Back to AtD 'collective thinking' p. 941

[Mark Kohut]

p. 941 "So the idea---whose 'idea' was a meaningless question around here."  Here still being Yves-les-Bain,
anarchist utopia, one might say.
 
Seems there is similarly labeled notion in modern anarchism reflection: "collective thinking", a form of 
thinking "diametrically opposed to the kind of thinking propounded by the present system. When faced 
with a decision, the normal response of two people with differing opinions tends to be confrontational. ....
[......state, defend, convince OR compromise...I paraphrase......]
 
"The aim of collective thinking on the other hand is to construct. ..Two people w differing ideas work
to build something new. ...the onus is not on my idea or yours; rather it is the notion that two ideas
together will produce something new, something that neither of us envisaged beforehand." 
"This focus requires of us that we actively listen." ---
                                           ---from James Miller's essay in The Occupy Handbook
 
He links this concept to the direct democracy of the General Assembly process of the Occupy movement
and says it goes back to the direct democracy efforts of the sixties, early SNCC and SDS [right from the Port Huron Statement itself]
 and further back echoing Gandhi's injunction to "be the change you want to see"......
 
It also seems, despite all efforts to keep inititatives the result of group decisions, the man I cited in
an earlier post, one David Graeber, is the one who convinced the earliest small gathering to conduct
their General Assembly under the principle of direct democratic consensus. 
                                                 ---all according to James Miller, IBID. 
 
Miller is a cultural/political historian at the New School, former editor of Daedalus, who has written other books on this shit......
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