In Rome “la Lupa” becomes a national student movement

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OSA

On the weekend of 5-6 February, the first national assembly of the La Lupa Movement, launched before Christmas on the avalanche of occupations of Roman schools, was held in Rome. It was a two-day event the likes of which had not been seen for a long time, with hundreds of students from all over Italy representing dozens and dozens of school collectives across the country.

In the afternoon of the first day, there was time to recount all the experiences that have characterised the last few months, with the occupations that have overflowed from Rome into other cities and have involved thousands of students.

Sunday was the time for the pars costruens, with a close political debate that built a platform for demands and launched 18 February as the first date of national mobilisation of the movement.

It was a real discussion, with a very high level of debate, and not limited, as we have been reporting for months in this newspaper, only to the specifics of the student condition. A strong discussion of the 100,000 students who took to the streets on Friday 4 February.

The abolition of the alternation school work is the point of collection of the Lupa, which just Friday in Rome had the opportunity to remove from the square the Rete degli Studenti Medi, the youth of CGIL that tried to dampen the student position on the issue and to water down the level of political conflict expressed by the students.

But the ‘maturity’ of this new-born movement emerges not so much from the radicality of the positions on specific issues, but from the horizon within which it wants to move: the union of struggles

The presence, during the weekend, of workers from the conflictual unionism marks the step to be taken, that of the search for a convergence between the struggles of the students and those hotbeds of resistance present in the world of work, above all workers or in the logistics sector (from ports to warehouses to the transport of goods).

What is at issue, therefore, is no longer just the failure of distance learning, the madness of staggered teaching, the inadequacy of school buildings, the precariousness of the staff, the inability of the government (from Conte to Draghi) to produce reasonable solutions to the difficult pandemic condition, managed as badly as possible.

At issue is the failure of a model of society, capitalism as it has historically asserted itself in the form of “Western liberal democracy”, even those born from the anti-fascist constitutions of the Second Post-War period – after all, Good School, Jobs Act, reform of Title V or Article 81, the Turco-Napolitano etc., all laws against which the Constitution could do little.

A failure that emerges forcefully in today’s school model, which is based on the concept of the company school (as imposed by the European Union, of subservience to the demands of employers and the labour market), made up of specific and sectoral skills, and not of knowledge and critical spirit.

It is the world at an important historical turning point, where students want to start running towards a fairer society, without hesitation or compatibility of any kind with those who exploit labour, plunder the environment, kill for profit, slow down movement for convenience.

“We students have a historical and political responsibility,” said Tommaso at the end of the two days, “the great movements that changed the history of the twentieth century had the courage to claim a place in the world. We have to tie up the threads with the history of the revolutionary movement and unite the struggles with the workers. Students and workers together are fuel on the fire of this system”.

An ambitious programme of struggle, as only those who want to change the world can have. Other than “good alternation”….

Below is the communiqué of the Alternative Student Opposition on the two days, one of the organisations that created the Lupa and one of the most active in this cycle of mobilisations.