On Feb 25, 2013, at 3:03 PM, Gar Lipow <gar.lipow at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm going to answer Barlett below. But I should point out that my
> Quaker example was not an example of the failure of consensus, but the
> high price sometimes paid for success. I'm also curious. I seem to be
> the only one on this list who thinks elevating consensus to a general
> principle, whether it is Barlett's principle or some other, is a
> serious error. Does nobody else think that whether to use consensus
> or not for group decision making should depend on particular
> circumstances rather than having some simple "principle" or checklist
> that determines when it is suitable?
I'm coming to this late, but Graeber treats the preference for consensus or representative voting as a cultural thing. Scale doesn't enter into his model at all. I don't see a lot of thinking about scale - either in politics or production - in contemporary anarchist thought. Unless it's about keeping things small to retain the face-to-face consensus model, in which case it's curtains for industrial production.
Doug