This week public universities continued to star on the national scene. More than 110 assemblies were held, with 90 faculties and headquarters seized in 41 universities, inter-claister and inter-student assemblies, mobilizations, street blocks and public classes. The educational community is fighting and deliberating after the veto of President Javier Milei’s University Financing Law, demanding a budget and salary recomposition for teachers and non-teachers.
The loss of purchasing power reached 33% in 9 months, while Javier Milei acknowledged this Friday in Mar del Plata at the IDEA Colloquium in front of businessmen that he made the adjustment during the holidays “so that people would not find out what was happening “. These statements only deepen the need to intensify and surround with support the fight that the student movement is carrying out to stop the adjustment that attacks the popular majorities. Discontent was expressed in the coastal city with a huge mobilization of students, teachers, non-teachers, retirees and union organizations who joined in the same march to express their rejection of official policies, especially the attempt to defund and empty the university. public. The flag that led the mobilization said “You can’t screw with the public university.”
Latest news from Friday 10/18
Ester Friday an important assembly took place at the University of Philosophy and Letters, where a day of public classes was defined in avenues the week of 10/23 to 10/25 to make the conflict visible and involve the greatest number of students; join the festival organized by the workers of the Laura Bonaparte Hospital and we support their fight against the threat of closure; make themselves available to fight against the layoffs at the Posadas Hospital, with the slogan “Families on the street never again. Health and Education, the fight is one”; holding an interfaculty assembly; and the preparation of a third federal educational march to continue the university struggle.
This Friday, a massive assembly was also held in the departments of Educational Sciences, Humanities, Mathematics, Biology, Biochemistry and Pharmacy, Economics and Agronomy of the University of Bahía Blanca, where it was decided, among other measures, to hold public classes simultaneously on the day Wednesday the 23rd, create small classrooms on the street of the rectorate of Colon 80 and then at 6 pm go to the rectorate to demand a position. Here you can see all the resolutions:
How the university fight continues
Teaching and non-teaching unions have already announced new measures. From October 21 to 26 there will be a week of strike, accompanied by different measures and actions of visibility and protest. In the case of the University of Buenos Aires, the Teachers’ Union Association (AGD) calls for public classes all week and to concentrate on Tuesday the 22nd in Plaza de Mayo in a day of public classes from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
This action will coincide with a day of public health struggle, which will also march from Congress to Plaza de Mayo from 1:30 p.m. and which was voted on in an assembly of residents of CABA, Nation and City, which was later joined by the Hospital. Garrahan, and will mobilize together with the Bonaparte hospital and other sectors in struggle.
For their part, other unions are calling as of October 23 to hold public classes every Wednesday at 12 noon in front of the National Congress.
The different measures must be focused on the need to extend and strengthen the struggle, with open faculties, public classes, deliberation and organization. Some sectors seek to direct the fight towards parliament and take it off the streets, trying to delegitimize the democratic processes of struggle and the assembly method. But you cannot have any confidence in the legislators who negotiated the basic law, the veto on retirees and the veto on university financing itself.
The fight for the public university cannot wait for the 2025 Budget to be discussed, which would only be voted on at the end of the year (with the semester already closed) and where Milei has the power to veto the articles that he does not like. The strength is in the streets and in the unity and coordination of the different struggles against Milei’s plan.
As was shown in the potential of the massive and historic mobilizations of April 23 and October 2, the defense of the public university is a demand that crosses not only the middle class, but the working class and for that reason also can show the way on how to confront this government. That is why this fight has very broad and massive popular support.
It is necessary to prepare a third federal march for the public university, for urgent salary restructuring, for tripling the budget, for student scholarships, and to jointly defeat the Milei adjustment plan that hits education, health, and retirees and the entire working class. But this time, the CGT and CTA union centers must rise to the occasion and call for mobilization with a national strike.
A review of the week
The week began on Monday the 14th with massive student assemblies throughout the country that defined different measures of struggle, the vast majority voting for takeovers of faculties, pre-university schools and vigils, with public classes to guarantee attendance, deliberation between teachers and students and continuity of the semester. A novel fact that had not had this magnitude or extension in any other period in history and that made Milei retreat, which had to “clarify” that it does not intend to pay universities, even though its policy is one of budgetary suffocation.
Among some notable events of the week, on Wednesday the 16th in La Plata, a massive mobilization of more than 30 thousand people took place in defense of university education and against the Milei adjustment. Also, according to records, it is a university march with historical characteristics, after a week of assemblies and protests in 14 of the 17 UNLP Faculties.
In CABA, on Wednesday afternoon, blockages of streets and avenues took place at different points, decided in the student assemblies and the takeovers of the faculties of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), and later they joined a torchlight march. summoned by the Trade Union Front of National Universities and the rectors (CIN) to Palacio Pizzurno (Secretary of Education).
Likewise, in Rosario the students from the different meetings and assemblies met in a large inter-faculty assembly. Within the framework of the arrests of 5 union leaders detained in a brutal and arbitrary manner, the assembly voted to mobilize to request their release. The unity of workers and students was key, with strikes called by teaching and state unions and then the declaration of a strike by the oil workers, they converged with the student mobilization and managed to impose the freedom of the detainees this Thursday. Now the fight is on until these causes definitively fall, while the educational fight continues.
For its part, in Tucumán, an enormous university mobilization took place through the streets of the city. A forceful response to the arrogant attitude of Governor Jaldo’s police who the day before tried to evict a public class in front of Philosophy and Letters. This Thursday, after an important day of public classes and assemblies, thousands of students and teachers converged on the Rectorate to travel to the Government House.
This Thursday the day was marked by the national strike called by the Trade Union Front of National Universities, for 24 hours and without attendance at the universities, while in many faculties, public classes and assemblies continued.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
