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[Unitierracalifas] UT Califas Demo Ateneo, 5-26-18, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Compañerxs: We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday, May 26, 2018 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below that are raised by the current conjuncture in which we find ourselves. 

Ghada Karmi informs us that "between 30 March and 11 May Israeli forces shot dead more than 40 unarmed Palestinians and wounded over 2,000 during the Great March of Return series of protests in Gaza. On 14 May alone, in protests coinciding with the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers killed a further 58 Palestinians and wounded nearly 2,800." (see, G. Karmi, "At 70 Israel is a Bellicose Giant.") She also highlights how Israel continues its bullying attacks against other sovereign nations including calling for the assassination of leaders in the region. This, of course, is only possible through the backing of the U.S. and other western nations. The relationship between the U.S. and Israel is more than simply an alliance between two sovereign powers. Israel's connection with the U.S. is such that the one nation can orchestrate a falsehood that can then become the dominant story repeated by the the other, circulated by the U.S. political class, pundits, and mainstream media supported by think tanks, lobby groups, and media manipulators, such as pollsters and communication strategists, and, increasingly, by universities and academic institutions that have marginalized pro-Palestinian faculty. In this instance, the orchestrated falsehood is that the rebellion organized in conjunction with the recognition of the Nakba of 1948 is nothing more than attacks by Hamas. More than one critical media analyst recognizes this as nothing less than propaganda, the propaganda common to fascism. The resistance of the people is framed as terrorist violence. Yet not everyone was so ready to buy the well orchestrated lies as solidarity actions and resistances erupted across the globe in support of Palestine —Tel Aviv, South Africa, Brussels, New York. In San Francisco, chants of Palestine will be free! rose up from the streets as people marched from the Israeli Consulate in the city's Financial District to Federal Building in Civic Center (See, Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, "Hundreds in Israel and Beyond Protest Killings of Palestinians on Gaza Border.") The following day also in San Francisco, the disruption of a planned book talk by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak resulted in eighteen arrests as those present interrupted and drowned out Barak's talk repeatedly, condemned him as a war criminal (see, Palestine Action Network, "Eighteen Arrested as Activists Shout Down Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in San Francisco for War Crimes.")

We are reminded of Aimee Cesaire's observation when examining the brutality of colonization, and that in the context of discussions about the rise of fascism and the Second World War. According to Cesaire: "They [the atrocities of colonization] prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out." (see, A. Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p.41) Israel's settler colonialism project has reached its apex, that is, the level of barbarity that is the natural evolution of colonial occupation. The colonizer loses his or her humanity and is capable of all manner of atrocities blinded by their own righteousness. And it is no wonder that Israel basks in the support of the U.S. Americans, if they are even aware of the violence may be momentarily appalled by the atrocities they witnessed these past few weeks in Gaza. Yet, they, "the respectable bourgeois," nonetheless maintain a system where the state apparatus, all of the elements of it, become an echo chamber for Israel's justification of a genocidal project they have been executing with impunity for seventy years, building on a settler colonial logic and program stretching back to the First Zionist Conference and the Basel Program of August 1897. Colonial and imperial powers, including the U.S. in the post World War II era, continue to rely on Israel for their purposes, that is for their own geopolitical designs for the region. And it is this moment, the moment that W.E.B Du Bois named democratic despotism that is the fundamental cause of all wars. It is the bargain the white working class makes with capital. The bargain is based on the quid pro quo that capital gets a compliant workforce and white labor enjoys a somewhat slightly higher wage, safer working conditions, more leisure time, and the few toys and trinkets of a bourgeois lifestyle, and all of that at the expense of Black and Brown labor and lives at home and abroad. In other words, the bargain can only be fulfilled through, according to Du Bois, colonialism which is to say war. (see, Du Bois, "African Roots of War.") The ethnic Mexican community shares an awareness of the nature of democratic despotism and its ties to war. We have resisted the imposition of the "Mexican wage" as well as fought for access and inclusion in all of America's dominant institutions since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 that articulated the expanded borders of the settler colony. Rather than marking the end of the war, the treaty also articulated the promise of a continuous social war organized around the criminalization of resistance. This has been our plight as Chicanxs and Latinxs in the U.S. —to confront successive strategies of criminalization intertwined with militarization. It is a long standing process that has its most recent articulation in the attack on the immigrant community orchestrated through the elimination of TSP (Temporary Protected Status), DACA, and the deliberately orchestrated home, work, and street invasions and sweeps conducted by ICE, INS, and the Border Patrol, working in conjunction with local law enforcement and private prisons. All of this occurs against the backdrop of increased levels of border militarization that continue to produce numbers of deaths despite the drop in immigration as a whole. And, of course, the violence on one side of the border is linked to the violence on the other side —a violence of kidnappings, assassinations, disappearances, feminicides, and massacres. The colonist's disdain for the ethnic Mexican community of Greater Mexico was on display this week when New York Attorney Aaron Schlossberg excoriated patrons and staff at a Midtown Fresh Kitchen for speaking Spanish and a barrista at a Starbucks in La Cañada Flintridge on the outskirts of Los Angeles wrote "beaner" on the coffee cup of an order placed by a cook only identified as Pedro. (see, Y. Simón, "After Racist Lawyer Goes Viral" and A. Cataño, California Starbucks Employee Writes Racial Slur") Both moments may seem trivial compared to the levels of violence throughout Mexico, across the border, and in the neighborhood, but each also reflects a level of dehumanization common to racial capitalism, settler colonial states, and the fascism that defines them. What connects these locuses of violence besides the trajectories of settler colonialism outlined by Cesaire? It's war. "War, money, and the State are constitutive or constituent forces, in other words the ontological forces of capitalism," explain Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato. To this they add, "the critique of political economy is insufficient to the extent that the economy does not replace war but continues it by other means, ones that go necessarily through the State: monetary regulation and the legitimate monopoly on force for internal and external wars. To produce the genealogy of capitalism and reconstruct its 'development,' we must always engage and articulate together the critique of political economy, critique of war, and critique of the State." (see, E. Alliez and M. Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, p. 15.) It’s total war. But, the total war is not new. It’s colonial war directed everywhere, no longer confined to the colony. Alliez and Lazzarato reclaim primitive accumulation to advance the analysis by not limiting it to a specific historical moment but rather, recognizing it as an ongoing process. It is worth quoting them at length: "It is therefore not surprising that the authors associated with research on the world-economy are completing and enriching analysis of the transformations of war and the ways it is waged in direct relationship with nascent capitalism and the colonies. And in fact, 'primitive accumulation' provides the crucible for all the functions that war would later develop: establishment of disciplinary apparatuses (dispositifs) of power, rationalization and acceleration of production, terrain for testing and perfecting new technologies, and biopolitical management of productive force itself. Most of all, war plays a leading role in the 'governmentality' of the multiplicity of modes of production, social formations, and apparatuses of power that coexist in capitalism at the global scale. It is not limited to being the continuation on the strategic level of the (foreign) policy of states. It contributes to producing and holding together the differentials that define the divisions of labor, sexes, and races without which capitalism could not feed on the inequalities it unleashes." (see, E. Alliez and M. Lazzarato, Wars and Capital, p. 76) 

Thus, it’s war that is based on controlling populations. In specific circumstances, that is when it is applied to “troubled areas,” it is organized as low intensity war, warfare that is not about taking of territory but a complex strategy of military and paramilitary violence, targeted aid, and specific policing powers all designed to disrupt the cohesion of a community so that specific populations can be more easily controlled. It is the Fourth World War as the Zapatistas have warned us, but it's also the longstanding, ongoing war of racial capitalism. The argument made in theorizations of racial capitalism is that race is not simply surplus but constitutive. Racial animus, organized through various strategies of criminalization and dehumanization that make possible dispossession, displacement, and dislocation, escalates with capitalism's collapse. Racial capitalism, as many have come to believe about capitalism in general, is both a mode of production and a mode of destruction. Race and racial belonging become the markers to determine what bodies must be controlled and therefore can be produced as disposable. Our resistances are critical to decolonial practice. Aimed at the architecture of control that checkpoints and borders represent, these are at the same time resistances against dehumanization.

New projects and a vision for research moving forward that begin to articulate new theorizations about the current race situation must take seriously how combined research efforts can contribute significantly to the de-criminalization of our communities, especially confronting the socially, politically, and economically constructed disposability associated with black wage-less life, illegal immigrant labor, third world “narco-terrorists,” and Indigenous autonomous communities. It must also engage in the de-militarization of our communities by exposing how capitalist extractivist strategies advance practices and strategies of dispossessing by de-humanizing, displacing by criminalizing, and dislocating through policing, especially pre-emptive policing executed by combined forces of police, military, and increasingly state bureaucracies once designed to administer a social wage. Successful research can be mapped out in cartographies of struggle confronting the spread of low intensity war and its manifestation in various moments of state and state manufactured violences across communities. These maps can include a variety of systems of information generated from the local, situated, and poetic knowledges that can shift the dominant frames of an increasingly complex media landscape and tell a different story about social justice. Such an effort can, for example, map fierce care, a category of struggle, or convivial tool, that emerged out of and was articulated through the efforts of mothers who re-directed their grief and rage at the injustice dealt them and their family into strategic moments of care to consciously reclaim community spaces while also raising awareness about the specific injustice suffered by often targeted families and the community as a whole. The collective construction of convivial tools emerges organically and is articulated in performances and practices that address inequality, especially the violences produced as capitalism reaches its internal and external limits as a result of the exhaustion of “cheap nature,” contradictions of commodity fetishism, and the advances of grassroots struggle. It is therefore a research that must approach the topic genealogically, that is to say, by uncovering how our present has come to be defined by racial inequality and a persistent racial animus organized through successive modes of criminalization, including the epistemological dimensions of settler colonial dominance. That is to say we must map out how knowledge is produced in such a way as to legitimize the criminalization of certain groups, i.e. those targeted for “premature death.” 

South Bay and North Bay crew

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One of my favourite things about Errico Malatesta, is that as well as founding one of the first and most militant trade unions in Argentina, the Baker’s union (which served as a blueprint for many others) He and his fellow anarchist bakers gave pastries blasphemous, rebellious names which they still have to this day:

Anyone who has dined in a cafe or shopped at a bakery in Argentina will immediately recognize menu items such as bolas de fraile, suspiros de monja, vigilantes, cañones, and bombas. For those who don’t speak Spanish, the pointed political metaphors the bakers cooked up start to make sense in translation: monk balls, nun’s sighs, vigilantes, cannons, and bombs.

Monk’s balls, a sweet bun often filled with dulce de leche, can be taken literally as jabbing at the church by offering up a friar’s testicle in pastry form. The nun’s sigh, to put a fine a point on it, can be considered a reference to an orgasm. The other goods are targeted toward the state and the police: vigilantes are made in the shape of a police officer’s baton; the cannons are long, hollow, and filled with a sweet filling; bombas are a choux puff pastry.

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Her ridiculous racism has brought an entire community together to bond and get to know each other.

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Amazon has been quietly selling its facial recognition system to US police forces, marketing it for bodycam use

Amazon bills its Rekognition image classification system as a “deep learning-based image and video analysis” system; it markets the system to US police forces for use in analyzing security camera footage, including feeds from police officers’ bodycams.

The marketing materials circulated to law enforcement touted Rekognition’s ability to identify up to 100 individuals in a single photo. Amazon bound the cities it pitched with nondisclosure agreements, and cities have cited these NDAs in denying public records requests for details about their plans to use Rekognition.

Amazon’s law enforcement material suggests that its tool could be use to identify “persons of interest” – not wanted criminals or even rehabilitated felons, but (for example) protesters and activists that police intelligence units have decided to target for continuous scrutiny.

Amazon developed its law-enforcement marketing through cooperation with the city of Orlando, Florida, where it created a “proof of concept trial.” It subsequently developed a network of city procurement officials and encouraged its existing customers to help the company pitch new business in other cities.

Amazon’s public list of municipal/law enforcement surveillance customers includes Orlando, and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon.

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/22/candid-body-camera.html

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read my interview with It’s Going Down here :) 

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UT Califas demo ateneo, 4-28-18, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Compañerxs: We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday, April 28, 2018 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below that are raised by the current conjuncture in which we find ourselves. It seems that the news cycle has taken a turn and moved on, and yet another shooting of an unarmed youth has started to fade from memory. Stephon Clark, once at the center of national concern about police excess seems to no longer be a major issue, even though direct actions protesting his death continue. Yet, even as Clark’s tragic execution on March 18, 2018 in Sacramento by two officers who came upon him in his grandmother’s backyard fades from the public eye, two other youth were gunned down around the same time and their deaths were barely registered outside the immediate local context. Nineteen year old Jesus Delgado fell victim to police on Capp Street in San Francisco's Mission District as he hid in the trunk of his car surrounded by twelve officers who were shouting commands at him before firing a barrage of ninety-nine bullets. Less than a month later on April 5, eighteen year old Nathan Prasad was hunted down by plain clothes officers of the Fremont Police Department, who together with four uniformed officers opened fire on him and killed him. It has been a little over a year since plainclothes officers from the Fremont Police Department acting as part of a task force stalked and then ambushed a car in Hayward on March 14th, 2017. When task force officers brandishing AK-47s opened fire on the vehicle, sixteen year old Elena Mondragon was killed. These attacks by undercover cops remind us of the shooting death in June of 2015 of Amilcar Perez-Lopez, a twenty year old youth from Guatemala who had no reason for being the target of undercover cops patrolling San Francisco’s Mission District. It also echoes the September 15, 2017 fatal shooting of Jacob Dominguez, who had been tracked over several days by undercover officers assigned to the San Jose Police Department's undercover Covert Response Unit (CRU). The killings continue —those that video recordings often make spectacular, and those that occur on back streets and cul-de-sacs by undercover units or dark highways by various Regional Auto Theft Teams. Stephon Clark’s death came to national attention due in large part to the protests immediately after his murder. Local activists and folks from outside the community intervened in business as usual in downtown Sacramento, the Sacramento city council, and at the Sacramento King’s basketball games. The mobilization spurred celebrities and scholar activists and non-profit folks to descend on the scene and champion the issue. Not surprisingly, many have called for the very familiar demands of more and improved police training as well as some kind of police accountability to the community through civilian review. In moments of tension that follow a police shooting, especially of unarmed youth, there is an urgency for action and demands escalate for better and expanded police training and for improving the police and improving relationships between the community and law enforcement. But, what this demand overlooks is the long history of civilian nvolvement in police monitoring. (see attachment below) Many folks can still remember a decade of violence during the 1960s when over 127 “urban riots” erupted across the country. In that moment, African American and Latino communities refused to accept police violence as a normal part of their lives. Their objections voiced in the streets were met with the deployment of national guard and federal troops in besieged communities, a brutal presence that escalated the number of deaths in the communities they entered to protect in the name of security, such as the 26 lives lost in Newark in 1967. (see, Revolution '67 and Democracy Now, "The Rebellions that Changed U.S. History: Looking Back at the 1967 Newark & Detroit Uprisings.") Thus, it is the long history of community protest that led to civilian review boards and and other civilian monitoring initiatives in most major U.S. cities today. The municipality of San Jose, for example, was forced to respond to the protests against the San Jose Police killing of Danny Treviño in 1976 and others subsequent by establishing San Jose's current, if limited, Independent Auditor. (See, "Community Demands Action in Treviño Killing" and International Association of Chiefs of Police, "Police Accountability and Review.") This prolonged history of community resistance and direct actions have contributed to a rich space of learning, as we are forced to recognize that calls for more police training and civilian oversight overlook a critical fact. We know that police are hyper trained, over armed and part of elaborate, military style operations. This poses contradictions about how to train officers to shoot less when police departments are increasingly the dumping grounds for military equipment and police officers are eager for more support to appear less like cops and more like infantry. But, the larger issue that remains for the most part uninterrogated in this moment is the basic presupposition that the police are in our communities to "protect and to serve." The police's only function in this and any other racial capitalist control state is to protect property. Police rarely shoot an unarmed young person from an affluent neighborhood who is in his or her own environ. When Jodi Melamed recalls Ruth Wilson Gilmore, she draws our attention to an often overlooked part of Gilmore's definition of racism: "Racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies." It is here Melamed identifies the dialectic, where "forms of humanity are separated (made 'distinct') so that they may be 'interconnected' in terms that feed capital." (Melamed, "Racial Capitalism," p. 78).  Property can carve hierarchies of vulnerability, including through the borders between the gated communities and the ghetto or hood, or along the contours of an economic enclave. But as a category of struggle, racial capital reminds us that beyond territory and deed, and exceeding possession, and ownership, property is also a relation and about belonging. (Bhandar, Possessive Nationalism: Race,Class, and the Lifeworlds of Property.) It is a relation to commodity, and a "bodily relation." As a "security against vulneralbilty," material property and property as abstraction undergirds a "differential distribution of symbolic and material insecurities," or, what Isabell Lorey explores as "precarity." (Lorey, State of Insecurity, pp. 18, 29-36). In this "state of insecurity" what function do security forces fulfill? How to reconcile the presupposition that the police are in communities to "protect and serve" when youth from certain communities, continue to be killed? What justifies their being stalked, sometimes over days and then shot by covert, multi-agency units? And, where can this question be fully debated? Not in the city council or with the city manager. The second presumption that underlies a call for more civilian review to monitor improved police training is that historically marginalized communities, that is long-standing racially aggrieved communities, have a voice in government at the local, county, state, and national level. Of course, the current vicious wave of voter restrictions and the strategic efforts to remove folks of color from voting rolls underscores the tenuous amount of political power that comes with the manufacture and maintenance of second class citizenship by dominant forces. In 2014 during the Caravan for Peace across Mexico Javier Sicilia, one of Mexico's most favored poets and a father who had lost his son to the narco-state violence increasingly common throughout Mexico, remarked that, "if we don’t unite as citizens in a true effort for peace and saving democracy, because it is not only representative democracy, to reestablish and rethink ourselves in democracy, in justice and peace.... there will be more killings, ever more disappearances, more migration. And it will be a people full of fear, like an open-air concentration camp." (See, AFSC, Where the Guns Go) Deaths of our young people will decrease when we recognize that they are the result of a low intensity war directed at our communities, that is, a war designed to control populations much the same way low intensity war continues to be fought out in Mexico, Central America, Palestine, Kashmir and so on. Moreover, we will not have to bury our young if we are focused on community safety and not complicit in the excesses of security, that is state practices to protect property. We must, as Sicilia proposes, take back our democracy at the most basic level to manage our own safety. Community safety can only be achieved, not by more state control, but through agreements reached by all members of any given community at different levels of struggle, beginning with the immediate neighborhood and extending into a part of town, city, county, region, and so on. As we write this announcement, the Zapatistas are hosting Conversatorio (o semillero): miradas, escuchas, palabras, ¿prohibido pensar? In this space, the Zapatistas have invited prominent voices in struggle to gather for ten days to think out loud about the current conjuncture —to learn together and to arrive at agreement about how to move forward in our distinct geographies and times, as they say. Like the Zapatista Women's encuentro a little over a month before, the urgency here at the Conversatorio is directed at the escalating violence: the murders and assassinations, the abductions and disappearances, the sexual violations and torture, the repression and incarceration. The Conversatorio continues the Zapatista effort to maintain a space of encounter for those of us who refuse to be victims to the excesses of capitalism and a narco-state to compare notes and to imagine across struggles. There is a call for greater documentation and monitoring of violence —not to turn over the facts to an arbitrating state institution, but rather to learn together to construct an alternate, radical epistemology, one that can undo the possibility of this violence and erasure, one that is capable of producing new subjectivities and relations. It is in this space, a space of learning, that we can support one another to end the multiple, intersecting violences of the war we find ourselves in. But, how do we extend this space beyond the Rebel Autonomous Zones defended by the Zapatistas to our own locales and across geographies? What tools can we pass on to each other in struggle? How do we learn how to learn to struggle alongside one another? South Bay and North Bay crew

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On the morning of April 9th, over a dozen water protectors from the L’eau est la Vie resistance camp shut down the welding of pipe on a construction site of the Bayou Bridge pipeline for several hours. Dressed as crawfish and Kelcey Warren, the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the group performed a humorous musical while blocking pipeline workers from accessing machinery to carry out their work for the day. The performance was so enthralling that even the pipeline workers couldn’t pull their eyes away from the scene or hold back from laughing.

After holding the space for multiple hours and receiving a dispersal order, the group headed east to another part of the pipeline easement in Maurice, LA and halted work on a site with a horizontal directional drill until being threatened with arrest.

The craw clan struck hard and slowed down both welding and horizontal directional drilling work, which are two of the most expensive components of the construction process, in one day. The group took action to draw attention to the 700+ waterways including the Atchafalaya Basin and much of Louisiana’s only remaining natural crawfisheries that will will be impacted by the pipeline.

“The Bayou Bridge Pipeline is the southern end and last remaining part of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the ETP project that sparked mass resistance in Standing Rock in 2016 ” said Mary Anne Mudbug, one of the crawfish in the performance. “The Craw Nation has raised its’ claws in solidarity with those who took a stand against Energy Transfer Partners in so called North Dakota and has vowed to continue that fight here in the swamps.”

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Lummi Nation Takes Totem Pole Across Country to Unite Indigenous Anti-Fossil Fuel Struggles

Lummi Nation Takes Totem Pole Across Country to Unite Indigenous Anti-Fossil Fuel Struggles

by Monsy Alvarado / North Jersey A totem pole arrives in Mahwah MAHWAH — A 16-foot colorful totem pole made a visit to the township Saturday at a ceremony where members of the Ramapough Lenape Nation prayed and sang and hoped to bring awareness to the struggles of Native American tribes across the country as they stand against fossil fuel projects. More than 100 people, including…

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“to do the future, paint the dream exactly as it was” — moten

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11″x17″ Poster || US Letter flier

A CALL FOR INTERGALACTIC SOLIDARITY EVERYWHERE TO END THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ZAD

We are writing with the smell of tear gas rising from our fingers. The springtime birdsong symphony is punctuated by the explosive echo of concussion grenades. Our eyes are watering, less from the gas than the sadness; because our friends’ homes, barns and organic farms are being destroyed.  Bulldozers, backed up by 2500 riot police, armored vehicles, helicopters and drones, are rampaging through these forests, pastures and wetlands to crush the future we are building here on the ZAD (the zone à defendre).   We are calling on you to take solidarity actions everywhere, it could be holding demos at your local french embassy or consulate, or taking actions against any suitable symbol (corporate or otherwise) of France! And if you are not too far away, to bring your disobedient bodies to join us on the zone. If the French government evicts the ZAD, it will be like evicting hope. For fifty years, this unique checkerboard landscape was the site of a relentless struggle against yet another climate wrecking infrastructure—a new airport for the nearby city of Nantes. Farmers and villagers, activists and naturalists, squatters and trade unionists wove an unbreakable ecology of struggle together and three months ago on the 17th of January, the French government announced that the airport project would finally be abandoned. But this incredible victory, won through a diversity of creative tactics from petitions to direct action, legal challenges to sabotage, had a dark shadow. In the same breath that declared the abandonment, came the announcement that the people occupying these 4000 acres of liberated territory, the 300 of us living and farming in 80 different collectives, would be evicted because we dared not just to be against the airport, but its WORLD as well. Since that victorious day, the battle has transformed itself, and is now no longer about a destructive infrastructure project, but about sharing the territory we inhabit. We stopped this place from being covered in concrete, and so it is up to us to take care of its future. The movement therefore maintains that we should have the right to manage the land as a commons (see its declaration, The Six Points for the ZAD). Today, it is this struggle that defines the ZAD of Notre Dame Des Landes. The ZAD was launched in 2009 after a letter (distributed during the first french climate camp here) written by locals inviting people to occupy the zone and squat the abandoned farmhouses. Now the  zone has become one of Europe’s largest laboratories of commoning.  It has bakeries, a pirate radio station, a tractor repair workshop, a brewery, anarchitectural cabins, a banqueting hall, medicinal herb gardens, a rap studio, a dairy, vegetable plots, a weekly newspaper, a flour mill, a library, and even a surrealist lighthouse. It has become a concrete experiment in taking back control over our everyday lives. In 2012 the French state’s attempt to evict the zone to build the airport was fiercely resisted, despite numerous demolitions 40,000 people turned up to rebuild and the government withdrew. The police have not set foot on the zad since, that is, until Monday morning, when at 3am the gendarmes pierced into the zone. On day one they destroyed some of the most beautiful cabins and barns, but yesterday we stopped the cops from getting to the Vraies Rouge, which happens to be where one of our negotiators with the government lives. Destroying the house of those that agreed to sit at the table with you was a strategic mistake. The fabulous ZAD press team used this as the media hook and today we are winning the battle of the story. If enough people get to the zone over the next days we could win the battle on the territory as well.  We need rebel everything, from cooks to medics, fighters to witnesses.  We doubt this rural revolt will be finished before the weekend, when we are also calling people to come and rebuild en masse. Already, solidarity demonstrations have taken place in over 100 cities across France, whilst the  town halls of several cities have been occupied. Zapatistas demonstrated in Chiapas, Mexico, there were actions in Brussels, Spain, Lebanon, London, Poland, Palestine and New York and the underground carpark of the French embassy in Munich was sabotaged. They will never be able to evict our solidarity. Post your reports on twitter @zad_nddl #zad #nddl and to our solidarity action email soutienzad@riseup.net  For more info in english see www.zadforever.blog and watch this video to see what is being destroyed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqrtUkBmv8s

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UT Califas demo ateneo, 3-24-18, 2.00-5.00 p.m.

Compañeras/Compañerxs/ Insurgentas,

We will convene the Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday on March 24 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below and raised by the current conjuncture we find ourselves.

On March 8th -10th, Zapatista women from all five caracoles organized the “First International Political, Artistic, Sports and Cultural Gathering of Women that Struggle” in the caracol of Morelia, Chiapas in coordination with protests and manifestations of struggle that took place across the globe on International Women’s Day. A large banner at the entrance to the Morelia caracol welcomed all the women of the world. A smaller banner announced that men were prohibited. As the sun rose, a Zapatista band played Las Mañanitas, the song traditionally sung to celebrate a birthday, to welcome and celebrate the new beginning. Insurgenta Erika opened with a communiqué, welcoming all the sisters of Mexico and the world; the compañeras of the 6th National and International and of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG); the commandantas,  insurgentas, and the compañeras from the militia, the bases of support, and the autonomous zones; they welcomed all those present and those not present, in struggle, both living and struggling elsewhere who could not come, and those dead. Insurgenta Erika made a point to offer a great embrace as wide as Mexico for the family of Eloisa Vega Castro, who traveled alongside Marichuy and was lost as a result of an accident on February 14th (see, "Palabras a Nombre de las Mujeres Zapatistas al Inicio del Primer Encuentro Internacional, Político, Artístico, Deportivo y Cultural de Mujeres que Luchan").

The opening communiqué read by Insurgenta Erika shared how the designation “insurgenta” is a strategy for when “we do not speak of an individual but of a collective." She identified herself as “Captain Insurgenta of Infantry, accompanied by other insurgents and militia companies of different degrees.” In an act of collective palabra (“our word is collective”) or sharing of the word, Insurgenta Erika laid out a history where the story-teller reflected on each stage of Zapatista women’s history through the rhetorical device of a vast and shifting “I” narrating a collective history: first she was a servant in the houses of others and she died of curable diseases, lack of medical attention, and lack of good food and education—where the doctors would not treat her because she was Indigenous and poor and did not speak Castilla. “But,” she reflected, “we also died for being women, and we died more.” During this time, she began leaving the house at night, to join the clandestine struggle forming in the jungle, telling no one, returning at dawn. The same collective narrator was born and grew up after the start of the war, listening to the soldiers, growing in resistance, leading and commanding battalions. She grew with her compañeras as together they raised schools, clinics, work collectives, and autonomous governments.  But, she warned, “it cost a lot, and it still costs a lot.”

Insurgenta Erika also named how the idea for the women’s encuentro took shape in the space of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG), a space where Indigenous and Zapatista communities come together. The idea began to grow alongside the agreement to put forward Marichuy as spokesperson for the CIG and also as the strategy for her to be the first Indigenous woman candidate was put into action. The idea for the encuentro for women was organized from below—first in meetings and conversations among the collectives and in villages, then in the larger regions and zones, and finally in the caracoles. The idea came from the collectives, where the women shared how they discussed that “we have to do more because we see something that is happening. And what we see, sisters and compañeras, is that they are killing us. And that they kill us because we are women.”

In their analysis, it is the violence and death that is aimed at women through the patriarchal capitalist system that also contributes to a shared experience for women, which is also an experience that produces rage, courage, and struggle and while we are all different (like trees) this also makes us alike and collective (like a forest). “So we see the modern manifestation of this fucking capitalist system. We see that it makes a forest of women from all over the world with its violence. And its death has the face, body, and fucking head of patriarchy.” It is the system of patriarchial capitalism, in which women also participate, that must be destroyed, and no one will do it for us. We cannot demand that this system provide or make available our freedom; we must take responsibility to do it ourselves.

To this end, the opening communiqué offered two options: those gathered could compete with one another to be the most beautiful, the most radical, the most brilliant or most militant and so on, and from here, we could all go home with nothing. Or we could find each other outside the individuating and alienating technologies of subjectivization organized through abstraction and the spectacle, and we could listen and learn from each other. It is, as Anselm Jappe warns, that we must be vigilant of the narcissism that capitalism breeds in its final stages. (see A. Jappe, Writing on the Wall)

The communiqués circulated for this particular gathering include vital information and reflect a collective organization, a complex system of information. There were, for example, details on what to do in an emergency or if someone got sick. There was a recognition that everything would be managed by women, and reminders that the women responsible for the garbage and the toilets, various health and sanitation tasks, as well as the lighting and technology, the food preparation, were also all participants so we should all help take care. It was shared that the lessons and ideas would be transferred back to the villages for those who could not travel to the encuentro, those who stayed home to tend fields and families and other responsibilities. There was always an inclusion of those who could not be there physically; the collective extends beyond those immediately present.

A report from each caracol informed all of us on the condition of Indigenous women’s lives before the Zapatista uprising and the challenges they continue to confront in the present. By evening, a series of theatrical productions continued the spaces of insurgent learning and convivial research: the evening theater show opened with a play to demonstrate how the Zapatista women had organized themselves to prepare for the encuentro and to prepare to host so many guests (by some counts as many as 9,000 guests and 2,000 Zapatista women). The theatrical performance helped illustrate the process of asemblea and the manner in which cargos or community-determined obligations, and tequios, or shared work projects are named, authorized, distributed, and fulfilled; they demonstrated how they organized themselves collectively around work to receive women in struggle from all over the world. It is worth remembering that the Zapatistas have invited us to take seriously the distinction between labor, that is the abstract labor imposed by capitalism, and work, the organized tasks fundamental to community regeneration. It is not an easy distinction to learn and much harder one to claim as we disentangle ourselves from the imposition of capitalist discipline in every aspect of our everyday lives. One theatre piece from the caracol of Oventik had no dialogue and took place against the backdrop of the “Sound of Silence” played on pan flutes. The choreographed sequence bore witness to the violence, the beatings and insults, that Indigenous women faced before the uprising, and how they organized themselves collectively to confront violence as Zapatista women, showing how this was a central part of their struggle as the “Zapatista women that we are.” Another number highlighted the selling and beating of women before the Zapatista time, and another was set in Ciudad Juarez and exposed the violence that women face when they leave their families, communities, and their villages, leaving their children in trash heaps and being traded amongst men as commodities on la frontera where they are beaten, disappeared, murdered. (see, S. González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine) In another, a colorful paper mountain burst open and Zapatistas poured out while dances welcomed all the women of the world. Later, Zapatista women groups from the caracoles, took the stage playing politically reworked corridos of Northern Mexico, including Dignidad y Resistencia from Oventik singing "Si no hay mujer, no hay revolución," (If there is no woman, there is no revolution) and "La Del Moño Colorado." Groups from Columbia and Argentina were invited to the stage as well and played late into the night to cries of  Zapatista afuera! and Bella Ciao!

The days were filled with soccer/football matches; volleyball and basketball, between Zapatista teams and also Zapatistas and encuentro participants. Each field was taken seriously, with a Zapatista woman referee stationed throughout the day and actively officiating at matches. Workshops, performances, and skill shares jostled for space across the mesas or performance areas, as invited guests shared strategies from struggles against extractivism and development’s megaprojects; offered testimonio on gender and sexual violence; performed wailing recollections of genocide in Guatemala; sang and acted out skits about organizing against the hacienda system and colonial regimes; conducted medical training skill shares and convened drawing circles and many other things shared. There was Afro-Columbian guerrilla theatre and murals being painted everywhere, and everywhere there was dancing and chanting.  Moments of critical self-reflection were built into the organization of the encuentro as well, as Zapatista women made available spaces for criticism—tables where ideas for improvement could be logged. Zapatista women and the consejas of the CNI moved in collectives across the hot open spaces, assembled themselves in disciplined formations and also in casual collective formations to listen, watch, participate.

At the same time that the encuentro began to unfold in the caracol of Morelia, Chiapas at the gateway to the Lacandon jungle, only an ocean away in Spain, women filled the streets by the millions, over six million it is reported, in a massive strike contesting the "alliance of patriarchy and capitalism" for International Women’s Day. All over the globe women mobilized to continue in greater force those mobilizations that have a long history as well as those that emerge in more recent formations. (see, Democracy Now, "In Spain, Women Launch Nationwide Feminist Strike Protesting 'Alliance of Patriarchy & Capitalism' ")

These spaces and actions are reflections of the violence and struggles in the current conjuncture. The violence ratchets up everywhere as capitalism implodes; it is unleashed with fury on the bodies of women.  Our comrades from UniTierra Oaxaca pass on what the Indigenous of Southern Mexico forewarn: our last battle may be upon us. At the frontlines are women defending the land: territory and life. These are insurgencies driven by fierce care, a command of fear, and a refusal to abandon collective struggle (see, M. Callahan and A. Paradise, "Fierce Care: Politics of Care in the Zapatista Conjuncture". The encuentro emerges alongside the #MeToo moment, the #Timesup moment in the wake of Weinstein’s prolific violence. It occurs as prisoners refuse silence against violations endured in carceral regimes as they document and stand up to violent gendered attacks by correctional officers in prisons that Alan Mills calls "the worst distillations of toxic masculinty." (see V. Law,  #MeToo Behind Bars; J. Wang, Carceral Capitalism) This includes the recently filed lawsuit by women and gender non-conforming plaintiffs housed and formerly housed at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. This moment also walks with Marichuy, as she exposes not only corruption, but the charade that is electoral “democracy” organized through the current nation state. It is reflected in the memory of Berta Cáceres of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), her life and struggle kept alive in the banners and spaces of struggle of the Morelia encuentro as well. It lives in Standing Rock and Unist'ot'en and all the places where women organize to collectively defend and regenerate life.

“We don’t ask you to come fight for us, just like we won’t go fight for you. All that we ask is that you keep fighting, don’t surrender, don’t sell out, and don’t stop being women who struggle.” In the Zapatista women's closing communiqué, a letter was read aloud from Ayotzinapa: don’t leave us. The bad government wants to close the case and leave us in oblivion. A small candle was illuminated with the reminder: if you feel alone, afraid, or that the fight is hard, light it again in your heart and take it to the dams, the disappeared, the murdered, the violated, the exploited, the migrants, take it to the dead. And tell every one of them that you are going to continue the fight for truth and for justice. And then we can say to each other, “Bueno. Now we are going to begin to build the world we deserve and need.” (see, "Palabras de las Mujeres Zapatistas en la Clausura del Primer Encuentro Internacional, Político, Artístico, Deportivo y Cultural de Mujeres que Luchan").

In closing two proposals were put forward for agreement: that we organize ourselves collectively in our own worlds to study, analyze, discuss, and if we can, agree to name those responsible for the pains that we have. And second, that we meet again the next year to convene spaces for women in struggle, but in our own spaces, according to our own ways.

South Bay and North Bay crew

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