General assemblies (GA) were the primary decision making bodies of the global Occupy movement which arose in 2011. Open to all who wished to take part, general assemblies allowed for an inclusive form of direct democracy. Such assemblies aimed to establish a consensus among all participants.
Assemblies were primarily voice-based, with different speakers addressing the crowd in turn. The specific forms adopted by the Occupy assemblies varied across the world. Most assemblies had facilitators to keep order and ensure that, if possible, everyone had their say. The larger assemblies often restricted the speakers only to spokespeople who represented smaller working groups, however each individual was still able to provide feedback, if only by means of hand signals.
General assemblies had been used by the Occupy Wall Street movement since its planning stages in August 2011, and were held in Zuccotti Park during the occupation itself. The name "New York City General Assembly" was given to the general assemblies taking place in Zuccotti Park. The "NYCGA" website, as it was known, was maintained by the Internet Working group as a resource for all assemblies and its working group meetings.
Methods
General assemblies were the de facto decision making body of the Occupy movement from its inception.[1] [2] Designed to facilitate the formation of consensus, they typically reflected egalitarian principles. They were often organized to ensure everyone had the chance to have their say, to counteract the natural tendency for the most forceful to dominate disorganized discussion. In larger assemblies such as some of the ones in New York, this was done by formal mechanisms such as the progressive stack.
Another organizational feature from many larger general assemblies was to limit speaking mainly just to representatives of smaller working groups.[3] This meant that each individual had a chance to speak and ask questions at work group level, while at assembly level the discussions were kept at a manageable length. In the smaller assemblies, anyone was able to make proposals for discussion. In larger assemblies, the audience got to make brief spoken responses to proposals from working groups. A queuing based system called a stack was sometimes used to manage this, with the facilitators indicating when it was a particular occupier's turn to speak. Even at the largest assemblies, individuals could always feed back to speakers and the crowd by means of hand signals.[4]
History
The use of General assemblies for consensus based decision making can be traced to the Athenian democracy that arose around the sixth century BC in Ancient Greece. Athens' version of direct democracy was ended in 322 BC after defeat by the Macedonians. Since then formal decision making assemblies of Common people have occurred only sporadically and have been of little prominence in world affairs, with exceptions occurring as part of the direct democracy taking place in the Swiss Cantons of the late Middle Ages, and the Quaker movement which arose in the mid 17th century.[1] In the 20th century, consensus based assemblies enjoyed a modest resurgence with the US civil rights movement of the 1960s.[4][6] They grew in prevalence at around the turn of the millennium, manifesting as the spokescouncils of the 1999 anti-globalization movement and as the horizontalist assemblies that began to appear in South America as a response to the Argentine economic crisis (1999–2002).[7]
Assessment
General assemblies are typically experienced positively by those who choose to participate, so much so that occupiers have often been described as "fetishizing" them.[7] Newcomers have sometimes indulged in soapboxing on their first speech, but folk typically soon chose to respect the process.[2] The Marxist activist Larry Holmes said that the Occupy movement needed to have general assemblies so they could create "real democracy", to oppose the existing state sanctioned institutions which he believes are controlled by financial interests.[12] Anthropologist David Graeber has suggested the use of assemblies was a key reason why the Occupy movement gained momentum, in contrast to many other attempts to start a post crisis movement, which used more standard methods of organization but which all failed to get off the ground.[11] The author and academic Luke Bretherton has written that general assemblies provide an "experience of a completely different space and time" so people can perceive the oppressive nature of regular reality.[13]
See also
- Deliberative democracy
- Participatory democracy
External links
- NYCGA.cc New York City General Assembly website for Occupy Wall Street.
- Youtube video about General assemblies and the consensus-based decision making process used by Occupy.
- Portal to various essays on General assemblies, by the occupy group The Future of Occupy Collective
- Critical view of General assemblies and the Occupy's consensus model from The Economist
References
- Nathan Schneider. From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere The Nation, 2011-10-31, retrieved 2012-01-04^
- Nathan Schneider. Thank You, Anarchists The Nation, 2011-12-19, retrieved 2012-01-04^
- Working groups met before the GA to decide their common positions on the issues at hand, sometimes on the bases of research carried out by their members. Often they had about 30 or less members, though popular ones were sometimes larger.^