I got an email from my local chapter voting on seceding from the national org. In part it reads:
BACKGROUND
On 1/22/2022 the President of the SRA, posted a letter to all members indicating that, in summation, our (now former) Financial Director failed in their duties to the organization. Weeks of auditing the SRA finances revealed massive overspending and improper allocation of chapter dues. In addition, it was revealed the SRA owes the IRS approximately $15k in back taxes and that dispersal of dues to chapters would be suspended given the current financial crisis. The SRA now owes chapters over $50k.
In the following days, said Financial Director canceled their dues, effectively resigning, without ever making a statement to the membership. On 2/2/2022 the Organizing Committee unanimously voted to formally remove the Financial Director from their post.
The SRAWU, the union representing paid and volunteer staff of the SRA, formed in 2021 under the assumption the organization was solvent enough to afford full-time staff, and with the purpose of developing fairer working conditions. In the multiple committee and assembly meetings since January 22nd, budget proposals have amounted to either laying off staff or massively reducing hours, which no negotiating party has been satisfied with for a variety of reasons. No proposal has properly accounted for every factor of this budget crisis, and they all leave the SRA deeply in the red at the end of the year.
On 3/21/2022, the SRA Organizing Committee vetoed the budget passed at the March Assembly Meeting on grounds that it violated the SRA Bylaws. On the same day, a topic entitled "We Are Doomed: The Organization Chose Death" was posted to the forum, which stirred a lot of debate surrounding the future of the organization. A [Local] member formerly served as the Web & Script Developer of the SRA and developed a reputation of being a trustworthy staff member. She posted in the "We Are Doomed" topic requesting that members stop contacting her for opinions on the state of the organization. That message was flagged by a forum moderator, who then told her she was acting "uncomradely" and proceeded to insult both her and other members of the [Local] who defended her. The moderator then suspended her account for "combative behavior." This led to a [Local] member posting a topic calling for an apology and accountability from the moderator, which was not received, and the topic was closed by the Secretary of the SRA.
The Assembly Committee on Administrative Affairs, Organizing Committee, and representatives of the SRAWU met on 3/22/2022. A joint letter was released affirming their intent to work together toward a "better future for the Organization," while stating nothing of substance, providing no inklings of a plan. On the same day, Gray_Colored_Glasses, Treasurer of the SRA, resigned for health reasons. The Organizing Committee has since pushed a fundraiser, asking for more money from members to help solve this crisis, when chapters are currently receiving zero funding.
This financial crisis has now been going on for 4 months and not one single concrete measure toward resolution has been accomplished.
CURRENT STATE OF THE SRA
The situation can be summarized as follows:
-The SRA has proven itself to be a toxic and abusive workspace, necessitating unionizing, which did not resolve the issues facing staff.
-The Financial Director failed at their job, left the SRA, and there is still no path toward replacement.
-The Treasurer has resigned, and there is no clear replacement.
-There is no clear path toward financial solvency; getting "in the black" could take years, and would involve drastically restructuring staffing and dues.
-The organization has failed to prioritize local chapters and on the ground organizing for the sake of prioritizing administrative overhead and bureaucracy.
Embezzlement is such stupid shit. The group behind the Proles of the Round Table podcast, the Marxist Centre in Colorado Springs, disbanded because one of the founders embezzled money to start a microbrewery. Literally anything is more important than another microbrewery in a state full of them. Some of the best in the country, boutique ones in half the stripmalls, the most terminally oversaturated market short of cannabis dispensaries.
I'll stand by my pretentious beer of choice being a proletarian beer for Belgian farmworkers.
Is it one of those disgusting dark bears made from a weird mix of grains that has as many calories as a meal?
God no. Saisons and sours, farmhouse ales that are brewed with wild yeasts. Dark beers are way too heavy for me. Like drinking mud.
He didn’t actually embezzle money—he proposed doing so to the others, and they went full Maoist on him.
Honestly, a intact Proles, with or without microbrewery, would have been preferable to how it went down.
I miss Proles. Great podcast and ML presence is definitely needed in an area where there's only otherwise a PSL chapter and 400+ breweries.
the time has come for the Hexbear Rifle Association :hexbear-shining:
members will be called six-shooters :brace-cowboy: :kitty-cri-texas: :deng-cowboy:
members will be called six-shooters
Because there will only be six members.
having commented in some of the clusterfuck threads that seem to have spawned the SRA
called it
:cia:
I've said it before, but even if it's not an op, and I'll say it likely isn't, putting your name on a list that essentially says "my interests include firearms and overthrowing the US government" is a bad idea.
any org like this that requires a real name is garbage, IWW kind of included? a little bit? just a little, leave me alone.
as far as I can tell here in the US the leaders either get got (ferguson protests, black panthers, etc) or the leadership gets co-opted (BLM) but maybe i'm just a doomer
When I got my grey card they instructed me to use a psuedonym, but that could have just been a cool chapter.
yeah i personally believe it was started in good faith but that isn't to say that it hasn't been infiltrated many moons ago. It would seem to me that it's a perfect honeypot, like it's exactly the type of org the feds get rock hard over. They've overthrown governments for less left wing views than the SRA lmao
I don't see why the feds and the irs can't work out a deal here
PURPOSE
The purpose of this proposal is to withdraw our chapter from the SRA, establishing [Local] as an independent, autonomous organization, with a new name to be decided by a vote of the member body. While there have been multiple points in the history of our chapter when we have discussed seceding from the SRA, usually concurrent with a discussion around incorporating the chapter as a non-profit, recent events have pushed this movement to a head, culminating with this proposal. Further proposals will establish what shall be decided as far as bylaws, dues, and fiscal hosting if this proposal passes.
I could see one of the really active chapters like Puget Sound SRA successfully making a splinter group, but when I was active in my local chapter a couple years ago all we did was meet up for a range day that was completely apolitical and do business meetings. Short of the local SRA chapter there's an anarchist militia that does more mutual aid work in the area but that's about it unless PSL has an armed wing. It's probably going to go the way of John Brown Gun Club and disappear entirely.
Fucking shame too because we need gun safety and marksmanship training that is otherwise only served by chud ranges around here.
It still got a good many people trained while it was around, and hopefully they and other orphaned chapters can act as the foundations for something new as conditions get worse. Tbh this is better than I expected for the SRA- after 2020 I had resigned myself to the near-certainty that it would shortly be compromised and destroyed by feds, but instead it continued for another two years. I still feel like it would have been destroyed be feds on a long enough time line, and am left wondering if this dissolution, setback though it is, might not provide the basis for a more flexible and decentralized group of organizations in the future.
Malicious incompetence is one of the strategies the feds use to wreck orgs. Wouldn’t be surprised if that happened here.
almost seems like they intentionally sabotaged themselves after that union organized.
The SRA has proven itself to be a toxic and abusive workspace, necessitating unionizing
unions are necessary in every workspace except, maybe, some smaller worker-owned cooperatives.
Do Americans just really suck at managing national organizations, or do we need a different model entirely?
I think it comes down to size as much if not more than any particular American pathology. It's a three day drive from one end of the country to the other so that's like making a pan-European org geographically. The next largest local chapters mine could interact with are like a day's drive in any direction, so even cross-chapter organising is impractical if not impossible. Doing it all digitally is a stopgap but can't be the physical basis for the org, and trusting local chapters with full autonomy wouldn't work with an idea like the SRA where they tried to keep it focused on general safety training rather than any kind of political action.
trusting local chapters with full autonomy wouldn’t work with an idea like the SRA where they tried to keep it focused on general safety training rather than any kind of political action.
This doesn't follow for me. If you can't trust local chapters in general, how can you trust the organization at all?
Specifically I mean that local orgs would use SRA symbolism at protests. There'd be nothing keeping them in line with the core strategy of the org, which was to have a clean entryist org that teaches the fundamentals of using guns. It could easily become a militia at a local level or otherwise splinter in ways that threaten a crackdown against all chapters.
Why does national have to exist, at all? Pass charter at convention, do your local shit, have mechanism of excluding locals by other locals, done.
They basically did just represent organising the convention. A coherent and consistent message from the name is the value for me. Anything with guns, especially mostly good logos with guns, risks encouraging adventurism. If we had a Kyle Rittenhouse, that would instantly taint whatever orgs they're associated with and the SRA was the only nationally present one left after JBGC's implosion. If those 50~ autonomous chapters could come together and put on a national convention to settle those affiliation rules then sure, but then the fully independent Pugent Sound SRA would go back to their much more radical area with more radical protests than my chapter's. They risk the herd by caving to local pressures to be a more radical org and there's no check on that. Whatever congress those 50~ autonomous chapters would form would effectively be the national, but a messy federation of competing interests that go beyond the point of the SRA.
It's that they're all built around amateurism and are super eclectic. It leads to no discipline, no actual relationship with the membership, and a lot of money or information in the hands of whoever happened to have the time to run for office.
Let's talk empirically.
no discipline, no actual relationship with the membership, and a lot of money or information in the hands of whoever happened to have the time to run for office
Is that not a good description of how the SRA National unfolded here?
I honestly think some of it is :fedposting: . The FBI seems like it might be interested in taking this group out.
oh yeah. They just need to get a fed in leadership (very easy because they literally take classes and get paid to be there = wow he's so dedicated to the org) and they can just empty the coffers of an organization, have the undercover dip out, then let the org wither and die.
That is what this smells like to me. Especially because the Financial director left without explanation. FBI prefers not to get too directly involved any more with arrests or anything, they just try to compromise the org and scatter the members.
America's legacy of left wing militancy was destroyed and coopted, through COINTELPRO, but much more damagingly, non-profitization. This means that we have very little legacy, and we're kind of working on a collective memory that only goes back to 1999. It's why Phillipino and Chicano orgs are the best organized, they have a longer collective memory and radical tradition. There needs to be a real effort to find the elders who were alive in the 60's and got burned out or arrested rather than coopted, and we need to seek out their advice. Read up on your local BPP chapter and look the names up in the phonebook.
There was a guy from the local BPP chapter that we reached out to for an event a few years ago. Unfortunately he had mostly turned lib.
That message was flagged by a forum moderator, who then told her she was acting “uncomradely” and proceeded to insult both her and other members of the [Local] who defended her. The moderator then suspended her account for “combative behavior.”
lmao
bad leftist mods are somehow worse than lib ones as always
"any pushback against us at all means you are a shit comrade, but we can insult you as much as we like"
The org has had problems for two years now, and some before that. There isn't even a strong need for national other than administration. Chapters are pretty self-contained and most of the drama comes from them interacting. Of course there's always those who try to get into positions of power because they want to be paid to be a leftist. Lee Carter's wife got shit because she's running the org's social media, never posts, gets paid and uses the org's twitter to dunk on her detractors. People keep stepping down because of the toxicity on national comms. Chapters fighting with one another and trying to kick each other out. Just a mess.
What I want is a new John Brown Gun Club drive, personally. I would join that, but never the liberal SRA.
I met like one cool person in the SRA and then the org stopped doing anything, citing covid as an excuse for not even keeping up on online shit.
Kinda don't get the point of the SRA doing the national and then local structure thing. Seems best to just start local orgs and do cross organization stuff if they exist around to do that. Starting it around this lose national structure and then leaving anyone to start official SRA affiliated local chapters seems stupid. It gets people into the trap of thinking "oh there is a local SRA so that's all we need".
Even if they aren't feds, they are so incompetent they may as well be.
Not American but apparently I've heard that the PSL had some good information on how the SRA might be feds
