In the last few weeks, the press has been abuzz with talk of this consensus decision-making that all the kool kids in lefty activist communities use. Although it’s a little unpopular in many lefty activist communities to admit, I personally have mixed feelings about consensus decision-making.
The participatory consensus model (PCM) is a system for groups to make decisions. The idea is that everyone should work to find a mutually acceptable solution to a given problem, not settle on something which is acceptable to majority. The reasoning for this is that a majoritarian view can alienate minorities, and a group decisions should be one that the whole group can feel part of and ownership of (so “alienate” here means not only “exclude”, but also the Marxist sense of “alienation”). A consensus is reached when everyone in the group agrees on a decision.
The PCM makes some basic assumptions about participants, and the decision-making context. It assumes people are willing to accommodate to each other’s points of view, that everyone actively wants to find a solution that works for everyone and resolve any problems that might be standing in the way of that. It assumes that everyone has an equal right to participate, and that everyone is committed to learning from each other. In a lot of ways, it’s very much like the consciousness-raising model — consciousness-raising for decision-making. Typically, PCM discussions are facilitated, to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak and speaking turns are allocated fairly. However, PCM is generally used in non-hierarchical settings.
On a more fundamental level: PCM assumes everyone has an equal ability to participate, and there is a very real sense in which PCM is relies on the idea that “decisions are made by those who turn up”. PCM is not a representative democracy.
That presents its own problems, of course. There may be good reasons why some people cannot turn up, or cannot participate as much as they would like. PCM also takes time — it’s easy to present a case for and against something. It’s much harder to invest the time and energy to finding common group that makes everyone happy. I can’t help noticing that many of the stalwart campaigners in many of the PCM-based campaigns I have been involved in are men with no dependents or disabilities or waged jobs. Not all, of course. But many, and although efforts are often made to include children, disabled people, poorer people, in PCM spaces, that doesn’t change the fact that PCM can be long and difficult sometimes, and some people will never have the energy to spare (although we might well have the energy to read up on material in our own time, and cast a vote).
PCM also assumes that everyone has the equal ability to be heard, and that everyone is committed to learning. I don’t doubt that people strive towards this. But I sometimes doubt that it is fully achievable in all situations, because we do internalise prejudices, because we’re all socialised in a very messed-up society. I’m not always sure it is the case that everyone is listened to equally, or that every group that strives to be non-hierarchical in fact ends up being non-hierarchical in practice, because people do and will associate some people with being knowledgeable, or sensible, or what-have-you more than others, and because some people will (and will be able to) put more work into group activities than others.
But many of these problems are problems also with representative democracy models (RDM). With RDMs, there maybe often be less of an effort to find the common ground, more majoritarian rule. That means that even if, say, single mothers get a vote, if they are a numerical majority, their preferences may be discounted.
In many ways, I see the test of these systems as being what happens in situations outside our feminist activist bubbles. PCMs don’t really work where there is a fundamental and insuperable difference of opinion between participants. But RDM does not encourage attempts to listen and persuade.
I will say this for the Glasgow student occupation, and PCM-based groups like them, though: they have built something extraordinary. The are truly remarkable examples of community-run inclusive projects. That they do it in stark contrast to the decision-making systems of university hierarchies, which are not RDMs, but strictly hierarchical with, it seems, particular focus on what is best for the senior management staff. So when I look at projects like the Free Hetherington that are built on peaceful, if civilly disobedient, protest and community involvement, all I can say is: more power to them.
Thoughts?
–IP
[Crossposted at Queergeeks]
The Cambridge occupation used PCM, and I had mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, I thought it was wonderful, in terms of getting everyone involved, and people actually listening to each other and working hard to find common ground. And I loved the hand signals (I still use them in conversation with people who know what they mean – it’s great to be able to communicate visually, without interrupting people mid-sentence. Must learn BSL some time, it would be awesome!).
On the other hand, the meetings were often *long*. I mean, *really long*. I think pretty much all decisions got made without me because I just didn’t have the patience to sit through whole meetings. And there’s only so many decisions you need to make at an occupation – I’m not saying they’re trivial decisions, but i don’t expect it’s anywhere near the scale of chaos of running even a city council, let alone a whole country. So my experience was that decisions were made mostly by people with the stamina to survive the decision making process. Also, even if the system is at its basis inclusive and hierarchical, the people who tended to participate were often louder / more confident / etc., so while there’s no explicit bias, I think there’s plenty of space there for various kinds of bias to creep in anyway (but then, that might be more to do with society already being twisted and oppressive and conditioning people in different ways, and I’m not sure what sort of decision making system if any you could put in place to fix it, and I think PCM fares much better than most).
Anyway, I think I’m pretty much just agreeing with you…
I love that the occupation was a non-hierarchical space, and I thought it was really cool that this is the method they used to make decisions, partly because it presents an alternative and a contrast to the sort of stuffy, hierarchical decision making that the university was using at the time, and that most of the time tends to be the only one we come across. And certainly in small groups, it would be my preferred method of decision making. However, my impression is that the bigger the group gets, the more difficult and impractical it becomes.
But yeah, particularly in activist groups, I think it’s a great way to make decisions, and a good way to lead by example.
Yeah, the length issue often gets underestimated. I found that PCM often made a meeting longer by a factor of 2 *at least*, compared to a more traditional committee meeting format.
And then I think of all the times I’ve sat in university committees that were scheduled for 2 hours and ran onto 3 because something contentious came up, and how much I would have liked people to have shown a little more of that good-faith attempt to understand where other people are coming from. But also knowing that, well, realistically, that means we’re looking at a 4-6 hour meeting, perhaps more. I do sometimes come out of university meetings a little frustrated, but hey, at least I’ll live to fight another one, instead of collapsing halfway through because I’m exhausted and just can’t hack the length.
Plus also, I’m just not convinced that this method is actually generalisable to situations when people have specific (and differing) political agendas and major political divisions, and haven’t made a major commitment to consciousness raising.
And yeah the confidence thing is important. It’s not always down to structural privilege.
So I guess I’m cautious about the idea that this method is generalisable. But sure, I love it in consciousness-raising contexts.
–IP
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[...] I’ve written a little about my own struggles with the participatory consensus model (PCM) of d…, with a specific view to the inclusivity for women and disabled people. The PCM is common in lefty activist circles, especially anarchist-leaning circles. [...]