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My Encounter with the "Precarious and Service Workers Assembly" of Occupy Oakland

Fri, 01/11/2013 - 11:34 -- Anonymous (not verified)

From Indybay

In early spring of 2012, announcements appeared at various internet sites calling for a “Workers Against Work -- Precarious and Service Workers Assembly,” ostensibly connected to or an outgrowth of the Occupy movement in Oakland.

The first leaflet that I saw for the effort said this:

“As service workers, we are often both overworked and underpaid; with Management forcing workers to work ever faster in an ever shorter amount of time. Productivity and speed-of-service requirements increase while hours per week are slashed. It’s clear: The harder we work, and the less we get paid, the richer they get! Many of us are already in tough situations as parents, immigrants, young people and students. Racism is blatantly apparent at many of our workplaces, with Latino and immigrant workers confined to back of the house positions, maintaining a racial hierarchy to keep us separated. For some, a job at a restaurant or a café is a 2nd or even 3rd job, a result of the declining wages of other careers. Even worse, we often find ourselves forced into student loan and credit card debt because of low pay. All the while, rent, food, and transportation costs climb through the roof.

“As frustrating as it may be for us to admit, our labor is useless. We produce nothing of lasting value. Whether its serving coffee, preparing food, or manning a cash register and being nothing other than an accessory for cash transactions. We are part of a massive sector of work, a whole generation that does little more than fill very temporary roles. We are the ones who put a smiling face on circulation. But we don’t need to tell you: Work fucking sucks and we all know it, so let’s do something about it!…”

This statement and the trajectory of action it implied were an excellent first step. As someone with a multiple decade-long track record of low wage temp and service sector gigs, I have an intense personal stake in seeing sustained, collective resistance to exploitation emerge among my fellow wage slaves in the service sector.

And this pertains to matters bigger and badder than anything as trivial as my isolated individual situation. As noted here:

“Some depressing facts: (In the US) Nearly half of people ages 16 to 29 do not have a job. A quarter of those who do work in hospitality -- travel, leisure, and of course food service. A study of 4 million Facebook profiles found that, after the military, the top four employers listed by twentysomethings were Walmart, Starbucks, Target and Best Buy. The restaurant industry in particular is booming; one in 10 now work in food service – 9.6 million on us. These numbers are growing each year. (My emphasis.)

“Food and retail jobs usually don’t pay a living wage -- let alone enough to pay back student loans – and they’re supplanting jobs that do. The average restaurant worker made $15,000 in 2009, compared to $74,000 for a manufacturing worker. Factory work, once the default employment choice for newly minted adults, was backbreaking and monotonous. But, if unionized, it was also stable, full-time, and decently paid.

“None of these things are true of the modern service industry, and shockingly few people are working to change that. Only 2 percent of food service workers are union members. Big unions like the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union opt to organize health care workers and teachers instead of the folks behind America’s bars and cash registers…the restaurant workforce is changing. Whereas in the 1970’s you could visit a steel ill and declare all the metal pourers “working class” today philosophy majors from Brown are making lattes alongside folks who grew up poor and assumed they’d sling drinks for life…”
(“Minimum Rage,” Nora Willis Aronowitz, ‘GOOD’ Magazine, Spring 2012, taken here from the July-August 2012 issue of the UTNE Reader)

No tendencies exist within the American political system to slow, let alone halt, much less reverse massive accelerating structural social inequality. The buying power of most working people’s wages began losing ground to the cost of living in the 1970’s, and this has occurred in tandem with a battery of social, tax and regulatory policies that have achieved a constant massive redistribution of wealth upwards into the hands of an ever smaller number of the rich and the ultra-rich. Massive inequality has been on the rise for decades. It will continue to rise. The growth of the low wage service sector is a function of this. The spontaneous rapid emergence of the Occupy movement was a response to pandemic inequality, and although Occupy has subsided Occupy was probably the first in a series of popular resistance movements to come. Workers in the service sector are not in the strategically central position to fight back that employees of the transportation, communications and power generation sectors are, but the sheer numbers of people in low-wage dead end job service sector jobs can make the service sector crucial in the rise of a wider and deeper working class hostility to capitalist America.

As Aronowitz points out, unions largely ignore the service sector, and in any case union membership numbers have been declining for decades. Capitalist business organizations of the AFL-CIO and SEIU stripe are losing their ability to buy social peace for the capitalist class by integrating a significant percentage of the wage-earning class into a lifelong stable system of exploitation. Unions do not command the material, ideological or emotional allegiance of most wage earners in the US and from an aggressive anti-capitalist perspective this is tremendous good news.

The gap Aronowitz notes between conventional upwardly mobile expectations of mainstream college graduates and the abysmal realities that are waiting in the job market can be the fertile soil in which an antagonism to this social order grows. And bad news faced by college grads at Starbucks or Trader Joes is worse news for hardcore working people, for whom an escape into the professional strata via diploma has never been an option, and who are acutely threatened by lumpenization, criminalization, and complete dispossession. Decades of declining wages, the absence of any credible work-with-the-system option for profound structural reform, the decline of the unions and the attendant fortunate disappearance of the union’s Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist camp followers have created preconditions for a 21st century anti-wage labor politics in the spirit of the old IWW. A proliferation of “Precarious and Service Workers Assemblies” initiated by energetic, inventive, determined and persevering enemies of capitalism could be a huge step towards catalyzing nationwide resistance among an expanding hard-pressed sector of the contemporary wage earning class. Social inequality can now become the fatal Achilles heel of capitalist America.

In statements on http://www.indybay.org, Facebook and elsewhere, the people initiating the Precarious and Service Workers Assembly were clearly animated by authentic anti-capitalist/anti-work and ultra-left sentiments currently fashionable among some twentysomethings in the Northern California anti-authoritarian subcultural identity scene. While it is pleasant to see a great availability of authentic communist/ultra-left documents and analysis on the internet, what happens on the internet stays on the internet, exists only on the internet, and never makes the leap to the non-virtual, indisputably alive, corporeal world, the world we actually live in, and the only world that matters.

I’ve been around the Northern California anti-authoritarian subcultural identity scene since the fall of 1982. In this 30-year span of time, with the very partial exceptions of Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails, I do not know of a single case where anarchist scenesters have produced a credible, ongoing, collective public manifestation of what they claims to be about in the world outside of their hermetically sealed subcultural cocoon. Activities of the Northern California anti-authoritarian/anarchist scene exist solely to reproduce the scene’s existence as an abject, passive, terminally disengaged drop-out culture phenomenon, and these activities only take place in the very safest of safe settings.

My gut instinct was that none of the people calling for this Assembly of Precarious and Service Sector Workers had ever been involved in any real-world attempt to assert the ferocious insurrectionary sentiments that they love to post on their Facebook pages. However, we all have to start somewhere, and the new opening and energy provided by Occupy gave reason to think this effort was not going to be another self-indulgent drop-out culture trip, but a sustained attempt to spread resistance and unrest among mainstream working people. My hope was that this could be part of the next step for Occupy -- to move from being a protest ghetto phenomenon into becoming an actual proletarian social movement for our time, sinking deep roots in the everyday life struggles of the vast majority of wage earners who pay no attention to the left, and who never go to protest ghetto events.

The first meeting of the Precarious and Service Workers Assembly was in early March 2012. The meeting that I attended was some weeks later in April. I arrived on time at a park near downtown Oakland. I was the first person there. Some minutes later another person appeared, an individual who I had encountered on previous occasions at the subcultural scenester space Station 40 in SF’s Mission District. This person told me with some embarrassment that the Assembly was probably not going to happen that day, since most of the people involved were bailing on it to go to a barbeque. This didn’t fill me with a surfeit of confidence, but we remained, and more people trickled in. With the passage of an hour or so a group sizable enough to conduct a meeting was present.

After meeting several times this “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” still had no clear focus or direction. There was no sense of forward motion. There was obscure talk of getting revenge on some obnoxious insignificant small business owner who had been mistreating friends of the assembly members but even this led to no specific proposals for action. I got the impression that the real focus here was not on temp and service sector employees as such, but on anti-authoritarian subcultural scenesters who currently had service sector gigs, and were apparently discovering for the first time in their lives and to their tremendous awe and amazement that working for a living is not endless fun fun fun. Food kyped from workplaces was shared among us at the meeting. I am as fond of high quality Bulgarian yogurt and French Roast from Peets as the next downwardly mobile bohemian déclassé, but I also tried to make a point here that the emphasis of this Assembly should not be on the satisfaction of our individual petty survival needs, but on using the wind at our backs from Occupy to try to catalyze some larger movement of resistance into being. Taking stuff from the boss is fine, but we can never remotely get back what’s taken from us in wage labor with this. As with large-scale urban looting, these “molecular attacks on the commodity-form” are subatomic in the scale of their insignificance. This effort needed to focus on mainstream working people in the larger society around us, and not on indolent slackers who were out to get kicks from fleeting acts of rebellion and who were into industrial strength hanging out.

One long-time subcultural philosopher at this meeting proposed that future meetings should be even more like a social gathering. He may have even used the word “party,” and he didn’t mean the class party, either. Against this I asserted that the point of an effort geared to the real world struggles of service sector proles was not to provide scenesters with a social life. I wanted this to be less like a social gathering and more like a social movement.

Time was of the essence in this matter. This was not because the world revolution was about to break out, but because any initial enthusiasm here was giving way to characteristic anti-authoritarian entropy. I strongly suggested this Assembly should begin some kind of ongoing effort among employees of Whole Foods Market. This wasn’t simply to give us something to do, although this was clearly needed. It would give us a tight focus on a specific target.

As of spring 2012, Whole Foods Market had more than 300 locations. A 2010 estimate on Wikipedia was that Whole Foods employed more than 58,000 people. Whole Foods is one of the largest green capitalist service sector employers. As at other low wage service sector companies, employees are expected to enthusiastically employ the plural-possessive “we” form in regard to their employer, and Whole Foods has become notorious for its Church-of-Scientology-meets-the-Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers creepy workplace management style. Two years earlier Whole Foods Market’s Creep Number One, John Mackey, had been the subject of a borderline sarcastic profile in the haute bourgeois 'New Yorker.' The 'New Yorker' piece took jabs at Mackey’s enthusiasm for the philosophy of the bad novelist and Nietzsche-of-mediocre-people Ayn Rand and noted that Mackey is an avowed global-warming denier. I don’t want to pander to vulgar populism, but a ripe target can make extremist communication tasks much easier, and Mackey of Whole Foods is like a buffoon plutocrat out of a Three Stooges short, garbed in earth-toned drawstring hemp dungarees and Birkenstocks instead of tuxedo tails and silk top hat.

I don’t work at Whole Foods. I’ve never worked there. I don’t shop there. I have no personal feelings about that company. I am not out to “get revenge” against them. Whole Foods is solely a means to an end. In 21st century class conflict terms any and all employers are nothing but a means to an end, that end being to abolish market society and replace it with a society worthy of the human beings who live in it. Efforts inside and against a large high profile employer whose antics are allowing it to accumulate visible ill will can spread similar actions in other, similar and less noticeable workplaces. Agitation, propaganda and more complex forms of action that would develop out of an initial targeting of Whole Foods could potentially spread into other service sector companies, both big and small, akin to the way that concentric rings flow outward after a pebble breaks the surface of a pond.

One of the people at the meeting was working at the Whole Foods in the Haight, and this person told of hassles he’d endured there and of how friends and co-workers had been fucked over at Whole Foods as well. In theory he could use his insights to help in a bigger ongoing effort. But an anti-Whole Foods project that would demand a real commitment of time and energy drew only the usual anti-authoritarian passive nodding sympathy. The Whole Foods employee sat on his hands grumbling but exhibited no motivation to use what he knew to raise sustained hell against the employer. If this individual’s supposed subjective radicalism and first hand experiences at Whole Foods weren’t going to be a foot in the door for sustained, credible, real world activity among precarious and service sector employees on the part of this self-styled “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” then it was a big question what would.

This meeting of the “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” was taking place a few weeks before May 1, 2012, the date of the second “General Strike” called by Occupy Oakland. The first “General Strike” the previous November 2 had been called with barely two weeks to spread the word, and although the day of that “General Strike” saw a large, festive and enjoyable rally downtown and a march to and shutdown of the Port of Oakland this event cannot remotely be described as a general strike, since less than two percent of the city’s wage earners refrained from going to work that day. In the Nov. 2nd “General Strike” almost all who missed work in connection with the “strike” were either using their sick days or got permission from employers to participate. By all salient indicators the Nov. 2nd “General Strike” was not even remotely a general strike, let alone a successful general strike. Indeed, this wonderful-world-of-make-believe approach to the complex and depressing larger realities around us is embedded in the DNA of the harmless and disengaged anarchist subculture as well as in the larger SF Bay Area leftist protest ghetto, and it bled into Occupy Oakland as well. For example, some self-indulgent fantasists insisted on calling events in front of Oakland’s City Hall and related phenomena the “Oakland Commune,” blithely oblivious to the fact that work and commerce continued as always everywhere in the city among virtually one hundred percent of the city’s populace, starting with the cafes and boutiques a few yards from the outer perimeter of Occupy Oakland’s stinky hippie tent encampment.

Apparently nothing had been learned from the general-strike-that-wasn’t of Nov. 2nd, since to the best of my knowledge there was no effort to get the word out to the city’s wage earners at large, and in easy to understand language, in the lead up to the second “General Strike” of May 1st, 2012. The phrase “General Strike” means about as much to contemporary mainstream US working people as the possibility of ammonia-methane based life on Saturn’s moon Titan does. A more effective and intelligible way to reach our fellow wage slaves was going to be to call for everyone to call in sick on May First. Everybody who has to work for a living knows what calling in sick means. A mass call-in-sick-to-work day on May 1st was going to interrupt the flow of surplus value more effectively than a call for a phenomenon that implies a level of collective identity, historical memory and connectedness that does not at present exist in the US. And with a little luck it might even establish a precedent for calling in sick on many more May Firsts to come. Why did this simple and obvious step not occur to anyone connected with Occupy Oakland?

With nothing more pressing in the works, people in the “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” were up for wallpaper pasting posters and leaflets for the upcoming “General Strike.” I committed to drafting the text of a poster for May 1. It read like this:

"WORK: It takes everything from us. Other than headaches and hassles it gives little back. And wage slavery isn’t just an unavoidable evil; selling our labor power to get money to buy back our survival is the source of all the other accelerating social problems we see around us.

This Tuesday May 1st, join tens of millions of other wage slaves on all seven continents and register your discontent. Give yourself a break.

Workers of the world, relax…

TUESDAY MAY ONE is
GLOBAL CALL-IN-SICK-TO-WORK DAY

On Tuesday May 1st vast numbers of people across the industrialized world will be taking the day off. You can do it, too. Pick up the phone and give yourself a one-day holiday. Call in sick to work on May 1. You’ve earned it. The boss owes you."

Others in the group did a fine job of laying out a leaflet version of this text with a cartoon graphic of an office worker, and reportedly hung them around Oakland in the days leading up to May 1st. In subsequent walks around downtown Oakland I saw few of these posters, but I’ll take the word of the people involved that some of these posters did in fact hit the walls.

Due to conflicts with my schedule at my new low wage service sector gig I wasn’t able to attend the next several meetings of the “Assembly.” In their online internal discussion list the Assembly members suddenly evinced a big interest in relating to hookers on the Mission District’s Capp Street stroll as sororal comrades in the precarious workers struggle. Attendant proposals included a “fuck work party” -- a logical event to invite prostitutes to -- at the scenester space Station 40, and holding a “forum” where people who don’t like their jobs could figure out how to find another job. This last proposal was worthy of a temp agency, and drove home the obvious fact that there was not even the faintest hint of an ethos of outwardly directed real world social struggle here.

The online discussion now focused on “sex workers.” This grandiloquently titled “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” had made no credible effort to engage with mainstream workers in the service industry -- note that I say “credible,” as opposed to slapdash, half-assed, juvenile and desultory. With no actual orientation toward mainstream working people, and as always too timid to stray from their comfort zone, the scenesters had conveniently shifted orientation, with prostitution described by one fool as “a major source of precarious employment.”

Only a little boy who has just moved out of his mommy’s house and spends too much time online can claim that “sex work” is a “major source of precarious employment.” Conditions are bad in the United States, but we are not as unfortunate as people in the post-collapse territories of the former Soviet Union. People who earn money selling sex acts are wage slaves, and prostitution is in all ways a “precarious” way to make a living, but that doesn’t add up to sex workers being a significant percentage of the wage slave class, let alone a significant potential combative segment of the class. A real world, focused-on-the-working class, subversive effort cannot be geared specifically around sex workers any more than it can be geared specifically around left-handed gas station attendants who have a harelip. This isn’t because left-handed gas station attendants with a harelip are not authentically a part of the working class, but because there simply aren’t enough of this extremely specific category of exploited and dispossessed person to merit specific attention. You have to choose your battles wisely and strategically and there are only so many hours in a day.

A movement of mass working class resistance is never going to begin among streetwalkers. Why do I even have to make such an absurd and obvious point? A lack of opportunities for ongoing mass direct action adds up to zero class struggle. Double-entendres aside, what collective leverage do sex workers have against their exploitation? What kind of mass job action can they energetically use to bring pressure against their bosses, and squeeze a better deal out of them? To say this is to say a mouthful. I have now slid into a role that would be better played by John Cleese or Graham Chapman in a Monty Python sketch. This happens with preternatural alacrity when attempting to relate to a phenomenon as ridiculous as the Northern California anti-authoritarian subcultural identity vortex on anything but tongue-in-cheek terms.

I was out the door of this “Assembly” of hot air. This effort did not show the slightest sign that it was about actual working people in the real world. I am not a John or a social worker so I have no interest in running around after street ‘hos. My humor chops weren’t dexterous enough to continue with a non-effort that had sailed beyond the point of comedy. With nothing to gain and less to lose I posted my opinion on the online thing, saying that that unless you have a Superman cape, and expect everyone else to wear one as well, and presume that with this that you can do everything and anything required to immediately redeem all of the ills of contemporary society a “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” has to have a very clear and narrow focus. A focus exclusively geared toward low wage service sector employees, as this effort was initially supposed to be, will have a greater potential in the larger society around us than focusing on the difficulties of Capp Street hookers. I suggested that those fired with an exclusively-focused-on-street-prostitutes enthusiasm should form a distinct and separate effort to rescue the hookers of the Capp Street corridor.

A characteristic response from one of the professional victims in the "Assembly" was this:

“As one of the many sex workers who are involved in the precarious workers assembly, I do not think that (Alexander Selkirk) should be welcome, based on his obvious disdain for us and our involvement in the project. I don’t want to speak for everyone, but being that at times the meetings are between 1/4 and 1/2 sex workers, I think it is safe to say that his opinions on the matter are bullshit and that there shouldn’t be a place in the assembly for him.”

This hissy fit conveyed with the concision of a haiku what’s found on the rare occasions when inhabitants of the anti-authoritarian subculture venture out of their hermetically sealed feedback loop into the big bad outside world.

Here’s my translation:

1. “The world revolves around me, and around whatever is of microscopic immediate interest to me. As soon as the rest of the world acknowledges this obvious fact, we’ll all get along fine.”

2. “I get a charge out of my pose as a great rebel and threat to the social order, but my acute lack of conviction and corresponding emotional fragility are so pronounced that I can’t stick up for what I claim to believe in, comport myself in an upright manner, and wage an articulate argument against an opponent. It’s always easier to run to mommy. Lucky for me all of my companions are members of the run-to-mommy crowd. And --“

3. “I play the victim card whenever possible. This gives me a credibility that my paucity of acts might deny me. Upper middle class white guilt is often a significant component of the personality structure and motivations of the anti-authoritarian scenester, so playing the victim card is almost always a winning move.”

“To the degree that there is any substance at all beneath all that posturing and gas we all know that most U.S. anti-authoritarians are in fact weak liberals. Our response to the world outside of our hermetically sealed subcultural feedback loop is limited to throwing temper tantrums at protest ghetto events and engaging in either charity activity or volunteer social work. Since no one can cop a nitrous buzz off acknowledging that they are in fact just a weak liberal we go for a more exciting, scary word, like ‘anarchist.’ We do so love that frisson of danger -- all the excitement and sense of menace and none of the time-consuming commitment and inconvenience! It’s the perfect form of risk-free radicalism in a society where everybody wants to be entertained all the time!”

As long as I’ve got my sarcasm checkbook out, dare I ask what concrete acts of solidarity our mighty subculture weenies could have engaged in with the Mission’s ladies of the evening? It‘s not likely that hardened hookers run by pimps from Richmond would allow themselves to be condescended to by these achingly naïve, coddled and clueless offspring of relative class privilege. Maybe the “Precarious Workers Assembly” would help a tiny number of young women to individually opt out of a wretched situation where they turn tricks to make a buck. If so, the totally politically righteous comrade pimps might object. A single predatory tough guy from Richmond could mop the floor and the inside of a garage pail with the entire San Francisco Bay Area-plus-Modesto-and-Santa-Cruz anarchist scenes while keeping one ring-bedecked hand behind his back. Maybe “insurrectionists” who dabble in sex industry work to piss off their bourgeois dads would take a more sex-as-commodity-positive direction here and help facilitate the Sisterhood-is-Powerful vocation of authentic impoverished girls doing car dates on fat, bad-smelling, butt-ugly Johns in the vicinity of 21st and Capp. This is all speculation. It doesn’t appear that this Prostitutes-as-Precarious-Workers trip was pursued with any more vigor or diligence than the early pretensions in relation to mainstream service sector workers were. It was just one more slumming streety pose briefly adopted for the entertainment of sheepish subculture slackers.

What subsequently became of this self-styled “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” is a mystery to me. It sank without leaving a trace. The scenesters of this “Assembly” have never produced a post-mortem account of what they thought was useful or could have been avoided in their efforts. The “Precarious and Service Workers Assembly” connected to occupy Oakland did nothing. It communicated nothing. It went nowhere. It amounted to nothing. But at least it still has a Facebook page.

ALEXANDER SELKIRK

Category: 

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

^this

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

is racist, classist, and misogynist.
yes...this is.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I think you would have quite an astonishingly difficult time picking out lines from this and analyzing them and actually coming to such conclusions.

I get the impression your mindset is thus: Claiming sex work is not a big a part of the economy as some would like to believe it is = misogyny.

Unfortunately that is not an argument, although I'd like to hear one.

Submitted by AoT (not verified) on

"A single predatory tough guy from Richmond could mop the floor and the inside of a garage pail with the entire San Francisco Bay Area-plus-Modesto-and-Santa-Cruz anarchist scenes while keeping one ring-bedecked hand behind his back."

There is nothing involving Reagan's "young buck" racism involved in this statement. Especially as it involves racism.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The name of this site is Anarchist News.

"Anarchist" "News".

Do either of those words have a relationship to this article?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

KEATING!!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Jeezus fucking Christ on a bicycle OP, fuck you. Fuck you and your long, pretentious, self-absorbent "better than you" speech. If I had a nickel for every time I've been judged n looked down the nose by one like you, I could pay the corporations to become president.

Now I'm gonna say something that's gonna stun you into silence.... My life is not a constant bid for the approval of "mainstream", "working" people. Dog bless them n all the little vagina goblins they have to feed, but I'm not convinced that they are the absolute salt of the earth or the secret to revolutionary success. Working people are people, and a lot of them are as shitty and boring as the anarchist scenesters you decry......

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

oh did someone forget to take their nap? i don't want you to throw another temper tantrum.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

IGTT 1/10

Oh come on, if you're going to troll at least do it with a little creativity.

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

'We do not know what anyone means when they describe the proletariat as a social category. If they are implying that the working class as a social body have something between themselves other than their experience of work then we utterly reject this. MD [i.e. Monsieur Dupont] have a penchant for Champagne and Tarkovsky movies whereas our neighbours prefer White Lightening [sic.] and WWF wrestling, our economic position, however, is identical.'

'The Proletariat will not be motivated by political values in its resistance to work but by its selfish interest to assert its species being; its bodily desire to be human floods across the barriers of separation. There is nothing nice or noble or heroic about the working class, it is essential to the productive process which constitutes the structure of our reality and therefore essential to revolution and the abolition of reality based on production.' - Nihilist Communism

Submitted by so embarrassing (not verified) on

"why are we wasting time organizing the hookers? that's what we have social workers for."

-kevin keating, somewhere between sending emails to a public listserv outing sex workers involved in this project as such and writing this bitter response a year later....

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Kevin Keating cries and whines about how nobody does anything relevant to 'mainstream working people" and yet he spends a year writing a response that is only directed at the exact same people who he claims are irrelevant. that must make him... doubly irrelevant, at least.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

This was the saddest bit: "I’ve been around the Northern California anti-authoritarian subcultural identity scene since the fall of 1982. In this 30-year span of time, with the very partial exceptions of Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails, I do not know of a single case where anarchist scenesters have produced a credible, ongoing, collective public manifestation of what they claims to be about in the world outside of their hermetically sealed subcultural cocoon."
Since 1982. That's over 30 years. 3 fucking decades of hanging around the fringes of anarchist projects, then writing shitty critiques of them. You know what I'd do if I hated anarchists as much as Keating does? Not spent 30 fucking years following anarchists around.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

All of our lives would be so much better if Keating would just leave us alone.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Have you considered that maybe he's interested in changing shit, rather than being part of a scene? And then worthless hipsters come in saying they want to change shit, so he checks it out... and it turns out to be just another fucking scene.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Which is why he got off his ass and started organizing people instead of suggesting other people organize people?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Yeah, that's bullshit. This lengthy, off-base diatribe is not the work of someone busy changing things.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Its a problem in terms of paradigms. Keatings is still rooted in materalism. Anarchism works best when its ethics based. Id feel better if there were a worthwhile syndicalist movement, but if the peoole around me are growing as people while contributing to the dismantling of heirarchal systems within both themselves and their environments that's enough. That's justification. This person probably hasn't seen his community put to the test. Would I like to drown scenesters? Of course. But if you don't have any solutions s.t.f.u. Me? I know everything.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

So, you made a flier and made some suggestions at a meeting and did nothing else. And this puts you above the people you're complaining about how?

Submitted by Comrade Bogus (not verified) on

I mean, there are some relevant criticisms of insurrectionary anarchists in here and they're familiar to my own experience way out in another faraway state, but they're all the same criticisms that even people of that tendency acknowledge and fret about on their own time. So I don't feel like the OP has anything new to offer other than a new permutation of asshattery. Yeah, it would be nice if a lot of the posturing, jargon, and persistent love for anarcho-coolness amounted to concerted avenues for attack, but is the way to go about that to promote condescension, misogyny, and what can only be described as ageism? Likewise is it even remotely reasonable to suggest that one and only one avenue for attack is legitimate? Isn't that rigid and authoritarian? If there are workers of any stripe who are ready to act, then who cares what the fuck they're doing? Isn't well-executed attack what we should be concerned with, regardless of whether or not the mostly fascist mainstream gives a shit? Turning inward on our own cool-ass, back-patting sub-culture doesn't work, but neither does appealing to the "masses." We anarchists of the 21st century need to come up with something better. What the fuck does that look like? I dunno but it ain't in the OP.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

" criticisms that even people of that tendency acknowledge and fret about on their own time."

So when do we have that debate? When does the change in strategy happen? Hell, when does a strategy get built in the first place? How much longer is everyone going to complain about how much of a ghetto Anarchism is while doing nothing to change that?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

^this

It seems like there are very few people/groups who engage in genuinely trying to change strategy. So much contemporary theory seems to be newer and flashier ways of saying the "t-word" rather than innovating something that makes sense in the (North) American context.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Because there's theoretical reasons that shut down any actual actions before they happen. Insurrectionary tendencies disprove organizing in the work place, Syndicalism disproves insurrection. Etc. Figure out what you can do and fucking do it. Doing anything is better than arguing with people about whatever theoretical shit on the internet.

Strategy doesn't change until we change it. Waiting for someone on ANews to tel you the right thing to do will get you(or me) no where.

But if you want someone to tell you what to do: Go canvas door to door in your neighborhood and figure out what the people around you care about, then figure out how to use direct action and mutual aid to fight for it. We've gotten so obsessed with arguing about broken windows that we've forgotten how propaganda of the deed actually works.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"Go canvas door to door in your neighborhood and figure out what the people around you care about, then figure out how to use direct action and mutual aid to fight for it."

Anarchists need to fight for republicans and democrats that our neighbors want as our leaders and figure out ways to decrease taxes while increasing american imperialism/globalization.....good luck anarchists !

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

seasol.net BOYA

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

xKEATING YOUTHx

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

If Keating, DOOM, Lierre Keith, and RCP ever team up we gonna be in trouble.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Nah, the BLACK ARMY will see them off. Actually, come to think of it, I really wanna see Keating get in a fight with the black army poster.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I would pay to see this.

ARE YOU LISTENING WORKER?!?!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Interesting article. A lot of what he says in terms of the Occupy movement's misdirection and inability to get things done is spot-on, but some of his critiques fall way off the mark. Nothing wrong with organizing and helping sex workers, any more than any other worker. Oh, and I have a pretty big problem with this quote -

"WORK: It takes everything from us. Other than headaches and hassles it gives little back."

Gives little back? Work feeds, clothes, and houses billions of people. It makes the computers we're all reading/typing on and the electricity that we use to power those computers. The fact that I even need to point this out says a lot about how far removed from reality some sectors of the US anarchist movement have become.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"Work feeds, clothes, and houses billions of people. It makes the computers we're all reading/typing on and the electricity that we use to power those computers."

You know, this gets said a lot, and I'm usually not one to throw it out there, but you aren't really an anarchist.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"You know, this gets said a lot, and I'm usually not one to throw it out there, but you aren't really an anarchist."

I certainly am. In no way, shape, or form is one required to be against work, lazy, or idle to be an anarchist... I have no idea where you got that from. I'll emphasize my point once more, since you dodged it: Work feeds, clothes, and houses billions of people. If nobody worked, everyone would die, including you.

I am glad the doctor showed up to work when I go in to get a prescription - same for the chemists who made the prescription, the drivers who delivered it, and the clerks who stocked it. I am glad that farmers went to work when I eat the food they made, and I am glad that electricians went to work when my home was constructed every time I flick on a light or turn on a computer. I'm glad miners went to work every time I use any kind of metal (electronics, automobile, bicycle, etc.), and so on for many other materials, inventions, and services. Since I benefit from so many other people's labour, I have no problem paying it forward by doing work, myself, which in turn benefits others. Pretty much every anarchist society or commune to have ever existed (Anarcho-Syndicalist Spain, contemporary squats, etc.) have some variation of this arrangement.

So, that is my line of thinking. Would you kindly explain to me, in detail, how acknowledging that work is a necessary, beneficial, and productive force precludes one from being "an anarchist"?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

A lot of hipsters, scenesters, and travelers seem to genuinely believe that all that stuff can exist without someone actually going and doing something to make it happen. Probably because someone else has always done it for them, whether through privilege or having non-productive service jobs or being a scavenger. iPods fall from the sky and medical care is something someone else has to worry about.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"When your not trying to buy happiness its easy to afford" - squalor n' sloth

Now fuck off!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"I am glad the doctor showed up to work when I go in to get a prescription - same for the chemists who made the prescription, the drivers who delivered it, and the clerks who stocked it. "

You probably live the average american life and probably enjoy it. You seem to be so happy with this system, this nation, the State, Capitalism, and other problems that Anarchists are opposed to....keep taking your Soma.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

cuz in order to make the world as it exists now a lot of people have to do a lot of shitty, boring, dangerous, stressful, and repetitive work that they would probably not do unless there was a state to make them do it.

there's a difference between cleaning the dirty dishes you made and doing alienating work that isn't relevant to your immediate life.

in regions controlled by anarcho-syndicalist spain the proles often didn;'t show up to work, slacked off, and didn't show up to the 'planning meetings.' All of which probably impeded their war with Franco.

So unless you can inspire hundreds of millions of people to maintain fiberoptics, work in factories, or whatever then no, you can't be pro-work and anarchist at the same time.

Submitted by AoT (not verified) on

"Work feeds, clothes, and houses billions of people."

Only if you equate work with a job. I've never had a job that did any of those things. Might not be such a nihilist if I had had.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"Only if you equate work with a job. I've never had a job that did any of those things. Might not be such a nihilist if I had had."

If you've ever eaten food, worn clothes, lived in a home, or used services & goods that somebody else produced... You have benefitted from work. Work produced those, all of them. It may not have been YOUR work, but somebody certainly showed up at the factory/farm/shop/clinic/etc. on time and got it done for you.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

This whole essay is filled with the old-school-lefty fallacy of "I've got a grand idea and this isn't it so I'm gonna shit all over it publicly as counter-revolutionary". It's intended to win over the working class with a brilliant display of sectarian bickering.

If you want to see something happen, take some initiative, inside our outside whatever project you're currently involved in. If others see merit, they'll join. If they don't, it probably wasn't meant to be. That's organizing.

Anti-authoritarian subcultures aren't supposed to build NGOs, they're supposed to maintain cultural institutions which are (by definition) never so permanent or well-defined. I've never been to So-Cal, so I can't speak to that scene, but it's hard to think of any project around here which hasn't had some involvement from prominent area punks and other assorted counterculturalists. These subcultures have played important roles in major struggles (Berlin wall? Squatting movements? Anti-globalization?) particularly in the "front lines" sense. Obviously, there's limitations to countercultural organizing, but that shouldn't overshadow the enormous role it's played in the past few decades.

Contrast that to 1930s style party organizing, which seems to be the writer's suggestion...

As for sex work, well, sex workers might not be a significant part of the working class in your neighbourhood, but they certainly are in mine. I don't know what percentage they are of the overall national workforce (other than that they're probably under-estimated), but they are one of the most exploited workforces out there. I shouldn't need to point out the relevance of focusing on particularly oppressed workers when it comes to larger struggles. Were the Mujeres Libre and other Spanish anarcho-feminists wasting their time when they attempted to reach out to sex workers?

Everything Occupy everywhere suffered from problems like this. Lots of dreamers, very little action. I saw the same problems, especially after the antiauthoritarian subculturalists turned their backs, and without any focus on sex workers. The whole experience was a big pain in all our asses, but most of us had better taste than to write and post an essay like this.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"If you want to see something happen, take some initiative, inside our outside whatever project you're currently involved in. If others see merit, they'll join. If they don't, it probably wasn't meant to be. That's organizing."

Reform and exit are two distinct strategies. OP is talking about the former and you're suggesting the latter. Red herring.

"Berlin wall? Squatting movements? Anti-globalization?"

Which all either ended badly or went nowhere...

Submitted by AoT (not verified) on

If he's compaining that he hasn't been able to reform a single organization in 30 years then maybe he should figure some shit out ad start his own shit. Why the hel couldn't he have started organizing Whole Foods on his own?

It really sounds to me like he's one of them "Idea people" who can't be bothered to go out and actually make shit happen.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The fact that sex has been made into work for the most marginalized and exploited is precisely why work must be abolished.

Submitted by IKNOWBETTER!~ (not verified) on

I'm not sure what sucks more, this article or the people that hate it. For real. Both are hella dumb and missing the point by miles.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

ya. people are all half the group was sex workers asshole so of course we're about organizing with sex workers! then they're are all fuck you keating for outing sex workers. a stranger would never assume that someone in a group which is half sex workers might be a sex worker.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Keating gonna Keat hahaha

I've been reading this dude's criticisms for like 8 years and he's never ceased to be a condescending bore.

Keating's best contribution to the Left was the lulz of that time he got arrested while drunk and flying in First Class.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I'm so frustrated that direct-action is non-existant. I'm going to write a critique about it. I can't figure out if this article is hypocritical, ironic, or an elaborate troll. Goading a bunch of negators with negative motivation, seems as useless as tits on a bull. With that said, now I want my 15 minutes back.

Submitted by it is not all a... (not verified) on

Either we acknowledge that most of what we've tried has not worked, abandon that which has not worked, keep that which appears to work, and try something different.

There is a major intersection between the set of "all non-conservative activists" on one hand and "psychologically fragile who require group interaction and validation to secure their sense of self worth." Any queers, for instance, who cannot interoperate in a mixed group in the Bay Area in the 2010s without screaming about some queer phobia and demanding that organizing stop to salve hurt feelings, need to be seeing a therapist to work on their issues instead of outsourcing their therapy to the 'rads.

So much of their "direct action" amounts to little more than being seen as being radical before one's radical friends. HNJ has been reduced to this, leaden actions differing in no way from what's failed over the past decade being repeated by reflex. The same people during OSF being seen over and again being led off in handcuffs by the cops leading to no growth of the movement became the norm.

These patrons of "the most vulnerable" feel that they are doing other-centered politics by caring about the weakest. But in reality they are only dealing with their own personal priorities and insisting that anyone else who thinks above and beyond the most vulnerable is being selfish. In reality, "other centered politics" means appealing to a sufficient popular base so as to give them reason to join in on some measure of a radical political project that can knock the legs out from under continued accumulation.

Short of hurting corporate power's things or their persons, which I am not suggesting and are best discussed elsewhere, the only thing that they understand is when they lose money, preferably when their rate of profit slows. That can only happen by mass organizing and mobilizing. That will include mobilizing racists, homophobes and sexists as most all who live in a racist, sexist and homophobic society will be have soaked in it our whole lives and no matter how much we try, residue will remain.

One would hope that those who would claim to be able to lead society (vanguard anarchists!) towards an anarchist future would be able to shake off someone else's insults to their race, sex or queerness.

But as Kaczinsky wrote, the leftist will seek the most unappealing in society, blame everyone else for not liking them, while alienating the most unappealing as well as those who find them unappealing. When the left is for all intents and purposes Richard Speck, BORN TO LOSE, what else can we do but call them on it if we don't want to end up in the equivalent of an Illinois prison on hormone shots wearing ladies underwear and putting our ass out for survival?

And, yeah, I've done sex work, I do sex work, gay sex work, gay daddy sex work. I've also got a tech job. A small set of advocates fetishize sex work more than most all sex workers do and that leads to a disconnect on the issue they'd lead on.

Organizing can very simple but requires work. Figure out what the majority of people support that intersects with your agenda and challenges capital the most. That is the easy party but it requires putting much of your agenda aside for a moment, so it is not for the ego challenged. Then figure out how to make that agenda item appealing to average folks. This is where the math comes in. You want to maximize the appeal of the campaign so that it does not appeal to the converted and ratify their preconceptions, rather appeals to enough people in a way that mobilizes them to take action.

Occupy could have done this but between the nonprofits and unions in SF and the lifestyle vanguard anarchists in Oakland, it never had a chance. J20 was a grafting of HNJ's narrow failed housing agenda and CNA's narrow California Pacific Hospital agenda onto OWS. So instead of being stuck in traffic or on a bus and seeing "Jail Wall Street Execs" or "End Student Loans" messaging, frustrated folks got to see "Decolonize Your Mind, Occupy Your Heart" which puts responsibility for the dysfunction on the organizable base. A week later on Oakland, those who use Sun Tsu as kitty litter liner picked another fight that they could not win, again, bearing consequences for others.

This refusal to take responsibility for organizing error stems from the oversocialization that Kaczinsky writes about. It is more of a faux pas amongst this crowd to name error than it is to make the same error over and again. We know that what others do can make matters worse for us. Thus their actions are not solely their own, they impact us all. As it stands, we cannot get a clear bead on corporate power because our own psychobabblers are standing in our line of sight.

OWS was about banksters and warmongers hijacking government, the economy and society. It was not about gentrification, about identity politics, about sex workers. The left has lost because anything has had to be about everything. We had a moment where our agenda intersected with the popular agenda. But every two bit activist had to make it about their interest or, even more ethically conflicted, the interest they're paid to advocate by whatever nonprofit has managed to secure a grant to pay them.

What you do effects others. The sooner we all show respect in that regard the sooner we can build the bases for cooperation. Participatory, decentralized, strategic, cooperative, democratic organizing is the only anarchist way forward.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The only anarchist way forward is to abandon all cities and leave them to rot. What is with this commraderie bullshit, y'all ain't friends and don't have ANY common interests except holding hands through the insurrection. When you meet up in the hills, organise raiding parties with people you trust to get the job done.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Not a big fan of the tone or the over-reliance on Kaczinsky, but there's some good points here which shouldn't be ignored. Particularly the points about taking responsibility for bad organizing.

Sometimes, when nobody's interested in joining a project, it's not because of "the man". It's not the work of infiltrators, the chicanery of liberal reformists, the bourgeois lifestyle politics of your comrades or any collective mindfuck from patriarchy and colonialism. Sometimes projects fail because they're boring, irrelevant, ill-conceived and insulting.

Submitted by xy (not verified) on

What else would one expect when the potential set of supporters has been whittled down to the faithful? I understood that Decolonize Oakland, at the end, was reduced to one disabled lesbian of color who had second thoughts about something and kicked herself out.

As far as Uncle Ted goes, I'm not a Kaczinskyist, but he really nails it on the psychology of leftism bit. A martyr economy at the narcissism nexus based on pity parties and oppression Olympiads is no basis for effective grassroots organizing. People don't want to hang with such buzzkills.

For those who want to abandon the cities to rot, I understand there is an off the grid cabin site available in Wild Rockies of Montana for real cheap. You won't even notice the winters. Take I-80 east or fly to Bozeman.

With respect to OSF, "the man" used the nonprofits and labor to divide the movement while the activist clique made OSF about every unresolved grievance imaginable. Add to that the cops directing violent suspects to Bradley Manning Plaza instead of being taken to 850 Bryant. Don't get me wrong, I like nothing more than to see shirtless muscled tattooed ex-cons lucha libre in the park as much as the next middle aged homo, but that level of worshipping diversity is not really conducive to broad based populist organizing, is it?

We've tried the cornucopia of causes already, it does not work, everything is not about Palestine. OWS offered a potential broad based new beginning that enjoyed significant popular support for relatively ambitious gains.

But the professionals knew better than that which enjoyed broad popular support, and proceeded to graft all of the dead wood from the past 30 years of failed struggles onto these green shoots which killed it.

Many still have jobs as "advocates" and "activists" where they get paid by the same government that repressed OWS and by the same corporations and foundations for which that was done. What is wrong with this picture?

We gotta meet people where there terms and ours intersect and then walk with them. Maybe we'll learn from them a little, them from us. But if we knew what worked we'd already have tried it.

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

I thought this article was cute and entertaining one of the best in a while.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

this is utterly horrific, and clearly was not written by an anarchist. Why worker posts this garbage is anyone's guess.

Submitted by CocoaButter (not verified) on

Worker does it as a sick joke. This is how they get their willies on. They post non-anarchist articles to anarchistnews, sick back, rub cocoa butter on themselves, and laugh at us.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

That mental image is *not hot*. Nor can I imagine catching wood from the anne coulterite who wrote this hateful, ignorant garbage.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Yeah, should change the name to NAZI NEWS as this reeks of white suprematism. Funny stuff.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

heh, i wish i'd put myself though hacking school right about now. never too late to learn!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

You're such a racist classist misogynist repulsive fat whore. Really think you should kill yourself.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

why are you even here? you're not an anarchist. you're a judgmental ignorant hillbilly.

Submitted by Whaaaaaa! (not verified) on

"That mental image is *not hot*. Nor can I imagine catching wood from the anne coulterite who wrote this hateful, ignorant garbage."

Mommy, mommy -- censor this! I'm a victim! Mommy! Whaaaaaah!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Gotta say that I had one of the best fucks ever at a gay skinhead sex club/bar in east london a while back. When I asked the proprietor how he dealt with racist skinheads, he said when they've got a big fat hard cock in their mouths, their racist babblings are much less of a problem.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

OK, Keating's being a dick but I can kinda see what he means. I know some anarchist scenesters who are fascinated with sex work because they're basically slumming it. They don't want to take money from Mom and Dad, so they do sex favors for people who contact them on Craigslist or strip at clubs. They don't have anything in common with street walkers and couldn't organize with them if they tried. Sex work, like being queer or trans, is considered the height of coolness and romanticized to no end. This fascination doesn't come from a revolutionary place and won't lead anywhere revolutionary.

Of course, at least the people at this assembly are trying to do something, unlike the majority of the mythical working class that Keating romanticizes in his own way. If Americans aren't organizing and rising up, that's not the fault of anarchists. Anarchists are much more active than the average dipshit consumerist American, and that's to their credit, even if they do tend to form subcultural ghettos.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The only thing that these children are trying to do is to make themselves feel better and to appeal to their circle of friends in ways that ratify their group consensus. There is no connection between trying to do something making things happen. There is no great scoreboard where you take points after you die for trying. All that matters is making a difference.

If people are not rising up and anarchists are trying to get them to rise up, then that's a good case against this detached notion of vanguard anarchy.

How anyone can compare "stripping" at the Lusty Lady behind a sealed glass pane with taking it up the hoochie after streetwalking just because they both involve sexuality demonstrates how juvenile and narcissistic these kids are.

But the oppression Olympiad must go on! The path towards anarchist insurrection goes through the narrowing of focus down to the smallest, most offensive and least conscious of us all. We could not have figured out how to sabotage radical potential if we'd tried. Perhaps some of us are really trying?

Submitted by Alexander Selkirk (not verified) on

Read the article again, and when you do try to pick up on two key points:

1. I don't "romanticize" the working class.

Working people are obviously the only force in this society in a position to change and transform this society in a liberatory manner, not "insurrectionary" SSI recipients and other long-in-the-tooth children of passivity and privilege making the scene at the SF anarchist bookfair.

2. And the entire point of the piece is that the people at this "assembly" were not "trying to do something" other than struggle to accrue subcultural capital among their fellow scenesters.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

See, there you go romanticizing again. You think some guy who works hard like an imbecile so he can have a plasma TV is somehow better than someone who doesn't want to be exploited by a boss and goes to anarchist assemblies. Because the former has grimy, calloused hands or something. Maybe a thick neck and brawny arms. A sickle to harvest grain like in Soviet art. Is it some homo-erotic thing? Or are you just a die-hard commie?

Submitted by Sir Einzige on

"Working people are obviously the only force in this society in a position to change and transform this society in a liberatory manner,"

No they are not.

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