Brazil: Editorial of the People’s Students Newspaper number 23
We share an unofficial translation of the Editorial from the new edition of the Jornal Estudantes do Povo which was published in commemoration of the Combatant Student Day (March 28).
Raise popular protest against privatization attacks on free public education
In 2022, during the electoral campaign, Luiz Inácio highlighted on several occasions that the budget would not be a problem for public education, puffing out his chest to say that the “scientific blackout” promoted by the genocidal military government of Bolsonaro and his generals would end. When in the second half of 2022 the budget cuts to education deepened, and as a result the struggle in the student movement increased, this electoral discourse became even stronger as a justification to curb popular mobilization, under the misleading electoral argument that “the new government would solve it” and the lie that “protesting at this time would incite the far right”. In fact, in several universities, the leaders of the old student movement proposed to stop everything so that students could dedicate themselves to electoral campaigning for the right-wing Lula-Alckmin coalition.
Hardened in the battles against the wrapped in shiny paper privatization policies of the government of opportunism from 2002 until mid-2016, 13 and a half years strictly following the guidelines of the World Bank/IMF “education reform”, a little by a little, the new student movement remained in combat throughout this period, leading, participating in and supporting important occupation strikes, including during the electoral period, denouncing and unmasking this immobilizing discourse of opportunism, showing that the only path for student struggle is through independence and combativeness.
In 2023, it took only a short time for the criminal “New High School” (NEM)” to be implemented for the spark to spread throughout the country, with broad mobilizations, where the new government, together with the pro-government Nacional Union of Students (UNE)/Brazilian Union of Secondary School Students (UBES), sought to paralyze the struggle to hold a “public consultation” on the subject. They did everything they could to prevent a new wave of strikes in high schools from developing, joining right-wing/far-right governors, boycotting demonstrations, making successive speeches in defense of a “supposed modernization of education” already in collusion with the shameful “reform” proposal made by the Ministry of Education (MEC) and, in the end, seeking to appeal once again to the discourse that “it was not the time to protest so as not to incite the far right”. And when they found themselves unable to stop the important strikes to occupy schools and universities that year, they began to condemn the tactic as a whole, saying that they were in favor of “stoppage” but not “occupation”, since that was a tactic of the “Maoists”!?…
As if the shameful position of the reactionary coalition government of Luiz Inácio regarding the New High School (NEM) and its misleading “reform of the reform” were not enough, the Fiscal Framework Law continued the same austerity economic policies of the Bolsonaro government, taking a new step in the attack on free public education. In addition to budget cuts, the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) began financing PPP (Public-Private Partnership) projects in various areas, including the “concession” of public schools to private companies, as seen in the auction conducted by the fascist Tarcísio de Freitas in São Paulo.
It was under these conditions that the National Strike of education workers was triggered in 2024, where the MEC categorically refused to meet with the striking workers, treating the issue as if it were only a “budget problem” that would not have any adjustment since it would harm “public accounts”, a reactionary discourse of the local and international financial oligarchy that receives large resources from the governments of the old State, while condemning any type of benefit that serves the interests of workers. One of the most important recent struggles of the university student movement also took place, the victorious occupation of UERJ students against the AEDA, in which for 57 days the students held high the flag in defense of public and free education, at the service of the people, and also of democracy and university autonomy, completely unmasking the “progressive” rectorate of the PT and PSOL (Gulnar Azevedo and Bruno Deusdará). Students took to the streets of Paraná to protest against the privatization of state schools, even storming the State Legislative Assembly. In São Paulo, several demonstrations took place against the privatization and militarization of schools, as well as against the NEM, with the most significant event being the combative occupation of secondary school students at the Antônio Ablas state school in the city of Santos, which was victorious despite the most brutal repression.
The year 2025 began with the occupation of the Pará State Department of Education, carried out by several indigenous peoples against the criminal Law 10.820/24, approved in a rush, in the last session of the state legislative chamber at the end of 2024. This Law extinguished the SOME (Modular Education Organization System), as well as its extension, the SOMEI (Modular Education Organization System for Indigenous Peoples), responsible for bringing in-person high school education to indigenous communities. The occupation was victorious and the law was completely revoked, defeating this shameful attempt to implement distance learning. This struggle proved, once again, that the tactic of the occupation strike is the most advanced form of struggle in defense of free public education.
All these recent struggles show that there is no other way to stop the successive budget cuts and privatization attacks other than active mobilization, especially through the tactic of the occupation strike. Those who accuse the mobilizations of inciting the far right, opportunistic immobilists from the old student movement who talk a lot about defending democracy and against fascism, but behave like cowards who fear both fascism and the radicalization of the student masses, and seek to transform student organizations into mere government appendages of the privatization policies of the Ministry of Education.
What really stirs up and feeds the far right is transferring billions of reais to the latifundium through the Safra plan, zero funds for the “agrarian reform program”, remaining silent in the face of the terrorist action of the Bolsonarist paramilitary hordes of “Invasão Zero”, while successive cuts are made to health, education and social benefits such as the BPC; it is implementing the reactionary policy of “fiscal adjustment”, while billions are transferred from the BNDES to the big bourgeoisie, the latifundium disguised as “agribusiness” and imperialism, financing privatizations and projects of all kinds to sell out the country.
There is no true struggle against the far right and fascism without mobilizing the masses in revolutionary struggle, especially when they mobilize the masses. The far right lives and feeds not on people’s revolt, as the opportunists would have us believe, but on the repression of all people’s protest, especially when spontaneous struggles turn into conscious rebellions against the old order of exploitation and oppression in a crisis of domination, just as the counterrevolutionary offensive has been dragging on in the country for more than ten years, preventing the inevitable uprising of the masses, in order to resolve its three reactionary tasks of: 1) restructuring its old State with the maximum concentration of power in the Executive via a white coup d’état through the dismemberment of the current Constitution or through the open culmination of a military coup; 2) boosting its bureaucratic capitalism and confronting its crisis of decomposition that is taking place in the Country; and 3) combating the danger of revolution by repressing all people’s protest and adopting draconian laws against the free organization and demonstration of the working classes.
The rise of people’s protest against privatization attacks and in defense of free public education that serves the people is more necessary than ever. The free provision of education, democracy and autonomy of the University must be defended tooth and nail. We must continue to raise the level of struggle, together with the student government, not only to defend the rights that have been won, but also to expand them: construction of student housing, creation of daycare centers at the Universities, free student passes, free operation of university restaurants, expansion of university autonomy and democracy, the adoption of student co-government, expansion of scientific research programs, the end of the entrance exam, etc. The student movement cannot be held hostage by the reactionary discourse of the ruling classes about fiscal adjustment, that there is no money for this, that we should be happy with the minimum.
This is crucial for the local ruling classes and their master, imperialism, which is shaking in the face of the great disorders caused by the general crisis of decomposition of monopoly capital, in which the same old provocateurs of World Wars I and II once again threaten to drag the world into a new and third, this time with the sole hegemonic superpower, the USA, Yankee imperialism, at the forefront, as the only means of trying to confront its agonizing crisis, resolve its internal contradictions to gain survival under a greater and colossal centralization of capital and crush democracy and prevent the proletarian revolution in order to continue enslaving the peoples of the world.
Comrades, let us make 2025 another historic year of struggle for the student movement. Raising even higher the banner of the heroic Palestinian National Resistance and the anti-imperialist struggle, rejecting all types of conciliatory and immobilist discourse, resolutely supporting the ongoing agrarian revolution, fighting alongside the masses against the far right and fascism, we must persist in the struggle to increasingly transform schools and universities into shining trenches of the class struggle.
