Bond Patrick

#FeesMustFall, the student revolt that began in October 2015, was an uprising against lack of access to, and financial exclusion from, higher education in South Africa. More broadly, it radically questioned the socio-political dispensation resulting from the 1994 social pact between big business, the ruling elite and the liberation movement. The 2015 revolt links to national and international youth struggles of the recent past and is informed by Black Consciousness politics and social movements of the international Left. Yet, its objectives are more complex than those of earlier struggles. The student movement has challenged the hierarchical, top-down leadership system of university management and it’s `double speak’ of professing to act in workers’ and students’ interests yet enforce a regressive system for control and governance. University managements, while one one level amenable to change, have also co-opted students into their ranks to create co-responsibility for the highly bureaucratised university fi nancial aid that stand in the way of their social revolution. This book maps the contours of student discontent a year after the start of the #FeesMustFall revolt. Student voices dissect coloniality, improper compromises by the founders of democratic South Africa, feminism, worker rights and meaningful education. In-depth assessments by prominent scholars refl ect on the complexities of student activism, its impact on national and university governance, and offer provocative analyses of the power of the revolt.

Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels is heating our planet at a pace and scale never before experienced. Extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels and accelerating feedback loops are a commonplace feature of our lives. The number of environmental refugees is increasing and several island states and low-lying countries are becoming vulnerable. Corporate-induced climate change has set us on an ecocidal path of species extinction. Governments and their international platforms such as the Paris Climate Agreement deliver too little, too late. Most states, including South Africa, continue on their carbon-intensive energy paths, with devastating results. Political leaders across the world are failing to provide systemic solutions to the climate crisis. This is the context in which we must ask ourselves: how can people and class agency change this destructive course of history? Volume three in the Democratic Marxism series, The Climate Crisis investigates ecosocialist alternatives that are emerging. It presents the thinking of leading climate justice activists, campaigners and social movements advancing systemic alternatives and developing bottom-up, just transitions to sustain life. Through a combination of theoretical and empirical work, the authors collectively examine the challenges and opportunities inherent in the current moment. This volume builds on the class-struggle focus of Volume 2 by placing ecological issues at the center of democratic Marxism. Most importantly, it explores ways to renew historical socialism with democratic, ecosocialist alternatives to meet current challenges in South Africa and the world.

This is the first publication in the Democratic Marxism Series, which seeks to elaborate the social theorising and politics of Democratic Marxism. Marx’s writings on and ideas about social transformation have figured prominently in the global Left imagination for more than 150 years. At the end of the twentieth century a number of factors seemed to converge to mark the end of Marxism’s influence on the world and, as a result, by the late twentieth century the relevance of Marxism was under question by both the Left (including Marxists) and Right. The decline was relatively short-lived, however, as the 2008 economic crisis brought into sharp relief the catastrophic effects of financialised capitalism and the need to (re)find alternatives. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the revival of Marxism is finding new sources of inspiration that revolve around four primary factors: the importance of democracy for an emancipatory project; the ecological limits of capitalism; the crisis of global capitalism; and learning lessons from the failures of Marxist-inspired experiments. This is not simply a return to nineteenth and twentieth century understandings of Marxism. Rather, the twenty-first century has seen enormous creativity from movements that seek to overcome the weaknesses of the past by forging fundamentally new approaches to politics that draw inspiration from Marxism along with many other anti-capitalist traditions such as feminism, ecology, anarchism and indigenous traditions. The Marxism of many of these movements is not dogmatic or prescriptive, but rather open, searching, dialectical, humanist, utopian and inspirational. This edited volume introduces some contemporary approaches to Marxism and explores some of the ways in which Marxism has been used in Africa.