Some thoughts about consensus.
Graber did some good research, because the problem sounds familiar from the ancient past. What he outlined for SNCC was picked up by CORE. As a consequence I got a few months of meetings and a couple picket lines at Van de Kamps, an LA chain of resturants that hired a lot of black waiters and waitresses and had them dressed up in antebellum outfits. The outfits were obnoxious since this was 1963 and ... etc. The uniforms were supposed to look like colonial Dutch to fit with the corporate theme. Maybe they did, if the help was blond and blue eyed. But on young black kids, this definitely read as cotton planation stuff.
I need to say, I later decided that headquarters orders about the color of the membership had a lot of important dimensions. For one thing CORE and SNCC were getting too damned white and that alone interfered with their credability with mass black perceptions. They needed to effect a greater racial solidarity which was slipping away. NAACP had the same problem, since most of their legal division were white guys from NYC, Chicago, and Philly. There was more going on than black nationalism. The Pathers tended to keep their white friends and support out of camera range. Again, a lot of the legal help was white.
Anyway, from other experiences I've seen consesus work but only when there was already a great deal of solidarity. In those circumstances consensus floats in the air. Good ideas and bad come and go until something gets into focus. This is also known as mob-rule, which I found hilarious. We were a mob and we had our rules.
I think a formal block is a bad idea, but again if enough people want to insist, okay. A formal block is by definition a strong break in solidarity. If I really didn't like a proposal, I would just argue against it and wait to see the response. People who agree will come out of their shell if they are encouraged. If nobody does, then that's my problem, not the group. I have to figure out why I got nowhere.
Let's take a really obnoxious issue. Should John Yoo be kicked out of Boalt? I don't think Yoo should be fired or academically censured. John Yoo is equivalent to Carl Schmitt, he wrote legal justifications for the government to commit war crimes. He violated the entire concept of justice, due process, and equality before law. I am not sure there is a proper word for his crime. John Yoo is evil. I put John Yoo in the Nineth Circle.
I have no real argument to keep John Yoo at Boalt.
On the other hand, I hope there is a permanent information booth in front of Boalt with a selection of legal literature that covers Yoo's memos and findings for the Justice Department. The idea comes from Orestes and the plague of flies (Sartre), also the Furies, from the Iliad, ``those who beneath the earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath''.
``What he [Trotsky] describes seems aligned with a consensual process that is the result of a long and patient campaign of education and struggle, and has very little to do with top down stuff.
I don't care if it takes eighteen months to change a light bulb.'' Joanna
Yes (!), that's what I thought and why I went ape shit over it. It goes with his idea of permanent revolution---that's what he meant by the term---to keep that horizontal network of soviets in play. He admits in My Life, that he had to change temperarily as chief of the Red Army, but even then he conducted a court with various units from his train-office as a mobil HQ. My Life is something of a companion piece and worth the six hundred pages.
People like Graber and other intelligentsia for Occupy really need to read these two works by Trotsky. They faced much more dire circumstances and won. They had that magic solidarity for long months at a time. But they paid big time with what amounted to what we call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Lenin had a series of strokes probably from exhausion and Trotsky was a psychological wreck. He started to drop out and take a breather. That's when Stalin moved in. Trotsky wasn't up for the next battle.
CG