Buses unloaded students, unions and citizens from across Quebec to come forward and protest against the Liberal government that held its General Council this weekend in Victoriaville.

The simple act of having put barriers on the ground separating the protesters from Congress, was enough to justify police violence against the people.

A rain of gas and violence fell on the demonstrators: more than 250 cans of CS gas, drawn from close range for some, many rubber bullets and hundreds of arrests. The police chief welcomed the excellent work of law enforcement …

ONE STUDENT LOST AN EYE AND ANOTHER IS BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH, many have suffered head injuries.

The SQ has hampered the work of paramedics who tried to rescue one of the injured students. Buses on the way home were also arrested, the police is now attacking the freedom to manifest and move in Québec.

The will of a man continues to crush democracy.

Is the university worth saving? The question arose insistently at The University is Ours! Conference, organized by the transnational edu-factory collective along with local Canadian allies and held last weekend in Toronto (April 27-29). In its current form, wracked by crisis, the academy produces precious little that can extend our collective capacities and much that diminishes them: hierarchy, exploitation, debt, precarity, cynicism, greed… The restructuring of university systems has brought corporatized administrations, rising tuition, departmental closures, expanded class sizes, noxious corporate food, anti-strike legislation enacted against academic workers… In a world where knowledge, culture and communication have been commodified as never before, capital has turned its attention to the academy and is completely dedicated to its wholesale transformation. This university is most certainly not ours.

And yet, as participants at the edu-factory conference made absolutely clear, within, against and beyond the neoliberal academy lies our own university. The austerity-stricken university is combustible, and knowledge is incandescent. Across today’s campuses struggles proliferate, from Rome to London, from Santiago to Berkeley, from Cairo to Dublin. Students, academic workers and their allies have flooded the streets, and universities have been one of the key sites of resistance to the market over the past five years. At the Toronto conference, participants gathered in an atmosphere marked by joyous affect, mutual respect, and non-sectarian engagement. On Friday a busload of students arrived from a Quebec rocked by protest, where red felt has run out as the carrè rouges, or little red squares multiply across the jackets of hundreds of thousands of students, faculty and supporters who have faced off against the police and brought the post-secondary system in the province to halt against proposed tuition hikes. It is not about high tuition, or even less tuition anymore, says CLASSE, the student organization that is leading the struggles, but rather about no tuition. The carrè rouge symbol itself traces the recent circulation of university labour, student, and broader social struggles in central Canada: originally used during anti-poverty actions in Quebec, then becoming the icon of the 2004 student strike, reappearing during and after the York University strike of 2008-2009 (the longest in Canadian history), the little red squares are now teeming in the streets of Montreal every night in spontaneous demonstrations which have brought hundreds of thousands out against the tuition hikes. In Toronto Quebec activists met and shared counter-knowledges with trade unionists, campus activists, and radical professors from Italy, the United States, Mexico, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom. The struggle for free education and dignified working conditions is global, one in which anti-racist activism entwines with queer pedagogies in a knowledge produced from below, aimed squarely against those transforming our universities from above.

In Toronto the struggles of students against tuition hikes linked up with and learned from those involved in union drives for teaching assistants, research assistants, and postdocs on campuses across North America. Labour activists doing solidarity work with gendered and racialized cleaning staff, admin assistants, and food workers reminded us that students and precariously employed professors are not the privileged subjects of transformation. Analyses of the ways hierarchy pervades and segments the neoliberal campus encountered the Occupy movement’s offshoot (Occupy Student Debt) responding to the shameful debt burden imposed on those who want nothing more than an education and a decent shot in the labour market. The University of Toronto General Assembly shows us that a parallel governance structure can be created within and against a university addicted to shady corporate donations. How do we create a political language of broad appeal across these groups? How do we create new practices of critical solidarity that engage not only those who produce knowledge on campus, but also those who toil on it doing the cleaning work, the service work, and communities whose lives are affected by university development more broadly? In our university we ask ourselves these questions and craft answers we will bring back to our communities.

The Toronto conference had other, vital horizons however. The weekend also heard from autonomous education initiatives existing beyond the university, experiments brought together in networks of inspiration, reflection, and critique. From these multiple sites, concepts wrapped in action: exodus, the common, occupation, decolonization, self-organization, autonomy – expressed and rearticulated through projects such as the Mess Hall, Social Science Centre, Lincoln, Convivial Research and Insurgent Learning, The Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry, Purple Thistle, Uninomade, Occupy… At several Toronto locations across three days, these experiences intersected, recognized, learned from each other. What it is that sustains our experiments, and what makes them die out? How is it that we can build alternative spaces for a knowledge production that are other than, oppositional and constituent? These institutions of the common, in which ideas circulate but money does not, point the way toward an independent relationship toward knowledge, outside of the confines of the neoliberal university. Struggles within the academy will need to link up with these experiments occurring beyond them.

And this conference, organized across the boundaries of time, institutions, hierarchy, and national borders, points to the direction to be taken as we occupy, appropriate, and construct our university. On the last day of the meeting we discovered that a comrade from Mexico had been kicked out of her downtown hotel, her belongings tossed into the hall in an ugly racist incident. The last act of the conference saw it march as a whole to the hotel, with over a hundred participants gathering outside to make it clear such behavior will be fought and exposed. In Toronto at the end of April 2012 we were our university prefigured in the present, a university that acts as an institution of the common, where knowledge breaks its bonds.

On Saturday 6PM at 16 Beaver (4th floor), we convene a “spontaneous seminar” on our urban struggles and the commons.

Contents:

1. Information on a “spontaneous seminar”

2. Prolegomena to an American Spring

3. Inquiries

1. Information on a “spontaneous seminar”

Who: Organizers and participants of the 16 Beaver Group with David Harvey, Miguel Robles-Duran, friends from Edu-Factory, Making Worlds, and friends and organizers from May Day

What: A Seminar for Molecular Knowledges and Networked Militancy

Where: 16 Beaver

When: Saturday, May 5^th 6pm to 10pm

How: Collectivize our intelligence on the politics and strategic questions of organizing networked militancy, autonomous knowledges, and practices.

2. Prolegomena to an American Spring

Just days after May Day, with its joys and passions still reverberating, we call for a spontaneous seminar around the theme and title of ”Organizing Molecular Knowledges and Networked Militancy.”

From the perspective of variegated and evolving processes of organization in the last months and years, the seemingly contrasting notion of a “spontaneous seminar” is meant to invoke a time for us to think and organize anew, starting from the most recent irruptions of energy in which we’ve found ourselves. These include a series of convergences from which we’re advancing where the space of the city and the space of autonomous education combine. Thus, the seminar seeks to organize our collective intelligence and investigate the processes that make the city a site of struggle and a site of autonomous learning.

We approach the city as the site of divisions and hierarchies, but also the site of common composition and horizontal organizing. We therefore want to think about the class forces of both commons and capitalist accumulation, and advance forms of militancy that build alliances and new political compositions that enable us to take initiative in the protracted struggles over our city, our education, and our future.

Months of organizing for the May Day demonstrations brought together new working groups, assemblies, affinity groups, organizations, and loose associations in order to reorient the strategic field of alliance across the city’s many workers. The experiences of “The Free University” in Madison Square Park on May Day opened a day-long portal to a commons of education, space, and militancy, wherein a collective vision of autonomous learning was built, elaborated, and animated. In a gathering called “The University is Ours!” in Toronto last weekend, militants took stock of the conflicts that surround the neoliberal university in North American and globally, “through a series of debriefings on experiences of resistance and the creation of a cartography of local and global struggles.” Their gathering was a linking of struggles and a call to develop a North American network that can deepen our relationships and advance our struggles.

This call to network suggests one pathway for combining our organizational energies in NYC and for building powerful transnational circuits of struggle.  On Saturday, we have the opportunity to collaborate with visiting Italian comrades Gigi Roggero and Anna Curcio from the militant research networks Edu-Factory and Uninomade, who have built up processes of collaboration, inquiry, and organizing across Europe in the last years precisely through networked forms of militancy. We will also be joined by David Harvey, Miguel Robles-Duran, Making Worlds, and other friends and organizers from May Day.

3. Inquiries

The city and the university are two sites on a common plane from which we assess our present situation and ask “what next?” in the organization of our autonomy. Some basic organizing questions we have before us:

(1) How do we understand the space of the city as the site of capitalist accumulation as well as the site of the production of our commons? What is the analytic reach of ‘the urban’ or ‘the social factory’ in understanding how our daily lives, relationships, and subjectivities are entwined in both practices of resistance and autonomous creation, as well as exploitation, command, and accumulation of money and power over us. What does “knowing the urban” help us know about ourselves, our struggles, and our vision for autonomy?

(2) While the “network” has become the primary form for linking social movement organization, we know that networks are not necessarily enough to build power and reorganize daily life. What common forms does a network take, and through what practices, does it emerge? How do we understand the network as both everyday institutions of our cooperation, sociality, and mutualism but also sites of command, domination, appropriation? That is, how do we organize ourselves and our struggles by transforming the networked social factory into a militant organized network of struggles? What is a “organized network,” and what does it mean to equate the “organized network” with the “autonomous institution”? Upon what bases, principles, and politics does a network become organized into a common? How can we organize networks of flight from the institutions that capture our common intelligence, work, and relations and how can we reappropriate resources, time, and relationships in the process?

(3) What is the dual role of knowledge and subjectivity in both the present political economy and in organizing revolutionary transformation? How can research and education open political processes and practices? How can militant research and learning practices reshape/modify/transform traditional notions of “movement building”? In other words, from this perspective it is not a question of how to use education to build some sort of conscience, that helps to movement to “attract people”, “become political”, etc. but rather a question of how the interaction established in an educational/research process is already a way of political participation which empowers people and, at the same time, transforms the movement itself in this very operation.

Through presentations and discussions we aim to think about the organization of autonomous knowledges within and beyond the university as well as the terms of networked organizing in the urban field/social factory. A relatively dense set of alternative practices and solidarities within and beyond the university already exists, and more are emerging. They have been important in our collective attempts to amass knowledge for our struggles in a new militant context. Our organizational, work, and learning experiences in the pores of the university, whether public, private or ‘free’, comprise an uneven field of politics, from city to city, from institution to institution, and from our varied subjective experiences of governance.

In this context, what does “organizing the common,” mean?

The seminar seeks to build upon the experiences of people and projects currently undertaking the work of plotting, planning, and scheming autonomous networks of space, knowledge, and subjectivity. We view this as an opportunity to think and organize into a network of autonomous practices across the city, within and outside the university system. We take both the city and the university to be a physical setting but also a set of elaborate power-knowledge relations that are diffuse across the urban terrain and social factory. We aim to use our time together to collaboratively, and spatially, think of our role in the aggregation of new knowledges and subjectivities in our urban struggles.

We therefore pose the question of organizing and aggregating the common, so that we may think more clearly about what it means to organize our cooperative networks beyond the borders of the urban/knowledge economy. Join us in thinking about (1) the stakes of autonomous education and inquiry into urban processes, and (2) how it can build power in the organization of networked militancy. Your thoughts, experiences, and wagers are welcome and necessary.

http://www.thisisforever.org/upcoming/organizing-molecular-knowledges-and-networked-militancy

“We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow.  And the jobs we
work toward are the jobs we already have.  Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt.”

— Communiqué from an Absent Future
(from the UCSC occupation barricades September 2009)

In the United States, two-thirds of college graduates leave school with student loan debt, an average of $25,000 each. Debt rates have increased 500 percent since 1999, and there are more and more of us across the country facing six-figure loans who will make monthly payments for the rest of our lives. Those of us who are low-income and working-class students often incur debts for degrees we will never complete because it is especially difficult balancing school and employment in this precarious economy. Student debt will burden us and our families for years to come. It will be the breath down our neck at every life choice and the clock that disciplines our present and future labor time. Debt is profoundly alienating and individuating. It separates us from each other and the commonwealth of our education gained from generations of social movements.

But now we see all around us the quiet compulsion of wages and debt, for if higher education is increasingly a necessity to “get ahead” it also is a means to blackmail us. The privilege of our hard-earned education is the debt that sustains the present economy.

Indeed, the debt explosion has brought students and families to a grim milestone: on April 25, 2012, total student debt in the US will surpass one trillion dollars. The Occupy Student Debt Campaign, part of an Occupy Wall Street education working group, calls it 1T Day.

How Did We Get to One Trillion?

Tuition at US colleges has risen 500 percent since the 1980s, twice the rate of inflation, amidst reduced government funding for higher education. The very political class and economic system which has produced sovereign and individual debt crises the world over is now responsible for structurally dismantling social welfare won through political struggle and preying upon millions of indebted workers.

College administrators at public institutions explain tuition increases by asserting that budget cuts have given them no choice. But that is not the whole story. In fact, college administrators, in many cases, want to raise tuition. US colleges are run like financial firms: Administrators use student tuition dollars as collateral to improve their institution’s bond rating in capital markets. A top priority at many colleges is to pledge students’ tuition to Wall Street to fund construction projects that enrich the one percent. This is also why it makes little sense to insist on a distinction between public and private institutions. Whether public or private, all colleges where students pay tuition are debt-financed. Those of us who can’t pay back our loans (an increasingly likely prospect for many) are cogs in the machinery of capital accumulation, as our colleges become sites for generating profit for billionaires.

How Does Wall Street Profit From Student Debt?

The SLM Corporation (known as Sallie Mae) is a former government entity that has been fully privatized since 2005. Sallie Mae illustrates how Wall Street profits from student debt. Sallie lends money to students for higher education, and then it sells those loan payments to Wall Street. Wall Street packages student debt into a financial instrument called SLABS—Student Loan Asset Backed Securities—that are similar to the mortgage-backed securities that crashed the housing market. Finally, Wall Street sells these debt bundles on the open market for a spectacular profit. Malcolm Harris noted that “in 1990, there were $75.6 million of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion.” From reduced state funding and exploding tuition costs to student loans sold as securities, the debt financing of US higher education is inseparable from strategies of capitalist accumulation and exploitation.

What Happens If Debtors Cannot Pay?
US debt collectors have extraordinary and unprecedented powers to force payment. Both federal and private student loans are exempt from bankruptcy protections. Banks, airlines, and wealthy individuals can file for bankruptcy and get their debts written off. It happens all the time.
On the contrary, if you don’t pay your student debt, collectors can garnish your wages. They can garnish your social security check in old age. In fact, the Washington Post reported recently that tens of billions in student loans are owed by people in their 60s, and it is not uncommon for debt collectors to harass the elderly for loans they took out decades before. These powers of collection are granted by the federal government, which works in tandem with the finance industry to keep the boot on the neck of student borrowers.

What Can We Do?

The Occupy Student Debt Campaign believes student debts are illegitimate from the start, and thus it makes little sense to reform the current system. Furthermore, we believe the hour for petitioning the government is long over. It’s time for direct action by debtors organizing collectively on their own behalf. The campaign has initiated a series of actions around the country on April 25, 1TDay (1tday.org). In New York City, we will host a mock jubilee, a celebratory write-off of all student debt, followed by a march to Wall Street for a ceremonious burning of Sallie Mae loan statements.

After 1T Day, our work continues. The centerpiece of the campaign is a pledge of student debt refusal. On our website, http://www.occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/, student debtors can sign a pledge to stop paying their student loans once one million others have agreed to do the same.

Here is the text of the debtors’ pledge:

The Pledge
As members of the most indebted generations in history, we pledge to stop making student loan payments after one million of us have signed this pledge.
Student loan debt, soon to top $1 trillion, is poisoning the pursuit of higher education. With chronic underemployment likely for decades to come, we will carry an intolerable burden into the future. The time has come to refuse this debt load. Debt distorts our educational priorities and severely limits our life options.
Education is not a commodity and it should not be a vehicle for generating debt, or profit for banks. Education at all levels—pre-K through Ph.D.—is a right and a public good.
* We believe the federal government should cover the cost of tuition at public colleges and universities.
* We believe that any student loan should be interest-free.
* We believe that private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books.
*We believe that the current student debt load should be written off.

In acknowledgment of these beliefs, I am signing the Debtors’ Pledge of Refusal.

“This is our time!” Join the movement for debt jubilee!

Through this economic system, we are the subjects of theft—our common wealth produced over generations, as well as the wealth of the so-called natural world that we co-produce, are held hostage. In this way, debt too has become a common, a shared destiny, and a generational theft of time: the appropriation of our labor in both the present and in the future.

As in many parts of the world, we too have suffered the effects of the deepening economic and political crises with every cut into our wages, our well being, and our time. But, in the US as elsewhere, we are also creating new publics, new commons, and new political cultures that empower us to both resist the blackmail of this crumbling economic system and find collective pathways out of it.

Debt is a decisive issue in this fight. What first emerged in demonstrations against the economic turmoil of the closing months of 2008—the international chant ‘We will not pay for your crisis!’—has turned into the increasingly urgent question of how debt will be used in the balance of global class relations in the coming months and years. As George Caffentzis reminds us, “demands for its abolition can be unifying, because it is everybody’s condition in the working class worldwide,” from those who suffer student debt to those saddled with “credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt.”

This spring, students and workers are walking out, striking, occupying, and organizing all across the country. In the context of a rigged system wherein student debts underwrite a form of indenture, refusal is the only adequate response. Refusal acknowledges the larger economic and political context in which education debts are incurred while also bypassing the conventional ideologies that have failed us so far. To refuse student debt is to reappropriate education as our commonwealth, not a source of profit. Refusal also allows debtors to act in their own interest rather than ask for assistance as supplicants. Finally, refusal to participate in an unjust system provides moral clarity and the framework for reimagining what the university might become once it is no longer a site for the accumulation of capital.

Refusing student debt serfdom is indeed part of a larger anti-capitalist struggle. Recently, in an open forum on the debt-prison system, we were reminded that debt was central to slavery in early America, for many slavers used credit markets to finance their acquisition of slaves from Africa. Now, people of color in the US suffer disproportionately in one the most brutal prison systems in the world. It is important that we make the connection between debt, slavery, and racism, not as co-equal forms of oppression, but as complementary modes of capitalist exploitation. This is why, as NYU Professor Nick Mirzoeff argued, “resisting debt servitude in the United States is a central part of extending and completing the Civil Rights movement.” Debt is central to how capitalism functions. To refuse student debt is to reclaim our present, our future, and our education. That is what it means to Occupy Wall Street.

President Selma Botman evoked a metaphor that made my stomach churn. It was on the evening of March 7, at a public forum on unemployment sponsored by various Maine labor unions and USM’s Economics Department.

Possibly mistaking the gathering of elderly union organizers and young leftists as “job-creating” capitalists, her brief opening speech enthusiastically lauded USM’s commitment to connecting students with jobs. “USM is a pipeline, which delivers students to employers,” she said.

I was left picturing my friends and fellow classmates sucked up a slimy sewer pipe leading to an office cubicle in some drab, Wall Street firm.

As it turns out, the pipeline ideology goes deeper than Botman’s uninspiring speech. The imagery is actually borrowed from Mike Wing, USM director of external programs. Wing’s quote shows up in a Portland Press Herald op-ed piece written by Botman on Feb. 20.

“We are helping to build a pipeline of human capital for tomorrow’s high-skilled jobs,” he wrote. Although a seemingly innocuous piece of corporate jargon, the attitude underscores the problem with higher education in America, and at USM. There has been much conversation recently about the University of Maine System’s “budget shortfall.”  We have been told that revenues fail to match expenditures and are encouraged to accept the obvious economic antidote to the problem: the chopping block.

My concern here is that no one has examined the bigger picture or questioned the economic and political forces at work within the context of higher education in the United States. The recent system budget trouble is only a tiny sliver of a much bigger problem.

The truth is that public universities are gradually being destroyed in favor of corporatized, student debt factories with shiny buildings and highly paid CEOs who know how to market a particular image. The knowledge commons of the academy is quickly surrendering to neoliberal models that value profit margins over intellectual pursuits.

While administrators aim to transform students into “human capital” and intellectual commons into a “pipeline,” the reality is that students are graduating to low wage service sector jobs and a lifetime of debt.

Furthermore, decreased state and federal support for higher education erodes the college dream for lower income students with each passing year. We have little choice but to take on massive amounts of unsubsidized debt, keeping mega financial institutions smiling. What happened here?

In Bad Education, an essay in the communique “Generation of Debt,” Malcolm Harris explores the institutional priority shift in public and private universities alike. He notes the exponential increase in the amount of debt current students take on compared to the benefits of the degree they may attain. While tuition at American colleges has risen 900 percent since 1978, far outpacing the rate of inflation, wages for recent graduates have fallen and unemployment has skyrocketed. “The result,” Harris writes, “is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.”

Now, for those of us who value the acquisition of knowledge over obsolete notions of career preparation, this might not be a large enough deterrent for us to opt-out of college. However, Harris goes on to note that the increase in tuition over the past several decades has little to do with the quality of education offered. In fact, the ratio of underpaid graduate adjunct professors to tenured professors now stands at three to one, a complete reversal from 40 years ago.

While the money going towards educators has diminished, head administrators are now pulling down large sums of money at many universities, due to market pressures demanding that they attract students, the consumers of university products and services. Within this corporatized view of education, administrators must focus on grandiose projects (second floor of the library, anyone?) to win those tuition dollars.

“If tuition has increased astronomically…[and] if the market value of a degree has dipped and the most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure,” Harris writes, “…higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.”

Fortunately, we are nowhere near the draconian tuition hikes of the University of California, where rates have gone up as high as 32 percent in the past three years alone. The tuition freeze is still in place at USM, but for how much longer? When tuition hikes do come, will we demand a more equitable model of higher education that creates critical thinkers instead of “human capital”? The choice is ours.

* http://usmfreepress.org/2012/04/04/lowry-on-usm-presidents-pipeline-of-human-capital/?ref=hp

The Polish edition of the book is out now!

Download in : PDF - EPUB - MOBI

Students and universities fear the new plans would give politicians more power over their operations and are upset over a proposal to charge students tuition fees for the first time at state colleges.

Students gathered at a downtown square in Prague with plans to march through the city to the seat of government to urge the Cabinet to reject the proposed changes.

“These changes are bad,” Miroslav Jasurek, a students leader, told the crowd. “Universities are not a toy in the hands of politicians,” he said.

Prime Minister Petr Necas said Wednesday he was ready to discuss with universities and students the proposed changes.

The plans would replace an academic oversight board of professors and students with new panels, which could include politicians and businessmen. The government says the reforms are necessary to increase educational standards and secure more funding.

Rallies were also planned in other major Czech cities as part of weeklong protests.

President Vaclav Klaus condemned the student actions. “A deep and thorough reform of universities is absolutely necessary and every sensible person knows that,” Klaus said.

The students argued they were not against the reforms in principle.

“We’re all for a reform that would improve the quality of universities,” Jasurek said.

Feb. 29, A report for libcom.org from Barcelona, as thousands of young people march in cities across Spain to protest austerity measures for the 29F: Vaga General d’Universitats.

Today’s demonstration, or as it was labelled here in Catalunya, a student strike, was held for a combination of reasons around university staff pay and conditions, general concerns about the privatisation of education, and in solidarity with the Valencian students who had recently been brutally attacked by the boys in blue for the temerity to demand the heating to be turned on when it was freezing cold. Police violence had been a recurring theme in discussions and placards at the protest. There were various chants about the state of Spain no longer being a democracy, or that the current government was fascist. While it is easy to dismiss these claims, as Spain is clearly not fascist, it is nevertheless disconcerting for a people only 30 years away from a genuine fascist government to see an increasingly aggressive police and government presence on campuses and in neighbourhoods.

Read more

Athens, 21-22 March 2012 : Occupied theatre Empros (Riga Pallamidou 2, Psyrri)

Even though EU governments and institutions repeatedly confine crisis to the ‘exceptional’ case of Greece, the state of emergency seems to be the spectre that is haunting Europe. It seems that in one of the richest areas of the globe, no one is living within their means and austerity is the only way to rescue whatever has been built for decades; rescuing by drowning, building by demolishing seems to be the dogma of political and economic orthodoxy.

Even though several political forces had in many instances predicted the tragic outcomes of this specific form of development that the post-fordist regime of accumulation and the unleashed financialisation of the economy would engender for societies at large, it seems that the general feeling, even among the most radical, is dominated by an uncomfortable numb. It seems that verification of prediction repeats itself always and only as tragedy.

Greece, however, seems to be the lieu par excellence, where this tornado, ravages wages, pensions, social benefits, in brief all welfare structures, and political rights that had survived from the post-war consensus. The Greek  experiment for the fine-tuning of the European future takes place in a clear and unequivocal way.

However, apart from the imposition orchestrated by the Greek government, the EU and the IMF looting of any material and symbolic, real and illusionary sign of dignity, it seems that what is intensified in this declared war are the responses of the opponent. The ongoing escalation of social struggles against the monstrosity of recurrent austerity measures gives birth to more and more numerous and more outraged monsters of refusal.

It seems that resistance is not enough; neither escape. What has been proven in recurrent instances during the past two years is that the question (im)posed by innumerable subjectivities is not that of resistance against the attacks, neither the construction of evading alternatives; it is simply and purely the unformulated, speechless, hence ungraspable, unpredictable and fearful refusal.

As anonymous, unformed and unformable part of this non-representable movement, we invite everyone who is part of this scattered, bewildered and confused street thought and action to come and form a two-day Open assembly in Athens, where the monsters of crisis from the global European South (from London to Madrid and from Berlin to Rome), as well as from the upheavals and insurrections in North Africa will exchange experience and ideas in order to further contaminate the European underdogs with hopeless rage and hopeful fear.

Following the 5^th of May 2010 demonstration in Athens, the Economist published in its front-page an image from Athens with the title ‘Coming to a city near you?’. Today we replace the question mark with an exclamation mark. The networks that link Syntagma with Tahrir, Barcelona, London or New York are stronger than ever; like a chain of events, occupations, demonstrations, initiatives for collective and un-mediated refusal become transnational.

We invite everyone individually and collectively to come to the assembly in order to think in common how we can disperse this absolute refusal and find ways to work together against the economic and political dogma of the crisis across established national, economic and political borders. Our aim is to open up to the various forms of active and absolute refusal that emerge in our every day interconnected lives, and to create common time and spaces of struggles, practices and actions.

If you want more information and especially if you want to send ideas, please go to http://resistancecomesfirst.wordpress.com/ or send email to syntagmacalling@gmail.com