Within the bounds of the ordinary common sense of today\u00b4s market societies (\u201cwithin the box\u201d) Fees Must Fall poses problems with no solutions.\u00a0 Unfunded rights often do.<\/p>\n
Let us first consider the minds of people we will call the \u201cBad Guys.\u201d\u00a0 They are the cashiers and treasurers of the schools, and other school authorities who enforce the rule that students are not allowed in classrooms and cannot do academic work for credit unless they pay the fees.\u00a0 They also include President Ramaphosa and all the members of the legislative, judicial, and executive branch of the government who enforce the rule.\u00a0 Notice something about the list of bad guys: they enforce, support, and comply with a rule (or set of rules).\u00a0 Question:\u00a0 Who or what has power here?\u00a0 People or rules?\u00a0 Are the bad guys really bad, or are they just trapped in the box of bounded thinking?<\/p>\n
Let us imagine the bad guys talking to each other: \u201cWhere are we going to get the money to pay for educating everyone who wants it and needs it if they pay no fees?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The government is already getting deeper in debt every day, and even has had to borrow from the IMF which they hated having to do.\u00a0 The middle class is tired of being a minority that pays almost all the taxes except the VAT.\u00a0 The majority is too poor to pay taxes.\u00a0 The super wealthy are so powerful they can evade most taxes, and it ever came to a show-down between them and the government, the super-wealthy would win.\u00a0 The VAT is as high as it can go, considering that even the poor have to pay it.\u00a0 Are we going to gut the budgets of the great universities so that their quality sinks to so low a level that they can only be diploma mills that award useless pieces of paper?\u00a0 How can these militant young activists identify as the Nelson Mandelas and the Harriet Tubmans of the 21st<\/sup> century when what they demand cannot be funded, and the real-world result of their agitation will do more harm than good?<\/p>\n Now, consider the moral demands of the student activists.<\/p>\n If the Stork happens to deliver you to a poor township in South Africa, then for you unlike for children just like you except for the fact that the Stork delivered them to parents with money, \u00a0the main legitimate escape route leading out of poverty is education.\u00a0\u00a0 Some children see the light and hit the books, studying while many of their age-mates are having fun.\u00a0 The nerds look ahead and foresee that if they do not get a qualification that leads to a job, they are likely to end up standing around on street corners doing nothing, or making\u00a0\u00a0 the kinds of trouble that people who feel dissed tend to make to get respect.\u00a0 Much of their comparatively short life (compared to the life expectancy of a professional person with a steady job) will be spent hustling money honestly if possible, dishonestly if necessary.<\/p>\n The nerds hit the books to save themselves and to make their parents proud.\u00a0\u00a0 The parents and grandparents of studious young poor people usually back them up, going hungry themselves to buy school uniforms or books.\u00a0\u00a0 The old make their own hard lives even harder to build a better life for the young. \u00a0Then, finally, I, assuming I was an infant that the Stork dropped in a neighbourhood where every day was an unending struggle just to survive, who turned out to be studious and smart, pass the exams to get a secondary diploma.\u00a0 I get accepted in a tertiary course leading to a qualification.\u00a0 And then:\u00a0 THE FEES stand in my way.\u00a0 The Freedom Charter says I have a right to an education and an opportunity to earn enough money to live on.\u00a0 That was what the Freedom Struggle was all about.\u00a0 So does the Constitution of South Africa.\u00a0 So do the United Nations.\u00a0 When I see hundreds of expensive cars whizzing down the highways, I see with my own eyes that South Africa is not a poor country.\u00a0 When they tell me there is no money anywhere to fund my basic rights, I do not believe it!<\/p>\n As long as we remain within the box of the \u00a0\u00a0common sense and orthodox law and economics of modern societies, Fees Must Fall belongs in a category that Lewis Coser calls absolute conflict.\u00a0 \u00a0It is absolute because the parties share no common framework inside which they can reason together to negotiate a compromise.<\/p>\n The culprit is the concept of \u201crights.\u201d\u00a0 Its classic sources are the French Declaration des Droits de l\u00b4Homme et du Citoyen <\/em>of 1789 and the Bill of Rights appended to the United States Constitution in 1791.\u00a0 The first Bill of Rights ever was the British Bill of Rights of 1689.\u00a0 The idea of \u201crights\u201d in the beginning meant and for nearly three centuries continued to mean,<\/p>\n \u00a0setting in stone powers of the people, or certain people<\/u>, to enjoy autonomy and privileges that the government must respect and may not interfere with.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the early British Bill of Rights, the certain people favoured were Protestants, members of Parliament, church prelates, and freeholders, i.e. landowners. \u00a0(Regarding the French Declaration <\/em>see Thomas Piketty 2020; regarding the USA Charles Beard 1921.)<\/p>\n In 1948 the concept of rights took a left turn.\u00a0 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights <\/em>of that year, unanimously approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations, and ratified by the parliaments of most nations, majorly modifies the relation of rights to governments.\u00a0 Bills of rights in national constitutions written since 1948 are no longer just lists of what governments must not<\/em> do<\/em>.\u00a0 Now they include lists of what governments must do<\/em>.\u00a0 These provisions of the South African Constitution of 1996 are typical:<\/p>\n Section 26 Housing<\/strong><\/p>\n (1) Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing\u2026.<\/p>\n Section 27 Health care, food, water and social security<\/strong><\/p>\n (1) Everyone has the right to have access to<\/p>\n (a) health care services, including reproductive health care; Section 29 Education <\/strong><\/p>\n (1) Everyone has the right<\/p>\n (a) to a basic education, including adult basic education; and However, social rights guaranteed in a Constitution need to be funded if they are going to be real.\u00a0 At the same time, the post-1948 Constitutions grant social rights they make it almost impossible to fund them. \u00a0The new Constitutions add social rights to the protections of property rights, of individual freedom, and of commercial relationships freely determined by contracts, i.e. of markets \u2013but they make no effective provisions for modifying property rights to fund social rights.<\/p>\n Since the beginning of modernity, not just since 1948, governments have been organized to attract investment.\u00a0 Governments are legally organized, as Max Weber says, make business possible by making the consequences of economic decisions predictable.\u00a0\u00a0 This means that the property rights and contract rights of businesses must be defended, not diminished.<\/p>\n So where are the funds to fund university fees and other unfunded rights going to come from?\u00a0\u00a0 The same constitutions that guarantees social rights also guarantee that the principal wealth of the country will not be seized to fund them.\u00a0 Tax competition to attract globally mobile capital, not just neoliberal economics, guarantee that wealth will be taxed less, not more.<\/p>\n History has bequeathed us a dysfunctional system that does not work for anybody.\u00a0\u00a0 The system is driving us straight toward an ecological catastrophe that not one single human wants.\u00a0 The system is filling the streets of cities with people who are homeless or one pay check away from homeless, often humiliated, rejected, half-crazy and searching in trash cans for food \u2013and the miserable existence of every one of them is a threat, not a blessing, for those of us who have the privileges of sleeping in a clean bed and eating three good meals a day.\u00a0 History has bequeathed us endless wars, as well as the economic, political, and cultural dynamics that cause the wars.<\/p>\n Summary:\u00a0 Today the struggle is not us against them.\u00a0 It is all of us against history, it is against the box history put us in.<\/p>\n Now let us bring this discussion of world dynamics back to the question of what we do about Fees Must Fall, and other unfunded rights, here and now.\u00a0\u00a0 Let\u00b4s go back to the infant the Stork dropped in hell on earth, who twenty years later realized that the Constitution of South Africa promised her or him heaven on earth.\u00a0 And revolted.\u00a0 And make a few tentative suggestions.<\/p>\n First Tentative Suggestion:<\/em> \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0All of the deserving students who should have their fees paid so they can use the knowledge they will acquire \u00a0to contribute to society cannot be funded by government\u00b4s or by the universities\u00b4 own funds.\u00a0 If justice is to be done, private donors will have to have to listen to their consciences and open their pocketbooks and purses.<\/p>\n Second Tentative Suggestion:<\/em>\u00a0 The major problem to be solved is back in the townships where the majority still are.\u00a0 Justice for the few studious young people who managed to study their way to the point where now they are frustrated by high university fees is a comparatively small matter.<\/p>\n Third Tentative Suggestion:<\/em>\u00a0 Government alone cannot solve any of society\u00b4s main problems, even if by some miracle it were to become corrupt-free tomorrow.<\/p>\n Fourth Tentative Suggestion:<\/em>\u00a0 The basic principle of modern society, namely the principle that everybody is supposed to make a living selling something to get money, usually selling their labour, has got to go.\u00a0 We must go back to the older African and pre-modern principle that everybody who is born is a member of an extended family.\u00a0 Everybody should be loved, respected, and cared for because they are a person, not because they have labour to sell that some employer can make a profit by hiring.<\/p>\n Fifth Tentative Suggestion:<\/em>\u00a0 Intelligent machines will be the workers of the future.\u00a0 The question is:\u00a0 Who gets the benefit?\u00a0 Will the same financial elite that owns most intellectual property rights to advanced technology also buy up real estate and almost everything else worth owning (which is what is happening now, as Michael Hudson and others show in detail)?\u00a0 We are not going to save the world by flooding the labour market with unemployed graduates with advanced degrees.<\/p>\n Sixth Tentative Suggestion:<\/em>\u00a0 It is not enough to fight for justice.\u00a0 To achieve justice, we must think<\/em> for justice.\u00a0 When we\u00a0\u00a0 think for justice, we realize that the answers to many key questions are not known.\u00a0 The \u201cunbounded\u201d approach is to admit that we do not know the answers.\u00a0 If we sincerely work together aligning across sectors, share ideas, and are willing to give of our time and treasure, our chances of contributing to building a better world improve.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cFees must fall\u201d is a South African species of a genus found on every continent. The issue is the high price of tertiary education. It is a chant that is easy to repeat, a slogan easy to remember–and a moral demand that deserves to be taken seriously. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":75476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[258],"class_list":["post-184812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial","tag-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n(b) sufficient food and water; and
\n(c) social security, including, if they are unable to support themselves and their dependants, appropriate social assistance\u2026.<\/p>\n
\n(b) to further education, which the state, through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/howard-richards.jpg\")
<\/a><\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. He <\/em>is a philosopher\u00a0of social science who holds the title of Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Indiana.\u00a0 He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. His books include\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action, Letters from Quebec, Understanding the Global Economy, The Dilemmas of Social Democracies, Gandhi and the Future of Economics, Rethinking Thinking, Unbounded Organizing in Community,\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0 His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, <\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival is scheduled to be published in July of 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"