The financial collapse that hit the world economy since September 2008, particularly affecting Europe after the Greek crisis a year ago, has blatantly exposed the failure of the Neoliberal ideology, and has shown that the main source of unemployment and of misery is the greed of the financial class and the obsession of profit. Did you expect that the leaders of the EU listen to the urgent demand for wealth redistribution, and for a democratic change in the economic life?
Well, you have been deceived, as the contrary has happened: the European leading class has reasserted the dogma of Neoliberal monetarism, the primacy of financial profit, and the compulsive idea of competition.
Like the Roman Church at the end of the Middle Age did absolutely refuse the idea that Earth is round and turns around the sun, the contemporary protectors of the Neoliberal Faith do not accept the idea that society is more important than the bank’s balance sheet.
So what did they do while the crisis was spreading? Instead of reducing the power of the banks and the financial class, without any democratic consultation, a self-appointed directorate, embodied by
Sarkozy Merkel and Trichet decided that the financial system will be saved at the expenses of people’s life. In the name of the unquestionable Dogma of profit the workers and students and teachers and young unemployed are bound to pay for profits of the banks notwithstanding their incompetence.
Democracy has been suspended, and national Parliaments have been dispossessed of their powers in what concerns the economy. The first victim of the Neoliberal Dogmatism of the European Monetary Church is Education. Those in power have said that education is costly, so they want to try ignorance. Money is being withdrawn from the schools, and invested in the bank’s bail out and in the Army. Public school is dismissed, de-financed, destroyed. In the UK students are obliged to leave their studies because the taxes for university enrolment have been tripled. In Italy Berlusconi and his pimps have decided to cut 8 billions euro from the public school while increasing of 1.5 bn public money for the private schools (owned by Berlusconi’s cronies, and by the Catholic Church).
Our schools and universities are falling apart, teachers are fired, libraries privatized.
This is preparing an age of misery, barbarianism, and of violence. So what should we do?
We, the cognitive workers of Europe, knowing that the future of the world is in our brains and in our hands, lamenting the lack of spaces for lecturing for reading and for living, DETERMINE that banks shall become places for lecturing and studying and reading, and sleeping and having fun and making love. THEREFORE in the day March 25th we invite our colleagues all over Europe to go into a bank and spend the day there doing what civilized people should always do: study molecular biology and Greek philosophy, learn languages and mathematics, reads poems and talk to people about the possibility of a better world where knowledge and sensibility - no money and arrogance - will be the leading force of social life.
