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Leaderless, consensus-based participatory democracy and its discontents
The Economist
OCCUPY WALL STREET is not only a mass protest movement intended to draw attention to economic injustice and political corruption. It seeks to embody and thereby to demonstrate the feasibility of certain ideals of participatory democracy. This is, to my mind, what makes OWS so interesting, and so unlike a tea-party protest.
OWS is not simply a group of like-minded people gathered together to make a point with a show of collective force, though it is that. The difference is that it has developed into an ongoing micro-society with a micro-government that directly exemplifies a principled alternative to the prevailing American order. The complaint that OWS has failed to produce a coherent list of demands seems to me to miss much of the point of the encampment in Zuccotti Park. The demand is a society more like the little one OWS protestors have mocked up in the park. The mode of governance is the message.
… It is hard to deny the romance of this, and part of me would like to camp out in Zuccotti Park and pitch in. But I wouldn’t expect it to last. Not only is it hard to see how this worthwhile little experiment in leaderless, consensus-based decision-making is a realistic means to the end of a whole society governed by leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, it’s hard see why this is a desirable end.
Because the participatory democracy of OWS is an ideological endeavour, it can avoid the hard problem of liberal society: the ineradicable diversity of moral belief and the impossibility of consensus. Consensus-based communes composed of individuals who opt in specifically because they already agree with the commune’s founding values can work precisely because the people who would make consensus impossible—people with very different opinions and values—stay away. But not only does the OWS experiment skirt the problem of pluralism through self-selection, the ideological homogeneity of self-selection may make deliberation tend toward extremism
(19 October 2011)
Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe
Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education
… Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.
It was on this island nation off the coast of Africa that David Graeber, one of the movement’s early organizers, who has been called one of its main intellectual sources, spent 20 months between 1989 and 1991. He studied the people of Betafo, a community of descendants of nobles and of slaves, for his 2007 book, Lost People.
Betafo was “a place where the state picked up stakes and left,” says Mr. Graeber, an ethnographer, anarchist, and reader in anthropology at the University of London’s Goldsmiths campus.
In Betafo he observed what he called “consensus decision-making,” where residents made choices in a direct, decentralized way, not through the apparatus of the state. “Basically, people were managing their own affairs autonomously,” he says.
The process is what scholars of anarchism call “direct action.” For example, instead of petitioning the government to build a well, members of a community might simply build it themselves. It is an example of anarchism’s philosophy, or what Mr. Graeber describes as “democracy without a government.”
He transplanted the lessons he learned in Madagascar to the globalism protests in the late 1990s in which he participated, and which some scholars say are the clearest antecedent, in spirit, to Occupy Wall Street.
(16 October 2011)
Athenian Democracy
Wikipedia
Athenian democracy developed in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the central city-state of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 508 BC. Athens is one of the first known democracies. Other Greek cities set up democracies, and even though most followed an Athenian model, none were as powerful, stable, nor as well-documented as that of Athens. It remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy where the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right. Participation was by no means open, but the in-group of participants was constituted with no reference to economic class and they participated on a scale that was truly phenomenal.
… The central events of the Athenian democracy were the meetings of the assembly (???????? ekklêsia). Unlike a parliament, the assembly’s members were not elected, but attended by right when they chose. Greek democracy created at Athens was a direct, not a representative democracy: any adult male citizen of age could take part, and it was a duty to do so. The officials of the democracy were in part elected by the Assembly and in large part chosen by lot.
The assembly had four main functions; it made executive pronouncements (decrees, such as deciding to go to war or granting citizenship to a foreigner); it elected some officials; it legislated; and it tried political crimes. As the system evolved these last two functions were shifted to the law courts. The standard format was that of speakers making speeches for and against a position followed by a general vote (usually by show of hands) of yes or no. Though there might be blocs of opinion, sometimes enduring, on crucial issues, there were no political parties and likewise no government or opposition (as in the Westminster system). Voting was by simple majority. In the 5th century at least there were scarcely any limits on the power exercised by the assembly. If the assembly broke the law, the only thing that might happen is that it would punish those who had made the proposal that it had agreed to. If a mistake had been made, from the assembly’s viewpoint it could only be because it had been misled.
As usual in ancient democracies, one had to physically attend a gathering in order to vote. Military service or simple distance prevented the exercise of citizenship. Voting was usually by show of hands (cheir?ton?a, “arm stretching”) with officials judging the outcome by sight. With thousands of people attending, counting was impossible.
… A good example of the contempt the first democrats felt for those who did not participate in politics can be found in the modern word ‘idiot’, which finds its origins in the ancient Greek word ??????? (idi?t?s), meaning a private person, a person who is not actively interested in politics;[10] such characters were talked about with contempt and the word eventually acquired its modern meaning
… Athenian democracy had many critics, both ancient and modern. Modern critics are more likely to find fault with the narrow definition of the citizen body, but in the ancient world the complaint if anything went in the opposite direction. Ancient authors were almost invariably from an elite background for whom giving poor and uneducated people power over their betters seemed a reversal of the proper, rational order of society. For them the demos in democracy meant not the whole people, but the people as opposed to the elite. Instead of seeing it as a fair system under which ‘everyone’ has equal rights, they saw it as the numerically preponderant poor tyrannizing over the rich. They viewed society like a modern stock company: democracy is like a company where all shareholders have an equal say regardless of the scale of their holding; one share or ten thousand, it makes no difference. They regarded this as manifestly unjust.
(accessed 22 October 2011)
A brief history of consensus decision-making
rhizome, Rhizome Network
It’s not surprising that passionate proponents of consensus decision-making might want to root their ideas firmly in history. After all it gives consensus greater authority and legitimacy. However, this is often done as a few short paragraphs or even a few short lines. When asked recently to focus on the history of consensus for a course I’m involved in delivering, I decided it was time to dig a little deeper and here’s the result…. a whirlwind tour of some of the historical movements and peoples upon which consensus draws, many of whom are still there and still using their version of consensus.
In reality few of these examples show consensus decision-making as it’s used by folk like Rhizome, ie: formal or simple consensus, but they all have important elements to them that are cornerstones of consensus. Oh, and I’m not claiming that this is an exhaustive piece of academic research – far from it.I’ve addded the odd aside along the way, drawing out what for me are some of the lessons we can learn about our own use of consensus.
The spiritual connection
One of the most widely cited historical roots for consensus decision-making is the Quakers and to a lesser extent, the Anabaptists of which perhaps the best known descendents are the Mennonites. Ethan Mitchell’s paper, Participation in Unanimous Decision-Making: The New England Monthly Meetings of Friends is useful starting point and includes some thoughts on recent social change movements that are inheritors of the consensus traditions of Quakers and Anabaptists. He says:
The consensus process used by the Society of Friends (Quakers) has been in use for three and a half centuries. It is a highly specific political mechanism, with its own vocabulary, ideology, and traditions. It has to be strongly emphasized that Quakers themselves are very reluctant to describe their consensus process in political terms. …
… My favourite discovery on this journey into the history of consensus was in Autumn Brown’s world map of consensus where she mentions pirate ships. A few clicks later I was reading a New Yorker article on The Pirate’s Code and following their link to Peter Leeson’s An-arrgh-chy paper. I’ll include it as a European example because so many of the well-known historical pirates are European in origin.
Leeson argues that:
historical pirates displayed sophisticated organization and co-ordination…Pirates could not use government to enforce or otherwise support co-operative arrangements between them. Despite this they successfully co-operated with hundreds of other rogues. Amidst ubiquitous potential for conflict, they rarely fought, stole from, or deceived one another. In fact piratical harmony was as common as harmony amongst their lawful contemporaries who relied on government for their social co-operation.
He goes on to describe a system of checks and balances for ensuring that no one pirate held oppressive power over the rest of the crew.
(June 18, 2011)
Overviews:
Notes on Consensus Decision-Making (Vernal Project).
Notes on Quaker Consensus (PDF)
The First Amendment and the Obligation to Peacefully Disrupt in a Free Society
Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post
Mayor Bloomberg is planning Draconian new measures to crack down on what he calls the “disruption” caused by the protesters at Zuccotti Park, and he is citing neighbors’ complaints about noise and mess. This set of talking points, and this strategy, is being geared up as well by administrations of municipalities around the nation in response to the endurance and growing influence of the Occupation protest sites. But the idea that any administration has the unmediated option of “striking a balance,” in Bloomberg’s words, that it likes, and closing down peaceful and lawful disruption of business as usual as it sees fit is a grave misunderstanding — or, more likely, deliberate misrepresentation — of our legal social contract as American citizens.
Some kinds of disruption in a free republic are not “optional extras” if the First Amendment governs the land, as it does ours, and are certainly not subject to the whims of mayors or local police, or even DHS. Just as protesters don’t have a blanket right to do everything they want, there is absolutely no blanket right of mayors or even of other citizens to be free from the effect of certain kinds of disruption resulting from their fellow citizens exercising First Amendment rights. That notion, presented right now by Bloomberg and other vested interests, of a “disruption-free” social contract is pure invention — just like the flat-out fabrication of the nonexistent permit cited in my own detention outside the Huffington Post Game Changers event this last Tuesday, when police told me, without the event organizers’ knowledge and contrary to their intentions, that a private entity had “control of the sidewalks” for several hours. (In fact, the permit in question — a red carpet event permit! — actually guarantees citizens’ rights to walk and even engage in political assembly on the streets if they do not block pedestrian traffic, as the OWS protesters were not.)
I want to address the issue of “disruption,” as Bloomberg is sending this issue out as a talking point brought up on Keith Olbermann’s Coundown last night: the neighbors around Zuccotti Square, says Bloomberg, are feeling “disrupted” by the noise and visitors to the OWS protest, so he is going to crack down to “strike a balance” to address their complaints. Other OWS organizers have let me know that the Parks Department and various municipalities are trying to find a way to eject other protesters from public space on a similar basis of argument.
Please, citizens of America — please, OWS — do not buy into this rhetorical framework: an absolute “right to be free of disruption” from First Amendment activity does not exist in a free republic. But the right to engage in peaceable disruption does exist.
Citizens who live or work near protest sites or marches have every right to be free of violence from protesters and they should never be subjected to destruction of property. This is why I am always saying to OWS and to anyone who wants to assemble: be PEACEFUL PEACEFUL PEACEFUL. Be respectful to police, do not yell at them; sing, don’t chant; be civil to pedestrians and shop owners; don’t escalate tensions; try to sit when there is tension rather than confront physically; be dignified and be nonviolent.
But the First Amendment means that it actually is not up to the mayor or the police of any municipality, or to the Parks Department, or to any local municipality to prohibit public assembly if the assembly is peaceful but disruptive in many ways.
(22 October 2011)
Writer Naomi Wolf was recently arrested in a protest against Governor Cuomo of NY. She describes How I was arrested.
Wikipedia reminds us that the First Amendment of the U.S. Contitutions reads:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“.
-BA
