Contrary to the predictions of sociologists and political scientists, the Chilean student movement, after a rather cold start to the year, obscured by the student federations’ fruitless negotiations with political power, refused to return to the condition of mere students. They declared themselves on strike, taking over high schools and occupying the streets. First, with the end of winter vacations, came the public secondary schools, shaking the university students out of their calmness, forcing them to admit the sterility of the negotiations in congress and making clear the insufficiency of representation within movements whose power necessarily lies in the expression of the multitude as multitude.

Chilean Students are not afraid of the police

by NICOLAS SLACHEVSKY AGUILERA

One of the consistent features of power is the recognition of past struggles in order to incorporate them into its orbit. Even last year, when the streets were filled by the demand for free education, the state and ideological apparatuses, without diminishing the intensity of repression, gave the false image, which to the extent that it was accepted should be seen as true, legitimating the student mobilization through the spectacular recognition of the struggle as a movement exclusively about the quality of education (and “in the world truly reversed, the truth is in a moment of the false”). This time, however, the conflict is reborn, highlighting conflicting positions with renewed intensity, at the same time as the latent political potential explodes within the heart of the struggle itself. The reality of exploitation in the educational structures is made clear, and new forms of association are created between students who go beyond specific demands framed within the traditional education system and a republicanism that is no stranger to capitalism.

In concrete terms, the demands that the university student federations and high school student centers have united around this year, the “five requirements for a new education system,” are not that different from the demands of 2011. If we take the petition’s main points, we see that the final objective of the mobilizations would be the demunicipalization of high schools, free basic and higher education, to do away with profit, and greater democratic participation of students and workers in educational institutions. The government, meanwhile, has lost the technocratic appearance with which it wanted to paint the discussion around education with the designation of the current minister. Or rather, it has shown how technocracy is the ideological veneer of liberalism (its neutral form, original to the government). From then on, it has gone to great lengths to maintain its positions, categorically refusing to grant the changes demanded by students and entrusting itself definitively and finally to the historic mission of liberalism in Chile. Even today, this liberalism, having been born of blood, is still not free from that threat.

Perhaps it is on this point that the intensity of the conflict allows us to see its biopolitical element. Recently, after the second or third evictions of the most traditional high schools, police were brought in to guard the entrances and safeguard the functioning of classes, in order to prevent new occupations. Thus, crudely demonstrating the shared conditions between educational institutions and prisons and industries: control and exploitation. Indeed, if we cannot yet talk about the articulation of discourses in this sense, the prolongation of student struggles, the globality of their demands and the profundity of the experiences of struggle necessarily go beyond the question of classes within the student body to confirm the formation of students in class. This is not a fanciful idea. It is as much a reality of the production and commercialization of knowledge, in the world, and in education, in Chile, as of the intensification of control mechanisms in the institutions of education and the elaboration of discourses about the quality of education under the classic model of productivity. These point to a rise in production that exclusively concerns students (within a chain that consists of professors, management and administrative figures) and a sustained exploitation currently being refined by the state, faced with these struggles, through the spectacle of the discourse on quality and the disturbing common sense affecting the understanding of education.

Thus, the Chilean student movement demonstrates that this is a class struggle. The government intensifies repression as it recognizes the danger the movement could pose when it goes beyond demanding reforms. Effectively that is the path opened up when the demands are impossible to meet, as they are for such an ideologized liberalism as Chile’s. That is why today a special law was passed in Congress that criminalizes, with up to three years of imprisonment, anyone who covers their face at a protest (“the masked”), convokes an unauthorized march, blocks public utilities, or occupies a high school. In short, persecuting everything that escapes the custody of the guardian state.

On the other hand, however, experiences of struggle have been growing and taking shape. A common consciousness is forming inside the struggle, beyond the contingent agreement around a determined number of demands. New forms of solidarity and collective self-management of daily activities are being developed, from common meals in the occupations to self-education in the occupied high schools to prepare for university entrance exams, and, even more, to educate themselves in extra-curricular knowledges of common interest, giving light to a struggle that goes beyond and destroys the capitalist forms of education, subjectivization and association.

During these days (around August 25th), let’s remember that a year ago the student Manuel Gutiérrez was killed by police during a day of protest. At the entrance to an occupied girls’ high school in Santiago, a painting paraphrases Victor Jara’s song “I remember you Amanda,” saying “The bell rings / for the return to school (where the original says “work”) / many did not return / neither did Manuel.” A few days ago, the leaders of the Confech, the country’s most important federation of university students, asked that “masked” protesters not appear at the mobilizations called for August 28, following the government in its divisive and desperate politics to affirm that this is nothing more than a movement demanding reforms. Yet, the rejection of these declarations by students on social media shows that what is at stake in the Chilean student struggle exceeds the representation of the leadership, which seeks to negotiate and realize a determined number of demands. What has begun is a movement in the proper sense, in which perspective is being given to experiences that seek to attack and leave the orbit of capital. As such, the movement is composed of a multitude of expressions, practices and desires, and cannot be understood as merely a weapon of negotiation of the leadership against the government. An awareness is being formed that a new education is not simply that which the state provides for free, which should be considered a basic requirement within the current forms of the capitalist game, what we have been reduced to by the Chicago Boys. In the movement itself a new education is being created and is educating itself. This shows that exploitation must be combated in all of its forms and that is the root of the true struggle that is taking place in the streets and in the institutions.

* Translation by Liz Mason-Deese.

http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/chilean-students-are-not-afraid-of-the-police/

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