Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I wouldn't say the anarchist is arbitrary about it. To take an extreme example, when confronted with a highly democratic gang of racist skinheads or killers, the anarchist would still consider this bizarre group as an enemy. (And react not just with "education" but also violence.)
I agree it's not easy; we've ended chattel slavery in some formal sense, but it still goes on...
All the best,
Tj
On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 2:51 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2012-02-12, at 7:32 AM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
>
>> Also, you'll see anarchist groups discussing situations where
>> undemocratic leadership is the better choice:
>>
>> "Say there are two mass organizations, both with a lot of
>> conservative members. One is highly democratic and votes to
>> exclude racial minorities or to oppose a program of member
>> education around racial oppression within the organization and in
>> society. The other is highly undemocratic, with a leadership to
>> the left of its membership. In the second organization, the
>> leadership undemocratically creates a program to educate members
>> about race and changes the members’ attitudes. Clearly both of
>> these situations are highly imperfect. Clearly the second is
>> preferable.
>>
>> "Above all, we should strive to create the conditions wherein an
>> organization can act democratically and make good decisions in a
>> democratic fashion. Sometimes this means encouraging democratic
>> processes even though this will result in worse decisions than if
>> an enlightened leadership made them. Other times, however,
>> certain issues are important enough that being less than fully
>> democratic is worth it because it will avoid catastrophes or
>> create conditions which change members’ consciousness over time."
>>
>> — http://ideasandaction.info/2011/06/mottoes-and-watchwords/
>
> There's noting uniquely "anarchist" about these abstract sentiments, for what they're worth. Marxists and even social democrats could equally endorse them. The leaders of all three tendencies would especially embrace the germ of the idea that they have the right to act arbitrarily on behalf of their members in order to "educate" them for their own good.
>
> The test is how an organization behaves in practice, and here the external pressures bearing on it typically lead to more concentration of formal and informal power in the leadership. The Spanish anarchist leadership joining the Popular Front government is a good case in point that the most democratic and egalitarian ideals of a movement are just that - ideals, until it is faced with the test of practice. The Bolsheviks didn't start with the conception that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become the dictatorship of the party would become the dictatorship of a narrow faction resting on the party bureaucracy. The social democrats didn't anticipate their parties would become detached from the trade unions which founded them, and come to resemble in virtually every respect the closed political clubs of the bourgeois parties, funded by the corporations and governing at their behest.
>
>
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