left/right cults (was re: Lefty Despair)

[Kendall Clark]

On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 08:52:44PM -0700, Brian O. Sheppard x349393 wrote:
> 
> Well, this is something I saw that was - you have to admit - fairly cult
> like, and had to do with Arthur Andersen. Last May I was downtown (Dallas)
> and saw several Arthur Andersen employees on lunch break. they were
> wearing orange t-shirts that said "I AM ARTHUR ANDERSEN" on them. I don't
> know if these were high-level employees or lower level peons, but I
> thought it was pretty disgusting, regardless. I felt bad for the workers
> that had to work in such an environment, who perhaps did not want to go
> along with such "team spirit," but felt pressured to do so because of fear
> of getting fired or reprimanded.
> 
> How's that for an unscientific, personal anecdote, by the way?

My memory is that just about everyone involved in that "protest" (yes,
it was a huge joke *as a protest*, since street protest presupposes
one has no other avenues of expression and communication, which
Andersen certainly did; the "protests" were meaningless, given that
pro-Andersen full page ads were being published around that time in
national newspapers) in Dallas was assuming, at that point, that
Andersen as an ongoing entity was doomed, i.e., no one participated
under fear of being fired or reprimanded since most were assuming that
it was merely a matter of time before the whole thing went into the
toilet for good. Less than half of the 1300+ Dallas Andersen employees
participated, far from mandatory.

Given the gossip I heard and postings I read on Andersen intranet,
most people seemed to participate because they were upset with the
public characterizations of Andersen as a fundamentally crooked,
dishonest organization, since they thought, rightly so, that the vast
majority of Andersen employees were honest, ordinary workers. (In my
view the problems at Andersen *were* systematic, and the vast majority
of its workers, being effectively powerless to set or influence
policy, were honest, ordinary workers.)

One thing that did bother me about the "protest" you describe is the
level of local media coverage it got, massive in comparison to the
non-coverage of the various antiglobalization, anti-INS, antiracist,
antiwar protests that've happened here, as you know full well. :>

And, fwiw, while I prefer black to orange tshirts as a matter of style
(or lack thereof), seeing a group of corporate workers arrayed in
matching tshirts strikes me as neither more nor less cultic than
seeing a group of anarchists all dressed similarly. And, yes, before
you offer the obvious retort, I agree that whether a group of
anarchists dresses similarly has little, if anything to do with the
quality of their activism, protest, dissent, or the like. But it's
probably just as hazardous to make assumptions about the degree of
coercion in, say, the Andersen example as it is in the anarchist case.
Human beings, at least as I understand them to be socialized in
Western contexts, tend to reflect a sense of group membership in
things like clothes, personal grooming, etc. That seems to reflect
some real human need, and I'm not sure that it is problematic *per
se*.

Kendall Clark