No mic checks, no drum circles, no "jazz fingers," none of that irrelevant counterculture horseshit that dazzles the left-wing imagination and makes everyone else yawn and pick Comic Con instead: Just people - literally anyone who wishes - congregating to discuss and arrive at political resolutions achieving some agreed upon level of consensus. That doesn't have to occur in a city park, and it doesn't even have to feature anything resembling the typical features of protest: It can be purely assertive and authoritative on the part of The People, provided the process is arranged to be both practical and inclusive. In other words, OWS and everyone who was ever sympathetic to it can just arbitrarily skip the entire protest process and go directly to institutionalization of (local) direct democracy.
Oh, I know, that sounds incredibly boring and grownup to people who enjoy the whole pageantry of protest and the symbolism of being theatrically contrarian, but that's the whole point of civil society. Life in a democracy is not supposed to be a Wagnerian struggle - it's supposed to be a bunch of dullards sitting around talking about what kind of trees to plant around the new school because that's legitimately the most dramatic and painful subject available. We've kind of perverted that principle by having some institutions that deal with trivia in order to avoid dealing with hard problems, and other institutions (mainly cultural) that just build a cult of perpetual suffering around hard problems rather than trying to solve them. Well, that shit's not going to cut it anymore. We can and must both look at the hard problems and actually try to solve them.
This is where OWS provided a glimpse of potential solutions to the current predicaments of the 99%: Direct democracy. Not in the anarchic sense that is inherently self-limiting, but in the sense of being a facilitated process that can yield social consensus. And guess what: Such a process doesn't have to occur in a city park, doesn't have to involve waving signs or banners, doesn't have to be anything in particular other than a broad group of people assembling somewhere, talking, and hashing out resolutions.
Here's the magic, all-powerful secret of democracy: It doesn't require anyone's permission. It asserts itself. So if you are of the community organizing persuasion and think it's time to resurrect OWS, create an organization called the (insert local political unit of a size small enough to be credible) Assembly, sign up for a public venue that is either free of charge or has minimal fees, and then go out of your way to convince ordinary people of all backgrounds and views to show up. Invite everyone who you think is personally sincere and capable of community cooperation, regardless of what they think (put community formation ahead of your own narrow agenda), and then make a massive effort to hash out some statement of consensus views and intentions.
It should be some sort of Declaration that will serve as the basis of the Assembly from then on and inspire the people who participate to continue doing so while inspiring others who see it to come take a look. Nothing pompous and self-important or, conversely, overly dry and laundry-listy. Just a crystallization of common purpose in a community - the underlying purpose simply being to assert that a community exists, which has become strangely rare in this day and age.
This won't work everywhere, but if enough people in enough places pursue it diligently and with commitment, it'll work in some - and those will serve as nodes of change that spread. We can already say pretty confidently where it won't work: If the organizers of the initial Assemblies either can't or won't form effective relationships with the rest of the community, and just want it to be a theatrical stunt to give themselves and their own narrow views a bigger stage. This is part of what doomed the original OWS - the core activists perceived being co-opted by labor unions and Democrats as a bad thing, even though that was how the New Deal came about, so there was considerable irritation in the relationships that led ultimately to mutual ignorance and abandonment.
In other words, you can't have it both ways: Either it's about us or it's about you, and you cannot be the definition by which democracy is judged. No one "owns" public support, so if some stodgy institutional power tries to co-opt the energy of your movement, that's a good thing - it's exactly what you were aiming for. You're moving the Overton Window, dragging the big, dumb, huge barges of these institutions in a progressive direction. When the Democratic Party co-opted the socialist agenda of the early 20th century to create the New Deal, it led to an entire generation where this Party was centered on a social democracy agenda. We want that again, right?
I've written specifically about some ideas for the organizational details of forming permanent direct democracy assemblies, so feel free to review those ideas if you're tempted to just throw out some lazy objection that so-and-so would happen, so we might as well not try because x or y easily-dealt-with problem could crop up:
Road Map Toward de Jure Direct Democracy: The Benevolent Fourth Branch
Basically, it would get very complicated very fast, especially if you succeed at getting people interested, so you need to have planned ahead with the methods and practices that will keep things orderly, inclusive, and safe from cynical maneuvering while still capable of forward motion. The basic features are pretty self-explanatory if you think about it: Create a hard numerical limit in participation in a given Assembly that results in fissioning into distinct Assemblies if the number is exceeded, so that it doesn't turn into some unwieldy mob. Use networking of smaller Assemblies to achieve de facto larger ones rather than trying to assemble say 100,000 people in a giant stadium to represent larger groupings. Etc. etc. The details are just a matter of mundane effort. What matters is just recognizing that nothing stops this from being achieved. Nothing.
That lame old Nike slogan is true: Just Do It. The established institutions of government won't be forced to admit any authority to the resolutions of Assemblies, at least at first, but there is absolutely nothing stopping people from cultivating a working relationship between democratic consensus and government institutions. Just practice common sense. Consistently reward leaders and institutions that take 1 step toward such a relationship rather than punishing them for not taking a thousand steps on their own arbitrary initiative, and eventually they'll take 1 more step. And another, and another, and another. There's no magic secret to democracy, no cosmic power that has to be channeled by ideological elites with eldritch insights. It's just effort, cooperation, and common sense.
Rebuild OWS with solid community roots from the beginning and remain focused on consensus issues that apply to the 99%, and it'll work because it already did work. OWS became prominent to the extent it followed that formula and was vulnerable to disruption only to the extent it became self-involved and alienated from the people who just wanted a job and healthcare, not some fantasy social revolution or pompous confrontation with authorities. I wish that everything I just said was totally obvious and didn't need to be said, but I'm afraid that's probably not the case.
Some folks still have the mentality of rationalizing failure as enemy action, and they'll always be ready with an excuse to never do anything differently. OWS was destroyed by the state, they insist, and desperately don't want to deal with why exactly the same or worse tactics failed to destroy prior movements in history. For them it's about the aesthetics of struggle, not about achieving anything, and certainly not about the "bourgeois" 99% that has never and will never truly appreciate the genius of anarcho-syndicalism or whatever other perfect theoretical system they subscribe to.
Well, even they have a role to play, but unfortunately those people aren't the ones to listen to in deciding how to move forward. Read the words and thoughts of MLK and Gandhi - people who had the uncouth audacity to succeed where the self-important before and around them had failed. There is the philosophical foundation for democracy, and as I've said, the practical foundation is and has always been simply common sense, common purpose, and diligent effort. There's no secret - whining about all the obstacles to progress, or trying to create a romantic cult around our failures is not going to take us anywhere. We get the future we build, nothing else.
9:57 PM PT: It's not hard to know the difference between a sincere activist and a self-involved nitwit: Ask them what should happen, and the former will give you ideas for what you and they can do together. Ask the latter and they'll tell you what other people are supposed to do for them.