>Yeah, instead you had a process where those with the time and lack of
>social responsibilities to take off weeks of work and spend endless hours
>in meetings end up running things. There are many good things to say
>about the A16 meetings and I would be the last to want sectarian socialist
>structures, but to claim there was no hierarchy is silly. I sat in a
>legal training where we were told that the rule was that anyone who left
>jail early would not be treated equally in any deal negotiated unless
>those staying in jail longer voted to include them in any final deal.
>Whether this kind of coerion to stay in jail longer was a good rule could
>be debated, but it was not. It was handed down as how things would be
>with no opportunity to vote on it.
>
>More deeply, there was a broad network of DAN and other folks who
>basically had a strategy for A16 - the "pie slice" model using affinity
>groups - that was presented to folks as a fait accompli when they arrived
>into town. Those who arrived a few days earlier might have pushed for an
>alternative, but given the time, everyone basically went along wth the
>plan.
>
>But the lack of structure - horrors "hierarchy" - meant that there was no
>way for those outside the in-group to really have a voice in strategy.
>Republican principles of election and equal reprentation are not the same
>thing as democratic centralism. And a lot of folks of color and many
>other working class folks without a lot of time or with day care
>responsibilities benefit from such representation, since their voices are
>properly weighted in the person of their delegate.
>
>If everyone who shows up gets to vote, those with more time get to vote
>more often and have more power in the organization. In capitalist
>society, time is bought with both money and privilege. Any process that
>rewards free time with more political power is based on economic and
>racial inequality.
I basically agree with Nathan on all the points he made. Since I couldn't take much time off from work to go to A16, I ended up participating as an outsider, merely a warm body to swell the number of people who went to D.C. And these problems -- informal hierarchy based upon who has time to go to many long meetings, etc. -- have become regrettably reproduced locally in a network of activists that we formed after the CWA strike at the Ohio State University (about which I posted last month), due to ill-considered adoption of a "consensus model" pushed by enthusiasts of the A16 style (those who disagreed initially were inexplicably red-baited and silenced as "anti-democrats," though I was the only Marxist among the dissenters), which doesn't serve to encourage the attendance of working people, especially those with family obligations. As a result, our ranks have become thin (both in number and breadth of representation) within a few weeks since the end of the strike; the group started out as a multi-racial coalition of labor, student, and community activists, but it's now exclusively students -- overwhelmingly white -- who come to meetings, with an occasional exception of the president of Local 4501, a representative from AFL-CIO, and a religious left activist (two of whom are single with no kids -- all three are white males). Now we need to adopt a different way of running meetings; otherwise, this network is not likely to survive, except as a club of predominantly white college kids.
The model loved by A16 organizers doesn't seem conducive to developing participation -- let alone leadership -- by African-Americans. When forced to participate merely as _individuals_ or at best representatives of small & predominantly white "affinity groups," it is not likely that Blacks would ever gain much power in a movement; African-Americans and other people of color need to participate as a group, so that we can have a voice in the movement. It appears that Chuck0, Kelley, & Doug are not troubled by the absence of democratic input from people of color, since they had nothing to say about the subject.
Doug asks what I would prefer. At this point, I'd say that decisions had better be made by the majority rule. I think that the use of "blocks" is not democratic, in that even one person, through a block, can prevent decision-making. "Stand asides" don't help either. And there should be affirmative action exercised within the movement to build up representation of people of color (to repeat, organized as a bloc, a caucus, or something like that). I love quotas.
Yoshie