Disrupting and Rising.

The hells we have lived through and live through still,

Have sharpened our senses and toughened our will.

The night has been long.

…………..

The ancestors remind us, despite the history of pain

We are a going-on people who will rise again.

And still we rise. 

Maya Angelou

Over the last year our society has been gripped by a resurgent enthusiasm of a radical student generation that have demanded the end to “business as usual” as a response to the growing inequality of our society and especially its manifestation in our institutions of higher learning.

Recognising their limited options to influence the growing middle class acceptance of the neoliberal status quo, while being intensely aware of the history and potential of student movements to catalyse social and political transformation, they instinctively realised that they were facing a monolithic conglomeration of interests that would not be easily moved.

The sheer intransigence of the institutional guardians, the complete dismissal of student`s demands by the Minister of Higher Education and the radical exuberance of a student cohort that have become uniquely aware of their colonised status, set the tone for what would be a consistent disruption of the status quo.

That many have called this a crises, is indicative of the critical nature and disruption of the status quo, but what many commentators have failed to articulate is that the disruptions are not merely an explosion of violent responses that needs to be condemned on the basis of some false notion of a disagreement on strategy.  Instead, the fact that this crises is the visible manifestation of a deeper misalignment of values and experience, which cannot be wished away by a change of strategy or be quelled by superior force, must be firmly placed at the head of this debate .

In other words, our society is in the midst of a social crises that cannot be overcome by sheer force, instead it requires a realignment of experience and values. Or rather a radical overhaul of the socio and economic conditions which underpin the inequality of society.

This societal crises cannot neatly be defined as merely a call for “ free and decolonized education”.  Instead this should be a clarion call to ,not only the governing authority, but also to all social formations and society in general, that the  “business as usual” neo liberal mantra does not offer a sustainable or even acceptable way forward.

The cries of condemnation of the student strategies of disruption emanating from those who feign progressive credentials and who are ostensibly the elders of society, especially those who are engaged in the academic field and who are deeply immersed in the structures of misalignment, are counter-intuitively providing ahistorical and reactionary moral cover to intransigent authorities who continue to ignore the social crises brought to the fore by the student movements.

Why is such moral cover ahistorical and reactionary you might ask. In terms of a historical perspective, we see that the history of human society is one of continuous struggle between contending forces in society. Most often this history has been between an oppressing class and an oppressed class. If one were not inclined towards a class perspective then one could argue that there has always been a tension between those who govern and those who are governed. To deny such historical lessons is itself an anti-intellectual act which in an academic setting should be unconscionable.

As Theda Skocpol, an American sociologist, political scientist and author who lecture`s at Harvard University, made explicit, social revolutions are often characterised by the type of misalignment between values and experience outlined above and is almost always preceded by the type of intransigence or unwillingness to recognise the misalignment by the governing authority. This is true from as far back as the French revolution and experienced throughout modern history.

A failure to recognise this misalignment and a failure to squarely and unequivocally place the responsibility for socially and economically addressing the misalignment at the door of the governing authority not only provides the governing authority with a false sense of moral rectitude but also bolsters its intransigence and predilection for using force to resolve a social and economic crises.

The difficulty that false moralistic condemnation of the students engender, is that it renders the underlying reality of misalignment and the violence of structural inequality invisible so that there exists the potential for those who are the misaligned and are the silent victims of structural inequality, to become either disillusioned with the status quo or they become sufficiently disoriented by the misalignment and structural violence that they are attracted to increasingly radical and violent alternatives.

Ironically, those who prefer then to have immediate peace in order to proceed with business as usual inadvertently lay the seed for deeper and more intractable struggles that render them vulnerable to demagogic calls to greater anarchy and violence.

The lack of broader social support to the student struggle, not least the lack of active “bodies on the line” type of support from academic staff and the infernal silence, never mind solidarity action, of working class movements has been a cause for great concern.

Not only does this isolation of the student movement render them vulnerable to sadistic state violence but it also allows a demagogic element to gain in prominence and allows the morally just objectives of the students to be corralled into a more reactionary ideological cul-de-sac.

The student movement has highlighted, among many other lessons, at least two salient points which we would do well to keep in mind.

The first is that any society that fails to honestly deal with the difficult questions posed by its young people, whether through the cowardice of its beneficiaries or through the implicit protection of special interests, will have to eventually confront the full reality of its failures sooner or later. The violence and destruction that accompanies such a confrontation, cannot be narrowly and uncritically be placed at the door of the misaligned victims of our society`s structural inequality, but should rather be placed squarely on the shoulders of the authority which holds the power to drive social and economic change. It is the governing authority that is vested by our constitution with the mandate to correct the misalignment and to limit or overcome the structural inequality implicit in the students demands. 

The second is the particularly bitter realisation that the South African progressive project, specifically any project that holds at its core the advancement of a working class movement that places working people and their interest at its centre, has yet to materialise in South Africa.  Despite the long and proud history of radical workers organisations in South Africa, the current dispensation has rendered any semblance of a working class movement moribund.  If this were not the case then the students would not have had to face the might of the neoliberal state on its own. Such a movement would have mobilised workers and working classes in defense of the working class demand for substantive equality.

Both these realisations thus point to an increasingly dystopian future in which the fragmentation of the working classes and the defeat of the left leave only demagogues in their place.

But all is not lost, for as Maya Angelou so eloquently points out  and as the students has so bravely reminded us, that even though the “night has been long…we are a going-on people who will rise again. And still we rise.”