gordonzola

wolfknuckles found this and posted in our little make-fun-of-sectarians LJ group. I believe it deserves a bigger audience.

I'm glad someone finally made a video for this song. And who better than the Maoist International Movement to visually interpret it?


Not that everything revolves around Lance Hahn, but he once told me how much he wanted to cover "Rebel Girl" in J Church but that he couldn't figure out how to do it without it being misinterpreted. He didn't want people to think he was making fun of a song he really loved.

My favorite part of my walk to work is on this block. A light-up cross sticks out from a church. Calling out to the passersby, it proclaims "God is not Dead!"

Kinda defensive, don’t you think? Then again, it makes sense that churches are a little defensive in San Francisco. Is there a more godless city anywhere in the country?* And then, you’d also expect a church to be a little defensive when it’s elbow to elbow with a queer sex club.

I often walk on another street home when I get off work on Saturday nights. By the time I would walk by, many men are already discretely making their way to club in full cruise mode. Normally, I like being cruised, but after eight hours in the cheese mines I couldn’t feel less sexy. I smell of pungent cheese and bleach, my pores are full of dairy molecules and my hair feels heavy, greasy, and gross.**

The worst night was some Pride event when there was a line half a block long of people waiting to get in. Usually it’s more of a get-out-of-the-cab-at-the-next-block kinda place and discretion is called for, but on this night there was a gauntlet of guys, dressed all shiny for a night out. I walked by with tired steps in my soiled sweatshirt and cheesy hands as they checked me out. When guys say they’re into cheese, this is not what they’re talking about.

Further down the block, I’ve never figured how Socialist Action managed to rent out the bottom of the subsidized senior housing that was built a couple years ago over the vacant lot which served as a x-mas tree lot and pumpkin patch when appropriate. Since this is San Francisco, I hope there’s a couple of old CP members who live there who spit at the door and mutter, "Damn Trots" under their breath when they walk by. There’s never anyone in their "bookstore" and I can only imagine the meetings where cadre are forced to rationalize this.

Embarrassingly for Marxists, they also have signs in their windows to "Stop the Freeway Rebuild!" Seems rather insincere and anti-progressive, in the original sense, to me. What a colossal waste of money though. First they retrofit that freeway so it wouldn’t pancake like the Cyprus Structure did in the ’89 quake. Then they tear it down. Now they are building it back up slightly differently. Still, it is a pretty good jobs program, I guess. You’d think the Socialist Action folks would appreciate that. I wonder if the national organization knows.

Oh yeah, Needles and Pens, the cool new zine store, clothing store, and art space is also on this block, where Black and Blue Tattoo used to be. It has Epicenter-like hours so it’s rarely open when I walk by, but it’s definitely worth checking out.



*Attempts to find the answer to this question sent me on an half hour-long internet tangent. It seems that this title is claimed by many, usually negatively by a local religious groups seeking adherents. But according to this website , SF is nowhere near the most godless in ratio of adherents to population, though still well below the national average. Check out Medford! Who knew?

** Speaking of the smell of cheese, while cooking the other day, my housemate came into the kitchen. "What’s that smell?" she asked, "It smells like a pussy with a yeast infection." Oh, Antique Gruyere, how I love you.

I know that I should just ignore the lefty sects. I’ve been told that on this very LJ. But I just can’t help it, those folks are so wacky. I try to think of it this way, I know they’ll never amount to much politically beyond annoyance, but tracking their splits and machinations has become something of a hobby since I became politically active.

walktheplank suggested that I read Inside Out by Alexandra Stein awhile back, and I finally got around to finding a copy. Her take is that the group she was a part of (called The O., for "The Organization") was more cult than political organization. That seems to be the case based on the mixture of self-help and Marxist terms, the arranged marriages, and the social control of members. It also might be considered a give away that they almost never actually do any political organizing, or even go on the cannibalize-for-cadre binges of other political groups that is the traditional sectarian method for recruitment.

I was especially interested in The O because of their involvement with the Food Co-op Wars in Minneapolis in the ‘70s. The thriving food co-op movement in that city was forever changed when, in the name of the people, sectarians in dark glasses carrying baseball bats took over the main food warehouse in the city and occupied it. After the fighting in the streets was done, the anti-sectarians simply started a new warehouse and boycotted the old one, driving it out of business. But the network of political food cooperatives in that area was destroyed forever. The O, then known as the C.O., was at its height then, but soon lost or purged most of its 200 members. The rest went underground. This was not identical, but mirrored the fights over the People’s Food Warehouse in San Francisco during that same time period which ended in a gunfight and a death during a meeting to decide the fate of the SF People’s Food System.

Everyone around at the time yells COINTELPRO, but how much was just bad politics?

That’s the question I kept asking myself as I read this book. Unfortunately for the co-op history* Stein’s involvement with The O starts in the early ‘80s as her San Francisco political friends begin to drop out of politics. I understand the longing for Movement and the feeling of wanting to be serious about her organizing. I understand that the dissolution of focussed activism in the late ‘70s made people do funny things when a few years before they felt that revolution was right around the corner. But I’ll never understand why people join small sectarian parties. Especially one which intentionally isolates her, doesn’t allow her to sleep (because of scheduled activities) and which never reveals any of its goals.

It’s unclear what she has been told and what she assumes are the politics of the "Marxist-Leninist" organization she joins. There were rumors that certain famous Black Power militants were really high up in the leadership which, one has to guess, made it ok that all the cadre were (seemingly) all white. In fact, it could be seen as a badge of commitment, and in this case anti-racism, that one would disavow their own self-determination (or bourgeois side according to The O) for the struggle as planned by The O’s wise leadership. As it turns out however, the group is run not by a central committee or a leadership collective, but by one Black man who seems to be making a living having all these white people working for him and hiring his construction company to constantly remodel their workplaces and homes.

Of course he’s also manipulative, violent, crazy, and has charismatic control of the members. Stein goes to great lengths to show how scared to think for themselves once they are involved in The O. In fact, the leader secretly goes to jail for over a year after killing someone, and everyone in the Organization (how many people? 10? 20 at most I’d say) just keeps working on their previous orders,** with no idea that it was not just them, but everyone, who hadn’t heard from the "leadership" during that time. Now that’s cadre discipline!

Predictably, the members of The O have no visible sense of humor and Stein hasn’t seemed to developed one since she terminated her membership. My favorite passage in the book comes after she has left The O and she confides to her Old Left mother that she has been in a secret communist organization for the last ten years:

"’What are they," (her mother) asked shrilly, "Trotskyists?"
For her generation of Communists, Trotskyists were the ultimate form of evil, so this was her way of trying to understand.
‘No," I sighed, ‘But that’ll do.’"

Now that’s a funny line; Lefty comic gold even. Trotsky jokes please radicals of all stripes except for, of course, Trotskyists. But instead of having a good laugh about this, this becomes a heavy moment about how no one can understand what she’s been though.***

Further demonstrating the lack of humor, which probably is a common denominator between sectarians and cultists, is the fact that early on in her O tenure, the inter-Organization communiqués stop coming from "O.S." (Organization Secretary) and start coming from "P.O.O."**** This is not commented upon.

jactitation reminded me of one of the other (unintentionally) funny moments. As soon as they leave the cult, what’s the first thing they do? Write a position paper on The O of course. Sectarians are nothing if not stubborn.

There was a (self-described) ex-Weatherman ex-radical who lived in the town where I went to school. He became a minor local celebrity denounce all campus activism using himself as a bad example. He used to repeat certain phrases a lot, whether shouting at us on the streets or on the local rightwing cable access show. "You’ve been co-opted by the international Communist conspiracy!" "You’re building shanty towns now, next thing you know you’ll be throwing molotov cocktails at banks!"*****

My response to him was always to yell back, "Stop blaming us for your bad politics!" That phrase kept coming back to me throughout reading this book. Inside Out didn’t make me think, "Wow, I could have joined a sectarian cult by accident!" Instead, it made me yell, "What are you thinking!" every few repetitive pages.



*The book Storefront Revolution details the Minneapolis food co-op history.
**Fortuitously, Stein had just been approved to fundraise for the ANC just before this jail term began. The idea may just have been to make contacts through which to sell their computer software, but since she received no other orders she actually did manage to do something useful for awhile.
***It also reflects on her relationship with her mother, but space limitations . . .
****acronym meaning unknown.
*****Yet some still say that ‘60s radicals had catchy slogans.