Democracy Ateneo Announcement 1-10-15
Compañer@s,
We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, January 10, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.
It's been sometime now that a small group of dedicated researchers associated with Universidad de la Tierra Califas agreed to focus on a specific research question, namely how to strategically research the struggle to de-militarize our communities. As part of that effort, we determined that any investigation into the source and impact of state violence and related violences as well as the oppositions would require a number of research commitments.
Our first commitment revolved around making sure we analyzed the entire Bay Area and its surrounding periphery. To do this, we approached it as an "enclave economy” and therefore the focus of state and capitalist interests imposing specific labor demands and a commitment to particular forms of labor discipline. (see, Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics") These conditions of labor for capital make the Bay Area available for the production of specific commodities and markets vital to a global economy. We initially viewed these to be digital technologies associated with the hightech and biotech industries as well as lifestyle markets that capitalize on the Bay Area as one of the most sought after places in the world to live. This analysis necessarily includes the extensive university system and its transmogrification in recent decades into the neoliberal university and commercial site of knowledge production. (see, N. Dyer-Witheford, "Cognitive Capitalism and the Contested Campus") At the intersection of digital technologies and networked campuses organized around research and funding are the defense and security industries that continue to fuel much of the productivity of Silicon Valley (see, Ann Baur and Harry Cleaver, “from Student Minority Report on the Stanford Research Institute,” 1969). We recalled how technology itself functions as a form of political weaponry (see, Cleaver, “Technology as Political Weaponry,” 1982). Imagining the greater Bay Area as an enclave economy also provided a way to think about the necessity for a proximate, tiered, and racialized labor force, enabling us to assess Bay Area wide patterns of gentrification and precarity in a nuanced way, one where people are moved around but also where certain relations to capital are imposed (see, Cleaver, “Inversion of Class Perspective” and Mario Barrera, "Action Research in Defense of the Barrio").
An additional commitment insisted that we uncover a number of different kinds of resistances and oppositions to militarization that have been longstanding as well as newer efforts that address the more visible forms of state violence while not ignoring less notable moments of repression. Thus, we noted that our research agenda demanded we examine multiple types and moments of violence especially noting the differences between material, structural, and symbolic violences as well as violences that are everyday, survived, and lived. However, our research efforts also uncovered additional dimensions of violence. Drawing from the work of Gustavo Esteva and Uni-Tierra Oaxaca we also recognize four additional violences: 1) violence of expropriation; 2) violence of transforming people into workers; 3) violence of exploiting workers; 4) violence of repressing workers (see, Gustavo Esteva, “Mexico in Crisis: Horror of State Violence,” 2014). The additional analytical elements to violence underscore how violence can be a useful category to uncover the particular social relations throughout the greater Bay Area and how these are mediated by capital and the state.
A third and critical commitment involved how we actually planned on "conducting" research. Our efforts in this regard explored the challenges and opportunities of convivial research. Specifically, we imagine that the research must emerge out of struggle such that it refuses to objectify communities of struggle, that it results from collective political processes, and that it serve some strategic purpose designated by a community increasingly organized in its opposition to militarization and counter insurgency along with the violences associated with a progressively militarized state. This third commitment also involved efforts to make sure that "the research" not only made oppositions to militarization more observable but also constructed new spaces of autonomous mobilization and organization beyond the manufactured violences of the state and capital. As a prefigurative project, the collective effort to confront militarization in our community resulted in a number of convergences and networks as well as on-going projects.
One notable effort has been the Community Safety Database (CSDbase). The CSDbase is a collective effort across communities to expose and intervene in state violence by documenting police excess, engaging grassroots people’s investigations, and promoting direct actions in order to reclaim community efforts to manage community safety —specifically around the components of defense, justice, care, and assembly. CSDbase seeks to respond to law enforcement violations by establishing mechanisms for greater accountability and transparency. Beyond this, the CSDbase contributes to a network of interconnected, autonomous investigative direct action projects across the state. As such it is part of a larger effort to build with families especially impacted by police excess across the Bay Area and the state. It is constructed as a convivial tool for communities to collectively investigate and map across regions the policing strategies, practices, and tactics of counterinsurgency directed at them through a network of law enforcement agencies and state institutions. Organized around five interconnected web nodes, including State Profiles, People’s Registry, Resources, Convergences, and Intake, the CSDbase provides specific information and resources to support investigations and direct actions as well as reveal the multiple strategies executed by state agencies in service of the racist capitalist carceral state. In sum, the CSDbase is conceived as an open source collective effort that recognizes and seeks to further connect the profound work already underway across many organizations and spaces. Our goal is to contribute to a variety of efforts underway to de-militarize our communities.
We take a moment to take stock and reflect on our collective efforts of strategic researches to review our progress to date and to reflect on how our commitments intersect with more recent efforts of what the Latino Cultural Studies Working Group theorized as "cultural citizenship." (see, R. Rosaldo, "Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism") Against the increasingly extreme strategies and moments of state violence, "socially subordinated groups” have been reviving struggles for civil rights and reclaiming the public sphere, creatively and strategically declaring, for example, "Black lives matter."
However, there has also been an equally important struggle to re-claim our own spaces often outside of "public" view. The opposition to the encroachment of charter schools and related efforts to dream and build a wide variety of spaces of learning under community control, for example, speak to the creative efforts to construct an alternative architecture of community not dependent on universal claims to citizenship or the fictions of a public square not dominated by elites.
South Bay and North Bay Crew
NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous Democracy Ateneo and Social Factory Ateneo announcements and summaries as well as additional information on the ateneo in general please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the second Saturday of the month.
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