FARE STRIKE! San Francisco 2005: First-Hand Accounts...hmmmmmm...

1. This prolix leftists' memoir of failure pamphlet is clearly intended for the consumption of people who were far, far away from San Francisco in the summer and fall of 2005, and who might be hoodwinked into believeing its wildly innacurate depiction of the 2005 fare strike fiasco; mass spontaneous resistance on a class basis, and other I-stiil-believe-in-the-Easter-Bunny versions of reality;

2. The people behind it, Gifford (GH), etc, intervened from the right against an already existing radical effort, and did all they could to turn it into a typical, Bay Area leftist single-issue complaint phenomenon. Any allegedly anti-capitalist politics that they claim to profess were so well-concealed from the working class Muni riding public as to be invisible.

3. They were successful in turning the effort into a typical single-issue, SF Bay Area leftist culture of failure event. They were able to make the effort a product of their "vision," or more accurately lack of vision.

Subsequently the effort was a flop. All the Muni operators I spoke to afterward, several dozen of them, were unanimous in saying this, and they were in a better position to judge than anyone else.

And, in the words of a disinterested young woman cafe worker that I know, "The fare strike lasted about a half an hour."

4. Now GH, consistent with his Warner-Brothers-cartoon-character comical pattern of dishonesty in all things, tries to paper over the abject failure of his politics in action by claiming that this clear and obvious failure was somehow really a great-moment-in-proletarian-history,

5. And after doing all they could to turn a potential mass transit self-reduction effort on SF's Muni into a typical SF Bay Area, left-wing-of-capital load of crap, we get an airbrushed history book version in pdf format -- garlanded with quotes from Guy Debord!

These guys did all they could to denude the effort of any actual anti-capitalist content. All the pro-Situ references afterward can't reverse that.

Oh yeah, by the way, did any of these clowns ever have the backbone or the even minimal integrity to ask Marc Norton, the guy who wrote their leaflets for them, and gave their effort its central political direction, what particular brand of Leninist he is?

Four of the nine -- not ten, as claimed -- people contributing to this prolix effort are beer-drinking buddies of the author, GH. As such I assume they are putative members of the Potemkin-Village leftist group "Insane Dialectical Posse." To fail to identify them as such is manipulative and dishonest.

Maybe in this they are picking up some tips from Marc Norton, the Leninist who wrote their leaflets for them, and gave their effort some of its most significant political coloration -- ignoring the drivers and Balkanizing what needed to be a join riders and drivers effort into a mostly riders-only effort.



"...in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence...the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as innocent as he was when he went into it."

Karl Marx, in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,' quoted here from 'Muni Social Strikeout -- the Failed Transit System Fare Strike in San Francisco in 2005.'

This article is available on the 'Love and Treason' web page at the Mid-Atlantic Anarchist Infoshop:

 http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_social_strikeout.

'The Failed Transit System Fare Strike' article is also available on libcom.org, and in numerous other places on the internet.

Kevin Keating, formerly of Muni Social Strike, San Francisco
 proletaire2003@yahoo.com

Kevin, thank you for your interest in our pamphlet, have you read it
yet? You mentioned on the other site we were debating at that you
didn't feel the need to. Just wondering.


KK:
1. This prolix leftists' memoir of failure pamphlet is clearly
intended for the consumption of people who were far, far away from San
Francisco in the summer and fall of 2005, and who might be hoodwinked
into believeing its wildly innacurate depiction of the 2005 fare
strike fiasco; mass spontaneous resistance on a class basis, and other
I-stiil-believe-in-the-Easter-Bunny versions of reality;

CM: Now you keep harping on how long our pamphlet is ("prolix"). It's
interesting that when I combine your four Train In Vain articles on
the Fare Strike/Social Strike, they are 27 pages (with part five on
it's way you note). Your "social strike out article" is 24 pages long.
That's 27 and 24 pages (text only) from one person, versus 27 total
pages from ten people with pictures, analysis, historical background,
footnotes, etc. Who is more longwinded? You are.

As for the claim we are trying to fool people outside San Francisco,
can you please show me the people INSIDE San Francisco who are backing
up your weird version of events? I don't believe there is a single
one. The pamphlet we put out has ten writers. The person who designed
the web site is from Social Strike, and another person from Social
Strike is writing an account we are going to add. People outside SF
might not know how alienated you've become, but they do know in the
Bay Area.

You claim our account is naive and false, but the reality is that
thousands of people did fare strike, It's not hoodwinking anyone to
say that I think some people were radicalized in the process of Fare
Striking. As one person in one day, I personally witnessed many
hundreds Fare Striking. That's why I think it's accurate to say
thousands did, and very possibly tens of thousands. I have no exact
count, but it's been suggested that looking at Muni's revenue losses
for the first day may be a good approximation. Can you back up your
charge that all ten accounts were wildly inaccurate?

2. The people behind it, Gifford (GH), etc, intervened from the right
against an already existing radical effort, and did all they could to
turn it into a typical, Bay Area leftist single-issue complaint
phenomenon. Any allegedly anti-capitalist politics that they claim to
profess were so well-concealed from the working class Muni riding
public as to be invisible.

CM: CM: We didn't intervene, we joined with an exodus of people who
were moving away from association with you. That's a big part of why a
second group was needed, you surely must know this by now.
If anything, our methods were far more participatory than your
attempted framework (rejected roundly) for Social Strike, and that
means that everyone was expected to be smart enough to represent
themselves, instead of just handing out your literature (virtually
unchanged since the 1990s) and relying on you as their representative
from above mediating between them and the drivers. Our efforts had
nothing to do with any undefined "leftist culture of failure" red
herring. Our pamphlet contains a lot of stuff written while the fare
strike was still going, and it was never a single issue campaign with us.
If anyone has consistently denied the possibility of meaningful
working class struggle in this process, it's you. Your hierarchical
approach was deemed oppressive and counterproductive.

KK:
3. They were successful in turning the effort into a typical
single-issue, SF Bay Area leftist culture of failure event. They were
able to make the effort a product of their "vision," or more
accurately lack of vision. Subsequently the effort was a flop. All the
Muni operators I spoke to afterward, several dozen of them, were
unanimous in saying this, and they were in a better position to judge
than anyone else.

CM: Note that you are engaging in a "post hoc" logical fallacy here.
Nowhere have you ever shown that anything "everyone else except you"
did was directly responsible for the alleged debacle as you have
called it (and certainly not for the drivers' actions during the
strike), or that it was connected to a "vision." Ideas alone did not
establish the material hurdles we came up against. In the case of
the drivers, they were under different types of pressure, from reports
of layoffs, to the actual disciplining of two drivers who had proposed
a wildcat strike. At the meetings with drivers, your literature and
posters were overwhelmingly rejected by them. You attempt to paint
this as a "Kevin and the drivers versus the Leftists" but no where
have you ever established you had any credibility with any of the
drivers. It's nice that you talked to drivers after the strike, but
you also fail to acknowledge their many acts of solidarity with riders
during the strike, and these are important to gauge the possibility of
cooperation between riders and drivers. Again, this is a disservice to
readers, who you claim we're trying to hoodwink by giving both
positives and negatives.
Now when we look at the collective Social Strike/Fare Strike
effort, we come to the Day Laborers, who more than anyone else
actually did establish driver rider connections, which is why the
Mission was among the major strong points of the entire effort. This
was one of the SUCCESSES of the Fare Strike, and had nothing to do
with you. We don't take credit for their work, but they did come
onboard through our group, not you. Aside from this, many in the Fare
Strike/Social Strike, rode and talked to drivers, delivered literature
to band barns, met with drivers, despite your efforts to exclude
people from the start.
One important reason people became fed up with you was your
hierarchical approach. You acted as a choke point between the riders
and the drivers, hand picking who would get to meet with drivers,
despite their telling some of the people involved that they wanted to
meet more of the riders in the campaign, as the saved e-mails from the
Social Strike web site indicate. In fact, two of the core people
involved with these early meeting groups were harassed out by you when
you labeled them "leftists." These were among the first casualties of
your sectarianism. Eventually, every single person was labeled a dupe
of the evil Leninists who allegedly stole "your fare strike" which you
apparently own. But as has emerged in the Bay Area discussions, most
anarchists and ultra-leftists, including our own group, see you as a
liability, a liar, and unprincipled.

KK:
4. Now GH, consistent with his Warner-Brothers-cartoon-character
comical pattern of dishonesty in all things, tries to paper over the
abject failure of his politics in action by claiming that this clear
and obvious failure was somehow really a
great-moment-in-proletarian-history,

CM: CM: You're one to talk of lies. You reposted several accusations
here that were already debunked, and you act as if you never received
a response from us!
You don't seem to get that what we're doing is presenting first
hand accounts in a democratically organized effort in which all
authors participated directly. Nothing is papered over here. There is
a lot of self-critique in the pamphlet, in the accounts and the group
conclusion. You are displaying your basic contempt for materialist
analysis when you insist that the "abject failure" is to be explained
by someone's supposed "politics," which you also misrepresent, or
don't grasp.
Your model was to plaster your politics onto the entire effort, to the
point that you didn't consider who would be reading the flyers, or how
to quickly get peoples' attention. Our efforts included flyers (NOT
written solely by Marc Norton as you've erroneously claimed for almost
two years now), that were shaped by our experiences talking to people,
comments from the drivers (remember them Kevin? They dissed your
literature.), the Day Laborers suggestions, and discussion at
meetings. The reality is that our flyers did not sum up our
"politics." They were something we used to introduce the topic of a
Fare Strike quickly. They did mention working class unity and the
threatened layoffs of drivers. Where the class struggle politics realy
came in, almost always, was in the individual discussions. But there
were a lot of people who never read _Capital_ who were interested in
the Fare Strike for less fully developed reasons.

KK:
5. And after doing all they could to turn a potential mass transit
self-reduction effort on SF's Muni into a typical SF Bay Area,
left-wing-of-capital load of crap, we get an airbrushed history book
version in pdf format -- garlanded with quotes from Guy Debord!

CM I prefer to describe it in this way. Your ego went nuts in your
dealings with the Anarchist Action and Social Strike groups. They
combined forces with us without alerting you. Together the groups
moved forward. As more than one person pointed out at the recent
BASTARD anarchist conference (which you've also denounced), valuable
time was wasted over the fights that arose between you and Marc,
mainly from your undisciplined sniping, and this delayed a well
coordinated action, especially given that everyone who has actually
agreed to sit down and think about the fare strike has stated we
needed more people involved. But those of us who were actually still
working together all knew the essential judgment of your role in the
months leading up to the strike. We can say we're anti-capitalist and
you can scream "no you're not" forever, but until you can back up your
bizarre claims, our writing and actions will be the deciding factor.
And I do encourage people to read our pamphlet at farestrike.org to
see if they think we're all leftist leninist dupes.

KK:
These guys did all they could to denude the effort of any actual
anti-capitalist content. All the pro-Situ references afterward can't
reverse that.

CM:
CM: I think your efforts at control from above are far more indicative
of a sort of Bolshevik/pro-capitalist position than ours. Your one man
management is very different from actions based on spontaneous action
from the participants themselves. We worked with radicals or people
who were becoming radicalized in the process of fare striking. In
contrast, you demanded a fully developed party line be parroted by
everyone in your orbit. As I've explained many times, and you've never
acknowledged, our class struggle focus was always front and center in
our interaction with people. You were not at our meetings; you were
not with us flyering; you weren't with us during the fare strike; and
you seemingly have not read our pamphlet; but you claim to know
everything about our actions and the content of our efforts.

KK:
Oh yeah, by the way, did any of these clowns ever have the backbone or
the even minimal integrity to ask Marc Norton, the guy who wrote their
leaflets for them, and gave their effort its central political
direction, what particular brand of Leninist he is?

CM: This loaded question was answered, yes, why pretend it wasn't and
repost here as if we ignored the question? That is called lying Kevin.
This is what I wrote in direct response to your question:
You are dead wrong when you say that Marc Norton wrote our flyers.
Our flyers were shaped by our experiences talking to people, comments
from the drivers (remember them Kevin?), the Day Laborers suggestions
that they be concise, and discussion at meetings. The reality is that
our flyers did not sum up our "politics." They were something we used
to introduce the topic of a Fare Strike quickly. Where the class
struggle politics came in, almost always, was in the individual
discussions. But there were a lot of people who never read _Capital_
who were interested in the Fare Strike for less fully developed reasons.
What I want to know, is since you claim we were led by a
Stalinist/Trotskyist/Leninist (your description has continually
morphed to suit your fancy), why were you ever willing to work with
people from the Drivers Action Committee? Isn't it true that their
leadership is essentially a Progressive Labor Party cadre? Doesn't
that make you a Maoist dupe? And can't we extrapolate from the fact
that you went to the retirement party of one of their members that you
were working behind the scenes to lead the Social Strike into some
kind of new Great Leap Forward, based on the teachings of your God
Chairman Mao? Come clean Kevin!!!

KK:
Four of the nine -- not ten, as claimed -- people contributing to this
prolix effort are beer-drinking buddies of the author, GH. As such I
assume they are putative members of the Potemkin-Village leftist group
"Insane Dialectical Posse." To fail to identify them as such is
manipulative and dishonest.

CM: Sorry you counted wrong, it is ten, they are actually numbered in
the online version. As for your years long ad hominem attack on
Gifford as an alleged heavy drinker,that may be based on your
friendship years ago, but as it pertains to the present, it's an
obvious case of projection. Your own reputation, complete with the
documented "air rage" incident, is so well known that it merits no
further comment.
And you claim we're hiding our identities, but our names are given in
the pamphlet, sometimes with only initials, but the initials are well
known to anyone who would care who we are. You're REALLY stretching here.

KK:
Maybe in this they are picking up some tips from Marc Norton, the
Leninist who wrote their leaflets for them, and gave their effort some
of its most significant political coloration -- ignoring the drivers
and Balkanizing what needed to be a join riders and drivers effort
into a mostly riders-only effort.

CM: In typical Bolshevik fashion, you keep insisting that it was our
job to organize the drivers, when in fact we wanted to meet them
halfway. None of the drivers ever called for a Fare Strike. The main
liability to gaining a closer relationship with them was your self
appointed role as choke point. As stated, the drivers criticized your
literature for being too ideological and too verbose. You claim we
wanted to ice the drivers out and then imply that it was our fault
that they didn't participate in larger numbers. None of that is true.
Our crews were among the people who did meet with drivers early on,
and who also were talking to the drivers on the busses about the
strike up to and throughout the strike. The biggest show of solidarity
from drivers came from the Mission district, where the Day Laborers
helped cement their trust. Recall the Day Laborers were brought
onboard through the Fare Strike group. Your charge of our anti-driver
stance is totally false. The punishment of two Muni drivers who had
suggested a wild cat strike was partly responsible for adding to the
drivers' hesitations. It had nothing to do with how one or another
flyer was worded. To suggest that is absolutely unsupported by any
evidence, like most of your outrageous claims.


KK:
"...in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and
their potency impotence...the democrat comes out of the most
disgraceful defeat just as innocent as he was when he went into it."

Karl Marx, in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,' quoted here
from 'Muni Social Strikeout -- the Failed Transit System Fare Strike
in San Francisco in 2005.'

CM: In response to your Marx quote, I quoted this about you:

About a year before, I had read an article of his in a magazine,
written with a terrible pretension to the most naive poetry and, at
the same time to psychology. He described the wreck of a steamer
somewhere on the English coast, of which he himself had been a witness
and had seen how the perishing were being saved and the drowned
dragged out. The whole article, quite a long and verbose one, was
written with the sole purpose of self-display. One could simply read
it between the lines: "Pay attention to me, look at how I was in those
moments. What do you need the sea, the storm, the rock, the splintered
planks of the ship for? I've described it all well enough for you with
my mighty pen. Why look at this drowned woman with her dead baby in
her dead arms? Better look at me, at how I could not bear the sight
and turned away. Here I am turning my back; here I am horrified and
unable to look again; I've shut my eyes--interesting, is it not?"

(Fyodor Dostoevsky, _Demons_,85)

Comrade puto writes poorly and is not too bright...

1. Prolix doesn't simply mean, a long document. It means an overly long, badly written document.

2. I was unable to work with:

the anarchists,, because, being the kind of people who call themselves anarchists in this part of the world, they all bailed on what they committed to doing.

And I wasn't out to work with pro=-wage labor leftists, like comrade puto, Gifford Hartman, and the Leninist who wrote their leaflets for them..

more soon,
Kevin K.

I don't get involved in efforts like this because I have absolutely nothing else to do with my time, but because I am fighting for the emergence of a communist perspective in the everyday life struggles of working people the world over. That is something that I don't think a conventional leftist like you is going to grasp.

Comrade Puto doesn't get the difference between an open, authentic antagonism to capitalist social relations, and the single-issue, hidden agenda, conventional leftist culture of failure effort that he and his fellow stumblebums asserted, with a striking lack of results, in the 2005 SF transit fare strike debacle.

1. Explain why you and your fellow bunglers communication skills were and are so poor that you had to sub-contract out the lealet-writing duties in your effort to the General Secretary of a one-man Leninist party? Devious leftist that you are you haven't answered this question yet. This gives all the answer needed.

2. Why did your leaflet not address the drivers, unlike the leaflet that Muni Social Strike distributed to Muni drivers in the thousands?

Because the Leninist who wrote your leaflets for you is out to form a top-down, riders membership organization modelled on the leninist-control LA Bus Riders Union, is why.

3. If you are against capitalism, then why was this perspective wholly invisible in all your efforts?

From having to get a Leninist to write your leaflets, to your utter failure to even effectively draw attention to the fare strike, to your prolix, laughably pedantic, virtually unreadable except to maybe three or four floodwater corduroy-wearing college 'Marxists' history, you guys can't use language effectively. I can. This elicits sour grapes from deceitful slimeballs like G.H. and his fellow couch potatoes.

In Spanish-speaking part of the U.S., "puto" is a homophobic slur. Here's the definition from an online dictionary of Spanish slang:

"Puta/Puto

Puta literally means whore, and can be extended to any woman who is seen as sexually loose. The male equivalent puto has different meanings in different parts of the Spanish-speaking world: in many places it is a pejorative for a gay man."

These posts are using a homophobic slur to belittle someone in an offensive way. Please stand up against homophobia and delete them.

Thanks

Kevin Keating is a homophobic self-professed communist. Based on his use of anti-gay slang, it's hard to believe the communist part. He sounds like the run-of-the-mill gay-bashing hateful bigot.

Here are more defintions:

 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=puto

Please delete his posts.

KK: Because the Leninist who wrote your leaflets for you is out to form a top-down, riders membership organization modelled on the leninist-control LA Bus Riders Union, is why.

CM: This is actually incorrect. While Marc had been considering the riders union idea a few years ago, he had backed out of it. By 2005, he had come to the conclusion that direct action was a better method.
So not only are you wrong that he wrote the flyer, you're even wrong on what you thought you knew about his stance during the 2005 Fare Strike. I'm not sure why anyone would take your "analysis" seriously when the best you seem to be able to muster is unfunny homophobic slurs and errouneous rants. I do however appreciate what your writing is doing for us as far as establishing our credibility, and in that limited sense I agree you're a better writer, so keep at it if you like.
Thanks,
Comrade Motopu
P.S. people will see that we have been answering your charges openly at indymedia sites (as in the above posts) and on anti-politics, despite your claims that we're engaging in some conspiracy of silence. We've been addressing your slander for nearly two years now.

Puto is not a homophobic slur -- this poilitically correct liberal is just trying to censor the substance of what I'm saying.

Deal with the substance of the issues at hand, clown. Cut out the decietful evasions.

Kevin, when we answer you, you say we haven't responded. But anyone who has read these posts or the anti-politics threads can see that you set the framework of every discussion and never seem to answer questions put to you. That's a strategy that can work, and in that way your as good at it as Karl Rove. But to claim people have evaded the questions you put to them, when all we need do is look above to the long Comrade Motopu response to your points... is just dumb.
Be aware that people can see through such transparently fraudulent debating tactics.

Every day, LGBT people are viciously attacked and slandered by those who create and or profit from anti-gay messages. Such expressions of intolerance clearly have an impact on how people treat members of our community. For us, it can be a matter of life or death. We will not tolerate any words that demean anyone in the LGBT community.

Kevin Keating is nothing but a hateful bigot. We encourage anyone who encounters the type of behaviour he engages in to act up and fight back. We will never go back.