Appeal Rete NoOcse In Bologna, after a month period of discussion and debates, a net of singles and groups has born to stop the OECD Conference that will take place in Bologna from the 12 to the 15 of June. The net is called CONTROPIANI (Counter-Plans). We invite all of you to join and to let this appeal be more known.
From 12 to 15 of June 2000 will take place in Bologna the Conference for Ministers responsible for SMEs and Industry that joined OECD and the Conference jointly organised by the OECD and the Italian Ministry of Industry.
The OECD (Organization for the Economic Co-operation and Development) links 29 countries and is better known as "The Club of Riches". Its implicit and explicit targets are: suppressing custom barriers and binding obligations which prevent the free circulation of capitals; making the local enterprises competitives, in order that rich countries' lobbies can usurp the global resources: from goods to labor in every their shape.
In so doing they induct a further pauperization of the northern lower classes, with an exasperation of flexibility and precariousness of workers, submitted to the unemployement blackmail; and above all starving and destroying the South and the East of the world.
The Bologna Conference will deal with small and middle enterprise and has the target of incentivate the tendency of reducing the production in big enterprises backing the small and middle ones thanks to the State support. Small and middle enterprises don't replace big ones, not only because the strategical choices are decided by multinationals, but even because the integration process between small and big ones goes on in the traditional form of decentralization and in the net organization one.
Italy's been choosen because in this country small and middle enterprises count much more than in the other industrialized countries. Bologna has been choosen because in Emilia-Romagna can be found models of this kind of production based on decentralization and integration. This kind of organization keeeps the interest of masters because of its lower wages, safety warrants and trade union rights are lower or they're even absent, production flexibility is very high and often wild. At the end of the conference "The Bologna Chart" will be decreed, directly dictated by masters and Governments.
OECD and WTO are antidemocratics and arbitrary international organizations, because they act out of the control of the ones undergone by their consequences: structures like these act in the total lack of transparency and they (even) utilize war to defend their economic interests. Either they use local, national and international politic institutions to have their neoliberistic plan carried out. Somebody bravely protects their role and function, somebody else believes that they have to be "democraticized" and modernized.
As far as we are concerned, we just believe that these structures haven't any legitimacy, and for this we have decided to prevent them from talking in Bologna, as it happened in Seattle last December.
In the third millenium, the society wants the rights of cityzenship to be globalized, not the capacity of competing with success as someone would like to happen, by impoverishing planet's lives and resources: universal rights of cityzenship as the right of free movement; the right of living in a safe environment and eating not genitacally manipoulated foods; the income right, above and against the mailblack of a precarious and ungaranteed job; the right for free formation and information; the right for a better life quality.
The end of century's novel told the story of the fall of custom barriers for markets and capitals, while bariers grown to push back immigrants and their backgrounds and desires; it illustrated woman's emancipation through the identification to male status; it told about how competition represents a value and social rights a lost to control, it explained how everithing in this world is for sale while what you can't buy is outside, it underlined the increasing of production given by the intoduction of new tecnologies and it inserted as a foot of the page note the physiological reduction of wages and opportunities, while the need of reducting the job timetable and of redistributing the socially producted richness were to be evidenced in splash headlines.
For the incoming century a common novel has to be written down in which lagers for unlegal immigrants nothing will be but a sad memory of a period when oceans and borderlines flowed blood and shame; in which women emancipation will meet the right of freely menage their own bodies, their own lives, their own sexuality; in which the productive power of social cooperation could oppose the competition between enterprises; in which equal rights for everybody could prefigure a different pattern of development, opposed to the one that we have known and hated. In June they will try to write down an unilateral form of globalization on "the Chart of Bologna".
In opposition we have to write down an other chart, more complex, more plural, more social, thet could be expressed in a wide, open and public place of critic dissidence where we can experiment a new sociality, opposed to the new economy, extended from the local to the global, passing through the intermediate role of the european metropolis, to assert a new, open cityzenship.
We would like this sociality to triumph at the opening of the bolognese summer. As to the form of the protest, we intend to riaffirm that we have the consciousness to live in a virtual, planetary, social body; but, at the same time, we know we have a body with the ancient meaning of the "habeas corpus": this mean that we can dispose of ourselves, of our bodies and we have rights ! We don't only have a body made up with desires and needs to satisfy. We have a complex body made up of different cultures, emotions, knowledges and it still is the measure of happyness, fear and transformation of reality. We don't have just a singolar body, we have a common body where to live all together: it is our planet.
Everything can be reproduced, but just like a copy. We want to remain original and mixed. We want to live in an original and mixed world, getting support from a plurality of cultures and from technology too.
We know that sensible men adapt themselves to the world, while those who are irreasonable pretend to adapt the world to themselves. And it's for this reason that every progress and every changement are due to irreasonable men.
Somos todos ciudadanos del mundo.
Bologna, 12 April 2000
