The history of the workers’ movement in Chile shows that the struggle over the means of communication has always been a struggle over the very capacity to exist politically. Seizing control of the printed word was a legitimate and necessary act, one that required the construction of an autonomous technical force. Recabarren did not merely *use* the printing press: he integrated it into the strategic horizon of the workers’ movement, transforming it into an instrument of organization, consciousness, cultural defense, and anti‑capitalist struggle.
In that process, the education and training of technical cadres acquired an existential character. Learning to print, edit, and disseminate was not an accessory trade but a concrete way of intervening in history through the materiality of the word. The creation of specialists and technocrats at the service of the movement sought to channel the voice of the working class with precision and to equip it with the tools needed to sustain its own political and cultural project.
The twentieth century opened with *“The Awakening of the Working Class,”* when broad popular sectors understood that political struggle required technical infrastructure, specialized training, and control over the material means of production. The working class invested in printing presses, linotypes, *Crisol*, newspapers, workers’ schools, and distribution networks, achieving an unprecedented level of mass organization. This advance—combining political consciousness, collective discipline, and technical capacity—was perceived by the elites as a threat and met with extreme violence to prevent the working class from sustaining its own historical project.
To say that Recabarren’s press is equivalent to the computer of the twenty‑first century is to recognize the strategic place technology occupied in the construction of popular power. In the early twentieth century, the printing press and the newspaper constituted the most advanced communication infrastructure available to the exploited classes. In the hands of the workers’ movement, these media became devices of organization, political formation, and ideological struggle, comparable—in their historical impact—to the role now played by computers, digital networks, and mass communication platforms.
Just as access to information technology today determines who can produce knowledge, intervene in the public sphere, and dispute meaning, in Recabarren’s world the printing press fulfilled that same function. Controlling the press meant controlling the principal means of production available; in the same way that today, for any social movement, mastering digital technology is a condition for political existence.
Yet today, the heirs of Recabarren—governed by technocrats who claim to interpret the sentiments of the exploited class—display a political incapacity to grasp the urgency of training technical cadres capable of producing and recreating contemporary media. Material infrastructure is not enough: it is necessary to master the languages, sub‑languages, and meta‑languages, as well as the technologies that allow one to defend, in the present historical moment, what one claims to defend.
Thus an unavoidable question arises:
Where are the party’s computer labs?
Where is its internal network of interconnected servers?
Where is the party’s online television channel?
Technical support today has been left to voluntarism, and that is not enough. Serious policies, rigorous planning, and a technical‑organizational determinism consistent with contemporary reality are required.
We need young revolutionaries who understand, assume, and transmit the responsibilities necessary to sustain and project the political development of the working class. This is not merely generational enthusiasm; it is about forming a force capable of reading the historical moment, mastering technical tools, and appropriating the languages and sub‑languages that structure today’s communication and symbolic production. Only then can the voice of the working class be amplified and ensure that it is the class itself that speaks—with its own words, from its own experiences, and in defense of its own interests.
The historical continuity of an emancipatory project depends on rebuilding the technical, cultural, and communicational capacity of the working class. Without trained cadres, without autonomous infrastructure, and without mastery of technology, any political project remains at the mercy of those who monopolize the means of production and communication. With them, however, the working class can once again speak with its own voice and from within its own historical horizon.