Our Future Occupation
A look back at an old essay on economic insecurity, rent as debt, recommoning, and more
This week I’d like to share an essay I wrote some years ago. At first I thought I would lift some material from it to craft a shorter post, but upon re-reading it thought I’d leave it here in all its glorious mess. It’s a good representation of how some of the themes I’d like to address through Unsettling have been rattling in the back of my mind for some time.
Some personal background that might provide a little context: When I wrote this, I’d been working at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles for several years. There was lots I loved about the job, but the math never quite pencilled out when it came to both paying rent and paying off my student loans. Things were okay when I was in committed relationships that were economically intertwined, but on my own, I knew things could get dicey. My experience of such economic insecurity, and the role that “necessary” debts like rent and educational loans played into it, continues to underpin much of my thinking on these issues.
A few years before that, I’d been involved in various projects, including the Transition movement, that focused on efforts like ‘reskilling’ — learning to grow one’s own food, setting up community structures to help support one another get basic needs met, finding ways to do things that required less energy, etc. The idea was to live in more ecologically sound ways that looked a little bit more like subsistence economies with the presumption that it would be necessary for multiple reasons: we needed to use less energy to stem off catastrophic climate change, and it was possible that we’d begin to see energy shortages due to a diminishing oil supply. This was before the fracking boom, and also before the advancements in solar and wind technologies made them seem feasible on a broad scale (and these were circles in which there was plenty of acknowledgment about the negative impacts of ‘renewables’ anyhow, and a recognition that they didn’t fix structural economic and social ills). But such movements didn’t seem to be spreading very much. And my involvement with them had been in Chicago; after moving to L.A., it felt nearly impossible to have a serious conversation with anyone about climate change. I dedicatedly rode my bicycle or took the bus and refused to own a car (which would have been too expensive, anyway) and experienced a growing depression about the whole situation and the alternating obliviousness or apathy of those I met. I grew increasingly interested in the bolder forms of activism that sought to challenge the typical complacency and the normal way of doing business, both which accelerated fossil fuel use and climate change. Hence opening up with words from activists like Tim DeChristopher.
Furthermore, I’d just come out of participating in Occupy, and seen the power of collective direct action to radically alter the mental map of almost the entire country. But where should we go after Occupy? What would realize the aspirations of that movement, which was surely not able to truly realize them itself? It seemed obvious that it required restructuring the two major economic pillars that structure our daily lives: how we use our labor, and how we relate to land. But what did that mean? My ideas were vague, influenced by efforts like Take Back the Land but also by writing like Ivan Illich’s The Right to Useful Unemployment.
I moved away from L.A. a few months after finishing this. I thought I was headed for deeper thinking on the matter, and further experiments in radical communal living; I’d applied for a spot at an intentional community back in my old neighborhood in Chicago. What’s ironic, as you’ll see if you make it through the essay—and apologies in advance for certain stylistic habits derived from reading too much critical theory just then—is that I never made it to that community in Chicago. The very same day I was accepted there, I received a second invitation, but this one to New York, for a job. Which I took; at age 30, it would be my first ever truly salaried position. Leaving my low-waged but literary retail friends and landing in the world of New Yorker non-profit professionals felt a bit like traveling through a wormhole, and it’s been quite a journey since then, as those of you who know me are aware. But coming out the other side of that wormhole this past year (I left my job working as the Movement Building Director for 350 Seattle in March of 2020), I find myself returning to some of the same conclusions as I did back in June of 2013, when I wrote the essay below. Are “good jobs” and electric cars really the best we can do in thinking about what a better future might hold? Will they even deliver what we say we want? Maybe we still need a new dream of the future; not a dream of something bigger, exactly, but a dream of something else we haven’t quite yet set our fingers on. I know I’m still grasping for it.
Our Future Occupation
“Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there's no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future – of a career and a retirement and all that stuff – I realized I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.” —Tim DeChristopher [1]
What does it mean to think about the future as a young person?
We are encouraged to draw up plans, make preparations, set our eyes on lofty goals for our lives. We, the young people, that much-fretted about millennial generation with stories of our personal self-absorption making front page news. Yet quietly we are asking ourselves,
What does it mean when there seems to be no future left to think about?
Our constant preoccupation with silent questions such as these has led many to label us narcissists and worse. But our racing minds and chronic delay of so-called major life decisions, while always experienced personally, are signs of much larger than our individual concerns. Some of us may have greater or lesser awareness of how the pressures of the world at large collide with our own position within it, but the brutal impact of that collision happens daily nonetheless.
Even those of us who consider ourselves aware – and perhaps then especially so – can find ourselves caught in a schizophrenic state regarding the future, a psychological circling fueled by matching environmental and economic anxiety.
I am on the older side of the millennials, and I can spend a solid evening full of biting my lips, knitting my eyebrows together, and thinking of how my own various aspirations – in turns academic or activist in nature – have led me down an uneven path of dubious financial stability and wondering about my overall effectiveness at creating cultural change. Over and over in my mind I try to sort through the dilemma, so small and personal and yet so large: this problem of the seeming lack of connections between the need to live, and under the current circumstances, the need to make a living, coupled with the need to engage in the slow, patient work that is required to help transform other people and their attitudes about the world, and the need for radical forms of direct action to address the climate crisis and our crisis of governance. How do I stay in one place long enough to build relationships and shape the way others see the world if what is needed looks something like chaining oneself to a pipeline?
And either I start thinking about the cost of bail or the cost of rent and looking at my personal budget until my student-debt-to-hourly-wage ratio has me searching internet job listings once more until quite late at night, when I realize I have yet again gone down a rabbit hole and not made any headway on the original problem. And then perhaps, drained by global and mental uncertainties alike, I fall asleep.
How many of us live in such a regular holding pattern of inaction? Many of my peers have been aware of the number and scale of global problems for much of our whole lives, and the routes for action typically presented to us seem obviously inadequate, resulting in despair veiled as apathy or its mirror opposite, activist burnout. If we were the hopeful type, perhaps we went to college with great optimism and signed the many papers they told us would help make our future possible only to come out on the other side with a weight of debt whose purpose appears to be strangling the very dreams it once promised. Throw in news of constant environmental wreckage (how many oil spills have we seen in the last few years? how many milestones of irreversible climate change have we passed?) and it seems clear that yes, any version of the future as we previously imagined it is gone. There was a future for the boomers, who brought us here with all their talk of progress. But their vision of wealth – even in its modified, soft green capitalist form – cannot be ours; our future can no longer be greenwashed.
Self-absorbed? No. Preoccupied? Yes. Uncertain of what course of action to take? Often. Certain that it must look different from those paths of non-success offered to us? Very.
There is a point, then, when our anxiety may become energy, may become what allows us to dream outside the box.
The Wrong Occupations
“The question is: why are these our only alternatives and what kind of struggle will take us beyond them?” —Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero
Outside the box is where we learn to see that if the means to support ourselves barely manage to accomplish that most basic task, while they at the same time render our future increasingly fragile, then it is time to find new means towards the critical end that is our lives. Our jobs may sometimes give us a living, but they rarely have given us life, and daily it seems they exist to ensure that we will not be given a future.
If the system of employment cannot provide us with a future, then why submit ourselves to it? Why allow it to continue its present stranglehold upon us?
Why not say instead: the future must be a future without jobs.
Consider what an incoherent mess liberalism and even progressivism has become – we simultaneously lament the lack of jobs and the decline of the labor movement to organize those jobs, though they do not exist! It's as though we believe we must return to those mythical decades of mid-20th century America – the years of the fetishized 'middle class' – before we can move forward into a new century in which we finally make demands for what we really want. We must make jobs and then make sure they are well paid and then that they are 'green' and then... Why not instead use this moment to help one another break away from our abusive addiction to the institutions of corporate industrialism?
We do not need jobs. We need:
air
food
water
and clean versions of these, not versions with poisons undetectable to the human eye – poisons we create 'unwillingly' at our day jobs that we keep for the sake of having a few extra hours in a week to volunteer to pass ineffective legislation against those poisons.
We do not need jobs. We need:
friendship
love
care
sex
pleasure
Those same things we are always having trouble 'finding,' as we say, as though these are objects to be stumbled upon, not actions we ourselves undertake. A job has been a means for some of us, to some of those things, for a historically limited period of time. We act as though the arrangement is inevitable. History demonstrates that it is not. But we use that thought of inevitability to calm our consciences as the apparatus of our consumerism forces others around the globe – those for whom jobs were previously not a necessity – into a situation where they become requisite as the only means for survival. The belief in the inevitability of the model of job-as-survival has helped close off the commons and quicken ecological and cultural destruction in yet another wave of global colonization.
We have been promised too long the benefits of our own productivity. The technological transformation of capital was to make our lives easier, our work days shorter. And now we find ourselves competing in agony for longer work days, that require us to work and think faster than ever, for amounts that barely cover the bills.
Even those jobs supposedly aiming at social transformation are rarely better: consider the ads in online job forums requiring 60-plus hour weeks at low pay. Want another entry barrier to a profession in making the world a better place? “Qualifications: Must have a dependable car, valid driver's license, and proof of insurance.” Yes: mandated car ownership for a social change job in the era of climate change.
Yet why are we competing for positions such as these, when by now we know the numbers, and the reasons behind them, that mean our jobs do not equal our survival or our happiness? Must we reprint the numbers once again that show the increased productivity of workers in the last four decades – their contribution to vast amounts of material wealth – at the same time that wages have stagnated, allowing the rich to increase their percentage of ownership? Numbers that show that despite these massive gains in productivity, inequality stands at record levels? No, I thought not.
Rent as Debt
But we are tied to our wage-based dependencies nonetheless, because the most basic of necessities, like our labor, have been turned into commodities, and we have allowed the continuing concentration of their ownership.
Which means that if we did not need a job before – if we had found some way to cultivate or trade for food, at least – now we do. Because everything is owned, and even to live anywhere, one must pay rent.
In giving up our common space, we have made the situation into this: one must have a job in order to sleep. Yet those who own these spaces may charge what they please, so even this fragile relation is not guaranteed. And because the law benefits primarily those who own things, even if we do the work of paving the streets, of planting the grass in the park, we are not allowed to sleep there.
One must take up space in order to live – we are physical beings! No matter how small. And if we must all pay rent – and for most of us today, even 'home ownership' is really an extended form of rental, with a slightly different arrangement of privileges and responsibilities – then we are all in debt from the day we are born.
So here we are: our jobs do not provide for us, yet we must fight to have them for the sake of staking out some very small space for ourselves to exist. To break away from this system of employment, then, that seeks to take each day more of our energy from ourselves while giving us less in return, we must look to break the spell of commodification over one of the most basic elements: the land.
A renewal of a world without jobs requires a simultaneous renewal of the commons, of land for general use – a world where we may sleep at night without needing to pay up the next morning. The land has been redistributed before; it can be so again. The majority of us can only benefit. We should not willingly choose those forms of survival that will befall many of us if we do not act: greater spread of slums in which we live off the garbage of those who have claimed they own everything but the waste they create.
We have given up too much. Our daily actions say:
This space is not ours: I will heed the signs, the property contracts, no matter the violent history hidden in now mundane ink and paper and chainlink.
This time is not mine: let me hand it over to another, who will fill my minutes and hours with tasks and purposes that may in fact be against all the purposes in the world I would wish to fulfill.
This is not our world: our pain to share together, our abundance and beauty to guard and multiply together.
But it is: our world, our time, yours and mine, our space to claim, reclaim, to occupy, if you will.
A Common Occupation
Striking down debt.
Resisting eviction.
Taking back the land.
These are the actions that rebuild both the commons (what I often call “recommoning”) and our economic and psychological autonomy. Occupy Wall Street helped launch some of these efforts, and invigorated others by sending its energetic youth into their organizations.
The connections forged into the possibility of a new commons remains one of the most notable achievements of OWS and the hundreds of occupations around the country. The encampments created physical political commons, and as we saw, this was no small feat. But even though the clearest visible of the representations of the movement's beginning were violently destroyed, the commoning impulse ignited by the occupations continues. Strike Debt and its Rolling Jubilee takes debt and ceases to treat it as a private, personal, problem, and transforms it into one that can be collectively dismantled. Occupy Sandy offers non-state based collective aid in the face of climate catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy. And the many linkages that have been created with the already-existent anti-eviction movement, both to resist foreclosure and to take over unused properties, helps exert neighborhood-level sovereignty over bank-owned land. Occupy helped debt, disaster, and homelessness become not personal tragedies but common experiences with communal forms of resistance, communal solutions – and solutions run by a temporary, transient apparatus of the people, not the permanent ever-growing and enduring apparatus of the state.
For what many in the Occupy movement saw and continue to see is that the solution to our economic, ecological, and democratic crises are intertwined: a recommoning of the world provides tangible answers to all three. A recommoning of the land, in particular, gives us the most basic of essentials – space – in which to exist, along with the time in which to work out means for the rest of what we need to care for one another, and a chance to break from the anti-democratic industrialism that is the root of our ecosystemic collapse.
So many Occupiers were unemployed, but saw in their lack the opportunity to begin creating a society where they could live nonetheless, and in doing so make the world a place more just, which is to say a place where even more people have the chance to really live.
Decolonizing for Recommoning
The Occupiers took on recommoning as their goal, but early on discovered the complications of creating what truly feels like a common space for all here in the U.S., with its long legacy of racism. While I would like to argue for the usefulness of the word “occupy” in a movement away from corporate control towards a new commons, it is with good reason that many questioned its ability to make such movements feel inclusive. Many Occupy groups discussed, and some began to use, the word “decolonize” rather than “occupy” in an effort to keep in mind the history of occupation in North America and its disproportionate impact on indigenous and other groups.
Still, in a world that has, at this point, been colonized over more than once, there is a useful connection between the concepts of occupying (as employed by Occupy) and decolonizing that should be recognized. To occupy a public space in the United States is, even if temporarily, to create a place where the possibility of decolonizing our minds and lands from corporate and state occupation exists. This twin mental and physical decolonization is something needed by all of us, those with greater and lesser structural privileges alike.
Yet the original impulse behind the switch to “decolonize” is right, its historical focus appropriate.
There is a reason that the efforts to seize back land have had their greatest activity in communities of color; this is the forefront of where such action needs to happen. For those of us who identify as white activists, to act in concert with these communities and to follow their lead, as they describe the needs and actions proper to their neighborhoods, is a necessary part of us moving to thinking truly collectively, to make sure that our recommoning is not simply building another space that is – even if unwittingly so – yet again exclusionary.
To occupy that we may resist corporate colonization is a practice that links us with many world-wide who seek both a dignified way of survival and wish to resist the constant threat of climate change. Many, today, are still seeking to prevent the social transformation that would leave them only at the mercy of the system of employment to meet their needs, and their struggles give us much to learn in our effort to break from that system ourselves.
Author and professor Silvia Federici has described the ways in which women, especially, fight to maintain common lands and common survival practices, resisting the financialization of agriculture and the takeover of farming land by large commercial interests. This includes the more casual capture of unused urban spaces for subsistence farming as well as larger battles, such as those waged by the Bangladesh Krishok Federation and its sister organization the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha, in their defense of river chars, new lowlands formed by soil deposits from the river. Federici writes:
Such new lands should be allocated to landless farmers, according to Bangladeshi law, but because of the growing commercial value of land, big landowners have increasingly seized them; however women have organized to stop them, defending themselves with brooms, spears of bamboo, and even knives. They have also set up alarm systems, to alert other women when boats with the landowners or their goons approach, so they can push the attackers off or stop them from landing. [2]
The Kishani Sabha, like many peasant organizations around the world, are aware of the connections between their daily subsistence and the changing climate, engaging in larger efforts to mitigate climate change at the same time they engage in such militant direct action. And they know the capitalist long game as well: they are not making arrangements with these commercial interests that they may benefit from “job creation” later down the line. They are fighting for their right to subsist on the land, and we should learn from the thoroughness of their resistance to colonization. They are not seeking the right to depend on a business for their well-being but to have the space and means to provide for one another.
Such subsistence production “is contributing to a noncompetitive, solidarity-centered mode of life,” says Federici, one “that is crucial for the building of a new society.”[3]
Recommoning Tools
My focus on land is not meant to ignore the importance of other recommoning efforts. There are deep-rooted reasons why projects like community gardens generate as much hope as they do, and inspire dedication from their participants. They encapsulate, sometimes in a very limited number of square feet, the entirety of aims and feelings in recommoning: land liberated for common survival; collective care for a basic necessity; a place for gathering, for fostering relationships, for the sharing of knowledge and methods; and in addition to this, the ability of a garden to connect us not just to other people but to plants, wildlife, and the broader biological world.
The resistance towards the growing and free, communal sharing of food marks it as critical terrain for action. The state employs subtle and less subtle displays of force in this realm, often using the health department as a shield for other motives. I remember being stunned at OccupyLA's kitchen, arriving one afternoon to donate more food some weeks in, only to be told they were now only accepting “individually packaged” items, per the health department's instructions. Had we given up so quickly? But the threat was clear: the food was a draw for attendees, and prohibiting it weakened the encampment's possibilities. In other more direct shows of force, members of Food Not Bombs and Catholic Worker groups have been arrested in various cities around the country in their attempt to provide free food for the homeless, as have those seeking to protect community gardens and farms from unwanted development.
No, we cannot give up ground on these fronts either. Every aspect of our shared life together must be defended.
Likewise every mechanism we develop to bring together and share our common wealth should be explored. Land trusts are clearly one potential tool for managing common lands – even if, in their current form, they can often be slow in implementation. Public or free schools, community tool libraries, skill shares, cooperatives, are all commoning mechanisms. One of the most successful developments may be the spread of participatory budgeting in North America, which reclaims public budgets as an item of common concern to be collectively decided.[4]
Recommoning Risk
Still, these projects will only take us so far. It remains: if we are to create a future in which there is space for us all to exist, and the time for us to take care of one another and the natural habitats in which we reside, the necessary measures look more drastic. The idea of defending ourselves with bamboo spears and knives certainly sounds alarming to most American ears, and it seems to be the case that non-violent forms of resistance have shown themselves both to be more successful than they had been for some time previously and possibly the only realistic ones currently at our disposal.
Yet it is clear that if we are to carry out the full work of recommoning, even in our beginning efforts there will be risk, especially in a state that surveils and polices as heavily as this one. This comes close to sending my millennial mind back into its economic panic, thoughts of arrest and its accompanying bureaucratic and financial entanglements quickly springing forth: my single arrest in the name of claiming the commons came with a $5,000 bail.[5]
But that arrest came with its own surprise: a community of support from those in groups like the National Lawyers Guild, from friends of friends, from other Occupiers. I had initially calculated the risk on my own, but came to find that not only would its consequences touch others (something I initially dreaded) but that it was willfully borne by others, help and remedies to come not from my personal resourcefulness alone but from others' simple, direct kindness. Such experiences are what we must replicate as we move forward together: the basic act of caring for one another at our most vulnerable moments.
And my panic comes, really, only in accepting the false safety of the more familiar risk over the lesser known. But it is here – in the daily experience of economic insecurity, in the feeling of loss for the future paths we once expected to take – that my generation can begin to find its strength. As Tim DeChristopher has said, describing how he found himself able to face the risk in his disruption of the 2008 auction of public lands in Utah: “I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn't know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost....”
Certainly he would add: is the future that was lost the one we really wanted anyway?
Our Future Occupation
This is what we have to give one another: not a slow death in isolated apartments and jobs draining us of our will to make the world we want, but instead, a life in which we work – not for the profit of others – but for the benefit of each other and ourselves. A life in which we share our risks and hurts together, and share also our common joys, the land and the fruit it has to offer, the surprises we hold within ourselves for each other.
This life is only possible if we begin the withdrawal from the systems we have come to rely on: the cycles of employment and debt and rent that have supported us even as we have felt their constraining grasp on our heart and imagination.
We know the transition may be painful. But this is where it begins: taking back our time, taking back our land.[6] No jobs, no rent, no debt. A future.
Notes
[1] All quotes from DeChristopher are taken from “What Love Looks Like: A Conversation with Tim DeChristopher by Terry Tempest Williams” in Orion, Jan/Feb 2012.
[2] “Women, Land Struggles, and Globalization,” in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, by Silvia Federici, PM Press, 2012, p. 133.
[3] Federici, ibid, p. 137.
[4] At the time of writing, I sat on the board of the Participatory Budgeting Project, which is providing technical assistance for many of the municipalities currently practicing participatory budgeting.
[5] This was a standard amount set for those arrested on or near Los Angeles' City Hall the night of November 30, 2011, for the charge of “failure to disperse.”
[6]“Our land”? Whose land am I talking about, exactly? This allusion to ownership is something to be interrogated and not quite how I would put it were I writing this today.