"But anarchism is a really broad category, and just because a Zerzan thinks numbers are harmful for society, it doesn't mean Chomsky holds the same views."
Tayssir, Doug, and others,
You're right. A lot of ideas are crammed under the "anarchist" rubric -- stuff from Kaczynski to Tolstoy to Zerzan to Chomsky. I can't account for everything Bookchin or Albert say, just myself; and thinking there's "the anarchist" position on issue X is like saying there's "the socialist" position on issue X. Unfortunately it isn't that easy. Bookchin may only want a face-to-face, small scale democracy, like Doug mentions. More's the pity. But plenty of anarchists are also in organizations that are more ambitious than that, like David Graeber, for example.
Regardless of whether the IWW as it exists today is a good or bad organization, I think that what's needed is a Wobbly-TYPE of model of direct economic democracy. The IWW involves offices, a constitution, and delegates empowered to do certain tasks. If that isn't 100% pure anarchist, well so be it. Whatever it is, I think it's the best idea there is -- economic democracy along the lines proposed by the early CIO, the CNT, IWW, etc., which can and does involve delegates, confederal structures, etc. The early CIO was a Congress of Industrial Orgs -- key word, "congress." I personally see nothing wrong with the idea of a congress of industrial delegates.
Nowadays I think these ideas of workers' democracy need to be augmented with a communitarian dimension so that communities and their inhabitants can have a meaningful say in production, etc., regardless of whether a given person is in a workplace at the time (someone maybe out due to disability, but still should be able to have a voice in running their economic lives).
These may seem like long-term goals (Yoshie's "outer planets") and they are, but the longer term goals should inform what we do in the short term, and any short-term type action does imply or infer a set of principles that point in a longer term direction, whether we like it or not.
About consensus: I don't think consensus is useful outside of extremely small-scale settings; say, housemates who want to run a house a certain way. In larger scale situations it grants too much power to single large egos who can constantly roadblock decisions favored by the majority. In other words, consensus in large groups grants too much authority to single individuals. Minority rights can be protected with what the IWW or CIO or any organization should have -- a constitution that protects minorities from majority tyranny. A right on a piece of paper is different from a right that is the ingrown habit of a people, though -- any right that's meaningful, whether it's the right to free speech, or the belief that majority rule should end at the doorstep of your house, has to become culturally ingrained.
The only way to make economic democracy happen is through some general agreement on a program or course of action. It doesn't even have to be specific. I'd like to see people work in solidarity to take workplaces and private property from bosses and then run them collectively, with community oversight or through confederations of other community groups. Democracy has to pierce the corporate shield and dig out corporate America's authoritarian innards, replace them with radical democratic structures, and wrench decision-making power away from bosses to redistribute it to the people.
Or at least that's my crazy idea! Whether Bookchin or Albert agrees, I don't know, but it seems to make sense regardless. There are organizations already working roughly along these lines, so it's not like they have to be conjured out of thin air. But it'll also require self-starters, too.
-B.
Doug Henwood wrote:
"A lot of anarchists/greens, and Michael Albert, don't like hierarchies of any kind. Many don't like representative structures - people like Murray Bookchin want no units so large that face-to-face meetings become impractical."