> I think Bookchin also believes that any jurisdiction too
> large to allow face-to-face contact is verboten. That
> sounds like an impossible constraint to me unless you
> want a hunter-gatherer economy to go with it. Why
> direct? Maybe I'm completely ruined by my capitalist
> upbringing, but I don't really want to decide everything
> in a town-hall style gathering. I'm perfectly happy to
> elect representatives so I can go on with the rest of my
> life. Does anyone else here share this fetish of
> directness?
Shane Replied:
> Nope. That's also a fetish of Participatory Economics, isn't it?
>
> I fwd'd the excerpt, and originally saved it, because his lucid take on
> consensus fits with nearly every experience I've had with the process.
> Specifically telling was the point about how a captious minority can
> block a majority decision.
>
> -- Shane
Nope - the consensus fetish can be found in all parts of the left (though concentrated more heavily among anarchists, I have encountered it in Marxists and liberals and social democrats). And there are plenty of anarhists and PE people who don't insist on either consensus or face to face participation.
I think in practice you might end up with some sort of parlimentary system. I would guess with an upper house chosen by some fairly conventional form of proportional representation to provide deliberation and agenda setting, and a lower house that used corporate style proxies.. The lower house would thus always be subject to immediate voter feedback. The upper house would be subject to veto and dissolution by the lower, but being far more stable and consisting of fewer people would in practice set the agenda. So you would have a representative democracy that was still subject to popular control, and unable to pull shit like getting into a war that 90% of the public opposes as happened in Spain. The executive and judicial branches would be subordinate to the legislative as in conentional parilimentary systems.
Looking at all how both capitalist "democracies" and "Marxist Democracies" have worked out, I think something of the sort would be the best compromise between the endless meetings of true particpatory democracy that seem allow one type of minority to take control and and elitism of conventional representative democracy trhat allows a different kind of minority to take control.