You ask, “What concrete actions can we take?” You have to strike, assholes! We need to take the example of Aboubakar Soumaoro in Italy, who organized the 21 May strike of agricultural workers to demand more rights. The labourers have no food, no water, no house, most of them have made a long and dangerous journey to reach Europe, the workers are mainly migrants, but among them there are also Italians, and now they have decided to strike.
How do the farm workers, those who prepare your fruit baskets for your conferences, which you eat while you hypothesise about their lives, manage to organize a strike when they have no rights, no contracts, no residence permits? Those with no homes, whose scant wages would at best allow them to die slowly of hunger, can drum up the energy and the wherewithal to organise, and you can’t do anything?
Start to know what is really important for the system, and start to boycott it from inside and outside.
You mustn’t be afraid of losing your bourgeois privileges. If you’re together, you’re not afraid. If you are alone, then yes, you must be afraid, because you will more easily fall prey to the hawks of human resources, to those who want to cut your teaching contracts, those who tell you that you are worthless, to those who blame it on the financial crisis while they build a fucking Aula Magna.
Okay, that is easy for me to say because I have nothing to lose, I understand that. I live alone, I have no children to support, I don’t have a contract at university except for some meagre teaching hours, I have an office given to me by a friend in his institute because he believes in my research, I live partially with state aid and teaching Italian in private schools that pay me little and according to the hours worked.
I don’t have anything, I won’t lose anything: I mean nothing that I can be tied to. I don’t have any books with me because, after the 17th time I had to move, I realised it was no longer feasible to own books.
But what I haven’t lost yet is myself. It’s my 10 years of study, it’s all the pages I’ve read and all the pages I’ve published, it’s the texts I still have to finish, it’s what I want to do. What I haven’t yet lost is this life. You have your life too, and right now, it’s starting to look as much on the edge as mine.
Go beyond the university. Start to teach in bars, in restaurants, in the park. Democratise knowledge.
What are you waiting for to get together with the precarious workers, the overworked researchers, the working poor in your department, what are you waiting for? Like the foreign workers and the Italian workers who united on May 21st, we should all join and strike en masse, together to ask for our rights.
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How could it be done? Take Sun Tzu and The Art of War. Start knowing who you are and knowing your enemy. Because being invincible is something inside yourself; being vulnerable is something inside your enemy.
Make some new allies at your place of work and elsewhere. Who are your students? Tell them that you are forced to teach bullshit, that your salary is ridiculous, that your department is at risk.
Launch a campaign to read Marx or other texts to help people understand the conditions in which they are existing. Tell your department that you will teach the fucking program, and introduce some lectures on Marx. Slow down the rhythm. Reduce the program in all your classes. Start giving importance to unhurried, deliberate reading in your class. Slow down the rhythm of meetings. Use administrative paraphernalia against the system. Dress entirely in red or violet for the whole semester.
During the pandemic you have continued to work from home to guarantee your students’ right to an education, but who guarantees your rights? Who protects you?
Go public. Go to the television stations, go on the internet, tell everyone that the university wants to reduce your rights, but also the rights of the students, and ultimately of everyone, because the universities are there for the freedom of the people, both present and future. Tell parents that you cannot do a good job with their children, because your unsettled working and living conditions cause you anger and pain. Fight for your rights every day until the war is won.
Why do you not have a contract like other workers? Stop arguing and theorizing, we already know everything, we have read everything, we have written everything, we have the intellectual wherewithal to deal with this situation. We have to stand together. We have to put a stop to this system, assholes. I believe in an unlimited general strike, starting for all, immediately. The time has come to act.
