>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..
It is true that consensus makes it harder to get the outcome you want, because that is the very idea. Rather than simply ride roughshod over objections of minorities, you would need to convince them to go along. The presumption of consensus advocates is that this is a good thing on balance, because of the advantages I mentioned before.
Presumably, advocates of majority rule think that it is a good thing to simply ignore the interests of the minority. And maybe it is in some cases, after all a dictatorship of the majority is essentially what is advocated when revolutionary socialists advocate a "dictatorship of the Proletariat." That is, the majority working class exercising dictatorial rule over the interests of the capitalist class to abolish class rule.
But that is, I think, justified by absolute necessity and of course is not a permanent arrangement. The dictatorial act of the working class in abolishing classes, would result in there no longer being any ruling class and thus would put an end this "dictatorship of the proletariat".
A permanent state of majority rule is OTOH a permanent dictatorship, with all the evil side-effects that any dictatorship entails.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas