<nettime> "free upload, free download" (Euro Mayday Parade 006)

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(May 1 is approaching, nettimers in Eurostan, time to hit the streets!
Glad to see that "free upload, free download" has been included in the
colorful list of demands. Let's pray for nice weather. Enjoy. /Geert)

http://www.euromayday.org/

Party, action & protest for social equality in Europe

The first of May of queer temps, immigrant part-timers, student stagiairesm nomatic free-lancers, pregnant flex-workers.

On the first of May, i.e. MAYDAY, for more than a century the global holiday of radical workers, We, the EUROMAYDAY network, are jointly
organizing MAYDAY PARADES of temporary, part-time, contract workers and other precarious youth, along with militant unions and social
collectives in twenty or more major european cities.

On mayday, we will demonstrate and protest against precarity, the most crucial and burning social issue in Europe today, as the gigantic
demonstrations in France of a whole generation against precarity and the CPE are proving. Precarity is a widespread work and life condition for
millions of europeans.

We demand social equality for all, the end of labor precarization and all forms of flexploitation, after two decades of labor market
deregulation which have caused diffuse poverty and NOT reduced unemployment. We demand FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT for migrants and INCOME SECURITY FOR
ALL as fundamental steps toward a truly social europe. We fight for generalized access to housing and mobility, free download and free upload
for all, freely available and sharable culture and information. We practice freedom of expression and dissent, we participate in social and
labor conflict, we build media to unmask the corporate or state-sponsored version of reality.

Last year, Euromayday parades gathered more than 200 000 precarious people of all sorts and brought protest actions against precarity and other
forms of labor and social domination in the streets of a dozen of EU cities. Why did we do it?

Because we are pr=E9caires, precari, precari@s: we are the unemployed, women and the young, the casualized, we are intermittent workers,
students, stagiaires, migrants, net/temp/flex workers, we are the contortionists of flexibility and survivors of precarity springing out of
dozens of collectives in our cities and through a transeuropean network to defend our collective social rights and claim new ones.

We have no trust or faith in those who, at the helm of governments, unions, political parties, or cultural institutions, pretend to speak in
our name and take decisions on our lives, while ignoring social demands and repressing practices of social transformation.

We will parade on mayday to reclaim our lives and fight against workfare or other authoritarian solutions to mounting inequality and welfare
crisis. We want to give flesh with our conflicts a new welfare system and a more horizontal, democratic society, where immaterial, service,
affective, flexible work is not subjected to pitiless exploitation, blackmail flexibility, and existential impossibility. Nobody wants to be
sentenced to the same job for life. But nobody wants to spend her whole day wondering how to pay the next bill, while juggling three jobs.

We want life-affirming social equality, not subservient, discriminative employment. European welfare provisions should be made independent from
either employment or citizenship so to benefit native as well as migrant precarious people. We are determined to severe the link between
welfare and employment, and between welfare and citizenship, as basic pre-conditions to create truly democratic, libertarian, and egalitarian
polities in the age of war-making globalization.

For this, and obviously a lot more, we invite you at the press conference of EURO MAYDAY 006, this friday, april 14th. Activists against
precarity will come from all over Europe (including France) to tell their struggles, projects and cross-alliances, their predicament in
securitarian and inegalitarian europe, and what they're fighting for.

At the end of the press conference: Surprise! Surprise! Easter chicks and rabbits will be released from their cages to participate in a great
Easter-egg treasure hunt, to free the capital of Europe from the neoliberal therapy inflicted upon loudly recalcitrant european populations by
the Barroso commission and its corporate-friendly policies.

By the way, how come he's still at his place, he and the ritzy others, after having lost two referendums?

MAYDAY WANTS:

- full+immediate adoption of EU directive on temporary workers
- european birthright of citizenship (ius soli)
- closure of detention centers for immigrants
- european basic income
- european minimum wage
- free upload, free download
- queer rights for all genders
- protection of THC consumers





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