SHERI HAMILTON

17. PEDAGOGY OF STRUGGLE

#OutsourcingMustFall

INTRODUCTION

In October 2015, 10000 university students gathered at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, to demand the scrapping of proposed fee increases and the insourcing of workers. #FeesMustFall (FMF), the banner adopted, unified protests initially directed against apartheid-like practices such as language policies and colonial symbols at historically white universities. At its height, FMF demonstrated the potential to unite the decade-long, often militant but uncoordinated student protests against academic and financial exclusions mainly at historically black universities. It was the FMF’s economic demands – no fee increases – that enabled it to grow into a national movement that forced the government to concede. This demand united the majority of students – the poorest, the ‘missing middle’1 – and attracted the sympathies of wealthier students. FMF not only temporarily halted fee increases, but secured in-principle agreements to scrap the outsourcing of workers at some historically white universities – a practice that was embedded in the restructuring of higher education rooted in the neoliberal economic policy, Growth Employment and Redistribution, adopted in 1996 by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government. As fresh protests broke out a year later following the announcement of fee increases that will be capped at eight per cent for the 2017 academic year, the threat to student unity is posed by differentially applied increases. Students are demanding free education while government has exempted poor students who are recipients of its loan scheme, excluding the ‘missing middle’ for whose funding government is appealing to the private sector. Having learned the lessons of FMF in 2015, the government appears to be much more prepared for a prolonged struggle which, at the time of writing, had resulted in the shutdown of a number of institutions. Whether the students have learned the lessons of the 2015 FMF struggle to not only build and sustain their unity but to draw upon the support of wider layers of workers will become clearer in the next period. The main aim of this chapter is to demonstrate through the example of a campaign among outsourced workers, mostly not organised under unions, the educational potential and willingness of workers to struggle against exploitation and social

A. von Kotze & S. Walters (Eds.), Forging Solidarity, 181–192. © 2017 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access s. hAMILTON injustice when there is effective political influence and leadership. I argue, firstly, that the form of solidarity which existed between workers and students during FMF was an expression of ‘class’ solidarity and provided a firm basis upon which to cut across divisions that later emerged among students. Secondly, I argue that a key aspect of building ‘class’ solidarity is to re-establish the authenticity of the ‘traditional forms of knowledge’ of the working class (Sawchuk, 2007), the core ideas of which are based on Marxism, representing the generalised experience of this class (Arendse, 2016). Thirdly, I argue that the role of the revolutionary party is key in (re)building and revitalising working-class organisations (trade unions, social democratic, communist and labour parties) – eviscerated, as argued by Peter Sawchuk (2007), by the consequences of neoliberalism. I maintain that these eviscerations are compounded by the crisis in the leadership of the working class following the dismantling of the former Soviet Union. In South Africa, this crisis was reflected in the expulsion in December 2015 of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA),2 the largest affiliate of the main trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and in the factional battles among its alliance partners, the ruling ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and its affiliated student structures in the Progress Youth Alliance. I draw upon John Holst (1999) and Bob Boughton (2013, p. 241) to argue that popular education, conceived of in terms of its appreciation for the influence of ‘organised and disciplined political leadership’ offered by ‘Marxist revolutionary parties’, has a key role to play in building organisations capable of waging an effective struggle to end oppression and exploitation. I further draw on the ideas of Sawchuck (2007) and Linda Cooper (2005, p. 67) about working-class organisations as ‘tools of mediation’ in developing consciousness through struggle to explore these questions through the experiences of the #OutsourcingMustFall (OMF) campaign.3 The OMF campaign was initiated after the FMF movement had ebbed in the wake of the zero per cent fee increase victory in 2015 and the onset of end-of-year examinations. OMF focused on those institutions where there were no insourcing agreements, targeting three provinces: Gauteng, Free State and Western Cape. Interviews with five activists from the Workers’ and Socialist Party (WASP)4 and its affiliate, the Socialist Youth Movement (SYM), were selected for their key roles in the campaign and to distil a student, union and party perspective. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the campaign in Tshwane where university workers went on strike, drawing in others like City of Tshwane workers.

Background According to J. Pendlebury and L. van der Walt (Dumba, 2014), the government’s neoliberal policies were justified as necessary for deracialising and transforming higher education and for integrating it into the international community. In reality, the previously racially divided institutions were subjected to government subsidy

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Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access PEDAGOGY of struggle cuts. Salim Vally (2016) shows how higher education state funding declined in real terms from 49 per cent in 2000 to 40 per cent in 2012. These income losses occurred as headcount enrolment increased by over 20 per cent between 2005 and 2010 (Hamilton, 2013). University measures to compensate for the loss in income included increasing student fees by 7 per cent between 2005 and 2012 (Vally, 2016), freezing permanent academic posts, employing temporary staff and outsourcing cleaning, retail, security and gardening services – in effect retrenching the permanently employed workers who had provided these services in-house (Hamilton, 2013). Noreen Dumba (2014), citing L. Ellram and C. Billington (2001), defines ‘outsourcing’ as the transfer of the production of goods and/or services performed internally to an external party. She explains that outsourcing is extolled as ‘cost effective, efficient, productive and strategic’ (Dumba, 2014, p. 9). But she shows through a cost accounting analysis based on the experience of the University of the Witwatersrand that it results in increased ‘transaction costs’. These costs are attributed to factors such as cost creep from an increase in complaints and worker unrest, the loss of coordination efficiency and of tacit skills and organisational memory (Adler et al., 2000, in Dumba, 2014). Dumba shows further how these different elements combine to achieve the opposite of the organisational efficiencies claimed to justify outsourcing. Since its inception, workers resisted outsourcing because of the poor working conditions and wages offered by outsourcing companies. During the student protests, FMF provided a national profile for the struggle for insourcing by incorporating it into their demands against fee hikes. FMF was therefore able to achieve what powerful organisations like trade unions had been unable to. This was despite the passing of legislation in early 2015 effectively banning ‘labour broking’,5 of which outsourcing is a form, and the passing of union resolutions routinely denouncing labour broking and precarious work as ‘wage slavery’. But apart from the education workshops of non-governmental organisations such as the Johannesburg-based Casual Workers’ Advice Office on the new labour law amendments, there was no effective national mobilisation to make workers aware of their new rights or, indeed, to wage a struggle to demand insourcing until the FMF protests. Outsourcing is rooted in attempts to reverse the fall in profits after the post-war boom, the effects of which began to appear after the oil crisis in the 1970s. This resulted in what Christine Bischoff (2015) describes as the decline in industrial production and employment in manufacturing, which was accompanied by an increase in employment in the service and public sectors. Bischoff explains how the new global division of labour undermined the traditional labour strategy of organising along industrial lines because global companies deliberately shift production and manufacturing to contract manufacturers through outsourcing (Bischoff, 2015). These developments have given birth to the ‘precariat’, Guy Standing’s (2011) reference to workers in insecure, poorly paid jobs across all sectors. Multinational companies such as Fidelity Security, GQ4S, Bidvest (formerly Prestige) and Servest found on university campuses have been subcontracted to provide services

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Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access s. hAMILTON previously provided by permanently employed workers. Often the same workers are re-employed by the outsourcing companies without the benefits they previously enjoyed, which not only means a loss of security of employment, medical aid and decent wages, but also that their children will no longer enjoy subsidised or fee-free education. According to Bischoff (2015), high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment resulting from the erosion of the post-apartheid industrial relations framework, is one of the causes of the organisational weakening of Cosatu. This has been aggravated by its failure to organise precarious workers in labour broking and other forms of temporary employment services. I propose further that a major factor precipitating the crisis in Cosatu was the impact of the Marikana massacre on the consciousness of mineworkers and the wider working class. Having lost confidence in the Cosatu- affiliated National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), whom they accused of colluding with management, mineworkers organised themselves into independent strike committees based on individual shafts6 during their 2012 strike across South Africa’s platinum belt. These workers later joined the small NUM rival, the Amalgamated Mining and Construction Workers Union, swelling its numbers to become one of the country’s largest trade unions. The disillusionment in the NUM was reinforced and extended to COSATU, the SACP and the ANC – all of which had condemned the strike – and marked a turning point in working-class consciousness. As a result, significant numbers of workers began to break out of the political prison of the Tripartite Alliance7 led by a party responsible for the policies that lie at the root of the immiseration of South Africa’s working class. I maintain that a key task in the period ahead is the rebuilding and revitalisation of its organisations with the knowledge and ideas of the working class in order to advance the struggle against exploitation and oppression and for the socialist transformation of society.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The adoption of neoliberal economic policies internationally accelerated after the break-up of the Soviet Union, whose very existence, despite the deformed character of its ‘socialism’, was living confirmation that a non-capitalist society was possible. However, with capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, the idea that a society other than capitalism was possible was undermined. ‘Capitalism was able to appropriate for itself new freedoms to detach itself from social provision, to move, to contract, and to freely trade across the planet’ (Sawchuk, 2007, p. 201). As Holst (2009, p. 17) suggests, ‘the polarisation and accompanying institutional crises brought on by major socio-political and economic changes impacts the apparatuses of the left as well’. This is expressed by the leadership of many working-class organisations rejecting an alternative, socialist vision of society, which has ‘allowed the ruling class to conduct a massive propaganda campaign extolling the virtues of the market system over “discredited socialism”’ (Taaffe, 2015, p. 27). This development ‘represents a major

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Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access PEDAGOGY of struggle ideological and political defeat for the working class that has led to throwing back its consciousness internationally’ (2015, p. 27). Sawchuk (2007) explains the ‘evisceration’ of working-class communities under the impact of neoliberalism as stemming from the loss of the conditions through which workers’ ‘traditional knowledge’ is created. He cites as examples of this evisceration ‘new levels of economic isolation, social fragmentation and a diverse working class majority’ resulting in the ‘loss of the “hidden knowledge” abundant during the “golden era” of the post Second World War period’ (Sawchuk, 2007, p. 200). The ideas upon which this knowledge was based have been replaced by the philosophical underpinnings of neoliberalism – postmodernism, with its embrace of multiple subjectivities, difference and fragmentation, of which identity politics and varieties thereof are a form, and which has become widespread on many university campuses, including in South Africa. In this context, the centrality of class is not recognised and is seen as outdated (Hamilton, 2016). However, as Leon Trotsky (1932, p. 651) explained in his epic History of the Russian Revolution, just as ‘nationalism was only the outer shell of an immature Bolshevism’, so also are many of the dominant ideas among students. For Sawchuck (2007), working-class organisations serve as repositories of the collective memory of the working class, especially of its traditional forms of knowledge. A core component of this knowledge is based on Marxism, a scientific approach used to analyse the objective processes in order to explain how society develops historically, is organised and in the process gives rise to class conflict and struggle (Arendse, 2016). This is what Marx meant in the Communist Manifesto when he said that ‘the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles’ (Marx & Engels, 1968, p. 35). The knowledge emerging from this experience is rooted in the contradiction between the role of workers as producers and as consumers. Workers are constantly confronted with the problem of having to struggle to either retain or advance the limited gains they are able to make through the share allocated to them from the surplus they produce. It is through this struggle that workers’ consciousness develops. However, David Livingstone and Sawchuk (2004) argue that participation in struggle – in the workplace, communities and campuses – is subject to limits and pressures that shape but do not determine the actual learning and its outcomes. What does determine their outcome is what George Novack (1972, p. 86) describes as the ‘stage of the development of historical conditions, the correlation of social forces and the extent of a person’s (collective, leadership, individual) precise connection with these at a given conjuncture’ – in other words, the extent to which ‘the guiding layers of a class’ (Trotsky, 1932, p. xvi) meet the requirements to execute a successful conclusion to that struggle. A key outcome of learning and struggle, therefore, is, as Anne Harley (2012) explains, that the working class becomes conscious of its own oppression and exploitation. While this process is both necessary and inevitable, she explains that Marx distinguished between the material transformation of the economic conditions

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Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access s. hAMILTON of production, ‘which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the ideological forms through which men become conscious of this conflict’ (Harley, 2012, p. 52, citing Marx). The revolutionary party has ‘a primary role’ (Holst, 2009, pp. 628–629) in contributing to building organisation from spontaneous struggles, unifying the working class which is fundamental in its embodiment of the revolutionary consciousness of the whole of the exploited classes. Therefore, the revolutionary party, as ‘the guiding layer’ of the working class, is, as Holst explains, the primary ‘tool of mediation’ which, along with trade unions and other organisations, contributes to developing class consciousness and shaping the direction of a successful outcome of that learning and consciousness. In fulfilling this role, working-class organisation has to be (re)built and, in the process, the authenticity of the ideas of Marxism, temporarily displaced during the ascendance of neoliberal ideology, re-established. Sawchuck (2007, p. 204) draws on the Marxist-inspired Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) to explain his use of the concept ‘tools of mediation’ as ‘the process through which people interact with the world to achieve outcomes through symbolic and or material tools or artefacts’. He explains that artefacts could refer to types of cognitive, emotional and/or material or institutional structures, rules, norms and conventions. Sawchuck’s (2007) CHAT analysis suggests that the contradictory way that artefacts of all kinds mediate our interaction with the world around us, is the glue that holds together the different dimensions of learning in the cognitive, emotional or socially established practices in the workplace or in working-class communities. Therefore, the loss or decline of these artefacts or tools of mediation in working-class communities undermines the basis for developing a working-class ‘habitus’ which supports an outlook on the world that can envision an alternative to capitalism. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1998) concept of ‘habitus’, employed by Sawchuck (2007), describes the cultural positions and dispositions that organise the ways in which individuals in social groups perceive and react to the world. According to Holst (2009, p. 631), Antonio Gramsci held that an essential characteristic and function of the revolutionary party as the primary ‘tool of mediation’ is education undertaken as part of a ‘collective, collaborative effort of explanation, persuasion and mutual education’. In my view, Cooper’s (2005, 2006) notion of boundary workers in a trade union context can be extended to the role played by party activists who traverse different communities of practice bringing important information which helps workers to re-contextualise and understand the significance of their experiences, while ordinary workers also share experiences and work collaboratively to construct common understandings. (Cooper, 2006, p. 11) In the OMF campaign, this role was played by WASP. My conceptual framework therefore draws upon popular education scholarship based on collective learning in struggle, including protests, strikes and other forms of mass action (Bleakney & Choudry, 2013; Cooper, 2005, 2006). In this conception,

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Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access PEDAGOGY of struggle there is no ‘ambivalence about the class character’ of the popular education that Boughton (2013, p. 242) explains is held by some of its popular education theorists. It is firmly located in the fourth quadrant of Astrid von Kotze, Shirley Walters and Thembi Luckett’s (2016, p. 108) compass of ‘popular education for radical transformation’, where ‘the ultimate goal is of conscientisation and action for radical transformation’. These authors distinguish three other quadrants of their compass as popular education for empowerment (where the response is to perceived needs or deficits); popular education for system change and issue-based popular education (instrumentalist or functionalist education for immediate action for particular change) (von Kotze, Walters, & Luckett, 2016). As these authors acknowledge, these quadrants overlap but it is their orientation towards reform or revolution which determines their direction on the compass.

THE #OUTSOURCINGMUSTFALL CAMPAIGN

Although some institutions yielded to the demands for insourcing during the FMF protests, many did not. Government undertakings to make up for some of the shortfalls did not compensate for the costs of insourcing. Where agreements were in place, task teams were established with representatives of workers, students and management to oversee the process of insourcing. As the full cost implications became apparent, there were attempts by management to renegotiate the terms and even to renege on the agreements. It was becoming clear that insourcing was not going to be achieved without a struggle.

Perspectives Guiding the Campaign One of the activists interviewed explained that a number of factors converged to facilitate the establishment of the OMF campaign. The first of these was the critical role of FMF in creating a national profile against outsourcing, inspiring the confidence of workers to engage in a struggle. Secondly, the passing of new labour legislation, which created the legal basis for effectively banning labour broking and outsourcing, opened up a second, legal front for a struggle against outsourcing. Thirdly, the opportunity presented itself when a group of outsourced workers in Tshwane/ Pretoria approached WASP for assistance in taking up their grievances with their employers. Fourthly, based on WASP’s perspectives, the local government elections and growing fears over its performance meant that government might be amenable to concessions which it would not otherwise make, given the dire economic situation.

Strategy and Tactics Sensing the mood of workers on campuses at the various institutions in the city, WASP activists produced a leaflet calling for a mass meeting to be held at Burger’s Park in the city centre of Tshwane on 9 November 2015. Workers were paid between

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R2 000 and R5 000 per month and had many grievances about their working conditions. The activists proposed that the demands be bold and inspirational and suggested a wage demand of R12 500 in an attempt to establish continuities between the demands of these workers and the miners of Marikana. But workers were sceptical of demanding what they considered to be such a high wage, and only after some debate and persuasion did they agree on three key demands: a R10 000 minimum wage; immediate insourcing; and, under the slogan ‘nothing for us without us’, direct representation in negotiations.

Building Organisation for the Campaign

A committee of workers established in the course of the campaign developed a memorandum of the newly agreed set of demands, which was sent to the management structures of Tshwane tertiary education institutions and government departments. Most of the government departments and institutions, except for Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), initially ignored the memorandum. However, their response was to refer the matter to the existing governance structures of the university as the duly authorised legitimate bodies. Management’s dismissive attitude angered the workers and put strike action on the agenda. Some workers wanted to go out on strike immediately but were cautioned by the activists against a strike that would be rendered ineffective by the approaching December holidays. The workers agreed to postpone the strike action until January 2016 when the universities reopened.

Popular Education in and through Struggle Rallies and meetings of workers were mass popular education events which took the form of speeches, discussions, singing and toyi-toying8 to raise the political consciousness of workers. Songs accompanying the toyi-toying reflected the workers’ demands but also their consciousness as a class of the oppressed in struggle against a class of oppressors. The discussions in mass meetings focused on explaining outsourcing, its link to privatisation and the economic policies of the government. Workers shared their experiences of poor working conditions and apartheid-style workplace regimes, such as being restricted in their use of amenities including free health clinics. These sessions inevitably led to questions about the role of workers in the production process and their exploitation through the capitalists’ appropriation of the surplus produced by workers. The alternative, socialism, was explained as a system that would use the surplus not for the profit of the individual capitalist but for the needs of the whole of society, democratically decided by workers.

The Strike as a Form of Learning in and through Struggle The practical work of preparing for the strike required that workers return to work to link with others within and across institutions and job categories of cleaners, caterers,

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Sheri Hamilton - 9789463009232 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 01:39:54PM via free access PEDAGOGY of struggle gardeners and security workers. At campus-wide workplace meetings, institutional representatives were elected based on the principle of the right of immediate recall to ensure only the committed would avail themselves for elections as representatives. Initially fluid, these structures had stabilised by 9 January, the date of the first meeting where workers resolved to strike the following Monday. It was a chaotic start to the strike on that day with some of the workers not yet fully confident ‘to raise their heads above the parapet’. Some simply did not know what to do, while others had heeded the call to down tools. Meanwhile, at the medical campus of the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University (formerly Medunsa), a group of National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) activists defected from their union to join the campaign. Some of these workers had a wealth of organising experience. By the second day of the strike it was on a much firmer footing with former NEHAWU members providing leadership in spreading and building the strike’s momentum. (Interviewee 1)

Victories of the Strike At the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University, management conceded almost immediately to all the workers’ demands. At the University of Pretoria, the centre of the strike, between 80 and 90 per cent of workers, including security workers, downed tools and the university was forced to close down after three days of strike action. Almost at the same time but involving more complicated negotiations, the University of South Africa (UNISA) and TUT put offers on the table. A dilemma presented itself once the four institutions had made their offers: how to sustain unity and support for the strike when management demanded workers return to work pending the implementation of in-principle agreements to insource and improve wages and conditions? It weakened the strike and at TUT there was a breakdown of trust between workers and management when it appeared that management was intent on reneging on the agreement. Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University conceded to a new minimum of R5 600 (from R2 500), a more than 100 per cent salary increase, free university education for workers’ children and free access for workers to health facilities at the clinic operated by the university. Management also agreed not to renew the contracts of outsourcing companies upon their expiry. The R10 000 wage demand was to be phased in over three years. At TUT, UNISA and the University of Pretoria, in-principle agreements have been struck with similar concessions as those made at Sefako Makgatho. Workers decided to call off the strike but to maintain the campaign to continue negotiations. At the time of writing, the campaign was continuing in what was proving to be a protracted struggle. Meanwhile, the process of organising organisational rights to join the General and Industrial Workers’ Union (GIWUSA) is under way, with hundreds of workers signing up to the join this independent union.

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LESSONS OF THE OMF CAMPAIGN

There are a number of lessons that can be drawn from the campaign. Firstly, a variety of popular education methods were employed throughout the campaign: in mass meetings; in reaching agreement on the demands to unite workers; developing slogans during protests, as well as what to include in leaflets distributed; mobilising support for and solidarity with workers across different institutions and campuses; negotiating with management and liaising with the media. The negotiation tactics in terms of what to concede and what to insist upon came from a political perspective that helped to anticipate the likely response from management. In the course of the struggle, under the guiding layer of activists from WASP and workers who emerged as leaders during the campaign, workers learned how to relate their socioeconomic conditions to the larger political and economic questions of the country, and internationally, and to their exploitation as a class. Secondly, the campaign has shown that unity in struggle among workers can overcome the potentially weakening effect of the precarious nature of work in the 21st century, which, at South African universities, is characterised by the dispersal of workers across different companies, institutions and departments, complicating the building of unity and forcing them to endure poor working conditions and pay. Evidence of workers’ growing confidence and, as a consequence, their developing class consciousness through struggle and learning facilitated by the political activists of WASP and SYM, was shown in their willingness ‘to raise their heads above the parapet’ as the strike unfolded. Thirdly, the experience of OMF shows that whereas the prior organisation of workers in trade unions is not necessarily a prerequisite of struggle and that victories can be claimed outside such structures, the necessity to defend and consolidate such victories allows workers to draw the conclusion that permanent representative structures are essential. The meaning of representative democracy was learned in struggle and will be an important resource in the efforts to contribute to the revitalisation and (re)building of the trade unions these workers have now joined. Finally, the dialectical interplay between the different forms of popular education – speeches in mass meetings, discussions in smaller worker committees and the learning in action during the strike itself – provided a steep learning curve for many of the workers who were entering into struggle for the first time. The four quadrants of popular education (von Kotze, Walters, & Luckett, 2016) were employed in the course of this struggle: in raising the workers’ confidence and through this achieving a sense of personal empowerment; in the campaign’s response to issues of ‘immediate need’ of improving wages and conditions; in forcing ‘system change’ by making insourcing a reality; and in developing political consciousness through learning and the experience of the strike itself. Through these processes, workers are beginning to (re)build the ‘tools of mediation’ with the knowledge and perspectives facilitated by the boundary workers in WASP and the OMF campaign.

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NOTES

1 The ‘missing middle’ refers to students who are ‘too rich’ to qualify for access to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme – a student loan facility – and too poor to afford university fees. These are mostly children of nurses, teachers, social workers and other low- to middle-ranking civil servants. 2 NUMSA was expelled following the adoption of a resolution at its 2012 Special National Congress not to campaign for the ANC in the 2014 national election, to withdraw its contributions from Cosatu and to lead the formation of a united front of workers, communities and youth, to build a movement for socialism and help establish a workers’ party. However, the official reason for its expulsion given by the federation was that NUMSA was flouting its ‘one union one industry’ policy through which unions are discouraged from organising across different sectors of the economy. 3 See http://workerssocialistparty.co.za/?s=outsourcing+is+falling&submit=Search (accessed December 2016). 4 WASP was formed following the Marikana massacre in December 2012 and was formally launched as a political party in March the following year. Its leading members were from the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), formerly the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC. 5 Section 198 of the Labour Relations Act (No. 66 of 1995) stipulates that workers employed for more than three months by the client of a Temporary Employment Service (TES) company (labour broking company) must be made permanent. The university, as the client of the TES company, must therefore employ workers on the same wages and conditions as their permanent counterparts doing the same work. 6 The predecessor of WASP, the DSM played a role in uniting the independent strike committees formed by workers who had rejected their own union, the NUM. 7 The ANC, COSATU and the SACP. 8 Toyi-toyi is a warlike dance accompanied by song that has become synonymous with struggle in South Africa and could be argued to form part of the educational repertoire of struggle.

REFERENCES

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Harley, A. (2012). ‘Unlearning’ hegemony: An exploration of the applicability of Alain Badiou’s theory of the event to informal learning through an examination of the life histories of South African social movement activists (PhD thesis). University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Holst, J. (1999). Affinities between Lenin and Gramsci: Implications for radical adult education theory and practice. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 18(5), 407–421. Holst, J. D. (2009). The revolutionary party in Gramsci’s pre-prison educational and political theory and practice. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41(6), 622–639. Livingston, D. W., & Sawchuck, P. H. (2004). Hidden knowledge: Organised labour in the information age. Toronto: Garamond Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1968). Manifesto of the communist party. In K. Marx & F. Engels (Eds.), Selected works (Vol. 1, pp. 35–62). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Novack, G. (1972). Understanding history: Marxist essays. New York, NY: Pathfinder Press. Sawchuk, P. H. (2007). Understanding diverse outcomes for working-class learning: Conceptualising class consciousness as knowledge activity. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 17(2), 199–216. Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Taaffe, P. (2015, September). Socialism: Past or future. Socialism today. Retrieved December, 2016, from http://www.socialismtoday.org/191/socialism.html Trotsky, L. (1932). History of the Russian revolution. London: Haymarket Books. Vally, S. (2016, September 8). Funding higher education. Presentation at the Social Justice, Learning and Teaching Seminar, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. von Kotze, A., Walters, S., & Luckett, T. (2016). Navigating our way: A compass for popular educators. Studies in Education of Adults, 48(1), 96–114.

INTERVIEWS

With appreciation and thanks to interviewees from OMF WASP, SYM and GIWUSA.

Sheri Hamilton Department of Education and Curriculum Studies University of Johannesburg

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