Report on the WSM Autumn conference

The Workers Solidarity Meeting held its Autumn 2005 conference over the October bank holiday weekend. National conference is the decision making body of the WSM – it does everything from agree the collective political positions of the WSM to decide what mechanisms we use to make decisions.

This conference took place in a period of growth in the libertarian movement across Ireland. As part of this the WSM has increased in size over the last couple of years which meant that at this conference we needed to deal with both structural issues arising from this growth and the political direction of the organization.

The conference was held in Dublin and well attended - around 80% of WSM members made at least some of the conference. Some 70 motions covering eight different areas were discussed and voted on over the weekend. Financial and other reports were also presented and questioned/discussed by the membership. The conference ended with elections to the various commissions and editorial groups within the WSM

The full text of the amended WSM position papers will be published next week but here is a summary of the areas discussed.

Trade unions

Eight motions addressed WSM work in the unions and the changing nature of the Irish workplace in particular in relation to the increasing percentage of women and /or migrant Workers. The focus of debate was around the Independent Workers Union (IWU)which was singled out as particularly worthy our support because of its work to recruit and organise low paid Workers and its anti-partnership stance. After some debate we decided to encourage all of our members to become either full or associate IWU members.

The Partition of Ireland
The debate around the WSM’s position with regards to partition continued at this conference with some 24 individual motions and some 7 amendments to these motions. Individual changes are too many to list here but as a result of this session this position paper will again see very substantial modifications. The paper continues to move towards addressing all aspects of partition rather than just concentrating on the provisional IRA and other republican campaigns against the border. Debate focused around the effects of partition on the south - in particular the reasons for the decline in the percentage of the Protestant population and the true level of state influence and power held by the Catholic Church. The concept of partition as a compromise for some unionists as well as Irish nationalists was also debated (as was much else!).

WSM constitution
The WSM constitution describes how the organisation functions and in particular how it makes decisions. As the WSM has expended in the last couple of years from one branch and a couple of members in Cork to three branches we have learned that what we had worked out in theory in terms of operating as a national organisation, did not work so well in practice. This session concentrated on how we would make decisions between conferences. In total there were 14 motions and 7 amendments to these motions. On the day itself we suspended standing orders for this session in order to allow additional amendments to be put forward as the discussion progressed.

Because internal democracy is so fundamental to anarchism this session was both painstaking and protracted with a lot of intense debate on what would look like minor issues to those with less concern for democratic decision making. After a three-hour debate we have emerged with what should prove to be a workable inter conference national decision-making structure complete with a new name, the ‘Delegate Council’.

One interesting aspect of this debate was the need to deal with situations where there were up to four different amendments to the same motions. We had to resolve how we would decide on which of these four were accepted. After some discussion we went for a system of voting where a hand vote would be taken and the proposal with the lowest number of votes eliminated. The vote would then be retaken and the proposal with the lowest number of votes again eliminated. Once agreed this turned out to be quite a rapid way of conducting a multiway vote so that that the result reflected the views of the majority.

International perspectives
In this session our two old papers ‘International Perspectives’ and ‘Building an anarchist International’ were merged into a single paper. Changes made reflected the increasing role the internet plays in international relations between anarchist groups. We also formalized our agreement with the anakismo.net project which included agreeing a delegate to the anarkismo.net editorial list and a annual donation to the project.

Our Perspectives
There were eight motions on the WSM ‘Our perspectives’ paper. These reaffirmed our commitment to working in mass organizations, set up a group to organize a national speaking tour outside of Dublin and Cork and re-affirmed our commitment to helping to build a broad libertarian movement. We also debated ways to improve the level of political debate within the organization and the agreeing of a collective approach to struggles. A major decision was to retire our position paper ‘State capitalism in Russia’ which was felt to be outdated and largely irrelevant outside of Leninist debates. A working group has been set up to discuss the Russian revolution and its aftermath and to prepare a new draft paper for a future conference.

Other stuff

Other areas there were motions on include WSM administration, practice and publications. This would mostly only be of interest to members although they do include setting up a group to get drafts for a new logo.

The next WSM conference will happen around March of 2006