Class, “race” and state in post-apartheid education

The elision of social class as an analytical category impoverishes social analyses and has profound implications for social transformation. Social class analysis has been largely ignored in analytical taxonomies in post-apartheid South Africa. When social class is referred to in education analyses it is all too often understood as a descriptive term rather than an explanatory concept. As a descriptive term, it is used mostly to recognize the social location of students as “poor, " or “disadvantaged, " to evoke characterizations of the conditions prevalent in “poor” and “disadvantaged” communities, and to provide testimony for the rigors of school life, the intractability of the problems of access, the grinding incapacities and effects on the lives and potential opportunities for the children of the “poor.” These descriptions make graphically evident the educational symptoms that typify the conditions under which the majority of South Africans learn, but do not address the cause of these conditions - the capitalist system. This chapter attempts to correct this limitation by “restoring” the value of class analysis. We argue that the absence of class analysis leads to a debilitating failure to appreciate the deeper characteristics of society; de-links poverty and inequality from the political, economic and social system - capitalism - which underpins them; obscures the class nature of the post-apartheid state; renders ineffective social and educational reforms; and denies the importance of class struggle and the agency of working communities in the struggle for social transformation. While this chapter reaffirms the previously dominant discourse in the movement against apartheid which recognized the salience of class and valued class analysis, it also examines the relationship between class, “race” and gender under racial capitalism historically and in contemporary South Africa. Finally, the chapter discusses the orientation of political organizations of the left to issues of class and the impact of the negotiated settlement prior to 1994.