Text for Spokes Council Proposal

[Mike]

Proposal for Occupy Chicago Spokes Council

 

The Direct Action Committee of Occupy Chicago proposes the formulation of a Spokes Council (SC) within Occupy Chicago.  

 

1.Purpose and function of the SC: SC will internally coordinate both the various committees in Occupy Chicago as well as any other occupations that wish to participate. In order to qualify as a spoke, an occupation or committee must:
 

1. Make publicly available it’s purpose, procedures and contact info
2. Be approved by a ¾ majority of the existing Spokes Council of Chicago

 

2. Composition of SC: The SC will be comprised of one member of each committee as representative of the given committee, referred to as “Spoke.”  

 

3. Duration of Spoke: The Spoke will serve on SC for meetings of the SC during the course of one week, or one week’s “worth” of meetings due to a lack of a standard meeting due to mitigating circumstances, including but not limited to a holiday.  After having taken a turn serving as Spoke for one week, the given committee member will be able to serve as Spoke again, following the turns of any committee members who have had yet to serve and are both interested in and have signed up to do so.

 

4. Scheduling of SC: All SC meetings will be scheduled two weeks in advance. The schedule for SC will be posted in calendar format on the OC website and in hard format at the indoor site of OC.

 

5. Decision making within SC:  All decisions on proposals will be made via a “super majority,” (2/3 of present Spokes or above). In the event that a Spoke thinks it is necessary to “block” a decision, that Spoke will be required to discuss the reasoning behind their block in order to resolve the issue and move towards a consensus, however, full (100%) consensus will be understood to be an ideal-and not a necessity- to pass the given proposal even if a block occurs. The scope of proposals to be decided upon within SC will be limited to those that had reached the given decision-making parameters as determined by the committee forwarding the proposal.  

 

6. Autonomy of decisions within SC: The SC will be a group autonomous of the General Assembly in terms of issues discussed and/or decisions made. The decisions made by the committees that comprise the SC- i.e. all committees that comprise OC- will have equal weight to any decision made by the GA.

 

 

Forum Post: http://occupychi.org/phpbbforumforum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2402

 

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[Mark]

Maybe I'm not understanding this but this seems like a sneaking in of representative democracy through the back door in addition to an outright diminishing of democracy in general making committees not accountable or answerable to the GA.

[jkaunert]

Mark, this goes much further than that. The wording of this proposal basically strips GA of all decision making ability.
Thankfully, I doubt GA will pass its own dissolution.

[abel]

With this model, spoke persons will have more power than regular Occupy Chicago participants in terms of what is passed and what is not. We already have some level of bureaucracy because of process involved with Secretariat committee and they are working to address that. But this proposal is going the opposite direction. It empowers fewer individuals and creates even more bureaucracy for new comers and other participants to make proposals and bring it to the General Assembly. I'm deeply concerned by this proposal. We have learnt from OWS that this has proven to be a bad model. I'm not sure why this is being proposed or how it's going to benefit Occupy Chicago.

Abel

[L'avant-garde]

Yes, I too can't agree with the idea of an autonomous spokes council unanswerable to the GA. Spokes Councils are not typically decision-making bodies, they are mouths of the groups they represent, as a way to bring the opinions of their representative groups to other groups represented on the council, and most importantly, as a means to keep everybody in the loop of what other committees and groups are up to or worried about. Therefore, a representative does not rightfully have the power to make decisions, without first having built up consensus in one's own group first. Further, and for the reason of avoiding entrenchment of power among the most active individuals, representation on a spoke council is supposed to be rotational, and not just as a matter of option. And the idea of an SC controlling membership guarantees a lack of openness.

I don't really understand why a Spokes Council with the power to pass decisions that impact the GA even needs to exist. I think an SC that functions as a news dissemination device with a rotational and open membership would be a great thing. Anything that gets brought up at an SC as a voting-issue can just as easily be brought up before a GA. What this is basically saying is that those who put the most time and effort into this movement are sick of not getting their way, sick of having to explain their positions again and again to new or infrequent faces. It's basically throwing in the towel, saying, we're done trying to get more people involved; we're tired of being answerable to an inconsistent membership, and we're tired of what OC has become. An SC that is not answerable to the people it makes decisions for, that impact those people, is an illegitimate expression of hierarchy, and realistically, can't honestly expect non-SC members to abide by them. This is an entirely volunteer movement--I understand we are not the Zapatistas, fighting to establish a new society in a near-political vacuum, where everyone is obligated to be involved and attend councils. But doing this kind of shit is exactly the kind of thing that will put the nail in the coffin of Occupy Chicago.

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