Lib coms block voting inside syndicalist unions

There is nothing wrong with block voting, it makes perfect sense for people with common politics to band together to vote for a common aproach - in fact given that others do it, it would be madness not to on some airy fairy principle based on a total misunderstanding of democracy and power.

Sending a rep with block power is not the same as anarcho-syndicalist use of a delegate with a mandate. Am I missing the point here..?

I think they mean bloc voting not blocking voting.

edit: ignore

No, I got the bloc bit - what Harri seems to be suggesting - unless I'm wrong -is he was witness to / learned of people (presumably representatives not delegates) forming blocs for voting at some meeting. My point is this could only happen with the instruction as part of a mandate from a branch to form a bloc, or maybe pre-arranged before a meeting/conference/congress/party-in-a-telephone-box.
I go along with what VIB is saying, but you couldn't pull that off without the instruction from your branch or local and still call yourself a delegate for an anarcho-syndicalist outfit, imo.

It's probably better to fan out, build relationships with non-aligned people and create a consensus that tends to favor your perspective through obvious and overt dedication to the wider body than come in as some bloc that alienates nearly everyone until its just a bunch of small bloc arguing with each other.

yeah, it's not easy-peasy when you're dealing with the tinpot would-be leaders from other camps. My experience in situations like this is they're more than happy to have you as foot soldiers, but all too quick to court marshal.... I got no easy answers. Especially if they're SWP.

The problem here is mostly to do with coalition work. Juan's approach would be pretty close to mine over the long haul but a lot of these groups are very ad hoc and very temporary. In that case I don't think there is really a problem with faction fighting and block voting it's inevitable, it's also why temporary ad hoc coalitions are often a waste of time and full of all sorts of really bad practices. Another nasty tool that alienates some people is meeting stacking. If you have an organisation with a real basis somewhere and a real constituency it's not hard to stack a meeting. The only reason I'm in favour of this stuff is because these groups tend to be screwed up anyways. There's nothing prefigurative about them so there's no point in messing around with process, they are mostly fronts for other leftist factions to raid each others new recruits.

-Due to the objective conditions of the time - the glamour and illusions held by many militant workers with the early soviet regime, moscow gold, party cells, etc, it was impossible for syndicalists to defeat the French Communist Party takeover of an important chunk of the post WWI organised labour movement in France - the CGTU . Whilst syndicalists of the time made things worse due to a lack of a common strategy - some going to form the CGTSR eg Pierre Besnard , others going to form the syndicalist league such as Pierre Monnatte to push for syndicalism in the CGT and CGTU and others being in "automous unions" (See David Sapposs book on Post War French Labour movement and David Berry's book on French Anarchism)
- Such objective factors don't now exist which helped the rise of stalinism/leninism and maintain their control of important segments of various labour movements.
What I think the way to go for contemporary syndicalists would involve is focusing on encouraging militantcy and exposuring the manipulation of various parties/officials in strategic sectors to encourage major waves of direct action and raising the morale and militancy in less strategic sectors - most important in all this would be creating regular mass assemblies where widest possible debate amongst the grass roots can occur. In the context of raised morale, success in class struggle eg reductions in speedups and reduced hours of work, it maybe possible to get militant workers(regardless of whether they are members of political parties or religous groups,etc) to attend adult education style courses, lectures etc at union and anarcho-syndicalist centres where they could be assisted in how to engage in research and rational discussion/debate of issues etc and so assist the development of a worker inteligencia. This would be a very important way to tackle the problem of manipulation at union meetings, where deciding issues on the basis of personal loyalities or party membership or being "emotionally worked up" can occur. Antonio Gramsci was trying to do something like this via his "Club of Moral Life" during his revolutionary phase associated with the workers councils movement in Turin and elsewhere in Italy during 1920, See "Gramsci and the Anarchists by Carl Levy" and review of this book on the archive section of our web site www.rebelworker.org
The problem for us today in places like Australia ( due to the predominance on the left of mass stalinism for 4 or so decades in the mid 20th Century) whilst stalinist/trotskyist groups have been reduced to the status small sects, the left subculture in heavily informed by the Stalinist Legacy and bourgeois ideology "identity politics" causing a state of " stalinist hegemony" amongst many who use the label socialist, anarchist, syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist. Despite these labels they think its fine to manipulate meetings and engage in all manner of duplicitous, under handed behaviour, stand over tactics , etc so as to stack meetings, have motions passed to outlaw debate on certain issues they regard as "sacred" and beyond debate and discussion eg aspects of identity politics. So that they discourage processes of research and vigorus debate so vital to building a genuine syndicalist movement.

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Wrote a long thing about the conference you're referring to, then realised it was a bit off topic

An anarchist bloc vote, for me, would be based on a full understanding of the issues, as opposed to being ordered to vote a certain way to avoid a vote 'going wrong'. It wouldn't be a bloc as much as a discussion before hand, the anti-thesis of a bloc vote itself.

I agree that it is not advantageous to not organise into anarchist 'blocs' on a principle of individualism. All that is being done is fully debating and explaining the issues, promoting a more enlightened view of the issues, something that is hard to disagree with considering the trots have done it beforehand and will do it during the conference. The issue is how do you gather together individuals and anarchists to debate these ideas during a highly scheduled conference, especially if you haven't met them before or even know they're unaligned.

Nah..sorry Puzzled. Block voting is ok if everybody in all the organisations are present and up to speed with the issue. You either believe - as I hope all libertarians do - in direct democracy (which would mean instructing a delegate to say it as you want it said) or you believe in less democratic forms of organisation that take away the power and decision making from the base - in other words, representative democracy. For local anarcho groups where they all turn up for tea and buns with the trots and form a bloc with some less crazy elements, then fair enough. On a larger scale where delegates are required, forming a bloc is very unlikely to be a possible even on the most flexible of mandates.

Which is why strict delegate democracy doesn't always work. Sometimes you need to be able to send trusted representatives with broad flexible mandates and a soupcon of trust.

Yeah but Vanilla you can send delegates with open ended mandate in strict delegate democracy. Our IWW branch a few years refused to send anyone with a mandate on charges that were being heard at convention for strictly this reason. I also remember some L&S folks and their allies being pissed at us for doing this because they wanted to kick the person in question out.

I don't think binding mandates prevents block voting though, you just have to organise your blocks at the branch level. I agree with a lot of the A-S critique of trade union democracy and their proposed alternatives but they only mitigate some of the problems they claim to make impossible. Politics is politics and sometimes you have to be willing to get into the mud. Hate to say it but there are also just straight up power struggles in even perfectly organised unions with a good program.

Yes you can - it's called representative democracy. That's why anarchists reject it.

Eh? Can't remember any anarcho-syndicalist saying that they could make impossible all the problems with organising on a more democratic level. IMO, anarcho-syndicalists have an inherently critical overview of what they do with the aim of improving best practise for a desired goal. It's not ideal.
People are often more fragile than the ideals they associate themselves with, that's just life.

If I'm not mistaken, representation runs deeper than that because it is not recallable, at least not in parliamentary decision making as we have it now. Such delegates even with open ended mandates would still be directly responsible to those who delegated them, representatives are not, unless you count the ballot box...

Unless I misunderstand the open ended mandate here. My point is though that the level of communication is wholly different in delegation and representation as understood in bourgeois politics and there are quite a few "safety valves" to prevent the former becoming the latter.

Look, you can send someone with a binding mandate to vote their conscience on a certain issue and a binding mandate to put forward another point of view on another. The absence of a binding mandate does not equal a slide into representative democracy.

Sometimes a binding mandate is inappropriate such as how to vote in an investigation of charges against a member where there are a lot of details to be considered. In that case sending a delegate with an open mandate is actually probably more democratic because otherwise the charges hearing is really just a kangaroo court.

Maybe your right Plasma, I'm inferring more from the tone than evidence wrt to Anarcho Syndicalists and process, I would also probably describe myself as an Anarcho-Syndicalist if I had to pin myself down.

Yes.

There is nothing wrong with sending delegates with a broad representative remit, as long as;

A. You trust them.

B. They are recallable, and term limited.

And frankly if you can't generally trust the people you're working alongside then who can you trust?

Ed - that makes more sense, I'll go along with that!

Vanilla - sorry Captain, I disagree. There has to be a degree of flexibility, and as Edmonton has pointed out, there may be instances where a flexible mandate is given (task specific: working groups, commissions, time sensitive day-to-day work) - and as you correctly pointed out should always be people you trust, recallable and limited term - but, those are 3 provisos that the voting public apply to the candidates they vote for in general elections. My main point is that we should be trying our very best to avoid any need for resorting to representatives.

In that case why have federal meetings at all? Why not just have referenda?

Because building organisations requires face to face contact and the social networking that happens outside the meeting is at least as important as anything else. Also because some of the issues debated may be binding and others aren't, rarely is a conference with regards to one single issue.

But more over, because we're communists. We decide and discuss on a local / branch level what's right for us. And because we're federalists we feed our voice into our federation through the use of mandated delegates. IMO the revolution starts with this process and not necessarily with the building of barricades.
Referendums are fine in certain ways - but to build the libertarian communist society, we ought to organise on our terms now, learning and developing as we progress and not - like what many referendums are about - organising like so many individuals within a party.

I guess there's two conversations going on here tho: bloc voting (and democratic procedures generally) within anarcho-syndicalist organisations and how anarcho-syndicalists operate within larger organisations like the CGT or NCAFC.

Sorry, what's "NCAFC"?

http://anticuts.com/

Broad left student anti-cuts group that was, sort of, on the forefront of the student mobilisation around student fees in 2010. Trots trotted it the fuck up, as I'm sure you can imagine.