Argentina: Milei's attacks provoke mass movement

In the last few weeks a dramatic situation has opened up in Argentina’s university campuses and schools. In response to President Javier Milei’s defunding of the public university system, students have voted to occupy campus after campus across the country. The movement is gaining support beyond students, providing an avenue for all of the hostility towards the Milei government to express itself.

Since taking power last December, Milei has directed brutal cuts towards many different sectors of the population. He has undermined a whole series of labour and basic democratic rights, such as the right to strike, and pushed many working class, middle class and unemployed people into poverty. Any public expense which benefits the working class and poor is sacrificed without second thought on the sacred altar of balanced budgets.

Over the past year, there have been various episodes of intense struggle against the government, but none of these have been so widespread nationally or have reverberated so strongly in society as the current struggle to defend the public university.

In Congress, there were intense protests against Milei’s DNU (“necessity and urgency” executive decree) and his omnibus bill, which outlined his legislative agenda. However, both of these were passed due to Milei’s strong-arming and buying off of provincially-aligned Peronists; the hypocrisy of the members of the liberal Radical Civic Union party, who denounced Milei while voting for his projects; and brutal repression in the streets outside congress.

In previous months retirees have been hit particularly hard. Milei has lowered pensions to 244,320 pesos per month (around USD$200), which is below subsistence levels. This has meant some retirees are limited to eating one meal a day, or are forced to choose between eating, heating their homes, or purchasing essential medications. In response, there were demonstrations by retirees. These brave people had to face down police batons and tear gas, with each canister costing more than one month’s pension. However, this movement failed to expand to wider layers.

Workers in the public service and public companies have been under constant attack and have experienced periodical mass layoffs. Aerolíneas Argentinas, the national airline, is a prime target of the libertarians for privatisation or closing, and the airline workers are fighting back with a series of strikes which are ongoing.

Certain sectors of organised labour have been able to resist an increasingly precarious situation in the private sector through militant class-struggle action. For example, the grain and food oil processing workers recently launched a militant strike, alarming the government. They are a small but important sector in the shipping ports of the Rio Paraná, which is key to Argentina’s all-important agro export complex.

Despite these instances, the working class has not moved decisively onto the scene to put an end to Milei’s attacks on their standard of living. The struggles which have broken out have mostly remained isolated and have had a defensive character.

Since he has managed to ride out each of the waves of protest against austerity and cuts whilst temporarily stabilising the macroeconomic indicators, Milei has grown confident. Inflation has been lowered as a result of a brutal contraction of household spending and the country’s risk index has improved from the point of view of investors. On top of this, Trump’s victory could signal increased IMF funds in the next year, which Argentina would use to pay off the large debt maturities looming in 2025. In spite of the brutal cuts in their purchasing power, and the recession triggered by his policies, a certain sector of the working class still views Milei favourably, desperate for a change after years of economic precarity under the last two governments of Alberto Fernandez and Cristina Kirchner, and Mauricio Macri.

What for now prevents the advanced layers of the working class from asserting themselves politically against Milei is the crisis in leadership of the working class. On the one hand, the Peronist political leaders suppress any extra-parliamentary struggle. Instead, they insist Milei can only be fought in the 2025 legislative and 2027 presidential elections. This disorients and demobilises the masses and guarantees the continued governability of the capitalist system for the time being.

On the other hand, the leaders of the labour federations are only concerned with negotiating with Milei to maintain their privileged position in society. In this vein, they call isolated marches only when they see it is in their interests and suffocate any other initiatives.

The public university: a history of struggle

The student movement burst into this wider situation. It is a movement which has had an impact nationally, far greater than previous fightbacks against Milei. It touches on an issue which the vast majority of Argentines, even across class lines, sympathise with. Argentina’s national public universities have a very good reputation, a high academic level and are attended by the children of the working class and the bourgeoisie alike, not only from Argentina, but from across Latin America.

The fundamental characteristics of Argentina’s public universities stem from the great university reform movement of 1918 / Image: public domain

The fundamental characteristics of Argentina’s public universities stem from the great university reform movement of 1918, which erupted in Córdoba, whose university had the most backward conditions and whose authorities were most resistant to change. It then spread to the rest of the country and reverberated across the continent. This movement for reform of the university system, led by radicalised students on the heels of the 1917 Russian Revolution, broke the centuries-old clerical and oligarchic domination of the universities originally set up by Jesuit priests as seminary schools.

In the early 20th century the universities were still run in a completely authoritarian manner by mostly religious authorities, who taught an out-of-date and unscientific curriculum, and prepared the children of the ruling class for life in the professions or politics.

The most important conquests of the reform movement were university autonomy, co-government, and the extension and increased accessibility of the university system. Autonomy and co-government meant the right of the university community to elect its own leadership based on the votes of the professors, students, and graduates free from state interference. The system of ‘free teaching’ broke the formerly unlimited and arbitrary authority of professors. Now, they were subject to periodic open and competitive elections, while parallel programmes of study were introduced, allowing students to choose under whom they studied and the orientation of their courses.

The reformers also demanded the extension of the university system, in order to make it accessible to students across the country, not just in the capitals of the most important provinces. This was combined with aid to students, and an orientation towards the local and social problems facing the population. The result was a profoundly democratic reformation of the university system.

In 1949, under Peron’s government, free education, another demand of the reformers of 1918, was finally won. This led to a massive entrance of working class students into the universities, which increased the size of the student body many times over.

These conquests were not willingly conceded by the ruling class, but were won through a bitter struggle. This included the occupation and running of the National University of Córdoba by the students in 1918, facing repression by the army and violent attacks by reactionary catholic shock troops.

The Radical Civic Union’s Hipólito Yrigoyen, president at the time, was initially supportive of the reforms. Before the year was up, however, he would send in the army to dislodge the students from the faculty and charge 83 of them with sedition.

These conquests in the quality and accessibility of public education are a historic victory for the working class. However, so long as the university exists under capitalism, and the allocation of investments is determined by the necessity of maintaining the profitability of the capitalists, this conquest will always be under attack. This forces the students, professors, and university workers into a perpetually defensive position, trying to save these conquests. In public universities, the bourgeoisie doesn’t see a social right, but a costly line of the national budget to be reduced. In private education, they see a means of profit.

During the last civil-military dictatorship of 1976-82, public universities were subject to an extremely brutal attack. The dictatorship systematically undermined the public education system by directing research as much as possible into alternative institutions and private universities and by laying off huge numbers of professors.

The military coup of 24 March 1976 came on the back of years of red-hot class struggle in Argentina in the 1960s and 70s. This included events such as the Cordobazo of 1969, where organised workers united with the students in an insurrectionary takeover of Córdoba, the country’s third largest city.

The generals, well aware of the potential for a student movement in those conditions and the danger that it posed to them, levied special physical repression against the education community. Books were burnt, and entire faculties or even universities were shut if they were deemed too subversive. Students and teachers made up a fifth of the 30,000 people disappeared by the dictatorship, being abducted, tortured, and killed without their families learning their fates. All this was unleashed for crime of participating in the students’ centres, unions or organising politically, with people deemed guilty simply by association.

The past 40 years, however, have shown that attacks against the public education system were not limited only to periods of dictatorship. Carlos Menem, the Peronist president of the 90s, first attacked primary and secondary education with the Education Transfer Law and Federal Education Law. This brought about the defunding of public schools, thereby lowering teachers’ salaries and worsening the quality of education. His Higher Education Law (LES) of 1995, which is still in force today, commodified education, deeming it a ‘service’, to be judged according to how well it conformed to the needs of the capitalist employers; it opened up private partnerships in university education and research; undermined the principle of university autonomy through the creation of the CoNEAU, a non-university body with the power to approve or disqualify university courses; and established tuition fees for graduate programmes, which then became ever more common and necessary as undergraduate degrees were undermined and their content shifted to the masters and PhD level.

The military coup of 24 March 1976 came on the back of years of red-hot class struggle in Argentina / Image: public domain

During the three combined terms of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, although university funding was increased and new universities were created, the LES was never struck down or amended, leaving the legal basis for the commercialisation of education intact. Higher budgets, paid for in times of economic boom, are of course no protection for the future of universities. Indeed, each subsequent government continually cut budgets as the crisis of Argentine capitalism deepened over the last decade.

Mauricio Macri’s presidency was defined by a subservience to the IMF. It looked to implement their policies and pay the (ever ballooning) debt at all costs. For the public universities this meant a brutal budget cut, the threat of bringing back tuition fees, and suggestion that universities rely on ‘other sources’ of funding than the state, meaning dependency on private capital. In 2018 this led to a massive crisis in his presidency due to the scale of the protests and faculty occupations that he had provoked.

Milei’s attacks

What is clear is that capitalism (whether it takes the form of a dictatorship or a democracy) does not give room for a sure and steady growth of conquests, as reformists promise. Instead, these conquests are constantly clawed back as the capitalists look to make the working class pay for the crisis.

From this, we can see that Milei’s attacks are nothing new or unique. Beneath his pseudo rebellious personal style, Milei is a slavish representative of the Argentine big bourgeoisie and imperialism. By defunding public education, he is faithfully carrying out their short-term interests.

The university budget Milei set for 2024 is in fact the same as that in 2023. This is despite the skyrocketing inflation over this period. In April, the effects were already being felt when many faculties, including the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) faculty of medicine, literally had to turn off the lights and cut the gas (although many classes continued in the dark) because of the squeeze between the reduced budget and the huge increase in utility fees. Milei had to concede a small operating sum to avoid the scandal that would follow if the universities were forced to close completely halfway through the year.

In this context a first ‘federal university march’ was called by the various unions representing university workers, which aimed to pressure Milei in their negotiations for an increase in funding. This included the Argentine University Federation (FUA), representing the students’ centres, and the National Interuniversity Council (CIN), representing the university authorities. The response to this call was enormous, with huge crowds gathering in all major cities in the country, totaling over a million people. Included in the marches were not only students and education workers. Instead, the majority of the crowd was made up of people unattached to any organisation or trade union block. They were simply workers who showed up to defend the valued public university.

This was a reflection of the mood of the masses. Already in April there was a clear desire to fight. People were only waiting for an initiative, and a lead from the so-called leaders of the large working-class organisations. Unfortunately, the peronist trade union bureaucrats have called the heavy battalions of the working class to the scene only a handful of times and, when they do so, it is always for limited actions, without any plan for continuity. Instead, they are focused on keeping the masses safely at home, so as not to interfere with their negotiations with the new administration.

In real terms, university budgets have been cut by 30% in 2024 compared to 2023. This entails massive austerity measures within the university, including lowering the wages of professors and non-teaching staff to below the poverty line. This unsustainable situation led to another wave of fightback from the university in the second half of the year.

Beneath his pseudo rebellious personal style, Milei is a slavish representative of the Argentine big bourgeoisie and imperialism / Image: public domain

In September, opposition deputies in congress put forward a bill stipulating a (modest) rise in funding for education. This was not really done due to genuine concern for the universities. In actual fact, it was an attempt to prevent a spill-over of public rage while opportunistically positioning themselves as resisting Milei. The bill passed in both the chamber of deputies and the senate.

If Milei had accepted this imposition, it might have been enough to contain another outburst in the struggle. However, he blustered that the bill “does not provide for the resources to be used for its financing… and tangibly affects the economic policy objectives set by the National Government”. In other words, he wanted to maintain a balanced budget despite the social cost, and so promised to veto the bill.

The veto came on 2 October, the very night after a second massive march against his veto and in defence of the university. In anticipation of the march and likely veto of the bill, students of some of the most politically active university campuses (including the UBA Faculty of Philosophy and Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences) voted to occupy their faculties. This marked the start of the current wave of struggle.

This handful of faculty occupations persisted until, one week later, the fuse was lit, turning this isolated struggle into a national movement of historic proportions. The spark that lit this fuse was the confirmation of the veto by the chamber of deputies after the opposition had failed to put together the two-thirds of the votes necessary to override it. While the government celebrated their pyrrhic victory in congress, the wave of occupations spread spontaneously from faculty to faculty until over 100 faculties as well as schools from the north to the south of the country were occupied in protest.

It is important to point out the method of these occupations. They were not called by the unions or students’ centres, but by self-convened assemblies of students. This is a method of organisation for the struggle of the working class which has been on the rise throughout Milei’s presidency and before it. It has emerged as rank and file workers in various sectors have confronted the passivity of the labour bureaucracy when faced with the need to resolve their urgent problems of salaries and working conditions.

Over the last month, students in these assemblies have voted to occupy and take over the running of their faculties from the authorities. They have held open and public classes in blocked-off streets as a measure of protest, showing that it is the professors and students who make the universities function.

The attitude of the unions and the university authorities through the CIN towards the occupations was initially of passive acceptance. They are distrustful of a movement which is out of their control, but their strategy was to seek to use it in their negotiations with the government. However, keeping the struggle behind the closed doors of negotiating chambers and in parliament, the natural theatre of operation for these types, is a dead end for the massive mobilisation of the university community, which is the only way to win concessions from the government.

The concern of the government has been evident by some of the statements that have emerged. The arch-reactionary minister of security, Patricia Bullrich declared on TV that the students in the occupations had Molotov cocktails, a provocation which foreshadows repression, if the government should feel it necessary. Another member of Milei’s cabinet was reported to say “the troskos [Trotskyists] want to overthrow us”. These statements partly reveal the government’s lack of understanding of the situation, as the movement involves much wider layers than merely Trotskyists, but it also reflects a certain worrying about the situation.

Milei’s popularity has been falling for some time and this has been made all the worse by his position on the universities. For example, he recently struggled to fill the modest amphitheatre Parque Lezama for the national launch of his party. On top of this, TV ratings, those most reliable of polls, consistently drop when he comes on to speak in primetime. Ordinary people are simply tired of listening to him speak.

After realising that defunding public universities outright is a losing position politically, Milei was keen to shift the goalposts. In the previous weeks he has been insisting that he “never wanted to privatise” and “never considered applying a tuition fee”, and only wants to audit the universities’ finances. In fact, the universities’ finances are already reviewed by the Auditor General’s office, which responds to congress. Milei wants the audits to be carried out by an office responsible directly to the executive branch.

Which way forward?

Whereas a more limited student movement than the current one put Macri’s government against the ropes, Milei has built his presidency on provocations and won’t back down because of a scandal. His plan at the moment seems to be to do nothing: to neither provoke an escalation by sending in police repression, nor to make concessions for the 2025 budget. He is hoping that the movement will lose steam once the summer break comes at the end of December.

In order for the movement not to fizzle out, the students must take steps to advance the movement politically and organisationally. A first step was a series of inter-faculty assemblies, which took place across the country. The assembly in Buenos Aires at the end of October resolved to convene a third university march for Wednesday 12 November. However, this independent call for a march was a step too far for the union bureaucracy, who consciously acted to divide the movement, calling instead for a strike on the following Friday. Peronist and Radical student authorities also participated in the active sabotage, voting against participating in the march in assemblies.

Milei has built his presidency on provocations and won’t back down because of a scandal / Image: World Economic Forum, Flickr

The result of this was that the third university march was small, attended only by the activists of left parties and without participation of the masses. The strike on the Friday was routinist, with no centralised demonstration called at all. Both these separate actions had almost no political impact at all, but the message from the union bureaucracy was clear: the movement must either be under their control, or there will be no movement at all.

Self-convened assemblies can be a tool for overcoming the treacherous union bureaucracy, but only when the masses of the working class mobilise and participate actively, not when they are solely spaces for layers of activists.

Crucially, these assemblies should be spaces of political debate, where a clear programme can be defined which strengthens the movement. They must not become the space for sectarian conflicts, such as over who gets to place their banners at the head of the march.

The students should make it clear that they are not fighting only for a higher budget for themselves. Under capitalism, a higher budget for the university can mean cuts and austerity elsewhere. What is given with one hand is taken away with the other by the bourgeois state. Milei has been relying on this idea and presenting free public university as a handout for the rich. However, this claim is refuted by the composition of the student body. A large portion of students are from the first generation of working class families to access higher education, up to three quarters of the student body of universities in working class neighbourhoods of the suburbs of Buenos Aires.

Everywhere students are facing the same problems that capitalism implies for the rest of the working class: poverty wages, unaffordable housing, rising prices, and hunger. The solution to these problems is the same as is required to create the conditions where education isn’t hampered by defunding and commercialisation. Capitalism must be overthrown, allowing us to build a society where the wealth is controlled and planned rationally by society as a whole. Through a workers’ revolution the conditions for the construction of a truly free university will be within reach.

With a sense of common objectives, students and education workers should develop a programme to reach out to other sections of the working class, to merge student protests with the workers, who have the power to stop production and bring Milei and the capitalists to their knees.

Comrades of the RCI in Argentina will be proposing a front in defence of free, public and lay education, as a space to debate and to unite those who are determined to carry the fight for education to its necessary conclusion – the fight for communism.