Norwegian anarchists talk in Hamilton

by Marley B

There is a widespread belief that anarchism means chaos and disorganization instead of its true meaning: direct democratic control over all aspects of society including the economy, social and economic equality and liberty. Unfortunately, this myth shows no sign of letting up. However, at least for one night in Hamilton, those 20 or so people who attended Kim Keyser’s talk, “The Prefigurative Organization,” got a glimpse of what anarchism really means.

Aided by fellow Norwegian anarchist Rudolph, Kim’s talk began by arguing that to achieve radical social change, we need to practice what we preach within our own organizations. As Kim showed, anarchists have always held this belief (which makes us different from other socialists) and we have over time come up with two important tools to make this happen: direct action and direct democracy.

As explained by the speakers, direct action is the anarchist equivalent of the belief that “if you want something done, you have to do it yourself” with the important difference that the “you” is replaced by “we”. Put another way, by direct action anarchists mean that if you and your community need something done (better housing, cleaner environment, stopping racists), it is best for the community to take direct charge of their struggles. Leaving it up to “elected” politicians, bureaucrats of every kind and bosses big and small only means that nothing substantial ever gets done or worse, they find ways to benefit at the community’s expense.

Direct democracy means that you and your community make decisions directly on the issues that affect you. This can and has been done through a number of ways such as neighbourhood and workplace assemblies, referendums, or by sending delegates to decision-making councils with strict mandates from the community. This kind of democracy is very different from what we have now where we choose representatives who are then free to do as they please till the next election circus.

Besides introducing the audience to these basics, the speakers also presented some innovative ideas of their own meant to get anarchists and others thinking how to better practice direct democracy in our own organizations. For example they argued that to avoid re-creating a bureaucracy, members elected to positions in the organization should: never be paid more than the average wage of the members, have no special prestige or privileges, have short, regularly-rotated, well-defined and narrow (minimal power) mandates and they should be easily removed by the membership if they abuse their responsibilities.

The speakers also presented the idea of “Opinion Points” which caused a lot of discussion. The aim of opinion points is to improve majority vote decision making by measuring the commitment and energy that the group is willing to put behind a decision. Under this method, members attach opinion points to their vote (say on a scale from 1-5 where 5 represents strongly in favour). The opinion points are then added up on both sides. The side with the highest number of opinion points carries the vote. Under this method, it is possible that a minority of members who are willing to put a lot of energy into putting into action a proposal, can out-vote a majority of weakly committed members. Ideally, this method is supposed to get us around the problem where decisions are taken but not implemented due to a lack of commitment.

Those who attended this well organized and interactive talk had a lot of discussion till late into the evening. Many more interesting ideas than can be discussed here were presented. These are available in the companion pamphlet “The Prefigurative Organization” written by Keyser. Hopefully this wonderful tool will soon become available online so we can start testing some of these ideas out.

For more information contact Kim at futurebliss(at)gmail(dot)com.

Audio of the talk is online here at www.radio4all.net