06/22/2015
PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT ASSEMBLY against Militarization
Friday, June 26, 2015, 1.00 to 5.30 p.m.
MLK Library 225, San Jose State University
(150 E. San Fernando St.)
Please join us at the US Social Forum in San Jose on June 26th for the PMA against Militarization’s third in a series of gatherings, or "rolling assembly,” to collectively think about how to further de-militarize and de-criminalize our communities. Our goal will be to focus a reflection and action space that highlights our multiple resistances to the intersecting dimensions of militarization and militarism articulated through a convergence of wars: war against Black and Brown youth, war on drugs, war on the border, war on terror, war on the environment and war on the social factory.
We imagine an assembly as a space to share information and resources across regions, generate new strategies for coordinated action, and build a network of support for local struggles. Towards that end, we are proposing a very specific schedule (see below) to engage three key areas of struggle and promote direct actions that will keep our process going beyond June 26th. We have scheduled each designated reflection and action hour with time devoted to discussion followed by a portion of the hour reserved for generating action proposals. Our goal in highlighting areas of struggle will be to review the projects, tools, networks, and strategies already in place in each area of struggle to connect across anti-militiarization efforts. For an archive of earlier gatherings in the rolling assembly please see < https://ggg.vostan.net/ccra/ #16>.
Struggle against Militarization Domestically
What are the strategies and practices that serve our efforts to abolish militarized policing and mass incarceration as well as tear down militarized borders and interior enforcement and end the war on the poor? How can we more fully connect struggles to confront police violence, struggles that refuse and disrupt the criminalization of people of color including through detentions and deportations, with struggles against surveillance and militarized technological incursions into our daily lives?
Struggle against Militarization on an International Scale
How do our struggles make visible the ways militarization at home is intricately linked to militarization and militarism abroad? How can our resistances more fully connect US settler-colonialism with specific occupations, e.g. Palestine? What have been our past successes in sharing tools that disrupt US military deployments abroad in order to end US investment in war and warfare, while connecting this to struggles against violences at home in the present? How are comrades in other countries mobilizing against US militarism that impacts specific regions?
Strategies, Practices, and Projects to promote Community Safety
What can we learn by examining collectively the convivial tools that advance our struggles—from skill shares, community care tents, cop watching, boycotts, rallies, assemblies, people’s investigations, caravans, justice campaigns, and people’s defense projects? How can our local organizing efforts go beyond solidarity and protest as well as state efforts to co-opt our demands for justice?
Schedule:
1.00 — 1.20 welcome & agreements
1.30 — 2.30 reflection & action: domestic militarization
2.40 — 3.40 reflection & action: militarization abroad
3.50 — 4.50 reflection & action: community safety
5.00 — 5.30 direction action and strategic planning
For more information contact:
Annie Paradise
Manolo Callahan
