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The plan starts with our common purpose.

Some of the common threads of the current global discontent:

Our political systems and structures do not have the expertise, will, or speed of decision required to address today’s complex world.

We have backward progress on the species-level threats caused by business and industry gone amok

unite to address these problems

we must come together in purpose

We can seek to solve, not just one, or a few of the above problems, but all of them. All of them at once. Together. In both senses of the word.

This is the purpose of the We Plan:

Strong forward progress on all of the major problems we face

The only way to harness the combined energy of all humanity is to build a credible plan that betters life for all humanity. This betterment must be measured by each individual’s perspective, not by a global set of “ideals” but by each one’s choice for how they’d like to see the world improve.

We must ask each individual to tell us what they think and need. The local plans must address these local and individual needs.

living organism

we must start with the end in mind

There are answers. Many have been working on the pieces for years. We must put these answers together in once place: the We Plan.

Then, we must work backwards from the end

Where we have only questions, the Plan will be to run experiments to find the best answers we can. We will learn from each other as these experiments run

will work on design for technologies; some on design for social structures; some on the logistics systems required to deliver the people, information, and materials required under the plan, some on the architecture of the Plan itself.

Just as we collectively and continuously build Wikipedia, we will collectively build the We Plan.

The We Plan will be developed both top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. Some will tie the pieces together. Some will flesh out the details of the pieces. The entire Plan will be visible to everyone all the time.

The We Plan will be a living plan

We will tell others about the Plan. We will work together to get more people to help us.

our plan will be the most credible way to provide equal rights for everyone

our plan will be the most credible way to quickly move to a sustainable ecologically sound world.

our plan will be the most credible way to reduce the need for state force and will greatly increase civil liberties.

the Plan will be efficient, healthful and intelligent.

the Plan will incorporate an open commons-based approach to intellectual property.

we will be addressing poverty and the lack of resources in a massively organized and logistically superior way.

we will make changes to our treatment of animals that harmonize with their passions.

we can develop without damaging the future for others.

Together, We will comprise the We Movement.

As the We Movement builds, We will begin implementing the plan. We will find resources. We will make the parts. We will educate. We will build.

We will have a movement with the force to make political change where necessary, to pool resources and knowledge, to stop destruction and looting by the few against the many, to remake the world in the image of our highest dreams.

without

a set of policy demands

Meanwhile the occupation grows day by day.

camp in Manhattan makes the doyens of the status quo feel nervous

‘Occupy’ camps in 70 cities across the nation last weekend.

Political leaders must be wondering what is going on. (‘Who are these kids? Would they vote for me?’)

the protesters

have no single message or identity

the movement

seems to follow the pattern set in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world earlier this year

Last week, the movement crossed a threshold. A localized set of swarm events evolved into a distributed swarm network.

OccupyWallStreet is a new kind of political movement.

The fact that the protesters have not leveled any political demands is significant.

creating a clamor of grievances that works surprisingly well to consolidate actions.

protesters are refusing to engage in traditional political action per se.

the movement is political, but this is a different kind of politics, which seeks to circumnavigate the tactics and fora of established political action.

To understand the true potential of the Occupy movement, we need to reflect on how the collective voice of the protesters is giving shape to a new vision of political culture, reigniting the hopes and dreams of those who are paying attention to it, in the US and elsewhere.

OccupyWallStreet is not a political movement in the traditional sense. It is a countercultural swarm. We need to see it as a swarm to understand why people are drawn to it, and what makes it the most important political force on the planet today.

The most powerful movements of the 20th century were identity-based movements,

‘We, the oppressed X, gather together to challenge the forces amassed against us’.

these movements have political limits, set by the system that they chose to work within. We see the limits of these movements when we compare and contrast the way that they shape the identities of their members with swarm movements.

we can say that traditional movements shape and transform their member’s identities in the following way: first, by orienting thought in relation to a

‘cognitive map’ of how things work

second, corralling identity in terms of a unitary social class or group

and finally, by activating the movement by steering its energies towards contesting established political and legal structures.

Swarm movements shape identity in a completely different way.

First off, they are are issue- or cause-based, rather than identity-based, movements.

affirm the diversity of participants as their fundamental strength

Instead of seeking to reduce the movement

diversity

is powerful when focused on a common cause.

A second point of difference between traditional and swarm movements concerns what these movements seek to achieve. 

Traditional movements focus on challenging and changing institutions. The goals of these movements are thus extrinsic to the movements themselves: they are achieved as a result of movement activity. Swarms can (and usually do) set extrinsic goals. Their primary goal, however, is to sustain the critical mass that holds the network together. As a result, movement activity is focused more on the intrinsic goal of empowering the swarm than any extrinsic goal the movement might hope to achieve. This can make swarms look unfocused from an external point of view. But within the movement, conditions tend to be highly conducive for participation. Swarm movements are intrinsically empowering and thus intrinsically rewarding for participants. Ultimately, participants do not need to look beyond the act of participation for a reason to join the swarm. Swarming is its own reward; the payoff is the empowerment that comes from swarming.

the more we look for extrinsic goals, the further get from understanding what really inspires swarm activity. Swarms are based in a common sense of potential. What catalyzes a swarm movement is the sense that here, today, a new way of working and living together is possible.

Swarms are transformative movements. Insofar as members acknowledge a common sense of  identity, it is a transformative identity, a sense of being part of a movement that is changing the world.

First, a mass of people acquire a new cognitive map, representing an original conception of what they can achieve together as a network. The cognitive maps that inspire OccupyWallStreet and Occupy Together resonate with innovations in the online world. OccupyWallStreet is an ‘open space’ movement. The camp structure is an open API that anyone is free to hack into and explore using MeetUp as a Directory. The second step in the process comes when the mass of people who apply these cognitive maps start reflecting on how working together expands their common potential. This insight gives rise to the swarm. A swarm movement comes into being as a swarm when a mass collective grasps what it is capable of achieving en masse.

No government or political institution can hold its ground when confronted with a new collective sense of what human beings are capable of doing and achieving en masse.

Swarm movements do not expend their energies by contesting the status quo. They reinvent it. Norms slide in all directions and political institutions are forced to keep up.

The protesters in Liberty Square and across the US are engaged in a more serious business than contesting dominant institutions.

The human microphone system is a physical expression of the appreciative process that happens on the internet all the time.

OccupyWallStreet applies the same modus operandi to transformative political action. I see it as a living expression of the intuition behind ‘Coalition of the Willing’:

in solidarity with labor struggles

public education taking place at the occupation

display of direct democracy practiced in the camp.

we speak a new language, one we have to translate it for them

not enough grassroots organizers fromNew York

was pushed away by some of the cultural norms being adopted

lack of demands

over-emphasis on process

I didn’t see how this would aid in the overarching aim of building a movement, beyond a single uprising

But I was wrong about some of those assumptions

things have steadily improved

the occupation has lasted more than two weeks and it’s growing every day

slept out

marched

pizzas ordered for us

thousands of dollars sent our way

livestream

emailing

calling

tweeting

occupations being planned in something like 70 cities in theUSalone

Next, we have taken steps to define ourselves, to write documents to that affect, and to move toward a collective consciousness that is bold and uncompromising.

we have been able to continue to grow and bring new communities in despite a lack of demands

our demands really aren’t as mysterious as some people are letting on

our critics are playing dumb.

have an implicitly unifying message: We hold the banks, the millionaires, and the political elite they control, responsible for the exploitation and oppression we face

we have planted ourselves in the financial capital of the world because we see it as one of the most deeply entrenched roots of the various systems of oppression we face every day.  Come on. The clue is in the title: Occupy Wall Street.

Every day, the occupiers see themselves more and more connected to a movement – a movement around the country and the world, but also a movement through time, stretching from the giants who came before us to the future giants we will be. Every day more people from different communities join,

This deepening of consciousness and realization of the connection between the different struggles we wage will be among the most important things to come out of this.

new forms of democratic participation

self-management

a new narrative – one that refuses to accept the myth that Americans don’t struggle, that we can be bought off with TVs and iphones, that things really aren’t so bad and we’re willing to let injustice happen because we get a bigger piece of the bounty our military and capitalists extract from others.

the story will be an important force

Occupations are an incredibly important mode of resistance, an expression of a dual power strategy.

they give us the space and time with which to create an alternative, to practice, to learn, to create new relations, to become better revolutionaries, and to experience community

they serve as a base camp from which to wage a struggle against the institutions that oppress us

Both are important. And yes, we face challenges in each realm.

We have to make sure that the de-centralization we are fostering actually empowers those who aren’t already conditioned by this society to speak a lot and lead and give directions. We have to find and create a new and diverse ways for people to participate

work to formulate a message together

continue to educate ourselves and each other

And perhaps even more important than learning about the ways we are kept down, is learning and exploring the world we might want instead, one without capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism – an economic, political, and social model that is solidaristic, equitable, self-managing, ecologically sustainable, liberating, intimate, warm, and creative.

developing the values

imagine the institutions we will need

We have to draw clear lines from the oppression heaped on this society to the agents responsible for it.

LibertyPlazais not the struggle; it is the home for the creation of the alternative, and the staging ground for the fight that takes us out into the streets, to make business as usual truly untenable.

“world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,”

break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries

In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere.

The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

a revolution against state bureaucracies

birth of modern feminism

Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena.

transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about.

ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate

Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements:

in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; they saw that apparatus as itself the problem.

It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late sixties as an embarrassing failure.

The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs.

the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.

I’ll take an obvious example. One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures

But afterward

they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years.

Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure.

What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?

When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint?

The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis.

Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves.