But the means of accomplishing things has a lot to do with the kind of world we wind up living in. Joanna
Quite frankly, I think these "movements" are intellectually bankrupt and have nothing to offer - zip, zilch, nada, zero - except their participatory rituals. Wojtek
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Okay, so I've seen the down side, but I have also known the upside within the context of a disabled students program. This is going to be a little long because it needs a description in order to understand the prescription.
When I read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution (HRR) one of the reasons I went ape shit was that I could see it, in part from the Egyptians and from the past 1971-75. In that period I worked for the Physically Disabled Students Program, and started out as the flunky gofer. Part of the reason was I was the strongest and was the most physically fit person on the staff. Going around campus on errands was no problem. This campus is set on a hill that gets pretty steep up toward the hills in the background. It's a physical grind to get around to some parts from Tele and southside where our office was---a converted flat with three bedrooms a dining area and a kitchen. It was very old which made it larger and pleasant, although rundown. We had an OE grant to make UCB programatically accessible to disable students. That was the mission.
So there was the money 80k no great amount in 1970 and there was the mission. Everything else was up to us. Because it was a federal grant, there were almost no UC system rules. UCB at the time had to provide institutional support in the form of space and routine staff services, telephones, mail, purchasing, motor pool, etc. Space was always a problem, so that's how we got an off campus flat which was by then routine for a variety of institutes and UC programs. Black and minority students had their own OE program in another flat around the corner. We didn't have much in common since they were organized in a more traditional manner and there was not much to recommend joint action, except on occasion.
The staff had been or were students. Some were grad student who had graduated like me and the program director and first assistant director. Others like the blind services counselor were still in grad school at the time. We knew what the problems were and figured out ways to fix them or get around them. Since we had a kitchen we made hot lunch every day on a rotating cook and shop basis. Money for groceries was collected among those who couldn't or didn't want to cook. Lunchs formed an on going staff meeting in which current students and a small cast of who knows what came to lunch to watch, have their say or just eat and hang out. Surprise. Learning to for groups is an essential organization skill. There were usually ten or so people with about half regular staff.
These were the session where consensus worked, where what was to be done was formulated over and over and what we were going to do in concrete terms was hashed out. Sometimes it was a surprising success, sometimes a disaster. We were all in our twenties, with one or two exceptions. Since the director and assistant director, and general counselor and office coordinator (and me) were always there for lunch, that was the time to us. Unless the director was specifically responsible for something like meeting with our campus program supervisor, questions and discussion of program and services were shuttled off to whoever was working those duties. This was partly laziness and part just common sense.
I wanted even more of a collective naturally because I was at the bottom of a very shallow pool. That is the distinctions of heirarchy were viewed as programatic necessities. The university and federal program office demanded a director, some one particular person in charge. However, the director John was not interested in getting down on the petty details of office management or any of the other `normal' hierarchial management programatics. Everybody knew their jobs because they created their jobs out of what was to be done. The collective attitude was just do your fucking job. I didn't like doing errands so I morphed it into emergency breakdowns. It wasn't an emergency that Mister Bigbody got a piece of paper (unless it needed a signature today), so send it through intercampus mail. I vastly reduced errands to picking up and delivering campus mail, two trips a day. But I was always on call for breakdowns or getting stuck somewhere or essential as opposed to routine errands. Campus was not accessible which was part of the job---making it so.
Accessibility required a lot of contentious and potentially expensive solutions and was pretty much a full time job on its own. So we turned that over to the Disabled Student Union since we knew them. The suggested solution was to form an architectual barriers committee and work with dept architecture, city planning, and the campus facilities departments. One student was an architecture major and several were in the city planning department as grad students. The group also had to meet with the city for similar barrier removals but this was done by an ad hoc collective of another group mostly involved with the city planning department on campus and city planning in the city bureaucracy. The mission was to locate inaccessible classrooms and offices and make arrangements to make them accessible. While this was on going, I could fill in where that kind of action hadn't got to. The removal of architectural barriers was already within federal law for institutions receiving federal money so the student groups had some outside clout in addition to their own presentations.
It's against these experiences that I saw the soviets and how they could function. I gathered from HRR that Petrograd was divided into sections with industrial development concentrated mostly in one region of the city. This facilitated the job of a workers revolution to no end of my imagination.
Gar Lipow wonders about how does consensus work in a union for 10k workers. It doesn't because unions are not consensus bodies. They are hard core top-down. As an alternative, I would propose worker associations without unions or bosses or formal membership. I got a glimmer of how this could work when the ILWU couldn't formally strike the port of Oakland---some legal issue and money lost in a potential port authority lawsuit, etc. So a trucker and port worker association advocated in conjunction with the Oakland Occupy group during a march. The marchers made delivery impossible because of traffic on the one port entrance for trucks. The marchers convinced the truckers they couldn't deliver `safely' and that was that for about a day.
Within a collective of such associations you can form a tremendous amont of power. That's what the soviets were, ad hoc bodies of collective action. I am assuming they had a fluid membership and ad hoc `leadership' that came and went with the time and the specifics of the issue.
I could see or thought I saw these kinds of bodies in the endless hours of Tahrir and the various haunts that AJE and the ad hoc street-with-video people visited, trying to find out what was the consensus on what to do, what to do next. Communications, medical, food, it's all there in the reproductions and productions of needs to fill the occupations.
CG