Organize the South

I guess the ACORN doesn't fall far from the tree. ACORN staffers have been fired after being caught on tape giving advice to a couple of right wingers who posed as a 'prostitute and a pimp', and asked about tax status and housing law pertaining to a fake planned child prostitution ring. But ACORN is already known in some poor communities as a slumlord that obtains housing, then runs it for a profit as poorly and undemocratically as any other slumlord.

So it begs the question, when the right wing attacks the center or center-left, do radical leftists have to help repel? When the center-left's position is to distance itself from socialists and others, it would seem as if radicals have no obligations.

ACORN was founded as an Alinskyite group that was meant to run counter to more radical organizing in the early 1970s. It was an anti-communist project at a time when there was radical organizing going on filling the same roles. To be fair, it has helped a lot of people over the years, and played an important lobbying role for those that go in for that sort of thing.

But the right wing attack on ACORN (or Van Jones, or Obama for that matter) is racist, tied to white nationalist groups like the John Tanton Network, and anti-socialist. Or in Joe Wilson's case, it was the Sons of Confederate Veterans. There has long been a theory on the radical left that certain kinds of pseudo-fascist groups present a third force, antagonizing both the state and capital on the one hand, and the revolutionary left on the other. What to do with the Teabaggers?

Simple, we don't ever need to defend the Obamas or ACORNs that have renounced us. But that doesn't mean we should be letting a pack of armed white nationalists (and their allies) become the loudest voice in opposition since Cindy Sheehan or the 2003 anti-war demonstrations. They need to get shown for what they really are.