Benjamin Fogel, Africa is a Country
In geographer Gillian
Hart’s excellent Rethinking the South African Crisis, she points to a rather
curious phenomenon as part of her engagement with the figure of one Julius
Malema and the ‘populist’ turn he represents. She notes that for a change the
far left and liberal right’s politics converge in the sense that they both
share the same critique of the ex-Youth League president and current
commander-in-chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
It is not often that
analysts of such diametrically opposed ideological tastes as Terry Bell and
Gareth van Onselen agree, one being a left-leaning labour analyst and the other
being a die-hard freemarket liberal, but they do in the case of Malema. Both
Bell and van Onselen have made the case that Malema and the politics he
espouses can be broadly categorised as ‘fascist’ or ‘fascistic’ in character.
Mamphela Ramphele went as far as to compare Malema to Hitler in a public
statement, a sure-fire way to justify ignoring both the tone, form and content
of an opponent’s politics.
Their argument can be
boiled down to this: The composition of social forces assembled behind Malema
and the Economic Freedom Fighters is a mix of ‘lumpen’ or young unemployed
voters. These ‘born frees are attracted to his militant rhetoric amidst a
hopeless situation’. In effect both the images of masculinity and militarism
are summoned in both the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies utilized by
Malema.
Secondly the contention
is that the calls for nationalization and other perceived ‘radicalism’ made by
the EFF represent in effect the demands of a certain fraction of the emergent
BEE-linked bourgeoisie, who want a bail out after their mining ventures failed
miserably. Together they fit a definition of fascism as an alliance between the
lumpen proletariat and an alienated faction of the bourgeoisie.
Some also add that the
EFF’s position on Mugabe and Zimbabwe also disqualifies them from being ‘on the
left’. The EFF professes open support for Mugabe’s Zanu-PF and in particular
their land-reform program. One of the central items of the EFF’s agenda being
the expropriation of land without compensation and the symbolism of land
occupations, given the history of dispossession in South Africa, making such
open support for Mugabe and Zanu-PF is unsurprising.
Leaving aside the
complexities of Zimbabwean politics, one can hardly argue that the EFF is not
‘left’ because it supports a position they disagree with. Most of these people
would hardly deny the late Hugo Chávez the right to be left — despite the fact
he was an open supporter of Mugabe. The more serious case to answer is the
‘composition’ argument.
There is not a single
historical example or paradigm of a fascist movement or party describing itself
as ‘Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian’. A movement which has set out a manifesto closer
to an old Trotskyist transitional programme, instead of barely coherent
ramblings about national purity or vast international Judeo-Bolshevik
conspiracies. In describing the above as Fascistic one essentially either
claims that all this Marxist talk is part of a conspiracy to hide the fascistic
tendencies of the EFF or one ignores all the written statements of the EFF
altogether.
Fascism is a notoriously
difficult concept to define and through frequent misuse its power and meaning
has dwindled. It is often used to slander one’s political opponents rather than
in a precise analytical fashion, from the Republican party labeling Barack
Obama as akin to Hitler or those on the liberal left describing George Bush’s
republican party as fascist.
The definition of fascism
used to attack the EFF emerges out of debates on the origin of fascism in
Europe, but whether this definition can be applied in a postcolonial context is
not at all dealt with in these critiques of the EFF.
This critique doesn’t
engage whether the models or definition of fascism, which emerged from a
specifically European historical context, can be applied elsewhere in a country
like post-apartheid South Africa – which doesn’t resemble the Weimar Republic
or pre-Mussolini Italy, in which fascism arose in the context of the ruling
classes’ fear of a strong international communist movement, or to put down a
militant trade union movement after a devastating war.
Furthermore it makes no
attempt to grapple with the complexities and nuances of South African
nationalism or postcolonial nationalism in general, in which a number of
movements and leaders from elements of Zanu-PF to Sankara in Burkina Faso have
championed very similar programmes and used very similar rhetoric to Malema and
the EFF. Surely such movements represent a paradigm closer to the EFF rather
than copying and pasting what is already a loosely defined concept in the
current South African political context?
There is hardly an
established historical paradigm of fascism emerging in a post-colonial context
from a ‘radical’ split from the ruling nationalist party. The closest to a
‘fascistic’ split one can locate is of a politics based on ethnic or religious
identity. EFF clearly doesn’t fit into that paradigm with its appeals to
pan-Africanism, and loosely speaking taking up the BC definition of black as an
identity which moves beyond ethnicity.
The liberal right
position makes sense; of course, liberals would want to delegitimize all left
forces that could potentially either channel political energy away from certain
liberal civil society projects or that great liberal party known as the DA. Van
Onselen, himself an ex-DA official, has a vested stake in attempting to portray
the EFF as a potentially murderous and reactionary force, preventing the DA
from leaking actual or potential voters to the EFF.
The far left position
also seeks to delegitimize the EFF, but for what reason? It is due to either a
fear of having the ‘radical space’ in the South African political scene seized
by a collective of corrupt opportunists or, less charitably, a fear of the left
space that certain careerists on the left have sought to monopolize on their
being seized by a group of upstarts.
The worst thing about
this argument is that it labels the dispossessed black unemployed youth – or in
other words those who have been worse affected by South Africa’s neoliberal
trajectory – as an essentially reactionary social bloc that is full of
‘fascistic tendencies’ or as lumpen, surplus or criminal in nature. This
position is often racialized to the extent that it reads as the middle-class
terror of the ungovernable, unwashed and uncouth young black masses demanding
such things as the nationalization of key industries, radical land reform and
‘economic freedom’. All things which, it should be noted, the left
traditionally supports. One would also think that the left views this grouping
as a potential base rather than a threat.
The significance of EFF
is that it marks a break from the current political consensus, both in terms of
our established political parties and the lobbying and legalistic strategies
currently pervasive through ‘civil society’, which it has with such venomous
opposition. The EFF marks a break with the established consensus because they
explicitly reject the rhetoric of ‘social cohesion’; they reject the line that
we need a social compact based on wage suppression to ward off a forthcoming
apocalypse and the panacea of Foreign Direct Investment as the solution to our
economic woes.
Whatever the case, to
claim the EFF is not left and is some sort of proto-fascist grouping doesn’t
stand up to any analytic scrutiny. This doesn’t mean that it should be immune
from criticism from the left; there are a number of issues one could call the
EFF out on ranging from its leaders’ less than commendable stance on women’s
rights in the past to the questionable finances of its other leaders and rather
xenophobic comments directed towards those of Indian descent. This does not
mean that the EFF cannot be another form of left sounding; opportunism, bad
political choices and corruption are by no means the monopoly of the right and
centre. Those on the left can also make mistakes and be in politics for less
than commendable reasons, but these criticisms do not undermine the
significance of the EFF as a whole.
In essence, they mark a
break with the fuzzy hangover of sentiment emanating from what’s left of the
rainbow nation nationalism of times past. They claim to be the authentic
representatives of the ‘radical Freedom Charter’ rather than the current
dominant liberal reading – a Freedom Charter which outlays the beginnings of a
socialistic or statist economic program.
The other strength (and potential
weakness) of the EFF is that they mark a reconstitution of the two dominant
black political traditions on the left in South Africa – namely Chartism and
Black Consciousness. They have successfully managed to incorporate both BC and
Chartists under the same political roof, potentially opening up the space for a
birth of a new form of black radical politics. Whether or not they can succeed
in keeping this alliance together after next year’s elections remains to be
seen and perhaps marks the biggest internal political challenge for the
movement.
