Column: Hallelujah, I’m a Bum

The U.S. Bank occupations taught us a lesson we can’t afford to forget: Direct action works. Protesters who refused to wait for institutional permission won a victory that official campus organizations and representative assemblies can only dream about.

The next time we get into a tired debate about the movement’s mass popularity or the need to dialogue with this or that member of the administrative apparatus, we have only to recall the closure of U.S. Bank. A group of activists, without the help of any formal organization, defeated the fifth-largest commercial bank in the country in less than two months. Enough said.

But now the Empire strikes back.

In the aftermath of the sit-ins, the Yolo County District Attorney charged 12 members of the UC community with violating California Penal Code Section 647c, “Obstructing a Thoroughfare.” This law holds that a person who “willfully and maliciously obstructs the free movement of any person on any street, sidewalk or other public place or on or in any place open to the public is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

In other words, the Banker’s Dozen may face 11 years in jail and a million dollars of damages for allegedly blocking a footpath.

To understand the yawning gulf between the severity of the charge and the alleged crime, we have to go back to when the law was created. As attorney Rebecca von Behren points out in a recent blog post, Section 647c seems to be a response to Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, a case that criminalized African American civil rights protests in the 1960s.

In 1963, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and a crowd of activists picketed in front of a department store in Birmingham, Ala., protesting racial segregation in local businesses. After refusing to move at the request of a police officer, Shuttlesworth was arrested and sentenced to 180 days in jail with hard labor. As in Davis, the city of Birmingham decided that ease of traffic was more important than social justice or freedom of expression.

Even more troubling, the Birmingham ordinance and Section 647c were both ostensibly drafted in order to combat panhandling, prostitution, public intoxication and other forms of disorderly conduct. Indeed, Section 647 was originally titled “Vagrancy, definitions; punishment.”

Under the eyes of the law, the Occupy protesters become homeless, with no proper place at Davis. Here the law only makes literal what conservatives have been saying all along about protesters: Left-wing activists become “stinking bums” or “rogue elements,” alien and threatening to the body politic.

While it’s little comfort, I would suggest that the best response is Industrial Workers of the World’s protest hymn, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” The radical labor organizers and civil rights activists of the 20th century were construed as vagrants because they took the side of those who didn’t count within the social order. Because they acted in solidarity with those who lacked any recognized power, they were forced to give up respectability and work outside of established institutions.

This suggests that those struggling to support a new group of invisible subjects, the debtors and the unhoused, must return to direct action. Students and faculty who felt at home on campus, finding a voice at campus forums and a position in the committees and clubs, were utterly helpless to stop U.S. Bank from extracting more money from indebted students. It’s so-called vagrants who made real change.

And we can be sure that only further direct actions will stave off repression.

UC Davis wants to punish the Banker’s Dozen not only as an alibi to avoid litigation from U.S. Bank, but also as a sign to future banks that might want to set up shop on campus that the school is willing to fight for capital.

The charges also serve critical strategic goals: to deflect attention from the November 18 incident and tie the movement down with a long legal battle.

In this period, there will be a temptation to quiet down, entrench and wait things out. To resist this, Occupiers will have to work half in and half out of established institutions to provide material support for the Banker’s Dozen while maintaining pressure from the outside through unsanctioned protests.

As long as financial capital wanders up and down the earth, protest movements will have to do the same. Only by matching the flexibility and mobility – the rambling vagrancy – of capital can Occupy hope to halt its circulation. And, at the moment, direct action is clearly the tactic that allows Occupy to move quickly and effectively.

JORDAN S. CARROLL is a Ph.D. student in English who can be reached at jscarroll@ucdavis.edu.