In a well attended parent-support-for-university students meeting held in Cape Town on Saturday past (31st October), a number of issues emerged that are worthy of further interrogation. This meeting was one of many more or less similar meetings across the country, held on and off university campuses. Till now the student revolt has thrown up a layer of student leaders who are very articulate, very organised but also very narrowly focused on their essential demands regarding free education, reduction in study fees and the like. Many are seeking inspiration from past struggles, revisiting the 1976 Soweto revolt, but unfortunately creating the impression that education struggles really only started in 1976. Clearly the onus is on the student leadership to uncover and assimilate the many ideological and organisational lessons this and other countries’ liberation struggles can teach them. Many decades of Afrikaner, liberal and ANC censorship and historical distortions have as yet not succeeded in suppressing the student youth’s clamour for free, meaningful and progressive education.
A key characteristic of student life is the transient nature of the university education they receive. Tens of thousands of students today find themselves in very precarious situations; barely managing to cope with syllabus and physical survival demands. The high drop-out rate at first year level is indicative of this. The individualism, which is a trademark of student existence on university campuses was,over the past decade, occasionally superseded by progressive student actions. However now, the imposition of neo-liberal diktats became too much to bear for thousands of poor, needy students. Those students who graduate, and their parents, more in hope than certainty, look forward to the day that they gain full-time employment enabling them to live meaningful lives. The precarious nature of their current and future situations must inevitably drive many to ask questions on what is to be done, by themselves, for themselves.
Many argue that since South Africa is a democratic country, there is no need for involvement of students in direct political struggles. No attempt is made to deepen the discussion as to what bourgeois democracy as opposed to socialist democracy entails. Student youth are bombarded with all manner of escape hatches to use, just to avoid the inevitability of facing up to the real political questions of the day. Business and government leaders implore them to become entrepreneurial; parliament is held up as the be-all and end-all of democracy and the system of representation. The bourgeois media suggests that they must “bite the bullet” until such time that the economy recovers. The sustained global economic slump and how it is destroying countries and its peoples is raised as a fait accompli – that “there is no alternative”. The gains of the Arab Spring revolts are considered to be inconsequential and just a distant memory. The wealth of political lessons to learn from past parent, students and teacher collaboration remain hidden from view. Worker-student collaboration during the 1970s and 1980s remains to be unearthed. Similarly the need to concentrate the many demands flowing from educational, health, housing, land and other struggles into generalised political demands (contained in a progressive political programme) has certainly been highlighted by the current student revolt. Current university and college students, as part of a generation born in the battle for truth can do much to advance the struggle for socialist democracy.