Epistemic Status: 
Sprouting
Sociocracy is a set of tools and principles that ensure shared power. How does one share power?
The assumption in sociocracy is that sharing power requires a plan. Power is everywhere all the time, and it does not appear or disappear - someone will be holding it. We have to be intentional about how we want to distribute it. Power is like water: it will go somewhere and it tends to accumulate in clusters: the more power a group has, the more resources they will have to aggregate more power. The only way to counterbalance the concentration of power is intentionality and thoughtful implementation.
~ Many Voices One Song
I came across this system while perusing the Foundation for Intentional Community website. In their list of books, they recommend both Who Decides Who Decides and Many Voices One Song, a pair of books written by Sociocracy for All a non-profit that provides training and books on this topic1.
- Who Decides Who Decides is a good introduction to the idea. It’s aimed at newly forming groups as a sort of tutorial without going too deeply into the details of the system.
- Many Voices One Song is more of a full and complete reference manual for the system. They cover a lot more ground here, and deal with difficult questions like, what to do if you need to remove someone from the group for whatever reason. I still haven’t completely read this (despite being listed in my read books category).
The basic idea is that while in typical consensus-based plurality or majority democracy, decisions can be made without the consent of every member of the group, leading to resentment, e.g. “He’s not my President. I didn’t vote for him.”, Sociocracy uses a consent-based system. No decisions can be taken without the express consent of all involved parties.
You might say, “But that just means nothing will ever get done!”, and that’s where the other parts of the decision making process come in. Assuming no bad-faith actors2, someone withholding consent is doing so because they can’t agree with the decision being made. To mitigate that, Sociocracy leans towards making shorter term “good enough for now” decisions, and revising them later.
It’s possible this only works on a small scale, but like most anarchist thought3, the goal is self-organizing bottom-up groups rather than hierarchal authority-based top-down groups.
I like to think that a system like this might be what they use on Anarres in The Dispossessed. I feel like there’s this assumption that anarchists would have no system at all, and in practice that would never work.
I would like to experience it in practice, and see if it lives up to its claims.
Footnotes
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I’m usually pretty suspicious of groups that do “consulting” on some method. But I haven’t seen anything here to make me think this is the same way, but I also haven’t engaged much with them besides the books.
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What do you do about people who just want to throw a wrench into things? At that point, it’s worth it for the group to step back and ask if that person’s objections are related to trying to meet the goal of the group (which has to be clearly defined up front), and if not, then it might be time to part ways with this person. Many Voices One Song has a lot of examples of various scenarios that have come up in existing implementations of this system.
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I’m not sure they’d include themselves in that space, but I think they fit right in. Anarchism requires democracy, the more direct the better.