Occupation and capitalist ideology
Why is everyone freaking out this much about a bunch of tents?
In the white-hot arguments surrounding the occupation protests for Palestine springing up in campuses across the country, it’s easy to forget that we are objectively talking about a bunch of people camping.
On the right this point is constantly obscured with fabrications about violence and terrorist plots — but we know that these lies are ultimately effects of what is happening, not causes. What is causing this, when we set those lies aside, is a bunch of people camping.
On the liberal-left this point is elided by (understandably) focusing on Zionist animus towards the message of the protesters, as well as (incorrectly) on some “culture of censorship.” But we can see where this analysis breaks down if we pay even a little attention to the intensity of opposition to advocacy for Palestine in other contexts. Advocacy for Palestine that respects private property laws — online, in the media, and in private settings — is generally not being met by rubber bullets. There is even, moreover, a whole genre of liberal critic who has professed sympathy with the cause of Palestine in other contexts, but who has suddenly declared it intolerable in this one.
There is a plain difference in both magnitude and character between the general crackdown on advocacy for Palestine and the specific advocacy for Palestine via encampment. We do not trivialize the malevolence of Zionism by acknowledging this. But once we do acknowledge this then the question arrives: what is it about encampments that the ruling class finds so threatening? Why are its footsoldiers freaking out over what amounts, legally, to a case of mass loitering?
It is tempting to come up with all kinds of complicated and counterintuitive answers to this question, but I think we have already provided a simple answer. The capitalist class hates loitering. And it really hates mass loitering, because what this amounts to is a popular rejection of the laws of private property.
Liberalism does little to explain why the US ruling class would be particularly angry over violations of private property law. It would predict that oppression in our world is equally driven by a diverse and “intertwined” — by which they mean indistinguishable — morass of illiberal sentiment: bigotry towards Palestinians, authoritarian attitudes towards speech, and so on. It would also, of course, not even qualify crackdowns on loitering as instances of oppression; in fact, it would classify the loitering itself as an oppressive act against some individual’s private property rights.
From a Marxist perspective, however, the encampment freakout makes perfect sense. Capitalists are particularly hostile towards mass loitering because it directly challenges the fundamental basis of their power. If capitalists can maintain private property law then they will always have the power to act out on whatever petty bigotries and censorious impulses infest their wicked hearts. But if people do not have to respect laws about where you can and cannot set up a tent, they reason, they won’t have to respect ownership claims over real estate and banks and factories either.
You can see how the private property system facilitates other strategies of “lawful” oppression in another response to the encampments: the billionaire-funded counterprotests at UCLA. In obesiance to capitalist ideology, free speech liberalism has to make one of two empirical claims: that capitalism creates a relatively equal distribution of wealth, or the inequality in wealth does not rig that marketplace of ideas to favor the rich. If neither is true, then it follows directly that the private property system cannot be reconciled with free speech. And in UCLA, we see that both are demonstrably untrue: yesterday, the Daily Beast reported that billionaires like Jessica Seinfeld and Bill Ackman have been radically inflating the turnout of counterprotesters at UCLA, and are planning to do so all across the country.
Ackman and Seinfeld are only able to drown out protesters with ethnonationalist propaganda because of the private property system, which has allowed them to accumulate and control astronomical concentrations of wealth. Both understand that if workers reject private property right en masse, this threatens their power in a way that free speech and egalitarian critiques of bigotry never can.
There are three related objections to this point that, when taken together, gives us important insight into how the ideology of private property actually works.
The first two are quite similar. On one hand, one may argue that many of these student encampments are not even illegal under the applicable laws of private property; particularly at public universities, there have been multiple incidents where students have been disciplined for their presence in public spaces. At the University of Austin, for example, the American Association of University Professors notes that when state troopers arrested student and faculty protesters last month, they were charged with “trespassing” — even though UA is a public university, which means that their presence was lawful.
On the other hand, one might also note that protests that do violate private property laws in the United States may not violate it in other countries. In Sweden, for example, the legal institution of allemansrätt — translated literally as “everyone’s right” — explicitly allows camping on private property in most cases, though the particulars of this right varies from city to city.
Third objection: that student trespassers are actually engaged in violence. But as Nathan J. Robinson has been assiduously tracking, when you dig into these claims, what you often find is that protesters are not committing trespassing and violence — they are just trespassing, which pundits and politicians then redefine as violence. This rhetoric ultimately has its basis in libertarian-type arguments about the non-aggression principle, but as writers like Matt Bruenig have demonstrated it is actually the enforcement of private property rights itself that ultimately relies on violence.
What these three objections tell us, I would argue, is that the private property system is not the expression of some specific jurisprudence or coherent intellectual theory of property. What we really have is an economy where a small group of people control most of the resources, and are able to leverage that control into propounding all kinds of norms and rhetorics that justify it. Bourgeois ideology is just what we call all of the amorphous, shifting, and sometimes even contradictory pretexts that capitalists use to maintain their control of property at any given moment.
Anti-imperialists, in that light, would do well to reflect on how Zionism serves as a pretext for capitalism as well. This is obviously the case in Palestine, where Zionist theology and ethnonationalist ideology operate as an excuse for Israeli settlers to control Palestinian land. Remarkably, even the left often finds itself embroiled in libertarian homesteading arguments about how the original inhabitants of any piece of land get to claim property rights over it; Israelis simply counter that it was originally their land, and thus the discourse proceeds well within the bourgeois framework.1
But this is also the case in the US opposition to encampments as well. One may say, with justification, that our ruling class is invoking private property rights in defense of Zionism — but it is also the case that they are wielding Zionism, with its ethnonationalist discourses of villification, as a cudgel to defend the rights of property.
The alternative to this framework, of course, is still a global socialist state — one which recognizes the fundamental left position that the earth belongs to all of us.