Train in Vain? Continuing critique of recent actions around SF's MUNI

This is part of the first draft of a longer article. Parts one and two can be found here:

part 1: http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/11/1785004_comment.php#1785478

part 2: http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/11/1785844.php

followed by lots and lots of real, real smart responses from the militants of The Party for Moderate Reform Within the Bounds of the Law.


TRAIN IN VAIN? PART 3

The recent effort to foment a "self-reduction" movement on MUNI against the Sept. 1st Fare hike, service cuts, and intensified exploitation of MUNI operators was in part insipred by similar actions a few years ago in Chicago. These efforts were intitiated by a group called Midwest Unrest. Info about their effort, "Fight or Walk," can be found here:

http://www.midwestunrest.net/fightorwalk/

Some Midwest Unrest people were in turn inspired by efforts some of us were involved in around San Francisco's Muni in 1993, and in "Friends of Black Bart" around BART at various times in the early and mid-1990's. This was a good example of how subversive efforts can cross-polinate. Info about those efforts can be found here:

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love2.html

One of the ways that the recent effort around MUNI went farther than the much smaller efforts of 1993 was that Muni Social Strike put together three "Town Hall" meetings to spread the word about what we trying to do. The first Town Hall meeting, held on May 1st in SF's Mission District, drew a good response from somewhere between 70 and 90 people. Unfortunately from that point onward a law of steeply-diminishing returns took effect, with each of the two subsequent meetings drawing fewer people.

The last one, held at the end of June, was attended by barely two dozen.

At that point we'd had sufficiently detailed discussions to have a clear idea of where we could go next with our effort. And we'd started off strong; we'd started by mass leafletting of MUNI employees and given out around 1400 leaflets to MUNI bus, streetcar, and cable car operators. (http://www.socialstrike.net/lit/driverleaflet.pdf) The address shown on the leaflet here now belongs to a disgruntled former follower of mine, who used it to spam the e-mail list we used in the effort and send me pestering e-mails, so I don't recommend anyone interested in anything substantial bother e-mailing to it.

In an action like this, we must start at the center and work our way outward; the employees of the transit system are the most crucial people to begin the effort with. They are in a position to make a mass self-reduction effort fly. Under the best circumstances this means they would initiate the event themselves as a wildcat, on-the-job tactic, outside of and against the control of the union. Under the most pessimistic scenario it would mean drivers passively going along with a mass action started by riders.

So by the end of June the third Town Hall meeting should have been devoted to specific, practical tasks aimed at getting the word out to the more than 99% of public transit riders in San Francisco. First the drivers, then the riders -- that's the way to go about it. We then had two months to get the word out, and to get the word out with an emphasis on a larger direct action, anti-capitalist, working class oriented worldview before the usual assortment of liberals, social workers, Lenin devotees and other culture-of-leftist-failure types glommed onto the cause.

My proposal was that the third Town Hall meeting should be focused around a specific plan for covering the city with posters. In the past, postering has proven to be an effective way to introduce larger numbers of people in SF who aren't leftist protest-ghetto denizens to a radical take on issues affecting their lives. Ultimately in this effort the stickers Muni Social Strike came up with worked much better, but this could only be learned in the doing.

In response to my proposal, one of the more liberalish-anarchists, politically indistinguishable from the 'Coalition for Transit Justice,' fretted that to plan anything specific would be "authoritarian." This is of course the great anarchist bogey-man, and serves as an endless excuse among circle-A-scensters for all kinds of incapacity and equivocating bullshit. In any case, nothing practical resulted for this third meeting. It was just a lot of empty talk, spinning our wheels and rehashing vague proposals that had already been bounced around in the first two public meetings.

And, if the inability to make a clear decision displayed by the anarchists at this meeting wasn't enough to give pause, there was an even more discouraging development; after that meeting Muni Social Strike collapsed for five weeks. The group ceased to exist. One other individual and I were the only ones left standing; apparently Anti-authoritarian-Attention-Deficit-Disorder had carried off the others like the 1918 Spanish flu.

Muni Social Strike falling apart coincided with some other anarchists organizing a demo in the Mission coinciding with the anti G-8 events going on in early July in Scotland. The demo drew several hundred people, and ended up evolving into a sort of anarchist-subcultural-scenester, just add-water-and-mix riot.

From a communique posted by some of the marches' participants (available here: http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/07/1752559.php) it's clear to me that the event and most of it's participants were motivated by subjectively radical, authentic anti-capitalist motivations. Making a connection between global capitalism and the gentrification of the Mission resonates personally with me. I like the way it sounds, I like the way it makes me feel. I have more of a will to believe in stuff like this than most people in this society, but ocassionally my ability to think critically gets the better of my gut impulses. The riot led to a little damage to some deserving capitalist enterprises and a dust-up with some cops, but it didn't communicate anything to anybody, other than communicating an illusion to some of the people involved that they were actually rebelling against something.

Whether stuff like the SF G-8 event is ever of any real use is a big question; I don't have a sure answer. Maybe if something a lot more valid and relevant wasn't already demanding a maximum commitment of of time and energy from authentically rebellious individuals it would be okay to do stuff like this. But in San Francisco at the beginning of July 2005, this event primarily served to siphon away energy that should have gone to the mass action around MUNI.

There's both a quantitative, and more importantly a qualitative difference, between a few hundred anarchist subculture people venting their anger at a few legitimate targets -- a wholly symbolic experience -- and a large-scale movement of opposition to increased impoverishment and exploitation, potentially by several hundred thousand proletarians; average, socially conservative, mostly a-political people who don't give a shit about anarchism or Marxism; acting around their own needs, antagonistic in a small but significant way to commodity relations and to the democratic state that commodity relations generate.

After the G-8 demo I spoke with an anarchist comrade -- one of the solid, thoughful, energetic individuals, not one of the flakes or servile types -- and this person ran down a list of all the actions they were equally committed to participating in; a list of four seperate efforts. Each one of these would demand a 75% to 85% level of commitment -- if the person involved is for real and serious and wants to help make a difference. Dividing their attentions four different ways meant at very best a 25% level of commitment to each effort; in other words, a superficial and necessarily mediocre involvement with each effort.

It became clear to me that some of the people I was trying to build a substantial, long-term, subversive political relationship with weren't capable of making good judgement calls, or aspiring to anything more substantial than choosing one of every item from the apparent-rebellion menu.

You can read about the best efforts to come out of the anarchist and Marxist branches of the classical workers' movement in the past. You can meet with substantial, serious enemies of capitalism today, in Europe, where I have, espescially in Italy and the Czech Republic, and undoutably elsewhere as well. None of them related to, or relate to their revolutionary politics as a form of entertainment. Unfortunately that's what happens with many, maybe most, of the self-styled anarchists in the US today. And the mass action around MUNI suffered badly for it.

Around the beginning of August people put electric paddles on the chest of the moribund Social Strike effort and brought the thing back from the dead. The main thing that had happened in the previous five weeks was that predictable anarchist flakiness had by now wholly handed the political agenda in this effort to the culture of leftist failure crowd, embodied at this point by Muni Fare Strike.

From that point on, the initiative in the effort to foment a "look the other way when people don't pay" action belonged to people who were determined that nothing radical would come out of this effort; that the action would be just about a minor problem with MUNI, and not about anything bigger. These guys were leftists determined to not even say anything in this context about the other aspects of life under capitalism from an anti-market/anti-state point of view. Nothing new was going to happen in this part of the world growing out of the MUNI action, if these guys got their way.

Anarchists seem to specialize in taking their best efforts, putting them in a box, and making a gift of them to liberals, Leninists, social democrats and social workers. Why is that?

(to be continued...)