The Congress Alliance’s/MDM/UDF slogans of the 1980s of “ungovernability”, “liberation before education” and others have in various forms been carried over into present-day variations on these themes. This is very noticeable in the “Fees Must Fall” struggles that started in late 2015 and which subsequently degenerated into a regurgitation of the hollow politics of the ANC aligned, so-called Progressive Youth Alliance, the Pan Africanist Students Movement of Azania and other reactionary forces, including Black Consciousness elements. The many unresolved political and economic questions that persisted in the wake of the grand negotiated betrayal of the early 1990s – amongst them educational oppression – are currently resurfacing with a vengeance. What was originally a legitimate struggle against unaffordable university fees has lost traction with the very students it claims to represent.

We will all accept that an education system serves the economic system of a country and is subordinate to it. The one million odd students on South African university campuses are meant to integrate into and serve this, and other countries’ economies. Knowing that they might not succeed in this, many students with working class and peasant backgrounds take up struggles against state measures that block their personal and professional aspirations. One such struggle is the current fight for lower or no fees. But this struggle will not make any headway if it is going to be viewed in isolation from struggles around employment, land, housing and the like. Similarly, since it focuses on higher education, it ignores the fight against the oppressive education system in its totality/entirety.  As unlikely as it is, Jacob Zuma and Blade Nzimande might at some point declare “no fees” for poor students. Will this however mean that present day students would have been liberated economically?  That their futures are in any way secure? We doubt that very much. The capitalist economic system which underpins this education system considers hundreds of thousands of qualified graduates as dispensable. The reality is that their interests are politically tied to a united fight against the current system of  class oppression and exploitation.

At virtually all universities there appears to be little evidence of progressive, left, counter-balancing forces challenging the historically moribund, politically bankrupt, educationally regressive and organisationally destructive ideas and strategies that have emerged and have become the main narrative on our university campuses. FMF and its leadership have done little to foster unity in struggle and build vibrant on-campus organisations.  They hardly interact with other organisations involved in struggle on a principled, united political basis or platform. Being mostly campus based, they cut themselves off from broader organisational collaboration and become sitting ducks for state actions against them. The mainstream media – for its part – has become an echo chamber for all the reactionary politics espoused by most of the leaders of these protests. The broader student bodies, instead of becoming participants in the struggles, are shoved to the sidelines to become spectators. They have instead been alienated by these politically bankrupt Stalinist elements. Addressing these thorny higher education issues calls for student and youth organisations, trade unions, civic bodies, political organisations who represents the interests of the working class and peasantry, to collaborate on current political demands.   It also means uniting on the organisational tasks and struggles these demands imply.

 Forward with progressive student and youth organisation. Down with reactionary student politics. Forward with progressive programmatic struggle.