CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 9: SUMMARY, DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
9.4 YOUTH AND THE FUTURE OF PROTESTS
We need an alternative, we will see where we are going, we can achieve what we want.
But at the moment it is dark. We can fight this poverty, if we can come together and come with an alternative. This is the way that can take us to socialism. As things stand nothing will come right.GO
The darkness referred to represents the eclipse of a vision of solutions. During the difficult days of apartheid, it was imagination of a different world that gave hope, courage and direction to the millions and millions who were turning to collective action as a solution to their problems.
Movement intellectuals are crucial in developing, elaborating and promoting an alternative vision. However, despite their efforts, it will probably take time and effort for the working class to come to terms with its situation in post-apartheid society, to find its bearings and regain its confidence as the class that produces the wealth and the houses that people need. It can be argued that only a vision of solutions can facilitate the unity of people across townships, villages and provinces, employed and unemployed, workplace and community struggles. The working class has to be restored to the political centre, as arguably happened during the climax in the struggle against apartheid, to allow a radically different way of solving problems can emerge.
Its intellectuals and leaders have to focus the movement on rebuilding solidarity, compassion and working class alternatives to neoliberalism.
consequences for future struggles. Youth constitute the largest age group in the country (Statistics South Africa, 2007). While the youth's lack of experience is a challenge, the capacity of the youth to learn is an asset, as demonstrated by the young Balfour leaders who, in my opinion, exhibited rapid development of their political ideas in a short space of time. During the anti-apartheid days the growing power of the working class movement was able to provide the necessary support and guidance to the militant township youth on the basis of the ideal of working class leadership. Youth were viewed as "workers of tomorrow".
The power of the youth should not be underestimated. A defining moment during the anti- apartheid struggle was the 1976 student uprising (Hirson, 1979). Recently, the Mahgreb revolutions have also largely relied on youth militancy (Petras, 2011L as has the anti- globalisation movement, and the anti-austerity protests in some European Union countries recently. However, a Marxist approach cautions against the substitution of youth for the working class because it is the class rather than the transient and even unstable social stratum called youth that can lead and consummate the progressive restructuring of society (Grossman, 1985). Youth provide an important barometer to what is happening in the working class and it can be the spark that lights the conflagration of working class mass mobilisation, and serve as its shock troops. Youth participation in the struggle also provides the movement's future leaders.
Protests will probably grow rather than diminish in the future because market orthodoxy will continue to fail in overcoming the legacy of uneven and combined development left by apartheid. How this militancy is harnessed, developed and crafted into an effective force for progressive social change is an important question. The future of the working class and indeed of humanity is at stake given capitalism's destructive and unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources (Cock, 2007; Kovel, 2007; Meszaros, 1995).
The restless and incessant search by the working class for collective organisation and action will still continue even if working class leadership is unable to rise up to the challenge and develop a viable counter-hegemonic project supported by the majority. The search may then take wrong
violence between worker and worker, and the containment and normalisation of protests by the powers that be. A rise in state repression cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, a skillful and visionary working class leadership can guide the search towards the development of progressive alternatives by a movement strong enough to challenge and overturn capital's power. This would give content and make the slogan "Another world is possible" a reality.
9.S SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES AND THE PEDAGOGY OF COUNTER-HEGEMONY
Socialisation, experience, organisation, leadership and propitious circumstances playa role in determining whether workers can be the best that they can be, or the worst that the system makes them to be. Gramsci (1988) argued for and sacrificed his life building a revolutionary working class party whose role was to educate, cajole and lead the working class into fulfilling its historical mission. Pedagogy was seen as essential in building counter-hegemony. Workers and society had to be systematically persuaded to see things from the point of view of
revolutionary socialism. I have argued that earlier that the protest leaders interviewed qualify to be called the organic intellectuals to whom Gramsci allocated the task of carrying out this pedagogy of revolution. Youth leaders in Balfour indicated their hunger for knowledge that could help take forward the struggle. For Gramsci, education and organisation building
constituted the preparatory stage - the war of position - in a strategy that would culminate in a direct assault on capitalist power (ibid).
Marxists in the 21st century carry the burden of the failures of the 20th century socialist experiment. Capitalist triumphalism thrived on these failures making it more difficult to develop a credible and persuasive argument against itself and for socialism. But the problems of capitalism for the working class and for humanity multiply as seen, for example, in the latest global economic meltdown, the resultant crises in European countries, the revolutionary upheavals in the Middle East, etc. Despite the heavy price the socialist movement is paying for the failures of Stalinist-inspired socialism, lessons can be drawn and the struggle for a new kind of socialism can begin. From this point of view, the protest movement in post-apartheid society requires and inspires the construction of alternatives to neoliberalism.