WSM national conference Spring 2009

We had the Workers Solidarity Movement national conference over the weekend in Dublin which meant hours spent inside while the sun was out debating and voting on motions and then hours spent outside when it was dark downing pint after pint of the black stuff.  Which makes for the sort of weekend that come Monday you need a weekend to recover.

We had the Workers Solidarity Movement national conference over the weekend in Dublin which meant hours spent inside while the sun was out debating and voting on motions and then hours spent outside when it was dark downing pint after pint of the black stuff.  Which makes for the sort of weekend that come Monday you need a weekend to recover.

Our main business was agreeing a collective postion on the capitalist crisis and resistance to it.  I’d submitted a 3600 word draft and another similar length alternative had been submitted as well as a few hundred words in amendments.  Fortunatly us submitters of the main texts sat down over lunch and managed to cut the number of bits opposed to each other way down and so focus in on those where there were some genuine disagreements.  This meant the discussion was a lot more political then I had feared, the danger otherwise is that we’d have got bogged down in a discussion of procedure.

National Conference has become a lot more functional despite growing attendence in the last few years because we’ve increasingly followed a set of standing orders that prevents us doing silly things like making up the wording of amendments on the spot.  Insisting anything more than a deletion proposal is submitted in writing in advance makes the decision making process flow a lot smoother even if it also means the frustration of not being able to ‘fix’ stuff up on the spot.  We do end up raising standing orders from time to time but a lot of the time that ends up being very messy, this weekend though the 4 or so times it happened worked out OK.

Other stuff that was debated included our position paper on The Partition of Ireland, a conference favourite that probably gets onto the agenda at least 2 conferences out of 3.  We also returned to the question of national decision making structures as defined in the WSM constitution and in particular the tricky task of balancing the requirement for emergency decision making against the accountibility of those who are given this power.  A range of other motions dealt with the internet, our newspaper, the process of generating collective policy and OKing the spending of money on various things.  I’ll hold off on any specific details until the official report goes up and the position papers themselves get updated.

I often wonder what new members make of the process (I often ask them as well but generally get the sense that the answer you get is more polite than critical).  I suspect the process comes across as too bureaucratic (its very formal) and it’s really only over time that you come to appreciate it.  It is quite effective, we probably collectively generated / amended something approaching 8000 words over the weekend.  But the usefulness of the whole process is also bringing members from different branches and cities together in the informal drinking and eating together in the evenings.  We have various methods of online communication but I find these face to face meet ups are very valuable in ironing out the tensions that can arise during online disagrements.