UFPJ Diary

[SonofRage]

UFPJ Diary: The Case for Participatory Democracy




Say, would you let me cry on your shoulder
I've heard that you'd try anything twice...
But then you open your eyes
And you see someone that you physically despise
But my heart is open
My heart is open to you
- Stephen Morrissey




This is an opinion piece, not a position paper of either the Direct Action Tendency,
the Industrial Workers of the World, the War Resisters League or September Action.
All of the positions advanced are my own, as are the errors. Of course, the final
product has profited from some donated labor: many thanks to Brendan Story,
David Meieran and Jim Macdonald for their valuable input and valiant efforts to trap
my many errors.


This piece and my role in the organizing described within it could not have happened
without my wife Donyal's patience and generosity (and skills as a photographer). I am
also indebted to Ed Hedemann and Ruth Benn who are War Resisters and War Tax Resisters
extraordinaire. My friend Matt Daloisio also played a pivotal role in the work described
in this piece: Matt, an organizer with Catholic Worker, is incredibly supportive of
this writer and my fellow Wobblies. People like Matt help make the WRL a place where
the religious left and the secular not only coexist but form a very viable synthesis.


I'd also like to thank my brother Sam Morales for having made this journey with me.
Sam is a true revolutionary and good friend. Lastly I want to thank my comrade Frida Berrigan
for providing an example, in terms of level of activism, that always makes me feel guilty for
not doing enough to elevate the Struggle. This piece is a Call To Action: the ultimate goal
is the creation of a space wherein all activists can ramp up their level of participation - on
their own terms.


I - Introduction




There is no shortcut to a society of participation.
Either one makes the basic institutions internally
democratic or one is blessed with political institutions
that take on the coloration of their surroundings.
- C. George Benello




A little more than a year ago I was driving home from the Socialist Party's
National Committee meeting in Pittsburgh when my mobile rang. Winding my
way along the Pennsylvania Turnpike I listened as Greg Pason, the SP's
National Secretary, asked if I would be willing to represent the Party as
the national delegate to United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). I was a little wary
of committing to any more meetings, however, Greg would not be denied and
I saw this as an opportunity to lobby UFPJ to embrace direct action.
I said yes...


I am now at the end of my rookie year as a UFPJ delegate. Much has changed
in a year's time: we've created a tendency of the SP devoted to activism,
UFPJ has embraced direct action and I applaud them for that. As for
democratizing UFPJ, I am no longer convinced that this is an attainable goal
but I encourage and support all of the dedicated activists who continue to
struggle towards this end. As I complete a year's worth of work within
UFPJ I am recommending to the Direct Action Tendency that we disaffiliate in
order to work with September Action with the long range goal of creating a new
organizing model predicated on participatory democracy and direct action.
Although I am resigning as DAT New York's local delegate to UFPJ I am not
advocating that we anti-authoritarians not sit at the same table with UFPJ:
I plan to do so. But I plan to speak frankly, at that table and elsewhere,
about the need for sweeping and immediate reform in United for Peace and
Justice. In as much as UFPJ claims to speak for the anti-war movement they
need to start listening to those of us who are rank and file organizers.
Whether we are card carrying members or not.


Although I lobbied hard for UFPJ to embrace direct action, suffered through
innumerable meetings and teleconferences and eventually saw the creation
of the Nonviolent Direct Action (NVDA) working group, I did not participate
in its first action: the civil disobedience at the White House that took
place on September 26, 2005. I opted out, choosing instead to join in an
autonomous direct action at the Pentagon. What follows is the story of how
it came to pass that what I fought for in UFPJ was realized and why I chose
not to be a part of its first outing. It is also an attempt to analyze
the shortcomings of UFPJ and make a case for participatory democracy within
that organization. In my estimation, the effort to democratize UFPJ will prove
to be much more difficult than the struggle to get UFPJ to accept direct action,
and is probably more meaningful for both the peace movement in general
and its direct action arm in particular. In the end, although I have opted to
work to create a new organizing model external to UFPJ, I believe, given UFPJ's
size and organizational profile, that the struggle for democracy must be carried on,
from within and from without.





Participatory Democracy is a form of democracy in which people participate
directly in decision making rather than indirectly through the election of
representatives. In terms of group structure - this would involve a free
agreement of individuals who work collectively towards common objectives.
In local councils, e.g. citizen's assemblies, every voice is heard.
The deliberative model is often consensus wherein a harmonization of values
is attempted so that the group as a whole defines it objectives, tactics
and message. (As opposed to a an elected body developing policy in isolation
or attempting to fabricate a compromise that mollifies a majority of the
constituents, marginalizes a minority and satisfies no one). In a large
organization a national council can facilitate participatory democracy if
it is formed as an assembly of recallable deputies mandated by local councils
and its sole functions are coordinative and administrative.
For more see:
Tom Hayden,
Murray Bookchin,
et al.





I urge all friends of participatory democracy and direct action who have chosen
to remain in UFPJ to join in the cry for democracy, to demand that the J in UFPJ
not be cast aside, to work with those of us who identify as anti-authoritarian
and who want a voice in the peace movement, who want a say in our messaging and
tactics, who want an organizational model that is consonant with the goals of peace
and justice. I urge all friends of peace and progress to work together to build
a movement we can all be a part of - and have a say in.


II - A Year In The Life of a UFPJ Organizer

Early June, 2004. David McReynolds, a longtime war resister and member of
the Socialist Party since 1951, asked for a volunteer to represent the
New York City Socialist Party Local in regular meetings of the newly reanimated
NYC Local of the War Resisters League (WRL). I began attending meetings of the
WRL in preparation for the upcoming RNC protests. This ranks as one of the best
decisions I have ever made. I haven't gotten around to leaving the WRL yet and
have no intention of doing so as the people are truly special and the actions
are meaningful. Although I am not a pacifist, believing both in the efficacy of
armed struggle as a means of national liberation and in the right to self defense
I feel very much at home in the War Resisters League as diversity is not only
tolerated but sought and the WRL approach to organizing is refreshing. One of the
things that is most distinctive about the WRL is the group synergy that results
from a democratic internal process and the shared struggle of activists who risk
arrest as an act of resistance. My WRL Local proves on a weekly basis
that participatory democracy is not only possible but productive as well.
The WRL's commitment to direct action is well known. And inspiring.


• The RNC: August 2004 •

August 29th, 2005, saw a very large demonstration in New York City, site of
the Republican National Convention. UFPJ turned out 500,000 marchers and
yet a fraction of this number set foot in Central Park as Mayor Bloomberg had
denied UFPJ a permit out of concern for "his" grass. As Jesse Jackson said at
the time: we shouldn't be so concerned about grass, whether we walk on
it or smoke it. {1} At the end of the march UFPJ parked a sound truck at
Union Square where steering committee members and staffers issued instructions
for marchers to disperse, indicating that some marchers were going to Central
Park. No UFPJ sponsored Direct Action to take the park occurred although
some protesters did indeed go there on their own. Two days later, on A31,
there were waves of civil disobedience and direct action throughout New
York City. In my first arrest as a War Resister I was cuffed at 28th and
Broadway, doing a die-in near Madison Square Garden. The WRL got good press
coverage for this action, in part due to illegal police arrests of 227 WRLers
at Ground Zero in an attempt to preempt the march (which failed). When I was
transported via corrections bus from Pier 57 to the Tombs, UFPJ protesters were
outside the Pier, yelling and cheering us as we drove by. We learned later
that UFPJ had organized a press conference and protest that pressured police
into moving us out of Pier 57, improving our conditions of confinement. This
was much appreciated and gave us hope that one day UFPJ organizers would join
us in the streets.


• The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Action •

Jump ahead to the "re-election" of Bush. The WRL, partly in response to
the illegal arrests of our marchers on A31 and partly to point out that
no matter who is in the White House the Iraq War would not stop, staged
a civil disobedience at the New York Stock Exchange on November 3rd. By
this time I had been to several New York City Coordinating Committee meetings
at the UFPJ offices on 38th Street and knew Leslie Cagan slightly...I called
her and asked if UFPJ would consider supporting our action. I was told that
UFPJ's primary concern was the election and that if it was stolen (was there
any other possible outcome?) they would need to act quickly and therefore
could not support us. We held our CD as scheduled, the day after the election.
My family participated in it by leafleting (this was my ten year old son's first
action as a War Resister, I was quite the proud papa) and even in a hostile
setting like Wall Street numerous passersby took our leaflets and thanked
us - expressing their outrage and disappointment that Bush remained in
power. Although irregularities plagued the election UFPJ did not organize
a mass protest. This left some of us in the WRL wondering what it
would have cost UFPJ to promote our action - via simple endorsement and
perhaps email outreach.


• UFPJ's Second National Assembly (St. Louis) •

After the action at the NYSE my WRL Local continued to have regular meetings
and began discussing UFPJ's role in the anti-war movement and the upcoming
National Assembly to be held in St. Louis, Missouri. In one of these
meetings my comrade and friend Frida Berrigan asked me to consider being
the WRL national delegate to the Assembly. I spoke with Greg Pason
and was able to get the SP's National Committee to designate an
alternate (a capable comrade by the name of Samuel Morales, Jr.) so that
I could rep for the WRL and Sam could replace me, at least temporarily,
as the Socialist Party delegate. We traveled together to St. Louis in
February, 2005. At the assembly we listened to speeches by Movement
stalwarts Angela Davis and Tom Hayden and voted on a wide variety of
proposals. But our primary reason for being in St. Louis was to push
the proposal for the creation of a Nonviolent Direct Action Working
Group - an idea put forward by the Iraq Pledge of Resistance, the
Brandywine Peace Community and the War Resisters League national office.
Things went well initially and our proposal made it out of subcommittee...but
on the day of the actual vote we were badly burned by a combination of
rigid bureaucratic process and the actions of a steering committee
member named Lisa Fithian who, in the opinion of many, misused her position
to block our initiative by speaking against it as an officer of UFPJ (it is my
view that she was responding to a perceived territorial threat as the proposal's
primary author was someone with whom she had personal issues). After the vote,
Sam and I sat down with a delegate from Madison and drafted a motion of reconsideration
citing the irregularities that resulted in our proposal going down to defeat.
At the next day's plenary we presented the motion to the appropriate
committee, expecting to be tossed aside with a recitation of some arcane
procedural rule. This did not happen - to our astonishment an administrative
committee member named Judith LeBlanc asked me to meet with Cagan in the hall...this
was my first exposure to the extraordinary administrative processes in UFPJ.
I quickly found two of the other proposal endorsers and we met with
with Leslie outside the plenary. She apologized for the actions of the
steering committee member who spoke against our proposal and asked me to
withdraw our motion as, at best, it would lengthen the assembly considerably,
and at worst, might invalidate the entire affair due to some of the voting
irregularities cited in it. She offered us a deal: Fithian would apologize
from the podium and we would be guaranteed the working group we had asked for.
We took the deal and only later did it occur to me that this sort of thing
might be a symptom of a serious problem within UFPJ. {2} I fully believe
that Leslie felt she was doing the right thing by all concerned and probably
she did - but what troubles me is that she was ABLE to do this, without any
process whatsoever. After the Assembly the NVDA proposal was brought to the
Steering Committee where there was a vote on it. This provided a post hoc veneer of
democratic process. It was a pretty thin veneer. Leslie had made a backroom deal
that essentially circumvented the assembly altogether. I think, in retrospect,
it was a Faustian bargain for all concerned. Had I been a delegate who voted
against the NVDA I would have been very surprised to see it created - despite
the proposal being defeated on the floor of the assembly by what was supposed
to be a democratic process. The fact that the national coordinator was able
to reintroduce a defeated proposal to the steering committee is problematic
in terms of process but the fact that she negotiated with me using this as a
bargaining chip, guaranteeing its passage, would seem to be an even larger issue.
(The fact that this deal was struck in order to prevent public scrutiny of
alleged voting irregularities is also an issue worthy of further examination).

• The NYC Coordinating Committee of UFPJ •

After the assembly, focus within the NYC Coordinating Committee (CC)
meetings of UFPJ turned to March 19th, the second anniversary of the
Iraq War. My WRL local was planning a civil disobedience that incorporated
military counter-recruitment - doing a blockade at Times Square. I began
to urge the NYC CC to support this but attention within UFPJ was largely
focused on a demonstration in Fayetteville, North Carolina which centered on
veteran's groups - devoid of direct action. Nonetheless I continued to
agitate for direct action, having now been joined by fellow DATer Sam Morales
who was representing the Socialist Party while I continued on as a lame duck WRL
delegate. At one meeting the Communist Party representative, Judith LeBlanc
(the current vice chair of the CPUSA), was addressing needs for the upcoming
actions and covered all of the various elements of the weekend of protests
except ours. Realizing this she turned to Sam and I and said: oh, we'll try
to work in support for your civil disobedience. Clearly, we were an afterthought
but we felt that Judith's assurance was significant. Even though UFPJ-NYC is
not a national body (UFPJ has a Steering Committee which meets monthly via
teleconference and presently has 42 members) it is very influential. It meets
in the UFPJ national office and 2 members of the Administrative Committee (a
subset of the Steering Committee which meets biweekly and is UFPJ's most powerful
body) rotate facilitation of the meetings. In addition to this, Leslie Cagan,
the national coordinator, frequently sat in on the UFPJ-NYC meetings I attended.
Thus we had hope that the move from protest to resistance might at last be underway.

• CP-UFPJ? •

The Communist Party is a major player in UFPJ New York. This is a mixed
blessing - on the one hand the administrative expertise and resources are
very valuable. On the other hand, the legacy of Gus Hall and the years of
democratic centralism being abused by CP leadership (which came to a head in
1991 at the 25th National Convention where 1/3 of the Party was expelled by
Gus Hall - the expelled becoming the nucleus of the Committees of Correspondence
for Democracy and Socialism) has produced something that those of us who were
once in the CPUSA call "CP Style". For the uninitiated, this is an organizational
style that is not particularly subtle about being top down. It is my
understanding that Sam Webb, the CP's current chair, is invested in making
the CP a more democratic organization (and perhaps he has succeeded, I wouldn't
know) but they have yet to jettison democratic centralism, i.e., Leninism.
Judith LeBlanc, in her capacity as UFPJ admin committee member, once remarked in
a UFPJ-NYC meeting that the role of the CP was critical in UFPJ as "when you say
Communist Party" people know what you mean - "it has name recognition." Setting
aside the issue of whether or not this name recognition is always positive,
this is an interesting point as UFPJ is big on name recognition and sucks
in a fair number of celebrities which it then husbands as a resource. Brian
Flanagan once remarked that the Democratic Party is like "a black hole
with an event horizon surrounding it" that sucks in peace activists who
are "never to be seen again" {3} - this could well describe UFPJ as it is
presently constituted. Indeed, it is my view that organizers as well as
celebrities are sucked into UFPJ and become "resources" (in the case of skilled
organizers they are all too often treated as go-fers - Jim Crutchfield, a member
of the IWW General Executive Board, attended a UFPJ NYC meeting in 2003 where "everybody
sat in a big circle and talked for hours, and then four people made all the decisions
after the meeting." This is very similar to my experience). Whether or not this approach
was influenced by the CP is anyone's guess but there is a striking similarity in terms
of the management of human resources between UFPJ today and the CP of the 1980s.
It is significant that two of the most influential officers in UFPJ: Judith LeBlanc
and Leslie Cagan, are vice-chair of the Communist Party and co-chair of the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, respectively.

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/10/58662.html