Democracy Ateneo Announcement 07-12-15

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. The People's Movement Assembly (PMA) against Militarization recently convened the third in a series of gatherings as part of its "rolling assembly" coinciding with the US Social Forum (USSF) held from June 24 - 28. The PMA v. Militarization gathered over seventy-five comrades and almost that number of organizations and projects to confront the intersections between militarization and securitization in our everyday lives. Examining how war and warfare have been changing --increasingly directed at populations abroad and at home with greater levels of impunity-- we analyzed how portions of our community experience counterinsurgency and various forms of low intensity conflict differently, often organized in the form of multiple, intersecting wars that target folks of color, the poor, migrants, campesinos, and other suspected enemies of an increasingly over armed and technologically outfitted security state.  The conversation initiated in the PMA against Militarization continued with the "Beyond Protest" workshop the following Saturday morning where a network of groups from across the state began braiding strategies for confronting low intensity war, a war that seeks to control populations rather than defend territory. This momentum continued into an additional space organized by the Coordindora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion (CNTE) with comrades present to share their struggles specifically from the teachers union in Oaxaca. The political and organizational insights shared by the CNTE comrades highlighted a critical view of a specific strategy of the Mexican state and the impact of counter insurgency on portions of the Mexican Left. Their analysis of the current conjuncture in the wake of NAFTA and subsequent economic restructuring outlined a state strategy of “administrative terrorism” advanced through a widespread precarity as a condition of life. This is the terrain, according to the compañer@s, on which current forms of militarization advance. As teachers protest and organize strikes for improved conditions of living and learning, they are snatched from the streets during rallies, tortured, and many held indefinitely. This "administrative terrorism" works in tandem with militarized policing and imprisonment and the fear of public extrajudicial killings, including teachers in front of their own families. (See, "Libertad Presos Políticos de la CNTE" and "Libertad Inmediata Ya!") The threats extend to the leadership as well as rank and file of the social movements. Elaborating on complementary aspects of militarization, the CNTE comrades examined the role of media in discrediting social and political organizations. The militarization of the entire country capitalizes on uncertain living and working conditions through the creation of new repressive police forces and infiltration of social movements in an attempt to control political mobilizations across the country. While at the same time, the destructive practices manifest in "sectarianization," or the political competition fostered between projects and organizations, creates the context for certain groups to be dangerously isolated and politically vulnerable while strategic coalitions unravel. Critical in any examination of the changing nature of war and warfare is the role of capital and capitalism, or what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson call the "operations of capital." (See, S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, "Operations of Capital") Mezzadra and Neilson begin their analysis with the intersection between financialization, logistics, and extraction as three key "analytical levers" that expose "the material aspects of capital's intervention in specific situations and their wider articulation into systemic patterns." They invite us to consider "how the tensions between 'expulsion' and 'incorporation' are always at stake in the systemic expansion of capital." "Nevertheless," Mezzadra and Neilson explain, "what counts more today is not the binary alternative, the 'either/or,' between 'expulsion or incorporation,' but the merging and contamination that characterize their deployment in the production of new societal and political codes as well as related forms of subjectivity." Thus, the "tumultuous tensions of inclusion and exclusion" are clearly observed in the defense of the commons and the battle for the communal ethos so clearly narrated by Maristella Svampa. (See, Maristella Svampa, "Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America") Drawing on Gustavo Esteva's notion of "spheres of communality" and Bolivar Echeverria's "communal ethos," Svampa explains oppositions to neoextractivism throughout Latin America confront "preexisting communitarian elements" and a "resistance orientated toward radical democracy." It is from here that we watch closely and learn from Indigenous struggles in the present, from the mining villages and working class neighborhoods of Peru and Mexico escalating their struggle against Tia Maria mining corporation to the caravans traveling out from Apache Sacred Oak Flats, Arizona to the kayaks and the last Lummi Nation canoes blocking Shell oil rigs from leaving Seattle harbors to the escalating resistance rippling across the northern US and Canada against the Keystone XL pipeline, including struggles by the Oglala Sioux to protect the Mni Wiconi water pipeline from being crossed by the oil pipeline. The inclusions and exclusions fundamental to capital increasingly organized through the intersections of state and state manufactured violence can be observed in the extractivism equally prevalent in gentrified metropolitan zones. Peter Gelderloos' recent comparison between Barcelona and San Francisco as highly sought after metropolitan zones is instructive in exposing the militarization in relation to "the operations of capital." (See, P. Gelderloos, "Precarity in Paradise") High tech meccas like San Francisco and Barcelona as well as London and Tel Aviv have become playgrounds for techies, yuppies, and hipsters to enjoy culturally rich areas that accommodate the digerati to stay plugged in and, as a consequence, constantly working. Unfortunately, the sought after counter culture and ethnic diversity of specific neighborhoods must be cleared out. "They run to what entices them but what they can never understand: countercultural zones that defy lawfulness and conformity," explains Gelderloos. But gentrification requires a new kind of policing based on colorblindness. "If colorblindness works," Gelderloos quips, "the employer, the coworkers, and the real estate zone (I hesitate to say 'community') will accept someone from Bangalore with smart clothes and an engineering degree, while the homeless black person who has lived on that street their entire life will be violently excluded. In cities where this model is in place, such a high premium is placed on giving police cultural sensitivity trainings, precisely so that cops don’t kill the wrong people of color." Militarized policing, the kind that produces surplus value in the production, distribution, and implementation of increasingly lethal armaments and practices, requires enemies and many of those are supplied by the discourses organized through the war on terror. Since terrorist threats are often manufactured or imagined, Gelderloos suggests anarchist street fighters protesting gentrification and privatization projects have become the new targets that justify escalating a repressive militarized policing presence there to insure that highly productive metropolitan zones fuse gentrification, technology, and tourism.Can an assembly, including a proliferation of networked assemblies, confront the militarization and securitization directed at us? In his analysis of the 2006 Oaxaca Commune, Gustavo Esteva writes, “the reorganization or creation of assemblies at the grassroots continues at its own pace, looking for more solid ground.” (G. Esteva, “The Oaxaca Commune and Mexico’s Coming Insurrection”). At stake is how to rebuild the social infrastructure of community to convene locally rooted assemblies that are not conferences or conventions, much less "workshops" where a small group of people are telling others what to do, how to think, and when to struggle. Rather, we are engaging a process that convenes a gathering of politically and socially committed people who are prepared to pursue dialogue and make decisions about what needs to be done to regenerate the community. But what happens when these folks have no other connection than political concerns and social worries and not to work or a relation to commons? For Maria Mies and Veronika Benholdt-Thomsen the commons exist through relations, bonds, and exchanges among us. “In our view commons cannot exist without a community, but equally the community cannot exist without economy. In the sense of oikonomia, that is, the reproduction of human beings within the social and the natural household. Hence, reinventing the commons is linked to the reinvention of the communal or commons-linked economy.” (See, Mies and Benholdt-Thomsen, “Defending, Reclaiming and Reinventing the Commons”) This points to a specific challenge of the practice of assembling in an urban context —we have been deterritorialized by capital and our assemblies face the challenge of growing without roots.South Bay and North Bay CrewNB: 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 <https://ggg.vostan.net/ccra/#18>. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the second Saturday of the month.