Posts on Politics, Culture, and Travels
I have written an article about the new acceleration in the pro-militarist discourse by our universities.
Today on the front page of il Manifesto: https://ilmanifesto.it/luniversita-e-le-sfumature-della-difesa?t=C4HD8jkJgIZ1nUPvKnVIA
Tomorrow night, Monday the 7th at 9 p.m., against European rearmament, we boycott the war. At the Casa del Popolo – Estella.
Info from the organisers:
Caricare, puntare, fuoco!
La corsa agli armamenti sembrava retaggio di un passato lontano, mai ci saremmo aspettati appelli al riarmo, meno ancora in un presente afflitto da conflitti in tutto il globo. Gaza, Ucraina, Yemen, Libano, centinaia di migliaia di vite spezzate che meriterebbero una politica di distensione, disarmo e solidarietà. Il generale Ursula, invece, gioca ai soldatini, coadiuvata dai colonnelli capi di stato, gli stessi che ieri ci chiedevano sacrifici – tagliando servizi essenziali, sanità pubblica, istruzione – ed oggi ipotecano miliardi di euro in pugnali e bombe a mano.
In casa nostra governo e opposizioni si danno al doppio gioco, mentre Giorgia Meloni si batteva per un “rivoluzionario” cambio di nome del piano di riarmo, le voci del centrosinistra parlavano di pace “che intorpidisce” e di “spirito combattivo” dell’Europa. Risultato: tutti d’accordo, alle armi!
A provocare queste guerre non è la pazzia di Trump o di Putin, ma un modello sociale che cerca nella guerra l’uscita dalla crisi irriversibile in cui versa da tempo. Lo sfruttamento normale dei tempi di pace non basta più, la competizione per il controllo delle aree strategiche e delle materie prime, spinge le potenze imperialiste a tentare di estendere il proprio dominio e di rilanciare le proprie economie attraverso le spese militari.
La propaganda di guerra è così pervasiva che non si limita ai grandi media, ma penetra fin dentro alle scuole e alle università. La carriera militare e la guerra come strumento di risoluzione delle controversie vengono costantemente sponsorizzate nelle scuole, mentre nelle università la ricerca è sempre più spesso dominata da collaborazioni con aziende e settori militari.
Non si tratta solo di opporsi al bellicismo, ma anche di iniziare ad immaginare insieme una risposta diversa ad un mondo perennemente in crisi.
Ne parliamo con:
– Matteo Saudino – insegnante e autore di Barbasophia
– Michele Lancione – professore ordinario Politecnico
Lunedì 7 Aprile alla Casa del popolo – Estella
Next week, 11th April 2025, I will take part into the wonderful Antrimondi_Antrimodi Festival at the Askatasuna squat and social centre in Turin.
On Friday at 6 p.m. with Marco Boscolo we will discuss the non-neutrality of science in the current military context and….
… at 9 p.m. I’ll be on stage as Voguemc to bring you some songs from the newly released EP, including a couple of new songs from the album coming out in June.
Follow on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6a7j5B9V6m8vfVt0ZhpHsc?si=1quZdBfOSIO42yzjKFHRjQ
I’ve been doing hip-hop (MCing) since I was 14. At 41 I record and release it.
Antifa and Queer.
BREAD anticipates an EP with tracks from old demos, before the new album in June. Now on all platforms. Lyrics (in Italian) below.
More info on this project: https://voguemc.com/
Bread – VogueMC
La prima decade è iniziata con un cordone appeso – una stanza dove il peso di me stesso era riverso tra le mani di mia madre sopra il letto – il riflesso di mio padre nella sala d’aspetto – e poi, nella culla di seconda mano, nel concreto di palazzo un bambino che fa un lago – cosa piangi figlio mio che continui a gridare – mi alleno a fare rime madre – sono gocce di stile.
E bis-bocce nel cortile con gli altri ragazzi, pantaloni nuovi rotti ginocchia a pezzi – e per pezzi di spocchia che eran sempre perfetti – erano pezzi di vetro lanciati dagli occhi. Che i vestiti coi ritocchi erano solo un’arte – come padre che parte a lavorare di notte – o con madre e sorella per la strada di sera – quando la luce era nostra per toccarci la schiena.
Rit.
E dimmi questo pane cos’è
Se ce lo siamo scelti o è quello che è
Non arriva dal Signore – Signore non c’è
Ed è duro per le ore che devono arrivare
E dimmi questo pane cos’è
Se ce lo siamo scelti o è quello che è
Non arriva dal Signore – Signore non c’è
Ed è duro per le ore ancora da scontare
Nella seconda c’è poco spazio per me – grasso che spinge e maglia di lana che punge – prende forma l’appartenenza a una classe – che non è sempre quella dei compagni di classe. E allora – guardo quelli intorno a me e mi dico – che sono quello che ho – solo se voglio – o divento ciò che voglio se suono chi sono – e resto coi bro a fare stereo il mono.
E allora rimo d’ago e filo – slego e me la sbrigo – rigo dritto come Lego, ma con poco ego e cado. Ma coi quattro bro, nella provincia di riso – c’è sempre alcool dove andare a sbattere il muso. E poi il lavoro, in bar, ristorante e pizzeria – a farsi il culo e ossa per andare via – ascoltando hip hop come fosse amore – a guadagnarsi ogni metro della propria evoluzione.
Rit.
E dimmi questo pane cos’è
Se ce lo siamo scelti o è quello che è
Non arriva dal Signore – Signore non c’è
Ed è duro per le ore che devono arrivare
E dimmi questo pane cos’è
Se ce lo siamo scelti o è quello che è
Non arriva dal Signore – Signore non c’è
Ed è duro per le ore ancora da scontare
E il terzo turno è, università di vita – diversa realtà della città e la partita – è aperta su campi nuovi contaminazioni di spazi testi e suoni – di pezzi misti e buoni. E si passano le sere a parlare coi fratelli – dei fardelli che sembrano legarci e tenerci testa bassa – lungo il Po che passa – che a liberarci sarà solo l’acqua mossa.
E la scossa è solo una partenza – dove ogni passo è una sfida alla costanza – e nella stanza dei bottoni siamo soli senza alcuno – a sentire ora il peso della cloche in mano. Già sai – che se ho rimpianti – li ripiano con antipodi e nuovi sentimenti – come quelli di ‘sto pezzo chiamato futuro – che non è altro del riflesso del presente che vivo.
Rit.
E dimmi questo pane cos’è
Se ce lo siamo scelti o è quello che è
Non arriva dal Signore – Signore non c’è
Ed è duro per le ore ancora da scontare
Ma forse questo pane non è
Non ce lo siamo scelti e arriva com’è
È l’insieme di ogni giorno – per chi sa cos’è
Che se ti guardi indietro ha un altro sapore
released March 20, 2025 (original lyrics from 2012)
VogueMC – lyrics
Shugmonkey – production
In the past year, Israel has sparred no resources to continue with its systematic intent to render Palestine a land uninhabitable for the Palestinian people. More than 43,000 Palestinian were killed; Gaza was destroyed in its infrastructure and all possibilities of livelihood; war was extended in Lebanon with the same intent and effort. Today, Israel has also passed a law preventing UNRWA from providing life-saving support across Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank. There is much more to all of this, but all points to the genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of the State of Israel.
I continue to be part of student and academic-led organising in Italy, aimed at fighting this violence and the wider relationship between the University and the Military sector in this country and beyond. But beyond direct action, there is the need to remind and reaffirm where responsibilities lie. To do so with clarity and urgency because the scale of the violence brought to the fore by Israel (and its Western allies) is so vast that reality seems to twist, and things get lost and blurred.
Two recent resources in this sense are:
Israel must be stopped. Free Palestine.
The next two weeks, I am going to be busy discussing with many others the colonial war waged by the State of Israel, the militarization of our societies and the roles of our universities in both things, in teach-ins across Italy – adding to dozens of previous assemblies and public events I have been involved in since last October in Turin (here, here, here, among many others), Pisa and Florence, Messina and Palermo, Cagliari, Milan, Rome and Naples, and more (including interventions on national media, for instance here, here, here and grassroots radios, among others).
I ground these conversations around dual-use technologies and the political economy of involving universities in the defence sector, starting from my book Universitá e Militarizzazione (here for a review), to then expand on the contemporary genocidal situation in Gaza, but also on the role of local economic district in supporting the defence industry (here for a recent interview). The idea is to discuss these themes with colleagues, organisers, and students and to support and share local forms of resistance against the cultural mantra of war and the material economy of its implementation in Italy and beyond.
The forthcoming meetings are:
On Monday, 6th May, 2pm-6pm I will intervene online in an event organised at the University of Bergamo on Palestine and Israel. My intervention – among very relevant others! – will be at 5pm (see the poster below for full details).
On Tuesday, 8th May, at 6pm, I will take part in an online teach-in organised by the Spazio Catai (rete Potere al Popolo) at the University of Padova (info TBA).
On Thursday, 9th May, at 12noon, I will take part in an online teach-in for students currently holding a pro-Palestinian encampment in via Zamboni, in Bologna (info TBA). In Bologna I will also take part into another event on Saturday 11th – a day of debates organised by Laboratorio Bologna (TBA).
On Friday, 10th May, throughout the day, I will be in Rome for the first national conference organised the Observatory Against the Militarization of the Schools and the Universities. This event will be important for organising in Italy. It is open to the public – all info at this link.
On Wednesday, 15th May, at 10am, I will be in person at the University of Salerno, to discuss the above themes with my friends and colleagues Giso Amendola, Gennaro Avallone and Valentina Ripa (see details in the poster below).
Last but not least, on Thursday, 16th May, at 12:30pm I will be in person at the University Orientale of Naples, for a conversation with Viola Carofalo, Miguel Mellino and their students (details TBA).
Avanti!
Today, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, I tried to sum up the last three years of personal and collective thinking / political organising around the relationship between the university and the military sector, also in relation to the colonial war of Israel in Palestine.
The interview, in Italian, is available here: https://ilmanifesto.it/leonardo-sta-diventando-per-torino-e-per-il-politecnico-quello-che-fu-la-fiat/r/zPgY466LfF2b6WidCtAz2
An automatic translation is available below.
“Leonardo is becoming for Turin what Fiat once was”. Michele Lancione, full professor of Political-Economic Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin, published last September with the publishing house Eris Università e militarizzazione. The dual use of freedom of research, well ahead of the current events of these days. “When I wrote it I wanted to open a discussion in the academic sphere, then there was an acceleration of the debate due to the disaster of the Palestinian situation that led to a strong awareness among students”.
In the preface, you wrote that he wanted to offer them a tool to ‘fight for the liberation of academic knowledge from military colonies’.
I did not imagine it would become normal to see police inside universities and students truncheoned for two placards. The perspective has been turned upside down: the university is used to have a critical spirit and protest, instead Minister Bernini gives reason to those who have sold it out. This has happened because for too long research has been intertwined with the military and the services connected to it, but this risks making the university lose its purpose of knowledge. Leonardo works to make a profit and should not pose ethical questions. The students’ protests stem from all this.
By militarisation, you do not only mean research.
No, I also mean that process, which began in the West after 11 September 2001, in which what is not pertaining to the defence sector, primarily public places, is turned into military.
The book asks whether the public university can do technological research without addressing the issue of dual use.
The transfer of knowledge or technology from the civil to the military or vice versa is a difficult issue to control. This impossibility of control is used as an excuse by those who are interested in bringing the university and the war industry together; we are told that we only collaborate with military partners such as Leonardo for civil research, but this is a hypocritical position. I will give an example: if a company makes a profit from armaments, it will be very easy to acquire technology that sends rockets to Mars, even to drop them on Gaza. But we must emphasise that if basic research is defunded, universities are almost obliged to look for money that way.
This, it seems to be understood, applies in particular to the Politecnico where you teach.
Since the automotive sector no longer guarantees jobs and research, Turin has decided to focus on the military aerospace sector. The first player is Leonardo. The Politecnico, which historically trained executives, managers and engineers for Fiat, saw a great opportunity in this new sector. In doing so, it granted Leonardo our knowledge and technologies, gave it an advantage over its competitors at the expense of the Italian university and offered it cultural legitimacy, a techno washing.
What role does Leonardo’s Med-Or foundation, on whose board of directors sit twelve rectors of Italian universities, play in all this?
It is an emblematic example of the militarisation of the university. Bernini, perhaps in good faith, boasts of this collaboration and is wrong. The think tank chaired by Minniti serves Leonardo to position itself in the strategic market of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It is natural that there should be an interest in the ongoing, or future, conflicts in these areas. Many chancellors are now beginning to wonder whether their mandate is to advise Italy’s leading arms manufacturer and whether this prevents sensible geopolitical analysis.
It is not only happening in Italy.
Across Europe there are very specific funding programmes that exist at various scales, such as Horizon. In Italy, the Pnrm (Piano Nazionale della Ricerca Militare – National Military Research Plan) was launched in 2022, which involves the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Education and Universities and has as its objective ‘the increase of the Defence knowledge base in high-tech sectors’. It actually serves to inject state resources and public researchers into the military industrial sector. But if the money is there, why not put it into basic research instead of throwing it to the military?
You are among the signatories of the letter that several professors sent to the rector of PoliTo.
We asked you to take a position on the beating of students inside the university, we are waiting for a clear answer.
For a few weeks, a number of academics in Italy have been working to stop an agreement between the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State of Israel to finance ‘scientific projects’ that can lead themselves to military use. The agreement – this one – speaks of research focused on ‘frontier applications’ in the realm of precision optics, electronics and quantum technologies. Working for this kind of technologies with the State of Israel today means working with its military-industrial complex.
Our letter received more than 2,500 signatures from concerned academics and university personnel around Italy, and students have used it to organise on the matter across the country. We scored some concrete successes since the agreement has been stopped, or at least put in question, in a number of Universities, including Turin and the Normale of Pisa. The original letter – here – is in Italian, but I am translating it a bit below:
“At the end of February 2024, we learn that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation is announcing a call for joint research projects based on the Industrial, Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement between Italy and Israel. We emphasise that the funding could be used to develop dual-use technology, i.e. for both civil and military use. This would aggravate our country’s international responsibilities since, despite the government’s assurances, Italy does not seem to have stopped exporting weapons to Tel Aviv as of 7 October 2023.
Given these premises, we demand that industrial, scientific and technological cooperation between Italian and Israeli universities and research centres be suspended, with the aim of putting pressure on the state of Israel to commit to respecting all international law, as is rightly demanded of all states in the world.
We also make this request in order to protect Italian institutions from the accusation of not having fulfilled the imperative duty to prevent genocide, wherever there is a danger of it, which is an obligation for UN member states according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or of being complicit in war crimes, currently under investigation by the International Criminal Court. The MAECI notice does not protect Italian institutions because it may include the development of dual-use technologies and devices. Our request is in line with the statement, dated 23 February 2024, by numerous UN experts that member states should immediately refrain from transferring weapons and military technology to Israel, including research and know-how for possible war use, as there is an inescapable risk that they will be used to violate customary obligations under international humanitarian law. Moreover, the collaborations that we are asking to be discontinued appear to be in serious conflict with the National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights that the government itself claims to be overseeing. It would be paradoxical to ask businesses to respect rights that are deemed secondary or violable in the actions of public and research organisations, which have a duty to comply with the republican constitutional order (which includes international law as an integral part of it).”
We have now prepared a new statement since tomorrow is the last day to stop the agreement, and strike action has been prepared by students and unions in Italy. Here is the text, in Italian: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y8j8lPk9ptCog1U0gZL2m7-gxXLPXcwH9KGHSeqH_kU/edit
The conclusions read:
“On 10 April, the MAECI notice will expire, but the deep connivance of our government and our universities with the plausible genocide taking place in Gaza will not see a break except under pressure from those who study, teach and do research in our country’s academic and research infrastructure. For this reason, in addition to participating in tomorrow’s mobilisations, we invite the academic community to a national online assembly to be held on 17 April at 5pm to discuss how to relaunch initiatives to break the links between Italian public research, Israeli institutions and the military industry, and to build real bridges of peace through the creation of channels of cooperation and support for the Palestinian population.
We feel a strong ethical responsibility for our work within society.”On 10 April, the MAECI notice will expire, but the deep connivance of our government and our universities with the plausible genocide taking place in Gaza will not see a break except under pressure from those who study, teach and do research in our country’s academic and research infrastructure. For this reason, in addition to participating in tomorrow’s mobilisations, we invite the academic community to a national online assembly to be held on 17 April at 5pm to discuss how to relaunch initiatives to break the links between Italian public research, Israeli institutions and the military industry, and to build real bridges of peace through the creation of channels of cooperation and support for the Palestinian population.
We feel a strong ethical responsibility for our work within society.”
Below I am reporting some interviews I have been releasing in national media, on la Stampa, il Fatto Quotidiano and Repubblica on this matter. Similar exposure work has been done by a number of comrades (both students, unionists and academics), who have been attacked on national media. Avanti!
Spring has arrived, and the horror of the Israeli war and so many other wars are still here. We must not stop studying and discussing the intensification of militarization in our collective lives in the West and beyond. This week in Turin and in Milan, I will take part in three exciting public events, open to all (discussion will be in Italian).
On Monday, the 25th, at 20:30 in Turin (at OST Barriera), there will be a meeting on the capitalistic mode of production and the fragmentation of international markets. It is the launch of a very interesting book by the Rete dei Comunisti, upon which I will offer some reflections, among others.
On Tuesday, the 26th, at 16:00 in Milan (at the Universitá Statale di Milano, Legnaia), I will be discussing my book Universitá e Militarizzazione and be talking about the relationship between the university and the military sector with students and comrades.
Finally, on Thursday, the 28th, at 18:30 in Turin (at the Kontiki place via Cigliano), I will discuss a book, with others, about the Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction campaign and the involvement of Italian authorities in doing all sorts of problematic (read: militarized) dealings with the Israeli state.
I look forward to all of this! Posters and info are below.
La settimana prossima, lunedí 18 continuiamo a confrontarci su guerra, universitá e militarizzazione con collegh* di CERTO (Coordinamento per l’Etica nella Ricerca) e corpo studentesco.
Ore 17 in presenza presso Sala Lauree del Dipartimento di Lingue
(Complesso Aldo Moro, Via S. Ottavio 18, terzo piano) o online al link nel poster.
Grazie a Pietro e Lorenzo per aver organizzato e per esserci!
Link al libro: https://www.erisedizioni.org/prodotto/universita-e-militarizzazione/
