Setting down some partially developed ideas here. Others are welcome to play with them. (Boosts are okay!)
Last night I listened to this interview with criminal justice scholar Emily Brissette, about Occupy Oakland: <https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-june-9-2021/>
The focus of the conversation is on the use of Stay-Away orders by the city, to keep specific Occupy activists away from certain public spaces, in an effort to dismantle the movement, but there's also some really interesting discussion of alternative viewpoints on what Occupy Oakland was trying to do.
As I understand it, Emily Brissette takes issue with the view put forward by the ACLU and others (in an effort to defend Occupy), that what Occupy was engaged in, through actions such as provision of free meals and first aid in public space, was a case of free speech. She particularly objects to the idea that Occupy Oakland's goal was to change state policy.
In discussing the problems with framing Occupy actions as being about speech, Brissette refers frequently to the idea of reimagining the structure of society, outside of existing state structures. Many of the primary goals of the Occupy movement have nothing to do with changing state policies, but with providing alternatives.
The idea I'm turning over in my mind is that despite the immediate focus on people's immediate needs, which as Brissette notes is *itself* political (in the same sense that the personal is always political), perhaps there's a conventionally political (as in state policy) piece to this too.
Is part of the message of Occupy (and Food not Bombs, as well as similar activities The Black Panther Party and others) that the state should allow spaces for exploring alternative ways of allocating resources and providing care?
Brissette and host Sasha Lilley talk some about the idea that in mainstream society, provision of basic services outside of domain of the state is seen as a private activity (think charity), not a public one, and that movements like Occupy challenge this perspective.
I feel like there's a kind of tension between radical movements that propose variations on the theme of "the state doesn't provide ____, so we will do that for ourselves" and the mainstream response of "that's great, here's how you set up a tax-deductible charity to do exactly those things, and now that we've got you on board, here are all of the permits you need to apply for to do the things you want to do, and there will of course be government oversight to ensure that you don't do anything that might be harmful / unsafe / etc."
Whether or not the state's claims about potential harm, public safety, etc. are well-founded (I take it as given that in at least some cases the real motivation is to avoid making rich people feel uncomfortable), there's something that feels... disappointing?... about the idea that something that started as a radical reimagining could end up as a fairly mainstream charity embedded within state structures.
One of the things I've started to think more about in the aftermath of Occupy has been the role of public space in cities.
Public space is for people. It is a valuable resource, one that many (if not most) cities do not have enough of. But not everyone has the same answer to the question of what public spaces are and should be.
I *hate* the efforts that are made to make public spaces uncomfortable for people who don't have houses to live in. But it's also not particularly unreasonable for people who do have houses to live in to have open spaces available to them to sit down for a picnic and allow their children to run around, and then go home in the evening. A lot of people with good intentions would argue that a natural role for government is to strike a balance between these kinds of competing needs. It's especially easy to think this way if you live a life of safety and don't pay close attention to what goes on outside your own bubble.
Occupy put an experiment in alternative ways to live directly into urban centers. This defied expectations. The classic commune, ecovillage, or intentional community exists in a rural area, on private land. Urban experiments in collectivism do also exist, at a range of scales, but tend not to be highly visible, and generally on private land as well.
Occupy was a highly visible collective experiment on public land.
In a lot of ways, cities are a good location for experimenting with alternative society structures. Society is made of people, and cities contain a lot of people in a small area. If you want to try living in an ecovillage, you need to be able to find out that ecovillages exist, learn where ecovillages are, to apply to live there, and to have the means to get out there at all. Ecovillages are also pretty easy to ignore for people who aren't interested in them.
Occupy camps were something you could find out about just by walking by, and were not so easy to ignore.
@dynamic For the ruling class, the not easy to ignore aspect is an unfortunate side effect of the advantages that cities give them. Cities allow workers to be grouped into easily managed spaces, so the ruling class can employ smaller control (e.g., policing) measures and breed the workforce. Cities enable exploitation of the environment by shielding people from it and providing the illusion that it can be minimized by confining people to smaller land spaces.
