Practical pros and cons of fulltime staff

Pro: Substantial increase in research capacity, outreach ability (esp. propaganda output), sharing of expertise of the most militant members and increased ability to organise across workplaces by using paid members as a fulcrum.

Con: Disassociation from struggle, mutation into ‘service provider’ ethos undermining grassroots militancy, creation of exploitable control points for capitalists (eg. ‘gatekeeper’ creation in info distro and negotiation with bosses) – allied to potential difficulty in swapping out paid positions should people prove unreliable/pushing agenda etc. Shunting of best militants out of direct ground floor confrontation.

Jesus things are bad when we haveto start retracing the very basics of anarchism. These debates are hundreds of years old, we all know the arguments.

what's your next thread, the pro's and con's of elections?

We are all voting for Boztaş*: http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/abdurrahman-bozta
Devrim
*This isn't serious before people have a go.

I told you Boztas is the exception that proves the rule, we recognise it as a transgression and use it draw aline round the principle, like Judas who betrayed Christ in order to be faithful to him.

seriously though these things shouldn't even be up for debate on an anarchist forum, well not amongst the anarchists anyway.

Well, it isn't the communist left who are arguing it. It is only 'anarchists' who are.
There are priciples:
For us the most important three are:
1) The rejection of parliamentarianism, and social democracy
2) The rejection of Trade Unionism
3) The rejection of all forms of nationalism, and the defense of internationalism
http://eks.internationalist-forum.org/en/basic-positions

I think that we are agreed with many anarchists on at least 1, and 3 here, and in agreement about the main points on 2, give or take some semantic trivia.

To us these are the positions of the communist movement. I have no problem that that includes people who refer to themselves as anarchists, Marxists, or neither.

All of these points have been argueed against on Libcom by those calling themselves anarchists though (of course that doesn't mean that we associate anarchists with them).

Devrim

I know, it's why I despair.

Out of interest what's your thoughts on paid full timers? I'm assuming it's against them because youse can follow through the logic of your own principles, something that seems to cause alot of anarchists on here numerous problems.

My initial reactions are deeply against them. For me there are some exceptions though. If our organisation grew to the point where we owned a press, I would not be definatley against the idea of paid printers.
To conclude, their may be times when employing some full timers is neccesary (in a manual/practical role). It could be a good place to give work to blacklisted militants. I would never support the idea of full timers in a political role though.
Devrim

yeah that's a very sensible position.

wrong site

What I'm making my contribution, i'm saying honestly my thoughts on it, I think it says something when anarchists start these kind of deabtes and furthermore I think the act of bracketing it in pratical terms away from the 'ideological' is itself an ideological act par excellence, as if the pratical can exist independent of an ideological orientation.

No you're dodging the issue, I'm saying that the very act of trying to bracket off the ideological/theorectical from the practical already inscribes 'the practical' with an unspoken ideological content.

This has always been how the reformism has sold itself, it's how militarism was pushed onto the militias by seperating the discussion from issues such as principles and ideology.

Have your discussion by all means but I still have the right to point these things out.

What's unconstructive about it?

And questioning the unpsoken assumptions and parameters of a question is very valid, infact I thought it was the basis of anarchist critique.

Anyway I've noted your unwillingness to engage and i'll bid you good bye.

Here's a speech you can use

The pros are obvious (to consider the comparison in a somewhat simplified form):

If you have one well-defined job that needs doing, equating more or less to 40 person-hours a week, you might get 40 person-hours of productivity out of a full-time paid person.

If you use volunteers, you realistically have no chance of getting one person to do they job - if you're lucky, you might be able to get 8 hours per week work from each volunteer. However, a certain portion of these hours are going to be taken up with communication - what the other volunteers have done, what needs to be done, and communicating the same to the others. Realistically, each volunteer is going to have to spend a couple of hours of their eight getting up to speed, and getting the other volunteers up to speed - meaning each volunteer has only got 6 hours of productivity left over - so you need at least 7 volunteers, each committing 8 hours per week each, to do the job of one-full-timer - you're wasting 2 whole working days of time.

In general, the communication overhead grows much faster than linearly with the amount of people involved - if you have 4 people on a job having to communicate with each other, you have 4*3 = 12 interfaces, if you have 8 people you have 8*7 = 56 interfaces. Also, since no communication channel is 100% reliable, the number of miscommunications grows exponentially with the number of people involved. Meaning that you're going to do a worse job with a larger team, or else you're going to have to add more people - meaning even more wasted time. There's also the fact that training overheads have to be factored in and the greater the size of a team, the greater the probability of churn. There's a rule of thumb called Brooke's law which states that "adding (hu)manpower to a late project makes it later" - and there are surprisingly few known counter examples. Basically, it works like that because, at a certain point, the communication overhead added with each new member is greater than the productivity of that member.

Of course, this all depends on the nature of the role - if it is perfectly partitionable into blocks of arbitrary size, needing no communication between the parts and with simple, well-defined interfaces connecting them, then you can simply add people for more productivity. However such jobs don't exist in reality and there is always some overhead required in partitioning any task.

So, to sum up, the pro is increased productivity and normally better quality work (due to less errors due to miscommunication).

The con is that, all else being equal, a full-timer is in a much stronger position than any ordinary member in terms of their ability to influence the practical politics of the organisation.

So basically what I said except much more longwinded and without the extra cons .

The Cheek!

Not really though - you listed some of the consequences of what I said. I went to such tedious length to illustrate the underlying problem and it's practical basis (i.e. something that can't be wished away or ideologically out-manoeuvered).

IIRC when thugarchist did this, he was told to start a new thread, or get banned. By catch or Jef Costello I think. Anyway, I don't care that much, but I think admins should be consistent about it.

Admin - abuse deleted, cut it out

fwiw jef's not an admin

Admin - snip

Joseph K. - ok, but it definitely happened.

That's not too far off my views on this.

It'd be quite nice if this site ever got much busier to pay someone (not necessarily me) to optimise the server/software/database properly rather than shell out for ever bigger and better hosting (we'd need to have about 6 times as much traffic to make that worth thinking about though). That'd be like a couple of days work then an hour or two a week though, so not a 'full timer'.

It'd also not be out of the question to pay people to OCR/translate pamphlets for the library - either really good rates to people in other countries via the exchange mechanism, or just a free scanner or something if they're in the UK and have time on their hands + want to do it anyway. They're both jobs which take time and care, and are hard to do on top of full time work on any great scale. Having said that, I find it weird that infoshop have paid writers (not much I understand) to do new writing for them, I don't agree with that at all, money's a shit motivator for political writing.

I think full time people in 'political' positions is an absolute dead end (or actively harmful in some circumstances), and have been surprised how many people are in favour of it on here.

posi, revol, split it yourselves to a new thread, otherwise I'll probably just delete your posts by the end of tomorrow, or another admin sooner with a bit of luck.

revol has been banned from libcom more times than thugarchist (and warned many more times), usually by me iirc. He's also (amazingly) better behaved than thugarchist going by posts in the past 3-6 months. A link would help me put that warning in context, and I've already said I'll just delete these posts when it isn't past my bedtime.

That's another post I'll be deleting tomorrow, better split quick if you want to have this conversation, 'cos I won't.

No offence but I'm not wanting to be helpful to people who are seeking to jettison basic anarchist principles or act as apologists for those who do.