https://mg.co.za/article/2017-04-04-the-effs-wrecking-ball-politics-is-fascist-rather-than-left
Student politics is extremely fractious and
complicated by its populist crowd character. Whoever steps in front leads the
crowd. I came face to face with this reality twice over the past few months:
first at a peace meeting at WITS hosted in a
Church during October 2016, which was disrupted by the EFF, and, second,
more recently at the Higher Education Convention, co-hosted by the National
Education Crisis Forum. Students and workers wanted recognition for their struggles
and the Convention was one way to affirm that and ensure the powerful were
listening. The Convention ended in an EFF-led brawl and with students turning
on each other. Months of organising and preparing an inclusive platform for
constituency based policy dialogue was de-stabilised. The alternative to
dialogue is too ghastly to contemplate: violent student protest at universities
and deepening state-led securitization of university spaces and more broadly
societal struggles. Universities will not survive in this context and South
Africa’s tenuous democracy will plunge further into crisis.
Student formations are generally extensions
of political formations in most instances. This complicates the dynamics within
student politics and in #FeesMustFall protests. Who is really leading? The EFF
is an interesting example in this regard given its militaristic and hierarchical
form of organisation. For the EFF
delegitimising the ANC at all costs means the worse things get the better for
them in any social arena. Deepening crisis through disruption is a political
strategy. From parliament, to communities and now universities its mode of often
violent disruptive engagement is becoming central to its political practice and
this is also diffusing as a societal norm. This means the EFF, in the context
of the Higher Education Convention, was not willing to rise above its narrow
partisan interests and place the interests of the country first. Solutions to
take the country forward are not important but rather short term political
calculation to upstage the ANC state is all that matters; even in a context in
which the main protagonist of social dialogue is not even the ANC state. This
is not oppositional politics but a politics of wrecking everything because collective
societal solutions don’t matter. It also means this kind of short termism will,
intentionally and unintentionally, unleash forces that will also clash with the
EFF down the road. It is breeding a politics that will come back to harm it,
assuming it is successful in growing in electoral terms.
But perpetual violent disruption, as a mode
of politics, also means this is a politics bereft of an understanding of what is essential for a
democracy to work. South Africa’s transformative constitutionalism, like all
modern democracies, requires all contending political forces to accept certain
rights and procedural standards in the political game. A crucial assumption at
work in this political framework is the idea that political difference is
acceptable but should not become antagonistic. The EFF does not respect
political difference and is antagonistic to all political forces that do not
agree with it. It is not just un-South African as some have suggested but is
deeply undemocratic.
Competitive political escalation for the
EFF means: accept its way or face violence. Does this make the EFF fascist? Liberal journalists, some academics and even
the SACP have declared the EFF fascist. The notion of fascism is a slippery concept to
define. As an appellation it has multiple meanings, both historically and
comparatively speaking and this has to be acknowledged. Liberal scholars
normally work with a typology of key characteristics to define fascism such as:
charismatic leadership, racism, ultra-nationalism, paramilitarism, violence (actual
or threatened), anti-parliamentarianism, anti-constitutionalism and
anti-semitic.
This is only helpful to a degree, but also
runs into analytical problems given that context specific conditions and
dynamics shape fascist forces. In the first half of the 20th century
it was easy to discern national variations of either Italian fascism or Nazi
totalitarianism. However, today fascism
is mutating and manifesting in a complex matrix of material national and global
conditions. It has arrived wearing pin stripe suits or sometimes as a suicide
bomber. This brings us back to the question: are those wearing red berets under
the EFF banner fascists? Is the main contribution the EFF has made to South
African politics is merely to draw more taut the line between those for
democratic transformation and those against?
The EFF is certainly a contradictory
formation and on its current trajectory it is not a visionary nation builder, nor
a programmatic force for change, nor a democratic political opposition. While at
some moments it looks good in relation to the kleptocratic Jacob Zuma regime,
we should not assume that it is better. The EFF expresses serious ambiguities in its
ideological make up: constitutional/anti-constitutional,
Marxist-Leninist/stakeholder capitalist, male chauvinist/yet appealing to some
women, decolonizing/yet willing to accept support from white capital. The EFF
like historical fascism draws its ideas from
across the political spectrum. As a result, what it stands for in terms of
values, beliefs and ideology is unclear. It really makes it up as it goes
through the theater of national politics, expedient political maneuvering and
through its authoritarian populist inventiveness.
The EFF received just over a million votes
in the previous national elections. Does this mean those who vote for it
believe in its mercurial, shallow and make shift belief system? Are these the
citizens who buy into the spectacle of authoritarian populist politics? An electoral outcome is really difficult to
decipher. There are always different degrees of support for any political
party. This ranges from hard core support to sympathisers to swing voters. In
the last national election the EFF certainly picked up a significant anti-ANC vote and it also found traction in
sections of the black middle class and unemployed poor. Interestingly the EFF
could not build on this momentum of national support and win a local government
election outright. Instead it emerged from the local government elections as a
coalition partner to the neoliberal DA in most big Metros. Moreover, given its
disposition to violent disruption and its inability to provide a way forward on national
challenges it is likely that its
electoral support has peaked. The next national election will be very telling
and will really be surprising if South Africans vote for a party that merely
offers fiery rhetoric, intolerance and violence.
But this still leaves the colour red on EFF
t-shirts, berets and paraphernalia. What does this mean? For some the red
dimension of EFF identity makes it left, coupled with a militant dose of
rhetoric like evoking the big ‘N’ word, ‘Nationalisation’. Nationalisation has always been about state
capitalism nothing more. The EFF has successfully claimed a space to the left
of the ANC and has projected itself as a left force picking up on residual
anti-establishment sentiment. Yet its performative antics in parliament of
representing workers through overalls and hard hats smacks of hypocrisy. While
most workers earn under R3000 per month in South Africa, an EFF MP earns over
R1million per annum and over R80 000 per
month. It pays to act exploited in the EFF script. However, the EFF should not
believe that workers are not watching nor unaware of the social distance.
Moreover, the EFF has not united left forces of the working class, the left
intelligentsia or more generally left social movements. Neither has it provided
a serious analysis of contemporary capitalism to guide its interventions. In
fact, the EFF in claiming to be left has actually through its politics
undermined the prospects of the left in South Africa. It is contributing to the
defeat of the left. The EFF is not a left force by any stretch of the
imagination despite its own declarations, the colour red in its identity and
simplistic media representations of it as a left party. An EFF in power will
certainly not take South Africa to the left. It does not have what it takes and
given what’s on offer, an EFF-led South Africa will probably mean most South
Africans will think the Zuma days were wonderful.
There is no straight line from Malema, to
Trump, to Le Pen and even Al Shabab. The EFF is not fascist in the 20th
century sense, but is certainly expressing elements of a 21st
century fascism in its role in South African politics. It is pioneering an
original fascism in the South African context. As it fights the ANC violently
and other progressive social forces, it is also delegitimizing democratic
processes and forms of dialogue. However, unlike the ANC the EFF claims to be
left but yet it is politically and ideologically certainly not left. Anti-capitalist
ideology is meaningless in the EFF understanding of the world and thus it is
certainly not a serious left orientated force. The interests it seeks to
aggregate are disparate and not representative of the working class as a whole.
Its disdain for hard won democratic values, constitutional principles and
practices makes it nothing less than an anti-democratic pariah. South Africans
need to choose very carefully where they stand when it comes to the EFF. The
national dialogue to resolve the Higher Education crisis will continue in
coming months, with or without the EFF. In addition, student formations more
generally also have to reflect on their commitment to disciplined, inclusive
and respectful democratic dialogue to find policy solutions.
Author: Dr. Vishwas Satgar is a WITS academic. He is also a member of the
convening committee of the South African University Staff Network, a partner of
the National Education Crisis Forum that hosted the Higher Education
Convention.
