Procedure
By Megan
The question of organization - or not - has been posed by many, you can read about the necessity of it on just about any Marxist-Leninist website, you can find millions of posts about on AnarchistLibrary. Do we need to get together and band together and be so formal to declare an organization, or do we just naturally “meet” together and express consensual social relations against some authoritarian system? Moreover, how do we make decisions related to tactics and strategy together? This piece looks at just that.
My friend who worked at a *certain* local bookstore told me about a frustrating volunteer meeting she attended where very basic decisions on operating the bookstore could not be determined because one volunteer said there wasn’t enough people in attendance to pass a vote.
Likewise, in many DSA chapters, there needs to be quorum for certain decisions to be made organizationally.
This got me thinking about the question of democracy in organizations in general. Is it fundamentally about whether a decision is democratic or not, or whether it gets us closer to liberation? The problems of the moment and the future will not be solved by seeking some other internal “process” for revolutionaries to fit into.
Let’s look at the struggle against white supremacy and for clean air. Does the resolution of this conflict depend on improving democratic norms, of persuading enough people that U.S. Steel is not being good by dumping cancerous gases on the steel valley? No, because no matter what structure you put in place, fundamental choices of direction will produce divides between the people involved in it. This has to do with the inevitable emergence of difference in politics between people, the reformist will want to get dirty air on a ballot initiative and go to board meetings and plead to certain regulators and politicians for the fine to be higher, the revolutionary will seek different means of accomplishing the end, the two can not be reconciled contrary to the claims of those who are the latter but often only do a whole lot of the former.
Some anti-authoritarians will try to pre-solve problems related to betrayal and usurpation of a cause by inventing elaborate procedures and internal processes, from decision by consensus, to bottom up decision making, whatever, but it doesn’t work because the problem of betrayal is itself not an organizational thing And often those processes themselves produce nothing but a bunch of nerdy wannabe bureaucrats wearing carhart, all who are too incumbered and paralyzed to act with the flexibility and unity that beating a more organized and powerful enemy requires. You can’t presolve differences within the movement by dreaming up some future structural innovation, because any structure is oging to face the strain over political direction.
Indeed procedure (no matter how perfected it is ) cannot guarantee that a correct approach is taken.
We fight for liberation, find organizational forms (that’s what it is called when you bring people together, whether you like it or not) to best bring in people from our community and neighborhood, get ideas of what to do to win and push for the liberatory idea, promote engagement in certain tactics based on an analysis of possibility and necessity, and win. Rinse and repeat until we get to where we need to be. This is easier said than done, but I know that we don’t need approval in advance to get there.
