We are publishing and distributing this appeal launched by workers at FIAT’s Mirafiori factory. Students and workers encountering each other on a class basis is step in the right direction. But any struggle will have to come up against capitalism’s structural crisis so that to come out victorious - if for nothing else, but primarily from the point of view of political clarity - it will have to be part of a general movement towards social revolution.

To university students and the world of education and training

We live in a period in which the political caste is the dominant class through a cynical use of the economic crisis they are making living conditions of those who study and work in the weakest sectors of society even worse.

We would like to share our conditions with you.

We FIAT workers about thirty years ago aspired and chose to go into the factories with the perspective of a low but secure wage which allowed us to have a dignified future for ourselves and our families. This little security was given to us at the time in order for us to buy consumer goods in exchange for our physical labour

From the first car bought on instalments, we went on to take on a mortgage and if possible loans to support the studies of our children to give them, we deluded ourselves, a better future than ours.

For years we have continued to ingest and defecate material goods producing the compost which fertilises the plant of the capitalist system. In the factory we were talking (and how someone was stupidly investing) in shares, on the stock exchange, on commercial bonds … and meanwhile workers were daily dying in their workplaces.

Now in the factory the cassa integrazione (being paid off) is used as a psychological weapon. In this way you don’t earn, you don’t spend and therefore you are no-one. You don’t exist.

The capitalist system wants to wipe out with a single stroke both the past (the rights and rewards won by struggles, through the sacrifices and deaths of our fathers) and the future i.e. the possibility of our children to study and to free themselves in exchange for a present ever more inclined towards immediate consumerism.

This condition, increasingly poor in recent decades leads us to think that it is no longer possible to struggle individually or sectorially; this leads us to believe that it is even more necessary to build a path to unity.

We want to be united in the struggle because we believe this is the only way to improve the opportunities of those who study and those who work

United, because both the world of labour and the world of study already have a precarious existence, and the present measures aim to make them worse.

United because the students of today will enter a precarious world of work and we, as our parents did, must do what we can to reject the remedies of those who only want to make “cash” from the lives of the weakest.

Today students and workers together can build a bridge where the world of education and the working and labouring class unite to develop a dialogue and a unity to reject the attacks of a society where only a few decide for the many.

For us it is important to get out of the factories.

We are convinced that it is necessary that the reality created everywhere by the widespread attacks of the government and the dominant class needs a first step of confrontation, of consciousness, of discussion which leads to the reinforcement of every struggle, so we can put in the field a force which is capable of turning things round and improving our living conditions.

For this we make an appeal for a Workers-Students Assembly in the shortest time possible to agree together soon after the day of action of 14 December.