Democracy Ateneo Summary 9-21-13

Compañer@s,

What follows is a brief summary of the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo convened on Saturday, September 21, 2013. Eight of us gathered for our regularly scheduled monthly ateneo in order to share questions generated from our political and intellectual work in our communities.

We initiated the space with a welcome and overview of our plans for the day. We officially began producing knowledge together through our brief introductions of ourselves and some of the projects we claim in our communities. Many of us share a commitment to pursuing new strategies related to "community safety" prompting us to ask how collective efforts to "de-militarize" our communities can get beyond the state and be in service of community regeneration. Some projects specifically struggle with confronting dominant institutions in search of alternatives, including "institutions of the commons," that can manage oppression while still challenging the dominant social order. (See, M. De Angelis, "Does Capital need a commons fix?" <https://app.box.com/s/dcjitk2udnh14mqrbuqc>) Others asked how we can pursue know your rights trainings, people's investigations, and other community defense projects in such a way as to articulate a collective political subject. In this way, we discussed community defense projects as assertions of dignity. (See, Holloway, "Dignity's Revolt" <https://app.box.com/s/7yt7u6jtce5iw7zdohxt>) Assertions of dignity can exceed the individual subject's "rights" and question the terms of citizenship under conditions of "democratic despotism." (See, Du Bois, "African Roots of War" <https://app.box.com/s/1o24g7tmbalii9yc8yv7>) Still others shared work currently underway with mujeres who are finding new ways to link self-organized communities, especially struggles of women who, for example, manage home care work that is outside of typical work spaces thus posing some obstacles for organizing.

We followed sharing our projects with a brief overview of the ateneo as a space that initially emerged out of several oppositions to caciquismo, or local bossism, in our communities and in the Ethnic Studies programs that we occupied during the nineties. We also recalled that more recently the ateneo has resulted from our efforts to approach Universidad de la Tierra Califas as a cargo, or collectively defined community obligation. (For a discussion of cargos, see B. Maldanado, Comunalidad and the Education of the Indigenous Peoples" in New World Indigenous Resistance <https://app.box.com/s/1mp960ie2nrfcrje3l21>) Specifically, at the moment that we committed ourselves to activating Un-Tierra Califas in the Bay Area we asked ourselves how we would engage it as a cargo in two ways. We imagined it as a cargo designated by the self-organized Uni-Tierra communities of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Puebla, and Toronto --projects each with their own histories and also composing a collective Uni-Tierra community. We wondered about the manner in which to negotiate Uni-Tierra Califas being careful to recognize the community we are claiming and the work that had preceded us. As we pursued Uni-Tierra Califas in relation to the organized Uni-Tierra community of Southern Mexico, we also questioned how we would engage an emerging local community. We imagined a community formation that would eventually claim a collective authority regarding Uni-Tierra Califas, making it possible to designate the specific cargos or tequios, specific work projects designated by the community, that would make it possible for Uni-Tierra Califas to serve the interests and desires of a locally rooted community. The ateneo as well as tertulias, as consistent open spaces for community engagement, seemed to be appropriate spaces to (re)build a "social infrastructure" that would give shape to an emergent community. Thus, a self-organized community fully aware of its project would help to determine Uni-Tierra Califas' path. We concluded our examination of the ateneo by interrogating how it works on a practical level as a space. Towards that end we investigated how it makes possible three areas of reflection and action: reflection that generates initial questions; reflection of the shared questions collectively produced; and reflection of the emerging interpretation of the questions.

The bulk of our work for the afternoon revolved around our sharing questions (see below). The questions we generated mostly focused our attention on the politics of care. We took up questions and the challenges of care in relation to work, learning, and community safety all in service of larger, shared, if often conflicted, effort to "re-weave" the social fabric. (See, Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism <https://app.box.com/s/enarq8pk320j4e6l22tp>)  Through this exploration of care and work, we were able to address the different sets of obligations that animate the social factory. Not surprisingly, we examined how the social factory operates as a site for the articulation of competing notions of gender. (See, James and Dalla Costa, Power of Women and the Subversion of Community <http://www.box.com/shared/hbhp7mpv94>) We recalled, for example, questions from gatherings last Fall during Silvia Federici's visit to the Bay Area. How can we recognize what she names as the "double character" of reproductive work "as work that reproduces us and 'valorizes' us not only in view of our integration in the labor market but also against it" while also recognizing the desire to care coupled with the tremendous burden of care --as in, for example, taking up the responsibilities of being the primary caregiver of one's aging or ailing parents while also confronted by the competing demands of life. (See, Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, <https://app.box.com/s/15cly5pgmaeirijwc62k>) Acknowledging together that community safety is about care, how do we advance projects where we are in charge of our own care and our own work? As questions around the politics of care intersected with questions of organizing working mothers and nannies outside of the work place, we asked, how could we link these questions with a politics of assembly as a space of care?

Much of our discussion was in reference to the Zapatistas and the recent escuelita. (see, Zapatista Little School Preparation <http://www.elkilombo.org/special-section-the-zapatista-little-school-preparation-pdfs-of-ezln-communiques/>. The Zapatistas generously shared their "research" with us and made it available in four notebooks <http://espaciolibremexico.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/los-cuatro-textos-de-la-escuelita-zapatista/>) Three of us present participated in the Zapatista escuelita and shared some of our experiences and observations. As a critical point of reference, the Zapatistas and the escuelita provide a bulwark for us to interrogate our local oppositions in relation to dominant institutions and practices. The Zapatistas relation to land, work, and community, especially as it was made more available as part of the escuelita, became a focal point of our own exploration about how we manage the politics of care. Relatedly, we examined the Zapatistas' relation to work and how "work" becomes a primary site of community regeneration. We placed side by side an understanding of work "as the way we organize ourselves to sustain our community" against work as a mechanism that organizes our time into disassociated realms of existence that correspond to subjectivities in the current configuration of capitalist relations (i.e. worker, activist, social civilian). We noted that work in capitalist configuration organizes time and subjectivities according to hours and days of the week. (See, Thompson, "Time, Work, Discipline" <https://app.box.com/s/l1p94x7ycgeirlovsvlq>) We struggled with the observation that the Zapatistas enter into the everyday civic life of the community through cargo, or the obligations of work, that people take up as they claim community. We noted how very much life organized around community regenerative work differs from our Western efforts to "organize" people ideologically through organizations associated with political "lines" and political "parties." The insights generated from the Zapatista escuelita provoked us into recalling the difficulties we face in convening assemblies and the challenges of managing decentralization across space. We were reminded of Gustavo Esteva's observation that we are a assembly when we are together and a network when we are physically apart. The politics of assembly in relation to work and community formation underscored our concern about the difficulty we face in "learning from the Global South." (See, Callahan, "In Defense of Conviviality" <https://app.box.com/s/px951dpere5qbryjzghc>)

We noted that local struggles are always producing knowledge about the conditions that they face and about their own efforts of autonomy and regeneration. Knowledge produced locally can circulate as "conspiracies" to advance community safety. We are reminded by Esteva of the original Latin of conspiracy,  conspīrāre, or "to breathe together." Thus, conspiracy can be thought of as a strategic mode of sharing what we have learned that coincides with assertions of dignity. "Conspiracies" can either organize our work, as when we pass amongst ourselves the stories necessary for our survival, or they can serve as a metaphor for our efforts when we come together. As such, they allow us to elude external authorizing agents, including those that call for "objectivity" and "verification" when we attempt to share what we know. Conspiracies are key aspects of a living archive and allow us to build on the knowledge of the community. As such, they are key to escaping capture and containment as they repeat and illuminate ways we are networked across spaces and in opposition. To what extent is what we do not only a "conspiracy" but, more importantly, a strategy? --the question of strategy emerged as a common theme throughout the discussion, as we asked can we or should we abandon the Western discourse of strategy if we are pursuing spaces that attempt to "go beyond" the disciplining language of the dominant? Lastly, the question of "conspiracy" also revolved around how particular communities are present in certain political imaginaries. For communities that are traditionally more guarded and therefore less vocal or visible practices that establish critical components in the safe life of the the community might not be considered political and therefore overlooked as a conspiracy in this dimension.

This brought us back to our conversation around the politics of care and work, as well as questions of organizing mothers, nannies, and domestic workers outside the work place. We noted the demand from the Global Women's Strike to recognize care-giving work with a wage and to insure that low income mothers have options available for raising their children, instead of having their children cared for by someone else as they are forced outside the home to work for a wage. (See, Global Women's Strike <http://globalwomenstrike.net/content/press-release-local-actions-12-us-cities-launch-campaign-recognition-caregiving-work-and-end>) We retold one mother's strategy for revealing the waged/unwaged divisions at play in care work, where women are able to earn a wage caring for a child that is not theirs, but not for caring for one that is. She suggested mothers within the community simply swap babies during work hours! This statement circulates in the realm of theater for what it reveals about capital relations and also could function as conspiracy for what it suggests as strategic, and possible.

Something that emerges distinctly here is the resonance between care and work --we often hear and speak of "care work" as a type of work or a realm of work-- one that is not recognized, or is demanded, expected, non-renumerated, non-valorized, etc. Framed by the recent insights from the escuelita however, something different emerges in our ateneo and in our collective learning where care exceeds being a "type" of work, relegated to a particular realm and performed by particular people, usually women. Rather, we can see how being in charge of our own work also means being in charge of our own care. This was nascent in the initial questions around care and the discussion following, and takes on greater complexity in our reflection of the questions we generated and some of our discussion that followed. As we struggle to link care to a politics of assembly, how might we also link care to cargos, as community defined obligations? And, how might this provoke new experiences and understandings of gender? Clearly, there is a back and forth in the practice of care and work, they are not mutually exclusive and are expressing new forms of struggle.
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Questions
1. How do we think of de-militarization that is not about pushing out oppressive forces?
2. How can we learn from the "Global South"?
3. How do we integrate our economic survival with our political community life? (precarious, or "shitty," adjunct jobs as a strategy of containment?)
4. How do we register moments of "intense dignity"?
5. How do we recognize the knowledge that dignity produces --how is it convivial?
6. When does the exercise of dignity trigger a political subject?
7. How do we organize working mothers outside of the work place, e.g. home care workers?
8. What kind(s) of relation(s) reflect praxis of community (safety: defense, justice, assembly) based on care and generosity, as tools? tactics?
9. How do we avoid the exercise of care becoming a social safety valve so that "care" is not exhausted?
10. How do we build alternative institutions that are resisting the state and not neoliberal reform?

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