This morning in the Tuscan city numerous students and precarious workers occupied the entrance of Pisa’s Cassa di Risparmio, a local bank; services were blocked for about an hour, tension culminated with the bank’s directors calling the authorities. In the meantime a banner was affixed on the door and participants in the action blocked the entrance with a garrison accompanied by speeches and smoke flares.

Cassa di Risparmio is a central component of Pisa’s financial and university world. It has been the treasurer of university funds for years; relations between the University of Pisa and the bank have been consolidated in time and today Cassa di Risparmio publicizes its commitment to offer “extraordinarily advantageous conditions” to all students and university workers who should deposit their money in this particular bank.

Reality is by far harsher: an institute that is willing to toss an entire generation in debt can’t promise this kind of things. The proof of Cassa di Risparmio’s true objectives is in its adhesion to the “Diamogli Credito” (“Give them Credit”) project, a protocol stipulated between ABI (Italian Banking Association) and POGAS (Ministry for juvenile politics and sport activities), with the collaboration of the Ministry of Reforms and Innovations in Public Administration and the Ministry of University and research; all of these various parties have theoretically joined up to “sustain the growth of younger generations”.

The project would provide students with loans, to let them finish their studies. The loans are given away without a guarantee from the student’s part; furthermore, the loans are assigned on grounds of meritocracy.
Not only this criterion of access to the loans implies an intensification of hierarchy, but it’s the loan system – an exportation of the failed American loan model in Europe – which is under attack by the students and temporary workers of KLF.

Everything written above was exposed in the speeches pronounced during the action; these speeches have also condemned the bombing occurring in Libia protracted by imperialist states. Students accept the wind of uprising arriving from Maghreb and see in the current events a horizon of change to reach to.

The action in the bank today confirms the necessity of directing academic struggles, student conflicts and precarious worker’s conflicts against the real architects, responsible and beneficiaries of the crisis; financial institutes. The transnational struggles of precarious generations oppose Europe’s imperialist bombs, circulation of knowledge and social wealth oppose exportation of systematic debt and poverty!
Knowledge against financial capitalism! Knowledge against capitalistic war! We are your crisis! Que se vayan todos!

Pisa, 24 March 2011