(no subject)

[skygiants]

Somewhere in the middle of the recent string of disappointing fantasy novels that ended deep in the horrific bowels of Tepper-land, I took a break from fiction altogether to read Freedom Is An Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. I forget why I picked it up; I think I saw it referenced in an article I was reading and was grabbed by the title? And I would generally like to know more about American social movements!

This was possibly not actually the book to learn more about the actual movements from; it's quite dry, with a very firm focus on The Question Of Whether Consensus-based Participatory Democracy Is A Potentially Valid Governing Structure For An Organization. (Spoiler: Francesca Polletta thinks yes, but it's hard!) This also is a relevant and interesting question, especially if you happen to work with any groups that do attempt to decide their direction by talking it out until everybody agrees -- and I do actually work with such a group -- but is probably less gripping than if the book was, as I originally thought from the summary, just straight-up history about some case studies in democratic social movements. (Also Francesca Polletta is not a particularly gripping writer. But a very thorough one!)

The case studies, for the record, are the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the civil rights-era group that organized the Freedom Rides; the Students for a Democratic Society, another major (mostly white) 60's era progressive protest group; and various small collectives of the second-wave feminist movement. Dry prose aside, it is actually pretty fascinating to take a really deep look at the organizational structure and governance of radical protest activity -- the 'endless meeting' of bureaucratic discussion that is nowhere near as exciting as the actual stuff that's happening, but nonetheless needs to happen in order to make anything else happen. Polletta's trying to show that even when consensus-based participatory democracy results in meetings that go on for literal days (as it sometimes did!), there can still be serious value in it; when you're putting your lives on the line, it's really important to make sure that everybody agrees that the things you're doing are worth putting your lives on the line for.

On the other hand, meetings that go on for literal days. And weird interpersonal politics, and weird attempts at overcorrection of interpersonal politics -- apparently the Students for a Democratic Society had a thing where everyone got really paranoid about being accidentally manipulative and had a huge decision freeze thereby -- and people accusing each other of cliquey-ness and all the other messy, petty, mundane stuff that you can't really keep out of your revolution no matter how hard you try. Which is an important thing to keep in mind, I think, and I'm glad I read the book! Even though it took me ages to get through it, because, as I said, dry as heck.

Comments

[vass]

Have you read any Starhawk? Suddenly I'm extremely curious about what you'd think of her non-fiction in particular (Truth or Dare covers some of the same territory as the book you're describing, but in a *cough* less critical and reflective way) but also her fiction (The Fifth Sacred Thing would probably make an interesting contrast to Tepper, in that it's ecofeminist utopia surrounded by a dystopia whose invasion the utopians are trying to stop through purely nonviolent means.)

[skygiants]

I have neither read nor heard of Starhawk! :O

[agonistes]

The Amazon link only let me read the preface, the endnotes, and the index, and from that I find this book pretty off-putting. Bearing in mind that that's all I've got to judge the book by... it seems like the point she wants to make leads to the case studies, rather than the studies leading to the point. (Like I don't know how you can talk about the classical phase of the African American civil rights movement and participatory democracy in the planning and just kind of leave out Fred Shuttlesworth and how much he and King could not stand each other and let everybody around them know it.) And her bit about coming in and ~teaching locals how politics work~ -- how the hell does she think Fannie Lou Hamer got involved and stayed involved?

Basically if she justified why she self-selected these movements, I didn't see it, but I'm getting hints of the usual fetishizations and narratives of the civil rights movement in the South, which is lazy scholarship at best and actively harmful at worst.

[vass]

Starhawk: big name Wiccan/neopagan and ecofeminist activist. Best known for The Spiral Dance about Goddess religion.

Her first fiction novel was The Fifth Sacred Thing. Possibly available at a library or second-hand bookstore near you!

It is very, very earnest, and kind of sweet even while occasionally making me want to bang my head against a wall.

Would make Ursula Le Guin reach for the migraine pills and start writing The Dispossessed if she hadn't already written it 19 years before.

[skygiants]

You'd know much more than I would! As far as I could make out, her method was basically to pick the examples of participatory democracy that other people have used most frequently to argue that the form isn't effective, and try to use the same examples to prove that they're wrong. Of course, I haven't read any of the stuff that she seems to be trying to argue against, so it's like coming in on the second half of an conversation and trying to catch up.

[skygiants]

Oh, lord. Man, that looks ... academically fascinating, but I think I need to let the Tepper hangover fade for a while before I'm ready to wade back into ecofeminist land.

[luzula]

I've been doing lots of organizational work and I really care about the democratic process. But I've never been in a consensus-based organization, and I feel skeptical towards the method. Like, sometimes you just have to accept that people have different opinions and take a vote and move on. Is my feeling, anyway. But as I said, I have no experience of the consensus model. Do you have experience of it yourself?

[sapote]

Oh my gosh, I was JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS in another window. The bees! The germ theory! The preachy polyamory! I need to reread it as an adult.

[sapote]

My experience of it was lousy, but then, my experience of it was specific and involved young adults from activist backgrounds with no real culture around it besides those activist backgrounds. People I know who, for instance, grew up in Quaker fellowships may have different experiences. (But even then, it presumes that there's no opportunity cost to waiting. The Quaker fellowship in the city where I grew up didn't do gay marriages for well on fifteen years because there was a single couple in the congregation that didn't believe in them.)

[skygiants]

Sort of? I do volunteer work with a very small nonprofit preservation org that in practice has a consensus-based model -- we've never formally voted on anything, we pretty much talk everything out about what our next steps as an organization should be. It works 'cause there's like five of us and we're only a couple years old, so there's barely even enough of us to vote on a thing. But if we grow much bigger, I suspect we will have to institute some kind of formal procedure.

[lnhammer]

Whether Consensus-based Participatory Democracy Is A Potentially Valid Governing Structure For An Organization

Based on my experience with Quakerism, I agree with Polletta, or at least your spoiler summary. Basically half of Quaker practice is devoted to training everyone into habits that the experience of generations suggest are how make this work. Extensive training.

(Most of the other half is spiritual disciplines designed to dovetail into the habits, though usually it's described as the habits are designed to dovetail into the spiritual disciplines. If the Society of Friends were not a religious sect, the order would not matter as much.)

---L.