Re: Consensus changing the world
From: Racheli Gai (rachelisonoracohousing.com)
Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2011 16:02:28 -0700 (PDT)
And of course there are peace and justice groups who use consensus.

Racheli, Tucson.
On Oct 16, 2011, at 3:38 PM, Moz wrote:

> 
> Note that I use the term "anarchist" to describe a mode of political
> organisation and analysis, rather than as a pejorative, even though I'm
> aware that the latter is ubiquitous in the USA.
> 
>> I wonder where the folks who are doing the facilitation training learned
>> it themselves?
> 
> There are large anarchist groups who are active in the US and involved
> with OWS - Food Not Bombs, Indymedia, Critical Mass and so on. At least
> some of those groups have used consensus since they started (and they
> started more than ten years ago). Then you have the queer and
> anti-capitalist groups who mostly use consensus internally and often the
> older of those groups have consciously made a switch from democratic
> organisation to consensus, while the newer ones have probably started with
> explicit consensus. So it's quite possibly "the way things are done" for
> many of the participants and especially for the organisers.
> 
> Those techniques are common in Australia, and the hand signals being used
> are familiar to me. Most activist groups here use either direct consensus
> or a spokescouncil model (representative consensus to facilitate
> large-group decisions). Anarchist groups here are used to (repeatedly)
> explaining to the socialist groups that we don't recognise their coercive
> powers so it's consensus or nothing. Dealing with a non-organised bunch of
> people who are merely unfamiliar with consensus would be easy by
> comparison - we do that every time we deal with media or p*lice.
> 
> Moz
> 
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