[lbo-talk] Graber on consensus

[Gar Lipow]

OK here is an example. Strikes are not limited to small locals with
under a few hundred members and general strikes.    Often there are
strikes that involve thousands or even tens of thousands of workers at
once - transit systems, school districts and so on.  When that many
people are on strike it is likely that one out of a 1,000 or one in
10,000 will be a scab. I'm talking here about scabs who are union
members, not outside scabs. But if you had consensus with the ability
to block, the same person willing to scab in the current system would
probably block the strike under a pure consensus system.  So in fact
any large local, or coordinated strikes with thousands has a good
chance of "irreconcilable conflict" built in.   In our current system,
within large unions and especially large locals, ability to "block" a
strike vote would be a disaster.  So one of the cases that  has been
proposed as suitable for consensus looks like it is not..

On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 11:40 AM, martin schiller <mschiller at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 25, 2013, at 10:38 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
>
>> Umm - no serious conflict within a class?  Does anyone really believe
>> that conflict between classes precludes conflict within classes?
>> Especially within non-dominant classes, whose members often accept the
>> values and interests of the ruling classes.  I'd say that is one area
>> where vulgar Marxism is NOT right 90% of the time, except that would
>> be unfair to vulgar Marxism which mostly does not oversimplify Marx
>> quite to that extent.
>>
>
> Aren't you saying that the 'conflict' is artificial - induced by ruling class rhetoric. Seems that if there was an effective countervailing rhetoric of the affected class, the artificial conflict would be neutralized. Perhaps an 'over simplified' rhetoric would be effective.
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