Adrian Chen has a story about the hacking by a "right-wing rabble rouser" of Occupy Wall Street's email -- they've been WikiLeaked and you can see a big dump of their emails here. He focuses on the implications of collaborating with the FBI -- but gosh, nowadays, to be a fink, you don't have to dress up in believable hippie outfits and sit in the back of tedious antiwar meetings for hours and days on end, you can just hack and infiltrate a revolutionary group's mail and then all you have to do is press "forward" on your email and "send" to an FBI contact!
Chen is predictably annoyed that conservative blogger Breitbart has made hay of this from as is Matt Taibbi, who has been accused now by Breitbart of conspiring together with other leftwing journalists to incite the OWS "movement". Breitbart didn't even give a link to the emails, and then went off on this conspiracy tangent -- which misses the point. Leftwing journalists don't have to have secret, conspiratorial emails to plot things; the whole premise of the Wired State is that they are already networked and interactive and seamless and don't feel themselves as somehow separated by any membranes of conflict of interest or ethics. Taibbi is obviously a known quantity; another obvious form of this phenonmenon is Reuter's social media rep Anthony de Rosa who is actively agitating for OWS even as he pretends to cover it as a "journalist" as well. Look, we get it that new media is ecstatically participating in the, um, new People's social movements, guys, why lie about it?
BIGGER THAN LEFT OR RIGHT? NO, JUST BIGGER ON THE LEFT AND PRETENDING
But that's just what Taibbi does -- he pretends that OWS is "beyond politics" in an article titled "Why Occupy Wall Street is Bigger than Left or Right" -- the usual gambit of the left pretending that there are meta/trans/post politics but then stealthing in the leftwing agenda again. Again, stop pretending that you are "above" the liberal and conservative dichotomies or "beyond" communism or capitalism, guys, when you hate on the rich and propose collectivism solutions. Taibbi, living in Moscow all those years, should know better.
The real story visible in spades from the leaked emails is that far from being some sort of spontaneous new movement, far from being some new crisis among youth sparked by lack of jobs or school loan debts -- although those are part of the background noise -- the movement is made up by seasoned, hardened political operatives, experienced, dedicated "community organizers" of the Obama type who have spent years and years honing their most decidedly Marxist-infused viewpoints, in the US and abroad, and who have very, very definite views and hardline agendas that they are merely tactically holding back now.
It's the old story of the Socialist Scholars' Conferences (which I attended in those days); the right gets in a frenzy about the Cloward-Pivens strategy and the Saul Alinsky tactics but indeed they are absolutely right as I witnessed myself: for years, the socialist groups in the US have been advocating the tactic of picking single issues, picking popular causes, and then working them aggressively as you gradually (or not so gradually) smuggle in your full-blown socialist agenda. This agenda might be from the old Students for a Democratic Society, or the Democratic Socialists of America or other socialist groups of the 1960s-1980s. Essentially, the Obama campaign is a national example of that tactic come to power, as you can read in Radical-in-Chief. OWS is merely another manifestation of this phenomenon which is a decades-old story -- just because the people have smart phones doesn't mean they have outgrown this stupid stealth-socialism that discredits the movement every time and paves the way for rightwing backlash.
OLD-STYLE SECTARIANISM
What also emerges from these emails is how immersed this small group (groupuscule?) is in the old sectarianism of the Stalinist left although many of the people in it are too young to have lived through Alcove One and Alcove Two -- the intolerance of dissent or or any liberalism that respects capitalism; the drive for radical politics and transformative world revolution; the rigid identity politics, the insistence on unity ("Unite for Unity!"), the pretense that they are just listening or gathering viewpoints and will "democratically" decide things -- when in fact, they are merely practicing democratic centralism of the Brezhnev type, discussing things in an already pre-selected, pre-defined group of likeminded person who are "all on the same page" already with anti-capitalist, thirdworldist doctrines opposed to the liberal democratic project of America as it has been throughout history.
To be sure, a LaRouche operative who managed to infiltrate the group readily was repelled, and some people were available to call LaRouche properly out as a fascist and an extremist and his followers as inciters and practioners of violence. Good! But in the atmospherics of the General Assembly, will this person be formally expelled or drummed out or in the interests of democracy, or will she be kept around because of "radical inclusivity"?
A batch of emails like this may not be representative of everything about the political culture of these people, but a lot of patterns are visible. It's enough to see the sense of the group as plotting and planning something that they have to "put over" on others. For now, they can't have demands -- as a tactic -- even though the people doing this planning themselves have very, very stringent and defined worldviews, every one of them -- here is one of many examples:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 11:20 PM, Jason Jones <surplus@notanalternative.net> wrote:
Only option now is brutal separation. The democrats are the enemy. Smash capitalism!
Another little telling example: A Russian graphic designer turns in a piece of graphic work in "do-ocracy" mode -- she just designs a clenched fist that looks a typical piece of socialist/communist graphic work from the Soviet Union or Cuba -- a clenched fist for the symbol of OWS TV (BTW, exactly like a similar graphic floating around Second Life for the The Wrong Hands faction of Anonymous, yet another eerie example of possible prototyping in virtuality first).
Yet her work is discounted by one of the cadres because they don't want to look like any past movement (and heaven forfend that any obvious communist/socialist sort of graphic work betray their hand!). They'd rather just have a graphic of a rectangle and a circle showing a camera lens -- indeed, they are supposed to be as generic and graphic as a public restroom sign!
The woman is put out that she put work into something and got rejected; some other people like her design and just want to run with it -- but the elder cadre prevails -- and by what process and authority, it isn't exactly clear. Another voice comes in to instruct and smooth and allign -- and you sense everywhere the unseen hand of the hidden agenda.
Cadres organizations are always the bane of these "spontaneous people's movements" -- shaping and influencing behind the scenes with their party discipline. With these particular people in Zuccotti, however, I don't see (yet) that they are from oldline Marxist sects like Worker's World or International ANSWER or even something newer like moveon.org (although some people in the emails note they are related to moveon.org).
FROM MARXIST PROFESSORS TO THIRD-WORLD JOURNEYS TO NGOS
Rather, the core group sleeping in the park visible in these emails reflect that journey of the modern leftist intellectual that is so typical -- the college campus with the Marxist professors; the stint teaching English or doing academic work in a third-world country (or actually being from Latin America and coming to study in the US); more teaching or work in a nonprofit with the same perspective; and...never the feet touching the ground. They live in a bubble of anti-Americanism unencumbered by any actual practical experience with America -- a job in a large corporation or even a small business; a house in a small town; something outside of Chomskian unreality. Their viewpoints and their realities are shaped first in the Marxist-infused college campus, then in the poverty-stricken Third World country, then back to the US again to work in a "movement" job organizing for "social justice" of one sort or another.
Among the leaders shown in the emails is Marina Sitrin, an academic who studies third world poverty, and who spent some years in Cuba, something you would have thought one of those rightwing blogs would have pounced on. Is she merely taking instruction from the comrades, is that how it all happens? No, she's an accomplished academic and writer -- in our day, in the Wired State, she doesn't have to be anything so crass or simplistic as an operative or agent of influence from a communist regime, because it's all interpenetrating -- she goes to Cuba because she already believes America is evil; she hates capitalism long before she hears a Cuban propaganda piece about it; she may even be critical of Cuban suppression of the arts or dissent, even as she (unconsciously) articulates a line that Cuba votes at the UN in her books.
Or take Justin Wedes, a graduate of the University of Michigan, the kind of guy who might have been a student of Peter Ludlow's in linguistics, a lover of geeky online open source stuff who gets a degree in physics and along the way picks up the usual campus Marxism (without ever calling it that or even perceiving of himself as a socialist -- he is for "progressive" causes, you see). He goes to teach English in Venezuela; does that mean he has become a Chavez follower? Oh, likely not; the heavy ideological indoctrination of people like this doesn't work in such a crass way, it happens on the Internet and even merely reading Wikipedia. It's all part of the continuum of lefty goodness -- Democracy Now, In These Times, The Nation, Daily Kos -- my semester in Venezuela, my job teaching inner city youth....Never would you ever have to step out of the warm bath of Chomskyism and face a challenge to your beliefs.
While in the New York public city school system, Justin also champions the "progressive" causes, like "deny waiver" to Catherine Black, Bloomberg's business executive friend who was believed to be all wrong for the schools (and maybe she was) -- but mainly because she didn't come from the appropriate "progressive" background. Justin put his all into this single-issue movement, but was that all he cared about? No, of course not -- again, here's a person with defined, full-blown, articulated leftwing views that permeate everything he thinks and does and have for years, although he is young. Probably no one has ever debated him, ever, in his life, nor has he searched for any alternative to the book list of Chomsky and Zinn and Foner prescribed by his Marxist professors. Justin claims "we are not coordinating anything" in a disingenuous interview with the New York Times, although his entire online footprint and biography let us know his set of views. Justin is not merely "a former Brooklyn high school teacher". He's a man of the left whose short life has been devoted to these ideals already for several years giving voice to neighbourhood sages wailing about the evil man keeping every down -- or punking corporations with culture jamming to yes, make a socialist point (evil, evil corporations! boo hiss!) or fomenting students to do a walk-out in support of the demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin.
I don't know why he dropped out of teaching -- perhaps it was too constrictive. He got a grant for helping kids after school become digitally proficient; he worked on tutoring and alternative education in the "edu punk" vein we know from Second Life. All of his "community organizing" jobs, paid or volunteer, are all different fronts or manifestation of the same "progressive" agenda -- which amounts to getting in our tribe, inserting collectivist principles, open sourcing and stripping away property and taking as much as possible from the state -- Shakedown Street, -- and hating on evil Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh! Hate, hate! and I'll have a mocha soy latte with that to go, please...
IF YOU'RE WHITE, STEP BACK...AND HAVE A CUBAN IDEOLOGICAL SANDWICH
As you read their emails, you see the paralysis of the identity politics. There aren't enough people of colour. Should you have a special working group just of people of colour? Or put people of colour in each working group? OWS is solving that by this outrageous notion of making white straight males step back and forcing to the head of the line the females, people of colour, and LGBT who have been oppressed and therefore need this sort of affirmative action in this new "democracy". It's old-style Soviet friendship of nations and nationalities policy...
And here's the typical Cuban/Duban WCAR/Marxist analysis of racism -- it doesn't exist in and of itself, with the remedies against it in law and human rights, but it exists merely as a kind of byproduct of racism.
So OWS has to express its goofy (and cunningly collectivist) calls to hate on the 1 percent and champion the 99 percent by saying that school loans or home foreclosures disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics -- again, as if Goldman Sachs or Fannie Mae employs a deliberately racist approach as a function of their evil capitalism, and hence these outcomes.
Of course, that the NINJA loans were made by black brokers themselves to fellow blacks; that the small-town banks giving out the loans to poor people were in a climate of liberal political correctness and that is indeed part of the reason for the recession, too, seems not only obscured by these people obsessing on the "banksters"; it is even denied. The Wall Street Journal has got the narrative about this right, however, and I've never heard the left honestly tackle it. Giving out lots of housing and school loans to an aspiring black and Hispanic and poor white lower class to bring them into the middle class was part of a redistributive justice scheme even from the Clinton era; it was supposed to be the American dream and the manifestation of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That evil banksters could bundle this toxicity and pass it around to each other like a hot potato is only the other half of the equation, and yet OWS makes it seem as if it is the only story.
Another page out of the Cuban Marxist doctrine so visible in Durban is the notion expressed in another email that the occupation of Palestine is "racist" and that Israel is a "racist state". Israel is racist against Palestinians, who are "people of colour." Well, that's hilarious, but at least a different rant than the usual nonsense we hear from these types, that they aren't antisemites, because Semites are Arabic peoples, and both Israelis and Palestinians are Semitic peoples, therefore one can't be antisemitic, see.
This sort of hateful anti-Israel position from Ryan Green, who can't concede any problem with Hamas. Ryan Green is reading "Palestine Peace, Not Apartheid" and surprise, surprise, Norman Finkelstein; he's part of the whole Palestinian liberation scene, participating in the Siegebusters' Ball. This is not a man who studied literature and then found he couldn't get a job and had a heavy student loan; this is a "a world music singer and theatre performer turned activist" -- but that means a man who has spent years in and around cadre organizations and causes and sectarian groups hating on Israel and promoting the Palestinian radical cause -- this is a man with a full-blown set of ideas and agenda. Moderation and listening to get input from a wide variety of social classes ("the 99 percent") and maintaining diversity are not going to be his center of gravity -- he is the most vocal in these emails trying to turn the group to an anti-Israel obsession.
'I WOULD LIKE TO SEE MY SOCIALIST SISTERS AND BROTHERS HAVE A LITTLE FUN WITH THIS'
Then there are people like Gabriel Johnson. "I am a Democrat," she says, showing the group an invitation to an event with Pelosi:
So this is the first email I've gotten from any official national Democratic group supporting us. I am a Democrat, but I would like to see my socialist (and anarchist, Marxist, etc.) sisters and brothers have a little fun with this. (Oh, D-Trip, you don't know what you've gotten yourselves into, do you…)
Have a little fun? What kind of fun, Gabriel? Gabriel is in PowerShift, a lefty environmental organizing site:
In November 2007, the Coalition convened the first national youth climate summit at Power Shift 2007. More than 6,000 young people from all 50 states gathered at the University of Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, DC for a weekend of training, action and inspiration. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Congressman Ed Markey recognized the growing movement, addressing the 6,000 young people gathered at U-MD. It was here that Van Jones, founder of Green For All and future White House Advisor, and other environmental justice leaders captivated a generation with a vision of creating millions of green jobs for our country and restoring economic and environmental justice. Exactly one year before the 2008 elections, young people returned to their campuses and communities ready to rally for a clean energy economy in the upcoming elections.
Ah, Van Jones. Now there's a product of the cadre organizations, and of course, he didn't last long in the White House, branded as a communist (or at least a socialist). He would never call himself those things, he avoids those negative labels. Instead, he is a "progressive," and now agitates at moveon.org.
THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY
Then there's Jason Ahmadi.
Jason Ahmadi is 25, and originally from California. He is currently based in Chimayo New Mexico, helping organize for Think Outside the Bomb's (TOTB)
Ban all nuclear weapons -- single issue cause -- but full-blown agenda underneath, not even lurking out of sight, but fairly obvious, without even having to find his reading list. Stay nonviolent, Jason, don't push over those police gates!
Jason is on the national committee of War Resisters League, an old antiwar organization that in fact I've long admired, particularly for their willingness to take up defense of victims of communism among pacifists and war-resisters. But that was an old generation. Today, the experience of Jason is one, like the others I've mentioned, a long spiral of university, nonprofits, and third-world countries, in which no positive experience in their own country has ever been found -- no job in a corporation, no start-up of a business, no purchase of a home, no middle class dream in suburbia...
When you have a group like WRL, with its very specific socialist leaders (like David McReynolds, a man I have also long admired, who I saw at OWS and recently heard speak at his book party in the West Village -- who once ran on the ballot as a Green Party candidate, and I voted for him) -- you can't say this is a movement without some political agenda. You can't say it is new, or modern, or post-political, or beyond liberal and conservative. That would be an outright lie. It would not be the kind of lie that these people in these groups even would tell you.
So why Matt Taibbi has to tell this lie, or why even some wire service copy writers have to tell this lie, is beyond me, except that they have a vested interest in making the movement seem more mainstream or grassroots or "authentic" than it in fact is.
You see, this pose, this tactic of pretending its a brand-new thing and a new-media new-democracy sort of thing just isn't credible when you read these emails. Example, from Ashley Anderson
I have heard a lot of talk about the "lack of a demand" at #OWS. I like all the demands thus far, and I defend them fiercely to the fearful lefty critics. But they're right to point out that an ultimatum is implied with an "occupation." Otherwise, it's a demonstration, right?
I'm not sure why having one demand / many reasons to rise up are mutually exclusive.
This occupation could pick a winnable demand and use the spotlight moment to continue pushing for all the great things it is talking about. There will be more occupations, more demands, and more victories if the tale of Occupy Wall Street can create something solid. We won't get it all in one sitting, but we will get it all if we make a habit of drawing a line in the sand. I always thought that the "one demand" was the most brilliant part of the strategy.
Ashley is a director of PeacefulUprising.org He's not somebody studying, oh, sociology who suddenly appeared out of the woodwork, because he ran up too big a student loan or befcause he is somebody who lost his job. He has a job, like many of the OWS, or had one, in a nonprofit funded by some progressive and trendy foundation. He's in a "community organization" (i.e., a nonprofit with a "progressive" perspective that purports to be from "the people") that has a decided agenda, definite goals, a very clearcut perspective. He is not just now tumbling to the idea that there is gosh, too much greed. He has been active in the cause of opposing capitalism and the free-market American society and everything it stands for, for years. He's a person strategizing here how to take that pressed-down-and-running-over very definitive "progressive" and decidedly leftwing agenda and package it for the masses; package it for the mainstream TV; package it for the people in fact might actually be materializing off the street because they can't find a job.
But again, let's not pretend that Ashley, like Marina or Justin or Ryan are somehow "beyond" politics or left or right or blue or red or liberal or conservative. That's bullshit. They most definitely are situated very decidedly on the political spectrum of the extreme left, and the pretense about it gets to be sinister after awhile.
I don't mind if you have a leftwing socialist set of ideals you are promoting. I just want you to be open and honest about it and not con the public.
That's why, again, it's fake to pretend these people come from nowhere, or the streets, or the campuses, without any prefabrication. They don't; they are indeed products of very specific political tendencies.
Don't let the goofy, even cultic environmentalist prescriptions of this group distract from their collectist notion, which tells you all you need to know And for added emphasis, they write "Corporations are not people!"
There's lots more in that vein -- I just don't have time to go through them all now. CUNY professors. New School professors. Other university professors all of a type. All of the leftwing academic sort without any shading or nuance. Like J.A. Myerson. Product of the NYC school system -- check! Free speech fundamentalist -- check. Graduate of Bard -- check. And socialist -- check!
So knock it off, Matt Taibbi, Paul Berman and others trying to pretend this is something glorious, new, post-political, and not predictable.
'CORPORATIONS HAVE NEVER FELT THE WIND BLOW ON THEIR FACES'
This is a downright obsession with OWS. They hate Citizens United; they loath the idea that corporations can spend on campaigns after this ruling -- which ironically was brought to court by a leftwing group for whom Hillary was an object of derision and loathing on Youtube because they were to the left of the Clintons. The "community organizations' outraged at the "corporations as people" concept aren't at all disturbed, as I've noted, at unions or nonprofits or law firms being corporate persons -- that's fine, because, because they are, well, more peopley. Corporations may give products and jobs to people, but they aren't people! They are made up of people just like any other human institution (duh) but...they are souless and uncaring! And that's because... they make a profit. They are for profits, not people, you see! And that's what it's about. Seething hatred of capitalism -- socialism, but dressed up in cyber-clothing and scented with fairly-traded organic coffee.
CAN THIS HARDLINE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT BECOME MORE MAINSTREAM?
Well, it's trying it's damnedest -- the entire Madison-Avenue ad campaign from Ad Busters, with the added organizational menace of Anonymous -- has gone into trying to make the socialist sow's ear into a silk purse that any discontented person can pick up.
Here's a typical "discussion" around a "demand" (yes, they do have demands, they're just tactically holding them back). Here's a demand to overthrow capitalism and socialize private property (if you think it's about something other than what I just said, I'd love you to justify it LOL) -- and see how they package it as "People Power":
We Demand that The People Take Control back from Global Corporations
This demand puts the responsibility for change where it belongs, on The People. We need millions of people on the street to change the system in any meaningful way, and it directly calls for the people to act. It lets the people decide later how to define the movement. Principles, policies, demands, and techniques can all be decided as we grow. It does not threaten anyone except the biggest corporations and the politicians that serve them.
The part about the global corporations may be more controversial, but I believe that the biggest threat to democracy is the global super class, those corporations and their billionaires, bigger than many countries, extracting wealth from all of the countries simultaneously. These corporations are the same ones that our allies in Spain, Greece, France, Egypt, and all over the world are fighting. The word global can be adjusted later to include more corporations if the people so decide.
Please, read the demand again on its own, and see if there is anything in it that you disagree with. Then ask yourself if we could all agree that it would be the right call to action for our movement.
Thank you for your patience and impatience, John McGloin
Each time I hear a rant or a chant about "The People," I can't help thinking of that scene in Dr. Zhivago where Dr. Zhivago's father, the wealthy landowner, driven out of his mansion, cries from the door of his hovel in exile, "But I'm a member of the People, too!" Indeed. I have never forgotten it.
LATINO POWER
Here's a fellow who does likely have a burden of student loans, although his master's in public health could in theory get him a job in any number of places from the UN to Bellevue Hospital -- especially because he has well-connected professional parents with very good jobs who can help him find one himself:
Alexandre has, since his youth, been deeply inspired by his parents to adopt a “Glocal” (Think Global-Act Local) philosophy. His mother works as Chief of the Montreal Protocol unit in the United Nations Development Programme, and his father is a Federal University professor in Rio de Janeiro working with Social-Environmental Entrepreneurship projects.
He is Latino (Brazilian?), a member in good standing of the Wired State in its global multilateral and indicative of the increasing visibility of Hispanics in public life and that demographic bulge of the fastest growing segment of the US population under 18 or 21 that we're going to be hearing a lot more from -- and are already hearing from, if you look at the Hispanic role in OWS (and this gets overshadowed by the fixation on "white faces" and "people of colour" as in "black").
Alexandre Machado De Sant'Anna Carvalho, NYU student, is unhappy at the Ad-Buster's one-note cause. He's chafing already under the superficiality of that cynical and calculated ad campaign -- and who can blame him! Read this, and tell me this man is "beyond politics" and "neither left nor right"!
Follow this discussion about concern that moveon.org (too associated with the Democratic Party and electoral politics for the taste of many of these radicals) has coopted the movement, and once again see OWS activist display their hands:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:43 PM, Charles Lenchner <clenchner@gmail.com> wrote:
Folks might be surprised at the level of liberal/radical fraternization that has been taking place since the Bloombergville stuff. The idea that liberals were ignorant, then snarky, then busy taking over is pure fantasy. I know some folks at Rebuild the Dream. They have no intention of taking over OWS.
Charles
Well, no. What we really need to worry about is not silly Monty Python stuff but the actuality of "progressive" politicos pretending they represent "the new post-political". Charles is in in Organizing 2.0 and that barely-concealed Marxist-Leninist outfit Working Families.
Come on people, Stanley Aronowitz, that flower of Schachmanitism, isn't exactly a Blue Dog Democrat, yanno? Why are we having this fiction?!
Again, with people like this in the core of the activists, why are we pretending that this is "neither left or right"? Fake!
Say, if you don't want the conservative press to call out OWS as merely another front group for ACORN, then you will have to become more liberal and mainstream. Oh, and if you don't want the outcome predicted by George Will, cited by this blogger, too -- the inevitable rightwing backlash after the extremism of the left runs its course.
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