Social Factory Ateneo 9-27-14

CompaƱer@s,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Social Factory Ateneo, Saturday, September 27, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Obelisco (3411 E. 12th St. Ste. 110; Oakland, CA 94601; b/t 35th Ave & 34th Ave close to Fruitvale BART) to continue our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.

It has only been a short while since we first convened the UT Social Factory Ateneo and it's a welcome moment to resume its regular schedule. Our research focus when we first gathered was to "approach the social factory as a category of analysis that exposes capital's efforts to displace the cost of reproducing the worker onto the community, household, and women." We insisted that the social factory is "an analytical category that recognizes 'the community' as a principal site of struggle with women as key agents undermining capital's efforts to impose capitalist social relations, as well as generating new forms of reproducing the community that are dignified and autonomous." We also warned that "in the current conjuncture, this analysis is incomplete without sustained engagement with the impact of mass incarceration, militarized policing, detention/deportations, and everyday surveillance along with other forms of capitalist discipline disrupting strategies and practices of care and the particular costs this has had on the community as a whole and on women especially."

During the brief August hiatus of the Social Factory Ateneo the struggle for community has been front and center of social justice efforts. The police, city officials, and state leaders were confronted by "the community" in Ferguson, Missouri as a result of the assassination of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson. And more recently, "the community" mobilized to save the planet and to stop climate change. The profound success of the Climate March underscored the power of the grassroots to mobilize and hold leaders accountable for the deleterious effects of an industrial system that is destroying the planet. Indeed, more and more people are linking the destructiveness of industrial Western societies with capitalism and are demanding an entire new system for organizing life on an already battered planet that we all must share. 

Not surprisingly, the battle to save the planet revives recent debates about the political possibilities and necessity of commons. Comrades in the Autonomist Marxist tradition remind us that commons must be understood in relation to on-going processes of primitive accumulation. Capital seeks to enclose moments of social cooperation to disrupt the resources that people draw from to remain outside of capitalist social relations (see The Commoner, "'Care Work' and the Commons"). Thus, commons are not only spaces or resources, as Gustavo Esteva warns, but a process of social cooperation that makes it possible to live and reproduce community outside of the circuits of capital and beyond the imposition of labor discipline, exploitative conditions, and the reproduction of systems of value that sustain capital (see Gustavo Esteva, "Commoning in the New Society"). 

Then what of the social factory --especially the portion of the social factory occupied by poor, historically underrepresented women. The sisters, mothers, and grandmothers of the community are daily confronted by racial violence that undermines its social fabric. This racial violence operates on a number of levels --it is structural as well as cultural. The material violence manifests in such a way as when we see the disproportionate impact of a dismantled social wage on Black and Brown communities. Symbolically the most marginal sectors of our society are represented as dangerous, predatory, lascivious, and lazy. Or, they are blamed for the conditions they must endure. These images and strategies of representations are all too familiar in a racial dictatorship such as the United States. More to the point, the structural inequality that persists is always accompanied by varying degrees and moments of repression. In other words, material enclosure is not possible without a social enclosure that parallels the displacement and expropriation that constitutes primitive accumulation.

How then do we imagine the social factory as a site of struggle that is not only consumed by racial violence? Are there emancipatory moments we observe when mothers and grandmothers mobilize the community to confront the multiple violences directed at Black and Brown youth? Can we imagine a reclaimed commons when we confront police repression --when we as a community refuse to accept a shooting death at the hands of a police force increasingly militarized and dedicated to counter insurgency? Or, when we mobilize to prevent a detention and deportation that will tear apart a migrant family struggling to survive? In the very moment of mobilization of the most marginalized communities confronting the predatory violence of extractive capital, the displacement of market forces, or the militarized repression of the state apparatus can we observe a "circulation of struggle" that is not just solidarity but something more: engaging intercultural dialogues, reclaiming commons, exercising community safety, and regenerating community? 

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 ateneo announcements and summaries please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo.