We republish below the statement we published on the tenth anniversary of the Youth Uprising of 1976. It is accompanied by an introduction to an analysis of the crisis facing youth and students today that will be followed by a programme, platform of demands and a programme of action to overcome the crisis in a later publication. Like workers, working class communities, and women, youth and students face a common crisis rooted in the crisis of capitalism. But in every theatre of struggle there is no unity within or across them.
That is the lesson of the struggle against apartheid. What began as separate struggles – women in 1956, workers in 1973, youth in 1976, and on the political plane against the apartheid regime’s renewed attempt to divide and rule to cut across the growing unity of the oppressed with the Tricameral Parliament in 1983/4 – converged into a unified movement against national oppression and capitalist exploitation in 1984-6. To unify each theatre of struggle, we need unity under a common programme. At the same time, we need unity in struggle across all theatres of struggle under a mass workers party on a socialist programme to abolish capitalism – the common root of the crisis in each theatre. The MWP believes that unity in struggle is paramount. Such unity must be based on a clear socialist programme. We offer the movement this introduction to a draft programme that we will circulate for discussion and debate to achieve unity in struggle.
Introduction
2026 will mark 60 years since the heroic youth uprising. The Soweto Uprising became a countrywide rebellion. Sparked by the forced imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools, it rapidly developed into a rebellion against the subjugation of the black majority. The class of 1976 demanded equality in education and liberation from national oppression.
It marked one of the critical milestones on the road to the ultimate defeat of apartheid. It earned the youth their own place in the working class’s march to liberation from national oppression. Their immediate inspiration was the revolt of the working class barely three years earlier. The 1973 Durban strikes demanding an end to exploitation in the workplace, for decent wages and trade union rights. But they also followed in the footsteps of the women mass protest at the Union Buildings in 1956, demanding an end to the pass laws.
The 1973 strikes brought to an end the aura of omnipotence of the apartheid regime that followed the imposition of the State of Emergency after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. It marked a decisive turning point in the struggle of the working class to change the balance of forces in the workplace. The working-class struggle against exploitation in the workplace in 1973, the youth against the racist Bantu Education system in 1976, moved onto the political plane with the launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983. The UDF was formed to oppose the toy telephone Tricameral Parliament. It was the apartheid regime’s attempt to arrest the unity of the black oppressed. It offered coloureds and Indians phony parliamentary representation to maintain the insult that black Africans were not citizens of SA but of bantustans.
The UDF inflicted a crushing defeat on the apartheid regime’s toy telephone Tricameral parliamentary elections in 1984. Of the registered voters, only 30% of coloureds and 20% of Indians voted. Even the US’s plaything, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 554 (1984) condemning the election, declaring it null and void as it was designed to entrench minority rule. The Apartheid regime’s humiliation was complete.
These successive revolts of 1973, 1976 and 1984 created the conditions for the convergence of the struggle of workers, youth and the explicitly political UDF campaign into a mass movement that reached insurrectionary proportions from 1984 to 1986. It culminated in the establishment of the Congress of SA Trade Unions in 1985 – the mightiest trade union formation in SA history. Launched in defiance of the partial state of emergency declared in May that year, the birth of Cosatu signified the impotence of the deployment of troops in the townships and the impotence of the apartheid regime’s method of kragdadigheid. The masses united, had set into motion the end of apartheid and the ushering of democracy in 1994.
This year marks a decade since the #Feesmustfall protests. That it was necessary for the students to embark on a protest to demand free education was a confirmation that the dreams of free education of 1976 had not been fulfilled and therefore a resumption of the struggle of 1976 is necessary. On his way out of the ANC and the country’s presidency, Zuma had tossed “free education” like a hand grenade into the ANC’s conference.
It has turned out that Zuma’s “free education” was no more than an improvised explosive device directed at his factional opponents in the ANC. Free education remains a mirage for the vast majority of working class students in particular. This has been underlined, on the tenth anniversary of #Feesmustfall, by the death of a student at Walter Sisulu University shot during protests against the lack of accommodation. The corruption-mired student accommodation crisis is in fact a form of denial of access to tertiary education. The lack of accommodation has now been added to the list of student grievances over more than thirty years of democracy of financial and academic exclusion, and National Student Financial Scheme (NSFAS) corruption.
The conquest of the right to vote was historic. But more than thirty years since the end of white minority rule, democracy has proven not to be the instrument it was seen to achieve the social aim of the liberation struggle – for jobs, housing, health, equality and free quality education universally accessible for all.
The crisis in education is rooted in and an expression of the overall crisis of post-apartheid society. It is the inevitable outcome of the strategic objective of Codesa (Convention for a Democratic SA) to dismantle apartheid but to preserve capitalism. Codesa transferred the political management of the economic dictatorship of the capitalist class from a government elected by the white minority to that elected by the majority on a non-racial basis. The inevitable result of the preservation of capitalism is the betrayal of the expectations of every single one of the constituencies that had played such a pivotal role in the defeat of apartheid and installing the ANC in power – women, youth and the working class as a whole.
South Africa is the most industrialised country in Africa and the second largest economy after Nigeria. Yet, as the World Bank reports, the number of people living below the poverty line has increased to the 30% in 2023 after falling initially. Despite a brief period of economic growth in the first few years after the advent of democracy, unemployment and poverty persisted. In fact, even in that period, inequality was deepened by the neo-liberal policy called Gear (Growth Employment and Redistribution) the ANC imposed on the country in 1996.
It was never going to be possible to eradicate inequalities under capitalism even if the ANC had not buried the Freedom Charter or abandoned the Reconstruction and Development Programme it briefly substituted. Both, however radical their socio-economic clauses, were firmly based on capitalism. Gear, however, accelerated the inequalities inherited from apartheid. It laid the foundations for SA to become the world’s most unequal society by the World Bank’s calculations.
The black (African, Coloured and Indian) majority remains overwhelmingly poor and unemployed. Although unemployment and poverty as well as inequality within the white population has increased, white households still earn nearly five times more than black African households, nearly three times that of coloureds and more than one-and-half times that of Indians.
The main difference is that the greatest inequality is no longer between white and black, but within the black populations. Post apartheid democratic SA has become an Irish coffee society, black at the bottom, white at the top with a sprinkling of chocolate floating above. These inequalities are expressed in social divisions throughout society in public services like health, housing and education.
The crisis facing the youth today
- After women, the youth carry the greatest burden of post-apartheid inequalities and social deprivation.
- Youth unemployment at 46% is the highest in the world
- According to StasSA’s 1st Quartr 2025, the NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) rate for young people aged 15–24 stood at 37,1%, with young women (37,5%) slightly more affected than young men (36,7%). However, the disparity widens in the broader 15–34 age group, where the NEET rate was recorded at 45,1%. Within this cohort, 48,1% of women were NEET, compared to 42,2% of men.
- For unemployed youth, there is no income whatsoever between coming of age at 18 and 60 when they qualify for a poverty pension, well below the cost of a basic basket of food.
- This deprivation places young women in the desperate position to be tempted to fall pregnant to qualify for the equally insulting child support grant.
- In the 1970s per capita spending on black education was one tenth of that for white education. As a result, black schools had inferior facilities, infrastructure, curricula and poorly trained teachers. Today, 77% of learners in public schools rely on the school nutrition programme. The quality of education a child receives thus remain dependent on factors like income, skin colour, place of birth and, above all, on class.
- Only 40 out of every 100 hundred children who start school complete grade twelve. Census 2022 shows that the proportion of persons completing Grade 12 after completing Grade 9 varies according to sex. The data shows that six in ten males go on to pass matric after they’ve finished Grade 9, while around seven in ten females do.
- Destitution awaits even those who survive the culling throughout primary and secondary schooling and overcome the entry barriers to tertiary and complete their studies. Graduate unemployment has risen to over 10%.
- The quality of SA’s education is ranked 75th out of 76 countries. 97% of Grade 4 learners aged 8-9 scored the lowest out of 50 schools of participating countries in reading and literacy tests. This, combined with rising unemployment and poverty has led to the education system itself culling the numbers of black children reducing their numbers as they progress from class to class, from primary to secondary and from there to tertiary.
- The poor quality of education has allowed the private sector to take advantage to profiteer. Private schools have increased from 3.5% to 10% over the last 10 years.
- Amongst the most prominent reasons for dropping out of school is teenage pregnancy. Last year 365 teenagers were giving birth per day, ten of these teenagers were children under 15 years of age.
2026 will simultaneously mark the 70th and 50th anniversaries of the Women’s march on the Union Buildings to end the pass laws, and the 1976 Youth Uprising. It must be seen as opportunity to renew the unity without which apartheid could not have been overthrown. At the same time, it is also an opportunity to retie the ideological knot between today’s generation and that of the 70s and 80s.
The convergence of the movement from 1973 through 1976, and 1984-6 was accompanied by huge leaps in consciousness. As Tsietsi Mashinini, first president of the Soweto Student representative Council, remarked, the youth quickly recognised that the most effective counter weight to state repression was the working class, the only social force capable of bringing the economy to a complete standstill.
The coming together of the youth and the workers led to a general strike in 1976. Of even greater importance was the fact that it led to an ideological and political cross pollination between workers and youth. The youth infused the workers movement with their elan and audacity and the workers raised the consciousness of the youth.
All sections of the movement had drawn the conclusion that the struggle to defeat national oppression was simultaneously a struggle against exploitation in the workplace. The understanding that the overthrow of white minority rule was inextricably bound up with the overthrow of capitalism was the predominant outlook of the leading layers of workers and youth. This was captured in the slogan on the 1987 Cosatu congress banner; “Socialism Means Freedom”.
That was cut cross by the negotiated settlement. Under the ideological miseducation of the SA Communist Party, Cosatu accepted the bourgeois democracy agreed at Codesa as a road to socialism. It turned out to be a roadblock. The preservation of capitalism perpetuated the slavery and exploitation of the working class. The poverty and destitution of every section of the working class flows from this. The struggle for socialism must resume.
The MWP calls for the unification of the student and youth under a Marxist Student and Youth Movement around a common platform, and programme of action. The youth of today must build on the ideological and class consciousness of the class of 1976, and campaign for the unification of the MSYM with a Socialist Civic Federation, a Socialist Women’s Movement, a Socialist Trade Union Confederation under the banner of a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
Capitalism worldwide is facing the greatest crisis since the 1930s. This is shown by Isreal’s genocide in Palestine, its attack on Iran and the possibility of a Middle Eastern conflagration. In the growing worldwide movement of solidarity with Palestine, the youth are to the fore. In Kenya, the youth have once again taken to the streets to protest the death of a youth in police custody as youth elsewhere on the continent and internationally are moving into struggle.
In uniting on a socialist programme, youth in SA must reach out to the youth on the African continent and internationally. Socialism cannot be built in one country. The 1976 Uprising inspired youth on the African continent and internationally. In the same manner a movement united on a socialist programme can inspire the youth worldwide to play the role of the light cavalry ahead of the entry of the heavy battalions of the working class ‘to overthrow of capitalism and bring about the socialist transformation of society worldwide.
