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South Africa: From #FeesMustFall to Budget Battles
AfricaFocus Bulletin
September 7, 2016 (160907)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"The most inspiring and surprising social movement to shake the
South African state since the Treatment Action Campaign of the early
2000s was #FeesMustFall in October 2015. The primary demand -- free
tertiary education -- is audacious." But, argues South Africa
academic and commentator Patrick Bond in a newly published chapter,
achieving that goal requires confronting the ideology of austerity
and the dominance of corporate capital as well as corrupt public
officials on the South African government budget.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin, not sent out by email but available on
the web at http://www.africafocus.org/docs16/sa1609b.php) contains
selected excerpts from that chapter, republished with the author's
permission.
The full chapter is available on-line at
https://patrickbondwits.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/bond-chapter-on-feesmustfall-mid-2016/
Sources on the broader context of today's political and economic
debates in today's post "post-apartheid" South Africa are the focus
of another AfricaFocus Bulletin released today, sent out by email
and available on the web at http://www.africafocus.org/docs16/sa1609a.php
See particularly "South Africa in the 21st Century in Video: A
Youtube Playlist," available at http://tinyurl.com/hqpr255
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on South Africa, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/southafrica.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
To Win Free Education, Fossilised Neoliberalism Must Fall
Patrick Bond, in S.Booysen, D.Motsepe, D.Everatt and P.Pillay (Eds),
in The #FeesMustFall Student Revolt: Challenging and Changing
Governance in South Africa
Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2016
[excerpted here with permission of the author]
Introduction
The most inspiring and surprising social movement to shake the South
African state since the Treatment Action Campaign of the early 2000s
was #FeesMustFall in October 2015. The primary demand -- free
tertiary education -- is audacious. There are various cost
estimates, depending upon demand-related assumptions or simply the
prevailing political agenda: a spokesperson of South African Higher
Education Minister Blade Nzimande (who was at the time opposed)
estimated R100 billion/year, although the 2013 figure from the same
office was just R23 billion (i.e. R27 billion in 2016 inflationadjusted
rand) (Petersen, 2015). But even the centre-right
Democratic Alliance estimated in late 2015 that free (albeit meanstested)
tertiary education would cost R35 billion per annum
(Bozzoli, 2015). The students' secondary, immediate demands were
that there should be a 0% fee increase in 2016 (effectively a 7%+
decrease in fees given rising inflation) and that all university
staff should be paid properly and 'insourced.' The early 2000s'
outsourcing of low-paid cleaning, security, gardening and similar
staff at most institutions was repeatedly contested before 2015, but
never successfully.
As argued below, these tens of billions of rands that should be
considered for investment in the students' future compare favourably
with hundreds of billions allocated by state agencies to megaprojects
that are largely fossil-intensive (especially based upon
coal and oil). The resulting climate change will irrevocably harm
the current student generation's future. But will the students come
to this realisation, and will it lead to creative political
strategies that link issues and constituencies with just as radical
a potential as was witnessed in 2015?
...
In this context of debate over which corporations have succeeded in
'state capture,' the students' partially-successful battle for
greater funding from Treasury deserves full attention. In the next
section we review the student forces arrayed against fiscal
austerity and university fee increases in 2015, and disputes over
whether the South African state is making a sufficient contribution
to cover the cost of higher education. These critiques of state
spending highlight aspects of state subsidies that harm the next
generation insofar as they contribute to climate change, which will
damage the current youth's futures, as shown in section 3. Then,
drawing on the 2016 budget, we can identify other constituencies
currently suffering austerity, in section 4. Finally, in section 5,
it is useful to ask (no matter if it is purely hypothetical),
whether there is a scenario in which these forces unite to demand a
different fiscal regime.
...
In short, we will conclude, if the strong momentum gathered in
October 2015 was quickly destroyed by a variety of political
dilemmas, some of which were internal to the student movement, but
some also external, at least one of the ways forward is for students
and their civil society allies to better interrogate the power of
financiers, mining houses and smelters -- which are the
beneficiaries of the budget at the expense of the students' present
and future interests.
Arguments for fiscal investments in the youth
The focus on the fiscus is terribly important (in part because it is
so rare), and this was recognised by several thousand students who
began national-scale #FeesMustFall advocacy on 21 October 2015 when
they stormed the parliamentary precinct in Cape Town. It was the day
of the budgetary mid-term review. Prior to Gordhan, the 2014-15
finance minister was Nhlanhla Nene, whose response that day --
formally articulated in his Budget Speech -- was that student
protests were 'unconstructive.' The word was perhaps chosen by the
Treasury's neoliberal speechwriters; it scornfully reveals a vast
distance between those championing the austerity logic in Treasury
on the one hand, and on the other, the logic of the society's
ascendant leadership at the elite universities, as well as the logic
of the 63% of society judged by UCT economists to be living below
the poverty line (Budlender et al., 2015).
As Reuters (2015) news agency tellingly reported, Nene "downplayed
the effect of university students storming parliament as he
delivered his medium term budget on the credit rating of Africa's
most advanced economy. 'What matters for the ratings agencies is our
response as government in addressing these challenges,' he said
about the students' demands to keep tuition fees unchanged." The
response taken by government's security officials against the
students that afternoon was described by many journalists as police
brutality. Nzimande (besuited) told the students from behind a
protective fence that they should accept a 6% increase as a victory.
They booed him, and he later joked, "If these students don't accept
this, we will start our own movement, students must fall" (and after
intense criticism, he subsequently apologised). Also revealing 'what
matters', in February 2015 Nene had relaxed exchange controls,
allowing wealthy individuals to take R10 million out of the country
each year, up from R4 million, while at the same time cutting grants
to poor people by 3% in real terms (Bond, 2015a).
Having made an exceptionally powerful statement, different groups of
students then marched in their thousands to the Johannesburg and
Durban headquarters of the ANC on October 22 and 23, and finally
demonstrated -- more than ten thousand strong -- at Zuma's Pretoria
office on October 23. There, restraining fences were torn down by
some of the activists. Tyres and latrines were burned, and police
once again responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets and water
cannons. Refusing to come out to address the crowd, Zuma instead
held a press conference where he conceded to the students' demand
for a 0% fee increase in 2016 following several universities'
attempt to raise prices into double digits. (It was Wits' 10.5%
increase that on 4 October 2015 spurred the original national
awareness of the crisis, although at UKZN two weeks earlier, the
burning of the administration building was already an indication of
extreme opposition to higher 2016 fees.)
...
Africans account for 79% of the population in the country, yet their
gross participation rate in higher education is less than 15%. The
low participation rate of the majority of South Africans is
untenable -- both from a social justice perspective and in terms of
meeting the demands of the 21st century and the needs of our
economy. Higher levels of funding and the expansion of the capacity
of the higher education system will be needed in future to ensure
that higher levels of participation of African and coloured students
are achieved.
A statement released simultaneously by the Democratic Alliance's
Belinda Bozzoli (2015) concurred:
[the Ministerial Committee] found that South Africa's budget for
universities as a percentage of GDP was only 0.75%, which is lower
than the Africa-wide proportion of 0.78%, the world-wide proportion
of 0.84% and the proportion spent by Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries of 1.21%. The report
also noted that between 2000 and 2010, state funding per full-time
equivalent student fell by 1.1% annually in real terms, while fees
per each of these students increased by 2.5% annually in the same
period… While President Zuma announced that a Task Team will be
established to find short term solutions to student funding
challenges, this Task Team will be set up to fail if it does not
include representation from Treasury. More needs to be done,
urgently.
The penultimate sentence is vital because even the centre-right DA
-- usually very supportive of the government's neoliberal bloc --
alleges that the National Treasury has been hiding during this
ferocious debate. Behind the fiscal conservatism of Treasury (in
Pretoria) are the men they report to in the biggest financial
institutions and credit rating agencies (mostly in Sandton). But
those men have experienced an exceptionally profitable period, and
their ability to disguise profits through misinvoicing and related
tax-avoidance techniques is well understood, though it continues
apparently unabated. The students were making demands upon the state
at a time the economy was slowing and fiscal revenues -- especially
from corporate taxation -- were declining. But this is certainly one
area where the broader class struggle could be pursued in future,
with students joining many other constituencies to demand higher and
more rigorous taxation, tightened exchange controls, and more
courageous economic regulation of transnational and local
corporations.
Arguments for not investing against the youth
Until most of the mining and smelting corporations were nearly
destroyed by the 2011-15 commodity price crash, large firms
operating in South Africa enjoyed what the International Monetary
Fund (2013) recorded as amongst the world's highest profit rates. By
many accounts, this was not honestly-acquired wealth, for according
to surveys by PricewaterhouseCoopers (2016) in 2014 (Hosken 2014)
and 2016, Sandton elites remain intent on committing economic
corruption at the world's fastest rate. In December 2015, the
Washington NGO Global Financial Integrity (2015) recorded an average
$21 billion in annual Illicit Financial Flows from South Africa from
2004-13, and in March 2016, the leaked 'Panama Papers' began to
unravel some revealing relationships between South Africans and tax
havens (albeit the tip of the iceberg).
Several specific firms had been earlier named by activists and
researchers as being guilty of invoice manipulations ('transfer
pricing') and other tax avoidance strategies: MTN and Lonmin (both
of which were led -- as board chair and main minority investor,
respectively -- during the offshoring period by Ramaphosa), the
other two major platinum firms (Implats and Amplats) (AIDC, 2014)
and De Beers (Bracking and Sharife, 2014). The corporations do not
pay a particularly high primary tax rate -- 28% -- compared to the
48% they paid during the last decade of apartheid, when exchange
controls were the main way the state ensured capital stayed within
the country. After 1994, deregulation of exchange controls occurred
on more than three dozen occasions, a situation that could easily be
reversed in line with international trends. For The Economist (2013)
magazine proclaimed a newly 'Gated Globe' because of resurgent
capital controls imposed by many countries following the 2008
turbulence, notably including China in mid-2015 and early 2016 as
its stock market lost trillions of dollars in notional values.
Moreover, Treasury also funds many incentive schemes for
corporations' benefit, and these are utilised but without many
obvious backward or forward linkages into the economy (such as cheap
electricity to BHP Billiton/South32 and Anglo American Corporation,
auto industry subsidies and the steel industry's increased tariff
protection). Were it not for state and parastatal infrastructure
spending, the levels of gross fixed capital formation would be at
record lows. Yet at the time students were protesting for more
resources, South African corporations had acknowledged reserves of
R700 billion in what was essentially idle cash, suggesting that the
profit motive for the 'real economy' had become far too low,
compared to what corporate treasurers can earn by parking their cash
in speculative investments, e.g. in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange
(which hit a record 55 000 index level in October 2015) and real
estate (which outstrips nearly all world markets). There was
certainly no shortage of savings in South Africa's economy, given
how rapidly the stock market's and property's value had grown as a
result of speculative financial bubbles, at a time investment in the
real economy withered.
To illustrate further, as a clear signal to students about where
Treasury's priorities lay, amongst the most generously subsidised
projects are those in the state's Presidential Infrastructure
Coordinating Commission (PICC) programme that promote, first,
exceptionally destructive coal exports via Richards Bay, mainly by
multinational corporations; second, the Durban port-petrochemical
complex's expansion; and third, iron-ore exports. Yet there is vast
world over-capacity in coal, shipping and steel, leaving South
Africa's second major steel producer in bankruptcy (Evraz Highveld)
and the largest (Arcelor Mittal) sharply cutting back on its main
foundries' output. But these White Elephant mega-projects continue
to get the lion's share of state, parastatal and private
infrastructure funding.
...
To illustrate, Gordhan's Budget Speech noted that "Transport and
logistics infrastructure accounts for nearly R292 billion over the
next three years under Minister Peters' oversight. Transnet is
acquiring 232 diesel locomotives for its general freight business
and 100 locomotives for its coal lines." ... But even the
industry's leading insider expert, Xavier Prevost, admits coal
exports had become a money loser by 2015 (Creamer's Engineering
News, 2015). ...
The second highest-priority PICC mega-project will also cost
hundreds of billions of rands: the South Durban Dig Out Port (on the
old Durban airport site). This project aims to increase annual
shipping-container traffic from levels of 2.5 million (stagnant from
2010-16) to a new capacity of 20 million by 2040, according to the
National Development Plan (other experts suggest 12 million is more
reasonable). The project will also double oil refining capacity in
South Durban (a residential area already saturated with toxins),
with the new Transnet oil pipeline from Durban to Johannesburg
originally estimated to cost R6 billion having been redirected from
white to black neighbourhoods by then CEO Maria Ramos, ultimately
costing R24 billion by the time it is complete in late 2016. Once
again, the port expansion is being subsidised generously with
taxpayer funds, yet the Baltic Dry Index -- the main measurement of
shipping demand and pricing -- is at an all-time historic low,
having peaked at above 12 500 in 2008 and fallen to below 300 by
early 2016. Either the South Durban investments will become yet
another of Durban's white elephant projects (e.g. the airport, Dube
Trade Port, Moses Mabhida Stadium and Point redevelopment), or if it
is miraculously successful in raising the level of traffic by
millions of containers in the coming quarter century, the project's
success will have the effect of deindustrialising many South African
manufacturing zones adversely affected by the import wave.
In these two specific instances, the vast subsidies that Treasury
and Transnet will provide to the corporate sector do not contribute
to the present younger generation's prosperity and environmental
conditions. On the contrary, they are much more likely to harm their
prospects, through climate change and through fewer labour-intensive
manufacturing job opportunities. The student movement should easily
be able to raise these as fiscal concerns, and they should resonate
with the broader society. After all, in the Pew Research polls of
South African public opinion, two issues have consistently ranked as
the highest in the recordings of the society's concerns about the
world: climate change and international economic volatility (Carle,
2015). South Africans are justifiably concerned about carbonintensive
economies -- of which theirs is amongst the world's worst
-- and about local vulnerability to the kinds of global economic
swings that reduce commodity prices and the value of firms operating
in South Africa by such extreme amounts. ...
These extremely desperate, carbon-intensive big businesses --
especially the group Ben Fine and Zav Rustomjee (1996) termed the
Minerals-Energy Complex (i.e. not just the Gupta family but the much
bigger set of mining houses operating in South Africa) remain
extremely powerful when it comes to subsidy allocations. For
example, the world's largest mining house, BHP Billiton ('South32',
formerly South Africa's Gencor prior to 1990s mergers), still gets
electricity at 1/10th the price of ordinary consumers, and at peak,
consumes 5% of the grid's output. When the Energy Intensive Users
Group of mining houses and smelters (responsible for 44% of
consumption) needed an increase in electricity supply, Eskom turned
to privatised electricity producers for renewable energy instead of
using its own resources. And in spite of their reported opposition
to a nuclear deal apparently struck by Zuma in Moscow in 2014, both
Nene (2015) and Gordhan (2016) made a R200 million downpayment on
what are likely to be Moscow-sourced Rosatom reactors that could
easily cost in excess of $100 billion, as well as the first funding
tranche for another pro-corporate investment, the BRICS New
Development Bank, whose target capitalisation (spread among five
countries) is $100 billion. One BRICS Bank director, Tito Mboweni,
is on record that the nuclear deal "falls squarely within the
mandate of the NDB" (Bloomberg, 2015).
In short, the students could readily have demanded -- and still can
-- that the state and parastatal budgets be restructured to reflect:
- the students' educational needs as a younger generation preparing
for employment, so that the state's human capital investment will be
valued in a skills-scarce national economy;
- the collapse of the prices of many exported raw materials, which
should, in turn, be reflected in a redesigned National Development
Plan, PICC and Transnet infrastructure investments (the largest
items mentioned in Gordhan's February 2016 Budget Speech; Bond,
2016); and
- the danger that if such investments continue to be made, the MEC
will grow stronger and the country's contribution to climate change
will also rise beyond the 34% cut in emissions (below 'growth
without constraints') during the 2020s that was repeatedly promised
by Pretoria negotiators at the United Nations climate summits, which
in turn will endanger the country's future as other countries also
fail to honour their commitments (Bond, 2012).
Uniting with other constituencies peering over the fiscal cliff
Students opposed to the low level of university funding and the
simultaneous use of taxpayer funds on projects such as carbonintensive
infrastructure can at least make common cause with
numerous social forces which are also firmly opposed to the
austerity trend. These include those community activists and
patients of the public health system who have been witnessing the
degeneration of fiscal support in their sectors: municipal finance,
housing, water and health care.
Again, consider the context, this time bottom up. The #FeesMustFall
movement's first short-term victory comes at a time that the ANC is
confronting unprecedented economic pressure and social unrest. The
GDP growth rate fell from just 1.5% in 2015 to an estimated 0.4% in
2016, at a time of a 1.3% population growth rate and no hope of an
upturn in the foreseeable future. South Africa is the most incomeunequal
of any major country, and 'tokenistic' grant payments (e.g.
R350/month for most beneficiaries, who are children), 'Free Basic
Services' and an unfunded National Health Insurance make little or
no difference, and sometimes (as in water provision) have had the
opposite effect because of Pretoria's social policy neoliberalism
(Bond 2014a).
The rise in social grant payments offered by Nene and
Gordhan was consistently far below an inflation rate that by 2016
was anticipated in double digits for poor people, given much higher
food, electricity and transport costs than affect wealthier South
Africans. Anger has risen across the sub-altern spectrum, and in
September 2015, the World Economic Forum (2015) judged the South
African working class as the most militant on earth -- the same
position amongst 140 countries held since 2012, when 34 mineworkers
were massacred at Marikana -- not long after the South African
Police Service had reported that in 2014, nearly 2300 protests
turned "violent" (in police terminology) (Africa News Agency, 2015).
...
But there are important reasons for caution. The rough class
structure of black 'African' society usually is expressed in terms
of a small but rising (and debt-encumbered) lower middle-class, the
working-class and the huge unemployed and low-income majority
(again, with a 63% poverty rate). The students generally come from
the first generation of university attendees, and it is no insult to
posit that they aspire to move from the working class to the middle
class, or in the case of students at the technical universities, to
acquire stronger artisanal skills. Their ability to view the
ceilings they face and contest various aspects of the university
education they receive, is reminiscent of the great massification of
universities in Europe and North America during the 1960s, when many
of the radical leaders were from first-generation, working-class
backgrounds. That they reject the implicit promise of ANC rule, i.e.
that they will have a guaranteed career and be black empowerment
beneficiaries, is important in material and ideological terms. Their
recognition that a university degree is certainly not a guarantee of
employment, and their ideological antipathy to nationalist, populist
politicians, together give these students the same kind of potential
for national leadership that the 1950s ANC Youth League soon
attained, breaking through ossified leaderships who fail to spell
out the struggle in terms that the wider society is ready to listen
to. That they take up 'decolonisation', raise 'the Land Question'
and demand redistribution to address the entirety of persistently
racist, sexist social relations also reflects this maturity.
However the danger remains that once the heat of battle subsides the
students will retreat to a relatively class-privileged position
instead of pursuing this historic challenge of economic justice.
Geographically, one of the main divide-and-conquer strategies
adopted by the apartheid regime and big business for about a decade
starting in the mid-1980s onwards, was to spatially segment the
housing market and encumber the higher echelons of the black working
class with debt (Bond, 2000, 2014a). The impact, today, is that many
townships and shack settlements are no longer home to the higherpaid
shopstewards and other experienced labour leaders who, in the
1980s, had been both worker and community activists, conjoining
their union leadership with their roles in the SA National Civic
Organisation. It was not atypical for the civic and trade union
officials to wear two hats, and to turn their geographic segregation
to advantage. The spatial compression of class, until the Group
Areas Act was overturned in 1991, in turn allowed the progressive
activists much more coherence in their anti-apartheid protests.
Demands for access to water and sanitation, electricity, housing and
transport regularly featured as combined worker-community protest
rationales.
The political genius of neoliberalism lies, in part, in its
fragmentation of opposition. The most important barrier to making
generalised community demands against the Treasury since the
mid-1990s has been the 'popcorn' character of protests: they are
segregated, atomised, ideology-free and very rarely link up even
with neighbouring activism. Indeed, many turn explicitly xenophobic
when instead of a municipal target, immigrant shop-owners so often
become the subject of community anger. Emanating from thousands of
violent protests, especially since the late 1990s when urban
neoliberalism took on its main features (Bond, 2002), there have
been sporadic but nearly entirely unsuccessful attempts at
organising up-scale. To, illustrate, recall the metropolitan Gauteng
anti-neoliberal coalition known as the Anti-Privatisation Forum
(APF). It was founded in 2000 after the University of the
Witwatersrand Urban Futures conference, in part by radical students
who -- like Prishani Naidoo and Ahmed Veriava -- were by 2015
lecturers involved in #FeesMustFall. But notwithstanding exceptional
victories in specific sites -- including Johannesburg metropolitanscale
service delivery policy -- the APF had become moribund by
2012, in part due to organisational failure (McKinley, 2012).
The failure of communities to unify across space and social
movements to unify across sector, added to the rise of the National
Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) as an independent
radical force after denouncing the ANC Alliance in late 2013, led to
formation of the United Front in 2014. By 2016, however, the Front
had failed to find its footing notwithstanding (largely paper)
membership of 400 radical social change organisations. ... . The
other dilemma for students was that they had multiple political
tendencies, and the Numsa/Front was just one of various competing
projects -- e.g. the Progressive Youth Alliance (with its SA
Communist Party and ANC Youth League dominance), the Economic
Freedom Fighters and PanAfricanist youth were much more visible
ideologues. The splits in the student movement that resulted from
competing tendencies have been partially documented, but the overall
question remains: do students have the potential to again, cross
class boundaries by uniting with low-paid workers; take physical
space as semi-liberated sites to build that unity; and generate a
national movement that takes on national targets, such as Treasury.
...
In this context of austerity, an oppositional programme could rise,
taking on Treasury, the SA Reserve Bank, and also the ratings
agencies and financiers who apply such pressure, based on three
arguments:
- the SA state has the ability to raise sufficient funding to meet
social needs;
- the social spending component of the fiscus has been far too low;
and
- interest rates should be decreased, which would allow for more
state borrowing (although exchange controls would need to be reimposed
to curtail capital flight) and also reduce South Africans'
extreme debt load, including that of recent graduates whose
repayment rates are miserable.
...
However, if students and their allies in civil society advance the
arguments made above, they will face both intellectual and policy
resistance. First, there is the fatuous SA Reserve Bank (2015) claim
that SA has an insufficiently low savings rate, which allegedly
justifies high interest rates. Yet as noted above, there is plenty
of loose savings available in South Africa, as witnessed by how much
money sloshes around in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and in real
estate, which in both cases are at the very top range of the world's
most speculative markets, respectively (Bond, 2014a).The amount
corporations hold in cash is said to approach R1 trillion, as they
lack profitable investment outlets. Savings shortages are not a
factor, in sum.
Neoliberals do have one valid rebuttal to the arguments above: if
interest rates are lowered and social spending and state borrowing
raised, there will be even worse capital flight. This is indeed a
very serious problem, in terms of both illicit financial flows and
licit, legal outflows of profits, dividends and interest (the
'balance of payments' within the current account). To pay these
flows in hard currency, the Reserve Bank must borrow abroad,
resulting in South Africa's total foreign debt rising from $25
billion in 1994 to $140 billion by 2015 (the same share of GDP as PW
Botha faced in 1985 when he defaulted), as distinguished from public
domestic debt which is still manageable and can grow. In addition to
illicit financial flows from South Africa (R330 billion annually
from 2004-13), the licit outflows of profits, dividends and interest
in 2015 exceeded R140 billion. (In comparison, the trade deficit was
only R34 billion.)
The solution to these pressures is simple: re-imposition of exchange
controls. This will be especially important in late 2016 when formal
'junk bond' status is likely to be imposed by the credit ratings
agencies. Such capital controls worked in the period 1985-95 when
the 'finrand,' helped to not only stop capital flight at a time the
apartheid state was a victim of successful solidaristic protest in
mid-1985 (when PW Botha's 'Rubicon Speech' meant activists could
further delegitimise South Africa). They are also a vital tool for
national economic sovereignty in a world beset by extreme financial
turbulence. As John Maynard Keynes (1933) once explained, "In my
view the whole management of the domestic economy depends upon being
free to have the appropriate interest rate without reference to the
rates prevailing in the rest of the world. Capital controls is a
corollary to this."
...
Conclusion
The essence of politics in South Africa is alliance building, and
students who mobilised for a 0% fees increase in 2016 plus
insourcing of outsourced workers did a remarkable job in their
initial efforts to move across class, to move across space and to
move cross scale. Much of the obvious political challenge to power
in the 2015-16 protests related to race, decolonisation and
restructuring of university power. A few nominal changes were made,
and major demands are still outstanding in relation to curriculum
reform, shifting the race and gender make-up of the professoriate,
and ending the alienation of black, female and LGBTI students.
However, this chapter has merely addressed the most serious
outstanding challenge: achieving free tertiary education by
identifying processes associated with the students' adverse class
power, financial institutions' 'state capture', fiscal options
(including the generationally-vital opportunity costs and benefits
of defunding fossil-fuel mega-projects in favour of human capital
investment), and the politics therein. This review of the political
economy of the students' major demand has concluded that to win free
education, worker insourcing, and genuinely decolonised
universities, the students will inexorably demand that
#NeoliberalismMustFall and that #FossilFuelsMustFall. ...
It is true, Naomi Klein (2014) argues, that 'This [climate] changes
everything.' Recall, finally, the October 2015 mobilisation of
social support across South Africa that contributed to the
exceptional pressure mounted against the Zuma government -- more
than the countervailing pressure of neoliberals in Treasury and the
ratings agencies, at least for R2.3 billion's sake. If the argument
above is sound, there is every potential for students and their
community, youth, labour, feminist and environmental allies to find
routes forward to a new society, by building on society's legitimate
grievances and demanding the ecological and socio-economic benefits
that would follow an end to both the influence of the neoliberal
bloc represented by Gordhan, and the populist patronage of Zuma's
last allies. As that battle continues to unfold -- as it will for
years to come -- an intensified progressive alternative stands ready
to claim, and to win.
...
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