Social Factory Ateneo 12-27-14
Compañerxs,
We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Social Factory Ateneo, Saturday, December 27 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.
In 2009, Kahlil Sullivan wrote on behalf of his family about the actions of the San Francisco Police Department following their murder of his brother Asa Sullivan in 2006, “The first one of my family who tried to find him at the coroner’s office was my youngest brother. He was taken to a room and interrogated about Asa for six hours, like he too committed a crime.” (see, Kahlil Sullivan, “In that attic, I saw my brother’s blood covering the floor and walls,” 2009). The letter exchange published in the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper between Kahlil and his mother, Kathleen Espinoza, exposed the first steps taken by the state following a killing in their attempts to execute a “social death.” The state's efforts to establish "social death" extends across families and communities (see, Lisa Marie Cacho, "Introduction" in Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, 2012.) At the time that the SFPD started interrogating those closest to Asa, the family did not yet know the story of what had happened. Eight years later in the Fall of 2014 when the SFPD officers who murdered Asa finally faced trial, those close to the case, in particular the family, exposed how the state used details culled from these early moments of interrogation combined with a series of records kept by state and state monitored institutions over the years to sanction state violence. In its effort to shield its own and establish that Asa was a threat and dreamed of a violent suicide, the state cast a pall of criminalization over everything that had surrounded and nurtured him (see, Mesha Monge Irizarry, “Justice delayed and denied for eight years, Asa Sullivan’s family appeals federal court decision to clear killer cops,” and Lisa Ganser and Nomy Lamm, “Stars out, guns drawn: The wrongful death of Asa Sullivan,” 2014).
Struggles waged from the social factory contest what the state and capital seek to make invisible. This is not only about confronting certain silences but recognizing collectively certain displacements. Together with Ferguson and Staten Island, Beavercreek and Cleveland, Phoenix and San Francisco, and a larger constellation of interconnected refusals and rebellions we are in a moment that seeks a collective analysis of militarization, war and racial violence. From our struggles in the social factory we ask, what is the relation of criminalization to militarization? And how does the social factory allow us to understand this criminalization as a web that extends out from the life targeted by violence, to the sites of its reproduction and the production of race?
When autonomist feminists in the early 1970s focused on the invisibilizing power of the wage to make other, non waged labor (including the labor inside the home) invisible, they called attention to a mechanism through which capital attempted to shift the costs of reproduction onto the home, women, and the community (see, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community, 1971; Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework,” 1975). Drawing on Tronti’s definition of the social factory—one where the rhythms, rules, and regulating functions of the industrial factory extended beyond the factory walls and into the realm of everyday life—the elaboration that emerged from shared struggles revealed and theorized a realm of capital exploitation, a space and strategy of ongoing primitive accumulation, and a site of oppression and the production of gender. This theorization also opened up a front of ongoing insurgency and self-activity that we draw on in the present to understand our own local autonomy and community regeneration. As a strategic category, the social factory offers a base to initiate our own investigations and make things visible in a shared process of building a collective analysis. This is also the work of an urban Zapatismo—the social factory as a category makes space for a honed listening, careful and militant. We recognize that what we witness and resist can be articulated into a living theory to address what we face in our dignified struggle in the moment without imposing a fixed already determined future. Through these investigations, we learn to hear echoes.
On August 5, 2015 Tasha Thomas was removed by police from a Walmart near Dayton Ohio to the Beavercreek Police Department and interrogated for 94 minutes by Detective Rodney Curd. In an aggressive and sadistic extended interrogation Tasha Thomas was repeatedly pressed to answer questions about a gun which she repeatedly insisted she knew nothing about, she was accused of lying and being high on drugs or drunk and told her eyes looked funny. She was threatened with jail and fed a litany of misinformation as part of the state’s attempt to extract information that would shield its agents from scrutiny into a recent act of violence. During the interrogation, Thomas was asked if her boyfriend was suicidal. It was not until the end of the interrogation that Tasha Thomas would learn that her partner, 22 year old John Crawford III, was already dead. Not long before, while Thomas and Crawford had both been shopping in different parts of Walmart, Beavercreek Police Sergeant David Darkow and Officer Sean Williams fatally shot Crawford in response to a 911 call from another Walmart shopper who informed dispatch that he thought Crawford posed a threat. A few minutes earlier, Crawford had picked up a BB gun from the toy aisle which he held by his side while talking on his cell phone. This woman he was speaking with at the time he was shot was LeeCee Johnson, a woman who had known his body so well that they shared two children with common blood. She heard police shoot Crawford and then heard him die on the phone.
As with the police interrogation of Asa’s brother, the moments following the violent confrontation that took Crawford’s life focused on the immediate removal and sequestering of Tasha Thomas. This space of state inquiry managed by Officer Curd marked the first phase of the state’s investigation into its own officer involved shooting and a critical moment of the production of the "prose of counterinsurgency" (see, Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," 1988). This is made all the more critical given that it was not Officer Sean Williams’ first fatal shooting as a law enforcement officer. Yet the interrogation nonetheless proceeded with those closest to the victim at the center of the investigation into the violence.
In this instance, it is three women close to John Crawford that expose the state’s attempts to invisibilize his life and produce a social death through criminalization. Tasha Thomas’s grueling interrogation session reveals the state’s strategies to construct their target as a threat or suicidal. Tressa Sherrod, Crawford’s mother, will soon come forward to narrate the surveillance tapes procured from Walmart and expose the state’s lies—Crawford was neither aiming or threatening the officers as they had claimed in their reports. LeeCee’s presence on the other end of the phone and miles away from Beavercreek confirms, against Detective Curd’s attempts to assert in the interrogation session with Thomas, that Crawford had not come to Walmart with the murderous intention to find LeeCee and “to shoot that bitch,” as Curd repeatedly hypothesized despite Thomas’ emphatic objections in the interrogation room.
On December 3rd, the struggle for justice for Alex Nieto met at the Federal Courthouse in San Francisco to pressure the SFPD to release the names of the four officers involved in killing Alex Nieto and the additional 28 - 30 officers present to secure the scene following the fatal shooting of Nieto in Bernal Heights Park on March 21, 2014. The state, speaking through the pronouncements of SFPD Chief Greg Suhr, justified the refusal to release the shooters’ names based on its concerns for the officers’ safety. The justice struggle for Alex Nieto offers a counter-explanation, stating “We believe that the true reason for hiding the names of the officers is to avoid the community learning the background of these officers and any contradictions in the police version of events. Community members have long suspected a cover-up in Alex Nieto’s unlawful police killing, and that’s a lot of officers who would need to keep a fabricated story straight!” (from, Justice for Alex Nieto flyer from rally December 3, 2014). The Nieto family was joined at the rally by Angela Naggie and Cadine Williams, mother and sister of O’Shaine Evans, killed by SFPD Officer David Goff on October 7, 2014 and Anton Serrano-Garcia, sister of Yanira Serrano-Garcia, killed in Half Moon Bay on June 3, 2014 by San Mateo Sheriff Deputy Menh Trieu.
The armored vehicles and heavy formations of riot police armed with assault rifles, tear gas and flash bang grenades that were deployed against communities in the streets of Ferguson and beyond over the course of the last several months can be seen as one component of militarization in what many are now identifying as a low intensity war (see R. Kelly, "Why We Won't Wait,"2014; M. Callahan, "In Defense of Conviviality and the Collective Subject," 2012 ). Criminalizing strategies aimed at the familial relations and social bonds following an incident of state murder can be seen as another critical aspect of a larger counterinsurgency strategy directed at Black and Brown communities. These strategies target the network of relations that form and cohere the social factory as a site of struggle and a space that communities rely on for their own reproduction. Criminalization tactics ascribe a singular and collective social death that aims to encompasses the larger space of reproduction that surrounds the life taken—John Crawford, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Asa Sullivan, Alex Nieto, O’Shaine Evans, Derrick Gaines, Errol Chang, Tamir Rice, Andy Lopez, Yanira Serano-Garcia, Kayla Moore, Kerry Baxter Jr., James Earl Rivera Jr., Mario Romero, Alan Blueford, Antonio Lopez Guzman, and all of those lost to us through state and state manufactured violence.
Across networks that link families throughout the Bay Area and beyond, stories continue to emerge that reveal connections between militarization and criminalization—family members and partners interrogated for hours after a state killing, interrogations occurring without informing families that their loved one is dead, children being picked up by police from school and interrogated in squad cars with no adult present following a state killing or manufactured violence, police arriving in homes immediately following a killing to search the rooms and look for any trace that may help fabricate criminality and ascribe this social death that then justifies the violence. Through collective investigation, we invite an analysis of counterinsurgency from the position of the social factory.
North Bay and South Bay Crew
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