Call to mobilisation in France !
Mobilisations are extending throughout Europe against the increasing commodification of knowledge. While the EU member states are about to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Bologna process in Vienna and Budapest on 11 and 12 March, students’ networks call to act, and get ready for a militant counter-summit. Calls to go on strike multiply in Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Europe. An alternative summit will be organized on the occasion of the European Council on 25 and 26 March, that will assess the outcome of the Lisbon strategy.
While claiming that they aim at 'harmonizing' higher education systems, those who launched the Bologna process actually prepare the way to competitive and privatization, which are objectives of the Lisbon strategy, officially meant to achieve the 'most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world', through a European market of higher education and research. Recent reforms implemented in various European countries occur in this context.
In the name of competitiveness such reforms force universities to turn to private sources of financing and raise registration fees. They increase inéqualities as many and many more students have to contract heavy loans, as a consequence of which the less affluent give up on further studies. Education as a public service is sacrificed to return on investment: on the 'knwoledge market' students are selected on the basis of their economic resources. With the implementation of private management methods, the threat on employment, the increased power of the private sector, knowledge is hijacked by economic interests instead of functioning as a necessary part of social development, and study courses that are deemed of little economic interest may be scratched off.
Still in the name of competitiveness the Lisbon strategy has undertaken to undermine any kind of social protection as its general objective is deregulation. What is under attack is not only the world of knowledge but the labour market, with flexible and conditional jobs, the major public services such as energy or transport, now open to competition, desorganized and privatized, systems of solidarity and redistribution that are gnawed away by social and fiscal dumping policies, the environment systematically destroyed by the productivist logic of what is presented as a 'sustainable economic growth'...
All sorts of social regressions and environmental disasters are blamed on a 'necessary adaptation to globalization', while the European Commission itself along with governments developed free trade as a way to influence public decisions. The aim of these policies is to further increase incomes and profits for the ruling classes and to comfort their power, both in the cultural and in the economic spheres. When the European Commission claims that it wishes the enterprising spirit to be stimulated from primary school onward, not only knowledge but our minds and indeed society as a whole are controled by capitalism.
Resistance and mobilization must converge, here and everywhere in Europe, against all such attacks, against precarious jobs and unemployment, against measures that jeopardize solidarity and public services, against the plundering of the environment and the commodification of knowledge.
We therefore call to participe in the Vienna counter-summit and to the European strike in universities on 12 March, as well as to two weeks of local action from 11 to 26 March between the Vienna counter-summit and the alternative summit in Brussels, thus connecting our struggle against the commodification of knowledge and the larger implications of the Lisbon strategy, which does away with social rights in the name of competitiveness. We have to reclaim public fora, through militant action and debate, in the lecture rooms and in the cafes, in the underground and the street, to make it clear that there is another Europe, a Europe of resistance that is moved by other values.
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