I tried my best to follow the Ruth First lectures this week. I knew Ruth First a bit so I'm interested. She would pop through London and I collected airport novels for her because she liked them and couldn't get them in Mozambique. She was a nice lady, full of laughter.So as I read some of the speeches made this week to commemorate her I thought about her and wondered what she would think of them. Would she, as part of the anti-apartheid generation, be afraid of the future, as one of the speakers, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, suggested that generation now is?story_article_left1What else could you infer, wondered Naidoo, a PhD student activist and, intriguingly, a former Olympian (Athens, beach volleyball), "when they use their bullets and teargas at the Union Buildings, when they spend their money on bringing private security companies onto campus, when they interdict us and suspend us and bring their expensive lawyers to put us down, one can but infer that the anti-apartheid generation has become afraid of the future"."Many in the anti-apartheid generation have become anaesthetised to the possibility of another kind of society, another kind of future," she said. "They have become fatalistic in their 'pragmatism', their 'hybrid models' and their evasiveness."Whew! In a way I think Ruth First would have approved of the rage, but then she would also have wanted to know how, if all the "pragmatism" is to be sneered at, who pays for the free education Naidoo and other student activists want. Where does the money come from?Should students perhaps manage that side of things at university too? I feel for people like Max Price at the University of Cape Town and Adam Habib at the University of the Witwatersrand. They're also anti-apartheid generation types. Are they scared? Would Ruth First be scared?I doubt it. Ruth First faced dangers, until she was blown up by a parcel bomb, that people like Naidoo cannot even contemplate, precisely so that Naidoo could make inflammatory speeches without attracting any personal threat upon herself whatsoever.As I read her speech I was also listening to Eusebius McKaiser read out a poem on the radio that made me cry. It went something like: "Fell from the 9th floor, slipped in the shower and hit his head, hung himself on the bars of his cell ..." a list, in other words, of the excuses the apartheid security police used to make when they tortured Naidoo's despised anti-apartheid generation, one at a time alone in a room, and went too far and murdered them.block_quotes_start She would even have been excited by the moment. Change is in the air. Certainly she would have been appalled by Jacob Zuma's administration block_quotes_endNaidoo, though, is not the enemy here. Bad government and rotten policy are and you can't expect a young student to fix those. They're entitled to demand free stuff and why should they care about where it comes from? Students have behaved badly forever.It seems an age since protesting students forced a frightened Jacob Zuma to agree on the spot to freeze fees for this year. Now the ANC has told the government to do that again for 2017. But what about 2018? There's another election looming. And in 2019 it arrives. So no university fee increases for four years? What's the plan, Comrade Blade?Big, prestigious universities will soon start not only to slide in the rankings but actually to stop teaching and researching certain things altogether.story_article_right2Fewer universities means fewer medical schools and engineers and that means fewer doctors and fewer roads and sewers.But this stuff all costs a bomb and presumably Naidoo's "another kind of society, another kind of future" is egalitarian and non-capitalist, so the question of who pays and how is relevant.The only really productive indigenous industries we have are mining and farming, and both are on the slide. Our agricultural exports fell for the first time ever last year. Mining, as we all know, is a mess. Any ideas, Leigh-Ann?As I write this I am conscious of not wanting to put thoughts into Ruth First's head. Perhaps she would even have been excited by the moment. Change is in the air. Certainly she would have been appalled by Jacob Zuma's administration.What I do know is that the JSE All Share index rose 1.3% on Thursday. That's an increase in wealth, in a day, of almost R100-billion, a fraction of which, if it were somehow pooled, would solve the fees problem and a host of others. But business is the devil, isn't it? Why bother talking to capitalists? What do they know?..