In every left organisation I’ve been recently involved with, there are currently disputes about codes of conduct. They need to be addressed as we build voluntary organisations (parties, unions, etc.). Invariably, there are arguments for free speech. Free speech and freedom of association are absolutely vital, and being subject to laws around libel, “terrorism” etc., means there’s so much to fight for. That doesn’t mean a free-for-all in our organisations’ meetings and online channels. Our organisations must have some discipline to function with independence from wider society. Freedom of association necessarily requires freedom to deny or put conditions on membership.
We actually do need codes of conduct and speech. Meeting chairs should silence or exclude those who unapologetically deploy bigoted speech or dangerous and disruptive behaviour, and online moderators should use tools available to moderate such content. If they don’t, our spaces become unpleasant and especially hostile to oppressed groups. People, therefore, disengage and “our” spaces end up dominated by the tedious few who can tolerate (or in some cases revel in) such environments. Experience of behaviour like this may be why so many people have been willing to give up on deliberation in favour of atomised online plebiscites.
When setting up rules, we need to avoid being too prescriptive and favour democratic procedures over bureaucratic ones. A list of proscribed groups, words, etc., isn’t something we should bake into rules. They will never perfectly legislate for all situations, and people will find and, in some cases, abuse gaps. There are some who I even suspect want to face disciplinary action so they can loudly declare their free speech is being suppressed. They can carefully toe the line and happily follow every bureaucratic complaint or appeals procedure to draw out processes, causing others to disengage through attrition. We have no time for this kind of energy-sapping edgelordism.
Instead, rules should be short and express general principles like “don’t use slurs against oppressed groups”. They should clearly state who gets to interpret the rules and decide to take action. This would naturally be an elected chair for meetings, an elected committee for online forums. Whoever it is needs to have authority from the membership via regular elections. Those representatives can then use their common sense to make decisions like not silencing someone from an oppressed group if they reference or reclaim a word historically used against them. If members don’t like their decision-making, they can be kicked out democratically. For mass organisations, there should be an appeals system (probably to a jury-style body), but only for serious sanctions like suspension/expulsion, not for simple actions like muting someone in a meeting or moderating online posts.
We have to build a culture in our voluntary organisations that means people actually want to give up their precious free time to participate. If we don’t, we can never have mass participation of the working class, and thus, we’ll never have socialism.
