Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consensus changing the world

[Racheli Gai (racheli]

Also - lots of feminist groups have used (and I imagine still using) consensus.
That's where I was introduced to it for the first time, almost 30 years ago.

Racheli.


On Oct 16, 2011, at 4:02 PM, Racheli Gai wrote:

> 
> 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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> 
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