I'm going to try to respond to a couple threads within this post. I'll start with the consensus conversation. I largely agree with shag, here. I think that there are probably ways that the jobs for all demand could be made in a way to alleviate some of the concerns that the anarchists have.... Most of these folks are willing to take the time to work out issues formally and informally. I think it just involves a different form of engagement. Sometimes, that's frustrating, but why not give it a shot? It may not model a new society, but its a useful exercise in thinking through other forms of collectivity. Hell, you might get a better resolution out of the process. (Ultimately, its the libertarians who are going to be the real issue.)
Secondarily, I thought Carrol's comments towards Doug were a little unfair. It seems pretty clear that the Jacobin debate and related actions were an attempt to make a political intervention into the debate, and this resolution is a kind of result. I don't think that Doug is trying to convince anarchists and libertarians, but isolate them. I think that this might be a mistake in relation to the anarchists, but its certainly a long standing approach to political intervention.
robert wood
ahh. good.
>
> I think the problem is that you are certain that consensus democracy
> cannot possibly involve rational discussion and debate. That fear is
> completely undermined by empirical evidence.
>
> R elatedly, you are also certain that majority vote entails rational
> discussion and debate. We all know that's completely not true. If it
> were, there'd be no occupations.
>
> As Polletta demonstrates in Freedom is an Endless Meeting you can have
> normative practices drawn from consensus-based decision making AND
> have majoritarian voting as d-making. There's nothing about either
> method that necessarily precludes the communicative ideal (ha ha) you
> seem to want.
>
> And BTW, people can threaten to block shit all the time. Graeber
> relates that story of early OWS planning. A woman from US Days of Rage
> threatened a block on a single issue. It didn't work. She didn't do
> it. Threatening it doesn't mean it happens. In consensus based
> decision making, the individual threatening the block knows that she
> could be destroying the entire group. That may be the goal of this
> anarchist group. Don't know and don't really care.
>
> As for the problems with what is called Conscious Social Reproduction,
> I've thought about some of it in the past, in the context of
> organizing work we've done. Maybe this will be of interest.
>
> Many political theorists call for the cultivation of practices which
> nurture citizens capable of autonomous democratic self-rule in which
> practices and authorities are understood as something we must
> actively, consciously agree to and participate in, rather than merely
> accept them as natural. in the name of democracy. It is claimed that a
> social order might possibly to transcend its own naturalized
> arbitrariness. Amy Gutmann calls this project 'conscious social
> reproduction' (CSR):
>
> "For a society to reproduce itself consciously it must be
> non-repressive. It must not restrict rational consideration of
> different
> ways of life. Instead it must cultivate the kind of character and the
> kind of intellect that enables people to choose rationally...among
> different ways of life."
>
> The politics of world construction encompass those aspects of our
> daily practices in which we ask one another whether what we do
> everyday reproduces the social world as we would wish it to be when we
> think about such things as justice, progress, and the 'good society.'
> Here, political participation is not a choice. It is a fact of life in
> so far as we always already live in and through social institutions.
> Participation in world construction, for example, can be 'privately'
> justified as earning a living or supporting a family; it can be
> disciplined by ideological social control or constrained by a
> technocratic ethos. It is not whether to participate in the politics
> of world construction that is at stake in many of our debates; rather,
> what is at stake are the qualities of consciousness attending such
> participation. For those who regard democratic dignity as served only
> by a politics of responsible world construction, that is, conscious
> social reproduction [CSR], none of these private or ideologically
> driven motives is sufficient.
>
> If there is a characteristic rhetoric connected with CSR, it is that
> of intersubjective social transparency. Here, an awareness of the self
> as socially embedded is necessary for the political dignity of knowing
> that, whatever our formal 'credentials,' we are factually implicated,
> for good or ill, in how the social world is built through our part in
> its daily reproduction. It should follow, then, that we appropriate
> that dignity not just through an abstract act of voting, but through a
> politics of deliberation.
>
> The naivete that infuses such a conception of politics is due, in
> part, to the under-theorized nature of this political vision applied
> to contemporary society. If taken seriously, the injunction to
> participate in this manner makes the creation and sustenance of public
> forums for the realization of democratic citizenship an issue that is
> at the heart of all public policy debates. And yet, perhaps this view
> of politics as world construction reasonable? Hopelessly utopian?
> Possibly even tyrannical?
>
> Advocates of CSR often dismiss these criticisms as if they could only
> be conservative or reactionary. They may well be; yet, it does not
> follow that we shouldn't attend to the impetus behind these objections
> in order to ask ourselves what they might mean for the practical work
> of actually creating a politics of CSR.
>
> There is a common theme that runs through the various arguments
> advocating CSR which points to the sociological distinction between
> formal and substantive rationality. In place of the formality of a
> rights-based democratic politics, CSR emphasizes the search for
> substantively good reasons for life's concrete and situated practices.
>>From this standpoint, only CSR can save democratic politics from
> technicism. Only a dialogic democracy can redeem interest judgments
> from the manipulation of images; can redeem representation from simple
> delegation to putative experts; can redeem zeal from
> bureaucratization; can redeem empathy from the demagogues of
> sentimentality.
>
> For many theorists of democracy, a politics of CSR seems the
> inevitable outcome of human progress. And yet, there are dissenting
> voices implicit in the literatures of the social and political theory
> which can be typified into three classes of argument: the potential
> for tyranny, the structure of modern society, and the possible
> violation of human nature.
>
> CSR, it can be argued, carries with it requirements for its
> implementation that are tantamount to tyranny. It reflects a singular
> vision of the good society, one of universal concern for political
> life and its pre-eminent status of citizenship. Given that many,
> perhaps most, people may not possess such an interest, or wish to
> manifest it only periodically in defense of valued ways of life
> (family, work, ethnicity, community, etc), CSR would require standards
> of conversation and levels of self-scrutiny and disclosure that are,
> in practice, intrusive and coercive. CSR would be perceived by many as
> an enforced search for personally intolerable standard of coherence
> between private conduct and public ideals including.
>
> The sheer complexity of modern society is the basis for a second class
> of arguments against CSR. Institutional differentiation and
> specialization means that no one person is capable of envisioning the
> whole of society. Myths, assumptions, trust, values and norms--assumed
> to mean the same things to people who espouse them--these are what
> hold society together. Like Dostoevsky's grand inquisitor, truly
> worldly people understand that bread, mystery and authority are the
> pillars of order.
>
> Such arguments, often dismissed as elitist and incompatible with
> democratic freedoms, need not be seen as such. Social complexity
> allows for a multiplicity of selves and a norm of privacy that
> underwrites liberty. True, this is a negative liberty, the right to be
> left alone, free to choose when to enter politics, however defined.
> The price is a principle of legitimacy that is understood as suffrage
> through periodic acts by a 'public' whose life is essentially lived
> outside of the polity. To object to the preservation of an "outside"
> to politics, or to subject it to a standard of constant
> politicization, is to abandon the balance made possible by modern
> societal complexity, between freedom as illusion and freedom as
> reality.
>
> A third objection to CSR is based on its relentless injunction to
> subject potentially all social practices to the rigors of public
> articulation. Here it is argued that the social world is held together
> through non-contractual solidarity, a kind of non-rational domain of
> social life that must remain unexamined if we are to ever get much
> accomplished. Good outcomes as well as bad are possible precisely
> because so much of social life is left unspoken. The linearity of
> spoken accountability may subvert the poetic simultaneities of
> practice in which the good that is served by practical judgment, is
> subverted by having to defend it on principle. If the risk be taken at
> all, through forums and deliberations appropriate to CSR, they need to
> be, in some sense, separated from those political process of formal
> administration and decision-making. But how can such boundaries be
> maintained in practice without regulations of Byzantine complexity
> whose legalism would stand in stark contrast to the perceived
> conversational authenticity they are intended to protected?
>
> Finally there is the possibility of arguing against CSR in the name of
> human nature. Perhaps human beings require faith in some
> unquestionable background in order to undertake the risks of action.
> Perhaps CSR is but another name for that presumptuous intellectualism
> which the Scottish Moralists criticized in those who thought the
> social world was envisionable enough to be consciously planned.
> Perhaps the human spirit is collectively too fragile to bear the
> ambiguities of perpetually informed consent.
>
> Episodic forums in the form of debates, assemblies, juries,
> testimonials, lectures, and the like no longer satisfy what we mean by
> the need for 'free' or 'public deliberative spaces.' It is both
> exhilarating and agonizing to consider how, in the name of democracy,
> a social order might seek to transcend its own naturalized
> arbitrariness. Is that the end point of any crusade against a
> technocratic politics? Should we regard popular sovereignty as that
> radical sense of informed consent appropriate to a politics of
> conscious world construction? These are but a few questions commended
> to our imagination, for they are, I think, necessary in our quest to
> define democracy more adequately for modern life, and in that quest to
> find new boundaries between what we hope to achieve and what we dare
> to dream.
>> Well, when you're engaging in consensus politics, which for the
> record
>> I've
>> only done a few times, the tendency seems to be to try to avoid
>> bringing
>> divisions and disputes to the foreground, in order to get anything
> done. So
>> that might mean that this kind of structure might facilitate the
> type
>> of
>> debate that can keep a diverse movement from fracturing.
>> If a slim majority passes a divisive resolution in a majority-rules
> system
>> that can indeed cause problems. But I'd rather the structure that
> allows for
>> real political debate and discussion, because I think this process
> is clarifying and better then "burying the contradictions."
>> Not sure if that makes sense, I'm rushing. I have a term paper to
> write.
>> Anne McClintock, Benedict Anderson, Habermas, feminism, nationalism,
> public
>> spheres, quite the clusterfuck.
>
>
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