[lbo-talk] Political Participation (was Re: consensus-direct-representative democracy etc)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat May 31 23:29:55 PDT 2003


At 1:03 AM -0400 6/1/03, Chuck0 wrote:
>You argue that consensus privileges minority rights over the
>majority, but other systems do that exactly, by privileging
>leadership, or the agenda of a small steering committee over the
>input of the entire group. The group is expected to rubberstamp the
>proposals and if there is dissent, it can frequently be forced
>through using majority rule decision-making. The problem with this
>is that it alienates the minority.

What makes people mobilized and what keeps them mobilized? What makes for political participation and what makes for lack of it? To take just one example, we've had some large anti-war protests in the last several months in the USA today, but protests would have been small if folks against the war on Iraq had said, "Hey, I didn't have any say in deciding the date, time, and location of the demonstration. I didn't get to choose the speakers either. In fact, I didn't play any part in shaping any aspect of the protest." Collective deliberation at political meetings, be they run by consensus or the simple majority rule or anything else, plays little to no role in the lives of the majority of people who are politically active today. -- Yoshie

* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>



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