On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Gordon Fitch wrote:
> There's no particular reason to believe that liberal democratic
> procedures in themselves will lead to better racial or cultural
> balance, however. What they seem to do in the outer world is
> lead to a sort of public legitimation of a constitutional
> dominant or ruling class who acknowledge some sort of debt to
> the unwashed while ruling them -- a bourgeoisie, one might
> say.
> Imitation of this sort of thing, the liberal State, by radical
> groups seems to lead to those depressing public meetings where
> Important People on a dais hector the multitudes gathered
> below them, after which everyone goes home and nothing much
> changes.
Those "important people on the dais" are iportant because a whole range of folks who can't attend every meeting has elected them. They have the right to speak more because they have essentially been given a lot of folks proxy to do so.
That nothing changes after a meeting is hardly some special attribute of such procedures - consensus decisionmaking can lead to endless meetings with refusals of consensus, thus forcing the status quo to remain.
The problem of the liberal state is not the procedures in themselves but the power of wealth and forces of inequality that operate to subvert them. Any system can be subverted. The problem with consensus decisionmaking is that it needs no subversion - power is allocated upfront to those with privilege of free time.
There is good reason that consensus decisionmaking is most popular with the most privileged and most white sections of the progressive movement. Whether they recognize it or not, it serves there self-interest as far as exercising power vis a vis those without such free time.
-- Nathan Newman