The veto was confirmed. Once again Congress came to Milei’s aid. Although the law did not threaten the ‘fiscal balance’ of the government, it was a necessity for the government to defeat the educational resistance that is brewing.

By PSTU – Argentina

But the effect it produced had the opposite result: the conflict is spreading all over the country. It is time to consider the lessons learned from the struggle thus far in order to win and defeat the cuts being made to education.

Where did the CIN go?

Since April, university rectors have appeared at the head of the demand. They called for the massive mobilisation on April 23. But after that, they did nothing else. They rode on our gigantic mobilisation to negotiate with Milei. They applauded his ‘willingness to dialogue’ when they got an increase in funds for operating costs, while teachers and non-teachers fought in solitude.

But make no mistake. We do not want Milei’s audits that only seek to justify cost-cutting. We know very well that the rectors and their administrations manage their petty cash with the sale of courses, paid postgraduate courses, and fee-paying degrees. And all this is occuring under the protection of the Higher Education Law of Menemism, which no government has repealed, not even the Kirchnerist ones. A very clear example is the fact that while several faculties and universities across the country were being taken over on the night before the vote in Congress, the Faculty of Law of the UBA was holding a private Campari event.

The National Interuniversity Council (CIN) and the rectors will not go all the way with the defence of our right to education, because what they are really defending is the model of the university as a business.

We cannot trust them. They are not our allies. As soon as they manage to negotiate, they help the government to demobilise.

The proof of this is the attitude of the UNLaM authorities, who tried to prevent the students from mobilising and taking over the facilities, even going so far as to encourage mob violence on Wednesday night. Even so, the student movement, and teaching and non-teaching sectors, in the face of the attempt to placate the struggle, were strengthened and continue to organise themselves to join the battle.

We got nothing by asking for permission

The Basic Law was recently passed in Congress. The veto of the pensioners’ increase and now the budget increase, as weak as they were, show once again that we cannot place our expectations on Congress to solve our problems. Votes are sold and bought for positions, for money. Positions change, and never in our favour.

Much less can we wait for 2025. It may be that the damage done will be very difficult to reverse by then.

We have to remember that our university is the child of the University Reform of 1918. This was a rebellion that did not ask for permission at any time when it came to fighting. As it says in its own manifesto: ‘The acts of violence for which we take full responsibility, were carried out as the exercise of pure ideas. We overturned what represented an anachronistic uprising and we did so in order to be able to raise our hearts above those ruins… (…) The moral sanction is ours.So is the right. They could have obtained the legal sanction, they could have been embedded in the law. We did not allow them to do so. Before iniquity became a legal act, irrevocable and complete, we seized the assembly hall and threw out the scoundrels, only then frightened, to the side of the cloisters. That this is true is shown by the fact that the University Federation then held a session in the assembly hall itself and that a thousand students signed the declaration of an indefinite strike on the very same rector’s desk“.

As this article goes to press, more universities continue to join the student takeovers all over the country, and there are already more than 40 from the north to the south of Argentina. And it is very important to discuss what this means. Although it is a method of radicalisation of the student movement that puts pressure on the university administrations by not allowing the normal daily functioning of the university, because it is the students who take control of the faculties (a kind of dual power), it allows them to exert great political pressure, both on these administrations to take a stand against the government, and on the government itself, which today is gaining more and more enemies and popular discontent.

But just as they are pushing for more sit-ins in universities and the possibility of secondary schools joining in (they called for assemblies at the weekend), it is necessary to propose inter-campus assemblies, to break with the division between students, teachers and non-teachers, as well as to organise coordination between faculties. The only way to make the struggle grow, is to guarantee the massiveness of the conflict, winning students to join the fight. And as several faculties and universities did today, such as the UNLaM, it is central that public classes are held, where discussions can be had with students who are not yet convinced that it is necessary to hit the government and bring down its plan of adjustment.

Let’s radicalize the fight! Organisation and struggle against Milei’s economic plan

As we have been saying, it is urgent that we challenge the institutionalism that today tepidly claims to defend public education. And as the 1918 struggle in Cordoba taught us, we must fill the streets, and move beyond the bounds of a purely student movement. It is urgent that we unite with the workers‘ movement, with the teachers’ sector, the state sector, the pensioners. This unity must be exercised through the solidarity of the student movement with the struggles at hospitals like the Garrahan, or the Laura Bonaparte, who through struggle won victory and reversed the closure. We must also work towards agreeing to the strike called for October 30 and join the roadblocks, acts and mobilizations; and just as we did on April 23 and October 2, break with the traitorous and pacifist leaderships (like the CGT for example) that bet on the parliamentary solution to the conflicts.

We must go out to look for the working class, to bring about unity as they did in 1918. We have to go to the factories to ask them to join the takeovers, to organise with us. Already in the mobilisations we see them, supporting us, even joining us with their work tools to guarantee the mobilisation, like the truck drivers in Comodoro. We must organise together measures that affect production in order to interfere with the profits of the big capitalists, who are the ones pulling the strings of this plan.

We cannot trust the Chamber of Deputies, who are nothing but traitors and agents of Milei’s government. Striking together is the only way to stop the advance of this government that will not stop until it sells our country. We must multiply the inter-faculty assemblies, create coordination bodies with other sectors to unify the fight. Congress will not solve any of these problems, we must go to the presidential palace to find Milei, to defeat his plan as a whole.

As we said in the previous statement, the vetoed law does not solve the fundamental problem of financing. It is necessary to discuss what we want our public university to do and be. But defeating the veto puts us in a better position to defeat the attack on education, which is not only Milei’s plan, it has to do with the plans of imperialist plunder in the region. The world powers want to take our natural resources, and they also want to take our knowledge.

Finally we demand the freedom of all who were arrested after the day of struggle in front of the Congress by the police of Jorge Macri and Patricia Bullrich. From the youth wing of the PSTU we put ourselves at their disposal to fight for their release, we call on all sectors to show solidarity with the students and workers who are fighting. Fighting is not a crime.