Anomalous Wave

Here’s two videos about the student demonstration of last Friday in Rome. The first one begins at Piazza Venezia and ends at Piramide where students try to enter the Ostiense railway station in order to occupy the tracks. However the cops stop them by force and things get chaotic. The second video starts right from the moment when people start running towards the station.

There are some interesting articles about the new student/universitarian movement in Italy and one of them is a piece written by Gigi Roggero, “Manif sauvage: gli studenti non vogliono pagare la crisi”, published on Global Project website 17/10/08.

What this article basically says is that the movement against the law 133 is characterized by a new subjective composition. This composition is “absolutely pragmatic, post-ideological, and entirely socialized in the productive fabric of metropolis”, and it has “no tears to shed for flags, no matter how colorful and beautiful they are”.

It’s a composition that knows that the boundaries between education and work have been transcended. It’s not a coincidence that this composition wants to pose in the center the question of dequalification of knowledge and degrees, and the demand of money.

The composition is unrepresentable, and in its protest actions, it makes its ungovernability a form of expression. This means moving quickly and in an unforeseeable way, and never going where the police and the political system expect them to go. It’s similar to the way the rebellion against CPE happened in France in 2006.

On one hand, these new students are not politicized, but on the other, they do have radical practices. For example, there’s no diffuse discourse of occupying universities. However this doesn’t mean immobility, but on the contrary, produces the necessity to take over the metropolis and make it ungovernable.

This is also a composition that wants to win. This was the also case with the French students against CPE. In order to win, the composition has chosen its autonomous temporalities, not subordinate to the timing of politics (the law has already passed),
neither to a linear image of the forms of growth and maturation of movements. To win, it is necessary to make ungovernability permanent, to choose specifically case by case the terrains in which to construct power.

The thing this movement is teaching us is that between the ruins of the public university, there’s life. Life of a subjective composition which doesn’t have any intention to pay for the costs of the crisis, not the financial crisis nor the crisis of the university. All of this is condensed in a slogan: “we are not going to pay for the crisis”. This is already a political program.

It’s a movement that fights the market with no nostalgia for the state. Knowing that the public is not to be defended but to be constructed. They have started constructing the public in the experiences of self-education (autoformazione), and starting from 2005, with the “self-reform of the university”.

The anomaly of the Italian situation is not Berlusconi, the anomaly is the universitarian movement. It’s a free, savage anomaly.

Today there’s a national strike of the public transport workers in Italy. It’s supposed to be a strike of 24 hours but I don’t know, I was also told that in Rome the urban transit would work between 5 and 8 a.m. It seems the strike is about wages.

We could say this strike is doing the same as the “manif sauvage” student demonstration of last friday, but more effectively. They are shutting down the the city, blocking the production by blocking the flows of people in the city.

Yesterday two friends who live and work here were talking about the strike. The other one said she doesn’t have to go to work today as her boss accepts the fact that it’s way too difficult for her to get there. The other one instead said she probably has no choice but to walk all the way to the library where she’s working.