In France, in some of the universities are held "General Assemblies" which are sort of like direct democracy, everybody can speak and vote for decisions. The thing is, when it gets too big, and I'm speaking of more or less around hundred people in the case of my uni, you end up with fucking fascists and counter-revolutionnaries participating in the GA's. I went to my Uni this morning and they were all over the place, ready to fight with people who they consider leftist, and the security had let them pass with knuckle gloves and steel boots. Nobody throws them out because "muh democracy".
That's also due to the fact that those organizing this kind of events are bourgeois fucking scum and have more or less bourgeois or liberal ideas, and try to pass it as leftist.
Now I'm just fucking angry nobody does anything about the fash at the Uni and if I do anything against that I'll probably get my ass beaten because nobody is ready to face them physically, so yeah, fuck direct democracy in my case.
Jayden Turner
It's unclear to me what groups doing consensus really mean by that. (And I've met some in real life and talked with them for hours. They have such an imprecise language it's driving me insane.) If the way you do consensus means that a group refrains from implementing a decision if even one person doesn't like it, it should be obvious that, as the group increases in size, the probability of reaching a consensus, and so the probability of the group doing anything, implodes. (I told them that much, and they treated that as an ultra-subjective statement as if I had talked about which type of ice-cream I prefer.)
It's pretty clear to me that to get anything done in bigger groups that use a type of consensus, the only way to preserve consensus is to limit what blocking a decision means. That is, you as an individual block the usage of a particular resource for obtaining that goal: yourself, your arms and legs (if you have 'em), your brain, your mouth. Those who do the work of implementing the decision can do that with a consensus among themselves.
Here's what I'd like to see: A big group that can constantly split into smaller groups of people who care about a thing and want to do something about that and then they merge back, split in other ways, merge back together, and so on. The big group can still have an identity as a big group and publish official statements (say, a 3/4 super-majority requirement for general statements, a threshold of 1/4 for NAME OF BIG GROUP - SOME FACTION statements). The big group can also own some venue and use that for concerts and habbenings and the like and recycle some proportional voting method, so that you have some proportional representation over time of what different smaller groups within the big group want to do with that.
