"A key tenet of the anarchist tradition is rejection of political representation: the idea that one person can represent others, meaning alienation of choice, expression, action and decision-making which occurs when political actors speak, campaign, act and decide on behalf of others in the political arena. Bakunin criticized representative democracy when it was just an embryonic movement. Seen by many as a force for liberation, Bakunin termed it ‘bourgeois democracy’ and ‘so-called representative democracy’. He argued it was an expression of existent relations of inequality, whereby political elite with privileged access to resources such as wealth, education and free time are able to deceive people into thinking it is acting in their interests whereas it is ‘invariably exploit- ing them’. Max Stirner argued that not only political representation but any forms of subjugation to ideas and principles that are not one’s own leads to oppression of minorities and self-creativity. More recently, Todd May and Saul Newman have drawn an anarchist critique of representation from poststructural theorists such as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault. The anarchist critique seems to have gained increasing importance during a time that some academic commentators label a ‘crisis of representation’ whereby many publics, not only anarchists, are losing faith in the ability of representative democracy to articulate their interests. The anarchist alternative to ‘representative democracy’ is sometimes called ‘direct democracy’ although some anarchists eschew the term ‘democracy’ altogether, since it means ‘rule by the people’, and ‘the people’ is an abstraction.

A specific practice associated with anarchism, which attempts to offer an alternative to representation, is consensus decision-making. Consensus in its most basic form means that all people affected by a decision can take part in deciding, in a face-to-face process, and everyone must agree before action is taken. It means that minorities have power to veto and so cannot be ignored. Consensus requires commitment to making decisions acceptable to everyone affected by the outcome. Instead of choosing between polarized positions through voting, consensus involves creatively modifying options through sometimes long processes of negotiation in order to take everyone’s needs into account.65 Unlike political representation, consensus does not assume unity of identity or desires that can be represented as a single vision. Rather, consensus assumes conflict—minorities can veto a decision, so they cannot be ignored. Combining perspectives on an issue in both process and outcomes can lead to more creative and effective decisions, and the process itself helps to build bonds and community. Consensus requires trust and openness, unlike parliamentary democracy which tends to assume conflict and competition. All participants invest time and energy in the process and all agree so they are more committed to implementing the outcome.

Many intentional communities, whether explicitly anarchist or not, prefer to use consensus for making important decisions. Practical details vary from group to group. Usually there is a facilitator, whose role is to make sure everyone has equal opportunity to speak and procedures are followed. Some groups have informal procedures, simply discussing a subject until everyone agrees. Other communities use colored cards or hand signals, coded to communicate agreement, disagreement (blocking a decision), and desire to intervene with a question or comment. The purpose of such systems is to minimize talking-over and interrupting. When well facilitated, consensus should allow everyone to speak, be listened to and understood, whilst louder voices and more assertive personalities should be prevented from dominating the proceedings. Some groups have a pre-consensus ‘heart session’ where participants can talk about, for example, how their week has been and reveal any personal worries or troubles, with the premise that this might ameliorate the possibility of repressed emotions being played out during the consensus process.

Consensus requires small groups to work effectively. Communities visited during my research varied from 4 members to about 400. As group size increased, consensus became increasingly difficult, and larger communities tended to delegate to sub-groups where possible but use varying forms of majority voting or representation for decisions affecting the entire community. Critics of anarchism cite this as a reason that anarchism could not work on a ‘large scale’. However, this misunderstands the anarchist position, which resides precisely in a re-scaling and dis-alienation of society."

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A further resonance between the [ #IntentionalCommunities ] movement and anarchism resides in the idea and practice of networked federation. The best known anarchist proponent of federalism was Proudhon. Many other anarchists have based visions on the idea of small and diverse self-governing communities associated through networks and loose associations, forming non-coercive organizations to communicate. Federation is a partial response to the issue of scale. Many aspects of anarchism, for example, decentralized production, affinity, community and limits on authority, require communities not to expand over a certain size. Federation in anarchism means that ‘the basic idea is to reproduce the collective, not expand it’. The principle of small-scale communities is also espoused by eco-anarchists such as Leopold Kohr who anticipated the deep-ecology movement’s preoccupation with bioregions and decentralization through his promotion of ‘human scale’ and small communal life. The issue of size and scale is also important in utopian studies. John P. Clark argues that the dominant utopia is based on a fantasy of innate superpower that ‘drives relentlessly toward the destruction of all diversity and complexity’ in the name of progress, whilst anarchist utopias are experimental and connect the rich specificity of ‘sense of place’ with diverse cultures and ecosystems. Tom Moylan also argues that whilst top-down, totalitarian utopias assume a singular jurisdiction over a very large area, critical utopianism assumes a proliferation of diverse small-scale experiments, calling for an ‘alliance of margins without a centre’.

Many intentional communities practice federation through the organization Radical Routes. Radical Routes is ‘a network of radical co-ops whose members are committed to working for positive social change’. Four times a year, nominated members will attend a gathering at which issues affecting cooperatives will be discussed, such as national laws and policies, and new applications to join, as well as issues facing groups financial need (Radical Routes can provide loans). The organization’s purpose is to provide ‘a form of structured mutual aid’ that is ‘about people taking control of their own housing, work, education and leisure activities’. In a very real and practical sense, intentional communities, networked through #RadicalRoutes, are engaged in renewing society from the grassroots, here-and-now, as called for by anarchists like Buber and Landauer. . . .

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