Both are open to manipulation. There is no structural way of ensuring democracy. Formal meetings at least make available some recognisied tools for dealing with manipulation, whereas the informality of consesus does not.
Consesus when raised on a pedestal can be as dictatorial as anything else and is particularily well adapted to the bureacrat.
In practice a consensual meeting can mean that the most stubborn and repetitive element wins by ensuring either that consensus is not made ( a nil decision) or that the only consesus is the retrobate position as all others have tried, by a variety of arguments to deal with it, but it emerges defacto as the only consistant position.
The secret of democracy lies not so much in the means but in the clarity of the arguments raised. Clear, honest argument means that a democractic opinion has the ability to emerge.
This is turn leans on the cultural level of the participants and especially on them having faith in their own abilities to think through the issue. Bureacrats have one weapon that is very hard to deal with otherwise, their prentense to have special knowledge.
I have seen bureacrats speak the most inane and nonsensical rubbish but to so with so much assurity that honest people doubt their own understanding and thus tend to support what they don't understand. An odd observation, but unless the level of debate is high and the meeting as a whole are assured of their own abilities, clarity can actually work against itself - people insecure in their own knowledge tend to dismiss what they have understood when confronted by a mystery which is expounded by authority and dressed in superiority.
Some of the absurdist experiences can be had in a meeting of any kind when this antidemocratic feature is at work. Bureacrats will contradict themselves openly, change their position midstream, cast the opposite argument into shapes never suggested and sometimes just adopt the outer wrappings of what they oppose and insist that the opposition is arguing something else.
In all cases, where the social/cultural controls of bureacrats, in a sesne, underwrite the meeting itself - they can apparently get away with democratic murder. The other factor to keep in mind is that a decision which leads directly to action is a democractic feature. If consciousness flows into an act, the performance of the act feeds back into consciousness. The bureacrat on the other hand desires non-decisions, decisions that in the context of the actual actions that flow is meaningless.
It took me years to understand that bureacrats retain their power all the more securely with non-decisions (where consciousnes and the act are disconnected), then of course their governing role is supported, the mysterious and incoherent decisions being their mandate to clobber anyone who does anything.
--- Message Received --- From: "Nathan Newman" <nathan at newman.org> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 08:32:44 -0500 Subject: Re: Twinkling
In any organizing meeting, clapping or twinkling is coercive and a way to overwhelm minority opinions by continually overwhelming contrary opinions. The flip side of twinkling is the "consensus decisionmaking" that gives minorities few formal voting opportunities, since things are "talked through" until a "consensus" emerges. Twinkling is part of the coercion to force minorities to give in without formal voting, in some ways less rude than clapping but visually stronger-- it's much like the patriotic flagwaving we see in mainstream media which makes alternative opinions even more uncomfortable.
I thought Cooper's piece was a pile of crap -- why spend the first part of precious space about PA on trashing domestic folks rather than highlighting the positive -- but the general view of process being more serious in such places than in our "process-obsessed" groups strikes me as true. I find the process of many student and "anarchist" groups to be incredibly elitist and anti-democratic, with endless meetings and insider-manipulated processes, where power goes to those with the most free time and the fewest day care responsibilities.