REC at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, 12-22 April 2010
Posted on | March 22, 2010 | No Comments
Public discussions/workshops: What do we do when we think, what do we make when we create?
Radical education needs to be a critique of capitalism and a tool for social struggles. Therefore we, the Radical Education Collective, are engaged with a number of questions about these particular issues, for example: Has critique become merely a form and, as such, already been thoroughly instrumentalized? Is a critique merely the postmodern apology – and camouflage – of academic and art institutions, and therefore incapable of any more profound theoretical or practical understanding of the crisis? Or alternatively, does such critique also contain a certain emancipatory potential based on values and, ultimately, also institutional forms that differ from those founded on neoliberal capitalism?
Since we are involved in the activist research and intellectual/art work in Slovenia we are following also the Coordination des intermittents et précaires d’Ile-de-France. In Slovenia, as elsewhere, we are facing a strong corporativization of both academic and art fields. We are at the same time facing a series of new laws, including the minor work law and the new higher education law. Regarding the autonomous urban occupations (such as the factory Rog in Ljubljana, which has been occupied in march 2006 and in the following four years transformed in a Social centre), we are facing the corporate city management (private-public partnership used as the legal grounds for eviction of selforganized space of the Invisible Workers of the World). Instead, the municipality (hand in hand with the Ministry of Culture) has announced an 82 million Euros investment in the i.e. Centre for Contemporary Arts. etc. There are many more things that we would like to discuss and share with you during our stay in Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, including the possibility to reelaborate a common research platform on precarity.
Radical Education Collective has recently started a small scale voluntary research What do we do when we think, what do we make when we create? that includes a series of discussions and workshops on the “translation” of the Workers’ Inquiry (Marx) that can fit the new modulation of work; so far the research is still in progress, but is nevertheless meant to connect the following levels: sharing of information, announcing the individual violations and legally defending the rights of the workers, launching the political campaign. These activities are organized as a transversal survey: on the one hand, to trace, map and document new forms of exploitation of intermittent, precarious workers in the sphere of extensive immaterial production, on the other hand, to inquire how knowledge, creativity, affects, and so forth as such can resist the capitalistic valorization, and how they enter as common in the sphere of performative arts, alternative/radical education, and possible collective actions.
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