Social Factory Ateneo 1-24-15

Compañerxs,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Social Factory Ateneo, Saturday, January 24th from 2 - 5 p.m. at Obelisco (3411 E 12th St Ste 110; Oakland, CA 94601; b/t 35th Ave & 34th Ave close to Fruitvale BART) to continue our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below. The space is fully accessible and we can share and support childcare. 

Across the San Francisco Bay area and beyond communities of struggle gathered together in the streets, jammed up institutions, and shared in a collective resilience for 96 hours of direct action and celebration of the insurgent Martin Luther King Jr. Organized by the Anti-Police Terror Project, a project of Onyx working in coalition with the Alan Blueford Center for Justice, Idriss Stelley Foundation, Workers’ World, and Healthy Hoodz, the 96 hours of direct action synchronized vectors of struggle from Palestine to Ayotzinapa to Ferguson to the Bay Area to Guantanamo and beyond. 

Several direct actions were aimed at “the backbone of the Bay Area’s public transit system,” shutting down BART at Montgomery, Embarcadero and Powell Stations in the financial and tourism center of San Francisco. This was merged with other moments of rebellion in San Francisco that included a sleep-in at Powell Station in the heart of the commercial shopping district. The sleep-in was organized by the Coalition on Homelessness in protest of illegal crackdowns by police against houseless people sleeping in the downtown stations. Other rebellions in San Francisco included a die-in on the California Supreme Court steps as lawyers, public defenders and others in the legal system gathered to confront racial and other injustices. In Berkeley, a City Council meeting convened to examine police and community relations following December’s three nights of militant protests. The space was stacked with community members who gathered for a speak out to recognize the violence that targets all Black lives, and specifically  transgender and disabled Black lives. In Oakland, Third World solidarity groups identified by hashtag #3rdWorld4BlackPower represented as “Vietnamese for Black Resistance,” “South Asians for Black Resistance,” “Palestine for Black Resistance,” “Filipinos for Black Resistance,” “Koreans for Black Resistance,” “Latinxs for Black Resistance,” “Xicanas for Black Resistance,” “Caribenas for Black Resistance”  as well as comrades from the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) and Haiti Action Committee gathered in a circle while some chained themselves to the Ron Dellums Federal Building downtown for four hours and 28 minutes. A great helium balloon floated a banner in front of the courthouse proclaiming “Black Power Matters.” That night, on the evening news on Friday, January 16th, we saw the billowing banner Justice for O’Shaine Evans move into the frame of coverage by his family. Also in Oakland, children and workers joined nurses, fast food workers and trade unionists, including members of ILWU Local 10, SEIU 1021, and Oakland Education Association (OEA), in a march and rally to challenge low wages and the privatization assault on public institutions, including through charter schools. The Blackout Collective gathered at 5:30am outside Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s house and projected through the dark onto a garage door an image of MLK with his statements, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” and “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Here, they chalked body outlines on the pavement and gathered in a circle. Singing, they called for the repeal of the California Policeman’s Bill of Rights, an anti-transparency government code that shields police records and abuses from public view. They called for the disbanding of the Oakland United School District police in an effort to demilitarize schools. They called on the city to fire officers who had records of misconduct, and to bar those officers from transfers or rehires in other law enforcement departments. They called for the end of the city's relationship with Israel, including interagency trainings and an end to Urban Shield. They called for an end to harassment of homeless people in Oakland. Mayor Schaaf in response called the police. From in front of the Mayor’s house at 5:30am tweets were shared, “neighbors complained of woken babies. We here cuz the state killing our babies,” and another, “Neighbors complain abt woken babies. 2 many of our babies will NEVER wake up.” Later that day, a group 2,000 strong that included many children and youth met at Oscar Grant/Fruitvale Station to commence a 2 mile birthday celebration march together. 

Further south, community members joined with Stanford students and abandoned cars on the road to shut down the Hayward-San Mateo Bridge, while marches and rallies took the streets of Palo Alto, Richmond, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz, and in the streets of Fresno, 1,500 families and community members were joined by Dolores Huerta. 

These coordinated and decentralized spaces of direct action spring from fertile terrain of prior insurrections, mobilizations, and community investigations. The spaces are connected through what they celebrate and refuse, and through the relations across communities sutured through shared projects and work. Here, we can read the efforts of the investigation by Against Hired Guns to confront the Oakland Unified School District Police killing of Raheim Brown in 2011. Here too are the investigations, archives, and counter narratives produced over fourteen years of struggle by the Idriss Stelley Foundation with its emphasis on supporting families. These 96 hours of direct actions over the MLK extended weekend were supported by the Oscar Grant Committee’s investigations, the People’s Investigation into the in-custody death of Kayla Moore including a birthday party escrache and a final report released by Berkeley Copwatch. These 96 hours were supported by People’s Community Medics trainings across Oakland and the cop watching efforts of the Brown Berets and the work of other community groups in Fresno, the vigils surrounded by SWAT teams in South San Francisco for Derrick Gaines, and vigils in Santa Rosa for Andy Lopez, in Oakland and in San Francisco for O’Shaine Evans, and by the collective organized for Justice for Alan Blueford and Justice for Alex Nieto. These hours were supported by the families that travel to meet other families from Half Moon Bay where the police killed Yanira Serrano-Garcia and from Pacifica where police killed Errol Chang and from Stockton where the police and sheriff’s deputy killed James Rivera Jr. and from Vallejo where the police shot Mario Romero 31 times and the Bay View where they shot Kenneth Harding Jr. and let him bleed out on the plaza and Eureka where they beat to death Martin Cotton Jr. on main street and the Hoopa Reservation where the Eureka police burned to death Peter Stewart with orders that the Fire Department not intervene.

These connections across regions and the organized families that insure these connections endure are refracted through the spaces we convene. New knowledges are generated and struggles circulate—linking lives taken on streets and sidewalks and Tribal Reservations and parking lots and in parked cars with lives taken inside prison walls and inside the prisons of Palestine and Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. The Ferguson moment is “wrapped” (Frederic Jameson) or “traced” (Antonio Gramsci) with the struggles that were woven together by communities and families before and enmeshed with the state attacks on Palestine from the summer and Ayotzinapa from the fall. Through these connections we affirm our care for each other and for the lives that the state and capital seek to inscribe as disposable. We also rely on these connections to build a shared analysis of the conditions we face—living theory emerges from these resonances. Palestine, we process collectively with Palestine, is an open air prison. Ayotzinapa confirms the Mexican state is a narco state and the US produced it. Ferguson and Staten Island demonstrate not only the racist brutality, but the blatant impunity of the police and the courts. In Guantanamo, one can be cleared but not let go. Inside the domestic carceral state, the guards kill the same as the police do outside—the stories of brutal killings and neglect emerge from inside the jails of San Francisco (see, Jeremy Miller, "Suspicious death at San Francisco County Jail: They call it suicide – would you?") and Santa Cruz (see, Sin Barras, "Cages Kill: Freedom Rally"), the women’s prisons at Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla (see, Diana Block and Misty Rojo, "Women in solitary: ‘Last night another girl hung herself’") and California Institution for Women in Corona (see, Victoria Law, "“A Girl Hung Herself Yesterday”: Deaths in Custody at California Institution for Women"), the entire Florida system (see, Shaun King, "Record 346 inmates die, dozens of guards fired in Florida prisons") and Manus Island Detention Center, where people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, and other regions have arrived in their struggle to build lives outside the violence deployed and manufactured by the US.

In the circulation of struggle in this moment, we use the social factory as a strategic concept drawing on three struggles. First, Mario Tronti named the social factory as a category of analysis in the autonomist workers struggles rising out of the Italian factories of the 1960s to note the “leap” of the factory’s forms of discipline and regulation outside the factory walls to permeate everyday life. We ask, what can we learn together with Palestine as the occupation “leaps” beyond the borders of Palestine? Second, women’s struggles theorized prominently by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Andaiye and others relied on the category of the social factory to reveal the work that the wage made invisible, devaluing both work and lives in the process of furthering primitive accumulation. We ask, what can we learn from the struggle to claim “Black Lives Matter” about capital’s mechanisms for devaluing lives? Third, in the present we read the social factory through relations of struggle and care—where the social factory exceeds a spatial frame and is not only a place “outside” of something else through which we can see its continuity; and where the relation of waged/unwaged is not the primary relationship of the category. We read it as the relations that we draw on to resist capital’s imposition, the very relations that sustain us and through which we reproduce ourselves and our communities. This includes the ways we gather to listen to loss and narrate our struggles. From here we ask, what can we learn about the war on the social factory if we assess collectively the ways the state aims its militarized and carceral apparatus at the relations that sustain us? And, with the families of those that have been taken at the center, what can we learn about collective survival? How does this shape our strategies and spaces of militant direct action?

North Bay and South Bay Crew