<http://www.sacp.org.za/pubs/acommunist/2016/issue191.pdf> AC.jpg African Communist | March 2016 (Extract from the Political Report to the Central Committee) People's education for people's power The ANC's 8 January 2016 statement appropriately names this year as the year of advancing people's power. This call is most appropri-ate, especially in light of the student struggles in higher education, worsening social distress in working class communities, as well as the local government elections. Indeed the many challenges we face call for the mobilisation of people's power, with the working class at the centre. It is therefore important for the SACP and the working class as a whole to ensure that this does not become just a slogan, but a reality. In fact the very corporate capture that we spoke about earlier can only truly be reversed and defeated through the mobilisation of peo-ple's power. In our analyses of the student struggles at our last Central Commit-tee in 2015 we noted a number of positive aspects of the #Feesmus-tfall campaign, among which was their potential to politicise many students for the first time in their lives, as well as putting pressure on our movement to implement its own resolutions. However there are many negative aspects and other lessons to be learnt out of these struggles. While internet based mobilisation is a very powerful organisational weapon, the internet cannot provide leadership to such mass struggles as shown by the collapse and defeat of a number of promising Arab Spring struggles in North Africa and the Middle East. A hugely negative outcome of these 2015 university struggles is that of the resurgence of Black Consciousness and PAC-type think-ing. Indeed, like in all racially dominated societies (both politically under apartheid, and economically in the past 21 years) black consciousness thinking tends to attract a lot of young people both from poor and from lower middle class families. The concept of "decolo-nisation" emanates from these realities and needs to be subjected to critique. The post-1976 student struggles quickly overcame Black Con-sciousness discourses mainly because of systematic interventions by the Congress movement, as well as through the formation of Con-gress-aligned movements in the 1980s. An important ideological role and intervention in this regard was that of the working class, through the fledgling progressive trade union movement in the 1980s and the all-important worker-student alliances forged on campuses, as well as the ideological role of the SACP underground. The 2015 student struggles have taken place against the back-ground of a weakened ANC-SACP presence on our campuses, as well as the absence of the concrete articulation of the perspectives of our movement on education, especially the concept of "people's educa-tion for people's power" in the current conditions. The participation and support given to the student struggles by some of our own ANC comrades have more been about advancing their narrow factionalist interests to attack the SACP and the work-ing class rather than principled support for genuine student struggles and the transformation of higher education. Therefore there has been very little theoretical and strategic guid-ance given to our student formations along the lines of our strategic perspectives of people's education for people's power in the contem-porary struggles. It is absolutely essential for the SACP to play a leading role in the concrete elaboration of our perspectives in order to guide these strug-gles ideologically along the lines of driving a second more radical phase of our transition, with the broader perspectives of the national democratic revolution. It is also absolutely imperative that we strengthen YCL structures on our university and college campuses as well as building strong SACP structures in these campuses. It is important also for the SACP to invite Sasco's leadership and cadres to its joint political schools, especially those with the National Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) and the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (Sadtu). Download the African Communist, Issue 191, March 2016, at: http://www.sacp.org.za/pubs/acommunist/2016/issue191.pdf -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. 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