MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In her unmissable 2023 book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein paints a picture of a "mirror world" of right wing and conspiratorial beliefs that are warped, false reflections of real crises:
For example, Qanon's obsession with "child trafficking" is a mirror-world version of the real crises of child poverty, child labor, border family separations and kids in cages. Anti-vax is the mirror-world version of the true story of the Sacklers and their fellow opioid barons making billions on Oxy and fent, with the collusion of corrupt FDA officials and a pliant bankruptcy court system. Xenophobic panic about "immigrants stealing jobs" is the mirror world version of the well-documented fact that big business shipped jobs to low-waged territories abroad, weakening US labor and smashing US unions. Cryptocurrency talk about "decentralization" is the mirror-world version of the decay of every industry (including tech) into a monopoly or a cartel.
Klein is at pains to point out that other political thinkers have described this phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, leftists called antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Socialism – the idea that working people are preyed upon by capital – is reflected in the warped mirror as "working people are preyed upon by international Jewish bankers."
The mirror world is a critical concept, because it shows that far right and conspiratorial beliefs are often uneasy neighbors with real, serious political movements. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, in other words:
Once you understand the mirror world, you start to realize that many right wing conspiracists could have been directed into productive movements, if only they'd understood that their problems were with systems, not sinister individuals (this is why Trump has ordered a purge of any federally funded research that contains the word "systemic"):
This also explains why the "tropes" of right wing conspiratorialism sometimes echo left wing, radical thought. I once had a (genuinely unhinged) dialog with a self-described German "progressive" who told me that criticizing the finance industry as parasitic on the real economy was "structurally antisemitic." Nonsense like this is why Klein's "mirror world" is so important: unless you understand the mirror world, you can end up believing that "progressive" just means "defending anything the right hates."
Historian Erik Baker is the author of a new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which has some very interesting things to say about the mirror world:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674293601
In a recent edition of the always-excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, the hosts interviewed Baker about the book, and the conversation turned to the subject of pyramid schemes, the "multilevel marketing systems" that are woven into so many religious, right-wing movements:
MLMs have it all: prosperity gospel ("God rewards virtue with wealth"), atomization ("you are an entrepreneur and everyone in your life is your potential customer"), and rabid anti-Communism ("solidarity is a trick to make you poorer").
The rise of the far right can't be separated from the history of MLMs. The modern MLM starts with Amway, a cultlike national scam that was founded by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos (father-in-law of Betsy DeVos).
Rank-and-file members of the Amway cult lived in dire poverty, convinced that their financial predicament was their own fault for not faithfully following the "sure-fire" Amway method for building a business. Andrea Pitzer's gripping memoir of growing up in an Amway household offers a glimpse of the human cost of the cult:
Amway – and MLMs like it – don't just bleed out their members by convincing them to buy mountains of useless crap they're supposed to sell to their families, while enriching the people at the top of the pyramid who sell it to them. The "toxic positivity" of multi-level marketing cults forces members deep into debt to pay for seminars and retreats where they are supposed to learn how to repair the personal defects that keep them from being "successful entrepreneurs." The topline of the cult isn't just getting rich selling stuff – they're making bank by selling false hope, literally, in Hilton ballrooms and convention centers across the country, where hearing an MLM scammer berate you for being a "bad entrepreneur" costs thousands of dollars.
Amway destroyed so many lives that Richard Nixon's FTC decided to investigate it. The investigation wasn't going well for Amway, which was facing an existential crisis that they were rescued from by Nixon's resignation. You see, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, was the former Congressman of Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel, who was also the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful business lobbyist in America.
At Ford's direction, the FTC exonerated Amway of all wrongdoing. But it's even worse than that: Ford's FTC actually crafted a rule that differentiated legal pyramid schemes from illegal ones, based on Amway's destructive business practices. Under this new rule, any pyramid scheme that had the same structure as Amway was presumptively legal. Every MLM operating in America today is built on the Amway model, taking advantage of the FTC's Amway rule to operate in the open, without fear of legal repercussions.
MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.
In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.
But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.
An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same.
Which brings me back to the mirror world, and Erik Baker's conversation with the Know Your Enemy podcast. Baker starts to talk about who gets big into Amway: "people who already effectively lead by the force of their charisma and personality many other people in their lives. Right? Because you're able to sell to those people, and you're able to recruit those people. What are we talking about? Well, they're effectively recruiting organizers, people who have a natural capacity for organizing and then sending them out in the world to organize on behalf of Christian capitalism."
Listening to this, I was thunderstruck: MLM recruiters are the mirror world version of union organizers. In her memoir of growing up in Amway, Andrea Pitzer talks about how her mom would approach strangers and try to lead them through a kind of structured discussion:
Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.
This kind of person, having this kind of dialog, is exactly how union organizers work. In A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey's classic book on labor organizing, she describes how she would seek out the charismatic, outgoing workers in a job-site, the natural leaders, and recruit them to help bring the other workers onboard:
Organizer training focuses on how to have a "structured organizing conversation," which McAlevey described in a 2019 Jacobin article:
“If you had a magic wand and could change three things about life in America [or her town or city or school], what would you change?” The rest of your conversation needs to be anchored to her answers to that question.
The MLM conversation and the union conversation have eerily similar structures, but the former is designed to commodify and destroy solidarity, and the latter is designed to reinforce and mobilize solidarity. Seen in this light, an MLM is a mirror world union, one that converts solidarity into misery and powerlessness instead of joy and strength.
The MLM movement doesn't just make men like Rich De Vos and Jay Van Andel into billionaires. MLM bosses are heavy funders of the right, a blank check for the Heritage Foundation. Trump is the MLM president, a grifter who grew up on the gospel of Norman Vincent Peale – a key figure in MLM cult dynamics – who tells his followers that wealth is a sign of virtue. Trump boasts about all the people he's ripped off, boasting about how getting away with cheating "makes me smart":
The corollary is that being cheated means you're stupid. Caveat emptor, the motto of the cryptocurrency industry ("not your wallet, not your coins") that spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected.
Tech has its own mirror world. The people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and make delightful and wonderful things are mirrored by the people who used tech to find fellow weirdos and call for fascism, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps.
In Picks and Shovels, my next novel (Feb 17), I introduce readers to a fictitious 1980s religious computer sales cult called Fidelity Computing, run by an orthodox rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Mormon rabbi:
Fidelity is a faith scam, a pyramid scheme that is parasitic upon the bonds of faith and fellowship. Martin Hench, the hero of the story – a hard-fighting high tech forensic accountant – goes to work for a competing business, Computing Freedom, run by three Fidelity ex-employees who have left their faiths and their employers to pursue a vision of computers that is about liberation, rather than control.
The women of Computing Freedom – a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family, a Mormon woman who's renounced the LDS over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, and a nun who's left her order to throw in with the Liberation Theology movement – are all charismatic, energetic, inspirational organizers.
Because of course they are – that's why they were so good at selling computers for the Reverend Sirs who sit at the top of Fidelity Computing's pyramid scheme.
Hearing Baker's interview and reading Pitzer's memoir last week made it all click together for me. Not just that MLMs destroy social bonds, but that within every person who gets sucked into an MLM, there's a community organizer who could be building the bonds that MLMs destroy.
This reminds me of a post I saw several years ago regarding right wing rationalizations for US involvement in the Middle East that said (I'm paraphrasing; I can't find the original post), "If the USA really wants to liberate a desert dwelling people from religious fundamentalists who traffic girls into child marriages, they should start with Utah."
There will be millions of actions like this over the coming years. An important thing to remember is that for them to work (anywhere, not just libraries) is people absolutely can’t announce that this is what they are doing.
Not seeing constant acts of resistance doesn’t mean it isn’t happening all around you all the time. Some very effective methods require silence and secrecy.
I just want to remind everyone how affordable buying food from indigenous tribes is. I live in a major city and I was able to purchase and ship (15) pounds of fish from back home to myself for cheaper than I could buy it from a grocery store here in the city. Yeah, shipping has its own environmental factors but I was able to support an indigenous owned business while also getting my groceries at a lesser cost. (Buying in bulk is always a good idea if you’re planning on having something shipped to you)
Some tribal owned grocers that ship:
Bow and Arrow (Ute Mountain)
Native Harvest (White Earth)
Red Lake Fishery (Red Lake)
Wozupi (Mdewakanton Dakota)
Ramona Farms (Gila River)
Tanka Bars (Oglala)
Indian Pueblo Store (Pueblos)
Twisted Cedar Wine (Cedar Paiutes)
Ute Bison (Ute)
Seka Hills Olive Oil and Vinegars (Yocha Dehe Wintun)
Honor the Earth is an organization founded by Winona Duke of the White Earth Nation (Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers (LGBTQ musical duo Indigo Girls and long-time political activists.) You can buy Honor The Earth merch online to support the environmental work they do, specifically to help protest Enbridge Oil’s Line 3 Pipeline routed through tribal lands that endangers wild rice beds which are both a staple crop and sacred to Anishinaabeg.
However, Winona also heads up a hemp farm called Winona’s Hemp & Heritage Farm located on and run primarily by members of the White Earth Nation. It seeks to general local wealth for the tribe by encouraging the production of hemp as a fast-growing renewable and regenerative crop resource to be used for everything from non-plastic textiles/clothing, housing construction and insulation, food products, and CBD products! (They also grow other crops there such as heirloom varieties of corn, beans, squash, Jerusalem artichokes, potatoes, and ceremonial tobacco in an effort to help re-establish and increase tribal food sovereignty!)
They have both a brick-and-mortar shop called The Hemp Market Store and Coffee Shop in Osage MN where they sell their products and others by Indigenous-owned & -run companies! (They also sell those seasonal tribal heirloom crops there including Lakota squash and Ojibwe purple potatoes.)
But you can also buy many of their products online including hemp-fiber clothing, hemp tea, and hemp pasta. They also partnered with an experienced tribal herbalist to formulate CBD medicinal products like balms and oils (haven’t used it myself, but I the CBD balm for my mom for Christmas a few years back and she said it helped her chronic hip pain a lot.)
Online retailer: partnered with some of the grocers in the list above, so you can order several grocers’ products from 1 place
✳️Tocabe (Osage, recommended by killmecoward) –> Pantry food staples
✳️Indigenous First (recommended by pingnova) –> Handmade crafts/art, Foods & Teas, Personal care, Decor, Seeds, Books, Jewelry supplies
✳️SweetGrass Trading Company (Winnebago, recommended by watcherscrown) –> Handmade crafts/art, Foods (of note: Salmon), Coffee & teas, Personal care, Books (website features recipes)
Coffee/Tea:
Yeego Coffee
✳️Spirit Mountain Roasting
Birchbark Coffee
Thunder Island Coffee
✳️Owl Lightning Coffee (Ute (?), recommended by c4-magic)
✳️Wild Canadian Tea (Algonquin/Anishnaabe, recommended by bellarad)
I have been informed by management that it is called Guy Fawkes day and will be taking down all billboards and flyers posted since this post was made. The Gay Agenda apologizes for this mishap.
Feeling stressed? Bored? Want to do something while you stream Netflix? We got you covered. Download our free coloring book of artworks from the Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute.
Download here.
If you check out the hashtag, #ColorOurCollections, you can see even more fun coloring pages from places like @huntingtonlibrary, @smithsonianlibraries, @bodleianlibs and more.
Today is a good day to remember that the black panther party always was a proponent for queer rights and queer activists today can repay that kindness by supporting groups such as black lives matter and by working to eliminate racism in our own communities.
Also the Black Panther Party protected disabled protesters during a 23 day sit-in in 1977 that resulted in the winning of 504 regulations. Please don’t forget that.
Being a good person is a choice. Don’t let people fool you into believing that truly good people never have bad thoughts, are never tempted by the easier path, by the low road, never mess up or act out selfishly. Never believe a person can be good without making a conscious effort.
Every single time you do something good, you’ve made a decision to make the world a little brighter.
Goodness is not an inherent trait, it is a choice. Keep making it! I see you, I’m proud of you, and I’m rooting for you!
Can I just say like… I’m not American so I can’t really know what it’s like out there right now, but I am really proud of you guys. Like, Trump - a man known to have sexually assaulted multiple women - is elected, so the women of your country not only turn out in their millions but they inspire women around the world to do the same in solidarity. He preaches anti-intellectualism, so your scientists host database hacking and saving days to preserve data. He bans government agencies from speaking the truth, so they create rogue social media accounts that spread facts even at the risk of their jobs. He brings in racist immigration bans, causing chaos in airports and huge uncertainties in the lives of real, innocent people, so protesters swarm to the airports, lawyers work pro bono round the clock to get people into the country, and people mobilise to destroy him in the high court in a day.
I know this is awful and it sucks and it’s only been one freaking week, but you guys are doing amazing right now and I am so moved and so proud. It’s gonna be tough and everyone will have to pick their battles and just keep fighting and pushing, and this isn’t how it should be but at least we know there are people with the guts and the gumption to do what they can.
You guys are the sand in the gears.
Thank you. If you want to understand America, you have to be able to imagine 400 cats in a moose costume. Most of the time it looks like an incoherent twitching mass as the cats inside hiss and scratch each other over things that only matter to those inside that one part of the costume.
Then something really big happens, something that catches the attention of all the cats, and suddenly instead of a twitching flat lump, you’re facing an fully grown, fully coordinated, VERY angry moose.
The administration thought it would be herding cats. Instead, it’s facing a charging moose.
Whether or not a protest is “peaceful” is decided by the state, not the protestors.
There’s a reason the Women’s March wasn’t considered a riot, and it has everything to do with white privilege and nothing to do with how “well behaved” we were. Police show up to peaceful BLM protests already in riot gear all the time.
“The abuser’s problem is not that he responds inappropriately to conflict. His abusiveness is operating prior to the conflict: it usually creates the conflict, and it determines the shape the conflict takes.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
I hate when comicbook fans gate-keep by running you through a fact-check quiz. Even if you’ve ready every comic you’re going to be wrong. Why? Because comics can’t even keep their shit together. Bruce’s parents were either killed outside of Mask of Zorro or an opera, their killer is either unknown or Joe Chill, he started as Batman at either 21, 26, 28 or 32. Barry has died six separate times and during several of his absences both Bart and Wally have been the Flash at the same time. Steve has given up Captain America due to anything from a minor cold, dying, wanting to retire and straight up disappearing. God forbid you ask how Tony got his heart.
The only thing we know for certain is that Uncle Ben died and it is always, always, always Superman’s fault that Lex no longer has hair
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