Sunday, August 5, 2012

Your consensus decision-making sucks a lot sometimes

Click here to access article from In Bed with the Resistance (UK). 

This critique of consensus decision-making is most important in building new methods of activism and to build an ideological nucleus for new societies. Personally, I have long supported this form of decision-making that he briefly alludes to:
Nested councils in which the councils at the bottom choose a spokesperson to go to the next level council. The morbid fear of representation among some activists often prevents this happening, though it has appeared in the form of a ‘spokes council’ from time to time. The key thing is to view the spokesperson not as a representative but as a delegate who can be overruled from below at any time. This system too will have disadvantages, but since it is the one the Spanish CNT – the biggest and most success horizontal organisation I know of – uses, we know that it does work to some extent. Unlike consensus decision-making in big groups of people.