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Title: Class Rule Must Fall! Author: Leroy Maisiri Date: August 19, 2015 Language: en Topics: Statues, Zabalaza, South Africa, class struggle Source: Retrieved on 10th December 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/28433 Notes: Published in Zabalaza: A Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism No. 14.
Slogans like “Erase Rhodes”, “Rhodes so White,” and Rhodes must Fall,”
emerging from student groups at South Africa’s elite universities,
recently monopolised social media. These have taken off, because South
Africa is in need of great structural change; 20 years after the
important 1994 transition, many black people remain trapped in
oppressive conditions.
No one would deny that during apartheid blacks, Coloureds and Indians
were racially oppressed, abused, and as workers, exploited. If removing
statues and changing place names can help solve the problems, and form
part of a meaningful redress of past and present injustices, then such
actions must be supported.
But can such demands really do so?
At a symbolic level, statue and name changes might provide some measure
of comfort to those who have suffered. But it also appears that very few
in these movements want to address the deeper problems, the oppression
of the largely black working class – the majority, whose cheap labour
lays the foundation for the wealth and power of the few. (By working
class, I mean the group of people who do not have ownership or command
over the means of “administration, coercion or production,” in line with
the anarchist definition).
The exclusion of most (working class) blacks, Coloured and Indians from
expensive, elitist universities cannot be tackled without tackling the
hostile class structure, which is propped up by a dismal township
schooling system, massive poverty and unemployment, low wages and rising
prices, and the long shadow of the apartheid past.
This situation cannot be removed with cosmetic and symbolic changes.
Renaming varsities and changing curricula in a few social science and
philosophy areas would not address this mass exclusion, and it would not
change the basically elitist nature of the system.
It is easy to assert that, for example, Rhodes University, in
Grahamstown, is “so white”, or a bastion of “white privilege,” focussing
exclusively on racial inequality.
Of course, racial prejudice and discrimination and the apartheid legacy
are real and must be tackled. But when the problem is reduced to the
attitudes of a few whites in the universities, or to curricula or to
symbols, we end up ignoring the larger class gulf in the society. Partly
this is a factor of the class nature of these movements, which are built
largely on the tiny layers of students at elite universities – white and
black – often from upper class backgrounds and schools. As a result, a
blind eye has been turned to the neo-liberal policy model aiming to cut
spending and to make universities profitable.
Arguing for stressing class does not mean ignoring race, as some claim.
It is very evident that the race and class you are born in still matters
in South Africa: being black and working class opens you up, undefended,
to a world of pain, as you are forced to withstand both class and racial
oppression, only to simply reproduce yourself in that same exact
position. How can the best-paid black rock-face miner, earning R12 500
monthly after bitter strikes, send his children to university education
costing R150 000 for fees alone?
Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) was a late 19^(th) century imperialist and
mining capitalist, whose policies translated directly into the British
wars in the areas now called Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe (formerly
“Rhodesia”) and South Africa.
The British Empire was racist, but its actions were shaped by the
capitalist and state drive for profit and power – not an abstract drive
to racial power. It crushed anyone in its way, including whites like the
Irish, using whatever forces were available, including large numbers of
black troops.
Colonel Graham (namesake of “Grahamstown”) used such troops in the
frontier wars, just as the British Empire actively used African chiefs
and kings for its rule. The same men, Rhodes and LS Jameson, who drove
the wars in “Rhodesia,” drove the wars on the Boer republics; the
Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) saw more than 26 000 white Afrikaner women
and children, and around 12 000 blacks, die in British concentration
camps.
If Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT), or his name at
Rhodes University, must go, it is surely not simply because it is a
statue of a white man; but that of an imperial master and symbol of the
capitalist system. That, I argue, is the real enemy – in Rhodes’ time
and still today.
This system thrives on exploited black workers, then and now. The new
South African black political elite works actively, in complicit
partnership with white capitalists, to perpetuate the same system.
In 2015 the enemy isn’t remotely “everything white;” not in South
Africa. Certainly, the colonial and apartheid hangover still shapes much
of our reality, in which many white people still benefit from the
apartheid legacy, not least in terms of apartheid investments in white
education. And it cannot be denied that poverty and inequality in the
new South Africa to an important extent follows old apartheid lines, in
that the majority of the poor and unemployed and low-waged are black and
Coloured and Indian.
But in 2015, the enemy is not some white university kids. It is a system
of class rule, where the “white master” – more correctly, the “minority
in the minority,” the small capitalist sector of the white population –
is joined by the equally vicious black master – an equally small
minority in the black majority.
In today’s South Africa, the black elite is directly part of the system
of oppression, and involved in corrupt deals with white capitalists. It
is the black-led state that, through its police and municipalities and
departments, sees to it that South African working class and poor black
people are mistreated and killed – mainly by other black people. Today,
South Africa has become a hostile environment for working class black
foreigners, whose life span is determined by how fast they can run.
South Africa should not narrowly fight against only racial inequalities,
but broaden this into a fight for true transformation that confronts
class privilege, which cuts across race and puts a (multi-racial) ruling
class in charge. This is the complicated reality that a stress on the
historical differences between blacks and whites can’t really explain.
Without this working class perspective – working class first! –
campaigns of vandalising statues and changing institution names to black
names becomes a well-crafted distraction to the real problem, hiding the
black elite and its guilt from view.
Indeed, talking of name changes, why even replace those of white
political and economic elites, with those of black political and
economic elites? Sol T. Plaatje, whose name is now given to the new
Northern Cape university, was a great intellectual and ANC leader – but
he was also a strong supporter of the British Empire and the British in
the Anglo-Boer War, and had close relations with De Beers, the company
Rhodes founded.
More broadly, why should nationalists – like Plaatje – whose
pro-capitalist, pro-statist political agenda, which took South Africa
into its dead-end, whose agenda derailed the struggle for a radical
socialist outcome in the country, keep being suggested as namesakes for
universities and other institutions?
A true symbolism that represents the majority should be leftist, and
represent the working class – that is multi-racial. Why are
revolutionary working class giants like Josie Mpama, Elijah Baraji,
Clements Kadalie, Albert Nzula, Bill Andrews, T.W. Thibedi, S.P.
Bunting, Andrew Dunbar, B.L.E. Sigamoney etc. forgotten, in favour the
leaders of the heroes of the failed nationalist currents, not just the
ANC, but its Africanist and BC rivals?
We need a left/ working class iconography. Statues are part of our
shared heritage – good and bad. They are also reminders of past evils.
History can’t be erased. Rather than removing the old ones, we need to
build new ones: but ones that are more working class, which recall a
history worth celebrating. Let us rather have working class figures
tower over the monuments of past horrors, balancing the score, as part
of the struggle for working class power.
Universities themselves serve as factory lines for the perpetuation of
class systems; those privileged enough to study further use this to
maintain the class position that they have, or use it to break into a
higher class through acquiring rare skills and higher income.
Universities as currently constituted are elite institutions, regardless
of the names. They are funded by the state and by fees, pushed by the
state, corporations and capitalist foundations (including that of
Rhodes), to adopt certain priorities. Ever rising fees, including fees
that openly discriminate against non-South Africans, and close the doors
of learning and culture to the great majority, are part of neo-liberal
cuts. Labour relations and wages for most campus workers are shocking.
Really changing this situation, winning a victory for the working class,
means transforming institutions like universities, and the larger
society, into uplifting pillars for the working class. This requires
working class struggle, which requires unity. The issues may seem simply
a race issue, but at the core, it’s both race and class. Hence, I ask,
“what about the working class”?
Capital and the state win immediately when there is division, and so
true transformation cannot be birthed from something dipped in hatred.
This is unfortunately a key element within the “Rhodes Must Fall”
campaigning, with people from all sides engaging in the most vicious and
racially-charged attack. No substantial transformation can come out of
this if the intention is not pure. The moment you add a drop of
intolerance to any movement, you have corrupted its very roots, and
begun a long journey towards failure and destruction.
The means and tools to bring about real social transformation must be
carefully thought about. What I am arguing here is that the system is
the problem. Transformation involves a fight for: free and equal
education (including university education), a massive expansion and
upgrading of education, ending outsourcing on campuses, promoting
genuinely scientific including social scientific work, and fighting for
larger social change.
So, let us think of a “workers and peoples scientific university” rather
than in terms of an “African university” or a “world-class university”
as part of a larger struggle for anarchist transformation – a radical
change of society towards self-management, democracy from below,
participatory planning and an end to class rule, and social and economic
equality.