Democracy Ateneo Announcement 2-13-16

Compañer@s,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, February 13, 2016, 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 briefly mentioned below.

Recently our compañeros and compañeras from Universidad de la Tierra Oaxaca resumed their Seminario Caminos de la Autonomía but not before they restructured it so that it may speak more directly to the conjuncture we find ourselves in. Now named the Conversatorio Caminos de la Autonomía, Bajo la Tormenta, the redefined reflection and action space invites us to begin our journey with two critical texts that might set the theme for the upcoming year. The texts include "The Rebirth of Epimethean Man" by Ivan Illich and the most recent communique by the Zapatistas, "The EZLN’s Words on the 22nd Anniversary of the beginning of the war against oblivion."

At first blush what connects the two texts are very clear statements of struggle. In the case of Illich, he invites us to reclaim hope and to abandon the world of expectations, an artificial world that fuels the very process that is consuming the planet. Illich's prognostication penned in 1970 couldn't be more prescient as we are confronted by the planet's destruction through the intersecting violences of capitalism and its expansion. "The limits of the Earth's resources have become evident," explains Illich. "No breakthrough in science or technology could provide every man in the world with the commodities and services which are now available to the poor of rich countries." Yet, we allow planners and decision makers to pursue policies that operate under the assumption that everyone has the right to enjoy what a consumer society can produce.  But, the entire world cannot sustain the 4 bedroom, 3 bath, 2 garage American dream. Du Bois warned of this excess a hundred years ago: the white American working class lifestyle depends on the exploitation of Black and Brown bodies and the resources extracted from the "Global South," a circumstance that is an enduring cause of war. (see, W.E.B Du Bois, "African Roots of War.") In contrast, we are reminded of Illich's larger statement about the political possibilities linked to conviviality, namely that we as a species must reimagine how we construct tools such that we forge devices that are in service of the community's regeneration.

The Zapatista word circulated in their new year statement is intended to remind us to continue our struggle; to rally those of us who have refused to allow the capitalist system to deny us our dignity and rob us of hope. The Zapatistas intervention also draws our attention to the war currently waged all around us as a result of the violences produced in and through the capitalist system. The war is no longer the domesticated version of war we have become all too comfortable with, but a war fully exposed for its 500 year history of denying those who refuse to succumb to oblivion and allow the earth to be pillaged. It is a war the Zapatistas have been fighting for 32 years and their commitment has not wavered. But, the Zapatista response to the Fourth World War has not only been on the battlefield. At critical moments in their struggle they have been visibly constructing an alternative to the capitalist system. Indeed, we might say that they have been co-generating new tools and reclaiming old ones in service of community regeneration. In the many spaces of encounter they have convened and hosted they have shared these tools as they have learned from others equally committed to abandoning the Promethean fallacy. They have abandoned expectations and reclaimed hope.

But what of the war we are confronted by as we struggle to reclaim hope and build the alternative to the capitalist system. Illich informs us that the "absurdity of modern institutions is evident in the case of the military." Our technologically advanced military might has an unlimited power for destruction. "Our institutions not only create their own ends," explains Illich, "but also have the power to put an end to themselves and to us." More to the point, we have a fail system to avoid nuclear holocaust, but "no switch detains an ecological Armageddon."

At first glance it seems that we have been taught to believe the war is always somewhere else, that it's never really at our doorstep. And when war does invade our reality it is a necessary war, a war to end the transgressions or oppression authored by miscreants of differing scales. This domesticated version of war obfuscates the persistence and prevalence of war. War, while ubiquitous also seems to be invisible. Mexico serves as a prime example. Alessandro Zagato warns "a vicious war is tormenting Mexico: a silent war that rarely reaches the headlines of the international media." It is a war for "the appropriation of resources, for infrastructural development, for control over territories, for the implementation of a new order —a war waged against whoever tries to resist or strike back." (see, A. Zagato, "After Ayotzinapa: Building Autonomy in a Civil War.") The war is orchestrated through the overlapping discourses of drugs and terror, both creating the very targets they attempt to eliminate in an unending cycle of violence that makes a military presence more common and "diversifies law enforcement" with an everyday impact that robs everyone of hope. Understanding the ubiquity of war has been the most difficult for those of us trapped in the U.S., the very arbiter of much of what is understood and experienced as warfare today.

Zagato reminds us of the Invisible Committee's observation quoting General Vincent Desportes that "military operations are truly a 'manner of speaking': henceforth every major operation is above all a communication operation whose every act, even a minor act, speaks louder than words." (see, The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, p. 151) But what message does 164,000 dead between 2007 and 2014 communicate? Attributed to the War on Drugs, the Mexican death toll supersedes the amount of dead for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And what about the number before 2007 beginning in 1994? And what of the death toll for those migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border from 1994 to the present? Between 1994 and 2009 approximately 5,500 people died crossing as a result of combined operations such as Operation Blockade, Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Safeguard, Operation Rio Grande. The most recent, Operation Streamline, has perfected turning the desert into an instrument of war insuring that migrants perish crossing. It also works in conjunction with the current commitment from DHS to deport families. Or, what of the number of missing young women and those who turn up mutilated and violated in the outskirts of border towns and the maquiladoras. State agencies have been unable to keep an accurate count of the amount dead much less, in the case of the feminicides, end the disappearances through the successful prosecution of those responsible. The recent capture of El Chapo underscores the message being sent —Mexico is a land of criminal violence and deserves the exploitation it endures at the hands of U.S., Canadian, and other corporations. The message is so consistent and clear that no one questions it, even when it's mouthed by a buffoon like presidential candidate Donald Trump who brazenly proclaims the need for a wall to keep out Mexican rapists and theives. What Trump blares out and makes clear is that all Mexicanos are criminal and therefore, as Ana Dinerstein argues, subject to "subsumption by exclusion." (see, A. Dinerstein, The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America, pp. 212-221).

The successful domestication of war, the view that war at times is necessary and justified in dealing with enemies, real or perceived, is an essential element of what Du Bois called democratic despotism. At the end of the day, war is the primary vehicle to justify the nation-state and its service to capital. One response to democratic despotism and the racialized warfare it produces is autonomy. For instance, the organized efforts to confront the assassinations in Ayotzinapa has been the unceasing demand from the parents of the 43 missing students that they be returned. Alongside the effort to demand state accountability has been the organization of the Municipal Popular Council of Tixtla. According to Zagato: "the proposal for an autonomous municipal council is based on three main concepts: solidarity with the parents in their pursuit of truth and justice; opposition to the party system 'with the aim to re-appropriate public power and free ourselves of this parasite that is the electoral system which is based on the rule of money;' and finally a critical analysis of the 'structural reforms' and the formation of a resistance strategy." In this instance, the grassroots effort towards radical democracy begins with a diagnosis of the "living conditions" in specific neighborhoods and pursues a level of self organization inspired, according to Zagato, by Cherán and the Juntas de Buen Gobierno that coordinate the Zapatista autonomous communities. These paths at autonomy are very clearly efforts to de-criminalize and de-militarize communities with a focus on community safety.

For those of us in San Jose and part of Universidad de la Teirra Califas who convene the Democracy Ateneo, the two texts take on added meaning. The texts taken together invite us to consider the complications of work. First, we want to make the distinction between work and labor where we understand labor to be that process of abstraction where our doing is appropriated and converted into value, an abstraction that attempts to impose on us a discipline that makes it possible to extract from us profit. By work we understand the tasks we undertake to regenerate our community, to care for one another. Both Illich and the Zapatistas invite us to reconsider, or more correctly, to reclaim the world of work such that our labors are in service of revitalizing our community outside the logic of value, the abstraction of labor, and the exploitation of bodies. In both instances, we must consider work as a process of reclaiming hope. It is through work that we are able to advance our autonomy, an autonomy that Dinerstein defines as the "organization of hope." Part of that work is the effort to not simply rest on solidarity, but to make an effort to construct the world we want in our own locale as part of a prefigurative moment, the "process of learning hope."

South Bay and North Bay Crew

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