Mutualità Studentesca: an (ant)i-capitalist cooperative at the University of Florence

HISTORY

To better understand what I am going to talk about, it is important to have some historical context: in late 2019, some students, coming from different student associations of the Università degli Studi di Firenze, started to meet each other to respond to important issues that students asked about, but that student associations could not solve.

Since they were student representatives, they were aware of some issues and problems that occurred, and were worried about the impossibility of solving them. These requests found their origin in the underfunding of public welfare for students in the last thirty years, especially after COVID-19 worsened the situation. Today, students, especially non-residents and poorer people, suffer the increasing costs of studying, in particular books, canteen costs, fees, public transportation, equipment and so on, which are growing more expensive year by year.

To summarise, there were two major problems: students needed to reduce their expenses and find well-paid jobs that could adapt to their necessities. There are then two other big points to analyse: in Florence, there are more than 15,000 international students and around 8-10,000 AFAM students, related to art, music and dance. It’s important to underline this, as these students have different requests and necessities. For example, AFAM students, even if most of them are enrolled in a public institution, cannot benefit from the agreement between Regione Toscana, Comune di Firenze, ATAF, ARDSU and Università di Firenze to have a free or 48€ annual ticket for public transportation.

Eventually, after two years of discussions, in September 2021 the group decided to found Mutualità Studentesca (MuSt), a cooperative whose aim was to answer these student issues. Indeed, the structure of the cooperative is divided into three different parts: services, works and members’ section.

COOPERATIVE STRUCTURE

Service

Since for the Italian law, MuSt is a “cooperativa a mutualità prevalente”, they created some services that can be used only by cooperative members. An example is GAS (Gruppo di Acquisto Solidale), for those students that must buy expensive equipment or books for the university. Architectural students, for example, have to buy equipment to build models, so in the cooperative GAS every member can get them with a discount; or Contovendita libri, where members can go to MuSt to sell their books, and get their money back after the co-op sells them, or even a service for borrowing books so that students can reduce their expenditures; cooperative members can rent a room for below-market price.

Works section

The works section is based on the idea of matching the student request of having well-paid and flexible jobs with the opportunities that other enterprises give to the cooperative.

MuSt usually pays their workers 8,5€ net using a job on-call contract. To list some of them: MuSt organises student-to-student tutoring, including high school students, within almost all possible subjects, and courses to learn how to use certain softwares from Office to Python; the most typical work is the security service during exhibitions or events; and market research or just researches for other companies. Since October 2021, the cooperative also collaborates with ETE (Earth Technology Expo) both on the organisation of spaces and providing security service workers.

Members' section

To build a community among members, MuSt created an entire section dedicated to the entertainment of its members with two diverse typologies of events: some open to everyone such as “beer pong” and “spritz and quiz”, and some open only to members such as “aperitivo soci” and the reading group.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM IT

In this last section, I want to focus on the reasons why this local development tale is important and interesting.

To do so, first I interviewed the president of the cooperative, Duccio Valerio, who told me that what is important for students is that MuSt gives them the possibility to work with better conditions than the market: regular work, higher wages and more flexibility to students needs like working during the semester and breaks during the exam period. The idea is that students can empower themselves from an economic perspective: they can indulge their interests without asking for money from their parents.

Then, there are services such as the student dorm, where five students are currently living, paying a lower rent than the market price for longer contracts. Even here, the aim is the same: make students' lives easier!

From a social perspective, another important role of MuSt is to create spaces for aggregation, where there can be both cultural and academic events, but also fun recreational events so that students can become a group, have fun and meet new people. The next steps for the association will involve creating a closer relationship with the University, focusing also on the economic growth of the cooperative, so that all the surplus generated by these activities can be shared between members, creating more services and improving student conditions and their lives. In the end, the most important issue is to create a stronger link with student unions, such as UDU, SDS and CSX so that their strength and our actions can be brought together to improve students' social position.

Now, I focus on my perspective on MuSt:

First, I found a crucial and interesting point in the choice of using the cooperative model, because the founding members saw it as the most participatory and democratic way to fulfil student’s necessities, without focusing only on personal profit and interests, but on community and connectivity! Moreover, they were aware that MuSt should not be anyone’s property, and, above all, this model is the fittest to adapt to university group dynamics, since every three or four years students graduate.

Second, I found in this project the first collective and participatory answer to the void that the State has left in the last thirty years, that goes in the opposite direction than the mainstream. It is a re-thinking of mutualism and all those socialist traditions such as cooperative enterprises, but in a more modern way.

From an academic standpoint, it can be an interesting case study from different perspectives, including participation.

In the end, using a metaphor that I like to use (and a not-so-lucky one), this project underlines how when you create networks together with a clear and shared aim, you can defeat and stop a giant, as the tiny people from Lilliput did to Gulliver or - by using the MuSt logo- students like ants, that only by collaborating all together, can be stronger!