What you're not confronting here (and you as an anarchist should be particularly concerned), is that consensus decision making as practiced during A16 does not eradicate the problem of "leadership." Consensus decision making _does_ create leadership, but it creates completely unelected, de facto, UNACCOUNTABLE leadership. As such, it's an even bigger disaster for freedom than say, democratic centralism (and I mean the real thing, not the Stalinist caricature).
It's also a complete inappropriate form of decision making for a large-scale, industrial society. I can't imagine production, distribution, and consumption decisions in a future socialist society being made along these lines. Christ, Chuck, it took the action spokescouncil THREE fucking meetings to decide whether to let those poor schlemiels who wanted to plant flowers participate.
And then there's the philosophical underpinnings of consensus decision making. Modern consesus decision making comes out of the Green movement, a movement which ignores the class nature of capitalist society and contends that everything would be alright if we could just convince everyone that their production and consumption patterns are wasteful and harmful. As if the ruling class doesn't know that pumping PCBs into rivers is environmentally destructive. I don't want to reach a consensus with the bosses; I wanna whup their asses.
My affinity group, Rosa Luxemburg, decided to junk the consensus model internally early on and revert to a modified form of majority rule with concern for minority opinions. I think this was ultimately more efficient in the long run. There's gotta be a happy medium between Roberts Rules and anarcho-masturbationism.
comradely,
Alex L.
------Original Message------ From: Chuck0 <chuck at tao.ca> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Sent: June 20, 2000 2:18:55 PM GMT Subject: Re: Where was the Color at A16 in D.C.?
JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> Yeah, early in my political career I became a great fan of a somewhat
reduced
> Robert's Rules. Working people with families have no time for this
> anarchochildish consensus bullshit. When I chaired meetings we started on
> time and finished our business in an hour and a half at most. Three cheers
> for liberal democracy!
Yeah! Long live the central committee!
<< Chuck0 >>
This was the year *everything* changed. -- Commander Ivanova, 2261
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"A society is a healthy society only to the degree that it exhibits anarchistic traits." - Jens Bjørneboe
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