Demonstrators march on the Alameda in Santiago de Chile on second day of national strike, August 25.
(Photo: Víctor R. Calvano/AP)

The following article is translated from a special issue of El Internacionalista (October 2011).

SEPTEMBER 16 – In media jargon, after the Arab Spring has come the Chilean Winter. It is the largest and most sustained mobilization in two decades against the regime inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. For four months straight, hundreds of thousands of Chilean students and workers have taken to the streets fighting for free, quality public education. Since the middle of May, hundreds of high schools and the country’s main universities have been occupied by their students and workers. The center of the capital Santiago and the other principal cities have repeatedly seen enormous demonstrations, with thousands of arrests and bloody street fighting against the military police (carabineros). On August 21, one million people came together to support the students on strike; on the 24th and 25th there was a 48-hour national strike called by the CUT, the national union federation. That ended with the assassination of a 16-year-old youth, shot down by a carabinero. In addition to repression, the government is employing calls for a treacherous “dialogue” aimed at diverting the protest, in which it has the help of the reformist leaders of the movement.

The student struggle enjoys wide popular support. According to an opinion poll taken at the beginning of September, 76 percent of Chileans support the students’ demands; at the same time, the conservative president Sebastián Piñera, of the right-wing “Alliance for Chile” coalition, has only a 27 percent approval rating. It’s not just the workers who support the struggle, but also a large part of the middle class, which has been weighed down by the high costs of university education, including in the “public” universities, ever more privatized themselves, where the tuition rivals U.S. levels. Nevertheless, in spite of its overwhelming popularity, the battle is far from being won. The antediluvian right, in power for the first time since Augusto Pinochet resigned, is defending to the end the dictator’s model of education subject to the capitalist market. The “opposition,” described as “center-left,” grouped together in the Concertación coalition and mainly consisting of the Christian Democrats (DC) and the Socialist Party (PS), pretends to support the students’ demands, even though during its nearly two decades in power it maintained this “free market” education system.

But even the main leaders of the students and teachers – both linked to the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) – and of the CUT (part of Concertación, are ready to “negotiate” what has been the starting point of the struggle and ought to be non-negotiable: free public education, accessible to all. This the core of the conflict, between the concept of education as a democratic right, rather than a “consumer good” that must be bought (at market prices) by “customers” (students and their families). As much as the reformists criticize “profit” in education – which is already illegal – they don’t even come close to advocating the abolition of private education. More broadly, the ex-Stalinists of the PCCh, the social-democrats of the PS, along with other more radical leftists (the Castroist Movement of the Revolutionary Left [MIR], “libertarians” and pseudo-Trotskyists), approach the question from a “democratic” perspective. They propose a constituent assembly as their final goal, to draft a new constitution to replace the “supervised democracy” imposed by the military dictatorship in 1980 (and only amended in 1989 and 2005). Of the necessary workers revolution, not a word.

With its “democratist” perspective, the opportunist left ignores the fact that the struggle for public education, although formally a democratic demand, is fundamentally a class struggle. The privatization campaign is an international offensive of capital, headed by the World Bank, UNESCO and other imperialist agencies. As we saw in the momentous ten-month strike of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999-2000, the capitalist state will mobilize all its forces to impose the commodification of education. Even so, at a cost of more than one thousand arrests, it was possible to keep the UNAM tuition-free thanks to the determination and massiveness of the occupation, and due to the worker-student defense of the strike, involving hundreds of electrical and university workers. Thus, the mobilization of workers’ power is much more than one more demonstration of solidarity with the students – it is essential to gain the right to free public education for all. This battle can only be won if it becomes part of a struggle whose final goal is the seizure of power by the working class, as champion of all the oppressed.

From the “Penguin Revolution” to the Nationwide Strike

Since they end of the military government – which lasted almost 17 years, from the coup d’état of 11 September 1973 until May of 1990 – the education system has been a focal point of opposition to the heritage of the dictatorship. One of the most-chanted slogans in the protests is “se va caer, se va caer, la educación pinochetista” (it will fall, it will fall, the education of Pinochet). In fact, the Organic Constitutional Law of Education (LOCE) was the last of the constitutional decrees imposed by the military, promulgated one day before the end of the regime. Reflecting the regime’s “neoliberal” ideology, the LOCE reduced the role of the state in education to that of a regulator, leaving the management of educational institutions to private corporations in the name of “freedom of instruction.” Based on this “constitutional” law students and teachers were barred from participating in school governance, and primary and middle school education was “municipalized,” to the detriment of those living in poor neighborhoods. Private secondary “academies,” technical institutes and private pseudo-universities flourished, with classes taught by “taxi professors” working at more than one school, with low wages and no job stability. Despite criticism from some sectors of Concertación, which governed Chile from 1990 until March of last year, the hated Pinochetist LOCE remained in force without alteration until the high school student revolt of 2006.

Known as the “Penguin Revolution” for the school uniform of a white shirt with a dark tie and dark slacks or skirt, and following in the footsteps of the student movements of 1996-97 and 1999-2000, it was the biggest student protest in the history of Chile … until now. In 2006 the demand was for abolition of the LOCE, an end to municipalization, a free student pass for public transit and elimination of fees for the Unified Selection Exam (PSU) for college admissions. With a series of mobilizations that lasted from April to June of 2006, the Socialist government of Michelle Bachelet was put in check. Student strikes and school occupations escalated, extending to over 100 schools, and two nationwide student strikes brought out up to one million students, along with teachers and some unions. However, public support for the high school students remained limited, while the Concertación government, headed by a socialist, took a hard line. It criticized supposed “vandalism” and sent the carabineros to viciously repress the movement. In the end the government conceded some crumbs to the students, while rechristening Pinochet’s LOCE the General Education Law (LGE).

The movement of 2011 is the legitimate heir of the “penguins.” A new generation is still in thrall to an education system designed by the generals and oligarchs who toppled the “Popular Unity” government of Salvador Allende and drowned the workers in a river of blood. Today, the majority of high school students are enrolled in private schools (some of them “subsidized”). State expenditure on education has fallen to 2.7% of the Gross National Product (the lowest level of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), while a university student graduating with a medical degree will typically end up owing around $50,000 in loans, in a country where the majority of the population has a monthly household income of $900 or less. Even with (inadequate) scholarships for the poorest students this means the exclusion of the bulk of the working class from higher education, and an unbearable millstone of debt for the middle class. This explains why the student protests have enjoyed such widespread support, not only among workers but particularly from the middle class, even from its more well-off sectors.

The current battle over public education began in early April, when students at the Central University of Chile (UCEN) protested against a proposal to convert the campus into a source of profits for a real estate consortium linked to the Christian Democrats (part of the ruling government coalition). A May 12 march called by the Confederation of Students of Chile (CONFECh) mobilized 100,000 students nationwide. This was followed by other marches of hundreds of thousands of students on May 26 and June 1, the occupation of 17 university campuses and a wave of takeovers of high schools – over 600 by the end of the month. The students held two consecutive days of mobilizations on June 15-16. The first was of high schools in the southern suburbs of Santiago, together with contract workers of the El Teniente mine, part of the state-owned National Copper Corporation (CODELCO), who had been on strike for nearly two months. This brought together more than ten thousand demonstrators. The second day encompassed the entire education sector – with students and educators of the teachers union – together with other public sector workers, swelling to 200,000 people, the biggest protest ever seen in this spurious “democracy.” And that was only the beginning.

On June 23 some 20,000 high school students marched while the minister of Education, the ultra-rightist Joaquín Lavín[1], tried to divide the movement by negotiating separate accords with high school and university students, “public” and private, but ended up being rejected on all sides. On June 30 there was another national mobilization, now with the support (but still not a strike) of the CUT, which totaled more than 400,000 protesters from north to south. In response, president Piñera announced with great fanfare at the beginning of July a Great National Accord on Education (GANE) and the creation of a $4 billion dollar fund to finance it. However, being the capitalist magnate that he is[2], this program ended up as a great subsidy for the banks. The $4 billion would be invested in the markets, with anticipated annual interest of $250 million to be distributed among the banks to facilitate a few more scholarships and a reduction of interest rates on some student loans. Shortly after this proposal was floated, Piñera replaced the disgraced education minister Lavín.

GANE did not satisfy the students, since it didn’t answer any of their demands. The demonstrations continued and more than 100,000 people took to the streets on July 14. Repression was also increased, and police provocations and attacks multiplied: the carabineros (nicknamed “pacos”) invaded the UCEN campus in Santiago, and beat unconscious student leader Recaredo Gálvez in the city of Concepción. A television reporter and students discovered infiltrators throwing stones in the marches. When protesters in Valparaíso tried to detain one of these provocateurs, he took refuge in the National Congress building, identifying himself as a police officer. On August 4, the authorities prohibited all marches, by the high school students in the morning and university students in the afternoon in Santiago, as well as those in outlying areas (Valparaíso, Temuco, Concepción). In spite of this, hundreds of protesters resisted attempts to disperse them, provoking heated street fighting which the capitalist press termed “excesses” and “violent disturbances.” That night there were cacerolazos (pot-and-pan-banging vigils) everywhere. There were 874 known arrests.

Denouncing the violent repression of the authorities against the youth, high school students of the CONES, university students of the CONFECh, the CUT and the Confederation of Copper Workers called for another march on August 9, in which 150,000 participated, with almost 400 detained by police. This was followed by another march on August 17, with 100,000 participating despite heavy, cold rain, and on the 21st was the “Family Sunday for Education” in Santiago’s O’Higgins Park that brought out one million protesters. Finally, on August 24 and 25 came the 48-hour nationwide strike which culminated in huge marches in Santiago and other cities of around 600,000 demonstrators. Over the course of three days of constant mobilization, the government detained nearly 1,400 people. Against this fierce repression, it is necessary to unchain the power of the workers movement to demand that all charges be dropped against the 3,000 students, youth, workers and parents arrested in the various protests. Despite all the propaganda against the “hooded” (encapuchados) high school students, various opinion polls showed a large majority of support for the strike. And despite the limitations of the workers’ action (it did not manage to shut down public transit, although there were few riders, and the copper miners did not stop work), the impact of the first big strike since the Pinochet dictatorship was undeniable.

The Need for a Revolutionary Program

It was only after the 48-hour nationwide strike – and particularly after the uproar over the killing of 16-year-old Manuel Gutiérrez Renoso, who it turned out, after repeated denials by the police, was killed on the night of the second day of the strike by a carabinero’s bullet, without any provocation whatsoever – that the government moved to propose discussions with the striking students. “Weakened, Piñera Calls for Dialogue,” headlined the Buenos Aires daily Página/12 (27 August). Even so, the regime continued to treat the students with disdain. The health minister, Jaime Mañalich, called the students of the Buin middle school who had gone on a hunger strike “liars” and accused a school official who visited them daily of being a “murderer,” then dismissed them all as “cowards” lacking in “heroism” when they called off their strike after 37 days. In the first meeting, which was held in La Moneda (the presidential palace in Santiago) on 3 September, the new education minister, Felipe Bulnes, presented an agenda consisting in a series of “roundtables” starting with the system of scholarships and grants – that is, the same GANE that was stillborn in July.

Despite minister Bulnes and president Piñera’s chutzpah in sticking to the same “proposal” rejected by all months earlier, student and teacher leaders who took part in the meeting responded with diplomatic, positive comments. Camila Vallejo, president of the Federation of Students at the University of Chile (FECh) and leader of CONFECh, declared that “positions were clarified,” while the president of the Society of Professors Jaime Gajardo, stated that “positions were frankly expressed” (from a press release of the Communist Party, 3 September). It’s no coincidence that Vallejo is a member of the Young Communists (JJ.CC.) and Gajardo a leader of the PCCh. In fact, the reformist “Communists” are the right wing of this movement. So much so that former education minister Lavín complained that “sectors to the left of the Communist Party have taken over the student leadership” and that the “extreme groups ... have no intention of coming to an agreement” (La Tercera, 2 July). What is true is that the PCCh’s “moderate” line has been rejected by more radical sectors.

A notable aspect of the Chilean student struggle is the transformation of its foremost spokesperson into a media star. There are hundreds of articles in the national and international press on the theme of “Camila Vallejo, the Beautiful Communist Leader of the Chilean Students” (Notimex, 23 August). The world of bourgeois journalism promotes her words, her personality and her fashion statement everywhere. Even the vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, inventor of the Evo Morales government’s “Andean capitalism,” declared “we’re all in love with her.” It’s plain to see that this campaign is intended to elevate a leader able to prevent a radicalization of the movement. In tactical and programmatic aspects, the PC and la Jota (the Communist youth) have tried to pave the way towards an eventual agreement with the government. Thus, for example, after a plane crash in the province of Juan Fernández that killed a popular TV announcer, Vallejo announced that the national grief “made it impossible” to go ahead with a student strike planned for September 8 (the murder of Manuel Gutiérrez, on the other hand, did not “make it impossible” for her to sit down with Piñera). Faced with dissatisfaction from “critical sectors” in the CONFECh, Vallejo had to backtrack. It was later reported that “government sources indicated that they were worried at the weakening of the more moderate leader” (La Tercera, 7 September).

The way in which the Communist-affiliated student and professor leaders have lent themselves to the government’s divisive maneuvers has been widely commented on. After ensuring that the Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students (ACES, which unites more lower-class students from the suburbs) would be present at all “dialogues” with the government, CONFECh, CONES and the teachers union attended the meeting anyway when the government refused to invite ACES (supposedly, according to the spokesman of La Moneda, because they “don’t have a very well established structure”). So ACES called a march on September 2 to “demonstrate the discontent of the students in the street... who are not represented at the negotiating table.” Earlier, on August 31, a group of around 50 high school students from a “Popular Assembly Education Department in Revolt” occupied Bulnes’s office, saying “We do not feel represented by the CONFECh,” that “it stands for reformism and nothing more; we are not in agreement with Concertación, nor with the right, or the PC.” They unfurled a banner saying “From the Classroom to the Class Struggle,” and their spokeswoman stated that “we are fighting for a life of dignity for the common people, for all our parents who work.”

No less important is the way in which the Communist leaders have trimmed the movement’s slogans to facilitate an accord with bourgeois sectors, not only of the regime but also in Concertación. In the big demonstrations, the students’ banners say plainly, “free education.” But the demands of CONFECh only speak of “having free state education as a horizon.” What’s more, spokespersons of the PCCh and the JJ.CC. always emphasize “no profit in education.” This is not a semantic distinction. Chilean law (in the form of Lawful Decree No. 2 of 2010) currently provides that private universities must be “private non-profit corporations in order to have official recognition.” Piñera has already indicated that he could “investigate” whether they are actually in compliance with this prohibition. In reality, university authorities and the “trustees” of these corporations have found a thousand ways to profit, ranging from stratospheric salaries, to the renting of rooms and furniture by real estate companies, to student loans, etc.

Basically, the PCCh “moderates” only want some modifications to the privatized education system instituted by the gorila Pinochet in the service of the momios (mummies) of the Chilean upper bourgeoisie. In this they follow in the footsteps of Stalin, who in a famous December 1936 letter to Spain’s president Largo Caballero, advised the Popular Front government not to frighten the bourgeoisie with revolutionary demands and to seek to “attract the small and middling bourgeoisie... protecting them against attempts at confiscation.” This was the nefarious role of the Chilean Stalinists during the popular-front government of Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular from 1970 to 1973, when the PCCh insisted on an alliance with the DC, while the latter (formerly the National Falange), under the leadership of Eduardo Frei and Patricio Aylwin, was preparing the bloody coup. Today, the social-democratized Stalinists continue to repeat the slogan of the UP, “The people, united, will never be defeated,” even when the history of Chile has proven that false “unity” with bourgeois sectors in the name of “the people” was what produced the defeat.

A revolutionary, genuinely communist leadership would fight not just for the end of educational profiteering but for the expropriation of the private universities and schools, for public, secular, and free education accessible to all – with open admissions and open attendance – under the control of councils of students, teachers and workers, as part of the struggle for workers revolution. The strike at UNAM of 1999-2000 was precisely to defend free public university education against the imposition of tuition. As we noted above, the strike succeeded in this after ten months of a campus occupation and in spite of over a thousand arrests and the takeover of University City by the federal police, a body that was created with the purpose of repressing the students. But the fact that access to the preeminent institution of higher learning in Mexico is limited by entrance exams means that every year there are tens of thousands “rejected” would-be students who have no way to continue their studies. That’s why today in Chile, beyond seeking “complimentary means of access,” it is necessary to fight to abolish the PSU and all exams that limit access to higher education.

The UNAM strike has been a point of reference for the Chilean students. It should be noted that at UNAM also, the authorities tried to use the “dialogue” tactic to isolate and trap the students. Despite denunciations in the media of the strikers’ “intransigence,” the students decided not to sell out the struggle for free university education.

One of the key aspects of UNAM strike was the direct involvement of the working class in its defense. The Grupo Internacionalista emphasized all along inside the strike committees that the students alone did not have the social weight necessary to defeat the capitalist government, and called for the formation of worker-student defense guards. Although at first our proposal was put aside as utopian, when an ultimatum from the government and the university rector threatened to dislodge the students from the campus using the army, the proposal was approved by the strike committees of two university schools. From the beginning, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) had shown support for the strike – what was needed was to mobilize its class power. With the mandate of the campus assemblies, members and sympathizers of the GI mobilized scores of students to go to the plants of the Central Light and Power company to directly ask the electrical workers for their aid.

On 15 July 1999, just as the deadline set by the government ultimatum was expiring, we went to the union headquarters to officially reiterate our request for aid. That same afternoon, the SME dispatched hundreds of union members who for days during this crucial moment joined with students and campus workers at a half-dozen university campuses. This demonstration of proletarian power stayed the repressive hand of the government for a time and contributed to the success (limited, but important) of keeping UNAM tuition-free.[3]

Forge a Trotskyist Workers Party in Chile!

The typical reformist thinks like this: first we fight for reforms, then later (that is, never), the time to fight for revolution will come. This is the old Menshevik-Stalinist scheme of revolution “by stages,” except that before the higher phase arrives, the supposed or wished-for “democratic” allies of the first stage massacre the revolutionaries. You only have to look at the experience of the Unidad Popular in Chile. As revolutionary Marxists we understand that the relationship between reform and revolution is exactly the opposite. As the young Cuban communist leader Julio Antonio Mella wrote in March 1923, when he launched the first national student congress, “we invite Cuban students to the revolution, in order to secure reforms. This is the only way. We students know it well” (from the collection J.A. Mella, documentos y articulos, Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1975). The utter failure of attempts at education reform under capitalism make it clear that in order to democratize education, one must fight for the socialist revolution that will make this possible. Or as Lenin emphasized again and again, “reforms are a byproduct of the revolutionary class struggle.”

“Democracy” is the great swindle and fraud of the bourgeoisie. In this epic of its decline, when the limited gains of previous years are systematically eliminated, capitalism in its death agony undermines with ever greater force the democratic promises of its youth. In Chile, the “accursed law” that illegalized the Communist Party at the beginning of the anti-soviet Cold War  was called the “Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy.”[4] Seventeen years of Pinochet’s military dictatorship were followed by 20 years of “transition to democracy” and still Chile has the most authoritarian constitution in America. Just as at the dawn of capitalism, great democratic gains are the consequence of the class struggle. And this requires the leadership of a revolutionary workers party. The experience of the Popular Front in Chile, as well as the dialectical relationship between democratic demands and workers revolution, underline that such a leadership can only be built on the basis of Trotskyism, the revolutionary Marxism of our time.

As the great internationalist revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote in the midst of the student and worker agitation in Spain at the beginning of the 1930s:

“The spirited student demonstrations are only an attempt by the younger generation of the bourgeoisie, and especially of the petty bourgeoisie, to find a solution to the instability into which the country fell after its supposed liberation from the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, of which the basic elements are still totally preserved. When the bourgeoisie consciously and obstinately refuses to resolve the problems that flow from the crisis of bourgeois society, and when the proletariat is not yet ready to assume this task, then it is often the students who come forward. During the development of the first Russian revolution [1905], we observed this phenomenon more than once, and we have always appreciated its symptomatic significance. Such revolutionary or semi-revolutionary student activity means that bourgeois society is going through a profound crisis. The petty-bourgeois youth, sensing that an explosive force is building up among the masses, try in their own way to find a way out of the impasse and to push the political developments forward.

“The bourgeoisie regards the student movement half-approvingly, half-warningly; if the youth deal a few blows to the monarchical bureaucracy, that’s not so bad, as long as the ‘kids’ don’t go too far and don’t arouse the toiling masses.”

–L. D. Trotsky, “Tasks of the Spanish Communists” (25 May 1930)

An apt description of the contradictory attitude of the Chilean bourgeoisie to the “kids” (cabros and cabras) who are now fighting for free public education! The attitude of the workers, emphasizes Trotsky, is very different:

“By backing up the student movement, the Spanish workers have shown an entirely correct revolutionary instinct. Of course, they must act under their own banner and under the leadership of their own proletarian organization…. The fact that the workers demonstrated with the students is the first step, though still an insufficient and hesitant one, on the proletarian vanguard’s road of struggle toward revolutionary hegemony.”

Taking this road presupposes that the communists will struggle resolutely, audaciously, and energetically for democratic slogans…. If the revolutionary crisis is transformed into a revolution, it will inevitably pass beyond bourgeois limits, and in the event of victory the power will have to come into the hands of the proletariat But in this epoch, the proletariat can lead the revolution – that is, group the broadest masses of the workers and the oppressed around itself and become their leader – only on the condition that it now unreservedly puts forth all the democratic demands, in conjunction with its own class demands.” 

Trotsky points out here that the struggle for democratic demands is not counterposed to, but an integral part of the struggle for socialist revolution. The Trotskyists of the League for the Fourth International (LFI) holds today in Chile, as we did in the UNAM strike of 1999-2000, that the struggle for free, quality public higher education for all requires the extension of the student strike to key sectors of the working class. Piñera, Bulnes and the privatizers of the right and the “left,” cannot be defeated by student marches and campus occupations, no matter how big and militant. The LFI maintains that this democratic right will only be won by breaking the power of the bourgeoisie with a revolutionary struggle that aims for the establishment of a workers government to begin the international socialist revolution. To sell out the elementary demands of the movement, as the leaders linked to the PCCh and Concertación are doing, is to prepare a terrible defeat after months of hard struggle.

To lead this struggle it is urgently necessary to forge the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party founded on the Leninist-Trotskyist program. As Trotsky wrote in his pamphlet, The Spanish Revolution and the Tasks of the Communists (January 1931):

“The more courageously, resolutely and implacably the proletarian vanguard fights for democratic slogans, the sooner it will win over the masses and undermine the support for the bourgeois republicans and Socialist reformists. The more quickly their best elements join us, the more quickly the democratic republic will be identified in the mind of the masses with the workers republic.”

His conclusion, as valid for today as it was 80 years ago: “For a successful solution of all these tasks, three conditions are required: a party; once more a party; again a party!” ■