[Sdalliance] committee meeting time/place - Mission Statement?

[Monty Kroopkin]

Are we going to do a Doodle poll for this?

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From: "Monty Kroopkin" mkroopkin at juno.com
Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2017 20:21:46 GMT
To: SDalliance at lists.resist.ca




 Angela, thanks. So it is not my proposal to amend this part: �� Proposed change 2 : rework sentence 3 → Saying “we welcome all who want to fightoppression” contradicts our points of unity; more accurately we welcome all who want tofight oppression and accept our points of unity. I think 'we welcome all who want to fight exploitation and oppression' is true to the FIRST version of our structure document, which proposed truly open campaign committees, where people who might not agree with all of the principles of the coalition could still work with us on specific issues they did agree on. Of course, this question of whether our open committees will be open only to people who agree with our points of unity is a remaining structure question we hope to resolve at the new general assembly. We seem to have two basic pathways ahead on this question. 1) We limit participation in our committees to people who agree with our points of unity. This would include individuals unaffiliated with any organization, and people affiliated with organizations which are not part of the coalition, and of course people in orgs that are part of our Collective Resistance San Diego coalition. This pathway would mean, in terms of likely numerical strength, that our coalition could have hundreds or at best a few thousand members in San Diego. The anti-capitalist left, even if we include the larger number of Sandersnistas, does not come close to what one would call a "mass " at this stage of the struggle in this country. In favor of this pathway is the greater chances of our being able to articulate a variety of unified Left positions and proposals and to build a coherent Left voice in our region. We know we will have challenges in finding that unified voice on some subjects. Not having liberals included in our internal discussions could make it easier for us to find agreements to share with the public. In disfavor of this pathway is that we will have a harder time getting larger numbers out for demonstrations, et cetera.  2) We limit participation in our committees to people who agree with some of our points of unity, but not necessarily all of these. This would again include individuals unaffiliated with any organization, and people affiliated with organizations which are not part of the coalition, but would not shut out liberals who do not agree with an anti-capitalist position. Which other parts of the points of unity we could waive would need to be well thought out. We would not want to waive anti-racist, for example. In favor of this pathway is the likely ability to involve larger numbers of people into the umbrella of our coalition, and the greater chance of us being a substantial factor in building the mass movement we all know we need now. In disfavor of this pathway is the complications it could present for building a coherent and unified Left voice in our region. It would especially be a problem, I think, if the individuals sent to the delegates council by the open campaign committees ended up being a lot of liberals. One safeguard we might adopt against that possibility would be to decide that ALL committees that are set up by our coalition have a coordinator/chairperson (or co-chairs) chosen by the coalition (through our decision process) and that those coordinators are also the delegate council reps for the committees.  I do not have a strong preference for either of the 2 above pathways. I do think that if we choose the first one, that we will then need to think about trying to affiliate Collective Resistance San Diego with one or more larger organizations that are more immediately capable of mobilizing the numbers of people we need to build a mass movement. Even if we go with the second pathway, we might still want to look at affiliations with groups that remain outside our coalition (especially on the larger regional, national and international levels). To conclude then about the wording of 'welcome all....' I think we have to first decide how open we want our campaign committees to be, and then see which 'welcome all...' wording fits that. mk   

Please note: forwarded message attached




From: Angela Risi <ang.mar.ris at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2017 12:11:36 -0800
To: SDalliance at lists.resist.ca
Subject: [Sdalliance] Request for feedback on Mission Statement

Comrades, Attached is the Mission Statement that was voted on to work with at the 1/29/17 meeting. Included in the document are notes from the discussion that followed. Please review this document and send feedback you have for the Mission Statement Committee. In solidarity, Angela
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