When You Got Nothing You Got Nothing To Lose

Bob Dylan’s iconic words carry several meanings. To those of us who decided (with the luxury of a middle class background) to live as leanly as possible, the meaning is literal: if you’re not part of the system, with a mortgage and credit card debt, when the system collapses you haven’t lost much. The other meaning, that when you’re poor and struggling and the system offers you nothing in the way of rising out of that poverty, you’re already lost.

Some of the folks who started Occupy Wall Street offer a third meaning. Many of them appear to be from recently achieved middle class homes—upward mobility from working class or minority assimilation—and aspire to professional work and home ownership—a piece of the American pie—albeit with a more sophisticated understanding of how that lifestyle is supported both economically and politically. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs doing what they’ve been trained to do, they can’t afford mortgage loans (and no one is building anything affordable anyway) because they’re deeply in debt from college loans. So what better way to spend the day than in the street with their cohort.

They are joined by an interesting array of other protestors, from all walks of life, including the working poor, college professors, union organizers, activists, and retirees. But the core group of folks, even with their different spin on “you got nothing to lose”, are the direct descendents of the protestors who were in the streets during the Vietnam war: people young enough and unencumbered enough to stay out there in the park day and night while a movement is created. Those of us who were in Washington D.C., Kent State, and every other city across the U.S. in the late sixties and early seventies keep saying to ourselves, “I wish I could be in Liberty Park, too.” But there’s the mother who requires 24-hour care, the house that needs to be ready for winter, the woodpile that needs to be split, and the animals that need to be fed and cared for.

The anti-war movement addressed all things that sustain a war of occupation: the imperialism of the war mongers, the military industrial complex, and the race and class distinctions that sent a disproportionate number of young men and women of color and low economic status to be killed. These power structures are still with us, and I suspect there’s plenty of conversation about them among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. But the overriding focus on the growing economic inequality illuminates Wall Street’s free market fetishism, which eludes the control of even the weakest regulatory oversight and defines an even more insidious hegemony than the war mongering political and corporate establishment we’ve been fighting forever.

I mentioned in a previous blog posting the conversation I had with a young friend who didn’t want to hear about what went on in the sixties, that the social network has supplanted the need for organizing in the streets. I’m sure all this twittering and tweeting is a lot less cumbersome than printing fliers on ditto machines, but there’s nothing like meeting your compadres face to face in a public space with a common sense of purpose. Maybe this time around, with their general assemblies, their consensus building skills, and the message on the wall “It’s the system, stupid,” they’ll avoid some of the internecine struggles that tore the New Left apart. Maybe not. But I’ve heard so many of the people interviewed in various Occupies around the country say, “I’ve been waiting for years for this to happen.” It’s impossible to keep cynicism at bay, without being part of an uprising of consciousness and spirit and action. (Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—Antonio Gramsci.) I may not be there physically, but I’m there, one way or another.