If you read the accounts of how actions were decided and acted upon, it is always about the slow, grinding work of people learning to trust each other and work through issues, and it is because of that foundation that they were successful.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- 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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-- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Solving the Climate Crisis web page: SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com Grist Blog: http://grist.org/author/gar-lipow/ Online technical reference: http://www.nohairshirts.com
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