueless and incompetent. What I saw was them realizing what he was about, then getting away from him. The clear eyedness developed through the process of being in proximity to him, and since the strike, the people who KK now attacks have written him off for good (this is now a well established trajectory for every single person who has ever had to deal with him in any sustained effort and has nothing to do with them all allegedly being liberals or whatever). Anyway, the clear eyedness evolves from experience.

Syndicalistcat:
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.

CM: “Disciplining” KK is an impossibility. People had actually gotten verbal agreements from KK to be less of a dick (not to refrain from critique, just not to be a total dick) at meetings and online, but he did not stick to them (it took the span of one meeting for him to break the agreement and start denouncing again). At that point, some people who had been there from the start began to bail on the whole thing. No one said “hide your politics” to KK, but when he just came out full throttle with denouncements of people, most people didn’t know what he was talking about and some just assumed that the entire effort was filled with wing nuts.

Syndicalistcat:
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.

CM: I really think that what KK sees as them disappearing has something to do with them disappearing from his proximity, as you allude to. Over time, a restructuring did happen. It ended up with a group that became known as “Fare Strike” but which really was made up of lots of different people coming together. The people in IDP/Adventure Club etc. were not there as a cohesive group. The process of the Fare Strike helped solidify us around this action, which is why I think this grouping of people, still doing things (I listed in my last post) has potential. We don’t see ourselves as a vanguard, just people working on theory and trying to tie that into actions. We don’t have a party line in the IDP, but we have all been informed by Situationist/Council Communist/Anarchist theory, Marx, as well as labor history and current events, and Larry from the three stooges, who was a council communist.

Syndicalistcat:
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.

CM: We didn’t do well enough, but we did try. We invited people to join us in the organizing effort, letting them know where the meetings were. We also asked them to organize their own participation in the fare strike. While the latter happened, the former did not. This is true of both groups. On the other hand, I would count myself as someone who was brought into meetings despite not identifying as an ultra-left person at the time (I still don’t label myself, I just say what influences me). The labels are problematic for me, as I certainly don’t see any connection between what KK does and people like Gorter, Pannekoek, Debord, Ruhle, Perlman, Luxemburg, etc. So if he wants to attack me for not living up to one or another label, it doesn’t bother me, I can’t take him seriously as anything but an authoritarian wing nut. I believe peoples’ actions ultimately are the test, and this is why I choose to focus on the fare strike events rather than the detached rhetoric/myth making one-two-punch of KK.

Syndicalistcat:
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.

CM: Yes! KK keeps writing about MN being our “leader” and so on, but it’s not true at all. You were actually at some of the Fare Strike group meetings, and you know this. I agree that some of the indecision hurt the group, especially in the case of sustaining it beyond day one. Part of that was that we had to keep regrouping to accomodate different personalities, and to see who was fitting where in the drama between KK and MN. That slowed everything down. But from what I saw, Social Strike people were still doing some things with KK, as I say, having not yet made a clean break. But by the end of it even the stragglers did. I don’t know of anyone who has “split” with us, and that’s why KK has to (as you point out--anyone who doesn’t agree with him, which is everyone) denounce everyone else as liberals.
We were all figuring out tactics for the fare strike itself even up to the last day, and I remember you being at the meetings where we were weighing how many people we had against what our target bus stops in the city should be, writing with a grease pencil on that map. And as it happened, on the first day of the strike, being mobile became a clearly more effective tactic for many in the fare strike, agitating for the strike on the busses and off.

Syndicalistcat:
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.

CM: From what I saw, the anti-capitalist in control focus did not go away and I’m glad it did not. But this never translated into excluding people. When I agitated with “F” and “D” at city college, we were able to both openly proclaim our anti-capitalist focus, and listen to people explain why they would participate. Many people explain essentially anti-capitalist arguments without calling it that. This happens all the time. The hope was the action itself would help clarify the opposition between capital and the working class. To me, one of the strengths of the Fare Strike meetings is that no one was ever told how they were supposed to participate as far as what they were saying in their conversations in the outreach. Sure, we all knew to explain the fare strike, make it clear that the drivers and riders were in solidarity, to let people know about our legal team and other factors that were basics, but the styles I saw were varied in different peoples’ outreach. One thing I saw as very similar between IDP types like GH, JZ, GJ, SF, JA, and the anarchist folks from Social Strike etc. was that the class struggle aspects were always up front and clear. It used to be frustrating to me when KK tried to lie about this, but now I don’t think people believe him, so it bugs me a lot less.
It’s harder to get people to want to come to meetings with something they are just finding out about. But when the day of the fare strike came, I know you agree, many thousands of people did participate, and their desire to do so was reinforced by seeing others doing it. So there was a spontaneist aspect. But not one that sustained itself. And the looseness of the group of people hurt the effort after the first day, from what I saw. But I do wonder if many of these people kept engaging in anti-capitalist actions together, strengthening the ties they made there, and learning from past mistakes, if the next efforts could be that much stronger. Part of what would have helped would have been a widespread open discussion on the strike, but this was eviscerated by KK’s Ptolemaic rendering of the Bay Area revolving around the gravitational pull of the black hole of his ego. But at least his version is no longer taken for granted as truth.

Syndicalistcat:
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).

CM: No, you’re absolutely correct, and we partially remedied the problem by providing links to your full articles in the online pamphlet.

Syndicalistcat Quoted CM:

CM quote: 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.

Syndicalist cat:
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.

CM: I hope I’m not being delusional. My comments were in response to the charge that a single Leninist had hijacked KK’s gig with the help of a leftist. I think my description is far more accurate, and I think you agree with that. Because KK simply keeps attacking on the same false points, we have not been able to move to a more real critique.
It’s quite valid to bring up the limited participation of community members in the organizing, but I also think we should remember what community groups DID join the effort. The Day Laborers are one. The photos of the events show this, and as quoted from our pamphlet, “various groups of senior and disabled riders, homeless organizations, the Chinese Progressive Association and the Day Labor Program, which is made up of mostly Latin American immigrant workers” were all participating. As we know, many drivers did participate, many did not.
You say our leadership role was not made accountable but I think our flyer is a good example of at least one area where we did adjust based on community input. Members of the Day Laborer program, drivers, and other community members had been arguing for concise flyers that explained the service cuts, layoffs, and what a fare strike is. Members of the community groups were actually responsible for the translations.
Also, it’s one thing to lead by giving orders, stifling input, denouncing people, intimidating, and demanding loyalty to a line. It’s quite another thing to “lead” by simply participating with fellow working class organizers in a way that allows maximum autonomy. I’m wondering if you agree with me that the Fare Strike group meetings were always very open. The participants were bringing their own plans, not going along with what some “center” had already come up with. I can’t equate what I saw with the Fare Strike group to KK’s obviously controlling methods. You yourself noted that KK demanded people adhere to his line, but I don’t think you saw that in the Fare Strike group, which you seemed happy to work with, and us with you.
I think that community groups that participated, and individuals too, did so on their own terms.
Having said this, I’m interested in more input from you on this subject, and on hearing from others who were involved in the fare strike.

Syndicalistcat:
Quoted CM:
CM quote:
The leaflet writing process has been posted enough times that KK should have “picked up” on it by now.

Syndicalistcat:
Maybe i've missed this but i don't remember you explaining this.

CM: Here is one link from a couple of months back as an example:
“You are dead wrong when you say that Marc Norton wrote our flyers.
Our flyers were shaped by our experiences talking to people, comments
from the drivers (remember them KK?), the Day Laborers suggestions
that they be concise, and discussion at meetings. The reality is that
our flyers did not sum up our "politics." They were something we used
to introduce the topic of a Fare Strike quickly. Where the class
struggle politics came in, almost always, was in the individual
discussions. But there were a lot of people who never read _Capital_
who were interested in the Fare Strike for less fully developed reasons.”
source: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/04/367533.html?c=on#c170986

CM: Elsewhere I’ve gone into more detail on this when responding to KK, but he has never acknowledged it, despite posting responses. The most he’s done is retreat on the wording of his claim, until it has become an almost meaningless haiku like description of chance, tendencies, and probability. He knows Marc didn’t write our flyer, but he can’t let go of one of his favorite smears of us. (I notice he is now reverting back to this lie in his last post, a sign of his utter rigidity and lack of contact with material factors in the fare strike.)

Syndicalistcat:
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.

CM: I do appreciate you tempering your critique with some of what you found positive. On the Marc wrote the flyer thing though, I’m telling you when I was there, the flyers changed a few times, based on the inputs I’ve mentioned. Marc was not in charge of flyer writing, but he was at the meetings where they were discussed and did have input like everyone else. There is a flyer that mentions “200 drivers” will be laid off, but there were conflicting reports coming out from the drivers, and at some point it was not clear whether the layoffs were just being floated to scare drivers or what. That might be why another version of the flyer did not mention the layoffs. I do know some people in fare strike wanted more focus on drivers in the flyers, while others thought the flyers were not guided at getting the drivers in the strike. This had already been going on with the meetings, the flyers that went to bus barns, the riding and talking with drivers and so on. By the time the strike was about to go down, it was accepted that the drivers were not able to come forward and declare for a fare strike as a group, largely due to pressure from Muni and their own union.
As you know, while KK has been acting as if only he was there at the beginning, and that Fare Strike group “sprouted up” out of nowhere to take his idea, in reality, many of the people in Fare Strike (or who worked with us at times like yourself) had been at the first meetings and had been meeting with drivers, except when KK prevented this, and I’ve posted his emails detailing this tactic.
There was never a coup from the right. This is a fiction that KK uses to fit the fare strike story into a familiar historical model that he thinks he can hoodwink people with. But despite his condescending view of everyone around him, people just are not the suckers he takes them for.

http://www.farestrike.idpeditions.org/

People with the best wheate paste recipes?

crikey. i don't even know you and i think you're an anus.

Yeah because if you're not nutty you'll graverob the friends of durruti, Makhno, and Malatesta into support for national liberation movements, union bureaucracies, and calls for the "nationalization of Ireland's natural resources".

In the previous thread you used "off-the-rack-on-40%-off-sales-day-at-Macy's leftist boobs"

KK has a lot of nerve calling ME a chucky doll. I took this shot of him at an anti-war rally and he bears more than a slight resemblance to YOU KNOW WHO.

Kevin Keating is clearly a total fuckwit and this thread is trainwreck.

Anyone who actually wants to build power must work with (currently) reformist mass organisations as their main political focus. That's where the class is - in unions, residents associations and local community action groups. Oddly enough it's not organised into groups with rightwing, reactionary, narcissistic, misanthropic insurrectionists.

Comrade M., you have something of a tendency to run-on sentences. You seem to be suggesting that the people who "disappeared" from Muni Social Strike ended up in Fare Strike. I think not. None of the people who I saw early on in Social Strike meetings who disappeared were with Fare Strike people during the strike nor did i see them at Fare Strike meetings.

CM:

Ultra-leftists, like I said.

me: "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)."

You completely miss the point. I'm not bitching about you not including my stuff. If you don't agree with it, why should you include it? My point is this: It is evidence that you all disagreed with organizing a mass riders union. Since this was a central criticism of your group, Muni Fare Strike, I made in my piece, you didn't want to include this in the pamphlet since then you'd be including a criticism of your own orientation.

I believe that this was a critical mistake of both Social Strike and Fare Strike, and I believe that it flowed from the ultra-leftism of both groups. At the very beginning of the organizing, six months before the Sept 1st fare hike, i suggested that we try to build a membership organization, an organization of ordinary Muni riders, that we not presuppose agreement with any "anti-capitalist" or "revolutionary" or "anarchist" perspective or whatever. That we organize a campaign organization that would be of, by and for working class Muni riders.

In the first Social Strike meetings I suggested we try to build a Muni rider union. I suggested that we start right away tabling at major bus stops, explaining the issue in terms of its impact on riders (fare hike, service cuts), and trying to get them to be members.

Why do this?

1. How do we create new activists? How do we draw ordinary working class folks into the movement and train them? Well, one way we do this is by them becoming members of an organization, getting involved in making the decisions, learning from the experience.

2. Drawing ordinary riders into an organization allows us to build a base we could have used to spread the strike. We could have passed out buttons months in advance "Fare Strike Sept 1" for the members of a riders union to wear on the buses. With a membership, we'd have had more people to help with the organizing when the fare strike actually happened. When the bus riders union in L.A. conducted their "No Seats No Fare" strike in 1998, that was based on a membership organization with hundreds of members they had created over five years.

3. With a mass organization in place, the struggle could be continued by other means after the fare strike. A riders union could be a public voice for the interests of working class Muni riders. Protests of various sorts could be organized, such as at hearings. In the absence of such an organization, no one speaks for the working class riders publically when there are public debates about public transit.

CM:

Yes, it was two groups of revolutionaries who said they wanted their own politics to be a dominant theme. How does this make this an action of the riders?

CM:

I know about the minor modification about layoffs in the leaflet. I talked with Marc about that. From what you say, i'd infer that Marc wrote a draft and maybe along the way there were some minor tweaks. If that's what happened, and that's consistent with what you say, then it's a bit misleading for you to swear up and down that KK is wrong when he says Marc wrote the leaflet. But who cares? Why be defensive about it?

Your answer to my point about organizing the riders to participate in an organization is to say that your group was open to people coming to meetings. Did your group advertise its meetings broadly? I don't think so. Did you do outreach to bring in riders? I don't think so.
Besides, that, once again, misses the point. Your group had no vision of building a riders union, a membership organization of the riders, that would continue to exist after the fare strike. You certainly never mentioned this idea in any of your literature.

Your description of your group's workings, and my experience of it, fits the label "tyranny of structurelessness." Accountability to the riders would have required that you build an actual membership organization with some structure.

That's not the same thing as them participating in making the decisions. That's just an obvious need for organizing in a city where the Latino and Chinese populations together are a majority of the working class population. People had mentioned this from the very beginning.

Kind of a side observation here... there seems to be a connection between the tendency toward guilt-by-association (accusing people of having the same political orientation as someone they're organizationally affiliated with) and the fear of participating in mass organizations with mostly non-revolutionary membership. Does it come down to an effort to protect themselves against paranoid fingerpointing by other ultralefts? ("You were in a group that willfully included in its ranks fifty-two admitted Democrats, seven Republicans, two Jehovah's Witnesses and a Larouchite, you backstabbing/doorknocking parliamentarian fraud!")

KK does attempt the guilt by association, but even his associations are hyperbolic and false. But notice that I have only pointed to his affiliations as an example of his double standard, not to "prove" he is a Stalinist, a Christian or whatever. What makes him an authoritarian is his hyper controlling, his conspiratorialism, and his willingness to lie about others for his own gain. There's also the "mean people suck" aspect that makes me think he needs a hug.

I'm also not willing to be lumped into some broad category "with" KK. I don't see him maintaining a principled approach to his actions, which never match his rhetoric. I don't put myself forward as an expert, I only try to call KK on his crap because he does present himself as an authority on theory, despite some glaring errors (not against some "orthodoxy" but simple understanding) in his own writing. I'm not claiming to be an expert on theory either, just saying that if KK wants to denounce people as idiots, he'd better be able to have his own, sometimes very stupid writing critiqued to all hell. Now I'm sucked into a fucked up death dance with him so it's hard to see where the lines end. But my goal has always been setting the record straight on the fare strike, not proving I'm an ultraleft superman, which I'm not.

I think one can glean from KK's constant accusations that other people are "trust fund anarchists" and his attacks on anyone who might have ties to their family as inherently proving their petit bourgeoisie status, that there is a certain assumption on his part that one needs to be a "self made communist." It strikes me as projection of his own feelings of shame, but also as embodying bourgeois attitudes about picking yourself up by your bootstraps. There are all types of family situations that people are in based on both economic needs and on loving relationships. Blanket attacks on people as "mama's boys" or whatever are just useless to me.

To the person who said we have to organize "where the class is" (if I'm paraphrasing correctly) I would only say that this too could be a reductionist statement. Should we all go to the churches to "organize"? (I do understand you qualified your statement with specific examples too.) Otto Rühle and Herman Gorter really have interesting cautionary statements on blanket calls to participate in institutions without acknowledging their functions in regard to capital, the history of their relation to the working class, and the extent of what would one could realistically expect by operating inside them. I do think for many workers now, it would be nuts to urge a decertification drive if it just meant they would become totally open immediately to harsher unchecked attacks. But I also see that when unions repeatedly show themselves to be mediators between capitalist bosses and the workers, instead of a tool of the workers to organize their own production, demands, lives, they must be challenged or given the boot. Reading _Solidarity For Sale_ by Robert Fitch is a very good look at the unions in the US.

I have never come out and labelled myself ultraleft, I only pointed out that some in our group can be described that way. But most of us are interested in a broad spectrum of theory, and try to test it in our own actions. We've certainly not burned bridges like KK in some purist adherence to replaying history exactly as it is "supposed" to be if one wants to act correctly. That is mere ideology. It's a long story.

There is nothing obscure about a lot of the names dropped as somebody implied a few posts ago. Herman Gorter to Lenin is very straightforward, and it has to do with material reality trumping opportunist rhetoric. I bring this up because I see the same disconnect between KK's goal, claiming a leadership mantle, and Lenin's opportunism in attempting to sublimate foreign CPs to Bolshevik nationalist goals over revolutionary goals. In both instances, revolutionary goals take a back seat to the concern of maintaining power. It may seem a stretch, but it really connects in my mind.

Syndicalistcat I'm not ignoring you. It's late and I wanted to put some more thought into my response to you. I'm recording music again tomorrow but may be able to post.

Apologies if I still come off as confrontational. I feel as if I've been under constant personal attack from KK for a while and I tend to have better, more open discussions with my closer group of friends than I do on these discussion groups because I can let my freak flag fly and admit when I don't know things and ask questions rather than having it always come down to a contest, which I hate.

Mass campaigns which have utilised churches as a means of social networking, and mapping have in fact proved very successful. If I was involved in refugee or immigrant organising I'd organise out of churches, Polish clubs, pubs, whatever the fuck is going to help build power and solidarity.

Unions are not organs of revolutionary transformation of society, that's true, but this is reductionism to a convenient grand narrative. Unions come in many different forms and the key factor that prevents unions from being fighting bodies which try to reclaim workers more of their surplus labour, is a deactivated rank and file. Union structures can be bad or good for encouraging participation from the rank and file, but there's no blanket generalisation that can be made and even within dreadful right-wing top down unions certain strategies can be used to mitigate some of these effects, if you can get members active.

Involvement in trade unions is a tactical decision, not one of principle. That's different from organising to 'win' the unions to your party or trying to become the bureaucracy.

Whatever criticisms you may have of Lenin and the Bolshevik, by 1917 their party had thousands of members and represented a substantial chunk of the views of the Russian working class and peasantry. Somehow I don't think KK and Lenin and the Bolsheviks are directly analogous in terms of social relevance. Perhaps if you were comparing him to a jumped-up, lonely, lunatic bus conductor...

Dundee i thought the working class were in the SSP?

What exactly is your problem Oliver? You seem to get off on dropping factitious insuations everywhere without actually making any accusations which can be challenged. Is that because of your views on homosexuals?

Its been 6 months. Isn't it time for you to opportunistically change all your politics and start denouncing all your new folks?