15 November 2015, Midrand, Johannesburg
Push in all fronts of struggle: Build strong structures in institutions of learning and give leadership to student struggles
The Young Communist League convened this summit at the right time. The recent student mobilisation against sky-high fee increases imposed by universities using their institutional autonomy, and the contested nature of the mobilisation clearly call for strong organisation in campuses. The strategic importance of our Party’s political programme centred on winning hegemony in all key sites and centres of struggle and power cannot be over-emphasised. The fact is that the contest over the leadership of the Fees Must Fall campaign did not only come from campuses but outside of both campuses and our country, and from organisations and individuals who have nothing to do with free quality higher education.
Inconceivably, the contest also came from factions from within our own movement that, too, have nothing to do with free quality education.
A lot of money was unleased in a factional manner to support the mobilisation in ways that isolate our General Secretary, Comrade Blade Nzimande, who by the way is also an ANC NEC and NWC member, instigate and carry out personalised attacks against his person.
This may appear to be an agenda against Comrade Blade as an individual. However, that is only its form.
In its content and essence, the attack on Cde Blade is an attack on the SACP as a whole, including, the Young Communist League, as well as on class conscious workers in general. This attack has nothing to do with access to higher education but everything with to do with an agenda to isolate communists and class conscious workers in the leadership of our movement going forward and consolidate a leadership core that is both anti-communist and anti-class-conscious-workers.
During the student protest, money was unleashed and injected in factional activities, including printing works that excluded the symbols of the Young Communist League, while, on the other hand, painting the organisation with a brush dirtied in a malicious and baseless allegation that it was not “supporting” the students but “protecting” the General Secretary. This false dichotomy was a part of a broader anti-communist and anti-class-conscious-workers agenda - wittingly or unwittingly.
It would not be a surprise should history reveal that some of the individuals who were, and still are, involved in organising the attack are the champions of the views of the spokespersons of foreign monopoly capital, ratings agencies.
In policy-making processes, such individuals would feature among those who are more concerned about complying with the views expressed by ratings agencies and monopoly capital, than the revolutionary essence of the historical mission of our struggle. Increasingly, there are newly found - i.e. post-1994 class interests, especially the accumulation of wealth on a capitalist private basis coalescing around state tenders. This dictates to some of those who are involved in this accumulation regime and their acquaintances that they must capture our movement factionally, including through corrupt and corporate capture and new alliances at the expense of the working class components of our liberation movement.
This accumulation regime, which has been gravitating toward a pluderpreneuring agenda, is bound to divide our movement and set it on a path of degeneration. It must be confronted for what it is.
The plunderpreneurs and the corporate organisations behind them must be defeated if we are to achieve the historical mission of complete political liberation and socio-economic emancipation. There is no other option if we are to succeed, too, in uniting the alliance and our broad movement as whole and defining the content of a radical economic and social transformation.
Let it be made categorically clear, without confronting monopoly capital and dealing with it in the most fitted manner, which is not being done in the National Development Plan (NDP), there can never be radical economic and social transformation in our country.
Unfortunately, since the alliance agreed at its summit two years ago, held from 30 August to 1 September 2013, that the SACP and Cosatu raised genuine concerns about the NDP and that, accordingly, these had to be addressed in line with the objective of placing our national democratic transformation on to the second radical phase - there has virtually been no progress.
Instead, things continue as if the NDP is a completely agreed upon “blue print” whereas, starting from within the alliance, it is NOT. The notion that the NDP is not cast in stone and is subject to adaptation has become empty - so far. There is nothing in practice that proves its validity.
Meanwhile, the problem of student funding experienced by students at universities and colleges is both a reflection and an outcropping of a long standing economic policy failure, dating back to 1996 and beyond - throughout the centuries- and decades-old eras of colonial dispossession, oppression and apartheid exploitation.
The hard fact is, it is NOT all students who experience financial exclusion. It is students from working class and poor families, majority of whom black, who become financially excluded and who drop out of the post-school system because they do not have money to pay.
This is but a surface manifestation of the deep-rooted, persisting crisis levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty. The problem goes far beyond the mandate and policy instruments available at the disposal of the Department of Higher Education and Training. It is therefore utterly unfair to blame Cde Blade for this problem.
By the way, the first time the government commissioned a study on the progressive implementation of free higher, technical and vocational education and training for students from working class and poor families who cannot afford student fees in the history of our country pre- and post-1994 was under the hard work of Minister Nzimande. The fact that he was told, thereafter, that there is no money to implement the recommendations of the study cannot be blamed on him as a person.
That is a broader economic, revenue and fiscal policy problem. But it is, in part, also a question of priorities as far as both revenue and fiscal policies are concerned.
Push the private sector, the single largest consumer of our education and training, to pay for the products!
The Young Communist League previously raised reservations against the youth wage subsidy - the so-called Employee Tax Incentive (ETI) - for which an initial amount of R5 billion was set aside. The alternative put forward by the Young Communist League in its 2nd National Council resolutions was that the money should rather have been allocated to support meaningful education and skills programmes in our post-school education and training system. The Young Communist League was reasonable.
In the first two months alone, January and February 2014, of the youth wage subsidy, the largest listed labour broker firm Adcorp made R7 million from the scheme. In its annual report the group accounted for this money as part of its “other income”. This is a lot of money, monthly and annually.
Another listed labour broker firm, Workforce Holdings, the largest after Adcorp, attributed virtually all its 2014 profit to the “Employment Tax Incentive”. In its annual report the group said it claimed R53.4 million under the subsidy last year and declared a profit before tax for 2014 of R51.2 million.
The money appropriated by labour brokers from the “Employment Tax Incentive” - which is, in its actual content, ABSOLUTE SURPLUS value, and from the economy in general can go a long way in supporting students to gain access to higher, technical and vocational education and training.
As Comrade Blade has correctly said, the South African economy is producing sufficient wealth to support the progressive rollout of free higher, technical and vocational education and training for students from working class and poor families who cannot afford, but the problem is that this money is appropriated by the private sector.
In addition, how many times have we heard that the state or its institutions are bailing out private and other corporations when they run into troubles? We need the same levels of energy when it comes to access to higher, technical and vocational education and training for the children of the workers and the poor who cannot afford university and college fees. Progress made so far in this regard - that is in expanding access in terms of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) must be welcome. In addition, more progress must be made. This means, and requires, more resources!
Without more resources, and in addition the transformation of the post-school education and training system reorganising its to share resources and giving more powers to the government to intervene against a lack of transformation progress we will go nowhere. There can be no better way of managing the problems of financial exclusion other than this strategic objective.
The Young Communist League must therefore reiterate the correct message that none of us must develop cold feet in taxing the reach and the wealthy to support free higher, technical and vocational education and training. That is where the money is, NOT at the house of Comrade Blade Nzimande’s family contrary to a factional call that was made for a march to the house of his family.
In any case the private sector, controlling over 70 percent of our economy, is the single largest consumer of our education and training. It must pay for these two products!
Fight both in theory and practice!
The campaign to widen access to post-school education and training will not succeed if it was only to be carried out in words reiterating a correct message. The Young Communist League, together with other formations of the Progressive Youth Alliance must therefore lead a massive youth and student campaign to the door steps of private capital to fund post-school education and training and call on the government to put in place a wealth tax for that purpose. This must become the central focus of the campaign on university and college fees going forward.
Link student struggles with workers struggles!
Let us also link student and worker struggles as these are inextricably related. The reason why there are students who cannot afford university and college fees is because their families, which are mainly working class, poor and black cannot afford to pay. The starting point in linking these struggles is to first and foremost unite students and workers in campuses and fight for the legitimate demands of both. This must then be elaborated in the rest of the key sites of struggle through scientific leadership content that clearly appreciates the dialectical link between the two.
Deal with the problem of institutional autonomy, fight for the transformation of the content of learning and teaching!
The struggle for free education must not be blind to the content of teaching and learning.
Much of the curriculum content in our universities and colleges is neoliberal and serves private capital ideologically and materially.
Materialist dialectics and conception of history are marginalised in the curriculum, altogether with their findings.
The study of economic exploitation in economics for example does not feature. It is the same as still banned this time not under the Suppression of Communism Act but institutional autonomy conflated with academic freedom.
Curriculum must be transformed. The use of institutional autonomy to block curriculum and overall transformation in institutions of higher learning must be dealt a blow!
Institutional autonomy must be regulated and limited in terms of our constitution, and if need be done away with. Our constitution correctly provides for the limitation of rights. Institutional autonomy is not a fundamental human right for that matter. It is a tertiary right that used to block others from exercising their fundamental human rights, such as the right to education including proper - unbiased content.
This is one of the reasons why the Young Communist League must support the central thrust of the draft Bill that has been submitted to Parliament giving the Minister of Higher Education and Training more powers to intervene in higher learning institutions in driving transformation!
The hypocrites of white privilege who are clothed as liberals, among others in the so-called Democratic Alliance (DA), want the government to be prevented, through the use of institutional autonomy, from intervening in institutions of learning to ensure transformation and access. But they are the first to blame the government for the things that happen as a result of the decisions made in these institutions in the name of autonomy. These hypocrites have lost elections, and must not be allowed to rule from the grave.
At the end of the day, it is constitutionally the responsibility of the state to ensure access to education - which is inextricably linked to transformation given that it was colonial and apartheid intransigent that was used to exclude the overwhelming majority from colleges and universities and from many qualifications under colonial and apartheid job reservation.
Let us move decisively to a non-racial and non-sexist democratic South Africa in which higher education, technical and vocational education and training are, along with prosperity, not an exclusive enclave of a few!
Thank you comrades!