If by "decentralization" someone really means "smaller is better," then that's dumb. If they mean the principle of federalism, of entities cross-checking and balancing each other so that no one entity arrogates too much power to itself, then that's something that I think is more in line with having a better, freer, more humane society.
The recovered factories of Argentina, the massive Mondragon enterprise, and other entities, all employ varying models of workers' democracy, and they're all industrial. A new era of meaningful workers' democracy is what organizations like the IWW have stood for and wanted to inaugurate, and the IWW is not consensus-based; it's based on direct democracy. (I personally am not a fan of consensus, and consensus isn't required for direct economic democracy.) I'm skeptical of any claims that "the necessities of modern society" or anything else mandate we have this or that form of authoritarianism. When it comes to full-on workers' democracy, I say, let's try it and find out, the way folks in the 17th century wanted to try out parliamentary democracy.
-B.
George Scialabba wrote:
"I guess I was assuming that mass production, large accumulations of capital, and a significant division of labor are inevitable in a high-tech economy. I'm sure there are debates on this, but I'm blanking at the moment, except for what is perhaps the earliest (and surely one of the most interesting): Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward' vs. William Morris's 'News from Nowhere.'"
Doug Henwood wrote:
"But I don't think you can have consensus decisionmaking in a large-scale enterprise. You'd need executives with some degree of power to make big decisions, though god knows how things would evolve over time. My impression is that anarchists don't like representative democracy very much, but that's exactly the kind of model I'm talking about in the economic realm."