#saul alinsky | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

psychreviews2 · 28 days

Text

Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 4

The Fear of Losing Success

Now that a possible protagonist has learned to understand how they feel "castrated" when having to deal with criticism, like in Part 1 of this series, and has discovered a form of True Self in Part 2, and has battled with self-hatred in Part 3, this part of the series looks at what a protagonist may go through when they are to embrace the Work side of Freud's equation of Work and Love as a goal for mental health. With the success of any cultures and institutions, and expanding marketplaces, like with all things in life, there are limitations and drawbacks to all systems, and even if there are improvements, they are taken for granted. The mind moves onto the next problem. How can we progress? Because we are all mortal, there will always be a medical problem, and because we work, there's always a labour problem. We have relationships that go through bouts of integration and disintegration. There's always a room for complaint and a desire for a rescuer or a hope for a new system to usher in a better world. Those desires can be partially improved as technology and social systems react to injustice with real improvements, but there are also cults where promises are not fulfilled and failed attempts at reform are discarded into the dustbin of history. This is usually due to one kind of ignorance towards practicality or another. For there to be a real improvement there has to be real manifestation. It usually shows up as an improvement that is real and tangible, is exciting due to novelty, and begins to show some drawbacks, albeit less drawbacks than what prior generations had to suffer. The drawbacks lead to boredom and a new desire to transcend those drawbacks returns. Political, economic, and cultural development. We often learn the most from our mistakes and contrasts when walking down a wrong path, but with the intention of walking down the right one. Many books are written about progressives and often what some people call success, others call failure. Everyone wants to be part of a utopia, or to feel like part of a vanguard ushering in a better future. In the modern world, people seek to look for success in the marketplace or in government. Each of these institutions has their benefits and dangers.

One of the best compendiums of social complaint related to weaknesses of the marketplace was Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kołakowski. Being a philosopher he was able to tap into his experiences of being a Marxist in the Soviet Union. Marxism is about alienation under Capitalism and the painful self-consciousness encountered in modern life. As Leszek moved from one strain to another, to try and revive the best humanist aspects of Karl Marx's writings, he saw that he undervalued Western society and overvalued Marxism, because of it's difficulty in finding ways to advance without embracing one form of oppression or another. Those Western influences go far back before Marx as well. Leszek found that Plotinus and Hegel were able to look at the sense of suffering in the goal orientation connected with self-consciousness. Again, like with many Western writers, you'll find lots of meditative connections towards oneness and a need to reduce the feeling of alienation in the sense of self. The Buddhist example is to weaken that impulse of Subject > Object > Time as much as possible. In the West there is a desire to use the Ego as an ally, to develop it, expand it, and to continue to transcend obstacles to life as they appear. One can adopt a sense of healthy challenge with obstacles. As soon as one obstacle is done away with, there is a momentary celebration, but then to avoid depression, it's on to the next obstacle, and there can be a zest and meaning to life when it's viewed as a game of trying to transcend limitation. Yet, medical breakthroughs are limited and the Ego has to shrink back to basic consciousness with age and with the hope that there's something more on the other side of total obliteration. God to us is continued existence, but as human consciousness grows up from adolescence, and when witnessing the death of older generations, those experiences bring in the feeling of our own finality. We are not God because we do not continue forever. An Ego desire to transcend can be presumed with its motivation to manipulate the environment to enhance life and increase independence. Plotinus describes what that would be like if we could be absolutely independent. "Certainly that which has never passed outside its own orbit, unbendingly what it is, its own unchangeably, is that which most strictly be said to possess its own being." Humans on the other hand are stuck in interdependence with the environment and a feeling of separation with individual consciousness. We can't "possess our own being."

Like you see in Freud and Psychoanalysis, when we're born, the Ego is underdeveloped and has to use comparison and contrast with the environment to slowly build up a sense of this self alienation from an environment that could be rewarding or hostile. "The first form of the existence of Mind is awareness that is still not self-awareness. It goes through a phase of sensual certainty, in which consciousness is distinguished from the object, so that for consciousness there is such a thing as being-in-itself. What was an object has become knowledge of an object, so that Being has become being-in-itself-for-consciousness. At the same time consciousness changes in character and gradually frees itself from the illusion that it is burdened by something alien. Then, when consciousness grasps things in their specific character and understands their unity, it becomes a perceiving consciousness, or simply perception. In perception consciousness attains to a new phase, that of apprehending generality in the individual phenomenon. Every actual perception contains a general element: in order to grasp that a present phenomenon is present, we must apprehend the now as something distinct from the perception itself, thus deriving an abstract element from the concrete datum. In the same way, when we apprehend the individuality of things we can do so only by means of an abstract conception of individuality, and we are on the level of generalized knowledge when we become aware of individuality as such. The actual 'thing out there' is inexpressible: language belongs to the realm of generality, and so therefore does every perception as soon as we express it. Perception, by imparting generality to the world of sense, surpasses the concreteness of the given object yet at the same time preserves it. Again, the object is distinguished by its particular qualities from other objects, and this opposition gives it its independence; yet at the same time it deprives it of independence, for the independence that consists in being different from other things is not absolute independence but a negative dependence on something else. The object dissolves into a set of relationships to other objects, so that it is a being-in-itself only in so far as it is a being-for-something-else, and vice versa."

We are also agents in the environment but we come from the environment. In meditation, tracing our interdependence tends to momentarily heal the sense of alienation, but it returns as soon as we direct our attention to differences in the environment that are more or less pleasing to our consciousness. All oneness leads to a sense of infinity when one reminds oneself that all experiences have an interdependence with something else with no known starting point, including oneself as a starting point. Yet as soon as this knowledge is available, the goal orientation to satisfy a myriad of cravings, while picking out details to transcend, we return to a sense of oneself as objectified, and there's a desire to transcend circumstance once again. We look at objects not as just "there" but as objects of utility. Objects appear to us as subjectively useful or useless, not an agenda-less objective scientific project. "...When the conception of infinity becomes an object of consciousness, the latter becomes self-awareness or self-reflection. Self-knowledge is aware that the object’s being-in-itself is its manner of existing for another; it endeavours to possess itself of the object and cancel its objectivity." For a Buddhist, you are already in alienation when chasing goals and "stop doing that!" The problem with this is Buddhist economics which relies on a religious caste that lives off of donations. The rest of the population has to manage with Ego in order to create goods that can be distributed to one religious group or another, a form of exploitation. The argument for religious types is that those goods are minimal and a true religious group has to be in self-denial while demonstrating a confident happiness for the laity to imitate in part, and in limitation with the work world as it is. In the world of work and the market, there is always attraction and rejection, including rejecting objects based on important data that could lead to damaging products and services, and there is a concomitant sense of self undergoing repeated humiliations, or as Freud put it, "castrations," that feel like mini-deaths. Each loss of a job, each divorce, and each banishment from an arena of society has the distinct feeling of death, even if one's body is still completely intact. The Ego wants to expand but when it gains some territory it doesn't like contracting, or letting go. This includes all our labour contracts and imaginations of an enjoyable sunset retirement with as little limitation as possible.

Alienation is a feeling of being contingent in time, which can't be eliminated completely, only accepted at deeper and deeper levels of meditation on our interdependence and the good choices we can make while we're conscious. Those good choices, and why we call them GOOD, has to do with a myriad of pleasures that follow those choices. As an individual consciousness competes with others, because of scarcity, a conflict within the means of production begins. As the marketplace unshackled from feudalism, Marxism viewed this more advanced state of being as having its own kind of shackles. You feel a sense of alienation, which is a loss of choice and opportunity, which is also a loss of ownership of what you produce. Your skill development is for someone else and at any time you can be rejected. In that view, the tendency is towards monopoly, since the owners want to avoid being in the position of workers, and the goal is to pay workers as little as possible in order to amass enough profit so as to live with higher consumption on tap. Profit to Marx was considered surplus-value and a signal of exploitation. The capitalist argument against that is if you are able save money as a worker, you can be a partial owner and earn dividends and interest. Profit is also necessary because a small business owner is taking a big risk by investing their capital, saved from individual renunciation, and they wouldn't do that unless there was a reward in the form of profit. Profits also help to absorb losses over time in order to make the business activity a going concern. All this falls apart when workers can't earn enough to save and can only bridge the gap with debt, which is limited as well. This also means that property owners, especially the very big ones, and as I showed in my review of Right Livelihood, those with power look at those without with an eye of objectification and utility, or disutility. When people feel objectified they feel that the more money they get from the organization, the more beholden. As workers become poorer and mistreated, because part of the consequence of leverage is that those without power can't escape mistreatment and if there are no consequences for abuse, then the owner, master, or the one with the power to make choices for others, can unleash their basest desires with no consequence. This happens in slavery situations where workers are only paid enough to work and produce more workers, and sometimes not even that. With a fractured consciousness that compares ego with other egos, the master is in the best position and is resistant to relinquish it.

The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Livelihood: https://rumble.com/v1grhrh-the-noble-eightfold-path-right-livelihood.html

American Workers Are Working At A Record “63 Hours A Week” To Afford Median-Priced Apartments - Steve Cortes - War Room: https://rumble.com/v1whktq-american-workers-are-working-at-a-record-63-hours-a-week-to-afford-median-p.html

When capitalism is working well, the competition can wipe out monopolies, but monopolies can sneak in via technological advancements and manipulation of the labour market to displace workers to reduce their value on the income statement. Each labour addition to an industry displaces another worker to force them to renegotiate their wages at a lower level or not at all. They have to seek a different occupation and try to displace someone else, or find a position that has been vacated. Each technological advance can displace many workers at one time and they have the pressure to create new skills to reenter the workforce. Again, the worker who wants to avoid exploitation needs to find work that allows for rest and recreation from burnout and injury, and enough money to save when one is old and invalid. Systems rise and fall depending on whether they can create a large middle class where a great majority can find themselves there. This means they have more time in their lifespans where they can make decisions towards the kind of work they want to do, and crucially like to do, and their choice for recreation, and choices for relationships. The more one can choose for oneself, the more one feels like an integrated self with reduced alienation, and the more one feels an ongoing sense of wellbeing. The slave scenario is having no pleasure to look forward to, only daily drudgery, if they can't find a way to enjoy their work. The worst scenario is one where one cannot handle the challenges of work, or finds work impossibly boring, like in Csikszentmihalyi's Flow system, where there is rampant abuse from the master, especially if sadism is the only enjoyment for a pathological master, and where there is also no rest or recreation that allows one to heal the nervous system and there ends up being a mixture of physical and psychological breakdowns where work ends either with injury or simple flight. The worker simply leaves work and has to look for sustenance in the form of a donation or a social program via taxation.

Van Diemen's Land U2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oji9TlprRk

How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

This is partially why an interest in politics and economics is necessary to understand alienation for the individual worker and the owner. The pain tends to occur when one singles out a section of reality and ties a difficult goal to it, leading to frustration. Many workers actually delay consumption by investing all their time in risk taking and creating new products and services to add something new to the world of interconnection. To not lose the social connection of endeavor, one can remind oneself how it connects to the propagation of a new generation, and also how it helps to protect against future violence and revolution when you instead have a grateful populace. There's a reciprocity that competes with individual survival. If I'm contingent, because I will exist finitely, there's a time trade. For example, if I'm a good nurse today, maybe when I'm older and sick, I'll get good nursing care in return. Like a Karma, or a reaping of what we sow. Our individual goals have to be seen interconnectedly. It's a complex balance between individual batteries, individual regeneration, and connecting that with a market where people can discharge pent up craving by making consumption choices. Unsatisfied cravings turn to social systems outside of the market. Most businesses accept that a certain amount of taxes have to be paid or else they would have to create the social services themselves. Since many corporations aren't big enough to do that, the state took up that mantle throughout the 20th century until now. Successes in creating a basic welfare state, public education, and various forms of public health care, have a cost, but one that many are willing to pay. This allowed people with varying pay rates to get basic help without them requiring a certain level of salary to pay for expensive things, you know, like dying slowly. The cost of taxes and regulation shifts back and forth based on ironically the same problem of feeling exploited. Workers in government require good pay and benefits and those in the private sector have to pay taxes and follow regulations. As those taxes and regulations get too onerous on the progressive side, the conservative side has to beat back power grabs, oppression and the same feelings of alienation. Again, seeing interconnection is important in politics because of the danger of splitting and creating false enemies. Workers in the private sector require social services when they can't find a private solution. Workers in government need to invest pension funds in the market. People who work in government are afraid of conservatives limiting their spending. Those in business, who finally managed to find enough zest and enjoyment in their work, they are afraid of over-regulation, taxes, and corrupt governments that literally plant government agents from a 1-party state political party into those business activities. The goal of course is to graft kickbacks with the threat of persecution on one side, to motivate payment, or the promise of protection on the other. Like gangsters charging for protection. Maybe one gangster doesn't take as much as another does. Private gangsterism or a Public police state. In the latter, the police can simply be seen as a glorified protection racket for a political party. Like all systems with too much leverage and power for a few, there is corruption, and workers feel a desire to limit their production because of a fear that a tax collector will simply take it way, so "why bother?," or having wealth simply means your a target for a gangster. Reducing corruption and reinstating fair rewards, so that one is more interested in production, means a thriving society. A failed state cannot thrive for the majority. People aren't just poor. They feel slighted. Even worse, one can feel slighted even if one is not poor.

Marxist efforts to change society had some successes, but power grabs where 40% of the GDP is not enough for a progressive movement, and only 100% will do, a certain acceptance of free will for the population has to be allowed again. Even a gangster or a tax collector knows that if you take too much you can proverbially "kill the goose that lays the golden egg." The person producing may not be able to produce anymore and joins the ranks of the needy. Rationality prevails a little and the exploitation has to pull back a bit because there is now less to pillage. You can also depopulate your country if slaves can't afford to have kids and produce another generation of slaves. If you displace workers enough, they may not have skills to find replacement work. It's like having a permanent buyers market for labor, and the sellers market of the labor themselves experience alienation. What's left is to join a gang or to join the government, or a massive business, which sometimes there's not much distinction between the two, depending on how much corruption there is and collusion. Like Saul Alinsky quoted in the last episode, that feeling of being slighted and frowned upon, it can lead to desires for revenge, and corruption is tempting. Another example is the Johnny Friendly character from On The Waterfront, the corrupt labor boss who has a fear of being at the bottom of society. "But my old lady raised us ten kids on a stinkin' watchman's pension. When I was sixteen I had to beg for work in the hold. I didn't work my way up out of there for nuthin.'" There's a priority to develop one's ego in contrast with others and there's resistance to lowering your position, even just a little. "First he crosses me in public and gets away with it and then the next joker, and pretty soon I'm just another fellow down here."

Johnny Friendly - On The Waterfront: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YFonHjiCec

Losing status, even if it doesn't mean starvation, but just a lack of regard can be enough to make one fear more mistreatment, and I'm sure many people who pursue power to make choices, if they were honest, secretly harbor the motivation to escape castration and abuse. The successful influence on the West from Marxism lay in the necessities of life being provided so that actual starvation would be eradicated. Much of that has been alleviated by most Western countries adopting some form of a taxpayer funded cushion, with some cracks in systems to haggle over here and there. As self-esteem shifts over a life as it measures against different generations, different office holders, and senses that other people are having more savouring than oneself, albeit temporarily, this envy decouples the connection between necessities and self-esteem. Going from a billionaire to a millionaire can have a similar threat impulse as someone living paycheque to paycheque. It's an emotional feeding or famine, not always an actual threat of famine. When people are negotiating with those in power, they are negotiating their self-esteem, which Otto Fenichel accurately connected with money in his The Drive To Amass Wealth.

The Drive To Amass Wealth - Otto Fenichel: http://freudians.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Fenichel-The-Drive-to-Amass-Wealth.pdf

Narcissistic Supply - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html

The irony was that Marxist attempts in the 20th century involved self-created famines because of politics. Oppression and murder. Not universal brotherhood. The problem of decoupling self-esteem from necessities is how a cloud of depression can project over the populace, even when people aren't necessarily dying from extreme poverty. Media can also mass-produce that kind of projection by focusing on dysfunctions in society as an emphasis and ignore actual successes. If you take in those toxic emotions you might be more uneasy than you should be. "Marx took over the romantic ideal of social unity, and Communism realized it in the only way feasible in an industrial society, namely, by a despotic system of government...Marx seems to have imagined that once capitalists were done away with the whole world could become a kind of Athenian agora: one had only to forbid private ownership of machines or land and, as if by magic, human beings would cease to be selfish and their interests would coincide in perfect harmony. Marxism affords no explanation of how this prophecy is founded or what reason there is to think that human interests will cease to conflict as soon as the means of production are nationalized." Who watches the watchers? It doesn't matter what political labels you put on something "fascist," "communist," "capitalist," "gangster," etc. This person has power and leverage, and this person doesn't. Any system can be corrupted because people aren't like an inert changeless constitution. As soon as they gain power, they want to use it to gratify their personal dreams. In fact their Ego daydreams are limited and as power increases, those dreams gobble up more of the environment and the people in it. Taxation, property abolishment, or regulation can strangle and oppress just the same as any capitalist monopoly. One of the accounting tricks for a supposed non-profit government entity is to include personal expenses into organizational expenses. "Surplus-value" or profit can creep in if people so desire. In the end all corporations are creating work that benefits individuals and the corporate legal entity is just to spread risk to increase creative risk taking activity. When it goes awry, it's when the general public has to work multiple jobs 7 days a week to make ends meet, and this includes the arena of needs plus wants in modern Western countries.

"Marx moreover combined his romantic dreams with the socialist expectation that all needs would be fully satisfied in the earthly paradise. The early socialists seem to have understood the slogan 'To each according to his needs’ in a limited sense: they meant that people should not have to suffer cold and hunger or spend their lives staving off destitution. Marx, however, and many Marxists after him imagined that under socialism all scarcity would come to an end. It was possible to entertain this hope in the ultra-sanguine form that all wants would be satisfied, as though every human being had a magic ring or obedient jinn at his disposal. But since this could hardly be taken seriously, Marxists who considered the question decided, with a fair degree of support from Marx’s works, that Communism would ensure the satisfaction of ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ needs consonant with human nature, but not whims or desires of all kinds. This, however, gave rise to a problem which no one answered clearly: who is to decide what needs are genuine, and by what criteria? If every man is to judge this for himself then all needs are equally genuine provided they are actually, subjectively felt, and there is no room for any distinction. If, on the other hand, it is the state which decides; then the greatest emancipation in history consists in a system of universal rationing."

A system of universal rationing with people cheating rules here and there would fail as kleptocracies of all kinds have historically shown. "...For perfect equality can only be imagined under a system of extreme despotism, but despotism itself presupposes inequality at least in such basic advantages as participation in power and access to information." The way to understand why it is despotism that is needed is because of the clinging described above. People don't relinquish property voluntarily so you need to take by force, or gain by the threat of force. Once people gain that much power, they learn aggressive power tactics to preserve their power, like with Johnny Friendly, it includes others who work for them and have to obey orders to preserve their source of income from him. "You're a walkin' dead man! You're dead on this waterfront and every other waterfront from Boston to New Orleans. You won't go anywhere, drive a truck or a cab or push a baggage rack without one of my guys have the eye on you. You just dug your own grave, dead man, go fall in it!" Because of the complexity of human power and how it evolves over a lifespan and transfers to new generations, it's going to be impossible to plan out a perfectly just society. "Technical progress cannot coexist with absolute security of living conditions for everyone. Conflicts inevitably arise between freedom and equality, planning and the autonomy of small groups, economic democracy and efficient management, and these conflicts can only be mitigated by compromise and partial solutions." For progressives, solutions from their end have to be small, targeted, and accrue over time. This way, any large encroachments on freedom, which is what Marxism was supposed to protect against, can be beaten back without having to rebuild a destroyed system from the ground up. Any signs of success have to come from signs in reality, not propaganda to protect entrenched interests.

Waterfront Labour Corruption - On The Waterfront: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4thvTkvbZjU&t=143s

Oligarchy

Now that we've reviewed a past attempt at utopia and have come down to reality, the fear of success can also been seen as the fear of having to fight corruption that is in the way. Most whistleblowers of every stipe have to go through some kind of crucifixion. The "new kid on the block" at a workplace is a threat to the office clique, which include many of those patients we talked about in Parts 2 and 3 of Fear Of Success. The tragedy of not succeeding with this social problem is that extreme political movements in history were always connected with these very ontological sicknesses, and the common feeling of being slighted. The way to get out of being confused on who the predators are comes from Kohut's understanding of the gradient with which people are more or less connected to reality. Any political prescriptions have to be compared to their real results, regardless if the truth hurts, or narcissistically wounds certain propagandists who protect their pet theories from reality, like they protect their wounded selves. Predators change their spots with every flavor of revolution you can think of, but their psychological damage appears the same, especially when they ignore the real failure of their social projects. They resort to lies and go as far as they can get away with. For example, Walter C. Langer profiled Adolph Hitler and the rules he used to brainwash the population. "Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Now as a disclaimer, I'm definitely in the conservative camp, and think they are closer to reality, not perfect by all means, than the current globalist left, but I will explore left-wing politics as it shows up in the usual places, like the Frankfurt School, Alfred Adler, and so on. Certainly pro-business people can't stay in business if there's no connection to reality, and many business people don't like competition and would prefer a monopoly and act like their stereotypical criticisms of government power. Power is power is power is power.

Because power allows you access to more consumption, making it more addictive, there's less need to follow values and principles. You don't care if it's government or business that provides you that power. People with money and power will intermarry and create revolving doors of employment cronyism between public and private partnerships to maintain their power, which is synonymous with Oligarchy. Each person that is afraid of success is partially afraid of being on the wrong end of power. Jeffrey Winters makes his own definition of Oligarchy as a specific type. "An oligarchy is different in that the scope of oligarchic minority power extends so widely across the space or community that exit is nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive. Thus to be worthy of the name, oligarchic power must be based on a form of power that is unusually resistant to dispersion, and its scope must be systemic...Extreme material inequality produces extreme political inequality...Oligarchs alone are able to use wealth for wealth’s defense...Oligarchy refers to the politics of wealth defense by materially endowed actors." Examples of wealth defense are found in terms like "lawfare" and such. If a victim can't afford adequate legal representation, they are less able to punish transgressions. How things slip away is when a large section of the population can't save very much money compared to others who have large streams of income due to their platforms. Minority power stems from leverage with important platforms, which include ownership of as many areas that individuals purchase from and find difficult to do without. This Winters calls Income Defense. "Oligarchs and oligarchy arise because some actors succeed in stockpiling massive material power resources and then use a portion of them for wealth defense – with important implications for the rest of the social formation. It follows that oligarchs and oligarchy will cease to exist not through democratic procedures, but rather when extremely unequal distributions of material resources are undone, and thus no longer confer exaggerated political power to a minority of actors." Of course if an oligarchy is aware of people wanting to come after them they can get an active head start in co-opting any dissent and opposition through influence of politicians. They might even use the same tactics used against them by revolutionaries or buy their skills as mercenaries.

Living In A Ghost Town - Rolling Stones: https://youtu.be/LNNPNweSbp8

A Message from Michael Stipe: https://youtu.be/awX5lGiqrl4

Gal Gadot and Stars singing Imagine: https://youtu.be/bQK32bwvRuI

Let Your Love Be Known - U2: https://youtu.be/ZRjaUjJb3Z8

In modern politics there are the Alinsky tactics that have a similar noise and fog as the Langer quote on Hitler and have been increasingly used as an affective method to attack self-esteem in political candidates. These practices are so effective that his influence has gone beyond progressive politics. You have to manipulate perception with these tactics but the weakness is that a connection with reality is lost, because it's just about scoring points. If these tactics actually work, then political opposition will copy it, like sports teams copying championship teams. The discourse goes into character assassination and policy prescriptions lose attention. It helps to look at Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, to recognize what you've been seeing for a long time. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." In keeping with a disconnection from reality and no room for learning, "never go outside the experience of your people." Conversely for the conservatives cut from different swathes, they often have a similar problem but they learn painfully when progressives "go outside of the experience of the [them]." Of course, those who read everyone's playbook is less surprised and can keep a better grip on reality when assaulted with these tactics. An important rule for Saul is to "make the enemy live up to their own book of rules," which has the correct understanding that Conservative Christians sin all the time and don't live up to their standards, but this has the problem of splitting where you can fall into the trap of "two wrongs make a right," and the standards that are abandoned means there's more disconnection from reality and no ability to learn from mistakes. To be a Christian, the goal is not to be perfect but to learn from mistakes and show personal progress.

One area that is a favorite of all politicians from every political stripe is "ridicule is mans most potent weapon." "I do the unforgivable. You can attack the establishment and get away with it. You can insult them but still survive, but I laugh at them and this is one thing they will not tolerate." Also throughout all politics is seeing that "a good tactic is one that your people enjoy," which means that entertainment can creep in and separate one from reality again, because reality can boring. Even a policy prescription that works gets taken for granted and becomes boring. As realistic boredom continues in politics with too much repetition, "a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag," because people ultimately want to see real results at the end of a bout of effort and protesting, and it's also nice if an evil doer is brought down in humiliation. Reality can in fact be fun, just like an engineer coming up with an airplane design that actually works, and some fun ideas are only fun as entertainment but yield no results. It's all how one looks at it. Similar to all political movements, there's the rule to "keep the pressure on," though the danger with this is pushing ideas that don't work. More pressure is thinking harder instead of smarter. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself," which is a sign that people aren't looking at policies, just the attainment of power. When there's an abandonment of policy and cause and effect, the rationale for constant pressure is self-justified by personal interest and comradery. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." Certainly not very radical and similar to all political debates is that "if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside," but what is missing is replacement policies, and if those policies don't connect with reality it becomes just negative politics with a sense of futility, like choosing a lesser of two evils. Alinsky saw this so the next rule is "the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative." Anyone who follows politics long enough knows that the most rare achievement is a constructive alternative. Decades go by without meaningful change, which is why the populace becomes jaded and tunes out. Politics then resorts to the politics of character assassination out of that sense of emptiness of having shallow alternatives.

A great past example was John King from CNN zeroing in on Newt Gingrich's divorce and making the opening debate topic to be about open marriages. "As you know, your ex-wife gave an interview to ABC News, and another interview with the Washington Post, and this story has now gone viral on the internet. In it she says that you came to her in 1999 at a time when you were having an affair. She says she asked you sir to enter into an open marriage. Would you like to take some time to respond to that?"

"No, but I will. I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office, and I'm appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that."

Gingrich slams CNN for asking about ex-wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygtFc3eR6So

Pressure needs a focal point and politics can sidestep debates on economics and regulations through personal attacks. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The danger is the narcissistic tactic of goading people into reactions that aren't well thought out that lead to violence, martyrdom, which is then used as an excuse to eliminate political opposition through a conflation of targets and incrimination of dissent. The relief is that you don't have to debate people who are in jail. "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength." If you downplay in the media a provocation that you make, and heighten the reaction caused by that provocation in the same media, it will appear in the general public that you're not the instigator but the victim. Narcissists chuckle at that one because it's their favorite tactic in divorce proceedings. Of course the weakness of this tactic is if the target appears the victim from the get go and there are enough witnesses or a large audience for the initial provocation. This is why it's important for big social changes to control political violence and aim for peaceful transfers of power. Political assassinations and violent riots just lead to escalation, desires for revenge, and the political theories and remedies again are put in the backseat.

Politicians know that most in the audience don't put the effort into finding evidence or a lack thereof in political assertions, because of the time required for research, or a lack of interest, so their opinions are based on the trust they have for media representatives and their platforms. Whether these are boring, but realistic citizen journalists, or propagandists, you have to look at any political party and focus on real results from policies, not on the promises. Left-wing, Right-wing, Capitalist, Communist, Religious, Atheist, or any labels you can conjure, these questions about which systems are good or evil can be confusing to sift through. Both sides make accusations of a similar kind at each other but the actions are what matter most. No matter the government in power, the duty of real journalists is to compare real data and actions with propaganda and write about the variance. In this psychoanalysis modality, the higher connection to reality and cause and effect, the healthier you are. It's also healthy because people bandy around the term Extremist to avoid debate, but it can't be extremism if it's cause and effect and reality that you're looking at, and the goal is non-violent. A political system that works well for more people, though not perfect because of individual choices and mistakes, can't be extreme.

The term extreme is used as a way to police dissent and leads to governments creating censorship bodies like in Orwell's 1984. The problem is again: Who watches the Watchers? The self-interested censors naturally load their fake fact checking and aim at political opponents. To have political success when there's popular dissent, everything has to be reversed. "War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." I would add that the word Democracy is abused when it's used to defend authoritarianism. Recently Barack Obama supported this kind of censorship. His Stanford speech sounded really pro free speech at one point and he criticized the CCP model, but then quickly this derailed when he talked about tech platforms. Even his use of the term "toxic information," which is reserved for political opponents, you can see a line has been crossed into authoritarianism. "The good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms and they are investing in large teams to monitor it." Obama continues to talk about the value of stopping hate speech and what incites violence, including what would be shared values for people across the political spectrum, but he then says "it doesn't go far enough. Users who want to spread disinformation want to become experts of pushing right up to the line what published company policies allow." Then he blamed the platforms for weakening against pressure from the predictable accusations of censorship, but also the motivation for profit to have as many engaged users as possible. He then applauded the use of algorithms and purposeful slowing of information dissemination against political opponents, but he wants more oversight than this. "Decisions like this shouldn't be left solely to private businesses." Leaving aside that one could pick apart his speech for contradictions on a myriad of topics, and Obama admitted that he's very aware that many people don't agree with him, a few days after this speech, Homeland Security introduced the infamous Disinformation Governance Board headed by Nina Jankowicz, which one could ascribe as Obama's real intent.

[Scary Poppins Propaganda Video]

Nina Jankowicz 'Scary Poppins': https://twitter.com/RealJamesWoods/status/1519871245856112640?s=20&t=JWM--Tc_YJoJOGZ4F8J__g

"Talking about the Deep State, and things like that, is a thread among conspiracy communities here in the United States, that there is this secret cabal here working to undermine the American people. It couldn't be farther from the truth, as someone who works in and around public servants everyday."

Democrat Steny Hoyer: "They want to eliminate what they call 'The Deep State.' The Deep State is a cadre of professionals dedicated to honoring the Constitution, the laws of this country, and carrying out the policies of the Congress and The President."

Sen. Kennedy: "Who at the department picked her?" DHS Mayorkas: "Senator we don't discuss our internal hiring processes, but I am the Secretary of Homeland Security, and ultimately I am responsible." "When the department picked her, did it know that she had said that Mr. Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian Disinformation?" "I was not aware of that. We do not discuss the internal hiring process. Ultimate as the Secretary I am responsible for the decisions of the department of Homeland Security." "When the department picked Ms. Jankowicz, did it know that she had vouched for the veracity of the Steele Dossier?" "I was not aware of that fact." Eventually Mayorkas only paused the Disinformation Governance Board, and as of working on this post, August 24th, it got terminated. Of course if power changes hands again, it could spring up again.

Typical of recent power grabs related to the COVID19 lockdowns, The Great Reset intrusions on farmers, the clamp down on trucker protests, and the CCP's method of conditioning tactics being used to intimidate the public into compliance, you know that warning you feel in your gut that asks "hey isn't this authoritarianism? Doesn't this feel like a school bully? Is this gaslighting?," the last 2 years since COVID19 has been endlessly surreal. Jordan Peterson described this intimidation process from Ordinary Men by Robert Browning about NAZI tactics. "Things get to terrible places one tiny step at a time. If I encroach on you and I'm sophisticated about it, I'm going to encroach 2mm. I'm going to encroach right to the point where you start to protest. Then I'm going to stop and wait. Then you're going to calm down. Then I'm going to encroach again, right to the point where you'll protest. Then I'm going to stop. Then I'm going to wait. I'm just going to do that forever."

All these topics I'm talking about could expand into huge detours for investigation, and that includes charges of voter fraud that both sides level at each other. Hillary Clinton famously accused Trump of stealing the election from her and even goes into pre-emptive election denial while also calling conservatives election deniers, who don't believe Biden got 81 million legal votes in the last presidential election. "Right Wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next Presidential Election." The debate moves between paper fraud accusations down to vote machine manipulation. There's a deep fear of voting machines with limited to no audits allowed in many American jurisdictions. In lawfare, the dollars are big and trials move slowly. One of the accused was Eric Coomer from Dominion voting machines, which is in a lawsuit with an accuser Joe Oltmann, who said he allegedly overheard Coomer on an ANTIFA group call say "Don't worry about the election. Trump's not going to win. I made fucking sure of that!" This is an ongoing legal warfare that includes others like Mike Lindell. Mike Lindell feels China was more involved more than Joe Oltmann who focuses more on Dominion. These are the typical lawsuits that nobody can pay for and losers go into bankruptcy because they need income the size of a GDP of a country to handle it. Eric Coomer is accused of being an unreliable addict, and Joe Oltmann is accused of being an unreliable used car salesman turned Conservative podcaster. You end up with weird depositions like this one.

"In the Facebook posts you use the word fuck quite often don't you?" "Actually I'm not sure I can answer that." "You don't know whether you use that word often?" "Can you define often?" "You know what often means?" "No I don't, not in your terms. Are we talking 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? What's often, sir?" "You can define it anyway you like." "Then I would say no." "You're testimony sitting here under oath today is that you don't use the word fuck often?" "In a Facebook post?" "No, generally." "Again I won't answer that until you define the terms." "You understand what the English word often means?" "Tell me as you understand the word often, you use that word fuck a lot?" "I would say I use it less than a lot of people I know. I would characterize it as not often." In the deposition Eric said that if a person believed that Dominion Machines could steal elections it would be a "deficient" understanding. He also said that his posts on ANTIFA were all satire and not to be taken literally, and he wasn't on a group call with ANTIFA.

Certainly, there were charges of conspiracy theories when conservatives said the machines could be connected to the internet, but a recent AP news story said that "Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed," but not to worry because "there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results." The Arizona Audit found illegal data access after the election, which is data that needs to be held for 22 months. A more recent review of election data by Verity Vote found that 740,000 ballots "do not have the required chain of custody..." This is just Maricopa County and an unfinished audit at that when it comes to the electronics to test for outside connectivity. It also didn't help to secure trust in elections when a dementia ridden President before the 2020 Presidential Election made a Freudian slip that was very particular and exacting. "We have put together, and you guys did it for President Obama's administration before this, we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." It was all brushed off as unimportant and an assertion that this voter fraud organization was to watch Republicans and their supposed voter suppression like Democrats are election hawks protecting integrity.

Voting Machines and Election Fraud - Barack Obama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFyMJTRaf5c

Conservatives in Arizona were also disappointed when the AG Mark Brnovich was given the information from the audit to investigate and make arrests. Very little was done in 1 year. Mark got lots of phone calls from residents to take action and here was his response. "It's Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. We've gotten a lot of calls and a lot of emails, but there is one thing people definitely want to see. They want to see more chucks. So people? You want more chucks? We got more chucks." His latest report was a small investigation of dead voters but they found there were only 282 dead voters. In regards to other irregularities and the lack of chain of custody "the work of the Attorney General's election integrity unit remains ongoing." State Senator Sonny Borelli had to dive in and work with his team to sample votes and he found 20% uncertifiable votes from a 100,000 sample. He remained guarded as to why the AG didn't do their job and attributed it to laziness or corruption.

"We did it! We did it Joe. You're going to be the next President of the United States."

From then on, any criticism of election integrity was treated as if the people who want full transparent audits are trying to suppress votes and guilty of election stealing. Biden treated the Republicans like they were Joseph Stalin. "The struggle is not who gets to vote, or to make it easy for eligible people to vote, it's about who gets to count the votes, and whether your vote counts at all." Yet the irony is that the Center for American Progress, a Democratic party think tank, provided suggestions in 2018 for protecting elections, back when it was alleged that Trump stole the 2016 election, they advised to "Conduct robust postelection audits to confirm election outcomes." This of course would solve all problems because the transparency would eliminate any concerns which would help the losers gather data about why they lost so they could try new policies to gather momentum for the next election. When people believe in elections and politicians respond to constituents, there's a healthy back and forth between the public and politicians, and usually small adjustments and changes done towards progressivism and conservatism.

In the political spectrum, conservatives have a problem of "what are we trying to conserve? Is it worth it?" The strength they have is that there's a history of what has worked well in the past more or less. The problem with progressives is the question "are we actually progressing?" Their strength is when they create policies that have popular support and the populace doesn't want to relinquish those changes, because they provide protections and also enhance some freedoms. When conservatives conserve things that don't need to be conserved, that's their weakness, and progressive experiments often have little to no real world data so unintended consequences, which are signs of reality, can derail policies. Even worse, there can be new fallible policies that fail to fix past policies that already failed. You can have failure after failure. There are also repeated temptations to centralize power and then decentralize in response to overreach. Elitists from elite schools, and so called professionals or experts have trouble in competition with the rule that "more heads are better than one," but they do try. The populace goes through cycles of dependency when very young or very old and independence in middle adulthood where the need for independence or dependence can switch places depending on circumstances. Can experts really help you more than you can help yourself? Sometimes that's true, like when going into surgery or asking for a prescription, etc., but it isn't always the case. Politics is not like hard science. Politicians prefer to save face and spin excuses, rather than change course into another theory. You try to double-down and triple-down until you get away with a failure. You rarely hear politicians say "oops. We made a mistake, but we figured out a much better path. Please trust us again!" You also don't hear "actually our opposition was more correct than we are. I will now resign and promote the opposition leader." Like in British Commonwealth Parliaments, the government needs a vote of non-confidence and a new election. New movements have to arise and replace old political dynasties in order for new ideas to be acted on. This can even be seen in hard science when science gets politicized because of the need for funding and if results from studies have political consequences. Nobody wants to see real world data that threatens their job, and everyone wants to entertain theories that they can exploit to increase their wealth.

How Nietzsche Explains Woke Madness: https://youtu.be/iVY9Ljhtxnc

The reality is that many people are disengaged from politics when their lives are going according to plan. They forget that a lot of really complex systems are allowing that smoothness to happen. When something goes wrong, that's the only time when there's an alarm and a desire to change things and "throw the bums out!" The ugliness of politics tunes them out as well when they return to more interesting personal goals. Who wants to read about problems with supply chains when one can watch a comedy show and have a beer? Like René Girard pointed out, we only notice institutions when they stop running smoothly or are totally corrupt. Maybe beer becomes too expensive and now something has to be done!

A more difficult part of social change is the sense of individual helplessness in a giant machine. People can be daunted or intimidated by reality even if they want that connection. It takes a certain amount of courage to take what you see and act on it without deferring to authority figures. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was fighting the unreality of progressives in the Soviet Union where lies were treated as common sense and what "good" people should support, and truth was always considered "extreme" and "dangerous," which is a projection of people in power who are only truthfully expressing the danger to their ongoing interests. Aleksandr had the same difficulty in convincing people to make some sacrifice in order to get involved and preserve freedom of speech and freedom of association. "But really, there is nothing to be done! Our mouths are gagged, no one listens to us, no one asks us. How can we make them listen to us?...The natural thing would be simply not to reelect them, but there are no re-elections in our country."

Alexandr's micro-prescription is to maintain a grip on reality, individual by individual, and how each person subjectively sees truth, which Alexandr was adept at including, because people do not agree on what reality is even if they feel it strongly. "...A personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!...For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person...Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world...Let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?"

In the old Soviet Union, people like the composer Shostakovich, had to make dog whistles and involve cryptic messaging in his music when there was a threat of persecution, repression, threats of imprisonment, threats of political audits and raids, threats of lost jobs and bankruptcy, but the desire to say what you think can only be bottled up for a certain amount of time. Eventually people lose their fear and speak up anyways. Alexandr listed out repeated behaviors of sheepish yes-people that scaffold inauthentic systems, and how to live differently.

· Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;

· Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;

· Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;

· Will not cite in writing or in speech a single 'guiding' quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;

· Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;

· Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;

· Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;

· Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;

· Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

Alexandr knew that many people will not follow these precepts, which are very connected to Western Enlightenment and revolutions in those centuries. "And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill...Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered."

When people are able to let go of the body and lean on conscience it's "not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul." Fear of success can also include the fear of speaking the truth and the consequences for doing so.

Main Currents of Marxism - Leszek Kolakowski: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780393329438/

Oligarchy - Jeffrey Winters: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781107005280/

Live Not By Lies - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies

Rules for Radicals - Saul Alinsky: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780679721130/

A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf

Group Psychology - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvcxr-group-psychology-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-33.html

1984 - George Orwell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781788282369/

Barack Obama Warns Social Media Misinformation Is A Threat To Democracy - Newsweek: https://youtu.be/l-QuQc_E2rI

'Ministry of Truth' - Tulsi Gabbard: https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1520713806086696960?s=20&t=ZmCyy0d-Dg3MGGag10Q1og

"There is no Deep State" - Nina Jankowicz: https://rumble.com/v13qfz5-nina-jankowicz-says-there-is-no-deep-state.html

Adding Context to Tweets about Voter Fraud Accusations: https://rumble.com/v147uhl-clown-nina-jankowicz-wants-trustworthy-people-like-herself-to-add-context-t.html

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claims Nina Jankowicz is eminently qualified to lead Biden’s disinformation board: https://rumble.com/v139x27-dhs-secretary-alejandro-mayorkas-claims-nina-jankowicz-is-qualified.html

Mayorkas admits that he didn't know that the head of Biden's "Ministry of Truth" Nina Jankowicz called the Hunter Biden laptop "Russian disinformation": https://rumble.com/v13i65p-may-4-2022.html

NYT finally admits Hunter's Laptop was real - Maria Bartiromo: https://rumble.com/vy2g9p-new-york-times-finally-admitted-that-hunter-bidens-laptop-was-real.html

'We made a total mistake': Jack Dorsey questioned over Hunter Biden censorship - Sky News Australia: https://youtu.be/7vJZdEk53xo

Tyranny, One Tiny Step at a Time - Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16uBwZxtzi0

Interview with Joe Oltmann: https://rumble.com/v1fhg97-interview-with-joe-oltmann-in-response-to-recent-media-smears.html

Cyber agency: Voting software vulnerable in some states: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-technology-georgia-election-2020-a746b253f3404dbf794349df498c9542

Arizona Audit Results: https://youtu.be/sAAu6O33rNE

Maricopa Dropbox Chain of Custody - Verity Vote: https://verityvote.us/maricopa-dropbox-chain-of-custody/

Mark Brnovich "They want to see more chucks!": https://youtu.be/JO-wZykVHDY

Arizona Letter to Karen Fann: https://www.azag.gov/sites/default/files/2022-08/Letter%20to%20Fann%20-%20EIU%20Update%20080122.pdf

Sonny Borrelli Shows Receipts For 2020 Stolen Election In Arizona: https://rumble.com/v1rdmdo-sonny-borelli-shows-receipts-for-2020-stolen-election-in-arizona.html

CAP: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/9-solutions-secure-americas-elections/

2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud Compilation: https://rumble.com/vb2j7b-2020-presidential-election-voter-fraud-compilation.html

Rules for Radicals - David Horowitz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRUP5yEm1WE

Joe Biden Breaks Down Donald Trump, Climate Change and The Election | Pod Save America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6u1uKznCYw

Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/

0 notes

racefortheironthrone · 19 days

Note

OK, I'll bite - what's the deal with the United Farm Workers? What were their strengths and weaknesses compared to other labor unions?

It is not an easy thing to talk about the UFW, in part because it wasn't just a union. At the height of its influence in the 1960s and 1970s, it was also a civil rights movement that was directly inspired by the SCLC campaigns of Martin Luther King and owed its success as much to mass marches, hunger strikes, media attention, and the mass mobilization of the public in support of boycotts that stretched across the United States and as far as Europe as it did to traditional strikes and picket lines.

It was also a social movement that blended powerful strains of Catholic faith traditions with Chicano/Latino nationalism inspired by the black power movement, that reshaped the identity of millions away from asimilation into white society and towards a fierce identification with indigeneity, and challenged the racist social hierarchy of rural California.

It was also a political movement that transformed Latino voting behavior, established political coalitions with the Kennedys, Jerry Brown, and the state legislature, that pushed through legislation and ran statewide initiative campaigns, and that would eventually launch the careers of generations of Latino politicians who would rise to the very top of California politics.

However, it was also a movement that ultimately failed in its mission to remake the brutal lives of California farmworkers, which currently has only 7,000 members when it once had more than 80,000, and which today often merely trades on the memory of its celebrated founders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez rather than doing any organizing work.

To explain the strengths and weaknesses of the UFW, we have to start with some organizational history, because the UFW was the result of the merger of several organizations each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Origins of the UFW:

In the 1950s, both Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez were community organizers working for a group called the Community Service Organization (an affiliate of Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation) that sought to aid farmworkers living in poverty. Huerta and Chavez were trained in a novel strategy of grassroots, door-to-door organizing aimed not at getting workers to sign union cards, but to agree to host a house meeting where co-workers could gather privately to discuss their problems at work free from the surveillance of their bosses. This would prove to be very useful in organizing the fields, because unlike the traditional union model where organizers relied on the NRLB's rulings to directly access the factory floors, Central California farms were remote places where white farm owners and their white overseers would fire shotguns at brown "trespassers" (union-friendly workers, organizers, picketers).

In 1962, Chavez and Huerta quit CSO to found the National Farm Workers Association, which was really more of a worker center offering support services (chiefly, health care) to independent groups of largely Mexican farmworkers. In 1965, they received a request to provide support to workers dealing with a strike against grape growers in Delano, California.

In Delano, Chavez and Huerta met Larry Itliong of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), which was a more traditional labor union of migrant Filipino farmworkers who had begun the strike over sub-minimum wages. Itliong wanted Chavez and Huerta to organize Mexican farmworkers who had been brought in as potential strikebreakers and get them to honor the picket line.

The result of their collaboration was the formation of the United Farm Workers as a union of the AFL-CIO. The UFW would very much be marked by a combination of (and sometimes conflict between) AWOC's traditional union tactics - strikes, pickets, card drives, employer-based campaigns, and collective bargaining for union contracts - and NFWA's social movement strategy of marches, boycotts, hunger strikes, media campaigns, mobilization of liberal politicians, and legislative campaigns.

1965 to 1970: the Rise of the UFW:

While the strike starts with 2,000 Filipino workers and 1,200 Mexican families targeting Delano area growers, it quickly expanded to target more growers and bring more workers to the picket lines, eventually culminating in 10,000 workers striking against the whole of the table grape growers of California across the length and breadth of California.

Throughout 1966, the UFW faced extensive violence from the growers, from shotguns used as "warning shots" to hand-to-hand violence, to driving cars into pickets, to turning pesticide-spraying machines onto picketers. Local police responded to the violence by effectively siding with the growers, and would arrest UFW picketers for the crime of calling the police.

Chavez strongly emphasized a non-violent response to the growers' tactics - to the point of engaging in a Gandhian hunger strike against his own strikers in 1968 to quell discussions about retaliatory violence - but also began to employ a series of civil rights tactics that sought to break what had effectively become a stalemate on the picket line by side-stepping the picket lines altogether and attacking the growers on new fronts.

First, he sought the assistance of outside groups and individuals who would be sympathetic to the plight of the farmworker and could help bring media attention to the strike - UAW President Walter Reuther and Senator Robert Kennedy both visited Delano to express their solidarity, with Kennedy in particular holding hearings that shined a light on the issue of violence and police violations of the civil rights of UFW picketers.

Second, Chavez hit on the tactic of using boycotts as a way of exerting economic pressure on particular growers and leveraging the solidarity of other unions and consumers - the boycotts began when Chavez enlisted Dolores Huerta to follow a shipment of grapes from Schenley Industries (the first grower to be boycotted) to the Port of Oakland. There, Huerta reached out to the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and persuaded them to honor the boycott and refuse to handle non-union grapes. Schenley's grapes started to rot on the docks, cutting them off from the market, and between the effects of union solidarity and growing consumer participation in the UFW's boycotts, the growers started to come under real economic pressure as their revenue dropped despite a record harvest.

Throughout the rest of the Delano grape strike, Dolores Huerta would be the main organizer of the national and internal boycotts, travelling across the country (and eventually all the way to the UK) to mobilize unions and faith groups to form boycott committees and boycott houses in major cities that in turn could educate and mobilize ordinary consumers through a campaign of leafleting and picketing at grocery stores.

Third, the UFW organized the first of its marches, a 300-mile trek from Delano to the state capital of Sacramento aimed at drawing national attention to the grape strike and attempting to enlist the state government to pass labor legislation that would give farmworkers the right to organize. Carefully organized by Cesar Chavez to draw on Mexican faith traditions, the march would be labelled a "pilgrimage," and would be timed to begin during Lent and culminate during Easter. In addition to American flags and the UFW banner, the march would be led by "pilgrims" carrying a banner of Our Lady of Guadelupe.

While this strategy was ultimately effective in its goal of influencing the broader Latino community in California to see the UFW as not just a union but a vehicle for the broader aspirations of the whole Latino community for equality and social justice, what became known in Chicano circles as La Causa, the emphasis on Mexican symbolism and Chicano identity contributed to a growing tension with the Filipino half of the UFW, who felt that they were being sidelined in a strike they had started.

Nevertheless, by the time that the UFW's pilgrimage arrived at Sacramento, news broke that they had won their first breakthrough in the strike as Schenley Industries (which had been suffering through a four-month national boycott of its products) agreed to sign the first UFW union contract, delivering a much-needed victory.

As the strike dragged on, growers were not passively standing by - in addition to doubling down on the violence by hiring strikebreakers to assault pro-UFW farmworkers, growers turned to the Teamsters Union as a way of pre-empting the UFW, either by pre-emptively signing contracts with the Teamsters or effectively backing the Teamsters in union elections.

Part of the darker legacy of the Teamsters is that, going all the back to the 1930s, they have a nasty habit of raiding other unions, and especially during their mobbed-up days would work with the bosses to sign sweetheart deals that allowed the Teamsters to siphon dues money from workers (who had not consented to be represented by the Teamsters, remember) while providing nothing in the way of wage increases or improved working conditions, usually in exchange for bribes and/or protection money from the employers. Moreover, the Teamsters had no compunction about using violence to intimidate rank-and-file workers and rival unions in order to defend their "paper locals" or win a union election. This would become even more of an issue later on, but it started up as early as 1966.

Moreover, the growers attempted to adapt to the UFW's boycott tactics by sharing labels, such that a boycotted company would sell their products under the guise of being from a different, non-boycotted company. This forced the UFW to change its boycott tactics in turn, so that instead of targeting individual growers for boycott, they now asked unions and consumers alike to boycott all table grapes from the state of California.

By 1970, however, the growing strength of the national grape boycott forced no fewer than 26 Delano grape growers to the bargaining table to sign the UFW's contracts. Practically overnight, the UFW grew from a membership of 10,000 strikers (none of whom had contracts, remember) to nearly 70,000 union members covered by collective bargaining agreements.

1970 to 1978: The UFW Confronts Internal and External Crises

Up until now, I've been telling the kind of simple narrative of gradual but inevitable social progress that U.S history textbooks like, the Hollywood story of an oppressed minority that wins a David and Goliath struggle against a violent, racist oligarchy through the kind of non-violent methods that make white allies feel comfortable and uplifted. (It's not an accident that the bulk of the 2014 film Cesar Chavez starring Michael Peña covers the Delano Grape Strike.)

It's also the period in which the UFW's strengths as an organization that came out of the community organizing/civil rights movement were most on display. In the eight years that followed, however, the union would start to experience a series of crises that would demonstrate some of the weaknesses of that same institutional legacy. As Matt Garcia describes in From the Jaws of Victory, in the wake of his historic victory in 1970, Cesar Chavez began to inflict a series of self-inflicted injuries on the UFW that crippled the functioning of the union, divided leadership and rank-and-file alike, and ultimately distracted from the union's external crises at a time when the UFW could not afford to be distracted.

That's not to say that this period was one of unbroken decline - as we'll discuss, the UFW would win many victories in this period - but the union's forward momentum was halted and it would spend much of the 1970s trying to get back to where it was at the very start of the decade.

To begin with, we should discuss the internal contradictions of the UFW: one of the major features of the UFW's new contracts was that they replaced the shape-up with the hiring hall. This gave the union an enormous amount of power in terms of hiring, firing and management of employees, but the quid-pro-quo of this system is that it puts a significant administrative burden on the union. Not only do you have to have to set up policies that fairly decide who gets work and when, but you then have to even-handedly enforce those policies on a day-to-day basis in often fraught circumstances - and all of this is skilled white-collar labor.

This ran into a major bone of contention within the movement. When the locus of the grape strike had shifted from the fields to the urban boycotts, this had made a new constituency within the union - white college-educated hippies who could do statistical research, operate boycott houses, and handle media campaigns. These hippies had done yeoman's work for the union and wanted to keep on doing that work, but they also needed to earn enough money to pay the rent and look after their growing families, and in general shift from being temporary volunteers to being professional union staffers.

This ran head-long into a buzzsaw of racial and cultural tension. Similar to the conflicts over the role of white volunteers in CORE/SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement, there were a lot of UFW leaders and members who had come out of the grassroots efforts in the field who felt that the white college kids were making a play for control over the UFW. This was especially driven by Cesar Chavez' religiously-inflected ideas of Catholic sacrifice and self-denial, embodied politically as the idea that a salary of $5 a week (roughly $30 a week in today's money) was a sign of the purity of one's "missionary work." This worked itself out in a series of internicene purges whereby vital college-educated staff were fired for various crimes of ideological disunity.

This all would have been survivable if Chavez had shown any interest in actually making the union and its hiring halls work. However, almost from the moment of victory in 1970, Chavez showed almost no interest in running the union as a union - instead, he thought that the most important thing was relocating the UFW's headquarters to a commune in La Paz, or creating the Poor People's Union as a way to organize poor whites in the San Joaquin Valley, or leaving the union altogether to become a Catholic priest, or joining up with the Synanon cult to run criticism sessions in La Paz. In the mean-time, a lot of the UFW's victories were withering on the vine as workers in the fields got fed up with hiring halls that couldn't do their basic job of making sure they got sufficient work at the right wages.

Externally, all of this was happening during the second major round of labor conflicts out in the fields. As before, the UFW faced serious conflicts with the Teamsters, first in the so-called "Salad Bowl Strike" that lasted from 1970-1971 and was at the time the largest and most violent agricultural strike in U.S history - only then to be eclipsed in 1973 with the second grape strike. Just as with the Salinas strike, the grape growers in 1973 shifted to a strategy of signing sweetheart deals with the Teamsters - and using Teamster muscle to fight off the UFW's new grape strike and boycott. UFW pickets were shot at and killed in drive-byes by Teamster trucks, who then escalated into firebombing pickets and UFW buildings alike.

After a year of violence, reduced support from the rank-and-file, and declining resources, Chavez and the UFW felt that their backs were up against a wall - and had to adjust their tactics accordingly. With the election of Jerry Brown as governor in 1974, the UFW pivoted to a strategy of pressuring the state government to enact a California Agricultural Labor Relations Act that would give agricultural workers the right to organize, and with that all the labor protections normally enjoyed by industrial workers under the Federal National Labor Relations Act - at the cost of giving up the freedom to boycott and conduct secondary strikes which they had had as outsiders to the system.

This led to the semi-miraculous Modesto March, itself a repeat of the Delano-to-Sacramento march from the 1960s. Starting as just a couple hundred marchers in San Francisco, the March swelled to as many as 15,000-strong by the time that it reached its objective at Modesto. This caused a sudden sea-change in the grape strike, bringing the growers and the Teamsters back to the table, and getting Jerry Brown and the state legislature to back passage of California Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

This proved to be the high-water mark for the UFW, which swelled to a peak of 80,000 members. The problem was that the old problems within the UFW did not go away - victory in 1975 didn't stop Chavez and his Chicano constituency feuding with more distinctively Mexican groups within the movement over undocumented immigration, nor feuding with Filipino constituencies over a meeting with Ferdinand Marcos, and nor escalating these internal conflicts into a series of leadership purges.

Conclusion: Decline and Fall

At the same time, the new alliance with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board proved to be a difficult one for the UFW. While establishment of the agency proved to be a major boon for the UFW, which won most of the free elections under CALRA (all the while continuing to neglect the critical hiring hall issue), the state legislature badly underfunded ALRB, forcing the agency to temporarily shut down. The UFW responded by sponsoring Prop 14 in the 1976 elections to try to empower ALRB, and then got very badly beaten in that election cycle - and then, when Republican George Deukmejian was elected in 1983, the ALRB was largely defunded and unable to achieve its original elective goals.

In the wake of Deukmejian, the UFW went into terminal decline. Most of its best organizers had left or been purged in internal struggles, their contracts failed to succeed over the long run due to the hiring hall problem, and the union basically stopped organizing new members after 1986.

#history #u.s history #labor history #ufw #united farm workers #cesar chavez #dolores huerta #trade unions #social history #social movements #unions

53 notes · View notes