Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
Being against [one form of] evil doesn't make you good.
- Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream, 1952
Over the last ten years or so there has been an
extraordinary degree of popular protest in South Africa. The seemingly
incorrigible elitism of the higher reaches of our public sphere has meant that,
particularly in the absence of sustained formal organisation, popular protest
has seldom won the right to represent itself in this space. For years the
media, NGOs, academy and political parties were able to substitute the
presentation of their own assumptions, frequently inflected with crude stereotypes,
for rational and democratic engagement. However now that the scale and tenacity
of popular dissent is being more widely recognised there is an astonishing
array of actors trying to capture it, or bits of it, including political
parties, NGOs, activists of various sorts, minor political sects,
entrepreneurs, tenderpreneurs and people with religious, ethnic and cultural
projects.
Neither popular protest nor successful attempts to capture
it automatically translate into progressive politics. Popular protest has often
aligned itself with deeply reactionary forms of politics, frequently mediated
through religion, ethnicity and hyper-masculinity. There are also examples of
corrupt and authoritarian states that have been able to renew their legitimacy
by making targeted concessions to popular protest. But there are also important
examples of sustained popular protest producing progressive movements, enabling
progressive forces to capture state power and achieve real social progress.
The Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) and the Economic
Freedom Fighters (EFF) have already entered the electoral fray and rumour
suggests that the metal workers’ union (NUMSA) is likely to break from COSATU
and make its own entry into electoral politics. None of these organisations
have emerged from the community struggles that have developed over the last ten
years. But all of them, including NUMSA if it does break from COSATU and form a
new party, will want to capture popular struggles in communities as well as
workplaces, and elsewhere.
Julius Malema’s charisma and notoriety, and the EFF’s
connection to the struggle in Marikana, which has given the party some real
political weight, has enabled the party to achieve significant media access and
some political traction. It’s too early to say with any certainty how this will
translate into electoral performance. But it’s not too early to draw some
conclusions on the nature of the party’s project and its likely effect on our
political landscape. However, it is necessary to keep in mind that all
political organisations are in a state of constant flux and subject to all
kinds of limits and influences. It’s not impossible that the EFF could be
changed in significant ways by the popular struggles it is seeking to capture,
by the alliances it makes, internal contestation, changes in our broader
political landscape or the nature of electoral politics.
A number of commentators have argued that the EFF is
essentially a fascist project. However its policy proposals, which are
sometimes rather crude, are clearly situated in a left tradition that, while it
is plainly authoritarian and deeply statist, is not fascist. No fascist
organisation proposes support for immigrants and opposition to homophobia and
patriarchy.
However the party’s policy proposals are clearly presented
via a militaristic posture that is, along with being inherently authoritarian,
also inherently masculinist. As Siphokazi Magadla has argued the dangers of
this mode of politics should not be taken lightly. The political theatre that
Malema performed at the court when his hate speech case was heard in April 2011
did evoke shades of Mussolini in many people’s minds and certainly created the
impression that his conception of power is rooted more in force than consent.
Moreover, there is a massive gulf between the stated
principles of the EFF and the behaviour of its key figures whose record is one
of gross sexism, thuggish authoritarianism, demagogic rather than rational
engagement, brazen corruption and a performance of social power rooted in
consumerism. Unless evidence emerges of a genuine Damascene conversation, or
unless the EFF attains a genuine capacity to discipline its leaders from below,
it would be entirely naïve to assume that Julius Malema really is aspiring to
be the next Thomas Sankara. We would, to say the least, be unwise not to recall
how the ANC Youth League, the National Youth Development Agency and the public
purse in Limpopo were plundered.
Malema did not step into the EFF from a sustained commitment
to popular struggle. His politics is that of an authoritarian man at the helm
of a party state and not that of a mobilised citizenry. He aspires to
concentrate power in the state rather than to disperse it to the people. Under
Malema the ANC Youth League looked to figures like Gaddafi, Mugabe and even Kim
Jong II rather than, say, the popular movements that were transforming Latin
America from below. Malema was, he said, willing to kill for Zuma. But when he
had Zuma’s favour he never said a word against the brazen and brutal repression
of grassroots activists under Zuma.
Malema only turned to popular struggle in search of a
constituency when the ANC turned on him. In COSATU’s estimation he was on the
party’s right wing before his relationship with Zuma broke down. There are
those who disagree and argue that the ANC Youth League’s support for
nationalisation under Malema means that he was really on the left all along.
This is a facile reduction, not uncommon in certain kinds of crude and dogmatic
leftism, of the political to a single economic question – the mode of ownership
of the means of production. The fact is that nationalisation was a key plank in
the original programme of the Nazi party. It has also been used by various
appallingly authoritarian regimes that have presented themselves in the
language of the left, including the North Korean monarchy supported
“unapologetically” by the ANC Youth League under Malema.
Of course there are also many cases where nationalisation
has played an important role in socialising economies. But nationalisation is
not an inherently progressive project. In 1961 Frantz Fanon argued that “the
nationalization of the economy” and “Africanization of offices” was a key
demand of the most predatory factions of what he called the national
bourgeoisie. Fanon was certainly not against nationalisation or
deracialisation, but he was very clear that for predatory elites
“nationalization does not mean placing the totality of the economy at the
service of the nation…as an expression of new social relations…..To them,
nationalization quite simply means the transfer into native hands of those
unfair advantages, which are a legacy of the colonial period.”
Ato Sekyi-Otu, the most brilliant and careful reader yet of
Fanon’s last work, The Wretched of the Earth, shows that Fanon goes on to argue
that this kind of nationalism is “a profoundly anti-political ideology”. In
Sekyi-Otu’s estimation what Fanon proposes is “the upsurge of richer modes of
reasoning, judging and acting” than the “brutality of thought” that can emerge
from an immediate response to colonial horror. For Sekyi-Otu a Fanonion
politics is rooted, precisely, in ‘new social relations’ that can restore
“dignity to all citizens …. and create a prospect that is human because
conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein”. Malema’s politics is a world
apart from this. He mobilises the language of Stalinism to approach the
citizenry as ‘the masses’, as a kind of battering ram wielded by leaders. The
fact that this mode of politics may offer a route into a certain kind of
respect for some young men cast adrift from hope in a society grounded in
contempt for their equal humanity does not make it progressive.
