Remember MAYDAY, the global holiday of workers, dear to anarchists and socialists worldwide, born in America and mummified in Russia and China, fallen in neglect in Europe as neoliberalism mounted and many unions sold out? Well, in Milano since 2001 a network of Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish media hacktivists, rank-and-file unions, self-run and squatted youth centers, critical mass bikers, radical networks, student groups, syndicalist collectives, immigrants' associations, assorted commies, greens, anarcos, gays and feminists have given life to a MAYDAY PARADE taking place in the afternoon of May 1st, whose participation and meaning has grown tremendously from 5,000 to 50,000 people, thereby triggering many urban actions and social conflicts that are spreading among young temps, partimers, freelance and contract workers, researchers and teachers, service and culture workers in Italy, France, Spain, and elsewhere across Europe.
maggio/ magg/ mayo/ may/ mai 2004
Milano / Barcelona / Lille
EURO MAYDAY 004
flexworkers of europe let’s unite!
There’s a World of Rights to Fight for:
Steady Income & Paid Vacation,
Access to Housing, Loving, Hacking!
precari+cognitarie d’europa uniamoci!
c’è un mondo di diritti per cui lottare
continuita’ di reddito,
maternita’ e vacanze pagate,
accesso a casa, amore e conoscenza:
la cultura e’ libera condivisione,
cooperiamo alla nuova scienza!
précaires d’europe unissons-nous!
il y a un monde de droits à conquérir
securité de revenu, congés payés
accès à la connaissance et à l’amour
(en ligne, aussi!)
MAYDAY, MAYDAY!! Why precari@s, intermittents, cognitari/e are rebelling across NEUROPA...
MAYDAY has been not only an event, but also a method, a project, and a process. A horizontal METHOD of crossnetworking the Genoa movement with the radical sections of unionism, based on subvertising, picketing, organizing and equal access to many identities and ways of action, thereby enabling the alliance between two generations of conflict. A PROCESS of radicalizing transeuropean service and knowledge workers to constitute an insurgent identity capable of contributing to a new european political and social SPACE in place of the one which recently foundered in Brussels.
PRECARIOUSNESS is what we live, FLEXICURITY is what we want. Across Euroland. And fast. We demand security and universality of income, social and vacation benefits, increased overtime and limitations on night and sunday work, subsidized education, housing, health, free access to media and knowledege, a eurowide minimum wage, right to
union-organizing for temps and flextimers, an end of wage and union discrimination by employers between temp and non-temp labor, the fact that the partimer's hour is paid less than the fulltimer's, an end to xenophobic laws and mass deportations that are suppressing the free circulation of people of all hues, religions, and cultures across
NEUROPA.
We are living in a WAR ECONOMY set in motion by an ongoing act of imperial aggression to establish the world hegemony of a neoliberal model that has proved incapable of either spreading wealth or preventing crisis. In the name of neoliberalism, the political élites of the West, reinforced by coercive social norms, such as drug prohibitionism or the return to family values, constant remote monitoring and close surveillance of unrest and disarray, have sold souls and assets to transnational financial markets and corporations, by privatizing utilities, housing, health, schooling, the ether, thus reinforcing the neoliberal bias in favor of stronger inequality.
Rumsfeld's flexible war has WAL-MART as logistics model, thanks to its information-rich labor-intensive efficient flow of goods and services. Wal-Mart is the biggest corporation and largest supermarket chain on earth. It's also a firm that pays on average SUBPOVERTY WAGES and imports huge quantities of textiles and other goods from Chinese non-union factories and sweatshops. Global chainstore brands like Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, Auchan/Alcampo, Metro, Yum, Esselunga, Autogrill are the essence of how neoliberal corporations look at people: pliant, obedient, subservient, manipulable, exploitable, available on call and on demand, firable at whim.
We are convinced that at the core of the process of neoliberal accumulation lies flexible and contingent labor by the young, women, migrants and casualized employees, in crucial reproductive and distribution services, and in the knowledge, culture, and media industries that provide the raw material on which the system functions: information. We call ourselves PRECOG because we embody the PRECARIAT working in retail and services and the COGNITARIAT of media and education industries. We are the producers of neoliberal wealth, we are the creators of knowledge, style and culture enclosured and appropriated by monopoly power.
We believe the celebration of EURO MAYDAY on May 1 --in 2004 date of EU entry for ten states from Eastern, Central, Mediterranean Europe but not for their migrants, and since 1886 the world's festivity of defiant workers-- could COMMUNICATE, INTERWEAVE, HIGHLIGHT to the world the many RADICAL IDENTITIES of precarized, outsourced, offshored, downsized, downgraded, impoverished, humiliated and plain stressed-out temp/flex workers across 21st Century Europe, aka NEUROPA.
We have chosen the MAYDAY PARADE, to be propagated and subvertised via independent omnimedia (print, spray, radio, video, net, satellite etc), as a libertarian and multi-identity format featuring dozens of sound trucks, carnival and allegorical wagons, vans, carts, and bicycles with kids and grown-ups, jugglers of jobs and contorsionists of flexibility, all together expressing cheerful anger against the exclusion of a whole generation and soon the rest of society from social rights with guarantees of collective self-defense. These must have either a continental and federal eurowide coverage or they won't come into being. To put it simply, in the Euro MayDay Parades in MILANO, BARCELONA and elsewhere, we wanna rock the euro boat to get our rightful share of the booty...
EURO MAYDAY PARADE 004
eco/media activism joins metro/labor radicalism
PRECOG
la lista di precari+cognitari
http://www.inventati.org/mailman/listinfo/precog
Anywhere, EU
