Liberation Without Borders Tour: 13th of May

From Rebel Universities to the Tunisian Uprising

by KNOWLEDGE LIBERATION FRONT

Last 11th-13th of February, during the transnational meeting in Paris promoted and participated by hundreds of activists, groups and networks that are struggling against precarization, austerity policies and cuts to education, Tunisian activists proposed a great meeting in Tunisia. The project immediately became a central issue in the construction of the Knowledge Liberation Front, because a new Europe begins from the Maghreb revolution. The 13th of May we will leave the European universities in struggle to transgress European borders and unite our conflicts with the uprisings on the other shore of the Mediterranean Sea, because they are our uprisings.

The activists in Tunis who have been organizing the meeting since mid February are extremely clear about its content: let’s not call this initiative a caravan because we have no need for help or simple solidarity, concepts that often hide traces of colonial charity, and because we are perfectly able to do the revolution without teachers. Moreover, they have added over the last weeks, what we see arriving labeled as “humanitarian” from the other shore of the Mediterranean are bombs and war. Instead, we need your struggles to unite the two shores of the Mediterranean through conflict and social transformation, to oust all tyrants – from Ben Ali to the tyrants of the financial capitalism.

This is the reason why activists, students and precarious workers of the Knowledge Liberation Front will go to Tunisia since the 13th of May: to learn. We will go to Tunisia to understand and to do militant inquiry, because the insurgent composition – highly educated young people and unemployed or precarious workers impoverished by the crisis, a system that produces corruption, women reclaiming and acting out their liberty, people who want to live and move without borders – has common characteristics with the European movements revolting against austerity and the cuts to education and welfare. We will go to Tunisia to bring our experiences and discuss, starting from the transnational common days of action against banks and the financial capitalism of the 24th-25th-26th of March. We will go to Tunisia to build relations and not to follow media events. We will go to Tunisia to organize together against a war run against the women and men who are rebelling in the North Africa: it is not against Gaddafi, who has always been a faithful ally of the Western powers in the war against migrants, but against the revolution. We will go to Tunisia to fight, together, against European borders and for the free circulation of people and knowledge. We will go to Tunisia to make Tunisia our university. Without aesthetics of revolt or the ambiguous veils of humanitarian causes and supposed solidarity, we want to learn what it means today, in Europe, to do as has been done in Tunisia.

The 13th of May we take only the first step: we want to build up a process and carry out concrete projects and, together with Tunisian activists, call for another great initiative in the next few months. For this reason, we will go to Tunisia cooperating with a delegation of activists involved in the NoBorder network, to claim freedom without borders. Because the real “caravan” will be towards Europe: following the migrants’ practices of liberty and the teachings of the Tunisian uprising, we want to liberate ourselves from all the tyrants.