A Protest Against Enclosure

Yesterday I recorded a little rant and posted it on Instagram. The subject was some grating that the restaurant Osha Thai Express recently put up on one of those outdoor seating areas that restaurants built during the COVID pandemic’s lockdown. I walked by on the way to the gym and seeing it made me so angry that I decided to take some inspiration from Eskor David Johnson’s Pay as You Go and say something about it.

What got me so angry is that this business saw fit to exclude people from the space, probably specifically targeting people living on the street who have used it as shelter at night (i.e. outside business hours). This sucks. What they’re excluding people from is space that was given up by the public (the seating area is built on the road and had been public parking) to help businesses continue to serve patrons and make money during that trying time. Now the public is getting told to fuck off. The business has decided that people using the space is inconvenient and therefore has enclosed it.

This is classic capitalism. As Marx described long ago, private interests will take a mile if given an inch. But what infuriates me even more is how the public sphere (“the state” or “the government”) doesn’t just allow it but actually enables it. It does this by making itself available for the taking by private persons. What do I mean by that?

The power of a state is measured in its economic prowess. The more money attributed to it, the more it can tax its populace and spend that money on hard power, like the military, which allow it to enforce its will by force, and soft power, like mighty public works, which improve “quality of life” and promote a productive citizenry. This all means that states go out of their way to help capital thrive so they can get the scraps necessary to serve that master into the future.

In this case, the state (the Oakland city government, but also the state of California and the USA) went out of its way to let private businesses use its “public property” for their benefit. They were incentivized to do this out of concern for the tax base generated by business transactions and longer-tail effects like residents leaving and taking their consumption elsewhere. It’s a fear of capital flight.

This isn’t the only place one can observe the state doing stuff like this: consider the 2008 financial crisis and bailouts. To simplify a bit, the federal government let Lehman Bros. collapse, saw that this might bring the whole world economic system down, and decided to pump a bunch of public money in so that financiers would feel good about their ability to get a positive return on investments. This got money flowing again and a bunch of private people pocketed the profit. Meanwhile, many people who lost their homes got hung out to dry. (Bob Meister has written a great book examining all this and more, for those who are also disgusted by this.)

This brings me to the other aspect of this whole thing: the impact to the people displaced. Not only does this private business get to profit from the public, but the public also manages those who are unfortunate enough to not have enough money to be upstanding citizens. Readers may know that the US Supreme Court recently issued a ruling, “Grant’s Pass,” allowing cities to disburse encampments on public lands. (Oakland is acting quickly to use this authority.) This mainly affects people living on the streets, aka “the homeless,” most of whom are there because they don’t have the money to afford stable living places and public services suck. These are the same people who were taking shelter in the outdoor eating area. So not only did this private business exclude them, but the public is fucking with them too.

One takeaway is that the public sphere is not our friend. It’s structurally incentivized to help capital and thereby impoverish many of us who compose its citizenry. No longer can anyone (homeless or not) just sit in that eating area outside business hours, i.e. access it without having to give OSHA money for the privilege. Just like there’s few public bathrooms so you need to pay a business to use theirs. Or just like you need to put your money in a private bank in order to make your life work. (Unless you happen to be a member of a credit union like me 😊)

What’s the alternative? Well Meister has an interesting proposal in his book. The basic idea is to establish some sort of alter-economy which is outside the public and private sphere, and to do so in a way that it isn’t able to be re-absorbed by them. This is similar to the idea of establishing a new commons. He looks at crypto as a way, but that only comes at the end of a long political struggle and folks may be skeptical of crypto. So I propose focusing on the struggle and deferring the specific mechanism that establishes independence to later. What can that struggle look like then?

First it requires organizing, i.e. resisting the growth of entropy that is capital accumulation. That means establishing connections with others for the sake of doing things that don’t make a profit. (These things can and will make life better. Just making money for the sake of making more money is out.) There are lots of collectives and groups out there and folks can narrow in their focus. For example there’s the Debt Collective, or local to the East Bay there’s Prisoners Literature Project, or make some art, or contribute to a community garden to challenge our ecologically-destructive food system, or there’s always a good ol’ fashioned labor union. I don’t know; it’s your life. Keep doing something non-capitalist for long enough and eventually someone will either try to charge you for it or take advantage of your “free labor” for their profit. If you get mad about that, then congrats! You’re now an anti-capitalist dissident.

These are the sorts of things we need to be doing to protest and resist enclosure. This is how to stop the ongoing degradation of our lives and living spaces: we stop doing capitalism to ourselves and do something else with our time instead. That something else can literally be anything else, because the definition of capitalism is valuing money and the creation of more money over everything else; or as Marx put it, the self-valorization of capital. So to not do capitalism, value things more than transforming more and more things into more and more money. Give a shit about something else. Make other things in your life your priority, and find other people to do that with!