First published in “South African Labour Bulletin”, volume 40, number 4, pp. 39-40
Recent worker-student alliances and activities are lacking in an anarchist/syndicalist approach which focuses on ‘people’s power’ and ‘worker control’. Such an approach is important for radical transformation, writes Leroy Maisiri.
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.
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.
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.
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