Participation in Action: the Climate Camp and the SDS

Saturday, 14 November 2009 00:10 Last Updated on Saturday, 14 November 2009 10:14 Written by Joe H

One of the aims of the PPS-UK is to "start as we mean to go on" -- that is, to structure our own organisation using the same principles that we promote for society at large.  As the name suggests, one aim is to ensure that the PPS-UK allows full participation for all its members.  We want to avoid the common division into a leadership group, who make all important decisions, and a passive group of supporters, whose only role is to do the day-today tasks in the organisation, raise funds, and so on. There are two big advantages to this.  First, we can serve as an example, providing evidence that an alternative form of organising is possible.  Second, while we are fighting against various oppressions, we also need to ensure that we do not reproduce them ourselves.  This should make the PPS-UK much more attractive to people fed up of being marginalised and ignored by traditional political processes.

Having said that, there are a lot of practical questions to address here.  How do we actually include everyone in decisions, without wasting to much time or smothering flexibility?  How can we achieve large-scale co-ordination alongside grassroots control?    As the PPS-UK hashes out some formal structure at upcoming meetings, it's useful to look around at some other like-minded organisations who apply participatory principles to their own activities.  Two examples that give cause for optimism are the UK Camp for Climate Action, and a North American organisation, Students for a Democratic Society.

The ``old'' SDS was the largest and most effective radical student organisation in the US of the 60's, and a crucial element in the broad alliance of movements against the Vietnam war.  The outlook and ideas now argued for by the PPS actually owe a lot to the SDS: take a look at their Port Huron statement, an impassioned call for participatory democracy.  In the 2000's a group of students founded a new radical student group under the old name.  From this modest beginning in 2006, there started an effective outreach campaign, helped along by the famous name and by accepting affiliations from existing anti-war and radical campus groups.  This strategy enabled a "stampede" of rapid growth claiming more than 100 new chapters in two years. The organisation now claims over 120 chapters on campuses across North America, and an impressive campaigning apparatus.

As they grew, the SDS had to become effective at a National and International level, while upholding the principle of full membership control and participation.  They say that, "for its first two years, SDS had no national oversight body, and it led to a lot of problems - namely that because work needed to be done, people were doing it informally with no accountability to chapters or members."  The structurelessness was in danger of creating an informal hierachy of its own.  This led to calls for more national structure -- a situation the PPS-UK in now, a similar amount of time after its formation.  Already the SDS had its local chapters, ``project'' working groups such as the antiwar group or the fundraising group, and minority caucuses like the women's caucus, but no structure to co-ordinate these groups.  One problem was that those who wished to get involved in campaigns on a nation level did not have a clear way to do so.  Another was the lack of co-ordination and accountability of the different groups.

Two new national groups were created to deal with this.  To solve the first problem, a "visibility project" was set up, as a place for members to go if they wanted to get involved in any of the working groups. The Visibility Project set up a National Calendar with meeting announcements for all the working groups on it, and began sending out a National Digest every two weeks with information and announcements about national work and events.  Each group now has a representative to contact, who also reports activities to the visibility teams, and each group has an e-mail listserv.  In the case of the PPS-UK, much of this structure is already automated on the website thanks to the hard-working IT team!

The most important new national group is the National Working Committee.  In keeping with the direct democracy they seek, this group is made up of recallable delegates from the local chapters, working groups and caucuses.  Their job is to form new projects as needed, and oversee the existing working groups.  At this stage of development, no need was seen for regional working committees between local and national level.  Each region of the US sends a number of delegates proportional to membership.  This group seems to function by majority vote rather than consensus (it is not clear from the website how often the group physically meets, etc.).  As well as this group, there are annual national gatherings where strategic decisions are made, and "action camps" for training and socialising.  All indications are that the new structures have helped the SDS to be an effective organisation, and the website emphasises the necessity of some structure like this: "Having communication between chapters, national campaigns, national media coordination and fund-raising, as well as events like the National Convention and Action Camp are essential to SDS being a powerful student/youth network."

Back in the UK, the Camp for Climate Action is a grassroots group focusing on issues of climate change.  Their stance on the environment includes a criticism of capitalism, and their organisation is based on grassroots power, making them a natural ally of the PPS-UK.  They are now the most visible radical environmental group in the UK,  with operations including education, public outreach work and direct action.  The regular climate camps, and active campaign against e.on, the electrictity generating company, are the most spectacular of their activities.

The CCA differs from the SDS (and the PPS-UK), mainly because it has a narrower focus, and also because much of their activity is based around their large face-to-face gatherings.  On the other hand, their internal organisation is also non-hierarchical, and based on local groups and working groups.  Instead of a national working committee of delegates, the climate camp has found it effective to make all major decisions at national gatherings held monthly.  At these meetings, consensus is used to make decisions, facilitated by trained members.  Working groups and those planning local actions are in many cases left to act autonomously.  This fits in well with their unpredictable actions against coal power and other targets.

The looser structure of the climate camp and national co-ordination of the SDS both fit their different circumstances, within the idea of participatory democracy.  The PPS-UK presents another set of circumstances and goals; we now have a smaller membership than the SDS, and slightly different aims, but a similar local chapter /working group set-up.  There is no blueprint for the structure of organisations based on participatory democracy, and applying all of the organising ideas of either group to the PPS-UK would not make too much sense. Having said that, it is great to see that organisations based on grassroots power can be as effective and dynamic.  As the PPS-UK grows, organsations like the the SDS and the climate camp can serve as inspirations for our development.

Read more about the first two years of SDS organising on Znet.