Democracy Ateneo Announcement 04-11-15

Compañer@s,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, April 11, 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.

The recent announcement of the upcoming "seminar" Critical Thought Versus the Capitalist Hydra "convoked by CIDECI-Unitierra and the EZLN's Sixth Commission on May 3-9, 2015, in the mountains of the Mexican southeast" marks an ongoing "initiative" that continues the Zapatistas' investment in convening spaces of reflection and action. It underscores, once again, a more visible investment in spaces of encounter that make learning and research central elements in building autonomy. Following the success of the escuelita, the Zapatistas have made their commitment to insurgent learning and convivial research much more explicit and the upcoming "seminar" continues that effort. In the Zapastista communiqué titled, "The Storm, the Sentinel, and Night Watchman Syndrome" (April 2015), the Zapatistas ask that invited guests bring their "word and use it to provoke thought, reflection, critique." "The seed that we ask of you," explain the Zapatistas, "for this seminar or seedbed is one that questions, provokes, feeds, and compels us to keep thinking and analyzing."

In the communiqué the Zapatistas introduce the metaphor of the sentinel and the night watchman cleverly noting that while some have been keeping watch, others only pretend to do so. More importantly, many who are designated to watch out act as though nothing is going wrong and there is no danger approaching. While the sentinel and the night watchman of the April communiqués serves as a metaphor for theory—which is always living theory—the metaphor nonetheless highlights the challenge of abandoning a marshal perspective. A sentinel at a watch tower evokes the language of the military (and borders), especially an army in relation to a sovereign territory (or state). In a very straight forward way, this opens a field of struggle that points to an ongoing reliance on a trained, dedicated force to watch over everyone. In this sense, it’s both a dedicated group of soldiers (who are soldiers so that one day soldiers will not be needed) and intellectuals. (We recall the moment of the Democratic National Convention, August 6-9, 1994 in Aguascalientes, Chiapas when the Zapatistas surrounded those gathered with white ribbons tied to the barrels of their weapons and declared that they would make every sacrifice to create a space for us to gather and learn to talk with one another.) Taking seriously the challenge of moving away from replicating a military perspective then, we note the struggle that has been underway as we desperately work on the ground to re-distribute the tasks of vigilance. In the U.S. for example there has been ongoing work since the early 90s to make sure that "copwatching" is not just the task of a few, often young individuals, but the obligation of an entire community, such that "everyone is copwatching, food-not-bombing, critical massing," etc. Thus, in this context we might claim the assembly as a space of vigilance such that community safety is completely in the hands of a collective subject determined by shared obligations that respond to locally rooted struggles.

Negotiating exactly this circumstance prompts us to take up the question of militarization. Our reflection and action spaces have made observable the fundamental tension we face, namely that honest people have two very different experiences of militarization and militarism. In one instance, activists and progressives experience militarization as a political dilemma in which they work to confront the military excess articulated in the nation's commitment to war, i.e. military adventures abroad, military expenditures over the social wage, and human rights violations associated with U.S. foreign policy. This might take the form of confronting the use of drones in civilian areas, the introduction of military equipment to local police forces, and opposition to U.S. wars. On the other hand, historically under represented communities, i.e. folks of color and low-income communities, experience militarization in a radically different way. Communities of color and the poor experience militarization directly as targets of militarized police violence. These same communities are also targets for military recruiters seeking to fill their ranks. One task it seems is to attempt to put these two experiences into dialogue so that we can generate creative, consistent, and compelling initiatives to address the violence that results from militarization and militarism while also building an autonomous space that is not organized around threat, force, and dominance.

This raises the issue of the circulation of struggle. On April 4th, the Marcha y Foro Comunitario por Ayotzinapa commenced with danzantes who welcomed them at 16th and Mission Street in San Francisco followed by a community forum a short few blocks away. This was Caravana 43, with family members of the forty three students of Ayotzinapa who were violently “disappeared” as they sought to claim their own insurgent learning spaces, and return to their villages to strengthen their communities there. Now, months later their families have crossed the border and traveled north into Califas to connect with families also targeted by state violence.

At the same time as the march wound through the streets, also in the Mission District, neighbors and community members gathered at St. John the Evangelist to send off the body of Amilcar López-Pérez, killed by San Francisco police on February 26, 2015. (See, "Eyewitnesses Speak Up at Vigil for Amilcar López-Pérez." ) Amilcar had crossed the border in search of work and to send money home. While his family could not obtain the visas to come and bring their child home, they shared with us that he had been sending remittances to the small village Aldea Santa Rosa la Cuesta, San Jose La Arada, Chiquimula, in the mountains of Guatemala. Amilcar’s body had just been suddenly released following the completion of the independent autopsy secured by the lawyers for Amilcar and backed by the community. The changing explanations of the killing by plain clothes San Francisco police officers Craig Tiffe and Eric Reboli did not match what the witnesses had seen. In the space of the church where the coffin that held Amilcar’s body lay, the air was thick with incense and copal. The chaplain spoke of justice and the struggles in the streets and the lawyer denounced the police lies, while neighbors and witnesses offered testimonio; they had heard the gunshots and watched as Amilcar died on the sidewalk, with the police refusing pleas to offer CPR from those gathered there. They spoke of the whole block being cordoned by a police perimeter. A man with a guitar sang America is a continent not just a country because an Indian planted it. La mesha, the mother of Idriss Stelley, recalled her son fatally shot by the San Francisco police in 2001 and from the pulpit read a list of names of those killed by agents of the US state—from Greater Mexico, Central America, and Latin America. The church was not an isolated space. In the weeks following the SFPD killing of Amilcar, neighbors and communities members had mobilized in vigils, protests, and potlucks that brought together other families targeted by state violence and where witnesses came forward to speak to what they had seen.

These spaces remind us that we must watch carefully and listen closely to the lessons and wisdom that emerge out of those moments of struggle. Most importantly, we note that these spaces are occupied mostly by women, the mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunties that are at the front lines of an effort that refuses to allow the U.S. dominated narco-state to disappear their children. In the spaces that largely women have generated, from Ayotzinapa to Ferguson back to Oakland and San Jose we are forced to recognize two elements often overlooked. First, women are confronting the state in a variety of ways that at times seem frustrating to many of us because we all have begun to recognize that the protest, the march, the vigil, etc while necessary are not the solution. However, it is not the mothers at the front of that part of the struggle, but in many instances it is an opportunistic Left that maneuvers to co-opt their efforts and put them in service of some other purpose. What the mothers and network of women appear to be doing is converting these as well as other spaces into moments of learning --re-learning care and re-membering what it means to be part of a community organized by care.

Taken together the emerging network of these spaces constitute what we have been calling "temporary autonomous zones of knowledge production" (TAZKP). Somewhat similar to Gustavo Esteva’s notion of the hammock, the TAZKP are networked spaces that expand and operate when we need them, and contract and are dormant when not in use. But, more to the point as linked spaces they circulate struggle, or better put, they circulate the learning and research that are generated through struggle and that are fundamental to our community regeneration efforts. However, these spaces are not always so formal and do not always claim themselves as "learning" and "research" spaces even though they are sites of knowledge production. It is in these spaces that, for example, the wisdom of comida is shared (see, Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism). For Uni Tierra Califas, we have relied on the strategic concept of “the social factory,” drawing on the work of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici to advance a collective analysis with women at the center that examines the way capital attempts to impose a particular set of relations aimed at the site where a family, and community, produces and reproduces itself. In particular, the Social Factory ateneo has served as space of community research to examine the relations and realm of social reproduction as a target of low intensity war. This realm and the relations that cohere also reflect a source and practice of autonomy. The ateneo serves as a part of TAZKP as well as a prism reflecting the many TAZKP present in our struggles in the present.

Thinking in terms of TAZKP here is an invitation to think together in two important ways. First, it underscores that the efforts in Uni-Tierra have been precisely to convene a networked space of learning and research that is a prefigurative space, that is that our approach to learning and research embodies the very space of autonomy we insist already exists. Second, it highlights that the Zapastistas and ourselves could go further in our efforts to network spaces of learning and research. We must link the less obvious spaces and claim them as essential moments and a fundamental part of our efforts to reclaim our communities. In Califas, our question has revolved around how do we relearn the habits of assembly. For us, that is the lesson we glean from a Zapatista civic pedagogy, namely how to construct spaces of learning and research that are spaces of assembly such that a collective subject can manage to construct the convivial tools it requires for its reproduction.

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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