The first ProleWiki book club happened 12th February at 8PM UTC, and it was conceived and led by RedCustodian, with @CriticalResist helping set it up, and Clover helping with the reading.

It was a great success and signs that ProleWiki is starting to become an organic entity, because this is perhaps the first time that a major decision was made without my contribution to it, because I was not directly involved in the conceiving to the execution of the book club.

More than 2 years ago, when ProleWiki was merely 2 months old, I made some comments (some very idealist) on the direction of social ownership of ProleWiki:

We hope that in about a year or so, ProleWiki is able to exist without me individually and becomes a valuable resource to revolutionaries from all over the world, socially owned by all contributors.

It took way more than a year, but we finally have an expression of this goal, which is a somewhat big decision being taken without my contribution. I think this is pretty symbolic of the direction of our organization, which is slowly, but steadily growing.

Even though some big decisions are still directly in the hands of CriticalResist and myself, especially administrative ones, ProleWiki couldn’t have maintained an unity among its editors without some level of democracy inside our server. Editorial decisions about the content of our wiki is no longer a decision solely made by the administration, and the administration promotes a culture of consultative democracy in most of the bigger decisions of our project.

As an important disclaimer, I should add that the administration does not hold up democratic values merely because we hold up an ideal and we are noble defenders of democratic centralism. Democratic centralism works, and it gives integrity to an organization. When decisions are discussed previously, sometimes exhaustively, the chances of disagreements are close to a minimal, and only in a free criticism environment can discussions happen until their exhaustion.