A collective ethnography of grassroots mobilizations for community safety across the Silicon Valley
 
This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to militarization, policing, and ongoing conditions of war in the current conjuncture of racial patriarchal capitalism. Grassroots researcher Annie Paradise presents here a collective ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance.
 
The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families’ struggles to reclaim their households and their communities—to create a social infrastructure of care, justice, and safety outside state- and market-determined modes of “security.” Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and the production and circulation of insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice efforts to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late racial patriarchal capitalism. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security” regime across the Silicon Valley and offers counter-counterinsurgent strategies and practices of co-generative, dynamic resistance.

ANNIE PARADISE is a member of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, a transterritorial research collective, and a collaborator with the Universidad de la Tierra Califas, an autonomous learning initiative, both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also a researcher with the Counter Counterinsurgency Lab.

“Far from utopian, a world without policing is being made every day in the community struggles for care recounted here with such urgency and insight. The War on the Social Factory is an exemplary model of collaborative research grounded in the life-affirming battles against the death-dealing system of the carceral state.” —Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family's Journey — -

“A powerful indictment of the direct and manufactured forms of state violence that threaten the lives of many Black and brown people in the San Francisco Bay Area, Annie Paradise’s compelling ethnography is also a testament to the critical insights and perseverance of the women activists—mothers and others—who bear witness to it and pursue alternative visions of justice and community safety.” —Eric Porter, author of A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport — -

“As state violence in service of racial patriarchal capitalism escalates—seemingly unabated—The War on the Social Factory offers crucial insights into community resistance. This collective ethnography draws on a rich history of struggle and strategizing toward new horizons of community safety. A must-read for our times.” —Nancy A. Heitzeg, coauthor of Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform — -