Democracy Ateneo Announcement 5-18-13

Comrades:

We are taking the unprecedented liberty of announcing two upcoming Uni-Tierra Califas' ateneos in the same electronic missive. The first, the Insurgent Knowledges Ateneo will convene on Thursday, May 16 from 6.30 to 9.30 at Don Ramon's in the heart of San Francisco's SOMA district. The second, the Democracy Ateneo will also convene as regularly scheduled on Saturday, May 18 from 2.00 to 5.00 at Casa de Vicky in downtown San Jose.

We announce both ateneos together not only because one follows closely on the heels of the other, but, more importantly, we have arrived at a conjuncture where both spaces critically examine questions about radical democracy, persistent racial conflict, and the multiple violences of capitalist social relations. Moreover, these overlapping networked spaces, or temporary autonomous zones of knowledge production, also articulate a collective effort of researching politically --that is a shared effort to co-generate strategic knowledges that address specific problems named by self-organized communities of struggle --what Illich referred to as the vernacular values that are fundamental to community regeneration. What follows is a brief statement that attempts to articulate this intersection and provoke new questions about how our convivial research and insurgent learning can celebrate radically different commitments than what appear to dominate in our shared spaces. We will take up the questions and issues raised below as well as others. Our goal will be to generate new questions as we renew our dialogue and exploration of insurgent learning and convivial research.

In The Right to Useful Unemployment, Ivan Illich warns against "the assumption that military requirements are to blame for the aggressiveness and destructiveness of advanced industrial society." He insists that the focus of the military "as the source of violence in an industrial state" should be "exposed as an illusion." "The modern industrial state," according to Illich, "is not a product of the army. Rather, its army is one of the symptoms of its total and consistent orientation." (p. 43) Illich makes two additional points to underscore what he believes to be the "destructive nature of a market-intensive society which drives its citizens into today's wars." The first point refutes the view that the modern systems of health, education, and welfare have been informed by "a military rationale" given that these national systems can all be traced back to "military antecedents." Of course, Foucault's disciplinary apparatus focused on the military barracks comes to mind as a main source for this argument. The second, and most troubling, point refers back to "today's professors and social scientists who seek to blame the military for the destructiveness of commodity-intensive societies." For Illich these very same professors and scientists are merely "attempting to arrest the erosion of their own legitimacy." More troubling still, the question of military destructiveness is blurred by experts' efforts "to protect professional autonomy against citizen maturity." (pp. 44-45) In other words, if we end the war against the autodidact and the autonomy self organized citizenry enact on a daily basis we will recognize the destructive nature of industrial society and the modernization of poverty.

Illich's position has profound political implications in the current conjuncture. Of course, the point is not that there has been an increase in U.S. military adventurism abroad since 1978 when Illich first circulated the statement above. Nor is the concern that U.S. advance of the military industrial complex and its recent reconfiguration of its global military strategy has undergone a profound overhaul by increasingly relying on low intensity conflict doctrine and applying it in a number of conflict zones as well as shifting from larger military installations to smaller more mobile ones. The result has been the exponential increase of U.S. arrogance no longer believing it necessary to mask its use of military force for both strategic and market interests. Nor is it any surprise that the advance of the military response across the globe is accompanied by the all too familiar battle cry of bringing democracy to politically backward or impoverished regions that have been overwhelmed with cultural despots and market gangsters.

We can agree with Illich that the violence does not reside in the military industrial complex, but rather the violence emanates from industrial society more generally. However, the more critical point Illich raises by exposing the fundamental source of unchecked militarism and the militarization of everyday life is its relation to what Jacques Ranciere cautions manifests in the "hatred of democracy." "Democracy," Ranciere explains, "stirs in the wake of American armies." It is worth quoting him at length: "It is part of a broader logic that can be reconstituted from its disjointed elements: it is because democracy is not the idyll of the government of the people by the people, but the disorder of passions eager for satisfaction , that it can, and even must, be introduced from the outside by the armed might of a superpower, meaning not only a State disposing of disproportionate military power, but more generally the power to master democratic disorder." (See, Jacques Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy, p. 6) Republican government of the West has attempted to manage the contradiction it creates for itself, the double-bind of democratic excess and the feared overflow of democratic impulses. Unfortunately, the solution has been to minimize collective activity, or the persistent and ubiquitous ferment of what Miguel Abensour calls insurgent democracy, and to simultaneously attempt to redirect the "individual withdrawal from collective life" that results from democratic management strategies, i.e. republican forms of government. (See, Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment) Not surprisingly, the "double bind of democratic excess" has only resulted in an equally repulsive democratic individualism organized around consumer culture.

However, we have argued elsewhere that the "democratic despotism" that both Ranciere and Illich worry about has as one of its organizing principles the ur-violence of racial difference. War according to W.E.B Du Bois results from Western Democracies' commitment to capitalist expansion organized on the basis of racial difference, both globally and in the metropole. The subjugation of one race by another makes it possible to invest in the persistent war. However, for war to work in this way it must be, as Achille Mbembe argues, domesticated. Thus, we note that Illich, Ranciere and others refer to war in much the same way Clausewitz suggested, and, that is to imagine war as peculiar to the nation-state as opposed to war as an on-going condition of the production of racial inequality. Capitalism, either in its mercantile, industrial, or financial forms, is not possible without primitive accumulation. The ongoing dispossession and dislocation of people from commons begins with their dehumanization and that portion of the persistent process of primitive accumulation has been and continues to be organized around racial violence.