If you screw us, we multiply!!! Notes on the Wisconsin Insurrection by Franco Barchiesi

Λάβαμε δι' αλληλογραφίας και αναρτούμε

Notes on the Wisconsin Insurrection

by Franco Barchiesi

(Dept. of African-American and African Studies, Ohio State University)

 

“If you screw us, we multiply”, read one of the signs held by the hundreds of demonstrators who staged, throughout the second half of February, a virtually uninterrupted occupation of the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. It was a rather unusual expression of defiance coming from a left end of the American political spectrum that, in the post 9-11 world and in the days of the Obama administration and its disappointed hopes, has realigned itself along paths of moderation and responsibility, or has simply been cowed into a public discourse that admits only “patriotism”, liberal-democratic individual rights, and the defense of the “American dream” as legitimate foundations for dissent.

But then, the huge demonstrations against the budget and the anti-labor laws of the ultra-right wing Wisconsin state government had a distinctly new quality about them. They represented the first instance of a mass, nationally visible mobilization explicitly directed against corporate power and its institutional representatives since the start of the current economic crisis, whereas the limelight has otherwise gone towards right-wing mobilizations, such as the Tea Party, blaming imaginary un-American foes and socialist conspiracies for the nation’s ills.

The catalyst of the Wisconsin insurrection has been governor Scott Walker, a staunchly pro-business Republican hawk elected in November 2010 with a 52 percent majority as part of an election cycle marked by a national wave of collective disappointment and disgust at the Obama administration’s response to socioeconomic collapse. Despite the hopes raised by the 2008 presidential election, it had in fact become quickly and painfully clear that the priorities of the new White House would be to demobilize the vast grassroots movements that brought Obama to power, rescue big business with a multi-trillion dollar bailout in the absence of any meaningful social measure to even alleviate the plight of the tens of millions thrown into poverty by the depredations of Wall Street, and put in place “bipartisan” measures – continuing tax cuts for the ultra-rich while slashing public spending and social programs – to make ordinary people and workers pay once more for the crisis.

Ε λοιπόν κύριοι αυτά δε συμβαίνουν μόνο στην Ελλάδα!!!!

Queens College Walks Out to Defend Public Education

To whom it may concern:

“Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life;

education is life itself.” - John Dewey

Education is a right, not a privilege. It provides more opportunities for individuals to realize

their full capacity to grow as human beings. Privatizing education secludes communities from that

right. In our present society, there is a strong emphasis placed on education for advancement. How

does privatizing public education offer the opportunity of prosperity for people, regardless of class?

How does privatizing public education help the disenfranchised? It doesn't. In fact, it seeks to exclude

these communities by turning our colleges into franchises.

The CUNY tradition, at its beginning, was based on the right to accessible and free education

for its students. At the time the student body homogeneously consisted of Caucasian men. Despite

strides made in civil rights, prior to 1969, the CUNY system was exclusionary to people of color, the

communities that mainly make up this city. It was the result of militant occupations, initiated by

students in CUNY that forced the administration to open admissions. Coincidentally, soon after CUNY

opened admissions, students for the first time received a tuition bill. Since 1976, tuition has

incrementally expanded. Despite spikes in unemployment, students were expected to scrounge for

money to pay tuition. Our generation is no exception to the burdens of this hassle, so we seek to carry

on the tradition of past generations' struggles.

KAFCA Journal of Common University Struggles

Το Φύλλο της Εφημερίδας Εδώ

For a New Europe: University Struggles Against Austerity Paris - Saint-Denis Meeting, 11-13 February 2011

Common Statement

 

We, the student and precarious workers of Europe, Tunisia, Japan, the US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina, met in Paris over the weekend of the 11^th-13^th of February, 2011 to discuss and organize a common network based on our common struggles. Students from Maghreb and Gambia tried to come but France refused them entry. We claim the free circulation of peoples as well as the free circulation of struggles.

In fact, over the last few years our movement has assumed Europe as the space of conflicts against the corporatization of the university and precariousness. This meeting in Paris and the revolutionary movements across the Mediterranean allow us to take an important step towards a new Europe against austerity and the revolts in Maghreb.

We are a generation who lives precariousness as a permanent condition: the university is no longer an elevator of upward social mobility but rather a factory of precariousness. Nor is the university a closed community: our struggles for welfare, work and the free circulation of knowledge and people don’t stop at its gates.

Our need for a common network is based on our struggles against the Bologna Process and against the education cuts Europe is using as a response to the crisis.

Since the state and private interests collaborate in the corporatization process of the university, our struggles don’t have the aim of defending the status quo. Governments bail out banks and cut education. We want to make our own university – a university that lives in our experiences of autonomous education, alternative research and free schools. It is a free university, run by students, precarious workers and migrants, a university without borders.

This weekend we have shared and discussed out different languages and common practices of conflict: demonstrations, occupations and metropolitan strikes. We have created and improved our common claims: free access to the university against increasing fees and costs of education, new welfare and common rights against debt and the financialization of our lives, and for an education based on cooperation against competition and hierarchies.

Based on this common statement:

·      We call for common and transnational days of action on the 24^th-25^th-26^th of March, 2011: against banks, debt system and austerity measures, for free education and free circulation of people and knowledge.

·      We will create a common journal of struggles and an autonomous media of communication.

·      We will promote a great caravan and meeting in Tunisia because the struggles in Maghreb are the struggles we are fighting here.

·      We will be part of the G8 counter-summit in Dijon in May.

·      We will meet again in London in June.

 

Fighting and cooperating, this is our Paris Common!

Concordia students demand their say By Matthew Brett, Irmak Bahar, Robert Sonin, George Alexander and Roddy Doucet, Freelance

Πηγή:The Gazette

Largely neglected after the forced resignation of Concordia University president Judith Woodsworth and facing the possibility of exponential tuition-fee hikes, hundreds of Concordia students and faculty members will hold a day of action on Monday.
The inept handling of senior personnel decisions, under the guidance of university chairman Peter Kruyt and the executive committee, will cost the university millions of dollars. In spite of a call for his resignation by the university senate, our institution's highest academic body, the chairman refuses to step down and let the healing process begin.
But for many of us, the forced and secretive departure of president Woodsworth comes as no surprise. This academic year alone, we have witnessed a series of events that would not be tolerated elsewhere.
International students were treated with utter disrespect early this year. Without prior notice, many students saw their tuition rise by as much as $6,000. It was upsetting to see international students plead for fair and equal treatment. Our growing body of international students was exploited, plain and simple.
Then our former university president joined a chorus of leaders calling for Quebec tuition to increase by $500 per year over three years. The Charest Liberals will make their decision on the exact annual increase this March. Here, one point must be made absolutely clear: The notion that Quebec is a nanny state for students is fundamentally wrong.
Tuition fees in Quebec are slightly above the average of 34 developed countries, according to a recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development.
And if these proposed increases go forward, about 50,000 Quebec students would be deterred from attending university, according to a study commissioned by the Ministry of Education.
In purely economic terms, denying citizens the right to higher education is clearly unsound. Citizens with higher education usually pay more in income taxes and social contributions. In essence, supporters of increased tuition in Quebec are denying their province economic and social advancement.
What do we want our province to look like? Do we care if 50,000 citizens are denied a post-secondary education? Debate has been very shallow thus far, and student views are not treated with the respect they deserve.
This Monday, hundreds of Concordia students will celebrate Valentine's Day by echoing the views of our professors and friends: We strongly urge Peter Kruyt to step down immediately. Fundamental reform to our university's governing structure is necessary, and students must have a strong and meaningful representation during this reform.
On Monday, we will also have no love for Premier Jean Charest and opposition leader Pauline Marois. As the federal and provincial austerity budgets loom, the student voice must be at the forefront of debate over education. We have been cheated too much already. Enough is enough.
Matthew Brett, Irmak Bahar, Robert Sonin, George Alexander and Roddy Doucet are co-organizers of Concordia University's Day of Action.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Concordia+students+demand+their/4270252/story.html#ixzz1E2UiRBBy

Η Γαλλία αρνείται την είσοδο σε ακτιβιστές από την Τυνησία που θα συμμετέχουν στην Πανευρωπαϊκή συνάντηση πανεπιστημιακών κινημάτων

France refuses to allow Tunisian activists in

Πηγή:ΕduFactory
Friday, February 11, 2011

For the free circulation of struggling people!
February 11th – 13th hundreds of students and precarious workers from Europe’s Universities are meeting to exchange, debate and organize common struggles at the European Meeting of University Struggles. This meeting is also welcoming activists from non-European countries because the struggle against the dismantling of the university, austerity politics and precariousness is common to us all. Tunisian students who participated in the movement against Ben Ali’s dictatorship and members of the Pan-Africa Student Movement in Gambia were refused the visas that would have allowed their entrance in French Territory, so they will not be able to participate in the Meeting.
This limitation of the freedom of circulation that European politics is imposing is unacceptable. This is, evidently, a political stance against social movements that, from Maghreb to the rest of the world, are struggling for freedom.
This is why Friday, February 11th, we will be in front of the Tunisian Embassy in France, in rue Barbet de Jouy, to call for a Europe without borders and for the free circulation of struggling people.
The European Meeting against Austerity, Paris – Saint-Denis

The Financialization of Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt Morgan Adamson

“Student poverty is merely the most gross expression of the colonization of all domains of social practice. The projection of all social guilty conscience onto the student masks the poverty and servitude of everyone.”

—Situationists International, 1966 (1)

Of all the transformations that have taken place in the American university during the post-1968 era, perhaps the most radical is the shift toward financing higher education through borrowed money. The vast amount of unforgivable debt students have incurred since the 1970s signals the birth of a new regime that has come to shape the post-modern university. Each year the sum of student debt seems to grow exponentially: the graduating class of seniors in 2007 had an average debt of $21,900, an increase of 8% from 2006 and almost 100% from 1997.(2) These astounding statistics do not even take into account the debt that most students take on if they choose to seek graduate or professional degrees. Despite the gravity of the situation facing students, academia, partic­ularly the humanities, has afforded surprisingly little atten­tion to the problem of student debt. Of the recent discussions that do critique student debt, most are largely nostalgic for a notion of the “public” university and find the rise in student debt to be yet another symptom of the death of the welfare state.(3) While these accounts often present impassioned de­nunciations of student debt and argue for a return to state-financed education, they systematically lack a critique of the very mechanisms of late capitalism that go into producing the student-in-debt. One must emphasize the limitations of nos­talgia for the public university when confronting the problem of student debt, noting that privatization is but one facet of a complex process. Instead, it seems that the student-in-debt is a necessary nexus of forces of power and control under current configurations of capitalism. The following propositions are gestures towards a broader exploration of how the student-in-debt is expressive of some of the most insidious mechanisms of control deployed in the transition from industrial to financial capitalism we have witnessed since the late 1960s.

1. The student is no longer a student confined but a student in debt.

In his 1990 essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze concisely updates Michel Foucault’s writings on disciplinary societies with the following re­mark: “man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt.”(4) This cryptic passage is a condensation of his powerful diagnostic of the unbounded financialization of life within societies of control. The debt Deleuze speaks of is, importantly, not only a financial obligation between two contractual parties. When alluding to the status of debt in control societies, Deleuze refers to something like a form or structure of life that is bounded to capital while being indefinitely deferred. Explicitly, financial debt is only an index of a form of life that is itself generated through debt. In this way, the debt within societies of control is a debt that can never be repaid, yet at the same time acts as a motor for constant “undulation,” movement, and adaptation.(5)

Campaign against Debt promoted by Edufactory

We, students, teachers, migrant and precarious workers, call for a debt abolition network to organize a global day of action against student debt.

We struggle everyday in movements all around the world against the privatization of the university, the precaritization of work, the new enclosures of our knowledges and for the reappropriation of our commonwealth.

We have identified debt as a primary component in all of these struggles.

Debt is the main instrument of enclosure of our social wealth: education, knowledge, access to healthy food, housing and healthcare. In nearly every aspect of our lives, the access to credit is necessary in order to live our lives.

Debt is a fundamental political question because it is a key component of control of our lives and bodies. This control is exercised as blackmail on an individual level as well as generalized social exploitation on a large scale.

Debt has been used as a management strategy to separate, divide and maintain supremacy over individuals, communities, countries and even entire continents for over 30 years.

Debt is a necessary parasitical function of financial capitalism today. Without continued lending and deeper debt, capital cannot continue to function. The current economic crisis exemplifies this principle.

Debt is therefore an inequitable system that produces profits for the financial industry at the expense of our education and our lives.

Student debt is one of the first forms where of this unjust system is put into practice. As students, we are forced to borrow to have access to education. These predatory lending strategies have created generations whose futures are indentured to banks and financial institutions.

Student debt means the corporatization and financialization of the university. It is the enclosure of our knowledge and passions, and the precarization of our labor and lives.

Student debt is therefore part of a general struggle against the contemporary slavery of credit cards, mortgages, and the international debt system. It is our singular battle in the common struggle for a more just world.

We therefore claim the right to bankruptcy for all and we claim the right to access credit for all. We call for the immediate abolition of debt and we call for civil disobedience against the debt system.

We won’t pay back the debt!

Τσελεμεντές κατάληψης ή πως να οργανώσεις την κατάληψη της σχολής σου!!!

Αυτό το κείμενο πρέπει να διαβαστεί από κάθε φοιτητή υποστηρικτή των κινητοποιήσεων, υποψήφιο καταληψία η εν ενεργεία. Από κάθε έναν που μίλησε για αμεσοδημοκρατία από κάθε έναν που υποστήριξε δημοκρατικές αντιπροσωπευτικές διαδικασίες, σοβιετικού ή άλλου τύπου στα συντονιστικά.

Ένας οδηγός μαγειρικής από τη φιλοσοφική σχολή του Slobodni στο Ζαγκρεμπ. Ένας οδηγός οργάνωσης της κατάληψης της φιλοσοφικής σχολής για 35 ημέρες. Απαραίτητο ανάγνωσμα, προαπαιτούμενο και αλυσίδα κατά το ξέσπασμα των κινητοποιήσεων. Παρά τη φαινομενική ελαστικότητα των φοιτητών στη φιλοσοφική σχολή, σπάσιμο μόνο των μαθημάτων κτλ ας αναρωτηθούμε τι ρόλο παίζει η φιλοσοφική σχολή στα πλαίσια των αντιδραστικών απορρυθμίσεων της τριτοβάθμιας εκπαίδευσης. Και ας αναρωτηθούμε αν με αυτό το βαθμό οργάνωσης το πλήρες τσάκισμα της διοικητικής δραστηριότητας και πιθανόν ορισμένων πτυχών της ερευνητικής και οικονομικής δραστηριότητας των πανεπιστημίων δε θα είναι παιχνιδάκι, ιδιαίτερα το πιο ουσιώδες για το πανεπιστήμιο της αγοράς, copyright, πατέντες, χρηματοδότηση μυστικότητα. Το κείμενο υπάρχει στα Αγγλικά και άλλες Ευρωπαϊκές γλώσσες μαζί με υλικό από τις κινητοποιήσεις εδώ http://slobodnifilozofski.org/?page_id=5. Σε μορφή pdf για ευκολότερη εκτύπωση και ανάγνωση Εδώ

Σχόλιο: Κι αν οι καπιταλιστές άφησαν τις μέρες της κρίσης όλο τον κοσμοπολιτισμό τους πάνω στο Margaritari Yiorgos εμείς δε θα πάψουμε να είμαστε διεθνιστούληδες,  Adonis...

Vankas

If they block our future, we’ll block the city! Notes on the university mobilizations in the Italian autumn of 2010 GIAN LUCA PITTAVINO

The image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa occupied by students traveled the world over, ending up on the BBC and the front page of the Financial Times in a matter of hours. A mirror image was taken a few days later: a besieged Parliament, closed off in their backrooms to approve an unpopular law while outside the country was blocked by the new generations. Two years from the “Anomalous Wave” movement, university students are once again the ones politically translating the lurking conflict latent in the world of education.
The Gelmini law passed the House but its passage was anything but painless. The parliamentary agenda was accompanied by a week of radical organization, both intense and capillary, extending to every Italian city. The “Wave” was not followed by a tsunami but by many small shockwaves that made an already unstable government tremble for a day (the 30^th of November).
The forms practiced in the mobilizations were varied: the occupation of universities, didactic suspensions, metropolitan paralysis, blocking the main nodes of transportation (stations, ports, airports), attempted interruption in institutional buildings and the squatting of national monuments.
Every initiative tried to synthesize the radicalism and the communicative nature in their acts. Protest actions generally resulted from assembly discussions between hundreds of people and virally circulated across social networks, not excluding word-of-mouth and direct communication, reinforced by assembly practices as reclamation of commonfare practices.
Class struggle in Temples of Knowledge
Intelligence for seizing the moment, the political use of the network, bending mainstream communication devices, ability to synthesize a wide political discourse; all these attributes confirm how the highest political composition of class in the country is condensed into the student today.

US education and the crisis MICHAEL HARDT

Governments across the globe are dramatically reducing funding for public education and raising university tuition rates. These measures are often cast as a response to the current economic crisis but really their implementation began well before it. Whereas in Britain, Italy, and other European countries students battle police in the streets and experiment with new means to protest such government actions, there is a relative calm on U.S. campuses.
Forty and fifty years ago US student movements were among the most active and innovative in the world, not only protesting against militarism, racism, and other social hierarchies but demanding a democratic reform of the education system. Why today do US student movements appear so far behind in response to this global crisis of education?
There have, in fact, been significant student protests in the U.S. in recent years that have not received widespread attention. The most important of these are the student movements to protest raises in tuition in the public university system in the state of California. Tuition in the University of California system had risen gradually to double over the course of a decade but the sudden additional increase of 32% in November 2009 set off the student protests. In the largest and most widespread actions on US campuses since the 1970s, students occupied university buildings and mounted demonstrations.
The primary focus of the California students has been the social inequality created by higher tuition rates and lower funding of the university as a whole. The poor are obviously the first and most severely affected by the changes. The widening class division, the students insistently point out, corresponds closely to racial divisions, since black and Latino students constitute a large portion of those most affected by the higher tuition fees.
The modest successes in the project to open university education to a wider population in a previous era are being gradually reversed.  For the past 30 years, explains Christopher Newfield, professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, “the public universities, which most US students attend, have been systematically underfunded, restricting all educational gains to the top quarter of students by income and destroying the country’s previous global advantage in educational attainment.”
The California student movement has been significant but not nearly as intense, widespread, or sustained as its counterparts in Europe. One obvious reason for this difference is that changes in the US university have been more gradual and smaller. Tuition at public universities has long been higher in the US than in most of Europe and recent increases have been relatively modest. The 32% increase in California in 2009 is dwarfed by the proposed increase in Britain of nearly 300%. A second factor that could contribute to less student protest in the United States is that university conditions are not unified at the national level. Public university funding and tuition rates vary widely in different states and the extensive system of private universities creates even more significant variation.

Farewell to The Corporate University Andrew Ross

Πηγή EduFactory

By ANDREW ROSS

The term “corporate university” barely raises an eyebrow these days. That is unfortunate. It’s perfectly fine for a collegial kvetch around the department water cooler, but it’s not all that helpful for analyzing how institutions like ours are being restructured. In fact, the term is a lazy shorthand for understanding the changes coursing through higher education.
Admittedly, there is a pile of evidence to support the idea that universities have gone corporate. The casualization of the academic work force is the most obvious—arguably, the loss of professional job security has occurred at a rate faster than in any other occupational sector. The polarization in salaries is another example of marketization: The ratio of executive compensation to the pay of the average adjunct instructor bears comparison with that in most top-down corporations. So too have universities, like corporations, gone offshore, cutting costs, spreading assets, and polishing their brands in “emerging markets.” The shift in attention and funds toward commercially relevant fields has also been quite pronounced, and the production of a jumbo pool of student debt has made universities into vehicles, if not instruments, for bankers’ profits. Some of the most delicious water-cooler tales emphasize how our administrators are adopting managerial techniques from corporate America.

Ευρωπαϊκή Συνάντηση Πανεπιστημιακών Κινημάτων, Παρίσι 11-13 Φεβρουαρίου 2011

 

Ευρωπαϊκή Συνάντηση Πανεπιστημιακών Κινημάτων, Παρίσι 11-13 Φεβρουαρίου 2011

Από το Λονδίνο μέχρι τη Βιέννη, από τη Ρώμη μέχρι το Παρίσι, από την Αθήνα μέχρι τη Μαδρίτη, μια νέα Ευρώπη αναδύεται. Οι φοιτητές και οι επισφαλείς εργαζόμενοι, οι πολίτες και οι μετανάστες, τα πλήθη αγωνίζονται για τη ζωή και το μέλλον τους στις πρώτες γραμμές κατά της κρίσης.

Αγωνίζονται να επανακτήσουν τα δικαιώματά τους και τον κοινό πλούτο που δημιουργούν καθημερινά. Επαναστατούν εναντίον των μέτρων λιτότητας που εκμεταλλεύονται το παρόν και ληστεύουν το μέλλον μας. Μαίνονται κατά της αλαζονείας της εξουσίας.

Μετά από τη συλλογική συμφωνία των συναντήσεων του περασμένου έτους «Bologna Burns» στη Βιέννη, το Λονδίνο, το Παρίσι και τη Μπολόνια και του «Commoninversity» που διεξήχθη αυτό το έτος στη Βαρκελώνη, το Edu-Factory και το Αυτόνομο Δίκτυο Εκπαίδευσης (Autonomous Education Network) συμμετέχουν στην πρόσκληση για μια ευρωπαϊκή συνάντηση με όλες τις ομάδες που παίρνουν μέρος στην κοινή πάλη για τη δημιουργία ενός ισχυρού ευρωπαϊκού δικτύου αγώνων εντός και εκτός του πανεπιστημίου. Ένα διακρατικό χώρο για να συζητηθεί και να αναπτυχθεί η συλλογική πολιτική μας δυνατότητα να αντιμετωπίσουμε τις επιθέσεις εναντίον των πανεπιστημίων και της κοινωνικής πρόνοιας και να οικοδομήσουμε ένα νέο μέλλον για όλους.

Μέσα από συνέδρια και ημερίδες, επιτροπές και συνελεύσεις, θα προτείνουμε τη συζήτηση γύρω από τα βασικά θέματα του Πανεπιστημίου, την αυτόνομη παραγωγή γνώσης, την αυτο-εκπαίδευση, τους δικτυωμένους αγώνες, τη διακρατική πολιτική οργάνωση και τα κοινά.

Η ώρα έφτασε να ξεσηκωθούμε, από κοινού, συλλογικά και μεμονωμένα, να διεκδικήσουμε εκ νέου τη ζωή μας και να οικοδομήσουμε μια νέα Ευρώπη που να βασίζεται στα δικαιώματα και την πρόσβαση. Ήρθε η ώρα να ανακτήσουμε ό,τι είναι δικό μας : τα κοινά.

Το πρόγραμμα και το flyer της συνάντησης Εδώ

Toward a global autonomous university

 

Προς μια επεξεργασία του μελλοντικού ιδεώδους της ανώτατης εκπαίδευσης. Όταν οι άλλοι μιλούν για εξορθολογισμό με τη λογική του προϊστορικού μέσου όρου, εμείς θα ανιχνεύουμε την κομμουνιστική προοπτική της ανθρωπότητας, θα αναζητούμε το ιδεώδες, θα εξανθρωποποιούμε τον άνθρωπο.

Το κείμενο Εδώ

Toward a global autonomous university EduFactory Web Journal

MANIFESTO

As once was the factory, so now is the university. We start with this plain and apparently unproblematic statement, not to affirm but to interrogate it. We want to radically rethink this assertion by means of both theory and politics. It is from here that the edu-factory project begins. Edu-factory has been running for two years. The project began as a transnational mailing-list for discussion of transformations to the university, the production of knowledge and forms of conflict ( edufactory@listcultures.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). About 500 militants, students and researchers have participated. Rejecting the notion that networks necessarily institute horizontal and spontaneous relations, we proceed with the view that networks must be organized if they are to operate as political spaces. The model has involved two temporally circumscribed and thematically identified rounds of discussion: the first on conflicts in the production of knowledge and the second on hierarchisation of the market for education and the construction of autonomous institutions. After each round of discussion, the list closes to await a new opening in a successive cycle. In this way, edu-factory moves from an extensive to an intensive mode of organizing networks.

Not surprisingly the edu-factory process has not been without tensions and conflicts. The opening and closing of the list in particular has led to debates with participants and onlookers regarding the openness and the ownership of networks. Despite these tussles, the project has assumed a life that beyond the list. Not only a website but also participation in and organisation of events in three different continents (Europe, Australia, and North America) have become part of edu-factory. Materials from the list have been collected and translated for a book publication in Italian: L’università globale: Il nuovo mercato del sapere (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2008). This volume became a central reference point in the ‘anomalous wave’ movement of students, researchers, parents and teachers that swept Italy in late 2008. Autonomedia Books will publish an English version of the text in early 2009.

Edu-factory is now at a critical turning point where the question of its political application becomes paramount. A central interest is the transnational linking of variously existing autonomous edu-initiatives, but this brings up problems and politics of translation, scale and resources. Has edu-factory lived beyond its life as a list? Or must its continued organisation involve the reinvention of the list and its modulation with other forms of practice and action?

After the last edu-factory round, we proposed the project of a global autonomous university. We do not want to enter the education market. On the contrary, our aim is to open a process of conflict in the knowledge production system and its mechanisms of hierarchisation. From this standpoint, the global autonomous university is not simply an alternative university but a process to build up a transnational organized network of research, education and knowledge production, based on experiments and experiences that already exist across the globe.

We now wish to propose another step in the process of the construction of edu-factory as an organized network, as well as in the evolution of the global autonomous university: a transnational journal. We choose this medium for two reasons. First because it will give continuity to the analysis on university transformations and knowledge production carried on in edu-factory. Second because it offers a stable platform of connection among the critical research projects, auto-education experiments, and struggles that connect to the project. In this framework, we want to re-open the list, in order to make it a collective place of debate, self-evaluation, and development for the journal.

 

http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=116&Itemid=64 

"Ιθαγενείς", "αντιδραστικοί", φοιτητές και μη, όλων των χωρών ενωθείτε!