Hot right now: self-reductions
Turin, Saturday 20 December 2008. The wave of students practiced “autoriduzione” (self-reduction) at a Feltrinelli chain bookstore at Piazza Castello. In the end, they took a few hundred books and distributed them to people for free.
The prices of school books, scientific works and literature are not affordable to young people and precarious workers. The access to knowledge and culture should be free to everyone.
Students went in front of the bookstore and opened a banner saying “Against the crisis: self-reduction - Anomalous Wave Turin”. They had few hundreds of second hand books which they gave to passers-by. Finally the students went inside the bookshop, symbolically occupying it, demanding and taking few hundreds of books, which were later distributed to people for free.
“In this way, the Way wanted to protest against the high costs of books, but also to show in practice that another form of circulation of knowledge is possible, free of charge, based on valuation of the use value, against commercial distribution and capitalistic speculation which subordinates knowledge to the logic of money, profit, value of exchange”.
Two days before, Turinese students practiced “autoriduzione” at the cinema Greenwich Village. They gave out “Onda Cards” which entitle people to free access to services on the basis of direct action. The Onda Card says: “We won’t pay for the crisis. A spectre is haunting the city… the spectre of who doesn’t want to pay for the crisis… students, precarians, migrants, workers, surfists of the Wave who reclaim income, transforming the present in order to construct the future”. The Card also quotes Bertolt Brecht: “The real criminal is not the one who robs a bank, but the one who founds one”. (Source: Uniriot)