by FRANCO BIFO BERARDI
The Italian government, in perfect agreement with the European central Bank is destroying the school, particularly the Brera Academy where I am precariously teaching media sociology.
The following lines are my contribution to the discussion among the teacher of this school. As I’m expected to start my course in Brera on March 14th, I want to understand if I should prepare my lectures. My answer is: no. I’ll go to the Brera Academy, on March 14th at 11.30, but I’ll not talk about cybercultures, as scheduled. I’ll talk about a different subject: how to organize a insurrection, because this is the only intersting subject at the moment.
The “riforma Gelmini” is cutting 8 billions euros in the Italian school system. The effect is easy to see, and in the next years the definancing of the school is going to produce misery ignorance and violence.
It’s not an Italian problem: in the UK thousands and thousands of students are leaving their schools as the taxes have become impossible to pay, while five hundred thousand public workers are waiting to be fired, and the british society is falling in a nightmare of devastation.
Therefore we should forget that the Milano Academy of Brera can be saved through some negotiations. The only way now is to fight against the financial dictatorship that is oppressing European society as Gheddafi and Mubarak have been oppressing Arab people.
Is this a task too difficult for the teachers of Brera? Yes, it is, but we are not alone. Millions of worker, all over Europe, – in the school, in the factories, in the hospitals and inn the social services – are facing a choice between misery and revolt, between radical struggle and depression. This is the moment to prepare insurrection. It’s better to be frank on this point: our future is over, as the future of our students, unless we forget fear and dare to fight for the right to teaching, and the right to studying, and the right to a decent salary, and for our dignity.
Discussing with the bureaucrats of the Brera school is useless, as they are only the tool of a devastating projects they cannot change at all. Useful is to occupy a square, a station, a parliament, and stay there as long as the government of mafia will be chased away, as long as the Trichet-Sarkozy-Merkel directorate will have been defeated. Is this prospect too much?
May be, but we have to be radical, as the situation has become extreme.
The Knowledge liberation front gathered in Paris Saint Denis on February 12th and called to a day of teach in in the banks of many European cities on March 25th. In London they are already doing this: groups of students and researchers go into the bank, and they occupy the place and read poems, and discuss molecular biology, and talk about their problems, and eat something, and sleep.
Occupying banks has to become a daily practice. Is it dangerous? It is, but it is more dangerous to wait for somebody to come and help us to have jobs and money and schools and house, when financial capitalism is destroying our lives. Financial capitalism has declared war against society.
We cannot avoid this war, but we can win.
I beg your pardon if my language may seem emphatically tragic. Unfortunately the tragedy is not an effect of my imagination.