This is what may be my last column as VUWSA President. I feel proud to say that the university are bringing about a $20 one-off internet levy. This is bringing about my pledge last year to make internet free, or non user-pays as explained when pressed last year, as nothing is ever free. Ultimately it is all paid for out of the wealth created by the labour of the working class.
We’ve fought hard this year against the Film School Proposal, we’ve stalled attempts to cut off Gender and Women’s Studies. Next year and even for the rest of the year, the university will be attempting to continue to their “rationalisation” of the university i.e. cutting off most of the small programmes at VUW, most of the choice that students currently have.
Since the 70’s access to student support and subsidies has been progressively attacked tightened and stripped back. This is not because of some right-wing rogernome conspiracy (although that did happen to a point) because as a capitalism came out of the post war boom, it could not sustain the levels of value given to buy students and workers. Remember in 1968, revolution was talked about seriously and students united with workers against the system most notably in France. The rate of profit (not the amount, but proportion of profit) has been decreasing ever since, just look in Forbes magazine for clarification on this. It’s not a secret, kinda like the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis, it’s the sort of thing that the ruling elite just don’t really want to talk about.
That is the reason why 1984 happened, Keynesianism had failed, it could not sustain capitalist profit while buying off workers at the same time with anything approaching a decent standard of living. With declining profits the state could not shell out for both the welfare state (workers) and simultaneously shelter the capitalist class from the effects of the recession. As a result students and workers were made pay. We suffer the effects of lower standards of living in the form of user pays, poorer health and the privatisation of public services including education.
Increased fees are the effect of this, lack of student allowances are the result of this, we pay double, in that production/the creation of value is a social thing, but the value/wealth from this ends up as profits/surplus value in the hands of a few. On top of this we pay for our own job training (course fees) to hypothetically create more value for those capitalist few. In the 70’s capitalism could contain this and allow the socially beneficial education to be carried out with no direct cost, we still paid, but only once, not twice like now.
The university want to increase your fees by 5% if you’re an undergrad or $500 if you’re a postgrad. We cannot change this at a university level. We could stop it this year, but in 2005 Massey voted for a 0% fee increase, the Labour government placed three new members on council and made sure a 10% increase got through. That is the outcome if we target the university only. We could target the government, as they set the direction of the unis, they find the unis, don’t buy the bullshit of autonomy or academic freedom, that only exists until it is challenged and then it is stomped on. Autonomy and freedom are accepted by the state, the government, until people try to put it in practice. Then it is clamped down and eradicated.
Hypothetically if the state allows a 0% fee increase, or god forbid scraps fees, it cannot be sustained as a challenge to the period of late capitalism that we’re in (how sad is it that free education is a fundamental challenge to the state?), we just get the 1984 backlash, because the state exists as a tool of capitalists to oppress workers and other groups in society, to maintain its hegemonic rule.
The state cannot maintain support for the working class, the producers of value in society without challenging the capitalist class. When that happens, you have situations like Pinochet in Chile. Capitalism reasserts itself.
So when you’re out there at 3pm today (Monday the 6th of October). Fight the fee rise, fight for a free education, but fight against the capitalist system that must be beaten before we can even attempt to realise a just and fair society. Capitalism can only be fought by revolutionary means, look at the Labour party in New Zealand, the Democrats in the USA. It cannot be destroyed by legal, parliamentary means, as it is the law, it is bourgeois parliament. Capitalist fuck us over. They have a sweet deal and have been in that position for long enough now to not give up without a fight. We need to fight. I’ll see you this afternoon.