Anarchists love democracy! I mean, mostly. There’s another system called consensus which I think people universally agree is better since it avoids the tyranny of the majority – in consensus, every member has veto power. This requires a change in how members look at votes though, so that rather than only voting for something when you want to do it, you only vote against something when you refuse to do it. Even with that conceptual change though, there’s still a danger of some member vetoing something out of spite or whatever, so consensus typically works best in groups that are small enough for every member to know each other and be committed to working together and working out differences
But, in situations where consensus doesn’t work for whatever reason, democracy is absolutely anarchist. I think the idea that it isn’t comes from two common misunderstandings:
- That states like the so-called US are democratic (they’re actually republics)
- That anarchism is opposed to all forms of organization and “governance” (anarchism is only opposed to hierarchies of power, so direct democracy is fine)
For example, Rojava is made up of a confederation of small direct democracies, and it’s an anarchist society. Organization is great, and democracy is great!
Sounds like a lot of work? Well, it’s not so bad.
Very relevant to most anarchist decision making models is that decisions are made by those actually impacted by it. So decisions about how a neighbourhood is organized are made by that neighboorhood.
Anarchist decision making models also generally leave a lot of space where no consensus is required because the thing decided only effects those that decide to participate and the only thing that matters is whether you can get enough support to realize it.
So important decisions are “is everyone who is impacted by this okay with this?” but a lot of less important decisions are “hey, I need 10 people to get this done, are there 10 people that wanna go do this with me?” and then you just go for it.
And finally, probably most importantly: anarchist decision making models are not set in stone. They can be changed if they’re not working. If too much power is gathered in one place or if everything gets bogged down in vetoes or if to many things are happening spontaneously and people feel like there isn’t enough consensus, you get together and change the model.
QueerAnarchism 