16.07.2026

Principles and guidelines

Ever expanding rules, elaborate procedures and three-minute limits are a gift to bureaucrats and the full-time apparatus. Mike Macnair argues for openness, time for debate and the right to organise around alternative perspectives

In the first three articles in this series I have been concerned largely with negative criticisms: in the first article, four weeks ago, I was arguing against the idea that questions of procedures of decision-making are a diversion from ‘real politics’. Three weeks ago I was arguing against ideas that democratic decision-making procedures are time-wasting in general, and against claims that the urgency of the situation, or the need to seize the moment and the initiative, may require undemocratic procedures. Two weeks ago I argued against the bourgeois liberal ‘constitutionalism’ of Citrine on chairmanship or Robert’s rules; and drew out of those arguments the more fundamental points that rules need principles to serve their interpretation, and seeking to decide everything by rules inevitably results in their overproduction (as in Robert’s rules).

This week we move to the paramount principle - which will reassert itself at all levels of concrete detail - that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take real decisions. The principle is two-sided. On the one hand, the ‘silent majority’ do not get to be ‘represented’. On the other, those who do participate - as party, union, cooperative, and so on members, as voters, as jurors, get to take real decisions, not to have these pre-empted by officials or by unprincipled manoeuvres. The members - for shorthand, because we are not in power, so as to be organising the decision-making of the whole society - have to have the right to make mistakes. But equally, they need to be aware that their decisions may be mistakes - and therefore need to include minority views (which after the event may turn out to be right).

Within the framework of this principle, it will then be possible to approach the conduct of discussion and of decision-making meetings: meetings need chairs; how should the chair work (to draw out and promote the clarifying of disagreements); how to handle proposals for amendments; what about proposals that are counterposed to each other; and so on.

Decision-making on a larger scale involves specific considerations. The easiest example is national organisation, but the same issues would apply in a local or sectoral organisation that got big enough. Sub-division into local groups - cells, branches, and so on - is indispensable; and a large part of discussion can and must take place in these, before any larger conference. But, even so, large numbers imply too many choices available, and it remains necessary to narrow the range of possible choices beyond the procedural forms discussed for meetings in general. Part of this role can be played by factional groups and caucussing at conferences; but arrangements such as commissions (as used in the early Comintern) and compositing negotiations (as used in the Labour Party before the recent past) are necessary.

The same issue - too many choices available - poses in a different way the question of leading committees. These are as much needed by large local organisations as by national ones. Here the choice between collective leading committees and the cults of individual leaders (and the direct election of individual officers) is a choice between democracy and Bonapartism.

I reiterate the point that I made in the first article, that what follows are merely my views (though I draw on CPGB practice), while I may miss some important points and not everyone will agree with my arguments; and the point argued two weeks ago, and argued further below, that what is offered are guidelines for procedure on the basis of the principle that participants, not fixed rules, get to decide.

Participants

The first and most fundamental principle, as I said, is that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take real decisions.

I referred two weeks ago to Ramsin Canon’s identification of Robert’s rules as “developed to protect the rights of … 4. Member non-participants (ie, absent members)”, and made the point that this is the classic tale of the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon in 1969, and (without the language) Neil Kinnock against Militant in 1985, John Rees against left critics in Respect in 2004-05; and most recently the Your Party leadership. In the same issue of the paper, our letters column’s resident Stalinist, comrade Andrew Northall, produced another variant. He argues:

But at whose expense would be this maximised impact and increased influence to the faction? It has to be at someone’s expense! It is at the expense of the majority of all other members who are not members of factions. Factions therefore serve to reduce the democracy of the majority of the membership. That is one reason why they are antithetical to communist democracy.¹

This is, in reality, one of the standard pro-capitalist arguments against trade unions: that they are unfair to non-members. The argument only works on the pre-supposition that people should not organise themselves without the approval of those above them (the management; state officials; the full-time officials and elected representatives). Back in April I made the point against Claudia Webbe’s case for banning the left groups from Your Party, that:

Allowing factions does not deprive the silent majority - “the members who are not members of organised currents” - of any rights. They have the right to speak, to vote and to organise themselves against the organised minorities.

In contrast, the method of banning the organised groups also bans the silent majority from organising themselves. What they are left with is the choice exclusively between which of the full-timers and elected representatives to give allegiance to. This choice may be expressed as plebiscites on options selected by the full-timers, but it is actually merely an option of personal loyalties.²

The implicit idea in Webbe’s argument, Northall’s, and capitalist objections to trade unions, is that permitting collectivist organisation places people who disagree under a de facto obligation to organise themselves, if they wish to oppose those who do so already. Behind this is the presumption in favour of decisions being made by private owners - and therefore against collective action - which I discussed in the last two articles in this series.³

Communists are advocates of trade unions, cooperatives, mutuals and collectivist political parties: that is, that people should actively organise themselves for collective action. We are advocates of the “cooperative commonwealth”: that is, that collective association for collective action should replace collective action organised and controlled by capitalists - and by capitalists’ agents (management, state officials, and so on).

What communism offers is not - at least initially - a world without duties. At the most elementary level, trade unionism involves a duty not to scab.

The Communist manifesto placed among the initial “measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production”, and specifically those “pretty generally applicable” “in most advanced countries”: “Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.”⁴ The point reappears in the 1848 Demands of the communist party in Germany:

4. Universal arming of the people. In future the armies shall be simultaneously labour armies, so that the troops shall not, as formerly, merely consume, but shall produce more than is necessary for their upkeep.

This will moreover be conducive to the organisation of labour.⁵

Harold Laski in 1948 asserted that the British Labour Party “have declared the equal obligation of all to work”. The reference is probably to the industrial and agricultural conscription of the war years.⁶ The reality is that the capitalist class operates economic conscription - not only of soldiers, but of a wide variety of jobs; notably through the military and IMF attacks on poorer countries that drive migration as a form of imperialist exploitation.⁷

In one field, duties to work are very commonly accepted.⁸ This is jury service. There can be no trial by jury without the duty of jury service; a volunteer jury would (like the volunteer police force) display systematic bias. This is, incidentally, a fundamental problem with sortition of the sort used by Your Party (besides its anti-deliberative character and lack of transparency): in the absence of conscription, sortition cannot actually fulfil its claims to be politically representative.

I do not make these points in order to advocate that labour conscription and ‘industrial armies’ should be part of our present minimum programme; or even to advocate that we should call for compulsory voting in elections (practised at present in a number of countries, and perhaps actually desirable).⁹ The point is merely that the idea that there can be no obligation to activity, which logically necessarily underlies ‘silent majority’ arguments like Canon’s, Northall’s and Webbe’s, is inconsistent with any form of collectivism, including trade unionism and trial by jury.

Hence, back to my earlier point. The ‘silent majority’ or the unorganised are in no sense obliged to remain silent, or to remain unorganised. Giving those who turn up to meetings the ability to take actual decisions does not deprive the unorganised of any rights. On the contrary, the unorganised ought if they disagree to attend, to speak and to organise. We are concerned as much with duties to participate in decision-making (and to do so in good faith) as with rights to do so.

Officials

In reality, the claim of the officials and those elected to represent the silent majority is the claim to freedom for the officials and elected representatives from accountability to those below. And this in turn leads, under capitalism, to being enmeshed in the regime of institutional corruption that is the rule of the bourgeoisie.

In the absence of capitalism, it produces the dynamics of the USSR and other ‘bureaucratic socialist’ regimes: officials lying to keep their jobs, ‘planning irrationalities’, ‘they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work’, and the tendency towards capitalism either by way of collapse (USSR and eastern Europe), or of managed transition (China, Vietnam, etc).

The dictatorship of the proletariat or la domination politique du proletariat (proletarian political dominance) is not an immediate leap into communism or the abolition all at once of the wages system. It is the subordination of the state officials and the middle classes to those who continue to be wage workers (or dependents of wage workers, or dependent on the ‘social wage’). The immediate form of this is the subordination of the full-time officials of trade unions and cooperatives, and of the elected representatives elected by parties, to the members. Thus Friedrich Engels, writing to Karl Kautsky in 1891 about the furore among the SPD leadership over the publication of the Critique of the Gotha programme, states:

It is also imperative that the chaps [meaning, the workers, or the SPD membership] should at last throw off the habit of handling the party officials - their servants - with kid gloves and kow-towing to them as infallible bureaucrats, instead of confronting them critically.¹⁰

As long as we cannot hold the officials and elected representatives in clear subordination (because we accept procedural schemes that give them control in the name of the ‘silent majority’), the idea that there is a communist or socialist alternative to capitalism is not believable to the large majority of the working class (let alone to the rest of society).

Rules will not achieve this subordination - for the reasons given in last week’s article. What is required is a political culture - both of officials themselves accepting subordination to the membership, Trotsky’s “constant readiness of the leadership to hand over every serious dispute for consideration by the party”;¹¹ and of the membership treating the leadership with a degree of suspicion in order to keep them on their toes on this front - Engels’s “confronting them critically”, or John Philpot Curran’s 1790 “eternal vigilance” as the “condition” for liberty.¹²

What we can produce, therefore, are procedural guidelines that will tend towards the active participants in decision-making having the ability to make real decisions on points of substance: not merely agreeing who will make decisions, or indirect decisions through procedural game-playing.

What are these guidelines? I begin with discussion as a necessary element in the decision process, and in the role of the chairperson, before moving to methods of voting with a view to achieving clarity in real choices.

Discussion

The democracy we need is, as I said three weeks ago, ‘deliberative’: it involves discussion, in as much depth as is possible, having regard to time and the need to actually reach decisions, before going to the vote.¹³ (An aspect of this worth noting is that we may conclude, when a scheduled vote is due, that the discussion has shown that the vote needs to be postponed.)

It is convenient to deal first with literary discussion; though issues that need decision may arise first in meetings. The CPGB’s practice (attempted, not consistent) has two characteristics that are inherited from the practice of Comintern and from the Russian Communist Party before the actual enforcement of the 1921 ban on factions by the double police coup of late 1927 (against the left) and early 1929 (against the right).

The first point, which was shared by both the RSDLP and Bolsheviks and the early post-revolutionary Russian Communist Party with the major parties of the Second International, is that our political discussions are as far as possible conducted in public, through publication in this newspaper. We have argued this point repeatedly. I will only make three very summary points here.

(1) a Communist Party does not aim to take decisions for the working class: it aims to make choices available to the class - in particular the options of working class political action and of the struggle for workers’ political power, which the capitalist class and its various supporters (including ‘economists’/syndicalists, people’s frontists and intersectionalists) would like to keep off the table.

(2) our watchword is “educate, agitate, organise” - not the Trotskyist “agitate, agitate, agitate”. Debate is in itself educational, strengthening the ability of those who pay attention to form and defend their own judgments on an issue. It is as educational for the readers of the paper (and for people more widely, to the extent that they pay attention) as for members of the party.

(3) these are arguments for party openness of political discussion. The arguments are even stronger for openness of state political discussion. It is very notable that, as long as the franchise was restricted, parliament was a deliberative and not merely a voting body. As the franchise has been extended, parliament has been made into a theatre for electoral campaigning and the MPs into a sort of local ombudsmen. Serious deliberative discussion has been withdrawn first into the cabinet, and more recently into inner circles within the cabinet. We stand for radical democracy: that requires deliberation among everyone who is willing to participate, which in turn requires openness.

The second point, which is related, and is Comintern and not Second International practice, is that we put to the vote theses and resolutions with numbered paragraphs, which include the immediate reasons offered for a proposed decision, and not merely the ‘action points’. We try as far as possible to publish/circulate these well in advance of their going to the vote.

The point of including immediate reasons is the need for openness, already mentioned. We cannot include all reasons, because every argument has in it deep-going assumptions (general physics, biology, etc; the basic claims of Marxism about historical materialism, class politics and the critique of bourgeois economics; the content of our Draft programme …). But we can include immediate arguments, and thereby open them to criticism and amendment.

The reason for using numbered paragraphs is to facilitate amendment, and also taking votes in parts where necessary. The design is to maximise clarity, as opposed in particular to unamendable texts, and to voting on the ‘general line’ of documents, both of which take actual decision-making away from the voters.

Conversely, where people have differences that are too substantial to be dealt with by amendments, we urge them to produce counter-line alternative texts. This does not mean that we encourage the multiplication of frivolous alternative texts, where the differences involved could perfectly well be dealt with by amendments. Nor that we ‘encourage’ the production of counter-line documents in the sense of avoiding sharp criticism of them, so far as is necessary, when they are offered. (We favour equally sharp criticism of leadership-proposed texts, so far as is necessary.) As with the question of the ‘silent majority’, what is involved is duties to contribute to discussion.

Meetings

Meetings are again deliberative institutions. If we needed only to vote without discussion, no meetings would be necessary. The consequence is that the discussion element of the conduct of meetings needs, like literary discussion, to seek to draw out points of difference that need to be settled; while at the same time providing space for issues that may not yet have been considered to be raised (which may, as I said above, lead to a decision that it is too early to vote and discussion should be continued).

The shape of discussion should, then, be as open as possible. The proposers of a resolution or theses should introduce them; any counter-proposals should be introduced, and any amendments; then there should be an open discussion from the floor; this should, in turn, be followed by replies from the proposers. The discussion is not bit-by-bit (as in, one for and one against motions, taken in some order selected by the chairperson or standing orders committee). Open discussion provides the possibility that amendments may be accepted, withdrawn or altered in response to discussion, or that new points may arise.

I made the point in the second article in the series that sufficient time should be allowed for discussion, and in meetings for individual interventions. The currently standard Brit left practice of three minutes per floor speaker is enough for soundbites, but no more, and therefore entails that real deliberative decision-making takes place outside the meeting (usually among the officers).

Meetings need chairpeople. Very small meetings, like small cells working on a particular task, can discuss informally. Anything larger needs a chairperson.¹⁴ This is not the same thing as “facilitators” in workshops and “assemblies”. ‘Facilitators’ start with the supposition that the meeting is not a decision-making body; decisions are made elsewhere, and the job of the ‘facilitators’ is to steer the workshop, etc, towards a pre-ordained end and at most to report back the ‘sense of the meeting’. The chairperson’s job is different. It is also not, as in a meeting run under Citrine, Robert’s rules, and so on, to be a neutral arbiter applying fixed rules in the procedural games played by participants.

Rather, the chairperson has to work in the discussion phase to draw out the differences of views that exist in the meeting. This is an active role. The chairperson should not pre-empt the decision process; but, on the other hand, he/she has an active job to do securing the hearing of majority and minority views and interventions ‘at an angle’ to disputed issues.

I have focussed on this point on chairing in decision-making meetings. But it actually applies also to non-decision-making meetings (mainly educational ones). The reason is the point made above: that debate is in itself educational, strengthening the ability of those who pay attention to form and defend their own judgments on the issue.

Online or hybrid meetings inevitably make these tasks more difficult. I do not think that there is a simple solution to this problem.

Voting

Should we vote? Organisations’ rules commonly contain a quorum - a minimum percentage of those entitled to vote who should be in attendance before a vote is to be taken (or is to be binding). The origin of the quorum is in Tudor commissions of justices of the peace; most local gentry were included in the commission, but the regular sessions of justices had to include members of the quorum. These were individual JPs who were legally qualified, or were regarded by government as politically reliable (the two were connected, because crown patronage of lawyers’ professional opportunities made many lawyers politically reliable).¹⁵ Quorum rules have subsequently been adapted into percentages of those entitled to vote, and widely adopted as part of what Ramsin Canon calls protecting “the rights of … member non-participants [ie, absent members]”, the silent majority. But, as I have already argued, this is still protecting government, meaning the officials, against the membership.

This does not mean that every meeting, however badly attended, should take binding decisions. But the point is a matter of political judgment. Decisions that are relatively uncontroversial may perfectly legitimately be taken in badly attended meetings, though they must, like all decisions, be open to revocation by later meetings. On the other hand, where a meeting to discuss a controversial question turns out to be badly attended, this is a legitimate political reason for deferring voting.

In what order should votes be taken? I made the point in the third article in the series that the Roberts’ rules/Citrine political form entails that the chair, or standing orders committee, can use the order in which motions are taken to manipulate both the outcome of votes and the information available to voters about the level of support for minority views.¹⁶

(It is worth noting at this point that ‘first past the post’ election of single MPs for constituencies has the same effect of reducing the information available to voters about support for minority views, by forcing a choice between the two gangs of bribe-takers. The single-MP constituency is part of the reduction of the democratic elements of the constitution in response to the extension of the franchise in the Reform Acts.)

The starting point for deciding the order of voting is that it is necessary to decide whether motions are counterposed. They are counterposed if passing them both would create a contradictory set of decisions. Amendments may also be counterposed to one another. If motions, or amendments, are counterposed, they should be voted against each other: those for the first, followed by those for the alternative. The point of this procedure is that it allows the real support for each alternative to be seen. It may be desirable to subsequently have votes for, against and abstentions on the motion or amendment that is preferred in the voting against each other; but this is only really called for where multiple counterposed proposals have been voted against each other, so that there may, in fact, be no majority.

Amendments should obviously be voted on before the motion they seek to amend. A few additional points relate to conduct in relation to amendments. The first is that it is desirable to avoid wasting the meeting’s time with trivial or drafting amendments. Obviously, what falls into this category is a matter of opinion; but, as usual, it is not a rule, but a guideline. It is also as much a guideline for the movers of motions (who should be willing to accept trivial or drafting amendments to save time for substantive discussion) as for the movers of amendments (who should initially contact the movers of the principal motion informally).

The second point is that ‘delete all/insert’ amendments are undesirable, as creating obscurity. They are usually used to circumvent submission deadlines for motions. There is a political objection to this course of action, which is that the membership needs to be given time to read and discuss motions. From this point of view submission deadlines are democratic. On the other hand, it may only appear in the course of pre-meeting discussion that the differences require a counter-motion rather than amendments in the proper sense. In this situation it is better to accept the late counter-proposal and consider deferring the vote if necessary. The choice is, as usual, political: and the issue is whether those participating in the decision process get to take a considered decision.

The third point is that people should only vote for amendments if they would vote for the motion if the amendment passed. If people who would vote against the motion even if the amendment passed vote on the amendment, the result is to create a false majority in the vote on the amendment and perhaps to block the ability of the proposers to put forward their own motion (the ‘wrecking amendment’ is a tactic not uncommonly used in trade unions, and so on; it is unprincipled).

My last point on voting is that votes should be taken formally as for, against, abstention; in voting on counterposed motions, for each of the motions, and abstentions.¹⁷ The reason for this is again information: to register clearly what the weight of opinion in the meeting is. Recording votes as “nem con” (nobody voted against) is a tempting shortcut, but one which is undesirable.

All of this, is, as I have said, guidelines, with the underlying principle remaining that the participants in the decision process get to actually deliberate and take actual decisions. So far it has proceeded on the basis of the ‘local’, whether geographically or sectorally ‘local’ (trade union factions, and so on): larger than a cell, which can work informally, smaller than a local or national organisation of any size, which needs subdivisions, leading committees, and mechanisms like commissions and compositing to narrow the range of choices.

This last issue, of organising democratic decision-making on a larger scale, remains to be discussed in the final article in the series.

1. Letters Weekly Worker July 2. I am concerned here only with comrade Northall’s general claim; the editors made, by the headline they gave the letter, the point that “Bolshevik” means “Majority-ite”: ie, Bolshevism was a permanent public faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between 1903 and 1917. I make only, in this footnote, the point that the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain would not exist, and the paper would have been shut down, but for its supporters’ factional opposition in the old CPGB in the 1980s.↩︎

2. ‘New proscriptions for old’ Weekly Worker April 30: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1583/new-proscriptions-for-old.↩︎

3. ‘Time is on our side’, June 25: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1591/time-is-on-our-side (under the subhead, ‘Question time’); ‘Legalism and labyrinthine rules’, July 2: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1592/legalism-and-labyrinthine-rules (subheads ‘Serving capital’ and ‘Left support’).↩︎

4. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm (emphasis added).↩︎

5. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm.↩︎

6. tribunemag.co.uk/2020/02/labour-and-the-communist-manifesto. On industrial conscription, outline information can be seen at www.iwm.org.uk/history/second-world-war/home-front/the-workers-that-kept-britain-going; with more detail in M Gowing, ‘The organisation of manpower in Britain during the Second World War’ Journal of Contemporary History Vol 7 (1972), pp147-67.↩︎

7. Economic conscription to the military: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_conscription has an outline of the usage; M Day, ‘Ending Economic Conscription’ Jacobin October 19 2018: jacobin.com/2018/10/military-recruits-full-employment-welfare-state; www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/05/economic-draft-young-neets-military-divides-opinion. More generally, there is an interesting discussion by EC Toussaint in ‘The law and political economy of food oppression’ Southwestern Law Review Vol 55 (2026), pp141-85, on political action to block food supplies as a means of forcing the acceptance of low wages, etc. See also I Ness Migration as economic imperialism Cambridge 2023.↩︎

8. Not just in Anglo-American countries: for civil law countries there is a convenient outline discussion in X Liu, ‘A comparative study of jury systems from a global perspective’ Frontiers in Humanities and Social Sciences Vol 6 (2026), pp331-42.↩︎

9. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting has an outline and references.↩︎

10. Engels to Kautsky, February 21 1891: MECW Vol 49, p131. There are several other related comments in this correspondence. “Servants” carries a clearer sense of explicit subordination than “employees”. “Chaps” is, according to Google’s AI overview, Engels’s English usage for German Kerle or Geselle, but is obsolete English; “guys” or “blokes” might work better.↩︎

11. G Breitman and S Lovell (eds) Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930-31) New York NY 1973,p 155.↩︎

12. The common expression is “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance” and the common attribution is to Thomas Jefferson (which turns out to be false): conversableeconomist.com/2017/07/05/notes-on-eternal-vigilance-is-the-price-of-liberty, elaborating on jeffersonlibrary.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/eternal-vigilance. For Curran see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philpot_Curran. He is not only the first attested user, but closer to our present concerns, since in the passage quoted he was condemning the usurpation of Dublin mayoral elections by the aldermen, due to the lack of opposition from the Commons: “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance, which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.”↩︎

13. ‘Time is on our side’ Weekly Worker June 25: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1591/time-is-on-our-side (under subhead, ‘Question time’).↩︎

14. ‘Chairman’ is sexist. ‘Chair’ works fine in oral usage, but the statement “meetings need chairs” in this article would read like a claim about furniture.↩︎

15. E Hasted, ‘General history: Justices of the peace’ The history and topographical survey of the County of Kent Vol 1, Canterbury, 1797: see British History Online www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-kent/vol1/pp215-221. There is a detailed study of JPs and quorum JPs in JM Kendrick, ‘What makes a JP? A socio-economic and character study of Justices of the Peace in Elizabethan Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire’ (PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2025).↩︎

16. ‘Legalism and labyrinthine views’ Weekly Worker July 2 2026: www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1592/legalism-and-labyrinthine-rules, subhead ‘Left support’.↩︎

17. The old International Marxist Group and its successors, while I was a member, had a fourth category: the “no-vote”. I was never clear what was the point of a “no-vote” as distinct from an abstention, and I do not see any point to it now.↩︎