On Shutdowns in a post-COVID-19 Higher Education Sector by Lindokuhle Mponco

Shutdowns have always been tactically used to put pressure on institutional management to submit to the demands of the students or at least reach a halfway point of compromise. However, post-COVID-19 these shutdowns have had little to no effect in the broader scale of the struggle. These shutdowns have instead become an arena for the management to identify all the reactionaries, counterrevolutionaries, and potential sellouts and scabs to use so that they can purge all of those who are problematic to the system. In this article we will analyze the role played by shutdowns in our history of the struggle for free, quality, well-resourced and decolonized education. We will then analyze the status quo and the effectiveness of shutdowns. We will then conclude on what is to be done to advance the revolutionary struggle for free, quality well-resourced and decolonized education.

Historical Role of Shutdowns

Shutdowns have been a known feature in the struggle for a Socialist society in South Africa. In the sector of Higher Education shutdowns are the lifeblood of the movement. The first shutdown to ever shock the system at a grand scale was the 1972 shutdown which started in the University of the North (University of Limpopo) and spread across the sector. This led to the expulsion of Cde. Onkgopotse Tiro who was the catalyst of the shutdown due to his scathing critique of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which was the basis of the education system for black people from primary school to the tertiary sector. Prior to that, shutdowns were limited to campuses and not nationally tied to one banner which unifies all the oppressed layers of the student populace. We must thank the advent of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), and the existence of South African Students' Organization (SASO) for such a development in our political space in the Higher Education sector. This was intensified in the 1980s with the existence of COSAS and many other students' organizations which became the bedrock of the struggle not only in the Higher Education sector but also in the Basic Education sector. 

The 1990s proved to be an era of instability and transition due to the political nature of the period. The CODESA process gave that character to every space where transition was required immediately. This process led to a lull while institutions that were administrated by the Bantu Education Act of 1953 continued with the struggle due to the historical disadvantage and the reactionary character of the institutional management. The author of this article must make it clear that all institutional managements in their nature have a reactionary element, however, during this period most tended to be progressive even though we must stress that history offered them no other alternative but to be progressive. It is in the 2000s and ultimately in 2010s that we begin to see shutdowns regain momentum and become the centerpiece of our struggle in this sector. The #FeesMustFall movement became the enabler of this situation. The South African Union of Students (SAUS) took advantage of this and became the unifying platform for all these struggles even though eventually reformism caught up with the Union. There are many reasons for SAUS taking the reformist turn, and those reasons can be simplified to one thing and one thing only, politics of the stomach. In the 2020s, the last attempt was halted by COVID-19 and the reformist character of the leadership in the former whites-only institutions. This reality of COVID-19 gave the management breathing space to beef up security and develop measures of infiltrating the revolution. Engels taught us in his classic work The Origin of the State, Family, & Property that the security sector is nothing but a group of armed men who exist to defend capitalist property. Lenin emphasizes this in his classic work The State & Revolution and even goes further to state that there is nothing revolutionary about the workers who are working in the security sector (police and private security). Lenin then ventures to even call them sellouts. SAUS also played a role by selling out the struggle for a temporary peace which is now up in flames. One thing we can see is that shutdowns have been used for pressuring the system at a national level to reform or die. However, the strength of these shutdowns has been sapped by the constant selling out and reformist character of the national unions, NUSAS during apartheid and SAUS after apartheid.

Status Quo

As we speak, Wits University (University of Witwatersrand) is having a shutdown due to accommodation issues and exclusion. These are issues that have been constantly plaguing the historically disadvantaged institutions from the 1930s till now. We know for a fact that Nelson Mandela was expelled at the University of Fort Hare for leading an accommodation strike and an SRC elections boycott. Today, we see that accommodation issues are not only limited to the University of Fort Hare or Walter Sisulu University but have also spread to the bourgeois institutions which is why the media has cast the spotlight on the recent Wits shutdown, while reducing the march in the University of Fort Hare to a march calling for a tavern without mentioning that the march was sparked by the murder and rape of two students coming back from a night out. This is the clear case of the media batting for the class interests of those that control their cameras and pens, the Bourgeoisie! The lack of unity between institutions emanates from the class differences between these two layers of institutions even though it is plain to see that the issues that are raised are sectoral in character. The deep penetration of the capitalist class in the sector has led to such issues being sectoral in character.

This deep penetration of the capitalist class was intensified during the tenure of Thabo Mbeki as President, and Naledi Pandor as Minister of Education. The outsourcing of many components within the sector has led to a crisis of shortage due to how a capitalist prices their buildings. The era of landlords being the determinants of policy in as far as accommodation and accreditation is upon us. It is not going to fade out anytime soon due to the ever-increasing austerity measures of the government of the day. We must make it clear that the blunt Blade Nzimande and his spawn Buti Manamela have played a critical role in ensuring that the capitalist class sink in their claws deeper than ever. It is under the tenure of Blade Nzimande as Minister of Higher Education where we have seen the most reactionary and counter-revolutionary policy positions in the history of the sector post-1994. It is under his tenure where we have seen many institutions go under administration and institutional governance collapsing. It is under his tenure where we have seen the white-supremacist cabal fight back against decolonization and transformation in the sector. He has been a mere by-stander and implementor of capitalist policies without criticism even though he serves as the National Chairperson of the South African Communist Party (SACP). We must then take the recent protests by the PYA-led SRC at Wits with a pinch of salt because these components of PYA are in an alliance with the ruling Party which is implementing these same policies that they find themselves protesting against.

Our status quo is that of a Minister who has put the sector under permanent austerity and is at the forefront of ensuring that our sector is the exact copy of the Bantu Education system. This cannot be distanced from the general outlook of the ANC and the tripartite alliance due to how the other components of the tripartite alliance have been meekly critical of the ANC. This meek criticism has been extended to other components of the alliance, and as such we are not surprised when we see SASCO being the epitome of this reformist behavior. SASCO is the center of selloutism in the sector of Higher Education and represents the character of the ANC in the student space. When students see SASCO, they must know they see the mirror image of the ANC. They are fundamentally playing the same role that the ANC plays in the mainstream political arena. The attack on revolutionary politics in our institutions of Higher Education has been led by SASCO and they continue playing the role of being the reliable spies of institutional management. 

What is to be done?

Our role as revolutionaries of the EFFSC is to firstly politicize our members and cadres to a point whereby selloutism will be a nonfactor in the movement. The second step in our journey is to intensify the call for a National Students' Revolutionary Summit which will look at unifying all the revolutionary organizations within the sector to form a National Students' Revolutionary Alliance which will not only fight for the demands of free, quality, well-resourced, and decolonized education but also center the question of liquidating capitalism through revolutionary means in our lifetime. It is clear that capitalism is at the center of the problems we face in the Higher Education Sector and as such we must not hesitate to mobilize ourselves to the realization of a socialist order. As revolutionaries of the EFFSC we must jealously guard the movement from tendencies that we condemn SASCO for. We must isolate all sellouts within our ranks whether they are found in the CSCT, PSCT, BSCT, BSTT or even amongst our groundforces. The movement must not be silent in the midst of this chaos, a national response is needed for such instances. 

Our understanding of Marxism teaches us that when the more developed institutions move towards a revolutionary posture, we must connect the struggle with the developing institutions to unify the struggle under one banner. Secondly, we must connect the struggle with that of the working class to ensure that the momentum is maintained to ensure that the demands are realized. We have seen such developments in the University of Western Cape (UWC) shutdown, and the Wits shutdown. Those developments must be commended; however, we must not stop there. The demands of our struggle must reflect the unity between workers and students. The struggle for free, quality, well-resourced, and decolonized education is a working-class struggle much like the call for a living wage and labor receiving the profits of what they produce is a students' struggle. The slogan of the 4th CSCT clearly states that community wars are student wars. We must not be rhetorical in our implementation of that slogan but rather be pragmatic in our implementation.