CHILE — Showing the fighting spirit of the working class, students and workers have united in a massive reform struggle for access to education and better wages. They organized a strike against the right-wing president Sebastian Pinera. Well over a half a million workers and students took to the streets and fought pitched battles with the cops, who killed one young teen.
Sick of the fact that education is becoming increasingly privatized and priced out of reach, many young people have been protesting for months to have access to education. The mass number of student struggles entered a new stage as it merged with the currrent miners’ struggle. This unity has worried the Chilean ruling class.
The students and workers in Chile are an inspiration to the international working class. Their spirit is a necessary ingredient in the struggle to lift us from the hell of capitalism. Unfortunately, a key ingredient — revolutionary communist leadership — is missing. The reformism and revisionism (fake leftists) that currently dominate place absolute limits on the struggle. Hundreds of thousands of workers and students chanting, “The people united will never be defeated” is a testament to how politically misled the movement is. There are fewer more bankrupt and dangerously misleading phrases than “the people” (including the bosses) as it hides class content and make one wonder, which people? Communist leadership will transform this chant into “The workers united will never be defeated.”
The false ideologies of nationalism and reformism are misleading the massive display of workers’ power into a dead-end struggle against a figurehead, instead of placing the blame solely upon the capitalist system.
These struggles are exciting to watch and will hopefully inspire future student struggle from South Africa’s young people to the Europe and the U.S. But, the workers and students of Chile need to build the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party because capitalism can never meet the needs of the working class.