Unabstracting collective struggle
And rejecting the notion of the impossibility of solidarity
When we say our struggles are interconnected, it is not an abstract connection that is somehow destabilized by time and distance. We struggle and we struggle together. The first two pictures above here are from the University of the Western Cape in 2016, the second two, below, are from the same campus in 2010. The fight in the first two images are ultimately struggles against the consequences of liberal capitalist expansion, state violence, and racial capitalism , the exorbitant cost of education in South Africa combined with the low wages and abject poverty mostly black folk suffer under and the state’s response; Fees Must Fall, though at UWC they were dubbed Fees Will Fall. The second two images are from similar protests regarding the disbursement of funds allocated to students through the NSFAS funding scheme. Time and again, young people come to the fore and choose to oppose the structures of violence that have determined their place in the world, and time and again they have been met with the might of the state and capital's security forces.
We have a duty to each other, to care for the other and build solidarity is the surest strategy. As much as all “[t]he children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe”, as Baldwin says, we all also belong to one another. Our responsibility is a custodial one, not one of ownership and domination, it is simply one of caretaking for the brief time we are wandering this planet. State violence, state repression, the insistence on the securitization of public spaces, and especially of university spaces, is a violation of that ethic of care that has to be central in any politic we continue to make for ourselves and our people going forward.
Collective struggle and transnational liberation movement and solidarity building are the only ways to continue this work, as state desires for and monopolies on violence continues to grow, and with the further implementation of the death of public goods and commons everywhere, with respite only granted to those who can afford it, continuing down any path that abstracts collective and transnational movement making is wasting our time. As students in the US protest for Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide of Palestinians, as Sudanese and DRC solidarity movements slowly begin to emerge more consistently, we must remember that these fights have been going on in places across the planet for years already, but the effectiveness of the west, and especially the USA, is its capacity to produce propaganda at a scale we have never seen before. Now, our work is to link our movements across geographies, and our work is also always to resist the temptation to derail movement making for the sake of being the most correct or loudest and most virtuous voice in the room. Any dogma that says solidarity is not a possibility is an enemy of liberation, of poor people, of black folks the world over. Now we have work to continue, as the students at UWC did in 2010, and then again in 2016, and will have to continue to do until the effects of neoliberalism, imperialism, and capitalism have been dealt a violent, staggering, halting blow.
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