h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

have an activisty problem and wondering if i could bounce the problem off you?

here goes...

as in all activist groups (especially the left i suspect) splinters emerge - how do we keep these to a minimum? is it better to root out people who you know don't agree with the key, indeed founding, principles of the group, and who appear to be in it because they are either lonely or destructive? or do you just leave it and let the infighting mount?

ta muchly in advance

span the puzzled

You would pick a problem with no good solution to bounce off of me If this keeps up I shall resort to zen-master tactics of shouting "kwatz!" in your face to emphasize my lack of guruness.

OK, I'll attempt an answer anyhow.

Certainly the emergence of splinters in left activist groups does appear to be a universal trend. At least, what you're describing sounds very familiar from my mid-80s experience in the USA. I used to be a heavy promoter of complete inclusiveness and allowing people to self-select into groups, no matter how little they seemed to have to do with the goals of the group. Who were we, the founders, to argue that we knew better than anyone else?

However in the end that sort of openness seems to leave every group open to be taken over by the unscrupulous who are interested in having warm bodies for their own ends, however little those ends have to do with the original ideals of the group.

Of course you can go too far in the other direction as well. When does "rooting out" become a witch hunt? A group that is too much concentrated on remaining pure will often not be able to get anything done at all.

So, these days, I have no trouble saying that it makes sense to get rid of the destructive folks. Lonely ones I'm not so worried about; perhaps they will eventually develop some energy for the cause instead of just for the group itself. But if someone really does appear to only be there to make trouble and subvert things, why let them stay? I might try some intermediate means first...shunning, not calling on them at meetings, just ignoring their input...but at some point the folks in the core may need to just say "Look, would you mind not coming round any more?" and being willing to back that up with other means if necessary (like calling meetings without inviting the troublemaker).

And people with a history of screwing things up (I think here of the US Trots in the mid 80s) should just be uninvited in advance. I remember some folks being thrown physically out of organizing meetings for the '86 Haymarket centennial, by others who had tried to work with them in the past and who had concluded that it was hopeless.

One thing to think about here is a philosophical basis for exclusivity. I believe one can be constructed based on the difference between an authority of power and an authority of knowledge. Those running things ought to be doing so based on experience and knowledge that is not widely shared, not just on having a large stick. I believe this is addressed in Giovanni Baldelli's _Social Anarchism_, though it's been quite a while since I re-read that one.

OK, enough nattering, hope some of it proves useful.