The goal is to reduce the excess that knowledge produces, to force into precincts the possibility, directly implied by the production of knowledge, of autonomy and critics. In Italy, we have given this process the name “downgrading”, to indicate the process by which the forced impoverishment, and the reduction of opportunities with respect to one’s life and work plans are functional to savage and unscrupulous precarization. As if to say that, put in a state of absolute necessity, of utter precarity, young people and students all over Europe may be, in the economic mechanism, prepared and subjected to mechanisms of constant blackmail.What is this if not a modern variant of slavery? The traditional opposition of the Left Party and also of most of the unions is not able to give an answer that is up to this set of problems. When you, when we took the streets this fall, the claims, the desires that we expressed could not have been represented by anyone. This is because in the context of crisis, also the neoliberal revolution has found an easier way, even more in the face of the obvious failure of the reformist hypothesis and of thetraditional neo-Keynesian alternatives. And the news these days is that Obama was forced to launch a very hard financial manoeuvring, "tears and blood”, with huge cuts to public expenditure and to the world of knowledge and education. So when we speak of economic and global crisis, we refer also to a crisis of reformism.
We believe that, within this framework, the reason that has led many students and precarious workers to demonstrate and rebel, is fundamentally a generational problem and crisis. Our generation is the one that is excluded from any form of social contract. It is the 'no future’ generation who, even though having a higher level of education than their parents, is aware that most of them will be poorer and is the one that has being denied the very possibility of imagining and building their future.
In England in the early '600 private property was set up with the first enclosures. Today the new enclosures that are being built with respect to knowledge define a new phase of primitive accumulation and new privatization. In the struggles of recent months, the main objective was, in the first place, to prevent the complete casting off of the public sector. Struggling against the cuts to research and university, as well as you in London against the tripling of tuition fees, means to prevent this public institution from being destroyed. But this struggle doesn’t absolutely allude to a mere defense of the public, because it is state or guaranteed by the state. I believe that when we build opposition and subtraction moments, we are already showing an alternative process: to defend the public means already to directly imagine and be able to build a common into action. To claim the defense of the public does not mean to be satisfied with the existing and with the services that the state can offer, but to have a real chance to build new institutions collectively. Autonomous and common institutions and that produce new rules from the bottom and claiming alternative forms of life (existence).
For this reason, from the Wave to the Book Block, among the fundamental claims of the Italian movement, that respect to new forms of welfare played a key role: claiming forms of guaranteed income for precarious workers and students, opening disputes on mobility, access to culture and social services. For the sake of clarity: in Italy, much less than in other European countries, there are very few forms of direct and indirect support to young people, precarious, and workers in general. With a joke, we can say that, for us, the only form of welfare is the family (if they can afford). But across Europe, more generally, a dismantling of the welfare state, as it is traditionally understood, is happening and it is not replaced by any other alternative form. When we claim income to live, study and work, we do not ask,however, to be assisted and supported by the state, but to be paid economically in an environment where all our activities, throughout our day, are channeled into a mechanism of total production of value. To claim an income means to establish a compensation for a continuous production, which in the state of today capitalism, occurs at all levels: from schools to universities, from the call centers, to care work.
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