I disagree that reaching a consensus is terribly important for most decisions. In many cases, reaching a decision, any decision, including suboptimal or even wrong decisions is better than reaching no decision or taking a lot of time to make it.

Issues that are less important are less valuable to spend time debating, and more important ones are worth more time.

The work I do is a lot consensus driven. It has its benefits, and it has its drawbacks. Many times people have very weak opinions and will just go with the flow to not raise things up. Many times people can be very opinionated and unreasonable and will not yield. Often times the loudest and most persistent person tends to get his way and this process favors those types of dominating personalities.

A hierarchy does exist (but it's not a "take orders" type place), but the hierarchy does a good job in driving for consensus on important issues, and keeping us from bickering about trivial things. Overall, there is a lot of trust that the "leader" overall listens to our feedback and makes useful decisions that are helpful (but not always perfect). We will disagree about many particular issues, but it keeps things going quite efficiently. Those that have a harder time end up "scisming" by leaving or finding a new group to work with.

I am perfectly satisfied with this type of relationship with the work and don't view it as a problem. What is your opinion on such a workplace? Is there any kind of scale of "this is not ideal, but is not as bad as a lot of other places and is not something to get worked up about?"

Sure, this is the football team scenario from above. Its probably going to be better to run a sub-optimal play than end up taking a five yard penalty. So what rational people do is reach what might be called (to make up a term here) a "meta-consensus"... to consensus to delegate a captain to call the plays.

Another example would be a protest march. Usually the route is consented upon before hand in public meeting. So the cops can already know where you're going, and can pre-stage kettles or mass arrests (which both take a lotta logistics on their side). One of the ways to avoid this problem is to delegate a march committee, which either keeps the route secret, or better yet, makes it up as you go along.It sounds like you are an engineer. I was, and the technical part of engineering and similar work is usually done in an ad-hoc consensus fashion. The problems you discuss regarding personality types is very real. An additional very real problem is that people coming from different backgrounds and different communities can have vastly different ways and norms of communicating. Ways of communicating that seems normal to me... a smart-ass, middle class privileged, college educated, white male, with extensive experience, and (usually) much more talent... will seem jaw-droppingly rude and disrespectful to others. In particular... we interrupt each other as a matter of course, and talk when we got something to say, instead of waiting our turn.

Luckily for us, some people have noticed this problem, and have worked very hard on ways to try to improve this situation. That's where all the silly looking hand-signals and the "step up, step back" policies and such come in, that we use at the Occupies. This is called facilitating, and it actually was developed by our sisters, and comes out of Radical Feminism (or Anarcho-Feminism, for those who must call everything Anarcho-this-or-that... a tiring habit IMO). The hand signals also help immensely in speeding things up, keeping the noise-to-message ratio down, and make having large to very large even possible.

They look silly, and seem so at first... but they really do work, and amazingly well. In very small meetings of course, they are just extra baggage and are discarded.I'm not sure if we are on the same page here.

When we have a meeting, we consense on a facilitator. But that facilitator is not a "leader" and doesn't make "decisions". The facilitator is supposed to be neutral, and their job is to just to keep the meeting moving forward and on topic. If the facilitator has a strong personal opinion regarding the proposal on the floor, we'll consensus on a temporary facilitator to keep the meeting going forward, while the main facilitator "temporarily resigns" and exercises their "voice" (says what they personally wanna say).

All decisions are still make by the group under the process in place. The facilitator doesn't have any more "vote" (input) than anyone else, or have any more power such as a "veto". And good practice is to rotate the facilitator (and other people helping with the meeting) as policy from meeting to meeting.Given the possible quibble I made just above regarding facilitators not making "decisions"... that's how we do things.

I find the methods you propose tend to be far more inefficient than other ways that you might find objectionable and don't mind deferring to a leaver to increase inefficiencies, but it sounds like you have no problem with this.

What if you have someone who is just an idiot and makes dumb suggestions and won't ever listen, do you just finally have enough and tell him to either shut up or hit the road?

Yes. Well duh.

MD just likes to use the English language in ways that are incomprehensible.

Ya md pmd me and cleared it up, I guess he just hasn't posted or anything lately.

Could expand on this a little with some examples? Any particular historical facts that Caplan gets wrong?

what if the idiot builds a factory polluting the air? what's the anarchist response to externalities?

Its not that he was making up facts. Its that he willfully misinterprets things. For example he does a lot of "Lizard-Manning" as I call it. There are several passages where he refers to "the anarchists" and "the workers" as if they were two separate groups of people. He willfully ignores that that was a war-time society, that there was no separation of church and state, that the church was a combatant in the war and the largest landlord in the country, that the CNT/FAI were part of a collation, that the capitalists were part of the other collation, etc, etc.

I'm hardly an expert, but I do have some books that are not going to be found on the interwebs. Is there some particular aspect of the Spanish Revolution you are interested in?It takes a whole lot more than one person to build a factory. It would typically take 100s, and they would typically be from the same region that the factory is located in. Its pretty hard to reach consensus from 100s of people to foul their own nest, so to speak.

But we've confronted rouge power plants before. Nonviolent direct action gets the goods. The anti-nuclear protests from the 1980s used our organizing models (affinity groups and spoke-councils), and we put over 100000 people on the streets -- not one of which was a leader or a follower, I would like to add.

Speaking of violence/non violence, what is the general concensus amongst anarchists regarding guns and such?

I know youre against gun "laws" but assuming anarchy, if you had two communities to choose from, one in which all were armed and another in which those carrying guns were ostracized which would you choose?

A lot more than just modern anarchists practice nonviolence. M.Gandhi and M.King were not anarchists obviously. We understand perfectly well that those suppressing us will have their hirelings show up armed to the teeth. All the way from the local cops, through the National Guard, to the regular army. This disparity of force is one of the reasons nonviolence works.

And as you might have noticed, we get attacked by chemical weapons too, perhaps more so than projectiles here in the US and Canada.

One of the constant points of irritation is the cops refuse to follow the consensus. At the Convergence (organizing center) for LA 2000 we had a no weapons policy. The Fire Marshalls respected our policy, and locked their firearms in their trunks when they came to visit. They were always given a hero's welcome. The cops refused to disarm, claiming it was against their policy. And they were barred from entry for that reason, and for that reason only.Well personally I enjoy going out and wasting some ammo in a responsible manner. The little Missile dog however had her own agenda. She knew what guns were, and she knew what cases they were in. She didn't like it when we'd load them up with all the other toys. And as soon as we'd unload them out at a range, she'd head for the car and ask to be let inside. It was typically about 110 degrees where we were shooting at, so we'd run the AC for her.

But she really hated when people would start yelling at each other or prepared to fight. Or when other dogs were hit. That was the only time when she'd act very visibly upset, and would actually growl and bark in anger. Other than that, people would sometimes ask us if she was mute. She was a good little dog.

To me personally it's a matter of proper gun responsibility. A community where everyone is running around open carrying for the sake of open carrying (and other such nonsense) is going to be flat out more dangerous than a pacifist no-weapons community. Just by accidents and such alone. If a community actually needs to run around armed for some reason, that community is already much more dangerous, by definition.

Its been decades, so I don't know if things are still the same... but I visited Australia three times in the 1980s. There the typical patrol cop didn't carry. They had guns in locked in their vehicles IRRC, and of course they have tactical units which were fully armed just like our SWAT teams. I personally think that's the model we should be looking at... given a perfect world, of course.

There is at least an argument that Gandhi was an anarchist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchi..._and_anarchism

--some guy

Very good link sir. I stand corrected.

This is a very good argument being made that Gandhi was an anarchist. In fact, now that I think it through, the counter argument, that he didn't self identify as an anarchist and is rightly famous for his involvement in a national liberation movement, is rather weak. Obviously, I was 100% wrong when I blogged it was "obvious" that he wasn't an anarchist. My bad.

Most anarchists don't believe in strict nonviolence. And sadly a lotta activists use the word "violence" as a "special" word, which just ends up getting themselves twisted up logically and confusing the issues, and annoying people like me. Also a lotta anarchists choose nonviolence for tactical or strategic reasons, not as a moral choice.

As an example, at LA 2000, we reached consensus on the use of violence as no harm to people or animals, no destruction of things, and no threats of the above, with one exception... police barricades, which were fair game (although not attempted IIRC).

Also the linkee does a good job of explaining how the core values of anarchism and nonviolence are intertwined and holistic. Its not a coincidence, and not simply for tactical or strategic reasons, that so many anarchists have adopted Gandhi's (and King's) nonviolence both in their actions and their lives.

Have you hit 20 yet? Because I have a 10,000% trivial and non-topical question. More of a personal prop bet, really.

Are you a burner?

Feel free to ignore if it's cluttering up the thread, but things seem to be petering out so I figured I'd throw it out there.

As in do I smoke pot? I don't think we're supposed to discuss illegal activities here on 2+2. But my Cali med-card (that I may or may not had used) expired in December, if that's what you're asking. Did you win your bet?