In capitalist society, there are capitalist politicians who win most of the time. There are capitalist politicians who lose most of the time. And then, there are capitalist politicians who lose all of the time, and that's the left in the US -- and that's what can be seen with the dishonest, prolix and pretentious account of the 2005 San Francisco transit system fare strike debacle, now being posted around the internet...
FARE STRIKE! San Francisco 2005: First-Hand Accounts...hmmmmm...an ideological truth-in-packaging law should apply here...
1. This prolix leftists' memoir of failure pamphlet is clearly intended for the consumption of people who were far away from San Francisco in the summer and fall of 2005, who can't check its accuracy from first-hand experience, and who might be hoodwinked into believeing its wildly innacurate depiction of the fare strike fiasco; mass spontaneous resistance on a class basis, and other I-stiil-believe-in-the-Easter-Bunny versions of reality;
2. The individual behind this account of the events (GH), etc, and a number of his fellow conventional leftist windbags, intervened from the right against an already existing radical effort, and did all they could to turn it into a typical, Bay Area leftist single-issue complaint phenomenon,
3. They were successful in this. They were able to make the effort a product of their "vision," or more accurately lack of vision.
Subsequently the effort was a flop. All the Muni operators, bus drivers and streetcar operators, I spoke to afterward, several dozen of them, were unanimous in saying this, and they were in a better position to judge than anyone else.
As a young woman cafe worker I know put it, "The fare strike lasted about a half an hour."
4. Now GH, consistent with his Warner-Brothers-cartoon-character comical pattern of dishonesty in all things, tries to paper over the abject failure of his politics in action by claiming that this clear and obvious failure was somehow really a great-moment-in-proletarian-history,
5. And after doing all they could to turn a potential mass transit self-reduction effort on SF's Muni into a typical SF Bay Area, left-wing-of-capital load of crap, we get an airbrushed history book version -- garlanded with refernces to 'Root and Branch' -- and quotes from Guy Debord!
These guys did all they could to denude the effort of any actual anti-capitalist content. All the pro-Situ references afterward can't reverse that.
There is a big disconnect between the fact that the Potemkin-Village group "Insane Dialectical Posse," posting here, and his buddies, acted in every way like conventional leftists of the Trotskyist, social democratic or idealistic left-wing of the Democratic party stripe during the failed effort to foment a transit system fare strike in San Francisco in 2005. In the one mass action that most of them have engaged in they were the most rightward-pointing faction of the effort
Revolutionary consciousness is what it does; if what the person or people in question do in the larger world is the same old left-wing of capital crap, then that's what their politics are. All the references to Mattick, Pannekoek and the Situationists can't redeem that.
I suppose these leftists offer a good example of what results when a gaggle of nominally "Marxist" college town slackers in early middle age attempt, in the case of almost all of them, for the very first time in their lives, to engage in some kind of substantial radical collective action -- nothing happens. The haven't honed their communications skills enough to effectively communicate any message they might have to convey to contemporary working people.
"...in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence...the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as innocent as he was when he went into it."
Karl Marx, in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,' quoted here from
'Muni Social Strikeout -- the Failed Transit System Fare Strike in San Francisco in 2005,' is available on the 'Love and Treason' web page at the Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Infoshop:
http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_social_strikeout.
'The Failed Transit System Fare Strike' article is also available on libcom.org, and in numerous other places on the internet.
Kevin Keating
Kevin, thank you for your interest in our pamphlet, have you read it yet? You mentioned on the other site we were debating at that you didn’t feel the need to. Just wondering.
KK:
1. This prolix leftists' memoir of failure pamphlet is clearly intended for the consumption of people who were far, far away from San Francisco in the summer and fall of 2005, and who might be hoodwinked into believeing its wildly innacurate depiction of the 2005 fare strike fiasco; mass spontaneous resistance on a class basis, and other I-stiil-believe-in-the-Easter-Bunny versions of reality;
CM: Now you keep harping on how long our pamphlet is (“prolix”). It’s interesting that when I combine your four Train In Vain articles on the Fare Strike/Social Strike, they are 27 pages (with part five on it’s way you note). Your “social strike out article” is 24 pages long. That’s 27 and 24 pages (text only) from one person, versus 27 total pages from ten people with pictures, analysis, historical background, footnotes, etc. Who is more longwinded? You are.
As for the claim we are trying to fool people outside San Francisco, can you please show me the people INSIDE San Francisco who are backing up your weird version of events? I don’t believe there is a single one. The pamphlet we put out has ten writers. The person who designed the web site is from Social Strike, and another person from Social Strike is writing an account we are going to add. People outside SF might not know how alienated you’ve become, but they do know in the Bay Area.
You claim our account is naive and false, but the reality is that thousands of people did fare strike, It’s not hoodwinking anyone to say that I think some people were radicalized in the process of Fare Striking. As one person in one day, I personally witnessed many hundreds Fare Striking. That's why I think it's accurate to say thousands did, and very possibly tens of thousands. I have no exact count, but it's been suggested that looking at Muni's revenue losses for the first day may be a good approximation. Can you back up your charge that all ten accounts were wildly inaccurate?
KK:
2. The people behind it, admin - name removed (GH), etc, intervened from the right against an already existing radical effort, and did all they could to turn it into a typical, Bay Area leftist single-issue complaint phenomenon. Any allegedly anti-capitalist politics that they claim to profess were so well-concealed from the working class Muni riding public as to be invisible.
CM: We didn’t intervene, we joined with an exodus of people who were moving away from association with you. That’s a big part of why a second group was needed, you surely must know this by now.
If anything, our methods were far more participatory than your attempted framework (rejected roundly) for Social Strike, and that means that everyone was expected to be smart enough to represent themselves, instead of just handing out your literature (virtually unchanged since the 1990s) and relying on you as their representative from above mediating between them and the drivers. Our efforts had nothing to do with any undefined “leftist culture of failure” red herring. Our pamphlet contains a lot of stuff written while the fare strike was still going, and it was never a single issue campaign with us.
If anyone has consistently denied the possibility of meaningful working class struggle in this process, it’s you. Your hierarchical approach was deemed oppressive and counterproductive.
KK:
3. They were successful in turning the effort into a typical single-issue, SF Bay Area leftist culture of failure event. They were able to make the effort a product of their "vision," or more accurately lack of vision. Subsequently the effort was a flop. All the Muni operators I spoke to afterward, several dozen of them, were unanimous in saying this, and they were in a better position to judge than anyone else.
CM: Note that you are engaging in a “post hoc” logical fallacy here. Nowhere have you ever shown that anything “everyone else except you” did was directly responsible for the alleged failure (certainly not for the drivers’ actions during the strike), or that it was connected to a “vision.” Ideas alone did not establish the material hurdles we came up against. In the case of the drivers, they were under different types of pressure, from reports of layoffs, to the actual disciplining of two drivers who had proposed a wildcat strike. At the meetings with drivers, your literature and posters were overwhelmingly rejected by them. You attempt to paint this as a “Kevin and the drivers versus the Leftists” but no where have you ever established you had any credibility with any of the drivers. It’s nice that you talked to drivers after the strike, but you also fail to acknowledge their many acts of solidarity with riders during the strike, and these are important to gauge the possibility of cooperation between riders and drivers. Again, this is a disservice to readers, who you claim we’re trying to hoodwink by giving both positives and negatives. I hope we set the record straight on that.
Now when we look at the collective Social Strike/Fare Strike effort, we come to the Day Laborers, who more than anyone else actually did establish driver rider connections, which is why the Mission was among the major strong points of the entire effort. This was one of the SUCCESSES of the Fare Strike, and had nothing to do with you. We don’t take credit for their work, but they did come onboard through our group, not you. Aside from this, many in the Fare Strike/Social Strike, rode and talked to drivers, delivered literature to band barns, met with drivers, despite your efforts to exclude people from the start. Your not giving an honest telling, it’s bad history Kevin.
One important reason people became fed up with you was your hierarchical approach. You acted as a choke point between the riders and the drivers, hand picking who would get to meet with drivers, despite their telling some of the people involved that they wanted to meet more of the riders in the campaign, as the saved e-mails from the Social Strike web site indicate. In fact, two of the core people involved with these early meeting groups were harassed out by you when you labeled them “leftists.” These were among the first casualties of your sectarianism. Eventually, every single person was labeled a dupe of the evil Leninists who allegedly stole “your fare strike” which you apparently own. But as has emerged in the Bay Area discussions, most anarchists and ultra-leftists see you as a liability, a liar, and unprincipled.
KK:
4. Now GH, consistent with his Warner-Brothers-cartoon-character comical pattern of dishonesty in all things, tries to paper over the abject failure of his politics in action by claiming that this clear and obvious failure was somehow really a great-moment-in-proletarian-history,
CM: CM: Your one to talk of lies. You reposted several accusations here that were already debunked, and you act as if you never received a response from us.
You don’t seem to get that what we’re doing is presenting first hand accounts in a democratically organized effort in which all authors participated directly. Nothing is papered over here. There is a lot of self-critique in the pamphlet, in the accounts and the group conclusion. You are displaying your basic contempt for materialist analysis when you insist that the “abject failure” is to be explained by someone’s supposed “politics,” which you also misrepresent, or don’t grasp.
Your model was to plaster your politics onto the entire effort, to the point that you didn’t consider who would be reading the flyers, or how to quickly get peoples’ attention. Our efforts included flyers (NOT written solely by Marc Norton as you’ve erroneously claimed for almost two years now), that were shaped by our experiences talking to people, comments from the drivers (remember them Kevin?), the Day Laborers suggestions, 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.
KK:
5. And after doing all they could to turn a potential mass transit self-reduction effort on SF's Muni into a typical SF Bay Area, left-wing-of-capital load of crap, we get an airbrushed history book version in pdf format -- garlanded with quotes from Guy Debord!
CM I prefer to describe it in this way. Your ego went nuts in your dealings with the Anarchist Action and Social Strike groups. They combined forces with us without alerting you. Together the groups moved forward. As more than one person pointed out at the recent BASTARD anarchist conference (which you’ve also denounced), valuable time was wasted over the fights that arose between you and Marc, mainly from your undisciplined sniping, and this delayed a well coordinated action, especially given that everyone who has actually agreed to sit down and think about the fare strike has stated we needed more people involved. But those of us who were actually still working together all knew the essential judgment of your role in the months leading up to the strike. We can say we’re anti-capitalist and you can scream “no you’re not” forever, but until you can back up your bizarre claims, our writing and actions will be the deciding factor. And I do encourage people to read our pamphlet at farestrike.org to see if they think we’re all leftist leninist dupes.
KK:
These guys did all they could to denude the effort of any actual anti-capitalist content. All the pro-Situ references afterward can't reverse that.
CM:
CM: I think your efforts at control from above are far more indicative of a sort of Second International/pro-capitalist position than ours. Your one man management is very different from actions based on spontaneous action from the participants themselves. We worked with radicals or people who were becoming radicalized in the process of fare striking. In contrast, you demanded a fully developed party line be parroted by everyone in your orbit. As I’ve explained many times, and you’ve never acknowledged, our class struggle focus was always front and center in our interaction with people. You were not at our meetings; you were not with us flyering; you weren’t with us during the fare strike; and you seemingly have not read our pamphlet; but you claim to know everything about our actions and the content of our efforts.
KK:
Oh yeah, by the way, did any of these clowns ever have the backbone or the even minimal integrity to ask Marc Norton, the guy who wrote their leaflets for them, and gave their effort its central political direction, what particular brand of Leninist he is?
CM: This loaded question was answered yes, why pretend it wasn’t and repost here as if we ignored the question? That is called lying Kevin.
This is what I wrote in direct response to your question:
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 Kevin?), 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.
What I want to know, is since you claim we were led by a Stalinist/Trotskyist/Leninist (your description has continually morphed to suit your fancy), why were you ever willing to work with people from the Drivers Action Committee? Isn’t it true that their leadership is essentially a Progressive Labor Party cadre? Doesn’t that make you a Maoist dupe? And can’t we extrapolate from the fact that you went to the retirement party of one of their members that you were working behind the scenes to lead the Social Strike into some kind of new Great Leap Forward, based on the teachings of your God Chairman Mao? Come clean Kevin!!!
KK:
Four of the nine -- not ten, as claimed -- people contributing to this prolix effort are beer-drinking buddies of the author, GH. As such I assume they are putative members of the Potemkin-Village leftist group "Insane Dialectical Posse." To fail to identify them as such is manipulative and dishonest.
CM: Sorry you counted wrong, it is ten, they are actually numbered in the online version. As for your years long ad hominem attack on Gifford as an alleged heavy drinker,that may be based on your friendship years ago, but as it pertains to the present, it’s an obvious case of projection. Your own reputation, complete with the documented “air rage” incident, is so well known that it merits no further comment.
And you claim we’re hiding our identities, but our names are given in the pamphlet, sometimes with only initials, but the initials are well known to anyone who would care who we are. You’re REALLY stretching here.
KK:
Maybe in this they are picking up some tips from Marc Norton, the Leninist who wrote their leaflets for them, and gave their effort some of its most significant political coloration -- ignoring the drivers and Balkanizing what needed to be a join riders and drivers effort into a mostly riders-only effort.
CM: In typical Bolshevik fashion, you keep insisting that it was our job to organize the drivers, when in fact we wanted to meet them halfway. None of the drivers ever called for a Fare Strike. The main liability to gaining a closer relationship with them was your self appointed role as choke point. As stated, the drivers criticized your literature for being too ideological and too verbose. You claim we wanted to ice the drivers out and then imply that it was our fault that they didn’t participate in larger numbers. None of that is true. Our crews were among the people who did meet with drivers early on, and who also were talking to the drivers on the busses about the strike up to and throughout the strike. The biggest show of solidarity from drivers came from the Mission district, where the Day Laborers helped cement their trust. Recall the Day Laborers were brought onboard through the Fare Strike group. Your charge of our anti-driver stance is totally specious. The punishment of two Muni drivers who had suggested a wild cat strike was partly responsible for adding to the drivers’ hesitations. It had nothing to do with how one or another flyer was worded. To suggest that is absolutely unsupported by any evidence, like most of your outrageous claims.
KK:
"...in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence...the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as innocent as he was when he went into it."
Karl Marx, in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,' quoted here from 'Muni Social Strikeout -- the Failed Transit System Fare Strike in San Francisco in 2005.'
CM: In response to your Marx quote, I quoted this about you:
About a year before, I had read an article of his in a magazine, written with a terrible pretension to the most naive poetry and, at the same time to psychology. He described the wreck of a steamer somewhere on the English coast, of which he himself had been a witness and had seen how the perishing were being saved and the drowned dragged out. The whole article, quite a long and verbose one, was written with the sole purpose of self-display. One could simply read it between the lines: “Pay attention to me, look at how I was in those moments. What do you need the sea, the storm, the rock, the splintered planks of the ship for? I’ve described it all well enough for you with my mighty pen. Why look at this drowned woman with her dead baby in her dead arms? Better look at me, at how I could not bear the sight and turned away. Here I am turning my back; here I am horrified and unable to look again; I’ve shut my eyes--interesting, is it not?”
(Fyodor Dostoevsky, _Demons_,85)