decision making in an organisation

In short you're not exactly right on the WSM thing, also having position papers is more an organisational matter than anything to do with how the decisions are made. Will write you a reply in a moment as soon as I find the right lolcats

Well I've been in a number of organisations. Anarchist Youth used a straight hand in the air vote but that wasnt the strongest organisation in the world. Dissent Ireland and later Grassroots Dissent used that wavey hands concensus shite, which was massively problematic and inneficient. I'm probably not the best person to discuss its merits though as I think its bollox and will let my prejudice get in the way of rational discussion.

This is where you enter complex territory because you cant seperate the organisational criticisms of syndicalism (for example) from the historical and political arguments. Syndicalist unions, we would say, will always because of their nature end up with large reformist tendencies, we believe in the need for a specific highly organised anarchist organisation to serve as a 'leadership of ideas'.

I always think that the reluctance of anarchists to go along with majority decisions in organisations is little more than dilletantism.

Sure, you may be against us participating in HOPI, your whole branch might be, but if you lose the vote, what's the big deal? At the most it means that you personally might have to go to a meeting or event as a delegate the odd time and the organisation might give them a few hundred quid. Big deal. A majority of your anarchist comrades disagreed with you and, hey, you might be wrong, none of us is a fucking fortune teller. More to the point, it just means that you're going to have to try to persuade your comrades of your position, come up with better arguments and so on.

Of course if you're the type of person who thinks that participating alongside a miniscule authoritarian organisation in such a tiny initiative is a fundamental breach of principles, you're in the wrong organisation and you should consider joining the internet anarcho-spartoid jihad.

double post

i wish sol fed had wsm organisational structure. It obviously makes sense. Unless you hate democracy and effectiveness.

Take a wild guess.

It's less of a problem than you'd think really. The position papers serve as a foundation stone that lays out in some detail the agreed principles of the organisation. This actually makes it easier to disagree on a whole range of issues as the differences are then usually over tactics. So while it’s obvious that everybody is against the development of a capitalist European state, the question of whether we should campaign against a European Treaty is a tactical question, as are the methods of doing so.

Quite often there are varying opinions as to the correct tactics, but simply because they are issues of tactics and not principles, the minority has always been happy to give the majority policy a go. If it doesn’t work, it can, as gurrier said, simply be improved by giving another idea a chance. The level of disagreement and heated internal debate can be fairly high – much higher then in the vaguer networks for instance – but it helps that you know people aren’t going to walk away because they’re getting a hard time over whatever the issue is.

Although it is rare that folks who join have numerous serious disagreements with our policies. I can think of a couple of people who developed differences though, and they left, including one last year.

The WSM is clear that we want to act as an organisation. In practice there is plenty (too much imo) of internal criticism regarding the efficiency with which we do this, though I suppose it’s better to be aware of short-fallings as something to be addressed. One of the practical problems in maintaining a coherent organisational approach is the range of things the WSM is involved in as it means that any one issue would garner less attention than maybe it merits. But for all the shortcomings, it is a strength of the WSM that it aims to act as an organisation and not simply to be a collection of individuals who share similar political views. I don’t see the point of being in an organisation that doesn’t aim to collectively implement its ideas.

One example of where we didn’t do that very well was a decision a couple of years ago to encourage members to become members or supporters of a small anti-partnership union. That policy was so vague and in practice left the decision up to individual members that there was no actual benefit to it and was subsequently scrapped. We should have either clearly prioritized the IWU or not at all. The initial decision was neither here nor there and thus had little real world effect.

The national decision making structure is as guydebord describes. The Delegate Council is not some stand alone entity dictating to the branches. Its most useful function, I think, is one of communication. Votes on motions could just as easily be collated on the internet, but getting verbal accounts of what other folks think is important and is essential to maintaining coherence, especially as we grow.