Desde o início do ano lectivo 2010/2011 que estudantes, professores e investigadores italianos têm protestado contra a reforma educativa que o governo vem tentando implementar. Esta reforma é basicamente um processo para acelerar a privatização da educação, visto que potencializa a livre entrada de privados dentro de um espaço que deveria ser público.
Mal o ano lectivo iniciou, sentiu-se um clima de protesto dentro da Universidade com aulas que tardavam a começar devido ao facto de professores e investigadores se recusarem a dar aulas, em forma de protesto. Já os estudantes preparavam desde o inicio o “Outono Quente”. Logo durante o mês de Outubro principiaram as manifestações e ocupações de facultades (como é o caso da Facoltà di Ingenaria dell’Università Degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” que está ocupada por investigadores e estudantes até hoje) ou momentaneamente de monumentos significativos para o país (exemplo do Coliseu de Roma). Contudo, foi a partir do dia 29 de Novembro que os protestos se intensificaram com ocupações em todas as universidades e de forma simultânea. No dia 30 de Novembro (dia em que se votou na câmara dos deputados a reforma da educação) todas as cidades italianas foram invadidas de protestos do mundo da educativo: estudantes, professores e investigadores caminharam lado a lado, bloqueando o trânsito e ocupando estações de comboios.
Para este dia, os estudantes da capital italiana tinham previsto uma manifestação que chegaria à Piazza Montecitorio, local onde se encontra a câmara dos deputados. Todavia, ao chegar à Via del Corso que é uma das avenidas principais da cidade e próxima da câmara dos deputados deparei-me com todos os acessos a esta praça bloqueados por carrinhas da polícia, demonstrando assim as intenções do governo italiano – reprimir o protesto. Com as ruas bloqueadas, os manifestantes realizaram um cortejo em volta desta praça tentando em vários momentos furar o bloqueio policial, contudo sem sucesso, visto que as armas da polícia e dos estudantes são diversas, uns têm gás lacrimogéneo que não tiveram problemas de atirar aos manifestantes e outros têm livros! Por isso, nesse momento a manifestação teve obrigatoriamente que recuar. No entanto e inesperadamente (para mim) os estudantes não desistiram e continuaram o protesto, mudando apenas o percurso. Dirigimo-nos assim para uma das estradas principais dando acesso ao centro de Roma, bloqueando assim o trânsito e cantando “Se nos bloqueiam o futuro, nós bloqueamos as cidades”.
Durante o bloqueio destas estradas muitos foram os condutores que saíram dos seus carros e aplaudiram os protestantes, demonstrado que o movimento estudantil é reconhecido e apoiado pela sociedade civil. No seguimento deste percurso (quase completamente espontâneo) os estudantes encaminharam-se para a estação de comboios principal (Termini) penso que com o intuito de poder de regressar às imediações da Piazza Montecitorio. Contudo quando estávamos a chegar à estação a polícia apareceu em força e entrou na estação de cassetete ao alto, claramente com intenções de agredir os estudantes. Dentro da estação ocuparam cerca de 10 terminais, impedindo que muitos comboios partissem, estando simultaneamente a defender-se da polícia que os procurava cercar. Felizmente no final saíram “ilesos”. No final deste dia e depois de toda uma discussão na câmara dos deputados, os estudantes esperavam o resultado da votação da reforma que lhes vai “bloquear” o futuro.
A reforma foi aprovada, caminhando assim para a sua aprovação quase absoluta, que será decidida dia 14 de Dezembro. Todavia, depois da suposta “derrota”, estudantes, investigadores e professores não baixaram os braços e continuaram até hoje os protestos. Nestas duas semanas seguintes, Itália foi invadida por ainda mais ocupações, por ainda mais protestos. Em Roma, um dos mais significativos foi um que sucedeu em frente à Fondazione Roma, museu romano gerido pelo banco UniCredit que é um dos interessados na privatização das Universidades, um dos interessados em fazer parte dos conselhos de Universidade, isto é, nada mais nada menos que o RJIES “à la italiana”. Mais uma vez um protesto foi fortemente reprimido, sendo cerca de 10 protestantes detidos.
Como estudante portuguesa que assiste em Portugal aos mesmos problemas dentro da Universidade que supostamente é Pública, questiono-me o porquê de o movimento estudantil praticamente não existir, o porquê da cegueira? Quando é que vamos deixar os brandos costumes, quando é que vão existir protestos de verdade, manifestações que não são convocadas em fim de mandato e com mão partidária? Quando é que me vou manifestar em frente do Satander? Quando é que em Portugal vai voltar a existir um movimento estudantil de verdade?
Aqui, prepara-se mais uma grande manifestação de estudantes, professores e investigadores para dia 14 de Dezembro, dia em que a reforma vai ser votada no Senado e dia de todas as decisões para o Governo italiano, visto que se decidirá a queda ou não do mesmo. Visto que para os estudantes essa é a única possibilidade de ver a reforma reprovada porque só assim a Universidade italiana poderá continuar a ser um bocadinho mais pública e mais acessível a todos.
Aqui os estudantes fazem-se ouvir de verdade e nós quando faremos?
Laura Dias
Durante os anos de chumbo o pessoal ainda era mais duro.
Mas a bófia agora anda mais bem armada e equipada, aí…
parte 1
9th of December 2010, around 3pm, after a seminar with my students, I join my
friends at the demonstration in Parliament Square. I go there from Goldsmiths
College with one of my students, we walk arm in arm, acting as if we were
tourists, as a light-hearted couple admiring the buildings in Whitehall,
indifferent towards the police all along the road, and laughing, enjoying this
silly performance. We just had a seminar where we discussed the current planning
of the demolition of the UK education system, the devastation of places like
Goldsmiths, where the public funding will be cut 100% and the fees raised to
9.000 pounds a year. The places that are going to be privatized completely are
precisely those where what is asked to students is not so much to collect
knowledge, but to think critically.
Today, for the first time in a seminar that I facilitate, Korean and Chinese
students are those who talk the most. I have been asking myself for a long time
what makes it so hard for Korean and Chinese students to take part in the
seminar’s discussions. It might be a language problem, it might be a gender
issue… today Korean students give some answers themselves: “every time we have
to talk in public we are scared, to talk in public means fear for us, and this
is because we have been repressed for so long and so heavily, our grandfathers
were killed by the police, our families persecuted”… “A conversation like the
one we have here could not take place in a Korean university”… “I was happy to
see so many books written by radical thinkers in the Goldsmiths Library, you
cannot find them in Korean Universities”… “I have the impression that the UK
university will become what the Korean university already is, a place where you
pay a lot of money just in the hope to find a job afterwards.”
We say how university in the UK already functions like a shop were the student
is a costumer: she knows what she wants and is supposed to complain if she does
not get it. The student/customer wants to bring something home, she takes notes,
she accumulates knowledge, that is, notions, and measures carefully how much she
gets in exchange of the money she pays. The privatization of university is also
this: you enter the shop, you get something called knowledge, you exit the shop,
most of the time you don’t find a job, but you are supposed to feel enriched by
this accumulation of accountable knowledge, enriched, and most of all
self-reassured and self-content: nothing has happened. If, once in the shop, you
start feeling some sort of unease, a sense of shifting away, a crumbling of your
notes under your hands, you shouldn’t lose your time and write immediately a
complain.
We arrive in the square, this demonstration seems rather different from the
previous one, a month ago, which was overflowing with joy, colours, sounds.
Everything here seems dark, there are a few fires scattered around the square,
the atmosphere is rather tense, but I’m happy to see my friends, we drink a hot
cognac that I brought in a thermos, and after half an hour we decide to go
somewhere warmer. We head towards the ICA, but the street is blocked by a line
of policemen. “Go through Whitehall” a policeman says “you can exit there.” We
go to Whitehall and there is even more police blocking the street. We then go
back to the policeman we spoke with before, saying that Whitehall is blocked as
well. “Yes, it was blocked, but now is open.” We go to Whitehall again, but
there is no way to go through. We start realizing that the policemen are lying
to us. We try the tube station but it’s closed as well. “Are we in a kettle
already?” I say smiling to my friends. I’m sort of joking, they cannot kettle
thousands of people into such a huge square, right? I brought with me hot cognac
and plenty of warm clothes because people were talking about kettles the day
before at Goldsmiths, but I didn’t really think I was going to use them, double
socks, double scarf, double jumper.
parte 2
We spend some time thinking what to do, trying to go from a place to another.
With an IPhone we read in the Guardian website that, yes, the whole square is
blocked, but they let out whoever wishes to join the candle march in Embankment.
But this is just another lie. I’m walking around, trying to warm up, and I see
someone with a covered face walking fast towards a boy and punching him in the
face. The boy screams, he comes towards me crying “my eye… it’s burning…” I
don’t know what to do, I don’t understand what’s going on. There are some guys
going around the square and randomly punching people on the face, it looks like
complete madness. This is the first act of violence we witness. The only way I
can make sense of this is that these guys are not protesters, and they are paid
by someone to be here and punch people at random. The violence has started after
the kettle was made, and not before, and it was not started by the protesters,
but by whoever has organized this nightmare. Because minute after minute, hour
after hour, this is becoming more and more a nightmare, something like a horror
movie. The police repeatedly charges the crowd, the crowd runs away, some people
are bleeding. We are enclosed in a place where everything can happen to us, we
are forced by the police to be exposed to a violence organized by whoever gives
orders to the police, in a space that immediately makes me think about what
Giorgio Agamben calls “camp”, a space which is constructed both inside and
outside the law, a space where we are stripped “bare”, in the sense that we can
be freely killed without this killing to be considered a crime.
But soon I think about something else, this is not just a “state of exception”,
there is something more at stake: this looks like a set of a Hollywood movie, an
apocalypse movie, something like John Carpenter’s Escape from NY, but with no
escape. It is dark now and a helicopter is flying over the square projecting a
beam of light towards the square, but the light is not really illuminating
anything, the helicopter is just part of a horrifying choreography, of a staging
where we are enforced actors of a drama that will soon appear on the TV news. A
TV horror movie where the protesters will be the “protagonists”, smashing
windows, throwing bricks, lighting fires, destroying an entire square. But what
on the TV screen will look like a chaos provoked by a huge number of
uncontrollable protesters, is in fact entirely and carefully planned and
organized by someone else, by whoever gives orders to the police around us and
to the disguised mercenaries amongst us. The day after the police will say that
nothing of this would have happened if the protesters would have followed the
established route. But it is the police that blocked all the streets and led
everybody into Parliament Square. Now the smashing of windows is coming near to
us and we can see better how it “works”: whilst people smash on the ground
floor, on the upper floors the windows open and someone takes photographs of the
spectacle below. This is like being part of a film that, at the same time, is
real, it is our life being exploited in this film, in a film that you never
decided to take part in, where people with smashed heads, and smashed for real,
are carried next to you whilst the police refuses to let them through.
parte 3
Before the police starts charging people we try to talk, to make jokes, we smile
at each other, “despite everything, I’m happy to be with you all!”. To try
warming up we improvise a dance class where one of us teaches to the others
different dance steps. But after a while we just try to keep on smiling, and the
more we stay here, the less we are able to talk, we see the screams getting
nearer to us, another line of policemen on the opposite side of the square is
charging people. It is many of us, so many, a crowd of people looking terrified
at a nightmare getting closer. We stay very near to the police line, the one
behind us, as to seek protection, and how pathetic to think about us still
seeking protection from danger by the police now that I’m writing all this. We
beg them to let us out, there are people crying. A policeman tells one of us,
with a confidential tone of voice, that the place where we are is safe, that we
should stay here. After five minutes the same policeman with all the others in
his line is charging us. All this seems madness to us, we don’t understand, also
because they look like human beings, despite the way they are dressed and the
weapons they carry, and you want to see them as human beings, because you are
frightened, upset, my bowls turn over. And they also talk like human beings, and
their tone of voice changes, from confidential, to reassuring, to authoritative.
It’s only after leaving this nightmare that we understand that they were not
human beings there, they were just acting as human beings, they were just part
of a spectacular machine of violence. I heard accounts of ’68 when students used
to discuss with the lined up police, and it happened that some policemen started
trembling because of those discussion. Now it is the police that looks for
discussions, but these are not discussions, because the policemen are trained to
say what they say, and to even think what they think, they are just a sort of
shell that still appears human, but is deprived of the capacity of thinking.
And the policemen are paid to act in that way, and trained to act and speak and
think in that way, and there are so many of them, and they are so well trained,
and so much money goes into paying for all of this, and after today this money
will be even more, more money for this lobotomy of a police training, and less
money for education, for this other very different “training” that develops a
critical thinking. And the money, of course, is not going to us here, once again
it is we who are working for free, as unprofessional actors this time, this is
free and enforced labour, we are forced to act in a TV drama where our life is
put in danger for real, in a sort of huge horrifying snuff movie, that will be
used by its brilliant producers to convince the TV news watchers and everybody
else that stronger measures have to be taken against this uncontrollable
terrorism that the students and the youth are able to provoke. Thanks to this
kind of productions more and more people will accept for this country, and not
only for this one, to further descend into this sort of spectacular fascist
regime, which is urgently shutting down and destroying the places where is
taught to people how to use their own brain (how to use our own body to think).
We need to keep cracking this control over the media
We need to contrast this monopoly of violence
We need to reappropriate what has been taken away from us
parte 4
A girl with a megaphone screams asking the students of Manchester University to
gather, a bus is waiting for them, the students are allowed to leave if they
show their ID card. A guy is distributing tickets for the bus and he puts a
couple in my hands, I ask for more, my friends stretch their hands towards him.
For a moment I think ourselves as a bunch of Jews in Nazi Germany trying to
desperately save their lives, holding this piece of paper very tightly in our
hands. It is when the Manchester students, and us with them, prepare to leave
that the police charges all of us. We cannot believe it, this is what we are
still able to say to each other: “I don’t believe this”, this is not possible,
it doesn’t make sense, not here, not in this country. There are all sorts of
people amongst us, there are some smartly dressed girls, young people, old
people, there is a guy who stares the policemen, face to face, for hours,
immobile. There are also some of my students that have never been to a
demonstration before. I try to smile at them, as if everything would be fine,
but after a point all I can do is to pretend to be annoyed, and I shake my head
as to say “This is all so silly”. But this is not really what I think and feel,
and I don’t even know what I feel anymore.
We run away from our spot, from the police charging us. Now we are on the other
side of the square, squeezed, we don’t feel the cold anymore, our bodies are
pressed together. The police starts releasing people one by one. It is around
8.30pm I think. Every time we hear a window crashing we all tremble, we, this
crowd of people that we don’t see where it ends. Now I start worrying about what
can happen when we leave the crowd. We know that it is our right not to say our
name. Someone suggests to cover our face when going out. I am about to leave,
the guy before me has a scarf covering his mouth, the policeman shouts at him,
the boy takes immediately the scarf away from his face, but another policeman
takes him away. I show the content of my bag to a policeman and I leave. I pass
beside two more policemen with a camera but they don’t take any pictures of me.
Two of my friends come after me. But we are the last to leave the crowd. The
line is closed again now. I’m outside now but I still can’t believe what is
going on. The three of us hug each other looking at the crowd behind the line,
at the row of horses in front of us. One of my student phones me, she is crying:
“Please, do something, help me, talk with a policeman, I cannot stay here any
longer, please…” I don’t know what to say, I mumble something to her, and then
I ask a policeman where will they let people out, even though I know it doesn’t
make any sense to ask this. Westminster, he says. The police shouts with a
megaphone: “You are free now, just go to Westminster bridge and leave the
square.” By now people know that this is just another lie. The police charges
the crowd. We decide to leave. Our friends and everybody else will be pushed
onto Westminster Bridge and detained there for another couple of hours. I don’t
know much of what happened there. I know that people were let peeing themselves.
I heard that more violence was perpetrated by the police. They had dogs on the
bridge. I called my friends after they were released, but they were not really
able to talk. “Great, you are finally free!”, I say. “No, it’s not great… it’s
not great… it’s not great…” is the reply. The same night my friend writes an
email saying “I’m not sure I could ever endure something like that again – which
is what they intended”. The day after she sends us another email: “The numbness
is wearing off now. From now on I will join every single demonstration.”
Since I left Parliament square I have been about to cry many times. I haven’t
done this yet. A friend told me “you must have been really scared”. But I was
not scared, it was something else, something that I could not really describe.
And this is the question I ask myself since that evening: how to channel all of
this into something else, into something different from a feeling of hatred? How
to turn this violence into some other kind of different violence, how to use it
as a force that is neither physical nor psychological, as the one used by the
police? How to have this something that presses tears in my eyes doing something
else, how to make it proliferate it all around, instead of having to vomit it
out in the form of a “human” violence like to the one perpetrated on us?
And possibly, how to practice something like a militant education, which is not
educating to militancy, but rather an education that is moved through the same
intensity of something like a militancy? Because precisely this was at stake the
other day, and now, right? Pedagogy was the issue, education and its collapse,
and what can emerge from this. A militant pedagogy like that of Jacotot, which
spreads outside the institution where is exercised, a pedagogy which even the
peasant utilizes, a pedagogy which can operate, but almost imperceptibly, inside
an institution, but which cannot be institutionalized, and which now is long
gone as it was, but it has never really died.
Personal account forwarded from Paolo
The same night I tell to my Colombian and Serbian friends what happened in that
square, and they understand everything immediately, right from the start of my
account. I spent most of my life in a country that has not been ruled under what
is properly called a dictatorship for more than half a century. I know that
European so called democratic countries, like the one where I was born, have
organized in a recent “democratic” past some nightmares which were much worse
than the one I experienced. I realize that unless you don’t experience something
like this you cannot have a sense of what it is. You read this in the
newspapers, you watch a documentary, you read it online, but you cannot really
get what it is. Now I think I have a sense of this, and it is as if I share
something else with friends coming from countries like Colombia and Serbia, who
have experienced what is called a dictatorship.
parte 5
From what my friends told me, I know that in Latin America the university has
traditionally been one of the few places where people could exercise and develop
something like a political thinking. This makes us understand the decision to
destroy the few places in Europe where people can learn how to exercise and
develop something like a political thinking. I wasn’t able to make sense of the
closure of the philosophy department at Middlesex until two days ago: why should
the managerial board of a university close a prestigious department that
attracts many students and consequently brings high profits? They said it was
because of the economic crisis, but this would be an illogical paradox. And now
everything becomes more clear. There is an old Italian saying that goes like
this: “Al contadin non far sapere quanto e’ buono il formaggio con le pere”,
that is, don’t let the peasant know how good is cheese with pears. This is at
the very bottom of what is happening here, at the bottom of the sinking of this
country, and not only this one, into a spectacular fascism ruled by national and
international elites and corporations. This is what the saying tells: “Erase all
the possibilities for people to think and experience what they have not
experienced, what appears as impossible, like having pleasure in eating
something salty together with something sweet for an Italian person in a time
where there was no TV explaining us how to eat and cook, and how to mix all
sorts of ingredients together. Erase for the people the possibility to think and
experience something different from what is offered or imposed on them. Erase
the conditions for something possible to take place.”
But there is another version of the same saying, it is less known perhaps, but
it has been sometimes used nonetheless. It goes like this: “Al padron non far
sapere quanto e’ buono il formaggio con le pere.” Don’t let the master know how
good is cheese with pears. It is here, through this doubling of the old saying,
through the doubling of this manufactured collapse, that we can create, keep
creating, the conditions for a possible to take place.
Pôssa nf, isso é quase um tratado, not suitable to i-net, just my 2 cents, next time just post the link, will ya ?
Uma observação rápida: estudar, tirar um curso, não é suposto conduzir automáticamente a um emprego.
Diff. skills e isso era dantes, e um privilégio, e uma treta.
Uma pessoa estuda (ou devia…) porque quer tornar-se numa pessoa melhor e menos estúpida, e nos mais altruístas, contribuir
Citação que poderão (ou não…) reconhecer: «It has always befallen to a few to sacrifice for the good of the many»
Depois de estudar o quanto achar bem, fax akilo que procurar, encontrar, ou que lhe cair em sorte.
Como disse antes, different skills…
Más notícias.
http://www.publico.pt/Mundo/berlusconi-sobrevive-a-mocao-de-desconfianca_1470894
A luta continua.
Lateral:
O presidente Giorgio Napolitano lá é uma figura decorativa e se bem me lembro era do PCI, quando ‘isso’ ainda existia.
Se esse f.d.p. putanheiro Berluscoiso caísse, quem se perfilaria para o suceder ?
Akele paralamento é uma ‘lamentabilidade’, quinhentos e tal onorevoles que não servem para coisa nenhuma, a não ser faxer umas flores numa língua baita sexy e depois viver do erário del popolo.
Estou ligeiramente desactualizado em relação aos ‘itálicos’.
Publiquei este post integralmente aqui:
http://blogdomata.blogspot.com/2010/12/mais-sobre-os-protestos-em-it%C3%A1lia.html
Espero que não seja abuso…
Cumprimentos
Salut.