Anomalous Wave

This afternoon, Milanese students gathered at the central railway station in order to pressure Trenitalia to allow people to travel with reduced prices to Rome to participate the demonstration of tomorrow. It seems, at the moment, that the situation is still going on. The police and carabinieri are present at the station as well. These updates are translated from La Repubblica.

Videos by La Repubblica 1 - 2.

15.40: About 100 students arrived at the station shouting “Everybody to Rome” with megaphones and carrying banners. The carabinieri are stopping them from getting to the platforms.

15.55: Kiosks and shops inside the station are advised to close. Some of them had already decided to do so.

15.56: Students organize a “counter-ticketing”, trying to collect money to finance the train trip.

16.04: The police and carabinieri block the access to the platforms. The students are not reacting.

16.10: There’s some tension among the passengers in departure.

16.11: An artist called Moni Ovadia arrives at the station and says he’s willing to help the students get to Rome.

16.17: The students say the negotiations are going on. The students are willing to pay 15 euros per passenger.

16.28: The director and actor, Moni Ovadia has joined the demonstrators. “Deregulation is a not a solution, it’s a catastrophe”, Ovadia says. “These students have understood that the Gelmini law is not a reform, it’s the massacre of public education”. He continues, “Why a company like Trenitalia should not give the students a hand?”

16.31: The formal proposal of Trenitalia is a two-way ticket of 44 euros, says one of the demonstrators. “Other institutional sources are saying they will make a proposal of 18.000 euros for a special train”.

16.52: The students try, for the first time, to block the way to the platforms. Tension rising among passengers.

16.59: The students try to break through the police lines, the police defeat the attempt. Tension rising.

17.05: New attempt to enter the platforms. Tension between students and the police rising.

17.10: Trenitalia proposes: From Milan we can provide three trains, 700 places in each. They depart right after 18.00. No concessions about the price: 44 euros each person.

17.25: Students try to break through to get to the platforms. The gates are blocked.

17.40: Some passengers start to argue with the students.

18.25: Luciano Muhlbauer (from the communist party Rifondazione) announces that “The charter train costs 32.000 euros, of which 18.000 has to be paid immediately. CGIL has offered to pay 5000 and Rifondazione another 5000. The students should guarantee 8000.”

18.50: The vice mayor of Milan, Riccardo Decorato (An) talks about “an arrogant minority of 200 people”.

19.05: People are collecting the last money needed for the trains to depart for Rome.

19.15: Departure in sight. Finally there is a special train for the 300-400 students waiting for departure. The price offer of Trenitalia was 44 euros for a two-way ticket, and CGIL and Rifondazione intervened and offered to pay a significant part of the costs. Therefore it seems the students reached a good result in the negotiations.

19.45: Agreement has been reached. The special train departs at 22.00. Trenitalia: “The train was provided at market price”.

The newspaper La Repubblica gives updates about tomorrow’s mass demonstration of students and universitarians. The headline says “The wave brings 100.000 students to the piazza”.

The unions are divided: Cisl, Ugl & Snals have withdrawn from the university strike of Friday. However, the student movement is determined to make this Friday a historical event.

The occupied faculties of Sapienza will host students who arrive from outside of Rome by special trains and buses. “We are expecting at least 100.000 students”, says Francesco Brancaccio from the Faculty of Political Sciences. “Our protest will be a pacific one, with hands raised and faces uncovered, but we are asking the police to authorize the demonstration to arrive until Montecitorio”. Montecitorio is the location of the Italian Parliament.

There are at least two parades, both starting at 9.30 in the morning. One will start at the main entrance of Sapienza, at Piazzale Aldo Moro. Another starts at Piazzale dei Partigiani, near Piramide, composed of students of Roma Tre.

At Piazza dei Cinquecento, near Termini station, also the students from other Italian universities will join the demonstration. At Piazza Venezia the parades will join together and head towards Montecitorio.

Today at Roma Tre, the students launched a “counter-inauguration” of the academic year. Later in the evening there will be a party of the “wave” at the occupied faculty of arts of Roma Tre.

Today there was also a “netstrike” against the law 133. People were asked to participate by connecting to the website of the ministry of education (www.miur.it) at 14.00.

CGIL has called a general strike for 12 December. No details about the strike, except that it will last at least 4 hours.

At the moment there’s some polemics between unions. The government excluded CGIL from a meeting in which others were invited. CGIL accuses the government of trying to divide the unions. In the meantime, CISL has withdrawn from the university strike which is taking place this Friday. UIL, however, confirmed its participation. CGIL not only goes on strike but also organizes a demonstration which starts at 9.30 at Piazza della Bocca della Veritá and ends up in Piazza Navona.

Students and universitarians will have their own parades independently of the unions. There will be three parades which will later join together. One starts at Sapienza, students of Roma Tre gather at Piramide, and secondary school students at Piazza della Repubblica.

This weekend will be interesting for sure. First, on Friday, there’s the autonomous national demonstration of students. On Saturday and Sunday, there will be a national assembly of the faculties and universities in mobilization.

On the Uniriot website, there’s a “Call for a self-reform of the university” from the occupied Sapienza which is hosting the assembly. Here’s a translation of what I thought was the essential part of the text.

Call for a self-reform of the university

The assembly of 15-16 November will be an occasion of an important discussion for all the faculties and universities in mobilization, not only to intensify the critique against the law 133 and against the future developments of government policies but, above all, to create a discussion about how to guarantee the extension and duration of this movement. This project is not too ambitious, if one considers that the conditions to give a dimension of generality and continuity to this protest are already taking shape: in fact, when fighting the specific reforms, this movement already levels a more extensive critique against the whole system of education and work.

In fact, every day in the course of this mobilization, we create a radically different way to go through our universities, to live them, to create knowledge, to share information and relations, to construct and re-think the concept of public.

This first national discussion is about defining an extensive project capable to imagine common discourses and practices through which we can continue to create the extraordinarity of what we have produced. It means to project a self-reform. In other words, to create not only a programmatic assembly but a constituent moment, in which we can all together define a proposal of a possible reform for the university.

To criticize the defunding of the educational system and the project of its dismissal doesn’t mean to stand for conservation of the existing university, because this university is a place of multiplication of precarity, of dequalification of knowledge, of subordination to baronial power. The challenge, a lot more radical, is to trace a project through which to transform the university, not in a more or less distant future but in the present.

The only possible reform is the one we have already started to put into practice, as students, researchers and PhD’s, as the living knowledge that animates the diverse sectors of education. For us, self-reform is concrete affirmation of the exercise of collective liberty that we are conquering. Self-reform is the minimum demand of a movement which already is expressing itself in all its unrepresentability and independence of parties and unions. Refusing to delegate to others the decisions about university means to start defining lines of self-normation through which to create a new model of education.

Self-reform is a way to continue to act, in the level of the crisis and beyond it, to construct all together a new field of possibility inside and outside the universities, continuing to propagate and organize waves. Because the time of transformation is here and begins now. In fact, it has already begun.

We propose a subdivision of the assembly in three thematic workshops: didactics, welfare and the right to study, education and work. After these workshops take place, the moderators of the workshops meet in order to prepare a report to be presented in the plenary next day, together with a proposal of political agenda. In the meantime there will be a meeting to discuss the theme of organisational forms and coordination of the universities in mobilization.

Saturday 15 November

10.30 - 13.00 Plenary session
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch
14.00 - 17.30 Workshop
17.30 - 18.00 Coffee break
18.00 - 21.00 Workshop
21.00 - 23.00 Meeting of the workshop moderators
21.00 - 23.00 Meeting about forms of self-organization of the movement

Sunday 16 November

9.00 - 12.00 Plenary session
12.00 - 16.00 Assembly of schools and universities