I meant to add that using "consensus building" and collective deliberative practices of the kind plays a role in making people reveal their true disposition to implement what is voted on and in making them increase their involvement. The youtube channel, Razones de Cuba (http://www.youtube.com/user/razonesdecuba) has been uploading the entire series of "En silencio ha tenido que ser" -- a TV series from the 1980s about a Cuban G2 agent who infiltrates the high ranks of the CIA, with Sergio Corrieri and Mario Balmaseda. The series shows how the G2, Cuba's state security agency, manages to elicit from its agents high levels of personal commitment to their missions, methods which -- by the way -- are exactly the same that were used in the process of selecting the troops that Cuba sent to Angola in the 1970s and 1980s. The long and delicate process of making these intensely personal decisions is "consensus building" at its best.
As I've been saying, political power is the productive force of labor directed at reinforcing or dismantling given social structures. Hierarchical "consensus building" (e.g. "Work for me or I'll kill you or punish you physically"; "Work for me or you won't have access to land, i.e. food"; "Work for me or you won't have access to money, i.e. survival"; "Work for me or you'll be a loser, break my heart, look uncool", etc.) have sharp limits. "Work along with me because it makes sense for all of us" -- when the "making sense" part is duly worked out -- leads to the highest quality work, the highest form of political power. That is the grain of truth in the anarchist approach.
On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Julio Huato <juliohuato at gmail.com> wrote:
> Carrol wrote:
>
>> Repeat: We are our only resource. Any decision we make is
>> only real if all or most of us participate _actively_ in the
>> implementation of that decision. It is that participation, not the
>> formal decision, which is the real decision.
>
> I haven't been able to follow the discussions here. So this is an
> entirely de-contextualized remark -- FWIW.
>
> Last Thursday, I was just telling a small group of my public finance
> students that, when economic theorists use the term "decisions" or
> "choices," they mean exactly this -- i.e. "actions." The three words
> are synonymous in economic theory, as you can note by paging Stokey et
> al. or Mas Colell's books. A "choice" is not something that happens
> in your head alone. What happens in your head alone (an abstraction,
> because there's nothing that can only happen in your head alone) falls
> under the rubric of "preferences." What you actually do, which
> results from the clash between your "preferences" and your
> "opportunities" (two things that can only be separated by
> abstraction), that is your "choice" or "action." I'm under the
> impression that, for some reason that has to do with the history of
> our languages, when people talk nowadays about subjective activity,
> they tend to evoke purely mental activity without any consequence on
> the physical world, i.e. something impossible, as if the mind operated
> in a Platonic plane, detached from a body embedded in a physical
> world.
>
> So, in partial correction of what Carrol says above, the "real
> decision" that people who vote but have no interest in implementing
> what is resolved by the vote is both to vote "formally" and then to be
> dispassionate about the implementation of the vote. It is an action
> aimed at accomplishing something other than what is voted on.
>