"For a New Europe: University Struggles Against Austerity"
Edu-Factory Collective

The common statement from the recent Paris meeting, now in English,
French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish and Korean.

We, the student and precarious workers of Europe, Tunisia, Japan, the
US, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Argentina, met in Paris over the
weekend of the 11th-13th of February, 2011 to discuss and organize a
common network based on our common struggles.

Students from Maghreb and Gambia tried to come but France refused them
entry. We claim the free circulation of peoples as well as the free
circulation of struggles.

In fact, over the last few years our movement has assumed Europe as
the space of conflicts against the corporatization of the university
and precariousness. This meeting in Paris and the revolutionary
movements across the Mediterranean allow us to take an important step
towards a new Europe against austerity, starting from the revolts in
Maghreb.

We are a generation who lives precariousness as a permanent condition:
the university is no longer an elevator of upward social mobility but
rather a factory of precariousness. Nor is the university a closed
community: our struggles for a new welfare, against precarity and for
the free circulation of knowledge and people don?t stop at its gates.

Our need for a common network is based on our struggles against the
Bologna Process and against the education cuts Europe is using as a
response to the crisis.

Since the state and private interests collaborate in the
corporatization process of the university, our struggles don?t have
the aim of defending the status quo. Governments bail out banks and
cut education. We want to make our own university ? a university that
lives in our experiences of autonomous education, alternative research
and free schools. It is a free university, run by students, precarious
workers and migrants, a university without borders.

This weekend we have shared and discussed out different languages and
common practices of conflict: demonstrations, occupations and
metropolitan strikes. We have created and improved our common claims:
free access to the university against increasing fees and costs of
education, new welfare and common rights against debt and the
financialization of our lives, and for an education based on
cooperation against competition and hierarchies.

Based on this common statement:

— We call for common and transnational days of action on the
24th-25th-26th of March, 2011: against banks, debt system and
austerity measures, for free education and free circulation of people
and knowledge.

— We will create a common journal of struggles and an autonomous media
of communication.

— We will promote a great caravan and meeting in Tunisia because the
struggles in Maghreb are the struggles we are fighting here.

— We will be part of the G8 counter-summit in Dijon in May.

— We will meet again in London in June.

Fighting and cooperating, this is our Paris Common!