[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [transcollab] Towards the social strike, let's unite and fight! Final Statement Strike Meeting

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Orsan Senalp <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 4:03 AM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [transcollab] Towards the social strike,
let's unite and fight! Final Statement Strike Meeting
To: networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org


Begin forwarded message:

*From:* Vanessa Bilancetti <vane.bix.vb at gmail.com>
*Date:* 25 Sep 2014 12:43:35 GMT+2
*To:* transcollab at lists.so36.net
*Subject:* *[transcollab] Towards the social strike, let's unite and fight!
Final Statement Strike Meeting*
*Reply-To:* transcollab at lists.so36.net

This is the final statement of the Strike meeting hold in ROme the last
weekend, at the end of it there is also a proposal to all the European
network to start and extend a discussion on a social strike and possible
common actions.


*Statement of the Strike Meeting assembly in Rome, 12-14 september 2014.
Towards the social strike, let's unite and fight!*

Let's start with a fact: during the three days of the Strike Meeting, more
than 500 workers, temporary workers, students, unionists, activists of
social centres and of committees who defend the commons, from all over
Italy and beyond, met and discussed for hours, comparing forms of
organization, programmatic claims and practices of struggle. This point is
not given for granted, we are not just assuming the quantitative strength
of the event, but it indicates the quality of a political process in which
competition between groups is replaced by the virtuous composition of
differences. We must start from here to go through the main points of the
debate.

In the workshops as well as in plenary assemblies, in the programmatic
tables as in the round table with activists from Germany, France, Greece,
Spain and Portugal, the focus of the discussion has been on the neo-liberal
policies, deepened by the crisis, that are reshaping the European scenario:
wages under attack, compression of trade union rights, deskilling and
corporatization of education and research, privatization of public
utilities, enclosure of the commons, new government of labour force,
mobility, and exploitation of migrant labour force. So, after a not at all
superficial definition of these phenomena, the need to go a step further in
the articulation of struggles and programmatic demands emerged.

It is clear to all - and it wasn't casual that we started the meeting with
a round table led by European activists- that Europe is the minimum space
of confrontation, the transnational level is decisive for conflicts that
want to be incisive. And it is clear that without the creation of a space
of permanent relationship and innovation between struggles and movements,
breaking the impasse and subverting the present is unimaginable. A social
strike, a strike that should be general and generalized, precarious and
metropolitan, wants to be a first step, undoubtedly partial but
fundamental, of this experiment. A way to begin to reverse this toxic
narrative that replaces merit with equality, fierce competition with common
happiness.

The strike platform composes requests that come from the world of labour
and of education, of non-working and of social cooperation. To refuse and
reject the Jobs Act and Renzi's school reform, as well as the new era of
privatization and commodification of the commons, and in general the
neo-liberal transformation of the labour market and the re-nationalization
of citizenship, means to fight for a new welfare, for the right to housing,
for a European basic income not linked to labour performance, for a
European minimum wage, for free access to education. It means to fight
against the device of selection and control that, through the meritocratic
rhetoric, makes schools and universities completely open to private
corporations and makes knowledge a docile instrument for companies'
interests.

It is not only unemployment to hit the young and less young, it is not only
underemployment to pierce the lives of millions of women and men. It is the
new mantra of employability that pushes to accept any kind of job, with no
rights, or even unpaied (see the Expo model). Claiming a basic income and a
European minimum wage must, therefore, go hand in hand with the demand of
freedom and union democracy, the right to coalition and to strike, inside
and outside work. Again: without the defence of commons and the
re-appropriation of a democratic welfare, a process of expansive conflict
that knows how to corner the neo-liberal management of the crisis is
unthinkable.

A common platform for a social strike that knows how to combine the
different forms of struggle and strike that have been experimented, and
design new ones, potentially capable of extending at a European scale:
general strike of dependent labour, precarious and metropolitan strike,
strike for who doesn't have the right to strike, netstrike, strike in the
places of education, gender strike. A kaleidoscope of practices to build
patiently through territorial strike laboratories.

Towards the social strike, for which we propose the date of 14th November –
in order to have time to grow a real process that goes beyond the rolling
evocation, and because in November the parliamentary process of the Jobs
Act will be over, while it will proceed expeditiously to the approval of
the Law of stability, and the day after it will end the Government's
consultation on the school reform-, Meanwhile there are several important
appointments that we relaunch with force:

The 2nd of October in Naples, to contest the ECB board; the 10th of October
the great mobilization and strike of students, teachers and school staff;
the 11th and 12th of October in Milan, starting the long agenda of
struggles against Expo, that will take the 1st May as a landing point;
October 9th to 12th, the tag guerilla against the Internet Festival of
Pisa; the 16th of October when in all probability the general strike of
logistics will take form.

*We also propose to all European networks to start a discussion on the
extension of the transnational practice of the strike: we will be at the
meeting in Brussels organised by the Blockupy coordination on 26th and 27th
of September to discuss joint initiatives. We also propose for the 7th
November a day of dislocated action in all the cities against the Youth
Guarantee program, especially against public and private institutions (job
centres, Regions, agencies, universities / foundations) that are
implementing the program.*

On Saturday, November 1st, and if the date of November 14th will be
accepted as the best one possible for the social strike, we propose to meet
again in Rome, in a meeting of the territorial strike laboratories, to go
ahead with the preparation of the strike itself. From all those who
participated in the Strike Meeting a warm hug to the activists still
deprived of their freedom, hoping to see them soon with us again in the
struggles.

*We have said it is time for a social strike, today this time is starting
to beat!*


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