index of 2005 conference papers

Women out of Bounds: mobilizing resistance to the global enclosures in “the factory on wheels”

Fiona Jeffries
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C.

ABSTRACT
This paper considers public transit as a site of enclosure and struggle in feminist organizing around the politics of mobility. I draw on the example of the transnational formation of the Bus Rider’s Union (BRU) that first emerged in Los Angeles and then in other cities, including Vancouver , to situate mobility struggles within urban resistances to neoliberalism. To excavate the relationship between the contemporary enclosure movement and the gendered, racialized control of proletarian mobility, I propose the BRU as demonstrative of the centrality of mobility struggles in capitalism, signified most viscerally in waves of new vagabond laws within and across national borders. The rise of the BRU signals some challenges and transformations in contemporary justice organizing across mobile, dispersed and multi-lingual constituents who don’t necessarily share fixed common spaces such as neighbourhoods or factories. I discuss the ways in which the movement’s constituency and organizing style connects with a wider re-invention of radical politics in neoliberal capitalism that extends the logic of the general strike to the politicization of everyday spaces of social struggle --in this case public transit. I argue that the BRU collapses conventional distinctions between reform/revolution, public/private and production/consumption politics.

The first Bus Riders Union (BRU) originated in Los Angeles in 1993 in the wake of the largest urban revolt the city had ever seen. In 2001 another BRU was launched in Vancouver , galvanized by a documentary screening and face to face meetings among activists from both cities who gathered to discuss struggles and strategies across political and national space. A strongly women-led movement, the BRU situates public transit, especially the inner-city bus - the transportation of the post-Fordist urban multitudes - as an integral site of segmentation and struggle. In Vancouver and L.A. public transit is overwhelmingly a space of labouring subjects on the move, and occupied primarily by women, people of colour and, in Vancouver, indigenous people (BRU, 2004). Movement to and in the city women’s movement, today and from the early capitalist enclosure movement. The politics of mobility/immobilization, relations in many ways synonymous with contemporary globalization, are encapsulated in the Vancouver BRU’s slogans such as “the right to get around” and concrete demands, such as those calling for the halt to the “curfew” imposed on transit users.

Drawing on the experience of public transit struggles, this paper explores the politics of mobility in feminist anti-capitalist organizing in the neoliberal “carceral city” ( Davis , 1993) . My analysis of the BRU is situated within an understanding of capitalist globalization as the historical present of primitive accumulation (Federici, 2004). Today we can witness the continuation of strategies used in the original capitalist enclosures of land over five centuries that provoked massive human movement and produced new modes of containment, criminalization and resistant urban subjects. Virtually everywhere we are witnessing an expansion of prisons, security belts and “no go” zones: walls going up around Baghdad, vicious border fences separating the US and Mexico; Israel and Palestine, London’s electronic “ring of steel” around its financial district. Simultaneously, the centrality of women, and especially racialized women, as an accumulation strategy may be obscured in official neoliberal narratives but is everywhere apparent: in de-funding of public services and jobs and the expansion of Free Trade Zones; in the commercialization of agriculture, urban gentrification and the migrations to the vast metropolitan service sectors. As Silvia Federici (2002) argues, neoliberal globalization is catastrophic for women not just because its male dominated institutions are unable to grasp women’s reality but because of its core objectives which separate people from the means of production and reproduction of livelihoods.

To excavate the relationship between the contemporary enclosure movement and the control of proletarian mobility, I draw on Lisa Sanchez’s (2001) analysis of the new urban “enclosure acts” and “spatial governmentality” to situate urban resistances to privatization and technocratic social control in neoliberalism. I discuss the BRU as demonstrative of the centrality of mobility struggles in capitalism, signified most viscerally in waves of vagabond laws within and across national borders, and as testament to the renaissance in political thought and action around the politics of presence in the global city. The movement’s constituency and organizing style suggests a concrete project for the assertion of new claims organized around a justice politics of free mobility in the post-Fordist city. I focus on two core aspects of this communicational insurgency: the politics of visibility and the elaboration of radical communication practices for democratic relations.

Mobility, Enclosure and the New Segmentations

In keeping with colonial capitalism’s narratives of public and mobile subjects as male and private and immobile life as female, v agabonds have historically been produced juridically, in popular and official culture as masculine (Woodbridge, 2001). Up until the nineteenth century following centuries of capitalist production of mobile and immobile subjects and the long struggle to consecrate private property relations, the spatial logic of enclosure, Sanchez (2001) argues, was crucial to defining women’s “proper place” in the private sphere and to controlling sexuality and reproduction. While urbanization is arguably a women’s movement, the opaque presence of women as mobile subjects in the 500-year history of primitive accumulation continues today in narratives of capitalist globalization. The mobility identified with global capitalism, where we meet the criminalized vagrant and the freewheeling traveler, is defined by its stratification that produces not only new instabilities, but new disciplinary strategies of differentiation. “ In late capitalism”, Sanchez points out, “the logic of enclosure has reemerged in technologies of spatial governmentality that unite population management strategies with identitarian discourses of citizenship, community and property.” (Sanchez, 2001: 136). Through the figure of the resistant mobile urban subject articulated by the BRU we see the extent to which transportation networks constitute - in conjunction with the myriad of electronic surveillance, city ordinances, fortress architecture and other familiar strategies - technologies of the new enclosures.

If the BRU organizing shows us how the mobile public spaces of the bus allegorise the new enclosures, how can we locate the subjects of struggle? Zygmunt Bauman (1998) uses the figures of the tourist and the vagabond to locate mobility as a central site of struggle in globalization. These figures attempt to uncover the production of the new segmentations rendered opaque in the dominant narrative of globalization that fetishizes the hyper-mobility of capital, commodities and the global rich. Brigit Young (2001) employs the mistress and maid as metaphors for elaborating the complex scales of differentiation among women in late capitalism. These binary metaphors can help us to elaborate a feminist analysis of uneven mobility in terms not of simple inclusion/exclusion but the production of new segmentations through differential incorporation.

The 1992 L.A. Revolt was a detonating factor in the formation of the Los Angeles BRU (Ramsay, 2000). Sparked by the not-guilty verdict of four white police officers charged with beating black motorist Rodney King close to death on an L.A. highway, the Revolt expressed popular rage against US urban apartheid. The police’s attack on King for transgressing the city’s intricate web of racialized borders in a rickety car was anything but exceptional in the increasingly militarized and segmented frontier city. Thomas Dumm (1993) argues that the police beating of King and the state’s super-militaristic response to the revolt are inextricable from the long history of capitalist enclosure movements. Ruling class fear of unregulated movement of the multitude reaches back to the first capitalist enclosures of 16 th century Europe when Vagabond laws were enacted to criminalize proletarian mobility. Only this time world public attention was drawn by accident of a bystander’s furtive videotaping which graphically depicted L.A. ’s urban enclosure acts in action.

The police beating and the revolt crystallised a core paradox of modern capitalism: its reliance on opening flows of people and social relations that are difficult to contain, exemplifying the control of mobility as an essential weapon of capitalist command in global restructuring. The mass expulsions that occurred in the wake of the revolt further stressed the political centrality of free movement struggles. Evident on multiple scales of the global justice movement, from anti-WTO street protests to Justice for Janitors organizing, the much celebrated hyper-mobility of capitalist globalization also opens up spaces for its transgression through what Saskia Sassen (2000) calls “the politics of presence”.

Visibility, Dialogue and the Politics of Presence

“Here we are!” whooped the Zapatistas when they surged onto the world stage in 1994. An anti-enclosure movement of the NAFTA-era, the Zapatistas articulated a politics of global presence and a radical re-thinking of revolutionary politics that situates free mobility, which includes of course freedom from expropriation, at the centre of struggle. Immediately the Zapatistas proceeded to participate in a “network of speaking a listening” open to groups and individuals interested in radical transformation (Lorenzano, 1998). Despite their many geographic, cultural and strategic differences, this politics of visibility and building a radical communicational practice is also central to the insurgent thinking-practice of the BRU . For, like the Zapatistas, the L.A. and Vancouver BRU use direct action organizing tactics, making visible and animating the subjects of public transportation as a struggle for the commons. In their writings and speeches, the BRU consistently draws comparisons between transit authorities with the IMF and World Bank logic of enclosure, also known euphemistically as “structural adjustment”, where the poor increasingly subsidize the wealthy (Burgos and Pulido, 1998; Roberts, 2005).

The BRU signals the challenges of justice organizing across mobile and dispersed constituents who don’t necessarily share fixed common spaces such as neighbourhoods or factories. As L.A. BRU organizer Martin Hernandez explains: “Since de-industrialization, buses are among the last public spaces where blue-collar people of all races still mingle.” (Davis, 1995: 272). The BRU’s politics of communication are significant to recognizing in post-Fordism polycentric struggles against the “factory without walls”. The precarity of the transit dependent -service workers, shift workers, students, elderly and single mothers – is the basis of their dialogical organizing model. Here the diversity of subjects makes challenges false claims of unity and conventional spaces of representation. Indeed, the BRU is not claiming to represent bus riders but to open up a space for the articulation of struggle for mobility and against criminalization. While BRU organizers and members sport bright, multi-lingual T-shirts, this appears to be a tool for recognition and symbol of affinity, not a claim of representation.

The L.A. BRU began as a project of the Labour/Community Strategy Centre in the early 1990s. The Centre emerged out of the city’s Reagan-era labour struggles and articulated a strong race, class, gender analysis of L.A. ’s post-Fordist frontier economy. Its radical left critique of US capitalism (including the technocratic unionism of the AFL-CIO), propelled the Strategy Centre towards non-conventional spaces of organizing. Recognizing and politicizing L.A. as a site of intense labour mobility, where women from the Global South provide a lion’s share of the city’s competitive edge, their analysis of the production of capitalist social relations rendered the 400,000 strong “factory on wheels” (Mann, 2000) a crucial site for justice organizing. A new social unionism became the basis of the BRU’s affinity with other cosmopolitan struggles and it began coordinating with movements such as those to defeat California ’s racist Proposition 187 and the Justice for Janitors campaigns. Invoking the reality against the dominant image of globalization, the BRU seeks to confront the transportation authority’s active role in U.S segregation: “the geography of work and travel reflects the spatiality of patriarchy, structural racism, and the division of labour.” (Burgos and Pulido, 1998: 80). Their “No Seat, No Fare!” campaign, documented in Haskel Wexler’s film The Bus Riders Union (1999), articulated specifically feminist demands of the transit constituency – street lighting at bus stops, unarmed escorts, an end to overcrowding, accessible child care – combining “transitional” demands with legal tactics and radical grassroots organizing.

In 2001, the Vancouver BRU emerged following a festival screening of the Bus Rider’s Union, which was accompanied by discussions with organizers from L.A. The film projected the bus as a site of radical proletarian cosmopolitanism and its radical reportage evoked a self-reflection for left cultures, providing a unique space for cross-border organizing around a radical politics of mobilty. It made visible the face of the city generally denied a voice in official plans and narratives and articulated feminist struggles around mobility and occupation in the U.S’s most thoroughly globalized city. The exchanges and border crossings so integral to the political project of radical documentary was manifested and extended in the BRU’s transnationalism. At the screening, Vancouver bus riders saw themselves as part of an extraordinary social constituency at once deeply connected to place but not necessarily to industrial-Cold War spaces of social struggle such as the factory or the nation-state. These representations suggested the bus could be a space for the elaboration of what Paulo Virno (2004) calls the “non-state public sphere.”

Vancouver , like most cities, experienced seismic restructuring throughout the neoliberal 1990s. The mushrooming of transit mega-projects, starting with the city’s highly contested Skytrain – built to host a second-tier World Exposition in 1986 whose very global theme was “transportation” – along with recurrent de-funding of bus service and a long transit workers strike, made the BRU’s political project especially resonant. Local activists, many connected with grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-poverty movements, held open workshops with the L.A. BRU at a union hall in the days following the film screening. The activists discovered a shared struggle: the official preference for enormously expensive, flashy commuter trains built through “public private partnerships” while the city bus services, which get the majority of transit dependent users around, are de-funded and costs downloaded ever further to the user through higher fares and reduced service. These discussions enabled for a deeper understanding of the transit dependent subjects as a post-Fordist proletariat and the bus a cosmopolitan space. Out of this discussion emerged a locally relevant politics of visibility, dialogue and presence.

The BRU practice, what I’m conceptualizing here as their communicational insurgency, entails street actions such as demonstrations and traffic blocking theatrics and, most significantly, what they call “direct-contact organizing”. Talking to riders and drivers and engaging in multi-lingual pamphleteering on the bus fuses industrial union organizing tactics with those of grassroots urban movements. The Vancouver BRU’s “night owl” campaign, for example, fought the de facto curfew imposed on shift workers – cleaners, security guards, service industry workers – with the cuts to late night transit services. Their dialogical practice extends to a radical investigation strategy called “Testimonial Research” whereby organizers conduct interviews and bus riders narrate their own experience and analysis of the transit system and how to improve upon it. This communicational strategy, I believe, is integral to situating public transit as a new commons.

Out of this dialogical, feminist research approach emerged the BRU’s slogan-demand for “the right to get around” that seeks to occupy the spaces of enclosure to confront and overturn neoliberal command. The Vancouver BRU’s four “transitional demands” articulate concrete struggle relevant to women’s lives through an analysis of exploitation of capitalist relations of reproduction as well as production. The movement suggests a shedding of the reform/revolution binary by working through concrete experience: 1. Defend and expand public services (More Buses, Lower Fares); 2. End transit racism, 3. Defence of public health and environmental justice; 4. For a transit system that puts women at the centre of planning (Roberts, interview 1995).

Last winter the Vancouver BRU held a “Fare strike” to demand a halt to rapid increases in transit fares. This brought the capillary strategy of the General Strike to the street as BRU organizers boarded buses to disrupt “business as usual”, and to demonstrate and act upon the material power of the transit constituency. Over 5,000 bus riders participated by refusing to pay the fare. The strikers avoided the Skytrain, however, because of its designation as a mobile state of exception within the transportation infrastructure. While the Skytrain’s aesthetic is of high-tech accessibility, it is the most policed transit route. Inextricable from the BRU’s struggles against the transit mega-projects such as Skytrain, are the militarization of public transit and the criminalization of its users that has intensified post 9/11. Previous to every major cut in public services, BRU organizer Martha Roberts attests, the authorities launch a criminalization campaign to demonise its users and supporters (Roberts, Interview, 2005). This spring the Skytrain constables were given guns for the first time in order to police these seams of mobility, and transit authorities dramatically raised the fine for fare evasion.

Conclusion

This paper considers public transit as a site of enclosure and struggle of anti-capitalist, feminist organizing. The BRU has emerged in conjunction with a general sea-change in revolutionary thought and action and the movement articulates a multitude of resistances to the privatization and militarization of North American cities under neoliberalism and the post-9/11 security state. Here, the street is political space, the bus is a site of struggle for the commons and w omen out of bounds are the dangerous subjects of globalization. The BRU’s organizing exemplifies mobility as a class, race, gender struggle not only across borders but also within the expanding borderlands. Since the first enclosures of the commons, mobility has always been a strategy of resistance to capitalist violence, and as Federici argues, “…migrant women are succeeding in exporting not just their labour but their combativeness.” (2000: 1032).

References

Burgos , Rita and Laura Pulido. 1998. “The Politics of Gender in the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union/Sindicato de Pasajeros.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Vol. 9, no. 3: 75-82.

Davis, Mike. (1993). “Uprising and Repression in L.A. : An Interview with Mike Davis by the CovertAction Information Bulletin.” In, Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising. Gooding-Williams, Robert (ed). New York : Routledge.

Davis, Mike. 1995. “Runaway Train crushes buses.” The Nation, September 18: 270-274.

Dumm, Thomas L. 1993. “The New Enclosures: Racism in the Normalized Community. Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising. Gooding-Williams, Robert (ed). New York : Routledge.

Federici, Silvia. 2001. “Women, Globalization and the International Women’s Movement” Canadian Journal of Development Studies. Vol. xxii, special issue: 1025-1036.

_________. 2002. “War, Globalization, and Reproduction” Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations. Winter, Vol 1, No. 4: 254-267.

_________. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York : Autonomedia.

Lorenzano, Luis. 1998. “Zapatismo: Recomposition of Labour, Radical Democracy and Revolutionary Project.” In, John Holloway and Eloina Pelaez (eds.) Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico . London : Pluto Press.

Mann, Eric. 2000. “A Race Struggle, a Class Struggle, a Women’s Struggle All At Once: Organizing on the Buses of L.A.” Socialist Register 2001. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds). London : Merlin Press.

Ramsey, Kikanza. 2000. “Riding the Freedom Bus in LA” Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy. Vol. 15, no. 3: 77-79.

Sanchez, Lisa. 2001. “Enclosure Acts and Exclusionary Practices: Neighborhood associations, community Police and the Expulsion of the Sexual Outlaw.” In, David Theo Goldberg, Michael Musheno and Lisa C. Bower eds., Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.

Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier”. American Studies. Vol. 41, No. 2/3, pp. 79-95.

Virno, Paolo. 2004. The Grammar of the Multitude. New York and Los Angeles : Semiotext(e).

Woodbridge, Linda. 2001. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana and Chicago : University of Illinois Press.

index of 2005 conference papers