What Occupy Wall Street Means

Yesterday I drove by the Occupy Berkeley encampment on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I only had a brief glimpse of the tents and a make-shift cardboard sign as I passed. So my first thought was of a small town somewhere in Oregon.

Long ago, while on a camping trip with my college boyfriend we came into the town as it was getting dark. We asked a pedestrian if there was a place to camp nearby.

“Sure” they answered, “ the city park is right down the street.”

Amazed we drove down to the center of town. Indeed! There were tents, green, tan and orange, beginning to sprout up all over the town square. There were ample bathrooms and water. And it was all free. The only rule was you had to leave in the morning. You couldn’t live there. You couldn’t become a resident.

Our experience that night was a bit exhilarating. True, we’d camped in one of the rest stops on the way out where sleeping overnight was legal, but never had we seen a campground in the middle of a town that was just for travelers.

In a way completely different from any protest we’d ever been at, that peaceful camping area in the middle of a small American town was like suddenly awakening in a whole different country, a country where people really were free.

The commonwealth

I come from Pennsylvania, a state with conflict built into its name. Pennsylvania is a Commonwealth. That means just what the word sounds like, a place of “common well-being” or property owned and enjoyed by all. At the same time, the name Pennsylvania translates into “Penn’s woods”. And woods, or rather timber, was one of the reasons Charles II, king of England in 1681 granted William Penn a land tract of territory for William’s Pennsylvania in the “New World”.

From the beginning, America has been resting on twin pillars: (1) the the promise of a great wealth to be shared in common by those who settled in this land, plus (2) the promise of private ownership being available to all [white males] who worked for it.

The commons

Closely related to the idea of commonwealth is the broader idea of the commons. The Boston Commons in the Commonwealth of New England is the most famous example in the US that ideal. What is a “commons“? Any resources held in common, whether land, natural resources, or intellectual property such as laws are examples of the commons.

Although the idea of commons began long before the US was formed, nothing is more “American” than the town commons, or as city planners called it, the “town square”. Nothing is more American than the public library, the intellectual and entertainment commons that serves all the people of that town. Nothing is more American than the voting booths along with the idea of “one [hu]man, one vote.”

The commons also includes:

• National parks and wilderness areas
• Interstate highways and roads
• Local streets and media strips
• Sidewalks and public plazas
• Public buildings and gardens
• The Internet

And intangibles such as:

• Culture
• Public art
• Political structures
• Shared values such as freedom of speech, religious freedom, and equal justice for all
• Constitutions
• Air and water

But from the beginning there was conflict. Nowhere was that conflict portrayed by mass media more vividly than in movie Westerns. Here the battle was often between the cattle ranchers on one hand and the railroads and farmers on the other.

The cattle ranchers, along with the “outlaws” who were also a symbol of the unfenced commons in the old “wild” West, were portrayed as the “bad guys”. The farmers and law-bringers were the good guys, often good guys without any guns.The American Indians were a sign of troubles fading into the past, while the railroads were the ominous sign of what was to come. In this way we were taught to hate the idea of the commons.

The attack on the American commons

In 2003, David Bollier wrote a book called, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. Even Newsweek had praise for this book. YES! A Journal of Positive Futures opened its review with this sentence: “When our times finally come to rest in the history texts, I think they will be called the Age of Enclosure—the age of privatization. It is a time when everything has become a commodity, and everything is for sale. (Winter 2003 issue, pp. 55-6 by Jonathan Rowe).

Another concept that Bollier comes up in Silent Theft is the “gift economy”. This is a social space where things are perceived as better because they are given freely instead of being bought and paid for. These kinds of freely given gifts are things like “personal attention, acts of kindness, sacrifices of time”.

Says Bollier:

In the real world, we all know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. We may pay for child care but worry that it is not the same as a parent’s loving personal care. We may pay for college tuition, but real learning requires a voluntary personal commitment. A father cannot buy his son’s affections, our votes should not be sold to the highest bidder, and paid sex is not the same thing as intimacy with a loved one. p 23

Occupy Wall Street (OWS)

Until the Occupy Wall Street movement began, Wall Street was an emblem for the supreme and extreme powers of privatization. The OWS movement called our attention instead to the public streets that Wall Street’s grand buildings sit in the middle of, to the the impoverished commons that surrounds Wall Street’s wealth.

Occupy Wall Street can be viewed as the “last stand” by the middle class, working class, and student “outlaws” of this century to preserve the American commons, and indeed, the global commons. Occupy groups are in London, Sydney, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Toronto and even in cities in Switzerland. In fact, you could say OWS groups were inspired by the uprisings in the Eastern Europe, China, and most recently the Middle East, that also involved famous city squares.

City officials here and abroad are now busy driving the OWS “protesters” out of their commons. With blinders on, they take a narrow view that the rights of private property owners and their employees are being trampled upon. But in reality the reverse is the truth.

Across the globe, private property has ridden roughshod over the commons for centuries. At the rate we’re going even air will be for soon for sale in a world where breathing is no longer a free good.

Public safety is part of the commons. Politicians have every right and duty to be concerned about it, but they can’t be allowed to forget that it is the public who are now occupying the commons that belong to the public.

Officials can’t be allowed to forget that they are merely the representatives of the public who own the political system of this country’s democratic government.

None of us can be allowed to forget that when people are no longer free to walk on the sidewalks of their own towns and cities or campuses; people are no longer free.

Follow Nancy Humphreys on Twitter @brucenomics