For a snapshot of the crisis

The world appears more and more multi-polar and in the grip of latent tensions of war, with an underlying crisis whose intensity is a known and by now systemic fact and no longer even doubted by the professionals of mainstream communication. Still, we keep on showing through the use of our own gaze (a partisan gaze, bottom left-leaning) a situation on the move in which we imagine new spaces of political action. Together with the echo of the Arab uprisings that do not stop resonating into processes of transition still open to multiple outcomes, it is the northern shore of the Mediterranean sea that in the last few months shows the most interesting experiments of transformation of the existing. Spain, Portugal, Greece… the struggles against austerity in those countries have assumed an extremely generalized and mass-scale character.

Italy is often accused of not having been able to keep the pace with these earlier forms of mobilization; but it is certainly important that the experiences of the last few years of struggle do not disperse since they have proved able to generate (first and foremost subjectively) the days of December 14 and October 15 [*], to accumulate conflict breeding grounds in secondary schools and universities, to make dozens and dozens of NOs! explode against the devastation of the territories but also, and above all, against the speculation in the territories. The Susa Valley is a litmus test both of potentialities and of limits: the battle against the TAV is the most advanced front of struggle in our country, but also a unique case of expansion and clash in the sea of crisis. Of course, we cannot but realize how much the framework has changed. The passage to a post-Berlusconi era compels us to rethink the political coordinates on which to build movement. In this context, the pivotal character of the education sector inside the processes of struggle that manifest themselves in our country is an evident, full-blown reality. From specific issues in the university context to mass participations in the territorial uprisings as in the case of the No Tav, the role of student subjectivity is certainly fundamental in creating, organizing, communicating antagonist trajectories and practices. The capacity of managing to counter-use knowledge inside the processes of struggle and organization is perhaps the main effort to be implemented at the front of the formation of subjectivities, by always taking on knowledge as warm, partisan and capable of transformation – never as cold, technical or as reproducing a decomposed existence. Thus, some data need to be considered as central. The existence of an at least Mediterranean space of action (as in the post-democratic era maneuvered by international financial institutions, national sovereignty is increasingly emptied) compels the education sector to a precise mission as a subject potentially able to cover this role: that of becoming-hub, weaving with needle and thread as many links as possible with other movements, not only of the education sector that emerge here as elsewhere following the material intensification of the crisis and the violence of finance, necessarily starting out from our territories. We must set as our goals the perspective of European days of mobilization, of a single framework to turn the rhetorics of crisis and austerity upside down, of an inclusive and never fragmented gaze in the trajectory of a new social constituent process. It is the post-democratic scenario to remind us to not take a step back from that impossibility to mediate with the current institutions, whichever form they may take. The process of depletion of these institutions is ongoing, both from above and from below, and we surely will not be proposing us as a helping hand. “Que se vayan todos!” in many languages and dialects is the slogan which (still) echoes from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other, as slogan and political program at the same time.

But this is certainly not enough. We need to build up those forms of autonomous institutionality from which exercise our push, destituent and constituent at the same time: the tasks that await us are tied to the centrality of the faculties and to the spaces crossed by the student composition in the prompt and continuous work to make them places of struggle and organization, with the constant emphasis on the production of antagonist subjectivity. Working on the universities as veritable forges and bases of conflict able to bring in and out, with a pendular movement, both the destituent and constituent wealth of those incompatible social relations that, moving from the critique and rejection of sacrifice and impoverishment, could manage to wrest the control of ever-broader spaces from those decomposing institutions and their processes of command. Practicing conflictuality in order to build up a framework of collective reappropriation: by achieving physical and political spaces within and against the connections that by now, pressed by the policies of austerity and impoverishment, are starting to blow up.

Subjectivities in the crisis

Within this framework, the voracity and the intensity of the systemic shake of the crisis is evident, and it defines itself as progressive disruption of the governmental dispositifs – certainly to be interpreted as a further opening of institutional faults (from which the capitalist contradictions emerge), but also to be intended as the game of capital to try a new reframing of government and command; thus as a reply to a destructuration of the system that ambivalently gives us the scale of both the potentialities and limits, of the opportunities as well of their opposite. In the context of a provincialized Europe – inside an interpretation of a geopolitics of crisis – the reflection to be build on the Italian anomaly from the point of view of struggles in opposition to the transition (disguised as technical in form, but odiously political in substance) schemed by Napolitano & Co is a particular one.

Into the big sea of crisis, from the point of view of political subjectivities, we believe the organizational tendency to be binary and collectively opened, knowing all too well that the phase is neither allowing the melting pot of spurious alliances nor of orthodox planning: first of all the territories, which are not a propagandist panacea of any reverberation, but that become the first basis on which to collectively build something, by exercising a non-ideological interpretation of the metropolitan space – in which the university assumes the foundation of starting point for the struggles yet to come, but above all for the knowledge of a social composition that transforms itself under the pulsating beat of the crisis – the social and political opposition, that is – intended as a collective process to institute, build and spread, but also as an effort of a positive break of the habit of the ritual model of practices of movements, by taking on the bet of field testing new forms and new spaces of antagonism moving beyond the mere defense and resistance (in terms of it being insufficient in itself) to organize a suitable political response of attack and, perhaps, of counterpower. It is unnecessary to emphasize how the path of antagonism is the only feasible way where we explore the zones of incompatibility, of refusal. We must not observe the student passivity left to us by the Gelmini reform through an inexact framework of discontent or even rancor but, on the contrary, as a subjective dimension to pick up as the first level of a trajectory of a new subjectivation that does not start without matching cards: the experience of the cycle of struggle we are coming from is strong in so far as the languages and the practices of the No Gelmini movement are coupled in the university collectives – but above all constitute the positive and genuine tension in which a generation of secondary school students that is starting to appear in the universities right now has grown up.

The governance of the country of professors is unfolding on a stiffened but also rationalized double framework. That is the place in which the system of the parties and their supply channels blows up (as an effect of a political destructuring) and at the same time the mantra of cuts and austerity (as a transitionary systemic medicine) installs itself. From an antagonist point of view, it is necessary to clearly keep this framework in mind in order to become promoters of the movements to come, indeed as an incompatible front, impossible to subsume, of a rebellion which interprets the crisis as a constituent process for a real change not to be plotted by technocrats and magistrates but, rather, commanded by the needs and desires of a shifting social composition. This is a necessary premise of any venture to turn the law-abiding and prude appeals of meritocracy into antagonist terms: that does not at all mean to run after the right-wing drives that are experienced on the Left but rather to politically understand, in different ways, the ongoing commotion in the country in terms of mass behaviors, with a grain and potentiality of opposition to an Italian economic system in decay. Otherwise, the presumption will (perhaps) make us keep going on at the edges of the metropolises, but our ambitions must necessarily be higher, because the ability of withstanding the challenge is indispensable in order to change and to be the protagonists of the transformation.

We are beyond the blatant crisis of representational politics that is intensifying and entrenching itself: the question of corruption must become a vehicle of attack against the whole complexity of a corrupt system but that needs a further development in the frontal repudiation of that army of corrupted and corrupting that make a living out of speculation and plundering. We cannot allow the technocracy and the judiciary to declare the esodati [**] to be the parasites of our times, most of all because cuts in the costs of politics is becoming the legitimizing lament of the ongoing and programmed social butchery, thus the corollary of the framework of social destruction aimed to govern the new poverties, the indebted humanity. Does not this emotionality, in need to be politically transformed, confirm what we shouted and keep shouting in the streets – that no one at all represents us?! Therefore, we are totally inside the processes of strategic dismantling of national and local welfare systems, when the governance of the systems of education, health care, pension and so on are not only prey of the progress of financialization, achievable through the earlier dispositifs of cartolarization and privatization, but they also become the battleground of the transitory transformation of the national economic system – whereas the collapse of the framework that produced and reproduced the party system (Regions, Provinces, Municipalities and affiliated bodies) clashes with the procedures of cuts, severity and questioning (only from above, up until now) of the spasmodic flow of money, cronyism and clientelism, that has been supporting the representative and productive system in our country for decades. To thematize the question of welfare and income we must start from here, from the territories that until today have been the bucolic dimension of a ravenous and shameful political class but that, starting from tomorrow, must and can become a (not merely claimed) space of processes of reappropriation – territorializations of new forms of militancy and sociality and politicity, results of the opposition to the decline and impoverishment of the different abilities of the social subjects.

Knowledge, income and constituent prepositions

Today, it is more obvious than ever how the traditional role of the university, which took shape in the modern age, has definitively changed – in close connection with the transformations of the productive system and the new role that knowledge has acquired. Students and knowledge workers constitute the subject which has suffered a process we call the strategic dismantling of the university; a process that was initiated in Italy by the Berlinguer reform and continued with the Bologna Process, up to the present state of permanent reform (Gelmini, Profumo). The public education system has been progressively dismantled giving way to a new hybrid public-private system, a process involved in the search by the continuously mutating capital for new forms of valorization and subsumption of labour. Thus, the scenery we face appears as constituted by the twisted mystification of culture and knowledge, by the continuous re-proposal of the category of ‘merit’ (used for labour hierarchization and for differential inclusion into the education sector) and of the blackmail of the debts of honour (a form of violence which proceeds through cuts, for example against the regional bodies for the Right to Education), by thus operating for an always more violent downgrading of commodity-knowledge, aimed at an obvious will of creation of a standardized and de-qualified workforce. The response of an antagonist side to these mechanisms is at work in what we define as a double binary: the reappropriation of time, spaces and indirect income (as the experimentation with occupations of new spaces teaches us), and the de-commodification of knowledge through co-operative development of an autonomous and alternative character (as tool of subjectivation of student composition).

In regard to the issue of income, we need to go beyond the harmful and compatible idea of mere demands and requests as that only brings about the creation of a rhetorical and abstract discourse. Some experience born out of the transnational movements seem to have the road to take quite clear in mind, that is the reappropriation of portions of welfare and services which capital has dismantled, with a strong ability to identify the counterpart and to work as a driving force behind the extension of conflict and processes of struggle, standing as an immediate source of counterpower. Thus the question of income appears ever more pivotal by assuming an ever more widespread social characterization as the whole family-built welfare system that supported the demand of student income by now appears not only as a ramshackle house, but as an institution which is going to be gradually abolished. It is necessary to emphasize the opening of spaces of counter-welfare that could be common and reproducible practices in order to really open up generalizable scenarios and further frictions and social rifts. The way to seek the generalization of conflict is therefore that of refusal and an overcoming of only posing demands.

By necessity and contingency, the question of income is intertwined to that of knowledge and therefore to practices such as co-research and self-education – approaches that we know well, but in regard to which we must also manage to show the ability of carrying out an analysis from a comprehensive point of view. Besides the question of income, even in regard to self-education, it seems essential to build paths impossible to subsume or that reproduce any value seizable by capital thus not working in any way as complementary elements, almost aimed to fill the gaps of the university-corporation and of its parceled knowledge. It is therefore necessary to bring self-education back to its original nature as a tool – a means used with the purpose of creating autonomous knowledge, irrecuperable and immediately antagonist such, that always stands on the other side of the barricade as weapon to attain goals such as organization, autonomy and conflict. After all, the neoliberal system focuses a great deal of its mechanisms of extraction and valorization precisely by feeding itself with proletarian knowledge, through commodification and rationalization. Thus, the production of alternative knowledge cannot avoid a critique of the technical and specialized capitalist knowledge – that neutral and de-qualified knowledge that the Monti-style government of austerity foists on us while paving the way for a future of precarity, both in the domain of education and in that of labour. Thus, the task of reading the global dimension of official education falls on the struggling subjectivities as an experience of wider processes by recognizing the political character and the systemic explanations behind it.

Our self-criticism about the use of tools such as militant inquiry and co-research is intertwined with the aforementioned reflection. We must actually bring back co-research to its original essence of the epistemological break – not as something separated from the struggle (as it recently appeared also to be) but as a strategy that, by allowing on one side to create a materialist vision inside the composition and completely within the precarious subjectivity, consequentially allows the development of theoretical forms of tendencies of disruption, and organizational forms. It is through the correct use of these tools that is possible to bet on a new strong university movement, as well as a confirmation of the potentialities of becoming advanced spearheads of the struggles – above all thanks to the capacity of speaking a generalizable language, the ability to produce projectuality in terms of constructing political trajectories of recomposition, of the extensive and continuous development of a new counter-subjectivity, of the capacity to advance and expand the clash on a mass scale.

As the legacy of Romano Alquati after all teaches us, to counter-educate implies the counter-production of counter-culture, of counter-knowledge and their consequential counter-invention; and for this we need adequate organization and struggles. The preposition of the ‘counter’ is interpreted and renew itself in the necessity and constituent tension of an antagonist opposition to the existing ruins, on university as well as metropolitan ground.

Document by the university antagonist students, for a political interpretation of the crisis

[*] 14/12/2010 and 15/10/2011, two great and mass-attended days of struggle in Rome against the political class

[**] A reference to those aged workers which were denied a pension after leaving their work (a condition preceded by sackings, trade union agreements, corporate restructuring and so on) by the Fornero labour reform