Maria Freydell | The O word — Occupy

When English professor and Occupy Penn activist Ania Loomba immigrated to America, she felt alienated by the “unchallenged obedience” of Americans to the law. “In India,” the self-proclaimed anarchist said at a panel earlier this month, “we protest everything.”

While she lectured, I quietly contrasted America’s rule of law to the right-impinging government in my home country of Colombia. There is no question that one of America’s successes has been maintaining an almost Millsian regard for freedom of speech, which has allowed a fairer “weighing” of individual rights than in other countries.

Regardless, this month’s intellectual exposition “Explaining Occupy,” where Loomba spoke, was quite an eye-opener for me and for some of my fellow students. “The fall of capitalism” was only one underlying premise of the panelists’ dialogue. Although the meeting was informative, covering everything from fiscal reform to corporate-private separation, I can’t say it made a cohesive argument. Yet Loomba explained how the oft-criticized “vagueness” of Occupy’s goals is a double-edged sword in the world of political mobilization, allowing for a critical mass to uphold new political platforms.

As the meeting progressed, I wondered if past Americans also sat out the angry mobs while engaging in intellectual discussions. To be fair, the entirety of demonstrators’ demands is not likely to remain in the political discourse. However, with the rate at which the situation is changing, these individual concerns have indefinite potential for becoming the next raw input in our “democratic” political machine. Penn students’ role in “remaining critical to the privileges, power and money” that allowed us an education, as lecture participants suggested, will not suffice to maintain the delicate balance of equality and freedom in America. Turning a deaf ear is definitely out of the question.

Seeing Occupy’s value as powerful social mobilization is accepting the facts. Inequality in America is no myth, and neither is a rapidly shifting national ideology. The current distribution of wealth is at levels seen only in 1930 — placing America among several African countries in a United Nations world ranking. Although skeptics attribute these statistics to faulty logic and lurking variables, the whole point of contesting inequality is that it is a relative claim. In other words, it is the perspective of the least well off that matters — not what your professor said about the “real” causes of the financial crisis.

Similarly, a change in the country’s ideological stance is hard to detect from a single individual’s perspective. But if economists have anything to do with the matter, several renowned ones including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and more than 170 others have issued statements in support of the group’s capitalist critique. Stiglitz even participated in the chanting — formally known as the “human microphone” — and proclaimed markets have “socialized losses and privatized gains. That’s not capitalism; that’s not a market economy.” A quick look at Google Trends for searches shows an increasing interest in “the failure of capitalism” and “inequality” since 2008, mostly in the United States and in Scandinavian countries.

Another mistake is ignoring Occupy solidarity. Occupy’s lineage can be traced to several prominent grassroots movements such as Occupy Philadelphia and Occupy Oakland, bearing satellite movements like that at Penn. While no names are yet making Fox News headlines, leaders have been effective enough to coordinate cross-state marches, state-wide boycotts and resist retaliating significant police violence. The stronger the local discontent, the more pointed their demands and uprisings have been.

Finally, the moral weight of extreme self-serving individualism is irrelevant. One confident Wharton friend told me his belief — that social forces will never dislocate entrenched capital, even less affect him personally. I cannot imagine just what techniques will appease the masses out of this one, nor see a Chinese-style “meritocracy” sticking very well. What Occupy is teaching us is that the solution won’t be to remain seated. For my friend, citizen-of-the-world, I wish him the joy of belonging to a place, but I doubt there will be any left at his current corporate tax rate.

Maria A. Freydell is a Wharton and College junior. Her email address is freydell@wharton.upenn.edu.

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