Democracy Ateneo Announcement 7-12-14

Compañer@s

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, July 12, 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. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the second Saturday of the month.

The recent publication of the special issue of Community Development titled, "Commons Sense, New thinking about an old idea", invites us to consider the the struggles associated with commons especially their political uses. Much has been said and is revisited in the special issue about the different approaches to commons --if they should be outside of the circuits of capital and the logics of the state or if they are to be managed within capitalist and state forces. The struggle over commons seems remote against the most recent exhibitions of state violence --state organized assaults such as the brutal beating of a young Palestinian American by Israeli police and an African American female pedestrian by a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer on a southern California freeway. Although the U.S. mainstream media has chosen to highlight the young Palestinian American from Florida, it continues to mask the number of Palestinians also beaten during the protest as well as the countless Palestinian lives lost and unmarked as a result of U.S. funded Israeli settler colonialism. These moments, although seemingly a world a part, speak to the impunity of state and capitalist repression articulated through a global democratic despotism and the maintenance of complex racial regimes on which it depends.

In this context is it possible to ask about the dignity of the commons? John Holloway reminds us that the Zapatistas have reclaimed dignity as a critical category of struggle. (see, J. Holloway, "Dignity's Revolt" and pamphlet) Dignity in the Zapatistas' hands exposes, according to Holloway, the social antagonism that impacts all of our lives. "The social antagonism is thus not in the first place a conflict between two groups of people: it is a conflict between creative social practice and its negation, or, in other words, between humanity and its negation, between the transcending of limits (creation) and the imposition of limits (definition). The conflict, in this interpretation, does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. The conflict is that between subordination and insubordination, and it is this which allows us to speak of insubordination (or dignity) as a central feature of capitalism. Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is class struggle." (p.183)

How can or are the commons a site of dignity? Gustavo Esteva warns us not to view commons simply as resources. (see, G. Esteva, "Commoning in the New Society") Rather, he asks that we recognize commons much in the same way Vandana Shiva imagines them and that is as "a life support base" that must be shared and "cannot be owned as private property or exploited for private profit." (p. i148) The obligation entailed is to think of commons as a verb, as an activity, as Peter Linebaugh suggests we should speak of commoning. We are able to engage the practice of commoning and develop the relationships required of the activity when according to Esteva we recognize commons as outside the very Western discourses of economy. "Commoning, the commons movement," explains Esteva, "is not an alternative economy but an alternative to the economy." (p. i149) Commons are the spaces that define social relationships and determine the fundamental obligations that arise out of mutually shared connection.

Thus, the battle for the commons is not only about claiming or not claiming a "resource" --there is a fundamental epistemological dimension in that the battle for the commons requires a shift in what we know about how we work together to manage our "life support base." Capitalist market forces and state-run institutions have never been able to manage life sustaining support bases. It has been increasingly clear for some time now that the failures of market and state-based logics associated with capitalism are likely to be catastrophic. It is in the context of the daily, multiple violences that impact our lives as state and market forces attempt to subdue groups that refuse to submit to the exploitation orchestrated by Western powers. The battle over access to water as human right currently underway in Detroit speaks to such a crisis. Yet, it is, as Esteva reminds us of Ivan Illich's prophetic words, necessary for us to recognize that the "survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force." (p i151) This discovery is not possible without dignity. We do not mean dignity, as Holloway warns, treated as religious notion or a humanistic common sense, but rather dignity as a category of struggle that recognizes "the assertion of dignity is neither a moral nor a political claim: it is rather an attack on the separation of politics and morality that allows formally democratic regimes all over the world to coexist with growing levels of poverty and social marginalization." (p. 170)

The exercise of dignity always captures our imagination. But, we must recognize that more than a moment of refusal, the claims to dignity invite a more complex engagement. Dignity is not only a category of struggle that alerts us to those moments when it is claimed or asserted in oppressive conditions. What we continue to learn from the Zapatistas is that dignity can also be re-imagined as a political tool, a tool in the Illichian sense that it is a device collectively constructed and in service of the community's regeneration. What we learn is that in addition to working on an analytical level dignity can also incite us to fight for the space necessary for dignity(ies) to flourish. Thus, dignity is always a political objective --an assertion, an effort to construct a space for new or different social relationships. The space of dignity requires a praxis, a political engagement that insures the assertion of one dignity does not diminish another. Dignity as a political objective, praxis, and space can also be an opportunity to learn, to rediscover how to nurture the commons that sustain us and make possible an assertion of our dignity, of our refusal to submit to the impositions that disrupt our efforts to care for one another and regenerate our community. The space of dignity is necessarily a radically democratic space.

South Bay Crew

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