1)   We need to rethink the issue of the network. Within the social movements over the past few years, everyone agrees that the new form of organization is network organization. This is fine, but it isn’t enough. In fact, today we see liberal economists and scholars exalt the same characteristics that social movements pointed to in a subversive way: the excess of  cooperation in market logic, the importance of sharing, the value of differences and multiplicity, the construction of public space, open-source and free software experiences. In other words, most of these people are aware of the impossibility of organizing social cooperation upstream: so, their crucial problem is how to capture it downstream. This is the meaning of the hierarchization and segmentation processes: they must continuously reduce social cooperation to economic value and impose command upon it _post festum_. Also governance is a form of network organization, to use the words of Ned Rossiter: it is based on the impossibility of the classical form of vertical government. In other words, it is based on the crisis determined by the struggles and living labor movements. Governance is decentralized, but it isn’t horizontal. In fact, there aren’t horizontal networks. To summarize: the network is not in itself subversive; it can only be so if linked with the questions of the re-appropriation of the public and the breakdown of capitalistic command and hierarchies.

2)   Edu-factory is a network, but this is not enough. The problem is: how to become an organized network, to use Ned’s categories, that is to say an autonomous institution? We have to clarify: we cannot become an autonomous institution only because we build up a cooperative. An autonomous institution is for us the relationship between the production of oppositional knowledges, the constitution of new common norms, and the disarticulation of the existent university. That is to say, it is the combination between common organization and resistance. So, the autonomous university is not an alternative to the class struggle within the university, or ‘union’ claims. On the contrary, the class struggle is the base of the autonomous university. This is our experience in university movements and auto-education projects: there is no autonomous university without class struggle, without the struggle against the exploitative relationships and the hierarchization process. So the invention of autonomous institutions is a political and subversive process.

3)  Governance needs self-organization, but it has continuously the problem of how to command it. Vidya Ashram wrote about the autonomous global university: ‘It is a site of cooperation among knowledge producers and a site of non-cooperation with the global regime of knowledge’. In other words, we have to build up a collective command within self-organization and social cooperation. Edu-factory is for us a field of political research on the transnational level. As many people have written, it is situated on the borders: here we need not to build up a universal path to liberation, but rather to connect and translate different forms and experiences in a common process. The idea of the autonomous global university is this common process, based on the multiplicity of singularities. So how we can start to build up this process, and link it to our production of oppositional knowledge? How can we concretely imagine an organized network, that is to say an autonomous institution based on the process of struggle and the re-appropriation of public space? How can the autonomous university open a battlefield on which to fight the forms of capitalistic capture, for example the intellectual property system? How can we become a site of connection for struggles in the metropolises and other social contexts? These are the main political questions for us.

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