The tensions of recent weeks at Sapienza are due – as is known – to the refusal of the central academic authorities to question, by accepting a specific request from the students, the collaboration agreements with Israeli bodies in the field of research for military purposes, in light of the very heavy toll (36 thousand deaths) from the ongoing war in Gaza. For the younger generations, in fact, the issue of academic and scientific autonomy with respect to funding is central.
And this is a theme widely addressed by Luciano Vasapollo in his Development Economics lessons at the Faculty of Letters.
The teacher, in the lecture held on 17 April on the occasion of the awarding of the hc doctorate by the University of Havana, recalled that “today, over 80% of spending on research and development is linked to the control of intellectual capital subordinated to the military apparatus. And in the corporate sector of OECD countries, this happens in particular, with companies classified as large enterprises, in particular with transnationals in the military-industrial sectors.”
A situation which Vasapollo and his school of decolonial anthropological economics courageously oppose, which at the Faculty of Letters also operates within the sociology of tourism lessons (taught by Salvatore Izzo). Declining a challenging path through study seminars such as that of the “Viroche Days”, which had a prologue in the Vatican on 17 May with an audience granted by Pope Francis to the two teachers and some students.
A new stage in this journey is the seminar “Be poets of peace” which will be held tomorrow at the Marco Polo University Center of the Faculty of Letters, with heterogeneous contributions that testify to the interdisciplinary vocation of the Vasapollo School.
The model followed is that of José Martì, poet and journalist but also a scholar of economics and sociology, so much so that he is considered the inspiration for the Revolution of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.
“The accumulation of knowledge and skills, of the general productive forces of the social brain and therefore of the school and university as a knowledge factory for capital, is absorbed by capital in relation to exploited labor and presents itself as a property of capital and , more precisely, of fixed capital, since it enters as a means of real production in the production process, in particular in its function as a factory of death with the war economy.
It seems like a perverse mechanism, which attacks the very formation of consciousness to the exclusive advantage of big capital, in particular the military-industrial apparatus.
In this regard, Vasapollo underlined the importance that communication assumes as a tool at the service of capitalism, as it allows all economic subjects to interact with the cultural model of the company, making decisions of all kinds on the basis of information obtained in a not always ethical (and indeed often misleading).
While at an international and national level, “public opinion is distracted by the continuous postponement of serious and rigorous agreements for the reduction of CO2 emissions, determined to protect, rather than the environment (and therefore the survival of the populations most exposed to changes climate), the interests of industries that have not been able to develop alternative solutions to the most polluting heat engines. Not to mention the dead and injured, and the damage to the environment, caused by the thousands of missiles exploded in the fighting or launched in the bombings which are mainly affecting Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. Different scenarios, but united by the same criminal strategy of the military-industrial apparatus”.
It is the intent of the Vasapollo School – through its seminar activities – to oppose the “new forms of media domination, which use information flows and systems of representation to obtain, among other things, social control and political-military control with ‘war economy’. An intent shared by most students.
Chiara Lonardo
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