Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei’s brutal austerity measures and attempts to dismantle public universities have triggered a massive student mobilization throughout Argentina. With protests, occupations, public classes, and assemblies to discuss the path ahead, students and staff are confronting the far-right government.
Juliana Yantorno
October 16, 2024
LEFT VOICE
Students, faculty, and staff participate in an assembly at the National University of Córdoba's Law School in Córdoba, Argentina.
When far-right president Javier Milei intervened to veto a Congressional bill to fund public universities and keep his slashes to the education budget intact, he had no idea that he would wake up the sleeping beast of Argentina’s student movement.
Between October 14 and 15, students and faculty held more than 100 assemblies to decide how to organize the fight against the far-right government’s attacks and many voted to occupy their universities. Students are now occupying 72 different schools and departments across the country and they are holding public classes in the streets in 30 universities across Argentina. According to data collected by La Izquierda Diario, more than 100 departments and schools are taking some sort of action to protest the gutting of the public education budget. In the following days, there will continue to be assemblies and possibly new occupations. Organized from below, the students in each occupation and assembly are beginning to prepare mobilizations to the centers of Argentina’s main cities.
It is not yet possible to foresee where this great university rebellion will lead, but it is already taking on historic proportions. It is spreading quickly in the province of Buenos Aires with 26 schools and departments occupied; 12 departments are occupied in the city of Buenos Aires alone. But the protests reach across the entire country, from the provinces of Córdoba, Santa Fe, Tucumán, Catamarca, Chubut, Jujuy, and La Pampa, to Neuquén, Río Negro, Salta, San Juan, San Luis, and Santa Cruz.
There is no corner of the country where this rebellion has not shocked the education community. The University of Buenos Aires (UBA) has been one of the epicenters of the conflict, with the historic occupation of departments such as Law, Medicine, Psychology, Architecture, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities, to which others are being added as the week progresses. More than six departments in the National University of La Plata have been occupied, as well various departments in schools in the Buenos Aires suburbs and in the interior of the province of Buenos Aires, such as Mar del Plata, Tandil, and Bahía Blanca.
A Force to Be Reckoned With
The magnitude of this conflict is the result of structural changes in Argentina over the last 20 years, namely the growth in the number of universities and in the university population. This means that the university system extends to every corner of the country. Public university enrollment has doubled from 28 national universities with 600,000 students in 1990, to 61 universities with 2 million undergraduate and graduate students today. Another 500,000 students are enrolled in private universities. Reality tells a completely different story than Milei, who declared that “the national public university is of no use to anyone but the children of the rich and the upper middle class, in a country where the vast majority of children are poor.”
It doesn’t take much to see through his lies. At least 48% of public university students are poor. First generation university students who come from working families make up around 47.8% of students enrolled in 2022, a deep and growing phenomenon that can be seen particularly clearly in the universities of Greater Buenos Aires and other urban centers throughout the country. This process is uneven depending on the area. According to government data, 39% of students at UBA are first generation; in universities in the Greater Buenos Aires area, such as at the university of José C. Paz, this figure rises to 75%; at the University of Florencio Varela, the figure is closer to 76%; and in Lanús University, 70% of students are first generation. In this way, a new subject has been developing within the student body, namely students who work or come from working families, drawing a more direct link with the working class and its traditional organizations (unions and social movements).
In these places, universities are in close proximity to large concentrations of workers. In other historical moments, this geographical unity generated an important objective basis for tendencies towards worker-student unity, as was the case in Córdoba in the 1960s and 1970s. This context is relevant to the present. New universities are joining the struggle alongside students from more historical and traditional universities such as the University of Buenos Aires, La Plata, Rosario, or Córdoba.
These changes show the potential of the new student movement as it breaks out onto the political scene. We cannot use the same old categories to understand it, as if this was just a middle class movement. The phenomenon is much deeper; the students are a political-social subject that can change the dynamics of class struggle at the national level and have an impact on the workers’ movement.
It is not only the education community that has been moved by recent events. Workers in factories across the country are excited by the protests and the students’ willingness to fight back. As one worker at the oil company YPF Ensenada told us:
I get excited thinking that my daughters can study at the University […] Our union should be doing what the kids who are standing up to Milei are doing, we should be in the same situation.
What Milei does not understand is that his attacks crush the hopes of millions of people who dream of their children going to a public university, and now he has awakened the student movement. The defense of the university is a demand that crosses not only the middle class, but also the working class. It has broad and massive support. With that, it can show the way to confront all the government’s attacks.
The Defense of Education and Rejection of Milei’s Austerity
The debates and discussions in the assemblies and among students express a resounding repudiation of Milei’s veto of the university budget, which attacks public education and is another arm of the austerity that affects the majority of working people in the country.
What resounds from below is clear: “we cannot stand it any longer.” In addition to the difficulties of keeping up with classes, students are burdened by increases in utilities, rents, and not being able to pay for travel to and from school. This comes on top of the government’s severe austerity and slashes to pension and healthcare budgets. This is the harsh reality of the majority of people living in Argentina. The outrage at this reality is being amplified and expressed through the voices of students, faculty, staff, and healthcare workers who are converging at the university assemblies, public classes, and protests that have spread across the country.
Faced with the anger of the student movement with popular support, Milei is trying to reposition himself. In response to the protests, he recently said that he is “not going to give in,” but he justified this statement by admitting that the university will continue to be public and that students will not have to pay fees; however, he went on to attack the protests, saying that the protests are “la defensa de un curro” — in other words, a scam by a few to take advantage and make money from the universities. Milei and his allies are getting nervous, faced with a student movement that they did not expect. This is evident in increased tensions at the universities; for example, at the National University of Quilmes (in the south of Buenos Aires Province), members of Libertad Avanza (the party founded by Milei) attacked those participating in an assembly at the university with pepper spray as they discussed the direction of the struggle. At other universities Milei’s supporters took the microphone at the assemblies to carry out provocations. The government’s policy is in crisis.
The argument that we are tired of hearing from Milei’s supporters is that we have to achieve fiscal balance, and that we have to say where we will get the money for the university budget. Who did they ask when the government made a decree to allocate 100 billion pesos for the Intelligence Services? Did they justify where they would get that money from? What these arguments seek to hide are the government’s priorities: in the 2025 Budget, the items for Education and Culture represent 0.87% of the GDP; Science, Technology, and Innovation take up 0.22%; meanwhile the Public Debt Services represents 1.31% of the GDP.
What is being rejected by the movement is that Argentina’s crisis should be paid for by students, retirees, healthcare workers, and all working people who face utility fee increases. It rejects the idea that culture and the sciences should be gutted to pay the IMF while businessmen and financial speculators continue to turn huge profits. What the government should really audit are not universities, but the illegal and illegitimate debt; it should cancel the taxes that favor big business that Milei’s government passed with La Ley de Bases. These are the real scams that have plundered the country for decades to the benefit of international financial capital and big business.
In every occupation and every assembly, students express their weariness for this austerity plan applied by Milei’s government. We fight to overturn the government’s veto, in defense of education and for an increase in the education budget and the salaries of teachers and staff.
But the fight against Milei’s austerity is broader. In every assembly we hear applause whenever a motion is proposed in support of the struggle of healthcare workers at the Laura Bonaparte Hospital and Garrahan Hospital, or every time someone mentions the bravery of the retired men and women who confronted harsh repression to protest pension cuts. In the assemblies we hear harsh criticism of the complicit leadership of the CGT (the main trade union confederation in Argentina) and the demand for a national strike and a plan of struggle to defeat the plan of Milei and the IMF. As students we know that our struggle can be a spearhead that strengthens all the sectors that confront Milei’s attacks.
This was expressed by the testimonies of the students in the different assemblies:
“Our struggle is in response to the cruelty that the government is displaying not only towards students, but also towards retirees and workers”
“Our need for the occupations is to protect the non-teaching and teaching workers, for the working students who do not even have a plate to eat on at lunch so we wait for dinner to be able to eat. The veto was the straw that broke the camel’s back”
“They are taking away from us the possibility of dreaming. For many, the public university is the only possibility of studying. It is taking away our future and we are not going to give it up that easily.”
Our fight cannot wait until Congress discusses the 2025 budget, which will not be voted on until the end of the year and which leaves Milei the power to veto the articles he does not like. In addition, university administrators will try to divide the various fronts in the fight against the government’s austerity, asking for increases in the university budget without caring if the difference is made up by making cuts to pensions or public health and education. The increase in the budget has to happen now! For months the university has been in a dire state, since the salaries of faculty and staff do not exceed the poverty line. We have to give a forceful response now in order to win back what the budget cuts have taken, including the 25% of faculty salaries that have already been gutted. We do not want faculty and staff to live below the poverty line! We also reject the entire 2025 government budget presented by the administration, which strictly follows the demands of the IMF to pay the fraudulent debt.
The student and university movement must funnel our energy into the streets to converge with all the sectors in struggle. For this reason, together with the coordinated actions that have already been voted on in many universities, in each assembly we raise the demand for a Third National Education March in Buenos Aires to make our rejection of the veto undeniable.
We Cannot Rely on Congress. We Trust Only in the Power of the Students and Workers!
These weeks have demonstrated the strength that we students and workers have when we organize and take actions like the occupations and public classes. This is what the workers of the Bonaparte Hospital did when they took over the hospital and managed to reverse the closure announced by the government.
But to keep up our momentum and drive the movement forward means confronting political forces that want to funnel our energies into electoral maneuvers. In particular, this means debating the path forward for the movement with the Peronist groups and leaderships (who represent Milei’s main center-left political opposition) which, depending on their electoral calculations, try to stop the struggle. These groups have not been at the head of developing a plan of action in any department at the university; they do not call assemblies, and in many cases they have voted against occupying the schools. Damningly, they did not participate in the important mobilizations that took place on the day that the university budget was voted on in Congress.
Máximo Kirchner (son of former Peronist president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner), leader of the organization La Cámpora, supported the different mobilizations and called to build “solidarity” among the sectors in struggle, but at the same time he maintained that,
The veto is a constitutional power of the President and if we could not reject the vetoes, it is because we still do not have the number of deputies that allow us to do so. An objective for 2025 throughout the country is to build an electoral force so that when the president vetoes we have the necessary hands to stop him. There is no other way to do it.
These groups at the university parrot the line of the Peronist party in government: the electoral strategy of waiting for the 2025 elections.
We have seen in the last several months that we cannot have any confidence in Congress. It is in this rats’ nest where Milei has been able to pass his vetoes, with the support of the right-wing PRO (Propuesta Republicana, the party of former President Mauricio Macri) and of the Radical, Peronist, and provincial party deputies. We have to draw a strong conclusion: no confidence in Congress!
We also have no trust in the university officials who, after the great mobilization of October 2, had an official policy of “wait and see,” emptying the streets and putting their trust in Congress.
We are tired of this government, but we are also tired of the deputies of all colors who sell themselves for two pesos. We are tired of the organizations and groups that seek to demobilize our protests and do not organize the struggle.
Our focus is the university rebellion, the student movement that is once again taking up the old traditions of assemblies and occupations, and that has shown with great strength that it can confront this government in the streets. What is new is the organization from below, in assemblies and commissions in each department. In the current context of student mobilization, self-organization has become a fundamental tool to give more strength to the movement, and it is an aspect that we are betting on to develop the struggle. The occupation of buildings, accompanied by public classes and activities, not only make our demands visible, but also seek to bring the whole community closer to the ongoing struggle. In several departments, commissions have even been formed to organize different aspects of the struggle; this includes the organization of public potlucks alongside members of the surrounding neighborhoods and community, generating stronger and broader unity.
The events we are going through now represent the most profound and sharpest process of class struggle in Argentina’s universities in the last twenty years. This progress is also reflected in the creation of spaces such as the “Asambleas Interfacultades e Interclaustros,” which integrate students, faculty, and staff in the construction of a plan of struggle from below. These developments have to function in a democratic way, based on the mandates of the assemblies and taking care that new comrades who are just joining the struggle can express themselves.
While Peronism aims at unity with the authorities and politicians, for us the real unity to defeat Javier Milei’s plan is the unity of the students, workers, and retirees. As Myriam Bregman — member of the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS, Left Voice’s sister organization) and part of the Frente de Izquierda electoral front, said recently:
In our country there are more than two million university students. If they were to unite with the retirees, with the health workers and other sectors that are under attack, their strength would be overwhelming. Unstoppable.
That is what Milei and his supporters fear so much, and this is the path we must fight for in the student movement.
This article was originally published in Spanish on October 16, 2024 in La Izquierda Diario.
Translation by Madeleine Freeman
From the Belly of the Beast, Solidarity with the Argentine Student Movement
Over 80 universities are occupied in Argentina in a struggle against austerity measures passed by right-wing president Javier Milei in the service of paying the imperialist IMF debt. If you are a student or university worker, sign this petition in solidarity with the struggle in Argentina and against the imperialist gutting of higher education.
Left Voice October 17, 2024
This is a statement in solidarity with the student movement in Argentina. If you are a university student or worker, we invite you to sign the statement.
Amid a slew of attacks against public services such as healthcare, airlines, public pensions, and education, the far-right president of Argentina, Javier Milei, vetoed the budget for public universities. This is meant to divert public funds away from education and towards paying off the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an arm of U.S. imperialism that forces semi-colonial countries into debt as a mechanism of control.
Through a series of democratic assemblies, students voted to reject this austerity and occupy over 80 universities, putting a hard stop to business as usual.
As a place of study and discussion, the university has always been a hotbed for organizing, and students have always been on the frontlines of combative struggle all over the world. Those signed onto this statement are students, faculty, and groups affiliated with colleges and universities. Many of us were involved in the encampments fighting for divestment and a Free Palestine and many have been involved in labor struggles on our campuses. Today, we are seeing the combative tradition of students continue in the fight against austerity in Argentina. As university students and workers, we stand in solidarity with this movement in Argentina.
This is a part of a greater global fight by students and university workers against our schools being run in the interests of imperialist domination. In Argentina, we see the increasing privatization of education, including this attack that guts educational institutions to pay off an imperialist debt. In the United States, public universities function via student debt and low wages while universities take endowments from the occupying force of Zionist Israel that bombs universities and kills professors. We see these attacks when our universities, which should be run by the students, professors, and communities, instead sic armies of police on us to crack our skulls and charge us with felonies for protesting a genocide.
Students and workers across the world are fighting back so that our universities are not run like businesses as opposed to institutions by and for the working class. The effect of decades of attacks on public education and privatization is that it is harder to pursue an education and students, faculty, and staff suffer the consequences of degraded living conditions. On top of their studies, students feel the burden of rising rents and cost of living. Most students are workers, often studying and working precarious jobs to pay for their classes and daily life; their job prospects if and when they graduate are increasingly dim. For university workers, between stagnant wages and underemployment, making a living is increasingly unstable.
Therefore, we as students and workers within the United States reject austerity everywhere, we denounce the scholasticide, violence, and repression against students everywhere, and as those dwelling here within the heart of imperialism, we reject U.S. imperialism everywhere, from Argentina to occupied Palestine.
Beyond defending ourselves from attacks, we demand that education be by and for the working class, where education is public and free, run by students, workers, and the broader community.
We as students and university workers in the core of the imperialist leviathan, make an international call to join our hands and hearts in solidarity and with students and workers around the world to not only combat attacks on our institutions, but to win them back against the capitalist that gut and destroy them. We support the student movement in Argentina and stand in solidarity with all those who are right now fighting Milei’s right wing austerity and occupying their universities.
Sign the statement.
When far-right president Javier Milei intervened to veto a Congressional bill to fund public universities and keep his slashes to the education budget intact, he had no idea that he would wake up the sleeping beast of Argentina’s student movement.
Between October 14 and 15, students and faculty held more than 100 assemblies to decide how to organize the fight against the far-right government’s attacks and many voted to occupy their universities. Students are now occupying 72 different schools and departments across the country and they are holding public classes in the streets in 30 universities across Argentina. According to data collected by La Izquierda Diario, more than 100 departments and schools are taking some sort of action to protest the gutting of the public education budget. In the following days, there will continue to be assemblies and possibly new occupations. Organized from below, the students in each occupation and assembly are beginning to prepare mobilizations to the centers of Argentina’s main cities.
It is not yet possible to foresee where this great university rebellion will lead, but it is already taking on historic proportions. It is spreading quickly in the province of Buenos Aires with 26 schools and departments occupied; 12 departments are occupied in the city of Buenos Aires alone. But the protests reach across the entire country, from the provinces of Córdoba, Santa Fe, Tucumán, Catamarca, Chubut, Jujuy, and La Pampa, to Neuquén, Río Negro, Salta, San Juan, San Luis, and Santa Cruz.
There is no corner of the country where this rebellion has not shocked the education community. The University of Buenos Aires (UBA) has been one of the epicenters of the conflict, with the historic occupation of departments such as Law, Medicine, Psychology, Architecture, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities, to which others are being added as the week progresses. More than six departments in the National University of La Plata have been occupied, as well various departments in schools in the Buenos Aires suburbs and in the interior of the province of Buenos Aires, such as Mar del Plata, Tandil, and Bahía Blanca.
A Force to Be Reckoned With
The magnitude of this conflict is the result of structural changes in Argentina over the last 20 years, namely the growth in the number of universities and in the university population. This means that the university system extends to every corner of the country. Public university enrollment has doubled from 28 national universities with 600,000 students in 1990, to 61 universities with 2 million undergraduate and graduate students today. Another 500,000 students are enrolled in private universities. Reality tells a completely different story than Milei, who declared that “the national public university is of no use to anyone but the children of the rich and the upper middle class, in a country where the vast majority of children are poor.”
It doesn’t take much to see through his lies. At least 48% of public university students are poor. First generation university students who come from working families make up around 47.8% of students enrolled in 2022, a deep and growing phenomenon that can be seen particularly clearly in the universities of Greater Buenos Aires and other urban centers throughout the country. This process is uneven depending on the area. According to government data, 39% of students at UBA are first generation; in universities in the Greater Buenos Aires area, such as at the university of José C. Paz, this figure rises to 75%; at the University of Florencio Varela, the figure is closer to 76%; and in Lanús University, 70% of students are first generation. In this way, a new subject has been developing within the student body, namely students who work or come from working families, drawing a more direct link with the working class and its traditional organizations (unions and social movements).
In these places, universities are in close proximity to large concentrations of workers. In other historical moments, this geographical unity generated an important objective basis for tendencies towards worker-student unity, as was the case in Córdoba in the 1960s and 1970s. This context is relevant to the present. New universities are joining the struggle alongside students from more historical and traditional universities such as the University of Buenos Aires, La Plata, Rosario, or Córdoba.
These changes show the potential of the new student movement as it breaks out onto the political scene. We cannot use the same old categories to understand it, as if this was just a middle class movement. The phenomenon is much deeper; the students are a political-social subject that can change the dynamics of class struggle at the national level and have an impact on the workers’ movement.
It is not only the education community that has been moved by recent events. Workers in factories across the country are excited by the protests and the students’ willingness to fight back. As one worker at the oil company YPF Ensenada told us:
I get excited thinking that my daughters can study at the University […] Our union should be doing what the kids who are standing up to Milei are doing, we should be in the same situation.
What Milei does not understand is that his attacks crush the hopes of millions of people who dream of their children going to a public university, and now he has awakened the student movement. The defense of the university is a demand that crosses not only the middle class, but also the working class. It has broad and massive support. With that, it can show the way to confront all the government’s attacks.
The Defense of Education and Rejection of Milei’s Austerity
The debates and discussions in the assemblies and among students express a resounding repudiation of Milei’s veto of the university budget, which attacks public education and is another arm of the austerity that affects the majority of working people in the country.
What resounds from below is clear: “we cannot stand it any longer.” In addition to the difficulties of keeping up with classes, students are burdened by increases in utilities, rents, and not being able to pay for travel to and from school. This comes on top of the government’s severe austerity and slashes to pension and healthcare budgets. This is the harsh reality of the majority of people living in Argentina. The outrage at this reality is being amplified and expressed through the voices of students, faculty, staff, and healthcare workers who are converging at the university assemblies, public classes, and protests that have spread across the country.
Faced with the anger of the student movement with popular support, Milei is trying to reposition himself. In response to the protests, he recently said that he is “not going to give in,” but he justified this statement by admitting that the university will continue to be public and that students will not have to pay fees; however, he went on to attack the protests, saying that the protests are “la defensa de un curro” — in other words, a scam by a few to take advantage and make money from the universities. Milei and his allies are getting nervous, faced with a student movement that they did not expect. This is evident in increased tensions at the universities; for example, at the National University of Quilmes (in the south of Buenos Aires Province), members of Libertad Avanza (the party founded by Milei) attacked those participating in an assembly at the university with pepper spray as they discussed the direction of the struggle. At other universities Milei’s supporters took the microphone at the assemblies to carry out provocations. The government’s policy is in crisis.
The argument that we are tired of hearing from Milei’s supporters is that we have to achieve fiscal balance, and that we have to say where we will get the money for the university budget. Who did they ask when the government made a decree to allocate 100 billion pesos for the Intelligence Services? Did they justify where they would get that money from? What these arguments seek to hide are the government’s priorities: in the 2025 Budget, the items for Education and Culture represent 0.87% of the GDP; Science, Technology, and Innovation take up 0.22%; meanwhile the Public Debt Services represents 1.31% of the GDP.
What is being rejected by the movement is that Argentina’s crisis should be paid for by students, retirees, healthcare workers, and all working people who face utility fee increases. It rejects the idea that culture and the sciences should be gutted to pay the IMF while businessmen and financial speculators continue to turn huge profits. What the government should really audit are not universities, but the illegal and illegitimate debt; it should cancel the taxes that favor big business that Milei’s government passed with La Ley de Bases. These are the real scams that have plundered the country for decades to the benefit of international financial capital and big business.
In every occupation and every assembly, students express their weariness for this austerity plan applied by Milei’s government. We fight to overturn the government’s veto, in defense of education and for an increase in the education budget and the salaries of teachers and staff.
But the fight against Milei’s austerity is broader. In every assembly we hear applause whenever a motion is proposed in support of the struggle of healthcare workers at the Laura Bonaparte Hospital and Garrahan Hospital, or every time someone mentions the bravery of the retired men and women who confronted harsh repression to protest pension cuts. In the assemblies we hear harsh criticism of the complicit leadership of the CGT (the main trade union confederation in Argentina) and the demand for a national strike and a plan of struggle to defeat the plan of Milei and the IMF. As students we know that our struggle can be a spearhead that strengthens all the sectors that confront Milei’s attacks.
This was expressed by the testimonies of the students in the different assemblies:
“Our struggle is in response to the cruelty that the government is displaying not only towards students, but also towards retirees and workers”
“Our need for the occupations is to protect the non-teaching and teaching workers, for the working students who do not even have a plate to eat on at lunch so we wait for dinner to be able to eat. The veto was the straw that broke the camel’s back”
“They are taking away from us the possibility of dreaming. For many, the public university is the only possibility of studying. It is taking away our future and we are not going to give it up that easily.”
Our fight cannot wait until Congress discusses the 2025 budget, which will not be voted on until the end of the year and which leaves Milei the power to veto the articles he does not like. In addition, university administrators will try to divide the various fronts in the fight against the government’s austerity, asking for increases in the university budget without caring if the difference is made up by making cuts to pensions or public health and education. The increase in the budget has to happen now! For months the university has been in a dire state, since the salaries of faculty and staff do not exceed the poverty line. We have to give a forceful response now in order to win back what the budget cuts have taken, including the 25% of faculty salaries that have already been gutted. We do not want faculty and staff to live below the poverty line! We also reject the entire 2025 government budget presented by the administration, which strictly follows the demands of the IMF to pay the fraudulent debt.
The student and university movement must funnel our energy into the streets to converge with all the sectors in struggle. For this reason, together with the coordinated actions that have already been voted on in many universities, in each assembly we raise the demand for a Third National Education March in Buenos Aires to make our rejection of the veto undeniable.
We Cannot Rely on Congress. We Trust Only in the Power of the Students and Workers!
These weeks have demonstrated the strength that we students and workers have when we organize and take actions like the occupations and public classes. This is what the workers of the Bonaparte Hospital did when they took over the hospital and managed to reverse the closure announced by the government.
But to keep up our momentum and drive the movement forward means confronting political forces that want to funnel our energies into electoral maneuvers. In particular, this means debating the path forward for the movement with the Peronist groups and leaderships (who represent Milei’s main center-left political opposition) which, depending on their electoral calculations, try to stop the struggle. These groups have not been at the head of developing a plan of action in any department at the university; they do not call assemblies, and in many cases they have voted against occupying the schools. Damningly, they did not participate in the important mobilizations that took place on the day that the university budget was voted on in Congress.
Máximo Kirchner (son of former Peronist president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner), leader of the organization La Cámpora, supported the different mobilizations and called to build “solidarity” among the sectors in struggle, but at the same time he maintained that,
The veto is a constitutional power of the President and if we could not reject the vetoes, it is because we still do not have the number of deputies that allow us to do so. An objective for 2025 throughout the country is to build an electoral force so that when the president vetoes we have the necessary hands to stop him. There is no other way to do it.
These groups at the university parrot the line of the Peronist party in government: the electoral strategy of waiting for the 2025 elections.
We have seen in the last several months that we cannot have any confidence in Congress. It is in this rats’ nest where Milei has been able to pass his vetoes, with the support of the right-wing PRO (Propuesta Republicana, the party of former President Mauricio Macri) and of the Radical, Peronist, and provincial party deputies. We have to draw a strong conclusion: no confidence in Congress!
We also have no trust in the university officials who, after the great mobilization of October 2, had an official policy of “wait and see,” emptying the streets and putting their trust in Congress.
We are tired of this government, but we are also tired of the deputies of all colors who sell themselves for two pesos. We are tired of the organizations and groups that seek to demobilize our protests and do not organize the struggle.
Our focus is the university rebellion, the student movement that is once again taking up the old traditions of assemblies and occupations, and that has shown with great strength that it can confront this government in the streets. What is new is the organization from below, in assemblies and commissions in each department. In the current context of student mobilization, self-organization has become a fundamental tool to give more strength to the movement, and it is an aspect that we are betting on to develop the struggle. The occupation of buildings, accompanied by public classes and activities, not only make our demands visible, but also seek to bring the whole community closer to the ongoing struggle. In several departments, commissions have even been formed to organize different aspects of the struggle; this includes the organization of public potlucks alongside members of the surrounding neighborhoods and community, generating stronger and broader unity.
The events we are going through now represent the most profound and sharpest process of class struggle in Argentina’s universities in the last twenty years. This progress is also reflected in the creation of spaces such as the “Asambleas Interfacultades e Interclaustros,” which integrate students, faculty, and staff in the construction of a plan of struggle from below. These developments have to function in a democratic way, based on the mandates of the assemblies and taking care that new comrades who are just joining the struggle can express themselves.
While Peronism aims at unity with the authorities and politicians, for us the real unity to defeat Javier Milei’s plan is the unity of the students, workers, and retirees. As Myriam Bregman — member of the Partido de Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS, Left Voice’s sister organization) and part of the Frente de Izquierda electoral front, said recently:
In our country there are more than two million university students. If they were to unite with the retirees, with the health workers and other sectors that are under attack, their strength would be overwhelming. Unstoppable.
That is what Milei and his supporters fear so much, and this is the path we must fight for in the student movement.
This article was originally published in Spanish on October 16, 2024 in La Izquierda Diario.
Translation by Madeleine Freeman
From the Belly of the Beast, Solidarity with the Argentine Student Movement
Over 80 universities are occupied in Argentina in a struggle against austerity measures passed by right-wing president Javier Milei in the service of paying the imperialist IMF debt. If you are a student or university worker, sign this petition in solidarity with the struggle in Argentina and against the imperialist gutting of higher education.
Left Voice October 17, 2024
This is a statement in solidarity with the student movement in Argentina. If you are a university student or worker, we invite you to sign the statement.
Amid a slew of attacks against public services such as healthcare, airlines, public pensions, and education, the far-right president of Argentina, Javier Milei, vetoed the budget for public universities. This is meant to divert public funds away from education and towards paying off the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an arm of U.S. imperialism that forces semi-colonial countries into debt as a mechanism of control.
Through a series of democratic assemblies, students voted to reject this austerity and occupy over 80 universities, putting a hard stop to business as usual.
As a place of study and discussion, the university has always been a hotbed for organizing, and students have always been on the frontlines of combative struggle all over the world. Those signed onto this statement are students, faculty, and groups affiliated with colleges and universities. Many of us were involved in the encampments fighting for divestment and a Free Palestine and many have been involved in labor struggles on our campuses. Today, we are seeing the combative tradition of students continue in the fight against austerity in Argentina. As university students and workers, we stand in solidarity with this movement in Argentina.
This is a part of a greater global fight by students and university workers against our schools being run in the interests of imperialist domination. In Argentina, we see the increasing privatization of education, including this attack that guts educational institutions to pay off an imperialist debt. In the United States, public universities function via student debt and low wages while universities take endowments from the occupying force of Zionist Israel that bombs universities and kills professors. We see these attacks when our universities, which should be run by the students, professors, and communities, instead sic armies of police on us to crack our skulls and charge us with felonies for protesting a genocide.
Students and workers across the world are fighting back so that our universities are not run like businesses as opposed to institutions by and for the working class. The effect of decades of attacks on public education and privatization is that it is harder to pursue an education and students, faculty, and staff suffer the consequences of degraded living conditions. On top of their studies, students feel the burden of rising rents and cost of living. Most students are workers, often studying and working precarious jobs to pay for their classes and daily life; their job prospects if and when they graduate are increasingly dim. For university workers, between stagnant wages and underemployment, making a living is increasingly unstable.
Therefore, we as students and workers within the United States reject austerity everywhere, we denounce the scholasticide, violence, and repression against students everywhere, and as those dwelling here within the heart of imperialism, we reject U.S. imperialism everywhere, from Argentina to occupied Palestine.
Beyond defending ourselves from attacks, we demand that education be by and for the working class, where education is public and free, run by students, workers, and the broader community.
We as students and university workers in the core of the imperialist leviathan, make an international call to join our hands and hearts in solidarity and with students and workers around the world to not only combat attacks on our institutions, but to win them back against the capitalist that gut and destroy them. We support the student movement in Argentina and stand in solidarity with all those who are right now fighting Milei’s right wing austerity and occupying their universities.
Sign the statement.
