Market Citizenship and Occupying Personhood

By Stephanie J. Nawyn

Assistant Professor

Department of Sociology, Michigan State University

As I watch the events of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement unfold and learn about the various responses to it, I am struck by the larger picture that many commentators have overlooked. Many critics of the movement, when they aren’t deriding the protestors for having no clear objectives or direction, claim that the protestors are driven by a sense of entitlement, or are “looking for handouts,” and should get a job and work hard like the rest of us.

In essence, these critics seem to think that those protesting the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few have abandoned the promise of the American Dream. Supporters of the movement counter that the message of OWS and its various permutations around the U.S. and in other countries is quite clear; the system is rigged to ensure that the few who have a lot are going to get a lot more, that the rules of the system have been set up by a government unduly influenced by those few, and that the outcome of those rules are unfair and ultimately unsustainable. In essence, OWS supporters argue that the American Dream has failed most of us, and perhaps was never more than a dream to begin with.

But the discontent driving OWS goes deeper than wealth distribution, down to the foundational beliefs underlying the American Dream. Those beliefs are essentially that if a person works hard and invests in his or her earning potential, that person can achieve upward mobility from where he/she started in life, and that upward mobility (or lack thereof) is largely the result of one’s labor and smart decisions. The inevitable conclusion that emerges from this belief is that people who are economically successful have worked hard and earned that success, and those who experience economic hardship have either been lazy or made poor choices, or perhaps both, and therefore are unworthy of assistance, compassion, or respect. They are not, in essence, full members of our society.

Scholars refer to this as market citizenship, the concept that the rights one receives is based on the success one experiences in the market. Under market citizenship, rights are not granted by means of legal membership; they are bought by those who can pay the price. If you are among the 1% that has an abundance of wealth/rights, there is no need for government beyond ensuring that your wealth is protected.

As economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in his Vanity Fair article, “The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves.” Meanwhile, those that cannot buy resources must simply do without.

I do most of my research in refugee resettlement, and I have seen the harsh realities of market citizenship play out in the lives of refugees. When refugees are brought into the U.S., the primary purpose of the resettlement program is to get them employed as quickly as possible. Every other possible need--save the most critical medical problems-- is secondary to earning a living. Few Americans would be surprised by that expectation, but not every country designs their resettlement program that way. Many European countries (where state benefits have been largely considered a benefit of citizenship rather than a sign of a citizen’s failure) focus on housing, language, and other elements of social incorporation, and often discourage refugees from acquiring immediate employment so as not to compete with native workers. In these countries, government protects people from the vagaries of the market, rather than serving people based on their market success.

In our country, people with legal citizenship are sometimes denied basic state assistance even in the most catastrophic of situations. Sociologist Margaret Somers describes the denial of government protection to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in her book, Genealogies of Citizenship. She notes that the tragedy of Katrina was the result of a government that disinvested in public works projects like the levies surrounding New Orleans, and that the mostly poor, mostly African-American, and disproportionately female residents were framed as “underclass,” “looters,” and perhaps most tellingly, “refugees.”

The response of evacuees was to insist that they were Americans, not refugees, not people who came from another country, and not people who deserved exclusion. They were legal members of our society, and had a right to expect emergency assistance because of that membership. But within the confines of market citizenship, legal belonging to a country matters less than access to capital. For those New Orleanians who could afford flood insurance, and for businesses located in wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods, they received resources to rebuild (much of it from the government). Poor New Orleanians were mostly left to fend for themselves, during and after the flood.

Just as the catastrophic failure of the levees revealed the inequalities experienced by New Orleans residents, the catastrophic failure of the global economy has revealed the underlying inequalities in our entire economic system. But while racism, classism, and sexism provided convenient tools for writing off poor black women stranded at the Superdome as “welfare queens” and poor black men collecting supplies as “looters,” the scope of this economic crisis means even those who had enjoyed some privileges now face a similar denial of their citizenship rights.

Those of us who are not “too big to fail” increasingly find ourselves without adequate police protection as city budgets are cut, without quality education for our children as state budgets are cut, and even the most fundamental of rights under market citizenship, the right to work, is available to fewer people. Meanwhile, our government protects the wealthiest Americans, providing bailouts for the institutions that the wealthy control and deeming corporations to be people and money to be political speech. Instead of protecting citizens from market fluctuations, our government has joined forces with the market. And this privileges the few individuals who disproportionately control and benefit from the market far more than mere wealth ever could.

These are not just problems with wealth distribution; these are ways in which personhood of Americans are denied. The 99% have been morally excluded, deemed less worthy of government protection than the wealthiest 1%. And so many Americans have taken to the streets, exercising their civil rights -- freedom of speech, freedom of association-- to fight for the right to be treated as humans worthy of the resources of this country to which they belong. The OWS movement is about more than the wildly unequal distribution of wealth in this country; it is about the philosophy that market success equates with personhood which makes that unequal distribution justifiable.

Protestors are taking back their status as moral equivalents by refusing to accept the identity of failed citizens offered to them by market citizenship. They are challenging the idea that only the wealthiest have full personhood. That is the foundational belief underpinning market citizenship, and it is a belief we must challenge if we are to have a true representative democracy.

Comments

[Raymond Jussaume]

Well done by one of my wonderful colleagues.

[Carl S. Taylor]

Bullseye, timely and universal. It would serve Congress well to consider, digest.

[Jessica]

Many do say that the American dream has failed us but it is those who work their hardest and deserve what they are getting. i agree with you in this statement. The protesters are stating their citizenship and are wanting to make a statement that the weathyiest are not the only ones with personhood.

[Hannah]

I am in high school and taking an online sociology class. Right now, I am reading about populations, and this article was very interesting to me. Specifically, how it tied into refugees. It is sad how as Americans, we look down on anyone who is doing something that seems desperate or very low class, even if it is necessary to live. Anyone who is different from us feels our stares. Why do we have to treat people so poorly, when they are really not that different from us? Those who called the victims of Hurricane Katrina "welfare queens" and "looters" would have to do the same things that they did to survive. They might even act more irrationally than anyone else, as they aren't used to being without whatever they want whenever they want it.