In early October a “Think Tank” sprung up in Occupied Zuccotti Park – Liberty Square. This wasn’t the average think tank; there were no wealthy private donors, no agenda driven research topics, and not a cushy chair or mahogany desk to be found. We had a blanket and eventually a carpet, some signage that we’d rummaged up from stray things left about in the park, and a small space that had to be reclaimed/cleared and cleaned every day for our 12pm start. This was nothing like the pristine halls of the Brookings Institute.

What we did have, though, were ideas and a seemingly endless number of people excited about them. Random passers-by, stalwarts of the occupation, lunchtime bankers, after-work social workers, they were all present, and all had a voice. We talked about race relations, corporate personhood, OWS finances, whether this new world of Liberty Park could ever be anything but a microcosm of the larger society as a whole. Anything was up for discussion, and there was always something to talk about, something to listen to, and always a way to feel engaged in the new revolutionary dialog that had been sprouting up all over the country and world.

Unlike a typical think tank, the People’s Think Tank became an institution organically. We didn’t sign a corporate charter, file any legal registration papers with the state, or even hire any academics (they came organically as well). We handed in a piece of paper with our email addresses on it, a paragraph about what our working group would be, and just simply sat back and let the energy of the people involved in the occupy movement take us wherever it did. It didn’t take long before the Think Tank was a fixture in the park, a place where many were introduced to Occupy, its topics, and its horizontal discussions, dialog, and discourse.

The Think Tank has changed mightily today. It is no longer fixated on the park. We no longer meet every day for six hours either. The movement has changed gears, changed its mechanisms. The working groups are the apparatus that many things are getting done through now: direct action, occupy the SEC, the outreach cluster, pop-up occupy town squares, teach-ins. And after all, the Think Tank really is about dialog and horizontal dialog at that, something easy enough to replicate amongst occupiers. While the Think Tank is becoming more involved in the needs of the internal groups within Occupy Wall Street, it seems very clear that the future of the Think Tank is in outreach – just as the future of the movement itself seems to be.

Who are we?

Occupy is a global movement, synonymous with a certain type of social, political, and economic discourse much bigger than the “hallowed” walls of Wall St. Groups within the movement’s many occupations have formed to work on the movement’s dialog, hone its discourse, and communicate with each other as well as community based organizations and communities themselves. The Think Tank has been working to become more intertwined within this network as well. The core group of organizers within the Think Tank have themselves been branching out into other working groups and other occupy related endeavors. This seems to be the pattern of the movement right now. As its landscape changes, so too do its avenues of discourse and action.

The Think Tank has cut down to two scheduling times every week for topical think tanks (see NYCGA.net for current schedule). This means our time has been freed up to work on expanding the process of dialog outside of lower Manhattan and to work more in concert with OWS’ other outreach actions. We have a steady Think Tank working with the Queens General assembly, and have worked with a community partner, Urban Rebuilding Initiative (URI), on setting up regular Think Tanks in the Bronx. In New York City we have done mobile Think Tanks in Times Square, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Staten Island ferry terminal among others, and are working to continue being a fixture at as many occupy events as we can, such as the pop-up Town Squares,  the City-Wide Assembly, and May Day. We have also been to Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and even had a Think Tank in Cairo. We are working with multiple occupies to help them set up their own discussion forums: Poughkeepsie, Harvard, Boston, Santa Fe, Washington DC, Oakland, etc. We are looking into radio, TV, and multiple online platforms. We want to capture the essence of what the Think Tank was in the park, and continues to be – an entry point into the ideas and discourse of Occupy.

Perhaps some day the Think Tank will produce actionable policy options, it is for now, really a platform for bringing together voices not usually heard – especially not heard in the same spaces. A white construction worker from Brooklyn, an African-American lawyer from Wall St., a Latino restaurant worker from Queens, a retired veteran from Staten Island, a college student from Indiana, all sitting in the same place, taking about issues relevant to our times. All these conversations are recorded and archived at NYU’s Tamiment Library Labor Archives, and starting to find their way onto the Think Tank’s new website occupythinktank.org.

The beauty of this working group is that it is just one of many doing the same things. Virtually every working group is doing the same things. They are all working to expand their and our reach. There are groups spending weekends in East Flatbush, Brooklyn going door to door, listening to neighborhood concerns and trying to bring people together. The Facilitation Working Group is working with General Assemblies through the city and country to help facilitate meetings and assemblies. The list goes on.

This has been the direction of the movement over the last few months – quiet expansion. While the mainstream media would have had us withering away into the ethernet, what we’re really doing is settling in for the long arduous process of social change. The activists and mechanisms of Occupy are finding stable ways to produce continued and sustained efforts, to hone our mechanisms and messages, and to plan events and outreach that will bring in new people both in person and in spirit. It could be argued that the most powerful weapon in the world is thought. And that – to me – is what Occupy is: the thought that another world is possible.

The clearing of Occupations in New York and around the country has presented challenges to and new possibilities for the Occupy Wall Street movement. A particularly creative group, which I joined and have described here, The Think Tank, is creatively responding to the challenge. They continue to hold sessions in Zuccotti, as they are also moving to other city locations. The summary here prepared by Aaron Bornstein of a session he facilitated in the Park on November 20, 2011, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, reveals the power of the actions. I received the report from Bornstein as an email to people working in the group. I publish it with his permission. -Jeff

Topic: “Policing and the movement: How to engage, whether to engage,and whether it’s a distraction”
facilitator: aaron

This was a really spirited discussion of what police are doing, what they should be doing, and whether we are distracting ourselves by focusing too much on them. Participants seemed to have broad consensus on maintaining nonviolence, but standing our ground in the face of police aggressiveness, even if it meant they would use force on us. Multiple participants pointed to the immense value of widespread cameras and recordings, in both preventing police violence and transmitting images of it to the world. Participants seemed split on the question of whether the attention given to police aggression was distracting from the movement’s goals. Some thought it was an unfortunate focus, some thought it was part of the problem we were fighting.

One exchange in particular sticks out in my mind. Over the course of the discussion, several participants had suggested that police officers were just trying to do a job, and thus couldn’t shoulder the entire blame for their actions. When Richard got on stack, he delivered a rather passionate excoriation of this suggestion, and then took it further by posing the question of who exactly it is that takes that kind of job, which — please correct me if I’m wrong, Richard –
I took as a suggestion (which seems to be borne out by experience) that police tend to be individuals who are prone to this sort of violence. Captain Lewis was sitting right there, in full uniform as he usually is, and I have to say the tension was pretty palpable.

Lewis then delivered a direct response in which he said Richard was essentially right. He said that departments assess recruits using the MMPI (Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory), which, among other things, quantifies the emotional sensitivity of individual officers before they undergo training. He said that departments exclude the more sensitive recruits. They do this because they feel that the six months of training would be lost money when those sensitive officers encounter the stresses and gore that are necessarily part of the job, and quit or get depressed. Thus, the ones who you keep will skew towards the less sensitive — more brutal — end of the scale.

He proposed that one specific action we could all take, and one he takes himself, would be to point out to the mayors and representatives who control PD policies that taking the less-sensitive officers is actually *more* of a financial drain, since it often leads to multimillion dollar liability lawsuits (we’re starting to see these lawsuits come out of Occupy, and my suspicion is many more are on the way).

Soon after, Richard asked Captain Lewis if he believed this was a factor in racial profiling and abuse. He responded yes.

Yes, I have that all recorded.

I’m going to editorialize a bit here:

I think this “revelation” about police selection is not at all surprising to anyone on this list, but to hear a police captain flat out admit it, with no hesitation, is pretty powerful. This sort of exchange, among a group of people who probably don’t normally cross paths, but who came together here, in this space, in Occupy, in Think Tank, and who had a frank and respectful and mutually beneficial discussion about a Deeply Important and powerful topic… well, I think this is what we’re here for. It’s certainly what I’m here for.

Thank you all for continuing to provide these powerful experiences.

What do these people want? What are they advocating? In the opinion of many, including Gary Alan Fine in his last post, it is easy to discern what OWS is against, but unclear what they are for. They know how to say no, he knows, but he wonders if they can say yes. He thinks this both about OWS and The Tea Party, as a detached but sympathetic observer of both.

Looking at OWS up close, taking part in a small but significant activity, I think the positive commitments of OWS are actually quite clear, and in marked contrast to The Tea Party. As I maintained in The Politics of Small Things, the democracy is in the details. I had an opportunity to look at some details in a corner of Zuccotti Park, joining the OWS Think Tank.

Many of the OWS activists who have taken part in The Flying Seminar sessions are active in the Think Tank. We started working together at The New School teach in. They have been among the active members of the seminar. I have visited them a couple of times in Zuccotti Park, and earlier this week, on Monday, I joined them in their work there. It was an illuminating afternoon.

From noon to 6:00, the Think Tank conducts discussion sessions of a special sort on a variety of topics.  Many different people facilitate the discussions. I responded to an email call for help and volunteered to do my part. The workshop topics range from the quite general, to the immediate and practical. They hope to inform decision-making in the park and to further understanding of problems of broad public concern, and even contribute to the formulation of policy positions and recommendations. It’s one of the spaces where the big questions about the occupation are being answered in daily practice, a striking case of the politics of small things. It confirmed for me that in politics the means are a significant part of its ends, the form at least as important as its content.

At the session I facilitated, the topic of discussion was mental illness and Occupy Wall Street. The subject was put on the agenda by a very practical activist. He wanted to discuss the problems of mental illness, substance abuse and health problems and Occupy Wall Street. He had a pressing need to address these issues, as significant social problems of the city are appearing in the park and dealing with the problems is quite challenging. We focused on mental illness and we talked about it both as a general issue, and as one in the park that required action.

We talked for about two hours. There were multiple voices, presenting different positions, revealing different sensibilities and experiences. Two people talked about their own struggles with diagnoses of mental illness, one thought of himself as a survivor of misdiagnosis and the madness of the mental health establishment, the other, a young woman, as a healed person, thanks to proper medical care. She spoke about how she would have been attracted to the occupation when she was deeply troubled, how she would have wanted to be where the action is, but how her response would have been off, more about her own internal troubles, less about public affairs. The critical young man reported that he was subjected in rehab to drug treatments, which were far worse than the drugs that got him institutionalized. The healed young woman spoke empathetically for people who suffer, about the need to empathize with their situation and to treat them with compassion. The man and the woman didn’t debate. They joined the discussion drawing upon their different experiences. While they didn’t agree in their general assessment of mental illness, they both pointed to a course of action that started with respect for the dignity of troubled people. But of course, this did not settle the matter.

Others joined in, including a woman who worked on mental health issues (I never quite got precisely what she did), the activist who was seeking insight to address difficult problems of aggression and fights in the park, and a woman who emphasized the need for practical action because of a case of sexual assault a few days ago.

The discussion moved back and forth between the general question of approaches to the mentally disturbed and very pressing matters concerning the peace and good feelings in the park. There was the occasional disruption also, particularly an older man who very much wanted more to talk than listen and had his own agenda, criticizing the focus of OWS and the Think Tank, maintaining that the first imperative is to fight against corrupt politicians, including, perhaps even especially, Barack Obama. I really wasn’t paying close attention to his words. Mostly as a novice Think Tank facilitator I was focused on keeping the group on the topic as they were developing it.

But generally speaking, staying on topic was not a problem. The competing progressive approaches that were discussed, I believe, were more or less like what one might come across in a discussion among psychiatrists, from those who are deeply committed to pharmaceutical solutions to those who are radically opposed. No policy was suggested. We didn’t come close to that. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for many reasons. But major issues were highlighted: to turn or not to turn to the professionals outside the park, love and compassion versus safety, treating people as equals versus addressing clear disabilities. There was a realization that general social problems were appearing inside the occupation, inevitably, leading to a need for responsible action.

Nothing was solved. I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of this discussion. It was one among many, without apparent immediate consequences. But, on the other hand, it revealed, at least to me, the answer to the question about what OWS wants. The participants in our OWS Think Tank session were all there because they were saying no to the way corporate power has distorted democracy. They see increasing inequality as a moral, political and economic scandal. They have a sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with the prevailing order of things. Saying no brings them together. This is of crucial importance, as Adam Michnik underscored in his dialogue with OWS at the Flying Seminar. “At a certain point you have to say no and the ability to say no is a revolutionary ability.” Yet, once they are together, they are moving beyond no and saying yes, as they act in each other’s presence and consider complicated problems together. The way they interact reveal their positive commitments. Careful mutually respectful discussions, open to opposing political positions, focused on pressing problems in practical ways, not forgetting primary commitments to democracy: social, cultural and economic, as well as political. I saw this at the Think Tank. I don’t think that this is what I would see at a Tea Party meeting. I await Fine’s or a Tea Party supporter’s response.

I know this may still appear to be of little consequence beyond the immediate interaction. But I think it has, involving the media representation of OWS and the deep task of reinventing political culture. I will turn to these issues in my next posts. Hint: involved will be my thoughts on the Occupation and Obama, and the Democratic Party more broadly, and the link between the Occupation and other social movements, especially labor unions. I will consider the problem OWS has in its relations with a broad public, not only speaking in the name of the 99%, but also in a language that the 99% can understand, so that it can respond and act.