America's Brave new Astroturfers - Part 2: The Guides
Ayni Institute and The Swarm Method
The imprint of IfNotNow and Cosecha remains strong within the Momentum Community. Two of the Momentum's current "core team" members are IfNotNow members, including Director Lissy Romanow and Development Director Davida Ginsburg. Two of Momentum's co-founders, Paul Engler and Max Berger are also IfNotNow activists. While it must be stressed that these activists have thus far used non-violent tactics, Berger in particular recently tweeted in support of Palestinian Dallas-area Imam Omar Suleiman who is known to have called for a third Intifada (violent uprising) against the Israelis.
Along with fellow Momentum Community co-founder Carlos Saavedra of Cosecha, Engler and Ginsburg are also involved in the Ayni Institute which is the intellectual and non-profit arm of the cluster of organizations that includes Momentum Community. This think-tank claims to have risen up in the wake of the DREAM movement. Originally called "Movement Mastery", eventually they adopted the title Ayni from a word in the Peruvian languages of Quechua and Aymara that refers to mutual acts of good will between members of a community. Whereas media coverage would have the consumer believe that the Dreamers are a product of the last years of the Obama Administration and the current Trump presidency, far left media outlets like truthout were promoting it during Obama's first term in 2010.
In a 2016 video series produced by the institute they outline what they call SWARM networks presented by Saavedra and various others. The gatherings have the form of a corporate training seminar with pauses for the viewer to do the same work as the attendants.
The first one features him and an IfNotNow organizer named Emily Mayer. SWARM networks are private groups within these so-called grass-roots that are the real hands moving the puppets. IfNotNow for example has a private SWARM group.
Mayer then states to the audience that they must build their organization to be decentralized in appearance but centralized when under stress, using the analogy of a sea anemone (which shrinks inward when under attack).The type of behaviour that is described in this "decentralized organization" training reveals the true AstroTurf nature of the groups: While they purport to be organic as Saavedra goes on to explain they are actually commanded from the top-down while presenting the facade of being autonomous.
Managing the Grassroots
In the third video of the series Saavedra and Ayni Institute Training Director James Hayes go through the organizational attributes of an organization and how they are expressed in centralized and decentralized groups. Hayes is deputy director of Ohio Voice, a voter registration and voter rights group. The discourse that Hayes leads focuses on how to balance the structure between a command-control (centralized) and completely self-managed (decentralized) group. At one point Hayes interjects that the campus organizing structure is inappropriate for the neighbourhoods. Throughout, they seem to Later in the video, when a middle aged participant observes that her successful command-control organization does behave like a family, Saavedra responds by suggesting that they do certain tasks like budgeting as a collective with the goal of decentralizing it.
At a later point an attendee observes that organizations seem to slip back into central control regardless of decentralization. In response Saavedra uses the example of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST; Landless Workers Movement), an anarcho-communist peasant movement from Brazil that would squat on private lands in a push for agrarian reform. When she insists that these groups nevertheless settle back into centralization, Saavedra talks about the need to "train tons of people in your culture" as a means of transferring the organization's DNA to each cell. He then settles on the main point: The enforcement of the group's ethos would be done through training rather than directs such that once the each group is matured they will enforce the group rules without management.
Another way that Saavedra states that the model can work is by creating rigid and defined roles which is actually an element of command-control (centralized) management, however he states that in these groups roles can be interchangeable to lessen the hierarchy. Another role where Saavedra states a command-control structure is information and shared communication. As such he claims that decentralized organizations require more structure and more work.
Most chillingly, Saavedra uses one example as a model of the SWARM strategy of decentralized command in communication: The practice of Black Lives Matter activists dogpiling and brigading against anyone using the #alllivesmatter hashtag. He claims that BLM activists have been trained in this.
Executing tasks in the SWARM
In the fourth video (above) the questioning audience member from the third one, Samantha Corbin, becomes the instructor. While not as identifiable as some of the other instructors, Corbin is listed as the "Actions and Trainings Director" for The Other 98%, a blogging and social media group best known for spreading stories so skewed to the left that even Politifact rates them "Mostly False". She also works for Movement Net Lab, a similar movement that grew out of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy. Interestingly, she also claims that Movement Net Lab learns many of its lessons from the "Spanish Revolution", another ode to anarcho-communism like Saavedra's in the previous portion. This seminar takes the form of a scavenger hunt and then an analysis of how decisions were made by the groups participating in it. Using geometric shapes to describe the concepts of organization, coalition, email list, online campaign org, and chapter organizations, she introduces the final concept of the Decentralized Self-organized Smart Network. This shape looks very similar to the sea anemone described by Meyer in the first seminar.
It is at this point (22:25) that a person of ambiguous gender expresses frustration that the attitude is so discouraging of hierarchy during the treasure hunt. Corbin clumsily segues into explaining that in some pressure-driven situations organizational commands are the best approach to solving a problem, and that she is not against hierarchy but only "abusive hierarchy".
This leads into the fifth video (above) that explains the decentralized self organizing network. She talks about how the "core" (leading) members are spread out within small subgroups. Attendees are encouraged to be members of multiple group clusters in order to proliferate their ideas faster through each cluster. She then describes the concept of "strong periphery" where members find ways to get help from non-members by describing a case where her mother through a law partner and relative obtained sandwiches for an Occupy event. This is an interesting way of relabeling low-level nepotism. But by using the periphery Corbin makes the point that it can be sucked into the group and therefore "grow the periphery".
Later she goes into some other networking mechanisms such as "fields" (areas of common interest) using the example of people of a common Baha'i religion. It is at this point that she uses rival Occupy groups as an example of a negative field.
"How many people do you need to succeed?"
In the sixth installment of the video series Saavedra laments that he and his fellow activists did not have the organization and numbers that they needed ten years earlier in order to react to the New Bedford ICE raid. In that incident immigration authorities swooped in on a factory owned by Michael Bianco, Inc. and arrested over 300 immigrants. In order to create a critical mass much faster, Saavedra proposes the "scale across" method whereby multiple movements organize in parallel but with interlocking relationships such that they act as one in a "movement ecology" across different organizational cultures.
Saavedra soon explains further that the Scale with-in theory will start from a circle (3) people to a community (around 30 people) to a village (five communities) to a region (five villages). Though he does not make the connection to urban planning geography, this is very similar to German urban planner Walter Christaller's Central Place Theory idea of forming new cities in concentric geometric shapes.
Christaller's idea was introduced in 1933 in Germany at the dawn of the Nazi regime, and while he himself was not politically aligned with them Himmler's SS eventually drafted him to work on their spatial planning designs for Eastern Europe, and after World War II he joined the Communist Party in West Germany which was eventually banned. Whether Saavedra was consciously using CPT or not, its idea of creating a centralized grid of entities that work together would function very similarly, just with activists instead of cities.
Roles and Functions
In the seventh video Hayes returns with Lissy Romanow, another IfNotNow activist. She puts forward a very interesting fact about her group: When posed with the question of why IfNotNow exists when there are already longer standing counterparts against the "Israeli occupation" such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Israel Fund she responds by saying that they were formed specifically to end Jewish American support for Israel. With this example she explains how to determine an organization's function. She then admits that IfNotNow members are also part of those other organizations and merely switch T-shirts based on which meeting they are attending. As such much of this lecture is aimed at simply defining the limits and parameters of the goals of the movement.
A major statement that Romanow makes is that "if there is no unity and clarity of function, much of the organizing time is spent in the buy-in". This means that while groups are nominally autonomous in these anarcho-communal models, in order for them to be of any efficiency they must conform in their thoughts and aims.
Meshing Functions and Roles
The eight and last video of the SWARM seminar concerns the five roles within a group critical to achieving its function, and curiously Romanow and Hayes decide to use the roles that some church missionary reformers had created. They are rephrased here by the initials APEST:
*Apostle - Initiators of new projects.
*Prophet - People that preach message of the group.
*Evangelist - Recruiting for the movement.
*Shepherd - Looking after the needs and administration of the movement/group.
*Teacher - Educating and informing members of the movement.
The Core of the Cancer
Watching or listening to the seminars presented by Saavedra and his colleagues could lead one to wonder whether the participants are learning how to lead a business, administer a school or what they are indeed doing which is to create colonies of indoctrinated revolutionaries. While as of today none of the movements that were spun off from Ayni/Momentum appear to be violent, the decentralized structure of cells evokes that of various armed urban guerrilla movements of the 1960s and 70s such as the Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Cells in West Germany. The appeal of decentralization is very powerful in the internet age due to the censorship of big technology firms, fears of a new financial crisis, and the rise of crypto-currency, and many of the same organizing principles discussed by Saavedra are echoed by anti-establishment libertarians like Ben Swann. However, in this specific instance the goals of the organizing are to take power and implement the agenda of groups like Cosecha that will lead to unfettered open borders immigration or to promote specific political proposals like the Green New Deal. As described in Part 1, the Sunrise Movement has achieved remarkable strides in a short time and this could be in part due to some of the organizing methods taught in these seminars in September 2016.
After describing the identities and agendas of these organizations in the previous section and their organizing methods here in Part 2, we next must delve into the financial support network for Ayni/Momentum and its associate movements.