Diamond Dave Whittaker

Diamond Dave Whittaker said many people don’t recognize the common cause we have with each other.

“Media puts them in the divisive direction of being anxious that someone on welfare is getting handouts, without paying attention to what the millionaires and billionaires are doing. Big corporate media sows divisiveness. Part of it is intentional with reality shows of rich people and celebrities.”

I asked Whittaker how we can get past this.

“In the old days, ward leaders knocked on doors.” Whittaker then went into one of his soft-spoken chants he repeated many times, at the encampment and at a coffee house nearby, Café Hey, where some of us got food, used the bathroom and internet. “Strangers become friends. Friends become family. Family becomes a community. Communities become a movement.”

Whittaker said he doesn’t believe in a vanguard approach to movement building such as that of International Socialist Organization.

“ISO is like a cult of Leninists where the ends justify the means,” said Bob Fitrakis  as I was word-pressing this a couple of weeks later, back in Columbus, Ohio. He made that commented  Bob Fitakis commented  as he and his wife Suzanne Patzer barbequed some vegetables outside the Columbus Indy Media Center.

“The vanguard approach is a last resort when a movement has to go underground. It’s undemocratic. It tends to be embraced by Leninists. I’m not a Leninist, so I don’t favor vanguardism.” Fitrakis said that approach tends to exist in countries without a democratic traditions. “It came out of Tsarist Russia where it was illegal to have an above-ground movement.”

But a couple of weeks later, I talked with activist Peter Scott as we rode the R train from Manhattan to a warehouse in Brooklyn, where dozens of Occupy Wall Street  one year anniversary protesters were sleeping, showering and shitting. He said  vanguardism is not necessarily top-down or hierarchical. Instead, the vanguard are those that initiate a tactic, strategy or idea that others voluntarily adopt. In other words, early adopters comprise the vanguard, according to Scott.

Whittaker said Lenin dismissed nonviolence as bourgeois morality, and that the Trotskyists and Leninists believed in vanguardism to guide the proletariat to revolution.

But back in Tampa during counter-RNC events at Romneyville and beyond, Whittaker went back into one of his soft-spoken chants. “Cast a wide net. Let life flourish. Don’t panic. Keep it organic.” He meant ‘organic’ in the sense of horizontal social structures where people work together to meet their needs.

“ As the capitalist machine is coming down, we need communes, collectives, cohabs, Co ops, and small businesses.” He then locked his fingers to stand for doing more together than we can do on our own.

“It’s not what you know or who you know. It’s what you know about who you know.”

Whittaker said Robert Zimmerman sat down in his living room and read Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory and then stood up as Bob Dylan.