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| John Holloway |
Lineages
of freedom. I love the title of the colloquium, with its suggestion
of a discontinuous continuity between past and present. It makes me
think of Bob Marley: These songs of freedom, redemption songs,
redemption songs.
That’s
what it’s all about, isn’t it? Redemption. It’s the word that
keeps on coming back to me in South Africa. I know that there are
people in the room who were imprisoned and tortured in the struggle
for a better world. I am sure that many of you will have known people
who gave their lives in that struggle. And there must be a sense that
this is not what you fought for, that this is not what you dreamed
of. There have been great changes, of course, fundamental changes,
but I cannot believe that in the world you dreamt of, there would be
so much poverty beside so much wealth. I cannot believe that your
ambition for South Africa was that it would win first prize as being
the most unequal society in the world. I cannot believe that Marikana
was part of your dreams. There have been fundamental changes, but the
pain of capital is still there, the pain of a form of social
organisation that quite literally tears up the earth and destroys the
humans, animals and plants that live on it.
Songs
of freedom, redemption songs. Redemption, because it is not enough to
remember, we must redeem that memory. We do no honour to the dead by
building them monuments. We honour them by picking up the dreams that
they left lying on the ground and making them ours. It is just not
good enough to proclaim a brave new world in which the young will
rule, uncluttered by the struggles of the past. It is not good enough
because there is something unfinished on the table. The dead, our
dead, must be buried with dignity. Their struggles must be redeemed.
It
is not the dead past that must bury its dead in this case because the
past is so frighteningly alive. Formally, apartheid is gone, but you
just need to go out the door and walk down the street and then up the
hill to see how alive it is, not an apartheid dictated by law, but an
apartheid dictated by money, an apartheid not just of colour, but
very palpably of class. The pain of money is still there, the pain of
capital.
Redemption
songs, but how do we sing those redemption songs? How do we redeem
the struggles of the past? Certainly not by being realistic, by
tweeking policies here and there or voting for DA instead of the ANC,
because realism inevitably pulls us in to the labyrinths of the real
world we are fighting against. We redeem the struggles of the past
not by making them more moderate but by pushing them farther, by
turning them not just against the government, but against the state
as a form of organisation, not just against the multinational
corporations but against capital as a social relation, as a way of
doing things. We sing redemption songs by walking in the wrong
direction, wherever and however we can.
That
is surely what we are doing today: walking in the wrong direction. In
the face of a massive tide that would wash the whole of higher
education into the search for more efficient ways of serving the rule
of money, we are saying that No, that is not what education is about.
Education is about retracing the lineages of freedom, redeeming the
struggles of the past. A hopeless task, of course, were it not for
the fact that we are not alone. There is a surge of discontent
throughout the world, a surge of ¡Ya basta!, Enough! Sekwanele!, a
surge of We cannot go on the way we are going, an African spring that
is a world spring, of which we today are part.
Lineages
of freedom, redemption songs.
