Hi, Ancap-chan! At the end of October, you answered a question about the LPR, during which you read their charter. Could you analyze the Charter of the Tea Club for inaccuracies, potential abuses and flaws, and its compliance with principles?
Anonymous Tea-pot (question accompanied by a donation of 0.00119809btc)
As I indicated during the analysis of the LPR charter, complex multi-page charters are quite unnatural for a compact young organization and are practically useless in the absence of an external enforcer who could, based on the text of the charter, make decisions regarding various conflicts within the organization. If a certain group of people within the organization systematically violates the charter, their opponents will have only one pathetic tool—to announce the expulsion of this group. However, it is utterly unclear why a decision on expulsion should be followed by those expelled. They have the opportunity to continue their activities while calling themselves members of the organization, until the emerging split becomes so unacceptable to the majority of activists that they flee on their own in search of a healthier environment.
Thus, the content of a charter can only be seriously analyzed based on the fantastic assumption that all members of the organization will be guided by it in their actions under any circumstances. Meanwhile, organizations are routinely shaken by scandals, large or small, and each such scandal usually brings stronger apparatchiks into the organization’s leadership, weeding out those for whom the substance is more important than the form of activity for which the organization was created.
It should also be noted that it is practically impossible to meaningfully adjust a charter through democratic methods. All of Hayek’s arguments regarding the impossibility of constructing coordinated plans that take into account the interests of various groups via democratic methods are fully applicable to making amendments to regulatory documents, whether they be charters, constitutions, budgets, and so on—not to mention creating them from scratch. Sooner or later, the question arises of entrusting the drafting of the document to experts and then voting on the final text. Thus, the original text of any charter may be successful to the extent of the expert’s talent who drafted it, and further democratic mechanisms for adjusting the charter are simply meaningless, regardless of whether they are written into the original charter or not.
Don’t think that I am trying to dodge the question: I have managed to get through your charter. It is clear that you tried to create your own LPR “with blackjack and hookers,” meaning you started from the charter of the libertarian party and tried to prescribe mechanisms of interaction within the movement that would better correspond to libertarian principles.
According to your charter, the movement is a collection of regional branches, the activities of which are coordinated by elected steering committees within the branches (as in the LPR) and an interregional council consisting of the chairpersons of the steering committees at the interregional level (unlike the LPR, where this is handled by a body elected at the congress). You have also separated the actual management of the branch from the accounting and control functions, whereas in the LPR the accounting and control body exists more as a formality, and the membership records are kept by the head of the branch. I have no idea how this division works in your practice, but separating the CEO from the HR director seems justified for a large organization, but excessive for a small one. You have also implemented liquid democracy instead of representative democracy when it comes to a large interregional meeting. I don’t know if something similar exists in other Russian organizations or how it works, but generally, the world’s attitude toward such a mechanism is quite favorable.
You also pay a lot of attention to the work of arbitration—the negative experience carried over from the LPR is clearly felt. You didn’t dare implement a pure arbitration court, preferring a compromise model with a council of wise arbitrators joined by representatives of the conflicting parties. It is not hard to guess that if the arbitrators are biased, the arbitration will turn into a farce, and the charter does not provide for a mechanism to deny the jurisdiction of a knowingly biased arbitration. So this scheme is also potentially vulnerable to bureaucratic intrigues, just like any other model with a permanent judicial body.
What would I suggest?
If you were a purely libertarian organization, I would suggest you throw away the charter altogether and be guided solely by libertarian principles: freedom of association, freedom of contract, freedom of choice of arbitrator, and so on. But you aim to attract class-libs as well, so it is better to have framework documents, but it would be better to grant branches the right to adopt their own charters and work regulations, and to abandon rigid territorial divisions (simply a group of movement participants united for joint work, started a treasury, got some useful gear, and solves common tasks until they split up). It only makes sense to strictly prescribe the conflict resolution procedure, and it would be great if this turned out to be something like: after an official accusation is made, the parties must amicably settle their conflict within a certain timeframe with a subsequent official notification of the end of the conflict; if an amicable solution is not reached, they have the right to apply to anyone willing to act as an arbitrator and choose a certain number of these volunteers within a certain timeframe; if a choice cannot be made, the conflict is recognized as frozen, and the parties are deprived of the right to participate in any decisions directly affecting each other’s interests; after a decision is issued by the arbitrator, the parties either voluntarily execute it or leave the movement. In general, something like that, the details may vary.
And that’s basically it. You will get an evolutionary system united by goals, principles, and a conflict resolution mechanism—but without coercion toward something people are not ready for. What more could you possibly need?
