The Chilean Student Movement: Repression and Privatisation.

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Friday September 03, 2004 18:34 by antrophe

An Interview

Paulo is a former student activist from Chile, who spent a number of years as a representative in his union, he is now working in Ireland, we managed to grab him for a brief chat about his experiences in the student movement and what problems face education in Chile.

What sort of issues do students face in Chile?

Well, basically the biggest issue is the problem of privatisation. That’s the biggest issue, ya know? And secondly you have the problem of repression as well, there is a lot of repression against the student movement that tries to organise and fight back against the privatisation measures. That of course is a situation that comes out of the time of the dictatorship, literally from the reform of 1980 when there was a big cutback in education to allow the private sector to start investing more.

So you say 1980 was a period of intensive cutbacks to force privatisation, that appears quite similar to what the Irish state are doing now, what sort of reforms were brought in back in Chile?

In the University of Chile where I was studying, just 30% of the income is public sector, 70% comes from the private including fees, so that gives you an idea of how important the private sector is in education in Chile and how much of a business is as well. Of course all that happened through forced measures under the dictatorship when the mass movement had many other tasks to face as well. So I think in Ireland you are in a better position to fight it off because you don’t have such a repressive context in which you have to face military rule and well the repression in Chile, it comes from that time, many laws about education such as the infamous LOCE were planted to make it harder for student organisations and literally to ban the left from the academy.

You say repression as well as privatisation is an issue facing the student movement in Chile, what exactly do you mean?

Well, you’re talking about a very subtle repression in some ways, it’s the whole system how it works, who the academics are. Most of the academics were appointed under military rule, they got to university that way and they reproduce the same kind of people in the academy. Academics tend to be very right wing and the student movement tends to be very left wing. It is very subtle and it affects everything you learn, to actual persecution of certain student activists through what we call summaries. Through basically keeping records of students…

You mean keeping track of lecture attendance and using it against them?

Yeah yeah yeah, and taking reprisals through academic performance of students to openly expelling some for supposedly terrorist links and even the most obvious form of repression which is police repression. Every student march will finish with water cannon, with a number of students in prison with batterings, students in hospital, I mean its really bad on that point as well. Every student march is the same, loads of tear gas, loadsa riot sticks, it’s always the same.

Privatisation remains an issue as a hangover from the dictatorship, what kind of demands are the student movement counterpoising to this?

Well, you have on the one hand privatisation the opposition to the current system of fees we are demanding a differnated system. If you don’t have fees at all you can’t oppose fees utterly, we are in a moment where every student pays fees and its not very likely that we will jump immediately to an openly public system. And then on the other hand it wouldn’t be fair because university is very elitist now as well, so what people are demanding is different levels of fees, and contemplating free university to people under certain incomes. So when it comes to privatisation its basically about the fees, demanding that the rich pay and demanding that people from working class backgrounds have free education, secondly we are demanding more public investment, a rise from 0.67% of the GDP to 0.84%. That’s very humble considering there is a historic precedent in Chile for 1.2%. We are demanding certain changes in the way that the state gives funds to university, they privilege school performance which means the universities with the best funds attract the best students and the best students at school always go to the best university because they have more funds and it’s a vicious circle, we want a more democratic system of giving funds. On the other hand we want democratisation, to get the different actors in education, that is workers, academics and students to take part in policy making at university that’s another important struggle. For us its as important as privatisation because the struggle for democratisation makes it easier to go through all the rest. And as well we are for the end of the current laws on education which were imposed under the dictatorship.

So how does the student movement organise?

Well its basically organised through student federations and student unions, there is a general congress of student organisations which is pretty ineffective because it has no executive capacity. So it just proposes ideas, so it’s pointless really. Then you have the federations, and they are composed of the different student unions, and each union is made up of the different careers. So that’s pretty much the way its organised, some federations are more militant than others, some have more rank and file organisations than others, you have federations that are in the hands of the right some are strongholds of the left. And then you have the right that is particular militant and was one of the fundamental toilers of reaction in Allende’s time in the early ‘70’s before the coup and most of the people that supported the Pinchet dictatorship were economists and sociologists and people that came from university but were militant in what was like a trade union, but that’s not an accurate translation as it has nothing to do with them, but it was a very militant right wing group with a social base among the posh universities..

What sort of tactics have the Chilean students’ movement found to be most effective?

It varies from federation to federation from students’ union to students’ union. Well of course the most effective tactic is direct action, and of course I am an advocate of that but there is always a tension between groups, we are always demanding rank and file action, real measures of pressure with struggle and there are those that are fond of lobbying but you have the communist party, the social democrats and the right that all privilege the lobby. Well the right don’t really privilege anything they just want the student union to organise football matches and stuff like that, but still you got the new left that privileges lobby as well, you got some leftist groups that privilege lobbying as well.

How does the student movement link in with other sectors? If you speak of democratisation, and involving various actors like workers, students and academics in the decision making process then to achieve this you need to develop links with these sectors, how have you done this? I’d assume to achieve democratisation you’d have to link in with these sectors and you can’t exist in isolation?

Well, student movements in Chile have never been isolated they have always played a very active role and being active participants in politics in general, as I was telling you both in reactionary politics and revolutionary politics in general, but the student movement has always been leaning to the left as a general trend and there’s always been historical links with the working class that go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, with the first Chilean university starting in the mid nineteenth century and then you have the first experience of organisation by the twentieth century linked to the popular movement, actually the student movement was built on the revolutionary unions that at that time were all illegal and they were born as means of direct struggle and points where the working class met with students in the struggle for a better society, so that link always existed.

It can generally be said that at the moment Ireland is witnessing a trend of neo-liberal reform, with a push being made for privatisation in education, transport and other sectors. Chile under military rule was a playground where these ideological models were played out first, leading some economists to claim there was an ‘economic miracle’, what do you think of neo-liberal reform in the public sector?

Well, Chile’s the best example that its not working, I mean probably the macro-economic figures are working, the productivity index and all that. But if you look at the distribution of income, if you look at the quality of public services and all that, its appalling. There has been the rise of an elite, where only the privileged sectors of society have access to third level education. But the working class find it more and more difficult as each day passes. Not only access to education has been affected, but due to the very logic of it things get worse, it affects the whole education system. The wages of teachers get affected, so teachers have to work outside education as well, so university becomes more a burden for them than a real job, where they can dedicate real time. There are many problems where labs are in decline, research is in decline, there is a concentration of research. It affects education at all levels, we had very good top research and its all gone in twenty years of neo-liberal reform.

If you are of the privileged, of course it’s a brilliant economic miracle. Of course if I’m getting richer, I’d tell all the world. But if you are working class and are obliged to work twelve hours a day legally, if you have no rights at all and have been systematically abused under the administration. If you know your offspring have no hope of going to third level and are always queuing for crap public health, you will find it pretty tough to talk about an economic miracle, its unrealistic. It all depends on what side are you on, it’s all class struggle.

What advice would you offer the student movement?

Oppose fees at all costs, because it will rot, at the end of the day the whole education system. If education goes down society in general goes down, research, even life expectancy, loads of stuff. But the most important thing is to understand its an ideological battle, its not about whether you can afford fees, most Irish students don’t give a shit, most could afford the fees the state are offering, but the point is you can’t accept education as a commodity and not a right. It’s the most important thing, it’s a matter of principle not a matter of whether I can afford it. It’s a really different struggle, which can only be won if you really build links with the wider social movement, with the unions, with workers and their struggles.