Prefiguring the Realm of Freedom at Occupy Oakland

Abstract

In recent decades a powerful discourse has taken hold, celebrating the struggle of civil society against the state, and many have attempted to read the Occupy movement through that lens. This essay draws on Marx's critique of liberalism in “On the Jewish Question” to denaturalize the neoliberal imaginary implicit in such readings and to suggest an alternative account that foregrounds the prefigurative nature of the movement as an attempt to create freedom in community with others.

Keywords:

• State
• Civil Society
• Prefigurative Politics
• Occupy Oakland

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mike King, Maliha Safri, and Ian Seda-Irizarry for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay, and the Oakland Commune for its provocation and inspiration.

Notes

¹This is evident in Solnit's piece as well. Locating civil society's first stirrings in the response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, she emphasizes the acts of heroism by ordinary people, the outpouring of mutual aid efforts, and spontaneous public acts of commemoration. Missing from her account is any acknowledgment of the vigilantism that also marked civil society, the threats and assaults on people who were assumed to be Arab or Muslim, including many Sikhs, the hostility and suspicion defining attitudes towards Islam, or the vengeful bloodlust that made the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq much more than just “Bush's war(s)” and brought people into the streets to celebrate the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Instead, Solnit explicitly suggests that all of the negative responses to 9/11 originate with and belong to the state.

²Although occupation and daily communal living distinguished the Occupy movement from previous struggles against neoliberalism in the United States, occupation as a tactic of social movements did not originate with Occupy but rather has a long lineage. As Maliha Safri (2012) notes, the need to reconfigure the realm of necessity, to find ways of supporting the occupation by allocating resources and meeting daily needs, is a common problem for all occupations. Within Occupy Oakland a truly voluntary division of labor emerged as ad hoc committees were formed to take care of food, sanitation, security, and so on.

³The anarchist notion of mutual aid well describes the functioning and spirit of the camps, but in Oakland the term has been largely appropriated by the police, acquiring a sinister and threatening connotation when used to describe the cooperation of multiple police agencies, drawn from surrounding cities, in the violent eviction of the camp and in the militarized responses to later days of action.

⁴The District Attorney of Alameda County successfully sought stay away (or restraining) orders against a number of Occupiers, many arrested on petty charges of obstructing a thoroughfare, as a condition of bail or probation. These stay away orders named the City of Oakland as the victim and in most cases required that those ordered stay at least 100 (or sometimes 300) yards away from City Hall and Oscar Grant Plaza. One Occupier convicted of a more serious charge was given a much larger stay away order by the judge as part of his probation; that stay away order was, in the words of his lawyer, practically a “banishment order” from Oakland, prohibiting him from being within several square blocks of downtown.