Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making)
TO THE VILLAGE: With a large college and high school student contingent, occupiers from all over the city have repeatedly marched to Washington Square where at least two general assemblies have convened. PHOTO: Stephen O’Byrne
On August 2, 2011 at the very first meeting of what was to become Occupy Wall Street, about a dozen people sat in a circle in Bowling Green. The self-appointed “process committee” for a social movement we merely hoped would someday exist, contemplated a momentous decision. Our dream was to create a New York General Assembly: the model for democratic assemblies we hoped to see spring up across America. But how would those assemblies actually operate?
The anarchists in the circle made what seemed, at the time, an insanely ambitious proposal. Why not let them operate exactly like this committee: by consensus.
It was, in the least, a wild gamble, because as far as any of us knew, no one had ever managed to pull off