Leaderless, consensus-based participatory democracy and its discontents

[xchrom]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-3

OCCUPY WALL STREET is not only a mass protest movement intended to draw attention to economic injustice and political corruption. It seeks to embody and thereby to demonstrate the feasibility of certain ideals of participatory democracy. This is, to my mind, what makes OWS so interesting, and so unlike a tea-party protest. OWS is not simply a group of like-minded people gathered together to make a point with a show of collective force, though it is that. The difference is that it has developed into an ongoing micro-society with a micro-government that directly exemplifies a principled alternative to the prevailing American order. The complaint that OWS has failed to produce a coherent list of demands seems to me to miss much of the point of the encampment in Zuccotti Park. The demand is a society more like the little one OWS protestors have mocked up in the park. The mode of governance is the message.

And what is the message of the "General Assembly", the governing body of the original financial-district occupation? According its website:

New York City General Assemblies are an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times.

Got that? If this sounds a bit academic, that's because it is. Whether you're having trouble parsing this or not, this piece by Dan Berrett on the academic roots of OWS's governing ideology is incredibly helpful.

[Rene Descartes]

1. "Consensus-based communes composed of individuals who opt in...

specifically because they already agree with the commune's founding values can work precisely because the people who would make consensus impossible—people with very different opinions and values—stay away.

That's the answer--the anarchists, socialists, communists, etc., should simply opt-out and go their own way, while at the same time leaving those with "different opinions" to follow their chosen paths.