The proliferation of the occupation of university faculties and colleges throughout the country against Milei’s veto marks a qualitative leap in the struggle against the government. They were combined with strikes and public classes immediately launched by the militant teachers of AGD UBA, and also with the participation of the non-teaching staff. And throughout the country the student struggle conditioned the university unions, even those most closely linked to the rectorates. Occupations are a reaction to the failure of the parliamentary negotiation policy of the rectors, who, together with Peronism and radicalism, sought to restrict the budget fight to the parliamentary arena but could not ensure that their own blocs would uphold the rejection of the veto. The students reacted to official intransigence by stepping up the ante and resorting to student movement’s historic methods of direct action and struggle. For the first time in his presidency, Milei has to face a massive struggle that clearly goes beyond the corset of isolated mobilizations to negotiate, put up by both the employers’ opposition and the trade union bureaucracy.

Therefore, the ongoing student mobilization marks a turning point in the struggle against the government. The defense of the public university has become the focal point of the national debate. Students and teachers respond to Milei’s statements, that pointed out that the poor do not enter universities, by stating that his government is responsible for having accentuated the massive dropout rate among the poorest students. Contrary to what Milei argues, the university that the government wants to take away from young people is seen as a mechanism for social advancement by broad layers of workers, in a country where 70% of the youth population is below the poverty line.

This explains the enormous popularity of the university struggle, which garners massive support in the face of a government that has failed to isolate it from the workers as a whole. The other central point of this student strike is the struggle for wages, against a government that is condemning millions of workers across the country to wages below the poverty line. In this way, University struggle is connected to the struggle of the entire working class, which is being deprived by the government’s policies, in a country where consumption has fallen by 15% year-on-year. Without going any further, the workers of Garrahan Hospital are coming from days of strikes and massive mobilizations and are preparing a new large mobilization in unity with universities for next Tuesday 22nd. They were joined by residents from different hospitals, such as the Bonaparte Hospital against the closure. In Rio Tercero, four thousand people mobilized with the trade union and chemical workers against the closure of a large plant. As yesterday with the pensioners, popular sympathy is being expressed despite the collaborationism of the trade union bureaucracy.

Milei’s hypocrisy knows no bounds, because the taxes ‘paid by the poor’ have been reinforced by his government measures while those paid by the rich are reduced (as is the case with Personal Property) and because the whole intention of his budget is that these taxes do not go to universities but to finance the ultra-millionaire international creditors, beneficiaries of a clause that authorizes the entire budget to be adjusted to guarantee the payment of interest on the external debt.

The other argument, audits, falls apart when 92% of the budget is spent on salaries whose amounts are deposited by the national government and whose payroll is available to all state agencies, except for the thousands of ad honorem, who of course work for free, so their funds could not be misappropriated. The radical-peronist cliques manage the tendering and hiring regime, but that is another matter, perhaps the libertarian “fachos” would like to have that control as in Insfrán’s Formosa.

In this way, students speak out for the silent majority that had been abandoning Milei in the polls and that was the one that starred in the ratings blackouts of the last national presidential network. The atmosphere of struggle that the national crisis is taking on will challenge all political strategies of both the government and the opposition.

University of the workers, not of the cliques

The occupations also revealed a divergence of methods and objectives between the student movement and the university cliques that had been the visible expression of the demand.

While the university conflict develops, radicalism of Yacobitti and Lousteau, who governs Santa Fe with Maximiliano Pullaro, has just applied a brutal pension reform against teachers and provincial employees. Opposition to this reform gave rise to a large popular mobilization. The government of those who present themselves as progressives in the university had five teachers’ and provincial employee leaders of the province arrested and prosecuted. Radicalism applies its own blows to public education and wages, as well as to democratic freedoms.

Therefore, the clash between Milei and the university cliques should be characterized as a circumstantial dispute over the magnitude of the budget cut and the speed at which the university should be subjected to a privatization process. It is by no means a principled opposition. The radicals and Peronists who co-govern universities collaborate by appointing officials to Milei’s government in the PAMI. They have been pursuing a privatization policy in the university for decades and they never lost sleep over the fact that a full-time job was not enough to cover the family basket long before Milei applied the current cuts. Only extraordinary pressure from Milei’s government, which put them on the ropes, led them to stage two street demonstrations. That is why they are now going to aim all their intervention at deactivating the occupations. Inevitably, the independent intervention of the student movement and the militant teachers will draw conclusions about who is who in the university.

The coup is Milei’s and it’s against the people

The government’s other reaction to the mobilization was to denounce that students were hiding behind the left with the intention of destabilizing the government. This is the classic McCarthyist way of attacking the student movement, because what the students are demanding is the basic budget for the university to function. It is Milei who places them in a ‘destitute’ field because he understands that his government will falter if it is unable to bring the country into line with the demands of international financial capital in order to squeeze every last peso for the payment of the foreing debt.

As always, the appeal to McCarthyism seeks to avoid responding to the most basic demands. Gabriel Solano responded by pointing out that it is the government itself which, by vetoing every popular demand, raises the problem that it is incompatible with health, education and salaries. This incompatibility raises, in the eyes of people who see their basic rights confiscated, the question of the struggle for the fall of the government.

A government that closes hospitals, that intends to starve pensioners, that destroys jobs in factories, closes down and destock soup kitchens and liquidates labor rights and that proposes to align Argentina seamlessly with imperialism and the Zionist genocide and bring it to its knees in front of the international creditors, pouring every penny into the payment of foreing debt.

Milei Peronism debates its 2025 lists, whilst Partido Obrero how to defeat Milei

In light of this situation, it is of enormous significance for the popular movement that Máximo Kirchner returned with his argument that the veto is a presidential power, while calling to form lists to go to the polls in 2025, and that Juan Grabois, in the same vein, proclaimed his candidacy for deputy. Meanwhile, La Cámpora in all University faculties manoeuvred to avoid occupations or to submit to them when they were a fait accompli. The PJ of La Matanza even sent a mob against the students who occupied the local university. The call to fill the Congress with representatives of Peronism ‘against the veto’ comes just after the deputies elected by this force in Catamarca and Tucumán gave their votes to Milei’s veto against the public university.

Against this orientation, Partido Obrero takes up the challenge posed by the political situation as a whole, pushing for Milei Out! This slogan must be developed with the intervention of working class as a whole in the political situation. That is why we associate it with the support for all struggles and the preparation of the general strike. And to debate a political alternative and a programme to overcome the catastrophe to which all capitalist political forces have led the country. With this objective in mind, we call on all the sectors in struggle throughout the country to join forces, and we will develop a campaign and a big central event in Lezama Park on 9 November, as well as events and talks in the rest of the country.

We do it from the place we have conquered in national political life in decades of consistent struggle in factories, neighborhoods, universities, defending each of the popular demands against the governments of capital that have been sinking the country.

A place that makes us the target of an enormous persecution, which this week had its expression in the summons to question Vanina Biasi under the infamous accusation of anti-Semitism, in a case set up by the Daia and Zionism to silence her denunciation of the genocide in Palestine, while the mega-case against the Polo and the Partido Obrero continues. With this militancy, we launch a big campaign to end the anti-worker government of Milei, to lead the struggles to victory, to defeat all the causes of persecution and to strengthen the struggle for a workers’ government.

We refute the accusations against Polo Obrero and the piquetero movement

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