as an anarchist, i'm morally opposed to standard "democratic" processes like representative "democracy", but i'm also opposed to things that are more standardly found in anarchist orgs to varying degrees such as direct democracy, delegatory democracy, and standard consensus

my main reasons for being unhappy with those latter three are that they all presuppose or produce the same kinds of legislative phenomena that are found in representative democracy

they, along with other standard democratic frameworks, presuppose a structure of governance whereby some people have a particular idea or proposal or plan of action or whatever that they wish to implement via the mechanisms of the coordinated decision making body

and the way that they go about doing this is by bringing the proposal to the decision making body and via some means of voting and tallying, the decision either becomes law or it doesn't, effectively

representation vs. the other three is a question of who's in that decision making body -- everyone or only a few people

consensus vs. majority is just a question of what threshold is required to pass a law -- majority vs. unanimity

these are all fundamentally the same tho

there is a group of people and a threshold and the only point of variation, ultimately, is whos in the group and whats the threshold number. the overarching mechanism is the same

and that's what i find unpleasant, because fundamentally that mechanism is bad

one of the things that i think this mechanism produces inexorably is a competitiveness

the group that wishes to forward their agenda is explicitly proposing something, and the deliberative body must say Yes or No to that thing

either you Win & your agenda moves fwd, or you Lose

the stakes are therefore very high, and the animosity that comes about when you lose (or when you win and your opposition loses) is very real

that mechanism fundamentally breeds conflict and rivalrousness

you get into the whole *game* of politics, trading votes, trading consensing/non-blocks, etc.

you get voting blocs, allegiances, camps, party tensions even with no parties

its highly fractious no matter what your political alignment and always has been

i do not believe there can be radical social change in our society that doesn't also entail radical change to how we think about decision making

many of the changes we need require not just legislative victories but also unity of purpose and commitment

the response to climate change is going to require that we move whole cities inland away from the coastline, literally. we're going to have to move tens of millions of people

this is a society wide long-term project that needs unity of purpose

abolishing the police, eliminating the punitive justice system, these are projects that are going to entail deep cultural shifts in our societies, whether its American or not, and you'll never legislate it to happen

the list goes on and on. every major change we need faces dramatic problems when approached from the perspective of votes or consensus or anything like that

so I don't have much hope for the long term success of leftist movements that still focus on these kinds of mechanisms for decision making, alas.

I think that the only way forward for leftists is to look at existing alternatives to those mechanisms, and look at developing new alternatives -- ones where the actions we take collectively are developed collectively, where we all develop these plans of action together

ones where, rather than proposing a plan of action, or a constraint on action, we together determine what we should do, from a whole field of options. where we together determine what the best approach is, and why