I talked with a young man who lives on the streets of the city of Sacramento. Never mind how he got there. He owns nothing except those things he can carry with him. He described for me the lengths to which he has gone to avoid standing all night on a sidewalk. I won't go into detail. On some cold winter evenings ice forms at his feet on the sidewalk. "I nearly froze my balls off last night," he told me. The anti-camping law in Sacramento makes it impossible for a homeless person to sleep in a sleeping bag or tent. You can't even put your sleeping bag or tent down for a moment in order to use facilities or find food. It might be construed as storing camping equipment on public property. Public property is not "the commons." You have to occupy a structure that is legitimately recognized by city authorities as your "property." Otherwise, if you are still young enough to remain standing all night freezing your balls off, you continue to pursue this icy alternative. An older person would presumably topple over after a short while and be subject to arrest for camping on city property. Poverty is a form of institutionalized oppression. It is an artifact of capitalism. Poverty is a death sentence. It is the "death panel" that has always been part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production. And the ruling ideology supports the notion that poverty is an acceptable phenomenon. If you are poor your life is shortened considerably. If you are elderly and homeless on an icy Sacramento street, then your death sentence will be carried out. It's only a matter of time.
Property rights seem to be the key to legitimacy of personhood in Sacramento. The homeless camp along the American River was dismantled this past week partly to appease property owners who were doubtless offended by this unsightly manifestation of capitalist oppression. I have witnessed the debate revolving around the exact cosmic tic at which a fetus becomes a person. However, if you own property then you have a status conferred upon you well beyond anything similarly conferred upon a fetus. Alternatively, if you have the means to rent space in someone else's property, then you can have property rights by proxy as it were. However, even if you had previously passed the "fetus" check, your poverty now deprives you of even basic human rights. You must go away. You have no rights.
Personhood, we were recently reminded, is conferred upon corporations, thereby effectually circumventing the "fetus check." Mitt Romney chided an occupy person who had the temerity to question the influence of corporations in the U.S. "Corporations are people, my friend." Rights are conferred upon a person through the occult status of property ownership. Politicians are speaking today to the middle class. That is to say, those who own property. I'm old enough to remember a time when presidential candidates used to speak of "The War on Poverty." Now it is simply "War on the Poor." The poor have disappeared from the rhetoric of presidential politics. This is a total dispossession not only of the right to claim a space, but, in addition, the dispossession of personhood.
The question seldom, if ever, arises in the main stream media as to whether our economic system could be democratized so that poverty could be erased. Any attempt to suggest an economic democracy is dismissed as "socialism." In fact, we are moving further away from this solution by the privatization of health care, education, incarceration, social security and Medicare. The cause of poverty, we are led to believe by the ruling ideology, is personal failure. Moreover, the primary means for eliminating poverty is through charity which is another capitalist industry. Charity is the institutionalized instrument that functions to ease the conscience and allow for the increasing disparity of incomes to continue. Meanwhile we can avert our eyes and believe that things are just as they should be. Profits are up. Wages are depressed. God is in His heaven.
The democratic alternative will come, but not through electoral politics. Not through the political class. It will come in spite of the capitalist class. The contradictions that plague capitalist accumulation are growing beyond the tectonic breaking point. Social unrest is inevitable. Class consciousness is taking shape. People are reoccupying the commons ... not just here, but in Egypt, in Europe and everywhere. There will be a commons once again. People understand that human rights trump property rights. It must be remembered: Oppression is never an accident.
