ÐÏࡱáternatives. Instead we can create a third, a fourth or more as we see that problems may have many possible solutions. Those who hold views different from ours do not become opponents; instead, their views can be seen as giving us a fresh and valuable perspective. As we work to meet their concerns, our proposals may be strengthened. When we use consensus, we encourage each person's active participation, and we listen carefully to what each person says.”

Or finally: “Voting is a process in which people express their preferences – whether strongly heartfelt or weakly ephemeral. Voters are usually forced to choose between two proposals – ostensibly opposite, but often both unacceptable: “would you rather be poked in the eye with a stick or hit on the head with a rock?” The decision is reached by simplistically adding up these preferences. [Voting] often encourages cagey manipulation.” 

(Way to take your opponent seriously guys.) But those who oppose the current trend towards consensus in anarchist circles are, if anything, worse: The only collective alternative to majority voting as a means of decision-making that is commonly presented is the practice of consensus. Indeed, consensus has even been mystified by avowed "anarcho-primitivists," who consider Ice Age and contemporary "primitive" or "primal" peoples to constitute the apogee of human social and psychic attainment. I do not deny that consensus may be an appropriate form of decision-making in small groups of people who are thoroughly familiar with one another. But to examine consensus in practical terms, my own experience has shown me that when larger groups try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted -- precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue. More disturbingly, I have found that it permits an insidious authoritarianism and gross manipulations -- even when used in the name of autonomy or freedom.

I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell Alliance, consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by members of a dubiously "anarchic" commune that was located in Montague, Massachusetts. … In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision, minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. … Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings -- so that a "decision" could be made. … On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the passionate dialogue that still persists even after a minority accedes temporarily to a majority decision, was replaced in the Clamshell by dull monologues -- and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of consensus. In majority decision-making, the defeated minority can resolve to overturn a decision on which they have been defeated -- they are free to openly and persistently articulate reasoned and potentially persuasive disagreements. Consensus, for its part, honors no minorities, but mutes them in favor of the metaphysical "one" of the "consensus" group.

The creative role of dissent, valuable as an ongoing democratic phenomenon, tends to fade away in the gray uniformity required by consensus. Any libertarian body of ideas that seeks to dissolve hierarchy, classes, domination and exploitation by allowing even Marshall's "minority of one" to block decision-making by the majority of a community, indeed, of regional and nationwide confederations, would essentially mutate into a Rousseauean "general will" with a nightmare world of intellectual and psychic conformity.  [Murray Bookchin]

(Don’t we all feel empowered to dissent from Murray’s position?)

Dissent must therefore be encouraged, not discouraged. Only through a principled discussion of what is at stake in an issue can the truth be clarified. It is liberals--those who accept the system--who water down and obscure truths to platitudes with which everyone can agree and who seek consensus in the form of "peace." In an age of accommodation like ours--as in all ages--it is liberals who would deny the importance of clarifying radical truths.

Majority rule is the democratic method of determining the will of the large group in decision-making. For majority rule protects the minority's right to dissent, and majority rule exempts them from the obligation to carry out a group decision with which they disagree. In order for diversity of opinion to be valued, therefore, majority rule in large groups must be viewed as an acceptable process. [Janet Biehl]

It is indicative, I suppose, of the depth of feeling on this issue that these serious thinkers and activists could engage in such a breath-takingly irrational string of caricatures. For present purposes, I want to focus on one aspect of the caricature: that each side in this debate characterizes the other as defending a formal procedure. Then the argument is that this procedure can be rejected in principle, because of instances in which it was abused or manipulated in oppressive ways. Bookchin and Biehl define consensus in terms of the voting procedure in which decisions are only adopted after universal assent (perhaps with stand-asides) and in which one person can block action. Then, Bookchin gives us an example of a group that abused this procedure by pressuring others into accepting the consensus. (One hardly need speak here of his transparent guilt-by-association ploy of mentioning primitivists.) Biehl and Bookchin both conclude from examples like this that consensus denies the existence of minorities, bullies them into conforming, waters down radical truths, even leads to “a nightmare world of intellectual and psychic conformity!” Advocates of consensus, similarly, define “majority rule” in terms of the procedure of voting on two preselected choices. They assume that people come to these choices and simply vote their antecedent inclinations (“whether strongly heartfelt or weakly ephemeral”), that such decisions are not “discussed in a spirit of respect and mutual accommodation,” that no effort is made to reformulate options, or to come up with others, that those with differing views are treated as “opponents,” and that manipulation is likely to be engaged in. That is, in both cases what is criticized is the practice of concrete groups who utilize the procedure in dispute. Certainly there is no essential reason why dividing opposing votes into blocks and stand-asides must lead to a suppression of dissent – indeed, as a simple matter of logic, the procedure assigns greater, indeed dictatorial, power to minorities – nor any reason why a commitment to majority rule requires lack of discussion, limiting options, or treating people as opponents. The claim can only be that this sort of behavior often, in fact, accompanies the procedure in question. But neither side – nor any other literature that I’m aware of – makes any serious attempt to argue that one procedure is more likely than the other to be abused in this way. By contrast, note how each group discusses its own approach: “In consensus, the group encourages the sharing of all viewpoints held by those with interest in a topic. These viewpoints are then discussed in a spirit of respect and mutual accommodation. New ideas arise and viewpoints are synthesized, until a formula emerges that wins general approval.” Or for a more expansive account: So what would an alternative revolutionary decision making process look like, you ask? To begin with, a fundamental shift from competition to cooperation. … Cooperation is more than "live and let live". It is making an effort to understand another's point of view. It is incorporating another's perspective with your own so that a new perspective emerges. It is suspending disbelief, even if only temporarily, so you can see the gem of truth in ideas other than your own. It is a process of creativity, synthesis, and open-mindedness that leads to trust-building, better communication and understanding, and ultimately, a stronger, healthier, more successful group. … The last and most visible step towards revolutionary change in group process is the manner in which members of the group interact with each other. Dominating attitudes and controlling behavior would not be tolerated. People would show respect and expect to be shown respect. Everyone would be doing their personal best to help the group reach decisions which are in the best interest of the group. There would be no posturing and taking sides. Conflicts would be seen as an opportunity for growth, expanding people's thinking, sharing new information, and developing new solutions which include everyone's perspectives. The group would create an environment where everyone was encouraged to participate, conflict was freely expressed, and resolutions were in the best interest of everyone involved. [C.T. Lawrence Butler] It is interesting that when allowed to speak for themselves, the advocates of voting espouse similar practices. Here is Bookchin again. Even so knowledgeable a historian of anarchism as Peter Marshall observes that, for anarchists, "the majority has no more right to dictate to the minority, even a minority of one, than the minority to the majority."5 Scores of libertarians have echoed this idea time and again.

What is striking about assertions like Marshall's is their highly pejorative language. Majorities, it would seem, neither "decide" nor "debate": rather, they "rule," "dictate," "command," "coerce" and the like. In a free society that not only permitted, but fostered the fullest degree of dissent, whose podiums at assemblies and whose media were open to the fullest expression of all views, whose institutions were truly forums for discussion -- one may reasonably ask whether such a society would actually "dictate" to anyone when it had to arrive at a decision that concerned the public welfare. [IBID]

A purer case of talking (yelling) past one another could hardly be constructed. What emerges is that there are two fundamentally distinct dimensions of assessment going on, which we may call “procedural” and “practical”. Procedural assessment looks to the formal rules that are explicitly adopted by the group as governing decision-making process. Practical assessment looks to the practices of the group, and the underlying habits, psychologies, traditions, and context that support the continuation of those practices. What is striking about the debate between consensus and majority rule, then, is that each side defines the other exclusively in terms of a procedure, while defining themselves first and foremost in terms of a set of discursive virtues that give rise to a practice

§2: Virtues and procedures The central claim of this paper is that issues of democracy in decision making are fundamentally issues of collective and individual virtue and practice, not issues of procedure. To achieve a participatory society is fundamentally a matter of achieving virtuous members of society, whose ways of relating to one another systematically and habitually exhibit various sorts of collective virtues. Procedures, in a just society, would play next to no explicit role, and where they did come in, their importance would be highly contextual, variable, and instrumental. A rational and just community will mobilize decision-making procedures because in this circumstance, we are faced with this problem, which can be solved by way of employing that procedure. But to fetishize process – to turn it into a (relatively) concrete object (a formal, definable procedure) and to assign it a level of normative significance it doesn’t, so objectivized, deserve – is to open the door to exploitation, no matter what the procedure is. I begin to move towards this conclusion with two actual cases. They are, respectively, a negative instance of the manipulation of consensus process and a positive instance of the use of voting within an inclusive and rational setting. I choose these examples not to argue that voting is better than consensus, but to undercut the common assumption that voting is more oppositional and less likely to be connected to open discussion than is consensus, and to highlight attention on the role of rational respect in decision making. The first case involved the Mobilization for Global Justice, the largest coalition of the Global Justice Movement to arise out of the uprising in Seattle in 1999. In Summer and Fall 2001, MGJ was planning for a convergence and demonstration around the annual meetings of the IMF and WB in Washington DC. A wide range of education, legal protest, and civil disobedience had been planned, generally in accord with the way these things had been going on for the last couple years. MGJ in DC was a large, diverse, and vibrant group, albeit one which in retrospect had two significantly different sorts of members. On the one hand, a wide range of grassroots protest, activist, organizer groups were a part of MGJ. On the other, a number of formal NGOs with paid staff took part. The attacks civilians in New York and Washington, DC on Sept. 11, 2001 caused something of a crisis throughout the progressive community. Clearly this was an event that had deeply affected the American public and nearly everyone realized that it changed the political context in ways that called for a re-thinking of strategies and tactics. Going into a crucial meeting following the attacks, nearly every member group in MGJ would have supported scaling back the level of confrontation with police, many supported eliminating civil disobedience altogether actions, and a handful of NGOs favored canceling the protests altogether. Representatives of this latter group arranged to be in the position of facilitator on the day in question. After a bit of discussion, a proposal was put on the board. “The MGJ will go ahead with its plans for protests during the meetings of the financial institutions” (or something very much like that). Immediately, representatives of the group in favor of canceling the event announced that they were blocking this proposal. Objections, arguments, discussion, etc. were met with stony rejection. The proposal was blocked, and the events were cancelled. It was estimated by those present that roughly 80% of the people in attendance opposed canceling things. But they had no real say. There was no real discussion or response to the arguments the majority made, merely condescending lectures on being responsible protestors, and stony refusal to consider the block, The second case involves not a radical organization, but an academic department, the department of philosophy at Georgetown University. For the last ten years or so, this department, in its internal deliberations, has been a veritable model of civility, rationality, and respect. It is a large department, as such things go, with around 24 members. It is ideologically, philosophically, and methodologically highly diverse including analytic and continental philosophers, conservatives, liberals, socialists, and (one) anarchist, committed Catholics, and atheists. Nonetheless, in almost every case members of the department genuinely respect one another, and in the few counter-instances, recognize the importance of treating their colleagues with respect and civility. Discussions are always open, intellectually sophisticated, and creative. New members quickly learn that we do not try to score points, put down colleagues, ignore the arguments people are making, or, for that matter, blindly endorse anyone else’s opinion. That just isn’t the way things are done in our department. Officially the Georgetown philosophy department works by a version of majority rule, following Roberts’ Rules in discussion, majority vote when there are two options, and a complicated variant of majority rule when there are more options. In reality, no one in the department knows much about Roberts’ Rules, and voting is a rather pointless afterthought. In the first decade of my participation, only a handful of votes ended other than unanimously, for the simple reason that discussion almost always led to a position that struck everyone as the rational one. However, on the day in question we had a highly disputed decision before us for which there was no possible compromise. And the department came into the meeting strongly divided. Group A felt that making this decisions was very important for the future of the department. Group B felt that rejecting the same decision was very important. And so, we discussed the matter. We argued, back and forth, brought up new considerations, laid out ways of thinking about the issue, … for several hours. And very few minds were changed. Sensing that we were making little progress, the chair finally called for a vote. And the motion passed, something like 16 – 8, whereupon we prepared to leave, assuming the chair would pass this decision on to the dean. Before we could do so, the leading voice in Group A – the winning group – stopped us. “Wait,” she said. “I’ve never seen us adopt an important decision with such a split vote. I worry that the minority are going to feel bullied here and would like to discuss this more.” Though not thrilled to have to stay longer, everyone immediately heeded this call and resumed their chairs. Whereupon the leading voice of the losing group said “Absolutely not. We made our arguments, gave our reasons. As always, everyone listened, took us seriously, and we failed to convince you. So I will not hear of re-opening the issue. The vote should stand.” One question to which I return below: was this majority rule, or consensus? I’m inclined to characterize the result as consensus in favor of going with the majority position. In any event, one thing that is clear is that there was a kind of virtue – both virtue on the part of each participant, and a collective virtue embedded in the habits of discourse among them – present in the GU philosophy department that day, a kind of virtue which was sorely missing in the MGJ. And in the presence of that virtue (or lack of virtue,) procedure was very much a secondary matter. It is clear enough that the problem with what went on at MGJ wasn’t primarily due to the use of consensus process. Had majority vote been the procedure, the NGOs could, for example, have engaged in a mass mobilization of members. (Part of the problem that day was that things were rushed, and these groups by way of their paid staff and better communication networks were able to prepare for the meeting much more quickly.) If they had done so, and turned out 51% of the people at the meeting, they could still have controlled the outcome, in roughly the same manner. Indeed, for all Bookchin’s (correct) insistence that majority rule need not involve a tyranny of the majority, or dictates or commands, it is perfectly clear that it can involve one. There is nothing in the procedural rules of voting that prevents this. At least as far back as Plato’s Republic, it has been noted that when the procedure is majority vote, it is possible to mobilize the mob through graft, rhetoric, fear, or other irrational means, so as to force decisions on the minority that are neither wise nor just. Clearly, as Plato is at pains to emphasize, there is no essential connection between what the majority believes and what is right and just. And it is worth noting that Plato probably deserves blame as the first writer to engage in the sorts of hostile shifts between procedure and practice that I’ve been complaining about. Plato’s own account of justice involves placing a small group of “philosopher-kings” in charge of the state. Clearly, as a procedure, this is no better than majority rule. (Indeed, it is essentially just a version of oligarchy, which he rejects for the usual reasons.) But in the case of his system, Plato focuses his attention not on the procedural rule, but on the practices and institutions which can be expected to inculcate intellectual and moral virtues in the philosopher kings. What makes them “philosophers” – Plato was not using this as a name for any academic discipline or profession (none of which existed in his day) but for a way of life (literally “love of wisdom”) – is that they have assimilated a systematic range of intellectual, political, and civic virtues which lead them to make decisions in a wise and just manner. But then, one wonders, how is it fair to criticize democracy by looking at the worst abuses of actual instances, while constructing one’s own system in a purely hypothetical form? Why not imagine democracy practiced by a community of people all of whom have been trained in the manner of Plato’s philosopher-kings? Why not a philosopher-polis? Plato would, indeed does, claim that not everyone is capable of achieving wisdom, that such training would be wasted on most. But no serious argument is given for this, other than the observation that people as they are found vary in terms of their ability to engage in rational discourse. But any progressive – not to mention any anarchist – would immediately respond that such disparity is largely due to the fact that most people are ill-educated, raised in oppressive environments, abused, never given chances to develop their intellectual talents, and confined to mind and soul-numbing alienated labor. §3: A community in which each is taken seriously The dispute is more than an empirical one. For anarchists the issue is not primarily one of predicting what percentage of people would, with the right upbringing, opportunities, context, etc., become reasonable, rational, cooperative members of society, or whether everyone is capable of the same level of expertise and intellectual accomplishment regarding issues relevant to the functioning of the polis. Rather, the question is one of fundamental moral commitments, of the sort of community we want to construct, and of our understanding of what it is to be a free citizen within such a community. To his credit, Plato recognized as well that these are the issues. He did not defend his form of social organization primarily on the utilitarian grounds that it would result a materially better life for the members of society. He probably believed this, but the important point was that the resulting structure was supposed to give rise to a harmonious and cooperative community. The problem, from our perspective, is (only!) that he believed that a harmonious and just society can nonetheless assign certain people structurally inferior positions. Any anarchist will reject this of course. Following Kant, anarchists take seriously the idea that to treat someone as a person is to engage with them rationally. Autonomy requires rational engagement – not only theoretical engagement with one’s thoughts and opinions, but practical engagement with one’s actions in light of the conclusions of discourse. That is to say that to not allow someone to participate in arguments about what to do, and the decisions that follow from those arguments, is to determine their life for them. And even if one does this in a way that is materially beneficial, it is a form of objectification or slavery – as Kant would say treating them merely as a means, rather than an end in themselves. Benevolent dictatorship is no closer to freedom than hostile. The fundamental Kantian point is that freedom is not a matter of material conditions. Think of the difference between the way we treat a pet, and the way we treat a mere object. The object, we suppose, has no interests that warrant our concern in any way that goes beyond what is useful for us. We don’t take the well being of a chair, for instance, into account in our decisions about what to do (again, except insofar as our well being depends on the continued good condition of the chair.) In the case of our dog, though, we do. That the dog wants to eat or play is a reason to allow this to happen. In the case of a person, what is crucial is that we take account of the person’s reasons for their desires and opinions. We listen to why they want to do something, argue with them if they are wrong, and agree if they are right. If dictatorship is treating the public like an object, mere voting, or any other procedure that aggregates antecedent desires into a group decisions, is treating the public like a non-rational animal. It was left for Marx to elucidate the ways that economic institutions of capitalism build such alienation and objectification into the fabric of society, explaining that a wage-labor system was essentially just another way of handing over autonomy to others. And it was left for anarchist thinkers to take seriously the question of what a political process and structure would be like which consistently adhered to the Kantian requirement that we consistently take everyone seriously as a rational end in themselves. Significant as it is, the only objection an anarchist should have with Plato’s Republic (aside from matters of detail) is that he does not insist that in a just society everyone must be a philosopher king. This may seem a crucial enough departure from Plato to amount to a joke, but I do not intend it that way. The point is to focus our attention not on this error, but on all the rest that Plato says about the way that the sub-community of Philosopher-kings would function, and about the sorts of institutional support that is needed for the nurturing of such lovers of wisdom. We learn much about society by studying the way that philosopher kings relate to one another and make decisions in the Republic. For one thing, note that they are not characterized as following any particular decision- making procedure. When an issue arises, they discuss it. Reason is the guiding impulse – along with a sense of duty to the well being of the society and the individuals within it. Philosopher-kings learn respect, humility, critical listening – just the sorts of things usually emphasized as the virtues commensurate with consensus process – but also what we now call critical thinking and also the various empirical sciences and humanities (not to mention gymnastics, which may well be one of those details). Such substantive education is crucial. One hears, all too frequently, a certain facile formulation of the norm of taking each other seriously, a formulation according to which “everyone’s opinion is as valuable as everyone else’s.” Well, as a simple empirical matter, this is plainly false. Most people are ignorant of most issues, and it is simply silly to take an ignorant position as seriously as an informed one. (To pick an issue almost at random, there are large regions of the country in which people believe that the Earth is some 6000 years old and that the various animal species were created simultaneously. To take this opinion to be as valuable as that of a competent biologist on matters of evolutionary theory is to abandon reason altogether.) The important point is that the norm – “take all opinions equally seriously “– is not a way of respecting autonomy in the first place. Indeed, to endorse every position equally is, in fact, a form of condescension – one which leads almost immediately to the idea that the best thing to do is simply vote our antecedent preferences, whatever their source or justification, since one is as good as another. If one puts forward an ignorant, ill thought-out, or foolish position, the respectful thing to do is to disagree with the position, to argue with it, to treat the person who put it forward as a being capable of recognizing his error and responding to reason’s demand to revise it. The measure of whether a group has taken me seriously is not whether they end up agreeing with me, or adopting a position close to mine, or letting my position count equally with others, but whether they seriously and genuinely listen, hear me, and either accept the view if it withstands rational scrutiny – regardless of how many people antecedently agreed – or reject it if it doesn’t. The key is that the view should be rejected only for good reason, not on the basis of prejudice against me or the view. (See the final comment of the philosopher who lost the vote in the case described above.) Indeed, unanimity does not guarantee correctness, any more than majority agreement, and while pointless re-hashing of positions is not to be sought, occasional critical evaluation of easy consensus certainly is. No rational group would ever have a hard and fast rule against re-opening an issue, if a single member seriously thought there was a possibility that the group had decided wrongly. (Think of some of the disastrously wrong positions that have enjoyed near consensus support over the centuries.) But at the same time, there is good reason to inculcate in ourselves a reluctance to re-open (tentatively) settled issues without good reason, as doing so bespeak not intellectual rigor, but narcissism. Returning to Plato, we all should tend to defer in practice to the expertise of those of our comrades who have studied a given issue most closely. I trust Juliet Schor and Robin Hahnel on detailed matters of economics, for the most part, because they have spent years studying issues that I have not, just as I defer to my plumber,

-- AnarchistU - 29 Jan 2005