Editing Consensus decision-making (section)

== History ==
Consensus decision-making, as a self-described practice, originates from several [[Nonviolence|nonviolent]], [[direct action]] groups that were active in the [[Civil rights movement|Civil rights]], [[Peace movement|Peace]] and [[Women's Movement in the United States (1963-1982)|Women's]] movements in the USA during [[counterculture of the 1960s]]. The practice gained popularity in the 1970s through the [[Anti-nuclear movement in the United States|anti-nuclear]] movement, and peaked in popularity in the early 1980s.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Leach |first=Darcy K. |date=2016-02-01 |title=When Freedom Is Not an Endless Meeting: A New Look at Efficiency in Consensus-Based Decision Making |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1111/tsq.12137 |journal=The Sociological Quarterly |language=en |volume=57 |issue=1 |pages=36–70 |doi=10.1111/tsq.12137 |s2cid=147292061 |issn=0038-0253 |quote="The popularity of consensus decision making has waxed and waned with the impulse toward participatory democracy and has become more mainstream over time. The last major wave in the United States began in the 1960s, gained momentum in the 1970s ... and peaked in the early 1980s, in the direct action wings of the women’s, peace, and antinuclear movements"|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Consensus spread abroad through the [[Anti-globalization movement|anti-globalization]] and [[Climate movement|climate]] movements, and has become normalized in [[Anti-authoritarianism|anti-authoritarian]] spheres in conjunction with [[affinity group]]s and ideas of [[Participative democracy|participatory democracy]] and [[prefigurative politics]].<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |date=2010-04-01 |title=Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 80s By Andrew Cornell {{!}} The Institute for Anarchist Studies |url=https://anarchiststudies.org/node/292 |access-date=2022-05-21 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100401065412/https://anarchiststudies.org/node/292 |archive-date=1 April 2010 |quote="Though rarely remembered by name today, many of the new ways of doing radical politics that the Movement for a New Society (MNS) promoted have become central to contemporary anti-authoritarian social movements. MNS popularized consensus decision-making, introduced the spokescouncil method of organization to activists in the United States, and was a leading advocate of a variety of practices—communal living, unlearning oppressive behavior, creating co-operatively owned businesses—that are now often subsumed under the rubric of "prefigurative politics." ... From the outset, MNS members relied on a consensus decision-making process, and rejected domineering forms of leadership prevalent in 1960s radical groups."}}</ref> 

[[File:Clamshell oct77.png|left|thumb|300x300px|Poster for the [[Clamshell Alliance]]'s first occupation of [[Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant]], 1977]]
The [[Movement for a New Society]] (MNS) has been credited for popularizing consensus decision-making.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Graeber |first=David |date=2010 |title=The rebirth of anarchism in North America, 1957-2007 |url=https://www.historia-actual.org/Publicaciones/index.php/hao/article/view/419 |journal=Historia Actual Online |language=en |issue=21 |pages=123–131 |doi=10.36132/hao.v0i21.419 |issn=1696-2060 |quote="The main inspiration for anti-nuclear activists—at least the main organizational inspiration—came from a group called the Movement for a New Society (MNS), based in Philadelphia." |access-date=30 May 2022 |archive-date=13 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230213003036/https://www.historia-actual.org/Publicaciones/index.php/hao/article/view/419 |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref name=":1" /> Unhappy with the inactivity of the [[Religious Society of Friends]] (Quakers) against the [[Vietnam War]], [[Lawrence Scott (Quaker)|Lawrence Scott]] started [[A Quaker Action Group]] (AQAG) in 1966 to try and encourage activism within the Quakers. By 1971 AQAG members felt they needed not only to end the war, but transform civil society as a whole, and renamed AQAG to MNS. MNS members used consensus decision-making from the beginning as a non-religious adaptation of the [[Quaker decision-making]] they were used to. MNS trained the anti-nuclear [[Clamshell Alliance]] (1976)<ref>{{Cite web |date=2010-04-01 |title=Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 80s By Andrew Cornell {{!}} The Institute for Anarchist Studies |url=https://anarchiststudies.org/node/292 |access-date=2022-05-22 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100401065412/https://anarchiststudies.org/node/292 |archive-date=1 April 2010 |quote="MNS trainers traveled throughout New England in early 1977, facilitating workshops on non-violent direct action with members and supporters of the Clamshell Alliance, the largest anti-nuclear organization on the East Coast, which was coordinating the action."}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=Anti-Nuclear Protests by Sanderson Beck |url=https://san.beck.org/GPJ29-AntiNuclearProtests.html |access-date=2022-05-21 |website=san.beck.org |quote="The Movement for a New Society (MNS) from Philadelphia had influenced the Clamshell, and David Hartsough, who had also worked for civil rights in the South, brought their nonviolence tactics, affinity group structure, and consensus processes to California"}}</ref> and [[Abalone Alliance]] (1977) to use consensus, and in 1977 published ''Resource Manual for a Living Revolution'',<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3662455 |title=Resource manual for a living revolution |date=1977 |publisher=New Society Press |others=Virginia Coover |isbn=0-686-28494-1 |location=[Philadelphia] |oclc=3662455}}</ref> which included a section on consensus.

An earlier account of consensus decision-making comes from the [[Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]]<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Blunden |first=Andy |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/946968538 |title=The origins of collective decision making |date=2016 |isbn=978-90-04-31963-9 |location=Leiden |oclc=946968538}}</ref> (SNCC), the main student organization of the [[civil rights movement]], founded in 1960. Early SNCC member [[Mary King (professor)|Mary King]], later reflected: "we tried to make all decisions by consensus ... it meant discussing a matter and reformulating it until no objections remained".<ref>{{Cite web |last=King |first=Mary |title=Mary E. King » The short and the long of creating democracy |url=http://maryking.info/?p=920 |access-date=2022-05-21 |language=en |quote="In SNCC, we tried to make all decisions by consensus—something in the news earlier this autumn with the Occupy Wall Street movement. The achievement of consensus, however, is far from simple. In SNCC it meant discussing a matter and reformulating it until no objections remained. Everyone and anyone present could speak. Participants included those of us on staff (a SNCC field secretary was paid $10 weekly, $9.64 after tax deductions), but, as time went on, an increasing number of local people would participate as well—individuals whom we were encouraging and coaching for future leadership. Our meetings were protracted and never efficient. Making a major decision might take three days and two nights. This sometimes meant that the decision was in effect made by those who remained and were still awake!"}}</ref> This way of working was brought to the SNCC at its formation by the [[Nashville Student Movement|Nashville student group]], who had received nonviolence training from [[James Lawson (activist)|James Lawson]] and [[Myles Horton]] at the [[Highlander Folk School]].<ref name=":0" /> However, as the SNCC faced growing internal and external pressure toward the mid-1960s, it developed into a more hierarchical structure, eventually abandoning consensus.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2010-04-01 |title=Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 80s By Andrew Cornell {{!}} The Institute for Anarchist Studies |url=https://anarchiststudies.org/node/292 |access-date=2022-05-29 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100401065412/https://anarchiststudies.org/node/292 |archive-date=1 April 2010 |quote=Yet, in the later 1960s, both the Black Freedom movement and the student movement, smarting from repression on the one hand, and elated by radical victories at home and abroad on the other, moved away from this emergent, anarchistic, political space distinguished from both liberalism and Marxism. Many civil rights organizers took up nationalist politics in hierarchical organizations, while some of the most committed members of SDS returned to variants of Marxist-Leninism and democratic socialism.}}</ref>

[[Women Strike for Peace]] (WSP) are also accounted as independently used consensus from their founding in 1961. [[Eleanor Garst]] (herself influenced by Quakers) introduced the practice as part of the loose and participatory structure of WSP.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Swerdlow |first=Amy |date=1982 |title=Ladies' Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3177709 |journal=Feminist Studies |volume=8 |issue=3 |pages=493–520 |doi=10.2307/3177709 |jstor=3177709 |quote=Eleanor Garst, one of the Washington founders, explained the attractions of the un-organizational format: "... Any woman who has an idea can propose it through an informal memo system; if enough women think it's good, it's done. Those who don't like a particular action don't have to drop out of the movement; they just sit out that action and wait for one they like."|hdl=2027/spo.0499697.0008.303 |hdl-access=free }}</ref>

As consensus grew in popularity, it became less clear who influenced who. [[Food Not Bombs]], which started in 1980 in connection with an occupation of [[Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant]] organized by the [[Clamshell Alliance]], adopted consensus for their organization.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Food Not Bombs |url=https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/faq.php |access-date=2022-05-22 |website=foodnotbombs.net |quote="Food Not Bombs started after the May 24, 1980 protest to stop the Seabrook Nuclear power station north of Boston in New Hampshire in the United States."}}</ref> Consensus was used in the [[1999 Seattle WTO protests]], which inspired the [[S11 (protest)|S11 (World Economic Forum protest)]] in 2000 to do so too.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Blunden |first=Andy |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/946968538 |title=The origins of collective decision making |date=2016 |isbn=978-90-04-31963-9 |location=Leiden |oclc=946968538 |quote=My next encounter with Consensus was in 2000 at the protest at the World Economic Forum held on 11–13 September that year, known as S11 and modelled on the events the previous year in Seattle. It was the anarchists who had taken the initiative to organise this event and mass meetings were being held to plan the protest for many months leading up to the day. The anarchists were by far the majority in these planning meetings and decided on the agenda and norms for these at their own meeting held elsewhere beforehand, so a fully developed form of Consensus predominated at all the planning meetings.}}</ref> Consensus was used at the first [[Camp for Climate Action]] (2006) and subsequent camps. [[Occupy Wall Street]] (2011) made use of consensus in combination with techniques such as the [[people's microphone]] and [[Occupy movement hand signals|hand signals]].