Category Archives: General

General

VACARON AL PRESIDENT, VIRUZ, 11/10/2020

The attempted coup d’etat by members of congress in Perú has erupted into street clashes, and the resignation of one of the coup’s orchestrators – interim president Manuel Merino.  This after two demonstrators were killed by police.

Perú swore in it’s third president in a week today, Francisco Sagasti.

While some are calling for the constitution to be scrapped for a new one, others are preparing to attack and defend themselves from a State they know never existed for anything more than exploitation.

Read the translated statement authored by Viruz and shared by Ediciones Yana Unancha on November 10, 2020

https://confrontacionesblog.noblogs.org/files/2020/11/Vacaron-Al-President-English-Translation.pdf

General, Translation

Better Times, Círculo de Comunistas Esotéricos, 2019

“It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years!”

On October 13th, 2019 Chilean President Sebastián Piñera declared ” in the midst of this turbulent Latin America, our country is a true oasis.”  Days later students in Santiago de Chile kicked off protests against a 30 peso metro fare increase.

“Evadir, no pagar, otra forma de luchar” (“Evade, don’t pay, another form of struggle”) the battle cry in a city where the costs of circulation are on par with major US cities, but wages lag far behind. Combustion.

After 30 years, marked by the brutal US backed dictatorship and neoliberal rule, Chile “woke up”. The impact of the explosion swelled the wave of rebellion sweeping the globe in 2019. From Hong Kong to Quito, Algiers to Paris, and  into 2020 where global Black rebellion has rocked the foundations of the American Empire; it seems we’ve reached a stage of constant rebellion, the question to answer is if it can happen everywhere at the same time.

Anti-blackness, the pandemic, the looming global economic crisis and climate disaster make ongoing rebellion a certainty.  There’s no going back, no restructuring of capitalism to buy peace, and we offer this translated text by the Círculo de Comunistas Esotéricos – a collective in Chile – precisely because it questions and critiques in way that is necessary if we’re ever going to overcome the limits of our struggles.  It is also one of our aims as a project to amplify & translate texts and ideas that might not otherwise reach radicals locally and beyond.

In San José liberal recuperation of the black rebellion was swift and shows it will take a great effort not just to uproot the tendencies and ideas that poison this place and local struggle, but also to find the measures and ideas that make communism & the abolition of capitalist totality possible.

There is much to rethink and imagine, and while the pull of a multitude of crises compel call us to constant action, we recognize the importance of theory and study in order to push past the defensive struggles keeping us on the backfoot, while avoiding ideas that perpetuate the social relations that hold capitalism together (anti-blackness, colonialism, gender to name a few). Let’s get free!

https://confrontacionesblog.noblogs.org/files/2020/11/Better-times.pdf

Big thanks to the homies Contraedicciones in $hile who shared this text with us.

General

Submission II: Teach their names

The Journey to Defunding Police in San Jose Unified

By Katherine Leung, art teacher

Spend one afternoon in a Hoover Middle School art class and you’ll hear immediately, exactly how much the police impacts low-income youth. In art classes, students sit at large communal tables. Tall ceilings, an industrial warehouse feel, free range of art supplies, project-based learning, and a hands-off constructivist teaching approach mean that students are talking – all the time. 

 

The first year I taught art at Hoover, I assigned homework. Students had to make five free draw sketches and turn it in every Monday. Within a year I scrapped that idea. Homework completion was very low, a typical experience of any teacher that assigns homework in a school with similar demographics. Whenever I asked students why they couldn’t get work done, they shared stories of arrests that happened outside their apartment complex, incarcerated family members that aren’t able to help them, court dates, and ongoing fear of ICE raids. While the media may minimize police violence, the effects of policing on Black and Latinx students and their ability to perform at school is all too real. Student fear and disrespect of police is manifested through acting out – pulling fire alarms and prank calling 911. In art class, their distrust of police is seen in artwork. “Fuck the police” isn’t just a cultural reference, it is a motto to many and a recurring theme in art projects. Street artists, like Keith Haring, is a favorite artist in the curriculum, because of his multiple run-ins with the law while peacefully creating art and stark anti-police symbolism present in his artwork. Anti-police sentiment permeates language, as well. Students use the term “cop” to refer to people they find unfavorable. The two School Resource Officers employed on campus have not fostered any positive relationships with students.

Schools with a larger population of Black and Latinx youth are more likely to have more School Resource Officers (SRO), whereas predominantly white schools in affluent neighborhoods may not house a single officer. There is growing evidence of SRO ineffectiveness in working with students. Seventeen people were shot to death in Parkland, Florida, while an SRO remained outside. Since 2015, video has captured an unarmed Black 16 year old girl being dragged down stairs in a Chicago high school; a Black 11 year old girl being wrestled in a New Mexico middle school; a Black 15 year old girl slammed to the floor in a South Carolina high school; a Black 17 year old boy in a headlock, a Black 14 year old boy punched in the face in a Pennsylvania high school all perpetrated by SROs. A 2018 Advancement Project and the Alliance for Educational Justice report found that there have been more than 60 incidents of police violence in schools from November 2010 to March 2018. A 2018 Washington Post analysis of nearly 200 incidents of gun violence on campus found only two times where a school resource officer successfully intervened in a shooting. It is no longer a case of a “few bad apples” but a highly documented phenomenon seen at various levels, in every state.

SROs actively contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. The United States has the highest number of incarcerated individuals worldwide. Black and Latinx students are more likely to be subjected to harsher punishments and more likely to be disciplined due to adultification. Districts “around the country have found that youth are being referred to the justice system at increased rates and for minor offenses like disorderly conduct” (Justice Policy Institute). After hearing countless incidents with the police and experiencing police brutality just blocks away from our school, two other BIPOC teachers and I decided to bring the idea of a defunding police resolution to our teachers union. 

In the summer of 2020, the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) used tear gas and rubber bullets on protestors. Many people were wounded and a teenage boy hit in the head with a projectile, following a long string of controversy regarding police brutality in various neighborhoods of San Jose. Community activist Derrick Sanderlin was shot with a rubber bullet by police and will suffer lifelong physical health problems. Respected and seen as a mentor to many, Sanderin worked holding implicit bias trainings of new police recruits for many years. We worked with him to write our Derrick Sanderlin Resolution to defund the police, as he worked with two neighboring districts, Alum Rock Union and East Side Union, the two other major school districts in San Jose, in successfully ending their contracts with SJPD. 

On June 11th, during the wake of the George Floyd protests, San Jose teachers and school board members worked together to pass a Black Lives Matter resolution in the district. The resolution acknowledged structural and institutional racism, mourned the unnecessary loss of black lives, recognized the experiences of black people, and called for “committing to work for change, with a charge to instill in our youth a belief that every person deserves to live with dignity, be valued for their inherent humanity, and be treated ethically.” With that precedent, we authored the Derrick Sanderlin Resolution with the help of ten other members of the Equity Team of the San Jose Teachers Association, and brought it to local teachers union, San Jose Teachers Association (SJTA) at representative council assembly. Representative Council is SJTA’s police-making body, made up of 110 members, elected to two-year terms by the teachers at each school in the district. The Resolution specifically calls for the rerouting of the $1.38 million typically allocated to SJPD in a SJUSD Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) “toward student support positions and programs such as counselors, school-based social workers, psychologists, restorative justice practitioners, or other mental or behavioral health professionals, as the budget supports, to meet the needs of students. It also advocates for the Superintendent to launch, by no later than August 20th, 2020, an inclusive, community-driven process – involving parents, students, teachers, school administrators, student support staff, San José Teachers Association, and other community partners – for completing a revised District safety plan with strategies for enhancing student learning, safety, and well-being within the District” and to stop the renewal of the contract with SJPD. On July 15th, the Derrick Sanderlin resolution was approved unanimously in SJTA.

Interest in the Derrick Sanderlin resolution reached all corners of San Jose. A corresponding petition on Change.org has received over 1000 signatures in support of police-free schools. A community coalition of parents, teachers, students, and organizers organically formed, called the San Jose Unified Equity Coalition, inviting in anyone open to discussions of student safety. Youth-led organizations such as Silicon Valley Debug and San Jose Strong are in strong attendance. A letter on behalf of organizations in support of defunding the police includes supporters such as Silicon Valley NAACP, ACLU of Northern California, National Center for Youth Law, San Jose Strong, Showing up for Racial Justice Sacred Heart, Together We Will San Jose, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte: Kids in Common, Amigos de Guadalupe Center for Justice and Empowerment, Change SSF, Fresh Lifelines for Youth, and more. Community members demanded the Derrick Sanderlin resolution be discussed at the San Jose Unified school board meetings on July 23rd and August 6th. As a result of union advocacy and endless letters, public comments, and statements from students, parents, teachers, and community organizations, San Jose Unified finally held a Special Session board meeting on August 25th to discuss the role of SJPD. Against the community wishes, there was no formal talk of the Derrick Sanderlin resolution, which had been sent numerous times to each board member by many community members. 

 

With the Special Session agenda set only twenty four hours before the start of the actual meeting, the teachers union president and the three teachers involved in the creation of the Derrick Sanderlin resolution pressed the board about the previously promised presentation time. We finally received five minutes of board meeting time just twelve hours before the meeting. Prior to our verbal-only presentation, over seventy community members spoke for the allotted one hour each in support of ending the MOU with SJPD. Among the commenters passionate about defunding SROs were students who witnessed SROs verbally abusing students of color; students recounting distinct racial profiling in who the SROs at their site choose to engage;  a mother who’s black son was targeted, wrongly accused and taken away in handcuffs at school; a public defender whose life’s work involves helping youth that entered the school-to-prison pipeline far too early; supporters that read stories of traumatized youth who wished to remain anonymous; and white activists that acknowledge the privilege of only having to hear such stories. A recurring theme was the undeniable violence at the hands of police nationwide, and for once, we are at a pivotal moment to end the presence in our 41 schools. 

 

We were not met without dissenters. Just the day before the Special Session, a public letter on behalf of twelve principals was went to the board in support of SROs. It stated that “when our students are alleged to have committed a crime, our campus officers are trained to work with school staff and parents as they treat students appropriately as kids” – which begs the question – what crimes do students “commit”  that teachers, campus supervisors, counselors, and peer mediators, and administrators cannot already handle? The letter states that “without campus officers, schools must rely on calling 911” – which is what schools are already doing. During the Special Session, the superintendent revealed that SJUSD made exactly 611 calls for police in the last year. The letter ends with “removing officers from our campuses will create a direct and immediate threat to the safety of our students and staff” but ignores the voices of students and staff of color who have already publicly declared time and time again that policers do not make them feel safe. Does it have to be an incident recorded on SJUSD security cameras, specifically, in order to change their mind? Does it have to be an incident involving their own child in order for them to see the problem? Do Black and Brown students not matter? 

 

The key writer of the letter was a white principal notoriously vocal against teachers who are high-risk or caretakers of high-risk choice to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic school reopening, an individual that clearly enjoys exercising power at the expense of students and teachers of color. Of the only twelve who spoke in favor of keeping police, two were retired police officers themselves. One was a school secretary that stated that police officers helped her this morning get “homeless” people sleeping in a student-less school site just earlier that morning (amidst record evictions and job loss). One was a student who recounted friendships with police officers while at school. One was a non-union teacher that attempted to write his own letter against the SJTA resolution, a thirteen page manifesto that shares his joyous experience at police academy, later revealing his family’s traumatic experience as a result of social unrest in Ireland. His overarching argument is criticizing the resolution’s appeal to popularity and suggests “building stronger, positive relationship” with SJPD despite the forty years opportunity to do exactly that. SJTA members replied with open invitations for discussion and debate, which he ignored. As a non-paying non-union member, this teacher still benefits from union protection such as paid leave, instructional minute and class size caps, and the catastrophic leave bank. Of the signatures in his manifesto, almost half remain anonymous, confronting the good-natured intent of police-supporters, educators that believe colorblindness and power blindness are an accurate lens to view the world. As idealized as a collaborative and productive relationship between police and schools are, the growing accounts of brutality, abuse, and killing on behalf of the police on specifically people of color can no longer be justified. 

 

The Special Session went on for three hours, with a lengthy presentation on behalf of the police, citing just how friendly they really are, the meeting concluded with board members deciding to put out a student survey on their opinion of police. After an endless stream of online surveys regarding school reopening this summer, conducted only in English, it will further disenfranchise the groups that were not present at the Special Session: people scared of being targeted, immigrants, people of color that aren’t familiar with the formal language to navigate board rooms, and most importantly, children. The president of the board stated not to “personalize” this moment as “this is not a black and white issue” multiple times during the duration of the meeting. 

 

While I am honored to be representing my students,  elevating their issues that they only feel comfortable mentioning in art class, I am worried that our greatest victory will only be in the teachers union, and not in the school district. A district as large, with colorblind leadership, with numerous instances of corruption and power at the top, may not have the tools to see their own problems, especially if the problems plague a group that is seen as disposable. As a teacher, I will do as much as I can in stopping the school-to-prison pipeline within my classroom. It’s a shame that we came so close, only to be so far away in abolishing police in our district. My heart aches as another video is released of yet another crazed officer brandishing power on a helpless student – as a teacher, for all of humanity. 

General

Against Peace Police & Liberal Moralizing in San Jo

Calls for nonviolence as anti-Black racist expressions

Almost three months to the date of May 29th, unnamed folks hit up San Jose mayor’s house, Sam Liccardo. Anti-police terror and pro-Black lives messages were written all over his house.

After the tagging of Liccardo’s house, his bootlicker neighbors quickly took to their knees to clean up and condemn the taggers for their “violent” means of expression. The “bad protester” trope was uttered and spread through the local media promptly—this remains the oldest tactic of the nonviolent (racist) self moralizing crowd.

Some of Liccardo’s neighbors and online supporters even pointed to the fact that he has a Black Lives Matter flag that hangs in his front window as a sign of his commitment to “good protesting.” This can only be true if you ignore the fact that this man is a millionaire with power over the murderous San Jose PD and a staunch supporter of Silicon Valley’s gentrification & death policies.

 

Yet, again the peace police jumped to the rescue to say that they too condemn violence, as if paint on a millionaires house equated to the murders of folks at the hands of the state. This argument is disingenuous at best and deeply white supremacist at worst.

 

Vicky Osterweil says it best in Chapter 7 of In Defense of Looting, “Nonviolence puts the entire moral weight of politics onto the backs of the oppressed. It takes the history of white supremacy and settler colonialism for granted and says that the responsibility for changing the violent nature of that history lies entirely with the people who are currently being crushed by that violence…”

 

“Nonviolence turns this historical accounting upside down. The nonviolent worldview, focusing entirely on protestors and not on police, ultimately obscures the responsibilities of the state, racists, and fascists, because it frames their much more extreme repressive violence as ‘natural’ and normal.”

“Nonviolence lets the police, and the systems they defend, off the hook.”

 

General

Against Apathy and Resignation in San Jo

What comes now after we’ve protested and signed hella petitions?

 

Unaffiliated rebels in Kenosha, Seattle, and Minneapolis have answered this question clearly with decisive action against the holy trinity of capitalism; cops, property, and prisons.

 

 

Here at home, DA Jeff Rosen, SJPD & Santa Clara Co Sherrifs have coalesced to maintain the racist order as hundreds face evictions & misery in the fucking wealthiest place on Earth. They are enforcers of white supremacist violence in these occupied lands.

 

 

These cops & prosecutors are at the heart of keeping order in Santa Clara Co. Think through the courageous Main Jail hunger strike that is being quashed by the County before it could spread or the many times cops have arrested folks for protesting Google or the countless lives taken by SJPD.

 

 

In this Valley, the monuments to white supremacy are still up and they’re listed as San Jose City Hall, Santa Clara Co Main Jail, PayPal, Zoom, and those ugly ass looking condos on San Pedro St.

 

 

The question remains for us, what to do to fight for a life worth living?

 

Let every burning prison & precinct light the way towards our abolitionist horizon.

General, Submissions

Submission I

Submission I

Here is the first submission from our first open call. This one is from the compx @vezael who has been vibing with our project for a minute. Follow and support their work! ????????

On the pics

“Firstly, i have a series i just made commenting on people disregarding the recent uprisings as lacking ideological basis or whatever, or inversely about people who try to impose their beliefs or ideology onto the uprisings.

The “no justice no peace” piece is kind of just a depiction of the kinds of things that were taking place during the beginning of the protests here in san diego.

The art gentrification graphic is just my response to the idea of a ‘radical art gallery’ or of putting art on this pedestal in the world of radical politics.”

Support our fundraiser for San Jose folks struggling.

Essays, General

3. ON RETREAT: AGAINST THE NPIC

 

“Recent experiences have shown the effectiveness of using money to win popular support and further the interests and goals of units conducting counterinsurgency operations… 
When used effectively, and with an end state in mind, money can be an effective means to mobilize public support for the counterinsurgent’s cause and further alienate the insurgents from the population.”
-US Army, “Tactics in Counterinsurgency,” FM 3-24.2
“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.”
-Assata Shakur
This is the third of a three part series. In the first, we discuss the importance of understanding gentrification as the grounding of all struggles in the so-called Silicon Valley. In the second, we talk about gentrification and the police. Here, we discuss the connection between gentrification and non-profits. 
____________________________________________________
So much of the world around us is consumed by the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). This non-governmental but in many ways state-aligned sector launders stolen wealth from tech companies that litter these occupied territories known as Silicon Valley. From the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the smallest non-profit, much of their existence relies not on protest but on the crushing of dissent. Tracing the money back to its stolen origins will be a longer endeavor we will have to take on but for now we will focus on the most visible aspects of their repression. Charity in Silicon Valley represents the repressive wing of capital and the state with a benevolent face.

The Military-Industrial Complex refers to the connection between the armed forces, defense contractors, and the state as they collaborate to wring profits from endless war. In the same way, the Bay Area Non-Profit Industrial Complex is a collaboration between government, non-profits, and the tech firms that fund them to ensure the continuance of a bankrupt social peace as displacement and exploitation continue apace. 

Take for example the recent protests in downtown San Jose calling for police to be defunded and a reinvestment in existing social services. The initial rupture of May 29th as our comrade has detailed in their report back Revolt and Recuperation: Avenging George Floyd, signaled a break with the existing liberal contract of charity for the poor and safety for the rich. Unaffiliated rebels took to the streets in a clear rebuke of state orders and rehearsed protest by non-profits but the aftermath would see these organizations restore their grip on protest. 

One of the most visible examples of this co-optation of righteous prole indignation was the commissioning of murals in the downtown area in partnership with non-profit Local Color. Murals with Black Lives Matter conveying support for the  protest were painted in the weeks following the battle of May 29th. Local Color even took to social media and proudly thanked the property management companies in the area for allowing them to paint on plywood erected to protect property from looting. Before taking lead on allowing us to paint and not paint our rage, Local Color consistently partners with the San Jose Downtown Association, notorious for supporting the gentrification of downtown and surrounding areas. What is the possibility of localized revolt when so much of our opposition has been co-opted and repackaged for the consumption of the yuppie gentrifier? Are organizations like Local Color aiding in the destruction of a future that appears to go extinct everyday? If we have to ask our overseers for permission to express our rage, are we really confronting the material conditions we live in or are we decorating their walls for the next downtown promotional brochure?

The city is filled with non-profits that depend on the stolen wealth of Silicon Valley to run their organizations. It is no coincidence then, that in December of 2018, the San Jose city council voted to sell public land to Google while non-profits remained largely silent. There was public outrage but much of it was autonomous organizing by grassroots groups like Serve the People San Jose and not the non-profits that claim to speak for dispossessed proles in the city. Almost two years later, some non-profits now openly celebrate the coming of the Google campus to downtown San Jose. Organizations like Working Partnerships USA have taken the task to attempt to convince proles – people on the Eastside and surrounding neighborhoods on the imagined benefits of displacement and gentrification. Talk about selling snake oil. 

There are political differences, and then there is treason to the class.   

To understand their conspicuous silence and mumbled lies, you just have to follow the money. The list of big non-profit donors in the Silicon Valley is a laundry list of the people who are actually fucking up the Silicon Valley. The Sobrato Family Fund is the philanthropic arm of a literal real estate firm. The hulking Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a “donor-advised fund,” which means the tech companies who launder their charitable contributions through, get to specify exactly how their money is used—and under what conditions. 

So it’s the case that Somos Mayfair, the east side non-profit fighting for anti-displacement policies, is funded by the exact people fueling displacement here and empire globally: eBay, Google, Intel. Sacred Heart gets money from Adobe and Google and HP.  

All those people fighting displacement are funded by the displacers. The people critiquing police brutality are paid by the people police brutality protects. It’s not to say that everyone working at these non-profits is a monster. It’s to say that there are strings attached, and that power-hungry corporations don’t turn into saints when it’s time for a few charitable donations. They fund the resistance they want to control.

A few years ago, proles in the Bay were blocking tech busses and knocking the Google glasses off techies in bars. Big Tech went and bought themselves a more manageable opposition with some investments in “social justice” and now our “leaders” tell us to wait, to ask, to beg.
 
There’s a long list of non-profits that devour the energy of movements only to repeat the tired script of voting and civic participation. As all-encompassing as their authority on dissent appears, this is a small universe of  technocrats with little influence outside their circles of happy hour buddies. Just days before the May 29th rebellion, Working Partnerships sent their subscribers a call to attend a car rally demanding the city do more for workers affected by the virus but the lack of social media activity indicates there was little engagement by proles in the city. As power goes, we know that the lack of participants in their rally doesn’t mean that they do not have access to the local political class; indeed, they are bound by shared interests. 
The May 29th rebellion sent a chilling message to the local political class, SJPD, and the non-profits that do more to crush dissent than provide the direct material aid proles need. Far from feeling despair, we see this rupture as the unveiling of what we had suspected for years but had not been able to articulate yet. For these non-profits, there is nowhere to hide their commitment and investments in the status quo—city grants aren’t awarded to those setting dumpsters on fire. But what if those lit dumpsters can wring more concessions from the politicos than any combination of picket signs and petition signatures ever could? Even the liberals’ treasured votes were won by prole rebellion; Congress only got the nerve to pass the Voting Rights Act after Detroit burned.
Our struggle is not the same as theirs and we aren’t looking for an alliance. In fact, we’ve never needed saving or charity, we want everything and that is not a compromise we are willing to make. Against the non-profit industrial complex; for a praxis of autonomous leaderless confrontations. Against those who would turn our rage and blood into grants and press releases; against retreat. In the pointed words of Dylan Rodriguez, “…perhaps it is time that we formulate critical strategies that fully comprehend the NPIC as the institutionalization of a relation of dominance and attempt to disrupt and transform the fundamental structures and principles of a white supremacist US civil society, as the US racists state.”

 

 

– a prole with thoughts of liberation

Essays, General

1. ON BANISHMENT: AGAINST THE GENTRIFIERS

This is the first piece in a series on gentrification. Part two is here. 

———————————————————————————

Let’s talk about who the police serve.

Yes, they protect the institution of whiteness, ever since they got rebranded from the fugitive slave patrols. And yes, they protect the capitalists who write the laws and the prestige of the entire imperial apparatus that carries them out.

But to ground our struggles, we have to be specific. Because in today’s so-called Silicon Valley, there is a force so strong it pulls on every piece of the terrain of struggle.

The truth is we are being decimated. Our neighborhoods, our communities, all the pieces of our lives that make them worth living. Every day, more of us are priced out—to Arizona, to Idaho, to the Central Valley, to the streets. The rents keep rising, the pay stays the same, and there isn’t enough money to go around.

But what if the problem isn’t a lack of money, but an excess? Because San José isn’t a poor city. Actually, if you look at how much money the people who live here have, it’s the richest city in the United States. And the people who move in are always richer than the people they replace.

Gentrification is the process by which working people—proles—get forced out of entire neighborhoods and cities, displaced by a rising cost of living. Landlords keep raising the rents because there are richer and whiter people who can afford to pay them, as long as they get rid of us first. In some cities, those new richer replacements work for big banks or universities. In the “Silicon Valley,” they mostly work as techies.

There was a time when big business needed us around. They needed our parents and grandparents to move to the cities as workers for microchip factories and canneries. Our ancestors were promised that in exchange for their labor, they could call a part of these cities their homes. The worst parts, true, but a part all the same. So it happened that many of them gave up their languages and cultures and identities as part of the deal, that in exchange for all this they would be able to rent a tiny piece of America. And then these cities became our homes, too.

Or so we were told. But the factories are gone now, and the deal was betrayed. The big capitalists don’t need masses of sweatshop workers making microchips in Silicon Valley, because they found that they could pay sweatshop workers in Bangladesh and China and Ciudad Juárez even less.

What makes big business the most bucks today is for us to be gentrified out and for the winners of what they call the “New Economy” to take our place—the bankers, the techies, and the yuppies who are the ones making the real money for the big companies. Their New Economy might have a use for us cleaning their houses or serving their food, but it would just as well see us dying on the streets.

And since it’s big tech making the real money in San José, it’s big tech calling the shots. Combined, big tech firms like Google and Apple have over a trillion dollars, not in investments or stock market value but in actual liquid cash stored in their offshore bank accounts.

They’re more powerful and wealthy than most countries, so ruling in a single city like San José is nothing to them.

So we can’t talk about politics and power in our city without talking about gentrification.

We can’t talk about police brutality without understanding the gentrifiers it protects.

Big tech and their accomplices are so powerful that in today’s Silicon Valley, they even fund the “social justice” non-profits that you’d think would oppose them.

We don’t point out the power of our enemies to inspire hopelessness. Hopeless and helpless is how they want us to feel. They want us to believe that it’s our fault we can’t afford the rent, that maybe if we’d been born richer or whiter or got our papers right or hadn’t dropped out then we too could afford to stay, too.

They want us hopeless because the hopeless only pray for salvation and wait. We are done waiting. We know it can’t go on, and we know that even in the so-called “Silicon Valley” there are more of us than there are of them. We know that we live in revolutionary times, and we know what home and liberation are worth.

We only point to the power of our enemies, then, to have a clear view of the field of combat. We point to the reality of our situation so that we and others like us might find our strength. We know that what little we’ve been given in their shit society was won by the struggle of those who came before us, and we’re glad to have you with us as we fight for everything else.

– An anonymous prole

Part two is this series is here.

General

REVOLT AND RECUPERATION: AVENGING GEORGE FLOYD

The George Floyd solidarity protest, and battle with police, in San José, CA on Friday May 29th, 2020 is distinguished from subsequent demonstrations in San José by its character of revolt and traces its origins to the uprising spurred by Black Youth in Minneapolis. These qualities allowed the conflict to ascend to unprecedented levels of violence for the city. By the time of the protest, the third precinct in Minneapolis had been burned and Black rebellion had spread to cities across the so-called USA. Our thoughts on this uprising, and a following action on June 5th, provide the impetus for this project, Confrontaciones.

I: Revolt

On the 29th, a multi-racial & intergenerational assembly of outraged people come together in front of City Hall. Many are young Black folks and non-Black POC, none have any obvious affiliation with locally known activist organizations. Anonymous flyers for the rally keep many liberal elements at home over concerns related to security. As a result, standard protest programs, podiums, and speeches stay home too. Chants of “Say his name! George Floyd!” and “No Justice! No Peace!” crescendo into a march weaving through several main arteries in the downtown area, immobilizing traffic, and culminating in a blockade of the 101 and 280 freeways. Law enforcement is unable to mobilize a response for close to an hour.

On the 101, car windows are smashed when some travelers attempt to force their way through the blockade, or step out of vehicles to confront demonstrators. Anyone bold enough to challenge the crowd sees their rage exceeded by youth who weren’t having it. Tensions briefly flare over the political logic of the blockade; these critiques fail to recognize the protest as a fierce response to fuck shit up (after the murder of another Black life), rather than a political reaction. SJPD learns this when demonstrators exiting the freeway confront & surround them on the overpass to smash up patrol car windows. Roughly 45 minutes after spilling into the freeway the protest had begun the march back to City Hall despite proclamations that, “This is San José, they ain’t goin to do shit!” On the way, there is a discernable sense that things are beginning to wind down. People are overheard saying “we gotta go to Oakland tonight!” (to an evening protest). A Black youth from Oakland admits “I didn’t know San Jose got down like this. After what they (Minneapolis PD) did I couldn’t wait. I had to come here too.” But the day is just getting started and the crowd that regrouped at City Hall is met by tear gas, rubber bullets, and an LRAD, barbarity which shocks the public into a movement to defund the SJPD. Joyous cheers erupt for a young rebel who braves a flurry of rubber bullets to throw back a tear gas canister. At this stage, in what felt like a lifetime since the start of the battle, there are almost no voices in the rebel ranks promoting “peace.” A bystander recording events on their phone takes a rubber bullet to the eye; nearby another is vomiting after inhaling tear gas. Throughout the battle people tend to each other’s wounds and share much needed snacks and water. Nearby, a UPS truck load is expropriated by rebels while dumpster fires are used to slow the police advance. Any who are present, whether engaged symbolic forms of protest (like taking knees) or willingly fighting the pigs, are attacked. For several hours, police effectively wear down demonstrators. Rebel measures – dumpster fires, projectiles and property damage – give pause to the highly militarized police, but are unable to sustain fighting. In total 38 arrests are reported while hundreds of complaints are filed against SJPD. Officer Jared Yuen goes viral for being unable to hide taking delight in brutalizing unarmed people, and SJPD’s own implicit bias trainer, Derrick Sanderlin, becomes national news after rubber bullet fire leaves the 27 year old needing surgery and uncertain if he will be able to have children.

II. Retreat

A week later, Friday June 5th, thousands descend on city hall. So many attend they spill onto the street for lack of space even in the vast area in front of the government offices. Noticeably, there are no police in sight for such a large assembly (In the days after the battle of May 29th police presence had been glaring at all times and a curfew was put in effect but ended Thursday June 4th, a day before this demonstration). This time organizations are conspicuous as hell and the amphitheater in front of the building acts as a platform for speeches. Once again a multi-racial crowd gathers, but in contrast to the week prior it is a gathering satisfied with acting out non-violent liberal protest forms. We have returned to what Frantz Fanon calls “hypnotherapy of the people.” (1) The protest “leaders,” standing apart from the crowd, lead demonstrators in an orderly march which climaxes with a moment of silence and kneeling at the police station, while making no mention of the county jail imprisoning Black and Brown folks just hundreds of feet away. The march route leads through First street, a major pathway for morning travel north where many corporate offices are situated, and a path for the public rail line, but no trolleys ever come through. Police maintain distance at all times and are never really in sight.

The account of June 5th is important to the context of the preceding week’s battle because we can draw a couple conclusions from it. One, that SJPD adjusted its approach after a week of scrambling to justify officer conduct, now adopting a strategy of de-escalation by withdrawal while simultaneously repositioning repression as defensive or reactive. Two, we can also confidently deduce that some level of coordination was taking place between the city and protest managers (i.e. the rail wasn’t running). And finally, the insertion of these protest managers “conducting” the march exerted a moderating effect on the action of the 5th. A masked up crowd can light up a dumpster. A non-profit leader who applied for a demonstration permit would never promote such a thing.

From the perspective of the social justice managers and conductors and professional campaigners, this later march was certainly a success. A decentralized, ungoverned sprawl of an action was replaced by an orderly procession to an approved site of protest. There was no violence, no looting, no conflict at all.

III. Residence

How did we go from street fighting to asking police or the mayor to take a knee? From decentralized mobilizations of solidarity to weekly protest schedules? And why is this backpedal significant? For starters, the pandemic appears to be here to stay and continues infecting the most vulnerable among us and forcing millions into economic precarity. At every turn the government responds with ineffective measures, and loses trust and legitimacy as the guarantor of health & safety. In this age of technological innovation and abundance, it might seem ridiculous for the whole thing to collapse under a tsunami screaming “ACAB”, but for the hungry person who cannot take refuge from a deadly virus, such abstractions are meaningless. The next wave of struggle is imminent. When the time comes, how can we foster and widen local revolt? Answers, action schemas, require an examination of where we are.

The self-proclaimed capital of the Silicon Valley and 10th largest city in the US, San Jose, rests at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area on stolen Tamyen Ohlone Land. From Indigenous Ohlone resistance against Spanish colonization, to labor struggles in the orchard canneries and later electronics industries, the region has been shaped by courageous examples of struggle. However, it is commonly understood, even within the Bay, if you want to get down, you go to the Town (Oakland) or the City (SF). Recent years have witnessed a rise in subversion, including a near-riot in protest of a Donald Trump rally in 2016 and grassroots efforts to derail the construction of a Google mega-campus, but the events of May 29th surprised many, due in large part to tech-funded non-profit hegemony in the city’s political culture. Social justice and community organizing are largely the domain of these institutions.

Known for its immense wealth to those outside, the Silicon Valley is in fact home to severe inequality and unaffordable living costs causing rising homelessness, gentrification & mass displacement from the region. There are two Silicon Valleys, one where proles sustain themselves holding multiple jobs and cramming into scarce housing and another where wealthy elites prosper in an environment homogenizing in perpetuity to accommodate their desires. These racialized groups tell the story of white supremacy, a contradiction of the liberal & diverse outward facade the city enjoys.

Despite San Jose’s reputation as safe big city with crime rates on the decline for decades, San Jose’s Police are responsible for the most fatal encounters of any Bay Area city since 2015 (2) – they have committed several murders of unarmed people that remain unacknowledged by city leadership even as they join in symbolic gestures of solidarity for people killed by police in other cities. The police are among the highest paid public employees in the city as city government and private partners are driving expansive efforts to redevelop and urbanize swaths of the city’s sprawling suburbs to attract big investors in the midst of a crushing housing crisis.

Those most affected by local outcomes are excluded from participation in any cardboard cutout democracy by virtue of being too poor and too busy, and when their hardship puts any kind of damper on all the prosperity it is police who sweep homeless encampments, enforce evictions and terrorize criminalized POC. Folks with the most to gain from the destruction of the status quo are being expelled from region and the economy altogether. Clinging to programs developed a century ago (with a vital class-conscious working class in mind) to confront these trends is a failure to recognize this reversal of industrial organization and a path to defeat.

Why? In Silicon Valley, assembly lines are gone; workers now labor for unnamed bosses with the click of an app button—it’s hailed as the gig economy. The time is always right for struggle and those among us speaking of reform or cultivating revolution through radical literacy employ the tongue of the state and privilege. Indignation against the current order is abundant and plain to see in the heightened frequency at which we move from uprising to uprising, so the task of the radical milieu in San José, as well as abroad, isn’t vanguardist work to create revolt or enlist the masses, but to develop and disseminate measures for our collective liberation. When the tension Power carefully manages – through minor concessions bearing major names – to limit social unrest. When it reaches its breaking point, we must be at the ready to provide the extra push.

 

IV: Revolution

In the post-mortem of May 29, the police chief issued statements describing “an insurrection of pre-planned violence the likes of which I have not seen in my time wearing this uniform.” It is a blatant distortion of reality from a man scrambling to rationalize the barbarity unleashed on protestors by his goons, but one admitting fragility, even as it dodges accountability. The battle of May 29th exceeded even the most optimistic prognosis of what would unfold that day and yet could’ve gone further, because while SJPD demonstrated it was on unfamiliar ground, the dominance of non-violent liberal protest culture in San José also reared its head. Report backs from other cities have communicated how diverse tactics can overwhelm police and confuse them. Individuals acting autonomously protected by the power of the protest have shown the potential to raze cities, and when reflecting on the battle that took place in San José, this potential appeared to be within reach. Without question the police and state have realized this and will reorganize to emerge stronger than before.

From the perspective of someone who wants to see this anti-Black world come apart, we must ask what non-violence truly means. Does it mean ensuring that our actions don’t tarnish the windows and newspaper boxes of the corporations? Or, given the mechanized brutality of our opponents, does true non-violence mean taking whichever tactics pose the greatest threat to the police and the empire? What sort of non-violence leaves the system intact and us kneeling outside the headquarters of our enemies? The rebellion of May 29th shut down our city as was relayed to militants around the country and the world. From this perspective, the perspective of winning, the perspective of destroying those things that destroy us, the stage-managed demonstration a week later was in fact a huge step back. We remember the words of Black anarchist Lucy Parsons when she said, “Most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution… Still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty.” Those taken in by the reformist and deformed world of non-profit campaigning seem to wish to work for liberty at any price, except at the price of a deadly social “peace.”

Not one more step that isn’t forward or on the throat of our enemies. Toppling this world is the task at hand and we must build capacity to see revolt through to its radical conclusions. To hell with this anti-Black, white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist world. Fuck the police and their dead homies!

– A pissed off Prole who got down

[1] Frantz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth, On Violence”

[2] San José Mercury News, June 28,2020: “Blacks are only 7% of the Bay Area, but 27% of those killed by police”

Another account of events can be found at: https://itsgoingdown.org/reportback-from-san-jose-may/

General

INICIO

This page was created out of the need to drive the conversation away from police reform and towards defunding. We have witnessed a wave of calls to defund police and ultimately abolish institutions of domination – we’re down with that! We also recognize that appealing to the state to defund a vital pillar of their institutional life with its limitations. In other words, the state will only concede on certain demands but will never give up its total control. As insurrectionist abolitionist, we see that only real threats to the legitimacy of the system can produce the conditions for a different world. This is to say that calls to city council meetings, petitions, voting, and appeals to politicians are limited in scope – they have an effect but not the sustained militancy we require. Our end is abolition of the current world and that is a long road ahead.

 

Additionally, May 29th was a watershed moment as a local comrade retells the battle that ensued between the youth and police on that day. It’s clear that the legitimate rage of the youth is steeping underneath the veneer of non-profit (liberal) driven protest – these are the voices not present at City council meetings. For any radical possibility, we must build on the confrontations with San José police from that May 29th short-lived rebellion.

 

For those reasons and others not cited here, we want to unearth the radical scene that we see is null to non-existent in so called San José. We want to build a project of insurrection that understands that confrontations with the state are necessary while rejecting any partnership or alliance with it. Our project looks to be explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-state, anti-patriarchy, anti-sexual violence, and vociferously for the proles. Confrontaciones is born out of our opposition to the state, capitalism, and to elements of an established “left” seeking representation over struggle.

 

There are still many questions to be answered but we see the road of confrontation with power as the only option for this current regime to end.  If you wanna know more, hit us up!

 

– Confrontaciones