Anticapitalist Youth
Argentina: National Declaration of ¡Ya Basta! at its First National Assembly
The Anticapitalist Youth is organizing to change everything
Originally published on https://izquierdaweb.com/declaracion-plenario-nacional-del-ya-basta-en-su-primer-plenario-nacional/
Translated by Cristopher Vallecillo Gómez
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Con 800 delegados, gran plenario nacional del ¡Ya Basta!
Saludos internacionales al plenario nacional del ¡Ya Basta!
Las comisiones del Plenario Anticapitalista en imágenes
The Anticapitalist Youth from all over the country gathered today at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) to organize against this system that is stealing our future. After a large and successful First National Assembly, with delegations from across the country where we discussed all our struggles, we are preparing to fight against far-right governments like those of Trump and Milei, in defense of public education and democratic rights, alongside the working class, for an anticapitalist and revolutionary way forward.
Right now, as we meet to discuss our actions and outlook, far-right governments and movements are on the rise around the world: Milei in Argentina is trying to dismantle public universities and strip away our rights; Trump in the U.S. continues his fascist attacks on migrants; and the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. Most recently, it blocked the Freedom Flotilla from arriving, kidnapping Greta Thunberg and the activists who were bringing humanitarian aid to Palestine in defiance of the starvation and genocide being imposed on its people.
“The anti-capitalist kids have something to tell you, @madorni
You’re going to get tired of watching her on IG
Lets go Ya Basta!”
We stand in solidarity with the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people who are fighting against genocide and hunger, and with the resistance of workers and migrant communities in Los Angeles and across the United States who are fighting against mass deportations and repression.
We are living in a historic moment where young people around the world are subjected to ultracapitalism, which imposes the idea that profits matter more than anything. Young people only have access to precarious jobs with miserable wages that prevent us from building any perspective for the future. These far-right monsters are trying to destroy universal, public healthcare and education systems so that no one can access them. In this way, they try to impose a system where everything is driven by capitalist profit and serves the market. At the same time, we are living through a true climate catastrophe that is destroying the planet to serve the super-profits of billionaire businessmen like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
This agenda is accompanied by a reactionary policy that presents itself as a “critique” of communism, and also entails an attack on the Enlightenment, reason, the achievements of the French Revolution, and modernity. They want to drag us back to the Middle Ages, and that’s why they attack all our rights: the achievement of a quality public university education for everyone, a healthcare system where anyone, regardless of social background, can receive care, the right of LGBT people to their identity, of women to decide over their own bodies, all democratic gains and freedoms, and our right to organize and do politics to transform reality.
“ The 1st National Assembly of ¡Ya Basta! kicks off with 800 delegates from the student and working youth across the country packing the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UBA
The most important event for anti-capitalist youth to organize against the proscriptive ruling, for a new student uprising in defense of public education, in defense of democratic freedoms, against job insecurity, against Milei’s war plan, and for an anti-capitalist way forward. ”
All around the world, center-left or centrist alternatives have proven not to be a barrier against the far right, but rather to pave the way for them. These are experiences like Lula’s in Brazil, where he has not dismantled a single one of Bolsonaro’s counter-reforms, instead he follows his budget cut policies, and now he hands over control of the country to reactionary forces. It’s the same with the Democrats in the U.S., who continued cut policies and cleared the path for Trump, and today let all his reactionary measures pass without opposition.
On the contrary, we Anticapitalists stand with the youth who are confronting all these attacks from the right and from the capitalists. There is a renewal of historical experience, with thousands of young people around the world organizing against this system. These are the young people who have occupied universities and are mobilizing for Palestine. The workers and migrants who are resisting Trump’s deportation and repression policies in the U.S. The app-based workers who are fighting against Uberization and organizing through the International Congress of Platform Workers. The young people who are mobilizing against the capitalist destruction of the planet and climate change. These groups are clear on one thing: capitalism has to go, and it is stealing our future. Together with them, we fight for an anti-capitalist solution.
Milei wants to attack all our rights.
We are living through this in Argentina as well, where Milei is destroying our living conditions, attacking wages, imposing miserable pensions, and launching a widespread assault on all our rights. At the same time, with his repressive project and political persecution, he undermines democratic rights in order to push through his attacks, banning Cristina Kirchner and seeking to block all forms of organization.
Capitalism also threatens our future with a crusade against the university. This is a twofold attack on education: on one hand, the brutal budget cut, which was slashed by half compared to 2023, makes it impossible to guarantee the basic conditions for courses, necessary resources, or the salaries of teaching and non-teaching staff, whose wages have lost 70% of their value compared to inflation. This economic attack carries with it a reactionary and obscurantist assault on the university as a public, social, and political space, a place where critical thinking is expressed, where young people are educated, where politics is practiced, and where we fight to change our reality. Their project is to turn the university into a tool of the market, stripping it of its universal content, its role in producing knowledge, and its mission of educating youth. They aim to cut degree programs so that we become just another cog in the system, with fragmented knowledge that serves the market, and to impose paid graduate programs if we want access to the content that currently exists in the universities.
They also try to regiment student councils in high schools to prevent organization. And they undermine our education with anti-educational reforms that aim to make schooling solely a means of producing people who enter the workforce as cheap labor for business owners.
In the face of this serious attack, Peronism is not an option. Its entire stance is based on giving in to Milei and adapting to the logic of the right. The budget proposal put forward by the National Interuniversity Council, although we support it critically, is limited because it states that “state spending should not be affected.” At the same time, it is Peronist sectors themselves that adapt to market-driven demagoguery by claiming that “degrees are too long,” and so the solution would be to accredit any kind of activity, as they propose with SACAU, degrading the content of the degree programs. This populist, easy-way-out solution is also capitalist at its core: adapting degree programs to the market and applying quick fixes.
At the same time, while the government grows increasingly aggressive and attacks the university and democratic rights, Peronism continues to place its hopes in institutional channels. From below, they block any expression of discontent, which is why they hold work leaves without strikes and strikes without work leaves. They also fail to call for large-scale mobilizations that coordinate all sectors in struggle. Instead, they focus on claiming that the university conflict would be resolved with a law that the government itself has already said it would veto. For all these reasons, Peronism and reformism in general cannot stop the right; in fact, they open the way for it. They have already proven not to be an alternative.
What we need today at the university is to stop treating the problems that capitalism imposes on young people as problems of the university itself. The difficulty of attending classes, studying, and learning comes from the precarious living conditions of youth, low wages, high costs of living and transportation, and the lack of scholarships and student transit passes. It’s time to envision an anti-capitalist university that aims to transform society in favor of the exploited and oppressed.
That’s exactly why we fight for grassroots organization, through assemblies and occupations: it’s time to take to the streets to defend the university and all our rights. The government that vetoed the pension increase, that tells the workers at Garrahan they deserve miserable wages for not being useful to the market, has already announced it will veto the new university funding law. There is no way to defend the university and all our rights unless we bring Milei’s fascist government to its knees with a massive university movement that radicalizes and fights alongside workers, women, LGBTI people, and all sectors in struggle, without trusting that the institutional path can solve our problems.
To wage this fight, we have to promote grassroots organization and go beyond the leaderships that choose passivity and let the government get away with everything. These include the radical leaderships of student unions and federations, who go out of their way to prevent the student movement from organizing or holding assemblies. And also the Peronist leaderships, who act to contain the movement, dragging the entire student body behind university administrations and union bureaucracies, leading us only to place our trust in the dead end of parliament.
For its part, the FITU has also experienced a significant setback in the university, where its organizing efforts are steadily declining. The PO has followed a strategy of subordinating everything to the piquetero movement (which is currently highly demobilized after the government’s attacks) and the PTS has taken a deeply electoral approach, focusing everything on Congress and its few parliament members, degrading itself and showing contempt for grassroots activism. In contrast, from ¡Ya Basta! we are a militant, active youth that fights tirelessly to organize the student movement, waging an independent struggle without relying on sellout leaderships or congressional maneuvering, but on our own strength. That’s why we’ve been true protagonists of the student uprising across the country, driving occupations and the fight in the streets.
That’s why this assembly aims to launch a massive nationwide struggle in defense of the university and against Milei’s attacks on democratic rights, fighting to defeat the government’s plan, to win the funding universities need to operate, and the salaries that teaching and non-teaching staff deserve. In the same way, we fight for a different kind of university, with an anti-capitalist program that puts it at the service of workers’ interests, so that it can truly be accessible to the masses and become a means to strengthen our education, our organization, and the transformation of society as a whole. To win the university we want, we need to fight against this entire rotten capitalist system and its defenders, both the far right that wants to destroy public education and Peronism, which wants a patched-up, degraded system: keeping a public façade while continuing to serve business interests.
Let’s defend our future by confronting job insecurity and fighting for a workers’ government.
Twenty-first century capitalism is also unleashing massive attacks on our working conditions. Today’s youth only have access to precarious jobs with no prospects, earning miserable wages while working under increasingly worse conditions. The model promoted by governments and business owners is one of Uberization, with no labor rights. That’s why they attack our wages and working conditions, why informal work is on the rise, and why Milei is going after the right to strike and pensions.
But in Argentina and around the world, workers are standing up to these attacks. We are the hospital workers and residents who defend public healthcare, the teachers who defend the university, the non-teaching staff in faculties who are mobilizing with great strength for fair wages despite bureaucratic leaderships, the precarious workers like the delivery riders of SiTraRepA who are fighting for union recognition and formal employment, the factory workers who resist employers’ attacks on exploitative working conditions, and the retirees who face repression and fight against their miserable incomes.
Today more than ever, youth are part of the working class, both inside and outside the universities. And young people also stand in solidarity with workers’ struggles, because we see that capitalism only offers us misery. That’s why the Anticapitalist Youth of ¡Ya Basta! commits to workers’ struggles and puts forward a deeper solution: to put an end to all these attacks and injustices, we need to turn society upside down and confront this rotten capitalism that exists by and for the profits of billionaire business owners. To defend our future, we need another system, and for that, we have to fight alongside the working class so that we are the ones who govern.
Against capitalism’s obscurantist attacks, let’s defend all our rights.
This system and the far-right governments want to drag us back to the Middle Ages. That’s why they attack all our forms of expression and the rights we’ve won through decades of struggle. They aim to roll back victories that are already a reality, trying to deny our right to identity, to perceive ourselves as we are, and to decide how and with whom we relate. That’s why they try to impose obscurantist offensives, attacking comprehensive sex education and inclusive language, attempting to undermine our right to make decisions about our own bodies, and legitimizing patriarchal violence. But we say it clearly: identities cannot be banned, and we will not allow any rollbacks on our rights.
At the same time, they seek to suppress any form of expression that doesn’t serve the interests of the market and profit. That’s why they want to deny us any artistic and cultural expression, which are ways of expressing our interests and our personality. To achieve this, they cut funding and all types of state support, erase our murals, and silence our artistic expressions.
To achieve this, they want to impose a repressive climate to prevent any form of resistance. Attacks like the attempted assassination of Pablo Grillo and the repression of any protest or action that doesn’t serve their interests, along with their questioning of the population’s democratic right to choose its representatives, are all aimed at defending a system that offers no answers to society’s demands. And as if that weren’t enough, they try to undermine our right to organize by attacking political activity in universities and infiltrating intelligence services to go after student organizing, as is happening at UNA Audiovisuales.
The Anticapitalist Youth is organizing to change everything.
In the face of the attacks from this capitalist system, the way forward is to get organized. From ¡Ya Basta! we are part of the youth who are organizing across the world to defend our rights, who stand in solidarity with the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people and demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, who fight for the rights of migrants and confront immigration police and the National Guard in the United States, who denounce the harm caused by climate change at the hands of capitalism, and who organize as young workers against precarious jobs, low wages, and for all our rights. We are the youth who organize the Anticapitalist Camp every year, the one that makes Adorni nervous, and the ones who, together with the entire student body, have driven the occupations of hundreds of university faculties across the country in defense of public education.
We have to keep building and expanding this youth movement that organizes independently of the capitalists, that fights in unity with workers in defense of the university, public healthcare, and all our rights. We want to keep strengthening our tools to transform society as a whole, building a 21st-century Marxism grounded in the historical lessons of past workers’ struggles and committed to the socialist transformation of society. A revolutionary youth that fights alongside workers to change everything, so that the guiding logic becomes meeting social needs, not corporate profits.
That’s why it is the task of this assembly and its commissions to come up with a plan of action to build the Anticapitalist Youth across the country. For ¡Ya Basta! to become the main youth organization of the left on a national level, pushing this movement beyond the institutional path that university authorities, bureaucratic unions, and radical-led federations want to impose. So that the student movement fights alongside workers and retirees. To change everything, we have to destroy this rotten system and build a solution led by the working class.
National Leadership of ¡Ya Basta!
June 14, 2025. Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, UBA.
