Posts tagged occupy
How do people make decisions in a participatory democracy? There may be formal rules. Major decisions are made by the group as a whole; when an issue is brought to the table, concerns are voiced until someone, formally designated or self-selected, asks whether people are in agreement on a line of action. In some systems, people can “stand aside” if they cannot commit fully to the group’s decision but do not want to block it. But formal rules by themselves provide insufficient guidance actually to deliberate. In any system, whether participatory, adversarial, or some nondemocratic form, countless issues are not covered by the formal rules: what kinds of concerns can be brought up, how they should be framed, what kinds and degree of emotions should be displayed in debates, how breaches in the formal rules should be dealt with, and so on. Every system thus depends on a sophisticated set of normative understandings that accompany the formal rules, a kind of etiquette of deliberation. Such an etiquette does more than keep things civil. By routinizing interaction and domesticating attendant emotions, it generates trust in the process, its outcomes, and its participants. Trust, in turn, is vital to the institution’s survival. Without it, say organizational theorists, decisionmaking is likely to become rigid, and the decisions that result are unlikely to be good ones.
The trouble with majority voting, say its critics, is that every decision made leaves losers in its wake. The next time a decision must be made, those who lost this time may forge the alliances and strike the bargains necessary to win, thus subordinating the aim of making a good decision to their own desire to gain position. Or they may withdraw altogether from an organization part of whose appeal has been the opportunity to act with common purpose. Groups that put a premium on the possibility of consensus help that not to happen, thus generating important solidarity benefits.
Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.
In recent years, analysts have been much more willing to credit participatory democrats with explicitly political purposes. Experiments with egalitarian and cooperative decision making are a kind of politics-just not the politics of parliamentary maneuver and bureaucratic manipulation. Rather, as sociologist Wini Breines put it in Community and Organization, her seminal study of the 1960s new left, by “prefiguring” within the current practices of the movement the values of freedom, equality, and community that they wanted on a grand scale, activists were helping bring them about. Their dilemma-and it was a dilemma, not a mistake-was that they wanted to effect political change without reproducing the structures that they opposed. To be “strategic” was to privilege organization over personhood and political reform over radical change, and this they would not do.
