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Title: Practical Anarchist Organising Author: Workers Solidarity Movement Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: anarchist organization, Workers Solidarity Movement, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 15th November 2021 from http://www.wsm.ie/c/practical-anarchist-organising-wsm-case-study Notes: Published in Red & Black Revolution No. 15 — Spring 2009.
Over the last few years, the Workers Solidarity Movement, the anarchist
organisation that publishes this magazine, has grown considerably. We
went from being an organisation with only a dozen members or so, to an
organisation six times that size. As part of that growth we have had to
reassess our internal workings and devise a range of new processes and
structures for communicating, coordinating and democratic decision
making. This article describes this process of change. It is hoped that
it may serve as a useful case-study for other groups facing similar
problems and as a small demonstration of the how anarchist
organisational principles can be applied in practice.
Up until about 2002, the WSM never really consisted of more than a
single branch in Dublin of about a dozen people and a couple of members
in Cork, with a few sympathisers scattered around the country. As an
anarchist organisation, even when we were only a handful, we were
careful to ensure that we had structures and processes in place which
would allow our members to have a full democratic input into our
policies and activities. Our constitution specifies that our twice
yearly conference, open to all members, was our supreme decision making
forum. These conferences provide an opportunity for any member to
propose a change to any of our policies. Being an organisation which
strives to put our money where our mouth is, our actions are guided by
our policies. Thus, our conferences serve as democratic decision making
forums which enable our members to direct the organisation’s activity.
Even when we numbered less than a dozen, our conferences were highly
formal affairs. In order to create new policies, or change existing
ones, members had to submit motions in writing, weeks in advance. These
motions, often accompanied by articles arguing their merits, were
collated into an internal bulletin which was circulated to all members
by post. Members then had a chance to submit written amendments to
motions. The conference itself was devoted to debate and voting on
motions. Tremendous care was taken to make sure that all points of view
were heard, and the strictest democratic principles were followed,
including providing private balloting and proxy voting.
When we numbered a dozen, the elaborate care that we devoted to internal
democracy made our conferences occasionally tortuous. Even when less
than ten members attended they could take two entire days, with
attendees increasingly irritable as time passed and procedural debates
came to the fore. Yet, despite the procedural frustrations, the
conferences proved productive. The WSM developed a set of detailed
policy documents, continually debated and amended over the years, which
distilled the organisation’s wisdom and experience into guides for
future action.
The coherence that these policies gave the organisation proved
invaluable when the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements emerged,
bringing with it a relatively large number of people who were
sympathetic or at least open to anarchist ideas. Through a lot of hard
work within broad and relatively informal anti-authoritarian groups such
as Reclaim The Streets and the Grassroots Networks, we gained respect
among activists, a higher profile for the organisation, and a wealth of
practical experience of the problems associated with organising among
larger groups with dispersed membership. Eventually, many of the
anarchist activists who had worked alongside us inthese groups came to
join the organisation. Many of those who worked within looser, less
formal groups and campaigns, repeatedly ran into organisational problems
concerning communications and decision making. The experience of working
alongside the WSM gave them an appreciation of how useful formal
structures and a capacity for coherent action can be – and that viable
anarchist models can be built.
Thus, in the last five or six years, our organisation has experienced a
steady influx of new members. Although our current membership of roughly
70 is hardly going to send the ruling class scuttling to their bunkers
in fear of revolution, over the last few years our rate of growth has
been such that we have doubled in size every two years or so. This
steady growth has required us to continually re- examine our processes
for communication and decision making across the organisation.
Happily, the formal processes which underpin our conferences have coped
admirably with our expansion. What used to seem somewhat constricting
and excessively formal, now seems to be an eminently sensible and
valuable system which allows all of our members to have a genuine
opportunity to change the organisation’s policy. Indeed, as we have
grown, our conferences have actually become more efficient and inclusive
decision making bodies. For example, at our conference in November 2007,
some 30 motions, proposing some 80 amendments to our policy documents
were proposed, debated and mostly passed, including the replacement of
our entire position paper on the environment. Most of these changes were
put forward by members who had been in the organisation for less than 2
years. To a considerable extent our conferences work better know than at
any time in the past – the formal structures that we put in place have
come into their own now that they are obviously needed. We have not had
to change our conference structures at all in order to cope with larger
numbers, simply formalise some of our standing orders. The success of
our conference structures is largely due to the fact that they were
originally borrowed from the democratic structures developed by anarcho-
syndicalist trade unions, which are retained by modern trade-unions,
albeit as a poor shadow of their former selves.
Our conferences, as they stand, provide an excellent example of direct
democracy in practice and they help to show new members exactly what our
politics mean in practice. However, if we continue our recent rate of
growth, within the next few years we will face new challenges as it
becomes more difficult to fit everybody into a room together and the
time available for debate and voting diminishes. Happily, however, we
should be well prepared for this eventuality. By the start of the
twentieth century, anarcho-syndicalist trade unions had already
developed conference structures based on tightly-mandated delegates,
which allowed vast numbers of members to have a direct say in policy
changes. We therefore have a wealth of models available to us which
should enable us to continue making directly democratic decisions at our
conferences for the foreseeable future. However, delegate-based
conferences are much less useful forums for debate – if the delegates
are already mandated to vote in a certain way, they can’t be persuaded
by argument, it is only if they have an open mandate that there is any
point in hearing arguments. We already use the Internet to circulate
debate pieces and arguments for and against proposed amendments in
advance of conferences, and as our conferences become more delegate
based, these debates and arguments will need to take on a greater role,
and may need to be given more formal structures.
While our conferences have proved well suited to coping with a larger
organisation, the rest of our structures were much less well prepared.
Conferences basically define the organisation’s core policies. There is,
however, never a formulaic way to translate general policies into
concrete actions. That is to say, that no matter how thoroughly our
policies describe our political positions, we constantly face decisions,
sometimes requiring subtle judgement calls, as to how we apply them in
practice. As a group of political activists, we face important tactical
decisions all the time – which campaigns to join, which political groups
to cooperate with, which demonstrations to go to, what leaflets to print
and so on. We also face a whole host of day to day operational decisions
– who will lay out our publications, write articles and leaflets, attend
meetings, carry our banner on marches and so on. As we grew, we
discovered that our structures were poorly suited to these types of
decisions.
Once a group grows beyond a couple of dozen members, particularly when
those members live in different regions, towns and neighbourhoods, it
needs to change in character. In small groups with relatively steady
membership over years, everybody can know everybody else reasonably well
and much day to day decision making and the sharing out of
responsibilities can rely upon informal communication channels. When you
have over 50 members, this becomes impossible and informal arrangements
become barriers to new members integrating into the organisation and can
lead to the emergence of an informal leadership based upon knowledge of
the various informal mechanisms that keep the organisation ticking over.
Therefore, as we grew, we had to develop new, formal structures to
coordinate our day to day decision making and communication and to
ensure that the organisation worked in a transparent way where everybody
had an equal chance to have an input into tactical and operational
decisions.
The problem was not that we had not thought about such problems in
advance – just that the measures for coordinating day to day activity
that we had defined in our constitution weren’t capable of addressing
all of our requirements. The constitution defined a National Committee,
which had to meet at least once between each conference. However, due to
our small size, the national committee was open to all members and due
to the fact that we only had a single branch, it effectively amounted to
our Dublin branch with an extra member from Cork in attendance. In these
circumstances there was little need for the national committee to meet
since it was much easier for the Dublin group to make most of the
tactical decisions, occasionally telephoning our comrades in Cork for
their opinions when needed. The constitution also defined Commissions,
bodies designed to coordinate the organisation’s work in particular
areas. However, once again, these commissions never really got off the
ground. We had a single branch which met regularly and commissions would
simply have amounted to a subset of these people having an extra meeting
– extra work without any real advantage.
Thus, when we started to experience sustained growth in the period since
2003, our structures for day to day coordination were rather theoretical
and untested in nature. One of the first real practical problems that we
encountered was how to divide up the organisation. This became pressing
in late 2004, when our Dublin branch became too large to fit in our
office’s meeting room. In addition to the cramped nature of meetings,
with up to 20 people attending, we found debates and discussions
becoming increasingly lengthy, cranky and frustrating – there were too
many people present to give everybody a chance to express their opinions
and anarchists are, if anything, full of opinions!
Therefore, we had to find a way to split our Dublin branch up. We had no
formal mechanism for doing so, so we simply gathered all of our Dublin
members together in a general meeting and, based on the arguments and
proposals that were raised, we eventually divided ourselves up into
groups based on two factors:
It was generally envisaged that continued and sustained growth would
require our branches to be increasingly tied to local community
activism. Thus, the location of each member’s residence was considered
to be important in allocating them to branches. However, the problem is
that in modern cities, with their wide socio-economic spread, community
identities tend towards the hyper- local. In practice, the various local
issues that interest people can vary widely from estate to estate and
neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Therefore, in order to have a real
impact on a community, an activist group needs to have a lot of members
living in the same neighbourhood. Furthermore, community activism is, by
its nature, slow-burning, requiring steady work over years to have a
real impact. As many of our members are relatively young and transient,
moving around the city frequently and living in rented accommodation,
they were not in a position to really implement a community- based
strategy.
A year after our Dublin branch’s initial sub- division, we yet again
found that our branches had grown too big. Again, we got together and
re-divided ourselves, this time into three branches based on where each
person lived and when they could make meetings. Once, again, despite our
efforts, this did not work as well as we would have hoped and this is
still a live issue in the organisation. Of our 3 Dublin branches, only
one is mostly formed of people who are long term residents in the same
area.
By early 2005, we had 3 branches, 2 in Dublin, while our Cork membership
had also grown to the point where it formed a stable branch. A year
later this had grown to four, with the creation of a third Dublin
branch. In 2008, a new Belfast branch was launched . As the number of
branches grew, the problem of day to day coordination between them
increased. As an organisation which prioritises theoretical and tactical
unity, we had to come up with structures which allowed us to take
decisions which would guide the whole organisation, even in cases where
there were significant disagreements about the best course of action.
The way that most organisations deal with this problem, even those that
are based around a democratic, policy-setting national conference, is to
appoint an executive committee, responsible for implementing the
organisation’s policy. Such arrangements, however, invariably degenerate
over time. Even when everybody acts with the best of intentions, the
fact that democratic decisions take longer than the decisions of an
executive officer means that the officers tend to become more powerful
over time. Alongside this tendency, the relatively privileged position
that executive officers occupy, allows them great influence over the
formation of policy. Before too long the conference has become a talking
shop with policy being effectively controlled by a small leadership. One
only needs to look at the conferences of the labour party, or many of
the trade unions to see stark examples of this process in action.
Furthermore, by limiting day to day decision making power to a tiny
number of people, the organisation vastly under-utilises its collective
intelligence. For all these reasons and more, an executive was not the
solution that we wanted.
We instead established a Delegate Council which would be responsible for
coordination and decision making across the organisation. This body was
established at our conference in Autumn 2006. Its structure has been
refined twice in the period since then, after some inadequacies in its
initial specification became clear. It meets once a month, with a
different branch hosting each meeting – meaning that its location is
rotated. Any member or branch can submit a motion to the council –
asking the organisation to commit itself to a certain course of action.
All the motions are circulated through our website and branches,
sufficiently in advance so that each branch has a chance to discuss them
at a meeting. Each branch then selects a number of delegates – one for
every five members and these delegates attend the council.
Initially, our Delegate Council meetings were not particularly
successful. Each motion would have been discussed and voted upon at
eachbranch and the delegates would merely report how many votes each
motion had received, for and against, from their branch. Although it
allowed us to make decisions, the motions had already been voted upon
and the delegates had no mandates to do anything but report those
decisions. The meetings were really limited to a bit of informal
discussion and the tallying of votes – something that could have been
done by email or over the phone. The real benefit of face-to-face
meetings is that they make it much easier for groups to make
compromises. Written motions are often formulated in such a way that
they do not include the proposer’s arguments and these may be then
misunderstood by others who only see the wording of the formal motion.
This can, for example, lead to situations where a motion is voted down,
yet no solution to the problem that it was addressing is put in its
place.
A face-to-face meeting gives each delegate the chance to explain the
thinking behind their motions and any concerns their branches may have
about other motions and to try to see if compromises can be reached
which accommodate everybody’s desires. Thus, as these problems became
apparent, although motions were still voted on in advance, delegates
were often provided with mandates to seek compromises or amendments to
motions. Since each delegate is only representing five members and has
to report back to their branch, there is very limited space for these
looser mandates to result in abuses. At our Autumn conference in 2008,
we formalised this in a vote at our national conference.
Although the Delegate Council has proved to be reasonably effective in
coming up with tactical decisions, since it meets only once a month,
there are occasionally situation where we have to make decisions to a
tighter deadline. To enable this our constitution allows any branch, or
group of members, to call an emergency Delegate Council meeting. This
has been used on a couple of occasions when we faced important decisions
and time was felt to be of the essence.
However, there are also frequently operational questions which need to
be made at short notice – should we send a speaker to aparticular
meeting, should we bring a banner to a demonstration called at short
notice? In such cases, it is not realistic to convene a national meeting
to make the decision. Therefore, at our most recent conference in
November 2007, we instituted an Interim Decisions Committee, a body made
up of 3 members, including the national secretary, which has the
authority to make operational decisions at short notice. Its power is
subordinate to Delegate Council, which is itself subordinate to national
conference.
In it’s first year and a bit of operation, the IDC has been called on to
make only a handful of decisions. Initially these were confined to
routine matters — endorsing a demonstration that was in line with
organisational policy and precedent, and turning down a request that was
deemed outside of its mandate. However, in recent months, the IDC has
been called on to make decisions on a couple of occasions over matters
of some controversy. These decisions were disagreed with by some, but
they were implemented without any problems. Nevertheless, the debates
surrounding these decisions have revealed that there remains some unease
throughout the organisation about this committee, both within the
committee itself and across the rest of the organisation. The IDC
remains very much a work in progress and it remains possible that it
will be replaced with another mechanism which allows broader input.
In summary, over the last few years the WSM has put in place a range of
structures in order to allow the organisation to take common decisions.
These structures are intended to maximise democracy, while still
allowing snap decisions to be made in emergencies. The WSM’s steady
growth over the last few years prompted these changes, and the shape of
these structures is in constant evolution as new problems are
encountered and overcome. Although the WSM remains a very small
organisation, this example does show the viability of anarchist direct
democratic decision making principles when applied to organisations that
are geographically dispersed and have enough members so that not
everybody knows everybody else.