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Title: Worker-Student Alliances Author: Leroy Maisiri Date: October 30, 2016 Language: en Topics: workers, students, South Africa Source: Retrieved on 10th December 2021 from http://anarkismo.net/article/29722 Notes: First published in South African Labour Bulletin, volume 40, number 4, pp. 39–40.
After 20 years of neo-liberal democracy, South Africa has not truly
begun the much-needed purge of race and class structural inequalities
and constraints inherited from apartheid South Africa. Many university
campuses across the country, since 2015, have been set alight by the
actions of a non-compromising body of students. This political wildfire
has moved from campus to campus, for a range of reasons: one thing
remains central, that tomorrow’s future is shaped by today’s youth,
restlessly tackling the structures and impediments that stand in their
way.
But what is missing however is a working-class focus and an anarchist/
syndicalist approach, a lesson well-taught by the “people’s power” and
“workers’ control” initiatives in radical sector of the 1980s
anti-apartheid movement.
Earlier in 2015, before and during academic registrations, the Tshwane
University of Technology and Walter Sisulu University faced protests
around student funding (Makoni, 2015), as did the University of the
Witwatersrand, around problems in the National Student Financial Aid
Scheme (NSFAS) (Bolowana & Pillay, 2015). At the University of Cape Town
(UCT), by contrast, demands centred on racial justice, framed as
“decolonisation,” with controversy around a Cecil John Rhodes statue
tied to bigger transformation issues (News24, 2015). These struggles
sparked protests and a weeks-long occupation of administration buildings
at Rhodes University (Maisiri, 2015). Followed by the “open
Stellenbosch” protests raised racism and language issues (Petersen,
2015). And most recently the rape protests.
But, as shown in the 1976 revolts, where black students led a fight
against racism and exclusion, and the narrow opportunities to those from
black working class homes (Maponyane, 2014), students have limited
power. The 1976 revolt, and the big battles of the 1980s, showed the
need to move from separate struggles, into involving the organised
working class, to fight against all forms of oppression and a radical
transformation of the whole society (The Worker-Tenant, 1984: 29). By
“working class”, I mean the term as defined by anarchists: those who,
not owning or controlling means of administration, coercion or
production, work for those who control such means. This includes workers
plus their families including the unemployed.
It also requires locating struggles against racial injustice in fights
against neo-liberalism, Universities are increasingly turned into
another arm of capitalistic accumulation, designed to exploit to take
more than they give. Ever-rising fees make lecture theatres fortresses
of privatised knowledge, entry being completely dependent on the class
into which you are born, the education you can afford. Facilities are
staffed by armies of precarious, contract and outsourced workers,
struggling to survive and excluded from university education.
The major victim of the neo-liberal restructuring of the university is
the black working class, both working class students and campus workers.
There is a direct capitalist and state attack on the working class, not
clearly captured by “decolonisation” discourse. In “Class Rule Must
Fall! More Statues, More Working Class” (Maisiri, 2015), I point out
that universities play a leading role in the continued existence of
class system, producing and reproducing privileged classes.
Therefore, the campus space is an arena where the class system and class
question must be confronted. The question then becomes: how?
First, student protests must develop a strategy linked to the working
class. But this, as in 1976 and 1983, must involve a much more accurate
critique of the enemy. In the 1980s, this meant locating the fight
against racist education in a fight against the apartheid state and
racial-capitalism, including the peripheral Fordist system. This also
means understanding the problems cannot be solved by symbolic changes,
or changing the composition of elite classes – it requires removing the
class system, and a new, libertarian, self-managed socialist order.
This analysis must be carried over to the black-led state of the African
National Congress (ANC), whose neo-liberal policies, capitalism and
elite enrichment. In “Who Rules South Africa” (2013:4), [Lucien] van der
Walt argues that the current state is in fact “an obstacle to the full
[national and class] emancipation of the working class.” This state is
protected by nationalist ideology, which denies the class question and
which cannot – as clearly shown in twenty years – solve the social
problems. This is quite evident in the way the ruling party pushed back
the responsibility of free education back to the universities washing
its hands clean of a problem, a problem that is structurally rooted in
Neo Liberal policies.
Renaming universities after nationalists is problematic, as nationalism
has helped take us into the current crisis, and as nationalists have a
“pro-capitalist, pro-statist political agenda”, (Maisiri, 2015). Rather
this paper argues for a left/working class iconography: in placing the
working class at the forefront to forge a new path, and moving off the
nationalist dead-end, let us make working class symbols and ideas and
struggles central to transformation.
Agitate for a “workers’ and peoples’ scientific university,” not a
capitalist or nationalist one. It is not enough to protest about fees
and statues and curricula unless we fight the framework defended by a
state that sends black working class police men to kill black miners. We
must take from the play book of the 1980’s and organise for a worker
student alliance. The universities seem to be taking their ques from old
regimes relying on police and interdicts. We must then push back against
all forms of oppression, a worker student alliance against outsourcing,
privatisation of education and against the bureaucratic hand that
stretches all the way back to the shoulders of the state.
Bolowana, A & Pillay, G. (21 Jan, 2015). “Wits Students Threaten Protest
Action over NFSAS Funds”. SABC News.
Maisiri, L. (2015). “Class Rule Must Fall! More Statues, More Working
Class”. Zabalaza: A Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism,
number 14.
Makoni, M. (12 February 2015). “Students Run Riot at Campuses over
Funding”. University World News.
Maponyane, B. (2014). “The 1976 Struggle and the Emancipation of the
Future”. Tokologo: Newsletter of the Tokologo African Anarchist
Collective”, number 4.
News24. (19 March 2015). “UCT Students to Protest Over Racial
Transformation”.
Petersen, T. (27 July 2015). “Students Protest in Stellenbosch over
Language”. News24.
Worker-Tenant, The. (1984). “Student Struggle in Perspective”. Number 3.
Van der Walt, L. (2013). “Who Rules South Africa? An
Anarchist/Syndicalist Analysis of the ANC, the Post-Apartheid Elite Pact
and the Political Implications”. Zabalaza: A Journal of Southern African
Revolutionary Anarchism, number 13.