INTRODUCTION

Most analyses of #FeesMustFall (#FMF) place it in the realm of post-class politics. As is commonly asserted, it was a movement about student identities, inter-generational politics and the return of black consciousness. Yet a class lens reveals a mass politics deeply implicated in class formation. An aspirant middle class wanting meritocratic class mobility is also involved in a complicated relationship with a black working class in precarious, outsourced work. The working class part of the relationship is a fraction of the working class as a whole, constituted from structural changes due to neoliberalisation – particularly the increasing fragmentation and segmentation of the neoliberalised university labour market into core and noncore functions as part of cost reduction. At the same time, though, this working-class fraction is being remade in class terms through defensive struggles, recognition struggles and struggles aimed at reversing structural exclusion.

The dialectic of structure and the agency of outsourced university workers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) will be explored in this chapter in relation to #FMF. A starting point for this exploration is the location of #FMF within a broader cycle of mass politics in the post-apartheid period to highlight the distinctiveness of its politics – this enables an investigation of the central questions in this chapter. Did outsourced workers have agency or were they merely liberated by students? Was Fallism the ideological lodestar of outsourced workers or was there a pre-existing anti-neoliberal politics among outsourced workers? How was solidarity constituted between aspirant middleclass students, workers and academics in the university space? Ultimately, how did working-class interests register in #FMF? These questions lead to an interrogation of the challenges facing #OutsourcingMustEnd/#OutsourcingMustFall.

#FEESMUSTFALL AND THE SECOND CYCLE OF POST-APARTHEID MASS RESISTANCE

During the anti-apartheid struggle, national liberation politics was mass politics, grounded in building class and national popular alliances as a basis of a national liberation bloc. A reading of the strategy and tactics documents of the African National Congress (ANC) confirms the centrality of class agency, particularly that of the working class, while affirming the importance of nonracial unity. The material foundations for this, at least in the 1980s, were mass movements such as trade unions, civic organisations, youth organisations and student organisations.