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So as many of you may have noticed, we were knocked a little off kilter by Hurricane Sandy, as was WBAI's studios. There still is no normal phone service there so the shows have been studio guests only, and the archives may not be quite up to speed (let us know if these links don't work for you). But the last three shows have been great! We've talked about Occupy Sandy, the economics of the response, and the meaning of community within the context of Hurricane Sandy. Enjoy...
This week's Occupy Think Tank radio show will be on housing. We will touch on issues of what it means to have a safe and secure place to live. How "safe and secure housing" translates into practical terms for people living in NYC and America. How the concept of ownership and private property factors into secure housing. And also the state of housing and homelessness in America today. Please feel free to offer suggestions and comments. We will be on wbai.org or 99.5 fm NY from 6:30 to 7pm on Wednesday. If you would like to be a part of the show, either in the studio or as a call in guest, please let us know.
We had another great conversation last night on jobs and unemployment on Occupy Wall St. Radio on wbai, 99.5 fm NY. We talked a lot about where "jobs" statistics come from. Do they even matter? What does it mean for NYC's communities and boroughs? Regular people? Does it ever touch "us"? All things that we got into in the discussion. Listen to it here. Enjoy!
We had a great show on Wednesday. A good lively discussion about inequality, disparity of income, and the high cost of living in America's richest and most costly city. How do the regular people of this city survive on an income that is more than not below the national average? Have a listen and see what the people think...
Listen here on wbai.org, or tune in every week at 99.5 fm New York.
Shoot out in parkway, stampede. Then Occupy marched into scene of crime. Didn't help. Two shootouts that Occupy wasn't a part of but looked bad.
Last day visioning circle. How do you vision more democratic future. Groups of three. Bigger and bigger list. Major things, etc.
Issues there for scribing as some people weren't writing down everything, and scribes didn't tie things together very well.
Staten Island Occupy Town Square (OTS)
Think tank did one there. Was fine.
Bushwick OTS
Was great, some say best so far. Most of community seemed integrated, a lot of participation, should have been think tanks there. Bi-lingual TT's? Multiple ones. Immigrant workers justice translation software.
What are the goals? Bring people together, help support local groups
Is town square amplifying other groups or other way around? IWJ seemed to be the ones that got things going.
Strong critique of local involvement and that the locals should be the drivers, not occupiers.
Labor research
Trying to figure out ways that occupy or labor could help themselves become a bigger force in society. Different ways, reading, understanding what's going on.
Union ordering books for them.
Doing surveys. Trying to find basic attitudes of people towards unions, organized labor, etc.
labor outreach committee meetings, Courtney been to meetings. Waiting to get understanding before presenting it to people.
ConEd, picket.
Universities getting involved with OSA and research? Starting student labor unions in fall or more likely the spring.
Learn more about structure of unions
Understand people's understanding of the unions/labors
provide ideas to labor/propaganda.
Urban Rebuilding Initiative (URI) was working with union organizing, etc.
How do you navigate vertical decision making unions versus horizontal structure? Part of research project.
Right to work legislation as part of polling?
Sustainable Occupy Research
Mutual aid group should be contacted
Resource guide, debt manual, Aaron working on it. Picture the homeless. Any leads would be welcome.
Bimonthly meeting on Thursday, at colors restaurant of Coops should be attended.
Meeting to follow, notes available.
Website
Trying to have blog, discussion with branches off in discussions.
“Tick”, allows branched conversations, fits in to existing website. Limit 8 people per conversation, multiple break out conversations.
Long conversation that will need more time to have.
Beta site? Kinda
Tutoring?
Not looking like its gonna happen at this point.
Urban farms
URI sustaining themselves, now trying to set up own food sources. Hydroponics, roof top gardens, etc. Major goal open an open air market done together. Food security, provide housing, etc. Vending ventures. Urban farming venture.
Tim to send out petition to ows tt list serve again.
Think Tanks?
Try to do one a week, or at the main events.
Vision for TT for future.
General consensus on the Think Tank holding discussions every week or two at occupy events, starting with next Occupy Town Square.
Work on setting up online discussion areas for think tank styled discussions.
And work on specific research projects aimed at solutions/policy outcomes/actions.
How do we refrain from giving our dollars to someone else? Someone not local?
What within occupy already working on it?
Legality structures
Internal workings, what is the critical mass that is manageable? How do you create solidarity and when does trust breakdown (how many people)
Decision making structures
How much is anything or could it be limited by personal or political will?
What is the education process? For one group its before someone handles money. There is an initiation time.
Mutual aid
Co-ops
economic development corps.
Regulatory structures
make business type plans
Reach out to other occupy's and places to broaden or research team.
This list is be no means exhaustive and was basically aborted as the meeting turned more in the direction of solving the "Israeli question". More will come in time....
Specific individual tasking:
A document about the issue or concept of using the "master's" tools. Specifically in terms of the tools of anti-colonial/anti-imperialists struggles in India and Africa - and how those struggles were cooped.
Cluster of people to talk about meaning of work and labor.
A document looking further into alternatives socio-economic engagements being practiced both domestically and abroad.
Everyone:
Will be looking to increase the participation of individuals from all over the global and occupy communities to engage with this project.
Will be able to help create a document on the parameters of engaging within this project so that we keep discussions, research, and collaboration constructive, positive, and inclusive.
Can create their own research avenue they think can add to this project!!
No next meeting was set as there was limited participation. We plan to assess how best for this group to move forward in terms of meeting given the eclectic nature of all the lives involved! Suggestions encouraged!
Occupy is a movement about change and creating another world. To that end, the Occupy Wall St. Think Tank will be undertaking an in-depth research and solution oriented study aimed at compiling, assessing, and creating sustainable models for the Occupy movement to work with moving forward.
The Think Tank will work to find a way to sustain individual socio-political engagement, occupiers, and the occupy movement itself. Our aim is to create ways for both individuals and communities to be more focused and dedicated as social and political actors, a structured yet flexible working and communications network, and the creation of longer term ethical environments to live, work and grow within.
We also want to provide a sustainable example for general society. That we can live within moral and ethical frameworks and still partake in the rest of society. That we can still have iphones, watch TV, have decent clothes, see family and friends, go places, make things, achieve great things, and enjoy our lives – but to do it through a more inclusive and rewarding way of engaging with social, economic, and political interactions.
Another world is possible - and there are countless examples from brazil to china, AD to BCE. Let's learn from them all, create possible alternatives, engage with them, experiment with them till we find the best way of all!. Figure out what it could be, set it up, and lead by example!
We will operate in an atmosphere of joyful exploration and mutual respect where every idea is valued.
Consider a few questions: What is the meaning of work? We can explore this question by engaging in physical production (sewing, carpentry, cooking), by reading novels about communes or academic works on the transition from manufacturing to service economies, or even have discussion groups with members of alternative living communities from abroad. Or how about nourishment? How do we understand our food and how we would want it to be produced and consumed. Or the nourishment we receive from art and music, or that a child receives growing up in a liberating environment? Stability, security, food, shelter, community, wants, needs, love, respect; how do we gain all of these for both our selves and others?
We will address these questions and countless more. We will learn from historical examples and doing, connect with small and large experiments around the world, and engage with the everyday lives of people and their ideas. We have a problem: “the world” is not working for most people. We must both create and envision a new one – in no particular order.
The Occupy Wall St. Think Tank will be undertaking an in-depth research and solution oriented study aimed at compiling, assessing, and creating sustainable models for the Occupy movement to work with moving forward. In its initial stages Occupy was an amazing systemic critique and protest of the current socio-economic climate via both dialog and message and through a prefigurative social apparatus diagramming another way of organizing social interaction. However, upon losing Liberty park the movement was forced into transition and to undergo change on many levels. Throughout the initial stages of the occupation, numerous individuals came to the park and were afforded the ability to sustain their lives through the community there while working towards the movement's and their own activist goals. Since the eviction of the park, many people have been forced to scramble independently for their own livelihoods, leaving their capacity to engage within the Occupy movement more tenuous. There are a tremendous number of people that have “fallen off the edges” as they had to get jobs, moved back out of the city, or simply have not been able to handle the lack of cohesion and/or transitional nature of the movement's current situation. We need to not only find a way to bring these people back, but to generate a sustainable pathway forward for the people willing to become full time activists. This would allow the movement itself to stably maintain and promote itself and also be more coherent and welcoming to new individuals and groups.
What we are proposing right now is to bring together a group of people to create a researc project that will lead to an exhaustible investigation and understanding of the context, factors, and history of the options available to move forward with The outcome would then be possible comprehensive suggestions at ways forward for both the movement and everyone invovled. What the think tank hopes to achieve in methodology and practice is a synthesis of Occupy styled horizontality and open mindedness, and social science research methodology. But this will be solution driven as opposed to simply research. We will be creating sustainable ways forward for the movement and its individuals. What these will be we do not yet know, nor is this about testing hypothesis or existing models through research. It is about finding several possible solutions amidst the sea of ideas, opinions, and solutions that people have previously come to the table with and/or exist in the world (from Brazil's landless movement, to coops in park slope). We plan to bring together one large network of individuals and ideas and focus them on answer the very specific question: How does Occupy create a sustainable way forward that allows it to meet its activist's basic needs, allows for the expansion and dissemination of its ideas and messages, and establishes exemplary and prefigurative models of social engagement while stably existing throughout the transitional process of change as society transforms to a more idealic social composition (or while simultaneously providing a relatively stable transitional process for itself as society transforms to a more idealic social composition, or...). This question would be the first thing to be addressed by the research unit. What does it mean to move forward and what is the question we need to answer.
For illustration purposes only, I will sketch a possible scenario, but I would advise anyone reading this to look beyond the illustration and to the questions that they are trying to address: We live in a capitalist world were certain parameters are necessary for stable involvement WITHIN the system. Housing, food, interaction and communication, all require things to obtain them – relationships, money, jobs, etc. We need to find an alternative way to structure our lives, while at the same time engaging with the old way enough to transition to something new. Inhabiting the gray areas. The research needs to be open, allowing every possible option on the table, and to methodically dismiss and add things through our principled research.
Sample concept:
Imagine if ten years from now Occupy controlled an old hotel structure in Brooklyn that it had fixed up, and was housing several hundred individuals, office and meeting spaces, and allowed itself the ability to sustain and feed both the facility and its people. That the location was a local hub in a national and global network of prefigurative Occupy principled entities that supported both the facility and the larger network through multiple ways such as revenue generation and also showed the general public a different way of producing goods and interacting with the economy. This network would be made up of many different hubs and entities bringing in revenue streams ranging from fundraising to guild-like entities to hybrid styled non-profit companies to perhaps something new. The housing situation would be cooperative and communal in some way shape or form and allocated and maintained by horizontal principles. The entire facility would function as a launching point for the movement's ideas, work, messaging, etc.
Sample revenue generating entity:
Perhaps “Choccupy” is a full part of this network and sells chocolates and deserts (sale or donation) to the general public in a non-profit cooperative structure. It works from either the hotel structure's industrial kitchen or from another production facility within the network. It produces chocolates and then sells them vendor and retail style throughout the city. It also maintains locations and relationships throughout the country for recipe sharing and localized production and distribution. All materials and ingredients are ethically sourced, as local as possible, and using principled methods akin to Occupy's values such as GMO free, non-expropriative labor practices, economically and socially just, etc. Revenue would come in either through sales or donations, and would be used to maintain itself, its facilities, and occupiers. It would be run, managed, and controlled by a cooperative styled entity made up of a number of individuals working horizontally, with all proceeds going directly back into the entity/facility and the movement and its goals. It also could be an affiliate endeavor, meaning it gives a certain amount or percentage of its proceeds to Occupy (or however it is that this arrangement is set up).
The goal would be to construct a prospective structure of autonomous affiliate entities (and locales) that met certain requirements to be a part of the network. They would work together, be horizontal, local, and work for the movement. These revenue generating entities would allow for individuals to work and to collectively show prefigurative ways of life. These entities could come in many shapes or forms based on the research and local initiative: services, retail, cofftea shops, production, agriculture, whatever. Anyway that individuals, businesses, or new entities felt they could structure society and socio-economic interaction amongst themselves, for sale for barter, for donation... Whatever could fit in the mind – a localized conglomerate cooperative fair/trade model with a horizontal leadership structure. How knows!
Sample housing entity:
Could be set up cooperatively as seen to best fit by the research and Occupy principles. There would obviously be a million questions about access, and decision making – tough questions that would get into gray areas about the movement's inclusivity – but that would be the purpose of the research study, to thoroughly research and find multiple options that could work. The principle goal could be to find a way that say 200 people could live together in a multiple occupancy structure and wake up in the morning and get to work together. Communally spending time on maintaining the housing situation, on revenue generation, and on broadening and working for the movement. All equally shouldered by individual's both living and not living there. How this would be done and structured would all be part of the research outcome. Just as how the space would be obtained. Squating perhaps is the first thing to come to mind, but is that viable? Wouldn't the NYPD shut it down straight away? So a lengthy research into legal issues and structures would be order for ways to allow stability on a legal level.
While those are just a few sample concepts to stir the imagination, whatever structures and entities emerge, the purpose of them would be to provide stable spaces from which Occupy would organize and structure its messages and actions. This would allow more consistent and concerted targeting of specific issues and actions with a more transparent, inclusive, and cohesive structural point of origin. In my opinion it is only from a stable foundation that we can have the security to go to work each day and be as productive as possible in working towards changing the world – both as a prefigurative message of protest and as an information generating and disseminating awareness machine.
On the whole: there are countless issues to address and research here, many of which wouldn't be known until the research showed them. The economics of anything of this sort would be incredibly complex. Where do you get a building from? Donation, lease, friendly lease and if so, how do you cover the costs of getting it, maintaining it? How do you start up those business like entities? They require start up funds, management expertise, planning, etc. Horizontal housing structures? We've tried that... how can it work? How has it worked? How is it that we could consense on the parameters of our principles? How big is that gray area that our collective principles will allow us to work within?
What we are talking about is planning to institute an entirely new socio-economic structure within the current one, under the watchful eye of capital and governmental forces bent on stopping us, within a horizontal consensus structure and movement, with little money, little time, and in our spare time. It is a HUGE undertaking that will take years and decades to see through. But this to me, is exactly what Occupy is about. This type of project would create structural alternatives for transition allowing Occupy to straddle mainstream socio-economic society and an alternative new pathway while maintaining the same activist and awareness raising work we are currently doing To find a legal way to maintain a space while creating a structure of interaction that was work-like and sustainable in a way that the general public could both respect and even desire. We could be laying the ground work for an alternative way forward while providing a stable place to do outreach, create media, do research, live, eat, etc.
And while yes, it seems daunting, sooooo much work has already been done. So many experiments and so much research has already been done both outside and inside Occupy. We just have to bring it together and find one or several practical usages and ways forward that we can contextually implement. This will again, not be easy. Most people would probably be quite reticent to give up their current lives and the “necessities” of it: individualism, ipods, cars, whatever. The process will have multiple levels and ways to allow individuals to partake in the transition (the project).
I would say this transition will take generations and require an entire new social construct. But it will be one that will have to happen through hard work on creating evolution on a revolutionary level as opposed to a singular revolt that could be seen to put something upon people as opposed to allowing them to come to it themselves. Mindsets takes generations to change collectively. We are on the right track.
These are notes from the meeting of regular Think Tank facilitators.
First on the agenda was a reportback from Evan and Fred about a community tutoring project they are starting up in Newark. They are currently seeking volunteers who can be in the classroom once a week during the months of July and August. They have sought out parents and members of the community to ask what they think would be most useful, and the goal is to foster a culture of education and independent thought. The program description is still being finalized, and will be sent out to the list within the next two weeks.
Second, we discussed the question of what the Think Tank should do from here, and what is next for the Occupy movement? We have been hosting horizontal discussions in public spaces around New York, and these have been fairly open. But they seems to lose their function as a space when they are not surrounded by Occupy infrastructure. Discussions at Union Square were great at the beginning, but now there isn't enough critical mass.
Should we start working with a more strategic goal in mind? Should these discussions be more like debates between experts? We tentatively established that our schedule will look something like this: Think Tank discussions on Wednesdays, before the reportback meetings at Liberty, and strategy and planning discussions on Monday nights at a union hall in midtown. We will be at Occupy Town Square events and may have more structured debates there. We all agreed that as an affinity group, we should respond to what is happening with the movement, and try to be there and offer what we can.
Today's Think Tank started with the question of why we were here, attending the May Day events. It naturally expanded, encompassing the question of why everyone Occupied at all (and writing this on May 2nd, after one of the great events of my life, it seems to me that I have a different answer now as well). The answers ranged according to the ages of the Occupiers, where they had come from, and what their specific issues of concern were. Some came out because they have been fighting the good fight for decades, some because this was something they saw as new and newly revolutionary. Many of us spoke about the changes Occupy has made in how we think about our lives, and how these changes have led us to different answers than we might have given were we the people we were on September 16th. There is very little more to say in advance of the notes, and we have left them on the main page because this is really something we can each only say for ourselves, even as we know that we are all together in one great political body.
H-I'll start. I first came out for very specific reasons: I wanted to regulate the banks, re-instate Glass-Steagall, etc. But since I got involved with Occupy, my whole idea of what political participation is has changed. Now, I think I have to be a citizen that is actively participating in democracy.
E--Same here, I first came out because I feel that people have lost their moral language, and the standard everyone falls back on to explain why they do and what we do is just pure selfishness - most people just assume that we have to be out here for ourselves as individuals, and nothing more than that. I have been humbled by Occupy. And, because, fuck 'em.
C--I occupied in DC for months, and we were evicted. I was active in civil rights in the '60s. I was happy when Occupy started, was part of the planning process for Occupy DC. My friends and family thought I was crazy at first, or they would ask me questions like "where did you shower?" But as time went on, I realized there was an underlying respect for what I was doing. I feel like the heartbeat of the movement is still in NYC, so I came up here for May 1st.
E--I was in DC too, that's where we met. The Freedom Plaza encampment was planned to be about the bankers and the Pentagon, and how much of our tax money they are wasting. I joined Veterans for Peace, I am a veteran. We are forming an organization that will form lines between the protesters and the police. I've been an activist for 25 years, and for me the question is always, how much is this country going to take before people rise up?
M--My family goes way back, I was in Union Square waving a flag on May Day when I was 7. Now we're talking again, that is what is so exciting.
D-I'm here because the economy is in shambles. The climate has changed. Anyone who was in New York this winter can tell you the climate has changed, or they are delusional. The government is broke but still at war. There is a huge load of problems that aren't being addressed. The banks got a 16 trillion dollar bailout at 0% interest, but student loan interest is at 6.8%? Also, fuck low interest loans, we want free education.
H--There was this concept during the financial crisis that the banks are too big to fail: SIFI's, or systemically important financial institutions. That is crap, they were allowed to gamble with our homes, and they are considered more important than the people? We are systematically important! The banks aren't important at all.
J--I hope there's critical mass for real revolution. We almost had it in the 60's, but they started feeding us drugs. There should be enough formerly middle class people for real revolution.
K-I'm here about the city. I feel the city has been ruined by the rich, I think another city is possible.
J--What will we do about all the people who don't want to participate? I have a friend who is broke and unemployed, but he still supports the wars and thinks that Goldman Sachs owning Europe is fine.
(direct response) My feeling is, you don't need everyone on board to make change. It's enough to have a few thousand committed people. The thing I'm worried about is the backlash from the right, and that will definitely happen. It is already happening. That's what happened in the '60's: we did not anticipate that, and that was one of our biggest mistakes.
(direct response) I think we have to recognize that the Right is a major counterweight to what we're trying to achieve. The Right in this country is powerful, and has only gotten more so. We can't ignore that.
(direct response) I think we should try to avoid thinking in terms of right vs. left. We should try to co-opt those people. There are overlapping concerns. People on the right hate the bank bailouts too. And libertarians should hate the attacks on civil liberties, etc.
(direct response) Yes, libertarians and libertarian socialists came from the same place historically, but there is a lot of difference now.
J-People don't want to participate because they don't feel they are activists.
--Questions of what is an activist, I don't feel I'm an activist, I am a citizen.
H-There is a stigma against activism, people don't want to accept those terms, because they see activism as being on the fringe, and I don't think my views are fringe. Not wanting the top 1% to own everything, or wanting to tax the rich at the same rate as everyone else, wanting to not completely destroy the planet is not a fringe view, that is entirely reasonable.
D-To participate, you have to actually operate the levers. When you have problems, you can't just ignore power, you have to do it.
E--A certain kind of person called the activist becomes an activist when you find a problem. It's when you see a problem that it is ethical to solve.
B--I've been doing work in West Papua, interested in creating links between Occupy and global justice organizations.
May Day is a huge topic, and there is a lot to read on the subject. There are very good recent short histories published online, like this one from Occupy:
http://maydaynyc.org/history
There are also older pamphlets published during past struggles, like this one from the 1930s:
In addition to these, which have focused on May Day as an expression of the Labor struggle, there are some short histories that focus on the holiday's pre-Christian past:
Many people don't realize that the repression of the May Day celebrations is a longstanding tradition that has affected many Americans' moral consciousness. This famous story by Nathaniel Hawthorne shows how relevant the issue was in the 19th century, even outside the Labor struggle:
We started speaking about community building today, carrying on a conversation we were having with an Occupier from Chicago where we were comparing the function and efficiencies of our assemblies. We wondered: How can we create a self-relying, sustainable and interdependent community? What kind of practices would we need for that?
These discussions led to the question of creating communitywide structures. Most of us agreed we needed unity to be a strong community. But the diversity of our community makes a consensus process difficult. We discussed the various needs of the community and talked about the importance of schools and education. Someone remarked that education can inform people of their power.
We then identified three needs, food, shelter and the right to education as the basis for people to reach their full potential. Providing these needs will enable us to sustain a healthy community. But in order to do that we still need to get past the notion of money. We discussed whether we should turn our backs to the system and make our small-scale communities work. Some of us thought we needed to do both, create an alternative and stay in the system, to bring about revolutionary change.
Transcript
S: When I hear community building, I think of becoming self-relying. Think about what you can do for the community and what the community can do for you. We should try to be interdependent.
*N: What kind of practices can create interdependence? We played ‘capture the flag’ this afternoon, which was superfun and interactive. I think this helps the process.
S: I think everybody has some kind of dream of idea. But here’s an example: creating a safe place to stay. How can we do that? We have to create a plan of action in order to achieve that, but we first need agreements on how to go about.
T: So you want to create community wide structures? How should we do that?
A: First, you need unity to be a strong community.
*N: Yes, but we need unity through diversity. Because our movement is so diverse, how should we build consensus with all this diversity? I think we could create consensus without a shared ideology.
T: I think that for starters it would be good to be strongly rooted in existing city communities in order to be effective.
A: The injustice of the poor is very visible.
B: It is effective to turn local. We should engage in the needs of the community and advocate specific local needs. For example: a training in legal observation.
A: There are so many great people that don’t do well in school. They shouldn’t be judged for that.
B: I agree, there’s not a lot of psychological sensitivity in schools.
A: I’m worried, because they are closing so many institutions in the poorest communities..
*N: Occupy has been most successful in local communities.
A: But most people don’t know how to fight..
N: But we’re all learning.
S: I think that community building starts with education. We should be mic checking issues all day long. That is when we’re all speaking in the same voice.
B: Yes, we should have lots of education about what issues really are. It will inform people of their power.
Y: I agree, that works very well. For example, during May day a lot of people will be in solidarity with the immigrant workers and undocumented through not identifying when arrested. That way this group who’s in risk might feel more empowered to join the struggle.
D: Thank you for bringing that up, it’s very dicey to join risky actions when you’re not American.
*N: that all goes back to issues of trust building, but right now we’re so decentralized.
S: GA’s were so amazing, it was the only place to go to speak and be heard. We don’t have that anymore. Autonomous groups are great and all, but they’re also clicky. We lost the ability to link up.
M: So do you all feel that the Great meetings might feel that gap?
T: it’s difficult to get everyone on the same space.
Y: It is, but as long as you give people the opportunity to actually create these alternatives to GA, it will make a big difference. Everyone can choose freely if they want to attend or not and if it’s successful it will probably spread anyway.
*N: We also have to keep in mind the different time frame we’re on. We need some more patience. We’ve been so used to something else, where everything went so fast and crazy and of course we don’t want to lose that momentum. But things are different now.
D: Maybe Kissinger could come to tell the US to wise up.
F: A strong community should bring groups together that are like stakeholders. Resource communities can connect these shared resources and take the time to actually listen to needs. This will help increase the community’s capacity. Everyone will feel empowered for their own social justice. We need to build more supportive structures.
D: But do we have a common goal? I feel like we need a common goal.
S: I just had this conversation in the train. Our conclusion was that we can’t make demands from governments, because they are the oppressors. We don’t want to use their form of structuring.
Y: The thing is that by not making demands it enables us to think differently about things. Occupy creates a space to think about alternative models, where we don’t need to turn to the government. I don’t think we should use their way of solving things by demanding certain things, because obviously their way doesn’t work.
F: But we are making demands, just not in pen and writing. Every day we’re making demands. But if we force demands on the groups it ties the individual’s hands. Right now we’re some kind of nebula towards social causes. We’re working towards solidarity, without individual voices.
M: The government is great at solving demands and keeping the problem. We need to perform instead of demand. Look at for example school kitchens. People made that happen. We need to make things happen. Bottom up.
G: We’re not scared of demands, we demand things from ourselves every day.
T: When a group has a common cause, a simple message is good. Having one demand endangers the movement though, because what happens if the demand is fulfilled? On the other hand, if don’t have demands, why do we do actions? Aren’t demands important for the morality of people? How do we build on that?
S: I guess our only demand should be fairness.
C: We need demands that are in the direction of people’s needs and that is the hardest challenge.
Y: the problem is that the government isn’t taking care of all the people. And taking care of everyone, making sure everyone can have a decent life is part of what we’re demanding, I guess.
*N: The thing is that demands don’t work. We need to thing about accountability. Demands create separation. Also, OWS can’t even take care of our own people.
G: We should demand to take care of the health of the world. We should try to get education for the whole world.
S: I think we should mimic other states. Look at Scandinavia and their educational system, it’s great, because everyone can get it for free. We need a better standard of living.
T: Yeah, other countries are doing a better job than we are..
Y: I understand that compared to the US other countries or countries in Europe seem a lot better, but please contextualize things. Even though things are really fucked up here, Europe has some pretty big issues of its own. I mean, Holland might have social healthcare and all that, but is moving towards an extremely racist attitude, sending longtime inhabitants back to countries in war, claiming they’re not welcome and can’t stay. Please be aware of context.
S: It’s a 99% vs the 1% mentality.. We do have enough money, but we should divide it better. I know that sounds pretty Marxist, but still, the top doesn’t provide a standard of living.
G: We’ve been talking about solutions so much, instead of about demands. Oppression is a conspiracy.
T: We need a system that required to divide wealth equally.
E: What the money empowers you to do is important.
F: The big issue is what money can’t buy. We’ve allowed money to do unhealthy things to our community.
B: How can we create another kind of labor movement? How does capital currently operate? It will always end up exploiting someone else. We need to create a more even playground.
I: We do need redistribution of wealth. Money means influence. But if everyone is rich that will only create a new zero level.
M: I spent 15 years in prison, where I had a lot of time to reflect on these things. This whole notion of being rich is very strange. Ignorance is the root of all evil. I realized that everyone has their own reality and my reality isn’t necessarily the same as yours. But if our realities aren’t the same we won’t agree about solutions.
Freedom has never been defined for me, I never know what freedom means to me. The founding fathers weren’t my daddies. People forget about the post traumatic stress that came out of the time of slavery. For a lot of years I was considered only a third human. So what does that word, freedom, really mean?
We need to share all our different realities and backgrounds to eradicate this ignorance. And if you follow all the problems that we have, it will show how money always follows.
M: The word rich is very strange too. Now it means resources and money. To me the word means rich of flavor, food can be rich, it means it has a good quality. We have to empower people to enrich themselves.
T: If we give people food, shelter and the right to education, people will have the ability to reach their full potential.
S: Freedom is pathological, we need to start thinking about changing the way.
BL: I think we should help people manage financial situations. We could create a system with a system with a loan thing that works on our own terms. The structure would be that people would be saving money every month with a group of people. There will always be a certain amount of money available to everyone. Of course there would be a strict accountability structure.
R: Yes, but that would still be a capitalist structure. We as a community have to pull our needs together. If we could get past money and only worry about needs, then we would have an alternative structure.
Y: I agree, because when your basic needs are taken care of people can choose to develop the skills they want to, to be able to contribute to the community. That way, the conception of work is completely different too.
T: Get control of the corporations and provide alternatives. Put money into other beautiful things. Work less and focus on your talents.
R: I think we should just start a community and put all this into practice..
S: We should focus on a local community, to create smaller systems without that competitive problem.
B: The risk of that is that we’ll only be bettering the lives of small groups of people. Of course it’s exciting to do that, but I feel there’s a need for a revolutionary idea.
Y: I agree with that.. Turning away from society has happened for years and won’t bring on actual change. OWS is exciting for me, because it tries to put the alternatives in practice while being in the system.
A group of high school students joined us for part of this discussion. They wanted to talk about education, although they thought at first that it wasn't necessarily related to Occupy Wall St. Most of us argued the opposite, that education is central to what we're doing, from Occupy the Department of Education, to educating people about the banking system, what a credit-default swap is, etc. One of the students remarked that he goes to a private school that is very libertarian in philosophy--an environment that is very "sink or swim." He asked whether or not a system that is only good for those at the top can really be described as very good overall. Some of us felt strongly that the educational system basically just distributes privilege.
This conversation was a very important one to have had, in large part because people outside Occupy should know how invested we are in contemporary educational problems. On the theory of education, one may consult the following classic texts to find some of the viewpoints that have been expressed in different conversations. Occupy does not sponsor any one of these views; we simply offer links to them so that members of the larger public can see the roots of the diverse opinions we have discussed in Think Tanks. As usual, we welcome anyone's recommendations - feel free to post in the notes section and we will try to make them available.
As well, many participants in Occupy have been very concerned with the mounting student debt crisis. In addition to short articles on the history of the problem and current responses like Alexander Zaitchik's recent Salon article
there is a long list of websites dedicated to presenting information to the public.
Business Insider has presented a long list of stats on which majors have successful placement rates (some will surprise you, and definitely contradict anyone seeking to blame arts majors for all of the world's problems - both Nuclear Engineering and Biomedical Engineering have higher unemployment rates than Studio Arts majors!):
More specific studies on the dynamics of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields also paint a picture that is strikingly different than what you will hear from employers. Ronil Hira of Rochester Institute of Technology is the leading economist focusing on job placement in these fields, and has noted in his Senate testimony that many of the claims made by Apple and other tech companies about the lack of educated American workers is misleading:
This led us to ask questions about how we are perceived in the mainstream, and what most people's view of Occupy is. A couple of us observed that people become radicalized at Occupy. When people try to reform the system, and those reforms don't come, they realize radical solutions might be necessary. After this conversation, it seems clear that the answer is that while many people who participate have anti-capitalist views, they don't necessarily think that should be the official standpoint of Occupy.
We discussed what being an Occupier is, and what is productive in activism. Some of us thought that just being around was significant. We discussed the concept of "step up step back".
Ingrid thought that maybe it should be difficult to join certain parts of the movement. We are used to showing up places at a certain time and working, but maybe there should be more of a meaningful narrative of involvement than with other jobs or volunteer work.
Some other interesting questions were raised: first, what do we stand for, and do people need to know this to be involved? Has Occupy determined that it is anti-capitalist, and is this necessarily exclusive? Could being anti-capitalist also be a popular position? Should we have some kind of protocol for new members? Does leaderlessness imply lack of a single message?
Transcript:
· -- It’s hard to understand OWS, because it’s so personal. It’s difficult to unify all these different perspectives. We need things to be more specific. The beginning of OWS was strong, people knew why they were there. Now that vision is failing.
· -- People misinterpret living in the moment. We need to be more in balance.
· -- It seems that OWS is taking on the form of some sort of cultural phenomenon. The people in power would like us to be just rebels, but I don’t want this to be a subculture. If that’s the case, I’m going home right now.
· --There’s a similarity to what happened to the 60s movement and the focus on drugs. That was all state propaganda. When OWS started off, things were really difficult to translate into media. We haven’t gotten better.
· --How are we going to do outreach? How will we show them that we’re not just a bunch of hippies?
· -- What is a hippie?
· --I think we need one clear umbrella issue, but most people aren’t prepared to make that big statement.
· -- Anti-capitalism seems to have become more important, but this doesn’t fly with the rest of the US.
· --We need to make things more inclusive by doing more outreach.
· --What is capitalism?
· --Survival of the fittest.
· -- Most people just want a better economic system. Anti capitalism is not a mainstream view.
· -- Actually, we don’t really have a capitalist society.
· --Let’s get back to outreach again. All this is really relevant. It’s about the question of who we are and what we are doing.
· --It would be a good start if we educated more. Give people basic knowledge of what is going on. I met this artist the other day who wanted to plug in and I simply didn’t know where to send this person.
· --Are our views fringed? We seem to be solidifying around a anti capitalist stance. Will this view appeal?
· --Having a long view is really important. There is this undirected anger towards the rich. A strong view is important, because people will really around it. Doing so means that it’s easy to get weaker, but a long view is needed to become stronger.
· --We need to be intelligible to people. People’s brains are hierarchical. Most people need more order and progression and we don’t have that right now.
· --The feminist movement had a straight, white female person as a head figure. OWS should have spokespeople and they should be diverse, like a gay or queer person or a woman of color.
· --We have a lack of space.
· --Do we really need a leader?
· --Not really and also, they get shot.
· --I don’t feel we need to have a leader, because it takes on all kinds of different tasks that people can just take on their selves without having to be a head figure. If you trust your community, you don’t need just one person taking the most responsibility.
· --Are we talking about leaders of rulers? People differ so much in what they can or cannot do.
· --How can we establish more inclusivity?
· --I think we should regard leadership as a value.
· --Positions of authority should be questioned.
· --The movement is about big things and along the way someone will be put at risk. The movement might not get so strong if people aren’t willing to take that risk.
· --We keep making the link with media and its importance to bring people in. In order to do that we need real stuff in real neighborhoods.
· --I’m an architect, so I always link things to that. We need effective tactics to achieve goals that aren’t necessarily media sexy. There’s always discussion about how to deal with media. We shouldn’t forget that content just takes a very long time.
· --OWS needs its own independent media.
· --Our society is based on 1% control, but we are the power. We need to create a mass movement by tuning into the community.
· --We need actions in our own neighborhoods. We’re limited in our actions. We should be in solidarity with other people. There is an enormous need for reciprocity right now.
· --I think the fear of OWS taking over is very legitimate. Look at the march for Trayvon Martin.
· --I disagree, that was a splinter march. The things we’re talking about are completely unrelated to that.
· --OWS coopting anything seems silly. I see OWS as a platform. We can take something over.
· --There’s a fear of a certain portrayment by the mdia. People who make these marches are fearful of the autonomous actions people of OWS might take.
· --So what we have been talking about until now seems to be our public image. Things like, who are we exactly and how are we being portrayed? The other things we’ve discussed are tactics. What kind of protocol can we create to plug people in more easily and how can we get our message across?
· --I used to work in IT. There you answer the same questions over and over again. People don’t understand how to deal with very obvious things. So let’s deal with these practical questions!
· --People should take responsibility!
· --Use the facebook account and do workshops in neighborhoods.
· --The barrier that’s there to be able to plug into the movement is good, because you will get to know the process of how to participate in group dynamics. That makes participation more stronger. A useful way to do outreach is to just have conversations about OWS in your daily life.
· --Just being here is constructive too. It’s very useful to just be here. The question of what work exactly means in OWS is very broad.
