Consensus decision-making and fear of bureaucracy stalled a mass movement’s momentum
Evidence
Some members were afraid of inevitable, dreaded bureaucratization if they sought to expand or take advantage of their popularity. One proposal sought to eliminate the necessity that everyone participate in those endless twelve-hour meetings. There would be a general assembly for some things, as well as smaller groups for other things. This was seen as unacceptably Leninist. For his part, Lucas “Vegetable” Monteiro essentially wanted to abolish all of the group’s existing structures. After endless discussion, a different proposal won out. The MPL would retreat from the spotlight in the middle of the city, neglect the universities and media, and go down to the people. They would concentrate on outreach in the periferia, the poor neighborhoods on the outskirts (or periphery) of the cities. Adjusted for the Brazilian context, this is the exact same thing that the original leaders of Students for a Democratic Society did back in the 1960s after the media spotlight furnished them with a lot of attention (and, consequently, a lot of new members). “Vegetable” hadn’t heard this story before, but when I began to tell him, he was able to finish my sentences for me, and predict exactly what was going to happen. “So people showed up trying to join a movement that didn’t actually exist outside the media?” he asked. Right. “Que loucura.” What madness. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 455
Categorization
- XREF: Directly echoes the earlier SDS story about media making movements that attract members to a fiction. — connects to: A horizontalist group member publicly declared it over without others’ consent — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 626; Democratic centralism means adapting constantly to movement rather than hardening into bureaucracy; Consensus decision-making and exhaustion prevented the MPL from channeling mass momentum — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 453