Resorte
7th May 2003, 04:29
In Brukman and wherever it is needed
THE POLITICAL FORMATION SEMINAR ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA OF THE POPULAR UNIVERSITY MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO WAS INAUGURATED
By Néstor Kohan
A new year begins
There is an old saying that “The second times are never good”. Our friend Carlos Marx has been even more critical. The author of The Capital thought that history never repeats itself. If it intends to do it, it can only aspire… to a farce.
Knowing the risk that we faced, we decide to go for it a second time. It was a matter of reprinting the Free Seminar Ernesto Che Guevara of the Popular University Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
This one-year seminar (coordinated by Néstor Kohan and by Claudia Korol) developed during the year 2002. It was hard work, gratifying, pleasant, and at same time exhausting . Because one thing is to put together a round table with “notable” and “important names”, where the public assist just as a simple passive spectators to see the parade of recognized or admired figures and then return to their homes, and another very different is to put together a systematic class of study that will be prolonged all year long, in which one must prepare with detail each class in continuity with the previous one, the texts of Bibliographic, the topics of discussion in group, etc, aiming at the active members and to the multiplication of the knowledge.
We could just be conformed with what we built last year. But the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo always ask for more. They are never satisfy . Always go a step ahead with more ambitious projects. They were the ones who insisted in the need of a political growth of the Popular University. Not only of three or four isolated militants (even tough they are very compromised or convinced that they are) but of the mass - quite diverse, certainly - of companions that share the experience of the Popular University. They were the ones who promoted the need of the POLITICAL FORMATION, of the study and the reflection on what we do.
When the Mothers launch an initiative, in the first time, seems - almost always - impossible or too difficult tasks to accomplished. But they know from their own experience that the limit of the impossible always runs out and it dissipates when there is a genuine will to go from theory to practice. Therefore, with the unstoppable effort of the Mothers (that encourage aim everything at the political growth and to the radicalization of the popular movement), we returned to the battle.
We decide to return to launch the class, but now as the POLITICAL FORMATION SEMINAR ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA (which is going to meet every Thursday of the year, from 7pm to 9pm in Defense 377, to few meters of Belgrano avenue). Not to repeat the previous experience -that we consider more than positive- but a different one. We do not want to be a farce neither a caricature of ourselves . Everything that does not grow and does not develop, stops and dies. The change in life should be permanent and uninterrupted. As the Mothers have taught us, we need to go for more.
In tuning with this second phase that is began, we decided to do the public inauguration not in the comfort of a classroom but in the street, that is also a classroom and that teaches us a great deal , as showed so many times in the Argentine history , since that historic May 29 of 1969 in Cordoba to the most recent one 19 and 20 of December of the 2001.
And what better than doing it in the recovered factory Brukman, one of the most important bastions of the Argentina’s current resistance movement ?
And thus it was: we inaugurated it last night, Thursday April 24, in Brukman. We thought in doing it in the headquarters of the Mothers situated in Defense and Belgrano. Everything was already prepared. Everyone was already notified. But we decide to move the inaugural class to Brukman. The companions had installed an enormous green tent set against the new police fence.
For us it has been a pride and a honor to inaugurate this Political Formation Seminar next to the heroic companions of Brukman. We were next to them, as they took the photographs that were published in local newspapers, elbow to elbow and arm to arm knocking down the fences of the prepotency middle-class, the fences of the dirty grimy kingdom of the private property, the fences of that murderous, bloodthirsty, and cruel police, daughter of the general Ramón Camps, daughter of the colonel Ramón Falcón and of all the series of repressors sadly famous in our country.
Yesterday night we returned one more time to be in Brukman to begin the second year of the Seminar. We couldn’t help but to do it in the streets, but we are sure that soon the workers will return to recover what belongs to them. Any fence, no matter how much could be chained and torched to the ground, cannot stop the popular impulse and the decision of fight.
When we inaugurated it in the Popular University in the 2002, almost a year ago, we had said that this seminar was available to all the ones that fight and yesterday we show it in practice.
Educate ourselves to face the vixen and the lion
Hardly a year ago we said that the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Marxist thought of the Che Guevara had something in common: the ethics cannot be divorced from politics as they is not possible either to be divorced from the subject of the object. The Mothers of Plaza of Mayo (who have supported the Brukman’s fight from the first day) they have taught to us that we cannot have the speech to the left and the body to the right. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have taught to us, like Che Guevara, that we cannot divorced what we say and what we feel from what we do.
The companions of Brukman have taught to us that the theory cannot go by one side and the practice on the other. The companions of Brukman have taught to us that to the left’s speech WE HAVE TO PUT THE BODY, although opposite is a complete army of shields, helmets, canes, pistols, guns, dogs, hydrants heavy tanks, patrol cars, trucks and everything that the brave Argentine police can offer.
The key of Che Guevara’s Marxism is, indeed, the unit of the theory and the practice, the unit of the subject and the object, the unit of a realistic and materialistic conception of the society and the one of a political practice where the subjectivity plays a fundamental role. To follow that EXAMPLE OF LIFE, of thought and action, the example of the Che Guevara and the example of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the heroic example of the companions of Brukman, the example of the companions of Zanón, the example of picketers companions and, is the great challenge that still we have ahead. All of them incarnate the great dream of the Che Guevara: to create new men and women.
Because we face a sinister and perverse monster. Capitalism constitutes a society that, although is based on the operation, the exclusion , the hunger and the misery of our people, at the same time it tries to convince the whole world that is a free society, that is an open society, that if a person works hard and save money, he or she can eventually become a millionaire and an executive. That if he wins the lottery, it is possible to stop being like Celia Martinez, or Estela Cardenas or Leonor or Liliana or Yuri or any other worker of the company and can be turned, overnight in Mr. Brukman. That ideological propaganda about the unlimited opportunities of social promotion with Capitalism floods the TV and the magazines and are ominous for the popular movement.
This work of ideological bombardment we saw it condensed in the case of the imperialistic and genocidal war against the people of Iraq. While the Yankees and the Englishmen were throwing the land’s most powerful bombs against the hospitals, the schools, the parks and the markets where they were massacring thousands and thousands of civilians, while their tanks were shooting journalists, the imperialistic capitalism was doing at the same time propaganda for TV and for their international communication networks of a supposed "humanism", a supposed "liberalism", a supposed "tolerance", a supposed " mental opening ", of a supposed rejection of the "fundamentalism"
In the Political Formation class we are sure that this perverse society is never going to fall alone. The capitalist system has a set of mechanisms, a complex joint of institutions that they contribute to his daily reproduction. The fences of the police, his bullets, his teargases, his blows with a stick and his assault cars are only the most visible face of this capitalist reproduction. The face of the State, the naked face of the wild and brutal repression.
But together with the police, together with the services of intelligence, together with the Armed Forces, together with the jails, together with the judges and courts that defend Brukman and close to the power of all those who devote themselves to exercise the systematical violence against the people, another type of institutions also exist . They are less wild, less brutal, but they are not less effective: the media of massive communication, the schools, the universities, the bureaucratic unions, the electronic churches, the sects and many other institutions destined to convinced that there is no other alternative oppose to capitalism. That we have to bend over and put the other cheek. In this punctual case: the workers of Brukman have to resign and enter, looking down, to the market of the unemployed persons.
We believe that Brukman's experience and all the current struggles of the Argentine people are showing that the power of the capitalism reproduces with the stick and with the carrot, with the violence and with the consensus, with the material force and with the ideology, with the subtlety of the fox and with the brutal fierceness of the lion, as Nicolás Maquiavelo used to say.
Along this second year, in the Seminar of Political Formation of the University of the Mothers we are going to try to study closely these diverse forms of capitalist domination and the best way of defeating them. Just for that reason we created this seminar: to study, to debate, to discuss, to share with everyone all the knowledge and to grow politically. Also the Popular University needs to grow politically.
We are sure that the struggle is fundamental, it is the base of everything. The history of the humanity is not more than the history of the struggle of classes like our great friend, don Carlitos Marx used to say.
But also we are convinced that this struggle must be paid with the study and the ideological struggle. IT IS NECESSARY ENCOURAGEMENT TO KNOCK DOWN THE FENCES OF THE POLICE BUT ALSO IT IS NECESSARY ENCOURAGEMENT TO STUDY.
It is necessary to study. If we are not educated, when the times of struggle comes and takes place a reflux of the struggle of classes, we return to fall down in hands of the bureaucratic lines, return to fall down in hands of the ideology of the power, return to fall down in hands of the leaders of neighborhoods and in the sticky fabric of spider that the system has prepared to get tangled up.
We are convinced that the capitalism is never going to fall by itself like a mature fruit falls from a tree. We have to face capitalism every day and for that we have to prepare ourselves. The ideological preparation and the political preparation are fundamental. We are never going to make a socialistic revolution in this country without a planned political strategy that combines the independence of the class oppose to the employers and the struggle for the socialistic hegemony. And for it, IT IS NECESSARY TO EDUCATE OURSELVES. Whether we like it or not.
During a long time in Argentina an important sector of our left side underestimated the preparation and the ideological formation of their militants. Today, after December 19th and 20th , after the massacre of the Puente Pueyrredón (that marked an inflexion in the repression), after the eviction and Brukman's wild repression, we cannot give us that luxury.
We have to be educate ourselves, we have to study, we have to learn between ourselves and everything. We have to think about the practices, about what we are doing day after day. And we have to do it leaving prejudices behind , leaving behind all kinds of meanness, leaving behind artificial competitions between all those who fight, leaving in the trunk of the recollection the distrust towards the companion that probably they do not belong to the same political group but which we always meet , elbow to elbow, in the same struggles and in the same trench.
In this sense, the Popular University Mothers of Plaza de Mayo is open for all and all those who fight, for all those who resist, for all those who want to be educated against capitalism.
Against rain, wind and tide
Yesterday it rained. And it rained a lot. As if the sky was on the side of the bosses. It does not matter. We decide to open the seminar anyway. Many companions confused by the rain, went to the original headquarters of Defense and Belgrano. They thought that the activity was returning to the original headquarters. In spite of this confusion and the soaker, in spite of the fact that everything was steeped and that it was not where to sit down, in spite of the noise of the trucks and groups (because the police displeased the new fences to stop the traffic interrupted during almost the whole week), in spite of the fact that we could not record this time - like always we do - what was said in class, we inaugurate.
In spite of everything nobody was absent. Karina and Pipo, of the Mothers' University, brought a sound and light device (because it was at night) together with approximately twenty chairs, and Javier, Lia came with the other companions from the " Library Julio Huasi " of the Popular University, and Mariel from the " Bookshop Osvaldo Bayer " of the Mothers and the teachers Raquel Angel and Alberto Guillis from the Career of Human rights and almost a hundred students. All mixed up with the companions from local assemblies, political parties, and from the left militancy most diverse.
We all made an huge circle in the corner of the factory and we began. It was at that time when a companion of Brukman, with his inevitable celestial dust-guard that already has turned into the unmistakable uniform of the dignity, started by reporting the experience of the recovery of the factory. She told us about the daily scorn of the management to the workers, the debts that the management left behind and the State never claimed them and the decision of the workers to occupy, to resist the evictions and not to lower the arms or throw the towel.
After her, a companion of Zanón took the stand with her red scarf to the neck and her brown shirt with the enormous symbol of the company under workers control in the back. Humbly as always she began to report that in Neuquén the idea of doing public classes to surround the workers struggles and to support the takings was implemented from the first moment. Breaking decades of clash between workers and students (encouraged in the syndical field for the bureaucracy Peronista and in the student field for the radical bureaucracy), Zanón called to the unity of students workers and for it she appealed to all the teachers and students of Neuquén. She returned to stress the unconditional support of the workers of Zanón to the companions of Brukman and to all those who fight.
While the companion of Zanón was explaining this strategy to surround the struggles and not to allow the management and the bureaucracy to isolate them, a drunkard approached shouting " Menem lives! ". Will he have been a simple disciple of the god Baco or a police agitator of those who are never absent in these meetings? At that time it began to circulate between everybody an improvised money-box made of paper to collect funds destined to the popular pot in front of the factory.
Later Roberto Martino took the stand, from the Movement Teresa Rodríguez. Like he already had indicated in other opportunities in our Seminar, the companion from MTR insisted on the common mistake of the whole popular movement: " We lack political formation. The ideological struggle and the formation of the militants is essential for the revolution ", ended up by saying the leader picketer.
After him, a companion of Movement of Unemployed Workers Aníbal Verón stated the need to deepen the path for a popular revolt, stressing his support to the struggle of the companions of the factory.
At that time, another companion of Brukman approached, alarmed, saying that the police were threatening to occupy the space opposite to the factory (since the public class was done in the corner, on the park). Claudia Korol at the time, the last speaker, rushed to say that the Seminar had the intention of supporting this struggle and that’s why we made the decision of inaugurating against wind and tide in the street. We also invite everybody to the festival that today - on Friday - night will be done in solidarity with the struggle, the play " The Mother " will be in the Popular University on Saturday at 8:30 pm in benefit of Brukman and the workshop of Popular Education, on Sunday at 4 p.m. in front of the factory.
Neither Claudia Korol nor Néstor Kohan had time to read the materials that both had prepared for the inauguration. We rushed everything and move rapidly to occupy the space opposite to the company. At that moment, the companions of the resistance were finishing cooking a rice stew that really was promising...
While all this was happening, the television was showing almost in simultaneous (channel 2 and channel 9 were transmitting it as if it was the speech of an acting president) the closing campaign of Menem, Lopez Murphy, Kirchner, Rodríguez Saa, Carrió and of the rest of the candidates who offer to take control and " to guarantee the administration ".
In other words … to clean the streets of rebellious workers and of rebellious picketers! The media dictatorship of the silence and no consideration imposed by the big monopolies of the communication dedicated less than a second to tell what was happening a few blocks from the company. The capital was not there . Only the workers and those who support them. Meanwhile, Menem, for example, was relying on millions and even had his own satellite to guarantee his transmission in chain on TV.
Last night we stay with the feeling of want it to say some more:
Thanks so much to the dear companions of Brukman for teaching us to knock down the fences of the power of this filthy and dirty system!
Thanks so much to the dear Mothers of Plaza de Mayo for teaching us in the street, with rain, with cold or with penumbra, that the only struggle that loses is the one that gives up!
Friday, April 21st , 2003
THE POLITICAL FORMATION SEMINAR ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA OF THE POPULAR UNIVERSITY MOTHERS OF PLAZA DE MAYO WAS INAUGURATED
By Néstor Kohan
A new year begins
There is an old saying that “The second times are never good”. Our friend Carlos Marx has been even more critical. The author of The Capital thought that history never repeats itself. If it intends to do it, it can only aspire… to a farce.
Knowing the risk that we faced, we decide to go for it a second time. It was a matter of reprinting the Free Seminar Ernesto Che Guevara of the Popular University Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
This one-year seminar (coordinated by Néstor Kohan and by Claudia Korol) developed during the year 2002. It was hard work, gratifying, pleasant, and at same time exhausting . Because one thing is to put together a round table with “notable” and “important names”, where the public assist just as a simple passive spectators to see the parade of recognized or admired figures and then return to their homes, and another very different is to put together a systematic class of study that will be prolonged all year long, in which one must prepare with detail each class in continuity with the previous one, the texts of Bibliographic, the topics of discussion in group, etc, aiming at the active members and to the multiplication of the knowledge.
We could just be conformed with what we built last year. But the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo always ask for more. They are never satisfy . Always go a step ahead with more ambitious projects. They were the ones who insisted in the need of a political growth of the Popular University. Not only of three or four isolated militants (even tough they are very compromised or convinced that they are) but of the mass - quite diverse, certainly - of companions that share the experience of the Popular University. They were the ones who promoted the need of the POLITICAL FORMATION, of the study and the reflection on what we do.
When the Mothers launch an initiative, in the first time, seems - almost always - impossible or too difficult tasks to accomplished. But they know from their own experience that the limit of the impossible always runs out and it dissipates when there is a genuine will to go from theory to practice. Therefore, with the unstoppable effort of the Mothers (that encourage aim everything at the political growth and to the radicalization of the popular movement), we returned to the battle.
We decide to return to launch the class, but now as the POLITICAL FORMATION SEMINAR ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA (which is going to meet every Thursday of the year, from 7pm to 9pm in Defense 377, to few meters of Belgrano avenue). Not to repeat the previous experience -that we consider more than positive- but a different one. We do not want to be a farce neither a caricature of ourselves . Everything that does not grow and does not develop, stops and dies. The change in life should be permanent and uninterrupted. As the Mothers have taught us, we need to go for more.
In tuning with this second phase that is began, we decided to do the public inauguration not in the comfort of a classroom but in the street, that is also a classroom and that teaches us a great deal , as showed so many times in the Argentine history , since that historic May 29 of 1969 in Cordoba to the most recent one 19 and 20 of December of the 2001.
And what better than doing it in the recovered factory Brukman, one of the most important bastions of the Argentina’s current resistance movement ?
And thus it was: we inaugurated it last night, Thursday April 24, in Brukman. We thought in doing it in the headquarters of the Mothers situated in Defense and Belgrano. Everything was already prepared. Everyone was already notified. But we decide to move the inaugural class to Brukman. The companions had installed an enormous green tent set against the new police fence.
For us it has been a pride and a honor to inaugurate this Political Formation Seminar next to the heroic companions of Brukman. We were next to them, as they took the photographs that were published in local newspapers, elbow to elbow and arm to arm knocking down the fences of the prepotency middle-class, the fences of the dirty grimy kingdom of the private property, the fences of that murderous, bloodthirsty, and cruel police, daughter of the general Ramón Camps, daughter of the colonel Ramón Falcón and of all the series of repressors sadly famous in our country.
Yesterday night we returned one more time to be in Brukman to begin the second year of the Seminar. We couldn’t help but to do it in the streets, but we are sure that soon the workers will return to recover what belongs to them. Any fence, no matter how much could be chained and torched to the ground, cannot stop the popular impulse and the decision of fight.
When we inaugurated it in the Popular University in the 2002, almost a year ago, we had said that this seminar was available to all the ones that fight and yesterday we show it in practice.
Educate ourselves to face the vixen and the lion
Hardly a year ago we said that the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Marxist thought of the Che Guevara had something in common: the ethics cannot be divorced from politics as they is not possible either to be divorced from the subject of the object. The Mothers of Plaza of Mayo (who have supported the Brukman’s fight from the first day) they have taught to us that we cannot have the speech to the left and the body to the right. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have taught to us, like Che Guevara, that we cannot divorced what we say and what we feel from what we do.
The companions of Brukman have taught to us that the theory cannot go by one side and the practice on the other. The companions of Brukman have taught to us that to the left’s speech WE HAVE TO PUT THE BODY, although opposite is a complete army of shields, helmets, canes, pistols, guns, dogs, hydrants heavy tanks, patrol cars, trucks and everything that the brave Argentine police can offer.
The key of Che Guevara’s Marxism is, indeed, the unit of the theory and the practice, the unit of the subject and the object, the unit of a realistic and materialistic conception of the society and the one of a political practice where the subjectivity plays a fundamental role. To follow that EXAMPLE OF LIFE, of thought and action, the example of the Che Guevara and the example of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the heroic example of the companions of Brukman, the example of the companions of Zanón, the example of picketers companions and, is the great challenge that still we have ahead. All of them incarnate the great dream of the Che Guevara: to create new men and women.
Because we face a sinister and perverse monster. Capitalism constitutes a society that, although is based on the operation, the exclusion , the hunger and the misery of our people, at the same time it tries to convince the whole world that is a free society, that is an open society, that if a person works hard and save money, he or she can eventually become a millionaire and an executive. That if he wins the lottery, it is possible to stop being like Celia Martinez, or Estela Cardenas or Leonor or Liliana or Yuri or any other worker of the company and can be turned, overnight in Mr. Brukman. That ideological propaganda about the unlimited opportunities of social promotion with Capitalism floods the TV and the magazines and are ominous for the popular movement.
This work of ideological bombardment we saw it condensed in the case of the imperialistic and genocidal war against the people of Iraq. While the Yankees and the Englishmen were throwing the land’s most powerful bombs against the hospitals, the schools, the parks and the markets where they were massacring thousands and thousands of civilians, while their tanks were shooting journalists, the imperialistic capitalism was doing at the same time propaganda for TV and for their international communication networks of a supposed "humanism", a supposed "liberalism", a supposed "tolerance", a supposed " mental opening ", of a supposed rejection of the "fundamentalism"
In the Political Formation class we are sure that this perverse society is never going to fall alone. The capitalist system has a set of mechanisms, a complex joint of institutions that they contribute to his daily reproduction. The fences of the police, his bullets, his teargases, his blows with a stick and his assault cars are only the most visible face of this capitalist reproduction. The face of the State, the naked face of the wild and brutal repression.
But together with the police, together with the services of intelligence, together with the Armed Forces, together with the jails, together with the judges and courts that defend Brukman and close to the power of all those who devote themselves to exercise the systematical violence against the people, another type of institutions also exist . They are less wild, less brutal, but they are not less effective: the media of massive communication, the schools, the universities, the bureaucratic unions, the electronic churches, the sects and many other institutions destined to convinced that there is no other alternative oppose to capitalism. That we have to bend over and put the other cheek. In this punctual case: the workers of Brukman have to resign and enter, looking down, to the market of the unemployed persons.
We believe that Brukman's experience and all the current struggles of the Argentine people are showing that the power of the capitalism reproduces with the stick and with the carrot, with the violence and with the consensus, with the material force and with the ideology, with the subtlety of the fox and with the brutal fierceness of the lion, as Nicolás Maquiavelo used to say.
Along this second year, in the Seminar of Political Formation of the University of the Mothers we are going to try to study closely these diverse forms of capitalist domination and the best way of defeating them. Just for that reason we created this seminar: to study, to debate, to discuss, to share with everyone all the knowledge and to grow politically. Also the Popular University needs to grow politically.
We are sure that the struggle is fundamental, it is the base of everything. The history of the humanity is not more than the history of the struggle of classes like our great friend, don Carlitos Marx used to say.
But also we are convinced that this struggle must be paid with the study and the ideological struggle. IT IS NECESSARY ENCOURAGEMENT TO KNOCK DOWN THE FENCES OF THE POLICE BUT ALSO IT IS NECESSARY ENCOURAGEMENT TO STUDY.
It is necessary to study. If we are not educated, when the times of struggle comes and takes place a reflux of the struggle of classes, we return to fall down in hands of the bureaucratic lines, return to fall down in hands of the ideology of the power, return to fall down in hands of the leaders of neighborhoods and in the sticky fabric of spider that the system has prepared to get tangled up.
We are convinced that the capitalism is never going to fall by itself like a mature fruit falls from a tree. We have to face capitalism every day and for that we have to prepare ourselves. The ideological preparation and the political preparation are fundamental. We are never going to make a socialistic revolution in this country without a planned political strategy that combines the independence of the class oppose to the employers and the struggle for the socialistic hegemony. And for it, IT IS NECESSARY TO EDUCATE OURSELVES. Whether we like it or not.
During a long time in Argentina an important sector of our left side underestimated the preparation and the ideological formation of their militants. Today, after December 19th and 20th , after the massacre of the Puente Pueyrredón (that marked an inflexion in the repression), after the eviction and Brukman's wild repression, we cannot give us that luxury.
We have to be educate ourselves, we have to study, we have to learn between ourselves and everything. We have to think about the practices, about what we are doing day after day. And we have to do it leaving prejudices behind , leaving behind all kinds of meanness, leaving behind artificial competitions between all those who fight, leaving in the trunk of the recollection the distrust towards the companion that probably they do not belong to the same political group but which we always meet , elbow to elbow, in the same struggles and in the same trench.
In this sense, the Popular University Mothers of Plaza de Mayo is open for all and all those who fight, for all those who resist, for all those who want to be educated against capitalism.
Against rain, wind and tide
Yesterday it rained. And it rained a lot. As if the sky was on the side of the bosses. It does not matter. We decide to open the seminar anyway. Many companions confused by the rain, went to the original headquarters of Defense and Belgrano. They thought that the activity was returning to the original headquarters. In spite of this confusion and the soaker, in spite of the fact that everything was steeped and that it was not where to sit down, in spite of the noise of the trucks and groups (because the police displeased the new fences to stop the traffic interrupted during almost the whole week), in spite of the fact that we could not record this time - like always we do - what was said in class, we inaugurate.
In spite of everything nobody was absent. Karina and Pipo, of the Mothers' University, brought a sound and light device (because it was at night) together with approximately twenty chairs, and Javier, Lia came with the other companions from the " Library Julio Huasi " of the Popular University, and Mariel from the " Bookshop Osvaldo Bayer " of the Mothers and the teachers Raquel Angel and Alberto Guillis from the Career of Human rights and almost a hundred students. All mixed up with the companions from local assemblies, political parties, and from the left militancy most diverse.
We all made an huge circle in the corner of the factory and we began. It was at that time when a companion of Brukman, with his inevitable celestial dust-guard that already has turned into the unmistakable uniform of the dignity, started by reporting the experience of the recovery of the factory. She told us about the daily scorn of the management to the workers, the debts that the management left behind and the State never claimed them and the decision of the workers to occupy, to resist the evictions and not to lower the arms or throw the towel.
After her, a companion of Zanón took the stand with her red scarf to the neck and her brown shirt with the enormous symbol of the company under workers control in the back. Humbly as always she began to report that in Neuquén the idea of doing public classes to surround the workers struggles and to support the takings was implemented from the first moment. Breaking decades of clash between workers and students (encouraged in the syndical field for the bureaucracy Peronista and in the student field for the radical bureaucracy), Zanón called to the unity of students workers and for it she appealed to all the teachers and students of Neuquén. She returned to stress the unconditional support of the workers of Zanón to the companions of Brukman and to all those who fight.
While the companion of Zanón was explaining this strategy to surround the struggles and not to allow the management and the bureaucracy to isolate them, a drunkard approached shouting " Menem lives! ". Will he have been a simple disciple of the god Baco or a police agitator of those who are never absent in these meetings? At that time it began to circulate between everybody an improvised money-box made of paper to collect funds destined to the popular pot in front of the factory.
Later Roberto Martino took the stand, from the Movement Teresa Rodríguez. Like he already had indicated in other opportunities in our Seminar, the companion from MTR insisted on the common mistake of the whole popular movement: " We lack political formation. The ideological struggle and the formation of the militants is essential for the revolution ", ended up by saying the leader picketer.
After him, a companion of Movement of Unemployed Workers Aníbal Verón stated the need to deepen the path for a popular revolt, stressing his support to the struggle of the companions of the factory.
At that time, another companion of Brukman approached, alarmed, saying that the police were threatening to occupy the space opposite to the factory (since the public class was done in the corner, on the park). Claudia Korol at the time, the last speaker, rushed to say that the Seminar had the intention of supporting this struggle and that’s why we made the decision of inaugurating against wind and tide in the street. We also invite everybody to the festival that today - on Friday - night will be done in solidarity with the struggle, the play " The Mother " will be in the Popular University on Saturday at 8:30 pm in benefit of Brukman and the workshop of Popular Education, on Sunday at 4 p.m. in front of the factory.
Neither Claudia Korol nor Néstor Kohan had time to read the materials that both had prepared for the inauguration. We rushed everything and move rapidly to occupy the space opposite to the company. At that moment, the companions of the resistance were finishing cooking a rice stew that really was promising...
While all this was happening, the television was showing almost in simultaneous (channel 2 and channel 9 were transmitting it as if it was the speech of an acting president) the closing campaign of Menem, Lopez Murphy, Kirchner, Rodríguez Saa, Carrió and of the rest of the candidates who offer to take control and " to guarantee the administration ".
In other words … to clean the streets of rebellious workers and of rebellious picketers! The media dictatorship of the silence and no consideration imposed by the big monopolies of the communication dedicated less than a second to tell what was happening a few blocks from the company. The capital was not there . Only the workers and those who support them. Meanwhile, Menem, for example, was relying on millions and even had his own satellite to guarantee his transmission in chain on TV.
Last night we stay with the feeling of want it to say some more:
Thanks so much to the dear companions of Brukman for teaching us to knock down the fences of the power of this filthy and dirty system!
Thanks so much to the dear Mothers of Plaza de Mayo for teaching us in the street, with rain, with cold or with penumbra, that the only struggle that loses is the one that gives up!
Friday, April 21st , 2003