Co/scienze Politiche Migrants’ Group was born in September 2001 as an attempt to bring inside Bologna University migrants’ fight against what still was the Bossi Fini immigration law project.
Our work started as a collective analysis of that law project, to involve in its comprehension that new generation walking in the streets of Genoa during the days against G8, on July 2001. Trough that work, we came to consider the Bossi Fini law as a political attempt to manage immigrant labour force in Italy, and we try to show its strict connection with the “white book†on labour market promote in that period by Italian minister of welfare. Considering migrations not only as a “necessity†determined by poverty, hunger or war, but as an autonomous social movement, an thus considering migrants not as a sick subject needful of assistance, but as a potential strong political subject under the light of their centrality in the process of fragmentation and “precarization†of labour in Italy as in all Europe, we started to think about a political practice coherently with that political position.
On the field of practical intervention and political organization, the problem was consequently how to give to migrants voice the possibility of take political word in a public space where “their†instance were at the same time the common field of fight for every worker is now involved in that process of precarization in which the Bossi Fini law have had, and still have, a central role.
That’s why the Group chose the practice of a militant inquiry (conricerca) with migrant workers in the province of Bologna: it has been a way for understanding the plurality of subjective experiences and conditions and to give start to a political subjectivation process inside an interactive relation between the two subjects involved in the inquiry. Then, it gave us the possibility of build up a communication network between the subjects inquired, starting from the common instances emerged from individual interviews. The second step, now operative, is to make active a political communication between migrants and italian workers, in the perspective of a common fight against the exploitation to which both them are forced. As an important result of this activity, on 2003 October 24, during the general strike organized by the unions, a group of migrants and Italian workers we putted into communication subscribed a document in which they denounced how the attack to pension system under which Italian workers now find themselves started two years ago with the Bossi Fini immigration law.
A political project that is today trying to show the big contradictions inside the so called “cooperative production systemâ€, whose social attempt is in facts the mask under which in the last twenty years the worst experimentation of that process of flexibilization and precarization of labour took place, and inside which migrant labour force is today involved for most, in Bologna province.
During these years, we always have tried to give our contribution to the political initiative of the whole social forum movement in Bologna, and of the Tavolo Migranti of Italian Social Forum. On the field of militant inquiry, the no-border camp organized in Italy during last summer has been an important moment to start a debate about the possibility of using that political practice to build up a transnational political network in which even seasonal migrant workers can be involved.
We think it should be one way to show how the political centrality of migrant work has today a real European and global scale, and to put into communication migrants all over the production frontiers.