Democracy Ateneo Summary 10-19-13

Compañer@s,

What follows is a brief summary of the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo convened on Saturday, October 19, 2013. Seven of us gathered for our regularly scheduled monthly ateneo and shared questions generated from political and intellectual work in our communities.
 
We initiated the space with a welcome and overview of a proposed plan for the day allowing us to make agreements to manage our discussion. Our brief introductions of ourselves highlighting the projects we engage throughout our communities began our collective knowledge production. We learned that many of us are working towards de-militarizing and de-criminalizing our communities, including, for example, a community such as the Santee neighborhood in San Jose. We also discovered the work underway accompanying the queer community working in the fields of California's Central Valley. Other folks have been organizing inside the Prison Industrial Complex extending the struggle for "community safety" "inside and outside." A number of us shared different efforts to make use of "drifts" in marginalized neighborhoods and inside the Prison Industrial Complex specifically, the women’s prison in Chowchilla, also in the Central Valley. We discussed our experiences in autonomous learning spaces including the recent participation in the Zapatista Escuelita as well as other autonomous learning spaces such as those in Italy, including uni-nomadie and the Bartleby Collective, to name just a few.
 
After sharing our projects, we reviewed the ateneo as a space that has been organized around two critical themes, namely convivial research and insurgent learning. We imagine the ateneo as a space of collective research as well as an autonomous learning space that is organized around the questions we bring --and these inspired by the struggles in our community. As a strategy dedicated to convivial research and insurgent learning, the ateneo has its roots in the Advanced Seminar in Chican@ Research from 1993 to 2003 in Austin, Texas; Acción Zapatista from 1994-to the present in Austin, Humboldt, and currently the South Bay; and Uni-Tierra Califas in San Jose since 2011.
 
The bulk of our work for the afternoon revolved around our sharing questions (see below). The questions we generated mostly focused our attention on how to negotiate the links between struggles inside and outside the Prison Industrial Complex. We asked how we take struggles inside as an essential part of our effort to understand struggles outside. There has been much (albeit not enough) attention directed at the hunger strike organized inside the men's units in California. Not surprisingly, women's struggles inside have been overlooked or are often less visible and legible. This includes women finding creative ways to address struggles outside as well. Our effort to understand and amplify "circulation of struggles" involves an attentiveness in "reading" political activity and assessing realms often overlooked as sites of struggle. (For mention of circulation of struggles, see Cleaver, "From operaismo to 'autonomist Marxism'" <https://app.box.com/s/nouq91vls242ng4st112>) Using the "social factory" as a category of analysis and site of interrogation opens possibilities for seeing different struggles in other often less-investigated realms, including prisons, and recognizing agents inside as potent political forces. (See, Federici, "Permanent Reproductive Crisis" <https://app.box.com/s/pzo7et50iog01kprukra> and James and Dalla Costa, Power of Women and the Subversion of Community <http://www.box.com/shared/hbhp7mpv94>) This also allows us to see strategies of repression inside on a continuum with strategies outside and as part of a larger low intensity war directed at specific portions of the community. However, it also helps us locate the different kinds of resistances taking place beyond prison walls including those that are less visible as prison solidarity. While noting the importance of networking across the Bay to maintain consistent dialogue and spaces of engagement, we began by reflecting on how to circulate struggle beyond networking.
 
One possibility in dealing with the struggle inside and the connections with the outside is the "drift," or efforts at a collective ethnography that moves through a specific space co-generating information with folks in the area (see, Precarias a la deriva, "adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work," <https://app.box.com/s/f8k96zooxarv3mevumqz> and Casas-Cortes & Cobarrubias,"Drifting through the Knowledge Machine," <https://app.box.com/s/qpwranichmceje6y5lun>). The drift in this instance presents an alternative, collective strategy of knowledge production that can become a new site of articulation for a radically different subjectivity from the kind facilitated by the traditional, progressive prison programs that provide certificates for group therapy and healing circles that reinforce some level of self-abasement. The drift also raises critical questions about how we can generate systems of information that can serve larger political purposes. For example, on the outside "know your rights trainings" can assist in disrupting gang databases and other efforts by law enforcement to register young people into the system. We noted the film Safety Orange <http://we.tl/TgwBsXF8BK> as an excellent source that depicts how the police use the gang database to get youth into the system. We noted how gang databases function as an archive that produces reality rather than describing it. The gang database functions within the larger prison industrial complex, one where the prison is always managing the outside. These disruptions on the outside coincide with a resistance inside, including the oppostion to "debriefing" as a condition to leaving solitary confinement that the prison hunger strikes made visible. As a direct action, the hunger strikes inside make observable different aspects of the struggle, as prisoners organize to not only improve the conditions of their living, but to refuse a system that seeks to determine their relations with other prisoners. While some disciplinary structures like the prison itself continue to remain at the scale of the Fordist era, some, like the gang databases outside, function on a more micro level. Like individualism and multiculturalism, in these diffuse disciplinary regimes, there is a strategy to use bodies to think. We noted how class decomposition is articulated around race and through the racial regimes.
 
Systems of information are not limited to gang databases but can include grassroots systems such as the drift. Other systems of information can be varied as in the case of a community garden where the plants and their ages can tell a story about a community and its struggles. A critical system of information can appear to be more active as in the case of the Zapatistas' commitment to vigilance in their communities at all levels of their social and political organization. Of course, in this instance vigilance does not necessarily refer to policing but rather to the obligations that community members have to make sure community members are making the contributions required of them and that the community is moving forward in a way that reflects the community’s collective decisions. While the Zapatistas can claim an elaborate system of vigilance, we also note that less organized communities can also claim system of informations even some organized around vigilance although these might not be as effective or complex as the Zapatistas. The Santee neighborhood would be a case in point. The community has a strategy to observe the comings and goings of the everyday life of their community including to note the presence of outsiders who might prove a threat.
 
The practice of vigilance and the active system of information it creates speaks to a "living theory," or a theory that presents the struggles of a community as a proposition to change those problems but without imposing a future or a set path to solve the problems. Thinking through systems of information raises a number of questions regarding the types of systems and their uses. The radio can certainly be a broadcaster of news and information but it can also facilitate different kinds of connections and convergences. The Zapatistas asking how we are able to be on the same frequency underscores the importance of creating spaces of encounter that produce new information and new relations. More importantly, systems of information are also generated through and dependent on research such as the co-research associated with early Italian workerism (see, for example, Gigi Roggero's Production of Living Knowledge <https://app.box.com/s/ppp88x3rqaeqh7glvbca>). Research can also be generated collectively as in the case of the co-production of knowledge made possible through spaces of encounter. The knowledge systems specific to spaces of encounter suggest a radically different subjectivity at work (or play). The drift, exercised in situated spaces through collective processes, creates radically different possibilities for organizing that suggest that through the knowledge production new social relations are formed. As a space for collective thinking, the drift re-thinks organizing.
 
People's Investigations, for example, can produce a number of different systems of information. They can also surface systems of information already in place in a way that gets folks "on the same frequency," as when the investigations document specific acts of corruption or brutality that then are broadcast across communities so that folks remain informed about the oppressive systems operating in their communities. The radio can also become a point to broadcast research findings once again facilitating different kinds of communication and engagements across struggles. (see, Radio Autonomia: Zapatismo in the Bay <http://radioautonomia.wordpress.com/>) Each investigation develops tools as part of its collective process, for example, creating graphs and or taxonomies of how various agents of the state interact with citizens during routine policing calls. (see, "People's Investigation: Kayla Moore" <https://app.box.com/s/swr6ap2nnjs77mutk0pp>)
 
Drifts inside that attempt to connect struggles outside and People's Investigations that document increasing levels of police violence directed at our communities (social factory) raises issues about shifts in U.S. racial regimes. Class decomposition is articulated around and through these racial regimes and underscoring how these regimes are not constant but can be identified with particular conjunctures. We recognize new mechanisms of racial violence designed to maintain an on-going system of apartheid. The Oakland police department's investment in Urban Shield <https://www.urbanshield.org/>, for example, highlights the increased investment in more militarized systems of social control and these directed at particular portions of the population. While there is an awareness of the threat posed by such a project, the organizing for the October 25th event <http://oaklandlocal.com/2013/11/urban-shield-in-oakland/> in protest to Urban Shields presence in our communities coalesced with other struggles against policing, including a growing statewide effort from family members, to raise critical questions about how we manage racial violence directed at our communities. Similar discussions emerged following the different kinds of mobilizations that resulted in solidarity with Oscar Grant and those associated with Occupy Oakland. These discussions were provoked on a broader scale by the logic of Occupy that made police violence visible in particular ways. How do new mobilizations for racial justice account for the everyday racial struggles of local neighborhoods? What must be done to engage already operational strategies of local communities who confront quotidian police violence such as the presence of gang suppression units? How can a drift disrupt low intensity war and how can it begin to anticipate struggle? What benefits are large assemblies common to the Occupy moment, for example, to smaller less visible communities such as Santee that already negotiate internal divisions between neighbors as part of the design of a low intensity war that divides communities through aid, para-military violence, mis-information and dis-information. How can our investigative projects be more directly linked to community assemblies?
 
The current struggles against the new tactics and strategies of an emerging racial regime raise critical questions about the differences between de jure and de facto slavery over time. While the persistence of slave revolts may have ended de jure slavery, some argue de facto slavery exists in many parts of the world. The actual everyday experience of coerced labor can be masked through multiculturalism that denies the harsh conditions experienced by specific groups who have been raced. Multiculturalism is hardly new. Strategies to mask racial difference begin as far back as the theorizations associated with mestizaje, a racial discourse that attempts to erase the possibility of Indigenous peoples. One of the strategies that decomposes our political formation around race is the "illusion of inclusions." This has been Chicanismo’s historic and theoretical relation to colonization; it refuses assimilation and accommodation to a U.S. imperialist capitalist settler colonial state. Through Chicanismo we are able to assert, “We’ve been outside the system for so long, how do we continue to maintain ourselves outside it?” From here, we begin to articulate the everyday practices of autonomy that we share across struggles.

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Questions

1. What does a "drift" look like in an extreme context of Low Intensity War?

2. How do we use "drifts" inside to better understand struggle(s) outside?

3. How can these be used to connect with struggles outside?

4. How do we manage "drifts" when prisons are sites of experimentation?

5. How can we articulate a strategy that expresses/connects/presents women's efforts to confront the Prison Industrial Complex?

6. What role can alternative, grassroots radio play in this nexus?

7. How can we build/organize around mental health struggles outside the Non Profit Industrial Complex?

8. How do we expose what produces mental health "conditions"?

9. How do we manage/promote "collective ethnographies"?

10. Are "collective ethnographies" possible through the "drift"?

11. How do state forces archive and rationalize criminalization, e.g. "gang database"?

12. How do state forces archive and rationalize militarization?

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