02.07.2026

Legalism and labyrinthine rules

Neither Major Henry M Robert nor Lord (Walter) Citrine provide the approach needed by the revolutionary working class. Mike Macnair critiques the widely accepted parliamentary forms of decision-making in the third of a series of articles

In the first article in this series, two weeks ago, I laid out what I planned to cover; and began with arguments for the importance of the issue, and why questions of procedures of decision-making should not be regarded as a diversion from ‘real politics’.¹ Last week I turned to issues of time, which were posed both by arguments that democratic decision procedures are time-wasting in general, and by claims that the urgency of the situation, or the need to seize the moment and the initiative, require undemocratic decision procedures.²

This week we come to my third general point: that we are concerned with principles and guidelines for practice, not with fixed rules like those to be found in Citrine on chairmanship or Robert’s rules.³ Rather, we need to begin with a paramount principle - which will reassert itself at all levels of concrete details - that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take real decisions.

Within the framework of this principle, it will then be possible to approach the conduct of decision-making meetings: meetings need chairs; how should the chair work (to draw out and promote clarifying disagreements); how to handle proposals for amendments; what about proposals that are counterposed to each other; and so on.

Decision-making on a larger scale involves specific considerations. The easiest example is national organisation, but the same issues would apply in a local or sectoral organisation that got big enough. Sub-division into local groups - cells, branches, and so on - is indispensable; and a large part of discussion can and must take place in these, before any larger conference. But even so, large numbers imply too many choices available, and it remains necessary to narrow the range of possible choices beyond the procedural forms discussed for meetings in general. Part of this role can be played by factional groups and caucusing at conferences; but arrangements such as commissions (as used in the early Comintern) and compositing negotiations (as used in the Labour Party before the recent past) are necessary.

The same issue - too many choices available - poses in a different way the question of leading committees. These are as much needed by large local organisations as by national ones. Here the choice between collective leading committees and the cults of individual leaders (and the direct election of individual officers) is a choice between democracy and Bonapartism.

Rules

There is a considerable history of the construction of elaborate rules or proposed rules for left groups. CPGB authors have written critically about this in connection with the Socialist Alliance around 2000-03, the small Campaign for a Marxist Party in 2007, Left Unity in 2013-15, and recently Your Party’s left.⁴

In the USA, there is some recent history of explicit debate. Ramsin Canon of the Bread and Roses Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America in 2019 advocated the use of ‘RONR’ (Robert’s Rules of order newly revised) throughout the DSA; Renato Flores in a 2021 Cosmonaut article calls for attention to knowledge monopolies as producing or reinforcing power imbalances, and seeks attention to skills training; he advocates use of the ‘Rusty’s rules’ simplified version as more accessible than Robert’s rules.⁵

Robert’s rules of order in the current (12th) edition of 2020 runs to 714 pages in a format slightly larger than a mass-market paperback⁶ (the index is made up of 63 pages and there are 50 pages of separately paginated front matter). The original 1876 Pocket manual of rules of order ran to 192 pages, including eight pages of index and the front matter. There is some parallel with Butterworths company law handbook, which collects UK statutes relating to company law (for American readers, corporate law); in the 1978 edition I used when studying the topic in 1980-81, there were 462 pages (plus front matter and index), in the 2025 edition 3,776 pages (plus front matter and index).

The dynamic to expansion reflects the character of the project as law. The original author of Robert’s rules, Major Henry M Robert (1837-1923) was perfectly explicit on this: “A work on parliamentary law has long been needed, based, in its general principles, upon the rules and practice of Congress, but adapted, in its details, to the use of ordinary societies … This manual has been prepared with a hope of supplying the above information in a condensed and systematic form …”⁷

I will discuss later why law as a technique tends to produce an expanding volume of rules. But at this point it is worth noting that Robert derives his basic conceptions from English ‘parliamentary law’,⁸ as adapted by the US Congress. A page later, he quotes from Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 Manual of parliamentary practice:

And whether these forms be in all cases the most rational or not is really not of so great importance. It is much more material that there should be a rule to go by than what that rule is; that there may be a uniformity of proceeding in business not subject to the caprice of the speaker or captiousness of the members. It is very material that order, decency and regularity be preserved in a dignified public body.

The choices made thus express loyalty to the parliamentary form of the constitution. Hardly surprising, given that Robert was a US army officer. We can make the same point in relation to the ‘procedural bible’ of the British labour movement before the recent intensification of bureaucratic control through ‘consultation’, plebiscitary Bonapartism, and so on: Citrine’s ABC of chairmanship (originally published in 1921 as The labour chairman). The model is derived from capitalist procedural practice. Lord (Walter) Citrine was a trade unionist, arch-bureaucrat, witch-hunter of communists and later director of public companies. In the ‘preface’ to the ABC he makes the continuity clear:

I have consulted most of the authoritative works including Erskine May’s Parliamentary practice, Palgrave’s Chairman’s handbook, Gore-Browne’s Handbook on joint stock companies, Courtenay Ilbert’s Manual of procedure of the House of Commons, and several old books, among them Smith’s Handy book of public meetings ...⁹

Wal Hannington’s Mr chairman!¹⁰ was written by an ‘official communist’ - but the procedural method it lays out is, in fact, a simplified version of Citrine. Citrine’s method had become deeply entrenched in the Labour Party and trade union movement, just as Robert’s rules has become deeply entrenched in the US trade union movement and left.

If we ask why the US and British labour movements adopted procedural forms derived from those of the capitalist class, the answer is fairly simple. The original craft unions emerged out of artisan guilds, which were organisations of the urban petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, the ‘rule of law’ regime was utterly dominant in 19th century British and US politics.

Many trade union leaders were - until they were forced to accommodate to the idea of a Labour Party - ideologically committed Liberals, just as many trade union leaders in the US today have been ideologically committed Democrats. Labour as it emerged began as a Lib-Lab appendix to the parliamentary Liberal Party and went on, in 1914-18, to distinguish itself as a state loyalist party. Authors and leaders like Citrine were part of this political milieu. For them Labour was a lobby group within the framework of loyalty to capitalist rule. It is entirely unsurprising that they should create procedural forms that express loyalty to the existing constitution.

Serving capital

The modern capitalist ‘rule of law’ state form was created by trial and error out of elements drawn from Roman republicanism and elements drawn from the ‘feudal constitutionalism’ of Magna Carta and similar instruments. In each of the original bourgeois revolutions it was found to be necessary to have bulwarks for the defence of property rights and creditor claims against the plebeian masses.

The first element was the ‘single person’: the Stadtholder in the Netherlands, Cromwell and later the restored monarchy in England, the Federal presidency in the US, Bonaparte in France. This aspect is copied in later bourgeois constitutions in preserved or restored monarchies and in elected presidencies, and in corporations in the persons of the managing director or chief executive officer. In modern politics the principle is also expressed in the demand of the capitalist media that there must be a single directly elected ‘leader’ of every party, and the attempt to run elections as plebiscites on the virtues or vices of this individual. The ‘single person’ serves to insulate the state bureaucracy from immediate subjection to the elected representatives.

The other side of this coin is the ‘rule of law’ and the creation of formal written constitutions, from Cromwell’s 1653 Instrument of Government, through the US constitution and successive French constitutions, to modern constitutions generally. The ‘rule of law’ is an ideological concept, but at the end of the day it expresses the primacy of property-owners’ interests, guaranteed in all the bourgeois constitutions and bills of rights, and in the predictability of judicial decisions.

This political form is specific to capitalist rule, because it is the first ruling class in history whose claims to take the social surplus are grounded solely on capitalists’ ownership of the means of production and money, without claims to direct rights over other people grounded on personal status (the free citizen’s ownership of slaves, clerical standing, lordship). As long as the state is committed to guaranteeing property rights, it is committed to the rule of capital; and the ‘rule of law’ guarantees that commitment.

The ‘separation of powers’ is part of this commitment. What is fundamentally involved is the separation of the judiciary as the oracles of law from the other branches of government. This separation is materially grounded in the income of the caste of lawyers from legal fees paid by property owners. This income enables the lawyers and hence the judges to oppose the state core or the majority in the legislature. But it is formally enabled by the separation of the legislative power (parliaments and other elected bodies) from the executive power (monarchs and presidents and the bureaucratic-coercive state under them. The point is that the elected legislature is permitted to act only by making general rules: it is then for the executive to decide how to implement these rules and for the judiciary to interpret them.

Both the directly elected presidents, and so on, and the elected representatives are in possession of a ‘quasi’ form of property right in their offices: a lease, or term of years absolute, to quote the English Law of Property Act 1925 section 1(1)(b). They are not removable during the term: even if provision is made for recall, it is usually impracticable. The term therefore functions within capitalism as an exploitable property right: that is, that the president or legislator sells his or her vote. In the imperialist countries these transactions are rarely transparent: rather, the official does favours for particular capitalists, in return for which they contribute to his or her re-election, in return for which ... and so on.

The result of this combination is that the state is responsive to the capitalist class as such and to particular capitalists. The relationship of forces within this class is expressed in the relative ability to bribe officials and to pay legal fees. Thus, just as shareholders have votes proportional to their shareholding in the company, property owners within the state’s territory have an indirect voice in the state proportional to their property holdings and income (a point made by Tom Paine’s 1776 analogy of government with a joint stock company).

The system of the rule of law and separation of powers thus functions to politically expropriate the large mass of the voters. The only choice voters are given is to decide to which corrupt politician to lease an office. In the direct election of presidents, and in first-past-the-post single-member elections, the choice is even narrower, since the only meaningful choice will be between the two candidates, or parties, that capitalist financial and media support has previously selected as having a ‘real chance of winning’.

This characterisation offers a little historical theoretical elaboration, but the fundamental points are not original. They were diagnosed by Marx and Engels.¹¹

Robert’s rules, Citrine and ‘labour movement practice’, described above, follow the general pattern of the separation of powers and the rule of law. There is an elaborate constitution, and a separation between the conference as a legislature and the national executive - often overtly so-called. The conference takes policy resolutions, which are the equivalent of legislation. The constitution and the procedural forms amount to a ‘law’ that sets limits on the decisions of conference. The elected officers and other full-time officials, like presidents and MPs, have a quasi-proprietary ‘term of years’ in their offices.

There is one significant omission. Though labour movement constitutions often provide for a ‘judiciary’ in the form of a disciplinary tribunal, there are no permanent judges or lawyers specialised in labour movement disciplinary proceedings. The private property and money is not there to support such a practice. When push comes to shove, however, and some capitalist or part of the state is prepared to back the dissident with legal costs, recourse can be had to the capitalists’ courts and lawyers. Compare the Labour right’s well-funded ‘lawfare’ against the Corbyn leadership in 2015-19.¹²

The rule of law form of labour movement constitutions, in other words, acts to subordinate the membership to the capitalist class and the capitalist state - through the political monopoly of the union and party leaderships, the independence of the bureaucracy and the rule of the bourgeois courts, just as the voters are subordinated within the bourgeois state itself by analogous means.

Left support

Why should leftists, who seek to overthrow capitalist class rule, support ideas of this sort? Ramsin Canon’s argument for Robert’s rules centres on two primary points and a number of secondary ones. The two primary points are, first, that the rules are “objective and widely available” (point 4 in his list) and “widely used and accepted” (point 5); and, second, that they “err on the side of promoting debate” (point 2) and “protect minorities without immobilising political majorities” (point 7).¹³

The second argument, from availability and common use, is in substance simply an argument for not thinking about the issues in question - apart from a single point, which is that, since Robert’s rules is in common use, leftists need to know how to play the game, if they are not to be constantly outmanoeuvred by the right.

The same can, of course, be said of the less democratic procedural forms of the post-Blair Labour Party: it was very striking that a lot of leftist youth who went into Labour in the ‘Corbyn surge’ were turned off and dropped out rather than learning to play the procedural games, which the right, who largely retained control, deployed against them in the constituency parties.

But the argument - from ‘most people use these forms’ to ‘we ought to use these forms’ - would actually imply accepting full capitalist control through bribery, or the bureaucratic centralism of the Communist Party of China (after all, 101 million members) or the Hindutva Bonapartism of the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party (140 million members).

The argument that the rules “protect minorities” is probably the more potent one. Many leftists and ex-leftists have passed through bureaucratic-centralist far-left groups and have experienced in them the political expropriation of the membership. That bureaucratic centralism politically expropriates the membership was blindingly obvious in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and is equally obvious in, for example, the British Socialist Workers Party: the appointment and employment of local full-timers by the centre creates a patron-client chain or apparatus faction; the members receive only such truths as the apparatus faction chooses they shall hear (and for the rest, lies); the powers of the central committee are used by the apparatus faction to pre-empt the appearance of any organised opposition by expulsions, etc; the occasional use of violence against dissidents creates an underlying threat to keep the rest in line.

Moreover, the former Eurocommunists and their satellites in the 1990s carried this bureaucratic-centralist political culture into the trade unions and socialist parties (the DSA is an unusual survivor of the older Labour and Socialist Party style of procedure). From this point of view, ‘traditional labour movement practice’ looks nostalgically attractive.

Before recent changes to increase bureaucratic control, and in the more democratic bodies remaining, this ‘traditional labour movement practice’ framework provides a means for quasi-democratic decision-making. Members, groups of members or branches or affiliates as the case might be can submit any motion they choose to meetings, provided they do so within the deadline. Others can then submit amendments to the motions (again within a deadline). Everything submitted will appear on an agenda, if it is not ruled out of order on one or another ground of inconsistency with the rules.

But the chair and secretary in a local organisation - or at national level the conference arrangements committee or standing orders committee - arrange compositing, list motions in an order they choose, and so on. These decisions have a profound impact on the likelihood of a motion succeeding. In the first place, there are almost invariably more agenda items than the time available, so that the order of the agenda determines which items will even be discussed.

Secondly, a commonly accepted rule is that, if there are two or more inconsistent motions or amendments, the passage of the first taken causes the others to ‘fall’ and not be voted on. The result is that by listing the chair’s or CAC/SOC’s preferred motion or amendment first it is possible to prevent the meeting seeing the level of support for alternatives. The effect of this is to pre-empt an important discussion element of the decision process. The chair, or CAC/SOC, confronts the members as monopolists of information - and the members are to be atomised (if there is more than one minority, we can never see the proportionality of views for alternatives - in order, perhaps, to make coalitions).

This procedural political expropriation was familiar to leftists who were involved in the Labour Party or trade unions in the 1960s-70s. From what I know (from reading leftist journalism from the 1970s-80s and some historians) the US trade union movement decision-making had the same vices, but with added vote-rigging and gangsterism. In sum, in ‘labour movement practice’ the members are politically expropriated by the same means by which the mass of voters are politically expropriated in universal-suffrage capitalist constitutional regimes: limited choices are allowed, but these possible choices are defined outside the democratic decision process by the officers, using procedural control and control of information.

This character actually flowed from the underlying ideas of parliamentary procedure that informed Roberts and Citrine. For two reasons.

The first I referred to last week. Parliamentary procedure was developed on the more-or-less silent assumption that the default rule is decision-making by private property owners; so that inaction is preferable to action. Parliamentary procedure, and the dilute forms of parliamentary procedure expressed in Robert’s rules and Citrine, therefore offer plenty of mechanisms for blocking collective action by procedural means without a substantive vote.

Secondly, parliamentary procedure was created as much in the interests of the crown as in the interests of the representation of the Commons: one of the principles is that “the king’s government must be carried on”. The speaker of the House of Commons is now supposed to be neutral (unlike the Speaker of the House of Representatives); but, until quite modern times, was put in by government to assist with managing the elected representatives. This is part of a bias towards control of the agenda by government that is deep-rooted in parliamentary procedure. Taken into the labour movement, it implies control of the agenda by the full-time officials.

Law problem

There is also a deeper problem involved. Canon writes:

Robert and the subsequent revisers of his rules were primarily concerned with one thing: “careful balance of the rights of persons or subgroups within an organisation’s or assembly’s total membership”. To that end, the rules have been developed to protect the rights of

1. The majority
2. The minority
3. Individual members vis-à-vis the whole organisation
4. Member non-participants (ie, absent members)
5. The organisation as a whole

The protection of the “member non-participants (ie, absent members)” is the classic tale of the “silent majority” invoked by Richard Nixon in 1969, and (without the language) Neil Kinnock against Militant in 1985, John Rees against left critics in Respect in 2004-05; and most recently the Your Party leadership.

It is more fundamental, however, that Robert’s rules is a system of rules (as I quoted earlier, of parliamentary law) that sets out to balance rights. The scheme inherently follows a rule-of-law practice. The problem takes us back to the earlier question: why Robert’s rules has expanded from 192 to 714 pages - and analogously, the statutes governing UK company law have expanded from 462 pages to 3,776.

The very basic problem is that rules are made of words. And then the question which is posed is: what do these words mean? How are they to be interpreted? Really quite simple words turn out in the case of dispute to be arguable. In the 1986 case of Re St Stephen’s Walbrook the question was whether a large Henry Moore statue with a flat top could be considered to be a “table” for the purposes of the 1602 canons of the Church of England, which require every church to have a “convenient communion table” (for some reason it was not argued whether the object could properly be called “convenient”). The Diocesan Court took the view that, since the purpose of the 1602 canons was to get rid of altars as part of making the Church of England Protestant, this statue was not a “table”. On appeal, the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved disagreed: the ordinary natural meaning of ‘table’ was in their view an elevated flat surface on which things could be put down, so this statue was a ‘table’.

This issue of ‘literal interpretation’ versus ‘purposive interpretation’ can have extremely sharp political consequences. The UK Supreme Court in For women Scotland overruled the purposive interpretation of the Scots Court of Session in favour of an “ordinary natural meaning” of the word ‘woman’ - drawn from the Book of Genesis (though that was not in the least admitted).¹⁴ Whenever judges claim that they are relying on the ordinary natural meaning of words, we should assume that they are about to make an arbitrary decision.

Law is made to more or less work, in spite of this very extensive potential arbitrariness in the interpretation of words and hence of rules, for two reasons. The first is the existence of the legal profession. Because the legal profession is a smallish closed group, it can have common ideas about what words mean. This is clearest in what are referred to as ‘terms of art’, the lawyers’ technical language - like the ‘fee simple absolute in possession’ (very roughly, legal ownership of land), or ‘murder’. The Digest of the Roman emperor, Justinian (534 CE), contained a title, De verborum significatione, (‘on the meaning of words’). Today LexisNexis markets Words and phrases legally defined (there are various competitors).¹⁵

The legal profession takes us to Renato Flores’s point about knowledge monopolies and Robert’s rules as the basis of a knowledge monopoly. But it is also true that the ‘specialists’ in Robert’s rules or Citrine who pop up with procedural objections are mostly not ordinary lawyers, but ‘barrack-room lawyers’: they do not form a functioning professional collective. The consequence is that the argument for the ‘objectivity’ and ‘common understanding’ of these rules is false. To have a legal profession proper, it needs to be paid for - out of social surplus, by some exploiting class (slaveowners, landlords, capitalists).

The second reason that law is more or less made to work is that the rules are not just words. They have underlying them two foundational purposes (principles or goals). One is predictability of decision or ‘certainty’. This can serve interpretation in the sense both of tying interpretation to previous interpretations (precedents, and so on) and in the sense of asking the question: is the interpretation offered going to work in a variety of future related cases?

But this on its own is not enough. Law also has as a foundational purpose justice: “careful balance of the rights of persons or subgroups”. ‘Justice’, of course, is widely debated. But the basic principle of legal justice is corrective justice: that a defendant should not take away something that belongs to a claimant. That is, ‘rights’ have to be analogised to private property in order to function as a legal goal or principle that can cut down the range of possible interpretations of words.

Back again to the rule of law as the form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The Soviet case demonstrated that without the lawyers paid by the ruling class, and thus independent of the state, formal laws exert no practical control over the state.¹⁶ Conversely, law becomes less law-like, the further it moves from private property relations.

Companies and voluntary associations are one of the areas in which this is a problem. The courts have been since the late 1600s concerned to deal with issues arising because of the conflict between the idea of the company shareholders having rights against each other, and the internal regime of majority rule. The result is that corporate management issues come to be treated as (at least sometimes) ‘non-justiciable’. The frame of justice and the frame of majority rule are in conflict.

Another aspect of the same point was quoted as proverbial by the Roman advocate and politician, Cicero, in 44 BCE: summum ius, summa iniuria - ‘the more law, the more injustice’. Behind this tag is the fact that the predictability goal of laws (and rules) inherently promotes the dishonest use of the rule as a form of scam. It is this conflict which drives the enormous multiplication of rules - and the expansion of both the UK company law statutes and Robert’s rules. If we are committed to the method of rules as the only way to deal with problems, all we can do is create an exception to the original rule. And then an exception to the exception. And then …

To make any rules work requires underlying principles, to enable choice between interpretations. The principles underlying Robert’s rules, Citrine and so on are ‘rights’ - that is, private property. To create democratic procedural forms we need to start in a different place. As I said at the beginning, this starting point will be the paramount principle - which will reassert itself at all levels of concrete details - that people who are prepared to participate in the decision process should be able to take real decisions.

1. ‘Centrality of democracy’ Weekly Worker June 18 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1590/centrality-of-democracy).↩︎

2. ‘Time is on our side’ Weekly Worker June 25 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1591/time-is-on-our-side).↩︎

3. W Citrine Citrine’s ABC of chairmanship London 1943.↩︎

4. Socialist Alliance: see, for example, J Conrad, ‘Sectarianism and a binary constitution’ Weekly Worker November 8 2001 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/407/sectarianism-and-a-binary-constitution); Campaign for a Marxist Party: M Macnair, ‘The procedural is political’ November 15 2007 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/697/the-procedural-is-political); Left Unity: PCC, ‘Left Unity: How to vote at conference’ November 28 2013, (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/988/left-unity-how-to-vote-at-conference); P Manson, ‘Left Unity: making a safe space for left ideas’ December 5 2013 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/989/left-unity-making-a-safe-space-for-left-ideas); M Macnair, ‘Left Unity: code of conduct or a safe spaces nightmare?’, November 13 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1034/left-unity-code-of-conduct-or-a-safe-spaces-nightm); Your Party left: C Roberts, ‘Drag towards bureaucracy’ February 19 2026 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1573/drag-towards-bureaucracy); ‘We need light and air’ March 19 2026 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1577/we-need-light-and-air).↩︎

5. R Canon, ‘Why Robert should rule’ The Call April 16 2019; Flores, ‘The procedural is political’ Cosmonaut August 2012. For ‘Rusty’s rules’ see chicagoiww.wordpress.com/rustys-rules-of-order-understanding-meeting-procedure-and-putting-ideas-into-action; and libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rules-order (2020).↩︎

6. HM Robert Robert’s rules of order New York NY 2020.↩︎

7. HM Robert Pocket manual of rules of order for deliberative assemblies Chicago IL 1876, p11.↩︎

8. On this the major source is Erskine May (first edition: 1844; the current version online is at erskinemay.parliament.uk).↩︎

9. W Citrine Citrine’s ABC of chairmanship London 1943, piii. The list in the Preface to The Labour chairman (at pv) is slightly different, but still starts with Erskine May and Palgrave.↩︎

10. W Hannington Mr chairman! London 1950 (my copy is 1980).↩︎

11. H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution New York NY 1977, Vol 1, book 1, chapter 13.↩︎

12. See, for instance, ‘Scorched earth litigation’ August  2016 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1118/scorched-earth-litigation); ‘Hodging their bets’ August 9 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1215/hodging-their-bets).↩︎

13. The secondary points are that RONR is flexible (points 1 and 3) and that RONR is sufficiently elaborate to deal with complex problems (point 6).↩︎

14. See, for example, M Macnair, ‘Case of judicial usurpation’ Weekly Worker April 24 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1535/case-of-judicial-usurpation).↩︎

15. lexisweb.co.uk/sources/words-and-phrases-legally-defined.↩︎

16. For more discussion, see M Macnair, ‘Law and state as holes in Marxist theory’ Critique vol 34 (2006) pp211-36 (also available at legalform.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/macnair-law-and-state-as-holes-in-marxist-theory-2006.pdf).↩︎