Building trust: The high road for America

Once again in the news there’s another “peaceful protest” organized by various black activist organizations that’s turned violent.  This time it’s Baltimore, MD.  The Last Refuge blog extensively chronicles what they term the “black grievance industry” and noted the alarming ISIS hand signs being flashed by some protestors at the latest rally.  To really understand the spreading mayhem, I recommend reading:  STORM Handbook: “Reclaiming The Revolution (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement)”  – Published in Spring 2004.   Van Jones, one time Obama nominee to be the Special Advisor on green jobs and avowed Marxist, was one of the key architects of this STORM movement.    Valerie Jarrett, sitting right in the White House, has been a long-time Van Jones supporter.

With escalating racial tensions and ramped up attacks against the police and white people in general, don’t believe that the protests are in reaction to specific incidents.  In my opinion, what’s going on is black activist organizations, quite effectively, are using the STORM playbook to fundamentally transform America.  Along the road, many less radical groups and Americans will be duped into believing the rhetoric, but these will be just more useful idiots, who will be discarded when the “resistance” boils over to the “revolution” stage .  The press will be fed a diet of misinformation to keep them in line too.

To me, the most heartbreaking sight in this ongoing attempt to overthrow the system was seeing a photo of a little girl holding a sign: “Police, Public Enemy #1”  Rest assured, fomenting distrust and racial hatred are, part and parcel, at the heart of the Van Jones and his Marxist friends’ plan.  Most of America will be on the sidelines, because they are deliberately instigating their revolution within America’s failed inner-cities. This general plan of destroying America by creating a race war isn’t anything new, it’s been around decades and used by both white supremacist groups and black activists, using the same old divide and conquer strategy, that’s been around for millennia.  Spreading hate and distrust is the name of the game.  Sadly, we don’t see many Americans trying to bridge the racial divides by doing what it takes to defeat hate.  You’ve got to reach out a hand, refuse to hate and talk to each other.   Yep, we need leaders who will rise above the political posturing and work to build trust between all Americans.

I suggest reading the entire STORM handbook, but here’s where I think they’re at in their plan (pages 53-54):

Moving from Resistance to Revolution

Our commitment to communist politics didn’t give us any easy answers
about what we should be doing to advance a revolutionary movement
in this country. Other organizations with a Marxist analysis seemed to lack a practical program for building the kind of power needed to win
our people’s liberation.

Several of these communist groups emphasized the immediate building of the revolutionary vanguard party. They thought the party should
prepare to seize power when the people “spontaneously” rise up
during imperialism’s inevitable crises. We believed that these groups
had badly misassessed the real state of imperialism and of social
movements. They prematurely anticipated a peoples’ uprising (which
we didn’t see on the immediate horizon) while underestimating the
importance and difficulty of building power in oppressed communities
to lay the groundwork for future uprisings.

Other communist organizations – and many individual activists – were
questioning the possibility of a revolutionary movement ever succeed
-ing. They emphasized immersion in unions and mass struggles to the
exclusion of intentional work to develop a revolutionary movement.

We wanted an approach that resolved the contradiction between the
need for building immediate (and inevitably reform-based) power in
disorganized oppressed communities on the one hand and the need to
lay the ground work for the long-term development of a revolutionary
movement on the other.

To resolve this tension, STORM developed an innovative analysis about
the role of revolutionaries in a non-revolutionary historical period. We
called it “Moving from Resistance to Revolution.”

We concluded that the current period is one of “resistance,” not one
of “revolution.” We thought that the main work of revolutionaries at
such times should be to build resistance fights. These fights would build
power and consciousness in oppressed communities. But revolutionar
-ies must design and craft this “resistance work” so as to help lay the
foundation for the long-term development of a revolutionary move
-ment. As “conscious forces,” we thought that revolutionaries should
work intentionally to help the resistance movement mature into a
revolutionary one.

This “Moving from Resistance to Revolution” framework was STORM’s
attempt to negotiate the contradiction between reformism and ultra-

STORM’s Points of Unity
STORM’s primary unity was around the need for the “liberation and
solidarity for all oppressed people.” For us, this meant that our vision
had to draw on different progressive and revolutionary traditions in
order to address the different forms of oppression facing our people.
As we crafted our second Points of Unity document, six ideas formed
the core of a new, more robust political unity in the group:

• Revolutionary Democracy:
  the belief that our movement
  will have to replace the falsely-democratic capitalist state with
  a truly democratic people’s government.
• Revolutionary Feminism:
  the belief that women’s oppression is fundamental to this society and that we have to place
  “Sisters at the Center” of our struggle.
• Revolutionary Internationalism:
  “the belief that white supremacy is a critical force impacting world politics, and tha
  Third World communities – inside and outside of the United
  States – along with white anti-racist allies need to work in
  solidarity build the power we need to overthrow the global
  system of white supremacy.
• Central Role of the Working Class:
  the belief that, in order to defeat capitalism and other forms of oppression, the
  working class will have to play the central role in the revolutionary struggle.
• Urban Marxism:
  the belief that the urban space was now
  the central site of revolutionary struggle, just as the factory
  and the point of production were in the days of Karl Marx.
• Third World Communism:drawing on the revolutionary communist traditions from Asia, Africa and Latin America, including the recognition of the need for a disciplined revolutionary party rooted among oppressed people.

STORM believed that there were three main strategic tasks facing
revolutionaries in this non-revolutionary period: building an advance-
guard organization, promoting revolutionary ideas and building revolutionary people’s power.

We believed that we needed to help lay the groundwork for an
advance-guard organization to emerge as a future, more powerful form
of revolutionary political organization. Such an organization could help
promising militants to develop as revolutionaries. It could help mass
organizations develop practically and ideologically. And it could develop
and promote lessons and theories from the movement’s experience.

We also believed that it was the task of revolutionaries to promote
revolutionary ideas among oppressed and exploited people. As we did
this, we thought four methods of work would provide the best results:
“observation and participation” (gleaned from our study of the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense); “the mass line” (as described by Mao
Tse-tung); structured “political education”; and consistent “criticism/
self criticism” to help us constructively evaluate our individual and
group work (this we drew from both Mao and Amilcar Cabral).

Finally, we believed that revolutionaries had to build revolutionary people’s
power. We saw “mass organizations” – fighting organizations made
up of members of the oppressed and exploited sectors of society – as
the key to building this power. We believed that these organizations
would be the main instruments of change in the survival struggles of
this reform period. And, if revolutionaries could successfully use and
develop a revolutionary organizing model, these organizations would
become the main engines of the revolutionary peoples’ struggle.

We believed that these three areas of work would lay the foundation
for a transition from the current reform period into a more intense
stage of the revolutionary struggle