Social Factory Ateneo 7-26-14

Compañerxs,
 
We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Social Factory Ateneo, Saturday, July 26, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Obelisco (3411 E 12th St Ste 110; Oakland, CA 94601; b/t 35th Ave & 34th Ave in Fruitvale, East Oakland, (close to Fruitvale BART) to continue our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.
 
Three critical moments recently capture the struggles we engage in and through the social factory. The performance of Love Balm at the Brava Theater from July 11th through the 20th refocuses our attention to the diverse efforts to document the violence suffered by the most marginal communities. Sunday July 20th marked the third Sunday of the month and the moment for the "monthly community feed" organized by Denika Chatman in remembrance of her son shot down by San Francisco police on July 16, 2011 in the Bayview Hunter's Point. The "community feed" put on by Denika along with other community members has been distributing food for the community in the spot her son was shot down by police since February 2011.  And July in Stockton marks the four year anniversary in the ceaseless struggle for justice for James Rivera, Jr. These moments and spaces raise important questions about the challenges we face in the social factory.
 
The July performances in San Francisco of Love Balm for My Spirit Child marked an extended moment of community theatre based on shared testimonios of Bay Area mothers who have lost children to police and street violence. It is situated within a larger project conceived by Arielle Brown of Oakland, including last summer’s series of performances on the streets and sidewalks where the young men’s lives were lost. Love Balm, in its many iterations, carves out a space of collective memory that refuses state attempts to further criminalize and erase communities. It is critical in that it makes visible the low intensity war directed at the social factory and the struggles that emerge there.
 
Denika Chatman is one of the many mothers whose story is part of the Love Balm Project. She recently affirmed the continuation of her own struggles for justice in the police murder of her son Kenneth Harding, Jr. The trial is set for this coming Spring. Denika’s struggle to have the truth of what happened to her son recognized as a critical component of justice is woven into another community regeneration effort, the community food give away she has initiated and maintained consistently following the attack on him by the San Francisco police. Kenny was left to bleed out in public display on a sidewalk in Bay View Hunter’s Point while the police maintained a strict blockade cordoning off the area, restricting any life-saving assistance from reaching Kenny as he died slowly. On this spot, on the third Sunday of every month, Denika and other supporters gather to share bags of free food with folks in the community. (see, "Kenneth Harding: Three Years After SFPD Murdered My Son, Just Demonizing, No Justice," <http://sfbayview.com/2014/07/kenneth-harding-jr-three-years-after-sfpd-murdered-my-son-just-demonizing-no-justice/>.) Currently, there are seventeen states that have passed legislation against sharing food in public.
 
In Stockton, Dion Smith-Downs, mother of James Rivera Jr., is also engaged with the community in a collective fight suturing justice with memory, truth, and care. Her son was shot by Stockton police and the San Joaquin County sheriff over thirty-eight times, including with an AR15 assault weapon, while trapped inside a crashed van on July 22, 2010. He was gunned down the day before his 17th birthday. Dion and Anita Wills of the Inter Council of Mothers of Murdered Children, together with Dion’s husband Carey Downs and their family as well as community members, including Occupy Oakland and Occupy Stockton, and other networked families, has continued to organize community barbecues in local parks, protests and marches, and a steady stream of interrogations aimed at city hall. They have gathered for speak outs, including on the corner in Stockton where the state murdered her son. On one such commemoration of both the killing and his birth, surrounded by community, Dion released balloons for each year he would have been alive. This struggle has also involved acts of collective memory that defy the state’s investigations and reports.  In response to enduring pressure by Dion, Carey, their family and community, a twenty seven page report was finally released by law enforcement agencies in San Joaquin Valley detailing their own investigation into their murder of her son. The report must stand against the actions of community members who on one anniversary gathered to walk the route James took in his van on the day he was first stalked by police and much later, gunned down. The community’s narrative of what transpired that day and their shared testimonios contradict the story that the state maintains in its official investigation. (see, “Whitewashing Police Murder,” <http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/26/whitewashing-police-murder>).
 
The Love Balm Project, Denika Chatman’s consistent and ongoing Community Feed, and Dion Smith’s creative and militant engagement with space in Stockton are moments of autonomous self-activity, organized around the concepts that organize our social factory ateneo—care, dignity, regeneration, and autonomy. In thinking about care, we draw on Precarias a la Deriva, a militant feminist research collective in Spain for whom care has an ecological logic that “opposes the security logic reigning in the world.” (See, “A Very Careful Strike: Four Hypotheses,” <https://app.box.com/s/f168ypt2nllo83d2si2u>. With the Zapatistas, we see dignity as the struggle against capital, as an insurrection and insubordination to the relations that capital attempts to impose on us. (See, John Holloway, “Dignity's Revolt," <https://app.box.com/s/7yt7u6jtce5iw7zdohxt>. We see our own autonomy in our shared struggles for regeneration.
 
We approach the social factory as a category of struggle noting how it exposes capital’s efforts to displace the cost of reproducing the "worker" onto the community, household, and women. Our commitment to the ateneo as a convivial research and insurgent learning space arises from a shared commitment to explore community safety and engage regeneration projects across the Bay Area. By community safety we mean a collective project where our own efforts at justice, defense, and assembly are organized against and outside of the state. Community safety projects unfold in response and resistance to ongoing strategies of low intensity war directed at the spaces of the home and the street as well as the bonds of family and community. As a way of situating community projects related to community safety and regeneration, we focus on elaborating a politics of care or the number of ways that care has been increasingly privatized and militarized; interrogating the everyday dimensions of precarity such that the manufactured insecurity of work and home impacts all aspects of our everyday lives; and exploring the opportunities and wisdoms associated with community regeneration and the on-going struggles of re-weaving the social fabric.
 
North Bay Crew
 
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