The Dilemma of "Participatory Democracy"

SRC is operated on the basis of "participatory democracy." This is an ill defined concept but it seems to imply that under such a system everyone would participate in all decision making. In theory this sounds all very well but in practice it leads to leftist self-isolation and blocism, for the decisions are taken by whoever cares to come along to meetings and make them. The end result is the substitution of factions who operate in the name of the membership as a whole.

It is often argued by supporters of the SRC system that it allows for informed rational debate. But again the fault with this argument is that a "participatory democracy" system stifles rather than encourages debate. This is because policies are set and action determined by those who, in the maelstrom of discussion, impress most by what they seem to be saying, rather than by what they actually do say. This has been most obvious at recent meetings where certain members have appointed themselves "constitutional experts" and bludgeoned others into silence by emotionally playing upon most students general ingnorance of the VUWSA constitution.

Another inherent problem in the SRC system is that forceful individuals can dominate meetings to their own advantage. This is not my criticism but that of a former SRC Co-ordinator, Jonathon Scott, who writes in his introduction to the 1979 SRC policy booklet: "...the role of SRC Coordinator has undergone a significant change in recent times. This state of affairs is wholly attributable to one event. In 1978 'Person X' began university. It is likely that rumours to the effect that since his arrival the SRC minutes have had to be stored in the Union basement because there is no other room large enough are slight exaggeration. Nevertheless I am acutely aware of the fact that I am the first SRC Co-ordinator that has ever had to face the annual task of summarising policy and in the process summarizing 'Person X'.

One need only consider the dozen or so names that appear and re-appear, with tiresome regularity in SRC minutes, as movers, seconders of, and speakers to, motions to realise that SRC is being used as a vehicle by a minority of students for the expression of their own sectarian political platforms. Lenin astutely diagnosed such situations in his accurate and trenchant pamphlet Left-wing Communism, and infantile disorder.

Similarly Lenin, in his leaflet Left-wing Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality drives right to the roots of this problem: "It is because you devote more effort to learning by heart and committing to memory revolutionary slogans than to thinking them out." That's what has happened to our own stereotyped Party writers who go on and on about the so-called 'democratic' institution SRC. But democracy' and freedom of oppression for whom? Themselves or for all students?