I think this manual is most appropriately understood as an early reference for the operations of the FBI in COINTELPRO, etc. State employed agents-provocateur and saboteurs were some of the first to literally use these exact reference manuals domestically, and their targets were the various social and labor movements of the day.
For more clarity on what can happen in organizations that are antagonistic to hierarchy and structure, I can think of no better read than “The Tyranny of structurelessness” by Jo Feeman https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
That happened to Occupy Wall Street, and to Black Lives Matter. Both failed to focus on specific, achievable goals. And so, they never got beyond the consciousness raising stage. If Occupy Wall Street had focused on "Tax the 1%" and "Break up monopoly landlords", and Black Lives Matter had focused on "Every killing by a cop gets investigated by the FBI" and "Fire the bottom 10% of cops", they might have achieved those goals.
My impression is that the movement gets co-opted as a generic partisan force, and then having specific goals is a detriment when the unstated goal is merely to elect a particular party.
The best goal for Occupy Wall Street would have been to break up all the Too Big To Fail institutions. The "problem" with that was twofold.
One, if that's the goal, and they manage to turn the election, then they'll expect the people they elected to actually do it. But politicians didn't wanna do it. Both parties are in the pocket of the banks.
And two, if they actually did do it, it would be done. The movement would have succeeded and lost its raison d'etre. If you solve the problem then you can't run on it again.
So you're completely right. The question is how to prevent movements from getting co-opted like this. Because actually solving the problem is the thing we should want.
BLM wasn't formed in response to police violence, so if it was to limit itself to a narrow tactical policy aim, those would have been odd choices.
Also, BLM has arguably had a broader and more substantial impact already than achieving either one of those narrow goals would have.
???
Do you have references to that?
I understand that BLM prominence started with the Ferguson protests against cop Darren Wilson murdering Michael Brown Jr
(Ps, forgot about Zimmerman murdering Trayvon. But that's also a cop-adjacent figure. What most people would define a vigilante)
Yes, it became prominent then because it was already well established with a network of activists, etc.; the principal triggering event (as your PS seems to acknowledge) was the slaying of Trayvon Martin.
> But that's also a cop-adjacent figure.
That may be a valid viewpoint, but it's not the fact that BLM organized around, which was the lack of accountability and the identity of the victim, not anything about the personal characteristics or background of the perpetrator.
“Police”.
> You're both saying that BLM was founded and organized around the lack of police accountability when killing black people
No, “police” was not part of the founding focus. Events involving police just happened to be the ones that brought the network to mass attention, after it was founded in response to a non-police (even if some might see it as “police adjacent”) killing with a focus that was not in any way focussed on whether those responsible but not held accountable were police, or “police adjacent”.
Courts of law are institutions of government, and surprisingly enough people sometimes disagree with the jobs done by institutions of government.
I'm sorry but I feel like this author is really out of touch here. Perhaps to someone who only interacted with it through the news, it seemed like they didn't get anything done. But that energy didn't just dissipate. It spread to almost every facet of American leftist organizing
Also saying Graeber gave us occupy is giving a lot more credit to him than I think is fair. And I think Occupy introduced a lot more people to Graeber than Graeber introduced to Occupy
And did you miss the 60's?
I didn't realize that Occupy had helped labor organizing.
Does leftist theory really help when trying to organize a business?
Ummm… the 60’s would like to have a word with you. You’re clearly lack some significant history lessons.
Dictatorial control only prevents this for institutions small enough for the dictator to fully understand every part of the organization.
Without that, you get middle managers jockeying for position and playing CYA and the people at the top are too far away from it to put a stop to it.
In looser structures like social movements or nascent labor organizations, it's hard for any individual/subset to wield enough authority to do either of those things.
There are parallels with any organization (even families), but I think it's rather weak when applied to modern corporations.
This is why the sabotage relies on organizational politics and by the book pedantry.
You have a corporate policy that was created by lawyers and HR for the solitary purpose of ass covering. It's so that if anyone violates it, they can point to the policy as an excuse to scapegoat them or have an independent pretext to punish wrongthinkers for things they're not legally or politically allowed to punish them for.
If you insist on actually following that policy to the letter to the detriment of the organization, your boss is risking their own ass to put a stop to it, so most of them won't. And the policy itself comes from over their head, so they can't change it.
Bob hates to work with X, but Bob's boss's boss got a kickback for signing a contract with X vendor, so now Bob is going to follow every policy to the letter on the X project until it fails or his request for reassignment goes through.
Carol has OCD. You give her a policy book and she's going to read it cover to cover and create her own index to it and make citations to individual provisions whenever she sees anyone violating it, even if they're only violating the letter and not the spirit.
Alice does the same thing but it's because she's an opportunist, so she only looks for policy violations as retaliation for not getting her way and people learn not to cross her.
... Scarily accurate? Spot on? A sad but correct reading of how companies actually operate?
These techniques aren’t effective because they’re clearly sabotage. They’re effective because they kill an organizations effectiveness AND often happen naturally, so by turning it up a notch you’ll throw even more wrenches into the works than normal - but fly under the radar.
The whole strict hierarchy and breaking ties thing you’re talking about exists because all the things in this manual happen all the time ANYWAY, just not as often.
And there are a number of ways to point fingers and hide/diffuse blame that happen all day everywhere anyway too, and work.
Managers are also aware of their company's market position. If the new Camaro didn't sell, GM was still going to exist. If the Model 3 didn't sell, Tesla was toast. A middle manager who bankrupts the company inherently loses their job, so people are less inclined to play stupid games when that's what's on the line.
Companies doing novel things are also able to retain employees who believe in the mission even when the big boss is a fire breathing dragon. You put the same kind of boss in charge of the DMV or the cable company and people are just going to quit, or exert political pressure against the boss.
This points to antitrust as a solution. Constrain mergers and vertical integration. Then companies that become bureaucratically inefficient actually fail and go away, solving the problem. And that possibility was always the primary deterrent to it happening, which is why it happens so much more when that isn't on the table.
Apple has 150k employees and runs mostly like a dictatorship with very long ruler at the top that has a lot of power and a generally consistent long-term version they’re executing on. Distributed decision making might be a bit stronger but there’s also no real laws to speak of with lots of forgiveness if things turn out well.
Also the motives are drastically different. Government is about creating the best structure for a bunch of humans to cohabitate with a shared value system. Corporations typically are about amassing power, wealth, and influence over governments.
I hate to bring this up but just think how differently things would have played out if the JFK assassination did not happen. I don't believe the conspiracy theories and so I consider it a black swan event. Where are we suffering from government sabotage today? Would BLM have turned out differently? Would we have even needed it in the first place if prior sabotage events didn't happen? Anyway this is leading into conspiracy territory but I just was wondering out loud.
Well it certainly didn't overcome all events. The FBI violently executed the leadership of the Black Panthers through local police that had 0 repercussions for their (very illegal) actions. Cultural groups in the south like the Daughters of the Confederacy really ramped up their culture war and made sure to filter all history textbooks, put up monuments, etc. Cops have been able to kill black folks and totally get away with it for decades now
Imagine where we could be if Huey Newton did actually get elected to local politics. Or if the South didn't ramp up their culture war
The processes in this document sound utterly familiar.
All the things in the quote happen naturally, through people’s general incompetence. To put it in a field manual is very tongue in cheek, reads to me as irony. Corporations and political parties run themselves as poorly as if they were infiltrated by sabotagers, but they do it to themselves.
My impression is completely the opposite. The CIA itself is a large inefficient bureaucracy and the people who wrote this are clever operators who have seen this in action themselves and can now point to this to accuse the perpetrators of being enemy saboteurs.
Think about what the countermeasures against this look like. Fewer bureaucratic rules, less rigidity, smaller teams, more individual autonomy. The behavior of the intransigent bureaucrat and the saboteur are the same, so institute policies in the name of defeating the one and you also take care of the other.
Take a look at the findings of the Church Committee, or at Operation Condor, Operation Mockingbird, the coup in Iran (admittedly a CIA operation), the CIA fomented strikes and civic unrest in Chile after Allende's election, Gladio, the "Jakarta Method", etc.
But anyway, the non-hoax better strategy for a saboteur is exactly doing whatever destructive acts come naturally to people. So a real guide would probably have those same topics.
And people do these things naturally all the time in large orgs and small. Visit a local PTA or a city council meeting with a copy and play bingo if you don’t believe me.
It only reads like a hoax because it’s all in one place.
But then, that depends on the who the guide targets, and may not be as important during an active war as it looks like in peace time.
If I wanted to convince most people I were not stupid or incompetent I would:
1. point out problems with their plans
2. argue about precise wordings as pedantry is seen as the sign of a precise intelligence.
3. be reasonable and urge reasonableness, surely the incompetent would not be reasonable.
4. talk about potential ramifications of decisions made going against organizational goals.
etc. etc. in short many of the methods that will allow you to shut down progress also help bolster your own reputation for intellectual rigor and understanding of issues from all sides.
Sure you won't be seen as a fiery genius, but a sagacious counselor - that's good enough.
Great way to stir up paranoia on a forum where people tend not to be able to grok humor, but also tend to believe in conspiracy theories.
It's pretty much not a troll post from 4chan.
But I've been ruminating on how to start a political and economic movement committed to dismantling the bureaucratic state by empowering individuals to be ever more autonomous.
Adjacent notions are participatory democracy (a la the Iroquois), banning usury, UBI, worker directed social enterprises, left-libertarian, and healing the world. More to be added as my whimsy and imagination permit.
Trouble is, one of the things that empowered, autonomous individuals always seem to do is organize themselves into corporate, governmental, religious, academic, or other institutional bodies that then proceed to behave indistinguishably from the targets they were reacting against in the first place. At each iteration, only the in-group beneficiaries and out-group victims are different.
The larger problem is the nature and regulation of human organization, which isn't so easily tackled.
The problem comes when markets become consolidated and uncompetitive, or bad regulations get applied at the national or international level and there is nowhere to flee. Which persists when upon it happening people say "eh" and do nothing, instead of taking it for the threat that it is and fighting it with all they've got.
A bit of Googling shows Ernest to be a minor Libertarian party official out of Maricopa County, Az, and anti-vax.
What exactly is he doing that you feel is worthy of people's attention?
[0] https://lpedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hancock
[1] https://thevoicegcc.com/11072/a1news/phoenix-couple-cautions...
As an activist, I spoke to anyone and everyone who'd have me. Socialist, Green, Libertarian, Democratic, Republican, and all sorts of nonpartisan orgs.
At the time, I felt everyone's core values were more or less the same. Opinions started to diverge over priority. More so with implementation. Then game-over once the dialog drifted into personalities.
I gotta believe that the way forward is flipping the script from nitpicking over differences to emphasizing our agreements.
And I sense that one of our shared, unifying, omni-partisan values is our mutual hatred of bureaucracy. Of any kind. Corporate and governmental.
I'm no smarter or better than any one else about this stuff. I have a history of getting really spun up. I do feel my efforts have helped my own mental state.
One thing that has helped, for instance, is figuring out that we're all a little bit crazy. Another is realizing that my "own the libs" siblings don't actually believe the stuff they say; it's just sport for them. So I try to not take the bait.
Any way. You get the idea.
Peace.
I don't write people off on labels. I have a high degree of suspicion that I share with others when they publically and openly signal adherence to a damaging set of certain lies, like antivax advocacy. In this case, they write themselves off.
I am classical liberal and know what it is like to have a minority view that is in reality held by everyone when you get past the barriers.
In this case, the website looks scammy.
I'm a cultural Christian (Presbyterian) and a treehugger. "Shepherds of the Earth" and all that. I currently like the "heal the world" framing better. Somehow it feels less like proselytizing, maybe more like gnosticism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_olam#Improving_the_worl...
I would add higher government pay scale with rules you can't just outsource to consultant markups. + more nimble technocratic management in government.
I am not Jewish (culturally or religiously) but love the notion.
Add this to your list:
Two party system is poison.
alas, many saboteurs may consider themselves friends.
How does the old quote go? ‘The worst tyrant is the one who thinks they are doing it for your own good, because the evil ones at least take a break, where the do gooders are tireless’?
99% of this is home gown. And infiltrating agent's job would, be to accelerate these natters. Assuming your group matters enough which allike.
What are we going to do about it?