DOWNLOAD THE STORM HANDBOOK HERE
There are some shocking parallels between Van Jones’s STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) and the ‘Occupy’ movements currently sweeping Wall Street and the country. Shockingly, the two share similar “Codes of Conduct”, specifically when it comes to abuse.
In their “Reclaiming Revolution” handbook, STORM members described an incident which crippled their organization:
Huh, that last paragraph sure seems to share come similarities to Occupy Wall Street’s attitude towards rape and sexual assault in their camps.
“(STORM) had sharp radical leadership and it was dynamic and exciting and yada, yada, yada. But what happened was that they started STORM as a loose cadre of collective whose structure borrowed from both the anarchist and communist traditions. And they would bring tomorrow in. They had a strict code of conduct and security protocols, and what was great is they would they would have this cadre organization model popular in the communist political tradition, but STORM had no designated leadership. See if this sounds familiar. And STORM borrowed from spokes model of the anarchist tradition. The group made all the decisions together by a modified consensus process,” Glenn said.
Who else has a “modified consensus process”? Occupy Wall Street – what do you think they are doing with their hand signs in those General Assemblies?
“Once they really got going, they got into some real problem because, well, an ex partner, a woman of color, alleged that one of STORM's leaders, a man of color, had physically abused her during the relationship there at STORM, and she distributed a letter about these alleged abuses through the movement. Even though the accused member denied these, she brought together a group of about thirty people to publicly confront the accused member. And most of the people in this group were her friends and classmates, and mostly were white and had very little relationship with the accused member, but it also includes several STORM members. And what the problem was is she was going outside of the collective to air these problems,” Glenn explained.
“There was some problems of sexual discrimination, there were problems of possible violence against women, and the women were like, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Aren't you guys supposed to be against domestic violence? Aren't you guys supposed to be...’ and they said, no, we have to solve this internally! Like good Marxists do. And that's really why it kind of fell apart is because the group didn't, you know, they didn't see eye to eye on, you know, violence towards women. Isn't that weird?”
